Diary
Will Self
In the first few years of the last decade I undertook a series of what I called – with a nod to Iain Sinclair’s circumambulation of London – ‘radial walks’. These were tramps of between three and five days from my home near the city’s centre out into its hinterland, following either a cardinal or an ordinal point of the compass, depending on which direction most appealed to me at the time. The first of these walks took me northeast up the Lea Valley, through Epping Forest, then followed a long path called the Essex Way that traversed the surprisingly deep country well to the north of the Thames corridor, before I debouched through Dedham Vale and the Stour Estuary to arrive at Harwich.
Letters
Vol. 33 No. 22 · 17 November 2011
From Alan Ryan
Will Self is no doubt right that the elderly Connolly was no great walker; but during one of the several visits he paid to ‘Sligger’ Urquhart’s chalet above St Gervais in the early 1920s, the youthful Connolly and Lord Balniel walked across the Col de Voza to Courmayeur, met their Italian guides, climbed Mont Blanc, reached the summit at dawn, and walked back to the chalet by way of Tête Rousse, where they left their guides, a round trip of around 30 miles, including the highest peak in Europe (LRB, 20 October). It wasn’t an untypical exploit.
Alan Ryan
Princeton University
From Steven Misander
Here in SE17, where in the dead of night Big Ben is often audible, Will Self could nonetheless, setting out after breakfast, and walking much of the time through the extensive parkland of this side of London, easily reach ‘open fields’ in time for lunch at the 14th-century inn that heralds their proximity; this, thanks to a quirk of the Green Belt that has preserved a slither of near Devonian farmland between the conurbations of Bromley and Croydon, no trace of either being visible from it. This was the start of the Sixth-Form Walk conducted every summer holidays in the 1960s by my history master, then president of the Surrey Paths Preservation Society, who had hiked with Hilaire Belloc before the war from his home village, Warlingham, in Surrey proper, down Titsey Hill and all the way over the Downs to Ditchling Beacon and finally the sea. This is still possible, though by our time the Sixth-Form Walk had been curtailed into an amiable country pub crawl – and alas many of those will no longer be found to quench Will Self’s thirst.
Steven Misander
London SE17
