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Real people share real stories of their connection with Nature. Hear how it feels to talk with animals, birds and landscape. Share the magic of cross species communication.
Created by award winning Nature writer and poet Estelle Phillips.
Instagram @estelle_writer44
TikTok @EstellePhillips
Rob Cowan's accolades include the Roger Deakin Award for his book Skimming Stones and a Portico shortlist for his book Common Ground. He has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Independent. His latest book, The North Road, is a masterpiece. One of the characters in The North Road is the anonymous a. Rob describes him as a good friend and foot companion for this leg out of London, someone unfazed by the physical and psychological drift of walking, of sleeping rough in unknown territory, Infantry man, map reader, veteran of doomed tours of Iraq and Afghanistan, his modus operandi is the swift processing of information, the handling of chaos, and the assessing of situations on shape shifting highways.
Estelle Phillips:Dot dot dot. He'd understood how roads can become borders to other places, other times. He hadn't needed to mention that he'd be walking with his own ghosts too. Can you imagine my joy at being able to speak with Rob and the anonymous a together about the North Road? You can't see the deep friendship these two men share, as well as an extraordinary rare quality, a beautiful humility.
Estelle Phillips:But you can hear it in this incredible podcast.
Rob Cowen:My name is Rob, I'm an author and writer and I live in Yorkshire underneath a henge which is a very exciting place to be.
A:My name is Agger, as you said, Army officer and long term friend of Rob's from university, so over twenty years ago and
Rob Cowen:And Road Buddy.
A:And Road Buddy in In the book. In the book and the discussions before and after that as well. Yeah. Creating the book.
Estelle Phillips:Yeah. One of the things that came out in the author talk that we just had was that the pair of you were together when you had an experience of, I would call it, communion with the landscape. Is that how you would describe it?
Rob Cowen:Yes. For context, we walked the first 50 miles of the Great North Road, the Old North Road, the North Road, whatever we call it, out of London, all the way up to a place called Iqwal Green, which is the oldest recorded village with a record of celebrating May Day from 1523. And it's thought that the village itself probably was celebrating May Day for five hundred years, perhaps more before that. It But has a permanent Maypole, it is a huge event, and we walked kind of staggered at that point to this place the night before May Day and slept in the woods, we put up a hammock and a tent and we slept there and yes, it's very strange. We'd had this entire crushing experience of history and time all the way through the old road walking from London.
Rob Cowen:And we got to this open Bedfordshire countryside of farms and this really weird rhythm to the soil there generally, is huge expanses of of crops and agriculture, and these small villages, Mogahanga, and North Hill, and Iqua Green, those great names. And the whole place had this sense of something waiting to be said, you know, that that that tremendous weird moment you have where just before someone speaks and the whole land had that expectancy. And we were knackered and we had a curry and then walked to this wood to sleep. And we heard children singing and there was nobody near us, but we could hear this strange singing coming into the wood. And it was one of the weird experiences, I walked around the wood and then we went and stood on the edge of the wood and there was nothing there, and it was very odd, but it was one of innumerable odd experiences I had on the road.
Estelle Phillips:You were together?
A:Yeah.
Estelle Phillips:What was that experience for you?
A:So and and you very kindly just asked me to to, you know, to talk about this, so, you know, I'm sort of dredging out memories from, you know, ten years ago, and this is I think, as Rob said, it was a real sense of expectation, you know, knowing that we were going to Iqal Green for this for this really really unique experience. And I think even though I am in the army, think sleeping in the woods like that really does ground you and it is quite I still find it a very spiritual experience, particularly if it's just the two of you and you're not, you know, you know, a massive group and it's and it's just quiet and peaceful. And and it really does connect you, you know, with with nature, with the sights and sounds. But I think, yeah, hearing that really did sort of I don't know, it sort of goes deep to your core in many ways and and it even without knowing it you almost sort of trigger certain sort of instincts in your body, you know, which I'm sure our ancestors have experienced for, you know, for hundreds of years.
A:Yeah.
Estelle Phillips:Can you please, if you can, say more about that deep trigger? Mhmm. Like, trying to explain that internal feeling.
A:Okay. I think I think being there like I said, it's also with the sights and sounds of nature as well. So, you know, we've walked from London, you know, you you you're coming from a job, you're coming from, you know, the train and so on, and actually, you know, it's all part of almost that unwinding or that tuning into nature. So that there was a really strong sense of that and
Rob Cowen:And we found deer vibrance on and the way that was a weird thing. But what was also weird was that the next day we went to the May Day celebrations, which were just off the scale crazy, and when I was returning to the hammock in the wood, finding a poem that was just nailed to a tree trunk for no reason, it wasn't like it was on the footpath or there to be seen, it was just there and it had this verse about may you who seek meaning in life or may be welcomed with a welcoming road or whatever it was. It just seemed like the whole thing was, you know, I think, basically, think my feeling is if your antenna is up, if your awareness is attuned, as Aga says, you know, like if you've walked 50 miles and slept in a wood the night before because we had a weird experience the night before, I don't know if you remember, we slept in that weird wood. There's a potter's bar and there was lots of kind of Eastern European people sleeping in the woods because they were people who were working in Central London, but they would get the train out and then sleep the night in tents in the woods because it was cheap and we could hear them talking, so you walk into a wood and suddenly you could hear, you know, Czech, Polish, whatever accents and it's kind of weird and firelight and you've got that sense of time because it could have been a fire because the language was different.
Rob Cowen:It could have been a medieval period fire, it could have been a Saxon fire, it could have been and you were suddenly in a wood listening to a different tongue and the smell of wood and we kept moving through these spaces and then, that first night, we slept well, Aga's a soldier, so he fell asleep immediately, but I went walked out because I was worried we were gonna get kicked, small phalanx would kick us out I said in the book, like, I walked up to this tree stump to have a wee and these two eyes, I had a head torch on, these two eyes are just staring at me, head height, two red eyes and I had a red head torch on, red beam and I realized after a minute that it was a fox sitting on a tree stump and it was staring at me and it just moved and disappeared down. But that was significant for me because the fox was the first animal in Common Ground, the book I wrote before this book, The North Road. So it's kind of this psychopomp character that's always in my work and seeing that was almost like an opening door as well, so that was significant.
Rob Cowen:But the weirdest experience actually, Aiger wasn't there for this one, but the weirdest experience I ever had was I'd I'd I'd sort of solved a murder that happened on the road in a place called Elkesley, near Elkesley, which happened in 1721, but nobody knew what actually happened because for three hundred years it's been mistold and misremembered and I was lucky in that when I was researching it, I found what actually happened, the first court records were digitized about the time I was searching for them. It involved a man called John Barra, which is a great sonar because it's already got barra barrow, it's nubbed with that inflection of earth and tomb and he was killed on the road and his gravestone says murdered by an officer of the Horse Grenadier Guards and it's really weird to have a gravestone that has murdered, like underlined on it. And I looked into this story and it turned out he was, you know, it's where the old saying, you know, don't discuss politics and pubs comes from. Because the rumor was that they had an argument about, it was a Jacobite period, they had an argument about politics and this guy stabbed him.
Rob Cowen:But actually, that didn't happen and it was a much darker and more weird story and you'd have to read the book to get it all, but it's much more interesting. But what was really interesting was I found where he'd been killed, cause he was stabbed from the back, through the back and a sword went through his chest and he died on the road, literally. He said, what shall I do now? Before he fell off the horse and then he lay on the road and died and I found that spot which is now an ancient bit of road which is like a footpath. And I followed this and his name is John Barra and I followed this road and I got to a wood where I slept and all the beech trees, tall beaches with their weird eyes that beech trees have, were turned to look down the road.
Rob Cowen:And I was setting up my hammock and I was wrapping this cord around the tree and I found my fingers going over some rough patch and I looked around with my head torch and the word John was carved in the cambium, yeah, and I thought no one was gonna believe it, so I took a photograph of it and it's in the book. But those things happened all the way along and that's when you talk about strange occurrences and and tenei, that's kind of what I'm
A:I was I was actually just talking about that with someone else in the the audience from the book tour we just had and just explaining that, yeah, you we we talked about the book before, you know, or the ideas you had before we went out to go and actually walk to the ground, walk the roads, walk the route and but even yet there were still surprises along the way and these things that sort of shock you as you say and you just didn't see them coming at all and it just, as you say, it's not, you know, a journey within a journey in many ways.
Rob Cowen:Totally. Well the big one being Nick Monkhouse's dad, you know?
A:Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. That was weird. That was incredible, yeah. And we got to the Potters Bar train crash site and again, you know, weren't expecting that at all, it's just
Rob Cowen:well you said it, mean, here's the weird thing, know, there was there's a section in the book about getting to Hatfield and Aga was asking me, you know, because we've been through so much already, these weird experiences, he was saying like how, you know, I think he actually swore but I put it in the book but How are you gonna how are you possibly gonna intertwine the story of this road with the story of your life? And as he said it Yeah. As he literally said it, the the the path on our left opened up into a into a space, the garden with rhododendron and sleepers and we went into it and I realized very quickly that it was a memorial garden to the four men who died in the Hatfield train crash. And one of those men was one of my best mates' dad, and when it happened, it was like an instrumental moment in my life where and actually all our friends' life, where this guy's dad, who was only 40, was just at 50, he just disappeared and didn't and it was just chance, he stood up, went to get a coffee and that's why he died.
Rob Cowen:If he'd sat down, he wouldn't have died, but it was so transformational in our experiences and growing up and it's completely changed how I think, you know, but we weren't expecting that at I didn't know where that place was, I'd never been to it and suddenly, you know, one of my best mates, Nick Monkhouse, his sister Claire, you know, his mom Sue, their names are written in brass, it was a dedication to Peter who I knew at this site and we could see the train line and it was rushing past where it happened and, you know, those kind of incidents, as Aga said, it's like you can't prepare for those, you can research the history of stuff, but your presence in a place also creates things that happen.
Estelle Phillips:You guys were there together before this path opened up and in terms of presence, you were together as two separate presences. Yeah? What was your presence there in that moment, please?
A:Rob talks about it in the book as well, writes about it the book. I'm in the army and, you know, and I've experienced these sort of places quite quite regularly and I'm trying to I think quite like quite a lot of people I expect you're trying to visualize, you know, the moment of the crash, the people involved, all of those things and and almost pay homage to their lives and, you know, what they did and yeah.
Rob Cowen:But also the thing with you being there which was particular to you is that you've obviously, you know, people dying young is not new to you, He you was a great person to be there because he it was quite shocking for me because I wasn't expecting it and so I had to kind of sit there for a while and, you know, clean the plaque with my t shirt and, you know, but he knows how to handle this stuff, having had to do it with young soldiers and that's the reality is you want somebody who understands this stuff and who also is just going to sit and wait for you to kind of get through what you have to get through before you can keep moving again.
Estelle Phillips:But the thing is Aga that you didn't just understand it, you also experienced it as well. With your antenna having slept the night before and everything. Your antenna was obviously up. So Yeah. You both had the same experience but from different bodies.
A:Yeah, absolutely and it took us totally by surprise and you, yeah, you've just got to go in the moment and as Rob said, even though I've been through that countless times before, it's still it's still unique and and and it's still unique in terms of how you feel and and the people that that are that are there being memorialized and and represented. So, yeah, it's as he said, it's really important to for me, it was, yeah, about just soaking it in, processing it and and, yeah, not rushing it and not trying to sort of just say something for the sake of it and feel the silence.
Rob Cowen:Yeah. That was good. Yeah. Yeah. Is.
Rob Cowen:Yeah. We had, you know, the whole that was a marker. That was the same day that we ended up in the woods, you know, so it all began with that moment and then just everything fell in, you know, it fell in, but that's the experience of the road, that's the experience of travel, you know, these things happen and if you're alive to it, then you can note it down or record it on your phone like you are, then you can remember it, you know, so that's the thing.
Estelle Phillips:Thank you very much.
Rob Cowen:Pleasure. Yeah,
Estelle Phillips:absolutely fantastic. Oh, what a joy, honestly. Thank you, it's wonderful.
Rob Cowen:Thank you. It's good to be here. It's great.
Estelle Phillips:Subscribe to Nature Talks With Humans for more true stories of people communicating with animals, birds and landscape. Follow me on Instagram at Estelle underscore writer forty four, and TikTok at Estelle Phillips. Bye.