The Long Riders' Guild

I’m excited to say I’ll be riding horseback 1,000 miles end-to-end in the U.K. in 2009. My purpose is to draw together the many threads of my writing and thinking into a book about the human-natural world. I want to explore how people think about the land today by examining how we’ve thought about our place through time. I hope to come to understand the place land holds in the lives of Americans by looking through our filtering lenses of religion, myth, national identity, genealogy and genetics by comparing the place land held for us in the past. Since we are an immigrant peoples, I want to travel to where it began for many of us: the British Isles.

I have visited England five times, each on a whirlwind tour by car, never with enough time to sink into place, to absorb it, feel it, translate it. So, in the spirit of slow travel and of my unknown but land-bound ancestors, I will ride horseback from the farthest point north in Scotland, John O’Groats, to the farthest south point in England, Lands End. On the way I want to explore the continuing consequences of humanity’s past environmental choices and ensuing mindsets in a place that influenced and spawned today’s American culture. I want to visit holy wells, green man festivals, cathedrals, prehistoric sites, universities, genealogists, historic and modern gardens, crannogs, highlands and islands in search of the once and future human-environmental relationship.

For more information, please visit Greer's website.

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