Hikes and the Sublime

I am back in London and I yearn for mother nature

The Mountains of Djurdjra, Tizi Ouzou

When I was younger, I don’t think I really understood what people meant when they spoke about the sublime. I’d heard the word before in school studying the Romantics, poems, paintings and essays that tried to make the natural world sound transcendent. But as a child, standing before the white chalk cliffs of Dover on long road trips to France, the idea felt abstract. The cliffs loomed above me, sheer and impressive, their faces lined with geological wrinkles carved by time and weather. They were beautiful, yes, like frozen waterfalls made of dust and stone. But they didn’t move me.

They felt like a wall. Silent and indifferent.

However, I’ve always felt a connection to nature perhaps in the way people say that cliché phrase, “it grounds me.” But that doesn’t mean I grew up in it. I’m a big city girl. Even in the vast expanse of Burgess Park to the quaint Victoria Park village, I’ve lived all my life surrounded by buildings and bus routes, concrete and noise. Nature, for much of my early life, was something to visit, not inhabit.

My earliest conscious experience of the countryside was on one of my many family trips to Devon and Cornwall. My dad loved being outdoors: the sea; the cliffs; casting a fishing line into the waves. My mother appreciated it, too, although perhaps more out of love for him than for the countryside itself. And I was... moody. Perhaps even ungrateful. A typical “teenager”. I can’t say I remember that much in detail, only that it wasn’t unpleasant. I vaguely recall having a good time, even if I didn’t realise it then.

But things changed when I was fifteen. My dear friend Leela invited me and a group of our school friends to her family’s house in Suffolk. The town was called Sandringham. It was small, charming, hidden away from anything I knew to be familiar. There were no cliffs, no dramatic drops into the sea, just continuous stretches of landscape. Acres and acres of open fields, hills, and sky. And that, I think, was the first time I truly felt the sublime.

It was a memorable trip. I had always felt estranged from the girls in my old group, partially because I was young and definitely had an inferiority complex of sorts. Truthfully, I rarely see a lot of those girls now, but that experience has stayed with me. I’ll always hold a dear affection for those girls, they were witnesses to a version of me I was still figuring out. They saw me at my worst, when I wasn’t always easy to be around. And still, there was something healing about that trip. We went twice, actually.

I remember the long walks, past the hills, down winding trails, across fields full of cows (which terrified my friend Josie, she would scream if we got too close). We saw deer, birds, even wild horses. There was something so surprisingly familiar about that place. I felt oddly at home, even though I’d truly expected to feel like an outsider. Growing up, only my white friends visited the countryside. Their families either had second homes outside London or were originally from those rural areas. So, inherently, I internalised the idea that the countryside wasn’t meant for people like me, that it belonged exclusively to white people. To add more salt to that wound, when my family and I visited Cornwall, we were met with stares in public that made us feel like some sort of traveling sideshow titled: “The North Africans Have Come to Steal Our Jobs!” Not to say my experience was terrible at all, but as a child my fond memories are often overshadowed by my negative experiences.

But, there was a quietness to Suffolk that I hadn’t known I needed. A softness. I was not met by hostile stares by the townspeople. Everyone was so welcoming and sincere. And though the hills weren’t particularly steep or threatening, they were wide, vast enough to get lost in. That was the part that scared me: the possibility of disappearing. But it was also what made it beautiful.

That’s the strange thing about the sublime. It is not always in the towering cliffs or violent storms. Sometimes it’s in the silence, in the wide open, in the way a hill can stretch forever. Those trips changed me. I learned a lot about myself walking through that countryside.

Years later, I went on my first big girl hike (not in the UK) but in my home country. It was, surprisingly, the first time I’d ever truly hiked. No casual stroll or tourist trail, but a real, sweating, climbing, leg-burning hike. And something shifted in me. I had never felt so at peace in my own body. It was a kind of calm I’ve never been able to replicate anywhere else…not in cities, not even in the small quiet of my room. The feeling I had when I reached the top of the mountains of Djurdjra was incomparable, I was exhilarated by the view, the experience. I cannot wait to go hiking again, maybe, next time, in Scotland.

Since then, I’ve caught myself daydreaming about living in the country surrounded by nature. A quaint cottage. Maybe a farm. Two cats, a dog. Something slower. The sublime doesn’t have to be grand, I feel as though it can be subtle too. It can be a place you never expected to feel like home.

And I know my parents are reading this, before you call me spoiled, I loved every countryside trip we went on and I hope we can all go on another one soon. I am so grateful you guys took me out to experience so much of the world at such a young age- I love you both so much.

Cute sign in Suffolk…miss it