This Celtic Christian culture of retreat originated in the Ireland of the fifth and sixth centuries. Begun by St Patrick in the 430s, and inspired by the desert saints of the preceding centuries, the practice of retreat spread to what are now western Scotland and coastal Wales: a centrifugal motion, carrying men to the brinks of Europe and beyond.
It is clear that these edgelands reciprocated the serenity and the asceticism of the
peregrini
. Their travels to these wild places reflected their longing to achieve correspondence between belief and place, between inner and outer landscapes. We can surmise that the monks moved outwards because they wished to leave behind inhabited land: land in which every feature was named. Almost all Celtic place-names are commemorative: the bardic schools, as late as the seventeenth century, taught the history of places through their names, so that the landscape became a theatre of memory, continually reminding its inhabitants of attachment and belonging. To migrate away from the named places (territories whose topography was continuous with memory and community) to the coasts (the unmapped islands, the anonymous forests) was to reach land that did not bear the marks of occupation. It was to act out a movement from history to eternity.
From the early years of Celtic Christianity, Ynys Enlli was renowned as a destination for the
peregrini
, and it is thought that the first monastery was built there in the sixth century. For all its difficulty of access, however, it is among the least remote of the monks’ habitations. You wonder at how the monks reached and settled landscapes such as the Garvellochs - the islands off the Argyll mainland where, over 1,000 years ago, people lived in clustered mortarless huts shaped like bee-hives - or Skellig Michael - the rock fang that juts 700 feet out of the Atlantic, nine miles west of the Kerry coast. The uppermost slopes of Skellig Michael are pocked with cells, built on the rock by the monks who landed there in the sixth century. The cells, which were used for penance and meditation, face out on to the Atlantic. Below them, the rock swoops away so abruptly and steeply that it is hard even to believe you are on land, and not hovering above only air and sea. There, with the ocean extending away from them, and nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or delay the eye, the monks were free to consider infinitude.
George Bernard Shaw travelled to the Skelligs in September 1910 in a clinker-built rowboat. The journey out took two and a half hours in calm weather; the way back was longer and more unnerving. Rowing in thick mist and darkness, compassless and moonless, over tide races and currents, Shaw’s guides steered by instinct and knowledge alone. The following evening, sitting by the fire in the Parknasilla Hotel in Sneem, Shaw wrote a letter to his friend Barry Jackson about his experience on Skellig Michael. ‘I tell you the thing does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in: it is part of our dream world . . . I hardly feel real again yet!’ For Shaw, as for the monks who once lived there, on the Skellig you were brought to think in ways that would be possible nowhere else. It was a place for deep dreaming.
The sea journeys that the
peregrini
made are extraordinary to contemplate. We had difficulties reaching Ynys Enlli in a thirty-three-foot ocean-going yacht. Shaw had feared for his life returning from the Skelligs in a well-manned rowboat. Yet the monks had got to the Skelligs, and had made longer, riskier voyages - to Iceland and to Greenland, over the rough seas of the North Atlantic - in far more exposed and unstable craft.
The boats in which they travelled went by different names in different traditions: the coracle or curricle in Wales, the carraugh in Gaelic, the knarr in Norse. Their shapes differed, too: the curragh was generally long and thin, with a snub nose and squared-off bows, while the coracle was lenticular. What they shared was a method of construction. Their hulls were of oxhide, which was oak-tanned, then wetted and stretched over a framework of bent wood and wicker. As it dried, the hide shrank around the framework, setting it rigid. Once it had set, it was caulked with tallow. What these craft had in common, too, was a logic of motion. They were designed, in their lightness and their shallow draft, to slide over the currents and the tide-rips, to slip up and over waves. This was their talent as vessels: they possessed a kind of maritime guile, barely displacing water, moving over the sea with the delicate touch of a pond-skater.
At last light, near the tip of Enlli’s southern arm, I walked through a field of dead sea pink, the compact plant that grows so well in the saline conditions of coastal margins. The crisp heads of the flowers, on their stiff stalks, vibrated in the breeze, so that in the twilight it seemed as though the ground were shivering. On water to the south, I heard the clatter of a cormorant taking off. I could see the glimmer of the cabin lights of the boat, swaying in the bay, and briefly wished I were there with John and Jan: hot food, a glass of whisky, the company of friends.
I glanced back towards the mainland. It was visible only as a line in the dusk, wire thin. The monks would have launched their boats from the coves of the peninsula. Even now in summer, if the weather is poor, it can be two to three days before it becomes possible to reach the island. When the winter storms set in, Enlli can be isolated for weeks at a time.
The monks would have gauged their timing carefully. The long wait for flat weather. The watching of tides. Then the launch, feet crunching in the pebbles, splashing in the water. The boats lurching even in the swell of the coves, and then tacking out into the open waters of the Sound, the currents stacked in descending storeys beneath them.
How exposed they must have felt, I thought. Yet perhaps they did not, perhaps their faith was so absolute that it resembled fatalism, which is a type of fearlessness. Certainly, many of them - unnamed, unchronicled - died there in the Sound, drowned by wave and current. ‘There is an island there is no going to / but in a small boat,’ wrote the priest-poet R. S. Thomas, whose parish of Aberdaron looked out on to Enlli:
The way
the saints went, travelling the gallery
of the frightened faces of
the long-drowned, munching the gravel
of its beaches . . .
We can know little for certain about the
peregrini
. We know few of their names. Yet, reading the accounts of their journeys and of their experiences on places like Enlli, I had encountered a dignity of motive and attitude that I found salutary. These men were in search not of material gain, but of a hallowed landscape: one that would sharpen their faith to its utmost point. They were, in the phrasing of their own theology, exiles looking for the
Terra Repromissionis Sanctorum
- the Promised Land of Saints.
A long Christian tradition exists that considers all individuals as
peregrini
, in that all human life is seen as an exile. This idea was perpetuated in the Salve Regina, the chant often recited as a last night prayer.
Post hoc exilium
, the prayer declares: all will be resolved after this exile. The chant, when sung, sounds ancient and disquieting. It is unmistakably music about wildness, an ancient vision of wildness, and it still has the capacity to move us.
Much of what we know of the life of the monks of Enlli and places like it, is inferred from the rich literature which they left behind. Their poems speak eloquently of a passionate and precise relationship with nature, and of the blend of receptivity and detachment which characterised their interactions with it. Some of the poems read like jotted lists, or field-notes: ‘Swarms of bees, beetles, soft music of the world, a gentle humming; brent geese, barnacle geese, shortly before All Hallows, music of the dark wild torrent.’ Others record single charmed instants: a blackbird calling from a gorse branch near Belfast Loch, foxes at play in a glade. Marban, a ninth-century hermit who lived in a hut in a fir-grove near Druim Rolach, wrote of the ‘wind’s voice against a branchy wood on a day of grey cloud’. A nameless monk, responsible for drystone walling on the island of North Rona in the ninth century, stopped his work to write a poem that spoke of the delight he felt at standing on a ‘clear headland’, looking over the ‘smooth strand’ to the ‘calm sea’, and hearing the calls of ‘the wondrous birds’. A tenth-century copyist, working in an island monastery, paused long enough to scribble a note in Gaelic beside his Latin text. ‘Pleasant to me is the glittering of the sun today upon these margins.’
Gleanings such as these give us glimpses of the nature of faith of the
peregrini
. They are recorded instants which carry purely over the long distances of history, as certain sounds carry with unusual clarity within water or across frozen land. For these writers, attention was a form of devotion and noticing continuous with worship. The art they left behind is among the earliest testimonies to a human love for the wild.
Ideas, like waves, have fetches. They arrive with us having travelled vast distances, and their pasts are often invisible, or barely imaginable. ‘Wildness’ is such an idea: it has moved immensely through time. And in that time, two great and conflicting stories have been told about it. According to the first of these, wildness is a quality to be vanquished; according to the second, it is a quality to be cherished.
The etymology of the word ‘wild’ is vexed and subtle, but the most persuasive past proposed for it involves the Old High German
wildi
, and the Old Norse
villr
, as well as the pre-Teutonic
ghweltijos
. All three of these terms carry implications of disorder and irregularity, and as Roderick Nash has written, they bequeathed to the English root-word ‘will’ ‘a descriptive meaning of . . . wilful, or uncontrollable’. Wildness, according to this etymology, is an expression of independence from human direction, and wild land can be said to be
self-willed
land. Land that proceeds according to its own laws and principles, land whose habits - the growth of its trees, the movements of its creatures, the free descent of its streams through its rocks - are of its own devising and own execution. Land that, as the contemporary definition of wild continues, ‘acts or moves freely without restraint; is unconfined, unrestricted’.
This basic definition of wildness has remained constant since those first appearances, but the values ascribed to this quality have diverged dramatically.
On the one hand, wildness has been perceived as a dangerous force that confounds the order-bringing pursuits of human culture and agriculture. Wildness, according to this story, is cognate with wastefulness. Wild places resist conversion to human use, and they must therefore be destroyed or overcome. Examples of hostility to the wild are ubiquitous in cultures ancient and modern, Eastern and Western. ‘Except for the true civilisation builders,’ hallelujahed the American preacher and writer James Stalker in 1881, ‘the very land in which we live would still be an undiscovered wilderness! These men see teeming cities, and thriving factories upon the desert, where others see only sage brush and alkali plains . . . these men have tunnelled our mountains, have spanned our great rivers, and opened our mines of wealth!’ The Old English epic poem
Beowulf
is filled with what the poet calls
wildéor
, or ‘savage creatures’. In the poem, these monstrous dragon-like beings inhabit a landscape of wolf-haunted forests, deep lakes, windswept cliffs and treacherous marshes. It is against these wild places and
wildéor
that the civilisation of Beowulf’s tribe, the Geats - with their warm and well-lit mead halls, their hierarchical warrior culture - sets itself.
Parallel to this hatred of the wild, however, has run an alternative history: one that tells of wildness as an energy both exemplary and exquisite, and of wild places as realms of miracle, diversity and abundance. At the same time that the
Beowulf
-poet was writing his parable of the conquest of the wild, the monks of Enlli, Rona, the Skelligs and elsewhere were praising its beauty and its riotous fecundity.
Even earlier than the
peregrini
, indeed, evidence can be found of a love for the wild. It is there in the Chinese artistic tradition known as
shan-shui
or ‘rivers-and-mountains’.
Shan-shui
originated in the early fifth century BC, and endured for two thousand years. Its practitioners - T’ao Chi’en, Li Po, Du Fu, Lu Yu - were usually wanderers or self-exiles who lived in the mountain lands of China, and wrote about the wild world around them. Their art, like that of the early Christian monks, sought to articulate the wondrous processes of the world, its continuous coming-into-being. To this quality of aliveness, the
shan-shui
artists gave the name
zi-ran
, which might be translated as ‘self-ablazeness’, ‘self-thusness’ or ‘wildness’.
Pilgrims and walkers, they explored their mountains in what they called the ‘dragon-suns’ of summer, in the long winds of winter and the blossom storms of late spring. They wrote of the cool mist that settled into valleys at dawn, of bamboo groves into which green light fell, and of how thousands of snowy egrets would take off from lakes like lifting blizzards. They observed the way winter light fell upon drifted snow, and how shadows hung from cold branches, and wrote that such sights moved them to a ‘bright clear joy’. Night was especially marvellous to them, because of the clean luminous presence of the moon, and its ability to silver the world into strangeness. Beauty did not always connote benignity: Li Po so loved the moon, it is said, that he drowned while trying to embrace its reflection in a river. Nevertheless, reading the poems and viewing the paintings of the
shan-shui
tradition, you encounter an art in which almost no divide exists between nature and the human. Form imposes itself on content so absolutely that these artefacts do not represent the world’s marvels, but partake of them.
A hundred yards from the black-rock headland that marked the end of the island’s peninsula, I searched for a sleeping place. The night air was loud with the pennywhistle piping of oystercatchers and the gulls’ yowls. It felt exciting to be out there in the dark, among the birds, and with the sea surging and sloshing all around me.