Feral

by George Monbiot

  This image can then become lodged in our memories, and we treat it as if it were as concrete and definitive as a photograph in an album. If we are focused on a cat and not on its surroundings, it could be that the process of singling out the beast magnifies it and shrinks the setting.

  I wonder, too, whether there might be a kind of template in our minds in the form of a big cat. As these were once our ancestors’ foremost predators,*1 we have a powerful evolutionary interest in recognizing them before the conscious mind can process and interpret the image. It could be possible that anything which vaguely fits the template triggers the big cat alarm: we lose little by seeing cats which do not exist, but lose a lot by failing to see those which do.

  But none of this explains why big cat sightings appear to have become much more common in recent years. The phenomenon is not confined to Britain, though it appears to be particularly widespread here; there have also been plenty of unlikely sightings in other parts of Europe, in Australia and in areas of North America that long ago lost their cougars and jaguars. Feral domestic cats have lived in the British countryside for centuries, and there is no reason to suppose, and no evidence that I have seen, that a higher proportion of them are now black. It could be, with the decline of gamekeeping, that their population has risen, but that must be offset against the fact that we spend less time outdoors; it seems unlikely that this outbreak of catatonia can be explained by a rising number of encounters with moggies.

  Certain paranormal phenomena afflict every society, and these phenomena appear to reflect our desires; desires of which we may not be fully conscious. In Victorian Britain, large numbers of people believed that the dead were appearing to them and communicating with them. They saw ghosts, heard voices and imagined they could exchange messages with the departed through séances and table-turning. The Victorians were obsessed by death. Walk around any ancient graveyard and you will read the tragic story of that era: children and spouses snatched away, sometimes, in the epidemics that raged through the crowded cities, within days of each other. Ours was a nation in perpetual mourning. The notion that the dead could return in this life must have been almost as comforting as the belief that we would be reunited with them in the afterlife. Today reports of contact with the dead are less prevalent.

  As the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union gripped the world’s imagination, sightings of UFOs and aliens, almost unknown in previous eras, multiplied. This was a period in which we entertained great hopes for the transformative potential of technology, in which large numbers of people fantasized about living on other planets and travelling across galaxies and through time. It was also an epoch in which the world was shrinking, and we were becoming aware that the age of terrestrial exploration and encounters with peoples unknown to us was ending; that planet earth was perhaps a less exciting and more certain place than it had been hitherto. Aliens and their craft filled a gap, tantalizing us with the possibility that encounters with unknown cultures could continue, while promising that we too would achieve the mastery of technology and physics we ascribed to extraterrestrials. Today, perhaps because our belief in technological deliverance has declined, we hear less about UFOs.

  Could it be that illusory big cats also answer an unmet need? As our lives have become tamer and more predictable, as the abundance and diversity of nature have declined, as our physical challenges have diminished to the point at which the greatest trial of strength and ingenuity we face is opening a badly designed packet of nuts, could these imaginary creatures have brought us something we miss?

  Perhaps the beasts many people now believe are lurking in the dark corners of the land inject into our lives a thrill that can otherwise be delivered only by artificial means. Perhaps they reawaken old genetic memories of conflict and survival, memories which must incorporate encounters–possibly the most challenging encounters our ancestors faced–with large predatory cats. They hint at an unexpressed wish for lives wilder and fiercer than those we now lead. Our desires stare back at us, yellow-eyed and snarling, from the thickets of the mind.

  I suppose and I generalize, of course, but the reification of our inner big cats is not the only phenomenon which hints at such yearnings. Consider the widespread and otherwise inexplicable response to the death of Raoul Moat. In 2010, Moat was discharged from Durham Prison after serving a sentence for beating up a child. Armed with a sawn-off shotgun and prompted perhaps by ‘roid rage’–the explosive, irrational anger experienced by body builders who take steroids–he set out to settle imagined scores with his former girlfriend and the police. He shot his ex-partner in the stomach and killed her boyfriend, then blinded a policeman by blasting him in the face.

  Officers from eight police forces mobilized to capture him, but he evaded them for almost a week, living rough, sleeping in drains and abandoned buildings. At the height of the search, 10 per cent of all the available duty officers in England and Wales were deployed to hunt him. Parts of Northumberland were evacuated. When at last he was cornered, the stand-off lasted for six hours, before Moat shot himself in the head.

  He was, in other words, an unlikely hero: child-beater, murderer, mutilator of unarmed people. Yet, long after his death, paeans to Moat are still appearing on Facebook pages.*2 Here is a small sample.

  R.I.P Sir Raoul Thomas Moat–A True Peoples Champion. Sir Raoul was murdered in cold blood by Northumbria police, anyone that knows the sound of a shotgun blast will know he didn’t kill himself. We will fight to get justice for you our brave fallen soldier.

  R.I.P Raoul You Were A Propa LEGEND! Ganna Be Missed Mate! Wish People Were Like You When Said Your Going To Do Something You Mean! STILL THINK YOU COULD HAVE WENT LONGER! R. I.P MATE ROCK HEAVEN LIKE YOU ROCK DOWN HERE! YOU TOTAL LEGEND

  A True Peoples Champion . . . It is sick the way our national treasure has been treated. R. I. P Sir Raoul Thomas Moat, gone but never forgotten.

  There are thousands of messages like these, posted by both sexes. Moat seems to have become a vehicle for urges to which we cannot afford to succumb. He is admired for his ability to evade capture, flitting like a wild beast through the brakes and coverts of Northumberland, outfoxing the hounds and helicopters deployed by the police. He had burst from his enclosure and gone feral, and in doing so he appears to have unleashed the desires of people who feel trapped in their lives. Several of the commentators lamenting this adulation for a killer used the same term. They complained that Moat had been ‘lionized’.16 This word carries more weight than the authors intended.

  6

  Greening the Desert

  When through the old oak forest I am gone,

  Let me not wander in a barren dream

  John Keats

  On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again

  All Hallows’ Eve. Nos Galan Gaeaf. Early frosts and still days had engineered a blazing autumn. The birches looked like a shower of gold coins. An occasional beech tree flamed against the pale ash leaves and the mauve-brown oaks. The sun was a pewter gleam behind the clouds, the air was almost still. There was a thickness to the day, as if it had been laid on with oil paint, or as if air and leaf and ground were the flesh of a single organism. The berries of the hawthorn exuded from the woods like specks of blood.

  Beside the track the dying willowherb had sprung white whiskers. Rills trickled through saxifrage and honeysuckle. Late caddis flies rose from the water and oared the thick air. From across the valley I heard an ancient sound, now rare in these hills: a farmer calling and whistling to his dogs. I left the path and stepped up into the last scrap of woodland before the desert began.

  The woods climbed a gentle slope. As I walked towards the light, sheep clattered away from me. I startled a jay and a great spotted woodpecker, which swooped off through the autumn trees with a long, high note. The forest floor had been scrubbed clean. Beneath the fallen leaves there was nothing but moss, sheep shit and mud. A single wood hedgehog mushroom had been turned over by the sheep, and showed its long fine
teeth. There were no leafy plants, no saplings, no tree younger than around a century, no understorey of any kind. Many of the oaks had fallen or were close to death. The old wood was dying on its feet. By eating all the seedlings that raised their heads, the sheep were killing it.

  The wood petered out into birches, bracken and the odd rowan tree, then into spongy pastures. As I walked up the bare hillside, I could see the mossy domes where trees had fallen: the burial mounds of what had until recently been a larger forest. I hacked through bracken and yellow grass and over anthills covered in red moss. The bracken soon gave way to moorgrass, now greying after the sharp frosts. The last of the waxcap and Inocybe mushrooms had flopped over on their stems.

  I climbed to the top of a small hill. To my east was Bryn Brith, the speckled hill, whose name suggests that it lost its trees long ago. The yellow grass was still mottled with patches of blue-green gorse. Beyond it were the long blurred slopes of the hills surrounding Pumlumon, the highest mountain on the plateau, grey-brown and treeless. To the south, the hills graded from yellow to green to blue as they stepped away, deep into Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire. Beyond them I could glimpse a grey blur of sea.

  Though I could see for many miles, apart from distant plantations of Sitka spruce and an occasional scrubby hawthorn or oak clinging to a steep valley, across that whole, huge view, there were no trees. The land had been flayed. The fur had been peeled off, and every contoured muscle and nub of bone was exposed. Some people claim to love this landscape. I find it dismal, dismaying. I spun round, trying to find a place that would draw me, feeling as a cat would feel here, exposed, sat upon by wind and sky, craving a sheltered spot. I began to walk towards the only features on the map that might punctuate the scene: a cluster of reservoirs and plantations.

  Out of the woods, the day felt colder. It had seemed still among the trees. Here there was a cutting, damp wind. I followed a path that took me along the line of a fallen drystone wall, now replaced with posts and wire. No bird started up–not even a crow or a pipit. There were neither fieldfares nor redwings, larks nor lapwings. With the exception of the chemical monocultures of East Anglia, I have never seen a British landscape as devoid of life as the plateau some local people call the Cambrian Desert. In most places the nibbled sward over which I walked contained just two species of flowering plant, the two that sheep prefer not to eat: purple moorgrass and a small plant with jagged leaves and yellow flowers called tormentil.

  I followed the Bwlch-y-maen–rocky hollow–trail over bare hills and down bare valleys until it brought me to a point overlooking a wide basin, cradling a small reservoir called Llyn Craig-y-pistyll. I sat on a rock and felt myself slumping into depression. The grass of the basin was already dressed in its winter colours. There were no tints but grey, brown and black: grey water, cardboard-coloured grass, a black crown of Sitka spruce on the far hills. The occasional black scar of a farm track relieved rather than spoilt the view. My map told me that if I walked for the rest of that day and all the next, nothing would change: the plateau remained treeless but for an occasional cluster of sallow or birch, and the grim palisades of planted spruce.

  As I glared at the view, the weather front passed in a litter of cloudlets and the sun broke through. Far from enlivening the scene, it brought the bleakness into sharper focus. Now I could see the grey wall of the spruce trunks and the green battlements that surmounted them. The emptiness appeared to expand in the sunlight. I trudged down to the lake. Five Canada geese sat on the far bank, the first birds I had seen since leaving the woods, two hours earlier. They waddled into the water when they saw me, and floated away, grunting softly. Sheep scoured the far bank.

  The water was surprisingly low for autumn, exposing the shaley rubble of the banks and the black mud of the reservoir floor, rutted with sheep tracks. I sat by the water and ate my lunch. From where I sat, the tops of the spruce trees looked like an approaching army edging over the hill, pikes raised. I realized that, though this was a Sunday, I had not seen a soul. I leant against the exposed bank of the reservoir, mentally dressing the land, picturing what might once have lived there, what could live there again. Then I rose, stumbled up the hill and ran back along the track. When I returned to the glowing hearth of the ruined wood, with its occasional bird calls, I almost wept with relief.

  The Cambrian Mountains cover some 460 square miles, from Machynlleth in the north to Llandovery in the south, Tregaron in the west to Rhayader in the east. They are almost uninhabited, almost unvisited: two friends of mine once walked across them for six days without seeing another person. They begin 300 yards from my home. I see them from my kitchen window, rising through fridd*1 and birch woods to a bare skyline.

  Before I moved to Wales, I lived for several years in a densely peopled quarter of a city. Whenever I heard the wild cry of gulls, and looked up to see them crossing the narrow strip of sky, I felt a small tear in the cloth of my life elongate a little more. At those moments I knew that I was in the wrong place. Where they were going, I wanted to be.†2

  When I arrived in Wales, and found myself living between two of the least-inhabited places in Britain–the Cambrians on one side of my valley, Snowdonia on the other–I felt almost overwhelmed by choice. Like a battery chicken released from its cage, at first I ventured into the mountains tentatively, not quite believing that I could step out of my front door and walk where I would for as far as I wanted, and seldom encounter a road or a house.

  But as I began to explore these great expanses, often walking all day over the hills, my wonder and excitement soon gave way to disappointment; the disappointment gave way to despair. The near-absence of human life, I found, was matched by a near-absence of wildlife. The fragmented ecosystems in the city from which I had come were richer in life, richer in structure, richer in interest. In mid-Wales, I found, the woods were scarce and, in most cases, dying, as they possessed no understorey. The range of flowering plants on the open land was pitiful. Birds of any kind were rare, often only crows. Insects were scarcely to be seen. I have walked these mountains for five years now, and with the exception of a few small corners, found no point of engagement with them. Whenever I venture into the Cambrian Desert I almost lose the will to live. It looks like a land in perpetual winter.

  It is seen as disloyal, especially in this patriotic nation, to talk the landscape down. Some people say they find it beautiful. The Cambrian Mountains Society celebrates its emptiness. It describes the region as a ‘largely unspoiled landscape’,1 and approvingly quotes the author Graham Uney, who claims, ‘there is nothing in Wales to compare to the wilderness and sense of utter solitude that surrounds these vast empty moorlands’.2 To which I say, thank God. What he extols as wild, I see as bleak and broken. To me these treeless, mown mountains look like the set of a post-apocalyptic film. Their paucity of birds and other wildlife creates the impression that the land has been poisoned. Their emptiness appals me. But I also recognize that it is a remarkable achievement.

  For the Cambrian Mountains were once densely forested. The story of what happened to them and–at differing rates–to the uplands of much of Europe is told by a fine-grained pollen core taken from another range of Welsh hills, the Clwydians, some forty miles to the north.3 A pollen core is a tube of soil extracted from a place where sediments have been laid down steadily for a long period, ideally a lake or a bog in which layers of peat have accumulated. Each layer traps the pollen that rains unseen onto the earth, as well as the carbon particles which allow archaeologists to date it.

  The Clwydian core was taken in 2007 from a mire in which peat has settled for the past 8,000 years. At the beginning of the sequence, the plant life was still affected by the cold, dry conditions following the retreat of the ice. Trees–hazel, oak, alder, willow, pine and birch–accounted for about 30 per cent of the pollen in that layer, grass for much of the rest. As the weather became wetter and warmer, elm, lime and ash trees started to move in. The woods became deeper and darker. By 4,500 years ago, trees p
roduced over 70 per cent of the pollen in the sample. Heather pollen, by contrast, supplied around 5 per cent.4

  Farmers began to colonize the hills in the Neolithic period (between 6,000 and 4,000 years ago). Over the millennia, they gradually cleared some of the land for crops, ran their sheep and cattle on the hills and burnt the remaining trees. The clearing and burning and grazing stripped the fertility of the soil, encouraging heather–which thrives on poor land–to grow. Until some 1,300 years ago the peat still contained pollen from most of the trees of the ancient wildwood. The ash and elm disappeared from the sequence soon afterwards, then the lime and pine, then–but for a few relict stands–the other species.

  As the trees retreated, the heather pollen began to rise. The pollen core marks a brief recovery of forest during the plague and economic collapse of the fourteenth century, and the turmoil caused by Glyndŵr’s revolt in the fifteenth century. But the regeneration did not last long. By 1900 the proportions of 1,000 years before had been inverted: trees supplied just 10 per cent of the pollen in the core, heather 60 per cent. The forest had been replaced by heath. Over much of the British uplands today, particularly the Cambrian Mountains, the heath has now given way to grass.

  Heather took longer to dominate the Clwydian Hills, where the soil is relatively fertile, than most of the uplands of Britain. Where the soil was thinner, it became the dominant vegetation as early as the Bronze Age, between 4,000 and 2,700 years ago. I think of the Bronze Age as the period in which the hills turned bronze.

  This record, and similar evidence from the rest of the country, shows us several things. It shows that the open landscapes of upland Britain, the heaths and moors and blanket bogs, the rough grassland and bare rock which many people see as the natural state of the hills, which feature in a thousand romantic films and a thousand advertisements for clothes and cars and mineral water, are the result of human activity, mostly the grazing of sheep and cattle. It shows that grazing and cultivation have depleted the soil. It shows that when grazing pressure eases, trees can return.