Dunstable Downs parkrun

Dunstable Downs rise in Bedfordshire on the edge of the Chiltern Hills. The chalk grassland landscape is partially managed by the National Trust, and is famous for gliders and kite flyers making the most of the air currents at this highest spot in the county. I grew up nearby and have spent many happy hours there walking, running, and taking in the great views of the surrounding countryside, so I was delighted to hear that a parkrun had started there in February.

Delighted but also daunted - the Downs rise to 203m above sea level. I am pleased to report that the course stays at the top of the escarpment rather than requiring a steep descent/ascent, though there is a short uphill section near the start and some undulations along the way.

I ran the 6th event (6/4/19) and I have to say this was one of the best parkrun courses I have run. It is a single lap out and back across the hilltop, heading through some woodland and around a couple of fields, almost entirely on grass/trail. The start is right next to the National Trust cafe/car park at the Downs' highest point with the finish at the beacon nearby.

115 runners took part when I ran, with local clubs represented including Dunstable Road Runners, Dacorum and Tring AC and St Albans Striders. First finisher - as he has been for most of the parkruns there so far - was St Albans' Steve Buckle in 17:35.

The course heads along part of the Icknield Way, so you are following some ancient footsteps not to mention those of Robert Macfarlane who describes a walk along this route in his great book 'The Old Ways: a Journey of Foot' (2012): 'I was soon on the summit ridge of Dunstable Downs, where scores of people were having fun. I sat and rested in a cooling wind and watched children flying kites. My legs preserved a ghost sense of stride, a muscle memory of repeated action, and twitched forward even as I rested'.  

Macfarlane was himself following the footsteps of Edward Thomas who describes his walk in 'The Icknield Way' (1913). Looking back over the Downs he is struck, like many visitors, by the grandeur of the skies as much as the hills: ' The air was now still and the earth growing dark and already very quiet. But the sky was light and its clouds of utmost whiteness were very wildly and even fiercely shaped, so that it seemed the playground of powerful and wanton spirits knowing nothing of earth. And this dark earth appeared a small though also a kingly and brave place in comparison with the infinite heavens now so joyous and so bright and out of reach'.

I drove to the Downs this time, on other occasions I have run up from Dunstable. Coming in that direction a chalk pathway passes over Five Knolls, a series of burial mounds dating back to the Neolithic but with burials from other times too, including the Medieval period when a gallows was located there.

Full details at Dunstable Downs parkrun site

Other Bedfordshire runs:

Running up Warden Hill, Luton

Running over Blow's Downs, Dunstable

Wardown parkrun, and a history of running in Luton

1970s Luton schools cross country

Southern Road Relays 2016 - Bedford Aerodrome

The Running Sky - of birds, books & runners in rotation

In Nottingham's Wollaton Park after this year's English National Cross Country Championships, there was a moment as the sun was going down when a large number of crows (yes I know the collective noun is 'A Murder') began circling above the hill where shortly before thousands of runners had circled on the last lap of their races. It felt like they were echoing the cross country race itself, though presumably they do it all year round, the park being home to 'a large corvid roost made up of rook, jackdaw, and carrion crow' (wikipedia)

It reminded me of a passage I'd read earlier that  day in Tim Dee's The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life, describing not crows but a similar flight of seabirds:

'To see vast numbers of birds in silent movement is beautifully strange. In this crowd of so many moving things, the eye leaps constantly from individuals to the whole event. These are not flocks but countless single birds caught in a storm of life. Individuals fly fast but the ensemble seems to be moving at dream speed. The rush of the single bird somehow slows in the crowd. I cannot focus for long on a puffin with its hurrying wings in the wheeling cloud; instead I see a tumbleweed of birds rolling out from their grassed lawns and terraces over a gulf of air, a slow motion collective rotation'.

I’d been reading this book on the journey up to Nottingham – with a title like the Running Sky it got some curious looks on a train full of runners. But of course it is not a running book but a reflection on the author's lifetime fascination with birds.

While I have never been a fully fledged adult birdwatcher, I was and am interested in them as I have mentioned before. At primary school an enthusiastic teacher enrolled me in the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds' Young Ornithologists Club, something I recalled recently when I went to a bird themed art exhibition at the old library building on Walworth Road, near the Elephant and Castle (the building, which housed the Newington library and Cuming Museum has been closed following a fire, hopefully it will fully reopen permanently in the not too distant future).

From 'Natural Selection', Andy Holden and Peter Holden

Natural Selection combines the scientific perspective of Peter Holden, sometime national organiser of the Young Ornithologists Club, and the work of his artist son Andy Holden who is as interested in the aesthetic properties of birds, their nests and indeed the illicitly curated hordes assembled by illegal egg collectors.  Without undue anthropomorphism he wonders whether in some circumstances individual birds make choices about their use and display of materials in a way that can be regarded as akin to artistic activity. 

The display includes a case of birds nests arranged on piles of books - the importance of which cannot be overestimated. A recent thread on Twitter started by nature writer Robert Macfarlane asked people to share which bird, animal and plant books they had learnt from as children. It reminded me of how much those of us with childhoods before the Internet or even widespread colour TV relied upon books like the Observer's Book of Birds and the various Ladybird bird books among others. In fact it was in some ways the colourful plenitude of these lavishly illustrated volumes that made bird life seem so appealing, even if most of us would only get to see a handful of the species in the feather and flesh. I was particularly taken by a series of early 1970s 'Hamlyn All Colour Paperbacks' illustrated by Ken Lilly, I still have my copies of Seabirds and Birds of Prey, though along the way have lost my Tropical Birds.

In the wild, birds are rarely to be viewed in fine detail up close and still, but as we catch glimpses we fill in the gaps in our visual perception with the mental images we have stored from drawings and photographs. But no bird book can really capture the social phenomenon of flocks of birds in 'slow motion collective rotation', like runners racing around a field. And what does the birds eye make of the crowd of humans down below as they jostle for position, each dwelling in their individual exertions and largely oblivious to the pattern they create as they weave in and out of each other, moving together and separately at the same time. 

(The Running Sky takes its title from a Philip Larkin poem, which rather gloomily asserts the pointlessness of dreaming of flying or running as loss and loneliness are all that await...

'If hands could free you, heart,

Where would you fly?

Far, beyond every part

Of earth this running sky

Makes desolate? Would you cross

City and hill and sea,

If hands could set you free?

I would not lift the latch;

For I could run

Through fields, pit-valleys, catch

All beauty under the sun—

Still end in loss:

I should find no bent arm, no bed

To rest my head'.

Natural Selection continues until 26 November 2017, I strongly recommend going to see it (visitor details here) 

On a similar theme to ‘Natural Selection’ here's the wonderful Band of Holy Joy with the Observer's Book of Birds Eggs:
'it was the first book I ever owned, the Observer's book of birds eggs, fully illustrated and described in natural colours, and yay it was mine. I devoured every page from the hooded crow to the ptarmigan' (incidentally lead singer Johny Brown ran the Royal Parks Half last month after doing the Great North Run last year).

'These forms who hasten by' - ghosts and runners on the Pilgrims Way (1923)

The Pilgrims Way

Along the Pilgrims' way.

The yew trees sigh and sway,

They stand a lasting line,

On ancient days a sign.

The monk and minstrel gay

With prayer and roundelay;

The pedlar with his load;

They took the Pilgrims' road

And when the sun is low,

They sometimes seem to go

Along the same old track,

By yew trees, gnarled and black.

When folks say what they've seen,

Well, WE know what they mean;

These forms who hasten by,

Are really you and I!

(RMH, South London Harriers Gazette, November 1923)

Pilgrims Way,  Kent, 1950 - Bill Brandt

The Pilgrims Way is a route between Winchester and Canterbury, at least part of which follows ancient trackways on the North Downs even if its name and conception as a single continuous route probably goes back no further than the 1870s. It is popular with walkers and runners - including those taking part in  The Pilgrims Challenge 66 mile ultra marathon in the last couple of years.

The notion of following in the footsteps of ancient pilgrims is an evocative one, and in a certain light quite haunting. In the 1920s, when this poem was written, there was upsurge of interest in both the great outdoors and in ghosts. Robert Macfarlane notes that in this period 'people, traumatized by the war, took to the paths in search of ghosts  - setting out on the tracks of the lost and left-behind. Old paths became mediums in two senses: means of communion as well as means of motion. The convivial pilgrimages described by Chaucer became tinged with a morbid historicism: spectres stepped from the verge or hedge, offering brief address' (The Old Ways: a journey on foot, 2012).

This would seem to apply to this poem, which I found in an old South London Harriers newsletter, but  I like the twist  - that what others see as ghosts may in fact be runners hastening by.

I wonder who 'RMH' was?

[update - South London Harriers have identified an R.M. Harrison who ran for the club in this period, so he is possibly the poet]

Hamish Fulton's The Pilgrims Way features in the current 'Conceptual Art in Britain' exhibition at Tate Britain gallery in London. In  April 1971, Fulton conceived of  'A 165 mile walk' on 'Ancient paths forming a route between Winchester and Canterbury' as an art work leaving no trace other than this photograph of  'A hollow lane on the North Downs'.

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Morrissey - List of the Lost

Burns Night Running Thoughts

Running in the Railway Children

A Midsummer Night's Running

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

The Running Stitch - running as landscape embroidery? (Robert Macfarlane)

I am really enjoying Robert Macfarlane's 'The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot' (2012), with its evocative descriptions of walks and other journeys, as well as reflections on the act of following a path.

One thing he dwells upon is the relationship between writing and walking (and by implication running too), both of which trace lines and consist of a kind of up/down motion while moving forward:

'As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker's feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth, and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream' (p.105 in the Penguin edition).

Of course he is not referring here to the kind of stitch you get in your side when running, but the running stitch in embroidery worked by the needle going in and out of the fabric just like my runner's feet going in and out of the mud in cross country this week. I am quite taken with the notion of running as a kind of landscape embroidery, stitching lines across the earth. On tarmac or track these mostly leave no trace, but in muddier conditions the running stitch is a visible line.