A walk to celebrate the Autumn Equinox on Monday 22 September 2025, 5.30-7.15pm meeting at The Pitt. Booking link
At the Autumn Equinox, there is balance between the daylight and the dark. As we celebrate and embrace this momentary state of equilibrium, let us take a deep breath. Transformation and renewal will come with the start of the season, so this is a good time to pause, walk, and notice what’s around us.
Meeting at The Pitt, Granton at 5.30pm, we’ll say hello, then walk in pairs towards Silverknowes, and back again. When we get back to our starting place, we’ll have some refreshment and discuss what we noticed. The event will end at sunset (7.12pm). Let’s hope it’s a clear night!
This is a flat walk on a hard surface and therefore wheel-friendly, whether buggy, wheelchair, stick or other. There are stands to lock up your bicycle at the start. Buses stop some way away: try 16, 19, 22 and get off either at Granton Square or the foot of Waterfront Avenue ///nail.served.dizzy or near the top of Spiers Bruce Way (bus top acid.pulse.cloth) and walk down.
I’m describing this walk as a Community Walk because we will walk together. All adults (and accompanied children) plus dogs are welcome. You do not have to live in Granton!
Please bring refreshments – I will provide chocolate/fruit.
This event is free to attend, though a donation of £5 per person would be gratefully received.
‘After That’ (the past) and before we get to ‘This’ (now), we must pass through a portal. This walk will seek gateways of all shapes and sizes. It’s for those who haven’t yet arrived in, or are curious about, the present moment.
Moving through a portico, from one side to the other, sometimes in conversation, sometimes silent, the present will be revealed. Carrying with you a paper portal sporting the words, Gateway to … , it’s the walking through and under these transitionary arches that will help us finish the sentence.
Free downloads (two) for the distal version of Gateway to This
This walk as taken in March 2025. It was the penultimate day of a 10-day hike from Chepstow, on the Welsh-English border, to Cheltenham. My artwork was in the Walking the Land’s Line(s) of Enquiry exhibition at the Hardwick Gallery, which opened on 7 March, and I was attending a Symposium at the University of Gloucestershire there on 21st.
You may be interested in this companion blog post: Walking with Ants
Detail, The Honeydew Line, by Tamsin Grainger (embroidery). I was walking for the small things, celebrating and honouring them as vital participants in our ecosystem
I am an Edinburgh-based artist who exhibited in the Walking the Land collective Lines of Enquiry exhibition at the Hardwick Gallery University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham. The gallery is situated near the Honeybourne Line, a greenway which used to be a railway. After the opening on 7 March, I made an artwalk from the Welsh/English border to the Symposium which was also at Hardwick and held by Walking the Land.
The Honeybourne Line in Cheltenham and the Cycle Route Network in my home city of Edinburgh date from the Industrial Revolution, whereas industrious ants have been around since the Jurassic era. For much longer than we have been commuting along these paths, they have been making their way back and forth to work from ant hill or nest, gathering food, clearing up after us, and making critical relationships with other species (famously stroking aphids so they secrete honeydew).
I have walked, watched, sketched and embroidered ants in order to appreciate and understand more about them and their busy lives. So often unseen, they are a vital part of our ecosystem and I celebrate them.
The Honeydew Line (stitching) by Tamsin Grainger at the Hardwick Gallery, Cheltenham. Ants walk each day to forage, and like commuters along the Honeybourne Line (Cheltenham), they pass in both directions often carrying heavy loads
I walked from Chepstow to Cheltenham through the Forest of Dean, the Severn Plain and the Cotswolds, looking out for the unseen small ones (eg ants who are part of our ecosystem and clear up our rubbish). For 10 days, I noticed, acknowledged, and paid attention to the vital role these not-insignificant members of our community play.
The mushroom says, fruitfulness comes from what is unseen or overlooked — hidden networks, decomposition.
Elizabeth Wainwright, Redlands
Orange crust fungusFrozen crocuses
At the end of each day, I visited the home of someone who had taken me up on my offer of a Shiatsu-hospitality exchange. Highlighting the walk in advance on social media, I invited others to accompany me and/or to meet in the evenings / overnight. I was delighted to make the acquaintance of many people I’d never previously met, and others whom I had known before but had not seen for a few or even for 40 years.
With Vicky at the end of day 1 @wyevalleyshiatsu
During the walking process, I witnessed the terrible devastation to our soil that we have caused through intensive forestry, extraction, and injurious industrial farming methods. The effects of the recent, more extreme, wind, storms and flooding, often attributed to climate change, were experienced every day.They prompted me to recognise our human failing to protect the insects, birds, plants and animals that we have a duty of care towards, and rely on.
Eroded paths – almost impassable with human feet
Over the next months, I’ll be reflecting on the injury to my leg from slipping on the mud while climbing May Hill at the end of a 10-hour-day’s trek carrying a heavy pack. The pain I walked with became an embodied manifestation of the state of the crisis we are in. There were times on the tops of hills when trudging and squelching through mud, that I wondered if I could continue to go on. I had to sit and rest, mindfully. I had to accept the situation, go right into the middle of the extreme discomfort in order to transform the pain that each step caused.
So many broken or fallen trees
I will be addressing the idea that this was more than a walk or a wander, perhaps a pilgrimage, and that the act of hope was inherent in the constant need to physically move forwards. I accepted help and occasionally I sewed a small panel instead of touching, embroidered something I had come across during that day’s walk – Melusine (found on the arch of Notgrove Manor) and a periwinkle flower (from the hedgerows). Though I had scheduled one rest day, I had to take a second, a break from the walking. Lucky me that I could do that, with the help of new and old friends.
Someone left a dog poo bag on the wall
This walk has been now been completed. Thanks to all those who walked with me, or who bartered hospitality for Shiatsu. What is Shiatsu?
Tamsin giving Shiatsu, Paris
My route: Chepstow, to Parkend, to May Hill, to Gloucester, and to Crickley. Salperton to Stow-on-the-Wold, to Winchcombe, to Tewkesbury, all along the Gloucestershire Way. Then, to Gloucester on a British Pilgrimage Trust route, and finally to the Walking the Land Symposium in Cheltenham along a Slow Ways route. Total: approximately 124 miles (around 200 kms).
Starting in Chepstow at dawn
The Walking the Land ‘Lines of Enquiry’ exhibition ran between 3rd and 27th March, and the Symposium was on 21 March 2025.
Arriving at the Hardwick Gallery, Cheltenham, for the Symposium on 21st March 2025 at the end of the walk
This is a Pedestrian Project about marking time. It took place between 27th October and 4th November 2024 (inc. images from 5th November).
I’m no creature of habit. Left to myself, I struggle to do the anything every day at the same time; I rarely eat at regular mealtimes, and having been self-employed for my adult life, I’ve never worked an on-going 9-5 (am-pm) day. Not since school.
Photos Taken 15 minutes Before Sunrise (or thereabouts)
EdinburghDay 2345678Anstruther, Fife
This may explain why Sunrise Walks are an interesting concept to me. Instead of following my own inner, wonky routine, I have decided to set my alarm and be there, on my doorstep at the correct time, every day between the clock chaging in the UK and in the US, as prompted by Blake Morris. The brief was to take a photo (or somehow to document) the moments that were 15 minutes before, at, and 15 minutes after, sunrise.
Except …
Sunrise changes by 2+ minutes every day so it isn’t actually ‘the same’. I made a chart in advance:
I didn’t notice that blip until day 7 and it was too late to change by then
Times and Twilight
I took the sunrise times from the Time and Date website and missed the 3 minute difference between 28th and 29th October. Instead, I saw that there were 2 minutes between 27th and 28th, 30th and 31st etc and followed that pattern for all of the start and end times (I’d be no good in a lab or at setting train timetables) meaning that from day 3, I was snapping my photos at the wrong times.
In writing this blog, I have discovered that this anomaly is because …
The Earth’s orbit around the Sun is elliptical, rather than circular, and the Earth’s axis of rotation is not perpendicular to the plane of the orbit. This non-circularity of the orbit and the tilt of the Earth’s axis of rotation both contribute to the uneven changes in the times of sunrise and sunset.
I like the image on the webpage (left). It reminds of my solargraphic camera image here
As an aside: I really like the idea of ‘civil twilight’ (above). That’s exactly how it was. It related to me as an ordinary person (not a military woman nor an ecclesiastical one) and was both a courteous and a polite time of day. I always thought twilight was before the dark finally settled down to sleep, but it means, “the soft glowing light from the sky when the sun is below the horizon, caused by the reflection of the sun’s rays from the atmosphere.” (Oxford dictionary), so it can apply to sunrise AND sunset.
Civil twilight “Begins in the morning, or ends in the evening, when the geometric center of the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon. Therefore morning civil twilight begins when the geometric center of the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon, and ends at sunrise.”
Anyway, I chose to walk the same route every day. Starting at the view near my front door 15 minutes before, walking to the highest point of Granton Crescent Park for sunrise, then down and through The Wasteland (to check whether my banner was still there and if the bulbs that we planted on the community walk had come up), and along to Wardie Bay for 15 minutes after. I didn’t make it on time to the beach every day as I got distracted by yellow cones at low tide and all manner of other things.
The Wasteland. Looking through the brambles from the Granton Crescent Park steps – the banner on the far wall had blown down again, but the circle of stones was in tact (at this date)
Traffic cones at low tide (left). That must have been a fine game for someone – really? They matched all sorts of other yellows which presented themselves: a sherbet-yellow yacht in the harbour, wild ragwort, chamomile (middle, like fried eggs with frayed edges), and spears of ageing sea buckthorn leaves (right). A flock of pigeons wheeled silently overhead, a single oyster catcher peeped piercingly, and a young gull lifted his feet higher than usual, one by one, to clear the wet grass fronds.
What happened?
The devil was watching just as I set off on the first day, and I dropped and completely broke my phone (the one with a decent camera). I reverted to my daughter’s very old one for the rest of the project hence the grainy quality of the images. That made me choose when and whether to take photos at all. I sketched and took careful mental notes so that I would remember, and spent time afterwards writing them down
I did this walk at the times on my chart until I got to Friday (day 6) when I realised it would clash with something I actually do every week at the same time, which is to go to my meditation group, so that day’s photos were not taken at the correct times
I thought Sunday was the final day (I’d put it in my diary wrong – don’t ever rely on me to be reliable) and on Monday I was doing this really long walk in Fife (the final day of The St Margaret’s Way) which meant that I had to be on an early bus and couldnlt walk the usual route
Thank godness art doesn’t have to be a precise science
Photos Taken at Sunrise (pretty much)
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Notes on photo gallery above: Sunrise Photos. Day 1 was taken 2 minutes early because of the phone debacle. Day 6 was not taken at the right time either which you can see by the sky colour, though it is a rather nice, pinky purple). The 9th picture above was taken in Anstruther. It wasn’t a Sunrise Walk day, but I needed 9 images to make the photo grid work and found that I had taken a photo at exactly the right time.
What did I discover?
A long, thin black feather and a small slim, silver-blue fish, both on the strand – a grounded agent of flight and a beached swimmer. A series of sandcastles with upright feathers stuck in them like sentinels of the dawn. Border lines: Fife and Inchkeith Island on the horizon; the Eastern breakwater dissecting the sea, along which silouettes walked; the dividing line between the light and dark skin on my arm where the nettle stung me and left a tingling sensation for the remainder of the day. Fallen white poplar leaves and a camp in the little woods with silver tinsel looped over a branch.
Day 5, A Windy Film
I learned that even when I get up at almost exactly the same time every day and walk almost the same route, the world is always different. It’s never the same. My thoughts are not the same, nor are my actions (even if I try) and neither is the sky / moon / sea / trees / rubbish (though the s-shaped hook was there impacted into the pavement every day). I liked the way the lichen pattern nearby and the shape of the crescent moon above seemed to be related to the curtain hook.
These solo walks were also social occassions. I knew that I was walking with other psychogeographers all over the world. We all shared on Intsagram and sent messages to each other, building up relationships over this 8-day period and, in some cases I knew some from previous Sunrise Walks or in-person meetings – I could picture Jackie in Dublin after walking with her in Canterbury, England, Carol near Philadelphia in the US after we First Friday Walked together along the Thames in London last month, and Kel who I’ve before met in Greece and Gloucestershire. Many, if not all, are part of the Walking Artists Network, and Carol, Kel and I are members of Walking the Land Artist Collective.
The last word(s)
I’m awake every day now. At dawn. Is that what it takes?
Compare what happened to day 7! It turned from dull to golden.
Photos Taken 15 Minutes After Sunrise (but not always)
Edinburghthe camera took this itselfWardie Bay34Not at the right time78Anstruther
Walking without a donkey 