The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence

by Neil Ansell

  The burn in the water meadows ahead of me seemed unfordable, deep and muddy and fringed with sedges, but a little way downstream in the woods the stream broadened to white water over shingle, so I took off my boots, rolled up my jeans, and waded across. Grey wagtails bobbed from stone to stone, and a little troop of tiny ducklings scooted away to hide under the banks. I walked through the pines and began to ascend. My goal was to investigate the caves on the hillside opposite. There is something alluring about caves; it seems impossible to pass one by without pausing to investigate. Perhaps it is an ancestral thing; a collective memory of a primeval past. I could also not help but check every plausible niche in the vain hope of running into a wildcat. As I climbed the slope towards the caves, I came upon a small herd of grazing roe deer. They jumped as they saw me, and clattered off over the rocky ridge like chamois in the Alps. When I reached the place they had been grazing, I stumbled upon the skeleton of a roe buck, long stripped clean of any trace of flesh or fur. The skull was detached from the body, and a little distance away, and I picked it up and looked it over. It was a strangely beautiful thing; the long graceful lines of its slender snout, the seemingly placid gaze of its empty orbits. It had one fine antler, but the other was snapped off halfway down. I wondered if this had happened at the time it had died; in the rutting season roebucks will sometimes fight to the death.

  When I visited in the winter, I had the problem of having to abort my walks in early afternoon, because it was dark by four. Now I had the opposite problem; there were nearly eighteen hours of light, and I cannot walk for eighteen hours. I would spend the evening sitting at my campsite, watching the swallows swooping over the water meadows, and the occasional heron or flight of mallards parading up and down the valley, following the turns of the burn, and hoping that the breeze would hold. I had decided to opt for the lowest-impact camping possible. I would light no fires, and had not even brought a camping stove with me, as part of my quest to travel as light as possible. I figured that I could manage without hot food for a couple of days; the hardest thing would be going without my morning coffee.

  At first I felt strangely restless and unsettled; I kept getting up and pacing a little way along the stream or into the woods. I had been on the move all day, and sometimes it is easier to keep moving than it is to stay still. I knew that this would pass, though; it just takes a little time. I needed to settle into the spirit of the place. The art of staying still, and paying close attention, is one worth cultivating. As the day drifted into the gloaming, the long drawn-out half-light of the northern summer, I began to ease my way into stillness, a slower way of thinking and moving, but with a greater alertness. I spent so much time in my years in Wales sitting quiet and still, that it feels as though this is my essential way of being, that the rest is just distraction. This is what can happen when you are completely alone in nature; you may see the same things as when you are in company, but you see them quite differently. You slough off the skin of self, all self-awareness, and are left with pure sensation. Nothing has a name; it is only itself. You look at a tree, and instead of seeing it as an idea, a network of associations built up over a lifetime, you see it for itself, pure form, freed of all preconceptions. You see the play of light, and everything is radiant, everything is in fact made of light. I have had moments like this since childhood, moments when I felt that I had stepped out of time, moments when I felt as though there was no longer any filter between me and the world; the filter being, I suppose, the carefully constructed self.

  As the light began to fade, deer emerged from the woods. First, a group of three began to graze well upstream from me, up by the waterfalls. Then a single buck came out of the pine woods opposite to drink from the stream. It must have scented me, or seen me, or heard me, for it suddenly jumped backwards and fled back into the woods. As it did so, it barked four times in quick succession. To dub this alarm call a bark is not to do it justice: it was fierce and explosive and it echoed against the crags so that it filled the whole valley. In spite of that, a little herd of five yearlings soon followed, delicately crossing the stream at the ford that I had earlier used myself. They began to graze on the water meadow between me and the stream, coming ever closer, and as slowly and quietly as I could I slipped inside my tent so they would not see me, and watched from within. This valley really was roe deer heaven. They came ever closer, until they were all around my tent, just feet away, so close that I would eventually fall asleep to the sound of munching grass.

  I woke at first light to the insistent call of a cuckoo. Realising I would not get back to sleep, I rose and strolled into the wood. The sunlight streamed in slantwise, almost horizontally, lighting up the forest floor more brightly than it ever would when the sun was high, all endless shadows and glints of light between the birch trunks. The dawn chorus had started up; I could hear the thrushes and the finches singing. These northern birch woods don’t support the same diversity and density of birds as, say, a southern oak wood, and so it could hardly compare to those dawn choruses long ago. I told myself this, but it was pointless; who did I think I was trying to fool? I could see the warblers in the trees, their beaks agape. But the songs of these wood warblers and willow warblers were now also lost to me; what remained were just woods and willows, followed by an absence, a void.

  My time was coming, my own personal silent spring. It would, of course, be possible for me to pass through life not hearing certain sounds without ever realising that I was missing out. The world is filled with things that are beyond our perception, of which we are never made aware. This silence had no doubt been creeping up on me for years in the city without my ever being fully conscious of it. It takes a very specific set of circumstances for it to come to my notice; it takes the focused attention that I devote to the world when I am out in nature for me to see where there would once have been a sound, where there should be a sound, only to find that it has abandoned me.

  On a muddy deer path within the wood, I found a single perfect fresh pad-mark, crossing the path rather than following it, facing towards my tent. A wildcat had come to visit me in the night, silent and unseen in the darkness. Of course it had. The world is full of hidden things.

  The Point and the Sound

  The Rhu of Arisaig is a small, almost uninhabited west coast peninsula. To its north is a little sheltered bay, Loch nan Ceall, at the head of which is the village of Arisaig. In this harbour are moored perhaps twenty or thirty sailing boats, and people learn to kayak in its calm, shallow waters. A road extends from the village partway along the northern shore of the peninsula, and along this are scattered a bare handful of houses, but the southern shores of the Rhu, facing out to the much larger and wilder Sound of Arisaig, are completely depopulated.

  I say depopulated, rather than uninhabited, advisedly. It is easy to look at a wild landscape and to assume that it was ever thus, that there is a steady progression over time from wilderness to civilisation, but this is not always the case, especially so in the Western Highlands. There was a time when many more people lived off this land than now. Two hundred years ago, there were perhaps fifty crofts on the Rhu, but when sheep-farming became the vogue among Scottish landowners, the land’s prior occupants were considered dispensable, and the clearances began. Many emigrated to the Americas, while those who remained were relocated in towns and villages away from the area. The whole of this peninsula became a single sheep farm.

  While the Rough Bounds were always isolated from most of the mainland, the fact that there were virtually no roads did not mean there was no communication, for there were still sea-roads. Getting from place to place was almost always easier by water, and the area’s links were more with the islands than the interior. There was a thriving community here once. It can be seen in the place names, the fact that almost every little hill and tiny lochan has a name, showing it was once of significance to someone.

  And occupation of this land dates back further, much further. I was on
a hillside on the south side of the peninsula, far from the nearest road or house, looking down at a Neolithic relic, which showed that while it might be uninhabited now, there were people here five thousand years ago. I had spotted it on my map – ‘cup-marked stone’, written in a Gothic script, and then I had read a little about it in the visitor centre in the village. It had been my intention to cross the peninsula and then head back along the coastline over the course of a couple of days, so it was just a matter of plotting the right line over the hills, in order not to miss it. The stone was sited on a steep grassy hillside facing south. There was a single tree nearby, and a single grazing sheep, watching me cautiously. A big smoothed slab of rock bulged from the long grass. Its entire surface was covered with dozens of small shallow discs that had been scraped into it, all different sizes, and in its centre a single large deep cup filled with rainwater.

  There were legends associated with this cup-stone. The blacksmith’s son would be brought here to wash his hands in the cup of rain; it would give him strength and skill. Earlier than that, the legend had it that if you circuited the stone three times while chanting in Gaelic, it would offer protection against witchcraft. This stone long predated blacksmiths, or Gaelic, of course. Cup-marked stones are found scattered throughout Europe, and we can only speculate as to their significance. They are not quite a tabula rasa, a blank slate, but they are abstract enough that they invite us to project our own desires, our own meanings onto them. As I looked over the face of the stone, what I saw was a pattern of stars, with a great sun at its centre. I imagined it once having been aligned with the setting sun, or the rising sun, and this site having its own ritual significance in its creators’ understanding of cosmology and the turn of the seasons.

  We tend to think of sun worship as the most primitive of religions, but it seems to me that it has a kind of logic based on the visible – far more so than the religions that came later, where man began to create gods in his own image. The sun, after all, is the source of all life, and each night it departs, leaving us hoping that it will return at its appointed time. The sun is demonstrably central to life on earth, and man is not, yet we have convinced ourselves that the world is actually all about us. So I look at the stone and see my own prejudices reflected back at me. It is all speculative; for all I know the cup might have been used as the repository for the blood of human sacrifices. All it can really tell me is that there were people here on these shores long ago, when the land was still unworked and pristine; people in search of meaning. I plunged my hands into the deep cup of rainwater, and rinsed them, out of respect. It was a perfect fit for my two hands together.

  Little is known of the ancient inhabitants of these lands. In around the year 150 AD, Ptolemy wrote his Geography, and in his account of the tribes of Albion he identified one known as the Creones, whose home range corresponded almost exactly with the limits of the Rough Bounds. There is absolutely no written record of these people, not even of their existence, beyond that one single mention by Ptolemy.

  Sometimes I feel it is good to know and to have certainty, but sometimes also a little ambiguity is a powerful thing and can inspire the imagination. Here, there are not many birds or animals or plants that can get past me without my being able to identify them, name them, or have some idea of their place in the scheme of things. But it can be worthwhile to get out of my comfort zone, too. If I travel to the tropics, or the South, I can find myself unmoored. In the hills of Rwanda, I watched a mixed flock of birds descending on a flowering shrub, and was completely unable to identify a single one, or even the family to which it belonged; nor was I able to identify the plant on which it was feeding. It is useful to be reminded of your place, and to recognise just how much you still have to learn, and how much you will never know.

  From the hillside of the cup-stone it was downhill all the way to the southern shore, a curved bay of grey pebbles, low cliffs with the promise of caves and a straggle of birch wood at their foot. These cliffs were set back a little from the shore; they had once been sea cliffs, and the caves that studded them had been sea caves, before the land had rebounded after the melting of the glaciers that had crushed the land down with the weight of all that ice. Beneath them was a rocky sea-splashed platform and a jumble of fallen boulders; I knew that much of the time I would be bouldering and scrambling rock to rock, rather than walking. Sometimes above the splash zone there would be a strip of grass where walking was possible, and misshapen birch trees clung to the lower slopes. Out towards the end of the headland something ran from my feet – a sandpiper. I looked down and sheltered beneath a frond of dead bracken was a little grassy cup, and in it four mottled eggs. They were neatly placed, with their four thick ends touching in the very centre of the nest, so that they looked like the four points of a compass.

  When I reached the final point of the headland I could see ahead, all the way along the coast to my chosen camping spot. Most of the bays along this shore were rocky, but I had found a single sandy beach on my map a few miles along the coast and had decided to make that my destination. I could see that it would take me hours; it would be very slow-going indeed, for this shoreline was ragged and broken. There would be no path, it would be rock to barnacled rock, traverses of low cliffs, the occasional hopeful leap. Sometimes I would be forced below the high-water mark, and would find myself slipping and sliding over dense mats of bladderwrack that hid the rocks beneath, while oystercatchers followed my slow progress, calling in frustration at my invasion of their territory.

  I would have to earn this walk. It would be like climbing a mountain packed with false summits. I would round a headland expecting to see a spread of sand, and would find yet another bay of stones. At one, I saw that I had company; a sea kayaker pulling up his boat onto the beach. When I come across someone else out in the wilds, I try to pick a line that will mean our paths do not intersect. I work on the assumption that they, like me, would prefer to remain alone, and they are not seeking out conversation. By the time I had reached the beach, the kayaker was sitting on the grassy strip above the stones, so I crossed the beach low down near the shoreline, from where I could give him a wave of acknowledgement without being within earshot. The smooth slate-grey disks of the beach were too small to step from stone to stone, but had no purchase on one another, so they slithered about under my feet as if they were constantly trying to turn my ankle. They squeaked and clattered like a shaken bag of childhood marbles. I knew I must have looked clumsy and graceless. The mere presence of an observer had returned me to self-consciousness. The great gift of solitude is that although you might think that it provokes introspection, actually the very opposite is true – you can lose all sense of self. A stranger in the distance was all it took to change my perspective, so that instead of seeing a landscape, I saw myself within it.

  The rock platform at the foot of the cliffs was not quite level; in places it was on a tilt so that only its seaward edge was dry, and it had captured vast quantities of seawater and presumably rainwater too so that it was filled with rock pools a foot or two deep. Some of these were enormous, the size of swimming pools. Rock pools make for a challenging habitat, where the temperature and salinity of the water varies wildly. These were packed with life regardless, and I paused for a while and peered in through the clear water at a miniature, apparently self-contained world of its own. There were little copses of sea lettuce and red seaweed amongst which darted tiny fish – blennies, I thought – and transparent prawns with waving antennae. There were colonies of sea anemones gently waving at me, and winkles grazing on the algae. Looking through the skin of the water was like looking through a glass at an alien world.

  In places the cliffs fell away, and the landscape opened up, sloping gently up into the hills. There would be raised beaches partway up the hillside, and the ruins of crofts, sometimes solitary, sometimes in groups that formed ghost villages. The clearances had taken place over a hundred and seventy years ago, and the crofts had not w
eathered well. Walls only a foot or two high remained, sometimes little more than a footprint. These crofts were tiny, single-roomed affairs; they seemed impossibly small for a dwelling-place, and I wondered if some of them might just have been for storage or for use as shepherds’ huts. I sat inside the void of one, a place that someone might once have called home, and tried to imagine what life could have been like here, but it was impossible to put myself in the crofters’ place and see this land through their eyes; it was a language that I did not speak. Beside each croft was a little patch of land, often with the remains of a boundary wall. These fields were correspondingly tiny, pocket handkerchief-sized, but they had been carefully tended; levelled and cleared of stones so that even now they held a growth of fresh green grass rather than ragged heather. From a distance, this chequerboard of small brilliant green patches was more visible than the ruins of the crofts, and showed the meticulous care the crofters had taken over the land they had been ejected from.