A walk that began at the birth of our planet and ended with a question only we can answer.
DEEP TIME WALK – INTERMEDIATE LEVEL – GUIDE PAUL GRAHAM – AWENRA PATHWAYS
This event has been delivered as part of World Wellbeing Week 2026
which runs from Wednesday 24 June to Tuesday 30 June 2026.
Some events leave you with a stronger sense of where you are in the world. Others leave you with a completely different sense of when. Our recent Deep Time Walk, an intermediate-level 4.6-kilometre journey guided by Paul from Awenra Pathways, belonged firmly in the second category.
Every two steps of our route corresponded to a million years of Earth’s history. At that scale, the ground beneath our feet became something else entirely: a record of volcanic upheaval, of oceans rising and vanishing, of the quiet, patient emergence of life in forms we would barely recognise. Paul guided the group with both knowledge and care, unfolding the story of our planet layer by layer — or, rather, step by step.
From the beginning of everything
The walk opened in deep time: a molten, churning Earth with no atmosphere capable of sustaining anything we might call life. From there, the group moved through the slow accretion of possibility, the first single-celled organisms, the astonishing leap to complex life, the great extinctions that cleared the way for what came next. The narrative was immense and yet walking it, inhabiting it physically, made it feel strangely intimate.
By the time the landscape of recognisable Earth came into view, most of the walk was already behind us.
The age of dinosaurs, the appearance of flowering plants, the arrival of mammals, all of it compressed into the final stretch of the route. And then, very near the end, humans.
“We’ve been here for about a fingernail’s worth of time. We can nurture, protect, love and enjoy our home or continue to mess it up. It’s up to us. I learnt on this 4.6 billion year walk that the earth will recover with time, with or without us”
Vernon John – walk participant
It is hard to imagine a more precise summary of what the walk offered. Vernon’s words, shared with the group, captured something that statistics and documentary footage rarely manage: the felt reality of our brevity, and the weight of the choice that brevity places on us.
Impermanence, resilience, and what we choose to do with now
To close the walk, Paul offered something more lyrical, a poem, by Ferris Jabr, whose themes settled into the group like sediment. It spoke to the very things the day had stirred: the impermanence of any single moment in deep time, the extraordinary resilience of life across billions of years, and the strange, quietly urgent significance of this brief window in which we find ourselves
We won’t reproduce the poem here, it belongs to the walk, and to the experience of hearing it in that context, in that landscape, at that moment. If you want to encounter it as it was intended, the best thing to do is book a walk with Paul and let it arrive the way it arrived for those on this walk.
“It was a great walk and put all that history into perspective. It also highlighted the importance of the decisions we make now for the planet’s (and our) future”
Dai Lloyd – walk participant
What the Deep Time Walk gives you, above all else, is proportion. Not hopelessness but steady reaffirming proportion. The Earth is old, and it is resilient, and it will endure. The question the walk leaves open, the one that followed participants home, is the one Vernon named so clearly: what do we choose to do with the time that is ours?
Our small woodland sits above one of Britain’s most important Westphalian geological sequences — Carboniferous strata 300 million years old, bearing stigmaria root fossils and spore assemblages that help correlate coalfields across the country. The Deep Time Walk gave this ancient record a human heartbeat. Every choice made in our small corner of South Wales is part of something immeasurably larger. We don’t just protect trees, we are custodians of Earth’s deep autobiography, written in stone beneath our feet. Walking through deep time with Paul, we understood afresh why every tree we plant, every creature we care for, every child we bring to this ancient ground, matters. Deep time is not behind us. We are living it.
Deep Time Walk practitioners carry this same understanding, that our minute contributions, in the grand sweep of 4.6 billion years, still matter profoundly. The future of all life is shaped by countless small acts of care, including yours.
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Deep Time Walk practitioners are actively using this experience to contribute to a thriving future for all life, carrying the perspective of deep time into their communities, relationships, and decisions.
Our thanks to Paul – Awenra Pathways, for guiding us through 4.6 billion years with such skill, warmth, and wisdom. We hope to see more of our community on future walks as I’m sure we will put on another walk with Paul for those who missed this one.
Awenra Pathways
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