Bafta-winning filmmaker Lily Wakeley, BBC Scotland podcaster May Robson, and artist Hannah Ustun contribute to this textured, multimedia story, resyncing life and coming up against deaths
This story is the next in our Trails series. We invited people to apply to assemble a group of friends and walk a multi-day trail of Slow Ways. They could submit the story of their adventure in whatever form they liked.
PART I: Queensferry to Inverkeithing
We stock up on coffee served in XL sized polystyrene cups before continuing along a road of XL sized detached houses of discordant styles.
We imagine that JK Rowling might live here, asking ourselves, which house is the most witchy?
My mind quietly flits to the recognition that my Grandfather’s body is leaving the house for the last time this morning, all dressed in a clean pair of cotton brushed pyjamas, having died the day before.
I idly contemplate the significance of the ending of his life and the beginning of our walk.
It’s not quite Joan Didion’s grief ‘vortex effect’, but grief swells up in small surges unexpectedly.
As the houses thin out into banks of ivy and nettles, we huddle around a low plaque marking the life of a ‘Pet’ or ‘Marjorie’ Fleming, 1803–1811, who is remembered for wandering there “in rural felicity festivity and pleasure”, praising it in her journal as a “delightful place, Braehead by name, where is ducks hens bubblyjocks 2 dogs 2 cats swine and which is delightful”.
We continue, busting out in bright early March sun, taken aback by the lyricism of this 19th century eight year old.
I later read on Wikipedia that Majorie was posthumously recognised as a child poet and prodigy, lauded as one of the “noblest works of God”.
I think about my own childhood diary comparatively, filled with injustices of being denied multicoloured hair dye.
‘Bubblyjocks’: an old name for male turkeys that derives from the sound of their cries, which then mutated into a description of pompous people. I imagine the toady men in my life, jowly and bloated.
The landscape breaks out into ploughed fields and mounds of grass kept short by sheep, with big tufts of spiky greenery and golden gorse that smell of pina-colada. This is the landscape so familiarly Scottish to me.
With the first wink of the sea, we talk about the transition of living with boyfriends: Hannah gives us tips, having already done so.
Walking stories
Before making this walk I’d been recommended Robert MacFarlane’s The Old Ways; an excerpt in Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running about his first marathon in Athens; and Howard’s End in which Leonard Bast wins the respect of some highfalutin sisters over a walk he did, amongst much else.
What is it about travelling long distances on foot that inspires these stories?
Like these writers and characters, I too share this intrigue (and hubris) about similar feats of endurance, and delight in the relatively rare and elementary experience of relying almost entirely on my body in full exposure to nature.
Hinterlands and ‘xenotopias’
The task of testing a set of Slow Ways paths was many things. As well as offering an excuse to talk to the people we encountered and getting us to get creative in instances where paths ceased to exist, absorbed into A4 roads and farmland, it offered a freedom to think less and just follow a set path.
Part of our walk intersected other ones – like the Fife Pilgrim Way – but also then went into places few walkers will likely purposefully seek out, like countryside hinterlands and ‘xenotopias’ – a term coined by MacFarlane to describe those unsettling or out-of-place landscapes.
But that is the joy of doing a whole journey entirely on foot: there is no zooming through the bits you don’t fancy. In fact, in reviewing Slow Ways routes, these are the parts arguably you must pay most attention to. I have a newfound appreciation for the way an idyll slowly or abruptly becomes built up, mediated by industrial estates and scrap yards with metal crunching machinery.
These sights are ordinarily kept out of sight, despite being essential components to the ecosystems that govern our cities and countryside.
Soundtrack of this time
Hard conversations and ‘thinking through’ things are often advised to do side-by-side with someone, preferably in motion – in a car maybe or on foot. Sometimes it feels that only through physical effort can we know something. Unlike the “homemade void” Murakami creates by running, I did this walk with two friends.
The landscape we moved through was at times incidental to our chatter and at others, a referential map of conversation, and our sore bodies a constant topic of observation. Two boys I went to university with once spent 54 days at sea rowing the Atlantic. They complained that for chunks of time the flat blue sea stretched out indistinctly, seemingly forever causing mind-numbing monotony with little stimulus to trigger their imagination. Conversation flowed seamlessly on our journey like some parts of the walk itself, and in staccato, like others.
Here I’ve tried to document our time with a similar rhythm, punctuated by May’s recordings of the people we met and the soundtrack of this time.
PART I continued
Soon only one thin line of trees divides us from a stretch of blonde beach, the tide far out.
The sand is still dense and unforgiving under foot from the water. It’s ribbed into slight divots from the motion of the tide, and patterned with wavy lines of small pink shells, cratered with silvery pools of sea.
We can see a fleshy mound and speculate what it could be as we get tentatively closer.
Its small, streamlined body, row of tiny pearly teeth and gently rounded snout are recognisable as belonging to an orca.
We contemplate the spectacle with two men in matching navy walking gear.
This baby is so small, perhaps it is a still born.
We’re all embarrassed by our impulses to take pictures of the corpse.
We leave the scene behind us for the final stretch to Queensferry – the font of the Queensferry bridges, the most famous of which gleams a brackish red. Perhaps reflecting with the blood of 73 of the 4,600 ‘Briggers’ who died labouring to make this architectural feat.
We tail the Queensferry History Group’s morning meeting, who tell us more.
We feel moments of vertigo, as the wind makes our hair wild and forces us to raise our voices.
We make a list of what gives us the ‘ick’. Hannah reads an encyclopaedia of examples compiled on her phone.
Some of the messages inscribed by lovers on a wall of ‘lovelocks’ make their way onto the growing list.
Once onto the other side, we awkwardly run across the motorway roundabout to a toilet in the Park & Ride surrounded by more incongruous gorse, the afternoon sun streaming through the perspex front onto a solitary vending machine.
We ask the group smoking outside to take a picture of us outside The Burgh Arms – our first walking milestone. They tell us that next time we come, the front will be painted a different colour.
The highstreet is like many others we will come across on the walk.
In Scotmid, I consider a bag of Iron Brew bonbons before contemplating the hot plate section – its crown jewels a small pastry case filled with piped mashed potato circling a heap of baked beans – and the first of many French Fancies dressed in frog jackets made of lurid green icing in the cold one.
The first signs of tiredness kick in as we temporarily rest, a twinge in my hip joints first making itself known.
Nineteen kilometres down, we have another ten to accomplish before sundown.
Follow the routes taken from Edinburgh to Inverkeithing and read the reviews here and here.
PART II: Inverkeithing to Dunfermline
May’s podcast from day two:
The bridges twist in different directions the further we leave them behind us, their proportions warping like the insides of a kaleidoscope.
The setting sun casts shadows throughout a graveyard, making a white granite war memorial glitter.
A farmhouse garden stretches in a walled slither between tilled fields, filled with primary-coloured toys popping in the sunset.
At this vantage, the sky is huge and unobstructed, bar the backdrop of the bridge well behind us, now appearing like snow-capped mountains far away.
May has been living in Glasgow but she’s leaving soon. Our stomping through the Scottish landscape from one place to another becomes a sort of metaphor. Our walk floats above the usual passage of time, bookended by normal life that we can consider more freely here.
We wave our arms mimicking a wind turbine casting long spidery shadows across toiled earth.
The countryside wanes into suburbs with long estate driveways, like 4 Privet Drive in Harry Potter.
Men are rallying on a floodlight astroturf in Dunfermline Tennis and Bridge club. It’s dark and we’re sore.
At last we arrive, immediately ordering a takeaway of fish curry with wads of stuffed paratha that we tear and dunk, whilst rubbing our calves and watching Fleabag in bed.
Sleep comes at us urgently.
Follow the route taken from Inverkeithing to Dunfermline and read the reviews here.
PART III: Dunfermline to Kinross
We talk with our hosts Suzie and Colin over their full Scottish fry-up, honed after ample black pudding trials.
The city is bordered by woodland, filled with fairy pools, moss and lichen and felled trees.
The severed head of a creature lies smack bang in the middle of our path. Is this our first encounter with the Beast of Blairadam? We tread around it superstitiously, gazing up at the canopy hopeful for more signs.
We meet a teenage girl and her mum but the daughter quickly shoots her daggers in borrowed embarrassment – we know to move on. We’re more prepared for the almost allergic reaction of the only other young people we meet on the walk the following day: two girls in matching tan tracksuits leaving a Mini Cooper scamper past the overly keen, smelly walkers (us), their words “we’re not professional walkers, we have nothing to say!” left lingering on the wind.
Today’s route throws us challenges. We scramble along paths long gone now and through barrages of thorny bush and over barbed wire we’re forced to scissor kick, assisted by an overturned red bucket we pull up for leverage.
We meet our first cows on the trip who take momentary pause from feeding to eye us suspiciously, their tufty quiffs wobbling.
We shortcut across Loch Fitty. The regality of a pair of swans appearing to levitate across this man-made body of water is almost cartoonish.
We’d thought a lot about St Ninians before being here – first a former opencast mine, and secondly a never-complete Scottish World Project designed by the landscape architect Charles Jencks.
It’s unmistakable from far away, its circular cement structures mounting the two artificial hills. Retired from its former designs, now it’s a languishing and eerie ‘xenotopia’ – not quite something and not quite nothing.
It’s subject of great titillation amongst developers, poised to become ‘an eco-therapy wellness centre’.
For the charity RAWS (Remembering the Accused Witches of Scotland), it is the site for a national monument to remember and honour the 4,000 Scottish women murdered for witchcraft.
Wellness and witches.
We beeline for the top up the vertical summit missing the ‘walnut whip’ – the paths that spiral the mound – to catch up with four members of a Tuesday retiree walking club.
We record our conversation whilst one man grins snapping away with his camera and large lens – an expedition sighting! A content swap!
“Are you twitchers?”, they ask. “Keep your eyes peeled for herons,” they say.
Over the brow we arrive in Kelty, where Vanessa in purple leather flares with thick black bangs scoops us up in her car to give us a drive-thru tour of the town and its murals, which she presides over with a crew of graffitists.
She parks up next to her Beast of Blairadam in the style of a Chinese tattoo, where she brilliantly recalls her chance meeting of the fabled cat that stalks the area.
Back at her house we meet husband Steve who wears big sunglasses inside. He hopes to apply to MasterChef, newly retired from decades working on oil rigs.
The walk to Kinross is even more trying than this morning: repeatedly stopped in our tracks as our path dissipates into a private garden or is engulfed by agricultural land, we balance between ditches and spiky sheaths of wheat.
Try as we might to keep to the path, it’s like our bodies are repelling magnets, continuously expunged back onto the roadside curb.
We catch a dissatisfying glimpse of Loch Leven behind barbed wire – the water repelling us now too, teasingly just in sight.
We’re spat out into the carpark of a cashmere factory and onto the chocolate box highstreet of Kinross, offering a clear route once more.
Follow the route taken from Dunfermline to Kinross here.
PART III continued: Kinross to Milnathort
Jimmy sits cross-legged in quiet contemplation outside of Unorthodox Roasters.
He asks us if we know him from a local news article, in which he’s pictured cycling in precariously windy conditions.
Today he wears the characteristic high vis jacket with brown cords, a tiny plait of grey hair secured with a red ribbon peeping beneath his hat.
He devotes his day to gardening and reading, having been a butler his whole professional life.
The barista asks if we’re walking through the Glenfarg Railway Tunnels accessible only by torchlight. Sometimes, he tells us, there are raves there.
May kickbacks on the sofa to speak to her sister just out of surgery.
The barista says that Robert Macfarlane is his hero and he hopes to do a Slow Way walk too.
I rub and poke a newly acquired throb in my hips and contemplate – without looking – the blisters forming around my ankles.
Nancy, my grandfather’s carer, told me she looks after her patients with the delicacy of hatching ‘eggs’. I fear my feet are starting to become scrambled.
The sun is low and we are filled with chocolatey zest.
The Muirs Corner-Stone’s plaque marks 118.37metres above sea level, where all Ordnance Survey measurements in the area are taken from. The sea – a shapeshifting unknown – the relativity used to know distance.
As Kinross melts into Milnathort, May speaks of another journey – one to get an European visa – and the necessary documents to prove her Grandmother’s asylum unearthed from Kew Garden archives.
Follow the route taken from Kinross to Milnathort here.
PART IV: Milnathort to Bridge of Earn
A young farmer nurses her lamb with an infected nose.
Larks start to sing as the sun settles over rolling hills. The stems of wind turbines grow into vision as we ascend, no longer floating heads.
We try to ignore the throb in our legs and the rub of our feet as we make it to Glenfarg in the dark.
We miss the last number 55 community bus of the day, and instead get the regular one to Bein Inn which has its own stop.
May realises this is the community run bus she’s recently read about, having started after the local Glenfarg to Kinross service was axed.
At last lethargy is free to flood over us, as is blood from my sores trapped by sodden socks.
We soak in the bath, beer and whisky, and devour the third portion of pork of the day.
Listen to the recordings from the day three below:
Morning greets us with the quiet and worrying stiffness of our bodies. The day looms ahead.
We can’t face the fetters of our walking boots so slip on crocs and trainers.
Our muscles start to loosen, drip fed with coffee from a thermos, as we meet the morning hills, ever changing with the rising sun.
We crane our heads upwards towards a ‘farm’ of wind turbines licking the dawning sky in apocalyptic idly.
Their ‘swoosh’ is barely perceptible up close, and even the sheep gather between them quietly during this slither of stolen morning. Monster, man and animals in a zen diagram of quiet contemplation.
There’s a Macbeth performance currently on in which the witches are disembodied voices heard through headphones, seemingly to appear from your own head.
I can’t help but jack my ear to the sky, searching for the turbine’s knowable trace.
Signage for Wallace Road directs us across a field, the path fielding an old drywall, past the long neglected foundations of a house over a twinkly stream.
We hop through bog.
I’ve been dreaming of a breakfast filled with greens and grains in Bridge of Earn spotted on Instagram – but it’s closed.
We turn to our now good friend, the egg and sausage bap, made by Sue who blinks behind thick eyelashes framed by shiny blonde hair.
We press our faces against the glass counter to gaze upon mounds of macaroni and stovie, and stacked lorne sausage under clingfilm.
Follow the route taken from Milnathort to Bridge of Earn and read the reviews here.
PART V: Bridge of Earn to Perth
We experience the first spittings of rain as we stop in our tracks while I battle with bad reception on a call to change my train, accepting the goliath optimism of this walk.
I shout each number of my debit card down the line in absurd parody.
The message from the line operator arrives in oscillating audibility: “When you fail, try and try again!”, he philosophises patiently.
A couple tells us that the springs around here were famed for their restorative minerality, bathed in as far back as 1711. The soft drink brand Schweppes took over the springs in 1910 before a terrible fire forced them to close the bottling operation.
We huff and puff by the biggest hill of the journey, rewarded by our first sightings of Perth which appears deceptively near now.
From here, the bridges over River Tay are cute and small.
The catastrophic collapse of the Tay Bridge in 1879, killing everybody on board, inspired the over-engineered latticing aesthetic of the Forth Bridge we crossed on our first day.
We read about the architect responsible for the Tay disaster and find that he ominously died 18 months later.
The country and city is melded together with scrap yards, industrial warehouses, and golf courses. Greyness is refracted throughout the sky.
We reach our final destination, Perth, victorious and overwhelmed.
We don’t rest long before we’re on the train speeding back south, undoing the distance we have walked rapidly, like a completed roll of film wound back into its bobbin in a singular snap.
The next day we text each other, admitting we haven’t achieved anything much more than TV in bed.
I feel dissatisfied trying to communicate what the walk was like to friends: “It was epic!”, I rant. But I’m also exhausted and tearful.
I only realise retrospectively what the walk provided and – a bit like fitness – how quickly it is undone.
Constant walking and moving landscapes created a perfect channel for thoughts to flow in and then out. They do not stay or flood the brain like unwelcome lodgers. Memories of my Grandfather, for instance, came and then went like a comforting visitor.
An Old English word uht-cearu translates to ‘early morning cares’: the kind of worries that are gone by breakfast. On this walk, I’m unplagued by even these, my mornings dictated by the needs of my body and the weather outside.
I learned to understand what Maggie Nelson means in The Argonauts when she says “I like physical experiences that involve surrender.”
Life after a Slow Ways walk is remembering this feeling: to resync with how time passes outdoors and then, to surrender.
Follow the route taken from Bridge of Earn to Perth and read the reviews here.
Lily Wakeley, May Robson, and Hannah Ustun met a decade ago studying at Edinburgh University. Lily Wakeley is a freelance writer and Welsh BAFTA-winning filmmaker (for the film Heart Valley). May is a podcast producer. She previously worked at the New Statesman and has just launched her latest podcast series with the BBC called The Commons, where she speaks to the communities in Scotland making ‘small revolutions’ in how we live, play and eat. May and Lily previously made the documentary NHS Borderlands together, which explores the human cost of the hostile environment in the NHS. They share a love of storytelling that centres the experience of unlikely characters doing extraordinary things, to draw attention to systemic structures. Hannah lives and works as an artist in Edinburgh. Most crucially, May, Hannah and Lily are great friends, and had great fun sharing this adventure together!
