I want to love winter walking, but I have two problems. One, I’m not very keen on winter: it makes me lazy, and probably gives me Sad (seasonal affective disorder). Leaves go mushy, and underfoot becomes slushy. Rain turns torrential, cold and – around Pendle Hill, Lancashire, where I live – slanty. Gales mean mental turbulence, at least for me.
The other, more serious, problem is that I tend to walk too fast. To do that, I need to keep a close eye on the terrain, so I walk with my head bowed (I’m 6ft 3in, so this is almost a reflex). My mind is focused on the summit, even when I pretend it isn’t. If I see a slope, I speed up; once on it, I race against myself. I’m no mountaineer – I’m talking the Pennine moors, not K2. I am assailed by a drive to arrive. Then, I sit down, wolf a sandwich and quaff hot tea. I even do that breathlessly, as if I had an appointment to keep, or a clock to beat.
While aware of all these issues, I’ve never tried anything to change habits acquired over 30-odd years of hillwalking and rambling, until I’m invited to take a mini mindful walk with Stacey McKenna-Seed.
Her Lancashire-based company, Rewilding Outdoor Therapy, works with the Pendle Hill Landscape Partnership (PHLP), a Lottery-backed programme of community-oriented activities and events.
On a short walk with a group of about 20 people into a patch of woodland, Stacey helps us to listen to the birds, study fungi and switch off our mental antennae for a few minutes. For once, I manage to zone out and relax while walking. More importantly, I begin to realise that walking well is not just common sense. It can need work, or at least attention.
“Good walking is all about connection and feeling the environment,” says Stacey. “It’s about getting out of the head and into the body, and also switching from the wide angle to the smaller details.”
But it’s even deeper than that. She adds: “We’re ordinarily in fight or flight mode, coping with one thing or another. Being busy has kudos. People think being exhausted is the pinnacle. So I always tell people to slow down. Walking slowly is the most radical thing you can do these days. I often recommend clients find a sit-spot or move slowly through the landscape.
“Winter, especially, is an opportunity to go slowly. We spend all summer squeezing as much as we can out of the warm, long days. Dark days are a time to replenish.”
What about my summit-anxiety? “We utilise and exploit and conquer nature to have power over it,” she says. “We should ask ourselves: what are we trying to conquer? We need power with nature, not over it. The best place on Pendle Hill may not be the top, where there’s all that wind and noise, but just down the side, where we can feel protected and enclosed.”
She emphasises that we should all seek to walk in places where we feel “comfortable” and that walking needn’t always be a challenge. “I always ask my clients where they feel safest. For me it’s a coniferous forest because I like to be contained, as if in a womb. It’s a fairytale feeling, and helps me connect with being a child. Ultimately, the best thing about walking in nature is to feel awe and wonder – and we all know how children do that.”
I’ve always tended to think of “mindfulness” as vague and unscientific, I tell Stacey. “I could agree with that,” she concedes. “But all of this is evidence-based: walking makes us switch from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system, which triggers the creative side of the brain. It can flood the body with happy chemicals.”
These chemicals must flow off Pendle Hill like lava, because another local project, called 72 Seasons, showed me a way to break the winter into manageable chunks and, hopefully, exorcise my Sad.
Kirsty Rose Parker, a Barnoldswick-based creative researcher and founder of The Evaluator agency, came up with the idea when she was tasked by PHLP with answering the question “What’s a Hill Worth?” and asked to focus on community and wellbeing.
“I came across the idea when a woman from Japan shared it with a Facebook group I belong to,” she says. “It’s an ancient Japanese calendar, and the basic idea is to break the year up into microseasons. I looked up the 72 Seasons app and it was great, but featured Japanese seasons, so there were bears and cherry blossoms. I thought maybe I could translate the idea to the Pendle landscape.
“I worked with over 300 volunteers for a year and together we created our own 72 Seasons – they work for Lancashire and perhaps many places in the north of England. A lovely artist named Cath Ford drew images to represent the seasons.
“The project began during lockdowns and worked through emails, but in the past year we’ve gone out into the landscape. Some people take notebooks; some prefer to look around and think, and chat later. Others use the concept to make them see more precisely or use their senses – to sniff the snowdrops – or they adapt the seasons to their gardening. The seasons, which are only four or five days long, can serve to remind people of traditional holidays like Lammas.”
“We have recently redesigned how we introduce the seasons so that they work with members of the Asian community and for people who don’t use the internet – whom we missed the first time round. Some people found the seasons worked well with their Muslim faith. We used the Women’s Institute and local walking groups to make contact with local people who are offline.”
Kirsty now shares the seasons on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. A short film shows the sort of things people look out for on their rural psycho-geographic wanderings – guided by the names of the microseasons, which include: “Hedgehogs Shut their Door”, “Morning Grass Glistens” and “Puddles Galore!”
She says: “People have said our 72 Seasons brought them joy, that they slept better and felt less angry. When we evaluated their responses, their wellbeing had increased.
“The reason it works is because it puts people into the present. Instead of horizon-scanning, they can enjoy seeing nature just doing its thing – and that can be comforting.”
She’s now looking at developing 72 Seasons further, to engage more people, in face-to-face sessions, and as a potential toolkit others can adopt.
I wonder if we shouldn’t personalise microseasons. My last week has gone from Rainbow Days to Wuthering Nights to First Frost. I also had a Blitz of Bramblings. For Scottish Highlanders it’ll soon be White Ptarmigan Time. For those on the west Wales coast, Corwynt Bach or Mini-Hurricane. For dwellers in southern climes perhaps Waders and Wet. Seasons to be cheerful, not Sad.
My third and, for now, final bid for season-aware slowness and wellbeing is homegrown. A year ago I adopted a cat from pet-homing charity Blue Cross. She was already called Pumpkin though she’s a svelte, athletic, four-year-old tabby who can stretch snake-like till she looks more like a sausage than a round vegetable – but I didn’t like to change her name. Pumpkin likes to be accompanied on walks, and so I join her – and my pace, pauses, route choices and scrambles through hedges emulate hers.
It might sound potentially stressful to shadow an animal known for its selfish, stubborn unruliness. But a working relationship has developed and we have a half-dozen routes we now use around the local farmland. She doesn’t go too high up the gnarly trees, she eventually joins me if I sit down for a rest, and she (usually) comes when it’s time to go home.
Numerous studies have shown owning cats to be conducive to people’s psychological health and many people believe therapy cats are as valuable as dogs. I don’t use a harness. As long as you’re careful never to put a cat in awkward situations – ensuring it is able to take flight, avoiding dog encounters and generally following rules – there’s little reason not to be a cat-flâneur . Cats are territorial and prefer to explore within limited parameters. Thanks to Pumpkin, I loitered on a bridge and saw a kingfisher, have learned the names of all the trees and bushes that are used in hedges, and mastered being patient and staring into space. When she makes a sudden burst for the bole of a potentially scalable tree, I admire her the way you would a fell runner or a speed climber.
As for weaving cat-walking into my new worldview, that’s easy. For many of the coming micro-seasons of midwinter, Pumpkin will sleep and eat and drink and sleep some more, perhaps venturing out to test the snow, study a robin, mark her territory. She is closer to nature than even the most rewilded human – and a perfect tutor to help me lose my hangdog attitude.
