ABSTRACT
The modern anthropologist Victor Turner operates with a set of oppositions similar to Virgil's in his discussion of the relationship between the structured, hierarchical world of the city and state, and that of "communitas", which builds upon a feeling of egalitarian brotherhood. The General Household Survey of 1990 revealed that a little more than twenty million people in Britain consider walking as their main outdoor activity. As a reiterated performative act, fell-walking creates personal pasts that are located in both time and place. These multiple pasts relate individuals through experiences and memories which are recited to new sets of people, intertwining people with place and forging links that cut across urban/rural, north/south and economic markers of social emplacement. Differences in clothing, the experience of past walks taken in more or less expensive and exotic locations, and expressions of cultural capital prevent the ideal state of communitas from being achieved in this secular pilgrimage.
