I was fascinated by my own encounters with pilgrimage, and focused on a particular route that stretched across the south of England. I was interested in how it can be a space of escape, of connection with our environment, and as I walked the same footsteps of many others before, how it can be a form of connection with the history of a landscape. Each of those footsteps carry a story and the landscape looking back experiences those stories too, holding them in its layers of sediment.

The existing research that explored the site did not imbue the narratives and landscapes with the richness of experience. The historical records exist as words on a page, lines on a map, or sometimes, as physical artefacts, wedged in clods of earth. I felt there was a need for new ways of communication that can story these spaces, and how a fictioning of them can help. We have been confined to consider these lively pasts in the soil, not as bubbling with rich earthy compost, but rigidly kept to the page, imprisoned by pen and ink.

“History encompasses that which is real, non-history encompasses that which is possible” (Morette et al., 2024). This idea of Non-History offered an important starting point, where my focus could shift into speculative storytelling. To do this I explored theories of fictioning within a landscape. The idea of fact and fiction as a hazy spectrum rather than something binary. Illustration can be considered as a tool to help conjure these new perspectives, a method of researching what could be possible rather than strictly a form of visual communication.

English archives of medieval imagery intertwined with 3d scans of trees, science fiction movie stills and a footstep in the mud. Sheep species sit atop cracked pot remains, and the meandering lines of an OS map stretch amidst a flatbed scan of chalk soil. There are somewhat disparate links weaving between the images, a murkiness, but there is also an uncertainty in the stories we walk amidst in our physical worlds, and a precarious unknowing about what the future of our landscapes hold. It requires an observer, a wanderer to experience these journeys
themselves, and for them to extract the story, to bring it to life.

Much like the layering of sediment in the landscape, centuries can be condensed into inches of soil, sitting within and atop the time before. This felt like a stronger visual metaphor than could be translated into communicating these ideas. Layering ideas and histories, offering strange interpretations of the past. How pulling together disparate sources can be a tool of adding murkiness to a narrative, rather than help draw meaning, how this can be a way of communicating the fictioning, provoking the certainty with which we hold historic “truths”.

I find the current revival of interest in walking and connection to landscapes exciting. There exists a plethora of interests in Weird Walk, Robert Macfarlane and art practitioners interested in walking as research. These are things people are really resonating with, in part as a form of resistance against the political and social climate we are living through, but also a more innate need to feel connected to a place, to salvage a sense of spiritual belonging, amidst outside forces that seek to isolate us and alienate us from each other. A pilgrim of a millennium ago might have journeyed for penance or for devotion of their faith, an experience whereby connection to the landscape and connection to a God would have been deeply intertwined. I was curious if those people would have found a sense of peace in the simple act of walking, if that experience is something that can connect us across time. And if the modern day, secular pilgrims might have something shared with the motives of historical ones. If devotion to a God could have similarities to how some people feel in rural places, the sense of being a small insignificant piece in the mechanics of the world.

In the final section of the visual essay I imagine what a future pilgrimage might look like. I considered the increase of people trying to seek physical connections in an increasingly digitised world, the decreasing numbers of people turning to Christianity for it, alongside the human-made erosion of our environments. Where and why a future pilgrim might go? I imagined them finding their spirituality in nature, journeying to their last remaining ancient oak tree in England – The Majesty Oak Tree in Kent. To me, it feels possible that future pilgrims might return to the deep spiritual roots of earlier pilgrims, only their devotion is to something they would turn to for hope and answers: the dwindling fragments of an ecology suppressed but still living on.

Much of the ideas that began the project came after reading Nan Shepherd's “The Living Mountain”, that I feel very much positions walking in nature not as a mode of transport, nor a means to ‘accomplish’ a mountaintop, but more of a form of meditation, of understanding yourself as much as the world around you. The more spiritual lens of Nan Shepherd offers an interesting perspective to things like psychogeography. The feelings and emotions that arise in these places are inherently tied to a site. I feel these ideas are really central to a lot of walking based research practices, particularly highlighted in ‘Walking as research practice’. Walking becomes something done through mental and physical landscapes, how a body moving in space connects with non-human bodies it moves past.

In seeking a better connection with our environment, we follow a path to protecting what we have, to understanding how precarious ecosystems are, and as Campo research studio put it “build resilience to the destabilising forces of power”(p. 145). I feel this idea is central to why groups like Weird Walk have become popular. The simple act of walking can become a powerful one.