by Neil Ansell
The lure of the cabin in the woods is something that speaks to many people, but it is often interpreted as a negative desire; the desire to escape from social commitments and pressures. When I tell people about my years of solitude in Wales, they will often respond by asking what it was that I was running away from. But it never felt like that, not to me. I was never running away; always running towards.
I set off out of the village and uphill through the woods. There was a well-worn trail all the way to the other side as this was very much walking country, but nonetheless from the moment I left the village I was not to see another soul for over twenty-four hours. Generally I prefer to break my own trail, but it was already midday and it was not a short walk, and there were three-thousand-foot mountains between me and my destination, so an alternative route might not be so easy to find. A broad steep track led through a mile of woods before breaking out onto the open moor. I found myself walking up a long valley at the bottom of which was a gushing river. A herd of long-horned shaggy highland cattle blocked my way. They had the run of the mountains but had chosen to stick to the path, just as I had. They were completely fearless and had no desire to move out of my way, so I had to wind between them and push past them. As the trail rose it closed on the river, until eventually the river was right alongside the path, rocky and fast-moving. It gushed from a hidden loch, right in the middle of the peninsula, which suddenly came into view, guarded by a solitary ruined cottage. A little rowing boat was chained up at the water’s edge, and the fish were jumping. I sat in the sunshine in the lee of the ruin and imagined what life might have been like in such a lonely spot. It was a beautiful prospect. This was not a tiny mountain lochan but a significant little body of water for so high in the hills – it would take perhaps twenty minutes to walk it end to end. Behind the cottage the hillside sloped sharply up towards the summit of Ladhar Bheinn, the highest mountain of the range, and across the water, where there was no trail, the slopes were flanked with birch woods that seemed to pour down the mountainside. At the head of the loch, a tangle of waterfalls flowed down from the invisible hilltops above. And I could see into the future – about two hours into my future, I guessed – for I could just make out the trail ahead, rising with alarming steepness into the hills beyond and over the ridge between two mountains.
The trail as far as the loch had been a broad gentle ascent; easy walking. But this was another matter, a narrow mountain trail that ran with water. After the heavy rains of the morning, the rainfall had found the path of least resistance, and walking the track was like walking the bed of a stream. It was not so bad where it was rocky beneath, but where it was soft underfoot the path disappeared into a mire of mud and flooded moor-grass, and I had to watch my feet at every step, and sometimes leave the path altogether. The trail became progressively steeper and more arduous as I ascended, and I found myself regularly pausing for a breather and taking in the view, looking back at how far I had climbed, and trying to work out just how much further I had to go before I reached the summit.
The pass was only fifteen hundred feet high; nothing really. In the Andes – in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia – and in the Himalayas – in India, Nepal and China – I had readily crossed passes ten times this high, though on those occasions I had admittedly started my walks from far above sea level. As I struggled my way towards the top now, I started counting my steps. A hundred steps and I would reward myself with a momentary break. I had to admit I was not in peak physical condition. Though I was not a youngster any more, I was in pretty good shape and had always prided myself on my resilience. It should not have been this hard. It made me feel as if I was at a much higher altitude when every step feels like wading through water, or as if gravity has unaccountably increased.
On the ridge above me stood a stag. I thought it curious how often I saw them like this, silhouetted against the sky; no doubt because I often missed them altogether when they were camouflaged against the background of the hillsides. This one was unmissable; a fine strong animal with a magnificent head of antlers, perhaps as many points as I had ever seen before. It was alert, watching me with interest. I thought that it would drift back out of sight, but it must have decided that I was no threat, for it continued its way and came closer. Behind it came a long trail of hinds; I counted them over the ridge, sixteen in total, quite a harem. This stag would have a fight on its hands when the autumn rut began, but it looked well equipped to hold its own.
I made a final push for the top, and suddenly the summit cairn appeared. A pair of ravens flew up and circled, calling, and their deep and sonorous voices echoed across the hills. They flew out over the valley I had just ascended. Beyond them the loch that had seemed so big as I passed it looked tiny now. I smiled to see them. My friends the ravens; I shall never lose them, they will be with me always, until the very end.
It does feel almost as though I have a special affinity for the crows. They always seem to be there, a part of my life, mostly in the background but sometimes taking centre stage. I remember the sweltering summer of 1976, when it was too hot to do almost anything, when all that the rest of my family wanted to do was lie on a beach. Each day we would drive out to Pagham in West Sussex where the beach was less crowded. While my family sunbathed I would walk out alone along the spit towards the mouth of the harbour, where there was a colony of beautiful little terns, tiny and yellow-faced, nesting in their scrapes on a gravel island. As I walked the path one scorching hot day, the air flexing in the rising heat, I saw a crow walking the path ahead of me. I kept expecting it to flush as I approached, but it never did; instead it hopped up and perched on top of my head. I felt strangely proud as I continued my way towards the harbour with my animated headdress. And then it drove its beak into the very top of my skull, as if it was trying to crack a nut.
In Wales when I walked in winter on the moors I would usually see only crows and ravens; almost nothing else remained. In the early spring, as early as February, when the ravens were the first bird to breed, I would watch them almost daily at their nesting site. Along with the snowdrops, they were the very first signifier that the world was still turning. And there was the injured raven that I cared for, briefly, until it recuperated.
I remember a Himalayan base camp, where the ravens stalked and scavenged, as proprietorial as cats, as if I was just a guest in their domain, which I was. Above all, I recall the crows of Zimbabwe, and one of the most surreal wildlife experiences of my life. I was hiking in the Chimanimani mountains in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe, hard against the border with Mozambique, which was in the midst of its fifteen-year civil war. After hitching to the road-head, I spent the remainder of the day heading up to the mountain refuge. It was not far, not as the crow flies, but it was a ridiculously steep route; the path ahead was like staring at a vertical wall reaching up to the sky.
It was worth it, though. The refuge had a fine prospect east from its verandah, over a broad lush river valley to the long chain of summits running north–south beyond. There would have been room for twenty easily, but I was the only one staying there that night. Tourism was at a low ebb, and those few who did come were mostly just visiting the game reserves. Behind the refuge was a stone basin for washing in rainwater, and a sign that warned you to beware of the crows, for they would steal your soap if you left it out.
In the morning a solitary waterbuck was wading knee-deep in the lush grasses of the valley water meadows. Its pale rump looked like a bullseye, a target for predators that said; bite here. I dropped down into the valley and forded the stream before making my final ascent to the summit of the range. It was a strange alien landscape; these mountains were deeply eroded, layered with contorted stacks and pillars of pale bare rock, sudden caves, and the unfamiliar botany of the African mountains. Though I spent the day in sunshine, the final summit was blanketed in cloud. When I finally made it onto the broad stone dome at the top, I stepped into a thick mist. Kraa, a voice called; kraa, kraa. The pea
k of the mountain was covered in crows, dozens of them, obscured by the fog. They didn’t seem to want to leave the summit; they stalked away from me on foot, and only flew a few yards at a time, if at all. These were Cape crows, bigger than our own carrion crow but smaller than a raven, with longer legs and a more slender, curved bill. They each paced through the fog cartoonishly, looking more like a caricature of a crow than a real-life bird. I walked on through the swirling mist towards the topmost point of the dome, the crows parting ahead of me, and then I saw the sign at the very top ahead of me. It was a tin billboard, with a row of crows perched on top, creaking at me in warning. This sign marked the international border, and informed me that under no circumstances was I to proceed beyond this point. The sign was full of bullet holes. It was a strange otherworldly place, like a kind of Gothic purgatory, here in the kingdom of crows.
Dropping down from the fogbound mountain top and back into sunshine was like returning to the real world. That evening, when I returned to the mountain refuge, I had company: a group of Zimbabwean women had arrived and were cooking up sadza, mealie-meal, over a log fire, and invited me to join them. After we had eaten, darkness began to fall, and the stars to appear; the unfamiliar constellations of the southern hemisphere that made me feel a long way from home. We sat out on the verandah and they pointed them out to me as they appeared: first of all the Southern Cross, and there, hovering above it, Corvus, the crow.
Night Music
I had imagined that when I reached the summit cairn at the top of the pass I would be able to see across the entire width of the peninsula, from Loch Nevis to Loch Hourn, or from loch heaven to loch hell, which they supposedly translated to from the Gaelic. I didn’t know how Loch Hourn had earned itself such a bad name; perhaps I would find out. Most likely it was a simple matter of geography; these northern shores consisted of steep north-facing slopes reaching down from high mountains, and would be in shadow for much of the time, perhaps in winter for almost the whole time. The settlements alongside Loch Nevis, meanwhile, faced the sun and would be bathed in light for the whole of the day. The view I had anticipated was not to be, however; the lie of the land made it impossible. The peaks rose steeply to either side of the path down from the pass, so it was like walking down a steep gulley, or the floor of a canyon that twisted and turned, and I would not catch my first glimpse of the loch below until I was almost halfway down.
The journey downhill was a lot easier than the journey up; there would be no more need for rest breaks. In fact I had to constantly remember to pace myself down the steep slope. My knees would thank me for it later. I had once spent a whole day of rapid descent thousands of metres down the Himalayas, ten hours in all, which led to an uncomfortable night with my knees throbbing in swollen regret. On the lower slopes of these hills lay great swathes of pine wood, a scattering of venerable pine trees. They were thick-trunked, broad-backed and twisted with age. They made me realise how the woods of North Morar that I had previously visited were very much secondary growth. I knew I wanted to pitch my tent beneath the shelter of these great trees, but it would not be easy to find a spot. The woods remained here, while they had been stripped from almost everywhere else, for precisely the reason that the location was too remote for human exploitation. Not only were these wooded slopes and dark north-facing hillsides far from habitation, they were also very steeply pitched. Finding a level, sheltered spot would not be easy.
The path down to the loch passed beneath the woods, so I left the trail and turned back up towards the hills, following the gulley of a raging burn that came crashing down the mountainside in a series of cascades, a miniature valley perhaps twenty or thirty feet deep that had been gouged out of the hillside, and was hidden from view, like a secret. There I found what seemed to be an ideal spot. Beneath the shelter of two of the greatest of the pines, and right alongside the biggest of all of the waterfalls on the hillside, was an unexpected level space the size of a room, soft with grass and moss and studded with a profusion of chanterelle mushrooms. This was perfect. I congratulated myself on having stumbled upon such an ideal situation. I would just pitch my tent and then I would prepare food and sit on the biggest of the jumble of boulders at the foot of the falls, my little bottle of single malt whisky in my hand. There is nothing like the sound of falling water to promote perfect, mindless peace. For me, in my condition, with my aching heart and my reserves of energy run down from lack of sleep, it had felt like an arduous day’s walking, and I was looking forward to an evening when I could just kick back.
It was not to be. As soon as I began to set up my tent, the midges descended; the air was thick with an endless black biting mist. The season generally ends in September, with the first frost, but that had not yet come. The summer had been warm and wet; perfect conditions for a frenzy of midges. I threw my tent together as quickly as was humanly possible, and dived in. There would be no sitting by a waterfall soaking up the peace, for there was no peace. Hundreds of midges had made it into the tent with me, either blown in during the few short seconds that the fly sheet was unzipped or clinging to my clothes. But at least hundreds felt like a manageable, finite number, rather than the swarms outside. I kept unzipping a tiny spyhole to look out, as I hoped when darkness fell they would drift away, but they were still there in their swirling millions. There was nothing to be done but to lie there and listen to the roar of the waterfall right outside, the waterfall of tranquillity that felt as though it would remain for ever just out of reach.
That night I lay awake for hours in the darkness of my tent, plagued by biting insects and with the roar and gush of the waters just a few feet away. And behind the erratic crash of the falling waters was another sound, a constant low drone like the sound of a distant plane taking off; the background sound, I supposed, of the entire burn, a whole mountainside of falling water.
And as I lay, and tried and failed to get to sleep, I gradually became aware of yet another sound, something quite different. I could hear what sounded like a ghostly cello playing, slow and stately, elegant and rather beautiful. I was under no illusion that there was anyone or anything actually there. I presumed it to be the product of some kind of harmonic interference between the rush of the falls and the background drone of the waters. I wondered if I could entirely be imagining it, but then concluded that, really, all sound is a creation of the mind, the brain’s attempt to make some sense out of external cues. It was not just in my head, I decided, at least no more so than any other sound really exists only in your head; I was convinced it was actually there, a natural product of the environment. It did not alarm me in any way; rather it felt comforting. It was a simple musical refrain that lasted for ten or fifteen seconds, and then was repeated from the start with minor variations, over and over. If I’d had more knowledge of music I would have been able to record the musical notations. I supposed that it was site-specific, tied to the very spot where I had chosen to lay my head, and that if I moved a few feet it might well change, or disappear entirely, and on another day when there had been a little more rainfall, or a little less, it might be lost too. It was a song of the earth, my own personal song of the wild, and for all the failings of my hearing I was undoubtedly the first person ever to have had the privilege of hearing it.
I rose at first light, keen to be on the move and away from that tiny confined space filled with biting insects. I peeked out but the clouds of midges were of course all still out there waiting for me, so I put together a day bag as quickly as I could and made my exit. I scrambled up the twenty-foot-high bank, pulling myself up by the jumble of pine roots, and then stopped. The mist had settled in the night. It had sifted through the old ragged pines to make the landscape look raw and primeval. The mountain tops were clear, and so was the valley; the fog had fixed itself halfway up the hills, so that each hillside was wrapped in a long white scarf that undulated like a frozen wave. The air was completely still, not even the faintest trace of breeze, so that the mist hanging betw
een the trees was utterly motionless. There was no sound at all, no movement, as if time itself had stopped dead and I was walking in the suspended moment. There was an eerie hush, and I drifted down the hillside as if in a dream, as if I had stepped out of the real world.
My route down to the loch-side took me past a bothy with three silent tents pitched outside it. In half an hour’s walking I had seen no living creature, not a bird in the sky, nothing that moved. But if I paused for a moment then a cloud of midges would descend on me. It was as though there was no other living creature on earth; just me and the midges. When I reached the shore of the loch the waters were perfectly flat and unmarked. As I passed a headland I saw a pair of mergansers swimming out on the waters. The path in their wake stretched back for hundreds of yards behind them, the only mark on the glassy-smooth face of the waters. I could see the route they had taken for many minutes beforehand. It was like having a window back into the past, and it was enough to break the spell and set time running again.
I followed the shore of the loch along a patchy trail that sometimes clung to the water’s edge and sometimes rose into the hills. The landscape was perfect; pine woods and birch woods trailing down the hillside to the narrow sea-loch. In some spots the pine trees hung right over the water; there cannot be many places where these tiny surviving fragments of the great wood reach all the way to the sea. The steep hillside across the water seemed trackless and wild and thick with birch. I would have liked to pause for a while and drink it all in, but as with my waterfall of the night before the midges would not allow it. If I kept moving they could not settle around me, but stopping still was made intolerable. Finally the skies began to brighten and the sun melted away the hanging fog. With the sun came the first tentative breeze, and the great clouds of midges were driven away. I chose my spot and stopped at last to drink in the landscape. I sat on the root-bole of a great pine overlooking the loch, the ground around me thick with generations of fallen cones. I once rolled out my sleeping bag and slept on a soft bed of pine needles, accumulated over centuries and as springy as a mattress, beneath a coastal redwood in Northern California. This pine tree was hardly as grand as that three-hundred-foot giant – few other trees could be – but it was an ancient beauty in an exquisite setting. It was reassuring to think that it had undoubtedly been here since long before I was born, and would still hopefully be here long after I was gone.