About five years ago, around the time I walked the Cleveland Way, I made a number of books consisting of index cards sewn together. Each card had written on it a word or phrase of something that I’d seen on one one of my walks, or which came into my mind by free association. It was an attempt to paint a picture of the experience of those walks in words, synthesised with feelings and ideas I was working with in my paintings at that time. I recently looked them out and realised that they were more successful than the paintings I was doing at that time. They read like poems. Here is one book in its entirety:
Red cliffs
The sea
Deep water
Rain
thistles
a jay
Things growing in hollows
Water courses
Crushed tarmac road
Very dark clouds and very light clouds
Houses as a natural part of the landscape
Landscape created by man – to draw the landscape is to draw man
Wilderness
Brick pits
Ash
Clouds created by eddies
Thermals
Growing cumulus
new shoots through burnt earth
Long paths
Horizontal lines
Red rain
Lapwings
A holly hedge
Oaks
God
Roman soldiers
The gap between heaven and earth
Distant smoke
mercy
weariness
a man carrying a burden
Hang gliders
Walking up a steep hill
Pale trees
Skulls in pale sand
New bracken growing through heather
Rainclouds
A dusty pale lemon path through black heather
lemon coloured earth and stones
A red chimney
Spring green, black and red
The shadows of clouds moving across the landscape
A patch of red sheep sorrel growing among black heather
Ploughed field
Red soil
Curlew
Grouse
Burnt shale
black heather
Gullies and scars
dragonfly
Grey and honey coloured porous limestone
Pea green against dark purple, almost grey
Sheep sorrel (died back)
Puffballs
Swallows
Different shades of heather. White, silver grey, lilac, orangey-lilac, purple, brown. Dead thistles
Green in the gully, with reds
Brown bracken
Bracken copper and green
Brownish purple
Bilberry with coppery tinge
Bees buzzing
Hole of Horcum
The Rufforth tip
A pile of red earth
A pile of vermillion
A pile of ash
A pile of bricks
A pile of stones
A pile of skulls
Bonfires
Thistles in stony ground
Compacted earth
Compacted rubble
Piles of stones
Piles of turnips
Piles of manure
Piles of suitcases
Piles of cinders
Burdock
Matthew Herring's Blog 
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