In Pursuit of Spring

I have to admit that there’s an intermittent kind of anxiety I’ve been carrying of late. Some of it belongs to the season itself - the contraction of winter, the sense of being hemmed in by shorter days and longer nights. But there’s also an outer layer to it, harder to name: a low background hum shaped by the wider world. Looking back over the past few months of writing, I can see I’ve been trying to locate myself within a shapeshifting landscape - where our digital lives promise infinite reach, yet so often leave us feeling tethered and oddly static.

Shakespeare was alert to this condition long before it had a name. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, he gives shape to a restlessness that emerges when engagement is mediated, and movement gives way to inertia:

Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits…
I rather would entreat thy company
To see the wonders of the world abroad
Than, living dully sluggardized at home.

And so, to dispel the sluggard in me, in ten days’ time - through the power of a camper-van-camino, in the dandling mizzle of the season - I intend to invoke the spirit of Edward Thomas by travelling the length of Great Britain north to south in pursuit of spring.

It was Thomas who famously travelled from London to the Quantocks in Somerset in March 1913 and wrote his findings in a book, In Pursuit of Spring. Alexander Harris writes that his journey was a way of “honouring all that continuity of past life in the places he passes,” but also “a way of putting into longer perspective his own solitary struggles.” It is in both of these impulses that I find the greatest parity.

In his book, Thomas finds himself constantly invoking words to weave into the warp and weft of his journey: Earth, Ocean, Air - Eternal Brotherhood.

And so this becomes my spell and incantation - the first step in emancipation from the caged beauty of winter.

Before a journey like this - one with so many layers and facets - there’s a sense that I need to honour it by paring back. Winter has already gone some way towards that: scouring both land and spirit, stripping things down to their essentials. But I feel the need to meet it halfway and begin by cleansing the digest itself. For the first time, I’m setting aside the photographs and the sketches and letting the words stand alone. A small act of blessing and an attempt to clear a space before stepping into it. One can only imagine how, from this bare branch of a digest, my journey might blossom.

This will not only be about the geographical insights gained from travelling some 2,000 miles through Scotland, England, and Wales. I will also be travelling through a liminal world, held in suspension between seasons, encountering imagined territories whittled from hagiography and myth. Dream-fields rising out of the shifting hinterlands of Pictish, Celtic, Shakespearean, and Arthurian legend, where story, prophecy, and landscape blur.

Through this winter of discontent, I am visiting places where the impossible has become possible and where fantasy has hardened into reality. Places blessed with the Selkie and embellished by the roar of the Cotswold lion. Places wrought from granite and gneiss; buildings hardened by the prehistoric in their walls, or softened by the golden tint of the oolitic.

This will also be a journey into the shadow self - an exploration of an inner geography that calls for the lucent mix of tangible and intangible that a pilgrimage can bring. Robert MacFarlane once suggested that we should ask not what we know of our landscape, but what it knows of us.

By the end of this journey - what will it know of me?

This journey has been a long time in the planning - the kind of planning that gets under your skin. People from across this land have moved mountains to help me access and see things I’ve longed to encounter for years. It’s the kind of planning that wakes you in the night, in fits and starts, after dream-states of road and hedge, buildings, birds, flowers, forest, and mountain - fevered awakenings that leave me asking how any of this truly began.

My struggles of the past are well documented here, yet much of what I created during those times I once believed to be lost. Now the words, photographs, and other fragments of a defining journey have been found. They constitute the most formative days of my career. What once felt broken now reads as fundamental to my growth - the raw material from which I have emerged.

How did it all start, and what was it in the material I found that invoked me to set out in pursuit of spring - a journey that carries the trace of a shattered self, and yet holds the possibility of healing, discovery, and hope?

To be continued...