Traveling Slowly

Traveling Slowly

"By increasing the speed at which we pass through the landscape we may greatly alter the time-sequences which are an integral part of our perceptive experience of it. "
   ___ Jay Appleton, "The Experience of Landscape"


    We notice and remember features about walking journeys that are not apparent to us when we drive. The spirit of the land cannot speak to us directly when we speed through it; it cannot catch our eyes through the outstretched branches of trees, or in the gleam of hidden water, or the deer-brown bracken of the hillside under the glancing winter sunlight.
   The time-sequencing of our landscape perception changes radically when we speed by unaware of what we are passing, or when we use a journey to work or read. We can pass through areas and have no recollection of having travelled through them.
    Our subtle perceptions are never engaged when we are car-bound because our senses themselves are not engaged; these outer and inn er senses are connected. The sense of our own velocity when we move under our own steam, rather with the help of wheels, imparts the message of the wind; the feeling of our feet upon the ground brings us into relationship with the presence of the land; our ears, unshielded by carriage walls, are able to tune into the subtle sounds of the earth; our noses can smell the distinctive scents of the landscape, most potent messages of memory. Infused into all these experiences, but predominating over them all, is the sense of the land itself and its own story into which we are straying.
   Were ever we walk, we enter the story of the land, becoming part of it. But only the one who travels slowly can perceive that story and learn from it.

"Take a walking journey along a route you would normally drive along. What is different? How did you relate to the land you journeyed through?"
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]