“Local: A Search For Nearby Nature and Wildness” is a celebration of curiosity, time spent outdoors, and a rallying cry to protect the wild places on our doorstep. [Alistair Humphreys]
“Localism isn’t better economically. It often isn’t more sustainable. But it is important because care and love can really only be local. Localism is about noticing the things and people you can actually affect.” [Henry Dimbleby]
.
How well do we know our own back yard? Or when we’re on holiday, how well do we get to know the spots we’ve chosen?
Meanwhile, intrepid traveller Alastair Humphreys has been enjoying the pleasures of slow travel in his own local patch:
After travelling the whole world, can exploring a single map ever be enough? Adventurer Alastair Humphreys spends a year investigating the small map around his own home. Can this unassuming landscape, marked by the glow of city lights and the hum of busy roads, satisfy his wanderlust? Could a single map provide a lifetime of exploration?
He discovers more about the natural world than in all his years in remote environments. And he wakes up to the terrible state of British nature, land use, and freedom to roam the countryside. This is an ode to slowing down and the meaningful experience of truly getting to know your neighbourhood. Local is a celebration of curiosity, time spent outdoors, and a rallying cry to protect the wild places on our doorstep. It is a reminder for all of us that nature and wildness are closer than we think.
‘Alastair Humphreys shows us that space is deep as well as wide, and that one need travel only a few hundred yards to become an explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby. This agile, wryly funny and wise book is dedicated to — as the Australian poet Les Murray once put it — being “only interested in everything”.’ – Robert MacFarlane
‘This looks wonderful. Localism isn’t better economically. It often isn’t more sustainable. But it is important because care and love can really only be local. Localism is about noticing the things and people you can actually affect.’ – Henry Dimbleby
Alastair Humphreys, who has rowed the Atlantic, trekked across the Empty Quarter, circumnavigated the globe by bike and run the Marathon Des Sables, decided his next adventure was going to be nearer to home. He got out his local Ordnance Survey map and decided to spend a year exploring as much around his home as he could. Each trip involved him randomly selecting one of the map’s 400 grid squares, jumping on his bike and searching for adventure in the modern sprawl that surrounds much of today’s cities. In this extract from Local: A Search For Nearby Nature and Wildness, we join him venturing into some unprepossessing muddy fields next to a motorway…
I bought the Ordnance Survey map that covered where I live – 20km by 20km of a very ordinary corner of the world on the fringes of a big city in the south of England – and committed to spending a year exploring its modest span. Once a week I visited a single 1km grid square, chosen at random, and delved into the minutiae of every street, hill and warehouse I found. I tried to be enthusiastically curious about whatever I found, as I always am when I am abroad. I worried at first that the plan was restrictive and banal, that my wanderlust would hate it, and that my boring neighbourhood could not compare with the mountains or coastlines I love. But I persevered with my tiny odyssey, and through repeating these outings the experience steadily became more meaningful.
Much of the author’s exploration was done by bicycle. Photograph: Alastair Humphreys
I went out in all weathers, grumbling through winter’s grey, wet days, but also then appreciating spring frosts and summer sun all the more. Some days I cycled around the grid squares, but usually I walked. My moods varied, too. Some weeks, I felt I was too busy to waste time wandering around random places. I had to consciously slow myself down, remembering how much I valued spending time outdoors. I would force myself to sit on a log, with no phone or music to distract me, and simply pay attention for a while. Without fail, I returned home feeling better than when I set out. Taking a camera with me also helped me to slow down, to be observant, to pay attention, and to try to regard everywhere as equally potentially interesting.
I enjoyed so many glimmers of beauty and intrigue over the course of the year. There was the ancient wood pasture dotted with vast, gnarled hornbeam trees; the weighty history of a tiny chapel that stood empty for six centuries since the Black Death wiped out the whole village; the fascination I feel in new places about all the homes I pass whose stories I will never know; the contrasts between the vineyards and graveyards and railway yards; and the kestrels and brown trout sharing the same landscape as kicked-in windows and burned-out cars. This was travel and exploration in its most condensed form.
