I spent that long night in a valley between two big dunes, close to the shore where the waves broke and the foam thickened, but safely up beyond the tideline. My bivouac bag kept me dry, and my sleeping-bag kept me warm. I dug a dip in the sand for my shoulders and one for my hips, and patted up a shallow pillow for my head. The dune valley sloped down a little towards the water, so that from where I lay I could see out to the sea, its black skin heaving and white waves curling out of the darkness to break along the beach.
The noise of the storm made sleep difficult. But I was happy to be there, sleepless inside the storm. For it was an extraordinary night. In its first few hours, the darkness was so absolute that it seemed to have become a black fluid, within which existed turbulent forms that could be sensed but not seen: funnels, tubes, spindles and whorls, gusting sheets of wind and unexpected eddies of storm energy. Around midnight I felt myself inside what might have been the storm’s hollow. There was a brief passage of calm, and then the inner edge of the storm rushed in, and the night fell back into unrest.
I finally slept, and when I woke, just after dawn, the storm had passed, the wind had settled, and with it the sand: a moist layer coated me, and when I moved it cracked into parched-earth patterns. I shook myself off, climbed to the top of a dune, and sat on the marram grass, eating an apple and some chocolate.
On the beach, a new line of drift debris - thick kelp stems with flaring arms like ganglia, driftwood, more plastic bottles - marked the reach of the storm-driven tide. Water was still fresh on the drifted objects, and they gleamed. The early small sun hung over the high ground, and I could feel its weak heat on the edges of my face. Thirsty, I climbed down from the dune, and walked to the bay’s southern end, where I found a small rainwater stream, catching its way down a slope. I washed my face and, where the water pooled, leaned forward and drank. Then I set off back towards Kinlochbervie and Ben Hope.
8
Summit
A snowy owl taking flight from the quartz and granulite summit of Ben Hope, set on a meridian course north, would bank out over the Pentland Firth, pass to the east of the Faeroes, cross the Arctic Circle, and enter the Greenland Sea. It would fly above the pack ice that locks the channel between Spitzbergen and Greenland. It would pass, as all things meridian must, over the Pole. From there, without changing direction, it would fly south past the ice-bound island of Vrangelya in the Chukotse Sea. Only after many hours would it reach ground as high as Hope again: a nameless peak in the mountains of north-western Siberia, where the temperature is so cold that steel splits and larch trees shower sparks at the touch of an axe. As I drove east to the mountain from Kinlochbervie, I imagined Ben Hope and this nameless peak rhyming in their altitude, across thousands of miles of cold space, each northering towards the other.
I had been told that if you climb Ben Hope on the summer solstice, and spend a clear night on its summit, you will never lose sight of the sun. The combination of elevation and northerliness means that the uppermost rim of the sun never dips fully below the horizon. A truly white night. In the autumn, too, it was said to be a fine place for watching the aurora borealis, which shimmered like aerial phosphorescence, green and red. But I was most drawn to Hope in its winter moods. For several years I had wanted to climb it when snow was on the ground, and spend a cold night on its summit: the sense of polar space opening out beyond me, the scents of berg and frazil washing down off the invisible Arctic Ocean.
Hope is a mountain which holds the solstitial opposites of north: it knows both the affirmation of the never-vanishing sun and the indifference of the eighteen-hour night. There could be, I thought, no other place in Britain or Ireland where you could better feel a sense of ‘bigness outside yourself’, in Stegner’s phrase. That ‘bigness’ had been there on Rannoch Moor and at Sandwood, and I had felt a chronic version of it in Coruisk. But I wondered if, once I began to move south, it would fall away, become unlocatable.
I drove through sleet, then sunshine, then squalls, with raindrops the size of berries pelting on to the windscreen. No weather system remained dominant for more than an hour. By early afternoon I was at Hope’s south-western foot. Clouds bearing cargoes of snow pushed past to the north-east. Snow was falling lightly over Foinaven, to the west across moor. The sky above me was clear, a pale winter white. I looked up at Hope, remembering its shape from the maps I had studied.
The geography of Hope is exquisite: a steep summit cone, shapely and symmetrical when seen from the sea. A sharp curving north ridge, on which peregrines nest, forms a glacis protecting the mountain’s northern approach, and keeps secret the watery land on Hope’s eastern flank - a region of fourteen lost lochs and lochans. To the south, the mountain’s long plateau-ridge, the Leitir Mhuiseil, streams out, tapering for three miles, trimmed on its western flank with a band of silver-grey schist and flashed here and there with quartz.
I started up Hope as the day’s light began to dim, feeling excited, almost jaunty, to be out there alone. Following a stream-cut, I passed big boulders worked by the water into curious shapes. As I climbed, the view over the surrounding landscape opened. Hundreds of empty miles of watery land radiating out in each direction, big peaks here and there - Klibreck, Loyal, holding snow in their eastern corries - and Loch Hope leading the eye north, past the mountain’s cliff ramparts, and out to the spaciousness of the Firth.
Reaching the upper brink of the Leitir Mhuiseil, I saw three deer standing watchfully on the ridge’s rim. They observed my approach, then turned in synchrony and rode their long legs off and out of sight. I sat by a stream, and drank handfuls of cold water. Westwards, the late sun was breaking through the cloud cover here and there, so that the day’s light fanned slowly upon the moors. I could see white bows of blown snow, strung by sharp straight rays of sunshine, and I counted four separate storms spaced across the earth. To the east, though, night was coming: the edges of that world were in a cooling blue of shadow and dusk and chill.
Hope did not give itself up easily. The ascent was nearly from sea-level, and the huge summit cone, crag-bound, was steadily steep. By the time I reached the top, the air around me was dark and gritty, and the wind colder. The summit was bare, stripped by gales and frost-weathering. Rime ice had formed in feathery windrows on shattered grey rocks, which were also marked with lichens the colour of lime and tangerine. Between the rocks, snow lay in stripes and furrows, dry and granular as sand. Working quickly, with numbing hands, and a growing sense of worry - was this too cold a place, too hard a place, to spend the night? - I moved rocks to clear a lozenge-shaped space of rough flatness, and arranged them into a low curving wall, a foot or so high.
That night the winds began a slow swing from west to north, bringing snow showers scattering against the canvas of my bivouac bag, and raking the summit rocks with hail. A moon was up there somewhere, breaking through the cloud cover. It was far too cold to sleep. I lay like a compass needle, head to the north, on my front, looking towards the sea, watching patches of silver open and close over the distant waters, trying to keep warm.
At two o’clock, still sleepless, I left the shelter, crossed back to the main top, and began to pace out the reach of the mountain’s curving summit plateau. The cloud cover had thinned. Moonlight came and went in squalls. Each rock wore a carapace of ice, which cracked and skittered off in shards at the slightest contact. Little hail drifts had built up in the lee of the rocks; otherwise the wind had stripped away all the unfrozen snow. The air smelt bright.
I walked out to where the mountain’s eastern ridge began, and from there looked down into the lost lochs, which were holding moonlight like snow. Moving across to the south-western tip of the plateau, I sensed more than saw the massive complex of Foinaven miles away, its snow-shires flashing silver, the rest of its black bulk invisible in the dark. The cold was pressing, constant, and I began to shiver; not a surface tremble, but a deep convulsive shaking. In that deep winter darkness, my sunny East Anglian beechwood felt suddenly hugely distan
t, the landscape of another continent or era, not just another country.
This was one of the least accommodating places to which I had ever come. The sea, the stone, the night and the weather all pursued their processes and kept their habits, as they had done for millennia, and would do for millennia to follow. The fall of moonlight on to water, the lateral motion of blown snow through air, these were of the place’s making only. This was a terrain that had been thrown up by fire and survived ice. There was nothing, save the wall of rocks I had made and the summit cairn, to suggest history. Nothing human. I turned east and south, straining to see if there was any flicker of light in the hundreds of miles of darkness around me. Even a glimpse of something lit, however distant and unreachable, would have been reassurance of a sort. Nothing. No glimmer.
There could have been nowhere that conformed more purely to the vision of wildness with which I had begun my journeys. I had been drawn here by a spatial logic, a desire to reach this coincident point of high altitude and high latitude. But now I could not wait to leave it. It was an amplified version of the discomfort I had unexpectedly felt at the Inaccessible Pinnacle in Coruisk.
If I could have safely descended from the summit of Hope in the darkness, I would have done so. The comfortless snow-shires, the frozen rocks: this place was not hostile to my presence, far from it. Just entirely, gradelessly indifferent. Up there, I felt no companionship with the land, no epiphany of relation like that I had experienced in the Black Wood. Here, there was no question of relation. This place refused any imputation of meaning.
All travellers to wild places will have felt some version of this, a brief blazing perception of the world’s disinterest. In small measures it exhilarates. But in full form it annihilates. Nan Shepherd found this out on the Cairngorm plateau, another bare, stripped, Arctic zone. ‘Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me,’ she had written of the water that rises on the plateau. ‘The water wells from the rock, and flows away. For unnumbered years it has welled from the rock, and flowed away. It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself. One cannot know the rivers till one has seen them at their sources; but this journey is not to be undertaken lightly. One walks among elementals, and elementals are not governable.’
Musicians speak of the ‘reverberation time’ of a note or chord: the time it takes that sound to diminish by a certain number of decibels. The reverberation time of that black and silver night on Hope would be endless for me. Standing there, I knew that the memory of it might fade but it would never entirely disappear. I wondered if there would be any such places south of there, or if this was to be in some way the end of my journeys.
At some point, the winds dropped, and the temperature rose by a degree or two. I returned to the shallow stone shelter and was able at last to sleep, for perhaps two hours, little more, longing for dawn and escape from the summit. When I woke at first light, cold to the core, the air was windless. My rucksack was frozen, the canvas rigid and pale as though it had been fired in a kiln. I found and kept a fragment of quartz granulite, irregular in its shape: sharp-edged, frost-shattered. Then I set off down the mountain, and it seemed as I did so that descent in any direction from that summit would be a voyage south.
9
Grave
The day before I reached the Burren, the worst storms to hit Ireland and Scotland for ten years passed over the countries. The accounts that emerged after the wind had lessened had about them the sound of a scourge. A fishing-boat with nineteen crew had foundered off the coast of Skye. Three people had been killed inland, two more were missing. A lorry-driver had died after his vehicle was blown off the Foyle Bridge in Londonderry. Many trees had been flattened, with the slow pressing down that big wind effects on forests: the trees supporting each other in their mutual falls, their canopies tangled, their limbs interlocked. On North Rona, in the Western Isles, the gusts reached 124 miles per hour: quick enough to peel iron from the roofs of barns and sheds, to pick up people and livestock. On South Uist, five members of a family were compelled to leave their home by rising waters: trying to cross a causeway to safety on Benbecula, they were swept to their deaths by storm waves.
The afternoon following the ebb of the storms, standing out on the flat rocks on one of the western headlands of the Burren, I could still see traces of this recent ferocity. The sea was rough, with angry wave sets champing at the rocks. A wide current flowed alarmingly fast along the headland - a northerly tide-rip so quick that it moved even surface objects at about 300 feet a minute. The sky was steep and black with rain. Surf brawled over offshore reefs.
The Burren rises, silver, in the north of County Clare, on the midwest coast of Ireland. Its name comes from the Gaelic boireann, meaning ‘rocky place’, and the region is so called because most of its surface is made up of smoothed limestone, intercut with bands of clay and shale. The limestone forms a vast escarpment, between the granite of Galway and the sandstones of Liscannor. From there it extends north-west, dipping beneath the Atlantic, to resurge thirty miles offshore as three islands: Árainn, Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr, or the Aran Islands, as they are called in English. Seen from a distance, on a sunlit day, the limestone of the region gleams silver and grey, and the Burren seems to have been cast in pewter.
One of the two most remarkable aspects of the Burren is its flora. Arctic, Alpine and Mediterranean plants all live within its 150 square miles. Nowhere else in Europe do species of such contrasting hardihoods coexist. The spring gentian, more usually found in the high meadows of the Alps, blooms within inches of the dense-flowered orchid, a native of Italy and Spain; the hoary rock rose and the mountain aven prosper near the maidenhead fern, a favourite Victorian house plant. That such botanical paradoxes are possible is a function of the Gulf Stream, of limestone’s ability to absorb heat in the summer and release it in the winter, and of the Burren’s exceptional light levels.
It was this unique climatic and botanical entanglement that had drawn me to the Burren. With its familial resemblances north to Scotland and south towards England, it seemed like the ideal landscape to come to after Hope.
The Burren’s other distinction is as a landscape of the dead. It has been occupied more or less continuously for 5,000 years. The abundant calcium makes for good bones on grazing livestock, and the soil that gets caught in the rifts of the limestone makes the land richer and more amenable to cultivation than the bare granite regions that surround it. And five millennia of human activity in the Burren also means that buried in it are 5,000 years’ worth of the dead. Walking its grey reaches, you find memorials to the dead everywhere: stone circles, dolmens, wedge-tombs, headstones, crosses, burial grounds consecrated and unconsecrated. It is a landscape of funerary monuments. Almost every era - Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, medieval and modern - has interred its people here, and has marked their resting places in stone. The past has a thickness in the Burren. Human time there is the historical equivalent of limestone: it has experienced a long slow settle into density.
Few of the Burren’s dead died peacefully. In the 1650s, Oliver Cromwell’s troops laid western Ireland waste. Clare was among the devastated counties, the Burren among the plundered regions. Two centuries later, the Great Famine fell upon Ireland. Clare was again one of the counties worst affected. Villages emptied during the Famine by starvation and emigration still stand in the Burren: roofless gables, sightless windows. Some of the thousands of paths and walls that mark the landscape were built by the victims of the Famine. Relief administrators, unwilling to provide aid for free, made starving people labour on purposeless projects in exchange for food tokens. Men who could hardly stand unaided were set to work building roads which led nowhere, and walls which protected nothing.
When Cromwell came across the Irish Sea with his army, to begin his brutal purge of Catholics and Royalists, he entrusted the wrecking of North Clare and the Burren to General Edmund Ludlow. Years later, looking back on that campaign, Ludlow would dismiss the Burren in a phra
se that has sounded down through its history. The Burren was, Ludlow wrote, ‘a savage country’, in which ‘there is not water enough to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth to bury him’. What a way of looking at any landscape: to read it only for how it might collaborate in murder. Ludlow was wrong, as well as grotesque. He had been an inattentive mover through that country. For the Burren, I would learn during my days there, is filled with all the things Ludlow missed. It is filled with water, wood, earth and the dead, and all are part of its wildness.
I travelled to the Burren in midwinter with Roger. He had reached a pause in his writing, and now that I was not heading so far north, he was keen to join me on some of my journeys, and perhaps do some woodland research along the way. When I asked if he wanted to come with me to the Burren - an area renowned for its dwarf hazel forests - he agreed immediately. I was very pleased at the prospect of Roger’s company; I had been alone for too long in the north.
We drove up towards the Burren from Shannon. The radio broadcasts spoke of climate change: another pessimistic report on sea-level increases had been released. It made me feel even more guilty than usual about driving, made the road seem an even less desirable place to be. There are few planning restrictions on roadside signs in Ireland, and every hundred yards was a gaudy placard in the shape of a shamrock or horseshoe, enticing motorists to turn off to a visitor attraction or a bar. Traffic was slow, and the trees by the roadside appeared stunted by pollution rather than by wind, their leaves grey with road pall.
As we neared the outer reaches of the Burren, though, the roads narrowed and became lined with healthy fuchsia hedges: in autumn, little pink lantern-flowers would hang brightly among the dark green leaves. The light assumed a clearer tone: reactive to the expanse of grey stone beneath it and to the tremendous mirror of the sea beyond that.
The Wild Places (Penguin Original) Page 13
