The Wild Places (Penguin Original) (10 page)

The consequences of this difficulty of engagement with open land have been considerable. It has been hard to make and hold a case for its worth, and so, over two centuries, the area of lowland heath in England - the Dorset linglands, Cannock Chase, New Forest - fell by three-quarters, lost to the plough, plantation or development. Of those heaths that have survived, most have done so because they have kept their designation as ‘common ground’ - that is, as areas open to all-comers, and that are invulnerable to conversion by private interests. Much of the now vanished heathland was brought under tillage for the first time during the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign of the Second World War. Other areas of openness - Salisbury Plain, the Brecklands of East Anglia - were sealed off and converted for military purposes, their unbroken expanses making them ideal for firing ranges, tank manoeuvres or airstrips. Strange Bodmin Moor, with its gorse uplands, shrank in area by nearly half between 1800 and 1946. Elsewhere, quarrying works, such as those on Titterstone Clee in south Shropshire, have taken industrial bites from the open landscapes. Nearly a sixth of the North Yorkshire Moors and the Northumbrian Moors are now planted with conifer for commercial use. Across England in particular, openness has been closed down.

The Pennine moors of northern England - to whose slopes and plateaux hundreds of millions of people from the cities of Nottingham, Derby, Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool have, over the centuries, escaped - were for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries run as a series of private grouse moors. Until the Mass Trespass on Kinder Scout of 1932, led by Benny Rothman, access to the moors was restricted to wealthy sportsmen, and the land was patrolled by gamekeepers who would treat walkers as trespassers. These gamekeepers were also responsible for the culling of predators. Raptors, mustelids and other carnivores were killed in their tens of thousands, their deaths recorded dispassionately in the columns of game books.

The contemporary appearance and nature of the moors is, then, in large part determined by their sporting history and use. Some of the marks left are subtle: on Stanage Moor, the Victorian owners - the Wilsons of Sheffield - employed masons to cut channels and holes into the rocks, so that rainwater collected there and provided drinking water for young grouse in the breeding season; their chisellings are still visible on the rocks. Other marks are more obvious: the large areas of moor that are burnt each year to stimulate the growth of young heather shoots, the staple food of grouse.

Yet despite the human influences in their making, the moors of Britain and Ireland have become wild places for numberless people, who leave behind the confines of their cities to enter another realm: of mazes made by troughs and hags, of wheatears flicking between stones, and of mica sand that causes stream-beds to flash in the sunlight with a silver fire.

Out on the Moor, some time around midnight, I was woken by a rumbling noise, the sound of stones rolled in water. It was a herd of deer sloshing across the river a few yards from us, turning rocks with their long sharp legs, as they followed their paths across the heather.

In the early hours, the sky cleared and the temperature dropped. We woke to a dawn of indigo and bronze, and we walked within that light for hours, passing in and out of the bays along the serried northern shore of Loch Bà. Thin beams of sun were probing down through gaps in the clouds. They looked like searchlights sweeping the Moor’s emptiness for fugitives, or lasers measuring its extraordinary extent.

During those hours, the Moor seemed to reveal itself in odd forms, abstract shapes that recurred wherever I looked. The curve was one such shape: the little gold sand beaches that bracketed the loch’s bays; the arc of a dark hillside held against the snowy backdrop of a higher mountain; a bough of a birch tree glimpsed through the window of a ruined crofter’s cottage near the Bridge of Orchy; the hoops of that bridge; and the path of an old road, curving away into the distance and shining with wetness. There was, too, the motif of the delta: in the antlers of the deer, in the branching forms of the pale-green lichen that cloaked the trees and boulders, in the shape of Loch Laidon, in the crevasses and fissures in the peat, and in the forms of the few stag-headed old Scots pines.

As we walked, I thought about my map, which was beginning to shape itself, clarifying location by location. I tried to imagine the wild places I had not yet reached, each remarkable for its particular arrangements of space and species, its angles of rock and light. The map I was making would never attain completion, but I was happy with its partiality. It could not include every wild place, nor did I want it to. For such a map, which sought to equal the land itself, would be like the one Borges wrote of in his cautionary tale ‘On Exactitude in Science’. The story is set in an Empire in which the art of cartography has attained such perfection ‘that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City’. Over time, Borges continued, even the accuracy of these province-sized maps was no longer satisfactory, and so the Cartographer’s Guild created a map of the Empire ‘whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it’. The map was, of course, unusable and oppressive. So it was ‘delivered up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars.’

I wondered how my map might seem to someone reading it a century hence: what changes would have been wrought in the human relationship with the wild over that time. Maybe Forster’s obituary would have come true by then; maybe wildness would have become extinct in these islands, perhaps in the world. If so, my map could seem quaint and outdated to its reader: a relic, the expression of a set of hopes and fears from an earlier world and mind. Perhaps, if it were read at all, it would be read fondly, in the way we now regard early mariners’ maps as embodiments of dreams and worries - those hills of gold drawn in a continent’s interior, those sea-monsters cavorting in the margins of the known.

In 1960, the historian and novelist Wallace Stegner wrote what would become known as ‘The Wilderness Letter’. It was sent as an appeal to an official involved in a federal policy review of America’s ‘Outdoor Recreation Resources’, and would later be published in a collection of Stegner’s essays. In it, Stegner argued that a wild place was worth much more than could ever be revealed by a cost-benefit analysis of its recreational economic value, or its minerals and resources. No, he explained, we need wild places because they remind us of a world beyond the human. Forests, plains, prairies, deserts, mountains: the experience of these landscapes can give people ‘a sense of bigness outside themselves that has now in some way been lost’.

But such landscapes, Stegner wrote, were diminishing in number. The ‘remnants of the natural world’ were ‘being progressively eroded’. The cost of this erosion was incalculable. For if the wild places were all to be lost, we would never again ‘have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it’. We would be ‘committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment’.

I had read Stegner’s essay the week before coming to Rannoch, and out in the Moor’s space his ideas seemed to reverberate even more powerfully. ‘We simply need wild country available to us,’ he concluded, ‘even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.’

Around noon, we emerged at the road on the western side of the Moor, and I stood there, peat-spattered and tired, on the edge of the asphalt, my thumbs tucked into the straps of my rucksack, as big freezer lorries thundered past, carrying fresh vegetables northwards to the Great Glen and beyond. We were bog-people, stepped from one time into another. The angles and the straight lines of the vehicles that flashed past, and the garishness of their colours, seemed bizarre after the long hours on the Moor: strange as spaceships.

In lay-bys further up the road, I could see that cars had pulled over, and groups of people - twos, threes - were standing and staring out across the Moor, turning at times, and speaking quietly to one another.

5

Forest

When I returned home from the Moor, I put the dolphin-shaped piece of wildwood pine on a shelf above my desk: another found object to set among my growing collection. Stones mostly, which were forming a small storm-beach, but also a feather from a kestrel, a few blades of blond moor grass and a willow catkin, whose sides had flexed open to spill fluorescent yellow pollen. I placed the pine fragment at one end of the loose line of objects, and it watched me with its knot-eye while I worked. Its grain flowed like water, and its surface was riddled with tiny boreholes: entrances to an inscrutable complex of corridors and passageways, which prompted dreams of miniaturisation, of exploring the labyrinth inside the wood-shard.

My habit of gathering stones and other talismans was a family one. My parents were collectors. Shelves and window-sills in my house were covered in shells, pebbles, twists of driftwood from rivers and sea. For as long as I could remember, we had picked things up as we walked. Humdrum, everyday rites, practised by millions of people. Sometimes the collection was for a purpose: my father had specialised in making reed boats, and hours of my childhood had been spent on riverbanks and lake shores, constructing these craft, often to elaborate specifications - catamarans with pebbles for ballast and hazel leaves for sails, pinned in place with hawthorns or blackthorns - before setting them sailing in ones, pairs, flotillas.

Now, though, collecting offered a way both to remember and to join up my wild places. Fifteenth-century mapmakers developed the concept of the ‘isolarion’: the type of map that describes specific areas in detail, but does not provide a clarifying overview of how these places are related to one another. At this early stage of my journeys, I still did not know what family resemblances would emerge between the places I would reach, what unexpected patterns and echoes might occur. The objects seemed to hold my landscapes together, without binding them too tightly.

They also offered hints and clues. The pine shard suggested where I should go to next. It had come from the preserved root of an ancient tree, thousands of years old, that would itself have been part of the great northern pinewoods which covered the Scottish Highlands until around 3000 BC. Almost nothing still remains of this magnificent prehistoric forest - which vanished largely due to climatic causes; smothered by the blanket peat bogs that spread during the cold and wet Atlantic period - except for a few relict fragments here and there. The most extensive of these is the
Coille Dubh
- the Black Wood - which lies just to the east of Rannoch Moor.

To move to the Black Wood after the Moor would be to follow a logic of opposition: from the wet to the wood, from the bog to the pine, from openness to enclosure. It would also be to travel backwards in time, for several thousand years earlier the Moor would have resembled the Wood. So in early December, three weeks after the first redwings had arrived in East Anglia, and when the hawthorns near my house were glossy with plump fruit, I travelled north again.

I entered the Black Wood one morning, from its long loch-bound northern limit, passing under the eaves of the outer trees. Winter had lent an edge to the air, and the sky was a single blue. Light fell from a plain sun, and blowing sideways through the light was a cold wind. I carried no map of the Wood with me because it is impossible to get lost there. Its thousands of acres are spread over the northern slopes of a range of ancient, glacier-ground mountains: even in the worst of weathers, gravity will lead one out of the Black Wood, for all its fall-lines lead back to the loch-side, and safety.

I wandered in the Wood all that day, tacking back and forth, following rides, moving through its dozens of covert worlds: its dense and almost lightless thickets, its corridors and passageways, its sudden glades and clearings. I leapt streams, passed over sponge-bogs of sodden peat, soft cushions of haircap mosses. There were big standing groves of green juniper, alders, rowans and the odd dark cherry. The pines, with their reptilian bark, gave off a spicy resinous smell, and their branches wore green and silver lichens of fantastical shapes: antlers, shells, seaweeds, bones, rags. Between the trees grew heather and bracken. I climbed a whippy rowan, scattering its orange berries in all directions, and a tall old birch that shivered under my weight near its summit.

At times the forest was so thick that any sense of direction came only from the sense of slope. Then - as at the bealach above Coruisk - a vista would open, framed by branches, to show ground far above or glinting water far below. Often, the only noise I could hear was the creak of boughs rubbing against each other in the wind, like pipes heating up in a house, and I thought back to my Cambridgeshire beechwood.