The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence
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Copyright © 2018 Neil Ansell
The right of Neil Ansell to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook in 2018 by Tinder Press
An imprint of Headline Publishing Group
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
Ebook conversion by Avon DataSet Ltd, Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire
eISBN: 978 1 4722 4713 1
Cover illustration combines image © Only Background, alex74, USBFCO, Eugenock and Nicolas Primola, all at Shutterstock
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Contents
Title Page
About the Author
Also by Neil Ansell
About the Book
Acknowledgements
PREFACE The Rough Bounds
NOVEMBER Still Waters
The Land of the Lost
The Singing Sands
MARCH–APRIL The Crossing
The Promise of Rain
MAY Silent Spring
The Point and the Sound
SEPTEMBER The Kingdom of Crows
Night Music
OCTOBER Autumnsong
Wild Heart
Last Call
About the Author
Neil Ansell was an award winning television journalist with the BBC and a long standing writer for the broadsheets. He is the author of two previous books, Deep Country and Deer Island, and has contributed to nature programmes and wildlife documentaries though his main focus was news and current affairs. He has two daughters and lives in Brighton.
Also by Neil Ansell
Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills
Deer Island
About the Book
Neil Ansell first visited the Rough Bounds, in the Northwest Highlands of Scotland, decades ago when he was just twenty; it was the wildest landscape he’d ever seen, and was the beginning of years of travel, seeking out the world’s wild places. In this mesmerising book, he journeys to the area again, five times over the course of a year, exploring the nature of solitary travel and what effects the seasons can have on a specific place and on a person.
As a counterpoint, Ansell also writes of the changes in the landscape, and how his gradual loss of hearing affects his relationship with nature as the calls of the birds he knows so well become silent to him.
THE LAST WILDERNESS is a hauntingly beautiful memoir on solitary walking within the natural world, and an intriguing exploration of memory, desire and the weathering of time.
Acknowledgements
My thanks always are due to my agent, Jessica Woollard at David Higham Associates. Without you, I suspect I might not have a career, or not this one, at any rate.
My appreciation also to my editor, Imogen Taylor, who helped make this book’s slow march from idea to reality such a smooth and enjoyable process, and to Amy Perkins and the rest of the team at The Tinder Press and at Headline. Writing may be a solitary affair, but producing a book is a team effort, involving many people whose names I don’t know doing jobs that I don’t understand, and they seldom get the recognition they deserve.
During my travels in Scotland I crossed paths, sometimes literally, with many people, some of whom found a brief mention in this book. I have also at times referred glancingly to my companions on those earlier journeys that I have recollected in these pages. If I have not done you justice, I hope you will accept that it is not because I think your stories are not worth telling, but rather out of discretion, and feeling that your own stories are not really mine to tell. My thanks to you all.
To my mother Jean, my first and least critical reader, my eternal thanks for a lifetime of support and encouragement, and to my daughters Kaya and Anya, my thanks for putting up with my occasional absences and the distractedness that sometimes comes from being lost in words, and for generally making life fun.
PREFACE
The Rough Bounds
The Rough Bounds of Lochaber, Na Garbh Chriochan, form a part of the North-West Highlands of Scotland so named for their remoteness and inaccessibility, their sense of being a place apart. On this far western shore rugged peninsulas reach out into the Atlantic like the fingers of an outstretched hand, each one pointing out to the islands. They are indented by long deep sea-lochs and cut off from the mainland by a chain of bare snow-capped mountains. Knoydart, the largest and northernmost of these peninsulas, the thumb of this supplicant hand, is notorious for having no road access whatsoever and has been dubbed Britain’s last great wilderness, though this is to draw a veil over its long history of settlement by crofters, of emigration, of forced clearances. Yet in a world where the air that we breathe and the waters that surround us are all contaminated by our activities, nowhere is untouched, and wildness is relative. A place can only appear to be less touched than others.
My first visit to the area was a lifetime ago, and when I first came to the Highlands it was the wildest landscape I had ever seen. This was the beginning, for me, of years of travel, and in particular of seeking out the world’s wild places, whether that be the frozen wastes beyond the Arctic Circle or the sand dunes of the Sahara, climbing mountains to where rivers first sprang from the foot of a crumbling glacier or gazing down into the molten heart of an active volcano.
There were occasions when I travelled with a companion, but as time went on I became more and more drawn to life as a solitary wanderer, and the freedom to follow my whims without discussion or compromise. It sometimes feels that I am designed for solitude. I don’t believe myself to be in any way antisocial, it is just that company has become something that I feel I can manage perfectly well without. The truth is that when I am on my own I never seem to feel I’m missing anything; I’m at ease with my own company. It’s not only for psychological reasons that I consider myself particularly suited for life as something of a loner, but for practical reasons also. I have been deaf in one ear since infancy, and the hearing in what I call my ‘good’ ear is severely compromised too, and is rapidly deteriorating. It has left me feeling semi-detached, as if everyone else is away in another room, beyond a wall of silence.
I wonder sometimes just how much this might have affected my life choices. It was never quite severe enough for me to be sent to a special school where I could learn sign language and keep company with others with hearing difficulties. Rather, I was left to struggle on as best I could in regular school. In a one-to-one situation I manage pretty well; I position myself carefully, I hear a bit, lip-read a bit, and guess a bit, and I have had a lifetime’s practice at muddling along this way, so that oftentimes people I meet will never even guess that I am basically winging it. But put me in a group of people, all talking, or in an environment where there is a background noise, and I am quickly lost, and will soon find myself drifting off to the periphery, into a private silence. Perhaps this has been why I have always been drawn
to solitary activities since early childhood, my head in a book or alone on a country walk, indulging my fascination for the natural world. Or indeed, becoming a writer, where I can communicate by means of the written word rather than conversation. It is simply easier that way, free of the frustrations of having to engage socially. It makes me feel a little apart from things, my head in a box, with everything muffled and dreamlike; a keen observer rather than a participant. It sometimes feels that I am only loosely tethered to the world.
After years of travel and rootlessness, I settled in the mountains of mid-Wales, living alone in a cottage with no services whatsoever, growing my own food, foraging, and watching the birds. My world reduced to contain only what was in daily walking distance. And so, after five years of roaming, I spent five years learning how to stay still. Each of these two ways of seeing the world – the restless and the rooted – has its own unique virtues. When I am on the move, and seeing things for the first time, the shock of the new gives me an intensity of experience, a sudden depth of focus that will perhaps never be replicated. When I stay in one place I become gradually aware of how things are more subtle and complex than they first appeared, of how malleable and mutable is the world, of how it fluxes and changes with the seasons and the passage of time.
My life in more recent years has been on the face of it more conventional; living in a flat by the sea with my two daughters, and writing about the world as much as living in it. When I was a young man, my travels were freewheeling, open-ended. I would take to the road with no particular destination in mind, seeking work where I could find it, and might not return for weeks, or months, or even years. This is no longer possible for me; not since having children. I have no complaints, for it is part of the contract you make when you choose to become a parent; you accept that your life is no longer entirely your own. Now my children are growing up, I can begin to feel my horizons opening up once again. I have obligations, so I can’t just take off as I once would have, but with forethought I can at least dip a toe into the waters of freedom.
And so I came up with a plan. I wanted to achieve a synthesis between the intensity of the new that comes with first sight, and the depth that comes with familiarity, by choosing a place that was relatively accessible and returning again and again, in all weathers and in every season. Rather than looking back on the entire journey and creating a narrative out of it retrospectively, I liked the idea of writing up each leg of the journey, noting my observations, thoughts and reflections, before I embarked on the next leg. Part of the very essence of travel is uncertainty, not knowing where it will lead you next. Writing as I went would be more like the journey itself, more like life. Travel takes you to places that you could never have quite imagined, not in detail, not in their singularity, and it may also lead you to unexpected corners of your own self.
I chose these barely remembered hills of the Rough Bounds, because that is where it all began for me; it was my first experience of wilderness, or the appearance of it. I had always thought that I would return one day to get to know the place a little better, and I am running out of time. I pictured myself heading out into the most remote fastnesses of these far hills, camping alone and far from human habitation, and in doing so finding my own rough bounds, my own outer limits. It is a part of the story that I tell myself about who I am. I have an assumption that I shall once again find myself alone on a mountainside, and that to me, and to others who feel the same way, this is an essential part of what makes life worth living.
This book is based around five visits spread over the course of a year, each consisting of about a week of solitary walking and reflection. I had no planned route, and no final destination in mind. It will not serve as any kind of guidebook to the area, for it is partial and impressionistic, just a walk in the wilds, a meditation on nature and an exploration of memory and desire. This had seemed like a very modest ambition, a relaxed and manageable return to the wandering life for someone who had been to many of the wildest and most far-flung corners of the earth. Yet as the year wore on and I penetrated deeper and deeper into these wilds my health began to fail me, and it turned out to be far more of a physical and mental challenge than I had ever anticipated.
NOVEMBER
Still Waters
A heron was standing frozen at the water’s edge, gunmetal grey and steely-eyed, poised over the drifting kelp. There was a penetrating fine rain falling, hardly more than a mist, and all was still, as if paused. The hills across the loch, only a few hundred yards distant, were barely visible through the smirr, just a shadow of themselves. Though this was a sea-loch, a fjord by another name, here was twenty miles inland from the open ocean. There was no trace of a wave on its surface; the waters were so smooth and unmarked they seemed stretched, swollen like the skin of a balloon. It felt as though a single jab of the heron’s bill and the whole scene would burst apart.
If it had not been so profoundly calm I probably would not have noticed the unexpected ripple far out on the water. Though with no reference points it is hard to judge size and distance, I knew at once that it was an otter. A rising seal will tip its head back as if it is looking at the sky, while an otter will rest its head flat along the surface of the water. A seal will float vertically, an otter horizontally. It was in full hunting mode, diving and surfacing repeatedly. It did not just sink into the water; it would give a little leap to propel itself downward. First its head would rise, and then swivel downwards, and so it would coil itself into the water, its back the arc of a circle. Sometimes it would flick up its tail, so that this would point straight up for a moment before sinking inch by inch.
After a while of hunting offshore, it turned to face inland. Though I must have been perfectly visible, it was heading straight towards me, and straight towards the heron on the shore. I could see where this was going. About ten feet from the water’s edge, the otter took a final dive, and then a few seconds later popped its head up right at the heron’s feet. The heron burst into life. It took an alarmed step backwards, hooded its wings and lowered its bill menacingly. The otter turned and set off west along the waterline, rootling through the kelp leisurely but systematically. I doubt that an otter would seriously attempt to take on a heron, for they are powerful birds. It was just playing, just teasing. I imagined it having a little smirk on its face as it carried on about its business. The disgruntled heron stalked after it for a few paces, but keeping its distance. I watched the otter for the best part of a half-hour as it worked its way around the bay, keeping pace with it at a slow stroll. It seemed completely unconcerned by my presence.
I was pleased to have seen an otter, in part because seeing an otter is always going to be a good thing, and in part for reasons of vanity. I had told people back home that I was going otter-watching in the Highlands, and immediately regretted my mistake. Now, the pleasure I took would be tinged by relief at not going home empty-handed. I find it better to travel without expectation, without goals, so that I’m not setting myself up for disappointment, and can simply appreciate things for what they are.
Over the years, I have watched a lot of otters; mostly here in the Highlands, but also in Wales, and even in Asia, while taking a rowing boat out on Phewa Tal in Nepal. The lake has a backdrop of some of the highest mountains on earth; Annapurna and Dhaulagiri, and closest of all Machapuchare, the fish-tail mountain, a mountain that has never been climbed to the summit. It is a mountain of spectacular beauty, and it felt humbling and somehow comforting to be able to glance up and see a place on earth on which no foot has ever trodden. Far out across the lake I came upon a family party of six little otters, on and off the shore, in constant motion and all whickering and chittering as they went. These would have been the Asian small-clawed otter, a smaller and more sociable species than our own European otter, and the type which is most often seen in captivity. Otters talk to each other constantly, and yet I have never heard their most characteristic call, and I doubt now that I ever shall. Th
eir contact call is a high-pitched whistle – this is often how people first become aware of the presence of otters on their local river, by hearing them whistling in the dark – but I suspect that it is too high-pitched for me; that to me it is like a dog-whistle.
The loch was Loch Sunart in the North-West Highlands, which stretches east–west between the peninsulas of Morvern and Ardnamurchan, the tip of which is the westernmost point of mainland Britain. For my first journey, I had come off-season, at the very end of November, on the cusp of the change of seasons. I had arrived through snow, the first serious fall of the year’s end, and the tops were all snow-covered while here by the loch-side the oak woods were still in full leaf, in their autumn colours.
Loch Sunart is renowned for these oak woods that flank it for much of its length. This shoreside cover is perhaps one of the reasons why it is so good for otters, as well as all the streams that descend from the hills, for otters may love the sea for the bounty it brings, but they cannot survive without fresh water to wash the salt from their fur. When we think of the native woodlands of Scotland it is the Scots pine that comes first to mind, the remnants of the Caledonian forest, but these are native oak woods that have perhaps been here since the retreat of the glaciers that formed these lochs in the first place. These long lochs bring a milder, wetter, coastal climate deep into the hills. Our highest point, the summit of Ben Nevis, is only four miles from the sea; a short but steep walk will take you from a place where snow hardly ever falls up to arctic conditions where in a sheltered spot the snow may persist all summer. These western oak woods are actually a temperate rainforest. It may cause us something of a double-take, to realise that we have our own local rainforests, because we are so accustomed to thinking of rainforests as being the hot and steamy jungles of the tropics, but walking through these woods you can see it. The trunks of the trees and the boulders of the forest floor are often covered with a thick pelt of mosses, epiphytic polypody ferns hang from the boughs, and the jagged angles of the smaller branches and twigs are laced with a filigree of ash-coloured Usnea lichens, like a kind of alien foliage.