The Wild Places (Penguin Original) Read online

  It is difficult, even now, to travel through the cleared glens of Scotland and miss the evidence of earlier calamity. Difficult, too, not to be disturbed by it, not to find one’s own relationship with the land changed by the knowledge of what once occurred here. The pasts of these places complicate and darken their present wildness; caution against romanticism and blitheness. To be in such landscapes is to be caught in a double-bind: how is it possible to love them in the present, but also to acknowledge their troubled histories?

  Sorley MacLean, the poet who led the revival of Gaelic verse in the twentieth century, knew this bind well. MacLean was born on the island of Raasay, on the west coast of Scotland, in 1911. During the Clearances, Raasay’s population had been almost eradicated. Dozens of families emigrated, and dozens were forcibly evicted. Those who stayed were pushed to the rocky northern end of the island, making room in the more fertile south for the Cheviot sheep. All four of MacLean’s grandparents were forced from their farms. The abandoned dwellings and steadings were boarded up, or left to dissolve into the land, gathered back by moss and ivy.

  Several of MacLean’s finest poems are set on Raasay, and the island’s wildness was, to MacLean, partly a consequence of loss: its spaciousness declared an absence, and its solitude a calamity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his dream-poem, ‘Hallaig’, which is set in the cleared Raasay township of that name, and in the woods that surrounded it.

  Wood was central to Raasay’s pre-Clearance culture. The surprisingly extensive forests of the island were worked by its inhabitants. Their boats were made of oak and pine, with oars and rudders of ash. Hawthorn and holly were used for hedging. Houses were made with beams of oak and thatch-supports of hazel. Baskets were woven of willow, and bowls were turned out of elder, and then polished up until the hooped patterns of grain could be seen on the wood. Life demanded the indefinite flourishing of the trees, and so the woods were worked and sustained. But when the people were cleared, the grazing of the sheep that took their place repressed the woods and prevented their regeneration. The woods departed, as the people had departed before them.

  For MacLean, the woods that remained on the island were precious and beautiful. He wrote once of standing in a storm in a pinewood, near the ‘green unpressed sea’, and feeling the moving trees as ‘wind-headed’ and ‘giddy’ about him: ‘the great wood in motion, / fresh in its spirit’. But the woods were also, for MacLean, eloquent of the island’s tragedy. They were uncanny realms, where time flickered back and forth, where past and present became confused. In the Raasay forests, he wrote, ‘the dead have been seen alive’, and the disappeared ‘are with us still’. So it is that in ‘Hallaig’, the cleared generations return as ghosts in the forms of trees. The poem is set at twilight, and in it, MacLean imagines a crowd of young Raasay girls, strolling along ‘lightsome and unheartbroken’ out of the wooded hills of the island - ‘a flickering birch, a hazel, a rowan’.

  We caught sea-trout; Angus took four, I took one. Small silver fish, little more than a pound each, which glittered in the light. Angus left me early in the afternoon, taking his catch back to his family. I thanked him for his kindness, and watched him walk away over the soft sand towards the bridge.

  I turned and made my way to the ridge that Angus had pointed out to me earlier, with the broch on its summit. I climbed its steep side, scrambling up over sand that gave way beneath my feet in little spills, grasping fistfuls of sharp grass for support, until I reached rock.

  Near the end of the ridge, I came to the broch. Its massively thick walls were well preserved, or had been re-created: they formed a rough stone ring, about thirty feet in internal diameter, with an entrance passage opening to the north-west. The ground around the broch still bore the marks of a ditch and a rampart, and, on the lower ground just to the west, I could see the imprints of what might have been hut circles.

  I stepped inside, and was surprised by the sudden calm. Rounded black stones, striated with quartz, lay about on the mossy floor like cannonballs. A dark charcoal ring marked the site of an old fire. I knelt by one wall, and scraped away a patch of moss and sand at its base. The stones descended as far as I could dig. The floor on which I was standing was the result of centuries of sand-drift. I remembered how, in certain parts of the Sahara, people did not try to keep the sand out of their houses, but would instead invite it in. They spread it thickly across the floors, then laid hand-woven rugs over it, and in this way used it to soften their sleep.

  Later that afternoon, I left the broch and went walking, to see what the land and the water held. At the edge of the river, where the bank angled down into the water, the tides had cut the sand into stepped terraces.

  Down on the shore, I found a limb of pale dry driftwood, rubbed by the sea back to its grain lines. I saw the tracks of an otter, perhaps the one we had seen, pressed into the wet sand as cleanly as a pastry cut, with a forwards fling of sand from the tip of each sharp toe-mark, showing that it had been moving at speed. I came across a set of animal bones, scattered in a rune I could not read. I picked up other things, carried them back to the broch, and laid them on its floor. A worn black stone, two inches long, shaped roughly like a seal; basalt, I guessed. A little rhomboid stone, whose grey and white strata recalled the grain of the driftwood and the sand terrace. A hank of dried seaweed. A wing feather from a buzzard, tawny and cream, barred with five dark diagonals. When I teased two of its vanes apart, they unzipped with a soft tearing noise. I arranged the objects into lines and patterns, changed their order. I would give the seal stone to my friend Leo, I thought, the seaweed to Roger, and I would keep the other objects for my storm-beach.

  As the day’s light lessened, I walked back down to the river’s mouth, and in the shallow waters of the estuary, where the salt and the fresh wove with one another, and the river lost itself gently into the increased space of the ocean, I swam briefly. Though I could not see how the two waters mingled, I could feel it all about me: the subtle jostle of currents, and the numberless small collisions of wave and ripple.

  Later that evening, my skin still tingling from the coldness of the swim, I moved stones to make a ring near the broch, and within the stones I lit a driftwood fire, and cooked my sea-trout over the embers.

  As the trout baked, its skin shrank, darkened and rucked up. Rain fell briefly, sizzling on the fire, and mottling the smaller rocks so that they resembled curlew eggs. Later, a flight of little birds flashed overhead like a shower of arrows. Far to the north, out in the Firth, the fixed constellation of a ship’s lights - white-red-white - slipped past. When I had eaten, I returned to the broch, lay back on the soft sand in my sleeping-bag, and gazed up at the circle of stars chosen by the broch’s walls. The sky was clear, and the stars were pointed and precise.

  Lying there on the drifted sand, under the white stars, I thought about how the vision of wildness with which I had begun my journeys - inhuman, northern, remote - was starting to crumble from contact with the ground itself. No such chaste land exists in Britain or Ireland, and no such myth of purity can hold. Thousands of years of human living and dying have destroyed the possibility of the pristine wild. Every islet and mountain-top, every secret valley or woodland, has been visited, dwelled in, worked, or marked at some point in the past five millennia. The human and the wild cannot be partitioned.

  Since the Celtic Christians, culture has endured in wild places and the wild has endured in culture. Landmarks and dwellings - shelter-stones, petroglyphs, cairns, stone walls, bothies, shielings, villages, townships - are to be found within wild places. Journeys have taken place into the wild, or across it. And it has been the subject of stories, songs, legends and poems - including MacLean’s hauntingly reciprocal sense of the relationship between people and trees.

  Nowhere was this more evident than in Strathnaver. The many human pasts of the glen were deeply involved with its wildness: as much as the otter prints, the old shoals of salmon moving inland off the ocean or the ice-scars on the rocks.
Somehow, I thought, the river and the land seemed to caution against categorical thinking, against partitions. Everywhere that day I had encountered blendings and mixings: the blown sand moving over the set sand, the sea water mingling inscrutably with the fresh. I recalled something the writer Fraser Harrison had said: ‘Our perception of land is no more stable than our perception of landscape. At first sight, it seems that land is the solid sand over which the mirage of landscape plays, yet it turns out that land too has its own evanescence . . . “Place” is a restlessly changeable phenomenon.’

  Just such a restless mingling of history and presence existed in Strathnaver. The wildness of the river and its borderlands were regarded so differently by a forester felling trees, by the captain of a fishing-boat plying the hard waters of the Firth, by an Iron Age settler, by a Christian monk, by parents who had lost their daughter, or by a dispossessed people, trekking northwards into alien country. Or, of course, by a traveller passing through for a few days.

  Then there were the unreadable priorities of the landscape’s non-human inhabitants, its fish and birds and animals, all moving in patterns older than history. How did the land look to these creatures, I wondered, how did they steer themselves within it? The otter, tracing scent maps, trotting over the stones, slipping freely between its three elements of water, air and earth. The salmon nosing up the river-mouth, navigating back to their birth-grounds, guided by a chemical memory and by the stars. Or the buzzards who had hung over for most of that long day, prospecting in their idle spirals, gazing down upon the terrain as an arrangement of planes and forms, and vigilant for movement within those forms.

  Later that night, I woke with a dry throat, and took a long drink from my flask. The night had made the water cold. It was after one in the morning. I stood, and looked out over the broch’s walls, out past the look-out point, to the empty northern firth, and to the river, dispersing tirelessly into the sea. The light of the high moon was curdling on the estuary in white streamers and curls, and dark moon-shadows were cast tightly beneath the stones and rocks. The wind was still strong, and where moonlight fell on the flats I could just make out the shifting skin of the blown sand.

  7

  Cape

  The name Cape Wrath is from the Old Norse. ‘Wrath’ means not ‘anger’, but ‘turning-point’. When Viking raiders, setting off on long Atlantic voyages of exploration and plunder, rounded the Cape’s distinctive cliffs they knew their home had been truly left behind. For the Norsemen, it was a marker in the ocean world, and they named it as such.

  The Cape was a pivot in my journeys, too. My aim was to reach it, to spend a night or nights out in the wild land around it, and then to climb Ben Hope and sleep on its summit. After Hope, I would turn back south, and start to work down through Ireland and the west of England: heading back into easier land and softer seasons.

  I left Strathnaver very early one morning. I drove through the neat village of Tongue, where I stopped to buy provisions, round the fretted shores of Loch Eriboll, where salmon-farm cages floated in the bay, and past Foinaven’s hulk. Then, on narrower roads, I reached the nearly treeless land around Kinlochbervie, where the road ended and the path to Sandwood Bay and Cape Wrath began.

  Sandwood Bay is the long sickle-shaped beach which lies to the south of Cape Wrath. It was regularly used as a safe harbour by Viking expeditions, who would run their longboats up on to the beach to escape storm waves, or in order to restock their freshwater supplies from Sandwood Loch, which gathers just inland from the Bay. The name is also from the Old Norse: Sandwood, from sandvatn, meaning sand-water.

  I left the road-head and walked for five brisk miles over moorland to the Bay. Then on across hours of rough and sunlit ground - the sea, docile and silvered, always on my left - towards the Cape. From the miles I walked during that day, I recall a buzzard’s shadow cast on the heather, flicking up and down as it passed over undulating ground. I remember stopping at a nameless stream, in whose water small black trout sped and darted, and picking up the bleached skull of a gull. When I rotated it in my hands, I could hear the silty run of sand grains through its chambers. At the same stream I found a near-perfect sphere of cloudy quartz.

  Just south of the Cape, I stopped on a promontory which looked west into the bright extensive air. I drank cold water from a cup. The headland of the Cape rose nearly 400 feet out of the sea, the white lighthouse reached sixty feet above it. The army’s live-firing range, away to the east, was silent. The air was so clear that I could see out to sea for dozens of miles. The dark horizon line was as plain as a strap.

  On the north-western coasts of Britain and Ireland, the air has a remarkable transparency, for it is almost free of particulate matter. Little loose dust rises from the wet land, and the winds blow prevailingly off the sea. Through such air, photons can proceed without obstacle. The light moves, unscattered, and falls upon the forms and objects of those regions with candour. Standing within such a light, you feel thankful for its openness. There is a sense of something having been freely given, without its store having been diminished.

  The clear quality of the light in the north-west has attracted artists and writers. It is also spoken of with exactitude and love by those who have lived and worked in these regions. Many of the people displaced during the Clearances, who had spent so much of their lives within this light, recalled it longingly after they had left.

  I looked out to sea and watched the waves build as they approached the land, curling up out of the water along their length, like flicked ropes. The air above the sea was live with scores of birds: fulmars planing the wind in white curves, stubby guillemots like winged cigars, whirring along just above the waves, gulls making their weightless turns and angles, and giving their quick cries. So much life was at work in this place! I picked out one fulmar and followed its motion for a few minutes, watching the laterals of its gliding wings, wondering what sort of pattern its complex flight-path would make if it could be plotted. Out of sight to the east were the Clo Mor Cliffs, home to a far bigger seabird colony: tens of thousands of puffins, razorbills, guillemots, fulmars and kittiwakes.

  But I knew that the Clo Mor colony, like numerous other seabird colonies - on little Rona, on steep-sided Hirta, Sula Sgeir, Foula and Fair Isle and on Skomer and Skokholm off the Dyfed coast - was under severe stress. After a century’s increase, seabird numbers had begun to dip, and in some places, populations were close to collapse. Sustained over-fishing was affecting the numbers of sand-eels, the silver fish that are the staple of many seabirds. The warming of the seas brought about by climate change was also driving the sand-eels further and further north. The sand-eel scarcity was beginning to have a serious impact on the colonies. Chicks were dying or being left by the thousand, as the adult birds - guillemots and razorbills in particular - were obliged to push further north in search of dwindling food stocks. On cliffs along the coasts, nests were being abandoned, and homes left empty.

  After half an hour on the Cape, watching the birds turn and the waves rise, I walked back south towards the Bay. The weather began to change rapidly. The bright containing light flattened out, and a brown storm light replaced it - a strange greasy shining out of the clear Atlantic sky. Then, distantly, sails of black rain came into view out to sea, and moved inland. Ghosts of longboats. The air the storm drove before it smelt salty and wet. The sea became quiet, its movements curved and gluey. Long compact waves rose foamlessly up and over the rocks at the base of the cliffs above which I walked. As the black sails reached the shore, I heard the fizz of rain on sea: rods of water driving down into planes of water.

  My map showed that inland of me was a dwelling of some sort, marked Strathchailleach, which might provide shelter, so two miles to the north of the Bay, I cut eastwards, feeling tired. The ground dropped into a wide valley down which a brown stream meandered. On the outside edge of its loops, big chocolatey peat banks were exposed. Held within the loops were green semicircles of lush grass. Set on one of these was a cotta
ge: white gable ends, grey walls, a corrugated iron roof, rusted red.

  I lifted the heavy latch, pushed the door open, ducked under the low lintel and stepped into a corridor. The air was damp and peaty. The door swung shut behind me, and the latch dropped back into place. Darkness. Rain firing off the roof. I could see two thin boxes of light: doors. I walked to one of them, groped for a handle, opened it towards me, and light fell in a slab on to the floor of the corridor, as though it had been leaning against the other side. A typed note in a plastic bag was pinned to the wall: it said that the cottage was ‘a simple shelter maintained in remote country for the use and benefit of all who love wild and lonely places’.

  The door I had opened gave on to an end room with a sooty fireplace and a rough wooden table. The room was lit by a single four-paned window, sunk far back into the wall. I laid an arm on the cold window-ledge to measure the thickness of the wall; it was the depth of my arm from elbow to fingertip.

  Rough painted murals covered the interior of the room, their bright colours glowing even through the soot. A sea eagle stooping on a mallard drake. Viking longboats with dark sails pulling on to a beach. A deer. A wild cat, scowling. On the single bookshelf were a copy of the Bible and Salar the Salmon by Henry Williamson. Tucked between the books was a thick sheaf of typed papers, the topmost of which was headed ‘Strathchailleach’.

  By the fireplace I found a candle and a box of matches. I lit the candle, dripped a puddle of wax on to the table and held the candle end in the wet wax until it set and stuck, at an angle. In a bucket I found slabs of dry heathery peat. I crumbled them into a pile of tinder, and lit it. The smell of burning peat filled the room, and pale grey smoke stung my eyes and settled in my hair.