Signs of the Pathways

We are walking today with Man in the Woods, an artist based in Bristol. For just over six years, he has been venturing out each Friday morning to walk across the lanes, fields and hills around the West Country. This is not an epic venture to conquer peaks and forge new paths, but rather a way to follow the decidedly older ones. It all started because he wished to live deliberately, slow down, feel connected to the land and its stories. Each walking day he sets out by bus or train to match up with the point he previously left off, threading his way around familiar places. If the journey is humble and slow, dictated by country bus timetables and his supply of dry socks and hot coffee, so much the better. He makes careful drawings and objects he calls artefacts and in the short videos that document the walks, his voice is absent, his presence almost as a witness to the natural world and lives of others happening around him.

Walking with Man in the Woods, the landscape becomes a place of discovery and there is a celebration of everyday magic in his stories. We hear about a taxi driver who keeps pigs on the viaduct, and about how he learned to dowse for water or perhaps it was just the way to the pub. We take time to marvel at careful repairs on church doors and years of rusty nails on an old signpost. “Signs for people who know how to read them, which is not me, but I like to read them anyway”, he says, self-effacingly, for the path he takes us on today is deliberate.

We are heading towards an ancient stone circle, passing through routes almost certainly hundreds, if not thousands of years old, and the transformations of the land in this time seem to fascinate him. Where once, the quickest way between a hill and the shallow part of a river was marked by a small track, after a time a wooden bridge was built. Later came a stone bridge, then a road, then a motorway with a service station, probably selling mugs that commemorate the hill. We clatter through one of the many kissing gates on our walk and he stops to laugh at the number of signs that adorn the metal rungs; the yellow waymarker arrow, and all the others that shout Clean up, Close this, Look out in their bright capitalised discs.

While some signs are written with letters others are ageless. Along the path leading us to the standing stones bare winter trees are adorned with mistletoe. A sacred plant for druids with both magical and medicinal properties, it is also sacred to some of us at this time of the year as we approach the winter solstice and people gather, feast, laugh and have a dance and a sing song. For Man in the Wood, these are “the times of silliness and specialness that I find most engaging about humanity.”

The clothes he wears are satisfying for him, brown and green like the trees, and he will look forward to the first thorn to catch his sleeve – proof of a life started. He repairs everything he wears, darning his socks, rewaxing his coat, sewing up loose threads with a bright cotton spool he keeps in his pocket. “I like slow, laborious things that probably aren’t really worth it. Probably nothing I do is worth it.” This self-deprecating love of the ritual of everyday life is important to him. As he walks ahead the patches he has made and sewn into the back of his rucksack, borrowing their graphics from the signs of the pathways, read as simple affirmations of existence.

I saw the sun rise.

I am a cider drinker.

I have seen Stonehenge. And then, more cryptic.

I have seen the beast.

Spending time in his company you have the notion he is happier to listen and learn than profess any expertise, and it makes for beguiling company. He shows us a new piece of embroidery he is working on, a musical tablature in berry-red cross stitch of songs he is teaching himself to play on a new pennywhistle. Songs for Christmas to play for his family. The threads of the meticulous stitching shine in the sunlight and he laughingly says one day this might end up in a frame in a charity shop, and that would make him really happy. So much care is put into what he does, with the hope that one day they go on to grow or to live another life without him, like contemporary artefacts or letters to the future.

In this way, everything he does is connected. Sewing, drawing, walking and storytelling are all a way of moving a line through space. A map is a drawing and a story too and the names are there to be unravelled. Etymology as a way of understanding the landscape.

We reach the standing stones at Stanton Drew, a site recognised as the largest stone circle in the UK after Avebury and Stonehenge, dating from the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age. In the sixteenth-century the site was mapped by the freemason and architect John Wood the Elder, who proposed that the layout corresponded to the Pythagorean planetary system of worlds, a concept he took into his designs for the circular arrangement of houses in Bath. This name of the site is listed in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Stantone, which refers to the stones and possibly an ancient oak, and geophysical surveys have shown the presence of nine concentric postholes that could have held trees revered by the druids.

Guided by Man in the Woods, we find appreciation for the archaeology of the site as well as the enduring rituals that have been enacted there. We look at the drip of candlewax down the sides of the stones, he describes piles of ashes on the ground he saw on a previous visit, and mushrooms and lichen grow on the surface and ground, all evidence of fleeting and perpetual time.

Stopping at a nearby pub we see a further three stones which we learn are one thousand years older than the rest. Underneath lies a burial chamber and we are told a compelling story about a wedding couple and a vicar who were lured to dance though the night by the sweet sounds of the devil’s fiddle, and upon sunrise they and all their merrymakers turned to stone.

Our cheeks flushed with ale and heat from the fire, we set off back through the gloaming, entertaining each other with ghost stories, while starlings swoop low over the hedgerow and horses wait patiently by gates. We talk about our own sacred trees – what are the ones that will tell our stories in the future? Man in the Woods, pondering for a while over cider apples and yew, eventually arrives at the only logical choice, an English oak,

“I love the shape of them on the horizon. I’ll plant a young one in my garden, and though it won’t be old until centuries after I die, that's part of the magic. A twisty old oak. The shape of the leaf is my favourite to draw.”

Man in the Woods wears the TOAST Point Collar Organic Cord Shirt, Donegal Wool Cable Sweater, Bill Organic Cord Wide Leg Trousers, and Dogtooth Wool Chore Jacket.

Words by Lindsay Sekulowicz.

Photography by Elena Heatherwick.