{"id":3055,"date":"2017-02-17T13:39:06","date_gmt":"2017-02-17T12:39:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=3055"},"modified":"2017-02-17T13:39:36","modified_gmt":"2017-02-17T12:39:36","slug":"the-marches-by-rory-stewart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=3055","title":{"rendered":"The Marches by Rory Stewart"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Thomas de Quincey calculated that Wordsworth walked a staggering 175,000 miles during his lifetime<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

He was almost constantly on the move, composing as he went, \u2018to which,\u2019 de Quincey added, \u2018we are indebted for much of what is most excellent in his writings.\u2019<\/p>\n

To put this in context, the circumference of the globe is only 25,000 miles. So Wordsworth could have walked seven times around the planet.<\/p>\n

Walking in Wordsworth\u2019s day was the act of a radical; it was to ally yourself, as the young poet wanted to do, with the peasant and the peddler. While more aristocratic artists of the day might take the Grand Tour by coach to Italy, he chose to walk through France during the year of its revolution. To feel connected to the world and people; to make an atlas of his own feelings and spiritual progression.<\/p>\n

Rory Stewart follows in that mould<\/strong>. His first book, the acclaimed The Places In Between<\/em>, saw him walking right across Afghanistan just weeks after the fall of the Taliban, an adventure that was both brave and revelatory.\u00a0 And this was just the beginning of a far longer walk that saw him cross Pakistan.\u00a0 He went on to further adventures in Iraq where he was appointed a governor after the invasion and wrote memorably about the fog of ignorance that pervaded that administration.<\/p>\n

Now he has come home, so to speak, to Wordsworth country. \u00a0In The Marches<\/em>, he has written an account of a walk across and around England, beginning with a traverse along Hadrian\u2019s Wall, built when a Roman emperor wanted to keep out alien migrants.<\/p>\n

The wall took 20,000 men more than a decade to build. It required more stone and labour than the pyramids.\u00a0 As Mr Stewart walks along what remains of the wall – for much of it was later quarried for use elsewhere – he imagines it, \u2018stone by stone, stretching fifteen feet high, entire\u00a0 and intact, from coast to coast, running straight up hillsides, down gullies and over cold rivers’.<\/p>\n

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However, and with obvious resonance for the wall that may divide America now, he is quick to point out that Hadrian built it more as political symbol than practical barricade.<\/strong> Indeed, archaeologists concur that it was far from being effective, was \u2018porous\u2019 and after a while, may have been most useful as a way of employing otherwise idle troops in wall maintenance.\u00a0 It became \u2018a zone of cultural exchange and encounter rather than a military barrier\u2019.<\/p>\n

The trope of the travel writer who returns to describe his own homeland as if it were another foreign country has become a familiar one – exemplified most recently by Paul Theroux, whose Deep South<\/em> was a prescient account of the forces beginning to stir there.<\/p>\n

So it is natural that Mr Stewart should find echoes on Hadrian\u2019s Wall of his own experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/strong>\u00a0 Britain sucked in Roman troops. It was considered an exceptionally difficult province to govern.\u00a0 The wall was a radical solution to a grave problem.\u00a0 The Romans struggled to hold Britain with 50,000 men – the equivalent proportionately, says Mr Stewart, of the Allies keeping half a million troops in Afghanistan. \u2018The problem was simply that the occupier lacked the knowledge, the legitimacy or the power ever to shape such a society in the way that it wished.\u2019\u00a0 A judgement he makes equally about the Romans then and Afghanistan and Iraq today.<\/p>\n

He remarks too on the way in which the Romans drove the wall across often unsuitable landscape: \u2018It looked like the straight lines drawn across flat ground by colonial officers in Africa.\u2019 Not that he is wholly concerned with the past.\u00a0 The area he walks through is now one of the most deprived in Britain, with high unemployment rates, and voted heavily for Brexit.<\/p>\n

For much of the walk along Hadrian\u2019s Wall, Mr Stewart is accompanied by his 89-year-old father, an ex-service man who injects a bluff candour to proceedings and is one of the book\u2019s many strengths.\u00a0 With great affection and frankness, Stewart charts both their present and past relationship;\u00a0 the book could almost have been subtitled \u2018A Walk Around My Father\u2019. At one point, discussing the wall, the author realises that his father sees it, not as a way of keeping the barbarians out – as most commentators do – but as a way, rather like the Berlin Wall, of keeping the Romans in. He had, after all, been a Cold War intelligence officer.<\/p>\n

Stewart\u2019s\u00a0 prose throughout is cool and lucid, with the odd touch of self-deprecating humour. But there is a lot of it. Just as I suspect no reader has ever wished that Wordsworth had written more, so here too even the most loyal of followers may limp in a little footsore by the end of the day.<\/p>\n

The problem with The Marches<\/em> is that having crossed England coast-to-coast along Hadrian\u2019s Wall – more than enough for most travel writers – Mr Stewart then embarks on a series of further walks for some thousand miles.\u00a0 The accompanying map looks like a spider\u2019s web. Much of what he later encounters is fascinating but not particularly germane. Now that he is a local Member of Parliament for the area, he may have felt he had to cover most of his constituency.\u00a0\u00a0 He certainly doesn\u2019t seem to know how to stop.<\/p>\n

This could and should have been a much shorter book. However, perhaps that\u2019s only to be expected from a long distance walker. I\u2019m sure any of Wordsworth\u2019s disciples who complained about having to do ten miles before\u00a0 breakfast were told, briskly, \u2018oh for God\u2019s sake.\u00a0 Just keep up!\u2019\u00a0 And, like Wordsworth, Rory Stewart brings a humane empathy to his encounters with people and landscape<\/strong>.\u00a0 A walk, he believes, is a kind of miracle – which can help him learn, like nothing else, about a nation or himself. \u00a0He is precisely the sort of companion one would want to travel such a route with:\u00a0 informed, engaged and with a great deal of compassion.<\/p>\n

A version of this review first appeared in the Washington Post\u00a0<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas de Quincey calculated that Wordsworth walked a staggering 175,000 miles during his lifetime. He was almost constantly on the move, composing as he went, \u2018to which,\u2019 de Quincey added, \u2018we are indebted for much of what is most excellent in his writings.\u2019 To put this in context, the circumference of the globe is only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,65,1],"tags":[40],"class_list":["post-3055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-literature","category-uncategorized","tag-rory-stewart"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3055"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3055"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3055\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3077,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3055\/revisions\/3077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}