Tirzah Garwood Swimming Scene

Detail from 'The Four Seasons: winter, spring, summer, autumn', wood engraving by Tirzah Garwood (1927)

 

Cherry blossom running in Dulwich Park

A beautiful Spring day in sunny South London last weekend (8th April 2017), I went to Dulwich Park unaware that it was its parkrun's 5th birthday. There was bunting, birthday balloons and of course cake.

As I was in the middle of a long marathon training run I didn't go flat out so was surprized when I got to the end to see that it was my fastest parkrun in over a year  - I know Dulwich is reputed to be a fast course on account of being flat(ish) with no sharp corners, but I haven't always run fast (for me) there.  As I wasn't really timing myself I didn't look at my watch on the way round, just concentrated on maintaining a steady pace - maybe that's something I should try more often!

I had more miles to do afterwards and wanted to run off road as much as possible so I decided to stay in the park. What I hadn't realized despite going to the park for years is that there is a proper woodland trail whereby you can run more or less the entire outside circuit of the park on trail, much of it in shaded woodland.




This includes the 'Village Copse' at the north-west corner of the park (pictured above). Only planted in 2006 by  TRUE (The Trust for Urban Ecology) it has now matured enough to let you run under trees, and at this time of year to be showered with cherry blossom while doing so.
 

 

 The romantic painter Samuel Palmer, who grew up in Walworth and often wandered in Dulwich wrote of  'Dulwich as the gate into the world of vision' and considered how to paint its hills 'to bring up a mystic glimmer like that which lights our dreams. And those same hills (hard task) should give us promise that the country beyond them is Paradise'. His 1834 painting The Shearers, painted when he was living at Shoreham in Kent, was an attempt to realize this landscape first glimpsed in the Dulwich 'valley of vision' 

No sheep being sheared in Dulwich today but maybe if you're lucky the occasional glimpse of paradise! 

Dulwich park - the outer perimeter is the woodland trail, just find a stretch of pathway as close to the edge of the park as you can get and follow it round, taking care to head to far side of the football pitches to the village copse section. The distance of the Outer Dulwich Park loop (see Strava segment) is around 1.3 miles.




See previous posts:




Running London: Dulwich Park


Midsummer running in Dulwich Park

Wilfredo Prieto - Walk (2000)

Cuban-born artist Wilfredo Prieto made 'Walk' (2000) during a residency on the Caribbean island of Curaçao. The artist put a plant in a wheelbarrow filled with soil and took it on a five-kilometer walking tour. According to the programme, 'While there is a comic absurdity to this gesture, Prieto’s work connects to a long tradition of walking in twentieth-century art, its precursors including the Situationists’ dérive (drift), the Surrealists’ unconscious explorations of Paris, Robert Smithson’s forays into the ruins of Passaic, New Jersey, and Francis Alÿs’s treks around Mexico City'.

 

The work is included in 'Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today' at South London Gallery until September 11th. Lots of other interesting work in the exhibition too.

 

'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'

Emily Wardill - Swimming Art

A fine piece of swimming art by Emily Wardill which I saw at the weekend in Enclave Gallery, Deptford as part of the 'Detours: After Detournement' exhibition.

The work is entitled 'Better to have loved and lost' (2014) and is ink on cotton.

Detail:

Running London (1): Nunhead Cemetery - Life's Race Well Run

Nunhead Cemetery in South London is a pleasingly decaying Victorian burial ground, first opened in 1841. At one time it was quite the place to be buried, but by the mid-20th century the burials dried up and the company running it went bust. It quickly became overgrown and by the 1980s the trees that had sprung up had matured into a fine woodland. Since then the combined efforts of Southwark Council and the Friends of Nunhead Cemetery have tried to prevent further damage to the graves and monuments, and make it accessible as both a wildlife reserve and a place of remembrance.

It's a popular spot with runners, as well as dog walkers, as it offers the experience of running through the woods in a place only a short distance from urban inner London. On hot days like we've had recently, it's also cool in the shade of the trees. And the angels and other monuments undoubtedly add an atmosphere of sweet melancholy.

You won't be able to do much reading of the gravestones while you're running, but it's always interesting to have a walk around before or after. Don't get too gloomy, but it does function as a kind of memento mori - one day your running days will be over. As the grave of Hannah Frisby (d.1921) says: 'Life's race well run, life's work well done, life's crown well won, now comes rest' (a verse by Edward  H. Parker that was used on the 1881 funeral casket of assassinated US President Garfield, and then became a Victorian/Edwardian favourite). 

Is it actually OK to run around cemeteries? If Martin Creed is right that running 'is the exact opposite of death' might it offend some people? Maybe I would think twice about running around a modern cemetery full of the recently bereaved, but in a place where most people have been dead for over a hundred years it feels more like an affirmation of the continuity of human existence. The torch has been passed on, and will be passed on again.  'A dreaded sunny day, So let's go where we're happy, And I'll meet you at the cemetery gates'

First World War Australian War Graves in Nunhead

Route: the most straightforward route is round the main pathway. Come into the cemetery from main entrance on Linden Grove SE15, take the track to the left and keep taking left forks at junctions until you are back where you started. One circuit of this is 1.5 km, and includes a good steepish uphill stretch where you are rewarded at the top with a view of the distant St Pauls Cathedral  through the trees. JMW Turner painted from here before it was even a cemetery.

There are other smaller paths and you can create your own longer routes by using these in various combinations. One route I have used is to do the basic loop once, as described above, and then at the end of first lap turn right up the central avenue towards the chapel. At the top turn left, then take the left where the path forks. Turn left again at the bottom and you are back at the start. Carry on towards the Scottish Martyrs memorial, take the left here where the path forks and follow track back round to the chapel. Turn left here and go back down the avenue towards the starting point. That route comes out at 2.4 km.

Terrain: mainly gravel paths, some larger stones underfoot in stretches to watch out for. Paths can get wet/muddy in autumn and winter.

Hazards: Lots of dogs being walked, but most of them friendly!

Getting there: 2 minutes from Nunhead train station; buses 78, 343, 484, P12 all go nearby

Opening times: check the Southwark Council website for details. At present it opens at 8:30 am throughout the year, but closing times vary from 4 pm in the winter to 7 pm in the summer.

Post-run refreshments: Dish and the Spoon on Cheltenham Road (near to back entrance of cemetery) and Bambuni on Evelina Road both do really good coffee etc. If a fry up's more your thing, Crossway Cafe (also on Evelina Road) is the place to go - they do a formidable vegetarian breakfast.

The Scottish Martyrs Memorial - commemorating radicals transported to Australia in the late 18th century.
In my romantic way it reminds me that freedom is a precondition for running free.
They didn't have that option on a prison ship!

See also:

Running Nunhead Reservoir: a 'secret' run in South London

Oh and here's a song made up of lines taken from Nunhead graves (including 'life's race well run):

Running on Screen (1): Muybridge's Runner, 1887

One of the earliest moving images of running comes from Eadweard Muybridge's famous Animal Locomotion series of 1887. A sequence of 12 photographs were looped to create the illusion of an endless run, with a further 12 documenting the same motion from a different angle. The still images capture the runner suspended in space, both feet off the ground.

I don't believe that the name of the runner is recorded, but it is known that these pictures were taken at the University of Pennsylvania with the encouragement of the university's provost, William Pepper. The athlete is believed to have been a student there. According to Marta Brown, 'The athletes were the product of Pepper's new system of physical education at the university, meant to develop an overall fitness and vigor, key, according to Pepper, to the "cultivation of manly and courageous qualities" that defined white masculinity... In the minds of pioneers like Pepper, the physical prowess of the university athlete would be a manifestation of the American way of life' (in 'Eadweard Muybridge' by Philip Brookman, Tate Publishing, London, 2010).

One thing that I hadn't noticed until recently is that the otherwise naked runner is wearing some kind of cap. Anybody comes across running headgear like that before?