The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence

by Neil Ansell

  The track led around the shore of Kentra Bay, between the birch woods and the sea. To my left was a steep jagged rock face overgrown with a tangle of slender grey trunks and a cloud of gold and red leaves the size of pennies; to my right were the flats. This was a broad shallow bay with a narrow entrance so that it was sheltered from the elements, and studded with many rocky islands streaked with dead bracken and the occasional stunted birch. Now at low tide much of the bay consisted of mudflats with a wide fringe of salt-marshes that merged into them, with curled fingers of water reaching out into the marsh. In spring these salt-marshes would be pastel pink with a carpet of sea thrift, but even now they were a beautiful luminous green quite different from the sere colours of the hills. The sky was half-and-half, quilted with little clouds, so that the sun broke through in streams, like constantly moving spotlights that gradually lit up different sections of the bay in turn with a golden glow. In the deeper channels of water that cut through the marsh were flocks of winter ducks with a scattering of waders at the water’s edge, and corbies, hooded crows, stalked over the green sward in a patient search for anything edible. I paused to watch a curlew, bathing chest-deep in the water, flicking its wings and contorting itself ecstatically as it preened. Far round the edge of the bay, in the deepest channel of all, I came upon a flock of at least two hundred wigeon, and among them two pairs of goldeneye. Both of these duck species breed in tiny numbers in the Highlands, but are joined each winter by a huge influx of migrant birds from the far north.

  Eventually the trail left the shoreline and rose over a hillside blanketed in a deep, dark wood. At the woodland edge was a big old house, Gothic-looking and run-down. Nothing so grand as a mansion, more an outsized farmhouse far larger than most. A row of blank windows like eyes looked out over the bay. Leading to it was an avenue of trees behind a padlocked gate. The trees had overgrown one another, tangled and meshed together to form a tunnel that looked barely head-high, and the path beneath them was thick with moss; it could surely not have seen footfall for decades. There was a sign at the gate into the woods, a warning not to leave the trail that rose through them, and not to touch anything metal in the dunes. There were unexploded munitions; the whole area had been taken over in the war as a training ground for special forces, and had never been completely cleared. I considered that you could set up a camp in these woods, and no one would ever find you; you would be almost guaranteed your privacy. I am not sure that this was the message I was meant to take home from their warning.

  It was a huge plantation that stretched on for miles, and must have dated back decades, perhaps all the way back to its Ministry of Defence days. The trees to either side of the ride were great thick columns; it was like walking at the bottom of a deep trench. I thought the trees must surely be ready for logging, and wondered if the foresters would be paid danger money for their trouble. Perhaps the forest would just be written off on safety grounds, and left to its own devices. On the banks behind the ditch on either side of the track were clusters of hedgehog mushrooms, the colour of orange chalk, like chanterelles but with a dusty look about them. They don’t have gills like most mushrooms, and get their name from their thousands of soft spines that look prickly but can just be brushed off. They make fine eating, with good, firm, nutty flesh, and I wondered whether, if I lived here, I would be able to resist taking my chances and scouring the woods for them. Mushrooming in a minefield.

  The way through the woods continued for a couple of miles, but then the path forked and downhill to my right I could see a glimpse of sea and sand and blue islands. The plantation gave way to a fringe of birch wood, then sandy heather, then marram dunes, and finally a deep bay of white sand, secluded by granite promontories. As I had hoped at this time of year, I had the entire beach to myself; not a surfboard in sight. A few oystercatchers promenaded the shore, and a couple of mergansers were riding the waves, bobbing up and down just behind where they broke. Streams ran through the sands, meandering into tiny estuaries that took a constantly changing path across the sands to the sea. Where the waters were deep enough, they ground their own channel, flanked by crumbling miniature cliffs of sand a few inches high. In places the stream was wide enough that I had to take a run and jump across as I made my way towards the sea; in others it fanned out wide enough that I had to wade, but where it was at its widest it was also at its shallowest. In places the water had overflowed its tiny banks and had radiated thinly across the sand, leaving a tracery of black dust in convoluted streaks, like a sketch in charcoal. The patterns formed were ghostly; I could not help but see figures and images forming in the dust as I looked. This is the way the mind works; to try to form order out of chaos, to see constellations in a starry sky.

  There are singing sands in scattered locations all over the world. It happens wherever conditions are just right: where the sand is the right consistency, the grains the right size, the right shape, then the sands will squeak and squeal beneath your feet as you walk over them. But today the sands were silent; they would not sing for me. I stamped and skated my way across the beach, but got only the barest response, and remained unimpressed. Perhaps, I thought, the humidity was too high and the sand was too damp to perform at its best.

  A buzzard was hanging poised above the woods. There must have been a fair onshore wind, for it held its place motionless without a single wing-beat. In fact, its wings were folded close to its body so that it was not blown backwards; it was in freefall, having reduced its surface area perfectly so that it fell at just the speed that the wind blew, with constant minute adjustments that enabled it to hold its position as perfectly as a hovering kestrel. A little way along the beach there was a raven on the sand, eyeing me cautiously. I was surprised it had not flushed on my arrival. Its mate circled above us, cronking, giving its mild alarm call. I tried to reassure them by giving my rendition of their friendly contact call, but my raven is a little rusty, and I walked deeper towards the sea to circle the raven and give it space. I walked the tideline, a scatter of shells – razor shell, mussel and limpet – and the empty carapaces of shore crabs left by feeding otters.

  At the edge of the bay was an outcropping of rock; pale grey granite domes twenty feet high, watermarked with barnacles. Between the rocks wound narrow ravines of sand; high-tide rivulets. I scrambled up the rocks to the summit to look down over a second bay, like a pint-sized version of the first but backed by a larger array of dunes. They were thickly overgrown with marram grass, with deep depressions between them. I found a fine hollow to give myself a moment’s respite from the wind, at the foot of a tiny twisted oak like a natural bonsai; it was a good sheltered place to pause in.

  Behind the dunes a little copse of trees, shaped by the wind and surrounded by a fringe of dead bracken, capped a house-sized rocky mound. It was a mix of birch and oak trees, their branches and twigs hanging low and all jagged angles from their constant battle with the wind, and thick with strands of lichen like Spanish moss. Beneath their shelter was a lawn of grass, cropped short I supposed by deer. There was a modicum of protection from the elements, yet from this elevated position still a fine view over the whole beach and over the sea to the small islands beyond. This is my spot, I thought, if I had a tent this is where I would pitch it, and if I had no tent then this is where I would lay my sleeping bag for the night. Although I had no intention of staying over at the singing sands, I could not help myself; after all the years of wild camping it was second nature to always pick the perfect spot, the place where I would choose to wake.

  I made my way back along the top of the beach, where the sands met rock face and forest. High up on the beach was a long step in the sand like a frozen wave that followed the whole bay. I guessed this must be the point where the highest of high tides met the land. As I walked its length I came upon the raven once again, still grounded after all this time. It was unwilling to leave its prize, and stalked away, keeping its eye on me, before finally flushing and flying just a short safe dist
ance. At my feet was a washed-up fishing float on which were attached perhaps a hundred fully-grown goose barnacles, with long reddish rubbery stalks like necks and beautiful smooth silvery-grey shells at their heads. The ravens had clearly been feasting here all morning; their tracks were all around like a diary of the day’s events, and there was a scattering of torn-off shells littering the sand.

  The barnacles did have an uncanny resemblance to the geese which I had watched flocking over the loch. Long ago it was believed that barnacle goose and goose barnacle were not just similar in appearance, but were one and the same, that the barnacle was the infant form of the bird, and that this explained the birds’ sudden appearance in winter, at a time when the concept of migration was given little credence. With our greater understanding of taxonomy this may seem like nothing more than a folk tale, but we have the benefit of hindsight. The world is full of transformations – acorn to oak, egg to bird, caterpillar to butterfly. They seem just as miraculous, until you begin to learn the processes at work, and the idea that small birds might fly thousands of miles without losing their way must have seemed no less implausible. Even the great eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White was in two minds as to whether his swallows migrated or hibernated, and this was a man with such keen powers of observation that he was the first to distinguish the three species of leaf warbler – willow warbler, wood warbler and chiffchaff – birds that look very similar and live in similar habitats, yet have distinctive calls and habits. White’s better judgement over migration was perhaps hampered by his correspondents, who were happy to regale him with anecdotes of swallows that had been dredged up by fishermen from the bottom of ponds, and subsequently revived. For it was believed that swallows not only hibernated, but hibernated underwater, a reputation perhaps inspired by the birds’ habit of drinking on the wing, skimming the surface of the waters. In the end, though, White’s instincts did not desert him, and he followed the evidence until he came down firmly on the side of migration.

  The familiar acorn barnacle of the littoral zone, which swarms in its millions on the rocks just below the high-water mark – if it is possible to swarm while stationary – seems akin to the limpets and winkles that share its space, but barnacles are not molluscs at all. Rather they are crustaceans, more closely related to crabs than to shellfish. In their larval form they drift in the sea, and then as they mature they come ashore and cement their heads to the rocks, stratified by species. The goose barnacle does not voluntarily come ashore; it is pelagic, a wanderer of the open ocean. It will fix itself to anything that floats: driftwood, or a lost fishing float. The goose barnacle is a hitch-hiker.

  Charles Darwin devoted seven years of his life to the study of barnacles, and wrote four volumes about them; two on their anatomy and taxonomy, and two on the British fossil record. These books were not among his bestsellers. Barnacles are, however, anatomically more interesting than you might imagine, as they have had to find a way to reproduce while adopting an entirely static lifestyle during adulthood. They might have adopted the more obvious method of disseminating clouds of sperm into the sea, like corals, but have instead developed a penis that is forty or fifty times their body-length, which they send out on little forays among their neighbours. Darwin’s theories of species change and natural selection did not come as a sudden flash of inspiration, but were the view from the summit of a mountain of hard-won knowledge. The apparently humble barnacle forms a surprisingly significant part of Darwin’s peak.

  It was a walk of several miles back to the road, where I would still have to take my chances on catching a lift. Having had the beach to myself all day, I was surprised to come upon a man in the depths of the woods. He had a shotgun cocked in the crook of his arm, and was wearing a deerstalker. He asked me if I had seen a big grey fox, and happily I was unable to help him. The pine marten lady had warned me that many people locally had a relationship with wildlife that consisted almost exclusively of killing it. I recognise, of course, that if you are trying to make a living off the land then this will inevitably breed a certain lack of sentimentality, but we have to learn to progress beyond a place where we see only two types of animal: competitor or prey. It is a rather biblical outlook, to see the world solely as a resource placed there for our own benefit.

  I emerged from the woods to a light shower, but I could see that the rain cloud above would quickly pass over and I would soon be back in a shaft of sunlight. The weather had held well. I paused and looked out across the bay. If summer is a wild-flower meadow on the downs, buzzing with insects, rippling with sunshine, then winter is a gust of sea air, the reek of drying seaweed, the trill of a curlew from out on the flats, frozen ice amongst the reeds, the cackle of overhead geese. This was how I passed my winter days as a child. In summer I explored the country lanes, the chalk streams, the shrubby blackthorn copses, but in winter I headed to the sea, for this is where the birds were.

  As a boy, I could see the marshes from my window on the hill; a half-hour or so would get me there. I had an annual ritual that I stuck with for years. On New Year’s Day, when everybody else was sleeping off a hangover, I would rise at dawn and set off. It was almost the only time I could be guaranteed to have the place to myself, before the dog-walkers and birdwatchers arrived, before the short-eared owls had left the salt-marsh and headed back to the bare offshore islands that they called home. Flocks of many thousands of winter dunlin wheeled over the mudflats, flashing light and dark. Chevrons of little black brent geese commuted back and forth with the flow of the tides between the estuary and the grassland that abutted the marsh. I might catch a glimpse of a water rail emerging shyly from among the reeds, or a jewel of a kingfisher driven to the coast by bad weather inland. Hares ran through the frosty fields; in a month or two I might see them boxing. The place was an oasis of life. Mudflats may be inhospitable to us, but they are an incredibly productive habitat; second only to tropical rainforests, it is said, for the sheer biomass they generate. This was my winter haunt for years; I can still smell the place, the salty mud, the fermenting seaweed at the high-tide mark. But it never felt like enough for me, I always wanted more; although Farlington Marshes made a worthy nature reserve the place felt too compromised for my tastes. The sloping sea wall that bounded the place, the concrete bunkers that must have had something to do with wartime defences, the little boats anchored in the mud, the factories and warehouses across the bay, and most of all the endless background drone of traffic on the motorway; I always longed for a landscape that was truly natural, that felt unsullied.

  Where I was sitting on the edge of Kentra Bay I was looking out at a big slab of rocky island directly facing me, the biggest of a scattering of islands in the shallow waters of the bay. It was rusty with bracken and heather and had a little cluster of birch trees fringing its granite face, with slender leafless branches also a fine red. I looked out across the marshland, dotted with dozens of little pools and runnels of water, and here and there a strip of bare mud, and wondered if this was a tidal island, if I might perhaps reach it dry-shod while the tide was still low.

  Farlington Marshes had their own tidal island, known as Oyster Island. It was nothing like this rocky green island, just a low ridge of shingle that covered little more ground than the floor plan of a house. But it was right at the tip of the marshes where they protruded out onto the mudflats, and could be reached at low tide by a causeway of weedy, slippery rocks. There was nothing there, just a midden of oyster shells and the trace of a brick wall, perhaps the ruins of an old oyster-pickers’ shelter, but if you sat on the seaward side you would be completely hidden from the view of anyone on land, and would have a closer view than anywhere else of the pintails and shelducks picking at the eelgrass, and the godwits probing in the mud. If I timed my visits just right by the tides, I would be cut off by the sea for about six hours, and would have the island entirely to myself for the whole day.

  It was too late in the afternoon to take my chances on this island
in Kentra Bay. Knowing my luck, I would probably end up waist-deep in mud just as it was getting dark. And I still had to make my way around the bay and across Kentra Moss before I even reached the road back to Strontian. Another day, perhaps; time and tide were not with me today.

  The salt-marsh blends almost imperceptibly into the Moss, but while the marsh was still a lush green the bog was all the reds and browns of dead heath and moor-grass. It was flat and sodden, dotted with peat pools and studded with unexpected boulders, some of them truly massive; erratics dumped here by a retreating glacier long ago. It was spotting with rain and the wind was gusting, and it felt like a bleak, strange place, somewhere inimical to life. But then, right in the middle of the bog, I became aware of a faint movement, offstage left as it were, perhaps the glint of an eye peering over the heather tops at me. I paused and looked more closely, hushed and turned in a slow silent circle. I was surrounded. I had somehow walked unnoticed and unknowing into the very middle of a flock of wild geese, greylags, and now all heads were turned cautiously to me like little periscopes. Geese are notoriously shy and hard to approach, hence the wild goose chase, yet sheer obliviousness had somehow delivered me to wildfowlers’ heaven. I thought that the game must be up now, and they would all take panicked flight, but no; only the very nearest stalked slowly away into cover, stately but watchful, finally taking to the air only when I began to move again, and even then only covering a short distance before settling back down just a little further off. The explanation, I think, can only be that as a single flock they saw safety in sticking together. There was no direction they could all take off to together that would not bring a share of them still closer to me than they already were.