Books
1997 Sacred Mountains: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Meanings (Floris Books)
1998 Sacred Nature: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Meanings (Capall Bann)
2000 Places of Pilgrimage and Healing (Capall Bann)
These books discuss the experiences of wilderness landscapes among contemporary walkers. They recognize that walking is at the heart of Human Geography and the public engagement with wilderness places. Walking draws Human Geography and Physical Geography together into a whole of frequently changing, often inspiring environmental experience. Ever since the first humans walked out of Africa, and continued walking around most of this planet's land surface, walking has shaped the ways in which landscapes and places have been interpreted.
The analysis is presented within a historical and philosophical context of the Anthropocene. Together, this trilogy forms an ethnographic discussion of walkers' experiences in wilderness environments in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Americas and Australasia. It therefore unpacks contemporary experiences of wilderness environments, including the literature, art and music which also contribute to individuals' wilderness experiences. This is done at a range of spatial scales. Extracts from interviews with each walker illustrate the discussion.
Walking in wilderness landscapes for extended periods is shown to include a sense of personal defiance against experiences of conformity and subordination. It is also shown to offer walkers an opportunity to reflect upon their experiences of the Anthropocene.
Wilderness landscapes are shown to embody a collection of intensely problematic paradoxes including the walkers' fear and fascination with specific wilderness environments; the conjunction of immanence and transcendence; and the further alignment of experiencing times of personal clarity and uncertainty.
Aesthetic implications of walking in wilderness landscapes are ultimately shown to pervade a broad range of elements within these walkers' geographical imaginations through cognitive and non-cognitive themes.
Feminist narratives serve to broaden the set of themes and texts which can be included within the discourses of wilderness walking experiences. These include references to the sacrifices which women participants have made in order to embark upon their journeys, and their varying experiences of redemption toward the end of those journeys. These feminist narratives also link with the narratives of their children in reflecting upon the impact of specific walking journeys on their family life.
These books also highlight wilderness walking for its intensely problematic, surprising and controversial dimensions. That is, they explore the impossibility of producing simple categorisations of contemporary walking experience. Within these problematic aspects of walking experience, the books explore the vulnerability which walkers often encounter when their plans, journeys and experiences are ridiculed and trivialized by their family or other peer group members. Resilience in response to this sense of vulnerability is also discussed.
Within many of the narratives explored, there is the recognition that wilderness walking can be therapeutic. Here again, the books explore the broad range of physical and emotional challenges which these walkers discuss, and which they suggest have been helped through their journeys. Examples include the ways in which they found help, through walking, in coping with depression, alcohol and drug dependency, living with terminal disease and bereavement.
The trilogy also focuses on events after walkers return home from extended journeys in wilderness environments. Returning to everyday realities and routines offers its own distinctive challenges. Bringing a re-newed enthusiasm for the wild, and wildlife conservation, into the home community is also not without its complexity and challenges.
Since 2007, the content and implications of these books has formed a series of public lectures and broadcasts which have been given in Europe, Asia, North and South America and Australasia.