The Wild Places (Penguin Original) Read online

  But through all this, the dreaming continued. In Bohemia, in secret, Murray restarted the manuscript that had been taken from him on his arrival. Weak from lack of food, he became imaginatively uninhibited. ‘I shed,’ he remembered, ‘any reticence about feeling for beauty.’ When he closed his eyes, the mountains and glens sprang to mind, vivid in every detail. He dreamed of the violet dusk of moors, of the green water of the sea lochs in which he had once swum, and the beaten-gold sky of dusk seen from the Buachaille’s top, and then he wrote of these things. During the last year of his confinement, he recalled, ‘I had not once thought of myself as imprisoned. I lived on mountains, and had the freedom of them.’

  On May Day 1945, Murray’s prison camp was liberated by American troops. A month after his release, Murray returned to Rannoch Moor. Weak and emaciated in body, but exhilarated in spirit, he climbed the Buachaille again and on its summit he stayed, looking out over the Moor, in the space of those wide skies.

  By the time I set out to cross the Moor in November, Coruisk’s rich summer light had ceded to autumn’s browns. The air was cooler, and in place of the long evenings of July and August were quick dusks.

  I had hoped for an early onset of winter, because I wanted to make an ice-bound traverse of the Moor, following its frozen waterways from one side to the other, on skis or even ice-skates. This was something which I knew had been done once before, in the 1950s, and I greatly liked the idea of keeping to a single element for the crossing, of using only water to cross such an expanse of earth. But my father, who had agreed to accompany me on the crossing, pointed out two minor problems with my plan: neither of us could ice-skate, and the weather was damp, so we would sink. I acknowledged the force of his logic; walking it would have to be.

  We caught the sleeper-train north together from London. The romance of the train, its Edwardian miracle of conjuring you to a different land while you sleep, was still perceptible. We left Euston Station - fast-food outlets, the tannoy’s squash-ball bing-bong, crushed beer cans in corners, the shifty body-mass of the crowds - and woke to chilly air, white mist and a stag disappearing into the drizzle. Fog pooled in the low ground. At Rannoch Station, we stepped down from the train and on to the Moor.

  That morning, we began to learn the habits and the obligations of the Moor, its resistance to straight lines of progress. As Murray knew, going on the Moor is slow, to be measured in hours, not miles. Much of the Moor is loch, and much is peat hag, and between the lochs and the peat hags bog streams wriggle, their water dyed black and shiny as oil.

  We leapt from hag to hag, jumped peat crevasses and picked our way through the maze-work of stream and tussock. Later, crossing a nameless river, I saw a big trout arrow across its pool and set chevrons rippling out over the surface. Here and there, sunk in the peat, we came across the big swooping roots of ancient pine trees, thousands of years old. How I would love to have climbed one of those great pines, I thought. Peatbogs are so preservative of wood that, during the Second World War, the US Navy used 3,000-year-old white cedar logs, recovered from sphagnum bog in New Jersey, to build the hulls of their motor-torpedo boats. From one of the stumps I took a loose dolphin-shaped fragment of wood, stained a deep brown by the peat. In another black bank, I found a white stone, bedded like an eyeball. I brushed it clean, and turned it in my hand as I walked.

  The Moor’s vastness and self-similarity affected our perception of distance. Objects and movements showed more clearly in its spareness. So extensive was the space within which we were moving that when I glanced up at the mountains west of the Moor, to try to gauge the distance we had come, it seemed as though we had not advanced at all: that, like explorers walking against the spin of pack ice, our feet fell exactly where we had lifted them.

  Hours into the day, we stopped for shelter in a ruin named on our map as Tigh Na Cruaiche. A rusted iron brazier stood in one corner. Otherwise, the interior was empty. It smelt green. We sat on stones, and looked out through the doorless entrance. Beyond the series of wooded islands slung across the centre of Loch Laidon we could see the Black Corries - the high holding grounds of deer, snow and fog - and the air which gathered in them had a deep cold blueness of tone. I thought enviously of Murray, who had returned after the war to cross the Moor on a hot August day, with only his dog for company. Halfway across, he had taken off all his clothes, put them in his pack, walking naked for the rest of the day, bathing here and there in pools and loch bays. Perhaps, I daydreamed, on the right winter day - bright sun, no wind - it might be possible to combine the traverses, and ice-skate naked from one side of the Moor to the other . . .

  Later, on the top of a fifty-foot-high knoll, we sat and ate black rye bread with cheese, watching rain fronts gather miles away in the mouth of Glen Coe and then billow towards us over the ground. Velvety rags of lichen hung from the rocks on the drumlin and rippled as wind passed over them. My father pointed west: a kestrel, hunting fast over the ground. Then it stopped, hung, collapsed its wings and dropped hard into the heather.

  That far into the Moor, the vast space we were in resolved the land around us into bacon-like bands: a stripe of sky, a stripe of white cloud, a stripe of dark land, and below everything the tawny Moor. The Moor’s colours in that season were subtle and multiple. Seen from a distance it was brindled; close up, it broke into its separate colours: orange, ochre, red, a mustardy yellow and, lacing everything, the glossy black of the peat.

  It took us all that day to reach what I had come to think of as the Moor’s centre, the Abhainn Bà - the point where the River Bà flows into Loch Laidon. We stopped there, for dusk was spreading over the Moor, and pitched a small tent. We lay talking in the dark: about the ground we had covered, the ground still to go, about the odd mixture of apprehension and awe that the Moor provoked in us both. Our sleeping-place was cupped in a curve of the river, on a miniature flood-plain that the winter spates had carved out and flattened: a shelter in the middle of the Moor’s great space.

  In a land as densely populated as Britain, openness can be hard to find. It is difficult to reach places where the horizon is experienced as a long unbroken line, or where the blue of distance becomes visible. Openness is rare, but its importance is proportionately great. Living constantly among streets and houses induces a sense of enclosure, of short-range sight. The spaces of moors, seas and mountains counteract this. Whenever I return from the moors, I feel a lightness up behind my eyes, as though my vision has been opened out by twenty degrees to either side. A region of uninterrupted space is not only a convenient metaphor for freedom and openness, it can sometimes bring those feelings fiercely on.

  To experience openness is to understand something of what the American novelist Willa Cather, who was brought up on the Great Plains, called ‘the reaching and reaching of high plains, the immeasurable yearning of all flat lands’. To love open places - and they have, historically, not been loved - you have to believe, as Cather did, that beauty might at times be a function of continuous space. You have to believe that such principalities might possess their own active expansiveness.Anyone who has been in an empty sea, out of sight of land, on a clear day, will know the deep astonishment of seeing the curvature of the globe: the sea’s down-turned edges, its meniscal frown.

  Open spaces bring to the mind something which is difficult to express, but unmistakable to experience - and Rannoch Moor is among the greatest of those spaces. If the Lake District were cut out of Cumbria and dropped into the Moor, the Moor would accommodate it. The influence of places such as the Moor cannot be measured, but should not for this reason be passed over. ‘To recline on a stump of thorn, between afternoon and night,’ Thomas Hardy wrote in The Return of the Native, ‘where the eye could reach nothing of the world outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything around and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrep
ressible New.’

  For Murray, it was not even direct exposure to the spaces of moor and mountain that consoled him during his prison years, but the memory of that experience. He knew that these places continued to exist; this was what sustained him.

  In 1977, a nineteen-year-old Glaswegian named Robert Brown was arrested for a murder he did not commit, and over the course of the following days had a confession beaten out of him by a police officer subsequently indicted for corruption. Brown served twenty-five years, and saw two appeals fail, before his conviction was finally overturned in 2002. When he was released, one of the first things he did was to go to the shore of Loch Lomond and sit on a boulder on the loch’s southern shore in sunlight, to feel, as he put it, ‘the wind on my face, and to see the waves and the mountains’. Brown had been out on the loch shore the day before he was arrested. The recollection of the space, that place, which he had not seen for a quarter of a century, had nourished him during his imprisonment. He had kept the memory of it, he recalled afterwards, ‘in a secret compartment’ in his head.

  We have tended to exercise an imaginative bias against flatlands: moor, tundra, heath, prairie, bog and steppe. For Daniel Defoe, travelling in 1725, the moors above Chatsworth were abominable: ‘a waste and a howling wilderness’. Reactions like Defoe’s occur in part because of the difficulty of making the acquaintance of flat terrains. They seem to return the eye’s enquiries unanswered, or swallow all attempts at interpretation. They confront us with the problem of purchase: how to anchor perception in a context of vastness, how to make such a place mean. We have words we use for such places, half in awe and half in dismissal - stark, empty, limitless. But we find it hard to make language grip landscapes that are close-toned, but that also excel in expanse, reach and transparency.

  The consequences of this difficulty of engagement with open land have been considerable. It has been hard to make and hold a case for its worth, and so, over two centuries, the area of lowland heath in England - the Dorset linglands, Cannock Chase, New Forest - fell by three-quarters, lost to the plough, plantation or development. Of those heaths that have survived, most have done so because they have kept their designation as ‘common ground’ - that is, as areas open to all-comers, and that are invulnerable to conversion by private interests. Much of the now vanished heathland was brought under tillage for the first time during the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign of the Second World War. Other areas of openness - Salisbury Plain, the Brecklands of East Anglia - were sealed off and converted for military purposes, their unbroken expanses making them ideal for firing ranges, tank manoeuvres or airstrips. Strange Bodmin Moor, with its gorse uplands, shrank in area by nearly half between 1800 and 1946. Elsewhere, quarrying works, such as those on Titterstone Clee in south Shropshire, have taken industrial bites from the open landscapes. Nearly a sixth of the North Yorkshire Moors and the Northumbrian Moors are now planted with conifer for commercial use. Across England in particular, openness has been closed down.

  The Pennine moors of northern England - to whose slopes and plateaux hundreds of millions of people from the cities of Nottingham, Derby, Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool have, over the centuries, escaped - were for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries run as a series of private grouse moors. Until the Mass Trespass on Kinder Scout of 1932, led by Benny Rothman, access to the moors was restricted to wealthy sportsmen, and the land was patrolled by gamekeepers who would treat walkers as trespassers. These gamekeepers were also responsible for the culling of predators. Raptors, mustelids and other carnivores were killed in their tens of thousands, their deaths recorded dispassionately in the columns of game books.

  The contemporary appearance and nature of the moors is, then, in large part determined by their sporting history and use. Some of the marks left are subtle: on Stanage Moor, the Victorian owners - the Wilsons of Sheffield - employed masons to cut channels and holes into the rocks, so that rainwater collected there and provided drinking water for young grouse in the breeding season; their chisellings are still visible on the rocks. Other marks are more obvious: the large areas of moor that are burnt each year to stimulate the growth of young heather shoots, the staple food of grouse.

  Yet despite the human influences in their making, the moors of Britain and Ireland have become wild places for numberless people, who leave behind the confines of their cities to enter another realm: of mazes made by troughs and hags, of wheatears flicking between stones, and of mica sand that causes stream-beds to flash in the sunlight with a silver fire.

  Out on the Moor, some time around midnight, I was woken by a rumbling noise, the sound of stones rolled in water. It was a herd of deer sloshing across the river a few yards from us, turning rocks with their long sharp legs, as they followed their paths across the heather.

  In the early hours, the sky cleared and the temperature dropped. We woke to a dawn of indigo and bronze, and we walked within that light for hours, passing in and out of the bays along the serried northern shore of Loch Bà. Thin beams of sun were probing down through gaps in the clouds. They looked like searchlights sweeping the Moor’s emptiness for fugitives, or lasers measuring its extraordinary extent.

  During those hours, the Moor seemed to reveal itself in odd forms, abstract shapes that recurred wherever I looked. The curve was one such shape: the little gold sand beaches that bracketed the loch’s bays; the arc of a dark hillside held against the snowy backdrop of a higher mountain; a bough of a birch tree glimpsed through the window of a ruined crofter’s cottage near the Bridge of Orchy; the hoops of that bridge; and the path of an old road, curving away into the distance and shining with wetness. There was, too, the motif of the delta: in the antlers of the deer, in the branching forms of the pale-green lichen that cloaked the trees and boulders, in the shape of Loch Laidon, in the crevasses and fissures in the peat, and in the forms of the few stag-headed old Scots pines.

  As we walked, I thought about my map, which was beginning to shape itself, clarifying location by location. I tried to imagine the wild places I had not yet reached, each remarkable for its particular arrangements of space and species, its angles of rock and light. The map I was making would never attain completion, but I was happy with its partiality. It could not include every wild place, nor did I want it to. For such a map, which sought to equal the land itself, would be like the one Borges wrote of in his cautionary tale ‘On Exactitude in Science’. The story is set in an Empire in which the art of cartography has attained such perfection ‘that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City’. Over time, Borges continued, even the accuracy of these province-sized maps was no longer satisfactory, and so the Cartographer’s Guild created a map of the Empire ‘whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it’. The map was, of course, unusable and oppressive. So it was ‘delivered up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars.’

  I wondered how my map might seem to someone reading it a century hence: what changes would have been wrought in the human relationship with the wild over that time. Maybe Forster’s obituary would have come true by then; maybe wildness would have become extinct in these islands, perhaps in the world. If so, my map could seem quaint and outdated to its reader: a relic, the expression of a set of hopes and fears from an earlier world and mind. Perhaps, if it were read at all, it would be read fondly, in the way we now regard early mariners’ maps as embodiments of dreams and worries - those hills of gold drawn in a continent’s interior, those sea-monsters cavorting in the margins of the known.

  In 1960, the historian and novelist Wallace Stegner wrote what would become known as ‘The Wilderness Letter’. It was sent as an appeal to an official involved in a federal policy review of America’s ‘Outdoor Recreation Resources’, and would later be published in a collection of Stegner’s essays. In it, Stegner argued that a wild place was worth much more than could ever
be revealed by a cost-benefit analysis of its recreational economic value, or its minerals and resources. No, he explained, we need wild places because they remind us of a world beyond the human. Forests, plains, prairies, deserts, mountains: the experience of these landscapes can give people ‘a sense of bigness outside themselves that has now in some way been lost’.

  But such landscapes, Stegner wrote, were diminishing in number. The ‘remnants of the natural world’ were ‘being progressively eroded’. The cost of this erosion was incalculable. For if the wild places were all to be lost, we would never again ‘have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it’. We would be ‘committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment’.

  I had read Stegner’s essay the week before coming to Rannoch, and out in the Moor’s space his ideas seemed to reverberate even more powerfully. ‘We simply need wild country available to us,’ he concluded, ‘even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.’

  Around noon, we emerged at the road on the western side of the Moor, and I stood there, peat-spattered and tired, on the edge of the asphalt, my thumbs tucked into the straps of my rucksack, as big freezer lorries thundered past, carrying fresh vegetables northwards to the Great Glen and beyond. We were bog-people, stepped from one time into another. The angles and the straight lines of the vehicles that flashed past, and the garishness of their colours, seemed bizarre after the long hours on the Moor: strange as spaceships.