by Neil Ansell
Deep Country
Neil Ansell
Neil Ansell spent five years living between the back of beyond and the middle of nowhere, on his own, with no electricity, gas or water and effectively only the wildlife around him for company.
His dilapidated cottage, rented for £100 per year, is so exposed to the elements that it appears to rain uphill, and so remote that you can walk for twenty miles west without seeing a single other dwelling. As the years pass he feels himself dissolving into, and becoming, just another part of the landscape.
Neil Ansell
DEEP COUNTRY
Five Years in the Welsh Hills
Prologue
The drivers always seem bemused when I tell them where to drop me. On a long, fast sweep of the road flanked with serried ranks of pine, there is a track through the woods, but it is invisible to anyone who doesn’t know exactly where to look. It is the merest whisper of a trail; I doubt that anyone other than me has trodden it for many a year. I step into the cool hush of the pine forest and make my way down to the valley floor. Through the trunks I can see the glimmer of light on water far below. Way above me a sparrowhawk is circling in her display flight.
There is a footbridge over the river, an old suspension bridge, and I pause midway to lean on the rail and look downriver at the water boiling over submerged rocks and veering around little mossy islands. The hours I have spent watching this river roll by, sometimes at a crawl, sometimes in a raging brown torrent. And then I look up; the day is wearing on and I still have a mountainside to climb. The steepest of steep fields, if you stretch your arms out in front of you as you are walking up it you can almost touch the ground ahead of you. It is May and the field is a haze of blue, the air thick with scent. Bluebells are flowers of the forest, not the field, but long, long ago this field was wooded; the biggest stumps, those too big to be dragged out by tractor, still stud the ground. And the bluebells still emerge in their thousands every spring in remembrance; the ground layer of the ghost of a wood.
Over a crumbling gate is the moor. The tight coils of bracken are unfurling, the whole hillside is bursting into life. Before long the bracken will be head-high and the trail will be a green tunnel. A pair of red kites circles lazily above the valley, and a solitary raven flies straight and determined above the fields below me, cronking as he sees me. I follow his course; I know exactly where he is headed. The liquid, bubbling call of a curlew trickles down the mountainside. The hills are calling; they always call me back.
Unless you know where to look the cottage is singularly hard to find, and that’s the way I like it. I reach it just before nightfall and kick open the back door; this is the only way to open it. I don’t have long before dark, and there is plenty to do while there is still enough light to see by. I must fetch in water, bring in logs from the woodshed, and fill the lamps. I must get the fire lit and make up a bed, and hang a kettle of water for cooking dinner. Then I’ll sit out front with a cup of tea, look out at the view as the sun sets, and count the bats out of the loft. It’s good to be back.
There are some mornings here when I could be on an island. In the night the valley fills with fog, in the darkness I can just make out a snake of it settling on the valley floor, following every twist and turn of the river. But when I wake the sunshine is streaming in through the curtains and I throw them aside to look out across a sea of foam. Here, at a thousand feet, it rarely reaches me. The tops of the nearest trees emerge like mangroves but beyond that it is twenty miles to the nearest dry land, the looming whale-backs of the Black Mountains, the spires of the Brecon Beacons peering over the long ridge of Mynydd Epynt. Sometimes the fog is so thick that when I step outside it laps at my feet in waves, and if I walk a few paces downhill I can barely see my hands. And then as the sun rises higher it starts to burn away, the tide turns and the fog retreats down-valley, leaving a hillside glistening with dew.
Morning comes, and I am alone but not alone. There is a redstart on the wire and a wagtail bobbing on the roof. Blackbirds are nesting in the woodshed, on an upturned hoe hanging from a nail on the wall. The redstarts seem to be nesting in the gables, they must approve of the new roof. Their nesting box they have surrendered to the great tits; when I open the lid eight hungry mouths gape up at me. After a few seconds, four of the baby birds slump back down, but the hungry ones keep pushing up, refusing to accept that I have nothing for them. The hole in the ash out front, which becomes home for some bird or another every year, has been occupied by a shy pair of stock doves; it is finally their turn. In the early-morning sun they display together in celebration, launching themselves from their nesting tree, and flying in a tight circle together, so close they are almost touching. The lead bird holds a little twig in its beak, as if it is returning to the ark.
I sit in my front porch looking way down across the valley to the faraway hills while sharpening my saw. Twenty-one strokes to the right, and twenty-one strokes to the left. There has been a dry spell, so it makes good sense to saw as many logs as possible while I am here, to split them and shed them before they have a chance to get wet. With the weather here so unpredictable it is reassuring to have several weeks’ wood in reserve in the woodshed; a backlog. As I sit preparing my chainsaw I see that the swallows have built their nest in the porch; I reach in and run my finger around the smooth mud lining. There is a single egg, she has laid her first today. She will lay another egg each day until the clutch is complete and she can start to incubate; then it will be time to abandon my porch to the swallows, and just use the back door.
I was always surprised by the number of birds that chose to nest in close proximity to the cottage when I lived here full-time; now the place is even less disturbed there are more than ever before. For the very first time, a pair of goldfinches is nesting in the garden. It takes me a while to find the nest in the blackthorns just inside the gate where the chaffinches sometimes make their home. The goldfinches are delightful little birds with cherry-red faces and brilliant golden bars on their wings. The nest is far from the trunk as is their habit, where it will be tossed about in the breeze, but the little mossy cup is built so deep that it will not be upset by even the wildest wind. The nest is about two metres up, too high to inspect, so I hold up a mirror over it to see the four tiny eggs nestled within.
I have picked a fine time for a visit; the spring evening is as balmy as any summer’s night. Tomorrow, if the weather holds, I shall head for the hills. As darkness begins to settle lightly on the land, a falcon appears over the front field. Birds of prey can be hard to tell apart on the wing, but not this one. I have it pinned immediately as a hobby, from its arc, its spirit. It is far from its usual haunts; even after all these years, the place can still bring me surprises. The falcon doesn’t seem to be hunting, more just celebrating life. As night falls, I watch enraptured as it swoops and banks and swerves on its scimitar wings, until I can see it no more. Never before have I seen a bird that looked so like it was dancing in the air.
The grass in the garden, fenced off from the sheep, has grown tall and rank in the months since I was last here. I can barely make out the shape of where my vegetable beds used to lie. I would cut it back were it not for the hares. Hares are the hardiest of creatures; they live out in the fields all year long and can breed at any time of the year. But this year they have chosen the spring, and have chosen my garden. There are two leverets now grazing just a few feet away in the lush grass of the fertile soil where my vegetables once grew. They are almost the size of rabbits, and must already be weaned as the jill is leaving them largely to their own devices; I have only seen her once. The two little hares watch me watching them but don’t seem to mind me so long as I keep my eyes fixed on them. If I glance away for a moment they seem to just melt away into the lo
ng grass.
I lived alone in this cottage for five years, summer and winter, with no transport, no phone. This is the story of those five years, where I lived and how I lived. It is the story of what it means to live in a place so remote that you may not see another soul for weeks on end. And it is the story of the hidden places that I came to call my own, and the wild creatures that became my society.
1. The Empty Quarter
I first came to the cottage on an autumn night the year of my thirtieth birthday, setting off at four in the afternoon from London straight after working a double shift. I hadn’t expected to make it that night, and had arranged to stop over with friends in Swindon and continue my journey in the morning. But the first truck that picked me up from the start of the M4 took me clear through to Leigh Delamere Services, so I decided to press on. Things slowed down after that as the roads got less and less busy. I was dropped off at midnight in the village by the last lorry driver of the day, said my thanks and got out my hand-drawn map. I took the bridge across the river, then headed into the lanes. The cottage is three miles from the village, along lanes that get progressively narrower and steeper and finally give way to a dirt track. As I walked, tawny owls called my way, the too-whit of the females, the too-whoo of the males. I counted five territories, it felt as though I was being handed from one to the next like a baton in a relay race. There was no moon but the Milky Way was a bright smear across the sky. From the last farmhouse there were seven gates to open and close, and I followed the track rather than cut across the fields even though it was so steep the trail wound drunkenly back and forth.
Although later I would prefer to take my night walks by starlight alone, everything was new to me then and I carried a torch. Everywhere it shone, eyes were reflected back at me; there were rabbits lined up along the edges of every field. I didn’t know it then, but they were at their peak. Soon, myxomatosis would hit again, and the population would crash to almost nothing, before slowly beginning to rise again. Although if you know where to look you can see the cottage like a beacon on the hillside from the main road ten or fifteen miles south, once you leave the village the lay of the land makes it disappear from view until you have closed the last gate, turned the last corner, and the track finally levels off. And there it was that I caught my first glimpse of Penlan Cottage, nestled against the hillside, surrounded by a ring of ash trees. After the steep trek into the darkness of the mountains it was a welcome sight. It looked like home.
From its northern aspect at least, the cottage looked like a child’s drawing of a house; four square windows, a central door, a steeply pitched roof, a tall smoking chimney stack and a tree to either side. From the south, it looked more like a shed, as it had been weatherproofed with corrugated-iron cladding and painted cream. It looked bad, but was probably necessary, for it was so exposed to the elements. A friend once described it as the only place he had ever been where it rained uphill. There was a porch too, a slab of stone, a timber frame clad again with corrugated-iron sheeting. This was a fine place to sit and look out across the valley, and when it was wet the rain would clatter on the metal roof like gunshot. Beside the porch was a sprawling cotoneaster, and I would transplant a wild honeysuckle from the woods which would grow to drape over the entire porch and fill it with a nectar that would attract hawkmoths, including sometimes the elephant hawkmoth, in pastel pink and mossy green, to my eyes more beautiful than any of the butterflies we have here in Britain. There were two windows facing south, from the living room and the main bedroom above, and the stone walls were sufficiently thick that the sills inside were deep enough to sit in should the weather drive me in from the porch. It was a view that never ceased to draw the eye. Either side of the house there was a single narrow slotted window. The place was a Victorian gamekeeper’s cottage, and these windows were designed for keeping an eye on the pheasant pens on each side of the building. The one to the west looked out across the moors. You could cross two fields and you were on open moorland; you could walk west for twenty miles without seeing another house, or a road, or a fence. This uninhabited swathe of the Cambrian Mountains right in the very heart of the country has been called the green desert of Wales, its empty quarter.
Just downhill across the track there was once a farmhouse, presumably Penlan Farm. An overgrown rocky mound in the approximate shape of a large building from which now sprout full-grown ash trees, it is not so much a ruin as the ghost of another era. This landscape is far wilder than it once was; the hundred-and-twenty-acre hill farm around me now barely supported a single elderly tenant farmer, yet scattered around its fields were the remains of five farmhouses or labourers’ cottages, and a mill. With mechanization came massive depopulation, as people moved first south to the mines, and then much later to the cities of the South Wales coast, and further. The world may be filling with people, but there are still a few places that buck the trend and are being left behind, abandoned by the gathering crowds.
The cottage had been built out of rocks scavenged from the ruins of the farmhouse, and placed back in the quarry from which they were excavated. Penlan was tucked into this scallop that had been scooped out of the steep hillside, the rock wall behind it was as high as the guttering of the roof. What induced the builders to site the cottage above the water-table I cannot imagine. The spring emerged just below my track, and was piped to a well fifty yards down the front field, where its overflow was piped on to provide the water supply for the farmhouse out of sight at the bottom of the hill. There were two rainwater-butts, fifty gallons in all, which would do for the garden or for washing, though the water needed to be boiled before it was fit for drinking, while the spring water was sweeter than any tap water.
There are not many places left like this. The cottage is part of a big estate, but when all the other estate buildings were modernized, it was decided that Penlan was just too remote to make it worthwhile, so it was left as it stood, with no electricity, no gas, no running water or plumbing. No one had lived here for nearly fifty years, it was a relic of a way of life long gone, which the world no longer wanted. It was the highest and remotest cottage on the estate, but was also considered to be the one with the most outstanding view. The mountains on the southern horizon were twenty-five miles away. Many other homes in the area gave a glimpse of these far hills, but most houses were built in little valleys or folds in the mountain, or somewhere there was a modicum of shelter from the elements. Penlan had been built without any consideration for the comfort of its occupants and was on such a high, exposed ridge that its horizon was a panoramic sweep that stretched fifty miles or more from east to west. It hovered over the world.
My friends had taken on the cottage earlier that year and had visited just once. They had attempted to start a fire, and the chimney had caught alight from the generations of jackdaw nests that filled it. After my first visit, I came again and again, I spent Christmas there, and saw in the New Year at the very top of my mountain. It takes longer to climb than you expect; there is one false summit after another, and then you suddenly reach the hilltop cairn almost as you are upon it. Sitting at the cairn you can see only a disc of around fifty yards around you, then the hillside falls away too steeply to be seen. It was a clear night and there was barely any grass there, just a forest of silvery lichen that looked almost fluorescent in the moonlight. The neighbouring peaks were smeared with snow, and all around there was a frozen silence.
On New Year’s Day I had planned a serious walk, but it poured with rain, so I spent much of the day sitting in the porch looking out. On the mounded rocks of Penlan Farm a big ash bough had long since fallen, too long ago for it to be any use for the fire. A great spotted woodpecker flew in from the trees in crisp black and white. No red on its crown, so a female, but a beautiful cherry-red rump. She began to hack away at the rotten wood, sawdust flying every which way. Over the course of an hour, seemingly oblivious to the heavy rain, she hammered out a fair-sized hole, pausing only to gulp down grubs. Eventually a stoat stuc
k its nose out from under the trunk; I swear it looked disgruntled at having been woken by the constant drumming above its head. It peered out at the weather, then finally ventured out and ran over to the quieter shelter of a nearby hollow oak. Stoats are normally full of vitality, they bound and prance and undulate as they go, but this animal was positively slinking, its black-tipped tail dragging behind it.
That spring I took over the tenancy of the cottage, paying a peppercorn rent of just a hundred pounds a year. A house that is lived in falls apart much more slowly than one that is abandoned. My friends had decided it was not for them, even as a holiday let. They had been offered the use of another cottage on the estate with better facilities. There was a big house over the river where the lord and lady lived, but much of the estate had been shared out among their children, so my landlords were actually the eldest son and his wife, whom I had known for years. I moved in at the beginning of April, having burned what few bridges I had left. I unlocked the doors of the cottage and hung up the keys on a handy hook just inside. And I don’t believe I have ever touched them since.
The first thing I needed to do was to make the place habitable, by my standards if not by those of others. I mended the gates and the fence to keep the sheep out of the little garden so it would be usable. A lot of roof tiles had slipped, so I fixed them back in place using the little strips of lead that undoubtedly have a name but which remains unknown to me. The ceiling of the main bedroom had collapsed, so I nailed up squares of plasterboard and roughly filled the gaps. I am no handyman; it looked a complete mess. But it worked, and still works now. The downpipe that led from the gutter to one of the water-butts had snapped off at the top. I filled the gap with a plastic funnel, a short length of hosepipe, and some gaffer tape. And that did the job for the next five years. The narrow gap behind the back wall of the house and the quarry wall was inclined to flood from the overflow from the water-butts and the rain that ran down the rock face, so I dug a trench and filled it with gravel and a length of cast-off land drain that I found in the corner of a field. Rain would run down the chimney into the fire, so I climbed the stack and cemented a couple of spare slate roof tiles over it in an upside-down V. I fashioned a cowling for the chimney-place out of a sheet of aluminium I found in the woodshed, to stop so much smoke backing into the room. And so the house was ready for me.
