walking – Page 2 – Walking without a donkey

Community Walking Projects, Walking without a donkey - travels in England

Walking with Ants

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

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.

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.

This walk has been now been completed. Thanks to all those who walked with me, or who bartered hospitality for Shiatsu. What is Shiatsu?

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).

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

Community Walking Projects

Sunrise Walks 2024

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)

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.

Jeff Mangum on the National Radio Astronomy Observatory

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.”

National Weather Service

If you are interested in that, you’ll probably like this too: Guardian article, The three phases of twilight, explained

The Route

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)

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)

Slow Travel (overland)

I’m championing Slow Travel, blogging about going overland on foot, by train, bus, Bla Bla Car, or ferry. I began in 2016 by taking a boat to Santander from Portsmouth across the Bay of Biscay, and walking around Spain, including from Pamplona to Santiago de Compostella (most of the Camino Frances) which took 5 weeks (approx. 410 miles / 660 kms). Then in 2023, I decided ‘no more aeroplanes for me’.

Pyrenees on the Walter Benjamin Trail 2023

There are several reasons why I’m doing this: the most important two are to avoid producing carbon emissions when flying, and the pleasure I get from being able to feel the ground under me and see the places I’m passing through. Ideally, I would walk, and I’ve done a lot of that, but I generally move between cities on wheels on a method of transport where I’m sharing with other people. I’m concerned about global warming and climate change, and would prefer not to be responsible for making it any worse, if possible.

This type of journey is slower. It takes more preparation time, and is often more expensive too, which means that I must incorporate the travel days into my itinerary rather than adding them on to the beginning and end of a holiday. I have chosen to make this a part of my life and art, and I know how lucky I am, privileged, to be able to do that. I stop off whenever I get an invitation to give Shiatsu, exchanging with people as I go, which means that I often meander instead of going in a straight line.

Toulouse-Matabiau train station between Paris and Girona

Between 2016 and early 2023, I did fly (although I often walked from the airport to where I was staying eg in Dublin), so you will find that info in the older blogs (see below, when I went to Croatia, for example. I flew from Paris to Milan and took buses from there to Zagreb.)

Scotland – Greece 1

Scotland – Greece 2

Scotland – Spain (2024)

Portsmouth (England) to Santander (2016)

Walking Spain on foot (and how to get there)

Croatia (includes some airport info as I didn’t make my promise to stop flying until early 2023)

St Pancras Station, London (where you can take the Eurostar to Paris and Brussels)

Greece

Tinos and Chora town

May 2023

Introduction

I thought I might take a break after teaching Shiatsu and giving supervision in Athens, so I looked up islands which were easy to get to from the capital and typed the word ‘pilgrimage’ into the search engine as a starting point. Tinos came up immediately. It’s not only a vital place of pilgrimage for Greek people, but it’s also famous for its dovecots (see photo at the end of this blog), which I have been studying for a few years now. To Tinos I had to go!

Map of Greece showing the location of Tinos in relationship to Athens

A sacred island of pilgrimage, Tinos is one of the Cyclades, and has a deep history that is crucial to Greece herself. Since the 7th century, a feast has taken place there in honour of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary (her passing from the earthly state). Then, in 1823, two years after the Greek War of Independence had started, a nun called Pelagia found the Holy icon of the Annunciation of the Panagia in a field. Considered a divine omen for the Greek Revolution, a shrine / church was founded to coincide with the agricultural calendar on the island, and a festival was established on 15 August to which women and men flock each year.

In the first [of several chapels at the Shrine] is a holy spring, where pilgrims collect water which has powers of fertility and cures sickness. According to tradition, the well was found during the excavations in search of the icon. The well was dry. On the day the church’s cornerstone was laid, it filled up with water. The source is seen as a miracle, and the chapel of the holy water is called the “Life-Giving Spring.”

Evy Johanne Haaland

Evy Johanne Haaland, a Norwegian researcher (Dr/PhD, history) and government scholar, writes here about Palagia, and the ritual that women through the ages have performed – climbing up the steep hill from the sea to the shrine on their hands and knees, sometimes with a child on their back.

Greek women are strong and active persons …, thus paralleling the divine Panagia.

Evy Johanne Haaland

Shrine to the Panagia, Chora, Tinos, Greece

Practicalities

Chora is the main town of the island, also known as Tinos, and is where the ferry arrives and leaves from Athens. I took the ferry to and from Rafina (not far from Athens – take the inexpensive KTEL bus).

The town is well stocked and bustling with pretty, narrow streets, a long waterfront (including the port) and steep climbs to the Panagia shrine.

There is a good bus service across the island, but NOT on Sundays and I didn’t find it easy to get information about when they run.

Café

Recommended book café: Antilalos, Fr. Paximadi & Afentouli, 84200 Chora, Tinos. The owner and other staff were so very kind to me. I arrived on a Sunday and had booked an air bnb at the opposite end of the island – too far even for me to walk in one afternoon (though I walked from Pyrgos to Panormos which was wonderful). They made phone calls on my behalf and really helped me out. There were no taxis because, of course it was some sort of festival and so everyone was celebrating with family. I started to walk, but it was far too hot at midday, so in the end they arranged for a taxi driver they knew to come on his day off from another village and pick me up. He took me to Pyrgos – more than three quarters of the way there, and I was really grateful.

Antilalos Café in Chora, Tinos, Greece

Accomodation

I stayed at the Pension Selenti which I would recommend.

Evening view of Chora town from the Pension Selenti, Tinos, Greece

Old Weaving School, Chora

“Zarifios Vocational School (Βιοτεχνική Σχολή Τήνου Υφαντήριο) is a legacy of the Zarifis family originating from Constantinople. Since 1898, Zarifios School has been a reminder of the gratitude of the family of banker Nikolaos Zarifis towards the governess of his children, who took them to the safe environment of Tenos (sic), when riots broke out in the Constantinople. The school emphasized in the traditional weaving art supporting women and society in adverse conditions. Today, 200 years later, it still continues to have a presence by supporting the School and textile workshops.” Description from thehouse.gr website

Archaeological Museum

The Archaeological Museum is worth a visit.

Built in the early 60s by the architect Charalambos Bouras, the Archaeological Museum of Tinos contains finds from Chora, the main town, as well as the hill of Exombourgo, local villages, and the Sanctuary of Poseidon. I particularly enjoyed the little courtyard with its bodyless legs and lace-like mosaic.

Archaeological Museum, Chora, Tinos, Greece

Artist’s Residency and Maria Valela

There was an Artist’s Residency taking place on the island when I was there, and I was particularly pleased to meet Maria Valela, a weaver, who gave an inspiring demonstration at the Old Weaving School in Chora, and invited me to accompany her to a local women’s knitting and weaving group that she was visiting. In return I offered her Shiatsu.

“The island is widely recognised for its marble tradition and was home to some of the most widely revered Greek artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.” from Kirki Projects page

Various photos of Maria and the knitting / crochet group, Chora, Tinos, Greece

The Inherited Earth artist residency programme was part of the Fe26 project a collective research program by the NWMW NPO team 2023. “The Fe26 project brings together an interdisciplinary group of people to exchange knowledge and practices around metal as matter, material, and object in conjunction with locus, crafts and identity. In this aspect, the NWMW team has envisioned along with curator Christos Artemis “The inherited earth” Fe26 residency.” ARTrabbit.com

Links

The second in this series of blogs about Tinos is Tinos and Kionia

Map and walks by Desired landscapes

Secret Tinos blog

Community Walking Projects

Sweat mapping

A guest post by Marie-Anne Lerjen, a walking artist from Zurich (Switzerland). Her website is in German.

We walked a good long walk (24 kms) from Girona to Banyoles in Cataluña, setting off in a considerable heat (27 degrees) and finishing after dark. Here is Marie-Anne’s Sweat Mapping blog

It’s a quick but good listen on Soundcloud:

Featuring myself and many other walking artists from around the world who had congregated at the Art del Caminar conference.

Share this:

Photos Taken 15 minutes Before Sunrise (or thereabouts)

Times and Twilight

The Route

What happened?

Photos Taken at Sunrise (pretty much)

What did I discover?

The last word(s)

Photos Taken 15 Minutes After Sunrise (but not always)

Share this:

Share this:

Introduction

Practicalities

Café

Accomodation

Old Weaving School, Chora

Archaeological Museum

Artist’s Residency and Maria Valela

Links

Share this:

Share this: