DUNCAN MINSHULL

– Introduction –

S oon into Sauntering comes Mr Hackman, mov- ing sketchily across a single page. Little is known of him, where he is heading for, or if he is open to foreign experiences circa the 1790s; and he makes only a sole utterance ‘I never look up’. At anything, it seems, for several years, whilst walking the length and breadth of Europe. But his words work in one way – they serve as a prompt, to select accounts of the ‘Continent’ being traversed by figures quite unlike this one. The pedestrian writers ahead do look up, and do look down, for on foot we connect with the world. The world comes our way. And our senses sharpen: the sights, the sounds, and the aromas; everything heightened, everything felt. So when Petrarch the poet climbs Mount Ventoux in Southern France (and pens the first pedestrian piece in 1350), it is the views that keep him going rather than any notions of glory or moral rectitude. He becomes elated by what’s close at hand and what’s seen from afar – ‘under our eyes flowed the Rhone’. Then Lyons is outlined . . . the bay of ­Marseilles . . . the shores of Aigues-Morte . . . Western Europe begins to unfold.

Isn’t this landmass embedded in all our minds?

xiv