By Charlie Gladstone

Charlie is here to talk to us about what he sees as the personal benefits of walking and then standing still.

As a retired (for now) runner and an incredibly active (in mind and body) person, we’re excited to hear Charlie speak on these subjects. Take it away, boss.

Part 1. Walking.

At the beginning of the year, I decided to stop running and take up walking. There wasn’t a particular reason for this, I just started walking every morning and then I carried on. I’ve been a runner for over 40 years and I probably will be again. But for now, I’ve decided to walk instead. I suppose that I’ve also been a walker for most of my life in that I like to go for long walks, generally in the country but sometimes in the city, but for regular exercise I have historically chosen running. 

The benefits of running are well documented and often far more eloquently than I might muster. Walking is much written about too. So, I’m not going to linger on these benefits for too long here. 

But…

Running is about getting the run done, about speed and sweat and a racing heart and being out of breath. For me walking is about ambling, about thinking and about looking. So perhaps the switch from one to another has been about a shift in my general attitude to life.

Maybe I felt ready to start walking because I felt calmer, more reflective, in need of slowing down.

And though I hate to admit that age may be a factor here, I am now 57 years old so, on some levels at least, walking makes more sense.

Each morning this year I have gone for a walk, either in Wales or at Glen Dye in Scotland and every one of those walks has been wonderful. My chosen time is after I’ve had some coffee and toast and caught up on the emails of the night before. I walk for 45 minutes, maybe more, and I take the dogs. I prefer to do it without other people because it’s the thought and reflection that are so valuable. Then I go into the office and I feel focused, calm and energised. And while I’m walking I’ve often had an idea and figured out how to execute it. 

I don’t really decide where I am going until I get there; yesterday I just wandered over some rough ground and then started to follow one of those winding paths that sheep make. Me following sheep, that says something. I often wonder why sheep choose to go where they go, but following the path doesn’t give me any answers.

Inevitably I have become obsessed with my step count.

Oh, how I laughed at David Sedaris’ brilliant essays on becoming addicted to his pedometer a few years ago and now here I am, too. Yesterday I did nearly 17,000 (very good); today I am at 8,976 (more work to do, must walk home from the office). On Friday I have a long drive so I will have to balance that out with a lot of walking on Saturday.

Photos by Jamie Brogan

Part 2. Standing Still.

If you’re walking in the country, there’s one thing that I can advise and that is that if you want to see animals, you need to stop and stand still. I learned this many years ago; I am a country person at heart and have spent tens of thousands of hours wandering around outside.

If you want to see a hare or a duck or a fox, stop and stand still; they get spooked and your stillness seems to concern them more than you passing by.

It makes sense; as you walk past, they think that by crouching down they can hide from you and if you stop and stand still, they get spooked because they can’t figure out what you’re doing or, I think, where you are.

Glen Dye is crawling with wildlife and this is one of the best ways of seeing it.

It’s the same in the city. Joseph Mitchell, the great chronicler of the American city simply says (and I paraphrase) ‘go out into the city and listen’. This is David Hockney’s thing too, but he thinks we need to look more; to just stand and observe, to investigate with our eyes as deeply as we can. This is why he has come to dislike photography so much, because it catches just one nano second and can’t possibly deal with depth and perspective and colour properly. 

Photos by Richard Gaston

So, sometimes on my walks I stop and look and listen, the main aim being to try to spook wildlife into showing itself but a side benefit being that I might please both Mitchell and Hockney. And yesterday I heard something quite extraordinary, something that I’d heard about but certainly never actually heard. It was a strange, spooky, almost electric sound that seemed to vibrate from the ground around me; it sounded a bit like the effect you get by flicking a thick plastic piece of tubing that catches and funnels the air in a sort of squeaky way, but faster. I found it weird but also deeply moving and beautiful and I stood there and listened and then reached for my phone and recorded it. It is far from a perfect recording but listen and be patient and you’ll hear this wonderful, pulsing vibration.

Quite quickly I came to the conclusion that it was a snipe, that beautiful, flighty, deeply elusive little wading bird beloved of all country people for its speed, long beak and big bulging eyes.

I see a lot of those on my walks, rare though they generally are, in fact I saw five yesterday and four today. Their call is loud and shrill and I imagined that this was some sort of mating call; I sort of knew what it was I had been hearing but I couldn’t place it.

When I got home, I googled ‘snipe song’ and ‘snipe mating call’ but, no, that wasn’t it. I couldn’t figure it out. And then, later, driving to the post office it came to me, it was a snipe drumming or winnowing (or bleating). Isn’t it funny how we have these things deep in the back of our minds? I don’t think I’d ever heard it, but I knew about it, maybe I’d heard a recording; but anyway, there it was, I’d recorded a snipe drumming. 

This is one of the strangest, most beautiful and alluring of all of nature’s sounds and it is created by the snipe’s tail while in flight.

In flight, that bit blew my mind, to me it had sounded like it was coming from the ground, but it was clearly echoing off the pond to my left and the drainage gully to my right. The outer tail feathers vibrate as the snipe swoops downwards and it’s something that you’ll only hear during mating season and is either a part of the mating ritual or possibly an alarm call; no one seems certain. So bizarre is the sound that endless folklore has arisen around it; in Norway it was long believed to come from horses in the sky and in Alaska, to be related to walruses. 

My mind was blown. I went back this morning and stood in the same spot. Initially nothing, not for several minutes. And then, there it was again, vibrating out of the pond and the drainage gully but coming from above. I recorded it again, but it was windy and the gale is the predominant noise on that recording. On and off it continued for a minute and then it was gone. 

If I hadn’t stopped and stood still, I'd have missed all of this.

And that would have been a shame because, in some small way I now know that the snipe are here to stay, whether I can see them or not.

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