The Wild Places (Penguin Original) (13 page)

After we had finished eating, Roger said he had a new scavenging prize, of which he was proud. He took me out into his steepled barn. In the dim cold light, I could see a series of fat metal tubes of differing lengths laid out on a worktop. Roger looked expectant. I looked puzzled. They were organ-pipes from a local Suffolk church, he explained, which had been about to go for scrap, until he had heard about them and bought them off the church. Excitedly, he showed me how he had fitted a steam-hose to the narrowed bottom of the middle-C pipe, and lidded the top end, in this way making a chamber in which he could steam lengths of wood into pliability for furniture making.

Then he took me over to another workbench, where he picked up an elmwood bowl he had turned from the trunk of an elm felled by the storm of October 1987. Elm is a magnificent timbering wood, he told me that day, because it continues to live and breathe long after it has been carpentered into a table or floor. Its vitality, he said, is exceptional among woods. He said, too, that the elm would return to England: that I should not worry, that in due course, probably after humans were gone or had retreated, the elms would rise again.

From my crag-top perch above the Black Wood, I looked back down on to the forest below me, and watched the trees move differently in the wind. The big oaks held their round shape, their branches describing orbits around a fixed point, their leaves bustling in circles. The thinner younger pines quivered and swung in arcs and lines. I wondered if it would be possible to traverse the Black Wood without touching the ground, keeping only to the canopy, in the manner of Cosimo.

Away to my west were the first reaches of Rannoch Moor, which showed white and silver, widening off beyond sight. To the north, over the road on the far side of the loch, the hillsides were thick with conifer plantations. The trees, set in their dark regular straight-sided patterns, appeared unnatural, as though their outlines had been cut with a jigsaw. Even at this distance, I could see the churned-up ground of the clear-cut zones, where, through the settled snow, the black sump-holes, the stubs of trunks and the tracks of machinery were still visible. It looked like a war-zone. I stood, and shook the snow from my feet, and began the descent back down the hillside and into the moving wood.

The poet and musician Ivor Gurney was born and brought up in rural Gloucestershire at around the end of the nineteenth century. For his family, as for many at that time, the long country walk was a habit and a pleasure. Like the poet Edward Thomas - whom Gurney admired - he grew up as a natural historian, exploring Gloucestershire’s riverbanks, woods and hedges.

The loving intensity of Gurney’s relationship with the Gloucestershire landscape rings throughout the poetry and letters he wrote as a young man, and the journals he kept. He observed how the fields enjoyed a ‘clear shining after rain’, and wrote of the wide River Severn ‘homing to the sea’. Of all aspects of the countryside it was woodland he loved best, with its ‘avenues of green and gold’. A composer as well as a poet, timber and timbre were to Gurney closely grown together: among the many poems he set to music were his own ‘Song of the Summer Woods’ and A. E. Housman’s ‘Loveliest of Trees’.

In 1915, Gurney joined up to fight in the Great War. His first posting was to Sarras, on the Ypres Salient. When Gurney arrived at Ypres, the Salient had been a battle area for two years, and the landscape he found there was a dark travesty of the countryside he had left behind. Before the war, Sarras with its rivers, orchards, woods and pastures might have resembled Gurney’s Gloucestershire. But two years of conflict had transformed it. Mud, midway between fluid and solid, threatened to drown men and entomb them simultaneously. On the military maps of the area that Gurney used, some of the old names of the landscape remained. But many of the new names spoke of the avoidance of death, or of its arrival. Shrapnel Corner, Crump Farm, Hellfire Corner, Halfway House, Dead Dog Farm, Battle Wood, Sanctuary Wood. The woods were no longer there, however; these were ghost names only. The trees had been felled for revetting, or blasted from the earth by shells. The only evidence of the forests that remained were upright bare dead trunks, stripped of leaves, branches and bark by shrapnel and gunfire. At their bases, human bones protruded from the mud like roots, and blood salted the earth.

To Gurney, writing home, it seemed he had come to an anti-landscape, whose featurelessness was a form of assault: ‘Masses of unburied dead strewn over the battle fields; no sign of organised trenches, but merely shell holes joined up to one another . . . and no landmarks anywhere. ’ The Salient denied the permanence, the rich and complicated pasts of the trees that Gurney cherished: their consoling constancy, their rootedness.

In the trenches, he was seized often by what he called a ‘hot heart desire’ for his Gloucestershire landscape. He was ‘clutched at and heart-grieved’ by ‘desperate home thoughts’ of ‘Cotswold, her spinnies’. ‘We suffer pain out here,’ he wrote home, ‘and for myself it sometimes comes that death would be preferable to such a life.’

But Gurney survived the war. He was injured - shot in the chest, and gassed - and invalided home. Shortly after the Armistice, he entered upon a period of frenzied creativity. Between 1919 and 1922, he wrote some nine hundred poems and two hundred and fifty songs. Walking and inspiration became intertwined for Gurney. He strode the countryside both day and night, often for hours. The letters he sent during these years speak of how much he ‘needed’ the night-walking in particular. At night, he was able to follow what he called ‘the white ways . . . unvisited by most’, which was, he said, a form of ‘discovery’. ’O that night!’, he wrote to a friend. ‘Meteors flashed like sudden inspirations of song down the sky. The air was too still to set firs or beeches sighing, but - O the depth of it!’ He spoke of ‘brambles beautiful in wind’, of the ‘black greenery of beech against the moon’, of how a low moon threw into relief the ‘still sky-rims . . . high above the valley’, and of ‘bronzed cloud-bars at cold dawn’. ‘Earth, air, and water,’ he wrote late in that period of his life, ‘are the true sources of song or speaking.’

By 1922, Gurney’s mental state, always precarious, had tilted into unbalance. He took to eating in binges, and then fasting for days. He lost weight quickly, and his behaviour become increasingly unpredictable. His family reluctantly committed him to the care of the asylum system. He went first to an institution in Gloucester, and then to one at Dartford in Kent. In both asylums, he was not permitted to walk outside the perimeter of the grounds.

It was to the Dartford asylum that Helen Thomas, the widow of Edward Thomas - who had been killed at the Battle of Arras - travelled on several occasions in the late 1920s to visit Gurney. She later reported that, when she first saw him, his madness was so acute that he was able to communicate only briefly with her, and showed little interest in her presence, or her association with Edward.

The next time she travelled to Dartford, however, Helen took with her one of her husband’s Ordnance Survey maps of the Gloucestershire landscape through which both Thomas and Gurney had walked. She recalled afterwards that Gurney, on being shown the map, took it at once from her, and spread it out on his bed, in his hot little white-tiled room in the asylum, with the sunlight falling in patterns upon the floor. Then the two of them kneeled together by the bed and traced out, with their fingers, walks that they and Edward had taken in the past.

For an hour or more this dream-walking went on, Gurney seeing not the map, but looking through its prompts to see land itself. ‘He spent that hour,’ Helen remembered, ‘revisiting his beloved home . . . spotting . . . a track, a hill, or a wood, and seeing it all in his mind’s eye, a mental vision sharper and more actual for his heightened intensity. He trod, in a way we who were sane could not emulate, the lanes and fields he knew and loved so well, his guide being his finger tracing the way on the map . . . He had Edward as his companion in this strange perambulation . . . I became for a while the element which brought Edward back to life for him and the country where the two could wander together.’

Helen returned to visit Gurney several times after this, and on each occasion she brought the map that had been made soft and creased by her husband’s hands, and she and Gurney knelt at the bed and together walked through their imagined country.

I left the Black Wood late in the afternoon of that winter day, returning to the northern brink of the Wood. As I stepped from the trees, I heard a clatter, like the sound of gravel being thrown on to a wooden table. Six crows, two of them juveniles, were at play, hopping from the low branches of a pine down on to the snow and then flapping back up again, chattering to one another in a familial manner. On the ground, they walked with their distinctive nodding motion, their feet wide apart, as if trying to keep their balance. They tilted their heads, and watched me watching them. The light of the snow gave a faint indigo sheen to their feathers and lent beads of whiteness to their eyes.

Crows, like all corvids - ravens, jackdaws, rooks, magpies - are relatively recent arrivals in Britain. It is thought they established themselves here once the clearance of the deepwood was begun by human hand, during the Neolithic period: an ancient inter-animation of the human and the wild. Dense wood is no good to crows - they are creatures of mixed cover and openness.

As I stood there, the two young crows walked out into an area of fresh snow, and began to circle one another playfully, each keeping a steady distance from the other, like opposing magnets, or kings on a chessboard.

6

River-mouth

Enlli, Coruisk, Rannoch and the Black Wood. Island, valley, moor and forest. Each landscape had taken me by surprise, had behaved in ways I had not foreseen or sometimes even wanted. But I had also learned from each place, had been brought to think by each in unexpected accents and shapes. Connections and patterns were emerging, too, supplied by the land itself. It was starting to seem that certain landscapes might hold certain thoughts, as they held certain stones or plants.

I still, though, wanted to get further north, to keep following my original magnetic orientation, to push on up into the bleak and stripped-back territories that had long held such a power to move me. So a few weeks after returning from the Black Wood, I left Cambridge again, training north, reading Auden as I went: boreal poems about night sailings, the blizzard’s march, windy dwellings under headlands.

My intention was to make a single winter journey along the uppermost edge of Scotland, where it faces north on to the Pentland Firth. At that latitude, I would be closer to the Arctic Circle than to the south coast of England. I wanted to follow the hard rimrocks - the Moine schist, the Cambrian quartzite, the Lewisian gneiss - that had kept this storm-crashed coast from ceding to the sea, and in this way to join up some of the reputedly wildest places of the mainland: Cape Wrath, its most north-westerly point; Ben Hope, the most northerly of all mountains; and Strathnaver, the most beautiful and melancholy of Scotland’s river glens. After all that, I thought, I would surely be ready to come south again . . .

I began in Strathnaver. Twenty-seven miles long, Strathnaver follows the sinuous path of the Naver as it flows from its source in the shadow of Ben Klibreck to its mouth in the Pentland Firth. The strath is wide and flat at its base, with fertile meadows, and protected by hill ridges to east and west.

The night before reaching the strath, I stopped at a hotel on a lonely stretch of road near Altnaharra. I ate a quiet meal, and then, ordering a drink, fell into conversation with a big man, dressed in camouflage trousers and a thick military-green jumper. His name was Angus and he was a forester. For the past few years, his job had been to cut down the conifers which had been recklessly planted over the peatbogs of Sutherland and Caithness during the 1980s, by landowners keen to profit quickly from the tax-breaks that the Conservative government had given to such forestry projects.

The peatbogs, known as the Flows, cover hundreds of square miles of the far north of Scotland. Like other peatlands, they are astonishing landscapes; their protection status is now equivalent to that accorded the Serengeti. And like all peatlands, they are vulnerable. Many of Britain and Ireland’s peatlands have vanished. The vast Bog of Allen, thousands of years in the making, was turfed into power-stations and burnt almost out of existence within two decades. The Lancashire Mosses were drained off and farmed. And the Flows were planted with thirsty and fast-growing conifers, which smothered and drained the bog, killing its mosses and destroying the rare species of birds, plants and insects that had thrived there.

The Flows had, just, been saved from extinction. The land had been expensively bought back, and steps were now being taken to restore it to its pre-plantation state. The first stage was to cut down the conifers. ‘Sitka shit’, Angus called them. He was paid twenty-five pence per tree felled. He loved his work, he said, even with the midges that emerged in their billions during the summer months, even with the deer-ticks that now carried Lyme disease. He had been born in Sutherland, but had married a French woman, and after living in the Auvergne for ten years they had moved back to Scotland, because he found he missed the landscape too much to keep away. Sometimes, in winter, he said, he went out deep into the forests, made a shelter, shot a deer, and stayed for a few days or a week. It saved the long walks in and out.