Walking Restorative Paths: Can Mother Nature Really Heal?
The path less travelled
As soon as my boots hit the sandy trail leading up Bickerton Hill, my shoulders relax. I’ve not taken this route before, but that doesn’t matter. The same rule applies; the further I move from the roadside and civilisation, the more my daily stresses and worries disappear. Maybe I simply left them behind at the car. But I often think the trees have more to do with it. Just as they breathe in carbon dioxide and release the life-giving oxygen we need, perhaps they hold the stresses of our daily lives in their branches, converting it into the perspective we need.
Urban roots
But I didn’t always have this kind of relationship with nature. In fact, I was very much raised to be a city girl. On shopping trips to London with my mum, we would take a deep breath of fumes as we stepped out of the tube station at Oxford Circus and onto the busy pavement. The smell and noise of the traffic symbolised that we were in our happy place. Even my pollution ‘tan’ marks at the end of a busy day shopping, didn’t phase me.
I loved the city. The hustle and bustle, flashing bright lights, and the cacophony of clashing sounds. It was a place bursting with life. The countryside? Well, it was green…and muddy…and smelly…and a place where the pavements ran out. Scary.
The silver birch
As I climb the new path I have chosen up Bickerton Hill, it leads through a small woodland, mainly populated with silver birch. I’m used to seeing trees bent one way by the wind, but these dance back and forth. A trick of the wind whipping around the hillside, maybe. But I see the canopies waving, welcoming me to their wonderous world.
Silver birches, are common in UK woodlands and play an important role in biodiversity. Their seeds can be spread far on the wind, they thrive in light, and can grow in poor soil. Therefore, they are often the first to colonise cleared or disturbed land. Growing quickly, they improve the soil, increasing its nutrient levels, making it possible for other woodland species to join them. For this reason, they are often said to symbolise renewal and purification. And this might seem apt for this personal essay, as I too, renew with the aid of nature.
But silver birches have come to symbolise something far more personal to me. As I watch them waving, I can’t help but smile. My body is flooded with the comfort of happy childhood memories. I might have been a city child, but that does not mean my childhood was devoid of the natural world. And silver birches used to mean precious time with my grandparents.
They were the sign that we were nearly at their house.
They were the trees in their garden which squirrels scuttled about.
They were the trees of the woods where we ran up and down ‘the bumps’ as we headed to the playground.
So, maybe nature has always been special to me, holding fond memories, and I just didn’t realise it until now. But it wasn’t something I ached for in the way I do now.
The wind of change
I don’t remember an exact moment when nature became something I sought out on purpose. But I do remember becoming fascinated by the landscape when I lived in the valleys of South Wales. The juxtaposition of the deprivation of towns decimated by the closing of mines and the incredible landscapes which surrounded them, was hard to fathom. It was everywhere you looked, not least in the jaw-dropping mountain tops with blackened slag heaps looming ominously.
But the beauty was hard to deny. It was surely an opportunity for regeneration. As someone who had not been there during the mining years, it was hard to understand why it was not a thriving area of tourism. Mountains and hillsides greeted you in every direction.
I remember vividly the drive from the supermarket up the valley hills to our home. If I looked out over the valley and to the ridge of hills to the east as the sun was setting, the shadows and sunlight across the land would play tricks on my mind. Where one space sunk into darkness, another still danced in sunlight. At other times, the shadows of the clouds slipped and slid across the hills, not always appearing where you expected. It was unfathomable.
In their paper, ‘Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion’, Keltner and Haidt discuss how awe requires a sense of vastness, and a need to expand our usual way of thinking (2010)[1].
This is what I felt in the face of these mountains, then. I was in awe of them.
Maybe it is from this that an appreciation for the natural world was born. But I also don’t think it coincidental that this happened during an incredibly difficult time in my life. I was a mother to two small children and had a husband who was drinking away our home.
A study by Anderson, Monroy, & Keltner in 2018[2], argued that it is awe in nature which reduces stress levels and improves mental wellbeing. In another study, Rudd et al found that awe altered people’s decision making, made them feel like time had slowed down, and improved their wellbeing (2012[3]).
Perhaps, I was unconsciously recognising the power of nature to heal and improve wellbeing. Those moments of awe allowed me to cope with the hellfire in which I lived. Maybe they even gave me the perspective to change my situation.
These days, turning to nature is a much more deliberate act. For example, this walk was prompted by the knowledge my mind was spinning and self-esteem collapsing. I need Mother Nature to sooth me.
As I continue the climb up the hill, an older silver birch stands tall in the middle of the path, it’s tree roots stretching out like the sinewy tendons on the back of a frail man’s hand. I step carefully through the maze, worried about causing any damage.
Eventually the path comes to a steep incline, broken by stone steps, worn down by thousands of feet.
I can’t help wondering whether the stones have been deliberately placed here perhaps by the current owners, The National Trust, or whether they were in situ when the Iron-Age hill fort bustled with life.
What was life like for the women of the fort in 600BC?
Did their feet travel this same path?
Were they in need of some kind of perspective as so many of us are today?
I suspect their lives were much harder in many ways, but also much simpler.
Whatever the answers, the steep slope fills me with gratitude. Because I know my body will be able to carry me up it, one step at a time, and up the staircase that lies further ahead as I reach my normal route up the hill.
And that hasn’t always been the case.
Stormy weather
My relationship with nature continued to grow after leaving the valleys. I ended my marriage, improved my fitness and began exploring the countryside, often walking the Malvern Hills. Then, I met someone new, a member of a mountain rescue team. Woods and hillsides became the norm. Eventually, I moved North and then to the countryside, surrounded by quaint villages and acres of farmland. Rush hour traffic became tractors running back and forth as they gathered grass from the fields, or cows moving along roads to new pastures. Nature and I became much closer.
I wanted nature.
I chose nature.
There was nothing happenstance about it any more. We were tied together.
But on 1st August 2021, the outdoor world was viciously ripped from me, my body no longer able to meander amongst Mother Nature’s artwork.
My lungs became lame, unable to suck in an adequate amount of air.
My heart went into overdrive, desperate to deliver the oxygen my body needed. I could be lay on the sofa with a pulse rate reaching beyond 150 beats per minute.
My muscles told me I was exhausted, that I had overworked them, shredding their fibres, even when I had barely moved.
The top of the stairs became my top of a mountain.
I had caught Covid, which then turned into Long Covid. And for the next eighteen months or so, I couldn’t walk further than the house. But this is not about the ins or outs of Long Covid.
It is about the moment that nature became everything. Because this is the moment everything changed.
I craved the outdoors.
I needed nature.
I ached for the countryside.
Small steps, big leaps
I was more fortunate than many; I could at least look out on fields and trees from the window.
In 1984, Ulrich[4] conducted a study on how a view from a window impacted on patients recovering from surgery. It found that patients with a natural view (as opposed to one of a brick wall) recovered quicker, had less complications, and required less pain medication. The results were so startling that it continues to influence hospital architecture.
And I’ve no doubt my mental health at least, would have suffered even more if I did not live in the countryside.
Yet, the pull to be outdoors was magnetising. The inability to do so, devastating.
But then the wonderful Suzy Bolt taught me about small steps and a 10% stretch.
That triggered the start of me building a deliberate bond with nature that also helped me to heal. It was as if my body knew what it needed to recover, that getting outdoors would take me step-by-step along a path of getting well. But I just hadn’t known how to start.
The goals started small. The first was to simply sit outside in the garden every day. I would cacoon myself in layers of warmth and sit outside, noticing the cool air stinging my cheeks. As I looked for daily glimmers, I noticed the new saplings growing the other side of our fence. So, my next step became identifying them. With a book in hand, and step ladder underfoot, I held a magnifying glass to the buds and learned how to differentiate leafless trees.
As the weeks continued sliding past, my goals grew. For years, I’d walked my dog along the canal near our home.
Where I joined the canal, there was a bench. If I could just get over the bridge, I could sit in front of a different view and reclaim a little of myself.
Then, the emotional milestone of walking my loyal border collie, once a distant dream, gradually became a reality. After faithfully lying at my side for so many months, I could finally repay him.
But the real challenge lay in climbing Bickerton Hill. More than once, I had allowed myself to think that I may never stand on its peak again and admire the views spanning counties and the Clywdian Range. If I could make it, I would know I was finally recovered, that anything was possible again.
Reaching new heights
As I step out of the woodland and onto the familiar path of my usual walk, it is not long before the views start to appear like a table cloth flown in the air before settling.
There are the fields with pools of standing water scattered westwards, testament to the wet winter, and Harthill hunkered beneath Raw Head to the North. Beyond that, chimneys sit along the River Mersey impaling the skyline, producing their own white clouds.
The path drops down again and an area, once cleared, is filled with new shoots, fresh green changing into a shimmering silver-purple at the tips.
It is a colour tone I recognise from earlier in the walk: silver birches. The National Trust is working hard to regenerate the original lowland heath. And yet, these silver birch seedlings seem determined to survive. But it won’t be long before the slopes are occupied by the placid and inquisitive Galloway cattle who will happily chomp their way through these seedlings, in between greeting walkers, of course.
Beyond this patch, is the staircase that was my biggest challenge last summer. When I pulled up in my car last year, ready to see if I could walk a hill, I told myself it didn’t matter how far I got. If I made it only halfway up the sandy path from the car park to the Sandstone Trail, then that was fine.
I didn’t need to climb the stairs.
I didn’t need to reach the top.
I didn’t need to see those views again.
But of course, those stone steps represented the hardest part of the climb, the most difficult aspect for some one with Long Covid. Climbing them, would mean recovery.
I stepped out of the car, and with one foot in front of the other, reached the Sandstone Trail. I felt amazing, and was shocked that my breath remained with me. With the steps looming ahead, I decided to give it a go. With each one I took, I expected it to be the last. But my ribs no longer constrained my lungs. I could take a wonderful, deep breath of fresh air and continue, every step.
As I reached the top, and realised I didn’t need to even pause to regain my breath, there was no way I wasn’t going all the way to Maiden Castle hill fort. And as I videoed my emotional achievement at the top, I realised I was healed. That anything was now possible as long as I could get outdoors.
But just as the path weaves its way up and down the hillside, over varying terrain, so too has my recovery. It’s been anything but linear. Not long after my recovery from Long Covid, I was rushed into hospital and had emergency major surgery.
Unable to move beyond the house for three months, my belief in nature helped me keep faith in my recovery.
A Healing Pathway
So, as I again take the staircase, six months on from my operation, I wonder if there is any evidence that Mother Nature really can help with recovery from Long Covid, or was it all in my mind?
Research into Long Covid is still in the early stages and there is no known cure. However, an article published in The Lancet suggested nature could help in both the resilience against, and recovery from, COVID-19 (Robinson et al, 2022)[5].
Perhaps, it’s the element of awe that aids recovery. Maybe it’s the trees reducing stress. But the truth is, I don’t need studies to tell me what I feel.
Every time I step out the house, I feel better.
Every time I engage with nature, I feel comforted and calmed.
Every time I climb hills, meander through woodland, paddleboard across a lake, I feel well.
As I reach the top of the staircase, I follow the path as it rises and falls, revealing more views to the west, where the welsh hills of the Clywdian range press themselves into the gathering clouds, losing themselves to the mist and mysticism.
There is the double ditch of the Maiden Castle fort to my left.
And as I step down to sit on the bench and take in the views, I look over to where Moel Famau hides in cloud cover, and I tell myself that she is next.
Because there isn’t a doubt in my mind that I will make it. Because nature holds me in her arms leading me to recovery, and one day, a place of better fitness.
I just have to take it one step at a time.
[1] Dacher Keltner & Jonathan Haidt (2003) Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion, Cognition and Emotion, 17:2, 297-314, DOI: 10.1080/02699930302297 https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930302297
[2] Anderson, C. L., Monroy, M., & Keltner, D. (2018). Awe in nature heals: Evidence from military veterans, at-risk youth, and college students. Emotion, 18(8), 1195–1202. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/emo0000442
[3] Rudd, M., Vohs, K. D., & Aaker, J. (2012). Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1130-1136. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612438731
[4] Ulrich RS. View through a window may influence recovery from surgery. Science. 1984 Apr 27;224(4647):420-1. doi: 10.1126/science.6143402. PMID: 6143402. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6143402/
[5] Robinson J.M., Aronson, J., Daniels C.B., Goodwin N., Liddicoat C., Orlando L., Phillips D., Stanhope J., Weinstein P., Cross A.T., Breed M. (2022) ‘Ecosystem restoration is integral to humanity’s recovery from COVID-19’. The Lancet: Planetery Health. 6(9), 769-773. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(22)00171-1