All three of our family have walked from Land’s End to John o’Groats, all in different years and with variations of route. There are a lot of photographs, and some of them are of the same place, taken years apart. I’ve been tagging such photos with Google’s help, and there’s a kind of mysterious pleasure in noting that a little wayside place that was logged 17 years ago was logged again more recently; like the padlock, which once was locked, but was open seven years later, or signs that have aged – or been renewed, or a parish notice board that’s changed, or the picture of a hemp leaf that’s mysteriously disappeared from a communications hut. Also it makes me think of Psalm 139. Not sure why.
Maybe it’s because these very different journeys, years apart, are connected by these things which are very small, very specific, in a very big landscape. They are in some way ‘special’.