Ways and Waydreams 2

 

Walking in the Scottish Borders

All I really want to do these days it seems, is walk. I don’t even think much as I walk, I don’t walk in order to think more clearly or more wide-rangingly, I walk just to be outside and breathe the air and look out at horizons and feel a sense of expansion and be in movement. To be among hills or by rivers or, most happily, by the sea. I don’t walk to get answers or resolve anything. I have no idea what directions or answers or resolutions might even look like. An inspired idea, well, that may come but I’m hardly looking for it.

I examined my newly acquired ‘book of walks’ & decided to go for one that starts in Melrose, goes along a lane above the town, to just beyond the hospital, then up a road, a narrow, little-used road, then turns off to a path. It’s a hazy, misty day, there’s even a little rain. That’s when I see the Eildon Hills, made  distant and vague, by rain. 

The path goes a little way downhill and then it’s all uphill, up and up, with a view over valleys, a lonesome feel to the land. 

 

Then over the brow of a hill, the loch comes into view. It’s downhill to the lochside, the grasses on each side of the path are long and it’s not just my boots that are wet but my jeans as well. I roll them up. Three young people are conferring by the lakeside. We ask each other how far we’ve walked – they’ve come from the other side of the Eildons. And they’re also going on to Tweedbank. Do you know how long it will take us? the girl asks. I say I don’t know, it’s the first time I’ve walked this way, but I don’t think it should be too far from here. They go on ahead and I take some photos of the loch. 

Cauldshiels Loch

 Then follow a path alongside it through woods with some old and spreading trees.

 Most of the trees are beech and pine. They give off that good feeling of having seeded themselves, grown into a company with each other, the right mixture of distance and closeness, not overcrowded, not too far away. The gentleness of these spreading trees, some with vast trunks, some saplings near the water’s edge. I’m not sure about the loch itself. I see one swan, later another, further away. People swim here. I do not. But I go to the lake’s edge and dip my fingers in. The water rustles ever so slightly on the stones.

 

Beyond the loch, the path turns into a track, then through another wood, overhung with trees in a dark and mysterious way and looks down on another, smaller body of water, Faldonside Loch, and one swam swims slowly, framed by 2 trees, towards another swan on the other side. 

 

After this wood there’s a stile crossing, and through a field, still downhill. It is further than I thought, but at the bottom of this field and hill, and after crossing a minor road, I reach the Abbotsford grounds, and a path leads to the River Tweed.

It rains a little, though the path is sheltered by the trees. I can see the rain falling on the water. This brings to mind a time in Germany in early summer, decades ago, when we travelled to Ingleheim am Rhein. I do not know why, it is something to do, I imagine, with the green foliage and the misty overcast skies. 

I watch memories as they come to mind and simply note their arrival, as if I was meditating and watching thoughts as they arise, not trying to work out why, or following any particular meaning of the association, just noting, as if memories are a kind of surf that uncover what has been underneath, and what has travelled, sometimes a long distance, many decades, yet here they are again, touched by some similarity – of vision, of water, of feeling, of landscape. 

There were certainly trees at Ingleheim and there was the river, the mighty Rhein and probably there was a tree-lined path bordering the river so perhaps it was that. Yet it is fascinating, this linking up, this past resurfacing and blending with the present. It is a little bit like dreaming while you are awake, like the dream world connecting with the waking one, like a meeting of our different selves, different lives, different axes of perception. And I still think that – though there are clearly associations in what we see, in our present surroundings, that touch the memory – there is something carried in the quality of the light that blends past and present perception. For I have no clear visual memory of Ingleheim, yet these trees, path and river, the misty atmosphere, the light rain, have made a connection, a feeling-memory.

The river is wide and still and patterned with raindrops. This walk is magical, river and trees, and I know it’s not far to go now, to the end of the Abbotsford woods and grounds, before I reconnect with the busy human world of roads and traffic and bus stops. Which is a pleasing thought as I am tired, it’s been over three hours since I started walking.