Recently published by Sceptre, Jenn Ashworth‘s ‘The Parallel Path: Love, Grit and Walking the North’ is Book of the Month for August. Here, the author speaks to Karen Lloyd about anti-heroics, tethered beetles, and walking with Wainwright and Wordsworth breathing down her neck.

_{Jenn Ashworth, photographed by Lasma Poisa}

The Parallel Path begins as a book about walking through the North and about ideas of Northern-ness. Was there a moment when that straightforward narrative began to alter, to be subject to more external influences?

The initial impulse to do this walk was about getting away from home – that enforced enclosure and domesticity I’d experienced during lockdown. It was clear to me that there was something paradoxical about this, given that I was both walking away from home, and, in travelling through the north, exploring what home was made of – all these different terrains and landscapes that make up the north country. I thought the book would be about that – that sense of home being not only a house, but a cultural identity of a region, and my relationship to that. And it is – there’s plenty in the book about northernness and my own experiences of leaving home and coming back – but my friend Clive Parkinson’s letters really added something to my experience and my writing that I didn’t anticipate. He’s thinking about home and the north too, his own experiences growing up in Morecambe, his own walking, but he’s also thinking about care, about friendship and nature and mortality, and these became key themes in the memoir too.

Before you set off, Clive had talked with you about living with incurable cancer. He made a proposition, which was that as you arrived at each B and B on the route, a letter would be waiting for you – not just a letter – but beautiful writing and art as a way of meandering through thoughts about life and death. I’m wondering what it was like to receive in this way as you walked alone across the backbone of the country.

I was mainly curious about what it was Clive wanted to say. When we first met he was working through a project with artists who had something to say about death and mortality – really wanting to address that question, which he’d been alive to through his whole career as an artist and academic in arts for health. It occurred to me that Clive was an artist who might have interesting thing to say himself on the topic, and I’d imagined the letters might be a way of doing that – though what I received: these beautifully created collages, photographs, artworks – was far beyond what I expected and totally changed the inner trajectory of the walk and the book.

You write about the idea of kinhin: the practise of slow deliberate walking in circles, and how in the film The Wicker Man the protagonist finds a beetle tied by a piece of string to a drawing pin inside a desk. A great deal of our lives are spent walking in circles — or repeated trajectories — travelling to work, circling home, shopping, and sometimes in leisure we circle back to the same places. Taking a walk across the country steps away from that regularity. How much was that part of the intention?

Hugely so. I hadn’t felt much of the supposed health and wellbeing benefits of walking my little locked-down circles across the city, and Wainwright’s description of the coast-to-coast walk – a purposeful ‘bee-line’ across the entire country – very definitely not a circle – felt so important at the time I set out to do it. It’s one of the book’s mischievous ironies that it ends with a chapter where I walk another circle – a 21 mile loop right around my hometown of Preston (a kind of minor local orbital) and found myself learning to love home, belonging and being knitted into the past and my own places in a way that the bee-line of the walk away from home had made possible.

Can you talk a bit about your experience of crossing the Lake District, which I imagine was the most challenging in terms of terrain?

Some people do the coast-to-coast backwards, and start in the east, to save the hardest part, and the grandest landscapes, for last. I did it in the traditional way, so the first few days was spent slowly crossing West Cumbria and then the Lake District National Park. Physically, yes, it was tough – and I was walking against, or with, all these ideas about sublime experiences and whatnot, with Wordsworth breathing down my neck. I’d gone for some solitude but found the busiest days in the Lakes too: it is a tourist attraction, after all. But that became interesting – a way to measure all these ideas of wildness and solitude that I’d imbibed from some of the walking literature against my own real experience, which was of constant company, of being in very managed, sometimes manicured environments. Wainwright has a lot to say about these places, and what’s interesting is how much some of them have changed – like the Honister Slate Mine – since he wrote his book in the 1970s.

What about the question of the intention of walking as a way into writing? I’m thinking about the kinds of writers you observe as you walk and write — Solnit, Hazlitt, Bashō, Thoreau et al. 

When I decided I was going to do this walk, I also embarked on a bit of a reading binge of walking literature – it’s a big genre. And it interested me, how often writing was connected with walking in the minds of some of these writer-walkers. It started to make sense to me as I set out: you don’t really ever walk 192 miles, you just take one step, then another, and that’s how books are written too: I never sit down and think, right I’m off to write a novel. I just type a few letters, a word, a sentence, I follow the line, and a book unfurls behind me. I really loved what Rebecca Solnit has to say about walking in Wanderlust – it brought alive to me how much this utterly pedestrian act is so culturally meaningful and the meanings it has have changed over the centuries. What she had to say about pilgrimage – both in the religious sense, and also in the sense that a walk is a hope or an opening up to being changed: when we walk, we ask for something – came with me every step.

In my early 20s I spent a lot of time walking in the Lake District. I learned to map read but could never remember with absolute certainty (I think it’s to do with maths) the exact way to take a bearing with map and compass, so I not only carried these navigational aids but the instruction book too! There would also always be a Wainwright guide in my hand, which was like having an accompanying friend, or another layer of security at least. Wainwright is probably the original lone enraptured male. How did you find walking in his company?

My attitude to Wainwright changed a lot over the course of the walk. He can be quite grumpy and pompous, and we never really get away from him and his opinions about things and into the landscape: we don’t get the world in Wainwright’s books, not really, we just get more Wainwright. And he’s hard company sometimes: his constant assumption that his reader is male got to me a bit, his annoyance at tourists that his own books have brought to the places he writes about was also a little irritating. And yet, I softened, and started to see his complaining as a way of mourning, of grieving change – ‘things aren’t what they used to be’ is a refrain of his, and captured a certain sense of mid-life Wainwrightian grumpiness I was feeling myself at the time.

Narratives about walking often feature individuals battling with the elements, prevailing through thick and thin. There’s a moment in the B&B at Shap where you arrive knackered and feeling remote from home (if not geographically far away). You call the landlady ‘Barbara.’ Barbara leaves you almost in tears by offering you scones and asking if your feet hurt. Later you describe having felt ‘luxuriantly, unattractively sorry for myself.’ I love this: it’s so anti outdoor hero! Did you set out to be anti-heroic?

I wasn’t really thinking about being a hero of anything when I set out on the walk: if I managed to get it done, and not get attacked by a cow, then what was good enough for me. But when I sat down to write it, I knew immediately I didn’t want to write a kind of triumphalist narrative about my victory over the landscape or my own body – I know those kinds of books exist, and culturally, that kind of story has been very appealing to us for a long time. But it just wasn’t my experience. It wouldn’t have been true. I didn’t discover inner strength or heroism or my own impressiveness – far from it. I got close to my vulnerability, to the depths of my self-interestedness and grumpiness, my own smallness in the landscape – and able to move past toughness and independence and into a softer, more grateful way of being with people and places. That felt like a better sort of news to me. 

The theme of care recurs throughout the book: caring for, being cared for, self-care, but also selfishness and how you experienced all these phenomena through and beyond COVID and along the route of the walk. You talk about caring for your family, for your bereaved daughter, for your students – and then Clive. How did all this affect the way you eventually composed the narrative?

I don’t think I realised what a huge theme care would be until I started writing the book. Partly, that came from Clive, who was so interested in his own experiences of care and being cared for, and partly it was my attempt to answer the question: why on earth was I doing this? I felt burned out, totally done with the needs of other people, which had been a huge part of my life during the lockdown. I imagined the walk would be a break from care, but actually it became this very gentle education, at the hands of Clive and the landscape itself, of being cared for.

During the long section between Patterdale to Shap you write about walking into a kind of symbiotic stasis: ‘I had tramped myself into a state that was both totally relaxed and pin sharp alert, the mind finally content to fall into line and allow the body to lead with its own felt, silent intelligence.’ Can you talk a bit about the to and fro of walking, meditating, being present and (almost) absent – would it be called a ‘flow-state?’

I think the nearest I’ve come to experiencing that sort of state before has been in writing – but my experiences there involve forgetting the body, almost. Looking up from my computer and realising six hours have passed and I can’t feel my feet. In walking, the mind does all the things it does, but the body is there too – asking for water, for plasters, for food and rest and suncream. It was the start of a change for me, understanding my body not to be this dumb car that my mind used to drive itself around, but this precious part of who I was, the way I connected with the world, and deserving of a gentler attention than I’d given it before.

As you draw closer to the east coast you walk into a heatwave – I’m not going to indulge in a plot spoiler here – but just to observe that it felt as if you were much harder on yourself than on the climate — which after all is massively challenging for most of us. I’m guessing this is about not being averse to demonstrating vulnerability.

Yes – this walk was interrupted by that massive heatwave we had in the summer of 2022. You experience that kind of heat a lot differently on the North Yorks Moors, carrying your own water, than you do in a pub beer garden. A lot of things became clearer to me at this part of the walk. First: that this really wasn’t going to be a story about willpower or heroism – it doesn’t matter how tough or focused you are, you can’t change the weather, and you can’t control the effect the weather has on your body or the landscape. With that, came that sense of fear – an ecological grief – and a grief or final acceptance (they’re similar things, I think – a lot of this walk was about learning about grief) about how little I was capable of and what my next right actions might be. There’s a joy that comes after submitting to what’s bigger than you. It took me a while to find it.

I’m interested in your perception of the aesthetic value of the landscapes you moved through. I’m guessing there are very different kinds of belonging depending upon which part of the North and which kind of landscape we hail from? 

You know, when I look back now, that long day through some fairly unlovely farmland in the Vale of Mobray, is the one I remember most fondly. There was something about walking through places of work, though landscapes that had not been carefully arranged and managed for the enjoyment and edification of a tourist, where I was clearly, even on public rights of way, a merely tolerated guest, that brought a totally different feeling to the day. The length of it too – that 27-mile trek – helped me to understand some new things about the nature of commitment, and how gentle it can be. I also get to say I walked a marathon, which I secretly quite like. 

You didn’t know it at the time, but you’d been walking with a brain tumour that finally grew large enough to press on the auditory nerve and cause some weird things to happen — at one point you fall over unexpectedly and don’t understand why, and then you develop a ringing in your ears that doesn’t go away. The final chapter’s title is ‘Tethered Again,’ which makes me think of the beetle in The Wicker Man again, but this time it’s you tethered to the neuro ward, Salford Hospital. None of this was anticipated of course, in the way that what life throws at us never is. I am very happy (of course!) that the surgery was a success, although it and the recovery presented another, so much greater ordeal. Looking back now, how do you think about the juxtaposition of this major walk and major surgery almost coinciding?

It was such a strange, unpredictable thing – the way it all came together. That the walk invited and required me to become aware of and listen to my body in ways that I hadn’t before – so I began to notice I was sick. The way Clive had written to me every day about his own experiences of sickness and care – became a kind of training for what would happen next. That the sense of wanting to leave home and shrug off belonging to a place had actually morphed into this deep appreciation of the ways I’d been entirely formed by the landscapes, lovely and not, that I’d lived in. It was all kind of magical, really. A year after the walk I was in neuro high dependency looking at these photographs on my phone – here’s what you were doing last year, Jenn – and there was an irony to that which was almost funny, and got me through the darkest days. The walk prepared me to go home, and be at home differently. 

*

‘The Parallel Path: Love, Grit and Walking the North’ is out now and available here (£19.00).

Karen Lloyd is the editor of ‘North Country: An Anthology of Landscape and Nature’ (Saraband, 2022) and author of the James Cropper Wainwright Prize longlisted ‘Abundance: Nature in Recovery’ (Bloomsbury, 2021). She is a senior researcher and writer in residence with Lancaster University’s Future Places Centre.