Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

We trot on, briskly, to the motorway bridge. From where I spot a tea stall sign. Renchi is adamant: we don’t have the time. He’s in the middle, just now, of complicated holiday season travel plans that carry him from a Wordsworth seminar in Cumbria to a New Age symposium in Portugal. He has inherited his father’s Citroën.

Soft estate walking — there’s no other means of reconnecting with the Pilgrims Way, on the north of the M25 — is like plunging into a river in spate. Juggernauts lurch on to Junction 6 (Sevenoaks, Dartford). We opt for the A22 (E. Grinstead, Eastbourne) — before recrossing the motorway by Flower Lane.

A police bike pulls us. No sane person would voluntarily offer themselves as roadkill. August is the optimum period for animal ironing, clogging tyre grooves with flesh and fur. Fifty thousand badgers, 100,000 foxes and at least 10 million birds: ex’d, maimed, mutilated. The Glorious Twelfth! We are walking on the day when grouse are slaughtered in the Highlands, on the Yorkshire Moors. In the south, traditionalists use the M25; a motor vehicle hurtling at seventy, eighty, ninety miles an hour. There are tunnels under the road for badgers, but nothing for humans: as we explain to the policeman. Entry to the fields is forbidden. There is no other route.

I’ve had meals in Shoreditch where people raved over the pheasant — before discovering that the feast was roadkill. Birds scraped from tarmac. Watercress scavenged from Chiltern pools. A room of drooling carnivores begging for the recipe, the frisson of scorched rubber across traumatised meat.

And here it is, courtesy of Jonathan Thomson:

The entire process is as follows:

• Having gathered the creature from the road, I check to ensure the condition of the bird is reasonable — I reject those which are infested with maggots or are too damaged from the impact of the collision.

• Once gathered next step is to pluck the bird — I always do this while still in the country — this is a problematic task in central London.

• A good ‘hanging’, from the neck with entrails intact, is essential to bring the flavour on — if this step is missed or the duration of the hanging is too short the meat does not develop a sufficiently ‘gamey’ flavour. The hanging process and the smell this produces stirs many adverse comments from those who live in our building; the last hanging bird was hauled down because of the strength of protest rather than the meat being sufficiently matured.

• On completion of the hanging the bird is gutted and cleaned.

• The cooking is as follows: I very slowly cook the legs in braise of white wine, game stock, onions, carrots, juniper berries and thyme. The dish is best cooked in a heavy skillet. Method is as follows: sear the legs over a high heat in butter and oil. Remove; add salt & pepper and sweat off onions, carrots and celery until softened — then add 2 crushed garlic cloves. Deglaze the pan with either white wine or calvados — ensure that all the sediment is scraped from the bottom of the pan. Replace the pheasant legs and add enough game stock to generously cover the bottom of the pan. Put into a moderate oven and cook slowly until tender. To finish: remove the legs (keep at serving temperature), strain off the braising vegetables and reserve the liquor in a saucepan (this is optional, the brazing vegetables can be retained). Place over a high heat and reduce, thicken the sauce with cream.

• The breasts, which are removed from the carcass before cooking, are cooked very quickly and served close to rare — dependent on individual taste. I cook the breasts on a skittle over a medium heat in a little butter and olive oil. Once cooked they are sliced and plated — they are served with a sauce which is made from the stock of the boned/legged bird and sometimes finished with cream to thicken.

• The vegetables I like to serve with this dish are roughly mashed potatoes, fresh fine green beans and carrots.

It’s not just a Carl Hiaasen menu of birds and hedgehogs and foxes, it’s fish. ‘Impervious edges to roads,’ as journalist Sanjida O’Connell reports, ‘increase the flow of water from the road into streams — leading to a build up of sediment, increased water temperature and pollution’. Salmon, apparently, are very sensitive to irregular ‘flash flows’. Salmon loss affects many other species, including bears and orca whales. The chain of interconnections is alarming: Moby-Dick threatened with extinction by the Art Nouveau filigree of Junction 5, its run-off into the River Darent.

Highway chemicals leech into streams. Heavy metals overwhelm motorway — fringe wildlife. Rock salt, used in road gritting, is toxic to many species of plant. Fish are unwell. Song birds, sensitive to the M25’s acoustic footprints, back off. Vibrations from the constant, twenty-four-hour madness of traffic persuades earthworms to keep their heads down; leading to an excess of crows — and crowkill — as birds try to prise their breakfast from unsuspected depths.

Now seriously peckish, almost ready to dispute crow-spoil, we lengthen our stride. If we stick with the Pilgrims Way, the first refuelling station will be Westerham; which is over the Kent border and about seven miles on. Sometimes we’re in deep countryside, no settlement in sight, no trace of the road — other than a continuing sense of unreality. Tidy fields, without cattle. Well-kept B-roads linking villages and farms. A lush buffer zone, a cushion. The unseen motorway as the dominant presence.

We’re always within a single field of tarmac, or admiring the pinkish-silver stream from a safe distance. The temperature is climbing. A sticky morning. Renchi abandons shirt and bandanna. We swim through a huge field of what looks like sweet corn, the feeling is Mediterranean. Like Godard’s Pierrot le Fou . Bright, comic-book colours; greens and blues. A hazy sun. Camions jostling for position on a shimmering road. The dry morse of crickets.

It’s when we sit to interrogate the map that I miss my spectacles; the act of having to take them off, or shove them up towards a vanished hairline. We’re on the nursery slopes, an arable field (unoptioned golf course) giving a clear view of the motorway, the steady mid-morning traffic.

I’ll go back. That’s my first thought. The bench. The ‘viewing point’. Which means: all that way along the edge of the quarry, the steps cut into the hillside, the travellers’ bungalows. The dogs. I’ll leave my rucksack, try a gentle jog — while Renchi, dressed only in shorts and boots, dries his shirts on the fence; presses his hands together, meditates on the landscape and his passage through it.

I lurch through a couple of fields, down among the corn, up the next slope, then change my mind. A degree of softness in focus is no problem. It might even be a benefit. Elective Impressionism. Anything close is still sharp. I’d rather put up with the hassle (and expense) of getting another pair of specs than endure the additional hours in Surrey. Let my Kingsland Road frames be the necessary sacrifice.

Renchi, in all probability, hasn’t noticed that I’ve gone. Dark blue sweater, light blue bandanna, white T-shirt: draped along the fence. Gently steaming. The pale-skinned, half-nude mendicant squats in the dirt, contemplating our assault on the Valley of Vision.

He has become, in my conceit, both a reprise and an anticipation of his great-grand-uncle, Clarence Bicknell. A physical embodiment of the Eternal Return and a tribute to the Victorian botanist (hillwalker, watercolourist, tracer of the rock-engravings of Monte Bego in the maritime Alps). Memory is homage. Engraved by time and experience, we grow to look like daguerreotypes of ancestors who have rehearsed our destiny. Except that they did it with more conviction, more innocence. Instead of hopping, boulder to boulder over black-violet sandstone and fine-grained schist, taking rubbings of Early Bronze Age rock carvings, we slide down Beckton Alp, photographing middens of urban rubbish.