The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence

by Neil Ansell

  I finally came to the road and the village of Acharacle, spread thinly along a mile of roadside on a ridge overlooking the foot of Loch Shiel. Loch Shiel stretches long and narrow from the mountains to the sea, and never quite makes it. It is a freshwater loch that drains through a short river that wraps around the northern edge of Kentra Moss. A few thousand years ago it was a sea-loch, and likely one day will return to the salt and become one again. I supposed that the ridge on which the village is set is built on moraine, pushed forward by the advancing glacier. From this elevated position I had a fine view east along the first miles of wooded loch, before it widened and kinked to the north-east for another ten miles or so. On its northern shores were the hills of Moidart, and the Rough Bounds proper.

  These hills would have to wait for another time, however. This first visit was coming to an end. I turned my back to the wilds and set off along the roadside. Every time I heard a car approaching, I paused and held out my thumb. I had walked almost ten miles, and darkness had already fallen, before a car finally stopped for me.

  MARCH–APRIL

  The Crossing

  Loch Morar is the deepest freshwater loch in Scotland, deeper even than Loch Ness, and like Loch Ness it has its own monster. Morag, she is called, though I was not expecting to see her. A good thing too, perhaps, for I had been told in the village that the legend was that if you saw her you would die. Though without any timescale applied this seemed a rather safe bet, for death is something of a given, monster or not. I confessed to a certain amount of healthy scepticism when it comes to cryptozoology, but my informant assured me that there were people in the village who claimed they had seen it, though he didn’t tell me whether these sightings had been followed in short order by sudden unexplained deaths. He did say, though, that he thought in truth it was most likely a giant eel or something of that sort. It was a big loch, he said, and full of fish – there must be a top predator. At its deepest point the loch reaches depths of over a thousand feet, gouged out by a steep fast-flowing glacier. This is three times as deep as the North Sea; in fact, to find oceans this deep you would have to go out beyond the continental shelf, out past the Outer Hebrides, out beyond St Kilda. So who knows what monsters may dwell in its abyssal depths.

  The coastal village of Morar has a single hotel and not even one shop, as I found to my cost, having planned to stock up there on supplies for my walk. It does have a railway halt, the penultimate stop on the West Highland Line, a few miles short of its terminus at the fishing port of Mallaig. Mallaig is tiny, but is bustling by comparison with Morar, for it is the ferry port for boats to the islands; to Skye, Rum, Eigg and Canna and more. There used to be a shop in Morar until about fifteen years ago, I was told by the barman of the hotel bar, but then the bypass was put in, the Road to the Isles, and that killed the village stone dead. He liked it though, he added, he liked the peace and quiet; it was like stepping back in time. See for yourself, he said. I did see for myself; I spent a couple of hours sitting in the bay window of the hotel bar, nursing a pint of bitter and a glass of malt, and in that time only one car passed. I supposed that the village just didn’t have enough inhabitants to support a local shop without the addition of a little passing trade. And everybody has a car these days; everybody except me.

  I had returned to the Rough Bounds once again on the cusp of the seasons. It was late March, just as winter soothes into spring. The tops were all snow-capped, more so than when I was here back in November. The spring migrants had not yet arrived, and it is not really spring until the birds come. The loch drains into the sea via the Morar, a river substantial enough for a hydroelectric dam, yet so short that you can walk its entire length in five minutes; the loch is that close to being a sea-loch. It is supposedly the shortest river in Britain and meets the sea in a shallow bay that drains as the tide turns, leaving it snaking through a vast expanse of white sands; the silver sands of Morar. The bay faces out to the Small Isles; the wild, rugged bastions of Rum, and the long plateau of Eigg, which ends in a single peak, the Sgurr, with its startling sheer cliff over a thousand feet high, that looks like a giant shark’s fin on the horizon. The island of Rum was brooding, cloud-swathed on the horizon; when the clouds parted I could see its Cuillins banded with snow like a ladder into the sky. Out on the waters of the bay were wigeon, but where the river met the estuary the mergansers had gathered. They all faced upstream, swimming slowly against the flow. They were in hunting mode, their necks stretched out ahead of them with their heads just submerged. If one of them spotted a fish it would suddenly power forward, churning up the water behind it. Oystercatchers, already in pairs, were the most numerous birds here, spaced out along the water’s edge, and their piping calls were a constant backdrop to the scene. Once or twice, a curlew called its plangent, rising trill. For me, this is the most evocative of all bird calls. It has a visceral effect on me, like a punch to the solar plexus. Whenever I hear it I am immediately transported back to my childhood self, wandering the marshes alone. It is as though I have been whisked back in time, and I know exactly how it feels to be young again, to feel a continuity that is somehow greater than simple memory.

  This west-facing coastal stretch between Arisaig and Morar is only five or six miles by road, but perhaps twice that if you follow the ragged shoreline. It is all white sandy bays between rocky headlands. Some of the bays are huge curved expanses of pure sand rising to steep dunes, others are handkerchief-sized pockets of sand hidden among the rocks. The trees that backed the beaches were no longer the oak woods of Sunart but the red mist of the winter birch wood. What few oaks remained were small and stunted. A few miles and everything can change. There are variations in microclimate that are invisible to us. You might expect a habitat to merge and blend, to ease imperceptibly into something different, but sometimes it is not like this at all; it is more as if you have crossed an invisible line.

  I set off early for the loch; the sun was shining and I knew I should take advantage of the fine weather, for it might well not last. Arriving at the foot of the loch was a spectacular sight, for the calm waters were studded with wooded islands, while in the distance behind them the head of the loch was ringed with snowy peaks that towered above them in the sunlight. Where the river met the loch was a Gothic-looking Catholic church made from deep grey stone, with a tall cylindrical tower that made it look more like it belonged somewhere in Middle Europe than here. It was named after St Cumin, a seventh-century abbot of Iona. This area has deep Catholic roots. I disturbed a pair of goldeneye, one of our rarest and most beautiful breeding ducks. They are hole-nesters, reliant on wooded loch-sides such as this. They arrive in large numbers as winter visitors but few remain to nest; the number of nesting pairs each year is in double figures only. In fact they first bred only in 1970, and have since been encouraged with nesting boxes, for in a land where most ancient trees were long ago felled, tree-holes are at a premium. I wondered if this pair would stay. I hoped so; I thought to myself that if I were a goldeneye I would make my home on one of those islands; dense with old-growth woodland, and safe from most predators. They paddled out away from the shore to safer waters, unhurried but cautiously turning to watch me again and again to make sure I wasn’t pursuing them.

  There was a narrow lane that followed the loch-side for the first few miles, leading to a village, or a small scattering of houses at any rate, before seemingly despairing of the terrain and becoming no more than a footpath; perhaps an old drovers’ road coming down from a handful of remote crofts in the mountains, almost all abandoned long ago. In places the sheltered banks were sprinkled with the yellow of coltsfoot, celandine and primrose, the first taste of spring, and the robins were singing constantly. They are among the first of our birds to set up territories and defend them, and here they seemed to be particularly populous; they had divided up the whole length of the loch-side into short sections, so you were never out of earshot of one or more of them shouting to the world.

 
There are many Scottish lochs that have one or two rocky islets, capped to scenic effect with a few Scots pine trees, but this chain of islands near the head of Loch Morar is a little different. Some of the islands are much bigger, covering many acres, and every one of them is completely swathed in forest, massive full-grown pines packed densely together, so tightly spaced it looks as though, if you tried to squeeze in one single tree more, the pressure would be too much and they would all come down. From a distance they look like cushions of moss, in extraordinary contrast to the bare hills all around. They must surely have never been cleared, and look as they have always looked, a relic of primeval wilderness. It makes you pause to think; is this how the entire landscape would naturally look, would once have looked, swathed in a forest so dense you could barely slip between its trunks? In our temperate climes we are not accustomed to seeing so much life packed together in so little space; these islands look almost tropical. Although the upper slopes of these steep mountainsides are so bare with exposed grey rock that I doubt they could ever have truly supported a forest, I could nonetheless imagine this loch more like some of those I visited in Scandinavia, lakes that you suddenly come upon, hidden unexpectedly in the midst of thick woodland.

  The shores and the lower hillside close to the islands were not completely treeless; there was an area of a few square miles where it looked almost as though the islands were trying to recapture the mainland. A scattering of mature Scots pines, either singly or in small copses, and denser thickets of birch or alder, interspersed with bracken and heather. This is more how we are accustomed to seeing a Scottish woodland; widely spaced, almost park-like. While the trees on the islands were arrow-straight and tall, like a plantation of firs, when it no longer has to compete for the light then the Scots pine spreads its wings, grows more like a deciduous tree, less tall but wider, more expansive, its trunk often contorted by its exposure to the winds, so it looks if anything like a giant bonsai tree. It is certainly true that in this iteration of their true selves they must be one of the most beautiful of trees, with their red, flaking, convulsed trunks, and their foliage such a deep powerful green that it is almost blue. Most of Scotland’s native pine woods look like this now, wide open through overgrazing, if not by sheep then by deer, that makes regeneration an impossibility. The red deer is our largest surviving native land mammal, and would probably have been wiped out were it not for the creation of deer forests, where it was effectively protected for the hunting pleasure of the nobility. Our other native deer, the roe deer, was wiped out in England and clung on only in a few Scottish woods, but has recovered through a mixture of escapes and reintroductions, aided by a modicum of reforestation. So many of our native mammals have been lost for good, and unlike in most countries, wildlife cannot just drift back in if conditions improve.

  While these relic pine woods of Scotland are not truly natural in appearance, they are nonetheless extremely pleasing to the eye. It is said that we have an innate tendency to be drawn to a landscape that is open and grassy, with scattered trees and copses and hills, and that is why we try to replicate it in our parks and gardens. It is the landscape of the East African savannah, the place where man was born, and where we did most of our growing up. Most of human history was played out there, and our spread to other climes and habitats, and different ways of living, is a very recent development. It is fundamental human nature to roam in a landscape much like this; it makes us feel at home in a way that perhaps we cannot place. These are our Elysian Fields.

  I left the road, following a trail of pine trees onto a promontory that faced out onto the islands, and sat in the dappled sunlight beneath a tree right at the water’s edge, looking out. I could hire a kayak, I could paddle over to the islands and explore them, pick one and camp out overnight, have it all to myself, my own little piece of wilderness. There is something very appealing about islands; their self-containment. They have indisputable limits; you can walk their bounds and feel that you know them, that you have possessed them fully. I could certainly envisage myself waking beneath the shelter of their wild forests and spending a day exploring them. But if they are truly wild, perhaps the best thing I can do is to admire them from afar, and leave them in perfect peace. It is that exploratory desire to possess the wilds for ourselves that has resulted in their disappearance. What the world needs most of all is places that no one goes; no one at all, not even me. It sometimes feels that as I advance into the wilds, the wilderness retreats from me, step by step.

  Though I love my islands, and have spent much time out among the Hebrides, I have made a conscious choice on this journey to explore the peninsulas rather than the islands, at least in part for the simple reason that there is just more to see. I may not see all or even many of these lands’ wild inhabitants, but at least the possibility is there. These peninsulas have many of the qualities of an island in that they are remote and not always easy to access, they are largely unpopulated and are almost surrounded by water, but that link to the mainland means that there are creatures here that once gone from the islands can never return, if they ever made it there in the first place. On the islands I may see otters and seals, and the red deer that are surprisingly good swimmers, but here on the mainland is a much wider range of surviving animals, and I could have at least a chance of roe deer as well as red, of foxes and badgers, of wildcats and pine martens, of red squirrels and arctic hares. And this island scarcity extends beyond the mammals, for many of the islands are almost bare of trees, and this habitat loss has resulted in the concomitant loss of plant and bird and insect species too. The islands do, of course, have their saving graces – the absence of predators makes them a haven for seabirds in particular – but these are islands off an island; their diversity is very limited. There are many European species that never made it across the land-bridge to Britain before the waters rose and it was islanded, and even fewer that made it further to these remoter islands. Those few that do make it may of course begin to follow their own evolutionary path – on our own islands we have the Skomer vole, the Orkney vole, the St Kilda wren – and these byways can make an island a place of extraordinary interest, but also terribly vulnerable to change.

  This promontory was a rocky dome like the islands; it seemed part of the same chain, but was joined to the land by a low grassy ridge just a few feet above water level, where someone had not long ago struck camp. There was a circle of stones filled with sodden ash and surrounded by a square of fallen boughs, perhaps gathered as driftwood. There had been quite a little gathering here, and I could see why it had been chosen. It was hidden from the road though not too far away, and the view over the loch and islands to the snowcaps beyond was superb. I followed on around the edge of the steep rocky outcrop, which was like the islands but also quite unlike them. While the islands were dense with full-grown pines, here there were just a handful of relic pine trees, and the ridge was overgrown with much younger growth; birch and alder scrub with a thick understory of rhododendron. To see the forests of rhododendrons in their native Himalayas is a fine and beautiful thing, but here they are invasive. I supposed they had been introduced by the landowners at some point and had gone wild. I hoped they had not spread out to the islands. I once spent nearly a year clearing rhododendrons. They had been planted as pheasant cover, and had run riot. Every day I would head into the wood with a brush-cutter in hand, and cut my way into it. It was like holding back the tide; a few years later I returned to the place, and found it largely overrun again.

  Hidden in the scrub I found a pile of rubbish from the campsite: plastic bags and food packaging, beer-cans and bottles, even, strangely, what looked like a perfectly serviceable pair of walking boots. It was frustrating; they had come to a place as pristine as this, and had not thought they should go to the trouble of taking their rubbish with them. It was too much for me to deal with single-handedly. I imagined they simply couldn’t be bothered to carry it a hundred yards back to their car, and just tossed it into the undergrow
th. If I was to make it over to those wild islands, perhaps this is what I would find: the remains of old campsites and a scattering of discarded litter.

  At the road-head, the main trail continued close to the shore, but there was another less obvious path that cut diagonally up the steep hillside, and this was my goal; to head up to higher ground and cross the backbone of the peninsula. Almost at once I had left the scattered trees of the loch-side behind and was on open ground. The loch quickly fell from view and I was in an empty wasteland of bare rock interspersed with moor-grass and heather and the occasional boggy hollow. The sense of bleakness was exacerbated by a sudden squall that gusted with rain; the contrast with the lushness down below was dramatic, but soon the rain passed. There was little visible life; just one or two sheep. These hills must be very thinly stocked, I thought, for there was not much here for them. Then the sun broke through the clouds, and the meadow pipits began to rise, hurling themselves into the air and then parachuting down, singing their little hearts out like low-rent skylarks. And I felt a sudden sense of loss as I realised I could not hear them at all.