Inside A Mountain: walking real and imaginary landscape with Charlie Lee-Potter

Prize-winning poet Penny Boxall has spent the past year as writer-in-residence at Wytham Woods in Oxford, studying soil. The results - a series of decomposing poems - are her farewell gift to the woods: buried poems, submerged poems, and poems written on fruit. As Penny finishes her residency, Charlie begins her own at Wytham. On a sunny autumn day, they walked the woods together with spade and hammer, as Penny hid her year's work around tree trunks, in moss and in earth. 

Music for 'Calcite Eyes' from Replaying the Tape composed and performed by Jane Boxall. 

Multimedia artist Fungai Marima printing her work Burn Out on an etching press

Fungai Marima is a prize-winning multimedia artist who specialises in printmaking and live performance. She uses her body in her work, imprinting it on glass or onto metal etching plates to express her sense of solidarity with those who've endured abuse and cruelty. Her work is visceral and sometimes disturbing and yet it exudes a sense of hope that things can be made better. I first met Fungai when we completed our Masters of Fine Art Printmaking together. I’ve always been struck by her brilliance but also by her ability to stick by the phrase which guides her – be kind. Born in Zimbabwe and living in London, Fungai has exhibited her work around the world. She has held various  international art residencies and her work is in private collections around the UK.

Fungai preparing to be rolled into the etching press to create her work Passage. She talks about the intense emotion behind the creation of  this work in the podcast episode. © Fungai Marima

Fungai creating her 8-hour walking work, Burn Out ©Fungai Marima

The writer Noreen Masud was brought up in Lahore with her three sisters. When she was a teenager, and with no warning, her doctor father banished them from Pakistan and, since then, she's created a life for herself as an academic. But now suffering from complex post-traumatic stress disorder, Noreen compulsively seeks out flat places in the landscape - bare spaces where she can see for miles and which find an echo in the traumatised, flat place inside herself. Her strange and original memoir A Flat Place, deservedly nominated for top literary prizes, is an ode to flatness and to the power of what lies beneath.  Noreen and Charlie walk the flat, muddy shoreline of Severn Beach - and talk about bones, flesh, and beauty. 

Artist Jake Tilson doesn't care if his projects take decades to complete - in fact, he likes it when they do. He's just finished recreating his vision of Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, an art project which took him years and involved walking around the market for thousands of miles. His recent solo show, which included miniature recreations of some of Tsukiji's 1,700 fish stalls, was a triumph of imagination, technical skill and eccentricity. The work is also a ghostly tribute to a market which no longer exists. In this episode Jake explains why walking and typography are so crucial to his work - and how to make a typeface out of eels. 

Jake's miniature fish stalls on show at White Conduit Projects

Photo credit: Jake Tilson

Jake's vast walking map of Tsukiji

Photo credit: Jake Tilson

The legendary pink pay 'phone 

Photo credit: Agnese Sanvito

Jade Angeles Fitton had been living a frenetic, toxic life in London, trapped in an abusive relationship and seemingly willingly to continue living that way. But, having been abandoned in a remote Devon barn when the relationship finally collapsed for good, she discovers the powerful consolation that silence can bring. Living as a hermit, she relishes the soothing solace of living alone and speaking to no-one. Her memoir, Hermit: A memoir of finding freedom in a wild place, celebrates isolation - a way of life that's so often misunderstood. Charlie and Jade take a walk from the Devon beach of Croyde to Baggy Point on the cliffs above - the path that Jade used to tread every day alone.... 

Jade Angeles Fitton at Baggy Point and, below, the calming presence of Lundy on the horizon. 

This episode takes a walk, but a very short one. That's because my companion is Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, professor of English at Magdalen College, Oxford, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2017. The disease has wrecked his capacity to walk more than a few hundred metres - and wonky, clumsy metres at that. But Robert has substituted physical walks with imaginative ones, scanning his mind for ways of reading himself through literature. His powerful, funny and frank memoir Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces is a sparkling demonstration of the places our minds can take us when our feet can't. 

SERIES 2

Episode 2: Night Walking with Anthologist Duncan Minshull

The writer Duncan Minshull has compiled five anthologies about walking, the latest being Where My Feet Fall. In this episode, Duncan and Charlie explore the streets of London at night to see what effect the darkness has on the way they think. There's a long tradition of writers and artists walking at night: Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Thomas de Quincey. What was it about the gloom they craved? 

Duncan Minshull on Hamilton Terrace

The canal in Little Venice where Duncan and Charlie start their night walk

SERIES 2

Episode 1: Dodging Falling Trees with Ian McMillan 

The poet Ian McMillan, presenter of The Verb on BBC Radio 3 and poet-in-residence at Barnsley Football Club, tells stories by the yard - eccentric, ridiculous, compassionate and wise. Ian has lived in the same South Yorkshire village of Darfield his entire life and writes about it with a unique mix of pride and hilarity. He's a performance poet and author of biographical stories such as My Sand Life, My Pebble Life: a Memoir of Childhood and the Sea, and Neither Nowt Nor Summat, a perplexed rummage in the mystery of what it means to be 'Yorkshire enough'. His writing has readers weeping with laughter, but there's deep human kindness in there too.  Ian and Charlie start their walk in the graveyard of Darfield Church, but they don't get very far before trees intervene...

EPISODE 6

Tom Chivers' book London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City is erudite and meticulously researched, but it's also funny, poetic and at times very moving. Tom digs down below the surface of the city to find its ancient, lost rivers, whilst also examining his own past. The book is part geological, part historical, and part reflective. 

In this episode, Tom and Charlie explore an ancient, subterranean Roman temple, go mudlarking, and find treasure. 

The Temple of Mithras (3 AD) 7 metres below ground level

Mudlarking with Tom Chivers on the foreshore of the River Thames

Tom Chivers, London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City (Doubleday, 2021)

Produced, edited, written and presented by Charlie Lee-Potter

EPISODE 5

Marcus du Sautoy, Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, has the kind of imagination which draws on complex mathematics, music, science and literature simultaneously. On this walk through a North London park, Marcus and Charlie cover both literal and imaginative ground - and one of them gets lost in the marshes.