‘By walking an hour each morning,’ Cracknell writes, in the opening chapter of Doubling Back, ‘I plant myself here.’ The line captures an essence of this versatile author’s work, that spans fiction, drama and – in this book – personal essays. From her earliest memories, Cracknell has been on the move, whether tunnelling through the undergrowth of her childhood back garden, walking barefoot through a village in Kenya or struggling, injured, across Norway.
But far from superficial tourism, her explorations are always about rooting down into the people, stories and natural worlds where she passes. And her spade is her pen. Cracknell writes to discover and her walks are a multi-dimensional excavation of places – and herself – across time.
The premise of Doubling Back is ‘Paths Trodden in Memory’ as Cracknell retraces the steps of previous walkers and entwines their experiences with her own. Some of the walks are intimately connected with her, such as following the climb of her late father in Switzerland. Others follow previous authors: Thomas Hardy in Cornwall, Jessie Kesson in the hills above Loch Ness and Rabbie Burns in ‘the Birks ‘o Aberfeldy’. Others explore ancient routes, like the Highland drove road to Skye or the ‘Mozarabic Trails’ of southern Spain.
Some are solo while others are in varied and colourful company. Threading the collection together are a series of memories from Cracknell’s three weeks at the writers’ retreat Château de Lavigny in Switzerland. She reflects there on the push-pull of movement and stillness that her writing demands and ‘the contradictory impulses of familiarity and ‘otherness’; self-sufficiency and company’.
That tension reaps rewards as Cracknell has a rare gift for conjuring experience. Her observations of nature are keen: a red-throated diver is ‘floodlit in a sudden splash of sunlight’. People are equally summoned: a guide ‘had a soft way of laying words’. A walk along the pilgrimage route of St Cuthbert’s Way captures a spiritual luminosity: ‘Our own reflections had us walking on water.’ And the final chapter, saturated with water in the peat bog of the Flow Country, takes us to the earthy depths as she got on her knees and ‘plunged hands into slow waters and raised dripping samples of sphagnum moss.’
That chapter is a new addition to the original book, which first appeared in 2014, but promptly disappeared with the publisher’s demise. This 10th anniversary edition brought out by Saraband is a welcome ‘doubling back’ over Cracknell’s walks and words, that hold ever more resonance and richness with the passage of time.
Doubling Back: Paths Trodden in Memory is published by Saraband (paperback, £9.99)
Merryn Glover
Merryn Glover, author of fiction, drama, poetry and journalism, was brought up in South Asia and Australia and has called Scotland home for 30 years. Her plays and short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio and widely anthologised. Her first novel, A House Called Askival, is set in India and her second, the award-winning Of Stone and Sky, in Badenoch where she now lives. The first Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park, Merryn is a regular contributor to the Guardian Country Diary. Her latest book is The Hidden Fires: A Cairngorms Journey with Nan Shepherd.