Walking Towards Walden

An exploration of sense of place, what it means, how it developed, and why it matters.

Based on an eighteenth-century literary device in which a group of friends undertake a walking tour and discuss a certain subject, this wide-ranging story emerges from the author s fifteen-mile bushwhack through woods, backyards, and marshes from a hilltop in Westford, Massachusetts, to the town of Concord, Massachusetts trespassing all along the way. A mock epic, complete with encounters with armed mercenaries and vicious dogs, the book covers all the aspects of place art, literature, myth, and even music.John Hanson Mitchell's work is focused on a square mile tract of land known as Scratch Flat, located about thirty-five miles north-west of Boston. Mitchell has used this anomalous landscape of rolling hills, farms, forests and encroaching suburbs to explore his continuing interest in natural and human history and the whole question of place in human cultures, both native and European. Best known of this series of books is the first, Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile, a New York Times Editors' Choice. The latest book in the group is An Eden of Sorts: The Natural History of My Feral Garden. All of these books have been collected together in a series known as The Scratch Flat Chronicles.