What They Say

The Philosophy behind Head For The Hills

When you wander among the hills, let everything tell you the beauty and the pain of life, so that you waken to your own sorrow and the ending of it. Krishnamurti

Many of us who love to ramble have found in Nature a tranquillity that extends far deeper that the beauty of the scenery. We experience a unity,

"When hearing and seeing and smelling and feeling are one sense; when the sweet sound that falls from a bird is but the blue of heaven, the green earth, and the golden sunshine made audible. Such a moment was mine as I stood under the elms listening to the blackbird." (W.H.Hudson).

And from similar perceptions Laurence Golding decided, in 1976, to create an annual sequence of walking expeditions called HEAD FOR THE HILLS. Twenty-five years later it has gathered a wide and enthusiastic following.

The idea was to evolve a situation by which a group of about a dozen people could move through the landscape for a sustained period of time - say a week - with as few of the distractions of the Twentieth Century as possible. Senses would be informed only be the natural world through which they passed; the group would gradually resonate in harmony with the surroundings. It seemed an appropriate antidote to the alienation of modern living.

A Landrover and horsebox transport a very comprehensive camp from site to site. This is set up while the party take a route researched to encompass the qualities and dimensions of the area.

Laurence says, "The integration in Britain of public rights of way into almost every feature of the land is unique in the world. It is a rare heritage. Often a path is rendered obsolete by changing patterns of land use, but to walk such paths is to experience the land when it appeared very differently; when it was vaster and wilder. It is not difficult to trace routes linking remote prehistoric sites. Often there is a logic to them which anyone familiar with walking sheep trods will recognise because they follow the broadest rhythms of the land and, indeed, would have themselves evolved from animal tracks . The ancient traveller, on foot or horseback, using these tracks was more involved with the character of the land, more susceptible to the constant subtle changes. That is the awareness to which we attune".

Laurence has evolved some simple techniques to aid the emergence of this consciousness. After a few days the group is often found spread out over the land, individually finding their own pace, their own space. 'The Great Outdoors is all too often regarded as hostile and a challenge, but Laurence regards walking as a meditation, "A time in which the mind can empty itself of all obsessions, fixations and anxieties; a time to allow the myriad forms of nature to flow in. We are, either in camp or on the path, delicately poised at a point sufficiently protected for our well-being, yet ever vulnerable to the stream of impressions nature provides".

People are encouraged to put away their watches and let the light and mood of the day determine events. The staff, who maintain the structure and produce the acclaimed Head for the Hills vegetarian recipes, do the same. Campsites are arranged with farmers; a select feature of the landscape, a wood or stream or hill. Out of the horsebox spring individual sleeping tents and the Big Tent which is the kitchen and dining space. Inside the horsebox are personal cupboards, a library, a lamp-store and numerous other facilities. Wherever possible a campfire is made. This lifestyle has all the basic comforts - but in nomadic form.

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I STOOD UPON THAT SILENT HILL

by Steve Henwood

Picture yourself on a hilltop watching how the valleys unfold, musing on the changing landscape as you follow a track almost as old as the hills themselves, or sitting round a hearty fire after an energising meal (vegetarian) that you didn't have to cook, feeling not exhausted but exhilarated and satisfied by the day: this is Head for the Hills. Your guide, LaurenceGolding , and his crew know and love the countryside through which you're walking and manage to pass on a great deal of that, not by just talking, but more by example and making sure that you experience the best that some of Britain's wilder corners have to offer. They've been doing it long enough that not only do they know the best way to go, but also the best manner; the point where comfort, sustainability and simplicity all combine to support a process of opening out and getting deeper into the land, its features, plants and animals, its changes and character.

Areas covered include the lesser known parts of mid-Wales, where Laurence lives, the great ranges of hills in the North, the moors and wild spaces of the West. Rarely are they tourist magnets and in any case you soon walk beyond the too-well-beaten paths, 'til the few cars, telegraph poles and postboxes you do encounter seem like unwelcome intrusions.

The paths and passes we followed on the Upper Towy walk (near Llandovery, the middle of the Cambrian Mountains) must have been used by successive invasions throughout history; expansionist tribes, pioneering farmers, mines and quarries, and finally the Forestry Commission who have smothered many miles of hillside in inappropriate, high-density pine monoculture. For a while we were invaders too, as tourists generally are; but in a few days, as we got closer to the hills themselves and the Head for the Hills attitude, it became clear that we needn't be either out of place or exploitative here. Our walk took us past abandoned settlements (it's a shock to find a part of this crowded isle that's actually depopulated, the farmers economically marginalised or else never returned from war) on similar patterns from the Iron Age onwards. In hilltop wilderness, desert, bog, truly in the middle of nowhere, in that mist/cloud/rain merger indigenous to Wales, we encounter a standing-stone from a far-distant era whose feeling for the shapes, paths and secret powers of the land you can only begin to appreciate after some time in its midst.

Few will forget: woodlands too far from the roads for many to tread; hillsides where even the voices of sheep can sound mysterious, where horses gallop up and off out of nowhere; on the tops where you can look back to where you were hours ago, days ago even, and on to where you'll be going, with the special satisfaction of knowing that you walked it all. The camp moves on every day or two (the Land Rover and crew take care of that~), so you travel an area properly; they are pitched usually in a corner of some hill farm (never commercial sites), often by running water and woodland, to continue the theme of the journey and the feeling of being far away from the civil world; for days we see very few other people.

From my lapse into the language of nature romanticism, you can see that I found this all very special. Not that I'm a total stranger to walking in the wilds, the sensations and thoughts evoked, the meditative and creative possibilities; but Laurence's attitudes are pleasantly contagious, and the experience of several days with nothing to do but walk through a gentle autumn was uniquely calming and opening. I'd recommend it unreservedly to anyone, city-dwellers in particular. The very act of following a path, cumulative footprints of the ages, of how a path is itself formed along the contours, shaped by the human need to travel somewhere meeting the exigencies of hill and river, is all very Taoist.

Many of the paths we followed were very old indeed; Laurence will always rather follow the old track even if the red line on the map or the fences say otherwise. Head for the Hills also have their own ides about walking: you spend little time in chatty gaggle; instead we were encouraged to walk far enough apart so that we rarely saw any more than a figure at the next bend, mind left clear to appreciate the surroundings most fully, pace unaffected by having to wait or catch up with anyone else. And it works, like many indescribable "just-so" methods. Nobody gets scared, nobody gets lost, nobody gets too bugged with the rest of the group. All the same, after five days in the company of the same dozen people, however different we were to start with socially, you do find yourselves beginning friendships.

You'd be right in assuming that it take a little while to adjust to the walking and the way of life, but the first day is deliberately gentle and it's actually far more difficult to adjust back to 'normal' afterwards. Llandovery never looked so much like a bustling metropolis bursting with traffic that after a week away from everything. Very little of the walk is actually hard work (though 'you can't get away with going on a walking holiday and not walking', as one of our number was warned), some days there might even be an easy route too, all you've got to carry is your coat and your lunch; the one morning the walk got a little vertiginous (sheep tracks are more daring than you'd give the creatures credit for) was more than made up for by the beauty of the afternoon's descent.

"Sometimes I think of Head for the Hills as an art-form that nobody else knows exists", says Laurence. He's right and most of those who have been out on the hills with him appreciate some of what he means.

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Spending Time with Intuitive Time
or
How to Chuck Out of the Window all you Ever Learned about Time Managementand Feel Good about it

by Sue Jackson

This appeared on a notice-board at N.E. London Polytechnic where a Management course was being taught called Self Managed Learning (SML)

For anyone who's been on a Head For The Hills walk the name conjures up a whole way of life - a bit like SML! Thinking of how to capture its essence in a nutshell, I came up with 'effortlessly holistic'. Head for the Hills' walks, organised and led by Laurence Golding, are for those who like to physically extend themselves without the back-slapping heartiness often associated with hikers. They are for those who want to experience holism without even trying. They are for those who want complete freedom to do what they want and for those who just want to be carried along with the tide (not literally of course - this is a walking holiday!).

Booking for a Head for the Hills holiday is to commit yourself to experiencing whatever the number of days holds. Yes, you need to know when it starts and when you're due back home, but in between lies a dynamic, evolving experience where you become led by other energies - beyond the need to quantify. Watches and clocks, along with all the other props and paraphernalia of city life, are discarded and packed away at the beginning of the holiday.

It takes a while to adjust. "What time will we get there?" "How far is it?" There I go again - leaping over each moment of experience between setting out and arriving. I examine my questions. Why do I need to know? Why is it more important to know the limits and the measurements than to experience them? Forty seven weeks of the year I probably do need to know, but now I have no reason on earth for needing to know - I am free to flow. . .

It's morning light and people are in various stages of taking down tents, eating muesli, bathing in the nearby stream, putting on boots - gingerly after the first full day's walk the previous day - or just sitting, involved in their own greeting of the day. Is it 6.00am or 9.00am? I wonder guiltily, longing to sneak a look at my watch packed away at the bottom of my bag to avoid temptations such as this, but not too inaccessible just in case the urge becomes too great.

"We'll set off in that direction," says Laurence, and I look at my map and get my bearings on the day's route. "What time do we leave?" "How long have I got?" "When will we get there?" "How many miles?" Time questions flood in. WHY this obsession with measuring? "Get a move on or you'll be left behind - typical of you - last again - keep everyone waiting." My inner judge is having a field day, but he's rapidly losing ground as I take my time preparing at my own pace until I feel fully ready to depart. I'm not the last - others are still engaged with boots or tent pegs. Setting off, I walk half a mile or so and find those ahead of me sitting waiting - the first spontaneous gathering of the day. It's not long before everyone has arrived . . . and so the day goes on, the ebb and flow of silence and laughter, walking and resting, gathering together and spreading out, experiencing the ground, the view, the weather, the landscape, shapes, colours, textures, sounds . . .

By day three, the obsessions have begun to fade. I don't care how long the walk is as long as I can make my sarnies last - how can some people still have banana, chocolate and tahini sandwich still left as the sun starts going down? Perhaps that's why people go back again and again on Laurence's walks - they need their annual shot of all the sumptuous vegetarian delicacies which appear daily and nightly. Laurence is generous with his recipes, but they never taste so good back in civilisation.

WARNING: These walking holidays are definitely SML compatible and are likely to become a habit.

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A JOURNEY

by John Lane

Resurgence Magazine featured an interview with Laurence and Head for the Hills. Amongst those who read it was John Lane who decided to go on a trip - a long one - Elenith; 10 days in the Cambrian Mountains of Wales. It was the first of many he subsequently took. Here are some of the notes he wrote in his journal, as he overcomes his resistance to the experience. It appeared as another article in Resurgence.

Tuesday, 23rd August

Heading for the Hills, climbing a track, I find myself absorbing this inane chatter - a companion has, most ominously, already attached himself. Have I blundered? Will this ten-day adventure, this pilgrimage in search of the earth, the elemental forces, be nothing better than a boring, wearisome, agonisingly extended chat?
There are eleven people: seven women, four men (including myself) and our itinerant shepherd, Laurence Golding, cook, coach, bottle-washer, nature-guru-in-residence. Imagine, then, all their different life stories multiplied by the number of days, of hours, of our walk. I shiver at the thought of my naivete. Shall I then cut my losses and return? But already Laurence is out of sight. A bird as it flies to the sun shakes the light, in flakes, out its wings. Too late already; the spell of Wales, of wilderness, has been cast. The future, not the present, wins the day.

Wednesday, 24th

After a sleepless night on hard earth, I wake to a morning of mist; it seems as if we are at sea at dawn. In silence we dismantle the tents, clean our teeth, pack our bags, prepare for the adventure ahead. And set off.
We pass through a thick, Grimm, dark wood: footsteps silent on the cushioned floor; every branch, twig, needle, shining with a diamond-bright pearls of dew. This is the beginning of our pilgrimage.
Then through verdant country: coppices of alder and hazel, oak woods, meadows thick with creamy sheep, until we rise imperceptibly into another world, sparser, more awesome, biblical in scale: the mountains of Elenith as the poet Giraldus Cambrensis first described them in the twelfth century. We are climbing to the source of the River Dulas.
Here in this desert place we have risen onto the Cambrians, an uncompromising wilderness.
We move northwards, a straggling band, keeping our distance better to savour the empty silence, the poetry of place. The horizons are white.
On the top a horseman passes by; he canters along the skyline, spurs his horse, bellows at the sheep, loud and clear. Somewhere beneath us the Wye flows under a cloud.

Thursday, 25th

I am sitting here in the open field - breakfast eaten and washed up, the tent packed, my back pack (full of sandwiches, a water bottle, an apple) waiting at my side. The sun flays up in warmth. Suddenly, from far across the field a heavy insect blunders past. Then the air is filled with flashes and skimming fountains of light: the rustling, swishing, twittering, humming of a great, but hidden, concourse of life.
We set off, and ah!, the sun is out of sight, shining from a hidden infinity, yet how gleaming-fresh this early light falls on glossy leaves and path. The pale sky drinks the earth and I, in turn, absorb the sky.
On a height, by a cleft in the hills through which a stream descends in arcs, over tea-dark rock, we rest ourselves. Twelve people, sitting here, mumble to each other as if in a church. We have found contentment in one another as well as in this place.
We stop again near a grove of shimmering sycamores in a basin of wilderness. Lying on the grass, I feel united to it. I watch, without disturbance, creation as it occurs.

Friday, 26th

The grass is silvered with dew. The morn an icy wafer. The horses visit me, black horses whose pounding hooves I have heard, like heart beats, in my sleep.
I collect some wood and nourish the fire, a soft breath of ash-blue smoke exhales from the orange flame. One by one the sleepers awake.
Walking as meditation. Walking on sward, on mud, on grass, on heather or on stone, I now move as a fish flows or as a bird flies, not apart from but with the element. The clouds move and the streams flow in harmony.
No map, no watch. Walking up valleys, across bogs, down rocky slopes above the Claerwen, along every kind of navigable path, we arrive, at sundown, at our camp.
The last miles pass, in twilight, like a dream; we swim through ferns, clamber down slopes, descend to the camp like travellers from a land for whom no word that 'home' has a sweeter sound. Then supper in the tent and, on rising in the night, low at the valley end, a golden plate of morn. Ah, how happy I am - how joyous in my heart to sleep beneath these great night suns.

Saturday 27th

Movement in the little camp, the sun, brassy with clarion light, is warming the valley floor. So I sit here by the nimble, corrugated stream, watching the others at their tasks, enjoying the heat intensify, nursing bruised feet, spinning words - as a spider spins her line. Yet I know that all these natural things - this fly on the rim of my mug, this sulphur butterfly in flight, this length of straw resting on a dark ball of dung - possess a strength, an authenticity, a wild existence, whether or not observed. I go to meet them.
I climb fields to an abandoned farm: it is roofless, gaunt and proud. A broken fragment of grate, pitted with rust, has been thrown in an adjacent field. Who lived here and for how long? And why and when did they leave? The wind returns no answer.
In the kitchen tent I pick up a journal called P.A.N., Pagans against Nukes - much on the greening of the world, astrology, the Earth Goddess and so forth with articles, letters, book reviews. One of these catches my eye. Earth Magic, a collection of verses by none other than Nicola Miles. This, surely, is the Pre-Raphaelite Nicola, with whom I've enjoyed long walks. She bakes, makes wine and patchwork, cultivates her garden, not only for food but as a natural celebration of the beauty of the world. Her husband is no less committed to a rediscovery of the living forces of the Earth. He strides along with a staff, cloven-hooved, carved with a head of Pan.

Sunday 28th

From Strata Florida we pass through downy country, the wind blowing tenderly, smelling of bracken and gorse. This is the place of sheep. Old farmsteads lie in ruins; thistles flourish in the fields. On these grassy tracks, however there is the freedom to move: we stride ahead, lined out, in silence. I am in the midst of loveliness and peace.
As the days pass, merge, coalesce, I sense a greater unity with the phenomenal world - the world of ash leaves and the flight of flies. I am beginning to breathe with my larger being; the earth becomes the lung by which I breathe.

Tuesday, 30th

I rise at dawn: ice cold air. Make for the pebbled fore shore of the Doethie, collect sticks, light a fire; the crumpled ball of orange fire-warmth in this shadowy blue-grey world. No bird song, no human head, nothing but the river sound.
I'm sitting here, on my folding camp-seat close to the fire. The sun has not appeared yet but Bellini-like, sheaves and pinnacles of dove grey rock unexpectedly begin to glow. Then another, closer, peak, peachgold, catches the light. Then a sway of trees. I long to put on record my joy. The sun now breaks the eastern hill and hovers, quivers, molten-white, on the crest, creaming this valley - world with light - creeping over the leaves, (greasing each with white); burrowing, with its golden fingers the stationary, receptive ferns; kissing, too, with a spangled touch, the river's molten glass. The morning is the triumph of light.

Thursday, 1st September

Our last dawn, last breakfast (muesli with peaches, bananas, fruits and tea) last packing, last walk. And what a Finale! The sun now dazzles with an almost May-time jubilation as we walk, springingly, over the short turf on the world's roof with out heads in the sky, so bright, wide-open and pure. Below a valley, as neat as if a child had composed it in his nursery.
But look along the landscape to the right: a shimmer of fawn and blue and gold and tawny brown: the Cambrian range, the Elenith mountains, whose distant trackways, secret lanes, valleys and heights, complete and compact, we have so recently and reverently traversed.
The walk has had appalling penalties: poor nights of sleep and blistered feet. Yet these were as nothing compared with the magnificence, perhaps a better word, the beneficence, certainly the beauty of what we have experienced.
In Llandovery, in the station yard, we say our goodbyes - goodbye to Laurence and Jane returning to Garth, goodbye to Nicola and Philip, returning to their raspberry jam and computers, goodbye to Louise setting off for India and inner worlds beyond. I, too, must say goodbyes to Elenith. I thanked them profusely.

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