For your stray attention this weekend

On labyrinths and those who walk them

On Saturday, I got lost while walking in the woods. This isn’t the first time; The Electricity of Every Living Thing opens with a similar feat of directional ineptitude. I find it very easy to lose my way.

With every change of season, my usual routes through the forest become unrecognisable. As the trees burst into leaf, or change colour, or fall bare, new paths are revealed, and familiar ones concealed. It’s no surprise that our ancestors believed that fairies could install magical paths aimed at fooling the unaware to journey into their realm. Once I had taken one unwitting wrong turn, the unexpected paths that appeared seemed almost eerie, as if they had been placed there by an unseen hand. At one point, certain that I knew where I was, I found myself checking a straight westward path to look for signs that it had been recently cut into the landscape. It had clearly been there for a long time. That’s when I knew I was sunk. 

I wondered, as I was scrambling up a hill trying to get back to familiar terrain, whether this was how the woods have always seemed to the uninitiated: confusing, impenetrable, uncanny. The woodland walks that most of us know take place on broad, safe paths cut by national park authorities or wildlife trusts; the woods were not always this inviting. They would once have been the exclusive territory of woodcutters and charcoal burners, people with an intimate, almost arcane knowledge of the forest. For the rest of us, they would have felt like a labyrinth with ever-shifting walls and deliberate trickery.