The Wild Places (Penguin Original) (6 page)

It is now understood that marine phosphorescence - or, more properly, bioluminescence - is a consequence of the build-up in the water of minute organisms: dinoflagellate algae and plankton. By processes not entirely understood, these simple creatures ignite into light when jostled. They convert the energy of movement into the energy of radiance. For their phosphorescence to become visible to the human eye, the collaboration of billions of these single cells is required, from each of which light emanates.

The existence of these plankton, long remarked upon by sailors, especially warm-water sailors, has produced some extraordinary phenomena. During the Gorda Basin Earthquake, which struck California on 8 November 1980, witnesses on the coast saw vast areas of the ocean light up. In the 1970s, several sea captains navigating the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf reported the sight, in calm seas, of vast phosphorescent wheels with luminous rotating spokes, up to 200 yards in diameter, trembling in the wake of their ships. Sometimes these wheels appeared to be below the water and sometimes they seemed to hover just above its surface.

In 1978, while crossing the Persian Gulf, under a starry sky in which stars were falling with long green tails, the captain of the Dutch vessel
Dione
saw several such wheels. There are no pre-twentieth-century records of this phenomenon, and it is generally assumed to be a function of the turbulence caused by the ships’ engines. It has also been proposed that the wheels’ apparent transcendence is due to the still water acting as a kind of lens, projecting the phosphorescence on to a thin layer of mist hanging just above the water’s surface.

In 2004, a father and son were sailing in the Gulf of Mexico when their yacht was capsized by a gust of wind, sixty miles offshore. They clung to the hull, as it was carried on the powerful currents of the Gulf. After night fell, the water became rich with phosphorescence, and the air was filled with a high discordant music, made of many different notes: the siren song of dolphins. The drifting pair also saw that they were at the centre of two rough circles of phosphorescence, one turning within the other. The inner circle of light, they realised, was a ring of dolphins, swimming round the upturned boat, and the outer circle was a ring of sharks, swimming round the dolphins. The dolphins were protecting the father and his son, keeping the sharks from them.

When at last I left the sea, and came out on to the beach, the light-filled water shed from me on to the stones, flashed and vanished. I walked slowly inland, fading back into darkness as the water ran from me, and then lay down and slept by the low embers of the fire.

3

Valley

The journeys of the monks, moving from wild place to wild place in search of their innominate lands, had provided one precedent for the map I was making. After returning from Enlli, I found another. It was an Irish saga, thought to have been written in the fourteenth century, and called
Buile Suibhne
- which translated variously as
Sweeney Astray
, and
Sweeney, Peregrine
. It told of an Ulster king, Sweeney, who so offended a Christian priest that a curse was put on him. The curse declared that Sweeney would be transformed into ‘a creature of the air’, and could live only in the wild places of Ireland and western Scotland. Like a wandering bird - a peregrine - he would have to shun human company, and to seek out remoteness wherever it could be found.

When the priest’s curse fell upon Sweeney, the poem said, he became ‘revolted’ by the thought of ‘known places’, and he ‘dreamed strange migrations’. Thus began his long period of wandering. He ranged far over mountains and wastes, passing through narrow valleys and dark woods, shouldering through scrub of ivy and juniper, setting pebbles rattling on scree slopes, wading estuaries and walking on unsheltered hills in starry frosts and wind-blown snow, until he was clad in black ice. He moved up and down rivers, swimming from pool to pool, and he wintered among wolf packs. He made lairs and dens for himself: on mattresses of soft bog, in root-nooks at the foot of big trees, by waterfalls. Despite the severity of these places, Sweeney came to find their harshness beautiful, and to admire the rhythms of time and weather that they kept.

On two large-scale maps, I charted as far as possible the places to which Sweeney had gone, researching the names that occurred in the poem, trying to establish either their present-day locations or their modern counterparts. Dal’Arie, Glen Arkin, Cloonkill, Ailsa Craig, Swim-Two-Birds, Sliebh Mis, Cruachan Aighle, Islay - the names joined up to make a poem of wildness. Several of his haunts no longer existed, lost to history. Others were now far from wild: they had roads running through them, or towns built over them.

Despite the changes, the form of Sweeney’s quest and the intensity of the poem’s vision remained powerful. I stuck pins in the maps for each of Sweeney’s stations, and joined the pins with white thread, so that soon there was a hectic cotton zigzag marking his travels. His journeying from wild place to wild place, his wintering out, his sleeping close to the ground: all this made inspiring sense to me. What also made me warm to Sweeney was his occasional wish, when out in the wild, for a ‘soft pillow’, a bed and a hot meal. These were longings I recognised with sheepish affection.

Of the many places to which Sweeney travelled, the one he found most magical and strange was the valley of Glen Bolcain. I could find no trace of Bolcain in any contemporary gazette or record, but its character was clear from the poem: this was a lost valley, steep sided, a ‘glen of winds and wind-borne echoes’, where watercress grew in clear-water streams, and moss flourished in banks firm and wide enough to sleep on. Daydreaming about Bolcain, I remembered the most extraordinary valley I had ever been to: the valley of Coruisk, on the Atlantic coast of the Isle of Skye. And so I thought that I would go there for my next journey; moving north from one igneous west-coast island, Ynys Enlli, to another, Skye.

We are accustomed to the idea that ice-caps and mountains can grip the mind or compel the imagination. But the capacity of valleys - gorges, canyons, arroyos, ravines - to shape and shock our thought is less well documented. Of the many types of valley, by far the most potent is the sanctuary: that is, the sunken space guarded on all four sides by high ground or by water. Sanctuaries possess the allure of lost worlds or secret gardens. They provoke in the traveller who enters them - cresting a ridge at a pass, finding the ground drop away beneath your feet - the excitements of the forbidden and the enclosed. Among the world’s great sanctuaries are the Annapurna and the Nanda Devi sanctuaries in the Himalayas, and the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. Accounts exist within the literature of Western exploration of those who entered these spaces for the first time. They are accounts of wonderment and fear.

There are sanctuaries in Britain and Ireland, too. Though they are of a different magnitude to their Asian and African counterparts, I find them almost as remarkable. Versions of the sanctuary are to be found in the combes of Exmoor, in the swales and dips of the Mendips and the Yorkshire Dales, or in the Devil’s Beeftub near Moffat. My cousin once told me of a small unnamed sanctuary in a lonely area of Assynt in north-west Scotland: he spoke of sleeping out there one night, alone, beneath an overhanging boulder, and watching a herd of red deer, led by a stag, pick their way down into the valley. The deer were surprised but not disturbed by this human presence, he said.

Between the first and second guardian spurs of Bidean nam Bian, the broad and complex mountain which stands near the western mouth of Glen Coe, there is a valley known to some as the ‘Lost Valley’, which is enclosed on three sides by the black rock fins and battlements of Bidean, and protected on its fourth by the double barrier of a rockslide that closes off the mouth of the valley, and the River Coe, which in spate becomes uncrossable. Late in the winter of 1939, W. H. Murray escaped into the Lost Valley in order to attempt new climbs on the crags of Bidean. Its floor was covered by a foot of snow, whose spotless surface heightened the loneliness of the valley, and deepened its silence. It was a place, Murray wrote, in which ‘it is easy to be still’, and in which ‘the natural movement’ of the heart was to ‘lift upward’. To enter the valley was to be ‘as much out of sight and sound of civilisation as if one dwelt at the North Pole’.

The greatest of the sanctuaries, though, is Coruisk: the loch-filled valley which lies on the south-western coast of the Isle of Skye. Coruisk is an Anglicisation of the Gaelic
Coir’uisge
, which means ‘the cauldron of the waters’, and its isolation is legendary. On three sides of Coruisk are mountains, and on the fourth is a deep inlet of the Atlantic, Loch Scavaig. The mountains are the Black Cuillin, the most austere and gothic of all Britain’s ranges. They are the roots of ancient volcanoes, fifty-five million years old, which have eroded down into a six-mile battlement of smashed basalt and gabbro.

The only way into Coruisk on foot is over one of the steep passes of the Cuillin, or the walk of many miles along the brink of Loch Scavaig, which includes a traverse of the ‘Bad Step’ of Sgurr na Stri, an angled plane of glacier-smoothed rock that tilts twenty feet above the green waters of Scavaig. The valley is by no means inaccessible, but its solitude is formidably guarded. And its world is exceptional. Coruisk determines its own weathers, its own skies and clouds. Light behaves unexpectedly within it. The rock of the Cauldron’s sides changes colour frequently, depending upon the weather’s accent. It can be grey in cloud, toffee-coloured at noon, liverish at evening, and metallic in rain and sunshine.

At the heart of the sanctuary is Loch Coruisk, fed by the cold river waters that drain from the ridge. The water of the loch alters colour, too, depending on one’s angle of vision of its surface: black when you are beside it, sky-blue when you are on the peaks and ridges above it, and a caramel brown when you are in it. In Coire na Creiche on the far side of the Cuillin ridge from the Basin, there are deep river pools that contain underwater rock arches. On summer days, it is possible to dive down and swim through the arches, in the blue filtered light of the water.

There is something in Coruisk’s forms and its habits that has long attracted stories of wildness. When Murray first reached what he called ‘the basin of Coir-uisg’ in 1936, he found that his ‘wild dreams fell short of the wilder reality’. Walter Scott, the impresario of Caledonian wildness, visited Coruisk in 1814 and described it as ‘dark, brooding, wild, weird and stern’. Such a summary, coming from Scott, was a spur to the romantics and melancholics of the nineteenth century. Successive parties of Victorian artists, writers and explorers made elaborate efforts to reach the Basin. They travelled there in their hundreds, on foot and by boat, braving midges, rain and storm, and living in tents and caves, or on boats anchored in Loch Scavaig: aesthetes willing to tolerate the harshness of life in the Basin in order to celebrate its form. What a curious colony they made! Among them was the little red-headed Victorian poet Algernon Swinburne, and J. M. W. Turner, who in 1831 arrived to see the wildness that Scott had described, and nearly fell to his death while executing a painting in which the Cuillin are distorted into spindly peaks, resembling whipped egg-white more than rock.

I came to Coruisk from the south on a hot August day, along the edge of Loch Scavaig, with Richard, my oldest friend, with whom I had over the years climbed several hundred mountains. For hours, we followed a narrow path that kept to the loch-shore as neatly as a hemline. The Atlantic was always to our left, turning slowly to brass as the day proceeded and the sun lowered. Shags were perched here and there on boulders, staring out to sea. Some stood motionless with their wings open, hinged at the carpals, drying themselves off in the sun and wind: iron crosses. Foam, the creamy colour of writing paper, gathered between shore stones.

Four miles into the approach, we passed through a miniature forest, 200 yards long, and with no tree over ten feet tall. The steady onshore wind had warped the trees eastwards, so that they had taken the curved shape of the land against which they were pressed. We had to bend and sidle to fit through the narrow space between the wood and the hillside.

There are few trees left now on Skye, as there are few people. The island lost many of its inhabitants during the Clearances of the nineteenth century, and it had lost most of its woodland only a few centuries earlier, through burning and felling. One of the first surviving descriptionsof Skye, from 1549, describes it as an island with ‘maney woods, maney forests, maney deire’. Now the only real trace of Skye’s wooded past are the old paths through its remoter reaches, several of which were first paced out by foresters. Skye’s celebrated bleakness is a relatively recent acquisition, and one which speaks sadly of its past. Like so much of Scotland’s wildest land, this is not an empty landscape but an emptied one. On Skye, one recalls that ‘bleak’ comes from the Old Norse
bleikr
, meaning ‘white’ or ‘shining’; that it is a word through which the bone shows.