The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence

by Neil Ansell

  It was perhaps inevitable that my thoughts would dwell on mortality and decline. I was suffering with the gripping pains of an as-yet-undiagnosed heart condition. I was fatalistic about it, though. We all get ill, at some time or another, sooner or later. When it comes to our own decline, it is never a matter of if, only of when. And we all have to work within the confines of our own physical limitations. If I could no longer climb a mountain, then I would climb a hill. And if the only thing that was still a walk in the park was an actual walk in the park, then I would find a park. And when the time came that I could do nothing more than look out of a window, then I hope I would have chosen for myself a room with a view worth watching. I had no complaints; I felt privileged and fortunate to have been born in a time and a place where most of the hardships I had endured and wounds I had suffered were in large part the consequence of decisions that I had freely made. I had never been compelled to go to war, and I had never been forced to flee my homeland for my own survival. I’d had the freedom to roam the world without the use of force; mostly I had been made welcome wherever I had found myself. Generations of people throughout history, and many people now, have had to live out their lives without these luxuries, without peace, without almost guaranteed access to enough food, or clean water, or medicines. My health might apparently be abandoning me, but I was able to be here, sitting under my tree in this most beautiful of spots, and I was grateful.

  There was a familiar call, and I looked up. A party of seven ravens flew low above me, all taking turns to tumble, like a circus troupe putting on a show. Ravens usually come in pairs rather than groups, and I presumed this to be a family party. Though they were all full-sized, I took them to be this year’s brood, not yet dispersed. Five is a full brood for a raven, so it had been a successful year. Further up the hillside, an eagle soared over the ridge-line and swung in a lazy circle. It was followed by a second bird, and the two slowly swung around each other, looping in and out of view at the top of the crags, circling high over the woods that swept down the steep hillside beneath them. I tried to imagine myself into their place; to see what they saw, to see this world through eagle eyes. They were joined by a third bird, slightly smaller and patched with white. At first glimpse I thought it was perhaps a buzzard out to mob them, but as it closed on them and followed their drifting flight I realised that it was a young bird out on hunting practice with its parents. Golden eagles typically raise just one young each year, if they are successful. It seemed as though everyone was having a good year.

  I spent the whole day out walking the shores of the loch, and finally, in the late afternoon, came upon someone else: an Englishman, an ex-soldier with a backpack, walking into the peninsula from the road-head. A long winding single-track road led to the very head of the loch before finally giving out. He was a serious walker, chasing Munros. The Munros are those mountains over three thousand feet high; there are almost three hundred of them in Scotland, and he had less than a score left to bag. The only ones he had left, he told me, were those which were most difficult to access. Knoydart had four of them, and he would summit them all in the next few days. It was a very different, goal-oriented approach to the hills from my own. Such a methodical approach is just not in my nature. I would not have the stamina to do what he was doing, or the drive. I was quite happy to set off and just look and drift about the hills like a circling eagle, in search of whatever sustenance I could find. A little while later, I met a very friendly couple of islanders walking into the bothy and campsite, taking their dog for a long walk; a very long walk. We stopped and chatted, and I was able to give them a report on the state of the trail ahead.

  When the afternoon was wearing on, I headed all the way back along the shore of the loch and up to the hills and the woods. I must have walked at least as far that day as I had done the previous day – certainly more than ten miles – but there had been less climbing involved and I had no heavy pack. I had been drowsy all day from lack of sleep, though, which had made me feel semi-detached from the world and made the day dreamlike as I walked past woods and water, beneath sunshine and cloud; it made the idyllic landscape seem almost like a picture of itself, made me feel even more of an observer rather than being truly present.

  I did not want to face another embattled night of hiding away in my tent, trapped by the midges. When I reached my campsite, their clouds were already thickening, as if they had been waiting for my return. So I packed down my tent, gave it a good shaking out, and fled, carrying my things off the hill and down to the bothy. There was quite a gathering there; besides the three people and a dog I had encountered, there were also two pairs of Scotsmen, lean and battle-hardened hill-walkers. Everyone was my own generation. The tourist season was over, the students were back to their studies, and the place had been left to those like me who could not quite leave these hills alone, and approached them with dedication. It was a very social night, by my standards anyway, as everyone told tales of the hills and of their travels. Between us we had seen a lot of the world. Though my visits over the course of this past year had all been solitary, I could not help but note that those that I had run into had without exception been friendly and welcoming. Everyone had a shared appreciation of this land; we all understood exactly why we would want to be just here, for all its discomforts and inaccessibility.

  After darkness fell, people settled early. Everybody else had pitched tents outside, so in the end I bunked alone in the bothy, taking the opportunity to hang all my damp things to dry and to spread myself out. I had a good restful night of it, a night very different from my night by the waterfall.

  I had to retrace my steps over the peninsula and back to the ferry if I was to make it home. The only alternative would be overland through tens of miles of uninhabited wilderness, and would take days, days that I did not have to spare. And I did not trust that I had the strength. The return felt less onerous than the outbound journey, however. Outward bound, it is unclear what challenges lie ahead, or how long the journey may take, but when retracing steps it is a known quantity. I knew that the crossing was readily manageable within the hours of daylight, without my having to push myself, and so I could take my time over it.

  The next evening, camped out on the strip of grass that backed onto the sands, just beyond the splash zone, I fell asleep to the lapping of waves and the muttering of geese out on the shallow waters of the bay, but I was suddenly awoken a couple of hours later. It was pitch black and there was a crushing pain in my chest, something nameless pressing down on me, something invisible, formless, like dark matter. I fumbled about in the darkness of my tent, feeling for where I had left my nitro, and took a gasp, but there was no obvious relief. Getting back to sleep now was not an option. I would have to get up before light anyway, to pack up and get to the jetty in time for the little morning ferry. I could not afford to miss it; I had to get home in time for a hospital appointment. My original plan had been to come here a little later in the month, but then the appointment had been set and I had decided to move things forward, for fear that my consultant would admit me straight away, or at least urge me to scupper my plans, tell me not to be so foolish.

  Knoydart is undeniably remote, and was perhaps not the most ideal of places to come for someone with a rapidly escalating heart condition, but what was I supposed to do? Lie on the sofa with a TV remote in my hand? My condition was not typical, anyway; I could climb in the mountains with a heavy pack all day long with little problem. These episodes always seemed to start when I was sleeping, and were rapidly becoming more frequent and more protracted. It was as if, when I slept, my breathing became too shallow, and my heart was starved of oxygen. It was as if I was relaxing myself into an early grave. I had been through something similar before, a decade ago. That time it ended in surgery, twice. Heart disease runs in the family, and you cannot argue with heredity; all you can do is learn to accommodate it.

  I unzipped the fly sheet of my tent and stepped out barefoot into
darkness. I took another hit of the nitro spray; damn but my chest was hurting. The grass was cool beneath my feet. Three paces and I was standing on sand. I decided to take a walk along the strand. I could not see a thing, but it was a beach, there was nothing I could bump into, nothing that could possibly go wrong, apart from the one big thing. The night was mild and the cloud was low. The waves were gentle and the geese had settled down for the night; there was no sound save for the occasional peep of a restless oystercatcher. There was no moon at all; it is not often that I find myself in the presence of such near-perfect darkness.

  Beneath my feet I felt the crackle of dried-up wrack, the sharp jab of a razor shell, the unexpected cold soft touch of a stranded jellyfish. I was relaxed, almost unnaturally so, if a little hesitant about what was to happen next. I had made my choice, and now I must take the consequences. This was the point at which I should have been calling for an ambulance, but there was no ambulance, there was no calling, there was just me, alone in the dark on a beach, remote from all help.

  A breeze began to blow in from the sea, and after a while the clouds above me parted to reveal a patch of starry sky, and I looked upwards into the great silence. I found the square of Perseus, I found the skewed W of Cassiopeia. It felt somehow urgent that I tracked down what I was looking for. I triangulated between the stars until I located the faintest smudge of light. I see you, M31.

  M31 is the Andromeda galaxy, or at least the bright core of it – most of it is too faint to be seen without a telescope. It is one of the only things from outside our own galaxy that can be seen with the naked eye; the only one that I have ever managed to find. The tiny droplets of light that hit my retina set off on their journey two and a half million years ago, before man was born. I imagined some remote pre-human ancestor knapping stones together for the first time on the African plain, and beetling his brow, becoming dimly aware, with an awareness that has no words, of a potential future. Yet while it is so very, very far away, Andromeda is still our nearest neighbour. It is near enough that, while galaxies across the universe are all accelerating away from one another, Andromeda and our own galaxy are wrapped in each other’s gravitational embrace, and will one day merge to become one. Those few photons of light that somehow managed to reach me formed a tentative link between a barely imaginable past and a completely inconceivable future. It may not be an original thought to remark that looking at the night sky can help put things in perspective, but for me, right then, it really did.

  There is a certain pleasure in walking in complete darkness; as if every step is a step into the unknown. As a child I would go out alone onto the downs, close my eyes, and run full tilt while counting out loud. Each time I would try to count a little further, while fighting against the temptation to count faster and faster. There was only one time that I ran headlong into a tree. I walked the strand all night, until the darkness began to have texture, until the first grey light of dawn. The pain in my heart had not gone away, but nor had it got worse. I was still here. The onshore breeze had picked up, and brought with it a sudden squall of rain. In daylight I would have seen it coming; the low cloud sweeping in over the loch, the tendrils of rain reaching down to the surface of the waters. I paused and turned towards the sea, spread my arms, turned my gaze to the heavens. Bring it on. Ice-cold raindrops lashed against my face; it felt like being alive.

  OCTOBER

  Autumnsong

  Though it was only a month since I had last been here, things had changed vastly. The woods of birch and oak were in their full autumn leaf; all yellows and oranges but not yet ready to fall. They looked exquisite, painterly. The purple heather of the hills was gone now, but the moor-grass had faded from the lush green of my last visit to a whole palette of earth colours; yellow ochre at the tips, burnt sienna at the base, and umber at the root, so that the hills looked scorched by the fires of summer. The first snows had already fallen on Ben Nevis but the sun was shining. Great flocks of redwings and fieldfares had arrived from Scandinavia, drawn by the glut of rowan berries. The scattered flocks were so vast that they might take several minutes to pass overhead, and then they would suddenly tumble from the sky as they came to another rowan. I could hear the chatter of the fieldfares, but the redwings were gone to me. These birds were ravenous, plundering the land like Viking marauders. Every time I came to another rowan tree, unseen birds would fall from the branches one by one at my approach, dropping out of it before rising. It seemed astounding that one little tree could hold so many birds that were invisible to me. Every time I thought that must be it, they must all be gone now, another group would pour out of the tree’s hidden recesses, and the ground beneath the rowans would be slick with their spillage.

  Deep in the woods, I was surprised by a sudden peal of birdsong; the autumn song of the robin, one of the few birds other than the wren that sings almost the whole year round. I sat and watched it singing to the world, and wondered if I was hearing its whole song or just a sample of its lower notes, or if perhaps it was just that this song is like an echo of its full spring song, with less variety, less range, than the full-throated melodies I had listened to from all the robins singing on the shores of Loch Morar back in March. Either way it was enough to delight me, out of season in a year which had held so little song for me. The robin is one of the few birds that hold a territory throughout the winter, for it cannot bear the company of others. Its call is the auditory equivalent of a ‘keep out’ sign, or a challenge to all comers. It sings because it wants to be alone. And yet our subjective response to the natural world has a kind of validity of its own even when it bears little relationship to reality. There is certainly something very moving about a solitary bird singing into silence at year’s end. After the vitality and exuberance of spring, this is a bird that will not let go. It sings on amidst the falling leaves, it sings on as the nights draw in, it sings on as all about it falls quiet. This bird’s song may not have the sheer brio that it had when the year was young, but it has subtlety and a seemingly elegiac, thoughtful quality. It sounds like the voice of experience, and I cannot fault it for its tenacity. When all else has given up, it just keeps right on singing; I am still here. No surrender.

  I had come almost on the spur of the moment for one more visit, tempted by a weather forecast that had promised an unexpected dry week, and even some sunshine, not at all what you would expect at the end of October. I had largely been lucky with the weather all year. My motivation for avoiding the peak tourist season had been driven primarily by a desire to keep away from the crowds, and have the best chance of being alone, but locals told me that the summer had been a washout. In July and August the weather had been biblical; it had rained every day for forty consecutive days. And so I had thrown together a bag and jumped on a train. After my stay in hospital I was heavily medicated and somewhat dazed as a result, but it had been established that my own peculiar back-to-front variant of angina was provoked not by exertion but by rest. There was nothing to stop me climbing a mountain; in fact, there was a better argument for me to climb, and keep climbing, and never stop. There was no possible response other than stoicism to an ailment that followed its own path so resolutely and so independently of any of my actions. In fact, it was quite liberating to be told there was nothing I could do about it, for I would not be faced with a hard choice between my health and my lifestyle. No compromises required.

  I had decided to try my luck at a little bothy that I had stumbled upon back in May. I was relying on my luck, and the fact that the season was now over. I had no plan for what I would do if it was fully occupied, for I had failed to pack a tent. Coming upon a bothy by accident while roaming in the wilds seems like a perfect way to find one; they are, after all, intended as an emergency shelter in a remote place rather than as a destination in themselves, and for this reason they are not publicly advertised but exist more as an open secret for those in the know, so they are not inundated and over-exploited. While a proportion of them are ma
intained charitably by the association, many are on private land and exist on sufferance. If people take advantage, leaving litter or damaging the local environment, they could easily be lost. They exist on trust.

  I had been following the coast far from the road when I saw a little shack perched on a stump of rock overlooking the sea; perhaps a boathouse, I thought, perhaps a bothy. Though it was still early afternoon, I thought that if it was a bothy and was unoccupied then perhaps I could spend a night there and make it my temporary home, drop off my things and use it as my base for the rest of the day while I explored the nearby coastline. It was an odd location, certainly not built for convenience, as I had to clamber up the rocky pillar to get to it; it had more the feel of a lookout post than a habitation.

  It was not unoccupied; inside were two Scotsmen, sitting in a fug of smoke from their roll-ups and with a bottle of whisky between them. They invited me to join them, and I was happy to shed my load and cool off in the shade for a while, for it had been hot walking. They had both spent the previous night here, and as it was already well into the afternoon they looked settled in for the day; neither of them was about to move on. They had not arrived together; both were habitual solitary wanderers like me. But they were old acquaintances, having met before over the years in other bothies far away, and had some catching-up to do. I had no intention of staying now that I knew the place was in use, for I had come to be alone, but I was interested to chat to them. These were members of my tribe, I supposed, fellow travellers, and it would be fascinating to compare notes, to see to what extent their own motivations matched mine, and perhaps gain a greater understanding of what drives us.