County diary: lines made by walking

Wenlock Edge, Shropshire Thawing snow highlights the paths people - and animals - take through the landscape

A thin white track up the field marked where footsteps of schoolchildren, dog walkers and ramblers had compacted the snow and turned it to ice. When the thaw came only the narrow ice track remained: white, opalescent, slippery and dangerous to walk on. People took to the sides of the path, already claggy from before the snow, making the white line through dark earth even more pronounced.

I was reminded of the work of the land artist Richard Long. A Line Made by Walking (1967), Long's photograph of a simple line that he had walked through short grass, had been really inspiring for me - as enigmatic as a ley line, a ghost image, ephemeral and transient. It had an important influence on how I saw marks in the landscape as a kind of writing.