The reward of solitude

Text 1: Three Days Across the Cinder Plains, by Louisa Brereton

An original travel writing written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

We left the last farm at Hrauntún at six in the morning, my guide Jón riding ahead with the baggage ponies, and myself following upon a little grey mare whose name, I was told, meant Smoke. For the next three days we did not see a house, a tree or a human being. The track, where there was a track, led across plains of black cinder and grey moss, past lakes of a blue so intense that it seemed artificial, and beneath mountains whose tops were hidden in cloud. Jón spoke perhaps a dozen words of English and I perhaps six of Icelandic, so that for the most part we rode in silence.

I had been warned that I should find this solitude oppressive. Ladies at home assured me that I should be frightened, or bored, or both. I was neither. I have never in my life been so entirely free of the chatter of other people, of calls to pay and letters to answer and opinions to agree with. At night, lying in my little tent upon the moss, I could hear nothing at all but the ponies cropping and the wind, and I felt that I was hearing the world as it sounded before anyone was in it.

On the fourth day we came down into a green valley and a farmhouse with a turf roof, where the farmer’s wife gave us coffee and fresh skyr and would not hear of payment. I was grateful, and the warmth of the kitchen was very welcome. But I confess that as I sat there among the children and the dogs and the steam of the coffee pot, I felt a pang almost of grief, as though I had been woken from the best dream of my life. It is the empty places I see when I close my eyes.

Text 2: A Thousand Miles by Kayak, by Callum Strachan

An original contemporary travel writing.

Last summer I paddled a sea kayak around the north and west coasts of Scotland, alone, a thousand miles in ten weeks. I set off with a romantic idea of solitude: just me, the sea and the sky, like a monk in a very small and wobbly cell. For the first fortnight that is roughly what I got. Some days I spoke to no one at all, and I found that I liked it. My thoughts slowed down to the speed of the boat.

Then, somewhere off Cape Wrath, I capsized in a cold swell and lost half my food, and by the time I dragged myself onto a beach near a fishing village I was shaking so hard I could not undo the buckles of my spray deck. A man mending nets watched me for a while and then, without a word, walked over and undid them for me. That evening his wife fed me lamb stew and their teenage son showed me, on his phone, a weather forecast I had been too proud to check.

After that, the journey changed. I still paddled alone, but the coast was full of people: a ferryman who let me sleep in his shed, a woman on Skye who drove forty miles to bring me a spare paddle, a group of retired teachers on a beach who adopted me for an evening and taught me a song I have forgotten. The solitude was wonderful, and I would not trade it. But what I remember now, a year later, are the faces. I went to sea to be alone. I came home having discovered how many people are waiting along the edges of a country to help a stranger.

‘Both writers present solitude as the greatest reward of their journeys.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about each writer’s journey
• explain how far you agree that solitude is the greatest reward for both writers
• compare the ways the writers present being alone and meeting other people.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.