The first leg went well. My walking appeared on the gps to to be pretty much straight, a few meters east of the northern leg of the grid square. A phone GPS is prone to error. It’s tolerance, it’s inherent inaccuracy must be a few metres. In a car, the map has the coordinates for a road and generally, with the driver being in a car, assumes such that the car remains on the physical road such that the blob remains on the road shown on the GPS display. Offroad and walking this assumption may not apply. After 30 years of serious close detail navigation with a map and compass, GPS has always seemed like a cheat, a backup. But on my iPhone Ordnance Survey map app, my walked path was congruous with the longitudinal path of the grid line. I reached the next, latitudinal grid line that would take me west. I set off, flush with success. But hubris always leads to nemesis. The second leg was a different experience.

On this leg, I was effectively passing over the summit of the moss. Up the first leg, up the slope, there was a distinct slow flow of water downhill. On this second leg that flow was absent. The second leg was wetter. It was the place where rainwater, having made its way along the water cycle, from some other distant water source, like the North Atlantic Ocean, and having spent some time in the sky as a cloud, would end its energetic journey through the sky. The summit being flatter would be where the water would rest and recuperate, each raindrop getting a chance to get to know the other raindrops that landed beside it and become a puddle or pool. A nice chill-out zone that now consistently filled my boots with haste not appropriate to any chill-out zone. The passage downhill to the stream could wait for now. Unfortunately, much of the water chose not to rest in the summit pools, instead, it chose to rush into my boots to rest. I heard the moss laugh out loud.

After a kilometre ascent, I had hoped for easier going. This did not happen. On seeking to sit and catch my breath and have a drink I spied many large tussocks of mixed vegetation. Bundles of mixed grasses, heather, bilberry, other green leafy plants, dwarf silver birch trees and sphagnum mass. So on seeking to sit on said bundle, it became clear they were like the clouds the rain had fallen from. My bottom seeking a seat, sank down rapidly directly into the water resting in the hidden pools under the vegetation. My bottom was not best pleased. To rest I realised I had to remain standing. This theme was to continue. The theme was one of unrelenting toil.

In his book Taming the Flood, author Jeremy Purseglove tells a tale or the UK’s rivers and wetlands and the centuries-old battle against flooding. What he makes clear is that what now comprises Walton Moss, once upon a time comprised much of the UK. Much of the UK was wetland. Now drained, we do not encounter the land the way our ancestors did. Our ancestors encountered largely unrelenting toil. They found places to sit and rest to be few and thus when found, were settled. Settled land was valued and thus protected, garrisoned, and defended. Settlement was intrinsically political. Land clearance and drainage takes time and money thus cleared and drained land tended to favour the wealthy and the powerful. Movement favoured the poor, marginalised into marginal lands, the wetlands, the heaths. The heathens is what they were called. They were travellers as much as settlers.

Their travels would be through water, through wetlands, bounded by marsh, pond, stream, river and sea, all impediments to travel and to rest. Walton Moss is 10,000 years old and thus pre-human, at least as we encounter it today in our dry houses, with clear paths, fast roads, and dry feet. So some reservations of farmers, land clearers and peat-cutters now may be better understood against this history. A return to the native holds a dread of a return to unrelenting toil, to uncomfortable living, to land too wet to walk and too wet to farm. There may be a justified fear that rewilding may prove to be a little too wild for our modern sensibilities. Walking Walton Moss makes this wildness an embodied experience. My presence as a human becomes superfluous. It is a wild place. It is the wildest place I know in the UK.

My travel over the second leg slowed down. In places, the footing I found on the first leg was wet and boggy, which led me to walk more carefully. A sign at an entry point warns of hazardous walking conditions comprising deep peaty pools. On the first leg by and large, the footing was wet but firm. On the second leg, there were water-filled pools between the tussocks that were deep. There were areas of the moss that required clambering over soft vegetation, and then descending into narrow slots of black water and peat. A straight line became impossible. I set my compass to a feature on the horizon as a target or point to head for. The moss became an act of climbing over tussocks and then descending into dark holes such that the horizon could not be seen. Each act of climbing and descent was never more than 5 feet of horizontal movement over the ground, but the actual path encountered was at times 8–9 feet including ascent and descent. The overall effect was one of disorientation. I became confused about my overall direction of travel continuously. Thus my continued passage along a straight line became virtually impossible.

But the act of walking a straight line is, in navigation terms, antithetical. In the days when navigation for walking was a living for me, walking a straight line was an unusual act. Most walking went from one place to another, one campsite to another, or from a drop-off or parking spot to a climbing site and back. In daily life, one walks to get to a destination, a shop or a house or a pub, and the route chosen will meander along roads and paths. On occasion when moving over open land one may walk on a compass bearing to get to a destination identified on a map, a campsite or a point of departure for the next leg of a longer journey, which cannot be seen, because of poor visibility or lie of the land. In theory, this should, naturally designate a straight line. In practice you spot a marker, say a small rock outcrop or other feature on the line of your bearing, and walk to that, then repeat with the next marker. In all cases the path taken is variable. The destination is fixed. With this walking, walking as art, the intention was to make the act of walking the point, the destination was not the point. The walking is the mark making. The point is the path. The point is the path should be as straight as possible. A straight path, of 1000m, due north emulating the straight line that comprises one side of a grid square, an entirely arbitrary human invention, like art. The grid square is useful to give us a grid reference by which to disclose a particular 100-meter square to another person that they may meet us there. The longitude and latitude system from which a grid square derives is useful for navigation. The human invention of latitude changed the human world, see here. But what purpose does my walking one side of a grid square serve?

Oscar Wilde said ‘All art is quite useless.’ What use was my walk undertaken as art? Like Wilde alludes, art has no useful survival value. I have walked on a bearing, in thick fog, on a hilltop with about 40ft visibility. The walk enacted with accuracy prevented me from a potential fall because the one point I needed to navigate to was the start of the only path granting safe descent. This walk, successfully navigated, was useful. Like accurate navigation at sea, granted by the invention of latitude is useful. Neither the hilltop walk nor the marine navigation is art.

The walk across the hilltop and navigation at sea were both things I did once upon a time as an outdoor instructor. They were useful, purposive, done to keep clients safe and help them learn from experience. The experience was intended to provide some level of novelty that they may learn a new thing from a new experience. For the clients, the new things people were impelled into was learning from experience self-reliance, teamwork, problem-solving, resilience and persistence and any number of personal and social insights. The experience was designed with intentionality. Art making becomes art making when the maker makes something happen with the intention of making art. This is intrinsically a recursive act. Whatever happens, happens in the making it happen. So with this walk I intended it to be art. I made it happen. But also in making it happen I was unsure of what would happen. It was undertaken as adventure, the journey of uncertain outcome, ad ventura, the thing that happens before you arrive. Ventura is latin for ‘things that will come’. The walking 1000 meters was art as adventure.

This walking as art thing, as a grid square and as other things is a thing I have done a lot. I walk as art, the intention to make a mark, make some thing happen, a lot, and it never fails to evoke some new insight. In the first and second legs I was able to two make a line on a map, as close to a grid square as I have ever done. On seeing this on the GPS on my phone, gave me pleasure. I was pleased with what I did. On reflection, here, I found a quote from philosopher Heiddegger in which he said of art that it was the ‘disclosure of the being of the beings’, and the first leg particularly, in its straight as it can get without a handrail fallible human straightness, disclosed something about being human. The dissociated abstractness of the grid square and the amazing story of what this line symbolises about human achievement and folly. The grid square and act of constructing a Cartesian plane on a spherical earth such that we may transverse it globally with the movement of people, goods and capital. Humanism at its best and worst. A grid square on a structure uninhabited since the Neolithic. The grid square is art, a mark made by man, a man, me. It’s meaningless and it’s imposition by me on a place that would abhor it and would shrug it off if it knew my intentions and observed my actions. I shall burn its image as a votive to post-humanism. I shall do what the Moss cannot. Shrug off my human marks. I shall dispose of my disclosure.