The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence

by Neil Ansell

  The older of the two men looked a little weather-beaten. He was coming down off a five-day bender, he said. He lived in Glasgow, and when he was home he never went out, never drank. He saved all his drinking for the Highlands. As soon as he had saved a little money he would be off again, hiking and staying in bothies. He had been coming to this particular bothy for fifteen years. In the early days he had hardly ever seen anyone else here, but more recently it had begun to get better known. The last time he was here about a dozen people had turned up and pitched their tents nearby. It had been quite a party. I got the impression that although he had no problem with his own company, he also had no problem with his solitary excursion turning into an unexpected social event.

  The younger man appeared to have no home. He said he was thinking he would soon have to start looking for work again. It would be live-in work, bar work or kitchen work, anywhere in the Highlands and Islands. He would settle for a while until he had a little money saved, and then take off again, going from bothy to bothy, hiking every day. He reminded me a lot of myself when I was younger. He told me he might possibly head on later today, to another place a few hours down the coast. I wondered if he was saying this out of consideration to me, to let me know that it was fine for me to stay if I needed, for it was a tiny place, with space for only two to sleep. Most bothies have been built from the reconstructed shells of abandoned crofts or farmhouses, but this one had apparently been purpose-built back in the fifties, which explained why its location was more scenic than practical. It was a single room the size of a large shed, with bunk space for two, a stove in the corner, and a single window that looked over the sea. The best TV in the land, the older man said. He picked up his field glasses. That boat has been moored there for hours, he explained. He looked out at it and said the guy was diving for scallops, there were a lot of scallops there in the bay. Then he named the boat, the fisherman, and the village he came from. OK, I said, now I’m impressed.

  I was not planning to stay; it was early still and I was going to head along the coast and find a beach to pitch my tent on. The older guy told me there were some decent caves along the headland, too. We sat and chatted about the various bothies we had been to, and the characters we had met along the way. They were certainly more experienced than me – it seemed as though they could have written a Michelin guide – but I was able to name a couple I had stayed in that were new to them. I told them about my place in Wales, that I had spent five years living on my own in a cottage with no services at all. Like having your own private bothy, they said, and I suppose it was. I had never really thought of it quite like that. I was surprised when they both said that they couldn’t do what I had done; it was too much, for too long. The older man seemed particularly put off by the fact that I had cooked over a log fire for all those years. That was too much trouble, he said, though I assured him that you got used to it, so much so that it became second nature, as easy as cooking on a stove. But he liked his comforts, and appreciated the fact that at home in Glasgow he had a twenty-four-hour shop just on the corner. It seemed ironic, given that he had spent fifteen years coming out here to get away from it all, but I suppose I had to accept that I was an outlier, and there were no rules. There are many people who are drawn to the world’s wild landscapes, but not all of them will be chasing solitude. Many will be happier with a companion, or a group of friends or family, someone to share the experience with. But wherever you go in the world you will find a rump of people who walk alone, by choice rather than by necessity. It cuts across race and class, and if historically it has been culturally more difficult for women to assert their independence in this way then this is changing, as more and more women reclaim the right to break their own trail.

  Though I had not known of the existence of this particular bothy, I did know of at least half a dozen or so others scattered across the Rough Bounds. I had passed one before in the distance; there had been a couple of people sitting in the doorway and two or three tents pitched nearby. It made me realise that I might have to rethink my plans a little. I had thought that I might stay in a bothy from time to time when it suited me, but it seemed clear that they had become better known and more popular than I had remembered from previous visits to Scotland. Almost every one I had visited in the past I’d had to myself. But they are well placed, often about a day’s walk apart, so they create their own destination, their own routes. If I wanted solitude I would be better off picking my own path, just wandering, and pitching my tent wherever I might find myself. It crossed my mind that I had perhaps done things back to front; that it would have been better to have resorted to bothies on my winter visits, and left them to others in season. Perhaps I would return in winter, find myself a bothy, stoke up the fire and remain there for a few days.

  I said my goodbyes and clambered down off the rocky perch and onto the beach. We speculated that we might very well meet again; another time, another bothy. They had been very hospitable; if I had felt at all uncomfortable stepping into a room of strangers then they had quickly put me at my ease. I walked along the top of the beach towards the cliffs.

  So now that the summer nights had gone, I had returned. I could still have camped, but the first frosts had come, and sitting by a driftwood fire in a bothy seemed like a more appealing option for someone who was not at full physical strength. The little rocky stack was poised between two curved beaches of grey stones, the bothy sitting low-slung at its summit, small as a shack, half-hidden amongst a tangle of stunted, weather-beaten oaks. No smoke emerged from the stovepipe that protruded from one corner. I picked my way up the rocks and between the scrubs of oak and unbolted the door. I need not have worried; there was no sign of anyone else having been there for days, at the very least.

  I dropped my pack and looked out from the one window. The place had been built so it faced out to sea, looking above the topmost branches of the oaks. The view was almost entirely of the waters of the bay; you would have to come close and turn your head to see the shore to either side. There was the stove, a bench to sit on, a wooden bunk tucked into the eaves, a shelf, and almost nothing else. The place made me think of an anchorite’s cell in its austerity, and in its setting, too; poised high on a rock face on western shores, facing straight out to the ocean, away from the world of men.

  Now that I had shelter, I needed just two more things: firewood and water. There was a bow-saw standing in the corner, and I had seen a whole tree washed up on the beach, so I walked down and cropped its branches and roots until I had sufficient for the evening. It was a tiny stove, so only small pieces of wood would do. I was annoyed that, as usual, I had not thought to fetch water on my way in; I could see on my map that the nearest stream was a good way along the coast, and on these trackless shores the return journey might take me the best part of an hour. There were still a couple of hours before dark, though, so there would be no harm in having to devote a little time to it.

  The shore was ragged and broken, with promontories that rose and fell in a tumble of rocks and led out to a scatter of islands, and held tiny hidden bays and beaches. There was no sign of any trail; if I was not hopping from rock to rock I was climbing and descending steep ridges that were chest-deep in dying bracken. Copses of oak were dotted randomly across the hillside, their trunks and branches contorted and corkscrewed by the elements but their canopies smooth and streamlined by the onshore wind, so that these woods looked moulded to the lie of the land. This was an ancient forest, but in miniature. Few of these trees made it to even twenty feet in height, yet the age of the woods was betrayed by the amount of dead wood, both fallen and still standing. Nothing here had been felled, or coppiced, or replanted; no one had even scavenged here for firewood. They were primeval and beautiful in their autumn colours, though I supposed that they were ultimately dying, unable to regenerate due to grazing pressure.

  I found the tiniest stream, trickling through the beach stones of a small bay, and followed it up until I discovered
a miniature pool fed by a waterfall six inches high, and filled my bottle. I returned to my perch and got a small fire going. The stove was only small, but it was freestanding and had a metal flue, and punched above its weight, radiating heat that slowly spread from its corner to fill the entire room. I boiled some water on it and made myself a bowl of soup, and then I sat and looked out of the window at the sea. It was hard to look anywhere else; the panoramic view drew the eye.

  A pair of cormorants had been fishing in the bay all afternoon, and now they were joined by three black-throated divers in their winter plumage. The two species kept their distance from one another, one side of the bay each. An eagle flew over; a sea eagle, crossing the sound to the far-off hills across the water. And then the seals arrived, and hollowed out the centre of the bay, as if pushing the birds out to the fringes. There were five of them, grey seals, all diving for fish. On land the grey seal looks doleful, and frankly depressed, but here in their element they looked joyful. They would all rise together in a circle, facing one another, their heads tipped back to the sky as if they were roaring with laughter. I imagined them as whiskered old men in a gentlemen’s club, telling ribald jokes over cigars and port. As the light started to fade, an otter slipped into the water from the shore of the headland where it had been invisible, unseen, and swam far out into the bay to hunt. Behind it trailed a shadow; this was a mother and cub. Each time the mother dived, a few moments later her cub would follow. It was strange to see so much without leaving the comfort of my fireside. I could get used to this.

  I watched the otters until it was too dark to see, and then I lit a candle and turned my attention to the fire. A driftwood fire, water from a burn, a stone cell; this is all I needed in life. And beauty, I could not live without beauty. I could imagine myself an anchorite, living like this, leading the simplest of lives. I had, after all, spent many years when I was younger leading a life that was not so different from this, and found that it suited me well enough.

  On the overnight train I had managed perhaps two hours of awkward sleep, and it was not long after darkness had fallen that I drifted into sleep. In practical terms, it was a mistake not to have forced myself to hold out a little longer, for it meant that I woke hours before it would get light. My candle had burnt down, the fire was out, and the room had turned cold. There was nothing I could do but sit and wait for daylight. I could not take a night walk, for it was a dark and moonless night and having thrown together a bag at short notice I had neglected to bring a torch with me. I doubted that I would even be able to get safely off my rock; I had inadvertently trapped myself. And so I stalked my small cell, pacing out the hours of darkness like a wildcat in a cage.

  My sleeping pattern had been compromised by my illness in any event; it is not easy to relax comfortably into sleep when you know that the night could turn to drama at any moment. My nights were restless and my days were spent in a daze; it was as if my waking life and my dream life were starting to bleed into one another. This can be a by-product of solitude too; with no one to draw you back to day-to-day reality the world can start to drift into greater and greater subjectivity. This is why solitary confinement is deemed to be the harshest of punishments. The candlelight flickered against the stone walls and I paced. I had chosen this; it had not been imposed upon me. I was an expert at solitude, with years of practice. I was grounded, secure in myself. This is what I told myself, and I did know from experience that the first night alone is always the strangest; after that I would quickly adjust. There is a moment of transition that you have to pass through, from a social way of thinking to the solitary mind. I checked the time; only another couple of hours before first light. I just had to wait it out.

  Wild Heart

  For more than half of my life, at home and abroad, I have passed my days in sight of the sea or at least a short walk away. This is no great accomplishment in Britain, an island, but nonetheless when circumstances have kept me from it then I have felt its absence. In my years in the mountains of Wales it was the one thing that I felt was missing, and from time to time the pull of the ocean would draw me down the hill to the roadside where I would hitch-hike to the sea. In between times my most favoured walk was down to the riverbank which served as a substitute shore.

  During my explorations of the Rough Bounds I had ventured into the mountains on a few occasions, but more time than I had anticipated had been spent following shorelines. In part the draw was scenic and in part it was because the meeting of the elements was not just a magnet to me but also to a great diversity of wildlife. It had also been a pragmatic choice; as the year had progressed and my health had begun to fail me I had not been physically able to embark on the kind of epic mountain walks into the interior that I had assumed would be the culmination of my journeys around the area.

  This fifth journey would be the final instalment of my year of visits; it was eleven months since I had first taken myself to the shore of Loch Sunart. I had expected the unexpected and had found it, though not always in the way I had imagined. I had fallen in love with this landscape and had experienced wildlife encounters that I could never have anticipated in their specifics. This is what I had hoped for, the unrepeatable experiences that are the essence of immersing yourself in nature. What I had not foreseen was the personal journey and the lessons I would learn about myself; I am not normally one given to a great deal of self-examination and the Rough Bounds had been more of a challenge for me than I had anticipated, and had forced me to come face to face with my own limitations.

  So on this final visit of the year I thought I should include a trip into the interior. I just had to be sure that I was not overreaching, not being overly ambitious, for caution does not come naturally to me and I had to acknowledge that I was not at full strength. I spread out my map and there in what appeared to be the dead centre of the Bounds was a mid-sized freshwater loch two or three miles long and entirely encircled by mountains. I planned my route; from the head of a sea-loch I would follow a river inland and from the river I would follow a burn up a mountainside and then head over the summit. It was not so far; I could get there and back in a day.

  It was a lively mountain river of peaty water but at its mouth it slowed and widened as it reached the sea, forming a tiny estuary of flat grassy islands and a miniature salt-marsh. A little flock of ringed plovers flew up from the salt-marsh as I approached; the inevitable mergansers waited at the river mouth, all facing into the flow of the water, while a solitary swan sailed by, silent and serene. Grey wagtails fed at the water’s edge and a pair of dippers bobbed and dived, one on either bank. There was a sudden movement in a waterside birch; a bird of prey spread its wings and turned on its perch on brilliant yellow legs. It was close, and I was surprised I had not noticed it until it moved. It had a dark bandit mask like an osprey, but the ospreys had all left for Africa. It was just a strikingly patterned buzzard. Every buzzard has its own individual markings; if you stay in one place for long enough you will start to get to know the local birds as individuals.

  As I followed the riverbank I got too close for comfort and the buzzard lifted off, mewling. A second bird flew out of the trees and joined it and they circled each other above me. Or rather, they spiralled around each other rather than circled, for each turn took them a little further upriver, and it struck me that if I had been able to map their flight paths they would have formed a double helix. I followed beneath them, walking away from the loch towards the hills. This was evidently a fishing river; there were signs marking the limits of different reaches, indicating where you could or couldn’t cast your line. In places there were even park benches, which looked bizarrely out of place in such a wild landscape, and I sat on one for a while just because I could, because it was there. But today there were no fishermen. This was not an inaccessible valley; the road and the railway line ran along the same valley as the river for the first part of my journey.

  After a couple of miles the river was joined by
a burn that headed straight down from the hills and this is where I crossed over the road and under the railway line and aimed for the wilds. The burn raced down a steep wooded gulley while the path followed alongside on the open moor. Great torrents of fieldfares and redwings gushed overhead; I had never seen such multitudes of winter thrushes. They had flooded in from the north-east and as the winter wore on they would disperse southwards but for now they were held here by the great harvest of berries.

  The trail climbed steeply for an hour or so and the valley floor disappeared from view. No more river, no distant sea-loch, no road or railway, and the very last of the few houses of the valley were gone too; I could see nothing but the scorched yellow moors and the mountain tops. It was not an easy ascent for me but the narrow trail winding upwards was distinct enough, and the weather held, cloudy but dry. Then I mounted a ridge and the path dropped into a bowl surrounded by hills and filled with peat bog and peat hag, the source of the burn. I lost the trail almost immediately; this wild land absorbed everything. My boots sank deep into the wet soil but if I paused to watch I could see my footprints disappear before my eyes. If I were to lie down here I would sink slowly into the peat until no trace of my passing remained. I would be perfectly preserved as the seasons turned, and would never be found, or perhaps I would be excavated in some distant future, mummified in the frozen moment, and some remote descendant, perhaps no longer even human, would wonder who I was and what I lived for, and my tanned leathery smile would tell them nothing.