I will walk for you

This month Plant Listening was touched to be invited to take part in some walks for Day of Access - a series of events that aim to give people whose lives are constrained by illness, creative access to wild spaces. Beyond physical exercise and distance covered, they understand how walks can be acts of solidarity, helping people feel less isolated and recover a sense of belonging.

The first event was a ‘Proxy Walk’ - a walk on behalf of someone who can no longer access a landscape or place they love. While this idea is not a new one - poets, activists and artists have been walking on behalf of those incarcerated, bed-bound or simply unable to access the outside world, for some time - it does feel radical. To walk for someone else gives you access to each other’s experience in a very tangible way. A foot-led empathy and a shared knowing of the world through memory and felt experience.

For Plant Listening’s proxy walk, we were invited by artist and poet Alec Finlay (who dreamed up the project) to ascend St Fillan’s Hill in Perthshire, a beloved mound he once climbed before physical illness meant he was unable to do so again.

(You can listen to Alec and I discussing his life and work during a conversation recorded this summer in Edinburgh’s Botanical Gardens, here.)

Alec writes, ‘I chose St Fillan’s because it's a walk I could once do – though with some pain afterwards. It's a wee hillock among big mountains, positioned where the old kingdom of the Picts and Gaels once collided. Tamara knew the region from the work she does with stalkers, but she'd never been up this wee hill – a pre-requisite for a proxy walk is that the walker has no previous knowledge of a place, so their impressions are fresh.’

It was beautiful, tender and sad to climb as Alec watched from a shady knoll at its foot. As he sat and wrote his memories of how the ascent had once looked and felt, I walked and noted what was growing and living, gathering some plants (yarrow, wood sage, plantain and lady’s bedstraw) for a tea that we could share, along with our stories, when I returned.

You can read the full poem Alec wrote that combines our reflections of the walk here, or simply stay with these words given to me by him when I rejoined him at the foot of the hill…

going up where I can’t

has made her

as small as the swifts

that halo the hill