Unlocking pathways
Clare and Abbi from In All Our Footsteps and Dr Sarah Bell (Exeter University) recently facilitated a workshop at the 2023 annual conference of the European Society for Environmental History in Bern (Switzerland). Here, Abbi reflects on their workshop and shares a collaborative tramping poem co-written by workshop participants.
The sounds of fellowship
Breathe deeply – the air dances around us.
Each intake transforms landscape into body –
hot air feels sticky, exhausting, it coats
my insides, not life-giving like cold air –
each out-breath casts the self into the world.
To breathe is to be unconstrained, we play.
When we sing we sometimes feel embarrassed
because we have forgotten the words.
Shhhhhhhhhhhh! A ‘sensible’ approaches
we hand the baton back to the birds.
Move smoothly – freestyle. There is no silence
time is kept by notes and beats. All I hear
is my pulse, the sound of breath. I carry
the stories and views and smells of other
places with me. Church bells in the mountains
blown by the wind, leave only echoes.
Have the sounds of the waves crashing drowned
the roar of the wind in the beech forest?
We sing, grasses sway, sheep bleat along
the body of air made solid through song.
A collaborative tramping poem curated by Abbi Flint from lines written by workshop participants. With many thanks to attendees at our ESEH 2023 workshop for permission to use their words to create this poem.
Our interactive workshop used participatory activities and provocations to explore entangled sensory and social engagements with landscape and nature, with a particular focus on sound and air as dimensions of these interactions. The workshop had an interdisciplinary and creative flavour; Clare is an environmental and medical historian, Sarah is a health geographer, and I am an archaeologist and poet. The first part of the workshop was structured around insights drawn from three projects:
Unlocking landscapes
First Clare introduced ‘Unlocking landscapes: History, Culture and Sensory Diversity in Landscape Use and Decision Making’; a network funded through the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It explored the potential for sensory history scholarship to disrupt and expand the types of stories shared about landscape; moving beyond dominant forms of landscape encounter and enabling a greater diversity of people to ‘be’ and belong in historic landscapes.
Focusing on the concept of sensory therapeutic landscapes, Clare highlighted the importance of the historical and cultural context of medical ideas relating to the therapeutic nature of ‘open-air’. She shared insights from 19th and early 20th century writers (such as Edward Carpenter) and physicians (including David Chowry Muthu) on concepts of health associated with the embodiment of air and the building of active connections, and even a kind of fellowship, with nature. Both singing and ‘tramping’ could be part of open-air treatment for conditions such as tuberculosis:
Singing exercises – These also form an important part of deep breathing and share all its advantages. They invoke correct nasal breathing, maintain a better expansion of the chest and a freer passage of air to remote areas of the lung, such as the apices - which are liable to become tuberculous owing to the comparative inactivity - and determine a more efficient supply of blood to these parts, and thus indirectly improve the local and general health. (Muthu, 1922, p. 246).
Image Credit: Photograph of patients on a tramping tour from Muthu, 1922. Wellcome Collection
Sensing nature
Next, Sarah shared insights from ‘Sensing Nature’: a research project that ran from 2016-2018, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. It involved an in-depth qualitative study exploring how people with sight impairment, living in rural and urban areas of England, describe their experiences with and within diverse types of nature.
Through evocative quotes from research participants, and historical sources, Sarah encouraged us to think inclusively – and beyond the visual – in terms of how nature and landscape come into being amongst people with sight impairment. The songs and sounds of the other-than-human, such as birds and livestock, can be points of connection and companionship with nature and spark off creative narratives about landscapes.
I went round the local park yesterday... and you could hear all these different birds, because they have all these incredible birds that go there. I’m sure it’s a, you know, very sort of elitist bird club. Very very specialist. Certain egrets don’t get in. ‘One cormorant at a time!’ Abbie (Sensing Nature Participant)
Image credit: Unsplash
In all our footsteps
Finally, I shared a small part of our UK AHRC funded research for ‘In all our footsteps’, which explores historical, health and policy perspectives of the mapping, development, use and experience of twentieth and twenty-first century rights of way. This drew on archival research, analysis of existing oral history testimonies, and go-along interviews to explore the diverse ways that people engage with and draw meaning from paths and trails, focused on singing.
Sharing early twentieth songbooks from open-air recreation and holiday organisations, and examples of contemporary outdoor choirs, I invited participants to reflect on how collective singing might contribute to the idea of paths as spaces of human and other-than-human sociality, and how the songs that were sung, where they were sung, and even how they were sung, may have served to both include and exclude.
The object is to encourage the growth of the true open-air spirit of fellowship and love, the vigour and joy of life and the emulation of the birds who give praise to Nature by their full-throated, joyous song. What better medium could we desire than the old English country folk song with its simple appeal and the very breath of the countryside in its jingling rhymes. (Ward, 1922)
Image credit: Sheffield City Archives, Ref 784.6 SST
Weaving the threads together
The workshop discussion weaved together and teased apart threads from the three presentations and drew on participants’ own experiences and research, including:
How auditory dimensions are part of how we story, and construct narratives, about our engagements and experiences with landscape.
What role sound plays in societal expectations of how to be and behave on paths and trails. What sounds do we welcome or expect and what sounds do we consider out-of-place?
How air mediates our experiences of landscapes, for example the materiality of air – i.e. the vibration of air molecules – enables us to hear soundwaves.
The different emotions that sound evokes and expresses; from birdsong prompting humour, joy and awe and as Sarah put it ‘birdy socialities’, to singing as a way to express fellowship, exhilaration, protest, or even fear.
Creating the collaborative poem
I am using poetry as a research method within the IAOF project and have found it a powerful way to analyse and engage with research texts, as well as crystallise ideas in progress (Flint, 2023). I invited workshop participants to explore poetry as a way of engaging with our session throughout. After each of our short presentations on the three projects, people were invited to spend a few minutes responding poetically to the ideas and material they had heard about and discussed. There was no pressure to share any of the writing produced, but at the end of the session participants were invited to share one or two lines they had written (anonymously) if they wished. The words shared were evocative and striking and spoke to many of the themes in our wider discussions. It was a joy to craft these together into the collaborative poem that opens this post. Perhaps these could even form the words to a new, sensory engaged, ‘tramping’ song!
Where next?
Clare and I are working on a research article which explores themes of open-air singing, sociality and health. Look out for future news of this on our publications page.
In the meantime, do check out the resources from the other two projects through the links below:
Unlocking Landscapes https://www.unlockinglandscapes.uk/
Sensing Nature https://sensing-nature.com/
References cited
Flint, Abbi (2023) Poetry, paths, and peatlands: integrating poetic inquiry within landscape heritage research, Landscape Research, https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2023.2237432
Muthu, David C. (1922) Pulmonary Tuberculosis: its Etiology and Treatment. London, Bailliere, Tindall and Cox (Wellcome Collection).
Ward, G.H.B. (Ed) (1922) Songs for Ramblers to Sing on the Moorlands. Sheffield Clarion Ramblers (Sheffield City Archives, Ref 784.6 SST)