The Wild Places (Penguin Original)

by Macfarlane, Robert

  Perhaps it was the effect of my return to England, after the vast wild spaces of Scotland. Perhaps it was reading of Edward Thomas’s walking tours, and looking at Palmer’s mystical canvases. Perhaps it was living with my daughter Lily, and watching her intense scrutiny of a snail, or a mushroom or a patch of briar. Certainly, it was Roger’s influence, and the glimpse into the gryke in the Burren: that miniature wildwood, no more than an arm’s-length long and a hand’s-span wide. Whatever the combination of causes, I had started to refocus. I was becoming increasingly interested in this understanding of wildness not as something which was hived off from human life, but which existed unexpectedly around and within it: in cities, backyards, roadsides, hedges, field boundaries or spinnies.

  Certainly, these islands possessed wild places on massive scales - the Cairngorm massif is greater in area than Luxembourg, and its weather systems can be polar in their severity. But my original idea that a wild place had to be somehow outside history, which had failed to fit the complicated pasts of the Scottish and Irish landscapes, seemed even more improper in an English context. English wildness existed in the main as Nash’s ‘unseen landscapes’: it was there, if carefully looked for, in the bend of a stream valley, in the undercut of a riverbank, in copses and peat hags, hedgerows and quicksand pools. And it was there in the margins, interzones and rough cusps of the country: quarry rim, derelict factory and motorway verge. I had not expected to find this when I had begun, had been all but blind to such places. But now a myopia was setting in, a myopia of a good sort, replacing the long-sight of the early northern and western journeys. Or a thawing of vision - perhaps that was a better way of thinking of it, now that summer had come.

  That margins should be a redoubt of wildness, I knew, was proof of the devastation of the land: the extent to which nature had been squeezed to the territory’s edges, repressed almost to extinction. But it seemed like proof, as well, of the resilience of the wild - of its instinct for resurgence, its irrepressibility. And a recognition that wildness weaved with the human world, rather than existing only in cleaved-off areas, in National Parks and on distant peninsulas and peaks; maybe such a recognition was what was needed ‘to help us end the opposition between culture and nature, the garden and the wilderness, and to come to recognize ourselves at last as at home in both’, as an American philosopher, Val Plumwood, had put it.

  An artistic tradition has long existed in England concerning the idea of the ‘unseen landscape’, the small-scale wild place. Artists who have hallowed the detail of landscape and found it hallowing in return, who have found the boundless in the bounded, and seen visions in ditches.

  William Blake perceived the world in a grain of sand. John Ruskin was captivated by the growth of lichens and mosses on trunks and rocks. Dorothy Wordsworth kept a series of elegantly attentive journals - the Alfoxden Journal, written when the Wordsworths were living in Somerset in 1797-8, and the Grasmere Journal, kept at Dove Cottage from 1800-1803, whose precision of observation supports Wordsworth’s allusion in ‘Tintern Abbey’ to his sister’s ‘wild eyes’. John Clare - from an early age a lane-haunter, a birds’-nester, a night-walker and a field-farer - wrote his artfully simple poems of praise for the landscape around his Northamptonshire home: poems that still carry the suddenness and surprise of the encounters he had during his years of countryside foray.

  Over the summer of 1805, the young watercolourist John Sell Cotman spent nearly four months living at Brandsby Hall, north of York, where he was employed as drawing master to the four daughters of Mrs Cholmeley, the Hall’s owner. During that time, Cotman began to explore the nearby landscapes: the rivers, fells and woodlands of Durham and North Yorkshire. He took his brush and colours, and went on foot, pushing further and further up the River Greta, and into the fell country near Kirkham. In this period, something remarkable happened to his painting. Cotman’s fame had previously come from his grand subjects: Cadair Idris, Newburgh Priory, Durham Cathedral. But that summer, he became fascinated by the local, the small-scale: a drop-gate over a stream arm, a boulder beneath a bridge, a copse of trees, smoke rising discreetly above a river pool. The images he made in those months are subtly close-toned, attentive. He wrote to his patron Dawson Turner to explain that he had spent the summer chiefly ‘coloring [sic] from nature’, making ‘close copies of that ficle [sic] Dame consequently valuable on that account’. He had been converted to the beauty of the parochial.

  The late-Victorian writer Richard Jefferies spent much of his life studying and describing the rural southern counties of Wiltshire, Sussex, Gloucestershire and Somerset: counties that were, to Jefferies, teeming with wildness. Jefferies had no interest in the nineteenth-century North American idea of ‘wilderness’ on a grand scale - a phenomenon to be experienced only amid the red-rock citadels of the desert or the glacier-ground peaks. For Jefferies, wildness of an equal intensity existed in the spinneys and hills of England, and he wrote about those places with the same wonder that his contemporaries were expressing in their reports on the Amazon, the Pacific, the Rockies and the Rub al-Khali. He found wildness joyful, but also minatory; the vigour of natural wildness was to him a reminder of the fragility of human tenure on the earth. In 1885 he published After London, or Wild England, a futuristic fantasia set in the 1980s, by which time, following an unspecified ecological catastrophe, much of Southern England has been flooded, and London has been reclaimed by swamp, scrub and tree:Brambles and briars . . . met in the centre of the largest fields. Hawthorn bushes sprang up among them, and, protected by the briars and thorns from grazing animals, the suckers of elm-trees rose and flourished. Sapling ashes, oaks, sycamores, and horse-chestnuts, lifted their heads . . . and these thickets and the young trees had converted most part of the country into an immense forest.

  Then there was Stephen Graham. Graham, who died in 1975 at the age of ninety, was one of the most famous walkers of his age. He walked across America once, Russia twice and Britain several times, and his 1923 book The Gentle Art of Tramping was a hymn to the wildness of the British Isles. ‘One is inclined,’ wrote Graham, ‘to think of England as a network of motor roads interspersed with public-houses, placarded by petrol advertisements, and broken by smoky industrial towns.’ What he tried to prove in The Gentle Art, however, was that wildness was still ubiquitous.

  Graham devoted his life to escaping what he called ‘the curbed ways and the tarred roads’, and he did so by walking, exploring, swimming, climbing, sleeping out, trespassing and ‘vagabonding’ - his verb - round the world. He came at landscapes diagonally, always trying to find new ways to move in or through them. ‘Tramping is a straying from the obvious,’ he wrote, ‘even the crookedest road is sometimes too straight.’ In Britain and Ireland, ‘straying from the obvious’ brought him into contact with landscapes that were, as he put it, ‘unnamed - wild, woody, marshy’. In The Gentle Art he described how he drew up a ‘fairy-tale’ map of the glades, fields and forests he reached: its network of little-known wild places.

  There was an Edwardian innocence about Graham - an innocence, not a blitheness - which appealed deeply to me. Anyone who could sincerely observe that ‘There are thrills unspeakable in Rutland, more perhaps than on the road to Khiva’ was, in my opinion, to be cherished. Graham was also one among a line of pedestrians who saw that wandering and wondering had long gone together; that their kinship as activities extended beyond their half-rhyme. And his book was a hymn to the subversive power of pedestrianism: its ability to make a stale world seem fresh, surprising and wondrous again, to discover astonishment on the terrain of the familiar. My 1929 edition of his book was well bound in stiff board and green leather, with gold imprinted lettering. Its corners were bashed and its cover scuffed: it had clearly been in a lot of pockets and knapsacks before I acquired it.

  That July day, as Roger and I dropped into the hazy light of our Chideock holloway, one of Graham’s remarks came back to me. ‘As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest
, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.’

  Down in the holloway, the bright hot surface world was forgotten. So close was the latticework of leaves and branches, and so tall the sides of the holloway that light penetrated its depths only in thin lances. Roger and I moved slowly up the bed of the roadway, forcing a way through the undergrowth, through clumps of chest-high nettles, past big strong-holds of bramble, and over hawthorns that had grown together, enmeshing across the roadbed. Occasionally we came to small clearings in the holloway, where light fell and grass grew. From thorn thickets, there was the scuttle of unseen creatures. Any noise we made thudded into the banks, and was lost. A person might hide out undetected in such a place for weeks or months, I thought.

  Lines of spider’s silk criss-crossed the air in their scores, and light ran like drops of bright liquid down them when we moved. In the windless warm air, groups of black flies bobbed and weaved, each dancing around a set point, like vibrating atoms held in a matrix. I had the sense of being in the nave of a church: the joined vaulting of the trees above, the stone sides of the cutting which were cold when I laid a hand against them, the spindles of sunlight, the incantations of the flies.

  I would like to see a map that represented the country only according to these old ways, and that was blind to the newer routes, to the roads which take so little notice of the shape of the land through which they pass. These old ways, these tradeworn cantons, tended to work round woodlands, to follow the curve of a valley or the surge of a hill. They existed in compromise with the land through which they passed. Many of them had evolved from footpaths that had, both for ease of movement and ease of orientation, attended to the twisting courses of streams and rivers, or the natural curves of rising and falling land. This relationship of accommodation between way and landform has now been largely abandoned: bypasses and motorways strike through old woodlands and hillsides.

  My own map was filling out, moving towards a state not of completion - it would never achieve that - but of coherence. I did not want it to be definitive, only to have caught and absorbed something of the places I had passed through, and something of how they had changed me, brought me to think differently. Reading the French philosopher of space and matter Gaston Bachelard, I had come across a paragraph that summed up my hope for the journeys. ‘Each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows,’ Bachelard had written. ‘In this way we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These drawings need not be exact. But they need to be written according to the shapes of our inner landscapes.’

  Later, after our first exploration of the main holloway, Roger and I set out on a wider reconnaissance of the area. Back at the old ash tree, using exposed roots for handholds, and the ivy again for a rope, we climbed up out of the road, and emerged into the lush meadow. After the greeny dusk of the roadbed, the meadow was startlingly bright. The grass blades flashed like steel in the sunshine. We stood blinking, wringing the light from our eyes.

  That afternoon, we walked along the curved ridge of the hills that extended east and south of the holloway - Copper Hill, Denhay Hill, Jan’s Hill. Sunlight skidded white off every surface. Everywhere we saw evidence of creatures taking refuge in the soil: mason bees, wasps, rabbits - successors to the fugitive priests. Where the sandstone was exposed, it was riddled with burrows of different sizes, with piles of ochreous silt marking the tunnelling work. There were networks of burrows through the gorsy undergrowth, too: miniature green holloways, no bigger in cross-section than a croquet hoop, which had been made by badgers. Following one such tunnel down into a steep copse, we found a badger metropolis. The animals must have been there for many generations, for the earthworks they had thrown up were substantial and long-term: ramparts, tumuli, barrows. I counted ten separate setts. Near the entrance to one of them lay a badger skull. I picked it up, saw the clamp-and-vice of its jaws, and the bulky orbit bones that protected its absent eyes.

  As we walked, buzzards turned above us like spotter-planes. Once, a roe deer picked its way nervously into the middle of a field, until something startled it and it escaped in urgent, arched bounds. Hours later, as the air was hazing up, we returned to our holloway hide-out, dropping down by the old ash tree again into the near-darkness. We cleared nettles and briars, moved loose trunks to make seats, and then Roger built a fire to cook supper on - a pyramid of small sticks, with a hot centre of tinder, that produced an intense and almost smokeless fire. We ate a spicy tagine that Roger had made in advance and carried up with him. Firelight flickered off the walls of the holloway and on the hedge canopy above us, and set complicated shadows moving in the leaves. As we sat there in the thickening dark, talking, the day seemed to convene itself around the furnace-point of the flames.

  Campfires prompt storytelling, and Roger, never slow to start a story, told me how he had once been shot at by a hunter in the Polish woods, because the hunter had thought he was a bear. The conclusion of the story, it turned out, was not Roger’s outrage at having been fired on, but his delight at having been mistaken for an animal. Then we each read out bits from a copy of Geoffrey Household’s classic 1939 novel, Rogue Male, in which the hero, pursued by Nazi agents, goes to ground in a Dorset holloway almost identical to our own. ‘The deep sandstone cutting, its hedges grown together across the top, is still there,’ Household had written, ‘anyone who wishes can dive under the sentinel thorns at the entrance, and push his way through . . . But who would wish? Where there is light, the nettles grow as high as a man’s shoulder; where there is not, the lane is choked by dead wood. The interior of the double hedge is of no conceivable use to the two farmers whose boundary fence it is, and nobody but an adventurous child would want to explore it.’

  I chose to sleep not in the holloway itself, but in the deep grass of the upper meadow. I lay in the warm darkness, breathing in the scents of the field, brought out by the gentle dew that had settled after nightfall. I could hear the ongoing business of the meadow - the shifting of grass stalks, the shy movements of animals and insects - and again I felt a sense of wildness as process, something continually at work in the world, something tumultuous, green, joyous. This was a wildness quite different from the sterile winter asperities of Ben Hope, and perhaps, I thought for the first time, more powerful too.

  I woke at dawn. The air was cool, but the sky was cloudless, and held the promise of great heat to come. So Roger and I walked back down the holloway, off the half-moon of hills, and past the chapel hidden in the laurels. Then we drove to the coast - to Burton Bradstock, where a pebble beach shelves steeply away from high sandstone cliffs.

  The sea was already warm, so we swam straight away, backstroking out for a hundred yards or so, and then treading the blue water. I looked back at the ochre sandstone cliffs, and the green hills rising behind them, and watched my arms and legs moving like phantom limbs beneath the surface of the sea.

  After the swim, we sat on the shingle, talking about Iris Murdoch, who used to bathe off Chesil Bank, just along the coast, and about Roger’s friend Oliver Bernard, who had inadvertently managed to so offend the owner of the public house on the nearby cliff-tops that he had been obliged to run for his life. We gathered piles of flints, and made Andy Goldsworthyish towers with them. Time passed languidly in the heat. Roger went for another swim. I lay on the hot shingle, watching overhead clouds, thinking about Cotman’s paintings and about Stephen Graham’s map of his ‘unnamed’ wild places.

  In so many of the landscapes I had reached on my journeys, I had found testimonies to the affection they inspired. Poems tacked up on the walls of bothies; benches set on lakesides, cliff-tops or low hill passes, commemorating the favourite viewpoint of someone now dead; a graffito cut into the bark of an oak. Once, stooping to drink from a pool near a Cumbrian waterfall, I had seen a brass plaque set discreetly beneath a rock: ‘In memory of George Walker, who so loved this place.’ I loved that ‘so’.

  These were t
he markers, I realised, of a process that was continuously at work throughout these islands, and presumably throughout the world: the drawing of happiness from landscapes both large and small. Happiness, and the emotions that go by the collective noun of ‘happiness’: hope, joy, wonder, grace, tranquillity and others. Every day, millions of people found themselves deepened and dignified by their encounters with particular places.

  Most of these places, however, were not marked as special on any map. But they became special by personal acquaintance. A bend in a river, the junction of four fields, a climbing tree, a stretch of old hedgerow or a fragment of woodland glimpsed from a road regularly driven along - these might be enough. Or fleeting experiences, transitory, but still site-specific: a sparrowhawk sculling low over a garden or street, or the fall of evening light on a stone, or a pigeon feather caught on a strand of spider’s silk, and twirling in mid-air like a magic trick. Daily, people were brought to sudden states of awe by encounters such as these: encounters whose power to move us was beyond expression but also beyond denial. I remembered what Ishmael had said in Moby-Dick about the island of Kokovoko: ‘It is not down in any map; true places never are.’

  Little is said publicly about these encounters. This is partly because it is hard to put language to such experiences. And partly, I guessed, because those who experience them feel no strong need to broadcast their feelings. A word might be exchanged with a friend or partner, a photograph might be kept, a note made in a journal, a line added to a letter. Many encounters would not even attain this degree of voice. They would stay unarticulated, part of private thought. They would return to people as memories, recalled while standing on a station platform packed tightly as a football crowd, or lying in bed in a city, unable to sleep, while the headlights of passing cars pan round the room.