Before I visit a place I often feel like I’ve already been there.

I’ve seen the drone footage and photographs and I’ve seen the “must see” viewpoints circled on maps and shared across social media. Nowadays places arrive in fragments long before our footsteps do. Does this somehow spoil the journey? 

Sometimes people ask me why I revisit places I’ve already been to, rather than going somewhere new. “You’ve already been there, isn’t it boring?’ they ask. Sometimes I need a little familiarity, to know what steps lie ahead of me. Although, do we ever really know what lies ahead? 

When I recently revisited Chee Dale Stepping Stones, I thought I knew what to expect having visited before. While some details returned with a strange clarity, other parts of it felt entirely unfamiliar. Some sections I thought I remembered had changed completely. How could I forget the steep, shiny stone ‘scramble’ that at points forced me to slide on my bottom?

It made me wonder whether we ever truly return to the same place twice?

I’d only been there once before, but in my memory it had become somewhat ‘complete’. I thought I knew it already. It was ticked off and done. But returning there made me realise how selective memory really is. I later found myself reading about how memory works and discovered something unsettlingly beautiful: memories are not replayed perfectly like recordings. They are reconstructed each time we return to them, subtly reshaped by time, emotion and whatever came afterwards. In other words, remembering changes the memory itself.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I start to return to places I’ve already painted. 

Shutlingsloe for instance has become ‘the comfortable one’.

I know where the path steepens, where the views first begin to open and where Pika usually stops to investigate something invisible in the grass. The landscape has started to feel less like a destination and more like an old friend. But despite knowing what to expect I don’t think that familiarity freezes a place in time. If anything, it layers it.

Walking there now means walking alongside previous versions of myself. I remember different weather, different conversations with different people along the way, different seasons and different reasons for climbing the hill in the first place. The routes stay recognisable, but the experience never fully repeats itself.

Perhaps that’s why certain places become important to us. Not because they stay the same, but because they quietly witness how we change over time.

At first glance Marking the Wild might solely look like an attempt to preserve these places, which it is. But, they aren’t really trying to capture the landscape exactly as it was, they’re also trying to capture a part of myself as I was. The colours become brighter, tone choices shift. Some shadows deepen. Shapes are simplified or enhanced. Certain features become exaggerated while others disappear entirely. Sometimes the initial sketch shows a small bushy tree, but I remember it taller and more elegant so, I allow that to come through.

Pair this with the Footnotes pack and those memories become even more colourful.

This means the artwork changes the place too, but that’s inevitable.

Perhaps every sketch, photograph, painting, memory and retelling becomes another version of the landscape, translated through whoever experienced it.

That’s why returning matters to me.

Not because we expect to find the exact same place waiting for us, unchanged and preserved, but because we don’t.

The landscape shifts. Memory shifts. We shift with them.

So maybe we never truly return to the same place twice.

Maybe we simply meet a new version of it each time.

And, quietly, a new version of ourselves too.