The Essay

In this first part of his five day journey the writer Robert Macfarlane walks the Hampshire miles of the South Downs, in monsoon rain and sunshine. He reflects on the relationship between paths and stories, and how old paths were imagined in 19th- and early 20th-century England as ghostly spaces of time-warp and spectres. He considers how paths might be thought of as sculptures, a kind of democratic art-form; and he meets a man who has been on the road for seven years, since the death of his wife. Producer Tim Dee.