The View
INTERVIEW
Adventurer Alastair Humphreys has spent a year exploring his local map. He says it might be the greatest adventure of them all.
ALASTAIR HUMPHREYS IS on a quest to narrow his horizons.
Early in his career as an adventurer, he was all about big ambitions. He cycled around the world, rowed across the Atlantic, and pulled a cart across the Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula.
Ten years ago, he scaled it all down with a book called Microadventures, which aimed to show how we can engage with wildness and push our boundaries without having to travel far from home.
But his latest book Local distils the essence of exploration down even further. Over the course of a year, Alastair visits (and walks in) all 400 grid squares of an Ordnance Survey Explorer map centred on his home. And he believes it might be the most revealing adventure of them all.
“There were two drivers behind the idea,” he explains.
“Firstly that sense of discomfort around the fact that people like me, endlessly flying off to beautiful and fragile wild places, were actually contributing to the damage suffered by those places.
“Secondly, realising that even microadventures require people to have some sort of desire towards adventure, plus access to the right equipment and ‘proper’ countryside.
“So I wanted to go even smaller and show that everybody can find that wonderful phrase ‘nearby nature’ within a short radius of home.”
Alastair’s home is on the urban fringe in southern England, meaning that the sights he explores include industrial estates, abandoned canals, fly-tipping hotspots and power station perimeterfences. Yet he is able to find nature and even wildness everywhere he goes. (Crucially, he does not name any of his locations, the idea being that this kind of adventure is universally available.)
“It was fascinating, because I felt more like an explorer in these apparently unglamorous spaces than I might up a mountain because they were so unfamiliar and alien to me,” he explains.
“But it’s absolutely true: if you find a list of the ten biggest fly-tipping hotspots in your area and go and visit them, you will find something interesting and even beautiful in the vicinity. An animal you didn’t expect to see; a regeneration project to be thankful for. Or maybe a story that shaped the way your community has developed.”
To make the journey as low-carbon as possible, Alastair cycled to the vast majority of his grid squares, the
