The Wild Places (Penguin Original) (26 page)

Down in the holloway, the bright hot surface world was forgotten. So close was the latticework of leaves and branches, and so tall the sides of the holloway that light penetrated its depths only in thin lances. Roger and I moved slowly up the bed of the roadway, forcing a way through the undergrowth, through clumps of chest-high nettles, past big strong-holds of bramble, and over hawthorns that had grown together, enmeshing across the roadbed. Occasionally we came to small clearings in the holloway, where light fell and grass grew. From thorn thickets, there was the scuttle of unseen creatures. Any noise we made thudded into the banks, and was lost. A person might hide out undetected in such a place for weeks or months, I thought.

Lines of spider’s silk criss-crossed the air in their scores, and light ran like drops of bright liquid down them when we moved. In the windless warm air, groups of black flies bobbed and weaved, each dancing around a set point, like vibrating atoms held in a matrix. I had the sense of being in the nave of a church: the joined vaulting of the trees above, the stone sides of the cutting which were cold when I laid a hand against them, the spindles of sunlight, the incantations of the flies.

I would like to see a map that represented the country only according to these old ways, and that was blind to the newer routes, to the roads which take so little notice of the shape of the land through which they pass. These old ways, these tradeworn cantons, tended to work round woodlands, to follow the curve of a valley or the surge of a hill. They existed in compromise with the land through which they passed. Many of them had evolved from footpaths that had, both for ease of movement and ease of orientation, attended to the twisting courses of streams and rivers, or the natural curves of rising and falling land. This relationship of accommodation between way and landform has now been largely abandoned: bypasses and motorways strike through old woodlands and hillsides.

My own map was filling out, moving towards a state not of completion - it would never achieve that - but of coherence. I did not want it to be definitive, only to have caught and absorbed something of the places I had passed through, and something of how they had changed me, brought me to think differently. Reading the French philosopher of space and matter Gaston Bachelard, I had come across a paragraph that summed up my hope for the journeys. ‘Each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows,’ Bachelard had written. ‘In this way we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These drawings need not be exact. But they need to be written according to the shapes of our inner landscapes.’

Later, after our first exploration of the main holloway, Roger and I set out on a wider reconnaissance of the area. Back at the old ash tree, using exposed roots for handholds, and the ivy again for a rope, we climbed up out of the road, and emerged into the lush meadow. After the greeny dusk of the roadbed, the meadow was startlingly bright. The grass blades flashed like steel in the sunshine. We stood blinking, wringing the light from our eyes.

That afternoon, we walked along the curved ridge of the hills that extended east and south of the holloway - Copper Hill, Denhay Hill, Jan’s Hill. Sunlight skidded white off every surface. Everywhere we saw evidence of creatures taking refuge in the soil: mason bees, wasps, rabbits - successors to the fugitive priests. Where the sandstone was exposed, it was riddled with burrows of different sizes, with piles of ochreous silt marking the tunnelling work. There were networks of burrows through the gorsy undergrowth, too: miniature green holloways, no bigger in cross-section than a croquet hoop, which had been made by badgers. Following one such tunnel down into a steep copse, we found a badger metropolis. The animals must have been there for many generations, for the earthworks they had thrown up were substantial and long-term: ramparts, tumuli, barrows. I counted ten separate setts. Near the entrance to one of them lay a badger skull. I picked it up, saw the clamp-and-vice of its jaws, and the bulky orbit bones that protected its absent eyes.

As we walked, buzzards turned above us like spotter-planes. Once, a roe deer picked its way nervously into the middle of a field, until something startled it and it escaped in urgent, arched bounds. Hours later, as the air was hazing up, we returned to our holloway hide-out, dropping down by the old ash tree again into the near-darkness. We cleared nettles and briars, moved loose trunks to make seats, and then Roger built a fire to cook supper on - a pyramid of small sticks, with a hot centre of tinder, that produced an intense and almost smokeless fire. We ate a spicy tagine that Roger had made in advance and carried up with him. Firelight flickered off the walls of the holloway and on the hedge canopy above us, and set complicated shadows moving in the leaves. As we sat there in the thickening dark, talking, the day seemed to convene itself around the furnace-point of the flames.

Campfires prompt storytelling, and Roger, never slow to start a story, told me how he had once been shot at by a hunter in the Polish woods, because the hunter had thought he was a bear. The conclusion of the story, it turned out, was not Roger’s outrage at having been fired on, but his delight at having been mistaken for an animal. Then we each read out bits from a copy of Geoffrey Household’s classic 1939 novel,
Rogue Male
, in which the hero, pursued by Nazi agents, goes to ground in a Dorset holloway almost identical to our own. ‘The deep sandstone cutting, its hedges grown together across the top, is still there,’ Household had written, ‘anyone who wishes can dive under the sentinel thorns at the entrance, and push his way through . . . But who would wish? Where there is light, the nettles grow as high as a man’s shoulder; where there is not, the lane is choked by dead wood. The interior of the double hedge is of no conceivable use to the two farmers whose boundary fence it is, and nobody but an adventurous child would want to explore it.’

I chose to sleep not in the holloway itself, but in the deep grass of the upper meadow. I lay in the warm darkness, breathing in the scents of the field, brought out by the gentle dew that had settled after nightfall. I could hear the ongoing business of the meadow - the shifting of grass stalks, the shy movements of animals and insects - and again I felt a sense of wildness as process, something continually at work in the world, something tumultuous, green, joyous. This was a wildness quite different from the sterile winter asperities of Ben Hope, and perhaps, I thought for the first time, more powerful too.

I woke at dawn. The air was cool, but the sky was cloudless, and held the promise of great heat to come. So Roger and I walked back down the holloway, off the half-moon of hills, and past the chapel hidden in the laurels. Then we drove to the coast - to Burton Bradstock, where a pebble beach shelves steeply away from high sandstone cliffs.

The sea was already warm, so we swam straight away, backstroking out for a hundred yards or so, and then treading the blue water. I looked back at the ochre sandstone cliffs, and the green hills rising behind them, and watched my arms and legs moving like phantom limbs beneath the surface of the sea.

After the swim, we sat on the shingle, talking about Iris Murdoch, who used to bathe off Chesil Bank, just along the coast, and about Roger’s friend Oliver Bernard, who had inadvertently managed to so offend the owner of the public house on the nearby cliff-tops that he had been obliged to run for his life. We gathered piles of flints, and made Andy Goldsworthyish towers with them. Time passed languidly in the heat. Roger went for another swim. I lay on the hot shingle, watching overhead clouds, thinking about Cotman’s paintings and about Stephen Graham’s map of his ‘unnamed’ wild places.

In so many of the landscapes I had reached on my journeys, I had found testimonies to the affection they inspired. Poems tacked up on the walls of bothies; benches set on lakesides, cliff-tops or low hill passes, commemorating the favourite viewpoint of someone now dead; a graffito cut into the bark of an oak. Once, stooping to drink from a pool near a Cumbrian waterfall, I had seen a brass plaque set discreetly beneath a rock: ‘In memory of George Walker, who so loved this place.’ I loved that ‘so’.

These were the markers, I realised, of a process that was continuously at work throughout these islands, and presumably throughout the world: the drawing of happiness from landscapes both large and small. Happiness, and the emotions that go by the collective noun of ‘happiness’: hope, joy, wonder, grace, tranquillity and others. Every day, millions of people found themselves deepened and dignified by their encounters with particular places.

Most of these places, however, were not marked as special on any map. But they became special by personal acquaintance. A bend in a river, the junction of four fields, a climbing tree, a stretch of old hedgerow or a fragment of woodland glimpsed from a road regularly driven along - these might be enough. Or fleeting experiences, transitory, but still site-specific: a sparrowhawk sculling low over a garden or street, or the fall of evening light on a stone, or a pigeon feather caught on a strand of spider’s silk, and twirling in mid-air like a magic trick. Daily, people were brought to sudden states of awe by encounters such as these: encounters whose power to move us was beyond expression but also beyond denial. I remembered what Ishmael had said in
Moby-Dick
about the island of Kokovoko: ‘It is not down in any map; true places never are.’

Little is said publicly about these encounters. This is partly because it is hard to put language to such experiences. And partly, I guessed, because those who experience them feel no strong need to broadcast their feelings. A word might be exchanged with a friend or partner, a photograph might be kept, a note made in a journal, a line added to a letter. Many encounters would not even attain this degree of voice. They would stay unarticulated, part of private thought. They would return to people as memories, recalled while standing on a station platform packed tightly as a football crowd, or lying in bed in a city, unable to sleep, while the headlights of passing cars pan round the room.

It seemed to me that these nameless places might in fact be more important than the grander wild lands that for so many years had gripped my imagination. Taken together, the little places would make a map that could never be drawn by anyone, but which nevertheless existed in the experience of countless people. I began to make a list in my head of what would be on my own map of private or small-scale wild places.

There would be the ‘Dumble’, the steep-sided ditchway in Nottinghamshire, in which I had played with my brother when we were young. There would be the little birch grove near Langdale in Cumbria, whose trees I had climbed and swung between. There would be the narrow strip of broadleaf woodland at the base of the Okement valley in Devon, where I saw a blue-backed falcon slip from an oak and glide off out of sight - a merlin! Such a good guardian for such a magical place.

There would be the patch of moss - soft and intricate as a rug, starred with sea-pinks - on a North Cornish sea cliff, on which I had once spent a night. I had reached the cliff along the coastal path as the day ended, and there, a hundred feet above the breaking sea, I had found my sleeping place. It was just large enough to hold me, and it sloped back inland, so that I did not feel tipped out towards the cliff edge. I lay awake until midnight in my comfortable niche, watching the weather out over the Atlantic. It was a night of odd temperatures: the air cold enough for my breath to show white in it, but warm enough for lightning to gather and strike, bright wires standing again and again far out to sea, their light strobing on the cliffs around me.

There would be the little beach in the intricate terraqueous lands that lie on the southern flank of Suilven, in Sutherland. The beach was two yards wide and three long, made of finely milled yellow gravel, and near it an anonymous waterfall gave into an anonymous loch. The gravel showed deer-hoof prints, in which water welled like ink. It was summer, and at that latitude the northern light was fine and persistent. I washed under the waterfall, and then swam, looking back from the loch’s centre at the bactrian form of Suilven. Later, I sat on the beach, when a red-breasted merganser cruised round a corner of the loch. It saw me, and watched me, and then dived, and its dive was almost rippleless, as if it had bored a hole in the water and slid down it beak-first.

And there would be the tree ring I came across by chance in Northumbria, on a summer day so hot that the air shimmered and bare rock was burning to the touch. It was a rough circle of old beeches, unmarked on the map, but within 500 yards of a main road. The earth within it was thick and soft with green moss and golden grass that had been closely cropped by rabbits. In Ireland it would have been called a rath, in Scotland a fairy-mound: Celtic folklore elected these tree circles as the doorways between the human world and the otherworld. Relatively few tree rings remain now; most have been ploughed out. I stepped into the cool shade of the ring, and lay there for half an hour, watching the business of the moor. When I left it, I walked south for two miles over heather, until I found a small black lake, near the edge of a spruce plantation, into whose sun-heated dark water I slipped, and in which my skin showed bronze, like the scales of a carp.

12

Storm-beach