The Wild Places (Penguin Original) (25 page)

At some point in the history of the road, hedging trees had been planted to either side of it, partly to make way-finding easier in poor weather, and partly to provide shelter from the winds and sea storms that beat in off the English Channel. Over centuries, these hedges had grown, died, reseeded, grown again, and now, unchecked, they had thrust up and out and over the holloway.

One thinks of hedges as nothing more than bristly partitions; field Mohicans. But these hedges had become linear forests, leaning into one another and meshing above the old sunken road to form an interlocking canopy or roof, turning road into tunnel.

Near the summit of the western horn of the half-moon of hills, the road became so overgrown that we had to leave it. We scrambled up its steep eastern side, and into the pollinous air of the flower meadow that bordered it. I looked back over my shoulder, to where the sea lay blue. The heat bred mirages out over the water; false promises of islands and mountain ranges. A few hundred yards further along, in a gap in the hedge by a towering ash tree, we found a way back down into the holloway, and descended into its shadowy depth, abseiling down the sandstone sides using ivy as a rappel-rope. It felt as though we were dropping into a lost world, or a giant version of the gryke in the Burren.

Few people knew as much about hedges as Roger. The twelve acres of his land were separated into four meadows and a small wood by almost a mile of old hedgerow, laid out on a medieval pattern. In certain places - the brink of his woodland, the edge of his moat - Roger had laid his hedges into beautiful lateral structures, which tightened their own meshes as they grew. But mostly he had let the hedges run wild. In places, they had reached twenty feet high and fifteen feet wide. Elder, maple, hazel and ash trees for the most part formed their central structures; dog rose, blackthorn and bramble billowed spikily outwards; and bryony, honeysuckle and hop draped and wove themselves around everything, giving the hedges differing densities and colours through the year. So thick were some areas of hedge that elms grew there to an uncommon height, protected from the death-carrying beetles by the thicket of briars and roses. Elsewhere flourished sloes, crab-apples, hollies, oaks and spindle trees. In autumn, the hedges produced hundreds of pounds of fruit, which Roger would harvest.

Roger’s hedgerows were exceptional, in the sense of rare. For thirty years he had kept them and let them run to jungle, while on neighbouring farms, mile after mile of hedgerow had been destroyed. Using a series of old maps, he had researched the changing hedgerow extent in his parish. In 1970, just after he moved to Walnut Tree Farm, he estimated there to be four miles of hedge within half a mile of his house, excluding his land, and a total of thirty-seven miles of hedge in the parish itself. Now only one and a half miles were left in his vicinity, and no more than eight miles in the entire parish.

All this was a version in miniature of the hedgerow loss that occurred across England in the decades after the Second World War. The drive to maximise agricultural productivity, especially in cereals, meant that vast areas of land - in the Midland and East Anglian shires in particular - were opened out into increasingly large fields, for the bigger the field, the more efficiently combine-harvesters and tractors were able to work it. Farmers were financially encouraged to plough out the woodlands and grub up hedgerows that divided their land. Nearly a quarter of a million miles of hedgerow were lost during this conversion; 2,000 miles are still being lost each year. On the Wessex Downlands and the Essex marshes, hedgerow systems were destroyed in their entirety. And with the loss of the hedgerows came the loss of the wildlife that thrived in them: tree sparrows, grey partridges and corn buntings, among other species, were brought close to extinction.

Shortly before we left for Dorset, I had driven over to Walnut Tree Farm to plan the trip. That day, by way of rehearsal for our Dorset adventure, we went out exploring Roger’s hedgerows. Walking the fields, we reached an unusually deep and thick area of hedge. Roger said he had seen a weasel emerge more than once from there, so we decided to try to crawl inside the hedge, to find what world it held. Pulling our sleeves up over our hands, we pushed under the first row of boughs, trying to avoid the biting blackthorns. A few yards in, we reached a natural hollow, where the trunks of the main trees rose, and we sat there, with our backs against a trunk, looking out into the meadow through the skein of briar and leaves, and listening to the life of the hedge. Paths through the leaf-litter around us testified to the hedge’s interior as a high-use animal roadway.

‘There is wildness everywhere,’ Roger had written once, ‘if we only stop in our tracks and look around us.’ To him, the present-day and the close-at-hand were as astonishing as the long-gone and the far-afield. He was an explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby.

Writing in 1938, the painter Paul Nash spoke of the ‘unseen landscapes’ of England. ‘The landscapes I have in mind,’ he wrote, ‘are not part of the unseen world in a psychic sense, nor are they part of the Unconscious. They belong to the world that lies, visibly, about us. They are unseen merely because they are not perceived; only in that way can they be regarded as invisible.’ Nash found his archetype for these unseen landscapes in the Wittenham Clumps: a hill in Oxfordshire, ring-marked by Bronze and Iron Age earthworks, and topped by an eighteenth-century beech grove. The hill is little more than 300 feet high, and of gently sloping sides; the sort of landform over which your eye might easily slide. But for Nash the Clumps possessed a numinous beauty.

Perhaps it was the effect of my return to England, after the vast wild spaces of Scotland. Perhaps it was reading of Edward Thomas’s walking tours, and looking at Palmer’s mystical canvases. Perhaps it was living with my daughter Lily, and watching her intense scrutiny of a snail, or a mushroom or a patch of briar. Certainly, it was Roger’s influence, and the glimpse into the gryke in the Burren: that miniature wildwood, no more than an arm’s-length long and a hand’s-span wide. Whatever the combination of causes, I had started to refocus. I was becoming increasingly interested in this understanding of wildness not as something which was hived off from human life, but which existed unexpectedly around and within it: in cities, backyards, roadsides, hedges, field boundaries or spinnies.

Certainly, these islands possessed wild places on massive scales - the Cairngorm massif is greater in area than Luxembourg, and its weather systems can be polar in their severity. But my original idea that a wild place had to be somehow outside history, which had failed to fit the complicated pasts of the Scottish and Irish landscapes, seemed even more improper in an English context. English wildness existed in the main as Nash’s ‘unseen landscapes’: it was there, if carefully looked for, in the bend of a stream valley, in the undercut of a riverbank, in copses and peat hags, hedgerows and quicksand pools. And it was there in the margins, interzones and rough cusps of the country: quarry rim, derelict factory and motorway verge. I had not expected to find this when I had begun, had been all but blind to such places. But now a myopia was setting in, a myopia of a good sort, replacing the long-sight of the early northern and western journeys. Or a thawing of vision - perhaps that was a better way of thinking of it, now that summer had come.

That margins should be a redoubt of wildness, I knew, was proof of the devastation of the land: the extent to which nature had been squeezed to the territory’s edges, repressed almost to extinction. But it seemed like proof, as well, of the resilience of the wild - of its instinct for resurgence, its irrepressibility. And a recognition that wildness weaved with the human world, rather than existing only in cleaved-off areas, in National Parks and on distant peninsulas and peaks; maybe such a recognition was what was needed ‘to help us end the opposition between culture and nature, the garden and the wilderness, and to come to recognize ourselves at last as at home in both’, as an American philosopher, Val Plumwood, had put it.

An artistic tradition has long existed in England concerning the idea of the ‘unseen landscape’, the small-scale wild place. Artists who have hallowed the detail of landscape and found it hallowing in return, who have found the boundless in the bounded, and seen visions in ditches.

William Blake perceived the world in a grain of sand. John Ruskin was captivated by the growth of lichens and mosses on trunks and rocks. Dorothy Wordsworth kept a series of elegantly attentive journals - the Alfoxden Journal, written when the Wordsworths were living in Somerset in 1797-8, and the Grasmere Journal, kept at Dove Cottage from 1800-1803, whose precision of observation supports Wordsworth’s allusion in ‘Tintern Abbey’ to his sister’s ‘wild eyes’. John Clare - from an early age a lane-haunter, a birds’-nester, a night-walker and a field-farer - wrote his artfully simple poems of praise for the landscape around his Northamptonshire home: poems that still carry the suddenness and surprise of the encounters he had during his years of countryside foray.

Over the summer of 1805, the young watercolourist John Sell Cotman spent nearly four months living at Brandsby Hall, north of York, where he was employed as drawing master to the four daughters of Mrs Cholmeley, the Hall’s owner. During that time, Cotman began to explore the nearby landscapes: the rivers, fells and woodlands of Durham and North Yorkshire. He took his brush and colours, and went on foot, pushing further and further up the River Greta, and into the fell country near Kirkham. In this period, something remarkable happened to his painting. Cotman’s fame had previously come from his grand subjects: Cadair Idris, Newburgh Priory, Durham Cathedral. But that summer, he became fascinated by the local, the small-scale: a drop-gate over a stream arm, a boulder beneath a bridge, a copse of trees, smoke rising discreetly above a river pool. The images he made in those months are subtly close-toned, attentive. He wrote to his patron Dawson Turner to explain that he had spent the summer chiefly ‘coloring [
sic
] from nature’, making ‘close copies of that ficle [
sic
] Dame consequently valuable on that account’. He had been converted to the beauty of the parochial.

The late-Victorian writer Richard Jefferies spent much of his life studying and describing the rural southern counties of Wiltshire, Sussex, Gloucestershire and Somerset: counties that were, to Jefferies, teeming with wildness. Jefferies had no interest in the nineteenth-century North American idea of ‘wilderness’ on a grand scale - a phenomenon to be experienced only amid the red-rock citadels of the desert or the glacier-ground peaks. For Jefferies, wildness of an equal intensity existed in the spinneys and hills of England, and he wrote about those places with the same wonder that his contemporaries were expressing in their reports on the Amazon, the Pacific, the Rockies and the Rub al-Khali. He found wildness joyful, but also minatory; the vigour of natural wildness was to him a reminder of the fragility of human tenure on the earth. In 1885 he published
After London, or Wild England
, a futuristic fantasia set in the 1980s, by which time, following an unspecified ecological catastrophe, much of Southern England has been flooded, and London has been reclaimed by swamp, scrub and tree:

Then there was Stephen Graham. Graham, who died in 1975 at the age of ninety, was one of the most famous walkers of his age. He walked across America once, Russia twice and Britain several times, and his 1923 book
The Gentle Art of Tramping
was a hymn to the wildness of the British Isles. ‘One is inclined,’ wrote Graham, ‘to think of England as a network of motor roads interspersed with public-houses, placarded by petrol advertisements, and broken by smoky industrial towns.’ What he tried to prove in
The Gentle Art
, however, was that wildness was still ubiquitous.

Graham devoted his life to escaping what he called ‘the curbed ways and the tarred roads’, and he did so by walking, exploring, swimming, climbing, sleeping out, trespassing and ‘vagabonding’ - his verb - round the world. He came at landscapes diagonally, always trying to find new ways to move in or through them. ‘Tramping is a straying from the obvious,’ he wrote, ‘even the crookedest road is sometimes too straight.’ In Britain and Ireland, ‘straying from the obvious’ brought him into contact with landscapes that were, as he put it, ‘unnamed - wild, woody, marshy’. In
The Gentle Art
he described how he drew up a ‘fairy-tale’ map of the glades, fields and forests he reached: its network of little-known wild places.

There was an Edwardian innocence about Graham - an innocence, not a blitheness - which appealed deeply to me. Anyone who could sincerely observe that ‘There are thrills unspeakable in Rutland, more perhaps than on the road to Khiva’ was, in my opinion, to be cherished. Graham was also one among a line of pedestrians who saw that wandering and wondering had long gone together; that their kinship as activities extended beyond their half-rhyme. And his book was a hymn to the subversive power of pedestrianism: its ability to make a stale world seem fresh, surprising and wondrous again, to discover astonishment on the terrain of the familiar. My 1929 edition of his book was well bound in stiff board and green leather, with gold imprinted lettering. Its corners were bashed and its cover scuffed: it had clearly been in a lot of pockets and knapsacks before I acquired it.

That July day, as Roger and I dropped into the hazy light of our Chideock holloway, one of Graham’s remarks came back to me. ‘As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.’