Monday 9 May 2011

This is my land

I went for a walk on Saturday - caught the 291 bus from my village up to Forest Row and then walked 12 miles or so back across the fields. Along the way I thought about maps - I took an OS map with me, but didn't need it as the route's one I've walked several times before, and anyway I carry plenty of internal maps (or is it one many-layered map?) in my head.

If you've lived in one place more or less all your life, wherever you go there are associations - the trip to A&E when your son fell off his bike and sliced his mouth open on the handlebars; the time your schoolfriend tried to entice a group of boys to your tent with mating calls; the iron age hazelnut you found on the archaeological dig (skeletons don't survive the acidic soil so a nut's a big deal); the pub where you learnt to drink cider and smoked your first and last cigar...
 

The bus passed all this and stopped outside H's flower shop in Forest Row. I turned round and headed home again on foot.

I don't know who devised the High Weald Landscape Trail, but it's gorgeous - rolling hills, fields and woods, and it all feels like it's mine because it's the landscape I grew up with. It was only when I lived in Yorkshire for three years that I realised how embedded our landscape is in our minds - I'm only at home when the fields are small, and each is hidden by trees and waves of overlapping hills.

The thing this walk rubs in, though, is that this isn't my landscape - every inch of it is owned. It's obvious when you walk through fields that they belong to the farmer or landowner. That's fine. But the central section of the walk goes through Buckhurst Park, an estate owned by the de la Warr family, and even in the woodland stretch you are confronted at every turn with notices telling you to keep out, keep to the footpath, go up this drive if you're a tradesman...

Thankfully, cross the road at Lye Green and you enter the Penn in the Rocks estate - although the land is all owned by one family here too, there are no signs apart from one helpful one pointing out where the footpath goes. Thank you!

I tried to draw a map of my route but it got way too complicated, covered in arrows and circles linking places and people. I'll have to keep it in my head.

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