I recently saw a China clay splattered wall in Tate Modern. It was hypnotic. It so impressed me that I knew I had to visit this exhibition at Tate Britain. Now I am sizing up a wall in my house for the same treatment.

The landscape Richard Long travels through is familiar to me, I have walked in the West Country, cycled up rolling and steep hills, camped in the wet. The elements of Heaven and Earth which have provided him with such a subliminal foundation are the natural experiences that uplift you. Eddies on the River Avon as it gently flows to the sea, contour lines around the landscape made of water on the Kennet and Avon Canal. The massive forces that oddly pile up the shingle at Chesil Beach. And the snow tracks in Norway by the railway line to Mjölfjell in Norway, the route in a blizzard back from Pitkävuori to Niskala in Finland. The nine endless, unsupported, days of sunshine and the tenth day of torrential rain cycling from London to Helsinki, 1200 miles. One night sitting on a suitcase in a phonebox in Narvik with deep snows all around.

Life's journey and our journeys in life are the very stuff of our attraction to the work of Richard Long. I was quite surprised by the first gallery with the two walls daubed in mud from the River Avon. I have been attracted by the I-Ching for its symbolic patterns though the deeper levels of Taoism and Shinto are not so accessible after an upbringing in post Enlightenment culture. Yet while Science seeks all it hasn't found all.

I noted much that was written about the works on display, beside them and within them. Not quite everything, sometimes just the essential line. All my notes are below but I have also identified seven works that particularly appealed to me and added my few lines. First I should say that much that is written by the artist is essentially poetic. At the same time it is a recipe for wellbeing and communing with nature. Urban man and urban art is so far removed from this that the art of living in harmony with nature is being lost. The remove from aesthetics, appreciation, and care results in decadence and anti-social behaviour. We have to live with nature rather than destroy it, work with the elements observantly and caringly.

I Ching

Mud from the River Avon, Bristol

Heaven

Earth

Thus walking ­ as art ­ provided a simple way for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and movement.

A ten mile walk, England

1968

Map and pencil

(Exmoor Forest)

Cloven Rocks Bridge (Start) to Cowley Wood. (East to West)

A Walk of four Hours and Four Circles

1972

Map and pencil

Dartmoor Forest

A Six Day Walk over all Road, Lanes and Double Tracks inside a Six Mile Wide Circle Centred on the Giant of Cerne Abbas.

1975

B&W photo, map and collage

(North of Dorchester)

This six day walk is interesting. I am not sure that it would take only six days to repeat the walk in Islington, the density of the roads is so high in comparison with the countryside. There must be an urban equivalent; what is the pattern of a paper-round, a postman's walk, a milk-man's delivery route or a policeman's beat? The knowledge of a local area is a basis for Neighbourhood Watch. Yes, even in the rural areas where farmers suffer fly-tipping and cattle rustling and theft of farm machinery.

Inca Rock Camp-fire Ash

1972

B&W photo

Circle in the Andes

1972

A Line Made by Walking

1967

B&W photo

Anthony d'Offay, London

England, 1968

1968, B&W photo

Cross in lawn made by removing daisy flowers

On Midsummer's Day A Westbound Walk from Stonehenge at Sunrise to Glastonbury by Sunset. Forty-five miles following the day. 1972

Ireland 1967

1967 V&W photo

Three white circles in beach sand.

Reflections in the Little Great Smokey Mountains, Tennessee

1970 B&W photo

Boulders in X form in clear shallow stream waters, with lyrics by Johnny Cash, "I walk the line"

A Somerset Beach, 1968

B&W photo

A square of rocks on rocky shore

A Hundred Mile Walk Along a Straight line in Australia 1977

(Outback)

The High Plains: A Straight Hundred Mile Walk in the Canadian Prairie, 1974

Straight Miles and Meandering Miles

1985

Text work

A Line in the Himalayas

1975 B&W photo

(Rocks arranged in glacial scree)

A Circle in Ireland, County Clare 1975

B&W photo

Angular limestone terrace overlaid by boulders laid in circle

A Circle in Alaska

1977

Driftwood logs on shore

Circle in Africa 1978

B&W photo

Mulante Mountain, Malawi, dry broken branches in a circle

A Five Day Walk

First Day Ten Miles

Second Day Twenty Miles

Third Day Thirty Miles

Fourth Day Forty Miles

Fifth Day Fifty Miles

Totnes to Bristol by roads and lanes, England 1980

Windmill Hill to Coalbrookdale

1979

The Windmill Hill folk were the first inhabitants of England to make permanent changes in the landscape. Wiltshire to Shropshire. The Coalbrookdale Iron Bridge. Coalbrookdale on the River Severn gorge, was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.

This is not the same Windmill Hill, the one I know is in Hampshire not so far from Butser Hill. But there is only the one Coalbrookdale Iron bridge. It should be visited by everyone in this land. I have a photograph of this magnificent bridge as the screen image on my laptop. The civil engineering paleantologists will recognize these valuable cast iron bones as the DNA haplotype of all species of bridge thereafter.

Light Snow Sleeping Place

1983 B%W photo

A seven day wilderness walk in Lappland

Two Journeys One Road: A Clockwise Walk, Summer 1974, A Clockwise Bicycle Ride in Winter, 1975

Bootle ­ Nettleton ­ Barton in the Clay ­ Pontrilas ­ Chester (Stoak) ­ Ragnall ­ Norton ­ Bromyard ­ Audlem ­ Kirk Hallam ­ Harborough Magna ­ Rumsley ­ Cannock ­ No Man's Heath

Pencil on paper

Though the drawing is the record of the walk and the ride it is hugely imaginative in detailing every little twist and turn on the byways of central England. How would this look in the rectangular State of Colorado, or on the grid of New York City around Central Park? The names alone tell a history, and I only noted the turning points.

Dusty Boots line

1998 B&W photo

The Sahara

A Line in Scotland

1981 B&W photo

Cùl Mòr 1981

(About thirty stones raised in a row)

The impact of the raised stones is such that I want to go and see if they are still standing.

1               Stone Line, 1980, slate

(Sawn slate like petrified timbers)

2               Norfolk Flint circle, 1990

(A herd of flint sheep)

3               Red Slate Circle, 1988

(Bonsai landscape)

4               Alpine Circle

(Black stones and rust)

5               Black white Blue Purple Circle

(White stones rounded and washed in river, other stones with crystalline fractures, traces of blue)

6               Basalt Ellipse

(Basalt, polygonal columns like Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland)

This large gallery with six sculptures of stones isn't intended to compare with a Japanese Zen garden but there is something about the grouping of the six works that relates to the austere Buddhist landscaped gardens. Why is our urban landscape starved of these grand statements, replaced instead with fractured paving slabs, knobbly paviors for the blind, patinated asphalt with pock-marks of gum, windswept kerbs strewn with filter tips of street smokers, foot prints in dog mess. I saw in the Norfolk flint circle a herd of wooly sheep awaiting shearing.

A Dartmoor Walk 1987

Pencil drawing and printed text

Eight days

A Hundred Tors in a Hundred Hours 1976

A Seven Day Circle of Ground

1984 Text work

Circle of Autumn winds

1994

Reading the Wind

Reading the Compass

A walk of 46 miles inside an imaginary circle on Dartmoor

For those if us brought up on black line weather maps on the back page of the newspaper, this circle of wind arrows is delightful. There is a diary of a passing weather experience. I am reminded that last month, walking in Islington, I came upon a fragile elderly woman hanging on to a pole by the kerb. The wind was up, rushing round the corner of a tall building. She couldn't cross without fearing being blown over, I offered her my arm and she followed the shelter of the lee side of the street.

Five Ways 2006

Colour photos with printed text (diptych)

Watershed

River Avon to River Thames

120 miles in 39 hours

Bristol Bridge to London Bridge

1992

A Day Night Day Night Walk

Tide Walk

English Channel to Bristol Channel

Ebb and Flood Ebb and Flood Ebb 1992

Hours Miles

A walk of 24 hours = 82 miles

A walk of 24 miles in 82 hours

England 1996

White Water Line

China clay, St. Austell in Cornwall

Blowing in the Wind 1981

Colour photo

(A stone line) Bolivia

Karoo 2004

South Africa B&W photo

15 day walk in the locality of Guarrie Berg

Midday Muezzin Line

2006 Colour photo

Siwa, Egypt

This photograph is tantalizing because it isn't clear quite how the straight line dividing the pebbly landscape from the sandier landscape was arrived at. Was it natural or made by Richard long?

Megalith to Subatomic from Carnac to Cern

A walk of 603 miles in nineteen days across France to Switzerland, Autumn 2008

Alpine Stones 2000

B&W photo

Raised stones

Snowdonia Stones 2006

Colour photo

Raised stones

The Stones Sink Slowly with the Melting Ice of Summer 1973

Norway

There is something interesting about how frozen H2O can have the strength to support crystalline rock, until the thaw.

A Cloudless Walk

An eastward walk of 121miles in 312 days from the mouth of the Loire to the first cloud

France 1995

Waterlines 2003

Colour photo, printed text

Waterlines Warli Tribal Land, Maharashtra, India 2003

Never to Pass This Way Again, 2006

An eight day walk in Norway. (Mist and dusting of snow)

'My walk really is just about being a human being living on this planet and using nature as its source. I like the intellectual pleasure of original ideas and the physical pleasure of realizing them. A long road or a wilderness walk is basically walking all day and sleeping at night. I enjoy the simple pleasures of wellbeing, independence, opportunism, eating, dreaming, happenstance, of passing through the land and sometimes leaving (memorable) traces along the way, of finding a new campsite each night. And then moving on.'

'My Art is the essence of my experience, not a representation of it.'

Richard Long exhibition, the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, 1996, exhibition poster

Untitled, undated

River Avon mud on paper

Irish Rivers 2008

Screenprint on parchment paper. Edition of 60.

Amazonia as a tree, undated, etching

"The work is nothing unless it is recorded."

From cave paintings to here and now ­ human mark-making with what is to hand.

From beginning to end

2009

Vallauris clay