Take a ruler. Take a map of Wales. Draw a straight line from border to coast… then pack a bag and walk it. To anyone familiar with the brambly, moist, sometimes-rocky terrain of the Welsh countryside this might seem like an insane idea. Nature, after all, doesn’t work in straight lines. Forests, rivers, swamps, and thickets do not permit direct travel, funnelling walkers instead along contour lines, down established footpaths, around private properties and bodies of water.

To Tom Davies, known on YouTube as GeoWizard, this unusual walk didn’t seem insane at all. Indeed, when he first conceived of the Mission Across Wales (as he came to call it) Tom was mostly enamoured with how much fun it would be – not surprising given a youth spent wading rivers and sneaking through farms in rural Staffordshire with his step-brother.

In March 2019 Tom set off from the border between England and Wales. He spent the next several days competing with every conceivable danger and difficulty, from fast-flowing streams to barbed wire fences and angry farmers.

The Situationist International viewed walking in a straight line as a potentially revolutionary act – a refusal to corralled by the architecture of a town or city. Tom, however, took on the quest in the spirit of pure fun and adventure. And he recorded the entire thing.

The footage (edited and published on his YouTube channel) is oddly hypnotic. Even mile after mile of dense forest or a featureless patchwork of fields is rendered intriguing by his single-minded passage through it. With impressive determination he treks through mossy woodland, threshes through groves and hedges, swears his way up and then down imposing, misty hillsides.

Even when the landscape is largely unchanging, there are moments of intrigue, each one all the more dramatic for its isolation. Tom discovers an abandoned safe, retrieves a stashed inflatable canoe to paddle across Lake Vyrnwy, and negotiates a number of mildly-awkward encounters with bemused farmers and landowners. As rainy and monotonous as it all is, there’s a sublime tension that runs throughout.

Will he make it, or will he be forced to deviate from his line? Will he risk wading an unexpectedly high river? Will he be spotted and escorted off the land by an irate farmer? These are questions that become invested with huge importance for the viewer simply due to Tom’s dedication to his goal… and which can only be answered by watching the video series in its entirety.

So far, almost a 1,000,000 people have already done so. It is clear from their reactions that the long-distance straight line walk represents a new and radical way of engaging with the landscape. With it in mind, hills and forest become obstacles not to avoid, but to challenge and perhaps conquer. We can find grand adventure even on quiet Welsh hillsides. We can, in Tom’s words, do something nobody has ever done before.