Landmarks

by Robert Macfarlane

  This changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one’s sense of outer reality. Then static things may be caught in the very act of becoming. By so simple a matter, too, as altering the position of one’s head, a different kind of world may be made to appear … Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere. Nothing has reference to me, the looker.

  Jefferies, too, aspires to catch things ‘in the very act of becoming’; thus the present participles that gang and roister in his prose: ‘the leaves are enlarging, and the sap rising, and the hard trunks of the trees swelling with its flow; the grass blades pushing upwards; the seeds completing their shape; the tinted petals uncurling’.

  Jefferies was alarmed by scarcity and exhilarated by excess. Nature’s surplus – its gratuity of gift – often thrillingly exceeds his ability to record it: ‘a thousand thousand buds and leaves and flowers and blades of grass, things to note day by day, increasing so rapidly that no pencil can put them down and no book hold them, not even to number them’. Just beyond the city fringe, he finds a profusion of life: ‘Sparrows crowd every hedge and field, their numbers are incredible; chaffinches are not to be counted; of greenfinches there must be thousands.’ During his first spring in Surbiton, he is ‘astonished and delighted’ to discover the bird life which proclaimed itself everywhere:

  The bevies of chiffchaffs and willow wrens which came to the thickets in the furze, the chorus of thrushes and blackbirds, the chaffinches in the elms, the greenfinches in the hedges, wood-pigeons and turtle-doves in the copses, tree-pipits about the oaks in the cornfields; every bush, every tree, almost every clod, for the larks were so many, seemed to have its songster. As for nightingales, I never knew so many in the most secluded country.

  What a stark, sad contrast this teeming bird life makes with the contemporary countryside. Over the past half-century, Britain has lost more than 44 million breeding birds, including an average of more than fifty house sparrows every hour for those fifty years. Over the past twenty years, farmland bird populations in particular have plummeted: the turtle dove has suffered a 95 per cent decline in numbers, the cuckoo population has halved, lapwings have lost 41 per cent of their numbers. Jefferies would hardly recognize London’s edgelands today: they would look and sound so very different.

  Jefferies’ eye for flowers was at least as sharp as his eye for birds. He wandered the verges of Surbiton’s suburban lanes, finding them to be ruderal idylls of astonishing diversity. ‘There are about sixty wild flowers,’ he writes wonderfully of one road, ‘which grow freely along [it], namely’:

  yellow agrimony, amphibious persicaria, arum, avens, bindweed, bird’s foot lotus, bittersweet, blackberry, black and white bryony, brooklime, burdock, buttercups, wild camomile, wild carrot, celandine (the great and lesser), cinquefoil, cleavers, corn buttercup, corn mint, corn sowthistle, and spurrey, cowslip, cow-parsnip, wild parsley, daisy, dandelion, dead nettle, and white dog rose, and trailing rose, violets (the sweet and the scentless), figwort, veronica, ground ivy, willowherb (two sorts), herb Robert, honeysuckle, lady’s smock, purple loosestrife, mallow, meadow-orchis, meadow-sweet, yarrow, moon daisy, St John’s wort, pimpernel, water plantain, poppy, rattles, scabious, self-heal, silverweed, sowthistle, stitchwort, teazles, tormentil, vetches, and yellow vetch.

  What riches in a single verge! Echoes here of MacDiarmid on the intricacies of heather, and Finlay and Anne teasing such variety out of the peat-lands of Lewis. Jefferies’ list celebrates profusion, but it should also be heard as an elegy-in-waiting. He saw Nature near London, like much of his late writing, as fulfilling an archival function. It was clear to him that London would keep spreading, and that the countryside would be engulfed by the city’s mobile margins. The image of the archive occurs explicitly in Jefferies’ chapter on Kew Gardens, where he praises the ‘great green book’ that grows there. The garden ‘restores the ancient knowledge of the monks and the witches’, he writes approvingly; it prompts him also to regret that modernity has led to ‘the lore of herbs [being] in great measure decayed and … lost’. ‘The names of many of the commonest herbs,’ he notes sadly, ‘are quite forgotten.’ He elected himself a recording angel for landscape and knowledge that was to be lost, and he wrote in the certainty of its future destruction – rather as Eugène Atget set out to photograph old Paris in the 1890s, aware that its abolition approached, or as Baker tasked himself with evoking the Essex peregrines and their territory: ‘Before it is too late, I have tried to recapture the extraordinary beauty of this bird and to convey the wonder of the land he lived in … It is a dying world, like Mars, but glowing still.’

  ~

  ‘The heart from the moment of its first beat instinctively longs for the beautiful,’ declares Jefferies in a late essay, ‘Hours of Spring’. At his most movingly and innocently optimistic, he saw nature as a redeeming force, and his writing worked as what might now be called a consciousness-raising exercise – an attempt to bring urbanites and suburbanites to a fresh awareness of natural beauty, and thereby to a heightened sense of ‘joy in life’ and the collective nature of identity:

  [T]he goldfinches and the tiny caterpillars, the brilliant sun, if looked at lovingly and thoughtfully, will lift the soul out of the smaller life of human care that is of selfish aims … into the greater, the limitless life which has been going on over universal space from endless ages past, which is going on now, and which will for ever and for ever, in one form or another, continue to proceed.

  It is true that at times, when striving to evoke the joy he felt in nature, Jefferies can sound too much like Molesworth’s sissyish classmate, Basil Fotherington-Thomas, who wanders round the grounds of St Custard’s school in a late-Romantic rapture, trilling his greetings to the world. But Jefferies’ cries of wonder are ballasted by his cries of despair. Often he writes of his sense of the material world’s terrible indifference to human presence. ‘The earth is all in all to me,’ he says bleakly in ‘Hours of Spring’, ‘but I am nothing to the earth: it is bitter to know this before you are dead.’ He acknowledges as an ‘old, old error’ the proposition that ‘I love the earth, therefore the earth loves me – I am her child – I am Man, the favoured of all creatures.’ And he writes blackly of the lack of the world’s answer to his calls: ‘Dull-surfaced matter, like a polished mirror, reflects back thought to thought’s self within.’ A similar veering between hope and hopelessness would characterize Edward Thomas’s relations with nature. ‘I am not a part of nature,’ wrote Thomas desperately in 1913. ‘I am alone. There is nothing else in my world but my dead heart and brain within me and the rain without.’

  Sunlight was the substance Jefferies associated most with life; dust the substance that most often triggered his dismayed materialism and his thoughts of death. Sunlight prompts him to his famous deliquescence in the opening pages of his autobiography, The Story of My Heart (1883), and sunlight falls through many pages of Nature near London. But dust – comminuted matter, collateral of ruin – settles upon them too: ripped handfuls of ‘delicate grasses’ and ‘dandelion stalks’ that lie ‘sprinkled with dust’ on a roadside verge, the ‘passing feet’ that crush ‘silverweed … into the dust’. The source of this morbid dust is almost always London. Dust is the metropolis’s scurf. Like the ‘white granular powder’ that gathers lethally upon a thriving landscape in the opening pages of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Jefferies’ dust contaminates both body and soul:

  The dust of London fills the eyes and blurs the vision; but it penetrates deeper than that. There is a dust that chokes the spirit, and it is this that makes the streets so long, the stones so stony, the desk so wooden; the very rustiness of the iron railings about the offices sets the teeth on edge, the sooty blackened walls (yet without shadow) thrust back the sympathies which are ever trying to cling to the inanimate things around us.

  At some point, probably in the late 1860s, J
efferies had contracted tuberculosis and he came increasingly to blame London for his affliction, which he figured as a kind of ‘dust’ that ‘settles on the heart as well as that which falls on a ledge’. Repeatedly in Nature near London, the ‘immense City’ is the source of poison and pollution. On one hot July day, Jefferies writes, ‘the atmosphere of London … came bodily and undiluted out into the cornfields’ – a toxic miasma that shifts and shimmers in the air. Elsewhere he conjures a vision of London as a city with its own Götterdämmerung building above it:

  the aurora of dark vapour, streamers extending from the thicker masses, slowly moves and yet does not go away; it is just such a sky as a painter might give to some tremendous historical event, a sky big with presage, gloom, tragedy.

  In another late essay, written when he was severely ill, even nature will not serve as salve: he wonders aloud if all of existence has been a dream, and whether ‘in course of time I shall find out also, when I pass away, physically, that as a matter of fact there never was any earth’.

  ~

  If the suburbs, as J. G. Ballard observed, are places where the future waits to happen, then the edgelands might be where the future is already underway. In 1884, a year after the publication of Nature near London, John Ruskin delivered two minatory lectures under the title ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’. Since the early 1870s Ruskin had become anxious that the weather in Britain had ‘decisively worsened’, becoming ‘darker and stormier, possessed of an animate threat’. His ‘Storm-Cloud’ lectures explicitly connected this deteriorating climate with physical and moral pollution, and they are rife with images of airborne toxicity, plague-winds, pollution and moral ‘gloom’. The year following Ruskin’s lectures, Jefferies published a counterfactual novella entitled After London; Or, Wild England, which realized in hypothetical form both his and Ruskin’s senses of impending ‘tragedy’. After London is set in a post-apocalyptic southern England in which, as a result of an unspecified catastrophe, the landscape has been dramatically re-wilded. Its opening paragraph assumes the matter-of-fact tone of a chronicle:

  The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike … No fields, indeed, remained, for where the ground was dry, the thorns, briars, brambles, and saplings already mentioned filled the space, and these thickets and the young trees had converted most part of the country into an immense forest … By the thirtieth year there was not one single open place, the hills only excepted, where a man could walk, unless he followed the tracks of wild creatures or cut himself a path.

  Grass here – as so often in eco-apocalyptic literature – is the concealer and healer, greenly unwounding the damaged earth. Only a few humans have survived the scarification of their species. Mad-Maxish tribes of ‘gypsies’ and ‘Bushmen’ roam the land, divided along ethnic as well as self-interested lines. Jefferies’ book follows its lone hero, Sir Felix Aquila, as he navigates the landscape and tries to find a way to re-establish a viable community that might mature into a worthwhile civilization. Early in the novel, Aquila crosses a vast inland lake to reach a noxious swamp, which he eventually realizes is the site of ‘the deserted and utterly extinct city of London’, now lying under his feet. The capital is granted no reprieve by the punitive Jefferies; Aquila is present to witness its total vanquishing by nature.

  Nature near London contains the seeds of After London. As he wandered his edgelands, Jefferies’ eye was often caught by signs of nature’s irrepressibility: the desirable ease and swiftness with which it might return to absorb human structures. He notices a ruined barn, on whose ‘old red brick wall … mosses have grown … following the lines of the mortar’, and on which ‘bunches of wall grasses flourish’. He writes approvingly of ‘the great nature which comes pressing up so closely to the metropolis’. Nature near London is waiting patiently for its chance to claim back its territory – the humanized landscape predicting its coming obliteration.

  In 1887, a decade after moving to Surbiton, Jefferies died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-eight. He was buried in the Broadwater cemetery in Goring, then a suburb of the Sussex town of Worthing. At the time of Jefferies’ burial the cemetery was in open country, but Worthing has since spread and its edgelands have converged around the site, which now looks on to a car park, a flyover and two schools. Trees – yews, hawthorn, ash, sycamore and oak – grow thickly over the cemetery’s thirty-four acres, though, and the area retains – at least in daylight – an atmosphere of calmness and natural life.

  Jefferies’ grave is marked by a ziggurat headstone of white marble, set into a marble-bordered plot. The inscription on the border reads, in heavily serifed black lettering: ‘To the honoured memory of the prose poet of England’s fields and woodlands’. The interior of the plot has been filled with earth, in which now grows a profusion of weeds and wild flowers: ox-eye daisies, daffodils, agrimony, lady’s bed-straw, wild mignonette …

  Glossary VII

  Edgelands

  Edges, Hedges and Boundaries

  bar-slap temporary gate in a gap in a drystone wall Galloway

  boodge to stuff bushes into a hedge to confine livestock Herefordshire

  buckhead to cut the top off a hedge to within about two or three feet of the ground Suffolk

  bullfinch hedge that is allowed to grow high without laying Northamptonshire

  buttil to fix boundaries Suffolk

  carvet thick hedgerow Kent

  cop bank of earth on which a hedge grows Cumbria

  cuasnóg wild bees’ nest Irish

  glat gap in a hedge Herefordshire

  grounders bottom stones in a hedge Cornwall

  hangstreet upright part of a gate, to which the hinges are attached Herefordshire

  hare-gate opening in a hedge sufficient for the passage of hares Lancashire

  hedgers, soldiers, toppers top stones in a hedge or wall Cornwall

  kes, kess build-up of soil and stone along the base of a very old hedge Cumbria

  lunkie hole deliberately left in a wall for an animal to pass through Scots

  May-mess profusion of hedge blossom in full spring (Gerard Manley Hopkins) poetic

  outshifts fringes, boundaries and least-regarded parts of a town East Anglia

  prick-nickle dry hedge of thorns set to protect a newly planted fence Northamptonshire

  round-about boundary hedge of a coppice Northamptonshire

  selvedge field boundary; also the edge of a piece of woven material finished so as to prevent unravelling agricultural

  shard gap in a hedge south-west England

  shattles, shettles bars of a five-barred gate Exmoor

  smeuse gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal Sussex

  smout hole in a hedge used by a hare Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, northern England, Somerset

  soft estate natural habitats that have evolved along the borders and verges of motorways and trunk roads Highways Agency

  squiggle to wriggle through a hedge Essex

  stoop gatepost Cumbria

  thru’-ban, thrubin, truban long stones for building a dyke Galloway

  Farming

  arrest harvest Exmoor

  ass-upping of hoeing: to turn the docks and thistles end upwards, or to cause the posterior to be the superior part of the body while stooping in the act of hoeing East Anglia

  bing a passage in a cowhouse, along the heads of the stalls Herefordshire

  BMV of agricultural land: Best and Most Versatile official

  bog to burn dead grass Staffordshire

  boon party of men, usually neighbouring farmers, helping each other out during harvests Ireland

  brake field after the corn has been reaped Northamptonshire

  bray hay spread to dry in long rows Cotswolds

  comhar sharing of work or equipment between neighbours; mut
ual assistance Irish

  cropmark light and dark marks visible in growing and ripening crops, especially via aerial photography agricultural

  crow stone shed west Cornwall

  feather pie hole in the ground, filled with feathers fixed on strings and kept in motion by the wind, as a device to scare birds East Anglia

  fid portion of straw pulled out and arranged for thatching Kent

  fochann corn beginning to blade Gaelic

  fozie of turnips: not good, spongy Northern Ireland

  franion, frem of a crop: luxuriant, thriving Northamptonshire

  gort field Irish

  gurracag heap of hay or corn not yet made into stacks Gaelic

  hain to leave a meadow ungrazed to allow cutting later Northamptonshire

  hallo bundle of straw made up for laying before cattle for fodder Shetland

  headland strip of land at the edge of a field where agricultural machinery turns back into work agricultural

  howk to dig, as in ‘tattie-howking’ Scots

  jogget small load of hay Cotswolds

  malkin, mawkin scarecrow Northamptonshire

  maumble moist soil that clings to the spade in digging Northamptonshire

  meat-earth good and fertile soil, as distinguished from clay, gravel or sand Exmoor

  mommet scarecrow Yorkshire

  moocher potato, left in the ground, which sprouts again Herefordshire

  ollands pasture Fenland

  pannage fattening of domestic pigs on acorns agricultural