While rainy weather sends most people indoors, Harrison suggests that “if you only ever go out on sunny days you only see half the picture, and remain somehow untested and callow.”
In this quiet gem of a book, she takes us on four walks in the rain in different parts of England. In January we visit Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire; Shropshire in April; the Darent Valley in Kent in August; and Devon’s Dartmoor in October. Different landscapes, different seasons, yet all of them reveal how our world is different in the rain, as well as its effects on us.
For some of us, rain induces a pleasant melancholy; one friend of mine calls it a blown-flame mood: not the thrill of fire but the lingering scent that turns us inward. Memories open like petals, and the past is no longer a foreign country.
Wet weather offers other rewards to walkers willing to brave it. Aromas become more intense: The difference between walking in a pine forest in dry or wet weather is astounding. Some creatures emerge while others hide. The air may be softer on your skin, the sounds more mysterious.
When the Kent sky—already overcast—darkens, it does so suddenly. A restless wind gets up, bullying the muggy August air so that the ripe wheat shifts uneasily, gusts pushing its golden surface this way and that like a nap . . . The downpour that follows seems to fall with more force than mere gravity could provide, and as lightning flickers—first distantly, then much closer—and thunder renders the sky, I weigh the risks of standing beneath the bankside trees against the discomfort of getting drenched.
Harrison explores the way rain transforms the landscape whether it be by storms or floods or the minute trickling of drops upon stone. She calls our attention to the way minerals create soil from which grow the plants and trees that support insect, bird and animal life.
The old drystone walls bounding the road where we walk are shaggy with moss and dog lichen and pinned with medals of pennywort and the delicate buttonholes of maidenhair spleenwort, all beaded silver with rain. A few paces ahead of us a stonechat perches on the top of the wall and flicks his wings insouciantly. The call he makes echoes almost exactly the clash of wet pebbles loosed from the disintegrating road surface under our boots.
As a genre, travel writing encompasses a wide range of formats. Most commonly its purpose is to encourage readers to visit places near and far. These pieces could be simply description of a place with suggestions for dining and lodging. They could highlight single endevours such as a farm that offers field-to-kitchen cooking classes. Or they could be a biography of the place, so to speak, incorporating history and legends, famous and not-so-famous residents, hidden gems and well-known sites which come together to portray the personality of the place.
Travel pieces may also be a story about the author’s particular experience there, their exploration and encounters with places and people and how they are changed. I’m thinking of Colleen Kinder’s Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us and associated website. Or a travel book can be a record of the travels of the author’s mind as they move through the world, as in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.
Fusion with memoir is common because our experiences are grounded in certain locations, such as in Martha Gellhorn’s Travels with Myself and Another or Edward Parnell’s Ghostland which combines travel with literary review and memoir. With fiction, as well, we sometimes say the location is a character in the story.
This gentle series of four walks is none of these. To me it felt like a guided meditation, as though the author simply invites me along on a walk with her. Look over here; feel this leaf; does this remind you of something from your childhood?
In amongst the luminous descriptions are tidbits of history, poetry, memory and story. I especially enjoyed hearing about the volunteer-driven British Rainfall Organisation, “a quintessentially eccentric body and one of the first examples of what we now call ‘citizen science’.” Harrison also incorporates legends and folklore, such as the belief that thunder on Sunday portends the death of great men but on Monday the deaths of women.
She’s fascinated by local dialect and includes an appendix of 100 Words Concerning Rain as well as a Glossary of Meteorological Terms for Rain and a Bibliography.
This short (less than a hundred pages) and lovely book is one I will return to often. It reminds me of the many walks I’ve taken in England and elsewhere, and encourages me to be more attentive to the world around me, not just the natural world, but the glimmers of history and memory that it evokes.
Have you read a travel book or piece that stood out to you?
I’ve been searching for a book to take with me to England and this is it! Perfect timing. Can’t wait to walk in the rain in Cornwall this month.