The Wild Places (Penguin Original) Read online

  Seals have long figured in the folklore of the Atlantic fringes as possessors of an uncannily double nature: in-between creatures, half-human and half-marine. In the 1940s, the writer David Thomson travelled between the westerly sea communities of Ireland and Scotland, gathering stories about the seals. Everywhere he went, he found that the tales told were the same: of the capacity of the seal’s gaze to compel and hold its subject, of seals stepping from the sea and becoming humans, and humans slipping into the form of seals. The seal was a living reminder, he noted, of how close we are to animals, and of our aquatic ancestry. ‘Land animals may play their roles in legend,’ he concluded in the book he wrote about his journeys, ‘but none, not even the hare, has such a dream-like effect on the human mind as the seal.’

  I walked back to the shingle beach on that still morning, past the burrows of the shearwaters, over the soft moulded grass, back through the field of thrift. I tried to imagine the conversations the monks would have had with one another about the places in which they dwelled: their discussions, implicit and explicit, about what it meant to be in affinity with the land they occupied. I admired the ways in which their spirituality found expressions and correlations in the physical world. In the view over a low-misted sea from a headland. In the fall of light upon the margin of a page, or a bay. In feathers rocking down through still air like snow, or snow rocking down through still air like feathers. Of course there were physical discomforts to their lives in these places; of course there would have been disagreements, dislikes, currents of bad feeling between the men themselves. But these ascetics had desired and celebrated an affluence which was beyond the economic, and which found its forms in the clearness of the air over the sea, or the shoaling patterns of a flock of seabirds in flight. Henry David Thoreau had written about such ideas of value. A lake, he said, a hill, a cliff, or individual rocks, ‘a forest or ancient trees standing singly’, ‘such things are beautiful, they have a high use which dollars and cents never represent.’

  Much had changed since the time of the peregrini. Plastic flotsam washed up in Enlli’s coves and gulleys. Power-boats thumped over the water near the mainland. There were problems with sewage, piped out into the Irish Sea from the Welsh coastal towns, and with chemical pollution which, on certain days, set the water foaming like shampoo on the rocks. And I could not have survived on the monks’ island, could not have lived on it even for a month, probably - the draw of the city, my own routines, my need for libraries, luxuries, connection, variety. Yet aspects remained of what had attracted the peregrini there, centuries earlier, and it felt somehow right to have begun my journeys in a landscape where people had, in the past, lived companionably with the wild.

  Later we sailed back across the Sound to the mainland, at the turn of the tides, passing as we did so over water that was plump and gleaming, as though it were covered in a sheeny surface membrane beneath which the upwelling current seemed to pause and tremble.

  John moored the boat a hundred yards offshore, near a point jutting west towards Enlli, facing a small bay. To either side of the bay rose jagged cliffs, complicatedly recessed and cut into by caves, off which bird cries pinged. The boat rolled on the subtle green swell, snapping its anchor rope tight with each roll, so that water sprang from it. Its mast, seen from the stern, ticked from side to side like a metronome.

  I dived in. Blue shock. The cold running into me like a dye. I surfaced, gasping, and began to swim towards the cliffs at the eastern side of the bay. I could feel the insistent draw of the current, sliding me out to the west, back towards Enlli. I swam at a diagonal to it, to keep my course.

  Nearing the cliffs, I moved through different ribbons and bands of temperature, warm, then suddenly cold again. A large lustrous wave surged me between two big rocks, and as I put a hand out to stop myself from being barged against them, I felt barnacles tear at my fingers.

  I swam to the biggest of the caves. Holding on to an edge of rock, and letting the swell lift me gently up and down, I looked inside. Though I could not see the back of the cave, it seemed to run thirty or forty feet into the cliffs: cone-shaped, tightening into the earth from its mouth. I released the rock, and drifted slowly into the opening. As I crossed the shadow cast by the cave’s roof, the water grew cold. There was a big hollow sucking and slapping sound. I shouted, and heard my call come back at me from all sides.

  As I got deeper in, the water shallowed. I swam breast-stroke, to keep myself as flat as possible. I was passing over dark red and purple rocks: the voodoo colours of basalt, dolerite. The lower sides of the cave were lined with frizzy green seaweed, which was slick and shiny where the water reached it, like wet hair.

  Further back into the cave, the light was diffused and the air appeared powdery. The temperature had dropped, and I sensed the whole gathered coldness of the unsunned rock around and above me, pushing out into the air and water.

  I glanced back over my shoulder. The big semicircular mouth of the cave had by now shrunk to a cuticle of light. I could only just see out to the horizon of the sea, and I felt a sudden involuntary lurch of fear. I swam on, moving slowly now, trying to sense the sharp rocks over which I was moving.

  Then I reached the end of the cave, and there, at its very back, and in its very centre, lifted almost entirely out of the water, sat a single vast white boulder, made of smooth creamy rock, shaped roughly like a throne or seat. It must have weighed five or six tons. I climbed awkwardly out of the water, slipping on weed, and sat on the rock, while the water slopped around its base, and looked back down the cave to the curved rim of light, all that remained of the world beyond.

  Remembering the white rock now, it seems like a hallucination. I cannot explain what it really looked like, certainly not what it was doing there, among the red and purple basalts. Nor could I conceive of the might of the storm waves that, over the centuries, must have brought that boulder to the cave, and then shifted it deeper and deeper in, until finally they had heaved it into that position, placed perfectly at the centre and the back of the cave.

  That afternoon the sun returned, filling the air with low warm light. We climbed steep cliffs near the cove, above deep sea water which would catch us if we fell, and gathered the rock samphire that grew in vertical fields. We perched in little nooks and sentry holes, facing out to the setting sun, and talked to each other across the cliff, as we chewed on the samphire’s pale green leaves, relishing its saltiness.

  As dark was finally falling, we returned to the cove off which the boat was moored. It lay at the mouth of a small steep-sided valley, cut by a stream. The valley’s two banks were thick with small trees - ash, elder, rowan - hung with wild honeysuckle, and bindweed, whose almond scent gathered in the air and moved with the wind in currents through the dusk, and whose white trumpet-shaped flowers shone in the fading light.

  The cove’s beach was formed of hundreds of thousands of stones, some as smooth as eggs. Several old rusted tractors with black plastic bucket seats were pulled up to either side, near the cliffs, ready to haul fishing boats out of the water. Where it was sandier, near the water, three wading birds moved forwards together in a line, swinging their beaks from side to side in arcs as they advanced, like a team of metal detectors. We moved boulders to make seats, and sat for a while, watching the sun complete its combustion over the western sea.

  When it was fully dark, we lit a birchwood fire in a pit of stones beneath the westernmost cliff edge of the cove, and sat round it, drinking, eating, talking. The orange fire popped bright sun-flares out into the darkness. Resin hissed, and wood cracked as it tore itself along its grain. Sparks rushed in flocks into the darkness, before passing out of sight. The sea hushed on the shingle. Time became measured by the fire’s failing and flaring. Later in the evening, I walked across the cove. I looked back through the dark at the fire, to see its orange sway, and the figures, visible only as shadows, moving about it.

  By two in the morning the fire had dulled down to a pyre of embers, which pulsed bl
ack and orange with the light wind. The night was moonless and tepid. It was then that I saw the glimmering of the water. A line of blinking light - purple and silver - rimming the long curve of the beach. I walked down to the edge, squatted, and waved a hand in the water. It blazed purple, orange, yellow and silver. Phosphorescence!

  I left my clothes on the stones, and waded into the warm shallows. Where it was undisturbed, the water was still and black. But where it was stirred, it burned with light. Every movement I made provoked a brilliant swirl, and everywhere it lapped against a floating body it was struck into colour, so that the few boats moored in the bay were outlined with luminescence, gleaming off their wet sloped sides. Glancing back, the cove, the cliffs and the caves all appeared trimmed with light. I found that I could fling long streaks of fire from my fingertips, sorcerer-style, so I stood in the shallows for a few happy minutes, pretending to be Merlin, dispensing magic to right and left.

  Then I walked out into the deeper water, and slipped forward and swam in a squall of tangerine light. I rolled on to my back, and sculled along the line of the shore, looking back at the land, and kicking my legs so that complex drapes of colour were slung outwards. What was it Thoreau had written about a similar experience at Walden Pond? ‘It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short while, I lived like a dolphin. ’ I remembered Roger describing how he had stood one night on the beach at Walberswick in Suffolk and seen dozens of swimmers out in the phosphorescent water, their bodies ‘striking through the neon waves like dragons’.

  It was dark in the cove, and there was little loose light in the sky, and I realised that I could not see myself, only the phosphorescence that surrounded me, so that it appeared as though I were not there in the water at all: my body was unclear, defined only as a shape of darkness set against the swirling aqueous light.

  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 ente
rs 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’.