Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
The Wild Atlantic Way
There had been a plan to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2020. It was thwarted by SARS-CoV-2 restrictions in 2020 and again in 2021. I considered walking one of the world’s longest defined coastal routes instead. The Wild Atlantic Way traces the rugged, indented western coast of Ireland, some 2600 km, the same distance as those pilgrim trails the pandemic put beyond reach.
Today isn’t our Day 27 on the way to Rome. We’re not making our 24th hike. The discrepancy is that we plan to rest on the seventh day of every week. If we were out on the trail, it would be categorised as an easy 19 km in the Pas-de-Calais. We’d have set out from Wisques after a good breakfast from accommodation unknown. I checked the weather – cloudy but only 9C. Perfect for a hike and another chat. Assuming we’re still talking to one another.
I’m pleased that the Magnolia chapbook has been well received. I’m saddened that I have found another hundred whose blooms have alerted me to their presence. One gorgeous stellata is barely fifty metres from our driveway, hiding in plain sight from my camera. Our national pandemic travel restrictions have been relaxed and today we ventured beyond 5 kms. Almost giddy with excitement, we walked the gardens of Fernhill, some six kilometres from our driveway. It was lovely to be in the company of tall pines, thuya and wellingtonia, spreading birch, beech and oak. We were also among specimen acid loving trees. Huge rhododendrons, camelias and several magnificent magnolias.
Frank Mitchell was the Professor of Quaternary Studies when I was a geology student in Trinity College, Dublin. When he retired in 1979, I was already overseas, working in Sharjah. A few job changes and a dozen years later, I was back in Ireland so to speak. In fact, I was commuting to work overseas and never found employment in Ireland in the coming thirty years.
‘We should have walked to Buxton today. It should have been the first stage of the trip to Rome … We’ll do it same time next year .. it’ll be 18 daily hikes before we can catch the Dover ferry to cross to France. And then, well, then it’ll be a mere 96 daily hikes to get to dinner in Rome’ or so I wrote this day last year.
Green exists between blue and yellow on the rainbow. It’s odd think that the rainbow might be a few kilometres away but the green is only a colour of the light with a 495–570 nanometre wavelength. It isn’t possible to be sure how far away a rainbow might be because it really only exists in your head. The rainbow is dimensionless, having no weight, size or physical manifestation. Your eye is what receives the rays of light refracted by the millions of droplets of water as they fall from the sky. Transience amplified. But the green is real.
