24 OCTOBER 2025
One day conference held at West Dean College of Arts & Conservation
Co-convened by Dr Melanie Rose & Sarah Hughes
Collage of some of the speakers words interpretively noted, so don’t quote me on it, but it shares a small glimpse of some of the ideas and observations from the day.
HAMISH FULTON
7 letter words: freedom, walking, harmony.
How walking is part of a process of making, and something made.Diverse sensations, experiences, encounters.
Poetic ramblings on foot and word.
Walk as a metaphor for artistic process.
Multiple intentions, purposes.
First, & Last.
Cannot make art without a walk.
WALK TEXTS
‘A walked line can never be erased.’
Challenges to feet and body.
Definition of adventure is that success must never be guaranteed.
Walking witnesses.
Other human walks: refugees, marches, protests.
Inventive walking.
“Will AI move us away from nature?”
Changes of air and breath
Surface and step
Temperature, space, and more.
Paths new and ancient.
“Nature exists, culture is made”
Poetic dialogue recordings
Making and finding ‘walks’
Nature has been ignored for landscape
Rights of nature and species.
Enslavement of land for ‘good use’ determined by some humans.
Wilderness is not underdevelopment, it is the opposite of that.
What can humans give back to nature?
The walk itself establishes the ‘attitude’
Q: What of numbers? Numbers are like patterns, rules observed.
Numbers construct things in the mind but the act is walking.
JACK CORNISH – RAMBLER, AUTHOR
‘The Lost Paths’
Forgotten Paths…Pasts
It takes effort for people to access footpaths.
It takes effort for people to establish footpaths.
Paths made by past industries, past reasons.
Droitwich paths to salt springs.
140K miles of rights of way
Traces of personal industries, getting to church, school, the doctor, now for leisure.
The necessity of leisure.
Paths made for leisure.
Past drovers – paths around dwellings but passing water, grass, for the animals.
Pubs for drovers in the middle of nowhere, but in their somewhere.
Pilgrims establishing routes. Healing well and pilgrim paths to and from Chittlehampton.
Oldest paths to the oldest monuments, to and from the sacred.
Rights of the past.
Rights of the present.
Rights of the future.
Rights of species, of what makes ‘place’.
LALLY MACBETH AND MATTHEW SHAW
STONE CLUB
West Penwith.
Recreating pre-history since 2021.
Listening & Equality.
Fun.
Sets up events, socials, with interdisciplinary speakers. Diverse and diversive views, experiences. Knowledge is shared.
Membership grows, a lot of city-livers more than rural.
LATES and participatory events, like at museums or through cities on a stone search club (Brighton)
Establishing myth – new or interpretations of rumours of old.
Picnics.
Making a new countryside code with fun stuff – how to make the perfect cheese sandwich.
Taking people, taking them on journeys.
Movie:
“A Field In A Day”
Zines:
Field Notes
Ancient Times
The stillness of stones and changes happening all around and on them. Slowness and speed.
Become a member.
Start a club.
DR KATE SOPER
WALKING TOWARDS A GREEN RENAISSANCE.
Walking as movement of the body.
Walking as zeitgeist – all the books on walking like a collage of signposts, maps, starting points, memories.
Different forms of walking:
The Convivial
The Pilgrimage
The Courting Couple Stepping Out
The Walk Down the Aisle
The Hike
The Funeral Cortege
The Carnival Parade
The Military March
The People’s Protest
The Sunday Family Walk After Lunch
What are your walks?
Who do you walk with, and when?
On a walk you are both rooted and airborne, like falling in love
Rousseau – Meditations of a solitary walker.
Walk as a means to escape people and society, solitude walking.
Dedalus – walking with a lobster on a lead (pre Edward James and Ivan Hicks).
Bach – mindless walking to travel rather than intentional to experience the journey itself.
Measure of walking – pedometers, steps, heart-rate, miles, number of styles, hills, passers-by. (Dear Data)
BUT – how does walking benefit nature?
People drive to paths to walk – some paths are isolated and you cannot reach them without trespass. Old WW2 airfields removed access temporarily, but not all were put back afterwards.
Q: What about toilets and women? Long skirts give a good squat but in trousers you have to strip, be vulnerable. Men don’t strip. They don’t have to be vulnerable. (Could someone design an upside-down coat, a skirt that keeps off the rain with a wide step to walk, with pockets, with dignity and usefulness?)
What if after the revolution of post-growth economies where consumerism has been contested and found failing, more people are inquisitive, curious, noticing ways to enjoy life itself.
What will that look like?
What do you want?
DR HOPE WOLF
WALKING IN COMPANY: RIFTED SHORES.
Image by John Stezaker “Mask”
Collage two images: a photograph of an actresses portrait with a picture postcard on the top of a painting of the cliffs of Sussex that joins the cliff to the face.
Sussex Downsmen who bought land to prevent development for industries other than farming. The demonisation of the developer, made monsters of others with counter views or ideas for the land, to win. Saw the land as a damsel that needed rescuing by them, a defenceless victim. The Seven Sisters. Ego and big tall hats.
(isn’t the same fight going on now? The sweet spot of giving without using it to build a big tall hat for yourself.)
Plurality of Places.
Plurality of Selves.
Charlotte Smith wrote of ‘Beachy Head’ in 1807.
Virgina Woolf wrote of it too later.
Marion Millner – drawings of land that show her mind rather than objects of land.
The dangers of metamorphosing are…?
PROF HARRIET TARLO
STILL STUMBLING INTO SOMETHING: IS THERE ANYTHING NEW TO SAY ABOUT THE RADICAL OPENNESS OF WALKING, ATTENDING, AND MAKING ART?
Her book of poems – ‘The Ground Aslant’ (2011)
“Walking moves the stuck mind on.”
Stop and start.
Pause.
Re-start.
What Thomas A Clarke said.
Slowness makes room for things that cannot be measured.
Being embodied.
Being local.
Ego-lessness.
Critical Survey Volume 29 Issue 1
Thomas A. Clark on walking, writing, drawing.
Walks inhabit different spaces – the land, gallery, book, cards, PowerPoints.
Movement between image and text.
Reaching beyond our own fields, beyond art, in the work we do, in the adventure of it, with a geologist or poet.
Rural Modernism, by Basil Bunting.
FIELDWORK – what is your fieldwork?
Working with what is and what isn’t there. What is now, and what was.
Changing assumptions of who and what, we move beyond.
On a walk there is a body, there are legs.
What is the point of ambition for that which is possible? There is more scope, more room, more adventure, in the beyond.
“If everything is moving, where is here?”
John Clares poems on enclosure, footpath poems.
The borders and the borderless.
Borders not recognised by the animals, insects, plants, water, fungi, trees, etc.
We cross borders.
Human boundaries of time and access.