Landmarks

by Robert Macfarlane

  ‘natural features … the steep slope of the scowling expression’: Richard V. Cox, The Gaelic Place-Names of Carloway, Isle of Lewis: Their Structure and Significance (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 2002), pp. 69–85.

  ‘magnificently surcharged with names’: Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1913; New York: Henry Holt, 1922), p. 437.

  ‘lit by the mnemonics of words’: Finlay MacLeod (ed.), Togail Tìr/Marking Time: The Map of the Western Isles (Stornoway: Acair and An Lanntair, 1989), p. ii.

  ‘Cùl Leac Ghlas ri taobh … Gaelic Positioning System’: Angus MacMillan, ‘Machair’, Archipelago 2 (Spring 2008), 39–40.

  ‘a modest capacity for wonder … made to perform’: Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), p. 44.

  ‘bold, visual, evocative … bottom of a canyon)’: ibid., p. 23.

  ‘requires that one … sitting at a particular spot … precision’: ibid., p. 89.

  ‘I like to. I ride that way in my mind’: ibid., pp. 45–6.

  the total number of native speakers … now around 58,000: according to 2011 Census results, summarized at http://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/news/census-2011-release-2a.

  ‘some of the place-names are forgotten or becoming incomprehensible’: Tim Robinson, Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (Dublin: Lilliput, 1996), p. 3; see also Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (Dublin: Lilliput, 1986), pp. 13–14.

  ‘important role … recently’: Cox, Gaelic Place-Names, p. i.

  ‘working relationship with the moorland … the language which accompanied that sense’: Finlay MacLeod, ‘Counter-Desecration Phrasebook Needed’, Stornoway Gazette, 14 February 2008.

  We are blasé about place: see Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 329. For Simmel, the blasé was a function in part of the numbing effect on perception that the ‘shocks’ of modernity had administered to the subject, and partly a function of the rise of the capitalist use-value model, which leads to what Adorno called ‘a generalized equivalence of all things’.

  ‘long-cultivated knowledge … the knowledge mostly unrecoverable’: Harrison, When Languages Die, p. 17.

  ‘Without a name made in our mouths … purchase in our minds or our hearts’: Tim Dee, ‘Naming Names’, Caught by the River, 25 June 2014, http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2014/06/naming-names-tim-dee-robert-macfarlane/.

  ‘the knowledge or belief that … master all things by calculation’: Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 139.

  Weber noted the widespread reduction of ‘wonder’: I draw here on Patrick Curry’s illuminating discussion of enchantment and its ‘immiscible’ relation to modernity, ‘On Not Saving Enchantment for Modernity (Even as Religion)’, in Tom Crook and Mathew Feldman (eds.), Sacred Modernities: Rethinking Modernity in a Post-Secular Age (London: Continuum, 2011).

  Our language for nature is now such that the things around us do not talk back: writing four years before Weber, in a chapter of Swann’s Way (1913) on place-names and place-relations, Proust made a similar distinction between the rise of the scientific and wilful, and the retreat of the unintended and enchanting: ‘[There are] those natural phenomena from which our comfort or our health can derive … an accidental … benefit,’ until ‘the day when science takes control of them, and, producing them at will, places in our hands the power to order their appearance, withdrawn from the tutelage and independent of the consent of chance’. Proust, Swann’s Way, p. 438.

  ‘the whole universe of beings … standing reserve’: Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology,’ in Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 325.

  to have their own lives if they are to enrich ours: I thank Tom Gilliver for our conversation about these matters on 3 November 2009.

  only that by instrumentalizing nature … we have largely stunned the earth out of wonder: see Peter Larkin, ‘Scarcely on the Way: The Starkness of Things in Sacral Space’, http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2010/03/scarcely-on-way-starkness-of-things-in.html.

  ‘One must wait for the moment … something that knows we are there’: Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney (eds.), Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2006), p. xviii.

  ‘That rivers and streams … nearly meet one another’: ibid., p. 159.

  ‘a type of low brush thicket … shin oak (Quercus harvardii)’: ibid., p. 325.

  ‘[I]t is along the banks of slow-moving creeks … only a second change of temperature’: ibid., pp. 89–90.

  ‘to recall and to explore … slipping off into abstract space’: ibid., p. xxiii.

  ‘the effect on the landscape resource … major and long-term’: ‘Lewis Wind Farm: Non-Technical Summary of the Environmental Statement’, submitted by Lewis Wind Power Limited, 17 October 2004, http://www.cne-siar.gov.uk/windpower/lewiswindpower/documents/NTS%20final%20version.pdf.

  ‘a vast, dead place … swept by a chill wet wind’: Ian Jack, ‘Breathing Space’, Guardian, 26 July 2006.

  ‘abominable … a waste and a howling wilderness’: Daniel Defoe, A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Divided into Circuits or Journies, 3 vols. (London: Strahan, 1724–6), vol. III, p. 74.

  ‘hideous blank … dreary, dismal desert’: Argus, June 1858. See, for a discussion of the perception of the Australian interior as terra nullius, the third chapter of Roslynn Doris Haynes, Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  ‘so much [of it] is unproductive wilderness’: James Carnegy-Arbuthnott, quoted in the Guardian, 10 August 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/10/scotland-land-rights. Compare the July 2013 comments of the Conservative peer Lord Howell during ‘Lords’ Questions’ that the north-east of England contains ‘large and uninhabited and desolate areas’ where ‘there’s plenty of room for fracking’, ‘without any kind of threat to the rural environment’, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthvideo/10211388/Lord-Howell-frack-the-desolate-North-East.html.

  ‘it is precisely what is invisible … a place to another’: this is Barry Lopez’s gloss on Yi Fu Tuan’s arguments in his Topophilia (1974). See AD, p. 278.

  ‘Those who wish to explain to politicians … sounding either wet or extreme’: MacLeod, ‘Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’.

  ‘An Talamh Briste, Na Feadanan Gorma … or to commemorate stories’: Anne Campbell and Jon MacLeod, A-mach an Gleann (Stornoway: privately published, 2007), passim.

  ‘Scotland small? Our multiform … marvellously descriptive! And incomplete!’: Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘Scotland Small?’, in ‘Dìreadh I’, from Complete Poems, Vol. II (Manchester: Carcanet, 1994), p. 1,170.

  ‘What is required … a Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’: MacLeod, ‘Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’.

  ‘something emotive abides in the land … invisible to the ironist’: Lopez and Gwartney, Home Ground, p. xviii.

  ‘a narrative not fully known … larger chains of events’: Adam Potkay, ‘Wordsworth and the Ethics of Things’, PMLA 123:2 (2008), 394. This deep-buried meaning of the word thing is likely to be a residue of the Old Danish Thing as designating a community meeting where legal issues were disputed and settled; i.e. a parliament or a court. In such a context, the idea of a Thing bears within it a judicial space of uncertainty, the connotation of a matter whose resolution has yet to be determined.

  ‘galvanized against inertia … as our natural reticence allows us to be’: Marianne Moore, ‘Feeling and Precision’, Sewanee Review 52:4 (October–December 1944), 499–500. I am compelled, too, by Moore’s fanaticism for rhythm as a means of cognition, a kind of precision: ‘it [the effect] begins far back of the beat, so
that you don’t see when the down beat comes. It was started such a long distance ahead, it makes it possible to be exact.’

  ‘For knowledge, add; for wisdom, take away’: Charles Simic, quoted by Jan Zwicky in Wisdom & Metaphor (Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2005), p. 74.

  In this respect it would inhabit … reciprocal perception between human and non-human: see John Llewellyn, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991).

  ‘John Locke, in the seventeenth century … he had perceived or imagined it’: Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Funes the Memorious’, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 65.

  ‘tendered … alterity were itself pure gift’: Potkay, ‘Ethics of Things’, 401. Potkay draws on the work of Sylvia Benso; see also Larkin, ‘Scarcely on the Way’.

  ‘having language to hand’: Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor, p. 32.

  ‘Tact: 1 (a) … translating Andreas Ornithoparcus)’: OED online.

  Tact as due attention … as rightful tactility: see Valentine Cunningham, Reading After Theory (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001).

  Chapter 3: The Living Mountain

  ‘the elementals’: LM, p. 4.

  ‘heaven-appointed task … to the approved pattern’: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 2 April 1931, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

  ‘I have had the same bedroom all my life!’: Nan Shepherd, quoted in Vivienne Forrest, ‘In Search of Nan Shepherd’, Leopard Magazine (December 1986–January 1987), 17.

  ‘all movement … those limbs move as you look at them’: letter from Nan Shepherd to Barbara Balmer, 15 January 1981, private collection.

  ‘library-cormorant’: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters 1785–1800, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 156.

  ‘a tall slim figure with a halo … an awe-inspiring dispatch case’: anon., quoted in Louise Donald, ‘Nan Shepherd’, Leopard Magazine (October 1977), 21.

  ‘long lean man … need not cease to exhilarate’: Nan Shepherd, quoted in ibid., 20.

  ‘dark wisdom, almost sorcery … giant ruffled eagle’s feather’: Erlend Clouston, personal communication, 30 April 2014.

  ‘Poetry … burning heart of life’: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 14 March 1930, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

  ‘possess[ed] … kind of thing that comes out of me’: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 2 April 1931.

  ‘snow driving dim on the blast … green as ice’: ITC, pp. 3, 53.

  ‘does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself’: LM, p. 23.

  ‘not out of myself, but in myself’: ibid., p. 108.

  ‘Oh burnie with the glass-white … over stone …’: ITC, p. 1.

  ‘I’ve gone dumb … for the mere sake of making a noise’: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 2 April 1931.

  ‘Dear Nan, You don’t need me to tell you … hill & country lovers’: letter from Neil Gunn to Nan Shepherd, 30 October 1945, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

  ‘a traffic of love’: LM, p. xliii.

  ‘Parochialism is universal … a man can fully experience’: Patrick Kavanagh, ‘The Parish and the Universe’, in Collected Pruse [sic] (London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1967), pp. 281–3.

  ‘irradiate the common … make something universal’: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 2 April 1931.

  ‘lust … effect upon me’: LM, pp. 8, 9, 107.

  ‘merely to be with the mountain … but to be with him’: ibid., p. 15.

  ‘I am on the plateau again … stay up here for a while’: ibid., p. 22

  ‘The plateau is the true summit … eddies on the plateau surface’: ibid., p. 2.

  ‘a legendary task, which heroes, not men, accomplished’: ibid., p. 107.

  ‘thirled me for life to the mountain’: ibid., p. 107.

  ‘Birch needs rain … can be as good as drunk with it’: ibid., p. 53.

  ‘the coil over coil … leggy shadow-skeleton’: ibid., pp. 61, 52, 65.

  ‘Beech bud-sheaths … brightness to the dusty roads of May’: ‘The Colour of Deeside’, Nan Shepherd, Deeside Field 8 (1937), 9.

  ‘bland as silk … rooted far down in their immobility’: LM, pp. 93, 92.

  ‘I knew when I had looked … hardly begun to see’: ibid., p. 11.

  ‘the eye sees what it didn’t … whose working is dimly understood’: ibid., p. 106.

  ‘snow skeleton, attached to nothing’: ibid., p. 42.

  ‘I could have sworn I saw … I never saw it again’: ibid., p. 2.

  ‘Such illusions … but steadies us again’: ibid., p. 101.

  ‘impossible to coerce’: ibid., p. 91.

  ‘On one toils … toil[s] upwards’: ibid., pp. 10, 16.

  ‘as the earth must see itself’: ibid., p. 11.

  ‘twisted and intertwined … secret of their formation’: ibid., pp. 55, 57, 69, 33.

  ‘interlaced … frozen floor of a hollow’: ibid., p. 70.

  ‘interlocks … hidden hollow’: ibid., pp. 70, 106, 72.

  ‘patiently adds fact to fact’: ibid., p. 58.

  ‘Slowly I have found my way in … I should know’: ibid., p. 105.

  ‘too much … resumed formation and direction’: ibid., pp. 28, 70.

  ‘The mind cannot carry away all … what it has carried away’: ibid., p. 3.

  ‘strong white … limber’: ibid., pp. 23, 98, 102, 51, 92.

  ‘That’s the way to see the world: in our own bodies’: Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), p. 106.

  ‘roaring scourge … purple as a boozer’s’: LM, pp. 1, 44, 36.

  ‘boys … high-spirited and happy report’: ibid., p. 39.

  ‘the body may be said to think’: ibid., p. 105.

  ‘incarnates … medium for having a world’: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), passim, but see especially pp. 144–6.

  ‘something moves between me and it … except by recounting it’: LM, p. 8.

  ‘The body is not … identity for the hand as much as for the eye’: ibid., pp. 106, 103.

  ‘This is the innocence we have lost … all the way through’: ibid., p. 105.

  ‘out of the body … soil of the earth’: ibid., pp. 106, 92.

  ‘one has been in … That is all’: ibid., p. 92.

  ‘coveted knowledge … pursuit of learning’: Donald, ‘Nan Shepherd’, 20.

  ‘I can see the wood … that reverberates/illuminates’: letters from Nan Shepherd to Barbara Balmer, 15 January and 2 February 1981, private collection.

  ‘reticent about herself … grace of the soul’: Jessie Kesson, quoted in Forrest, ‘In Search of Nan Shepherd’, 19.

  ‘striking power … he said yes to life’: Nan Shepherd, Introduction to Charles Murray, Last Poems (Aberdeen: Charles Murray Trust/Aberdeen University Press, 1970), p. ix.

  ‘I hope it is true for those … has been so good, so fulfilling’: Nan Shepherd, quoted in Forrest, ‘In Search of Nan Shepherd’, 19.

  ‘a peerer into corners’: LM, p. xlii.

  ‘recesses’: ibid., p. 9.

  ‘It cannot be seen until one stands almost on its lip’: ibid., p. 10.

  ‘The sound of all this moving water is as integral … a dozen different notes at once’: ibid., p. 26.

  ‘journey to the source … and flowed away’: ibid., p. 23.

  ‘total mountain … being’: ibid., p. 105.

  Chapter 4: The Woods and the Water

  ‘part-islanded’: WW, p. 4.

  ‘a great inland sea … the pleasures of living beside it’: ibid.

  ‘sit[s] lightly on the sea … like an upturned boat’: ibid., p. 8.

  ‘It’s extraordinary what you see in an English moat’: Roger Deakin, The Garden, BBC Radio 4.

  ‘All water
… holds memory and the space to think’: NFWTF, p. 186.

  ‘frog’s-eye view’: WL, p. 1.

  ‘1. The action or fact of flowing in … thus flows in or is infused’: OED online.

  ‘a spring in your step’: Heathcote Williams, ‘It’s the Plunge That Counts’, London Review of Books 21:16, 19 August 1999.

  ‘like weeds … spontaneous and unstoppable’: NFWTF, p. 63.

  ‘slip-shape’: Alice Oswald, Dart (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 48.

  ‘Searching the map, I had seen … slabs of slate hollowed into baths’: WL, p. 91.

  ‘when we try to pick out anything … hitched to the whole world’: John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), in NW, p. 245.

  ‘I threw myself in … crawled out onto the beach like a turtle’: WL, p. 131.

  ‘To enter a wood is to pass … paradoxically, by getting lost’: WW, p. x.

  ‘The woods and the water … for us to understand more thoroughly’: Roger Deakin, unpublished notebook entry.

  ‘fifth element’: WW, p. ix.

  ‘I am a woodlander … a tree is itself a river of sap’: ibid., p. x.

  ‘The central value of English … and environmental education’: Roger Deakin, ‘Dark Horses: Environmental Education and English Teaching’, unpublished lecture delivered at the Royal Festival Hall, 21 September 1990.

  ‘The dandelion in full flower … is itself incomparable and unique’: D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays (1925; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 358.