The Wild Places (Penguin Original) (33 page)

I asked Yvonne if she had been here during the 1953 floods. She whistled. She had been on the boat with her mother, she said, when her mother had noticed the water behaving oddly: drawing back to show bare mud, then rushing forwards again shortly afterwards, like, she said, the sea was being shaken somewhere. Yvonne had been sent to get her dad, who had just gone ashore, and bring him back. She found him quickly, and they went back to the boat and cast off, and sailed out up the estuary and into the open water. The weather was terrible, she said, very frightening, and the boat was nearly swamped, and everything fell out of its place in the galley, but it was nothing to what happened onshore.

Peter explained the meteorological physics of the flood to me. When a depression over water is surrounded by highs, he said, the highs begin to rotate around it, and give a spinning motion to the depression. The sea beneath the depression is drawn up into the vacuum created by the low-pressure air. That January, a rotating depression in the North Sea coincided with a northerly wind and a high spring tide. The wind drove the depression south, from the expanses of the North Sea towards the Channel, where the land narrowed the sea down, which caused the tide to surge even higher.

The surge struck the North Norfolk coast first. Blakeney Point was immediately overwhelmed, the Cley marshes flooded, and the Holkham pines stood in water. Warning should have been sent south, but in the chaos it was not, and a short time later, the sea-defences along the Essex coastline were swamped. The sea wall was breached in dozens of places. On Canvey Island alone, about 200 people were drowned. If you had been out at St Cedd’s, which remained dry, said Peter, and you had looked back inland across the peninsula, you would have seen only the upper storeys of buildings, and here and there the woodlands.

Later that afternoon, I met my friend Helen. A natural historian, a poet, an artist and a falconer, Helen had a keen sense of the wild, developed from many directions. She had caught a train out to the Dengie, and I met her at the station. After the two days I had spent haunting the woods and the saltmarshes, the shops seemed surprising to me in their brightness and language: a Numark Chemist, a Golden Delight Chinese takeaway, a Pound Store. We drove together back to the village of Dengie itself, where an old friend of Helen’s, Ron Digby, lived. Ron was a bird-artist and falconer, renowned within the world of falconry. He had lived in Essex all his life, but had travelled the world painting birds of all kinds. Of all birds, hawks and falcons were the ones he knew best, and painted most often. His manner was gentle, assiduously polite.

We sat in Ron’s kitchen, drinking tea. He talked a little about the way in which being a hunter, or being with hunters, changed the way you saw a landscape. He told me that partridges could look almost exactly like clods of earth or big soil-covered flints, and how, when he was hunting regularly, he had come to know some of the field edges so well that he could identify a bird automatically, because he carried a map in his head of where the big stones and clods were. Anything out of the ordinary would likely be a partridge, he said.

He stood up and beckoned us to the kitchen window. There on the back lawn, tethered on wooden stumps, were two peregrines: a plump brown young female, with a cream front, and a beautiful blue-backed male - a tiercel. Their heads bobbed up and down as they watched us: measuring distance, assessing threat.

Ron went out and brought back the tiercel, perched on his gloved hand. The bird’s colours recalled the minerals of the coast from which I had come: his beak and back were the silex blue of some of the flints I had found, and there was an orangey ironstone burr to his creamy upper chest. The feathers on his back lay tight and flat as chain-mail, and his sharp wings crossed like sword blades behind him. His eyeballs were the same shiny black as escalator handrails. Around each of his eyes was a rim of pitted yellow skin, like the rind of a lemon. He smelt burnt, of hot stone.

Later, Ron drove us all out through the peninsula and back to the sea wall, just south of where I had slept, his car bouncing over ruts in the road, and Helen sitting in the passenger seat with the hooded tiercel steady on her gloved hand. We discussed the tiercel, and as we did so he tipped his head from side to side, as though embarrassed at being talked about. Once, he creaked open his beak to reveal a tongue as hard and gleaming as plastic.

Right out there on the sea edge, in the depressed land, wading calf-deep through green fields of lucerne, we flew the tiercel. He launched himself from Ron’s wrist, flapped his wings clumsily twice, three times, seemed as if he would sink to the grass, and then lifted and flew out on a steep upwards diagonal. We watched him diminish.

He climbed with little hinged flaps, in an effortful but controlled motion, moving in a wide helix, until he reached a high pitch, perhaps 200 feet up, and at that height he levelled off and began to move in big circles, looking down on the land, surveying it.

‘The peregrine sees and remembers patterns we do not know exist,’ wrote Baker, ‘the neat squares of orchard and woodland, the endlessly varying quadrilateral shapes of fields. He finds his way across the land by a succession of remembered symmetries . . . he sees maps of black and white.’ The tiercel, up at an altitude greater than any land point in the county of Essex, would have seen out over the sea wall, to where the flocks of waders and gulls were massing on the edge of the incoming tide. He would have seen inland, through the haze, to the rectilinear pattern of the fields and ditches. Beneath him, he would have seen three human figures, moving in a line across the baize of a lucerne field, two figures on one side of a drainage dyke, one on the other. And then he would have seen two partridges startled up from cover, moving trackable objects, one flying south and seaward, the other north-west and inland, out across the crop field, a single feather falling from the northernmost bird as it fled.

The partridges clattered out from our feet, and glancing up I saw the tiercel suddenly tilt into a steep stoop, the lateral bird becoming a near-vertical bird, the ground rising to meet the diving falcon at around 230 feet per second. He missed the partridge, pulled up from his stoop, and began to climb again, regaining his pitch. The partridge had taken cover in the lucerne; when we flushed it out, he stooped again. A longer, more angled dive, perhaps at sixty degrees to the ground, and at the last extension of this stoop he extended a taloned foot and struck the partridge with an impact inaudible to us.

We walked across the field, and when we reached the tiercel we found him mantling: hooding his blue wings over the dead bird, and looking up at us, fearfully.

Later, after the tiercel had fed, we walked up on to the sea wall, where the warm light onshore wind blew the smell of salt and mud on to us. The tiercel perched on Helen’s hand, and all four of us sat there, looking out over the saltings, and watching the high migrations pass. Behind us, the late sun blazed in the evening haze, red as an aged sparrowhawk’s eye.

14

Tor

A sequence of clear nights in early November brought the first frosts. Skim-ice formed on standing water. The moon hung low over the city, yellow as it grew, then silver on the wane. After the frost came gales, and the leaves of the horse-chestnut trees, loosened by the frost, ticked down in their hundreds of thousands and drifted up against the kerbs and hedges.

On a day when the wind was buffeting rooks from the trees, I went to the Hope Valley in the Peak District, to see my friends John and Jan Beatty, who had sailed me out to Enlli many months before. I wanted to bring my journeys to some sort of end, and it seemed right to do so in the company of those with whom they had begun. Besides, John had promised to take me to see the snow hares.

John was born and brought up in the Peak, within sight of the Kinder Downfall, and became a park warden while still at school. After working around the world, he settled back in the Peak, in the village of Bamford, near the Ladybower reservoir. Decades spent walking and climbing in the region meant that John rarely used a map, because he carried one in his head. He knew all the Peak’s aspects: its bleak upper reaches, its gritstone edges and its wooded cloughs. He knew what time of year each species of migrant bird arrived. Redwings and fieldfares in autumn. Golden plover, sandpipers and dunlin in spring. Occasional snow buntings after a midwinter northerly gale. He knew the locations of particular trees: star-leaved field maples, big lone beeches, and the black-barked sweet chestnuts, which flamed a sulphurous yellow in autumn. He knew the locations of the snares and stink-pits set out by gamekeepers on the private swathes of moor, to trap anything which might prey on the grouse. He knew on which south-tilted rocks the adders sunned themselves on hot days. He knew in which larch-tree a pair of goshawks kept their nest, and at the bottom of which heathery down-slope hen harriers had once successfully hatched.

He also knew where the snow hares lived.

The hare had long been my totem animal, and I had been pleased to find hares, like the hawks, appearing throughout my journeys. I had seen them all over the country: hunched discreetly in their forms on Orford Ness, sitting attentively on the turned fields of Suffolk, and scooting over the snow-slopes of Meall nan Tarmachan and the karst shires of the Burren. They had been there too, less expectedly, in the name of Edward Thomas’s First World War training camp, and in the hare’s ear flower I had seen out on the Dengie Peninsula.

The hawk and the hare: they were the perfect pair of familiars for my map-making. The hawk turning its sentinel circles in the air, looking down on to the land. The hare knowing the land peerlessly at ground level, able to move faster over it than anything else earthbound. My sleepings-out, in cups and dips of rock and earth and snow; this was the habit of the hare. But the pull to the high ground, to the summits and ridges, to look down upon the land; this was in mimicry of the hawk.

Of all hares, it was the snow hare,
Lepus timidus
, that fascinated me most. Smaller and more ancient than their low-altitude cousins,
Lepus
europaeus
, the snow hares flourished across Europe during the Pleistocene. When the glaciers retreated, they followed the cold: their winter colouring allowed them to survive in snowbound conditions. Pliny thought that the snow hare went white from eating ice; in fact, it moults into its winter whiteness, shedding the smoky bluish-brown coat that lasts it for most of the year. Its winter moult is instigated by a reduction of the light received through the eyes. Decreased day-length begins the moult in autumn, and winter’s low temperature sustains it.

After the recession of the glaciers, the hares were marooned on islands of high ground - Wales, the Pennines, Cumbria, Scotland - before dying out everywhere but the Highlands. Then in the 1840s Scottish snow hares were introduced to the Peak District, in order to diversify the shooting bag on the grouse moors. They survived without flourishing: perhaps 200 hares now live across the many miles of high moorland plateaux that spread between the cities of Manchester, Sheffield and Derby. This is the paradox of their presence in the Peak: they have become for many people, including me, a sigil of wildness, but their presence here is entirely a consequence of human management. Even in the Cairngorms, their true fastness, they are under threat from climate change, and severe culls by gamekeepers who believe they are the secondary carriers of a tick-borne grouse-disease.

Snow hares possess, as well as the ghostly beauty of their winter pelage, an exceptionally graceful nonchalance. Poise at rest and elegance in motion: this distinguishes the snow hare. Watching one make its curved run over a steep snowfield, you understand why the Egyptian hieroglyph of a hare over a zigzag of water meant the verb ‘to be’, in the particular gerundive senses of ‘being’, ‘existing’, ‘persisting’.

For years, John had followed and watched a particular colony of hares which lived in and around a scatter of gritstone tors. The stones are set at 2,000 feet in a remote reach of the moors. There is little cover on the high tundra of the Peak, so it is natural for the hares to be drawn to the tor complexes that extrude here and there, and each of whose stones has its name, its history and its resemblances: to flying saucer, howdah, ostrich egg, quernstone.

It was this colony which John had watched during the great snows of March, when I had gone night-walking in Cumbria, and he had written to tell me of them playing among the ice dunes. In early November, a week before I went to see him, he had called to say that he had been up to the stones, and had found the hares there, on the turn into winter pelage, their brown coats blotched with white. He also said that if I wanted to sleep out, he had found a possible bivouac hole for us: a tunnel, open at both ends, weathered into the north-west face of one of the tors, its floor a blond grit-sand beach. A hare’s scrape, really. To sleep
inside
a tor! I couldn’t wait.