The Wild Places (Penguin Original) (18 page)

If I could have safely descended from the summit of Hope in the darkness, I would have done so. The comfortless snow-shires, the frozen rocks: this place was not hostile to my presence, far from it. Just entirely, gradelessly indifferent. Up there, I felt no companionship with the land, no epiphany of relation like that I had experienced in the Black Wood. Here, there was no question of relation. This place refused any imputation of meaning.

All travellers to wild places will have felt some version of this, a brief blazing perception of the world’s disinterest. In small measures it exhilarates. But in full form it annihilates. Nan Shepherd found this out on the Cairngorm plateau, another bare, stripped, Arctic zone. ‘Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me,’ she had written of the water that rises on the plateau. ‘The water wells from the rock, and flows away. For unnumbered years it has welled from the rock, and flowed away. It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself. One cannot know the rivers till one has seen them at their sources; but this journey is not to be undertaken lightly. One walks among elementals, and elementals are not governable.’

Musicians speak of the ‘reverberation time’ of a note or chord: the time it takes that sound to diminish by a certain number of decibels. The reverberation time of that black and silver night on Hope would be endless for me. Standing there, I knew that the memory of it might fade but it would never entirely disappear. I wondered if there would be any such places south of there, or if this was to be in some way the end of my journeys.

At some point, the winds dropped, and the temperature rose by a degree or two. I returned to the shallow stone shelter and was able at last to sleep, for perhaps two hours, little more, longing for dawn and escape from the summit. When I woke at first light, cold to the core, the air was windless. My rucksack was frozen, the canvas rigid and pale as though it had been fired in a kiln. I found and kept a fragment of quartz granulite, irregular in its shape: sharp-edged, frost-shattered. Then I set off down the mountain, and it seemed as I did so that descent in any direction from that summit would be a voyage south.

9

Grave

The day before I reached the Burren, the worst storms to hit Ireland and Scotland for ten years passed over the countries. The accounts that emerged after the wind had lessened had about them the sound of a scourge. A fishing-boat with nineteen crew had foundered off the coast of Skye. Three people had been killed inland, two more were missing. A lorry-driver had died after his vehicle was blown off the Foyle Bridge in Londonderry. Many trees had been flattened, with the slow pressing down that big wind effects on forests: the trees supporting each other in their mutual falls, their canopies tangled, their limbs interlocked. On North Rona, in the Western Isles, the gusts reached 124 miles per hour: quick enough to peel iron from the roofs of barns and sheds, to pick up people and livestock. On South Uist, five members of a family were compelled to leave their home by rising waters: trying to cross a causeway to safety on Benbecula, they were swept to their deaths by storm waves.

The afternoon following the ebb of the storms, standing out on the flat rocks on one of the western headlands of the Burren, I could still see traces of this recent ferocity. The sea was rough, with angry wave sets champing at the rocks. A wide current flowed alarmingly fast along the headland - a northerly tide-rip so quick that it moved even surface objects at about 300 feet a minute. The sky was steep and black with rain. Surf brawled over offshore reefs.

The Burren rises, silver, in the north of County Clare, on the midwest coast of Ireland. Its name comes from the Gaelic
boireann
, meaning ‘rocky place’, and the region is so called because most of its surface is made up of smoothed limestone, intercut with bands of clay and shale. The limestone forms a vast escarpment, between the granite of Galway and the sandstones of Liscannor. From there it extends north-west, dipping beneath the Atlantic, to resurge thirty miles offshore as three islands: Árainn, Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr, or the Aran Islands, as they are called in English. Seen from a distance, on a sunlit day, the limestone of the region gleams silver and grey, and the Burren seems to have been cast in pewter.

One of the two most remarkable aspects of the Burren is its flora. Arctic, Alpine and Mediterranean plants all live within its 150 square miles. Nowhere else in Europe do species of such contrasting hardihoods coexist. The spring gentian, more usually found in the high meadows of the Alps, blooms within inches of the dense-flowered orchid, a native of Italy and Spain; the hoary rock rose and the mountain aven prosper near the maidenhead fern, a favourite Victorian house plant. That such botanical paradoxes are possible is a function of the Gulf Stream, of limestone’s ability to absorb heat in the summer and release it in the winter, and of the Burren’s exceptional light levels.

It was this unique climatic and botanical entanglement that had drawn me to the Burren. With its familial resemblances north to Scotland and south towards England, it seemed like the ideal landscape to come to after Hope.

The Burren’s other distinction is as a landscape of the dead. It has been occupied more or less continuously for 5,000 years. The abundant calcium makes for good bones on grazing livestock, and the soil that gets caught in the rifts of the limestone makes the land richer and more amenable to cultivation than the bare granite regions that surround it. And five millennia of human activity in the Burren also means that buried in it are 5,000 years’ worth of the dead. Walking its grey reaches, you find memorials to the dead everywhere: stone circles, dolmens, wedge-tombs, headstones, crosses, burial grounds consecrated and unconsecrated. It is a landscape of funerary monuments. Almost every era - Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, medieval and modern - has interred its people here, and has marked their resting places in stone. The past has a thickness in the Burren. Human time there is the historical equivalent of limestone: it has experienced a long slow settle into density.

Few of the Burren’s dead died peacefully. In the 1650s, Oliver Cromwell’s troops laid western Ireland waste. Clare was among the devastated counties, the Burren among the plundered regions. Two centuries later, the Great Famine fell upon Ireland. Clare was again one of the counties worst affected. Villages emptied during the Famine by starvation and emigration still stand in the Burren: roofless gables, sightless windows. Some of the thousands of paths and walls that mark the landscape were built by the victims of the Famine. Relief administrators, unwilling to provide aid for free, made starving people labour on purposeless projects in exchange for food tokens. Men who could hardly stand unaided were set to work building roads which led nowhere, and walls which protected nothing.

When Cromwell came across the Irish Sea with his army, to begin his brutal purge of Catholics and Royalists, he entrusted the wrecking of North Clare and the Burren to General Edmund Ludlow. Years later, looking back on that campaign, Ludlow would dismiss the Burren in a phrase that has sounded down through its history. The Burren was, Ludlow wrote, ‘a savage country’, in which ‘there is not water enough to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth to bury him’. What a way of looking at any landscape: to read it only for how it might collaborate in murder. Ludlow was wrong, as well as grotesque. He had been an inattentive mover through that country. For the Burren, I would learn during my days there, is filled with all the things Ludlow missed. It is filled with water, wood, earth and the dead, and all are part of its wildness.

I travelled to the Burren in midwinter with Roger. He had reached a pause in his writing, and now that I was not heading so far north, he was keen to join me on some of my journeys, and perhaps do some woodland research along the way. When I asked if he wanted to come with me to the Burren - an area renowned for its dwarf hazel forests - he agreed immediately. I was very pleased at the prospect of Roger’s company; I had been alone for too long in the north.

We drove up towards the Burren from Shannon. The radio broadcasts spoke of climate change: another pessimistic report on sea-level increases had been released. It made me feel even more guilty than usual about driving, made the road seem an even less desirable place to be. There are few planning restrictions on roadside signs in Ireland, and every hundred yards was a gaudy placard in the shape of a shamrock or horseshoe, enticing motorists to turn off to a visitor attraction or a bar. Traffic was slow, and the trees by the roadside appeared stunted by pollution rather than by wind, their leaves grey with road pall.

As we neared the outer reaches of the Burren, though, the roads narrowed and became lined with healthy fuchsia hedges: in autumn, little pink lantern-flowers would hang brightly among the dark green leaves. The light assumed a clearer tone: reactive to the expanse of grey stone beneath it and to the tremendous mirror of the sea beyond that.

Our base in the Burren was an old low-slung house in its centre, belonging to a friend of Roger’s. The house blended New Age and old age. Guarding the front door was a row of ancient hawthorns, quiffed eastwards by the onshore winds, from which silver wind-chimes hung and rang in the ceaseless breeze. Behind a gnarled gorse bush in the garden stood a three-foot plaster statue of Jesus, his right hand raised in permanent and startling blessing.

The evening of our arrival, we moved round the house, looking out of the windows on every side. Visible in the grey dusky light, midway up the glass of each window, was a flat horizon-line of dark rock. It felt as though we were in a diving-bell, part-submerged and gazing out at the water as it encircled us. That night, we sat in half-darkness round a peat-fire, reading out passages from books to each other and talking. I told Roger about my night on the summit of Hope, about the sudden fear I had felt instead of the exultation I had expected, about the intractability of that place.

At dawn the next morning, we began our explorations, carrying with us a map of the area made by the cartographer and landscape historian, Tim Robinson, who lived up the coast in Roundstone. Roger had been unusually and mysteriously ill in the month before we left, and he was still weak, so we moved gently, walking for slow miles across the limestone, pacing out the Burren’s reaches, trying to begin to understand this heavily encrypted landscape.

The solubility of limestone, its acquiescence to water, means that the Burren - like its sister limestone lands in the Peak District and the Yorkshire Dales - is rich with clandestine places: runnels, crevasses, dens, caves, hollows, gullies. It is a landscape that has the vast, involuted surface area of a coastline, or a lung’s interior. Things pool and hide in limestone, including meaning: it forms a lateral landscape, but not a shallow one.

The soft worn beauty of limestone has also made it a commodity. From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, a trade in the stone grew; it was desirable for rockeries and municipal flower-beds. Legal and illegal quarrying means that in Britain, where a scant 6,000 acres of surface limestone pavement exist, only around 200 acres remain undamaged.

Limestone, I found during my time in the Burren, demands of the walker a new type of movement: the impulse to be diverted, to wander and allow the logic of one’s motion to be determined by happenstance and sudden disclosure. We learned, or were taught by the ground, how to walk without premeditation: turning corners when they came, following bends in valleys, our paths set by the ancient contingencies of geology and the immediate contingencies of footfall, our expectations quickened - ready for surprise when it happened.

It happened often. Birds sprang from invisible crannies in the stone: a woodcock rolling away through the low air, a snipe exploding out of a scrubby hollow. Hares pelted up from their forms. On a summit, out of sight of the sea, we found a cow’s skull, green with mould, and then, scattered over half an acre, like the wreckage of an air crash, the rest of its skeleton. In gullies we found groves of ancient hawthorns and blackthorns, lichen flourishing on their thin trunks, giving them the look of shaggy centaur’s legs.

Once, in a rain-filled midday dusk, we watched a peregrine fly from an escarpment of wet limestone cliffs facing the Atlantic. It launched from its rock sill, flapped its wings clumsily twice, three times, seemed as if it would sink, and then lifted and flew out and over the wooded hillside until it was only a black star in the grey sky.

Early on another day, we crested a pass to find three hundred acres of bright water shining in the valley beneath us, unmarked on our map. It was a
turlough
- one of the temporary lakes which form in limestone country after heavy rain, when the water level rises up from beneath the rock, like a bath filling from its own plughole. This
turlough
had overwhelmed the valley, and we could see dozens of trees standing in their own reflections, like playing-card kings. A sparrowhawk circled above the water, covering miles in minutes.