The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (23 page)

Kenn, the young hero of Neil Gunn’s novel
Highland River
(1937), grows up by the side of the Dunbeath river in the Highland region of Caithness. He comes to know the river so well that when he is sent to the trenches to fight in the First World War he can ‘
more readily picture the parts
of it he knew than the trench systems he floundered amongst. In zero moments it could rise before him with the clearness of a chart showing the main current of his nervous system and its principal tributaries.’ John McGahern has written of how the Irishmen who were imprisoned by the British during the War of Independence fought off the boredoms and humiliations of jail by sharing their memories of the River Shannon, ‘
walking together
in their imagination up one bank of the Shannon in the morning, returning down the opposite bank in the evening, each man picking out what others had missed on the way.’ ‘They knew,’ concludes McGahern, ‘the river stretches like their own lives.’
When the painter John Nash
was in the trenches of the Western Front with a Romany friend from Buckinghamshire, they discussed the old ways and green lanes of England, telling stories to each other that were guided by the paths they had walked, and they promised each other that, if they escaped the mud alive, they would travel them together.

As we approached the Lairig Ghru’s summit, the beaten-earth track narrowed to a slender thread and disappeared altogether into the wilderness of a boulder field. Then – as when Manus’s path became apparent in the glen of stones on Lewis – I suddenly learnt to see the path: now a faint line of rosy granite, scoured from the brown patina of the boulders by the passage of feet and crampons. Shepherd had noticed the same phenomenon of the granite ‘
shin[ing] as red as new-made rock’
where feet had fallen.

We followed that track of new-made rock and it led us to the Pools of Dee, two tiny lochans whose water falls as rain and snow and is filtered by the granite of the pass. I have seen the Pools many times, and except once in winter when they were frozen solid, their water has always been miraculously limpid. To my mind the Pools possess a near-supernatural presence, recalling the dust-free mirrors of Buddhist symbolism or the ‘
well at the world’s end’
in Neil Gunn’s novel of the same name, which contains water so clear that it is invisible to the eye but palpable to the hand.

That day, amid the confusion of boulders, the silver sheets of the Pools’ surfaces were a surprise, and the lucidity of their waters once more an astonishment. Transparent and reflective, they appeared like the mountain’s own eyes, gazing skywards. I stood by the edge of the first one. The stones in its shallows seemed set beneath glass. Green weed on its floor caught the light and sent it back. I stooped and dipped a hand through the mirror, the water binding cold to my fingers.

‘
A mountain has an inside,’
Shepherd had written. It is a superbly counter-intuitive proposition, for we customarily imagine mountains in terms of their external surfaces and outward-facing forms: cliffs, plateaux, pinnacles, ridges and scarps. But mountains are also defined by their interiors: their corries, caves, hollows and valleys, and by the depths of their rivers, lochs and lochans. Once our eyes have learnt to see that mountains are composed of absent space as well as massy presence, then we might also come to imagine walking not ‘up’ a mountain but ‘into’ a mountain. Shepherd was always looking
into
the mountain landscape; again and again she pries through surfaces: into cracks in rocks, into the luminous interior of lochs or rivers. She stepped naked into the shallows of Loch Avon, she poked fingers down mouse-holes into the snowpack, and she recalled how as a child she would play in waterfall-pools by ‘
pitching into them
the tiniest white stones I can find, and watching through the appreciable time they take to sway downwards to the bottom’. ‘Into’, in
The Living Mountain
, is a preposition that gains – by means of repeated use – the power of a verb. She went into the mountains searching not for the great outdoors but instead for profound ‘interiors’, deep ‘recesses’.

On foot for hour after hour, wrote Shepherd, one ‘
walks the flesh transparent’.
‘On the mountain,’ she remarks in the closing sentences of
The Living Mountain
, ‘I am beyond desire. It is not ecstasy … I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. That is the final grace accorded from the mountain.’ This was her version of Descartes’s
cogito
:
I walk therefore I am
. She celebrated the metaphysical rhythm of the pedestrian, the iamb of the ‘I am’, the beat of the placed and lifted foot.

The final half-mile up to the watershed. Heavy legs, slow feet. A blue dusk starting to haze the air. The terrain narrowing, funnelling down. Perception gradually squeezed, sightlines narrowed, vision diminished … and then suddenly the pass was reached and the world yawned open ahead, pine-forested northern lands spread out ahead and below us. I placed my handful of bog myrtle, azalea, juniper and dry heather on a natural
ortholith
of granite, and set them alight: a brief flare of orange in the dusk, a beacon-fire at the pass.

We walked on in the gathering gloom, down the great north slope of the massif, telling stories to each other to sustain ourselves, down through the vast pine forest of Rothiemurchus, which in that dusk had become a fairy-tale wood of shadows and toadstools, through which the path picked its way, moonlight shimmering off the pine needles and pooling in the tears of resin wept by the pines to either side, and in this way we made the descent to the north, the sky above us still blue and incredible, our legs tiring and our pace slowing.

Towards the very end of his life, even the walk down to the stream gorge became impossible for my grandfather. His legs – which had carried him so far over so many countries – lost their vigour, his centre of gravity rose and his stability diminished. Stride shortened to shuffle, shuffle to dodder, dodder to step. The walking sticks that he and my grandmother had for years kept by the back door, used for whacking down nettles or for pointing out landscape features, became crucial auxiliaries to movement.

During the same years that my grandfather was losing the ability to walk, my children – his two first great-grandchildren – were gaining it. Step lengthened to dodder, dodder to shuffle, shuffle to stride. Five days after my grandfather died, my three-year-old son and my five-year-old daughter reached the summit of their first true hill, Darling Fell, near Loweswater in the Lake District. The final slopes of that fell are sheep-cropped grass, into which previous walkers have imprinted a series of deep and distinct footmarks. My children went on ahead of me to climb that last slope, fitting their feet into the marks, following the invitation of the print-trail. I watched them go, and thought of having been one of those children myself, watched by my parents, and of my mother having been one of those children in turn, watched over in turn by my grandparents. When the summit had been reached, we all sat together, drank cups of sugary tea and looked across at the mountain ridges receding into the distance, too many to count.

My grandfather’s funeral occurred in the modest church in the village of Tomintoul. I stood with my brother and our cousins by the door. There were murmurs and handshakes with people we did not know, or knew but could not name. A procession of dark suits, respectful comments. The coffin-bearers wore black gloves on their thin arms, and reminded me of Mickey Mouse. The organist struck up. Mourners moved up the aisles and into the dark-wood pews. High in the north-east Cairngorms, the quartz of the granite shone in the light, and the mica of the granite flashed. Foam in the pools of the Avon, and alder leaves turning in eddies. I walked to the front of the church where the coffin was waiting, an arrangement of gentians, heather and delphiniums on its pine lid, and tucked a sprig of creeping azalea into the heart of the bouquet.

The service began. The minister said, ‘What will survive of us is love.’ Scree shifts slightly in Lurchers Gully in the Northern Corries of the Cairngorm. A stone falls and then comes to rest. ‘What will survive of Edward and Alison is love,’ said the minister. ‘
Knowing another is endless,’
Shepherd had written; ‘The thing to be known grows with the knowing.’ I nearly cried, and could not tell why I did not.

As we filed out of the church, the organist struck up with ‘The Road to the Isles’. It’s a well-known Scottish folk song of nineteenth-century music-hall origin – rife with pseudo-Gaelicisms and tinged with remembered Jacobitism – about dreamed-of western landscapes, the open road that leads to them and the foot-travel by which they will be reached. It plays with the walk west to the Hebrides as a walk in the direction of loss, a journey towards the setting sun. My mother’s mother had sung it to her, and she in turn had sung it to me as a lullaby and as a walking song, in her high voice.

A far croonin’ is pullin’ me away

As take I wi’ my cromack to the road.

The far Coolins are puttin’ love on me

As step I wi’ the sunlight for my load.

The organist duffed note after note, but the song was still recognizable, and the old words ran through my head in time to the music. We moved onto the pavement and into the sunlight. More murmurs, more handshakes. Sunlight, pebbledash, car-noise, woodsmoke. People were bustling and talking, louder now, while the organist played boldly on. The hearse gleamed. The congregation was reflected in its polished side doors. The bearers emerged, wheeling the coffin on its carriage. A whispered
one, two, three, heave
and the coffin was off the carriage and into the back of the hearse. It shifted a few millimetres each way, nudging the rubber buffers which held it like a parent guarding a young child from harm.

Sure by Tummel and Loch Rannoch and Lochaber I will go

By heather tracks wi’ heaven in their wiles.

If it’s thinkin’ in your inner heart the braggart’s in my step,

You’ve never smelled the tangle o’ the Isles.

One of the coffin-bearers stepped into the middle of the road, and raised a flat hand to stop the traffic with all the authority vested in him by death and dark clothes. The cars slowed, stopped, began to back up into a queue. From inside the church the final verse of ‘The Road to the Isles’ drifted out.

The blue islands are pullin’ me away

Their laughter puts the leap upon the lame;

The blue islands from the Skerries to the Lewis

Wi’ heather honey taste upon each name.

The hearse starts off up the road, and in front of it, a few yards ahead of it, leading the way, clearing the path, goes the chief coffin-bearer, stepping slowly and measuredly up the road, a respectful stiffness to his gait and his body. Sun glints on the dark road, the hearse creeps forwards, the undertaker makes my grandfather’s final walk for him, his journey marked by the beat of each carefully placed and lifted foot.

PART III

Roaming (Abroad)

10

Limestone

Raja Shehadeh — Claustrophobia & conflict — The
sarha
— Walking as resistance — Depressions of the land, depressions of the spirit — Reaching Ramallah — The basketball match of the Martyrs — A strange pattern of lights — Down Wadi ’qda — Bullet-holes & bullet-casings —
Natsch
— Land-zones —
Qasr
& dog fox — A wadi path — ‘Encrustations of curses’, ‘bones of rock’ — The imam’s sermon — The Zalatimos —
Taboun
pebbles — Clemens Messerschmid — Preferential pathways — Chert eyes & amorous chameleons — Contact springs & generosity — Walk, Don’t Walk.