ABSTRACT
A path is sometimes easy to walk along, and sometimes not.1 Among hill-walkers and mountaineers, stories are often told about mishaps such as injuries, losing the way, lost or forgotten equipment, or bad weather. Here is one I heard during a walk in the hills of north-east Scotland:
And another, recounted whilst walking on an icy path in the same region:
The success and media coverage of the book and film Touching the Void (Simpson 1998) taps into a certain fascination with when things go wrong, telling the story of a physically and socially catastrophic fall into a glacier. Richard Storer’s popular book The Joy of Hillwalking similarly devotes a chapter to ‘hillwalking accidents’. As he writes, ‘the longer the fall, the more excruciating the pain, the greater spillage of blood, the more salivatingly relished the tale’ (Storer 2004, 117). All these biographical narratives convey an intensity of experience, when something ‘really happened’ during the journey. In the first of the above anecdotes the walker is injured, though not as seriously as it first seems, by a tiny movement or disjuncture, a slip between the boot and the shale, and the character of the walk changes radically.
