In the wake of five years which had seen a heart-attack, an operation to remove one third of his lungs, and increasing pain and difficulty walking from arthritis, Callum James resolved to walk the South Downs Way, one hundred miles from Winchester to the coast at Eastbourne. Walking five miles one day each weekend, James limped down the steep hill into Eastbourne four months later. The South Downs is partly a grimoire of the walk, partly a linear topography, partly a treatise on necromancy. Subverting the expectation that books on landscape are divorced from folklore, spirits, and the magic of a place, Callum James writes as one who does this magic, speaks to these spirits, and follows this lore. As a result, this is a book which is neither fiction nor non-fiction, because those categories don't work when you leave materialism behind. It is story.
In the wake of five years which had seen a heart-attack, an operation to remove one third of his lungs, and increasing pain and difficulty walking from arthritis, Callum James resolved to walk the South Downs Way, one hundred miles from Winchester to the coast at Eastbourne. Walking five miles one day each weekend, James limped down the steep hill into Eastbourne four months later. The South Downs is partly a grimoire of the walk, partly a linear topography, partly a treatise on necromancy. Subverting the expectation that books on landscape are divorced from folklore, spirits, and the magic of a place, Callum James writes as one who does this magic, speaks to these spirits, and follows this lore. As a result, this is a book which is neither fiction nor non-fiction, because those categories don't work when you leave materialism behind. It is story.