ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author introduces an artistic intervention that he calls conversive pilgrimage and shows how the idea of pilgrimage is closely linked to the activity of walking, suggesting, after Robert Macfarlane, that ‘the volume and depth and intensity of the world is something that only those on foot will ever experience’. The main part of his text presents a series of linked, rhizomatic, notes and recollections of one particular project, Ghosts of the Restless Shore, presented as memories that collapse traditional ideas and experiences of time. Here, the author focuses on a four-day phenomenological walk in 2015 along the Sefton Coast. Central to this section of the chapter are four text-based works listing everything seen and heard on the walk: ‘memorials’ celebrating local ecologies. Finally, the author suggests that these lists of flora and fauna created and shared on these secular pilgrimages embody the appreciation or understanding of, in the words of Jane Bennett, ‘things in their singularity’ – a way to bridge the dualism between culture and nature, allowing us to engage with ethical issues that confront us in the Anthropocene.
