Introduction – Establishing Gothic Footfall

Summary

In 2016, Andrew Bowden, author and creator of the online walking blog ‘Rambling man’, wrote an article titled ‘Is it Safe to Walk Alone? (The Answer is Yes!)’. As the title implies, Bowden is keen to assure us all that, irrespective of age or gender, walking in the countryside in solitude is perfectly safe. As he observes, ‘Where else will you bump into a random stranger holding a rifle, and end up having a conversation about butterflies…?’ (Bowden, 2016). Bowden's partner, Catherine Redfern, in her own blog London Hiker, writes on the same subject:

Tell yourself logically, what is the likelihood that someone is going to be waiting behind a hedge on a remote hillside where hardly anyone goes for hours and hours just on the small chance that someone might pass by to attack? The risk is greater when you leave your house in the morning and walk down the street, but you don't stop doing that, and quite right too (Redfern, 2012).

What is interesting about Bowden and Redfern's advice is that both are writing in response to a perceived sense of actual threat that something fearful resides in the countryside. Despite the statistical unlikeliness of such a threat, there is something about the magnitude of the countryside, its sublime immensity, the dwarfing of our physicality by comparison and the seemingly endless, panoramic expanses of open space that unsettles us on another level. Robert Macfarlane captures this inexplicable fear in an article titled ‘The Eeriness of the English Countryside’, in which he identifies it, rather less precisely, as ‘a realm that snags, bites and troubles’ (Macfarlane, 2015: 1–2).

Our book explores that less explicable interface between the actual physical geography of the landscape and its walking trails, and the sense of haunting travellers experience, or perceive to be at work when journeying across and through it. William Hughes has identified, as a staple of tourist Gothic, journeys undertaken on foot, which separate the protagonist from the comfort and security of modern forms of transport (Hughes, 2013: 242–243), but relatively little sustained critical attention has yet to be paid specifically to walking and its relation to landscapes. This book covers predominantly rural and some urban landscapes and extends into extreme terrain, vertically into the high peaks and horizontally to the poles.