by Neil Ansell
When she finally tired of beating her way round and round the wood, the birds would engage in their much more familiar spring display flight. This is highly characteristic and your best chance of watching the bird for any protracted period. They rise high above their nesting wood and fly in tight circles above the site, for once making themselves deliberately conspicuous and visible from far off, presumably to indicate their whereabouts to the birds in neighbouring territories and stake their claim. Every now and again they will suddenly plummet down into the wood, often to the exact tree where they will build their nest. And this is how I first found their nesting site, close to the north-west corner of Penlan Wood, facing out on to the moors. There were three old nests in adjacent trees, for like the buzzards they prefer not to reuse old nests but choose to build a new one next door. Having found the site I kept clear, for I didn’t want to disturb them.
The jays raised four young in their nest above the fox earth. As soon as the fledglings were on the wing, they moved down to the broadleaved woods by the stream, and reverted to their customary ways, crashing in a noisy troupe from tree to tree, announcing their presence with raucous cries. They would have done better to stay silent, for each time I saw the family there seemed to be one less, picked off by the sparrowhawks. Over the course of two weeks, I found the remains of three of them, a flash of blue among the leaf litter, a scatter of lilac down.
A sunny morning in late spring, and I was sitting on my doorstep looking out over a silent hillside. The sparrowhawk pair burst from behind the cottage, one to the left and one to the right. They were flying straight out at great speed, the ground falling away beneath them. As they reached the bottom of the front field, the little male plunged down, then turned and swooped directly up at his mate, as if he were about to attack her from beneath. As he reached her he rolled on to his back and locked talons with her, and the two birds started to tumble downwards, wings flailing wildly. Just as it seemed they were beyond the point of no return and would be dashed on the ground, they separated and raced into the woods below, their wingtips brushing the tops of the long grass. It was a breathtaking display of aerial mastery that was over in seconds but was unforgettable. As quickly as they appeared they were gone, leaving just the fields basking in the morning sunshine, and the hillside ringing with a sudden emptiness.
2. A Gathering Silence
The farmer had been out in the front field all day long, grubbing up thistles. He was fighting a constant battle with the thistles that invaded his fields; a battle he was losing, at least in this field, which was rapidly becoming overgrown not just with thistles but with bracken, nettles and sedges too. Personally I liked the thistles, they brought in the tinkling flocks of goldfinches that would winkle out the seeds with their sharp beaks; but then I wasn’t trying to scratch a living out of this land. I invited the farmer in for a cup of tea and he came to join me. He was a heavily built man, amiable and slow-moving, a man of few words, which suited me just fine, but on this occasion he opened up a little. He worked in partnership with his brother, who lived in the neighbouring farmhouse with his family. That farm had been bought, while this one was still tenanted. He told me he regretted never having had a family of his own, but he had stayed at home until he was in his forties to tend to his ailing parents, and by then it was too late to find a wife. The sheep on both the brothers’ farms were dyed in the wool, not with their initials, but their father’s.
He said he could remember from his childhood when Penlan Cottage was still occupied full-time. He told me that the lady who lived here had died in the cottage, and had to be taken to chapel for burial. Not to the village church, but to a chapel miles further away. She was a big lady, he said, a very big lady, and the most direct route to chapel was over the tops. The coffin was carried down to the bridge near where my postbox was now, and up the hillside beyond. The incline here is extremely steep, it would have been an arduous climb even unburdened. He said he watched for hours as the pall-bearers inched their way up the mountain under their heavy load. It took them twelve hours in total to get to chapel.
Although it was over forty years since anyone had lived here year-round, the cottage had been used in summer, so there was a modicum of furnishings: beds, a table, a couple of wardrobes, some old tools in the woodshed. When I moved in I took nothing with me but a bag of clothes. This was a conscious choice; I had decided I would start with nothing, and work my way up to a bare minimum. I wanted to know how lightly I could tread on the earth.
My friends who had first let the cottage, and then decided it was not for them, offered to sell me their two-ring cooker. But I thought: why commit myself to hauling gas bottles up the mountainside when there was a perfectly serviceable fire? The fireplace was actually equipped for cooking, with a solid metal bar across the centre and a selection of S-hooks of varying lengths to hang your pots from. There was already a big old hanging kettle here, black with soot, which would be in constant use. I picked up a beautiful cast-iron skillet from an abandoned farmhouse, a friend gave me a witch’s cauldron that she found for me in a car-boot sale, and later another gave me a Dutch oven, with a lid so heavy it was virtually a pressure cooker. It is easy to become complacent about eating when you live alone, but I made sure I cooked proper meals each day. If I had to soak beans overnight, then spend two hours cooking up a cauldron of stew, then so be it; I had the time. I became proficient at cooking over the fire, and it seemed more natural than cooking on a hob. When my biggest-ever group of guests arrived unexpectedly, it was no problem to rustle up a meal for ten. Visitors would sometimes try to replicate my meals when they got home, but said they never tasted as good. I don’t know if it was the slight smokiness that infused everything, the thickness of the pans, or just the setting, but it was true: food tasted better here.
At a turn in the river there is a wide bank of pale grey shingle filled with flood pools, where the mallards dabble, and overgrown with a wood of mature alders. The wood regularly floods, but the alders don’t mind the occasional dunking. Every time there was a spate the trees would end up festooned with flotsam: branches, leaves, fertilizer bags, even car tyres. It is an other-worldly place. I was exploring this stretch of the river a few months after first moving to the cottage when I had a curious find. As I walked through the trees I saw a face coming towards me. It was my own face, in the intact wing mirror of a car that had lodged in the crook of an alder at head height, and I speculated on the history that had led it to this place. I had not seen myself in weeks, there were no mirrors in the house, but now I had a shaving mirror.
At first I had no way of telling the time either, I just lived by the rhythms of the sun, but then I was given a little transistor radio. It was nice to be able to listen to music occasionally if I wanted to, though mostly I chose silence. And it was useful to be able to find out the time, if for example I wanted to cross the river to the main road and catch the postbus to town, which came only once a day. Though usually I preferred to hitch, because then I could simply stroll down to the road at whatever time suited me.
The decision not to have a vehicle was critical. It changed the scale of things entirely. To me, the pocket of wild country I lived in felt remote, but the nearest town, a very small town admittedly, was only seven miles away. That’s a long walk, but only a short hop in a car. These are small islands. I knew that if I walked to the main road in the morning and started hitching, I could be in a nightclub in London that night. And because I knew that I could, I didn’t have to. Hitching coast to coast in America took me nearly two weeks, and in Australia my longest lift was over a thousand miles, because that’s how far it was to the next city. That’s a distance equivalent to travelling from Britain to Africa. And I had to wait thirty-six hours by the roadside to get that lift. Yet though I was living in a crowded country, the isolation at Penlan was real. Over five years I kept count of the number of passers-by who came walking up my track. Not one. The track simply didn’t go anywhere; it followed a circuitous ro
ute from the middle of nowhere to the back of beyond. People who wanted to hillwalk generally went to the Brecon Beacons further south, or Snowdonia to the north. These hills and moors midway between them, with slightly lower peaks, were for the most part left to me and the birds.
In summer it was usually possible to get a car up to the cottage, though you had to open and close seven gates on your way up the track, and the final steep slope defeated some people. In the wet, or when the leaves were falling, it was more touch-and-go, and in the winter it was pretty much four-wheel drive only. Summer was a sociable time for me, by my standards. I am by no means an antisocial person, in fact I had hitherto lived a life in which I chose to surround myself with people, and I now wanted to know who I was when I could no longer define myself in terms of my relation to others. When I first moved to the cottage, I had no idea whether I would be able to cope with living alone, whether I could live with myself. Friends would come for weekend visits, or sometimes longer. It was like a camping holiday for them, with my cottage a stone tent. They would come bearing gifts, boots filled with canned goods and crates of beer. Sometimes they would bring musical instruments, and we would have a jam session around the fire. I would enjoy showing them my haunts and introdu-cing them to the local wildlife, and I would keep them busy hauling wood up the hillside. It was nearly always up; there was very little dead wood above me, I was so close to the treeline. No wood, no fire, I would say. No fire, no dinner. The real hard work was not sawing the logs or splitting them, it was getting the wood to the cottage in the first place. And when after a few days my guests departed, I would wave them off and think: Well, that was nice, but now back to real life. And I would feel a palpable, if slightly guilty, twinge of relief. And perhaps they would feel a sense of relief too, at heading back to the comforts of home.
Sawing logs for the fire with a handsaw was incredibly time-consuming, so I picked up an old chainsaw that had seen better days, which made my life a whole lot easier. The farmer would sometimes tell me of a tree which had blown down across one of his fences, and say that if I logged it he would bring it up to me with his tractor, which was a godsend. The chainsaw also had the added advantage of allowing me to earn a little money. It wasn’t good enough for clear-felling, but there were smaller jobs in these outlying woods, like thinning out twenty-year-olds, that weren’t worth sending in a team for. With no rent to speak of, and no bills, I didn’t need to earn much. I would write the occasional article and send it off for publication, and down near the village was the field centre for the University of Wales. The doctor who ran the place was a mine of information on local natural history, everybody came to him with their observations, and he would occasionally ask me to help out with a research project. All of these pieces of work had two things in common: I could do as little or as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted, and I could do them almost entirely alone, hardly ever having to see another person. In spring I got busy with two projects that I undertook every year. I had a hundred and twenty bird boxes in the woods that I checked weekly, recording the laying dates, the dates the birds began to brood, when they hatched. And finally, when the young birds were ready, I would ring the fledglings. And I had a four-mile beat of the river that I monitored for the river-bird survey. These two projects occupied me two days a week for several months each year.
I don’t recall ever having felt bored, not for a moment, in the same way that I don’t recall a moment of loneliness. There was simply too much to do, and this was a life lived without any of the time-saving devices that we take for granted. There was always firewood waiting to be chopped, and water that needed to be hauled. Just making a cup of tea would take ten times as long as elsewhere; there was no switch to flick. If there was no rain for two weeks, the water-butts would run dry, and all my water had to come from the well. With the reputation that Wales has for rain, this may seem unlikely, but in fact it would happen twice every year, once in summer and once in winter. On just a couple of occasions the well ran dry too, and I had to carry water all the way up the hill from the stream. The longest drought I ever experienced was six weeks; much more frequently there would be daily rain for weeks. The weather here is unpredictable, and it can change from one minute to the next. I remember one clear, sunny day in early summer I was coming down off the hill when I was overtaken by a sudden hailstorm. The hailstones were the largest I had ever seen, the size of marrowfat peas, and it had been so mild I was not even wearing a jacket. I pulled my jumper over my head and ran for home, the stones bouncing off my knuckles. There is no use railing against the weather, it is out of our hands. All you can do is learn to live with it, and welcome it in all its variety.
I had a daily routine dictated by the simplicity of my lifestyle, and an annual routine too, led by the seasons, the elements. We insulate ourselves against the world outside our windows, so that our lives can carry on regardless. Peel away those layers of insulation and the cycles of the natural world regain their true importance. I even developed my own rituals, such as seeing in the New Year from the summit of my hill. At the summer solstice, I would not sleep; I would walk overnight through the darkness deep into the hills, to see the sun rise on the longest day from a mountain top. Long before the first rays of light came over the horizon, as soon as there was the barest lifting of the darkness, the snipe would begin their strange drumming display flights, falling from the sky with the wind bleating through their tail feathers.
I couldn’t feel lonely. Loneliness is the product of an isol-ation that has not been freely chosen. You can of course feel more lonely in the midst of a crowd of people if those people are not giving you the human contact you desire, in the same way that poverty surrounded by affluence feels harsher, more shocking, than poverty shared. Solitude embraced is the opposite of loneliness. Friends would occasionally ask why I didn’t get myself a dog, for company, but of course they were missing the point: that I was trying to understand the meaning of a life lived without company. Having a pet would have felt like a compromise. And on a practical level, this was a far less suitable place for a dog than it appeared at first sight. I took care of a friend’s dog once for a week or so while the owner was on holiday. The dog was a Welsh border collie just like the farmer’s sheepdogs, but she had been born in the city and lived there all her life, and had never seen a sheep before. She spent her entire time hunkered down in the long grass in the garden, her eyes fixed on the sheep in the field below. And when I took her out for walks, I could never let her off the lead, for nowhere could be guaranteed sheep-free. It must have been a week of intense frustration for her.
In the summertime I generally bathed in the river. Often I would make a day of it, taking a packed lunch and striking out over the hill to a favourite location: a wide beach of smooth disks of slate, perfect for skimming, and a deep pool. The water off the mountains was always cold, but if the sun was warm it didn’t matter. I would spend hours there: bathing, swimming, washing my hair and my clothes. In the winter I would boil up kettlefuls of water and have strip-washes in front of the fire. Or there was a holiday let down by the river where they would leave the key in the porch for me so I could go in and use their bath and washing machine. A cheat perhaps, if this had been a dare, but there were no rules other than those I decided for myself as I went along.
Every week or two I would walk to the village shop to buy staples: tea, coffee, sugar, and so on. There was a petrol station in the village too, where I could get petrol for my chainsaw, and a couple of pubs, though I never felt tempted to walk down to the village of an evening for a night out. Not once. Rather than following the lanes, I would take a more direct and scenic route — through fields, over fences, along the riverbank. I could get there in just over an hour if I didn’t dawdle, though I usually did. Down the track past my little oak wood, then across a field towards the beech hanger. There was a tongue of bracken-covered moorland alongside the wood here, and the hillside fell sharply beneath the overhanging beech boughs. At the bottom of
the wood there was a footpath that ran south the whole length of the wood. There were views of the river below, and it was a fine, full-grown beech wood, a haze of blue in the spring. The path eventually led to a bridge where my stream met the river. This was the head of the lanes; the track up to the farm and Penlan began here. There was a turning circle, which was also the point for rubbish collection, so I would drop mine off; I usually generated about a carrier bag’s worth a month. I would cross a footbridge over the long-abandoned railway track and follow the riverbank. About halfway to the village there was a break in the trees that fringed the riverside. A nice grassy spot to pause for a while, with a fallen tree to sit on, and a big shingly island where the common sandpipers nested. Another stream joined the river here; in summer I would pick my way across it on wobbly stepping stones, while in winter I would take a running jump and hope to clear it.
