Anywhere: A Mythogeography of South Devon and How to Walk It

Mythogeographer Phil Smith has been walking, exploring, photographing, filming, talking, and writing about South Devon for about 20 years. He has absorbed it, and it him. In Anywhere, walking and writing as character Cecile Oak (a young PhD student of Symbolist art and performance who is invited to report on a Radical Walking conference in Paignton) Phil offers us an extraordinarily vivid portrait of a small part of South Devon. The picture he presents is not always pretty but never short of startling and sometimes jaw-dropping detail. And it’s all brought to exhilarating life in this account of a series of intense journeys that he has made on foot in these places. Anywhere is an adventure, momentous and fleshy as any novel. It is also the first, detailed mythogeographical survey of a defined area. Its subject is the place, the landscape, the buildings, the history, and the people. It sets in motion, around each other, its subject’s geological instabilities, deep political fissures, legends and monsters, street generosities, and unexpected histories. This is Devon as it has never been seen before; Devon from deep within, mined and ploughed by a quarter century of investigation, treading its footpaths and pavements. And Anywhere is also a way of looking and feeling: a lesson in how to be (and walk) in your own place, village, city, countryside, wilderness. It is a guidebook for anywhere. Anywhere is intended for radical-, artist, performance- and everyday-walkers, Situationists and dérivistes; artists and [site-specific] performers who use walking in their work; human, urban and cultural geographers; students discovering and studying a world of resistant and aesthetic walking; tourists who want to leave the beach; and anyone troubled by official guides to anywhere. [Subject: Devon, Walking, Mythogeography, Psychogeography]