Category Archives: Adventurer

Interviews with adventurers

Nick Hunt talking walking

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Have you been inspired by a piece of travel writing to try a similar endeavour of your own, but found circumstance or lack of courage has knocked you off your stride?  Not so Nick Hunt, who as a teenager, read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of a walk across Europe.  bavaria_2Nick has followed in Fermor’s footsteps, walking from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, recounting his seven month journey in a book entitled ‘Walking the Woods and the Water’.  What pace do you set yourself? How do you keep yourself going? Who do you have as your companions? What do you learn about yourself and about walking? As I try to keep up with Nick on a walk along the popular canal towpath from Broadway Market to Islington, I ask him these questions and more. 29’27″14.5MB

Download notes from the interview with Nick_Hunt

Want to hear more from Nick Hunt?  Try his audio field guide on How to walk across Europe

walking the woods and the water_2Buy: Nick Hunt’s Walking the woods and the water published in trade paperback by Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

Photo credits: Nick Hunt


Where the wild winds are – published in 2017 – It describes a series of walks following the invisible pathways of some of Europe’s named winds – Helm, Bora, Sirocco, Foehn, Mistral – to discover how they affect landscapes, people and cultures.  READ MORE

“Where the Wild Winds are” was shortlisted for the National Geographic Traveller Reader Award for 2018 

What has Nick done since our interview

“In the past year I have moved from London to Bristol, but am currently looking after a small cottage in the Lake District for the coldest, darkest, wettest of the seasons. In 2016 I spent three months living and working in Atlantis Books, a bookshop on the Greek island of Santorini, and last year led a group of friends on a ten-day walk through the Accursed Mountains of Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro. I’ve been continuing to work with the Dark Mountain Project as editor and contributor, publishing two books of (loosely) ecological and ‘uncivilised’ writing a year. But my main project has been a series of walks following the invisible pathways of some of Europe’s named winds – Helm, Bora, Foehn, Mistral, Sirocco – to discover how they affect landscapes, people and cultures. The book about these journeys, Where the Wild Winds Are, was published in September 2017 by Nicholas Brealey, and is soon being translated into Italian, German and Dutch. Currently I am working on a book about London’s feral green parakeets for Paradise Road.”

Indie publisher Paradise Road published in Autumn 2018, Nick’s study of parakeets in London – you can get a taste of it in this article that Nick wrote.

Nick Hunt shares his 20×20 Vision of walking in 2040

Tim Hagyard – talking walking

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Tim Hagyard a planner and urban designer, took a career break in 2013, to devise and walk a 1500 mile route through Britain, that linked places of worship with places from his childhood and those related to friends and family. “Walking Sacred Britain” also marked the 10th anniversary of his wife’s death. DSC01684Contemplative walking is key to Tim’s way of life, providing respite from the day to day pressures of a busy local authority planning department, and as part of his practice as a Buddhist.   The interview was recorded when Tim was only three days into the 112 day walk, full of anticipation and a sense of freedom. His walk began began from the Sangha of Amaravati Buddhist Monastery in Hertfordshire – we join him in London, after breakfast in Swiss Cottage, and walk a short distance to the mosque in Regent’s Park.  Our conversation ranges widely, as Tim reveals the choice of destinations and how they relate to his life and faith. 20’44” 9.7MB

Download notes of items mentioned in the interview with Tim_Hagyard

What has Tim done since our interview

“After the walk, it took me a while to note certain fundamental changes had taken place in my habits and ways of thinking.

For instance after 5 months of not sitting in a car I never found the option of car travel very attractive again. My annual mileage has fallen to 2- 3000 miles a year and that includes some essential use for work.

In daily life I try to either walk or cycle journeys because I really want to be outdoors, enjoy the physical movement and exercise . I also try to use public transport as I prefer many things that this offers in terms of exercise, adventure and the abilty to use the travelling time for reading etc. Car travel for me is not the quality choice.

I actually returned to complete gaps from the 2013 walk. So in 2014 and 2015 I walked another 350 miles so that finally my whole route around Britain had been done on foot, making it a complete continuous walk was important to me if not entirely logical.

When it comes to holiday planning I tend to find myself thinking of walking holidays as the most relaxing option.  e.g. To keep me in touch with my young adult children we have started the South West Coast Path – walking it in stages.

Pilgrimage – I was delighted to hear about the British Pilgrimage Trust and joined them in 2017 for a weekend of walking and singing Blake’s “Jerusalem” down in Sussex. I very much appreciated their joyful and inclusive approach. http://britishpilgrimage.org/

This was a prelude to joining “Just Walk to Jerusalem” – Organised by the Amos Trust , a walk from London across Europe to the Holy land for equal rights in Israel / Palestine to mark the centenary of the Balfour Declaration ….As soon as I was sent a link I knew I had to join it .

http://www.amostrust.org/amos-palestine/

So I negotiated a career break even though it was a difficult time at work with re-structuring of the planning service. I joined over 100 others and 9 of us made the 2000 mile journey across Europe with a final huge reception in Palestine. My previous experience did give me a certain inner confidence in completing the walk, although the dynamics were very different from the more personal nature of the 2013 walk. It really opened my eyes to injustices that I was poorly informed about. I also kept a weekly blog of the journey.

https://justwalkingforpeace.wordpress.com/  “

John Davies talking walking

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John Davies a Church of England vicar in Norris Green, Liverpool talks about his walk beside the M62 from east to west which he undertook in 2007. M62coversmRecorded over the Internet in February 2009 and published in February 2010. 21’30” 10.1 MB

Download notes of items mentioned in this episode: John Davies

Martin Kohler talking walking

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Martin Kohler, a professor in urban planning at Hafen City University in Hamburg talks about the Harbour Safari – part guided walk, part exploration of a lost quarter of the city, part art intervention. This interview was recorded over the Internet in December 2008. 17’45” 8.4MB

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Hamish Fulton talking walking

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An Interview with Hamish Fulton: Hamish studied St Martin’s College of Art in the mid 1960s, and has been categorised as a conceptual artist, a land artist, a sculptor and a photographer, but he sees himself as a Walking Artist. 13′ 51″ 6.5 MB

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Hamish at Banff, in the Rockies, at the time of the interview

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What Hamish has been doing since our interview:

 

 

 

 

Elinor Whidden talking walking

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An interview with Elinor Whidden, sculptor, video and performance and walking artist who has tackled two key North American obsessions, the motor car and the western frontier. 20′ 25″ 9.6 MB

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What has Elinor been doing since our interview

“Elinor Whidden has been a practicing visual artist since 2005. She uses sculpture and performance to deconstruct colonial narratives, particularly as they relate to contemporary car culture. In 2006, she deconstructed an entire 1995 Ford Taurus, fabricating canoes, knapsacks, paddles and rucksacks, which were then hauled in a two-day portage around Niagara Falls by nine modern-day Voyageurs. In her persona as Mountain Man she has re-traced the colonial paths of the fur trade in urban settings by leading walking tours in Vancouver, Kamloops and Sudbury using her collection of Rearview Walking Sticks. In 2013, Elinor recreated a Depression era “Bennett Buggy”, outfitting participants in horse costumes fabricated from scavenged mufflers to drag a car through downtown Antigonish, Nova Scotia.  Her most recent work, Head-Smashed-In-Engine-Block-Buffalo-Jump, is an enormous pile of Buffalo skulls and bones formed from scavenged car parts.  Working from early photographs that document giant mountains of Buffalo bones waiting to be shipped by train for use as fertilizer and in bone china, these Buffalo reference both the grandeur and decline of dreams related to the Western Frontier and Henry Ford’s utopian vision of “a car in every drive way”.  The colonial greed and disregard for the land that fueled the extinction of the North American bison is manifest today in the towering piles of scrapped automobiles and in our incessant thirst for oil.   Whidden believes that reconciliation is only possible when we look critically at the ways in which history continues to repeat itself.
Since 2011 Elinor has also collaborated with artist Maggie Hutcheson as DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC MEMORY. In collaboration with communities of service users and staff they combine street performance, creative writing, visual/installation art, testimony and ceremony to tell the unique stories of specific public institutions in Toronto. They have commemorated the first publicly funded daycare in all of Canada in collaboration with parents, daycare workers and childcare advocates; celebrated the first Canadian organization run by and for HIV Positive Women with the organization’s founders, past members and staff; mourned the closure of a palliative care hospice with nurses and support workers, and much more. In each case, the DEPARTMENT encourages participants and audiences to reflect not only on their own stories but on broader questions of how we might foster a more caring, liveable and inclusive society.”

Listen to Elinor Whidden’s 20×20 Vision for walking