The Wild Places (Penguin Original) (3 page)

Roger and I had met a few years before, brought together by a shared love of the wild. I had written a book about mountains, he one about rivers and lakes. Although he was over twice my age, we quickly became close friends. When my daughter Lily was born, he assumed the role of a
de facto
great-uncle. On her first birthday, he gave her a wooden steam engine, wrapped up in sycamore leaves and tied with grass. Before her first visit to his rambling house, he told me that he had made her another present: it turned out to be a leaf maze - thousands of bright yellow mulberry leaves that he had raked and shaped into a Lily-sized labyrinth.

So on a bright day, a week or so after our conversation on the phone, I drove across to Mellis Common in Suffolk to see Roger, turning in past the wide self-coppiced willow stump that marked the start of the lane leading to his farm.

Roger lived in the most unusual home I had ever known. In 1969, when he was twenty-six, he had bought the ruined remains of an Elizabethan steading and twelve acres of surrounding meadow. Little survived of the original sixteenth-century structure except its spring-fed moat and its vast inglenook fireplace. So he put a sleeping-bag down in the fireplace, and lived there while he built a house around himself.

Walnut Tree Farm, as Roger christened it, was made largely of wood. Its frame was of oak, chestnut and ash, and more than three hundred beams kept its roof and its floors from falling. When big easterlies blew, its timbers creaked and groaned, making a sound ‘like a ship in a storm’, as he once put it, ‘or a whale on the move’. It was as close to a living thing as a building could be. He kept the doors and the windows open, in order to let air and animals circulate. Leaves gusted in through one door and out of another, and bats flitted in and out of windows, so that the house seemed almost to breathe. Spiders slung swags and trusses of silk in every corner. Swallows nested in the main chimney, and starlings in the thatch. Ivy and roses clambered up the outer walls, and sent prying tendrils inside through knot-holes and cracks. At the front grew the eponymous walnut tree, which in early autumn clattered green hard fruit down on to the roof of his barn and the heads of visitors. At the back was the moat in which he bathed most days during the summer months, and which was kept clean by a colony of thousands of ramshorn snails - the hygienists of the pond world.

I had visited Roger often, and had come to know his home and his land well. His fields, tended but unfarmed, were busy with life. Sparrowhawks cruised the sky overhead, hedgehogs slept under corrugated iron, and tawny owls hooted from the wood of hornbeam and oak that he had planted. Over the decades, he had established in his meadows a variety of outlying structures, including a shepherd’s hut into which he had fitted a bed and a stove with a stove-pipe, an old wooden caravan with a cracked window and a railway wagon he had painted Pullman-purple. He liked to sleep in the railway wagon on stormy nights: ‘An amazing thunderstorm last night as I lay listening,’ he had once written to me after a summer tempest. ‘Like being inside a kettledrum with a whole symphony going on out there and with thunder in wraparound quadraphonic!’ One morning, he woke in the shepherd’s hut to find that the whole structure was shaking. An earthquake? No, a roe deer scratching itself against a corner of the hut, unaware of its occupant.

The day I went to see him, we sat and talked for hours about the wild, drinking tea from big fired-clay cups, occasionally pulling books or maps down from his shelves, comparing our different understandings and experiences of the idea. Roger told me about some of the places in England he found strangest and most wild: the Brecklands of East Anglia, the Undercliff at Lyme Regis, Canvey Island in Essex. I told him about a waterfall pool far up Glen Feshie, which was overflown by peregrines and whose water was horseback brown; and about the Shelter Stone, a huge balanced boulder in the heart of the Cairngorms, beneath which it was possible to spend the night, even in winter.

I asked if he would accompany me on some of my journeys, and he said he would, especially those in England and Ireland - and that he was particularly keen we do some trespassing together. He declared his specific desire that we mount an expedition into the grounds of Madonna’s Wiltshire estate, in order to assert a right to roam in that beautiful wooded land. I demurred, muttering something cowardly about man-traps and gamekeepers - but already looking forward to our adventures together. I did not at that point know how vital a presence Roger would become in my journeys, or how powerful his influence would be in helping to change my understanding of wildness.

For weeks after my visit to Roger, I carried on planning. I bought and borrowed specialist maps - geological, meteorological, natural-historical - and let my mind wander out over them, dowsing for possible sites, trying to imagine in full what the maps only suggested might be there. I traced rivers as they dropped from escarpments, and guessed at the shapes of the rocks they carved. I ringed unnamed wooded islands in Scottish lochs and Irish loughs, and imagined swimming out to them, climbing their trees, and then sleeping out on them. I marked up areas of roadlessness and openness: the altiplanos of Rannoch Moor and the Fisherfield Wilderness. I tracked different rock types - gabbro, hornblende, serpentine, oolite, boulder clay - watching them submerge and then resurface across the landscape. To my desk I pinned a paragraph written by the mountaineer-explorer W. H. Murray as he researched an expedition to the Highland mountain of Ben Alder, using the old one-inch maps: ‘Even on coloured paper, all that country bore the unmistakable stamp of the wild, recessed by corries great enough to have at their backs still wilder fastnesses, where secret things awaited inquiry. What kind of things? you might ask. But, of course, I did not know.’

I listed hill-forts, barrows and tumuli in the Welsh marches and the south-western counties, and plotted routes between them. I spotted cliffs: the legendary rock prow of Sron Ulladale on North Harris, the escarpments off the south-west arm of Mull that plunge nearly 1,000 feet to boulder-beaches; the sheers of Clo Mor near Cape Wrath; and the north-facing corrie walls of Braeriach in the Cairngorms, where snow lies all year round, sintering slowly into ice. And I noted where certain animals and birds had their refuges: golden eagles, dotterel, greenshank, otters, snow hares, ptarmigan and even the ghostly snowy owl, making its rare forays south over the Arctic Circle.

Almost all of these places were in the far north or far west: the high hills and remote coasts of Scotland and Wales. But that cardinal bias seemed to supply a rough natural shape for the journeys. I would begin with what I knew and loved, casting outwards and upwards to the peaks and littorals that Fowles had declared as the last enclaves of ‘old nature’, and that conformed most purely to my private vision of wildness. Then at some northerly point I would turn south, back down through Ireland and eventually into urban England, where the wild seemed most at risk, most elusive and most foreign to me.

I also decided that, as I travelled, I would draw up a map to set against the road atlas. A prose map that would seek to make some of the remaining wild places of the archipelago visible again, or that would record them before they vanished for good. This would be a map, I hoped, that would not connect up cities, towns, hotels and airports. Instead, it would link headlands, cliffs, beaches, mountain-tops, tors, forests, river-mouths and waterfalls.

This book is that map. And I began its making by heading west, out along the pointing arm of the Lleyn Peninsula of North Wales, to a remote island where the first glimmerings of a wild consciousness could be found.

2

Island

Low evening light glowed in the bow wave. The wind was strong, and the boat was heeled over at twenty degrees to the horizontal. The sails were tight, the sea grey, agitated. All three of us on board were braced against wires and wood in order to keep our footing on the sloped deck. I was at the helm, trying to hold a steady course towards the island. I could feel the current pushing us sideways, forcing a sly lateral slide north, towards the distant rocks of the mainland, upon which broke a line of fine pale surf. Above the mainland hung two thin layers of cloud, black over white: a sign of disturbed air.

Early evening, early summer, off the westernmost tip of the Lleyn Peninsula. We had left harbour late, knowing that the wind was high, and darkness three hours away at most.

The boat was moving nearly eight knots, and had settled into a steady battering bounce over the waves, when there was a crack, and a fierce white flapping, like a swan taking off. The boat slewed round to leeward and slowed, as though the water had suddenly thickened, and we were all jolted forwards. Cold spray broke up and over the starboard side, and slapped my face. I could hear a noise like an irregular drumbeat.

The staysail had torn out from the deck, near the bow. The thick pin that clasped it in place had sheared through under the wind’s pressure, and the sail was lashing almost free, secured only at the masthead. The heavy metal spool fixed to the sail’s loose lower end was flinging about and pounding at the fibreglass deck.

John, the skipper, issued brief and exact orders. He took the helm, brought the boat round into the wind, and then left me to keep it there. Wave water soaked the deck. Jan, John’s wife, edged out along the boat’s bucking side, caught the spool and lashed it to a railing. The sail was lowered, and we wrestled it back from the wind and rolled it, so that it could be laid flat along the deck and taped down.

The final hour passed in the quiet that follows a crisis. With less sail up, we moved slowly. Four knots, rarely more.

The island, to the south-west of us, was silhouetted against the setting sun: a big back of cliff and crag, rising five hundred feet out of the water, then tapering off to a long shallow arm of land. On the arm stood a tall lighthouse, its opal mirrors glinting every few seconds.

We sailed at last into the wind-shadow of the island’s cliffs, and the single sail slumped, airless, from the mainmast. Then, by way of welcome or miracle, though of course it was neither, the low sun broke fully through the clouds and turned the sea silver, and we motored into the small sheltered harbour on the surface of that bright water.

As we drew close to the shore, the air filled with a high keening noise, which grew in volume the nearer we came to land. I thought that it must be an acoustic effect of the wind - quick air singing in the boat’s tight wires - and I looked around at my companions, unsure if I were the only one hearing it. As it became louder, I realised that it was not a single note, but a braid of dozens of notes, each of a slightly different pitch. And then I understood. Seals! Seals were making the sound, the hundreds of seals that were hauled out on every rock and kelp-hung skerry in the bay, and on its curved shoreline. They were giving off noise without seeming to, as bees do, or water. They were of many different colours: grey, black, white, fawn, fox-red and leather-brown. As we passed close by three smaller females, I saw that their fur was elegantly marked in swirls and contours.

John rowed me ashore in the dinghy, running it up on to the pebbled beach in the dusk light. I moved off alone inland, down the island’s thin south-western arm, passing through the plainsong of the seals, prospecting for a place to sleep.

The island’s name is Ynys Enlli, which means Island of the Currents. The name is well given, for several fierce tide races meet around Enlli. A tide race occurs when a rising or falling tide drives the sea rapidly through a channel. The water in tide races, especially at points where two or more races converge, behaves erratically. At the turn of tides, it can achieve a sleek calmness, but when the tides run, the water seethes and there is a submarine twining of currents. Where the races meet, waves stand up like shark-fins, and bubbles rise in gouts, as though the seabed itself were being stirred.

Tide races can also reach into apparently open water. When a race meets a headland, as it does at the tip of the Lleyn Peninsula, it is deflected outwards. The distance of the deflection depends upon the speed of the race: a quick race can reach out a menacing arm for miles. It is easy to see how early navigators, caught in the pull of such a current, ascribed supernatural malevolence to certain headlands and peninsulas.

Ynys Enlli was among the many remote places of the west and north-west coasts of Britain and Ireland to be settled between around AD 500 and 1000. During those centuries, an extraordinary migration occurred. Monks, anchorites, solitaries and other devout itinerants began to travel in their thousands to the bays, forests, promontories, mountain-tops and islands of the Atlantic littoral. In frail craft and with little experience of seamanship, they sailed out across dangerous seas, in search of something we might now call wildness. Where they stopped, they built monasteries, cells and oratories, dug cemeteries for their dead and raised stone crosses to their God. These travellers were known as
peregrini
: the name derives from the Latin
peregrinus
and carries the idea of wandering over a distance, giving us our word ‘pilgrim’. Before coming to Enlli, I had plotted on a map the known routes and landfalls of these migrations, and I had ended up with a tracery-work of what are still among the wildest parts of Britain and Ireland.