The Wild Places (Penguin Original) (34 page)

We began walking late in the afternoon, with a big wind driving rain into our faces, and chopping up the water of the reservoir. We walked north first, through a mile of larch and birch forest. The frost followed by the wind had knocked billions of golden needles from the larches, and they lay in glossy saffron reefs by the side of every road and path, glowing even in that low light, possessing a lustre rather than a colour. John talked as we walked, pointing out birds, trees, plants, describing his love for the moors. There was nothing showy about John’s knowledge; his manner was the emanation of a deep passion. He possessed an integrity and an enthusiasm that reminded me constantly of Roger, and I wished they had been able to meet.

After two miles, he stopped and pointed up to the skyline: the tors, a mile or so from us and 300 feet above, just visible in the dusk. They were formed of gritstone, layers of submarine sand laid down around 300 million years ago, and then compacted over time in a subsiding basin to become rough rock. Ice, wind, and water had eventually carved sections of exposed gritstone into the eccentric shape of the tors. They reminded me of the ventifact sandstone outcrops of the Hoggar Mountains around Tamanrasset in Algeria, which have been abraded by sand-carrying winds into structures impertinent to gravity: boulders the size of houses, balanced on stems of rock.

We began to move steeply uphill, over boggy ground, slipping on bracken and grass. Our clothes, already wet with rain, became slicked with mud. We neared the rocks. Then - Hares! Hares! Two shouts from John, and two hares breaking from cover in the rocks above us, bobbing away uphill. And they were white! They moved so easily, little ghosts slipping between the rocks, over the bilberry and heather. Five seconds and they were gone, leaving my heart thumping.

We walked up into the heart of the tors, alert for more hares. The tors were spread over the rim of the plateau, and they faced twenty clear miles of high moor. At that height the wind was colossal, hurtling out of the black west, and of such strength that it was impossible to stand straight in it. We moved from rock to rock, reaching out to steady ourselves, as though on a ship’s deck in a storm. The rain was pelting now in heavy cold monsoon droplets. I took shelter behind a pair of twenty-foot tors that tilted in towards one another to form a wind-gate, and when I stepped from the shelter into the gate itself, the force of the gale was such that it pulled the flesh on my face tight and back. I remembered another gateway to another upper world: the Chalamain Gap, the granite portal that marks the northern entry to the centre of the Cairngorms.

John located the bivouac cave, and I knelt to examine it. It was already flooded out, a pool of water glinting on the mica-sand at its near end. This was a wild night, a wonderful night in its way, and I was glad to have seen the moor in this mood. Certainly, I would have liked to wake among the hares. But it was no night to be out. Sixteen hours of storm-soaked darkness, with almost no cover, would only have been a mortification. The hares could tolerate this, but not us. I found and kept a lozenge of gritstone from the bivouac, and then we retreated behind a tor, blew on our fingers, drank hot coffee from a flask, and shouted at each other above the wind, planning our return in the near-dark over these miles of rough steep ground.

Looking for cover, we walked up and over a shoulder of moor, and there, suddenly, were more hares, dozens of them, white against the dark moor, moving in haphazard darts, zigzagging and following unpredictable deviations, like particles in a cloud chamber. They must, like us, have been driven away from the rocks by the wind, and come here to the peat-troughs for shelter. Their white fur drew the very last of the light, so that they glowed against the dark moor. One, a big male, still dabbed here and there with brown fur, stopped, glanced back at us over his shoulder, and then spun away into the dark.

So few wild creatures, relatively, remain in Britain and Ireland: so few, relatively, in the world. Pursuing our project of civilisation, we have pushed thousands of species towards the brink of disappearance, and many thousands more over that edge. The loss, after it is theirs, is ours. Wild animals, like wild places, are invaluable to us precisely because they are not us. They are uncompromisingly different. The paths they follow, the impulses that guide them, are of other orders. The seal’s holding gaze, before it flukes to push another tunnel through the sea, the hare’s run, the hawk’s high gyres: such things are wild. Seeing them, you are made briefly aware of a world at work around and beside our own, a world operating in patterns and purposes that you do not share. These are creatures, you realise, that live by voices inaudible to you.

By the next morning the storm had blown itself out almost completely, and long slants of sunlight flashed across the moor’s edge and down through the village. The sky had a rinsed after-storm sharpness. It was Remembrance Sunday, and at eleven o’clock the Reveille sounded through the cleared air. John and I took part in the service, which was held in the main street of the village. I thought of Gurney, of Thomas, of unnamed and unnumbered others.

After the service finished, we walked up on to Bamford Edge, the broken gritstone rampart that extends along the moor directly above the village. After two or three miles of walking, we found ourselves above a deep wooded valley which dropped steeply away from the moor.

Below us, the valley was ablaze. The great conflagration of autumn was underway. Hundreds of acres of trees on the turn: larch, birch, beech, sweet chestnut, carrying leaves that were orange, carmine, brimstone and gold. The sight ignited in me a sudden series of memory flares, back through my journeys, to the different kinds of phosphorescence I had seen: the glowing seas off the Lleyn Peninsula, the rainbow in Coruisk, the pollen drifting through the pines of Morlich, the northern lights visible from Ben Hope - and now this autumn wood, a mile from a village.

Autumn leaf colour is an expression of a death which is also a renewal. Through spring and summer, green chlorophyll is the dominant leaf pigment. But as day-length decreases and temperatures fall, chlorophyll production is reduced, eventually to the point of extinction. As the chlorophyll content declines, other pigments begin to shine through: carotenoids - sunlight-capturing chemicals that flame orange, yellow and gold - brown tannins and the rarer redder anthocyanins. The anthocyanins are produced by the action of sustained strong light upon the sugars which get trapped in leaves as the tree’s vascular system prepares for leaf-drop. In these ways, deciduous trees burn themselves spectacularly back to their bare branches, in order to survive the winter and prepare for the resurgence of spring.

It was on high ground above the clough that we found the beech tree. A single old tree, no more than twenty feet tall, thriving in a little marshy hollow. This dip was all the beech needed by way of protection from the wind, and it had grown to precisely the level of the surrounding land. It had also created a raft of solid ground in the marsh, binding the bog with its roots so that turf could form. It was a survivor, this tree. Each of its hundreds of branches corkscrewed complicatedly, turned this way and that over the years by the wind. The ground beneath it was golden with shed leaves.

It was a tree that invited ascent. John sat beneath it, looking out over the valley beneath, while I climbed. It was the finest climbing tree I had ever met: the next branch always there, perfectly curved and kinked to take a foot or a hand. It seemed almost to help me up. I perched near its summit for ten minutes or so, thinking south and east, to my own beech tree on top of its little hill. Far beneath, the church clock struck one.

I climbed down, and John and I sat together under the tree for a while. Suddenly we heard a high cheeping, and looked up. A handful of tiny birds had blown in and settled on the upper reaches of the beech. Goldcrests! After a minute or so, swarming the top branches, the birds gusted off, down towards the deeper wood in the clough, to gild some other tree.

15

Beechwood

T. S. ELIOT

The evening I got back from the Hope Valley, I took down my stones from their storm-beach on the shelf, and laid them out on my desk, adding my gritstone lozenge to the pattern. I began to move them around. First I arranged them into a long line of their finding, with the earliest to the left and most recent to the right. Then I moved them into order of their ages, as best I could: Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Permian, Jurassic . . . Then I dispersed them into a rough shape of the relative places of their findings, so that they made an approximate mineral map of the archipelago itself, and my journeys within it. Each stone still carried with it some residual memories of the moment of its finding: the smell and temperature of the air, the light’s texture.

The blue basalt heart from Ynys Enlli, from the gulch-edge of the pearly sea. The olive-shaped quartz pebble from Coruisk, which I had rolled in my mouth as we left on that hot bright day. The two eyeball-shaped stones, plucked from the peat of Rannoch and the stream-cut near Sandwood, staring back at me. The blue and white oblong taken from the frosted root bole in the Black Wood, which still had winter-wood magic trapped in its layers. The frost-cracked shard from the summit of Ben Hope. The hooped rhombus from the Naver estuary, whose lines recalled wood grain and sand terrace. The mapstone from Blakeney. The dolmen of chalk from the cockle beach at Essex, and the flat red wedge of brick from the Wilderness. And - last of them all - a squashed egg of pale granite flecked with mica, which I had taken from a shelf at Walnut Tree Farm on a visit after Roger’s death, to mark the wildness of his home. Other talismans, too: raptor feathers, the dolphin of wood, the broken whelk, the catkins.

My journeys had revealed to me new logics of connection between discrete parts of Britain and Ireland, beyond the systems of motorway and flight-path. There were geological links: tor answering to tor, flint to flint, sandstone to sandstone, granite giving way to mud. There were the migration lines of birds and animals. There were the unpredictable movements of weather and light: the passage of blizzards, mists and darkness, and the wildness they conferred on places. And there were the people, alive and dead, who had dwelled in or passed through the landscapes. A webbing of story and memory joined up my places, as well as other more material affinities. The connections made by all of these forces - rocks, creatures, weathers, people - had laid new patterns upon the country, as though it had been swilled in a developing fluid, and unexpected images had emerged, ghostly figures showing through the mesh of roads and cities.

I had made more journeys than I have told of here - and there were many more places to which I still wanted to travel. The Orkneys, the Shetland Islands, St Kilda and the Scillies. Skokholm and Skomer, off the Pembrokeshire coast. Secret coves in Devon and Cornwall. Exmoor and Bodmin. The Black Mountains in mid-Wales. The Ardnamurchan Peninsula and the Monadhliaths. Lost little fens in corners of the Norfolk Broads. Parts of Wiltshire and Shropshire. The Borders, where I planned to follow the route taken over the high ground by the fleeing Richard Hannay, in John Buchan’s
The Thirty-Nine Steps
. And I wanted to carve a kayak from a big birch and paddle down the Wye. But the making of the map had never seemed like a finite endeavour. There would, anyway, be time to do these journeys, or some of them, in the future, I thought. And in a few years, my children would be old enough to come with me.

The road atlas now seemed even more distorting an account of the islands than when I had begun the journeys. So many aspects of the country go unrepresented by it. It does not observe the pale lines of old drove-ways that seam the soft-stone counties of England, or the tawny outlines of the south-western moors. It fails to record the ceaseless movement of mud within the estuaries of the Wash, and it is inattentive to texture, smell and sound: to the way oak pollen and fireweed seeds drift in wind, to the different shadows cast by mountains, to the angles of repose of boulders at the base of Pennine crags. It ignores the mists of Dartmoor, which are as thick, fluid and quick as milk, and the black peat of Rannoch, so liquid that a human footprint is dissolved within hours. It is blind to the chosen perches of goshawks in the forests of the Dark Peak, or the hunting paths of the sparrowhawks of Cambridgeshire.