The Wild Places (Penguin Original) Read online

  When the fire was going steadily, I sat down at the table to read the papers. ‘Travel as far north-west on the British mainland as the public roads will allow,’ the first page began, ‘then carry on, along wild mountain tracks, over a sweeping river and across a wide swathe of barren moorland, and you will reach the cottage of Strathchailleach . . .’ The papers told the story of the cottage and its former inhabitant. It had been lived in for three decades by James McRory-Smith, or Sandy, as he was called by those few who knew him. He had been a riveter by trade, working the Clyde shipyards. Then his wife had died in a car accident. He had left his trade, abandoned his home in Glasgow, and moved haphazardly north, until he reached Strathchailleach, then an uninhabited crofter’s cottage, some time in the late 1960s. In the hearth of the back room he lit a peat fire, which he would keep almost continuously stoked for the next thirty years.

  I wondered about McRory-Smith’s journey north. What questions had he asked of those he had met on his way? What ghosts had he been in flight from, or in search of, that had brought him to this land? What had decided him that he should settle here? Perhaps it was only that there was nowhere further north to go.

  During the years he lived in the cottage, McRory-Smith gathered driftwood from Sandwood beach. He fished the lochans and the rivers, where in autumn and winter the salmon rammed upstream to spawn. He cut three decades’ worth of peat from the brown banks to the west of the cottage. Now and again he walked the fourteen-mile round trip to the nearest village, to pick up supplies, buy batteries for his radio and collect his pension. During the long winter nights, when the temperature in the cottage dropped far below zero, he painted the murals, and listened to the radio. He was often unwelcoming to visitors: here was no example of the hermit made saintly by the wild. He struck me as an irascible, contorted opposite of the monks of Enlli, a man who came to this wild place not in search of solace but in flight from grief.

  In 1981, Strathchailleach was hit by a winter storm so forceful that it collapsed the western gable wall. McRory-Smith retreated into the back room and waited out the storm, until he could go for help. With assistance, he rebuilt the west wall, and he continued to live in the cottage until shortly before his death in 1999.

  McRory-Smith’s story put me in mind of George Orwell. Between 1946 and 1948, Orwell spent six months of each year living and working in Barnhill, an exceptionally isolated stone-built cottage set on the tawny moors of the northern tip of the Scottish island of Jura. To reach the cottage from London was a forty-eight-hour journey, ending with a seven-mile walk from Ardlussa, the village at the head of the island’s only motorable road. Flowering rushes flourished on the path between Ardlussa and Barnhill, and after his first visit to the cottage, Orwell bought a scythe with which to cut them back as he walked. What a morbid sight he must have made to any other traveller who met him on that lonely road at dusk! A tall thin cadaverous man, moving slowly forwards along the path, swinging his scythe through the fast-growing rushes . . .

  At Barnhill, Orwell kept a small orchard and vegetable garden and farmed livestock: sheep, cows, a pig. The sea was only a few hundred yards to the east, over a low rise of moor. A few miles to the north was the Sound of Jura where, during the changes of the tides, the great Corryvreckan Whirlpool sucked and spun. Orwell fished the sea, the lochs and the rivers, and on warm days he swam in the lochs and in the Sound itself. Inside the house, he kept a peat fire burning, and he lit his rooms with paraffin lamps whose flames quickly sooted up the walls.

  It was during those years, seated at a big scarred wooden table, between walks and work on the land, that Orwell wrote his most visionary book: Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is clear that Orwell needed to be in that wild landscape to create his novel; that there was a reciprocality between the self-willed land in which he was living and the autonomy of spirit about which he was writing. On Jura he found himself able to think and see differently, roused by the country - harsh, graceful, aerial, marine - that surrounded him.

  The price of this vision, though, was his life. For Jura killed Orwell in the end. His fragile lungs, unable to stand the island’s dampnesses and colds, succumbed to tuberculosis, of which he died in 1950.

  The pitch of the noise of the rain on the cottage’s roof changed suddenly, became sharper. I opened the front door and looked to the sky. A hailstorm had swept in off the sea. Beads of ice were hitting the roof and then rolling down the corrugations in neat scuttling processions, so that in the gutter beneath each furrow a pile of hail was building.

  I went back into the end room, knelt down in front of the peat fire and blew on it. The fire ate deeper into the peat slabs, and raced along the heather stalks so that they glowed like fuses. And as I blew, too, films of ash peeled themselves off the surface of the peat, and yawed up the flue, lifted by the hot air. They were patterned in grey and black, so that it seemed briefly as though dozens of little maps were lifting off from the peat’s surface, and vanishing up into the darkness of the flue.

  Since the start of my journeys, I had been studying cartography. I had read book after book, spoken to surveyors and mapmakers, and tried to understand the rudiments of different projection techniques - Azimuthal, Gnomonic, Pseudoconical. The language of geodesy sounded like the language of spells.

  Before it was a field science, cartography was an art: this was the first thing I had understood. We are now used to regarding cartography as an endeavour of exacting precision, whose ambition is the elimination of subjectivity from the representation of a given place. Such a presumption is hard to set aside, for we are accustomed to trust maps, to invest confidently in the data with which they present us. But in its pre-modern expressions, mapmaking was a pursuit that mingled knowledge and supposition, that told stories about places, that admitted fear, love, memory and amazement into its projections.

  Broadly speaking, there are two types of map: the grid and the story. A grid map places an abstract geometric meshwork upon a space, within which any item or individual can be co-ordinated. The invention of the grid map, which occurred more or less coevally with the rise of modern science in the sixteenth century, lent a new authority to cartography. The power of grid maps is that they make it possible for any individual or object to be located within an abstract totality of space. But their virtue is also their danger: that they reduce the world only to data, that they record space independent of being.

  Story maps, by contrast, represent a place as it is perceived by an individual or by a culture moving through it. They are records of specific journeys, rather than describing a space within which innumerable journeys might take place. They are organised around the passage of the traveller, and their perimeters are the perimeters of the sight or experience of that traveller. Event and place are not fully distinguished, for they are often of the same substance.

  The earliest sorts of maps would have been story maps. Spoken cartographies, describing landscapes and the events that took place in them. Maps that could be learned, amended and passed on between people and down through generations. This distinctive crag, that tree-line, this bend in the river, the rock at which this accident occurred, that tree where the hive was found: such features would have been descriptively plotted to make a route that was also a story. Perhaps there were written maps, too, portable or permanent, now lost to us. In Bedolina, on the Lombardy plain of Italy, one of the oldest written maps of the world exists: a complex petroglyph, clearly topographical in nature, incised upon an angled boulder whose surface has been smoothed by the retreat of the glaciers to make an ideal writing sheet. It shows human figures, animals, settlements, dwellings, paths both zigzag (uphill) and straight (along the flat). The map is palimpsestic in nature: the first markings are thought to have been made in the Bronze Age, around 1200 BC, and the most recent - the houses - during the Iron Age, around 900 BC. The map is vast, extending fifteen feet wide and over seven feet high.

  In the long history of way-finding, the grid map is a relatively new development. Bu
t its dominance is now almost total. From the fifteenth century onwards, new instruments of measurement (the compass, the sextant, the theodolite and eventually the chronometer, which allowed the determination of longitude), and new methods of analysis (orthogonal sectioning, triangulation techniques) came into being; advances that permitted a conceptual lattice to be extended over the earth’s surface.

  Before this newly rigorous cartography, the more impressionistic and itinerant mapping practices of pre-scientific cultures quickly fell back. By the late eighteenth century, the potency of the grid map was so evident that the two young republics of that era founded themselves geographically upon its principles. Thomas Jefferson’s cartographers divided the hinterland territories of America into the rectilinear forms of township, county and state which persist today, and the French Republic despatched two of its finest astronomer-cartographers to determine the extent of the meridian arc between Dunkirk and Barcelona, and thus to re-establish the French metric system upon the fundamental unit of the metre - which was to be one ten-millionth of the distance of that section of the meridian.

  The grid map has proved an exceptionally efficient method for converting place into resource, and for devising large-scale approaches to a landscape. It is a technique that has brought uncountable benefits and advances with it. But so authoritative is the grid method, so apparently irrefutable the knowledge that it dispenses about a place, that it has all but eliminated our sense of the worth of map-as-story: of cartography that is self-made, felt, sensuous. The grid’s rigorous geometry celebrates precision, and suppresses touch, feel and provisionality.

  It is not that we should desire the abolition of the grid map - I travelled with them throughout my journeys - only that we should not forget story maps, for they exemplify a largely lost way of proceeding within a landscape. As the American poet Robert Penn Warren beautifully observed, ‘our maps have grown less speculative, less interested in the elemental possibilities of the Earth’s skin, and that suggests that the Earth has lost its capacity to keep secrets. We tend to look at them for what we want to avoid, rather than what, in good fortune, we might discover. There is not much mystery in a landscape we cannot enter.’

  Cultures that grow up in close correspondence with a particular terrain often develop idiosyncratic methods of representing that terrain. These can be drastic and punitive. Certain Inca tribes would bind the heads of their babies with cloth, so that their skulls grew into the rough shape of the mountains from which they were thought to be descended. Other methods were more benign and practical. In 1826, at Cape Prince of Wales in the Canadian Arctic, a British naval officer encountered a hunting party of Inuit. Unable to communicate directly with the officer, but comprehending his desire for orientation, the Inuit created a map on the beach, using sticks and pebbles ‘in a very ingenious and intelligible manner’ to build a scaled replica of the region. The Inuit people are also known to have carved three-dimensional maps of coastlines from wood. In this way, the maps were portable, resistant to cold and, if they were dropped into water, would float and could be retrieved.

  The Inuit have also developed a portfolio of sky maps and cloud atlases: a knowledge of the moods of the sky so precise that it allows them to infer the quality of the ice beneath the clouds, as well as future weathers. The Koyukon people of north-west interior Alaska use intricate stories to map their landscape: narration as navigation. According to the anthropologist Richard Nelson, who lived closely with the Koyukon, the landscape is to them:filled with networks of paths, names, and associations. People know every feature of the landscape in minute detail. The lakes, river bends, hills and creeks are named and imbued with personal and cultural meaning. People move in a world that constantly watches - a forest of eyes. A person moving through nature, however wild, remote . . . is never truly alone. The surroundings are aware, sensate, personified. They feel.

  Such maps are, it is true, inaccurate by the standards of modern surveying. But they are alert to aspects of the land to which such surveying might be blind. For in such maps, human memory and natural form rebound endlessly upon one another.

  They are deep maps, too, that register history, and that acknowledge the way memory and landscape layer and interleave. They are living conceptions, idiosyncratically created, proved upon the pulses of a place, born of experience and of attention. The map of a seabed intuited by a fisherman who has fished the same ocean for so long that he knows, though he has never seen, the differing textures and substances of its floor, the contours of its hills and valleys, and can tell the changes wrought upon its face by storms. Or those river-pilots who know the waters and currents and sandbanks so well that they can steer through them in darkness, or blindfolded. I had read of a man called Cathel Morrison, a crofter and conservationist who had been born and brought up near Sandwood Bay, and who had, throughout his life, watched the changing positions of the Bay’s dunes, tracking their strange migrations by sketch map, fixed-point photograph and memory.

  Maps such as these, held in the mind, are alert to a landscape’s volatility as well as its fixtures. They tell of the inches and tints of things. They are born of a sophisticated literacy of place, rather than aspiring solely to the neutral organisation of data. We cannot navigate and place ourselves only with maps that make the landscape dream-proof, impervious to the imagination. Such maps - and the road-map is first among them - encourage the elimination of wonder from our relationship with the world. And once wonder has been chased from our thinking about the land, then we are lost.

  The day’s light was tending to nothing as I walked the final miles from the cottage back to the bay. I had cut peat bricks from the nearby bank to replace what I had burnt, stacked them to dry, and then left the cottage. It would have been a fine place to sleep, but I wanted to spend the night among the dunes of Sandwood, to be out in the rain and the storm. What was it that Robert Scott had written to his wife, Kathleen, as he lay dying in his small tent in Antarctica, only eleven miles from One Ton Depot and safety, knowing he would never see his family again? ‘How much better this has been than lounging about in too great comfort at home.’ It was the most heartless sentence I had ever read! But for all my disapproval, there was something there, some selfish love of asperity, that I guiltily recognised. And that evening, my inner Scott was telling me that I should leave the cottage and spend the night out in the sea storm.

  I reached the bay’s brink, and picked my way down through the crags that fortify its northern end, passing small waterfalls growing turbulent with storm water. The wind had become gusty, and kept cuffing me off balance. Sleet and rain still fell at a cold slant. A mile to the south of the bay, there was a sun flare over a salient of dark rock. Moor grass shook at my feet.

  The river that bounded the bay beneath the crags had risen sharply. I had crossed it easily earlier in the day. It was now thirty feet wide, and the water was torrid.

  I stood there, considering how to cross, when, unexpectedly, because I had not seen another person for two days, a woman stepped from behind one of the dunes and came to stand opposite me, on the far side of the river. I waved at her with one hand, using the other to shield my eyes from the flying sand. She waved back. Sand grains were moving over every surface in a loose laminar flow.

  I sat on a rock, took off my boots and socks, and waded into the river. The water was so cold that my feet quickly numbed. It felt as though I were walking on short stilts. There was the distant sensation of slippery rocks, of boulders shifting beneath feet, and I remembered the deer crossing the Abhainn Bà on Rannoch Moor.

  When I reached the sand on the far side of the river, the woman walked forward to meet me, holding out a stiff arm for balance. I clasped it around the wrist, and came out of the water, and, unsteady, caught at her shoulder with my other hand.

  We stood in that odd half-embrace, shifting our feet uneasily to keep our balance in the wind and on the soft sand, as though performing an awkward ballroom dance. I leaned close to her ear, and sp
oke in a shout. She did the same to me. The wind tore at our words. We swapped information. The river leading north-east from the loch’s inland end was torrential - uncrossable without a rope and a partner. The big waterfall to the north was being blown back up the cliff by the wind. She said that according to the forecast she had heard, the storm was due to be short-lived, but severe. As we spoke, I noticed, over her shoulder, far out on the grey horizon, the low flat form of a cargo ship, still and turreted as a castle.

  We left each other. She to go back south towards Kinlochbervie, and I to find a sleeping place among the dunes. I watched her walk away for thirty or forty yards, being steadily gathered up by the sand-storm, her outline becoming grainier, as though she were being tuned out, until suddenly, with a snap, she was no longer there, and I stood unaccompanied on the beach.

  A dark sky over shining acres of sand, the sun an orange stoke-hole to the west, and a huge onshore wind. I watched the storm gather in the last light. Above the wind noise, I could hear the chitter of blown sand and the rounded boom of heavy waves striking the cliffs to the north of the bay.

  I walked up the long beach, passing between the big dunes that had formed there, and that grew, shifted or shrank with each great storm. The wind coming off the sea was so strong that, running and leaping with it at my back, I found I could take giant moon-steps, six or seven feet at a time, landing heel-first in the soft sand. It felt as though a hand were lifting me up and then setting me down with each long pace. I ran half the depth of the beach in this way, and then turned and walked back into the wind, leaning against it, down towards the water’s edge.

  All along the shoreline, sea-foam, thick and yellow as cream, had gathered in trembling drifts, ten feet deep and hundreds wide. The wind was scooping up loose balls of foam, and blowing them across the sand, and as they tumbled and scudded over the beach, they diminished in size, dwindling until, like a magician’s trick, they vanished.