The Straight Line Ramblers Club

The Straight Line Ramblers Club was first conceived when we were teenagers walking our parents dogs around the Oxfordshire countryside, membership was flexible, anyone could join and of course the one thing we didn’t do was walk in a straight line.

Many of us have kept in touch and when we meet up that spirit of adventure still prevails, there aren’t any rules but if there were they would be that spontaneity is all, planned routes exist to be changed on a whim and that its very important to see what’s around the next corner or over the next top. Flick and I go daily into the hills to exercise our dogs and several times a year make more organised trips to parts of Scotland that we haven’t visited before to explore, take photographs and video and research ideas for paintings. Last May we went to Knoydart. Blessed with the fine weather that stayed uniquely on the west coast of Scotland for most of the summer, we spent five glorious days exploring that remote peninsular in true SLRC style. We walked the coastline and found sandy bays with wind tortured trees clinging to the rocks above them, oyster catchers fishing in the shallows and seals basking on the offshore islands; we explored the hill lochs and glens and on one occasion were rewarded with the discovery of a disused mica mine, complete with a huge ancient rusty compressor who’s location 1500 feet up a rugged hillside defied comprehension. Another day our ascent of Ladhar Beinn saw us out for over twelve hours, the walk back to Inverie along the Aonach Sgoilte ridge, with views of the Cuillins on Skye and Rum and Eigg to the south west was magnificent.

As a boy I read a lot of books and these were the early inspiration of my creativity; I read Brenden Chase by BB and imagined living in a wild camp in the woods, back then I would break bounds from boarding school and take long walks through the Berkshire countryside, I remember well discovering my first scarp and dip slope. I graduated to Gerald Durrell, Corbett’s Maneaters and then Gavin Maxwell who inspired enormously seeming to have a lifestyle that embodied all my aspirations. Later I read Thoreau’s Walden, John Seymour’s Self Sufficiency and within the whole 70’s idealism pursued the back to nature dream. I left Oxford and moved to a croft on the West coast of Scotland; if there is a straight line running through the rambles of my life this desire to connect with Nature has been it.

Sometime during 2007 it was believed that for the first time more than half the world’s population were living in cities, this struck me as a huge change to our collective unconscious. For millennia we have struggled and survived within the natural environment, now more than half of us were living in an artificial one with a whole new set of rules and strategies to be learnt. Don’t get me wrong, I am most enthusiastic about technology and our intellectual development; I am very happy to be writing this on my new PC that also helps me enormously with many aspects of my visual work, no its more that in our long evolution there seems a danger of a disconnect at this point. We have always been controlled by Nature, now we think that we can control it. John Muir, whose writings I have discovered during the research for this exhibition felt that he needed to experience the wilderness “to find the Law that governs the relations subsisting between human beings and Nature.” Intuitively he postulated, “an essential Love, overlying, underlying, pervading all things”¹ After many long and often dangerous journeys into wild places he began to understand that their existence was essential to our well-being, “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike”¹ “..wildness is a necessity…mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life”. Later in his life he was instrumental in persuading President Roosevelt to set up the National Parks in America to protect wild places from exploitation by loggers, miners and ranchers.

Today unspoiled wilderness seems to be of more importance than ever, in a world threatened by climate change we must guard and cherish these shrinking places as never before; we all feel uplifted by them and our spirits nourished when we see images or better still visit and spend time there. Its reassuring to know that there are organisations like the John Muir Trust raising money to buy tracts of land and use inventive methods to manage them in an environmentally sustainable way. My own sensation is that when I return from a few days walking and camping I am subtly altered for a time, my senses more alert, my inner harmony more balanced; like John Muir and many others I need to connect my nature to the wild Nature of the land at regular intervals. These paintings are my Chronicles from some of the wonderful locations that we’ve been able to visit during the last couple of years, they are born of an immersion in wild places and are a celebration of them. You’re all welcome to join The Straight Line Ramblers Club, we look forward to meeting you on the hill soon.

¹ Son of the Wilderness The Life of John Muir by Linnie Marsh Wolfe