The Wild Places (Penguin Original) (21 page)

I had not expected the pilgrims, nor had I expected the litter on Patrick’s summit: chocolate-bar wrappers stuffed into rock crevices, rotting banana skins lying outside the door to the new oratory. It was an uneasy mix of the sacred and the profane; I left it to the pilgrims.

After my magical coastal night, though, I still wanted to sleep at altitude, and so I drove back down to the southern flank of Mweelrea, the great mountain that rises above Doo Lough - the Black Lough. As I had passed Mweelrea earlier, I had spotted a hanging corrie, nameless and difficult of access, overlooking the Lough, and had thought that it might make a good place to spend the night.

I reached the corrie as dusk was falling, cresting its lip about 1,000 feet above the valley floor, to find myself in a wide, sunken bowl of grass and boulders, with encircling rock walls that rose 600 feet or so on every side and were washed by a series of fine waterfalls.

Few people would have been into this corrie before, I guessed. There was no reason to come this way: no water to fish, no easy route through it up on to Mweelrea itself. The corrie was its own lost world, with only one way in and one out. What a place it was to be in that dusk, with the waterfalls misting in the thickening light.

Within an hour, pale cloud had gathered around the mountain above, and clothed the summits of the crag curtain, so that through the dusk the waterfalls appeared to drop coldly and sourcelessly from the sky. The silence in the corrie, save for the waterfalls’ white noise, was absolute. I could see down into part of the valley beneath, and to Doo Lough, whose surface had become still and uniform as a sheet of dark iron.

The valley I overlooked that evening was allegedly the site of one of the worst episodes of the Famine. At Louisburgh, the town to the north of the valley, in the cold spring of 1849, a crowd of around 600 people gathered. Many were close to death from starvation; all were hoping to find food at one of the relief stations that had been established in Louisburgh. Food, or an admission ticket to the Westport workhouse, which would at least guarantee them some sustenance. But the Relieving Officer of Louisburgh told the crowd that he could not supply them either with food or with tickets. He said that they should instead apply to the two Poor Law Guardians of the region, Colonel Hograve and Mr Lecky, who were due to meet the following day at Delphi Lodge, the big house at the southern end of the valley, ten miles away, beyond Doo Lough.

Two accounts exist of what then happened, of contrasting gravity. The more distressing is collected in James Berry’s
Tales of the West of Ireland
. According to Berry, that night, the crowd slept in the streets of Louisburgh. It was a clear night, and the temperature dipped consequently low. The next morning, an estimated 200 people were found dead where they lay. The survivors began the long walk south, up over the Stroppabue Pass, and down round Doo Lough. There was no road at that point, and they walked on sheep tracks. Nor were there bridges over the rivers, and at two points the marchers had to ford the Glankeen River, which was turbulent with water from the previous days’ rain.

When they finally arrived at Delphi, the Guardians were still at lunch, and sent word that the people should wait. So they sat down among the trees at the brink of the estate, where several died of exhaustion. When Hograve and Lecky had at last finished their lunch, they went down to where the people were, and told them that neither food relief nor workhouse tickets would be forthcoming, and that the people should return to Louisburgh.

The survivors set off northwards, retracing the path they had just so effortfully taken. The weather had worsened by this point, with the wind veering round to the north-west, bringing hail and sleet. Their clothes, soaked by stream-fording and sleet, froze quickly about their limbs to the ‘stiffness of sheet iron’. Many died where they fell by the side of the track, killed by hypothermia and exhaustion. When those that were left reached the crest of the pass, at Stroppabue, above the Doo Lough, the wind was of such strength, and the people of such weakness, that scores were buffeted into the water of the Lough, where they drowned.

The next morning, Berry recorded, the path from the Glankeen back to Houston’s house was covered with corpses ‘as numerous as the sheaves of corn in an autumn field’. The Relieving Officer at Louisburgh, having heard of the tragedy, gathered together a group of near-starving men, and they walked along the corpse-strewn track, interring the dead where they lay. When the burial party reached Doo Lough, where so many had died, there was not enough earth to bury the bodies, except in the little glen or ravine which ran down the brow of the cliff between Stroppabue and Doo Lough. ‘So,’ recorded Berry, ‘they had to gather all the corpses and carry them to the little glen where they buried them in pits just as on a battlefield, and there they lie sleeping where the sighing of the winds through the tall, wild ferns which wave above their nameless graves forever sings their requiem.’

When I woke in the corrie above Doo Lough that night, at some point in the small hours, the cloud had passed away, and the moon was pouring its light down on to the valley. I was thirsty, so I took my metal cup and walked to the side of the corrie, and held the cup beneath the spill of one of the waterfalls. The water hit the tin and set it ringing like a bell. I drank the cold clear rainwater, and looked down over the dark valley. The shadows of the mountains on either side of the lough were cast over its floor in clear black shapes. The starlight fell upon the scene, old light from dead stars, and where it fell, the boulders and swells of the landscape cast dark moon-shadows, and I could see the night wind rippling over the grass of the valley, stirring it into ghostly presence.

10

Ridge

For four days in late March, snow settled unexpectedly across Britain, taking it by surprise. Spring had arrived a week previously: black buds had popped green on the ash trees, and I had seen brown hares making curved runs in the Suffolk fields as I drove across to see Roger in Mellis. But then the wind changed direction, northerlies brought freezing temperatures, and spring stopped. Gritter lorries moved over the roads, whirring out fans of salt and stone. Children made an ice slide on a quiet road near my house, and queued up in jostling lines, polishing the ice to the consistency of milk-bottle glass. John, who had sailed me out to Enlli, wrote from his home in Hope Valley in the Peak District, to say he had spent two days out tracking hares. He spoke of big beluga drifts of snow, and of the hares, still in their white fur, moving unhurriedly between them.

I had been hoping that spring would hold, for I wanted to see the fizz and riot of the land coming to life again after winter, to feel some of the warmth I had glimpsed in the gryke but that I had so far missed on my journeys. My plan had been to go to the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire, where I could explore the rich green valleys of the Ribble and the Lune, and sleep out on riverbanks. Roger was going to join me. But the return of the snow changed things. I decided instead that I would go alone for a proper night walk in the Cumbrian mountains.

Snow perpetuates the effect of moonlight, which means that on a clear night, in winter hills, you can see for a distance of up to thirty miles or so. I know this because I have experienced it several times before. Several, but not many, because in order to go night-walking in winter mountains, you require the following rare combination of circumstances: a full moon, a hard frost, a clear sky and a willingness to get frozen to the bone.

I watched the forecasts. They anticipated that a further ‘snow-bomb’ - the remnant of a polar low, dragged south by other fronts - would hit north-west England, before quickly giving way to a high. When the snow-bomb landed, temperatures over the hills were expected to drop as low as -15°C, with winds gusting at speeds of up to fifty miles per hour. It seemed too much to hope that I would be rewarded with such conditions . . . But the chance was there, and so I left Cambridge and travelled up to Buttermere, in the mid-western fells of the Lake District: back on to the hard rocks, the granite and the tuff.

‘Is the Lake District another bourgeois invention, like the piano?’ Auden had asked in 1953. Certainly, with its tea shops and eroded footpaths, it could feel like that; as though it had been loved into tameness by its millions of visitors. But I hoped that, out by night in the snow, I might catch at some of its remaining wildness.

Noctambulism is usually taken to mean sleepwalking. This is inaccurate: it smudges the word into somnambulism. Noctambulism means walking at night, and you are therefore etymologically permitted to do it asleep or awake. Generally, people noctambulise because they are in search of melancholy, or rather a particular type of imaginative melancholy. Franz Kafka wrote of feeling like a ghost among men - ‘weightless, boneless, bodiless’ - when he walked at night.

I had found another reason for being out at night, however, and that is the wildness which the dark confers on even a mundane landscape. Sailors speak of the uncanniness of seeing a well-known country from the sea; the way that such a perspective can make the most homely coastline seem strange. Something similar happens to a landscape in darkness. Coleridge once compared walking at night in his part of the Lake District to a newly blind man feeling the face of a child: the same loving attention, the same deduction by form and shape, the same familiar unfamiliarity. At night, new orders of connection assert themselves: sonic, olfactory, tactile. The sensorium is transformed. Associations swarm out of the darkness. You become even more aware of landscape as a medley of effects, a mingling of geology, memory, movement, life. The landforms remain, but they exist as presences: inferred, less substantial, more powerful. You inhabit a new topology. Out at night, you understand that wildness is not only a permanent property of land - it is also a quality which can settle on a place with a snowfall, or with the close of day.

Over the past two centuries in particular, however, we have learned how to deplete darkness.
Homo sapiens
evolved as a diurnal species, adapted to excel in sunlit conditions, and ill-equipped to manoeuvre at night. For this reason, among others, we have developed elaborate ways of lighting our lives, of neutralising the claims of darkness upon us, and of thwarting the circadian rhythm.

The extent of artificial lighting in the modernised regions of the earth is now so great that it produces a super-flux of illumination easily visible from space. This light, inefficiently directed, escapes upwards before being scattered by small particles in the air - such as water droplets and dust - into a generalised photonic haze known as sky glow. If you look at a satellite image of Europe taken on a cloudless night, you will see a lustrous continent. Italy is a sequined boot. Spain is trimmed with coastal light, and its interior sparkles. Britain burns brightest of all. The only significant areas of unlit land are at the desert margins of the continent, and along its mountainous spine

The stars cannot compete with this terrestrial glare, and are often invisible, even on cloudless nights. Cities exist in a permanent sodium twilight. Towns stain their skies orange. The release of this light also disrupts habits of nature. Migrating birds collide with illuminated buildings, thinking them to be daytime sky. The leaf-fall and flowering patterns of trees - reflexes controlled by perceptions of day length - are disrupted. Glow-worm numbers are declining because their pilot lights, the means by which they attract mates, are no longer bright enough to be visible at night.

By the time I reached the mountains, it was late afternoon. The snow-line was regular at 1,000 feet, dividing the world into grey and white, lower and upper. It was clear from the mood of the sky that another big fall was coming. Dark clouds had started to hood the earth from the east, and the brown burnt light of imminent snow was tinting the air. Scatters of thin sleet were falling. My cheeks and nose buzzed with the cold.

The path to the upper ground switchbacked from the lake shore through tall oak woods. Old coarse snow lay in rows between the trees, and in rings around their bases. Where I brushed against branches and leaves, snow spilled on to me like sugar. I met three other people, all of whom were descending. On each occasion we spoke briefly, acknowledged the extraordinariness of the land in this weather, and went our ways.

After half an hour, I reached the wide valley that holds Bleaberry Tarn, and behind which rises the line of peaks including Red Pike, High Stile and High Crag. Looking to my east and north, all I could see were white mountains. Distant snowfields, on mountains whose names I did not know, gave off bright concussions of late light. The wind was cold, and blowing into me. It was already so strong that I had to lean into it at a five-degree vaudeville tilt.

Above the hanging valley, the path was thick with hard compacted snow, its stones grouted with ice. To the right of the path, I noticed an irregular trail of tiny red crooked poles, an inch high at most, standing out from the snow like stalagmites. Two days previously, when the snow first fell, someone must have dripped blood as they walked, and the blood had frozen as it trickled down into the snow. Since then, a steady wind had chafed away the loose snow, so that what remained standing were the poles, each one a drip of blood.