Moving the stones around, I thought back over the arc of the journeys: the long cast west and north, and then the retreat south, and eventually down to Essex, unlikely wild Essex. I had a chromatic memory of the change: from the whites, greys and blues of winter Scotland, through the pewter and cream of the Burren, to the green and gold of the English summer. I had a haptic memory, too, a memory of touch: from the hard rock to the soft mud, from the ice to the grass and the sand. But most powerfully I remembered it as a change of focus: from the long sight-lines from peninsula, moor and mountain summit, to the close-up worlds of hedge and ditch, sea pool and hare scrape.
As I had moved south, my own understanding of wildness had been altered - or its range had been enlarged. My early vision of a wild place as somewhere remote, historyless, unmarked, now seemed improperly partial.
It was not that places such as Hope and Rannoch, the last fastnesses, were worthless. No, in their stripped-back austerity, their fierce elementality, these landscapes remained invaluable in their power to awe. But I had learned to see another type of wildness, to which I had once been blind: the wildness of natural life, the sheer force of ongoing organic existence, vigorous and chaotic. This wildness was not about asperity, but about luxuriance, vitality, fun. The weed thrusting through a crack in a pavement, the tree root impudently cracking a carapace of tarmac: these were wild signs, as much as the storm wave and the snowflake. There was as much to be learned in an acre of woodland on a city’s fringe as on the shattered summit of Ben Hope: this was what Roger had taught me - and what Lily did not yet need to be taught. It was something most people forgot as they grew into adults.
One other change had happened, and that was a shift of time-scheme. I had come to feel wildness as a quality that flared into futurity, as well as reverberating out of the past. The contemporary threats to the wild were multiple, and severe. But they were also temporary. The wild prefaced us, and it will outlive us. Human culture will pass, given time, of which there is a sufficiency. The ivy will snake back and unrig our flats and terraces, as it scattered the Roman villas. The sand will drift into our business parks, as it drifted into the brochs of the Iron Age. Our roads will lapse into the land. ‘A ghost wilderness hovers around the entire planet,’ wrote the poet and forester Gary Snyder, ‘the millions of tiny seeds of vegetation . . . hiding in the mud on the foot of an arctic tern, in the dry desert sands, or in the wind . . . each ready to float, freeze or be swallowed, always preserving the germ.’
In between my journeys, I had spent increasing amounts of time exploring the farmland and the copses within a mile or two of my home. The hedgerows, the fields and the little woods that I had once been so avid to leave behind for the far west and north, had come slowly to seem different to me - filled with a wildness I had not previously perceived or understood. Strange things had begun to occur in this landscape. Once, emerging from a high-hedged lane, I put up a flock of white doves from a brown field, and watched as they rose applauding into the sky. On a spring day, I had gone to Nine Wells Wood, and found numberless threads of white gossamer hanging from the leaves and twigs of the spindle trees, and drifting languidly out in the wind like prayer-lines. It was a nursery of thousands of white micro-moths, with each pupa making a single thread of silk. Those trailing silks, some of them five or six feet long, cross-hatched the path at every height, so that it was impossible to move along the wood’s narrow tracks without getting snagged and wrapped by the silk, and by the time I reached the far end of the wood I had been part-cocooned. On a sultry August evening, when the air was still and ripe with humidity, I had run up to the beechwood, passing through hedges thick with bindweed, whose snowy-white trumpets were making their anti-clockwise revolutions. Everything that evening seemed slowed by the heat, and I had the illusion that the air had assumed the consistency of water. I watched from the observatory as a crow took flight from a branch, then moved away with languorous manta-ray wing beats.
In the early days of autumn, with Helen and another friend, and Lily, I walked up to the hedgerows between Nine Wells Wood and the beechwood. We carried baskets, and picked blackberries, cherry-plums and sloes. Lily poked inquisitively about in the brambles. At an old felled ash trunk, I snapped back a bit of dry bark, and showed her the insects teeming beneath it.
Up near the entrance to the deepest sided of the hedgerow ways, we stopped to see the black walnut tree that Roger and I had found two years previously, when it had been just a self-seeded sapling. Eccentric and independent, it had survived the passage of tractors and the drift of pesticides. It was flourishing, and within a few years it would bear fruit.
One afternoon, a week after the snow hares, the wind was rising, so I went to the beechwood. I walked there, following streets to the city’s fringe, and then along field-edge paths. The hedgerows were bright with the ochre of hazels, the doubloon-gold of birch. In the grass of the verges, a few last scabious heads bobbed, and I passed a single cow-parsley inexplicably in flower, lost in its own dream of summer. Woodpigeons were doing paper-aeroplane swoops, turning in stiff curves, their wings raked up.
From the bottom of the hill, I could hear the noise of the trees with the wind; a marine roar that grew in volume as I approached. Looking up at the swaying wood, I remembered something I had read: when you see a wood or a forest, you must imagine the ground almost as a mirror-line, because a tree’s subterranean root system can spread nearly as widely as its aerial crown. For the visible canopy of each tree you have to imagine an inverted hidden one, yearning for water just as its twin yearns for light.
The wood looked drab from the outside that day. But when I stepped into it I found myself inside a light-box. The sunshine streaming through the leaves was throwing gold, copper and silver light into the air. The effect was so unexpected and counter-intuitive that I walked out of the wood and then back into it. The same again. Brown outside - and then a dazzle of colour! I walked on up through the kaleidoscope wood.
The beech will be among the first tree species to die out in southern Britain if the climate continues to warm. Studies of beechwoods show that big old beeches are already beginning to lose their vigour long before their usual time, and trees of fifty years’ growth are showing decline more usually associated with trees three times that age. Unlike the elm, however, the beech will not vanish; it will migrate. Beechwoods will follow the isotherms, searching for the cooler land, as the snow hares did after the Pleistocene. The beeches will find fresh habitats and ranges in the newly warmed north. Not the death of a species, then, but its displacement. The loss would still be great, though, and it could happen in my lifetime: the beechwood might die before my eyes.
Up near the long top of the hill, I found my tree. I climbed up past its familiar marks - the crooked branch, the carved ‘H’, the elephant skin, the missing limb - until I reached the observatory. I settled myself on the forked branch, and looked out over the land.
I have followed a hare’s run, I thought: out, round and back to my starting point, turning arc into circle.
Standing there in the observatory, I tried to imagine the effects of the wind across Britain and Ireland. I thought east, to the coasts of Norfolk and Suffolk, where it would be urging the sea to shingled plungings. I thought north, where it would be driving the snow hares of the Peak into shelter, fraying waterfalls into spray in Cumbrian valleys, and moving the sand at the mouth of the Naver. I thought west, where it would be rushing over the summits of Bin Chuanna and Croagh Patrick, scouring the golden island on which I had slept near Rosroe, and probing down into the shearwater burrows on Enlli. And I thought south, where it would be stirring the still air inside the Dorset holloways, and buffeting the birds on the Essex mudflats.
I imagined the wind moving through all these places, and many more like them: places that were separated from one another by roads and housing, fences and shopping-centres, street-lights and cities, but that were joined across space at that time by their wildness in the wind. We are fallen in mostly broken pieces, I thought, but the wild can still return us to ourselves.
Then I looked back out across the landscape before me: the roads, the railway, the incinerator tower and the woodlands - Mag’s Hill Wood, Nine Wells Wood, Wormwood. The woods were spread out across the land, and all were seething.
Wildness was here, too, a short mile south of the town in which I lived. It was set about by roads and buildings, much of it was menaced, and some of it was dying. But at that moment the land seemed to ring with a wild light.
SELECTED READINGS
Water
Bachelard, Gaston,
L’eau et les rêves: essai sur l’imagination de la matière
(Paris, 1947)
Carson, Rachel,
The Sea Around Us
(New York, 1950)
Carver, Raymond,
Where Water Comes Together with Other Water
(New York, 1985)
——,
A New Path to the Waterfall
(New York, 1989)
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor,
Collected Letters
, ed. E. L. Griggs (Oxford, 1956-71)
——,
Notebooks: 1794-1808
, ed. K. Coburn (London, 1957-61)
Cornish, Vaughan,
Waves of the Sea and Other Water Waves
(London, 1910)
——,
Waves of Sand and Snow
(London, 1914)
——,
Ocean Waves and Kindred Geophysical Phenomena
(Cambridge, 1934)
Deakin, Roger,
Waterlog
(London, 1999)
Maclean, Norman,
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
(Chicago, 1976)
Maxwell, Gavin,
The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy
(London, 1960-68)
Raban, Jonathan,
Coasting
(London, 1986)
Simms, Colin,
Otters and Martens
(Exeter, 2004)
Thomson, David,
The People of the Sea
(London, 1954)
Williamson, Henry,
Tarka the Otter
(New York, 1927)
Stone
Ascherson, Neal,
Stone Voices
(London, 2002)
Bagnold, Ralph,
The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes
(London, 1941)
Bradley, Richard,
An Archaeology of Natural Places
(London, 2000)
Harrison, Robert Pogue,
The Dominion of the Dead
(Chicago, 2003)
Household, Geoffrey,
Rogue Male
(London, 1939)
Langewiesche, William,
Sahara Unveiled
(New York, 1996)
McNeillie, Andrew,
An Aran Keening
(Dublin, 2001)
Meloy, Ellen,
The Anthropology of Turquoise
(New York, 2002)
Murray, W. H.,
Mountaineering in Scotland
(London, 1947)
——,
Undiscovered Scotland
(London, 1951)
Perrin, Jim,
On and off the Rocks
(London, 1986)
——,
Yes, to Dance
(Oxford, 1990)
Robinson, Tim,
Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage
(Dublin, 1986)
——,
Mementoes of Mortality
(Roundstone, 1991)
——,
Stones of Aran: Labyrinth
(Dublin, 1995)
Shepherd, Nan,
The Living Mountain
(Aberdeen, 1977)
Thomson, David, and George Ewart Evans,
The Leaping Hare
(London, 1972)
Tilley, Christopher,
A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, Monuments
(Oxford, 1994)
Worpole, Ken,
Last Landscapes
(London, 2003)
Wood
Agee, James,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(New York, 1941)
Calvino, Italo,
Il Barone Rampante
[
The Baron in the Trees
], trans. Archibald Colquhoun (London, 1959)
Deakin, Roger,
Wildwood
(London, 2007)
Fowler, John,
The Scottish Forest Through the Ages
(Edinburgh, 2003)
Gurney, Ivor,
Collected Poems
, ed. P. J. Kavanagh (Oxford, 1984)
Harrison, Robert Pogue,
Forests: The Shadow of Civilisation
(Chicago, 1992)
McNeill, Marian,
The Silver Bough
(Glasgow, 1957-68)
Nash, David,
Pyramids Rise, Spheres Turn and Cubes Stand Still
(London, 2005)
Platt, Rutherford H.,
The Great American Forest
(New Jersey, 1977)
Preston, Richard, ‘Climbing the Redwoods’,
The New Yorker
, 14 and 21 February 2005
Rackham, Oliver,
Trees & Woodland in the British Landscape
(London, 1976, rev. 1990)
——,
Hayley Wood: Its History and Ecology
(Cambridge, 1990)
——,
Woodlands
(London, 2006)
Wilkinson, Gerald,
Epitaph for the Elm
(London, 1978)
Air
Bachelard, Gaston,
L’air et les songes
(Paris, 1951)
——,
La poétique de l’espace
[
The Poetics of Space
], trans. Maria Jolas (Paris, 1958)
Baker, J. A.,
The Peregrine
(London, 1967)
Drury, Chris,
Silent Spaces
(Thames & Hudson, 1998)
Ehrlich, Gretel,
The Solace of Open Spaces
(New York, 1985)
Heinrich, Bernd,
Ravens in Winter
(London, 1991)
Macdonald, Helen,
Falcon
(London, 2006)
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de,
Vol de Nuit
(Paris, 1931)
——,
Terre des Hommes
[
Wind, Sand and Stars
], trans. William Rees (Paris, 1939)
——,
Pilote de Guerre
[
Flight to Arras
], trans. Lewis Galantière (Paris, 1942)
Simms, Colin,
Goshawk Lives
(London, 1995)