walks 2018 to present
Walking
I've walked ever since my first unsteady baby-steps. My parents always walked, and took me and my siblings along. For my first nine years we lived variously in East Morton in West Yorkshire, Cuddesdon in Oxfordshire and Baildon in West Yorkshire. Then we moved to a village in North Yorkshire, close to the Yorkshire Three Peaks, about as far west and north as you can get in the county.
This was deep in the countryside which meant I was able to take myself on long walks. For an (undiagnosed) child with an autistic spectrum disorder who found social situations difficult and painful, and who was bullied at school, walking provided peace and respite. And of course wonderful views, a sense of the changing seasons, and a habit of regular exercise (even as light as walking). So I walked a lot, by my teens already occasionally reaching the ten-hour mark in summer.
Shortly before I was 19 I spent close to a year in London, where I continued to walk everywhere. I didn't enjoy the city and was happy to return home, where I remained a further five and bit years. After that I moved to Cardiff to study for a BA. Cardiff is a relatively small city, and I began to regularly walk out of the city in all possible directions. I also took the train out to other places where I could do a few hours walking whenever I could afford, which was infrequently.
Fast-forward seven years and I moved to Manchester. As ever I walked everywhere - to and from work, on my lunch break, to do my grocery shopping, on nights out. As I always do in a new place I explored the city by starting to walk at random, deliberately getting lost, and looking out for parks, rivers and canals.
Slowly my walks started growing longer, and I started to get to know the city on foot, then beyond. I walked to Ashton under Lyne, to Stalybridge, to Stockport, to Reddish, to Lymm, but mostly reliant on familiar routes.
Around 2014 I decided to push myself to take longer walks, to leave the city more. I started by working out a route around the outside of the M60, Manchester's orbital motorway, and building up the distances I could walk. Starting in 2014 most of the plotting and preparation actually fell in 2015. And in May that year I completed the circuit in one day.
Since this was such a large undertaking I chose to document the preparations. You can find my dedicated blog for the walk at this link, https://mattm60walk.wordpress.com. While this was the first suggestion of the accounts of walks that would follow, it wasn't the first link between my art/writing and walking. Those links go back to my early teens.
Walking through my teens and twenties
On walks as a teen I would often find myself imagining stories. Not linguistically but in terms of visual, aural and physical impressions. But sometimes I would try to compose poetry in my head (1). Later still I took to reading poetry on parts of some walks, and even attempted to translate Heine with my limited German while walking.
A couple of years later after I moved to Cardiff my writing began to change and become more fractured. I felt that I needed a way to structure the resulting poems, and the most readily available form was that of a walk.
As I walked around the city I would take notes: mentally, written on my hands and arms, on paper napkins, on ends of till-roll, on envelopes and so forth. Later they'd be drawn together sequentially, following the route of the walk I'd taken. Further reflections and wordplay would then be added. Irrespective of the intention and quality of the poems, the germs of my later practice were coming together.
But that was more or less where it stopped for a while. The next elements wouldn't emerge until after I'd moved to Manchester.
Manchester
I'll try to keep this section brief. I could get very detailed, but I only want to hit the most significant points.
The first major milestone is starting to use Twitter in 2009 (my account is here https://twitter.com/soundpoet). After a messy start I found a niche creating small capsule descriptions of things I saw, fragments of overheard speech etc. More recently those Tweets have become less frequent, and promotion of my own work more prominent, which I think is a shame. But for several years my Twitter feed was a micro version of the poetry I'd written in Cardiff, only without being drawn into structured poems.
At the same time I was starting to explore visual and sound poetry, then visual and sound art. Moving away from the purely textual. Naturally I began to apply visual and sound practices to the exploration of place in the way that I had with poetry in Cardiff.
In short order I simultaneously investigated Manchester and the folk song Tam Lyn in a durational project Tamlyn11, naturally enough in 2011 (https://tamlyn11.tumblr.com); explored a broadening visual world, and an unfamiliar place with an artists residency in Kunming, China, also explored in an online journal in 2011/12 (also proceeding to explore mental health issues that immediately followed - https://mattdalbyjournal.tumblr.com); and in 2013 a durational challenge to produce several pieces of work each day throughout February with a project called 28 (http://2twenty8eight.blogspot.com).
All these precede and foreshadow my 2015 walk around the M60, and my more recent walks and their documentation.
The M60 and beyond
I already discussed the M60 walk. The effect was to increase my ambition with the walks I took, and an initially unrealised intention to document walks as they happened. So I began to take longer walks more regularly, and in the last three years have started to add new routes. The majority of these are not circular, they're walks out to destinations from where I can get public transport home.
And I have begun to document the walks. Not so much as they happen, but through contemporaneous notes which are subsequently typed up, sometimes lightly edited (mostly for clarity), and then recorded. The audio version and the text version are then published and shared.
Those accounts are the impetus for me writing this blogpost. To point you in the direction of where you can find them, and for me to surprise myself by just how much material I've generated in a relatively short time.
There is a playlist of the audio accounts from 2018:
There is a playlist of the audio accounts from 2019:
And there is a playlist of the audio accounts from 2020:
I was much slower at producing text versions of the accounts, since at first I chose to read straight from my notebook. But while I like my handwriting it isn't always the clearest, especially written as these accounts are while I'm walking, sometimes in poor light or iffy weather.
But you can find text versions of 14 of 2019's walks at this link, https://www.scribd.com/lists/22695969/Accounts-of-walks-2019.
The text versions of this years walks are at this link, https://www.scribd.com/lists/23347757/Accounts-of-walks-2020.
To round this out, while I haven't been great at plotting my routes (time constraints being a major factor), I did document my M60 planning and final route, as well as a few other walks at Plotaroute. My account and the 36 routes I've apparently plotted at time of writing are at this link, https://www.plotaroute.com/userprofile/15322.
While I feel like there's much more I could say, I think that's probably enough for now.
Just one more thing, as much as I enjoy walking and documenting my walks, and would be doing this anyway, it is a lot of time and effort. I'd be really grateful if you could share this post, the links within it, or any favourite accounts around. It means a lot, and I have some ambitious walks planned for his year and beyond.
(1) There are two things to note about this. First, although I wrote prodigiously as a child and teen, and had a lot of notebooks, it wasn't until my later twenties that I thought of carrying scraps of paper and card with me for notes. I wouldn't carry a notebook habitually until well into my thirties. Second, when I composed in my head I almost invariably found that once I wrote the composition down later it was dead and uninteresting. The lesson I took from this was that my writing wasn't very good, which may have been at least partly true. But as I've come to know my writing better and begun to develop my improvisational skills I've taken another lesson. Writing is situational. It relies on an interaction of author, reader and moment/situation/location/time. If you substitute performer(s) and audience for author and reader you'll see how I got to the realisation backwards, as it were, through my improvisation practice.
I've walked ever since my first unsteady baby-steps. My parents always walked, and took me and my siblings along. For my first nine years we lived variously in East Morton in West Yorkshire, Cuddesdon in Oxfordshire and Baildon in West Yorkshire. Then we moved to a village in North Yorkshire, close to the Yorkshire Three Peaks, about as far west and north as you can get in the county.
This was deep in the countryside which meant I was able to take myself on long walks. For an (undiagnosed) child with an autistic spectrum disorder who found social situations difficult and painful, and who was bullied at school, walking provided peace and respite. And of course wonderful views, a sense of the changing seasons, and a habit of regular exercise (even as light as walking). So I walked a lot, by my teens already occasionally reaching the ten-hour mark in summer.
Shortly before I was 19 I spent close to a year in London, where I continued to walk everywhere. I didn't enjoy the city and was happy to return home, where I remained a further five and bit years. After that I moved to Cardiff to study for a BA. Cardiff is a relatively small city, and I began to regularly walk out of the city in all possible directions. I also took the train out to other places where I could do a few hours walking whenever I could afford, which was infrequently.
Fast-forward seven years and I moved to Manchester. As ever I walked everywhere - to and from work, on my lunch break, to do my grocery shopping, on nights out. As I always do in a new place I explored the city by starting to walk at random, deliberately getting lost, and looking out for parks, rivers and canals.
Slowly my walks started growing longer, and I started to get to know the city on foot, then beyond. I walked to Ashton under Lyne, to Stalybridge, to Stockport, to Reddish, to Lymm, but mostly reliant on familiar routes.
Around 2014 I decided to push myself to take longer walks, to leave the city more. I started by working out a route around the outside of the M60, Manchester's orbital motorway, and building up the distances I could walk. Starting in 2014 most of the plotting and preparation actually fell in 2015. And in May that year I completed the circuit in one day.
Since this was such a large undertaking I chose to document the preparations. You can find my dedicated blog for the walk at this link, https://mattm60walk.wordpress.com. While this was the first suggestion of the accounts of walks that would follow, it wasn't the first link between my art/writing and walking. Those links go back to my early teens.
Walking through my teens and twenties
On walks as a teen I would often find myself imagining stories. Not linguistically but in terms of visual, aural and physical impressions. But sometimes I would try to compose poetry in my head (1). Later still I took to reading poetry on parts of some walks, and even attempted to translate Heine with my limited German while walking.
A couple of years later after I moved to Cardiff my writing began to change and become more fractured. I felt that I needed a way to structure the resulting poems, and the most readily available form was that of a walk.
As I walked around the city I would take notes: mentally, written on my hands and arms, on paper napkins, on ends of till-roll, on envelopes and so forth. Later they'd be drawn together sequentially, following the route of the walk I'd taken. Further reflections and wordplay would then be added. Irrespective of the intention and quality of the poems, the germs of my later practice were coming together.
But that was more or less where it stopped for a while. The next elements wouldn't emerge until after I'd moved to Manchester.
Manchester
I'll try to keep this section brief. I could get very detailed, but I only want to hit the most significant points.
The first major milestone is starting to use Twitter in 2009 (my account is here https://twitter.com/soundpoet). After a messy start I found a niche creating small capsule descriptions of things I saw, fragments of overheard speech etc. More recently those Tweets have become less frequent, and promotion of my own work more prominent, which I think is a shame. But for several years my Twitter feed was a micro version of the poetry I'd written in Cardiff, only without being drawn into structured poems.
At the same time I was starting to explore visual and sound poetry, then visual and sound art. Moving away from the purely textual. Naturally I began to apply visual and sound practices to the exploration of place in the way that I had with poetry in Cardiff.
In short order I simultaneously investigated Manchester and the folk song Tam Lyn in a durational project Tamlyn11, naturally enough in 2011 (https://tamlyn11.tumblr.com); explored a broadening visual world, and an unfamiliar place with an artists residency in Kunming, China, also explored in an online journal in 2011/12 (also proceeding to explore mental health issues that immediately followed - https://mattdalbyjournal.tumblr.com); and in 2013 a durational challenge to produce several pieces of work each day throughout February with a project called 28 (http://2twenty8eight.blogspot.com).
All these precede and foreshadow my 2015 walk around the M60, and my more recent walks and their documentation.
The M60 and beyond
I already discussed the M60 walk. The effect was to increase my ambition with the walks I took, and an initially unrealised intention to document walks as they happened. So I began to take longer walks more regularly, and in the last three years have started to add new routes. The majority of these are not circular, they're walks out to destinations from where I can get public transport home.
And I have begun to document the walks. Not so much as they happen, but through contemporaneous notes which are subsequently typed up, sometimes lightly edited (mostly for clarity), and then recorded. The audio version and the text version are then published and shared.
Those accounts are the impetus for me writing this blogpost. To point you in the direction of where you can find them, and for me to surprise myself by just how much material I've generated in a relatively short time.
There is a playlist of the audio accounts from 2018:
There is a playlist of the audio accounts from 2019:
And there is a playlist of the audio accounts from 2020:
I was much slower at producing text versions of the accounts, since at first I chose to read straight from my notebook. But while I like my handwriting it isn't always the clearest, especially written as these accounts are while I'm walking, sometimes in poor light or iffy weather.
But you can find text versions of 14 of 2019's walks at this link, https://www.scribd.com/lists/22695969/Accounts-of-walks-2019.
The text versions of this years walks are at this link, https://www.scribd.com/lists/23347757/Accounts-of-walks-2020.
To round this out, while I haven't been great at plotting my routes (time constraints being a major factor), I did document my M60 planning and final route, as well as a few other walks at Plotaroute. My account and the 36 routes I've apparently plotted at time of writing are at this link, https://www.plotaroute.com/userprofile/15322.
While I feel like there's much more I could say, I think that's probably enough for now.
Just one more thing, as much as I enjoy walking and documenting my walks, and would be doing this anyway, it is a lot of time and effort. I'd be really grateful if you could share this post, the links within it, or any favourite accounts around. It means a lot, and I have some ambitious walks planned for his year and beyond.
(1) There are two things to note about this. First, although I wrote prodigiously as a child and teen, and had a lot of notebooks, it wasn't until my later twenties that I thought of carrying scraps of paper and card with me for notes. I wouldn't carry a notebook habitually until well into my thirties. Second, when I composed in my head I almost invariably found that once I wrote the composition down later it was dead and uninteresting. The lesson I took from this was that my writing wasn't very good, which may have been at least partly true. But as I've come to know my writing better and begun to develop my improvisational skills I've taken another lesson. Writing is situational. It relies on an interaction of author, reader and moment/situation/location/time. If you substitute performer(s) and audience for author and reader you'll see how I got to the realisation backwards, as it were, through my improvisation practice.
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