A Book of Silence (28 page)

Islands are ‘delightful’ not just to hermits, but to many other more modern people as well. In 2003, indeed, a four-acre island in the Outer Hebrides came up for sale; it had a ruined cottage or bothy in a small cove at one end and wonderful views over a broken cliff and beach coastline, other tiny islands and the vast sea. My brother-in-law and I talked about buying it. I would rebuild the bothy and live there alone and later, when he retired, he would build a house at the other end. It was a daydream, really, and we both knew it. When I confronted the complications of power generation and motorboats, when I faced up to the long, long dark of the winters and the enormous distance and solitude, I quailed – to say nothing of the fact that my sister had no enthusiasm at all for the project!

And underneath those practicalities was a growing certainty that although I was entranced by the islands and felt their desolate loveliness deeply, they were not my place. The endless movement and sound of the sea was not my silence; the low-lying islands and flat expanse of ocean did not, for all its charms, offer me that lift of land and sense of space that the moors did. I knew, too, that I would feel contained and restricted within an island’s boundaries; that I would miss the long walks, the physical sense of the land being wider than I could encompass. The sense of ownership, of being ‘monarch of all I survey’,
⁹
was not as important to me as my sense of freedom, my right to roam.

What this little fantasy did make clear to me, however, is that what I was doing during the three years after my adventure into the complete silence of Skye was exploring the various terrains of silence, in both culture and wilderness, and finding everywhere the same ‘delight’ as the Irish poet found. It is hard to write about without it all sounding restless and unsettled, but I kept coming back from these various forays to my house on the moor and brooding in solitude and silence over what I was discovering. And one of the things
I discovered was that there was a traditional territory of silence that I was avoiding; and I was avoiding it because I was frightened.

I was scared of forests.

I am not alone – I know a good number of other people – bold walkers of high hills or those happy to sail little dinghies in tidal waters alone, both surely far more dangerous activities in physical terms – who do not like to be in forests, who are scared or freaked out by them. Some of this discomfort is probably related to the unnatural ‘dead’ atmosphere of most of the forests we know – the huge monoculture stands of Sitka spruce (
Picea sitchensis
) that squat dark and ungainly over so much of the wilder countryside of Britain. Sitka spruce, favoured by commercial forestry between the world wars because of its fast growth, is native to Canada. Although it flourishes in Britain, it does so at a considerable ecological price: native oak trees have been found to support 284 species of insect compared to the Sitka spruce’s 37. Fewer insects mean fewer birds and fewer birds means less botanic diversity that in its turn reduces zoological diversity. The trees are planted in straight rows, often very close together, and the huge ploughs that cut up the earth to make planting possible leave broken, haggy ground and often deep drainage cuts of sour water underneath the trees; old field systems and agricultural holdings were stripped out to create the plantations – these plantations really are ‘dead’ in quite a technical sense.
¹⁰

But, together with this discomfort, there is a more chthonic fear; forests are what Freud called
heimlich unheimlich
– they are uncanny. Inside most of us post-Enlightenment and would-be rational adults there is a child who is terrified by the wild wood.

Once upon a time the forest went on for ever. It is almost impossible to imagine now how continuous that forest was. In Britain the wide sweep of the downs was all forest and it ran pretty much unbroken except for the chain of naked heights along the Pennines north through most of Scotland. Every seam of coal underground represents a fallen petrified forest. In Continental Europe it was much the same: from the Mediterranean almost to the Arctic circle, except where the mountains, tundra or bog made the land so inhospitable that even alder and scrubby half-horizontal birches could not gain a roothold, the forest created a huge unimaginable sweep of silent danger. Human beings had to hack out small corners to set up home – usually clinging to the fringes, huddled on coasts or beside rivers, going into the forest as seldom as possible. Forests are enormous but they give no sense of space, because you are always in the tiny bit of forest you are in – you cannot see out. When in the eighth century Boniface went into the endless forest, which ran away beyond the Rhine through Germany, Poland and into Russia, to convert the pagans, almost the first thing he did was summon Anglo-Saxon Benedictines to set up monasteries and start singing in the silence. This was a silence that he knew needed breaking.

I knew there were wolves in the forest; there were witches in the forest; there were demons. I was haunted by the silence of the forests, which is the silence of the fairy stories. These northern European stories have their roots in the silence of the forest and are as ancient and tough as the Wild Wood itself. I did not like the idea
that there was a whole silent terrain that I had not visited because I was scared. Moreover, these stories had been my territory as a
writer
for a long time; a great deal of my fiction, and especially my short stories, have been retelling the ancient tales, trying to pull them into the modern world and face up to what they tell us about ourselves. Thinking now about silence I had to accept that, along with feminist reinterpretation and my desire for fiction that explores universal human themes, I had been writing my own fears, my own darkness and my own profound sense that violence and beauty, risk and joy, are inextricably tangled together; and the roots lie in the forests.

I decided that I needed to challenge my fears and experience the forest and its fairy stories. The primeval forests of Europe are not monotone, and once upon a time the diverse habitats must have merged into each other smoothly from the most northern birch and alder scrub forests of Scandinavia southwards to the Via palm forests on Crete. Now, however, they tend to come in smaller and more discreet patches. I should perhaps have gone to the Reinhardswald – the great oak forest between Kassel and Göttingen in Germany. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who published their first collection of
Märchen
, a better name for such tales than the English ‘fairy stories’, in 1812, were professors of linguistics in Göttingen and it was here that they recorded the 800-odd local folk stories, which have become the core texts of northern European childhood. There is now a ‘fairy story route’, a long-distance walking path, through the area, leading to Sababurg Castle, Sleeping Beauty’s palace, where in the tale total silence reigned for a hundred years.

However, I found I did not want to be away for so long, and – just as I had avoided specifically religious communities when I went to Skye – I did not want my experience of the forest to be mediated too directly through a tourist-inspired interpretation. Moreover, my experience is that travelling in a country where you do not speak the language increases both the need for and the effort of communicating. Instead, I decided to go north into one of the few 
remaining stands of the Great Caledonian Forest, which once covered over 15,000 square miles of Scotland. There is very little of it left now and it is hard to imagine how it must have stretched on and on beyond imagination. In the north and east of its range the forest is dominated by Scots pine and in the damper west by sessile oak; but for people who have only known the modern plantations it is difficult to realise how diverse and rich the ecosystems of the forests are; ‘dominated’ should not suggest any exclusivity; the ecosystems of ancient forests are rich and diverse, with a huge variety not just of trees, but of other organisms. In Britain alone there are over 600 species of moss and as many again of lichen.

The Caledonian Forest has its own shadowy literature, particularly in the Welsh tales. Merlin, King Arthur’s magical counsellor, retreated to these woods in his madness after the battle of Arfderydd. The Caledonian Forest was, from a southern perspective, associated with madness and magic. The terror of the wild wood is older than the oldest stories, and they have grown out of it.

Now there is less than 1 per cent of the original forest, reduced to thirty-five small patches. I chose to go to Glen Affric, one of the more substantial of these remnants and famous for its isolated strange beauty – an ancient band of wood along the side of the loch and the huge ferocious hills above. It is hard to describe the isolation and harshness of the surrounding country, which somehow makes the closed-in feel of the forest itself even more intense. Among other things Glen Affric boasts the most isolated youth hostel in the country – it is eight miles from the nearest road and you are advised not even to attempt to go there without detailed maps and a compass. I was more self-indulgent, though, and stayed outside the glen in rather cosier conditions.

I walked and sat in the forest for three days. Underneath the towering scots pine there was a range of smaller scrubbier species – rowan, alders, birches, aspen, hazels, junipers. The ground under the small trees was lumpy and mossy. Some of the mosses were a vivid, even virulent green, and gave way under my feet in unexpected directions; there were clumps of fern-like fingers. Unlike
a forestry plantation, there is a great deal of variety in an ancient wood – single huge pines, surrounded by lower scrub or dense thickets of spindly tangled growth, carrying a lot of skinny dead twigs. Very tiny, very fast, crystal-clear burns rushed through. The trees were draped in flowing lichen. Lichen itself is a strange life form – a not fully understood symbiosis of plant and algae, and it comes in innumerable forms – those close-clinging yellow patches on damp rocks are lichens, the rough orange skin that clings to tree trunks are lichens and so are the long grey strands that hang down over the little burns in the ancient woodlands. They look like cobwebs or spiders’ webs but are heavier, denser than either.

Beside a burn, in front of the moss-covered remains of an abandoned stone wall, I saw a weather-beaten notice that said, ‘Tress Cutting is Prohibited’. For a few startled moments I thought this referred to the lichen, though sadly closer examination revealed that it only said ‘Tree Cutting is Prohibited’. I liked the idea of the trees as ensorcelled maidens with lichen hair, now grey with age and stirring gently in the breeze. It was very beautiful and very spooky.

It was very silent, too. I knew, sitting there, that I had been right to be scared. This was primal landscape and full of silent shadows of menace, the menace of being lost, magical-mad like Merlin, swallowed up into something wilder, bigger and infinitely more ancient than myself. In my mind I could hear the ghost wolves howling in the hungry winter. There is a current debate about the reintroduction of originally indigenous species into these surviving woodlands and the wild area around them; and while almost everyone would desire the windflower, the one-flower wintergreen, to be dancing again here, there is an almost atavistic resistance to reintroducing wolves. Before I went to Glen Affric I had been fairly simply pro-wolf, persuaded by the argument that they would prove the most effective way of managing the excessive red deer population that denudes and destroys the forest itself, and conscious that the prejudice against and consequent destruction of wolves was
almost completely unfounded. But sitting there looking slightly edgily at the treacherous moss hags, the strangely distorted trees, the somehow sinister stillness of the loch itself and the lichens, which might at any moment reach out their cold crinkled fingers and touch me damply, aware that immediately around me was dense silence into which I could not see and in which anything might lurk concealed, I had a deep sense of relief that there were no wolves.