Walking with Plato (26 page)

From Townleigh Farm, we walked twenty-one miles to the remote(ish)
Jamaica Inn
, on Bodmin Moor.

I say ‘remote(ish)’, because, although it’s slap-bang in the middle of the moor, there’s a tiny hamlet, Bolventor, plus a clonking-great A-road, the A30, nearby.

The greater part of the day’s journey was a pleasant but unremarkable hike along minor roads and footpaths through rural Devon. The last few miles, though, across the empty, heather-clad granite moorland of Bodmin Moor, were something special. Like Thoreau, I find that my spirits ‘infallibly rise’ when I am surrounded by bleakness and wilderness. And the same goes for Wendy. So we both arrived at Jamaica Inn in good spirits.

Jamaica Inn, a former coaching inn, built in 1750, provided both the setting and the title for Daphne du Maurier’s 1936 novel, set in the harsh and violent world of Cornish smugglers and wreckers in the early nineteenth century.

Her inspiration for the novel came to her while staying at the inn, after getting lost in the mist while horse-riding on Bodmin Moor. That would be a very easy thing to do. Wendy and I crossed it on a bright autumn day. But even so, without the GPS on my trusty smartphone, navigating it would have been no easy matter.

Today, Jamaica Inn is a hotel/pub/restaurant/museum that trades quite shamelessly upon its literary and lawless associations, with olde-worlde décor and abundant references to du Maurier’s novel and the world of smuggling. It is also (and I say this with a world-weary sigh) reputed to be one of the most haunted places in Britain.

But, for all that, it’s a fun and comfortable place to stay – especially at the end of a long hike.

From Jamaica Inn, we walked fifteen miles to the town of
Bodmin
.

We spent the morning heading south along the eastern side of Colliford Lake, Cornwall’s second-largest lake. It was a splendid walk across the moor. Not quite as splendid as the previous afternoon’s walk, since our path lay along a minor road rather than along footpaths and bare moorland. But splendid nonetheless.

I can’t remember details. I have a general recollection of a wide expanse of water on our right, and of scrubby grassland, meagre trees, and herds of Dartmoor ponies on our left. But I recall very clearly that I enjoyed it immensely.

At one point in his classic work of philosophical fiction
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
, Robert Pirsig talks about the kinds of things that one ‘should notice’ when walking up a mountain: ‘This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer.’

I wouldn’t, for a moment, dispute the value, to Pirsig and others, of this kind of observant awareness. But such conscious attention to detail isn’t at all my cup of tea.

Once or twice, in the past, I’ve tried to walk ‘mindfully’, to focus my attention on ‘this leaf’, or ‘this rock’, or the coolness of the breeze, or the singing of the birds. But it distracts and annoys me. My attention gets focused not on the intended objects, but on my own attempts to focus.

I find it far more rewarding to practise
un
-mindfulness: to climb a mountain, or to cross a moor, or to paddle in the ocean, or to lie beneath the stars without making the slightest effort to notice or focus upon anything.

I get my kicks by
absorbing
rather than
observing
.

This makes me, I think, what C.S. Lewis, in the second chapter of his book
The Four Loves
, calls a ‘nature-lover’.

Nature-lovers, as Lewis uses the term, are not the kind of people who seek out the beauty of individual natural objects such as rocks, streams, and flowers. Neither are they the kind of people who take special delight in beautiful vistas.

In fact, Lewis says, there’s nothing so irritating for the true nature-lover as sharing a ramble with a botanist or a landscape painter. The botanist will insist on pointing out beautiful objects, and the landscape painter will insist on pointing out beautiful views.

Nature-lovers find all of this annoying. They’re not interested in particulars. They want to experience the whole.

Lewis writes:

Nature-lovers want to receive as fully as possible whatever nature, at each particular time and place, is, so to speak, saying. The obvious richness, grace and harmony of some scenes are no more precious to them than the grimness, bleakness, terror, monotony, or ‘visionary dreariness’ of others. The featurelessness itself gets from them a willing response. It is one more word uttered by nature.

He considers the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth to be the archetypal nature-lover.

Wordsworth decried ‘giving way to a comparison of scene with scene’, being ‘bent overmuch on superficial things’, and ‘pampering’ oneself ‘with meagre novelties of colour and proportion’. It was far better, he thought, to be sensible to ‘the moods of time or season’, and to ‘the affections and spirit’ of a place.

This describes my attitude to nature, and to the countryside, to a ‘T’. So I have no hesitation in describing myself as a nature-lover. I hadn’t realized it before setting off on JoGLE. And it took me a long time to realize it
while
doing
JoGLE. But, nonetheless, a nature-lover I am.

After crossing Bodmin Moor, we walked southwest, along minor roads and the occasional footpath, to Bodmin.

Bodmin is one of Cornwall’s major towns. But, despite spending an entire rest day there, I remember almost nothing about it.

I remember that Wendy and I stayed in an unpretentious but adequately comfortable room at a Thai restaurant/hotel in the centre of town. And I remember that, on our first night there, we lounged on the bed, ate crisps and chocolate, and watched
Strictly Come Dancing
. But, apart from that, it’s all a blank.

Our journey from Bodmin to
Newquay
 – the final part of the penultimate section of JoGLE – took us twenty miles west, along minor roads, through gently undulating farmland.

Summing it up, like that, it all sounds a little dull. Or, at any rate, of little consequence. And if you asked me about it, and understood how little of it I can actually recall, you’d think that it really
was
of little consequence.

But that’s not how it was. And that’s not how it is.

I have two photographs in front of me now, which I took that day using my smartphone.

The first shows a leaf-strewn forest path, which is enclosed overhead by the canopy of the trees, giving it the appearance of a tunnel. The second shows a broad pasture extending to a line of trees at the horizon, with white cotton-wool clouds in a pale-blue sky overhead.

Without those photographs, I might struggle to remember those scenes. But, at the time, they were magical. And, even now, something of their magic remains.

In the spring of 1802, my fellow nature-lover William Wordsworth came across a long belt of daffodils while walking with his sister Dorothy in the Lake District.

This event inspired him, a couple of years later, to pen his most famous poem, commonly known as ‘Daffodils’, which begins:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

The poem, though, isn’t just about that one experience, that fleeting moment in time. It’s also about memory, and how memory can make such fleeting moments last.

The poem ends:

I gazed – and gazed – but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

And it’s the same for me with that forest path and that broad pasture. I may struggle to remember precisely when and where I saw them. I may confuse them with similar paths and similar pastures. But nonetheless their beauty remains. As does the beauty of a thousand other half-remembered scenes.

At the time, I ‘little thought what wealth to me the show had brought’. But now, when I look back – even after all this time – ‘my heart with pleasure fills’.