The Old Ways

One of my retirement presents was this book, and it is now my bedtime reading. The Old Ways is beautifully written and poetically and very evocatively describes landscape, routes, history and characters. I am now about 1/3 way through it. I particularly liked Chapter 4, "Silt" with its description of walking the Broomway, which I remember my friend Joyce walking in 2018. Here is a flavour of the writing...

"We stepped off the causeway. The water was warm on the skin, puddling to ankle depth. Underfoot I could feel the brain-like corrugations of the hard sand, so firmly packed that there was no give under the pressure of my step. Beyond us extended the sheer mirror-plane of the water, disrupted only here and there by shallow humps of sand and green slews of weed.

Out and on we walked, barefoot over and into the mirror-world. I glanced back at the coast. The air was grainy and flickering, like an old newsreel. The sea wall had hazed out to a thin black strip. Structures of unknown purpose – a white-beamed gantry, a low-slung barracks – showed on the shoreline. Every few hundred yards, I dropped a white cockle shell.

With so few orientation points and so many beckoning paths, we were finding it hard to stay on course. I was experiencing a powerful desire to walk straight out to sea and explore the greater freedoms of this empty tidal world."

You can read more in an excerpt from it on the BBC site here.

Highly recommended, and not just by me!