The Wild Places (Penguin Original) Read online

  To Gurney, writing home, it seemed he had come to an anti-landscape, whose featurelessness was a form of assault: ‘Masses of unburied dead strewn over the battle fields; no sign of organised trenches, but merely shell holes joined up to one another . . . and no landmarks anywhere. ’ The Salient denied the permanence, the rich and complicated pasts of the trees that Gurney cherished: their consoling constancy, their rootedness.

  In the trenches, he was seized often by what he called a ‘hot heart desire’ for his Gloucestershire landscape. He was ‘clutched at and heart-grieved’ by ‘desperate home thoughts’ of ‘Cotswold, her spinnies’. ‘We suffer pain out here,’ he wrote home, ‘and for myself it sometimes comes that death would be preferable to such a life.’

  But Gurney survived the war. He was injured - shot in the chest, and gassed - and invalided home. Shortly after the Armistice, he entered upon a period of frenzied creativity. Between 1919 and 1922, he wrote some nine hundred poems and two hundred and fifty songs. Walking and inspiration became intertwined for Gurney. He strode the countryside both day and night, often for hours. The letters he sent during these years speak of how much he ‘needed’ the night-walking in particular. At night, he was able to follow what he called ‘the white ways . . . unvisited by most’, which was, he said, a form of ‘discovery’. ’O that night!’, he wrote to a friend. ‘Meteors flashed like sudden inspirations of song down the sky. The air was too still to set firs or beeches sighing, but - O the depth of it!’ He spoke of ‘brambles beautiful in wind’, of the ‘black greenery of beech against the moon’, of how a low moon threw into relief the ‘still sky-rims . . . high above the valley’, and of ‘bronzed cloud-bars at cold dawn’. ‘Earth, air, and water,’ he wrote late in that period of his life, ‘are the true sources of song or speaking.’

  By 1922, Gurney’s mental state, always precarious, had tilted into unbalance. He took to eating in binges, and then fasting for days. He lost weight quickly, and his behaviour become increasingly unpredictable. His family reluctantly committed him to the care of the asylum system. He went first to an institution in Gloucester, and then to one at Dartford in Kent. In both asylums, he was not permitted to walk outside the perimeter of the grounds.

  It was to the Dartford asylum that Helen Thomas, the widow of Edward Thomas - who had been killed at the Battle of Arras - travelled on several occasions in the late 1920s to visit Gurney. She later reported that, when she first saw him, his madness was so acute that he was able to communicate only briefly with her, and showed little interest in her presence, or her association with Edward.

  The next time she travelled to Dartford, however, Helen took with her one of her husband’s Ordnance Survey maps of the Gloucestershire landscape through which both Thomas and Gurney had walked. She recalled afterwards that Gurney, on being shown the map, took it at once from her, and spread it out on his bed, in his hot little white-tiled room in the asylum, with the sunlight falling in patterns upon the floor. Then the two of them kneeled together by the bed and traced out, with their fingers, walks that they and Edward had taken in the past.

  For an hour or more this dream-walking went on, Gurney seeing not the map, but looking through its prompts to see land itself. ‘He spent that hour,’ Helen remembered, ‘revisiting his beloved home . . . spotting . . . a track, a hill, or a wood, and seeing it all in his mind’s eye, a mental vision sharper and more actual for his heightened intensity. He trod, in a way we who were sane could not emulate, the lanes and fields he knew and loved so well, his guide being his finger tracing the way on the map . . . He had Edward as his companion in this strange perambulation . . . I became for a while the element which brought Edward back to life for him and the country where the two could wander together.’

  Helen returned to visit Gurney several times after this, and on each occasion she brought the map that had been made soft and creased by her husband’s hands, and she and Gurney knelt at the bed and together walked through their imagined country.

  I left the Black Wood late in the afternoon of that winter day, returning to the northern brink of the Wood. As I stepped from the trees, I heard a clatter, like the sound of gravel being thrown on to a wooden table. Six crows, two of them juveniles, were at play, hopping from the low branches of a pine down on to the snow and then flapping back up again, chattering to one another in a familial manner. On the ground, they walked with their distinctive nodding motion, their feet wide apart, as if trying to keep their balance. They tilted their heads, and watched me watching them. The light of the snow gave a faint indigo sheen to their feathers and lent beads of whiteness to their eyes.

  Crows, like all corvids - ravens, jackdaws, rooks, magpies - are relatively recent arrivals in Britain. It is thought they established themselves here once the clearance of the deepwood was begun by human hand, during the Neolithic period: an ancient inter-animation of the human and the wild. Dense wood is no good to crows - they are creatures of mixed cover and openness.

  As I stood there, the two young crows walked out into an area of fresh snow, and began to circle one another playfully, each keeping a steady distance from the other, like opposing magnets, or kings on a chessboard.

  6

  River-mouth

  Enlli, Coruisk, Rannoch and the Black Wood. Island, valley, moor and forest. Each landscape had taken me by surprise, had behaved in ways I had not foreseen or sometimes even wanted. But I had also learned from each place, had been brought to think by each in unexpected accents and shapes. Connections and patterns were emerging, too, supplied by the land itself. It was starting to seem that certain landscapes might hold certain thoughts, as they held certain stones or plants.

  I still, though, wanted to get further north, to keep following my original magnetic orientation, to push on up into the bleak and stripped-back territories that had long held such a power to move me. So a few weeks after returning from the Black Wood, I left Cambridge again, training north, reading Auden as I went: boreal poems about night sailings, the blizzard’s march, windy dwellings under headlands.

  My intention was to make a single winter journey along the uppermost edge of Scotland, where it faces north on to the Pentland Firth. At that latitude, I would be closer to the Arctic Circle than to the south coast of England. I wanted to follow the hard rimrocks - the Moine schist, the Cambrian quartzite, the Lewisian gneiss - that had kept this storm-crashed coast from ceding to the sea, and in this way to join up some of the reputedly wildest places of the mainland: Cape Wrath, its most north-westerly point; Ben Hope, the most northerly of all mountains; and Strathnaver, the most beautiful and melancholy of Scotland’s river glens. After all that, I thought, I would surely be ready to come south again . . .

  I began in Strathnaver. Twenty-seven miles long, Strathnaver follows the sinuous path of the Naver as it flows from its source in the shadow of Ben Klibreck to its mouth in the Pentland Firth. The strath is wide and flat at its base, with fertile meadows, and protected by hill ridges to east and west.

  The night before reaching the strath, I stopped at a hotel on a lonely stretch of road near Altnaharra. I ate a quiet meal, and then, ordering a drink, fell into conversation with a big man, dressed in camouflage trousers and a thick military-green jumper. His name was Angus and he was a forester. For the past few years, his job had been to cut down the conifers which had been recklessly planted over the peatbogs of Sutherland and Caithness during the 1980s, by landowners keen to profit quickly from the tax-breaks that the Conservative government had given to such forestry projects.

  The peatbogs, known as the Flows, cover hundreds of square miles of the far north of Scotland. Like other peatlands, they are astonishing landscapes; their protection status is now equivalent to that accorded the Serengeti. And like all peatlands, they are vulnerable. Many of Britain and Ireland’s peatlands have vanished. The vast Bog of Allen, thousands of years in the making, was turfed into power-stations and burnt almost out of existence within two decades. The Lancashire Mosses were drai
ned off and farmed. And the Flows were planted with thirsty and fast-growing conifers, which smothered and drained the bog, killing its mosses and destroying the rare species of birds, plants and insects that had thrived there.

  The Flows had, just, been saved from extinction. The land had been expensively bought back, and steps were now being taken to restore it to its pre-plantation state. The first stage was to cut down the conifers. ‘Sitka shit’, Angus called them. He was paid twenty-five pence per tree felled. He loved his work, he said, even with the midges that emerged in their billions during the summer months, even with the deer-ticks that now carried Lyme disease. He had been born in Sutherland, but had married a French woman, and after living in the Auvergne for ten years they had moved back to Scotland, because he found he missed the landscape too much to keep away. Sometimes, in winter, he said, he went out deep into the forests, made a shelter, shot a deer, and stayed for a few days or a week. It saved the long walks in and out.

  That evening, after an hour or so of talking, I made to leave, wanting to get to sleep. Before coming to the hotel, I had identified a place to spend the night: in a roadside sitka plantation, where the tightly meshed canopy of needles would keep light rain off me. I didn’t tell Angus I was going to sleep in a plantation; I thought he might disapprove, and I was a touch embarrassed.

  As I stood to go, Angus asked if I wanted to come fishing for sea-trout with him the next day, in the estuary of the Naver. I said that I would, very much. He gave me directions to his house, which he told me he had built himself. It was impossible not to find it, he explained, for it was the only house on the waterward side of the long road that ran along the shore of Loch Naver. I should come there first thing, and we would drive together up the strath to the river-mouth, where the free fishing was.

  Near the estuary, he said, there was a grave set up on a ridge, looking out over it. A child, Elsa Danckwerts, had died of leukaemia in 1902, and her parents, who were Dutch immigrants, had chosen to bury her there, overlooking the sea. The gravestone was a sight in itself, let alone the view from it. He also said that as we drove, he would tell me about the Clearance history of the glen - for the valley was the scene of one of the darkest episodes in Scottish history.

  On a warm Sunday morning in May 1819, the Reverend Donald Sage took the pulpit for the last time at the little church of Langdale in Strathnaver. It was a beautiful day, and the trees, the mountains and the river, he later remembered, ‘with which all our associations of “home” and “native land” were so fondly linked, appeared to unite their attractions to bid us farewell’.

  Sage ministered to many of the small parishes - Achness and Kildonan and Syre - that lay in the long river valleys which stretched between the Pentland Firth on the northern coast, south-west to Caithness and the North Sea coast. That Sunday would be his last in the Langdale church, he knew, because he and his congregation had been warned that the Clearance of the townships of Strathnaver would begin again soon. Men working for the Countess of Sutherland, who owned the valley, would come in numbers and compel the inhabitants from their homes, so that the land could be turned over to the more lucrative rearing of sheep.

  The accounts of what happened in Strathnaver over the following weeks and months are contradictory and disputed. It is known that a total of 1,200 people, almost the entire population of its townships, were evicted from the strath that year, by a combination of threats and false promises. It is known that the Clearances were driven by nothing more or less urgent than greed for profit on the part of the landowners. It is known that, by May of 1820, a crow had built its nest inside the abandoned church at Langdale.

  What is unclear is the degree of violence used. Donald MacLeod, an inhabitant of the Rosal township in Strathnaver, recorded that on the day of one of the Clearances, he walked at eleven o’clock at night to a hill above the strath, and looked back. In the darkness, he wrote, he could still hear the cries of women and children, the barking of dogs and the lowing of cattle. He could see, too, the buildings of that district, over two hundred of them, burning, either in full flame or collapsed into glowing timbers. The Countess’s men had come on horseback and on foot, he said, bearing brands, mattocks and sledgehammers, and with these they had broken up and burnt the schoolhouses, kilns, corn-mills, stables, barns and byres, as well as dozens of houses.

  Strathnaver was cleared in two campaigns, 1814 and 1819. The displaced inhabitants were mostly driven north, to the coast. There they were expected to make new lives on the Pentland Firth, where the topsoil was thin, sandy and salt-blasted. Even the journey to the inhospitable coast was arduous; there were deaths along the way from fatigue and exposure. One man, Donald Mackay, whose two daughters were weak with disease and malnourishment, was so desperate to get them aboard a small sloop travelling to Caithness that he carried them on his back, one at a time, to the coast. He laid the first down in the open air on the beach, then walked back, and picked up the other. In this way, he walked twenty-five miles.

  Those who completed the exodus to the coast faced great hardship. Unacquainted with the skills of the sea, many came close to starvation, and were reduced to gleaning for cockles on the shoreline, or eating nettle broth thickened with oatmeal. Such exigencies must have been painful to the refugees, for they had been turned out of one of the reputedly most idyllic of all Scottish glens.

  But, over the course of five years - by emigration, conscription, death and displacement - Strathnaver, like so many of the valleys of Scotland, was all but emptied of its people. During the Clearances, wrote Alexander MacKenzie in 1881, the families of the northern glens were ‘utterly rooted and burnt out’, and parish after parish was ‘converted into a solitary wilderness’.

  From the road, Angus’s house had a tight, low look. Its single grey pebble-dashed storey seemed crouched down into the land. But its position was magnificent. Immediately behind it stretched the loch, which was flashing in the clear dawn light. Stands of silver birches fluttered in the wind, their trunks as bright as whitewash. And rising to the south was Ben Klibreck, still backlit, its outline long and curvaceous. On either side of the house’s driveway sat a massive glacial boulder, on which a complex map-work of snail trails glimmered.

  We drove up the strath road in Angus’s car, with black fishing-rods sticking out of each back window like aerials. He pointed out landmarks as we drove: houses abandoned during the Clearances and never reoccupied, lazy beds, old fish ponds, Bronze Age hut circles. After forty minutes or so, we reached the river’s mouth, and parked near a girdered steel bridge, which had recently been painted a gleaming black. I got out. The air was cold in the nose, and smelt different from the loch air: sharper, saltier.

  A path led over the steep rocky ground to the western side of the bridge. We followed it, and stepped down on to the wide golden flats that banked the river. The sand was airy, and I sank in it up to my ankles.

  An exquisite optical effect had been created by the combination of dry air and strong wind. Billions of particles of loose sand were being blown across the flats, giving expression to the wind, moving with such coherence and fluency that they seemed to form a rippling second skin, silky and supple, which shifted so quickly over the set sand beneath it that it was hard to conceive of the two as of the same substance and different only in their motions.

  We trudged downstream through the shifting sand, the river to our right, towards the sea. At one point, we disturbed an otter, which loped and skittered away over the rocks, then poured itself into the brown water, where it was instantly invisible. The winter sunlight was so bright that it lay in ingots on the riverbed.

  Angus gestured to the easternmost of the headlands, at the entrance to the estuary. Up there, he said, were the ruins of a nineteenth-century look-out point. During the spawning season, men would sit there, watching for incoming shoals of salmon. The salmon were then so many in number, he said, that when they shoaled they would form dark masses under water, big enough to be visible from the look-out
. The watchers would shout, and boats would be launched to haul a net across the mouth of the estuary. Those days were gone, though: the river was poor in salmon now.

  He told me that the first settlements had been established in Strathnaver more than six thousand years previously, and that there had been human presence of some kind here more or less ever since. Marks of these successive occupations were to be found everywhere in the strath. The Neoliths had buried their most important dead in chambered cairns whose ruins were still visible. There were rings and rows of standing stones, erected in the Bronze Age. Up round the corner of the bay - he gestured north and west - was a Christian settlement, established by Cormaic, a colleague of St Columba. The settlement was on an island: Eilean Neave, the Island of the Saints.

  Then he pointed up at an outcrop ridge of sand and rock, which ran lateral to the river, hackled with green marram grass. Up there was a broch, he said, the remains of an Iron Age broch. Its walls were fifteen feet thick! In those days, he said with a slow smile, they knew how to keep the wind out of a building.

  For the rest of that sunlit morning we fished the western bank of the river, moving silently for hours, rods held low and angled down to the water, while above us two buzzards turned in tight spirals.

  Two centuries previously, the exiled people of Strathnaver would have passed along that bank of the river. They would have reached this river-mouth exhausted and frightened. The dunes which stood so splendidly to either side of the estuary would, to them, have been the gateway to a new and hard coastal land.