1980 : 1981 :1982 : 1983 : 1984 : 1985 : 1986 : 1987 : 1988 : 1989

CROSSING STONES

A STONE FROM ALDEBURGH BEACH ON THE EAST COAST CARRIED TO ABERYSTWYTH BEACH ON THE WEST COAST
A STONE FROM ABERYSTWYTH BEACH ON THE WEST COAST CARRIED TO ALDEBURGH BEACH ON THE EAST COAST
A 626 MILE WALK IN 20 DAYS
ENGLAND WALES ENGLAND
(www.richardlong.org/)

One walk involved taking a stone from Aldeburgh beach in Suffolk and leaving it on Aberystwyth beach in Wales. Long then reversed the process and carried another stone from Aberystwyth back to Aldeburgh. [...]
The text accompanying his Aldeburgh-Aberystwyth walk, a single sheet of paper framed and designed to be hung, tells us nothing beyond the facts that he carried the stones and walked 626 miles in 20 days. "They are authentic," he says. "I have done them and the texts are the residue of a factual event. On the other hand, I realise that they are not about proof. They are perhaps incidental proof of being there or seeing something. So I try to make the walks work on the level of a good idea even if someone doesn't believe I did it or it never happened. It has to work for unbelievers as well."
(www.guardian.co.uk/)

But Long uses maps, and a compass probably, to move through a landscape any feature of which suffices to establish a direction towards which or away from which he walks. And when he gets to Aberystwyth Beach he knows it isn't Aldeburgh Beach. So where is this blank he is supposed to be in? The two beaches cannot in fact differentiate the ends of the line walked from each other for the line is undifferentiated from end to end. To be at the Aldeburgh end is to be at the Aberystwyth end: it is the beaches, not the ends, which differ. The line floats free of external coordinates, those mountain ranges, beaches, or groups of trees, by defining itself as in a void, i.e., as a line without direction so without coordinates.
(Conor Joyce, Walking Into History, FlashArt International, July, 1989, pp 114- 117 (www.speronewestwater.com/))