Buttermere...

We’re all looking for meaning in our lives, with varying degrees of success. There’s a big difference, however, between ‘looking’ and ‘looking for’. When we look for our mislaid car-keys we are seeking a known quantity. Knowing what we’re looking for, we can immediately discount anything that isn’t key-shaped. We look for spiritual enlightenment too, and, if we search long enough and hard enough, we will probably come up with something that matches our expectations. It will, however, be in the realm of what we already know; we only know we’ve found something because we recognise it.

But when we are simply looking, we are not constrained by the need to find. Saying “I don’t know”, honestly and openly, frees us up to new experiences. I’m not looking for the right answers; I’ll happily settle, instead, for asking the right questions.

By the age of 25 most of us have assembled a portfolio of beliefs and opinions, which, if left unchallenged, will last us a lifetime. We develop political affiliations; we may come to identify with a particular religion (most likely the one we grew up with) or reject religion altogether. Once our beliefs, opinions and, yes, prejudices, are firmly in place, we have the intellectual wherewithal to meet every new situation with an appropriate response. We know where we stand on the pressing issues of the day, which cuts out a good deal of thinking and soul-searching.

We may be ‘good people’, regular church-goers and well-regarded members of society, but at some point in our lives most of us stop looking and listening. We develop a coherent and consistent view of the world, and our place in it, precisely so that we don’t need to ‘waste’ time and effort in looking afresh. Our beliefs are the only ones worth having, our opinions are those held by “all right-thinking people”. We make sense of our lives, and our increasingly blinkered view, by being 'right'. Questioning our beliefs and opinions might make us doubt everything we hold dear... and then where would we be?

Whatever bolsters these opinions is gathered up; whatever challenges them is cast aside. We buy the newspaper that promotes our beliefs, opinions and prejudices; we choose our friends based on how closely their views coincide with ours. Our equilibrium is threatened by those who choose to live their lives in a different way. We don’t want to discover anything new; we just want the opinions we have already to be confirmed.

At moments of doubt, we default to what we already know. We collude in the process of making ourselves more unhappy today than we were yesterday. The pattern is set. We become old... in attitude, if not in years. We stop looking; we stop listening; in the game of life, we’re just ‘playing out time’.

Ford, River Winster and (out of picture) one pissed-off 4x4 driver...

Do kids still play ‘pin the tail on the donkey’ at parties? It seems unlikely. I remember being blindfolded and spun around till I was dizzy, then being pointed vaguely in the direction of the donkey. It was about as much fun as it sounds. The adult equivalent is trying to negotiate a complicated road system and getting hopelessly lost.

We carry in our minds a map of our surroundings - whether that’s a detailed topography, a compass bearing or just a big empty space with tumbleweed and a sign reading ‘Here be dragons’. As we drive along a road, we upgrade our mental map - automatically, continually, unconsciously - by the position of the sun and our innate awareness of the direction we’re travelling. With every junction and bend in the road we make the appropriate adjustments to our position on the map, so at any one moment we have a pretty good idea whether we’re headed North, South, East or West. Even if we can’t pin the tail on the donkey, we have a pretty good idea whether the donkey’s over here or over there.

This kind of mental map has served us well over the centuries, helping us to find our way across unfamiliar terrain. However, all it takes is a complex motorway junction, or a convoluted one-way system in town, to wipe our map clean of useful information. We’re confused, we quickly ‘lose our bearings’’. We have to rely on signs and instructions; without them we’re lost.

One option, of course, is to wind a window down and ask a local for directions. We’re likely to get a long list of instructions (we’ll remember the first two, typically, and forget the rest). The stranger’s directions always end the same way, with a smile and “you can’t miss it”. Well, yes, we can miss it; we’re lost. A few minutes later we’re asking someone else, and then someone else after that: a procedure complicated by a few other factors. The person we ask may know the way, but is wilfully misdirecting us (I’ve done it; I'm not proud of the fact. I’m sure other people do it too). The person we ask may be lost too, but doesn’t want to admit it. The person we ask may be a helpful soul, who would rather offer misleading directions than no directions at all. One way and another, by trial and error, we’ll find our way to where we want to be: frazzled, fed up and half an hour late for our scheduled meeting.

Instead of cultivating our innate sense of direction, we’re delegating our route-finding responsibilities to a small computer screen perched on the dashboard. Having tapped a postcode into the SatNav we can generally get to our destination without mishap. A disembodied voice (male or female, depending on choice) tells us where to go. Not a long list of “lefts” and “rights” and “straight aheads” to forget (and no cheery “you can’t miss it” either), but just calm, measured instructions, delivered in plenty of time for you to indicate and change lanes. We arrive at our meeting ten minutes early: cool, calm and collected. For the return journey we simply tap in our own postcode and follow the instructions. The technology is amazing. What can possibly go wrong?

Well, maybe we’re relying too much on a gadget which, though rich in data, is short on common sense. Lorry drivers drive down narrow country lanes, quite unsuitable for HGVs, for no better reason that their SatNav told them to. Terrified motorists find themselves teetering on clifftops and river-banks, or stranded in a ford that the SatNav neglected to say was a bit too deep, following heavy rain. One man tried to drive along railways tracks, having followed SatNav instructions rather too literally as he was negotiating a level crossing. A cab driver taking Earl Spencer’s daughter to a Chelsea match ended up 146 miles off course, in the picturesque North Yorkshire village of Stamford Bridge. Add your own choice of (possibly apocryphal) SatNav horror stories here...

A SatNav encourages us to dispense with our mental map altogether. We don’t bother to reorientate our internal compass. Even if we still have a road-map in the car, we’ve probably forgotten how to use it. So when the temperamental technology of a SatNav lets us down, we’re not merely lost... we’re completely lost, geographically and psychologically lost, to an extent we couldn’t have imagined before our capricious computers started telling us where to go.

Crummock Water...

I became a trespasser by accident, not design. Feeling that walkers were uninvited guests on other people’s land, I used to play the game. I kept rigorously to rights of way, following the pecked lines on the Ordnance Survey map, and the tracks ‘on the ground’. And, mostly, I still do: not wanting to come up against an impassable obstacle, I aim for stiles rather than climbing over barbed-wire fences and dry stone walls. I don’t want to do any damage (though even the most anti-social walker is a mere beginner in doing mischief to the countryside, compared to the professional desecrators of our treasured landscapes. Oh, don’t get me started...).

What stirs me to action is the plethora of signs, particularly around the Lake District, telling me where I can and cannot wander. Even in my more anarchic moments I have no intention of marching across anyone’s garden, scattering lawn chairs and bellowing “All property is theft” at the startled residents. But when I see an empty landscape, and a sign telling me to go away, I take exception.

I don’t question the ownership of these tracts of land. I know that wherever I wander, on this small and overcrowded island, I am on somebody else's property. But I don’t want the deeds to the land and I don’t want to build a house; I just want to be able to walk there, that’s all. And, in doing so, I don’t think I am asking too much.

‘No Access’ signs establish the idea, in the public imagination, that ownership of land can be used to deny every other person on the planet the view that the owner enjoys. That plot of land is, in essence, removed from the map. And that can’t be right. So these days I trespass regularly, routinely, whenever the spirit moves me, with a light heart and a clear conscience.

I have a pretty little speech prepared, on the subject of trespass, and how it’s a civil rather than a criminal offence. “Phone the police? Go ahead”, I will say, while striking a pose, suggesting that the threat of prosecution is a rather empty one. However, despite having the speech ready for my next encounter with an angry landowner, I’ve yet to deliver it. There’s never anyone around, you see. Landowners are generally elsewhere, making more money so they can buy more land, while most walkers take the ‘No Access’ signs at face value (“Can you do that?”, a fellow walker asked, incredulously, as I ignored another ‘Private’ sign and clambered inelegantly over a locked gate. “Watch me”, I replied). It means, ironically, that I mostly have these landscapes to myself.

Palace How Farm and Grasmoor...

“Wainwrights? I’ve done them all”, he bragged. I waited to hear a few choice anecdotes about his peak-bagging exploits. I waited in vain. A few words of encouragement seemed in order. “That’s a great achievement”, I lied. “You must have so many stories”. Well, apparently he hadn’t. Instead of providing a few memorable moments, the climbing of AW’s peaks – all 214 of them – had left him with no tales worth the telling. Imagine going to all that trouble, and having so little to show for it. “It’ll be something to tell the grandchildren”, he said, unconvincingly, suggesting that climbing the Wainwights isn’t something to do; it’s something to have done. The pleasure comes only in retrospective.

Peak bagging is something I don’t really understand. But there are so many other things that I don’t understand (mobile phone tariffs, double entry book-keeping, our seemingly endless fascination with the fluctuating fortunes of Marks & Spencer... the list is long, and getting longer) that one more barely registers on my personal Richter scale of incomprehension.

When we walk we have the opportunity to question – perhaps even undermine – the work ethic that rules so many aspects of our lives. Work implies order, efficiency, time & motion, making the best use of the time available to maximise profits and minimise costs. But so ingrained is this work ethic that we bring it onto the fells too. Looking to make most productive use of our free time, we give ourselves targets to achieve and ‘personal bests’ to be bettered. Miles must be logged, peaks must be bagged, boxes must be ticked; this isn’t recreation, it’s accountancy.

I certainly don’t understand the urge to climb every lakeland mountain, then tick a box, then bag another peak, then tick another box, and carry on like this until you’ve run out of summits, or boxes, or both. Once you’re a fully paid-up member of the peak-baggers’ club, and ticked off all the Wainwrights, what do you do next? Head north to tackle the Munroes? Start climbing the Wainwrights again from scratch? Or retire to a comfy chair by the fireside, and wait optimistically for the grandchildren to show even the tiniest flicker of interest in your fell-walking exploits of so very long ago?

Coniston...

There are many kinds of silence. There's the embarrassed silence you find during breakfast in a lakeland boarding house, which makes the tinkling of tea-cups seem deafening by comparison. There's the blissful silence when a migraine-inducing car alarm finally drains the battery and whines to a merciful stop. There's the brooding silence at the heart of a marriage when love has died. But best of all are those moments when the chatter of the mind abates, when memories, ambitions and everyday worries evaporate like puddles on a hot pavement, and - however briefly - you are blessed with stillness.

The world seems to have been washed clean by overnight rain, leaving Coniston looking its best. There are a few precious days each year when the leaves on the trees glow with hypnotic shades of green, as though lit from within. When the swallows, swifts and martins race and scream over the lake, seemingly for the sheer joy of scything effortlessly through the sky. When almost anything seems possible. And today is one of them.

It's June, early summer, and there's no better time of the year to skive, loaf, dawdle, dally, hang loose, take things easy, stand and stare, shoot the breeze, twiddle our thumbs, kick our heels, and generally let the grass grow under our feet. Yes, here in lakeland we’ve learned the lexicon of leisure.

Sulphur-yellow wagtails chase each other along the water-margins. Startled moorhens skitter into the reeds. Dragonflies flash by: vivid blurs of electric greens and blues. The air is still and soporific. Let your problems melt away; there’ll be time enough to deal with them later on. Slip into that silence, with the same ease as a dipper, leaving barely a ripple.

We lead our lives at such a lick; no wonder we’re stressed out most of the time. We complain there aren’t enough hours in the day, and then settle down for an evening in front of the TV, watching celebrities eating grubs in the jungle. Being over-stimulated - like kids who quaff too much fizzy pop - we need bigger and bigger doses of eye-popping sensation. If we are to respond to the quiet lure of the countryside, where excitements are subtle rather than blatant, we need to take stock and recalibrate our senses.

Windermere at Waterhead...

A sour-faced man poked his head out from the cabin of his brand new sailing boat and gave me a glare. “It’s private”, he pronounced, before ducking back inside.

On a gorgeous summer evening, calm and untroubled, I was taking a leisurely stroll around the marina, hopefully doing nothing to disturb the tranquility of the scene. The guy could have smiled. He could have said “Hello”. He could have rhapsodised about how good it was to be alive and well and in control of his faculties, able to enjoy some quality leisure time on Windermere, rather than, say, working late at the office or being stuck in a stationary queue of traffic on the M6.

The English language is the perfect medium to express nuances of pleasure: the warmth of the evening and the pride of new yacht ownership. He could have pointed out the silky, ever-changing reflections in the water as a blood-red ball of a sun dipped down towards the familiar silhouette of the Langdale Pikes beyond the northern reaches of the lake. Conversations can spin into an infinity of possibliities, if you have a convivial nature and time to spare.

But no. He was neither convivial nor conversational. And the merest glimpse of a photographer - obviously not a member, unless the club had abandoned its dress code - was enough to darken his mood. “It’s private” were only two words he could muster, on this fine summer’s evening.

He was right, of course. I was trespassing: in a thoughtful, principled way, I like to think, but trespassing all the same. The marina is a private club for well-heeled folk, with a hefty annual fee securing a berth for their floating gin palaces. Members can enjoy the company of like-minded people, without having to rub shoulders with riff-raff like me. And, once or twice a year, who knows, they may even find the time to rig their yachts and go for a sail.

While I see the the lakeland landscape as a wonderful resource for everyone to share, for some people it’s a commodity, a reward for their success in the world of business. Once they’ve bought up their Cumbrian Camelots, with panoramic lakeside views, they try to pull up the drawbridge after them. It’s never quite enough to look at a beautifiul view; the pleasure’s not complete until that view is denied to others. A bleak sort of pleasure, you might think.

Up go the walls, the fences, the fast-growing leylandi hedges and a plethora of signs to keep the riff-raff out. Why do landowners deny access to walkers? Because they can, that’s why. Wherever you look around the Lake District, there are signs that say ‘Private’. There’s ‘Strictly Private’ too, raising the stakes for those visitors who might otherwise imagine that ‘Private’, unqualified, means “Come on in, old friend, put your feet up, have a beer, make yourself at home”.

The conservation movement has a splendid slogan: “Not ours, but ours to look after”. The preponderance of prohibitive signs delivers a rather different message: “It’s not your land, it’s mine. Now clear off, sharpish, before I set the dogs on you”…

Getting lost is like forgetting: you only need to do it once. You don’t have to keep forgetting where you left your car keys. Once is enough. You don’t keep getting lost; one wrong turning, in a moment of distraction, is enough.

While taking photographs for a book on the Pennine Way, I walked to the top of Bleaklow, in Derbyshire’s ‘Dark Peak’. Maybe I became disorientated by the peat hags, or the fact that the top of Bleaklow is an extensive, rocky plateau rather than a well-defined summit, so that when I tried to retrace my steps I took the wrong path. Since I always carry on Ordnance Survey, I shouldn’t have made the mistake at all, or, having made it, I should have realised quite quickly that something was amiss. But I misread the landmarks I saw, trying to make them conform to what I saw on the map. Wanting to believe I was on the right path, I reconfigured the landscape to match my preconceptions until, suddenly, the construction of my imaginary landscape fell apart, like a house of cards, and I realised I was lost.

Bleaklow is well-named. During the winter months it can be very bleak indeed. Plenty of walkers have trudged over the top, in wind or rain or snow, and decided that if this is what long distance walking was all about, they’d rather give it a miss. Fortunately, the weather on this day was surprising mild. I was walking through a moorland landscape which, if not quite featureless, was hard to ‘read’. There were no stone walls, no fences, no farms, no barns; I looked ahead, I looked left, I looked right, and saw nothing that seemed familiar. But I had to do something, so I decided to walk in a straight line downhill and see where I ended up. Seeing no other walkers, even on a Saturday, I shared the moorland landscape with skylarks and curlews and a few insouciant sheep which looked up, briefly, and returned to the more important matter of chewing the coarse moorland grass.

Walking was easy, with the peat and heather dry underfoot. The sky was blue, with cumulus clouds stacked up like scatter cushions, and, once I‘d stopped scolding myself for getting lost, I relaxed into the moment and started to enjoy my surroundings. When I came across a small stream, I followed it down into a grassy, steep-sided valley.

I remember the sun being hot on my back; in my memory it was midsummer, but memory plays tricks. Thanks to the miracle that is digital photography, and the way that metadata is ‘welded’ to every image that comes out of my camera, I can be pedantically accurate. It was April 7, 2007. I sat by the stream, watching the clear water bubble over the rocks. I lay down on dry grass, letting the song of the skylark recede as the bird climbed ever higher in the sky. I was still lost.

I closed my eyes and fell asleep.