The Wild Places (Penguin Original) (17 page)

I reached the bay’s brink, and picked my way down through the crags that fortify its northern end, passing small waterfalls growing turbulent with storm water. The wind had become gusty, and kept cuffing me off balance. Sleet and rain still fell at a cold slant. A mile to the south of the bay, there was a sun flare over a salient of dark rock. Moor grass shook at my feet.

The river that bounded the bay beneath the crags had risen sharply. I had crossed it easily earlier in the day. It was now thirty feet wide, and the water was torrid.

I stood there, considering how to cross, when, unexpectedly, because I had not seen another person for two days, a woman stepped from behind one of the dunes and came to stand opposite me, on the far side of the river. I waved at her with one hand, using the other to shield my eyes from the flying sand. She waved back. Sand grains were moving over every surface in a loose laminar flow.

I sat on a rock, took off my boots and socks, and waded into the river. The water was so cold that my feet quickly numbed. It felt as though I were walking on short stilts. There was the distant sensation of slippery rocks, of boulders shifting beneath feet, and I remembered the deer crossing the Abhainn Bà on Rannoch Moor.

When I reached the sand on the far side of the river, the woman walked forward to meet me, holding out a stiff arm for balance. I clasped it around the wrist, and came out of the water, and, unsteady, caught at her shoulder with my other hand.

We stood in that odd half-embrace, shifting our feet uneasily to keep our balance in the wind and on the soft sand, as though performing an awkward ballroom dance. I leaned close to her ear, and spoke in a shout. She did the same to me. The wind tore at our words. We swapped information. The river leading north-east from the loch’s inland end was torrential - uncrossable without a rope and a partner. The big waterfall to the north was being blown back up the cliff by the wind. She said that according to the forecast she had heard, the storm was due to be short-lived, but severe. As we spoke, I noticed, over her shoulder, far out on the grey horizon, the low flat form of a cargo ship, still and turreted as a castle.

We left each other. She to go back south towards Kinlochbervie, and I to find a sleeping place among the dunes. I watched her walk away for thirty or forty yards, being steadily gathered up by the sand-storm, her outline becoming grainier, as though she were being tuned out, until suddenly, with a snap, she was no longer there, and I stood unaccompanied on the beach.

A dark sky over shining acres of sand, the sun an orange stoke-hole to the west, and a huge onshore wind. I watched the storm gather in the last light. Above the wind noise, I could hear the chitter of blown sand and the rounded boom of heavy waves striking the cliffs to the north of the bay.

I walked up the long beach, passing between the big dunes that had formed there, and that grew, shifted or shrank with each great storm. The wind coming off the sea was so strong that, running and leaping with it at my back, I found I could take giant moon-steps, six or seven feet at a time, landing heel-first in the soft sand. It felt as though a hand were lifting me up and then setting me down with each long pace. I ran half the depth of the beach in this way, and then turned and walked back into the wind, leaning against it, down towards the water’s edge.

All along the shoreline, sea-foam, thick and yellow as cream, had gathered in trembling drifts, ten feet deep and hundreds wide. The wind was scooping up loose balls of foam, and blowing them across the sand, and as they tumbled and scudded over the beach, they diminished in size, dwindling until, like a magician’s trick, they vanished.

I spent that long night in a valley between two big dunes, close to the shore where the waves broke and the foam thickened, but safely up beyond the tideline. My bivouac bag kept me dry, and my sleeping-bag kept me warm. I dug a dip in the sand for my shoulders and one for my hips, and patted up a shallow pillow for my head. The dune valley sloped down a little towards the water, so that from where I lay I could see out to the sea, its black skin heaving and white waves curling out of the darkness to break along the beach.

The noise of the storm made sleep difficult. But I was happy to be there, sleepless inside the storm. For it was an extraordinary night. In its first few hours, the darkness was so absolute that it seemed to have become a black fluid, within which existed turbulent forms that could be sensed but not seen: funnels, tubes, spindles and whorls, gusting sheets of wind and unexpected eddies of storm energy. Around midnight I felt myself inside what might have been the storm’s hollow. There was a brief passage of calm, and then the inner edge of the storm rushed in, and the night fell back into unrest.

I finally slept, and when I woke, just after dawn, the storm had passed, the wind had settled, and with it the sand: a moist layer coated me, and when I moved it cracked into parched-earth patterns. I shook myself off, climbed to the top of a dune, and sat on the marram grass, eating an apple and some chocolate.

On the beach, a new line of drift debris - thick kelp stems with flaring arms like ganglia, driftwood, more plastic bottles - marked the reach of the storm-driven tide. Water was still fresh on the drifted objects, and they gleamed. The early small sun hung over the high ground, and I could feel its weak heat on the edges of my face. Thirsty, I climbed down from the dune, and walked to the bay’s southern end, where I found a small rainwater stream, catching its way down a slope. I washed my face and, where the water pooled, leaned forward and drank. Then I set off back towards Kinlochbervie and Ben Hope.

8

Summit

A snowy owl taking flight from the quartz and granulite summit of Ben Hope, set on a meridian course north, would bank out over the Pentland Firth, pass to the east of the Faeroes, cross the Arctic Circle, and enter the Greenland Sea. It would fly above the pack ice that locks the channel between Spitzbergen and Greenland. It would pass, as all things meridian must, over the Pole. From there, without changing direction, it would fly south past the ice-bound island of Vrangelya in the Chukotse Sea. Only after many hours would it reach ground as high as Hope again: a nameless peak in the mountains of north-western Siberia, where the temperature is so cold that steel splits and larch trees shower sparks at the touch of an axe. As I drove east to the mountain from Kinlochbervie, I imagined Ben Hope and this nameless peak rhyming in their altitude, across thousands of miles of cold space, each northering towards the other.

I had been told that if you climb Ben Hope on the summer solstice, and spend a clear night on its summit, you will never lose sight of the sun. The combination of elevation and northerliness means that the uppermost rim of the sun never dips fully below the horizon. A truly white night. In the autumn, too, it was said to be a fine place for watching the aurora borealis, which shimmered like aerial phosphorescence, green and red. But I was most drawn to Hope in its winter moods. For several years I had wanted to climb it when snow was on the ground, and spend a cold night on its summit: the sense of polar space opening out beyond me, the scents of berg and frazil washing down off the invisible Arctic Ocean.

Hope is a mountain which holds the solstitial opposites of north: it knows both the affirmation of the never-vanishing sun and the indifference of the eighteen-hour night. There could be, I thought, no other place in Britain or Ireland where you could better feel a sense of ‘bigness outside yourself’, in Stegner’s phrase. That ‘bigness’ had been there on Rannoch Moor and at Sandwood, and I had felt a chronic version of it in Coruisk. But I wondered if, once I began to move south, it would fall away, become unlocatable.

I drove through sleet, then sunshine, then squalls, with raindrops the size of berries pelting on to the windscreen. No weather system remained dominant for more than an hour. By early afternoon I was at Hope’s south-western foot. Clouds bearing cargoes of snow pushed past to the north-east. Snow was falling lightly over Foinaven, to the west across moor. The sky above me was clear, a pale winter white. I looked up at Hope, remembering its shape from the maps I had studied.

The geography of Hope is exquisite: a steep summit cone, shapely and symmetrical when seen from the sea. A sharp curving north ridge, on which peregrines nest, forms a glacis protecting the mountain’s northern approach, and keeps secret the watery land on Hope’s eastern flank - a region of fourteen lost lochs and lochans. To the south, the mountain’s long plateau-ridge, the Leitir Mhuiseil, streams out, tapering for three miles, trimmed on its western flank with a band of silver-grey schist and flashed here and there with quartz.

I started up Hope as the day’s light began to dim, feeling excited, almost jaunty, to be out there alone. Following a stream-cut, I passed big boulders worked by the water into curious shapes. As I climbed, the view over the surrounding landscape opened. Hundreds of empty miles of watery land radiating out in each direction, big peaks here and there - Klibreck, Loyal, holding snow in their eastern corries - and Loch Hope leading the eye north, past the mountain’s cliff ramparts, and out to the spaciousness of the Firth.

Reaching the upper brink of the Leitir Mhuiseil, I saw three deer standing watchfully on the ridge’s rim. They observed my approach, then turned in synchrony and rode their long legs off and out of sight. I sat by a stream, and drank handfuls of cold water. Westwards, the late sun was breaking through the cloud cover here and there, so that the day’s light fanned slowly upon the moors. I could see white bows of blown snow, strung by sharp straight rays of sunshine, and I counted four separate storms spaced across the earth. To the east, though, night was coming: the edges of that world were in a cooling blue of shadow and dusk and chill.

Hope did not give itself up easily. The ascent was nearly from sea-level, and the huge summit cone, crag-bound, was steadily steep. By the time I reached the top, the air around me was dark and gritty, and the wind colder. The summit was bare, stripped by gales and frost-weathering. Rime ice had formed in feathery windrows on shattered grey rocks, which were also marked with lichens the colour of lime and tangerine. Between the rocks, snow lay in stripes and furrows, dry and granular as sand. Working quickly, with numbing hands, and a growing sense of worry - was this too cold a place, too hard a place, to spend the night? - I moved rocks to clear a lozenge-shaped space of rough flatness, and arranged them into a low curving wall, a foot or so high.

That night the winds began a slow swing from west to north, bringing snow showers scattering against the canvas of my bivouac bag, and raking the summit rocks with hail. A moon was up there somewhere, breaking through the cloud cover. It was far too cold to sleep. I lay like a compass needle, head to the north, on my front, looking towards the sea, watching patches of silver open and close over the distant waters, trying to keep warm.

At two o’clock, still sleepless, I left the shelter, crossed back to the main top, and began to pace out the reach of the mountain’s curving summit plateau. The cloud cover had thinned. Moonlight came and went in squalls. Each rock wore a carapace of ice, which cracked and skittered off in shards at the slightest contact. Little hail drifts had built up in the lee of the rocks; otherwise the wind had stripped away all the unfrozen snow. The air smelt bright.

I walked out to where the mountain’s eastern ridge began, and from there looked down into the lost lochs, which were holding moonlight like snow. Moving across to the south-western tip of the plateau, I sensed more than saw the massive complex of Foinaven miles away, its snow-shires flashing silver, the rest of its black bulk invisible in the dark. The cold was pressing, constant, and I began to shiver; not a surface tremble, but a deep convulsive shaking. In that deep winter darkness, my sunny East Anglian beechwood felt suddenly hugely distant, the landscape of another continent or era, not just another country.

This was one of the least accommodating places to which I had ever come. The sea, the stone, the night and the weather all pursued their processes and kept their habits, as they had done for millennia, and would do for millennia to follow. The fall of moonlight on to water, the lateral motion of blown snow through air, these were of the place’s making only. This was a terrain that had been thrown up by fire and survived ice. There was nothing, save the wall of rocks I had made and the summit cairn, to suggest history. Nothing human. I turned east and south, straining to see if there was any flicker of light in the hundreds of miles of darkness around me. Even a glimpse of something lit, however distant and unreachable, would have been reassurance of a sort. Nothing. No glimmer.

There could have been nowhere that conformed more purely to the vision of wildness with which I had begun my journeys. I had been drawn here by a spatial logic, a desire to reach this coincident point of high altitude and high latitude. But now I could not wait to leave it. It was an amplified version of the discomfort I had unexpectedly felt at the Inaccessible Pinnacle in Coruisk.