There’s a footpath opposite my house; it slips between two bungalows ending at a stile that takes you into the fields. In spring, it’s one of the first places you can spot cuckooflower and Jack-by-the-hedge; in summer, borage sprawls on to the path, humming with bees.
I have walked and run along this path thousands of times – sometimes alone, sometimes with my dog, husband, friends or neighbours. While the route remains constant, the experience never is. My outer cargo has included a raincoat, head torch, wellies, sunglasses, binoculars, backpack. My internal baggage, contentment and sadness, joy and anxiety, irritation and uncertainty. I’ve felt everything – as well as nothing at all – as I’ve added each new layer of footsteps to those that have gone before.
This morning, I crossed the stile and ran across the gently sloping field. From the top, there’s a view of the sea, three miles to the south-east. Some days, when mist blurs the horizon, you’d have to take my word for it. Other days, it glistens. Today, it’s a matt-blue ribbon, pulled taut. I pause and drink it in. My days here are numbered and the prospect of leaving has imbued the remaining time with new significance.
A week from now, we will be packing our belongings into a van and moving house. The last time we did this, six years ago, I rode my bike the half-mile from old place to new. This time, the journey is somewhat further: 621 miles, according to the satnav.
Each encounter with my local landscape weighs heavy with sentiment. This might be the last time, I think, as I walk the dog through the jay wood, or run along the beach, or pat the gnarled trunk of one of my favourite ancient oaks as I step over her buttress roots. Of course, there are people I’ll miss dearly, too. But people are mobile, they can visit. Places stay put. As the departure date draws closer, I feel their grip on me tighten.
I was bestowed, I admit, with a generous helping of the nostalgia gene. I already have a roster of places that I feel “claimed” by and that I get a visceral urge to revisit at regular intervals. Not to mention the suitcases of childhood diaries, photos, love letters and race medals I have (all of which will be accompanying me to the new house).
Nostalgia – an affection and hankering for the past – is often regarded as mawkish and self-indulgent, but research suggests it conveys many benefits, from improving mood and boosting self-image to reducing loneliness and creating meaning in life. Looking back is bittersweet – it shows you just how much ground (physical, emotional, social) you’ve covered, while also reminding you of the irrevocable passage of time and your limited supply of it.
While leaving here is a choice, it’s also an ending of sorts. “Here” is a quiet corner in the easternmost reaches of East Sussex before it cedes to Kent. The small town of Rye is a couple of miles away and beyond that, the famed pearl-white expanse of Camber Sands.
We moved here 14 years ago, knowing little about the place, other than it was rural, easy on the eye and, thanks to HS1, commutable to London. Back then, I could look at OS map 125, of Romney Marsh, Rye and Winchelsea, with cool detachment. Now, I see my life played out upon its surface. My memories and experiences are trodden into its routeways and tucked between its contours. Old selves, memories and long-gone companions rise up to accompany me as I retrace my steps. I can even remember, sometimes, what I was thinking once, at a particular place on a particular run.
Here’s the little house we stayed in the night before our wedding; here’s where I saw a fox cub curled into a tiny circle and fast asleep in a ghyll; here’s the stretch of river where I first saw a kingfisher; here’s where we jumped in – mid-run – one ridiculously hot day.
Places are not neutral, as any geographer will tell you. Take a particular bench in a park. For you, it’s a landmark on your daily walk to work. For the people who knew the person named on the plaque on its backrest, it’s a memorial. To a runner, it’s a stretching post. To a couple, it’s where they were sitting when she first told him they were pregnant.
“Places are a combination of location, a particular physical presence or landscape, and a set of meanings and narratives, individual and shared,” writes the cultural geographer Tim Cresswell on his Substack Place Matters. There is a whole array of terms used to encapsulate the emotional relationships we build with the places we inhabit and frequent. The most famous scholar of place, Yi-Fu Tuan, came up with “topophilia” – love of place – while “place attachment”, “sense of place” or “place identity” encompass all manner of experiences and emotions, good and bad.
Most of the time, we live our lives blissfully unaware of how intricately entwined we are with our places (be it your home or garden, your town or a much-visited holiday destination). “At moments of change or transition, when the bond between person and place is threatened, the significance of place identity becomes apparent,” write John Dixon and Kevin Durrheim in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. Leaving a place, they say, “tends to provoke strong psychological and social responses, precisely because it entails a loss of self”.
This feels exactly right: it’s as if when I go, I will be leaving behind earlier versions of myself. Or, as Vybarr Cregan-Reid, author of Footnotes, observes about going back to visit loved places: “Places are more than a backdrop for our experience of them … all the things you’ve done and seen seem written there.”
I once read that polar bears leave a scent on the ground with every footstep. When other bears pass, they can learn about those who went before them. It’s a shame, I think, that we leave so little trace of our own journeys on foot in the soil, on rock or tarmac when those journeys make such a mark on us.
While I’ve driven cars, sat on trains, ridden a bike and paddled a kayak all over East Sussex, it is that direct contact with the earth beneath my feet, I think, that creates the most intimate and sensory relationship with the environments in which we live. It’s the miles of daily dog walks and regular runs that have embedded me into the landscape and the landscape in me.
Cresswell notes that in the phrase “sense of place”, the word “sense” refers to an overarching sense – an impression – and to the senses themselves. “Places are seen, heard, smelled and felt,” he writes.
Cregan-Reid, a professor of creative nonfiction at York St John University, is, like me, a runner. He moved from south London to York a couple of years back, but the haptic memory of his runs there remains vivid. “I can remember the kinds of paving on every street, even the camber, the texture of Blackheath’s hexagrammic tracks, the noise of the traffic on the heath, the sight of Canary Wharf as I crested the hill in Greenwich Park,” he tells me.
With my rose-tinted spectacles on, I ask if he misses certain paths or routes. “I don’t so much miss the runs, as revel in the memory of them,” he says. “I sometimes crave the sense of relief and sustenance those places gave, but I have new ones now.” I wonder if I’ll be so willing and able to let go and move on.
For Jimmy Measures, a researcher at the University of Essex, who moved from a village in Surrey to the city of Colchester, it wasn’t leaving itself that made them reflect on the area in which they’d spent most of their life, it was going back to visit. “I went to the local pub with my dad and it was like a time warp – the same people walking in at the same time as they always had. But, on the other hand, a couple of elderly neighbours had died and their houses had new occupants, and the new village hall had opened. I felt a kind of wistfulness, about life moving inexorably onwards,” says Measures. “Like a bruise you can’t help pressing, even though it hurts. I don’t want to turn back time – I’m done with the place – but there was some good stuff there. I hope the village will be all right.”
Moving to a new place also highlighted Measures’ deep intimacy with the Surrey landscape, which they’d been previously unaware of. “I realised I had Surrey mapped out in my head. In Essex, I experienced a sense of ‘unmooring’ – I didn’t know how places fit together, and I had no history with the county, no memory map. But it’s also an adventure. To look at a footpath and think: ‘I wonder where that goes?’ and to map your experiences on to a new place.” Cregan-Reid agrees: “Our brains have an inbuilt desire to extend our maps, to better understand the world.”
I, too, will be laying down new routes – and roots – when I get to Scotland. Like Cregan-Reid, running is one of the first things I do when I go to a new place – a way of making sense of the world from the ground up. “Google Maps can tell you how a place looks, but a run tells you how it feels,” says Cregan-Reid.
Moving is always a “going towards” something as well as a “going away from”. Although my eyes will miss the house sparrows that bask in the sunshine on our shed roof, and my ears will miss the song thrush that belts out his thrice-repeated song from a perch a couple of gardens along, and my feet will miss the springy turf of the Rother Levels, there will be new sensory delights, new paths to explore, new experiences to have and memories to make.
When we first decided to say yes to the opportunity that had presented itself north of the border, the apple orchards were just coming into blossom. This morning, I noticed the fruits were ripe and ready for harvest. A new season is unfolding.