From that height, the land was laid out beneath me like a map. Dispersed across it were more fragments of woodland, some of whose names I knew: Mag’s Hill Wood, Nine Wells Wood, Wormwood. To the west over corduroy fields was a main road, busy with cars. Directly north was the hospital, its three-piped incinerator tower rising far higher than my hilltop tree. A deep-chested Hercules aeroplane was descending towards the airfield on the city’s outskirts. Above a road verge to the east, I could see a kestrel riding the wind, its wings shivering with the strain, its tail feathers spread out like a hand of cards.
I had started climbing trees about three years earlier. Or rather, restarted; for I had been at a school that had a wood for its playground. We had climbed and christened the different trees (Scorpio, The Major Oak, Pegasus), and fought for their control in territorial conflicts with elaborate rules and fealties. My father had built my brother and me a tree house in our garden, which we had defended successfully against years of pirate attack. In my late twenties, I had begun to climb trees again. Just for the fun of it: no ropes, and no danger either.
In the course of my climbing, I had learned to discriminate between tree species. I liked the lithe springiness of the silver birch, the alder and the young cherry. I avoided pines - brittle branches, callous bark - and planes. And I found that the horse chestnut, with its limbless lower trunk and prickly fruit, but also its tremendous canopy, offered the tree-climber both a difficulty and an incentive.
I explored the literature of tree-climbing: not extensive, but so exciting. John Muir had swarmed up a hundred-foot Douglas Spruce during a Californian windstorm, and looked out over a forest, ‘the whole mass of which was kindled into one continuous blaze of white sun-fire!’ Italo Calvino had written his magical novel,
The Baron in the Trees
, whose young hero, Cosimo, in an adolescent huff, climbs a tree on his father’s forested estate and vows never to set foot on the ground again. He keeps to his impetuous word, and ends up living and even marrying in the canopy, moving for miles between olive, cherry, elm and holm oak. There were the boys in B. B.’s
Brendon Chase
, who go feral in an English forest rather than return to boarding-school, and climb a ‘Scotch pine’ in order to reach a honey buzzard’s nest scrimmed with beech leaves. And of course there was the team of Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin: Pooh floating on his sky-blue balloon up to the oak-top bee’s nest, in order to poach some honey; Christopher ready with his pop-gun to shoot Pooh’s balloon down once the honey had been poached.
I also came to admire some of tree-climbing’s serious contemporary exponents, in particular the scientists who study the redwoods of California and Oregon.
Sequoia sempervirens
, the giant redwood, can grow to over three hundred feet high. Most of the height of an adult redwood is near-branchless trunk; then comes a vast and complex crown. The redwood researchers have developed exceptional techniques of ascent. They use a bow and arrow to fire a pulling line up over a firm branch in the crown. By means of this line they then raise and secure a climbing rope. Once in the crown, their rope-skills are so refined that they can move about safely and almost freely, like latter-day spidermen. Up there, in that aerial world, they have discovered a lost kingdom: a remarkable and previously uninvestigated ecosystem.
There was nothing unique about my beech tree, nothing difficult in its ascent, no biological revelation at its summit, nor any honey. But it had become a place to think. A roost. I was fond of it, and it - well, it had no notion of me. I had climbed it many times; at first light, dusk and glaring noon. I had climbed it in winter, brushing snow from the branches with my hand, with the wood cold as stone to the touch, and real crows’ nests black in the branches of nearby trees. I had climbed it in early summer, and looked out over the simmering countryside, with heat jellying the air and the drowsy buzz of a tractor audible from somewhere nearby. And I had climbed it in monsoon rain, with water falling in rods thick enough for the eye to see. Climbing the tree was a way to get perspective, however slight; to look down on a city that I usually looked across. The relief of relief. Above all, it was a way of defraying the city’s claims on me.
Anyone who lives in a city will know the feeling of having been there too long. The gorge-vision that streets imprint on us, the sense of blockage, the longing for surfaces other than glass, brick, concrete and tarmac. I live in Cambridge, a city set in one of the most intensively farmed and densely populated regions of the world. It is an odd place for someone who loves mountains and wildness to have settled. Cambridge is probably, hour for hour, about as far from what might conventionally be called ‘wild land’ as anywhere in Europe. I feel that distance keenly. But good things hold me here: my family, my work, my affection for the city itself, the way the stone of its old buildings condenses the light. I have lived in Cambridge on and off for a decade, and I imagine I will continue to do so for years to come. And for as long as I stay here, I know I will also have to get to the wild places.
I could not now say when I first grew to love the wild, only that I did, and that a need for it will always remain strong in me. As a child, whenever I read the word, it conjured images of wide spaces, remote and figureless. Isolated islands off Atlantic coasts. Unbounded forests, and blue snow-light falling on to drifts marked with the paw-prints of wolves. Frost-shattered summits and corries holding lochs of great depth. And this was the vision of a wild place that had stayed with me: somewhere boreal, wintry, vast, isolated, elemental, demanding of the traveller in its asperities. To reach a wild place was, for me, to step outside human history.
The beechwood could not answer my need for wildness. The roar of the nearby roads was audible, as were the crash and honk of the trains that passed to the west. The surrounding fields were treated with fertiliser and herbicide to maximise productivity. And the hedgerows were favourite locations for fly-tippers. Junk heaps would appear overnight: brick rubble, water-swollen plywood, rags of newspaper. I had once found a bra and a pair of lacy pants hanging from the thorns, like oversized shrike kills. Fly-tipping, I guessed, rather than a fit of roadside passion - for who could make love in a hawthorn hedge?
For weeks before the windstorm, I had felt the familiar desire to move, to get beyond the fall-line of the incinerator’s shadow, beyond the event-horizon of the city’s ring-road. And up there in the crow’s-nest that day, looking down at the roads, the hospital and the fields, and the woods cramped between them, I felt a sharp need to leave Cambridge, to reach somewhere remote, where starlight fell clearly, where the wind could blow upon me from its thirty-six directions, and where the evidence of human presence was minimal or absent. Far north or far west; for to my mind this was where wildness survived, if it survived anywhere at all.
Time and again, wildness has been declared dead in Britain and Ireland. ‘Two great wars demanded and bequeathed regimentation,’ wrote E. M. Forster in 1964, ‘science lent her aid, and the wildness of these islands, never extensive, was stamped upon and built over and patrolled in no time. There is no forest or fell to escape to today, no cave in which to curl up, and no deserted valley.’ For Jonathan Raban the extinction of the wild happened far earlier: by the 1860s Britain was ‘so thickly peopled, so intensively farmed, so industrialised, so citified, that there was nowhere to go to be truly alone, or to have . . . adventures, except to sea’. John Fowles, writing in 1985, was grimly adamant: ‘We are now, in hard fact, on the bleak threshold of losing much of the old landscape. We have done unimaginably terrible things to our countrysides. It is only here and there along our coasts and on the really high hills and mountains that the ancient richness of natural life is not yet in danger.’ Five years later, the American author William Least-Heat Moon described Britain as ‘a tidy garden of a toy realm where there’s almost no real wilderness left and absolutely no memory of it. Where the woods are denatured plantings. The English, the Europeans, are too far from the wild. That’s the difference between them and us.’ Repeatedly, the same lament, or the same contempt.
An abundance of hard evidence exists to support these obituaries for the wild. Over the last century in particular, disaster has fallen upon the land and the seas of Britain and Ireland. The statistics of damage are familiar and often repeated, more as elegy now than as protest. In England, between 1930 and 1990, over half of the ancient woodland was cleared, or replaced with conifer plantation. Half of the hedgerow mileage was grubbed up. Nearly all lowland pasture was ploughed out, built on or tarmacked over. Three-quarters of heathland was converted into farmland, or developed. Across Britain and Ireland, rare limestone pavements were cracked up and sold as rockery stones, peatbogs millennia in the making were drained or excavated. Dozens of species vanished, with hundreds more being brought to the point of crisis.
In Britain, over sixty-one million people now live in 93,000 square miles of land. Remoteness has been almost abolished, and the main agents of that abolition have been the car and the road. Only a small and diminishing proportion of terrain is now more than five miles from a motorable surface. There are nearly thirty million cars in use in Britain, and 210,000 miles of road on the mainland alone. If those roads were to be stretched out and joined into a single continuous carriageway, you could drive on it almost to the moon. The roads have become new mobile civilisations in themselves: during rush-hours, the car-borne population across Britain and Ireland is estimated to exceed the resident population of central London.
The commonest map of Britain is the road atlas. Pick one up, and you see the meshwork of motorways and roads which covers the surface of the country. From such a map, it can appear that the landscape has become so thickly webbed by roads that asphalt and petrol are its new primary elements.
Considering the road atlas, an absence also becomes visible. The wild places are no longer marked. The fells, the caves, the tors, the woods, the moors, the river valleys and the marshes have all but disappeared. If they are shown at all, it is as background shadings or generic symbols. More usually, they have faded out altogether like old ink, become the suppressed memories of a more ancient archipelago.
The land itself, of course, has no desires as to how it should be represented. It is indifferent to its pictures and to its picturers. But maps organise information about a landscape in a profoundly influential way. They carry out a triage of its aspects, selecting and ranking those aspects in an order of importance, and so they create forceful biases in the ways a landscape is perceived and treated.
It can take time and effort to forget the prejudice induced by a powerful map. And few maps exercise a more distortive pressure upon the imagination than the road atlas. The first road atlas of Britain was produced in 1675 by John Ogilby. It was a six-volume work, which claimed to be the only ‘Ichnographical and Historical Description of all the Principal Road-ways in England and Wales’. Ogilby’s maps showed a scrupulous attention to landscape detail: they depicted not only roads, but also the hills, rivers and forests that the roads ran round, along, through and over.
In the centuries since Ogilby’s innovation, the road atlas has grown in ubiquity and influence. Over a million are sold in Britain and Ireland each year; twenty million are thought to be in circulation at any one time. The priorities of the modern road atlas are clear. Drawn by computers from satellite photos, it is a map that speaks of transit and displacement. It encourages us to imagine the land itself only as a context for motorised travel. It warps its readers away from the natural world.
When I think of this map - when I think
in
this map - I see the landscape in grainy CCTV splices, in images of direction, destination, purpose: vehicle brake-lights at dusk, the hot breath of exhausts. The road atlas makes it easy to forget the physical presence of terrain, that the countries we call England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales comprise more than 5,000 islands, 500 mountains and 300 rivers. It refuses the idea that long before they were political, cultural and economic entities, these lands were places of stone, wood and water.
It was at some point soon after the windstorm that the idea first occurred to me. Would it be possible to make a series of journeys in search of some of the wild places that remained in Britain and Ireland? I did not believe, or did not want to believe, the obituaries for the wild. They seemed premature, even dangerous. Like mourning for someone who was not yet dead, they suggested an unseemly longing for the end, or an acknowledgement of helplessness. The losses to the wild places of Britain and Ireland were unignorable, and the threats that they faced - pollution, climate change - appeared greater in number and vigour than ever before. But I knew that the wildness had not wholly vanished.
I began to plan my journeys. I wrote to friends, asking them where and when they would go to find wildness. ‘Birmingham city centre on a Friday night, just after closing time,’ one replied. Another told me about the Grind of Navir in Shetland, where during the spring tides, waves a hundred feet high hurl boulders a quarter of a mile inland, to form a storm-beach out of sight of the sea. Then my friend Roger Deakin rang, to recommend Breachan’s Cave on the lonely north-west coast of Jura, and a peninsula on Loch Awe in the Southern Highlands, whose ruined castle was enticingly rook-haunted, and on which, he said, he had enjoyed an invigoratingly bad-tempered encounter with an estate manager. But - why didn’t I come over, he suggested, and we could sit and talk properly about it all.
There could have been no one better with whom to discuss wildness than Roger. A founder member of Friends of the Earth, he had been fascinated by nature and landscape all his life; a fascination that had culminated in the late 1990s, when he set out on a journey to swim through Britain. Over the course of several months, Roger swam in dozens of the rivers, lakes, llyns, lochs, streams and seas of England, Wales and Scotland. His aim was to acquire what he called ‘a frog’s-eye view’ of the country, to immerse himself in an unfamiliar element, and see the land from an untried perspective. The book he wrote describing his journey,
Waterlog
, is a classic: a funny, lyrical travelogue that was at once a defence of the wild water that was left, and an elegy for that which had gone. It also rang with his personality: vigorous, digressive, passionate. ‘He’s over sixty years old,’ a mutual friend of ours once said to me, ‘and he’s still got the energy of a fox cub!’