The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence

by Neil Ansell

  I left the loch-side and headed off into the hills. I found myself in a broad valley flanked with high rocky crags. It was a beautiful patchwork landscape. The valley was studded with rocky mounds on which grew dense copses of birch and sometimes a little oak, and there were small stands of Scots pine scattered in seemingly random clumps. On the higher, drier ground grew heather and moor-grass and emergent bracken, while on the lower, flatter ground were fields tufted with cotton-grass and little shrubs of scented bog-myrtle. The dense mats of sphagnum mosses at my feet were dotted with carnivorous plants, sundews and butterworts. As I walked across this skin of moss the ground sank and rippled beneath my feet, as if I was a pond-skater on its meniscus, walking on water. It was then that I discovered that one of my boots was leaking, badly. There was nothing I could do about it; I had no other shoes with me. For the next week I would be wet-footed whenever I was on the move, with one foot wet, one foot dry, and whenever stationary I would have one boot on and one boot off, and a sock hanging out to dry.

  I began to climb up the steep flank of the valley towards the crags above, twin domes of bare rock. In a band along the valley was a dense strip of birch woodland that I would have to penetrate. On the forest floor was a jumble of moss-covered boulders that I had to scramble up on hands and feet. There was a sudden commotion as a roe deer leapt up from the hollow where it had been sleeping, and its hooves clicked against the rocks as it raced away urgently, its white rump bobbing. A willow warbler sprang from my feet and flew up to perch on the nearest branch of birch, where it looked at me accusingly. Out of long habit I had mentally marked the spot from which it had emerged, rather than letting the bird distract me, and for all its camouflage I found the nest at once, a neat dome of grasses interwoven with fresh moss, tucked into a niche between the stones, with a side entrance facing outwards. Inside were five tiny pale eggs, the promise of new life, sprinkled with reddish-brown markings. Beneath the watery light of the thick canopy of birch leaves they looked tinged with the palest blue. It was tempting to pick one out and hold its warmth in the palm of my hand, but I touched nothing, for I knew that my scent might leave a trail that predators could follow.

  I emerged from the damp quietness of the wood onto the heathery hillside and climbed slowly up to the first of several small stands of Scots pine. As I reached the first I laid my hand against its trunk as if touching a talisman, and turned to look back. I had climbed a few hundred feet and the landscape had opened out. I could see over the tops to a chain of small lochans that in this sunshine were an astonishing ultramarine blue, a far deeper blue than the sky, and on the horizon I could see the jagged peaks of the Cuillins of Skye, still streaked in places with the last of the snow.

  I took a break beneath the pines to cool down from the climb; one boot off, of course. I feel at home among the pines; we have so much history. The Scots pine has a huge range, for all that it has a name in English that makes it sound like a local speciality. It grows all across northern Europe, and in mountains further south, it blankets Scandinavia up to above the Arctic Circle, and it reaches all across Russia as far as eastern Siberia, forming a significant part of the taiga, the largest expanse of woodland in the world, larger even than the Amazon rainforest. This was the tree that I planted out in my years in Sweden, where a million of their saplings passed through my hands. And when I finished work, these were the woods I walked through. When I looked out over the Baltic Sea from my home on the coast, there were thousands of tiny rocky islands, almost all uninhabited, which I could row out to, and each one was capped with a little fringe of Scots pines. When I lived in Wales, too, my cottage was high on a hillside beneath a plantation of them. As the years passed, I watched this wood grow from a dense, impenetrable thicket to a fine stand of mature trees, helped by me along the way, for I spent a year in there with my chainsaw, thinning it out to give it space to breathe.

  These relic woods in Scotland are thought to cover just one per cent of their original range. They cannot regenerate naturally; if mankind were suddenly to vanish completely from the Highlands they would still not grow back. There are simply too many deer, and since we killed the last of the wolves a few hundred years ago the red deer has no natural predators. Change one thing and you change everything, in a cascade of cause and effect. Attempts are being made in places to replant these native woods in areas of moorland protected by deer fences. A replanted wood will never be a wildwood, it will always be a simulacrum, yet it is being handled with care and thoughtfulness. Rather than just replanting bare patches of moorland, the existing fragments of pine wood are being allowed to expand into the hills around them. Eventually, perhaps, these last relics of the once great wood could begin to join together. It will not happen in my lifetime, but perhaps one day the forest will be reborn. The red deer will not mind; the irony is that they are by nature creatures of the forest, and have had to adapt to living on open ground.

  I finally reached the summit of the ridge and threw down my pack. The day was hot and I was overdressed. There was a steep drop beneath me, down to a small loch studded with islands, and the steepness of this hillside had perhaps protected it, for it was covered with a dense stand of pines. The loch looked incredibly inviting, and after a pause for breath I began to slither down the slopes, heading from tree trunk to tree trunk to slow my descent. At one point I came to a sheer drop, perhaps fifty feet of cliff, and I picked my way down carefully, handhold by handhold on the bare rock. Further down, the ground levelled off a little, and the pine wood had an understorey of young birch, and beneath that a ground layer that was carpeted with bluebells and primroses and violets. It was idyllic.

  Mostly the hillside fell straight into the waters of the loch, but there was a little bay in the lee of the nearest islands, and a tiny blanket-sized strip of sand, so that would be my beach. I am not a dedicated wild swimmer, in that I do not set out to a destination with the specific intent of taking a swim. I am more of an opportunist; if the right circumstances arise then I will take advantage of them. And this was the perfect opportunity; I was overheated from a stiff uphill walk, the sun was shining and I was in a perfect spot that I had all to myself. There was a little pine-topped island just fifty yards out that made a tempting destination. So I stripped off and waded into the shallows. The water was silky and not as cold as I had expected; I supposed that this loch was not so deep, and I was sure that the thousand-foot-deep Loch Morar would still be icy. I breast-stroked my way across to the little island and clambered up its rocky sides. An island of my own; it did cross my mind that I could pitch my tent here and make this my camp. The water was fairly shallow close to the shore, and I could probably just about have waded out to the island with my pack held above my head. But the island was rocky and beneath the pines was an undergrowth of three-foot-high scratchy heather. So instead I continued my swim, doing a little circuit of the bay.

  I am not a strong swimmer, and avoided going too far out. As a child I was never allowed to swim, because of the chronic ear infections that had plagued my early years and left my hearing so impaired. I did not finally teach myself to swim until I was twenty or so. I was trekking in the jungles of southern Mexico, close to the Mayan ruins of Palenque. It was so hot and humid that I was breaking out in prickly heat; dozens of tiny sweat bubbles beneath my skin, the first and only time I have ever suffered from this. I came to a stream through the jungle, which fell down a hillside in a series of waterfalls, beneath each of which was a swimming-hole of crystal-clear water, and without really thinking I jumped in and found that I could indeed swim, I just didn’t know it. From that point on, I swam at every opportunity, without ever becoming particularly proficient.

  A few years later, snorkelling off an island on the Great Barrier Reef, I became distracted by the incredible spectacle, the sheer profusion of corals and tropical fish, and noticed too late that the shore had become much further away than I had anticipated. And no matter how hard I swam back towards the shore, i
t became still further away; I had been caught by an undertow and was being steadily sucked out to sea. By the time the lifeguards reached me I was spending more time beneath the surface than above it. I had not realised that my predicament had been spotted, and had accepted that this was likely the end of my story. My life did not flash before my eyes; rather, I felt annoyance at the carelessness that had led me to such a foolish way to die, and I felt sorrow too, for there were so many things that I still wanted to see, wanted to do. That night, back on the mainland, I was unable to sleep, for I had broken out in a sudden high fever. I walked along the edge of a forest of gum trees, clouds of fruit bats passing in a great stream through the canopy. Each time I inhaled, it was like a knife to the chest. The water in my lungs had turned to pneumonia. I would spend several days in hospital in Cairns, on an oxygen inhaler and with an antibiotic drip. They told me I was lucky that it was seawater I had inhaled, rather than fresh water, for reasons to do with osmosis, I suppose. Luck is relative, and ever since then I have taken more responsibility for my own luck when it came to water, and treated it with greater respect.

  As I swam, a pair of water birds emerged from the dense vegetation at the water’s edge, and began to sail towards me. I supposed that perhaps my crashing down the hillside had caused them to hide beneath the bank, but now that I was silently immersed in water and only a head high, I seemed more harmless. In fact, they seemed to regard me now more as an object of curiosity than as a possible threat, for they swam closer and closer. I stopped my swimming and held still, expecting at any moment for them to back away, watching at eye level as they approached. Their bodies were a deep coppery red, their wings black, their heads crested and their eyes a startling crimson. They were Slavonian grebes, a bird that really should not have been here. This is the bird that I had watched on Loch Sunart in the winter, a bird that I regretted I would not see in its glorious summer plumage. The few pairs that stay on when winter ends are restricted to a very small area of the Eastern Highlands, far from here. As I cooled off in the little hidden bay, with primeval forest all around, the sun beating down from above, and these extraordinary, implausible creatures drifted ever closer, I felt disconnected from the world, out of place and out of time. I felt I had been transported for a moment to an alternate reality; a better reality. These birds are very late nesters, and the truth, I supposed, was that they were yet to head to their nesting grounds in the east, but seeing them here now was not something that I could ever have anticipated.

  The birds turned suddenly, and swam quickly back to shore. I had made no unexpected movements; this was not about me. I lay on my back in the water and looked up. High above, a golden eagle was circling the grey crags from where I had descended. After a moment it was joined by a second bird, and the two of them circled lazily overhead, watching me, I think, trying to make sense of what I was, and what I was doing there.

  I spent the day aimlessly wandering the hills, with no destination save for the expectation of seeking out a suitable location to camp for a day or two. Meadow pipits sprang from my feet, then fell to the ground a few feet away, broken-winged. Rather than searching out their nests I humoured them, following them for a few feet until they would suddenly recover their strength and take to the air, victorious. I liked to imagine them congratulating themselves over how clever their deception had been. They were everywhere in these hills, singing and calling, though of course to me they were no longer pipits, they were just —its.

  These moors and bogs were trackless, save for the occasional sheep or deer trail. The stocking levels on these hills were so low that I might have walked for an hour or two without seeing a single sheep, but they still left their mark. I find it hard to resist falling in with a track when I come across one, and they occasionally serve to lead me around a rocky outcrop or across boggy ground with a degree of efficiency, but for the most part they are a false promise. They may look as though they are going somewhere, but the priorities of sheep are different from ours, and they are likely to lead only to where the grass is greenest.

  There is one more quality to these hills which adds to their sense of isolation, beyond their physical inaccessibility, and that is that they almost entirely lack a mobile phone signal. I would not be receiving any sudden phone calls or texts, would not be tempted to check my emails or try to contact anyone even if I wanted to. If I got into difficulties it would be entirely up to me to get myself out of them. Even when we are alone it is only a provisional solitude if the world is only a click away. Travel nowadays is a very different experience. When I first travelled people would expect me to be entirely out of reach for, say, six months; they might perhaps receive a postcard telling them where I had been a couple of weeks ago, but had no way of responding. Now, there is an internet café on every corner, people can update their travel blogs daily, there is GPS tracking and live video chat. What is meant now by being alone is not what it used to mean. It is, of course, possible to opt out of all this, but it demands a mental shift; we have come very quickly to accept it as the norm that we are contactable at all times.

  I found my spot, beneath a wizened oak tree at the edge of a fine birch wood that clung to a ridge in a craggy valley, and overlooked a winding burn. Not far upstream, this burn ran fast and narrow down a series of waterfalls, but here the valley floor levelled and the stream widened and deepened and coiled between boggy water meadows, flat and lush, that extended about a hundred yards to each side of the winding stream. I faced out to a fine stand of pines and above to bare grey cliffs in which were a couple of small caves. I pitched my tent, a tiny one-man mountain tent good only for sleeping, not for sitting up in. The oak had a thick root-bole, and the trunk leaned back, providing me with a perfect seat where I could kick back and while away my time looking out over the stream and up and down the valley. The tent was unavoidable, I had decided, not so much because of the unpredictability of the weather as because of the fact that midge season had begun.

  If my first trip had been all about the otters, and my second about the eagles, I was seriously hoping that the key species of this visit would not turn out to be Culicoides impunctatus. The Highland midge can descend in vast clouds, drawn in by the gradient of carbon dioxide from your breath. They don’t really hurt – much more problematic are the ticks that can carry Lyme disease, and one of which I had already removed from my groin – but even for someone as phlegmatic as myself, they can be utterly infuriating. I tell myself how lucky it is that only the females draw blood, as part of my lifelong quest to look for the bright side in anything, but it doesn’t help all that much; the difference between a cloud of a million and a cloud of two million is ultimately an academic one. Arguably, though, they are guardians of the wilderness; there can be no doubt that they help keep visitor numbers down, and help keep the place wild and unpopulated. It sometimes seems as though all the most attractive destinations have their own special curse; the snake in the garden. I recall the coral cayes of Belize, which had some of the most beautiful deserted beaches I have ever seen. Deserted for a reason; you could barely walk on them, and certainly not stand still on them for even the briefest moment, because of the sand fleas, almost invisibly small biting midges that would attack like a thousand miniature hypodermic syringes, starting at your ankles and working very quickly up. Camping out on one of these islands, with no tent, I couldn’t sleep on the beaches because of the sand fleas, and I couldn’t sleep inland because of the vast hordes of land crabs that came out to prowl every night, and were so numerous that you couldn’t walk after dark without hearing the crunch of them beneath your feet. I resorted to a long-abandoned wooden hut on an uninhabited beach, raised on stilts, but even then as dawn approached it was invaded, and I moved to an old wooden jetty, and slept out at its tip, over water.

  This evening, at least, the midges were not being too unmanageable. There was a pleasant breeze blowing, which kept them at bay. Whenever the breeze dropped, they would suddenly appear as if f
rom nowhere, but the wind would soon pick up again and drive them away. Having pitched my tent, I decided I would use this as my base for a couple of days. I am not about the distance covered; I would win no prizes for my abilities as a long-distance walker. I don’t count my miles, or set myself goals; peaks to conquer, targets to be met. I know that many people like to engage with the natural world as a sport, a personal challenge, but I am more interested in quality, the depth of experience rather than the quantity of it. I would probably count a day in which I had not gone far as more of a success than a day when I had gone twice the distance, for it would indicate that there had been more worthwhile distractions along the way. When I was younger, I was perhaps more greedy in my ambitions; I wanted to see everything and go everywhere. But I came to realise that trying to quantify experience is meaningless. Spending a month in one country could offer just as much diversity of experience as spending a fortnight each in two countries, and so I made a conscious decision after I had passed the fifty-country mark to simply stop counting. And this felt liberating, in that if I liked a place I would stay as long as I wanted rather than chasing borders, rather than every arrival being filled with thoughts of departure. I imagine that a fit and determined hiker could complete a circuit of the Rough Bounds in about a week. For me, with all my diversions and digressions, my retracing of steps already taken and my self-imposed delays, I envisaged that my own circuit would probably take up more than a month of walking. And I would still feel that I had barely skimmed the surface.