This is a unit of progress and it is also a unit of thought. “From my heel to my toe is a measured space of 29.7 centimetres or 11.7 inches. To sing out was–-and still is, just about, for the Songs survive, though more and more of them slip away with each generation–-therefore to find one’s way, and storytelling was indivisible from wayfaring.” Thus the world was covered by ‘Dreaming-tracks’ that ‘lay over the land as “ways” of communication’, each track having its corresponding Song. Depending on where they fell, these foot-notes became linked with particular features of the landscape. As Bruce Chatwin explained in his flawed but influential account, ‘each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints'. They began to walk out across this non-place, and as they walked they broke through the crust of the earth and released the sleeping life beneath it, so that the landscape sprang up into being with each pace. According to this cosmogony, the world was created in an epoch known as the Dreamtime, when the Ancestors emerged to find the earth a black, flat, featureless terrain. “The best-known connection between footfall, knowledge and memory is the Aboriginal Australian vision of the Songlines. 'A culture,' he wrote warningly in 1953, 'is no better than its woods.' ” When woods and trees are destroyed - incidentally, deliberately - imagination and memory go with them. When the physical correspondents of thought disappear, then thought, or its possibility, is also lost. 'Thought, like memory, inhabits external things as much as the inner regions of the human brain. Such knowledge, seriously considered, changes the grain of the mind. It is valuable and disturbing to know that grand oak trees can take three hundred years to grow, three hundred years to live and three hundred years to die. It is beyond our capacity to comprehend that the American hardwood forest waited seventy million years for people to come and live in it, though the effort of comprehension is itself worthwhile. This discretion of trees, and their patience, are both affecting. To walk in a wood is to find fault with Socrates's declaration that 'Trees and open country cannot teach me anything, whereas men in town do.' Time is kept and curated and in different ways by trees, and so it is experienced in different ways when one is among them. “Single trees are extraordinary trees in number more extraordinary still.

The old ways a journey on foot