The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence

by Neil Ansell

  It is the sheer finality of needless extinction that makes it so heartbreaking. With all the other threats that we have inflicted on the world, such as deforestation, air pollution, ocean acidification, overpopulation, melting ice caps, retreating glaciers, there is still some faint hope that we may be able to change our ways enough to hold back the tide, to halt the decline of the earth or even reverse it. But each extinction is a light going out that can never be switched on again, and impoverishes us all.

  I walked on through the wet woods of Sunart. There is a recommended trail that follows a loop through the woods; the signs even suggest following the circuit anticlockwise rather than clockwise. I assume it is for aesthetic reasons and this route will pass through young growth, through areas of natural regeneration at the forest edge, through to the heart of the mature forest in a natural progression. I decided to break off and follow a smaller footpath that led up to the trackless moor of the hills above the woods. It is not that I wanted to avoid the crowds – there was no one else here – but where possible I like to break my own path, find my own route. I seem to have a terrible habit of losing a trail anyway. Perhaps I spend too much time watching the birds, and not enough time looking at where I am going. Perhaps there is a secret part of me that wants to be lost, that wants me to feel that I am living in a world where being utterly lost is still a possibility.

  Being alone in the natural world feels like my default setting. On my own, my relationship with the world feels purer, unmediated by social considerations. I imagine that most people’s biographies would contain the history of their relationship with others, and that periods of solitude would be intermissions, gaps of no account in the story of their lives. I feel my own story is that of all the times I have spent alone. Time with others is an interruption to the essence of who I am, the story of a man alone, a tale of solitude. In all the years I spent in the mountains of Wales, I had regular, if occasional, visits from friends and lovers, but these visits felt anomalous. What stands out most in my mind from all those years, is my long solitary walks in the hills, the long weeks when every night was spent sitting alone in front of a log fire, in silence, seeing no one.

  Yet there have been times in my life when I surrounded myself with people. I spent many years living and working among rough sleepers, and among drug users and street drinkers, the dispossessed, and I also spent time among refugees and Gypsies; outsiders, one and all, whether by choice or by the forces of history. I like to think that I have empathy to spare, that I am open to everyone, that I will treat all people with equal respect. Empathy is not a zero sum game; caring about nature does not mean you care less about other people. It is more a matter of self-sufficiency. It is not that I do not care for other people, but rather that I do not depend on having others around me in order to feel whole.

  I am sure there are many others who feel this way, people who would rather climb a mountain alone than as part of an expedition, people who feel that the many pleasures of company are optional extras, people who do not feel lonely when they are alone, people who do not think time spent in solitude is time wasted. Even during the more sociable periods of my life, it has always felt as though my natural condition, the state I know I will return to, is one in which I am out, alone, exploring the wilds and immersing myself in nature.

  It has been this way for me since childhood. Not for me the football field or the youth club. I was the sort of child who, when free time allowed, was out straight after breakfast, and back when it got dark. We lived on the south coast of England. Hovering over the city of Portsmouth is a low ridge of chalk downland called Portsdown Hill, an outlier of the South Downs. From our home we could look out over the city, sandwiched between Portsmouth Harbour and Langstone Harbour, and across the Solent to the Isle of Wight. I would wander the hill, rich with the wild flowers of the chalklands – nitrogen-fixing plants like the trefoils and vetches – and orchids too; vast congregations of pyramidal and spotted orchids, and sometimes a rare gem like a bee orchid. In my memory it is always sunny on these walks; perhaps because they were almost a daily feature of the long summer holidays. There were butterflies too, everywhere the little jewels that are the common blue butterfly, and six-spot burnet moths, with crimson patches on their metallic greenish-black wings. I would search out their chrysalides in the long grass, take them home and watch while they emerged, then set them free having watched their transformation. I would follow the fox trails through almost impenetrably dense patches of prickly blackthorn, tracking the foxes back to their earths. I would watch the kestrels on their nest on a nearby chalk cliff. I would follow the banks of chalk streams through farmers’ fields until they led me to little hidden copses.

  As I grew the walks became longer and longer and I ventured as far as the day was long. I remember one scorching summer’s day, with corn buntings singing their scratchy song from the top of every telegraph pole as I headed down the lanes at the back of the hill. I wonder if the corn buntings are there still. I doubt it, for they are one of the prime examples of the calamitous decline of our farmland birds that has taken place in the course of a single human generation. In the long grasses at the foot of a field-side hedge I came upon the nest of a harvest mouse. It was the size of a tennis ball, and would probably have bounced like one, it was so tightly woven. It was presently unoccupied, for the breeding season was over, and I could not resist the temptation to disentangle it from the thin stems of grass that supported it and take it home as a precious keepsake. Its entrance hole was tiny, the size of a finger, and I felt inside. For the lining, they had selected only the finest grasses, cut into short lengths, and it was soft as cotton wool in there.

  I paused at a stream through a little wood, checked a place I knew, a muddy crossing, and found the slots of roe deer, the pads of fox and badger. Far out in the lanes, the stream crossed the narrow road in a ford, and there was a little low footbridge that must have seldom seen any foot-traffic. The day was hot and still, so that the air wavered with sunlight. I paused and leaned on the rail of the bridge and watched the clear weedy water beneath. Something was nosing through the water towards me, with a mouthful of long bents of grass. It delivered them to a second water vole that sat on its haunches at the water’s edge just below me, on a flat muddy beach, well trodden, behind which was their burrow. The first vole delivered its load and set off for more, while the other took the grass in its paws and dexterously chopped it up into short lengths which it carefully placed in a neat pile at its side. The animals seemed completely unconcerned by my presence and I must have watched them for an hour. It was idyllic; the lazy buzzing air of a sun-filled afternoon, the grassy scent of a summer’s day, the clear water drifting beneath my feet, the quiet industry of these beautiful little animals. It felt timeless.

  It was a couple of weeks before I had the chance to go back in the hope of seeing them again, and I could see before I got there that something terrible had happened. The stream-side trees had been hacked down to stumps, and the stream ground out with a bulldozer to make a muddy ditch. The voles would be gone for good. It would be decades before I saw another water vole, and that would be in a reserve, where the animals had been reintroduced and fenced in to protect them from the depredations of predatory feral mink. I was with my children, and I led them hopefully around the boardwalk through the reed beds until we finally caught a glimpse of one nose-up in the water like a miniature beaver. It meant nothing much to my kids, of course, but for me it was hugely evocative of my own lost childhood.

  It must sound as though I spend my walking time dwelling on the past, but this is not the case at all. Occasionally I may see something that sparks a brief recollection, but most of the time I am looking outward, not inward, open to the world around me and its sensory experiences; this walk itself was about the colour of the autumn leaves, the scent of a fern, the texture of lichen between my fingers, the feel of the rain on my skin. It is just that when I come to reflect on the walk that
I have taken then I cannot help but delve further, deeper. This is the person who is walking; I carry all these memories and experiences within me. We are all built from a shaky edifice of memories. I may choose to travel empty-handed, but I have a full stuffed backpack of life that comes with me wherever I may go. Most of the time it is buckled up tight, but as I write it is as though I have chosen to sit on some mossy stump and start to unpack, pulling things out one by one and examining them. And as I turn each thought, each memory, between my fingers, I ask myself, what is this thing? What is it doing in my baggage? Why do I carry it with me, always, rather than having just discarded it along the way?

  The path led out of the woods and through a gate in a deer fence onto the open moor. The rain was getting heavier and the hilltops were completely obscured by lowering clouds. Everything was sere and russet, burnt-looking, with the rain in the air making it look as though the hillside was still smoking. Waterfalls tumbled down the hillside in narrow ravines jammed with boulders and fringed by precariously poised trees. As I climbed my route was boggy and trackless; if there had been a trail I lost it almost at once. My feet sank ankle-deep between tussocks of moor-grasses and heathers, until my walking boots became useless and I sloshed as I walked. I was soaked through; drookit, as the Scots would have it. They have some fine words for all manner of wet weather.

  The old mine workings spread across the mountainside in a chain, all at the same level, following the contour lines around the slopes. It was a place where two geological formations rubbed up against each other; granite to the south and gneiss to the north. In the shear zone where these two eras met, lead ores had gathered, and were first worked at the beginning of the 1700s. More recently, just thirty years ago, one of the mines was reopened and worked for barites, which had some inscrutable use in the drilling for oil at offshore oil rigs. Amongst the lead ore was found a weird profusion of crystals, not just barites, but strontianites, calcites, brewsterites, harmotomes, sphalerites, and many more. The element strontium was first identified here, isolated by Humphry Davy. There cannot be many places that have their name memorialised in the periodic table.

  It had been my intention to explore the old mine workings, but time and the weather were against me, and I could see myself navigating my way around flooded potholes as darkness fell, so I decided to descend and head back through the woods. From up here I could see the full extent of the forest spread across the valley beneath me in its autumn glory, promising some little shelter from the rain that was battering against my face here on the mountain.

  It had been a day’s walk that was almost bereft of birds and animals. This is not particularly unusual, for even on a good day of wildlife watching there may be long waits where there is nothing much to be seen. It is what it is, and I know better than to expect otherwise. And yet the day’s empty skies cannot help but remind me of a greater emptiness. With everything I see I am aware of a certain sadness as well as the joy of discovery, a kind of nostalgia. For I am watching a natural world that is already halfway lost, and is disappearing before our eyes. A veil of silence is falling over the earth.

  The Singing Sands

  The inevitable consequence of having a fixed base was that I could not just wander freely and stop for the night wherever I found myself. I determined that I would remedy this when the time of year allowed, but for now I would have to plan my days to include only return journeys or circular walks at best. I could at least extend my reach by hitch-hiking. Not so many people seem to hitch these days, it seems to have fallen out of favour. Perhaps these are more suspicious times, and as people have become more and more reluctant to engage with strangers, the waits for lifts have become progressively longer and longer until hitch-hiking no longer seems a viable way of getting about. But I figured it wasn’t unreasonable here, where if you had no car you had no other choice, for there was only one bus a day that worked these roads.

  I consider myself a good hitch-hiker in that I have what I believe to be the right attitude for it; a kind of fatalism. I am patient and I know the pitfalls, having hitched on five continents. As with watching wildlife, I travel without fixed expectations, with no deadlines. Of course it can be frustrating if I have a particularly long wait and find myself nowhere as darkness is falling. But there is absolutely nothing I can do about it; I have placed my fate in the hands of others. I have known many people who found hitching unbearably frustrating, such that it sent them into a rage. I try to avoid hitching with people who feel entitled to a lift, for it is unsettling to be trying to calmly surrender yourself to fate when you have a travelling companion who is steadily working themselves into a state of apoplexy.

  For the truth is, to my eyes, that there is absolutely no reason why someone should stop for me. There could be any number of issues that lead people to pass me by; for all I know they might be about to turn off a hundred yards up the road. I do not find myself throwing curses at the receding tail lights of the cars that have not stopped, for I have expected nothing else. I am pleasantly surprised when someone actually does stop. Someone always comes in the end; of course they do. And I’ve met some great people hitching; a self-selecting group of the kind of people who are willing to go out of their way to help a complete stranger.

  The longest wait I ever had was a little over twenty-four hours. This was in Australia, trying to get from the west to the east across the Nullarbor Plain. This dead centre of Australia is sometimes thought of as a desert, but it is more featureless than that; a seemingly endless flat plain studded with low scrub and no discernible distinguishing features. It stretches on for a thousand miles and more. I imagine if you lived here long enough the smallest variations in the topography and the quality of the scrub would begin to make it a place of beauty, a place of wonders. I was standing beside a sign that stated that it was two thousand kilometres to Adelaide. There was nowhere else I could be going really; there were no turn-offs, almost no places to stop over, just a long straight road with a service station every hundred kilometres or so, and the occasional wedge-tailed eagle scraping dead roos off the roadside. For animals that had so many hundreds of square miles to roam free in, the kangaroos seemed to have an uncanny propensity to hover at the roadside, ready to leap into the path of the occasional passing truck. You would think that the place was getting them down.

  I knew it could be a long wait. I was asking someone to commit themselves to my company for the next twenty or thirty hours, and that is a big ask. But I was in no rush; my only plan was to get to South Australia in time for the start of the fruit-picking season. There was a roadhouse opposite where I could get water and sustenance if I required, and there was a little grove of gum trees where I could hide away with my sleeping bag if it turned into an overnighter.

  That evening there was a sudden desert storm that seemingly came out of nowhere, a blast of icy air of tremendous power that carried driving rain. I ran at once for the shelter of the roadhouse. I say ran but I was buckled down, struggling to keep my feet. The wind tore up an isolated gum tree from its roots and sent it sailing through the air until it ripped through an overhead power line. I stopped in my tracks and watched; I had never seen anything like it in my life. By the time I reached the roadhouse and blew in through their door, they were already lighting their hurricane lamps.

  I had decided now to visit the singing sands on the north coast of the Ardnamurchan peninsula. It would have been just about possible for me to walk there in a day, or to walk back, but not both. I was going there on a recommendation; people in the village had told me it was a place not to be missed. To be fair, I had only spoken to two people in the village, but both had urged me to see the place, and two out of two starts to feel like a consensus. Had it been summer this would probably have been enough to put me off, to the point where I would probably have crossed it off my mental list and headed in the opposite direction, but a beach in winter is a different proposition.

  I set off from the vi
llage walking and hitching, and found a lift almost at once. My driver was only going a relatively short distance, but he too seemed keen that I should see the singing sands, and as we were chatting amiably, mostly about otters, at the point where he would have turned off he decided that he would drive me all the way there, or at least as far as the roads would take us. We drove along the shore of Loch Sunart as far as Salen, where Ardnamurchan proper begins, then north across the peninsula through Acharacle, at the edge of Loch Shiel, and then we turned off the main road and onto narrow lanes that led across Kentra Moss. This big flat expanse is a raised blanket bog, a rare habitat indeed, bleak and otherworldly. Finally the road petered out at a locked gate behind which was a shaky-looking bridge over a wide shallow river that sprawled out as it reached the sea. This was as far as we could go by car. I asked my new friend if he would care to join me on the day’s walk; in my estimation he had at least tripled the length of his journey for my benefit. But he had an appointment, so he handed me a business card and headed off, and I was on my own again.