Adventure: the road to revelation.

There is a lovely Scots word, "stravaig", which means to wander without purpose. The natural history writer Robert Macfarlane calls such a wanderer a "Meanderthal". I neither stravaig, not am I a Meanderthal. I love to have a purpose and a destination when I walk. More often than not, I carry a heavy load with which to do things; cameras, tape measures, collecting equipment, binoculars, rifle.

Each walk must be a journey. A successful journey should have an element of discovery. That's what makes it an adventure. Adventures are about discovery. You don't have adventures until you feel the thrill, the wonder of seeing something new or spectacular, something that stands out in your memory, something you talk about and recall with friends.

I have always found that the natural world thrills me more deeply, touches me more profoundly, than anything else. Natural discoveries can be small, happenstance encounters. Last week I watched a raven performing a display flight over the chalk hills near my home. I heard it’s deep croak “prruuk”, and looked up to see it flip over upside down, then roll back again. It dipped and rose again, effortlessly surfing the great green wave of the downland escarpment. Or they can be more dramatic, profound encounters such as the journey I made last year to photograph tigers in Maharashtra’s Tadoba-Andhari National Park.

Raven


Lou and I often go out with the express purpose of a certain discovery: to find otter signs, to see the great bustards on Salisbury Plain or visit some hidden coombe in the folds of the hills. These purposeful walks are some of the best, they combine the art of the hunter with the hopeful expectation of the naturalist: I have a set purpose but am also open to a joyful serendipitous encounter that will divert me from my mission, leading to revelation and inspiration.


This is one of the great things about hunting for ancient and veteran trees. I know that I will meet a remarkable tree; that I will measure it, photograph it and know it. I also know that these trees hold many secrets. They have holes where bats live, mammals burrow around the roots and fungi gradually hollow their centres. So any meeting with an ancient tree holds the promise of meeting one of it's close family that will supply me with the joy of a surprise encounter.

Two trees, an ash and a willow, entangled one in another.

I remember meeting a wonderful ash tree in the Glyn Valley, Cornwall. It was a huge old tree standing near an old mill site. When the corn mill was working in the Nineteenth Century, the tree would have been quite venerable even then. When I encountered it, the top had blown out years before and new stems had sprouted up from it’s bole. The original trunk of the tree had hollowed out and I squeezed inside it to see what I could find. As I had suspected, it harboured bats and owls as evidenced by their distinctive droppings. But to my great delight I saw that the tree had started to grown internal roots. From high above my head, roots had sprouted and were writhing down through the rotting carcass of the old tree: the rejuvenated stems were feeding on the decaying remains of the original tree, extracting and recycling nutrients that it had first acquired in the previous century.

Such encounters open windows on the natural world, brief glimpses into lives and ways of living that are completely alien to humans. This is what makes purposeful walking so important to me. It is the mode of travel that enables the journey to take place. When I walk I am part of the world, I am in the landscape. In a car, or even on a bicycle, you travel over the land not through it. The Meanderthal on his or her stravaig will do so wrapped in thoughts of themselves, their mind free to dwell on their lives and loves past and present. My purpose consumes me, it removes all spurious cares and considerations from my life and focuses my mind on the job in hand. In my search for the designated target, I will inevitably come upon the unexpected revelation that brings delight as well as data.