The Wild Places (Penguin Original)

by Macfarlane, Robert

  I read Cornish’s books with increasing wonder at this man, whose eye was so attuned to the wave form that he could see it everywhere, and with increasing fondness for him: his monomania, the way his vision hovered partway between spirituality and hard science. Cornish perceived affinities between phenomena that one would never usually think to connect. He pointed out similarities between the movement of steam quitting a chimney, the arrangement of water-weed tresses in a stream, the way fallen leaves drift before the wind, the composition of quicksand, the rippled cloud effect called ‘mackerel’ sky, the body-shapes of fish and cetaceans, the wings of birds, and the cahots or undulating tracks that were made by the procession of sledges or carriages over snow or mud. His curiosity was exemplary. Why, he wanted to know, did flowing water create transverse ripples of sand, hard under foot, like the ridges in a cassock? He developed his own esoteric vocabulary for describing his wave forms: he named the ‘entrance’ and the ‘run’ of wave-drifts of snow or sand, terms he took from naval architects’ language for the swelling fore-part and narrowing after-part of a ship. He was particularly interested by what he called the ‘eddy-curve’ - the complex form of drift, with a blunt head and a fine tail, that was produced in snow, sand or any other non-liquid particular matter by the effect of a current moving against a fixed obstacle.

  Sand became Cornish’s preferred substance of study, and he wrote about it with a lyrical intensity that remains moving to read. At Aberdovey, he found dunes that in their ‘crescentic form’ approximated an ‘Aeolian sand-hill, the mound having two arms or horns similar in shape to the cusps of a four-days-old moon’. Such dunes, he noted, had a family resemblance with the barchan dunes of the Taklamakan Desert in Central Asia, and with the medao dunes of the Peruvian deserts. Back in Dorset, in the ‘loose dry sand of the sea-shore between Branksome Chine and Poole Haven’, he studied how sand formed into ridges and ripples around marram grass, and he photographed these shapes obsessively.

  Once, Cornish lay down among a range of small dunes, and looked upon them for so long that, with only a depthless blue sky above him, he lost all sense of scale and of era:The steep slopes, the sharp arêtes, and the pyramidal peaks of the sand-dunes stood out with an intensity of light and shadow which, combined with uniformity of tint, was more like lunar scenery as viewed with a telescope than any terrestrial landscape which I had hitherto seen. The slopes of the dunes were smooth and unspotted, and in the absence of detail or of objects of known size there was nothing to provide a scale of magnitude. With a low sun, which threw dark, long shadows, the dunes, with their bold, mountainous forms, loomed immense, and an unbiased observer might easily have supposed their height to be thousands of feet.

  Anyone who has spent prolonged time in deserts will recognise Cornish’s experience: the swift vertiginous loss of scale, the sudden Alice-like shrinking of the self. This can happen elsewhere. Stare for long enough at the surface of a granite boulder in the Mamores, and it will come to seem a mountain range in itself. Several times in the course of my journeys, I found myself affected in this way by the self-similarity of the landscapes through which I was passing, drawn into illusions in which my sense of scale was thrown, and it seemed that I might be able to enter a bird’s nest, or the bole of a tree, or pass into the curled lustrous chamber of a whelk, following the whorl of its chamber round, keeping a hand pressed to its shining surface, searching for its topmost spire.

  I reached the far tip of Blakeney Point, four long shingle miles out, as dusk was falling. Sea on three sides of me, the air going grainy, and the wind pushing down to my lungs if I turned to face it. Beached in the scrubland of salt marshes inshore from me was the wreck of a small trawler, big rusted anchor-chain holes staring seawards. This far out along the spit, gravel had given way to sand: blond dunes, bound together by mint-green marram grass. In the offshore wind, each long slim blade of grass had leaned over and inscribed a portion of a perfect arc in the sand with its sharp tip, like the pencil arm of a compass.

  To the north, across a tidal channel down which the sea was running fast, was a big sand shoal, a hundred feet or so across. Scattered over it were seals, common seals, hundreds of them. Some were lounging in the last sun, their tails and heads bent upwards so that they rocked gently on the braced curve of their own bodies, like weeble toys. Others were hauling themselves towards the channel, slid off the sandbank into the deeper water with a wallop and a splash. The wind carried their pungent marine scent to me; raw fish and wet dog.

  The tide was running faster and faster, clapping and chopping aggressively in the channel, overwhelming the sand bars. Behind me, in the darkness, I knew it would be snaking coldly through the dunes over which I had walked earlier, infiltrating the channels and miniature bars, and beginning to submerge the old ribs of the hull by which I had bathed.

  As the sun dropped beneath the horizon, I found an inclined sand dune, with a flat sloping side, a couple of square yards in area, tufted with marram grass at its summit. There I arranged flint pebbles in the form of the organising patterns of the day: the cross-hatch and the spiral. I found blue stones, the same colour as diesel smoke, and bleached chalk-white stones, and laid them into a double helix, white coiling with blue, which resembled the cloud formation that was at that moment shaping in the sky. Then I returned to a deep hollow between two dunes that I had seen earlier - a gentler southern version of the dune nook on Sandwood Bay - and settled into my sleeping-bag for the night.

  As full darkness was falling, a gun boomed along the coast. The birds had begun to move inshore. They came in their dozens, mixed geese and ducks pouring back to their roosts on marshes and flashes. They flew in groups and letter-sets over my dune hollow, moving fast and softly, often passing just a few yards above me, unaware of my presence. These were stealth-fliers, making the transition from predatorless sea to hazardous land, coming in low to avoid danger. Sometimes all I could hear of an incoming group was the tweeting of their wings. Against the dark sky they were visible only as silhouettes. Occasionally the birds sensed me even in the darkness, for they veered off, honking their alarm, and banking from side to side. Some went over so fast that I did not even see them, only heard a squeak and a rush of displaced air, and looked up to see unbroken sky, and a young horned moon.

  For an hour or so this fast traffic went on. Then, as the day’s last light drained back over the horizon, the flow of birds slowed. Suddenly, it was so dark that I could barely make out the distinction between black sky and black sea to my north. Only the bright lights of distant fishing trawlers roved slowly back and forth along the horizon, like big combines harvesting the dark, indicated the division between the two.

  Putting a hand down to my side, I could feel that a small rim of wind-blown sand had already built up against me: the beginning of a dune which would overwhelm me if I were to lie here for long enough. The rough blades of marram grass skittered quietly against one another. The honks of the sleeping seals drifted down to me, familial and soporific. There was the chatter of dinghy lanyards clacking on metal masts, from the boats moored in the marshes, tittle-tattling to one another. I fell asleep to these noises, and the drum-talk of the waves.

  I slept fitfully, and woke at six, with a pain in my back from the sand, which under the weight of my body had compressed to the hardness of concrete. The tide had sluiced up to within thirty feet of my bed, and the seals’ sandbank was submerged. A set of human footprints, which I was sure had not been there last night, passed just behind my head in the sand. But the wind had vanished. The sea was placid, sheeny. A thin band of mist hovered a foot or so above it. It was a mysterious place to come awake.

  In the long silky dawn light, I crunched back over the rinsed shingle, calling out good morning greetings to the seals, who followed me cheerily in the shallows, bobbing up and down, or disappearing into the undersea. I passed two dead crabs, lying on their backs, claws locked behind their heads, pale stomachs presented to the dawn, like a couple of early sunbathers.
Dunlin were out in flocks of twenty or thirty, pecking through the esoteric debris of the wrack-line. Whenever I got within ten yards or so of them, they would lift off and fly down the beach as a single whirring flock, their wings making the soft flutter of riffled paper.

  Even this early groups of people were on the beach, here and there, staring out to sea, drawn by the sense of being at the salt edge of things. Most were bird-watchers, sitting in fold-out shiny canvas director’s chairs, binoculars pressed to their eyes, watching the dawn arrivals pelt in from the sea. An hour later, only a few hundred yards from where the spit joined back to the land, I walked past an elderly man in a deckchair, its legs sunk into the gravel, a tartan rug tucked around him to keep him warm, staring out to sea, as if waiting for an armada to come.

  From Blakeney, I drove south along the coast, and inland to Walnut Tree Farm. Roger cooked me breakfast while I told him about my night on the Point, and then he picked fresh mint from the clumps that grew in profusion outside his front door, and we drank cups of mint tea, sitting by the moat in the early light. Then we drove on together to Orford Ness.

  In the eleventh and twelfth century, Orford was a thriving port, protected from the North Sea by the comforting arm of the Ness. Then that arm turned murderous. Over the course of several centuries - accurate time-telling is difficult with regard to these shingle formations - it extended down the coast, and strangled the port. Without the flushing action of regular tides, which were deflected by the Ness, the harbour silted up, making it impossible for deep-bellied ships to reach the quays. Orford was turned into a small-boat harbour only, dead to trade.

  The weather had been deteriorating since we left Walnut Tree Farm; the yellow dawn of Blakeney curdling into a sour grey day. To reach the Ness you must be ferried across the River Ore. As we stepped from the ferry on to the pontoon on the Ness’s shore, it was clear that the Ness was in a wild state. The tide was incoming, and brown currents swirled beneath the pontoon, making it squeak and shift. The easterly wind had strengthened. Looking across the Ness from the pontoon, it was impossible to tell where brown desert gave way to brown sea. The horizon was lost, dissolved into a single rolling beige of shingle, sea and sky. Two Harriers blasted overhead, moving due south, leaving a sandpapery roar in the air. We set off to walk the spit.

  For eighty years the Ness was owned by the Ministry of Defence, which prized its natural security cordon as well as its uniformity and expanse. So it was that like many other larger deserts - the Great Victoria in Australia, the Kizil Kum in Kazakhstan, the Mojave Desert in America - the Ness became a site for ordnance testing. Bomb ballistics and weaponry experiments were conducted on the Ness during the First and Second World Wars, and in the 1960s, nuclear detonation devices were trialled in specially built concrete structures now known as the Pagodas. In big concrete halls, the Ness military scientists would stand British fighter planes, and then fire enemy bullets at them from fixed cannon, attempting to locate weak points, and to see how the planes could be better armoured.

  All across the Ness, enigmatic military structures still protrude from the shingle - pre-fabricated barracks, listening stations, beacons, watch-towers, bunkers, explosion-chambers. Unexploded ordnance still lies around. It is forbidden to step off certain cleared pathways through the shingle, which have been made safe, and marked out with a rust-red dye and blood-red arrows. By the sides of the pathways we were following lay military debris: twisted sprays of tank tracking, a shattered concrete block, and an exploded boiler, whose inch-thick iron casing had flared into bright rusted thick petals: warnings not to stray.

  It is hard to be on the Ness, and not feel its militarising influence upon one’s vision. That day, everything I saw seemed bellicose, mechanised. A hare exploded from a shingle divot. Bramble coiled and looped like barbed wire. Geese landed with their undercarriages down. Green and orange lichen camouflaged the concrete of pillboxes.

  Roger and I walked out to the mid-north of the Ness, halfway between its inner and outer coasts, and there we climbed up on to the roof of the Bomb Ballistic Building, a black chunky structure which had been used for observing the fall of ordnance from planes. From the summit of the building, we gained a harrier’s-eye view of the Ness - or a Harrier’s-eye view. To our west, cupped on its landward coast, were salt-meres: Lantern Marshes, Kings Marshes. To the north was the gleaming puffball of Sizewell B, oddly bright on this overcast day. Disappearing into the southern haze was the Ness’s distal point, probing ever further down the coast - a thin finger indicating the way to Dungeness. And to the east was the outermost edge of the Ness, where its grey-brown stone shaded into the grey-brown water.

  Laid out below and around us, much as it would have appeared to the First World War bomb-watchers, was the main expanse of Ness. Seen from this height, the landscape’s own logic became more apparent. There were the longitudinal shingle ridges running and curving its full length - the Ness’s storm-born growth rings. Cutting across these were other less regular ridges, made by the vehicles of the bomb-disposal teams. These were the marks of the clean-up operation; of the desert’s decontamination. The man-made lines and the storm lines swooped and arced and intersected with one another, to create a single vast fingerprint of shingle, stretching as far as I could see.

  Vaughan Cornish died almost unknown, his work on the wave form dismissed as cranky. One person, though, would encounter Cornish’s work, and would build on it to become a pioneer in the analysis of the behaviour of particulate matter.

  Ralph Bagnold fought as a young man on the Western Front, and then returned to England to train as an engineer. In the 1930s, stationed in Egypt, he led expeditions into the sand seas of Libya, and became fascinated by the abstract beauty of that arid world. Above all, he was interested in the migrations of the Libyan dunes - their slow martial processes of advance and retreat. To Bagnold, the dunes seemed to possess the wilful unpredictability of living beings. He loved, too, the eerie song of the dunes, made when wind played in a certain way on the sand slopes. This song had haunted his Libyan evenings; at times the dunes would emit a low-pitched sound so penetrating that normal speech could be heard only with difficulty. As he travelled more between deserts, he began to catalogue the different songs of the sand: the high keening of the slipfaces of the Libyan sword dunes, and the ‘white roaring’ of the Kalahari sands.

  Bagnold was compelled by the contradictory properties of sand grains. He wanted to know how it was that loose, dry, uncemented grains of sand could settle so firmly against one another that a loaded lorry driven across the surface of the sand would make tracks less than an inch in depth; but that sand grains of the same consistency could form pools of dry quicksand, fluid and deep enough to swallow that same loaded lorry.

  His engineer’s mind engaged by the behaviour of the sand, Bagnold began to delve into the scientific literature surrounding its properties. What he found was that almost no work had been done, apart from that of Vaughan Cornish, on the physics of dune formation or sand structures. It was true that the dunes had been named and described, making an austere litany of names - erg, seif, barchan - and that their forms and habits were known; the star dunes that built and spread out from a still centre, the seif dunes that drifted in linked chains miles long, the barchan dunes, crescent-shaped and showing their outer curves to the wind. But beyond this, nothing. Empty territory.

  So Bagnold began to investigate the topic. The physics involved in the analysis of the dunes was formidably complex. One had to map and anticipate the turbulence patterns of the wind, even before one tried to understand how the sand grains themselves - each of a different weight and shape - behaved within the flows of the wind. Only a brilliant obsessive could have taken on the subject.

  Bagnold was such a man. Working by night, he held candles in the slipfaces of the dunes - their ‘undercliffs’ - in order to determine the ‘wind regimes’ that controlled the behaviour of sand there. In the heat of the day, he walked for miles through what he called ‘t
he streets’ - the corridors of low ground that the dunes preserved between themselves, even as they moved - and he walked along the fine lines of the trailing wing-tips of barchan dunes, which reached up to ninety feet high. In an effort to determine the different possible liquidities of quicksand, he took to jumping up and down on the surface of the firmer pools, and recorded that such leaps could make ‘a real circular wave radiate outwards for several metres in the undulate sand’. In prose of beautiful precision, Bagnold catalogued the dunes and the physics of their behaviour: their serpentine crests, their rounded windward shoulders, and their steep leeward slipfaces, ‘where the slope of the dune surface reaches the limit of steepness imposed by the angle of shear of the deposited material’.

  When Bagnold returned to England from North Africa in 1935, he retired from the army, built a wind tunnel for himself, and began a decade’s worth of intricate experiments into the physics of blown sand. He found himself occupying a physical universe of exquisite formality, in which dunes travelled before the wind, preserving their individuality by an equality of loss and gain of their component sand-grains.

  The massive accumulation of minute particulars: this was Bagnold’s method of study, and it could not have been more appropriate to his subject. This was science as devotion. Information, for Bagnold, was not a way to summarise and therefore reduce or close down the desert landscape, but instead a way to make it more astonishing. Science, for him, refined the real into a greater marvellousness.

  In 1941, Bagnold published his findings as The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes. William Langewiesche rightly describes the book as ‘a small masterpiece of scientific exploration’, the consequence of Bagnold’s love-affair with sand. ‘Instead of finding chaos and disorder, ’ Bagnold wrote of the desert:the observer never fails to be amazed at a simplicity of form, an exactitude of repetition and a geometric order unknown in nature on a scale larger than that of crystalline structure. In places vast accumulations of sand weighing millions of tons move inexorably, in regular formation, over the surface of the country, growing, retaining their shape, even breeding, in a manner which, by its grotesque imitation of life, is vaguely disturbing to an imaginative mind.