When Simon English concluded a 5,000-mile ramble through the hills and dales of England in 1971, he thought a once in a lifetime adventure had reached its end. But the 61-year-old has now repeated the epic excursion almost 40 years later, retracing his steps along a route he planned by drawing the word England on a map.He has taken fresh photographs of 75 points along the route that he captured on his original journey, creating a fascinating record of the sweeping changes to the English landscape in recent decades.
Fields have become car parks and roads, hedgerows have grown or been cut down, trees have been destroyed by new diseases and farms have been forced to diversify. The father-of-two spent three months retracing the original route spelling out the word England from Cumbria to Southampton. The route is 275 miles long and 40 miles wide, with 10 miles between each point.He said: "It was very interesting going back to all these places that I had been to as a young man and it was lovely to see how they had changed.
"Every point has a different story to tell. In some places a rotten tree stump was still there after 40 years, but in others a once healthy tree had completely disappeared and was now a pile of sawdust."In many cases the hedges had grown much bigger and taller, but I was also surprised by how some places had hardly changed in four decades."
Mr English, a conceptual artist who lives in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, first spent the summer of 1971 hitchhiking along the route with friends.Then a student at Leeds College of Art, he drew the word England in large letters on a map and worked out the exact grid references he would need to visit to trace the word on foot.The route spanned 20 of the then 41 English counties and Mr English spent two months travelling from Hadrian's Wall in the north of England to the south coast, using maps to navigate his way to remote fields and farms, towns and tracks.
At each stop he took one black and white photograph using a Pentax camera and one colour picture using 35mm colour slide film. He also left tiny St George's Crosses on tree trunks, gateposts and pylons at every point.
"As I retrace my steps I'm very impressed by the young man who did it originally," Mr English said."I had to rely on maps to find each place and I'd sleep under a hedge, then hitchhike to the next point. "I was actually surprisingly accurate and there are only two points I seem to have put in slightly the wrong place originally so it was harder to find them again."
Mr English, who now lives with his wife Wendy and has two daughters, aged 24 and 21, used GPS, virtual cartography and a digital camera to retrace his original journey.The rambler revisted his original 75 places as part of The Re-Enchantment, a year long arts project produced by artevents, a production agency in London.
The Telegraph
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