The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence

by Neil Ansell

  A rosefinch was singing from a nearby bush, a recent arrival, a bird that had not long before irrupted from the east in one of those sudden expansions of range that some birds are prone to. A huge Caspian tern, like a tern on steroids, was patrolling the shore. A Montagu’s harrier was effortlessly quartering the salt-marsh, as if gravity was a matter of no consequence. And then a pine marten padded out of the woods towards us, nose to the ground. It was a rich chestnut red, and its head was broad, so that it looked like a hybrid of weasel and otter. At first it seemed completely oblivious to us, relaxed, inattentive. It was in its own domain; it just didn’t expect to see us there, least of all in the very first light of dawn. It was close when it finally spotted us. It stood up on its back legs to get a better look at us, showing its creamy yellow underbelly. It twitched its head from side to side, giving us the once-over. It seemed more curious than nervous, but finally decided to exercise a little caution and turned to follow the woodland edge and not stray too far from cover.

  This had been an incredibly rewarding short visit. Sometimes, just very occasionally, things work out like that; there is a confluence of time and place and serendipity, all conspiring together to render a perfect moment. It sometimes feels that this is what life is all about, or my life anyway; a search for the perfect moment.

  I had to leave my Scottish hide in the early afternoon. At three the sun would fall behind the mountains, and by four it would be dark. This was the problem of being here at this time of year, more than the unpredictable weather, for the weather here is always going to be unpredictable. The short days would limit the amount of time I could spend out in the field, the distances I could cover.

  After a mile or so I met up with a tall older man with a long staff, the first other winter walker I had come upon. We commented, of course, on how blessed we had been by the day’s weather. He told me he was walking across Scotland from coast to coast. A couple more days and it would be done. He was not racing; he would walk just ten or fifteen miles a day, mostly on roads, and his wife would drive ahead in the car and wait for him. I just like to walk, he said. This seemed to me to be a very fine thing to do with your retirement. I told him about the hide and gave him directions, adding that it was a worthwhile short diversion from the road, as he would see seals, and perhaps an otter if he was lucky.

  I figured that there would be enough light left for me to take the slow way back along the edge of the loch. It would mean picking my way through woods, wading through boggy ground, and bouldering my way around the rocky promontories that protruded into the loch, but would be more interesting than following the road back the way I had come.

  Deep in the woods, a winter woodcock rocketed away from my feet, like a handful of fallen autumn leaves that had suddenly burst into life. Then I came upon a grazing roe deer hind. I paused and watched her for a while; she seemed unaware of my presence and carried on feeding regardless, until after a few minutes she just melted away into cover. After the sun had dropped behind the hills of Morvern, I came upon a tall Scots pine right at the water’s edge that was stuffed with herons; a roost. They looked ungainly and out of place up there, draped in the branches like badly hung laundry.

  The sun had already set as I approached the village; the valley was in deep shadow and the still waters of the loch were slick and oily. The moon had risen over the loch-head, and in the far distance I could see the snow-covered caps of the Grampians, all shining like beacons. In the dark, but with a horizon all lit up by the departed sun; it brought back memories. Perhaps I have reached a point in my life where everything I see brings back memories of times long gone.

  We did make it to the Andes all those years ago, my girlfriend and I. Our journey took us through a dozen countries, through border disputes, through coup attempts, but we had the invulnerability of youth on our side. We slept rough in places you really probably ought not to: Mexico City, Managua, Medellín. Our only break from the roadside came from our decision that we would agree to stay with anyone who invited us back, no matter how drunk or crazy they seemed. And so we had a few nights with a family of shellfish divers here, a night with a drug smuggler there. And finally we crossed the Andes on foot, a walk of a hundred or two hundred miles across the Cordillera Blanca of Peru, a walk that would take us over five-thousand-metre-high snowbound passes, up among the condors, still with nothing more than a sleeping bag and a pair of trainers with string for shoelaces.

  The night before we set off on this epic walk, we were on the plain, down below the foothills to the west of the range, and we took a stroll at dusk. As it grew darker night fell around us but it was still day up on the peaks and they glowed in the setting sun like a string of lights. The chain of mountains ran from as far as we could see to the north, to as far as we could see to the south, a great wall of ice that seemed to stretch away for ever. Among the mountains were Huascarán, the highest peak of the northern Andes, and the perfect ice blade of Alpamayo, often held to be one of the most beautiful mountains in the world. We walked into darkness; we would have been unable to see our way were it not for the light still being reflected off the tops. We came to a tall cactus, the height of a tree. It must have been a night-flowering cactus, for as we watched the hummingbirds began to gather around it. We could not see their colours, only their silhouettes against the snowcaps beyond. Their numbers grew as they flew in from all directions, until there were dozens of them, large and small, all buzzing around the flowers of the night.

  The Land of the Lost

  I woke to rain. The previous day had clearly been the exception I had been told it was; I could not expect anything other than challenging weather at this time of year. Today I would take to the woods. Though there is a bleak aesthetic beauty to the open hills, the moors and the deserts, that draws me back again and again, I am sure that if I were to live in such a place for long I would miss trees too much. Though I love the Hebrides, most of the islands have been almost entirely denuded of trees, and that was part of the attraction of coming to this area; to see the landscape more as it perhaps ought to be, in something closer to its natural state of bare mountain tops poised over wooded valleys. Though the vast majority of our forest has been lost, it still seems to be lodged in our collective unconscious. So much of our mythology, our folklore, still seems to emerge from the deep dark wood of the soul.

  For those of us who are drawn to the wild, it may be hard to acknowledge that what looks like wilderness may really be a simulacrum, just a place of temporary neglect. Almost everywhere is to some extent the product of land management. There is no terra incognita, no place where no one has staked a claim of ownership. Sometimes I wish that I could go back in time and see the world before man: pristine, untouched, before we’d had a chance to meddle with it. I imagine what it would be like to see a Scotland swathed in forest from top to bottom; the Great Wood of Caledon. There must have been that first primal observer, in whatever landscape we can visit, who in a sense first brought that place into being as a concept, as an idea. I would love to be able to view the world around me through that person’s eyes, to see the world as mystery, without preconceptions. Though of course, it is quite possible that they did not see the place as beautiful, but as terrifying. I think there are two opposing desires within us; the urge to explore, to constantly break new ground, and the urge to understand, to know a place intimately and to feel rooted there, to feel a sense of belonging. I have seen this conflict playing out in my own life, that tension between the desire to constantly keep moving and the desire to feel fully at home in the place where I am.

  The landscape here is actually incredibly young. The very first human visitors to these shores would have come during an interglacial period, but would have been driven away, along with everything else, as the land was scoured clean by glaciers. Ten thousand years ago, almost nothing in geological terms, this land was thick with ice, lifeless, and then as the ice slowly retreated, everything had to start again, and
the forest took over the land. But the only people to have seen the Great Wood at its finest would have been the very first returnees; small bands of hunter-gatherers. It is now thought that by the time of the commencement of Neolithic farming, the forest was already in retreat due to climatic changes, was already falling back from the higher ground. Then the settlers began to clear what was left.

  I walked uphill alongside the tumbling Strontian River. Up in the hills above the village are the Ariundle oak woods, a particularly fine tract of native woodland that is now a forest reserve. These woods have been here for as long as records have been kept; there is every reason to believe that the area has been continuously wooded since the retreat of the glaciers, and there can be few places where this could even be considered a possibility. In Britain forests and woods cover only about ten per cent of the land, and even this is up from the minimum, when forest cover was not much more than half that, a condition that lasted for centuries.

  I worked in the forest in the years I spent in Sweden. It was perfect employment for someone with workable but rudimentary language skills. There, forest cover is over sixty per cent, the forests seem to go on for ever, and they are managed sustainably, such that as much is planted as is cut. Though I did spend a season with a team out in the deep woods, clear-felling, most of the time I was at a nursery, planting out saplings. I must have planted more than a million trees; I sometimes wonder if this will be my secret legacy, the most beneficial thing I have done with my time on earth. I wonder if it will be enough to make mine a carbon-neutral life. Yet though the endless woods of Sweden look perfectly wild and natural, they are of course all managed; felled when they reach maturity and then replanted. Just once, I visited a remote swathe of what was believed to be urskog, primeval forest that had never been touched. The most striking thing about it was its impenetrability; the trees were massive, huge trunks lay everywhere, trees that had silently fallen in the forest decades ago, gradually rotting into the ground in a slow, endless round of recycling. Wherever a tree had fallen was a thick tangle of young life, stretching up in a race to the sun. I imagined the place as home to wolves and bears, which it likely was. It felt mythical, almost menacing, like a forest of the imagination. It made me realise just how watered-down, just how tame, what looks like wild nature to us may actually be.

  Though these hills above Strontian may have been continuously wooded for millennia, that is not to say that they have been left to their own devices. There are few really ancient trees, there has been logging for pit props for use in the mine workings in the hills above, and coppicing for charcoal for the lead-smelting works that once formed the main business of the village. It is noticeable that most of the trees seem to be of a similar size, dating from when the mines fell into disuse and coppicing largely came to an end, about a hundred and fifty years ago. And now, of course, the woods are managed as a reserve, with well-marked paths, a recommended route, signs urging me not to leave the path, little wooden bridges over the river, a boardwalk to take me through a boggy patch of alder and birch scrub, even a visitor centre.

  I had the woods entirely to myself in this rain; I didn’t see anyone else for the whole day. Although these woods didn’t have the entirely natural appearance of a wildwood, the trees were all native to the area, and this was ancient woodland nonetheless. If a wood is clear-felled, and then the land is worked for a while before being replanted, it will never be entirely what it once was, for a forest is not just an assemblage of trees, but a whole community of plants and animals, of mosses and ferns and moths and beetles. Many of them may never find their way back once the chain is broken.

  There was a hush in the woods, nothing more than the hiss of rain on autumn leaves. In spring they would be filled with the song of migrant birds, of leaf warblers and redstarts and flycatchers. I know the life of the oak wood from my years in the hills of Wales, where the characteristic woodland was the hanging oak wood, stunted sessile oak trees that clung to the steep, rocky sides of the cwms. These too were relics; the reason they remained was because they were on land too steep to be farmed. They were often open to the sheep walk, and were heavily grazed so that little grew beneath them. They had their own beauty, for their status as relics meant that they were often in the most precarious, marginal places, and they had their own natural richness, creatures that thrived in these semi-natural conditions. There are always winners and losers; there will be some species that will benefit from an adulterated landscape more than they would have done from a landscape left in its natural state. The calls of wood warblers rang out constantly through these wide-open woods, and buzzards mewled continually overhead.

  But today the woods were still. I saw no signs of bird life in this weather save for a solitary overwintering redwing. They were not lifeless, but their lushness was strictly vegetal. A thick carpet of starry mosses covered the forest floor, sweeping through like a green tide. Where there were boulders among the trees the mosses just swept over them regardless, softening their hard edges into smooth mounds. Clumps of fern emerged from every sheltered corner and hung from the crooks of the branches, and the trees were dense with lichen, so much lichen that a bare patch of bark seemed like an anomaly. I paused to examine a thick fleshy mat of Lobaria pulmonaria, the size of a football. Its sea-green fronds were tinged with rust red and veined with a complex pattern of ridges. Its lobes really did look lung-like, and plants are, of course, in their way, green lungs, silently inhaling and exhaling. It was a thing of beauty. It may seem perverse to have a favourite lichen, but I am something of an aficionado. As a thirteen-year-old I would go out on my walks with a pocket guide to hand that I had carefully wrapped in a dust jacket of brown parcel paper to keep it pristine. It was perhaps a conscious effort to extend my interests beyond the more obvious attractions of birds and mammals, and the orchids and butterflies that thrived on the chalk downland where I grew up. Lichens were obscure enough that almost none even had common names; it was Latin all the way, and identification could be a challenge, yet I soon found that as with most things in life, the more you know about a subject the more interesting it becomes. I had never come across this particular lichen as a child though; it was almost lost from England. It was a fine indicator of an environment in robust health as it could only thrive in the profusion that it did here where air pollution was negligible. Lichens are symbiotic organisms, not quite one thing or another; this lichen is a particular collaboration between three organisms of wildly remote descent; a fungus, an alga, and a cyanobacterium. An extraordinary piece of teamwork. It would be like me merging with a tree to make a green man.

  I got out my phone to take a photo of the lichen. When I was younger I never owned a camera, part of my philosophy of having nothing. There are almost no photos of me as a young man. It was only when I had children that I used a camera, as refusing to take photos would have felt like parental neglect. But I took no pictures during all my years of early travel, as a matter of principle. I held to the view that seeing the world as a photo-opportunity would somehow contaminate the experience and stop me from really seeing. I would be considering the world in a selective way, framing it, choosing which parts to preserve and which parts to discard, recording life rather than living life. I worried that I would end up not really remembering things, but just remembering the image of things. Now, of course, I don’t need to make any decision as to whether or not to have a camera; there is one fitted as standard in my mobile phone, and life has organised itself in such a way that insisting on living without one seems like such an act of stubbornness that it is beyond even me.

  These woods are a key location for the highly localised chequered skipper butterfly. I will not, of course, be seeing any at this time of year, but it is nice to know that their pupae must be here somewhere in secluded tussocks at the forest’s edge, waiting out the winter. The chequered skipper was originally known as an English species, native to the woods of eastern England, but they were in precipitous declin
e and were finally declared extinct in 1976. That would have been the end of it, but a couple of decades earlier, it was discovered that they held a remote outpost just in this particular area of Scotland, in woods close to Fort William. The two populations had been separated long enough to diverge, however, and form separate subspecies. The English variety is gone for good.

  It seemed apposite to be here today; to visit a rainforest in the rain. No matter that there was not much to be seen in the way of birds and animals. To be honest, forests are seldom the best places to see wildlife, for there are too many places to hide. I recall visiting the cloud forests of Costa Rica, a high-altitude jungle on the hills that form the volcanic spine of the isthmus. The hillsides were swathed with an unbroken dense cover of trees, through which slowly drifted thick swirls of fog. I had hoped to catch sight of the resplendent quetzal, the totemic bird of Central America, a bird with brilliant iridescent plumage and a tail twice the length of its body, but it was not to be. The rain never let up for a moment for the whole time I was there, although it never exactly fell; rather, as I was inside a rain cloud, it just hung in the air, inescapable. The one bird I did see was a solitary toucan looping from tree to tree. I walked along narrow muddy jungle trails for hours until I found an abandoned hut where I could shelter for the night, while the forest dripped all around me, and everything was sodden, including myself. I saw amphibians in plenty; garishly coloured tree frogs and luminous toads. I wish I had paid them more attention now, given them a little more appreciation. This was the last redoubt of the golden toad; less than a decade later it would be declared extinct, and I had just walked on by without paying it much mind, keen to find shelter from the rain. It was first spotted on the same exact few square kilometres of hillside in 1965, a creature that looked like a perfect effigy of a toad cast in gold, and less than twenty-five years later it was gone for ever. It has since become the poster-toad for extinction studies. Species are disappearing from the earth at a shocking rate, and amphibians are the bellwether of this great vanishing. The golden toad was hugely vulnerable to climatic change; it had a tiny range, and all it took was a brief succession of unusually dry breeding seasons for the few shallow pools in which it spawned to dry up before its eggs could hatch and its tadpoles could grow to maturity. I find it hard to bear that a unique creature, something that has been around for perhaps millions of years, should be lost on my watch, in my short lifetime, and to know that however many more billions of years the universe may last for, there will never, ever, be another golden toad.