John Davies, Walking the M62

I’ve been reading Anglican priest John Davies’s self-published book about his 2007 walking journey across northern England, following the route of the M62 motorway. Davies did not walk on the actual shoulder of the M62—given the narrowness of hard shoulders on UK motorways, that would have been suicidal—but he did closely follow the route of that highway. Walking the M62 collects Davies’s blog posts during the walk, which range from poems and prayers to beautifully detailed accounts of things seen and places visited, with an introduction added after the fact. I’m surprised the book didn’t find a publisher; it’s a lovely account of an unusual journey.

In his introduction, Davies describes the “fantasies” that “provoked this journey”: “the fantasy of arrival,” of coming back to his home city, Liverpool; “the fantasy of learning how to ‘read the everyday’”; a “search to find ‘heaven in the ordinary,’” which is closely connected to his fantasy of reading the everyday, but which is “based on a faith which is understood today sacramentally—where people encounter the divine in engagement with ordinary objects like bread and wine, and through everyday experiences (conversations, occurrences) where they are surprised by a powerful spirit of grace”; “a strong belief in the ongoing importance of place in a society which increasingly embraces mobility and networking as norms”; and, finally, “[t]he idea that ordinary people are interesting,” that “the way we normally spend our days is endlessly fascinating, once we start to look into it” (8-10). Davies acknowledges his debts to urban theology and to psychogeography: one of his walking companions was Phil Smith, the founder of mythogeography, and he also cites Sinclair’s London Orbital as an inspiration. Davies suggests that “the opposite to the slow walk must be the motorway drive, an intensely focussed, often stressful and (to the pedestrian observer) horribly violent high-speed pursuit of space through time” (11). Indeed, one of the surprises of Davies’s work is that he walked where planners have deliberately excluded pedestrians. Some motorway junctions and “rural passages,” he writes, “are impossible to get close to on foot,” so he sometimes found himself “taking circular routes or ones which zigzagged over and under the motorway over some distance” (12).

As he walked, and wrote about his experiences, Davies found himself developing two themes. The first was shopping “and the complexities of what people are actually doing when ostensibly ‘out shopping’”—the “complex social interactions” that are involved in retail spaces. The second theme was “the presence of ghosts on this journey” (13). Those spectral presences included “the ghosts of communities no longer physically present in particular places but still active, ‘dead roads’ which had been cut off by the building of the M62 across them, the ‘spirits of place’ which I tried to describe at times in diary entries,” and especially “the haunting nature of motorways and their users as seen (a little fancifully sometimes) from the perspective of this suggestible pedestrian” (13). “Motorway ghosts inhabit the uncanny noises made by traffic crossing high bridges or underpasses where the vehicles can’t be seen but their presence is awesome,” Davies continues; “they are felt in roadside memorials and Police Accident Information Request signs; and they are seen in the eyes of drivers which are (rightly) focussed on the road ahead but seemingly oblivious to anything else in nature: like the undead” (13-14). Along with the lovely prose of Davies’s diary entries, I am struck by his interest in ghosts, and wonder how many ghosts exist in a relatively new and unused highway like the Regina Bypass. It would be worth watching for such presences.

Davies’s Walking the M62 is available as an ebook through Lulu.

Work Cited

Davies, John. Walking the M62, self-published, 2007.