In Thomas Birtles’ photographs of the Manchester Ship Canal under construction (1887) the bottom of the vast earthworks is lined with railway tracks. Civil engineering projects in this pre automotive era, including the construction of railway lines, used temporary tracks to enable locomotives to transport aggregates and other materials. Once completed, the finished tracks of a railway line were known as the Permanent Way. Before photography, the railway was of the most popular subjects for the mass entertainment of the panorama. Part of the appeal of these railroad panoramas was the recreation of a journey, the movement of travel, conveyed in a succession of landscape pictures. Very possibly railroad photography, by following the path of a railway mile by mile, developed the practice of sequencing photographs in a progressive order. But unlike the unwinding scrolls of the moving panoramas or the footage of moving film, photography is resolutely stationary.

The photographs of the incomplete M6 Toll Motorway bear a striking comparison to those of the Manchester Ship Canal under construction. Once the water has flooded in, or the road surfaced, rapidly create the impression that the landscape has always been that way. The period of transition has been erased; the pathways have been established. within a short space of time the traffic makes the landscape look as though it has always looked this way, that glimpse in between times gone forever. Then those pathways take on a visage of their own. The untouchable netherworld of London railway lines running behind the houses form a corridor along the anti-façade of the city, the huge embankments cutting deep intrusions into the urban landscape. These are sites seen and traversed but never trodden.

Just as a photograph is made from a solitary position, so the viewing of a photograph is ultimately a solitary experience, as lonesome as the ubiquitous promeneur solitaire  in romantic literature or a W G Sebald protagonist. As much as a path may be the way forward, a journey may also be a return. Photography rarely faces forward; it shows Eudora Welty’s “full severe look behind”. Hodology retraces these neural pathways, as does the solitary narrator. In time, the grandest schemes of civil engineering become the footpaths of personal experience.