Planning a Gentle Walk Through Poetic Landscapes

Why Poets Make Good Walking Companions

Most of us walk to get somewhere, or to add a few miles to a tally. A poetry walk asks something rather different of you. It asks you to go slowly, to follow a line of verse as much as a line on the map, and to treat a bench, a stile or a bridge as a destination in its own right.

The poets who knew this best were the ones who walked as part of the work rather than around it. John Clare tramped the fields around Helpston with a notebook in his pocket. Edward Thomas walked Hampshire lanes in all weathers and turned them into prose and verse. Dorothy Wordsworth kept a journal of ordinary things — moss, a storm, the sound of a beck — that her brother later quarried for poems. None of them was chasing a personal best. They were simply paying attention, and writing down what they noticed.

That is the whole method, and it is available to anyone with a pair of boots and an afternoon.

Matching a Poem to a Patch of Ground

Choose your route backwards. Start with a poem you genuinely love, then find the landscape it describes, or one that answers to it closely enough.

• Look for named places. A river, a valley, a churchyard, a stretch of coast or a particular hill will give you an anchor. Read the poem carefully before you go and check whether the geography still holds.
• Allow for change. Enclosure, reservoirs, bypasses and conifer plantations have rewritten plenty of ground. A poem can still guide you to a parish even if the field it mentions is now under wheat and a new fence.
• Keep the mileage gentle. Three to five miles is plenty. A circular route with a bench or a pub roughly halfway is ideal, because you will stop more often than you expect.
• Print the poem out. Fold it into a coat pocket where it will not blow away. There is a particular pleasure in reading verse aloud at the place that made it, even if the only audience is a curious ewe.

If you cannot get to the exact spot, do not fret. Any lane, moor edge or canal towpath will do, so long as you hand it over to the poem and let the two talk to each other.

Packing for a Slow Day Out

The kit for this kind of walking is small, cheap and easy to forget. Assemble it the night before.

• A notebook with a firm cover and an elastic band, small enough to fit a coat pocket. Floppy pages are useless in wind.
• A pencil, plus a spare. Pencils work in rain, cold and the sort of damp that defeats a biro.
• A flask. Tea or coffee, taken sitting down, is half the point.
• A waterproof sit mat, the folded foam kind. Dry trousers make you linger longer.
• A paper map in a clear plastic wallet, and a proper waterproof jacket. Assume the forecast is optimistic.
• Decent boots with grip, especially in autumn when limestone and clay both turn treacherous.

Leave the headphones at home. The soundtrack you want is wind, water, rooks and your own footsteps.

The Art of the Frequent Pause

Aim to stop every twenty minutes, or at every gate, bridge and stile you pass. Stand still for longer than feels natural. Count to a hundred slowly. Birds and animals will resume whatever you interrupted.

When you stop, give yourself a small, specific instruction rather than an open invitation to admire the view. Try one of these:

• Write down five nouns and nothing else.
• Note one sound, one smell and one colour.
• Describe the weather on your face in a single sentence.
• Find one object — a rusted gate latch, a strand of sheep's wool, a shard of pot — and describe it as if it mattered, because it does.

Do not tidy your notes. Roughness is where the good material hides.

From Footpath to First Draft

Back home, with the kettle on, spend twenty minutes turning notes into writing. Do not attempt a masterpiece; attempt a mess that has one true detail in it. Prompts that work well after a walk include:

• Write the whole walk in five sentences, one for each sense.
• Write a short poem that never uses the word "walk".
• Borrow the metre or line length of the poem you carried, and fill it with your own afternoon.
• Write about what was not there — the mill that has gone, the elms that have gone, the people who used to take this path to work.
• Write a letter to the poet, telling them what has changed and what has stubbornly stayed the same.

Weather, Seasons and Making It a Habit

British weather rewards the walker who dresses properly and lowers their expectations. Drizzle is fine. Low cloud on a moor is atmospheric rather than ruinous, provided you have a map and know how to use it. Save the long routes for spring and early autumn, when the light is low and the hedgerows are loud with growth. Winter walks can be short and still generous: bare branches show you the skeleton of a place, and you will notice walls, ditches and old trackways that summer hides.

One reliable habit is to walk the same route once each season with the same poem in your pocket. Read it in April and again in October. Keep a separate notebook for that route alone, and date every entry. Within a year you will have something no guidebook can give you: a record of a place, a poem and your own changing attention, all pressed between the same two covers.