Category Archives: Literary, artistic, spiritual

Revival of Irish Pilgrimage Paths

by Amanda Wagstaff, Hut2Hut Pilgrimage Editor

View of the holy mountain Croagh Patrick, ancient pilgrimage site, Co. Mayo, Ireland, © Amanda Wagstaff, 2010

March 22^th-29^th, 2016 is Pilgrim Paths Week in Ireland. This national event, which takes place simultaneously at various pilgrimage sites, first started on Easter Saturday 2014 in an effort to revive interest in Ireland’s ancient pilgrim paths. It’s been growing ever since. Not only do many Irish citizens walk these paths, but many foreign visitors, including myself, have been attracted to these ancient pathways, many of which date from prehistory.

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Book Review: “The Hut Builder”, by Laurence Fearnley

Published by Penguin Books New Zealand, 2010

With 950 huts in a nation the size of Oregon, huts are a vital part of New Zealand’s landscape and imagination. What I loved most about this novel, in addition to this it’s sensitive portrayal of the life story of a quiet poet-butcher named Boden Black, was an even quieter main character: the “Far-light hut”.

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Hut Log Books: illustrations from AMC huts

“The Art of the Huts” is a fun article by Roger Sheffer, reprinted with permission from Appalachia, June 2000. I enjoy perusing hut log books. While they mostly contain fairly banal expressions of appreciation of the hut experience, some are very clever and others are quite moving. And occasionally there are some wonderful illustrations. Roger Sheffer compiled some illustrations from AMC hut logbooks and makes some interesting comments on the genre. I am always interested in examples “hut art” of all kinds — high and low, written, visual, performative or sculptural — and welcome your submissions and leads. — Sam Demas

Read the article: “Art of the Huts” by Roger Sheffer from Appalachia 2002

Meet our new “Pilgrimage Editor” Amanda Wagstaff

by Amanda Wagstaff, Hut2Hut Pilgrimage Editor

“A pilgrim travels differently. Always in pilgrimage, there is a change of mind and a change of heart.”

– John O’Donohue.

In a roundabout way, John O’Donohue is the reason I am living in Ireland right now. In the summer of 2014, my sister and I travelled to northern Virginia to visit a family friend who was living with cancer. We all knew that it might be our last time together, and indeed, it was the last time that I saw Aunt Ann.

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Watercolors of huts and an illustrated trail map

[I met Paula Christen while visiting Methow Valley trails, where she works, and was taken with her work in illustrating a trail brochure and her lovely watercolors of huts and cabins. I requested the post below about these, see images following text!]

Paula Christen Watercolors —The Sa Teekh Wa trail painting series:

Trailside art is nothing new. Beautiful examples of sculpture or monuments are found in almost any city green space or park walk. Often however, the art doesn’t connect or relate to it’s surroundings. Nature just provided a nice “frame” for the creation.

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A “Classic of the Green Mountains”

Benton MacKaye’s 1900 Hike Inspires Appalachian Trail

by Larry Anderson

The Long Trail “is a project that will be logically extended,” forester and conservationist Benton MacKaye prophesied in his pathbreaking October 1921 article, “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” which appeared in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. “What the Green Mountains are to Vermont the Appalachians are to the eastern United States. What is suggested, therefore, is a ‘long trail’ over the full length of the Appalachian skyline.” When MacKaye first publicly broached his idea for the Appalachian Trail, he thus offered the then-uncompleted Long Trail as a model for his vision of “a series of recreational communities throughout the Appalachian chain of mountains from New England to Georgia, these to be connected by a walking trail.”

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“A Hut in the Wild”: essays on huts from down under

Book notice of “Hut in the Wild” by Dianne Johnson, with a link to chapter one “Hut as Inscape“.

Dianne Johnson’s quirky, delightful, and inspiring book Hut in the Wild (http://www.loveofbooks.com.au, 2011) explores the hut as an archetype, “a cabin of the imagination, and inscape, it is redolent of a lost paradise regained, a gleaner’s bliss….and sometimes a place of hospitality.” Dr. Johnson, an anthropologist, has compiled a series of essays as homage to the hut as a powerful “inscape”, or idea and archetype. Johnson wrote books on many topics (including Aboriginal social justice and indigenous astronomies), and this little book (97 pages) is a flowering of her love affair with huts and wilderness.

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What is a hut? Towards a hut definition

What is a hut? A pictorial romp and an initial typology

What is a hut? Is it a hovel, a shelter, a hostel, or a hotel? Quick answer: all of the above, and much more. In everyday useage it is a catchall term for forms of shelter and specific definitions are elusive. These are notes towards a workable hut definition.

We’ll touch on the most common definitions and perceptions of the term “hut”, then focus specifically on the use of the term in the context of long distance walking. My purposes are to briefly illustrate the wide range of huts for walkers (and skiiers & bikers, which are lumped into the terms hikers and walkers here) and to attempt an initial typology clarifying the uses of the term.

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Why Walk? – essay by Robert Manning

Why walk, indeed? History can be read as a millennia- long struggle to free ourselves from the need to walk. Freedom from walking has always been highly coveted, coming first to the rich and powerful; slaves carried their masters, knights rode horses, the rich owned carriages, and the upper and now middle classes drive cars. Today, only the less fortunate are forced to walk. Most people prefer to sit and ride rather than walk, or so it’s been.

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Art on the New England Trail

by Charles Tracy, National Park Service.

In my work on community-based, regional and long-distance trails for the National Park Service, I have found that working with artists is an effective way to draw new visitors and to deepen the experience of current trail users. Connecting with new audiences to national parks and national trails through art is also recognized by the National Park Service as the “Arts Afire” national strategy in our recent “Call to Action”–plan for the NPS Centennial in 2016. The “Arts Afire” strategy is to “showcase the meaning of parks and trails to new audiences through dance, music, visual arts, writing, and social media.

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