Elena's Arms
Tuesday February 2, 2010
- Walking The Pyrenees: Summits Or A Long Distance Path
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On two occasions recently in the Pyrenees, I got some extensive and useful advice from local Spanish walkers. The first time I’d walked up from Refuge Larri, above the Pineta Valley, on what I came to understand was a madcap plan. After I’d got a lift from cloud sodden Gavarnie to the sunnier Spanish parts, I wanted to return to the High Route which meant, if possible, going up to the Barroude Lake. There appeared…
- Walking The Pyrenees 2010
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Gavarnie When I arrived at the Lourdes station – weird and unpleasant though the town is – I felt I could breathe again. The Pyrenees can be seen in the distance, it’s a simple southern France town (underneath the tourist nonsense)) and it was warm. I felt the same thing two years ago though on that occasion as I made the journey to the mountains, the skies clouded over and remained that way for most of…
- Street Conflict, Photography, The Imaginary, Symbolic, And Real
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Returning home from work about four months ago a car pulled off the pavement where he was parked, into my path. I was forced into an emergency stop, and there was a minor collision. At the time, the scumbag apologised immediately. Two months later, he’d lied to insurance companies and was saying it was my fault. This would penalise me in terms of future insurance ratings. Instead of providing little sketches to illustrate what…
- Mountain Walking: The Books Of Robert McFarlane
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When I first heard of Robert McFarlane’s Mountains Of The Mind, I knew I wanted to read it. My special interest is the effect of mountains on mood and thought, the imperceptible but familiar process for regular walkers. We romp the hills for a few days and come back soothed, calmed, and refreshed; our psychological perspective changes coinciding with the altered geography. And as McFarlane notes, mountain walking involves a cultural and perceptual attitude that…
- Mountains Of Scotland: First Impressions
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The places in which any significant even occurred become embedded with some of that emotion, and so to recover the memory of the place is to recover the emotion, and sometimes to revisit the place uncovers the emotion. Every love has its landscape. thus place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you’re present, possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as a sense of place, a summoning in…
- Mountain Walking: Wild Rhinog Pathways
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I’ve just finished reading The Practice Of The Wild, by Gary Snyder. I found it very tedious and poor quality, largely just an emotional-narrative construct in which he blends ecology, Buddhism, native teachings and rural-anarchist politics. I ended up skipping much of it, weary of nonsensical platitudes such as “the world is watching: one cannot walk through a meadow or forest without a ripple of report spreading out from one’s passage” (19). There may be,…