Across much of Europe, summer has become something different.

For weeks now, thermometers have remained stubbornly above thirty-five degrees Celsius. In France, entire landscapes have disappeared behind walls of smoke. In Catalonia, where many of us walked together only two months ago during the Walking Assembly, forests have once again been threatened by fire. Rivers run dry. Footpaths have turned brittle. Even morning walks now begin with an eye on the temperature rather than simply the horizon.

Perhaps that is why, in these scorching weeks, many of us who gathered in Catalonia in May have found ourselves thinking back to the Muga, a cool river flowing through the Catalan foothills. Memory has its own climate. 

Even now it is easy to recall the sensation of stepping from a dusty path into the shade of alder and plane trees, hearing water long before seeing it, and feeling the cooler air on your skin. 

It is remarkable how much emerged from what appeared to be such a simple expedition. Yet that may be why this is often the way with walking. We imagine we are simply moving through a landscape, only to realise later that the landscape has been moving through us.

A walk truly begins only after the walk. Places continue working upon us long after we have left them. They reorganise our attention, returning unexpectedly in other landscapes, other conversations and even other seasons.

The Walking Assembly was conceived as an experiment in learning through movement, correspondence and shared attention. Four expeditions followed different trajectories through the same territory, each exploring another way of inhabiting a river landscape together. Along the Muga, however, something unexpected happened to all of us.

Nobody could have predicted that a simple hammock would become one of the defining images of the Assembly.

At the outset it seemed little more than practical equipment, a place to rest after walking. Yet in our walk we intentionally transformed its identity. Suspended between two trees beside the river, it became a boat, a nest, an observatory, an ear and a sail for walking. It offered another relationship with the landscape. Instead of looking across the river, we found ourselves suspended within it. Instead of moving onwards, we lingered.

Walking with a hammock was symbolic. Over the past two decades, walking arts have gradually expanded from individual walks and artworks towards communities of practice. Along the Muga, that evolution seemed to take another gentle step. Walking remained central, but increasingly what mattered was not only what happened while we walked, but what continued afterwards, in relationships, collaborations and renewed ways of paying attention.

Walking remained at the heart of everything. The hammock acquired meaning precisely because we walked towards stillness. The walks led us from one shaded bend in the river to another, through forests, across medieval drystone bridges and alongside water that continually invited us to slow down.

Participants later remarked that they had never experienced rest as such an essential part of walking itself. Other walkers discovered that their richest observations emerged while gently swaying above the ground, watching birds disappear through the canopy or listening to the current. Stillness became another way of paying attention.

The hammock became a methodology. It reminded us that not every encounter with a landscape needs to be measured in kilometres. Sometimes depth matters more than distance.

As heatwaves become longer and walking through exposed landscapes becomes increasingly demanding, that may be why summer itself asks us to rethink our relationship with movement. Walking has never been about covering ground as efficiently as possible. It has always contained another invitation: to notice, to pause, to listen, to remain.

As this extraordinary summer continues, perhaps there is something worth carrying with us from those days beside the river. Find a place where shade still gathers: a small woodland in the city, a riverside park, a mountain valley or a stretch of coast where trees still offer protection from the afternoon sun. Walk there slowly. Notice the temperature changing as you leave the open path. Listen before speaking.

Then, if you happen to have a hammock, suspend it carefully between two trees. Not to escape the landscape, but to enter it differently. Read a few pages. Write a note. Watch clouds drifting through the branches. Do nothing at all for a while.

You may discover that the walk never really stopped.

That may be why this is one of the directions in which walking arts are now evolving: less towards ever more walks than towards lives that continue to be shaped by walking as more than walking. The most important part of the walk may not always happen on the path itself, but afterwards, in the way we return to the world.

This summer, perhaps, the most radical walk is the one that keeps us suspended beneath the trees.

If these reflections resonate, there are several ways to continue the journey. The new year-long On Pilgrimage poetry competition invites writers to explore walking through verse, while the next WALC Confluence follows Eléonore Ozanne's Following the Moon from One End of the World to the Other, before I will take you on a walk through the open call for the Made of Walking Lab in Beveren (10–18 September), part of the Creative Europe WALC programme.

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