The Wild Places (Penguin Original) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1 - Beechwood

  2 - Island

  3 - Valley

  4 - Moor

  5 - Forest

  6 - River-mouth

  7 - Cape

  8 - Summit

  9 - Grave

  10 - Ridge

  11 - Holloway

  12 - Storm-beach

  13 - Saltmarsh

  14 - Tor

  15 - Beechwood

  SELECTED READINGS

  Acknowledgements

  INDEX

  PENGUIN BOOKS THE WILD PLACES

  Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), won the Guardian First Book Award, a Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was filmed by the BBC. Robert Macfarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel College Cambridge.

  Praise for The Wild Places

  “A wonderful read, this, one man’s search for wildness. His prose moves like the wild wind to ‘join cross space’ and time our ‘mostly broken pieces.’ Fresh and exhilarating.” —Bernd Heinrich

  “Macfarlane is a descriptive writer of breathtaking power. In a few words, he conjures up not only the shapes and dynamics of the land, but the experience of being absorbed by it. The afterimages of The Wild Places left me with the strange impression of having walked alongside him.” —The Sunday Times

  “A beautifully written and deeply thoughtful book. . . . Macfarlane’s prose is as robust as the landscape he describes. He switches to considerable effect between loose-limbed, meandering sentences and plain staccato, choosing his words with the precision of a poet. . . . Anyone who loves language will take pleasure in this book.” —The Telegraph

  “The Wild Places is a book that inhales the zeitgeist, as well as the fresh air of open country. . . . [Macfarlane’s] vocabulary is deep and diverse, and his mood is generally close to rapture. . . . He also encourages his readers to feel that while many of our fundamental connections have been broken or lost, many remain—if only we have the sense and the tuned senses to appreciate them.”

  —The Guardian

  “A marvelously evocative portrait of place . . . What Macfarlane did for the world’s high places in his award-winning debut Mountains of the Mind, he has now done for the wilderness of Britain and Ireland.”

  —The Sunday Telegraph

  “A beautiful and inspiring book . . . When Macfarlane moves into the realities of the landscape, he makes them sing. . . . In the course of his travels, he comes to realize that wildness is not just about remote places. A weed forcing its way through a concrete pavement is as much a sign of wilderness as a storm at sea.” —The Independent

  “What makes this book so remarkable is not so much the message as the extraordinary beauty and precision of the author’s prose. Time and time again he takes the reader’s breath away with the exactitude of a phrase or image.”

  —Financial Times

  “These fifteen perfect essays relating travels off the well-trodden paths sparkle like early morning. Their combination of physical and spiritual adventure creates a kind of peregrinating enchantment. . . . Macfarlane has the ability to see everything, however famously visible, for the first time. . . . The Wild Places contains writing of an exceptional beauty, and it is a strong statement about our present divorce from the natural world.” —The Literary Review

  “Macfarlane writes with passion but also an ache for a world most people don’t see, while he balances the personal with the scientific. . . . A magical, masterly call to the wild that asks us to think about what we have in these isles—and what we have to lose.” —Metro

  “A beautifully modulated call from the wild that will ensorcell any urban prisoner wishing to break free.” —Will Self

  “A lovely book by a sublimely civilized writer—honest nourishment for the mind and true enhancement for the spirit.” —Jan Morris

  “A driven and necessary account of the wild places of these islands, near or remote, as they can be located and possessed within ourselves: in good heart, in hungry intelligence.” —Iain Sinclair

  “Eloquent . . . Macfarlane’s striking prose not only evokes each locale’s physicality in sensuous, deliberate detail, it glows with a reverence for nature in general and takes the reader on both a geographical and a philosophical journey, as mind-expanding as any of his wild places.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in Great Britain by Granta Books 2007

  Published in Penguin Books 2008

  Copyright © Robert Macfarlane, 2007

  All rights reserved

  Lines from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, used by kind permission of Faber and Faber

  Map copyright © Helen Macdonald

  Photographs copyright © John Beatty, Rosamund Macfarlane and John Macfarlane, see page 330

  eISBN : 978-0-143-11393-5

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  For my parents,

  and in memory of Roger Deakin (1943-2006)

  I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

  JOHN MUIR

  1

  Beechwood

  The wind was rising, so I went to the wood. It lies south of the city, a mile from my home: a narrow, nameless fragment of beechwood, topping a shallow hill. I walked there, following streets to the city’s fringe, and then field-edge paths through hedgerows of hawthorn and hazel.

  Rooks haggled in the air above the trees. The sky was a bright cold blue, fading to milk at its edges. From a quarter of a mile away, I could hear the noise of the wood in the wind; a soft marine roar. It was the immense compound noise of friction - of leaf fretting on leaf, and branch rubbing on branch.

  I entered the wood by its southern corner. Debris was beginning to drop from the moving canopy: twigs and beech nuts, pattering down on to the coppery layer of leaves. Sunlight fell in bright sprees on the floor. I walked up through the wood, and midway along its northern edge I came to my tree - a tall
grey-barked beech, whose branches flare out in such a way that it is easy to climb.

  I had climbed the tree many times before, and its marks were all familiar to me. Around the base of its trunk, its bark has sagged and wrinkled, so that it resembles the skin on an elephant’s leg. At about ten feet, a branch crooks sharply back on itself; above that, the letter ‘H’, scored with a knife into the trunk years before, has ballooned with the growth of the tree; higher still is the healed stump of a missing bough.

  Thirty feet up, near the summit of the beech, where the bark is smoother and silver, I reached what I had come to call the observatory: a forked lateral branch set just below a curve in the trunk. I had found that if I set my back against the trunk and put my feet on either tine of the fork, I could stay comfortable there. If I remained still for a few minutes, people out walking would sometimes pass underneath without noticing me. People don’t generally expect to see men in trees. If I remained still for longer, the birds would return. Birds don’t generally expect to see men in trees, either. Blackbirds fussing in the leaf litter; wrens which whirred from twig to twig so quickly they seem to teleport; once a grey partridge, venturing anxiously from cover.

  I steadied myself in the observatory. My weight and movement had made the tree rock, and the wind exaggerated the rock, so that soon the summit of the beech was creaking back and forth, describing arcs of five or ten degrees. Not an observatory that day; more of a mast-top crow’s-nest in a sea swell.

  From that height, the land was laid out beneath me like a map. Dispersed across it were more fragments of woodland, some of whose names I knew: Mag’s Hill Wood, Nine Wells Wood, Wormwood. To the west over corduroy fields was a main road, busy with cars. Directly north was the hospital, its three-piped incinerator tower rising far higher than my hilltop tree. A deep-chested Hercules aeroplane was descending towards the airfield on the city’s outskirts. Above a road verge to the east, I could see a kestrel riding the wind, its wings shivering with the strain, its tail feathers spread out like a hand of cards.

  I had started climbing trees about three years earlier. Or rather, restarted; for I had been at a school that had a wood for its playground. We had climbed and christened the different trees (Scorpio, The Major Oak, Pegasus), and fought for their control in territorial conflicts with elaborate rules and fealties. My father had built my brother and me a tree house in our garden, which we had defended successfully against years of pirate attack. In my late twenties, I had begun to climb trees again. Just for the fun of it: no ropes, and no danger either.

  In the course of my climbing, I had learned to discriminate between tree species. I liked the lithe springiness of the silver birch, the alder and the young cherry. I avoided pines - brittle branches, callous bark - and planes. And I found that the horse chestnut, with its limbless lower trunk and prickly fruit, but also its tremendous canopy, offered the tree-climber both a difficulty and an incentive.

  I explored the literature of tree-climbing: not extensive, but so exciting. John Muir had swarmed up a hundred-foot Douglas Spruce during a Californian windstorm, and looked out over a forest, ‘the whole mass of which was kindled into one continuous blaze of white sun-fire!’ Italo Calvino had written his magical novel, The Baron in the Trees, whose young hero, Cosimo, in an adolescent huff, climbs a tree on his father’s forested estate and vows never to set foot on the ground again. He keeps to his impetuous word, and ends up living and even marrying in the canopy, moving for miles between olive, cherry, elm and holm oak. There were the boys in B. B.’s Brendon Chase, who go feral in an English forest rather than return to boarding-school, and climb a ‘Scotch pine’ in order to reach a honey buzzard’s nest scrimmed with beech leaves. And of course there was the team of Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin: Pooh floating on his sky-blue balloon up to the oak-top bee’s nest, in order to poach some honey; Christopher ready with his pop-gun to shoot Pooh’s balloon down once the honey had been poached.

  I also came to admire some of tree-climbing’s serious contemporary exponents, in particular the scientists who study the redwoods of California and Oregon. Sequoia sempervirens, the giant redwood, can grow to over three hundred feet high. Most of the height of an adult redwood is near-branchless trunk; then comes a vast and complex crown. The redwood researchers have developed exceptional techniques of ascent. They use a bow and arrow to fire a pulling line up over a firm branch in the crown. By means of this line they then raise and secure a climbing rope. Once in the crown, their rope-skills are so refined that they can move about safely and almost freely, like latter-day spidermen. Up there, in that aerial world, they have discovered a lost kingdom: a remarkable and previously uninvestigated ecosystem.

  There was nothing unique about my beech tree, nothing difficult in its ascent, no biological revelation at its summit, nor any honey. But it had become a place to think. A roost. I was fond of it, and it - well, it had no notion of me. I had climbed it many times; at first light, dusk and glaring noon. I had climbed it in winter, brushing snow from the branches with my hand, with the wood cold as stone to the touch, and real crows’ nests black in the branches of nearby trees. I had climbed it in early summer, and looked out over the simmering countryside, with heat jellying the air and the drowsy buzz of a tractor audible from somewhere nearby. And I had climbed it in monsoon rain, with water falling in rods thick enough for the eye to see. Climbing the tree was a way to get perspective, however slight; to look down on a city that I usually looked across. The relief of relief. Above all, it was a way of defraying the city’s claims on me.

  Anyone who lives in a city will know the feeling of having been there too long. The gorge-vision that streets imprint on us, the sense of blockage, the longing for surfaces other than glass, brick, concrete and tarmac. I live in Cambridge, a city set in one of the most intensively farmed and densely populated regions of the world. It is an odd place for someone who loves mountains and wildness to have settled. Cambridge is probably, hour for hour, about as far from what might conventionally be called ‘wild land’ as anywhere in Europe. I feel that distance keenly. But good things hold me here: my family, my work, my affection for the city itself, the way the stone of its old buildings condenses the light. I have lived in Cambridge on and off for a decade, and I imagine I will continue to do so for years to come. And for as long as I stay here, I know I will also have to get to the wild places.

  I could not now say when I first grew to love the wild, only that I did, and that a need for it will always remain strong in me. As a child, whenever I read the word, it conjured images of wide spaces, remote and figureless. Isolated islands off Atlantic coasts. Unbounded forests, and blue snow-light falling on to drifts marked with the paw-prints of wolves. Frost-shattered summits and corries holding lochs of great depth. And this was the vision of a wild place that had stayed with me: somewhere boreal, wintry, vast, isolated, elemental, demanding of the traveller in its asperities. To reach a wild place was, for me, to step outside human history.

  The beechwood could not answer my need for wildness. The roar of the nearby roads was audible, as were the crash and honk of the trains that passed to the west. The surrounding fields were treated with fertiliser and herbicide to maximise productivity. And the hedgerows were favourite locations for fly-tippers. Junk heaps would appear overnight: brick rubble, water-swollen plywood, rags of newspaper. I had once found a bra and a pair of lacy pants hanging from the thorns, like oversized shrike kills. Fly-tipping, I guessed, rather than a fit of roadside passion - for who could make love in a hawthorn hedge?

  For weeks before the windstorm, I had felt the familiar desire to move, to get beyond the fall-line of the incinerator’s shadow, beyond the event-horizon of the city’s ring-road. And up there in the crow’s-nest that day, looking down at the roads, the hospital and the fields, and the woods cramped between them, I felt a sharp need to leave Cambridge, to reach somewhere remote, where starlight fell clearly, where the wind could blow upon me from its thirty-six directions, an
d where the evidence of human presence was minimal or absent. Far north or far west; for to my mind this was where wildness survived, if it survived anywhere at all.

  Time and again, wildness has been declared dead in Britain and Ireland. ‘Two great wars demanded and bequeathed regimentation,’ wrote E. M. Forster in 1964, ‘science lent her aid, and the wildness of these islands, never extensive, was stamped upon and built over and patrolled in no time. There is no forest or fell to escape to today, no cave in which to curl up, and no deserted valley.’ For Jonathan Raban the extinction of the wild happened far earlier: by the 1860s Britain was ‘so thickly peopled, so intensively farmed, so industrialised, so citified, that there was nowhere to go to be truly alone, or to have . . . adventures, except to sea’. John Fowles, writing in 1985, was grimly adamant: ‘We are now, in hard fact, on the bleak threshold of losing much of the old landscape. We have done unimaginably terrible things to our countrysides. It is only here and there along our coasts and on the really high hills and mountains that the ancient richness of natural life is not yet in danger.’ Five years later, the American author William Least-Heat Moon described Britain as ‘a tidy garden of a toy realm where there’s almost no real wilderness left and absolutely no memory of it. Where the woods are denatured plantings. The English, the Europeans, are too far from the wild. That’s the difference between them and us.’ Repeatedly, the same lament, or the same contempt.

  An abundance of hard evidence exists to support these obituaries for the wild. Over the last century in particular, disaster has fallen upon the land and the seas of Britain and Ireland. The statistics of damage are familiar and often repeated, more as elegy now than as protest. In England, between 1930 and 1990, over half of the ancient woodland was cleared, or replaced with conifer plantation. Half of the hedgerow mileage was grubbed up. Nearly all lowland pasture was ploughed out, built on or tarmacked over. Three-quarters of heathland was converted into farmland, or developed. Across Britain and Ireland, rare limestone pavements were cracked up and sold as rockery stones, peatbogs millennia in the making were drained or excavated. Dozens of species vanished, with hundreds more being brought to the point of crisis.