Classics of Roaming

[Extollager]

There's been a stir lately in writing about walking -- I'm going to have try try Robert Macfarlane, for example. Here we could discuss nonfictional outdoorsy writing that, in the writer's view, is established as a classic (or has been around long enough that it deserves such recognition). A separate thread might be more appropriate for current writing.

I'd like to steer discussion of travel books away from the present thread, instead to this thread:

https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/540732/

Here we can discuss writers who roam around on foot, horseback, or maybe by self-powered boat in their own locations, or at least their own countries. I think we'd better save road trips (by car), etc. for the travel books thread. Clear enough?

These are some things that come to mind, all of which I have but not all of which I have read:

Some passages, at least, in Thomas de Quincey
Cobbett's Rural Rides
Borrow's Lavengro and The Romany Rye
Thoreau's Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Maine Woods, and Cape Cod, and essays such as "Wild Apples"
Algernon Blackwood's essay on his canoe journey down the Danube*
Letters by C. S. Lewis about his walking tours with pals such as Tolkien and Lewis's brother
Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City (?)

Other ideas? Has anyone read ghost story master L. T. C. Rolt's Narrow Boat?

Some of Dickens's essays relate to urban walking, but we have threads on his 1850-1870 Journalism and his Sketches by Boz. Things about urban walking are OK for this thread.


*Link here:

https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/540650/

Cf. these related Blackwoodian-Danubian threads:

https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/530518/
https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/533606/

 

[Extollager]

I've been dipping into Farley and Symmons Roberts' Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness (2011), dealing with "familiar yet ignored spaces which are neither cioty nor countryside....gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites" (quoting from the back cover). They are thinking of "those places where overspill housing estates break into scrubland, wasteland....underdeveloped, unwatched territories." "Somewhere in the hollows and spaces between our carefully managed wilderness areas and the creeping, flattening effects of global capitalism, there are still places where an overlooked England truly exists...complicated, unexamined places that thrive on disregard, if we could only put aside out nostalgia for places we have never really known and see them afresh."

I'm looking forward to seeing what they have to say about Brendon Chase.

They mention artist David Rayson, a series of paintings From Ashmore Park to Wednesfield, of which these are three:

 

[Bick]

Would Jerome K Jerome fit into this category? I read both his well known books, and they are not travel books, that's for sure, they're concerned with taking in the outside world, being in touch with the landscape, and generally goofing off (in a Victorian way).

The Edgelands book seems to look at areas that could also be described as bleak and depressing. Those photos make me want to shoot myself, but perhaps that's the point. This quote from the book: "...complicated, unexamined places that thrive on disregard, if we could only put aside out nostalgia for places we have never really known and see them afresh..." sounds like pretentious nonsense to me to be honest!