The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence

by Neil Ansell

  Occasionally, mounting a heathery hillock, I would come upon a thin trail and think for a moment that I was back on track, but the only footprints I found would be the slots of deer, and I finally had to accept that if there was a visible trail then I had long since parted company with it, and I would have to make my way with just a general sense of direction as my guide. I was lost in the wilderness. The wilds of the Scottish Highlands may be insignificant in scale when compared to the vast expanses of northern Canada or Siberia, but when you are on foot and have lost your way, they can feel quite big enough, and wild enough. Every year hill-walkers go missing in these mountains, and not all of them are found. I had seen a ‘missing person’ sign earlier that day. It marked the last known location, six months ago, of a man exactly my age who had set out on a five-day walk into these hills and had not been seen since.

  It was bleak and lifeless up here; not a single crow was in the sky and there was a complete silence. I climbed a ridge over the bog, hoping that I would be able to catch a glimpse of the loch and recalibrate my sense of direction, but I saw just more of the same and dropped back down into another bowl between the hills. It was then that I heard a sudden loud roar, close by, otherworldly and shocking in the emptiness. I looked all around me but could not find its source. It is an inevitable consequence of having only one functional ear that I have no sense of direction, when it comes to sound; everything originates from the same place. If an acquaintance spots me in the street and calls my name I will likely spin around in a complete circle to find them, much to their bemusement. There was another answering roar, a little further off, and then it was as if a chain reaction had been sparked, for the hills all around me reverberated with roars and bellows.

  I realised that I must have walked into a battleground; that the rutting season of the red deer had begun, and these unearthly calls must be stags. Although I was completely surrounded by them I could not see a single one; they were all hidden from sight just beyond the ridge line.

  There was no alternative; I would have to go up to go down. To find my bearings, I set off up the mountainside to higher ground. Otherwise I could spend the whole day wandering in these wastes, walking in circles and getting nowhere. This was the right call, for I had not climbed so far when I got a sudden glimpse of blue far below. Though it was a long way down it was close. I had not really been lost at all, I told myself; I had been on track all along. I started to make my way down the steep scree slope, walking sideways on the loose rocks as you do, to check my descent. And then I came to the edge of a crag, poised high above the loch. I followed its edge until I came to a place where it peaked to a point, a spectacular overhang that soared precipitously over the valley. It was a spot so dramatic that it looked as though it belonged in the Sierra Nevada rather than the Scottish Highlands. I inched my way out to the very lip of the overhang; it was irresistible.

  Loch Beoraid was sprawled out beneath me, almost entirely enclosed by sheer mountainsides. At its foot there was a break in the hills, and the loch gave way to a couple of smaller lochans and then the river Meoble that led their overflow through a valley to distant Loch Morar. Peering over the edge of the cliffs, I could see down to the golden canopy of a spectacular wildwood of birch that led all the way down to the water’s edge.

  I skirted the crags until I found a way down into the almost impenetrable woods. The hillside beneath them was entirely covered in a jumble of giant boulders, many as big as garden sheds, all covered in a thick carpet of mosses and with sprays of ferns springing from every crevice. There were hidden ravines, hollows and caves, and the boulders lay against one another in improbable balancing acts. And in the niches between the stones grew the ancient trees. The birch of these parts is the downy birch rather than the silver birch of more southerly climes. The silver birch is a slender tree with branches that droop decoratively and which is short-lived; its lifespan is on a human scale. These trees were made of sterner stuff. In spite of their obvious similarity, they were much more rugged in character. They were twice as tall, twice as stout, and much more ancient. They can cope with higher rainfall and wetter conditions. They are the trees of the far north.

  Woods seem to have a personality all their own. I don’t just mean the difference between species – say the difference between the dark tangled mystique of a yew wood and the sculptural elegance of a beech hanger – I mean that an individual wood can have some intangible quality that makes it stand apart from all other woods. This one somehow felt different from the other birch woods I had travelled through. The birch is part of a natural succession. It is quick to take hold, and it will usually be the first tree to grow on neglected land, before finally giving way to oak or whatever other tree forms the climax vegetation of the locality. Here, it was a permanent fixture. Nothing else would ever take its place; it was as though it had finally been able to step out of the shadows, out of its role as supporting act, and fulfil its true potential.

  My progress through the woods was unbelievably slow; it was hard to imagine a more uncompromising terrain. Almost the whole time I had to use my hands as well as my feet as I tried to find a way between the boulders, using root and branch as handholds, clutching at handfuls of crumbling moss. I constantly had to backtrack as I found myself at another impasse. I imagined that this place must have been just like this since the retreat of the glaciers and the return of the trees; ancient, unchanged, and utterly inhuman. And although I knew that even these woods were inevitably in jeopardy, that they would never be able to regenerate and colonise the wider hillside due to grazing pressure from the uncontrolled deer population, I felt that I had finally found something I had been looking for. This was the wild heart of the Rough Bounds, a place that was pristine and without surrender, a place that I felt I deserved, because I could never belong here; I could only ever pass through.

  It was still a good couple of hundred yards down the steep hillside to where I could see the waters glinting below, between the golden leaves of the trees. I guessed that it might take me the best part of an hour at this rate, bouldering from rock to rock. I stood on a carpet of moss and found that it was growing on air. I flailed, trying to find some purchase, something to grab hold of, but found nothing, and began to slither and tumble downwards. I fell about ten feet or so, and must have somehow rolled as I did so, for I came to rest head down in a crevice between the rocks, with my things scattered all around me. I was soaked through from landing in sodden moss, I had barked my shin and bruised my elbow, and I had a gash on my cheek just below the eye from where a branch had caught me on the way down. But it could have been a lot worse. If I had broken a bone I would have been in a fine mess indeed, for I was a long way from anywhere. I never plan for the worst, always assuming that everything will work out just fine. This incorrigible optimism has stood me in good stead, for it has given me the freedom to lead a life more adventurous, but I have always known that it could one day come back to bite me. This was life, I supposed; one minute you could be standing heroically on a cliff edge, staff in hand, master of all you survey, and the next you could find yourself upside down in a muddy hole.

  I decided to tack sideways through the wood, and make my way down to the loch-side over open ground; I had been following a route that was almost impenetrable in its intransigence. The edge of the wood was marked by a deep ravine with a little stream at the bottom. It was extraordinary that such a tiny stream should have created so deep a gulley, but I supposed that it must have its moments after high rainfall when it turned into a raging torrent. The crags above the wood, the ravine to its side, the chaos of boulders that it grew in, the loch at its foot; all conspired to cut it off, to make it a world apart. I was sure that the deer could get into it with a little determination, just as I had, but was equally sure that these flukes of geography that had made it so inhospitable and so awkward of access were just what had preserved it in such a pure state.

  I picked my way cautiously down into the
gulley and then diagonally up the facing slope, to where I was on easier terrain; a grassy hillside with scattered trees. I followed the hillside until I once again had a fine prospect over the entire length of the lake. Far away, perhaps a mile or so, was the inevitable wooded island. I imagined hauling a canoe over the mountain tops and paddling out to it. I am told that further north of here there is a large island in a loch that has its own small loch within it, and that loch too has its own small island. An island on a loch, on an island on a loch. On an island.

  The view was of mountain and crag, water and sky, wildwood and island. There was no road, no trail, no human habitation. There was just one mark of human intervention visible. At the foot of the loch, where it and its associated lochans turned to river, was a small dam, with a shed beside it that I supposed was a small hydroelectric power plant, and a trail that led along the riverside towards it. It was only a tiny affair, not big enough I thought to affect the water level of the loch, but it was enough to remind me that there is almost nowhere that we haven’t tampered with. I recalled a visit to the Gearagh in Ireland’s County Cork. Here, the river Lee left the hills and spread over a broad flood plain, and a great oak forest grew on low muddy islands surrounded by shifting channels of the river, in an impenetrable inland delta, a kind of temperate Okavango. Alluvial forest such as this is an incredibly rare habitat, with only a few examples worldwide; it grew from the retreat of the glaciers, and survived for ten thousand years in one of the few countries to have suffered worse from deforestation than Britain has. In the 1950s, just a lifetime ago, a hydroelectric dam was built on the river, the forest was felled and the plain flooded.

  The Gearagh is a strange otherworldly place now. A broad valley flooded with shallow water, out of which protrude thousands upon thousands of blackened stumps. A fragment of the forest survives, perhaps ten per cent of its original extent, and I spent the day walking its bounds. It was just enough to give me an impression of what had been lost.

  It had been mostly cloudy all morning, but now the day was starting to clear. The eastern sky was a glorious blue, with just a few small clouds dotted in it, while above me it was still thick with a straight-edged cloud bank that stretched from horizon to horizon, north and south. And this sky was reflected in the waters below. The far end of the loch was a tapestry of blues, of reflected hills and glints of sunlight, while directly down the hill beneath me the waters reflected the roiling clouds above. These reflected clouds should surely have looked twice as far away as those above me, but somehow the waters seemed instead to bring them closer, to shrink distance, so that it felt as though I could reach down and grab them by the handful. I considered that the extraordinary beauty of this spot was as much in the moment as in the place itself; that I could visit this loch a hundred times, and ninety-nine times it would not look quite as spectacular as it did right now.

  Last Call

  The trail from the roadside to the bothy was just a few miles and should only have taken a couple of hours. But I had walked for four hours that day to reach the starting point, first along trackless shores and then along roadsides, so I was already feeling worn out. My failing health made every trail seem longer, every hillside steeper. The path dropped down into dense birch woods where a plank bridge took me over a stream before the beginning of a climb that gradually became more and more arduous. The woods were a riot of colour, of red and yellow and orange and fading green, and were thick with winter thrushes, more of them than ever, streaming constantly overhead.

  The bothy had been recommended to me back in May by the two Scotsmen I had met in the little bothy on the crags. This one was popular and better known, they had said, but it had the space to cope with it, and they told me that the setting made it worthwhile. After stumbling upon a bothy by accident, having one on a personal recommendation seemed like the second-best way to find one. With frosts at night, it seemed like a more sensible choice than camping, certainly better than camping without a tent.

  The trail was ancient and well marked, mostly stony, but as I made my way up the steep wooded crag-side I managed to lose it anyway, I think when I stepped off the path to circle a tree trunk that had fallen across the original route; and then in the dense cover and the waist-high dead bracken I had failed to pick up the trail again. The problem was that I had not been paying sufficient attention, and was no longer sure whether I was above the trail or below it. Not knowing whether to go up or to go down the hillside, I held my course, in the expectation that I would eventually meet the trail again. Of course this never happened, and yet I persisted to the point where it seemed ridiculous to turn and go all the way back. Eventually I emerged from the woods onto open hillside. I could see down to the shore far below, and up to the tops far above, yet I could see no sign of any trail whatsoever. There was a good reason why the hillside here was bare; it was too steep for trees and I was basically traversing what was almost a cliff. Another day, another cliff, lost again; this seems to be a regular feature of my life. Finally I reached a point where I could not go on, and had to make a choice. I decided to scramble upwards and mount the ridge above me, and having done so I found the seemingly obvious path winding up into the hills. I had wasted an hour getting nowhere, and exhausted myself in the process.

  Now that I was on the open tops the path was unmissable; it snaked across the umber moor, twisting between crags, and I could see it stretching out almost to the horizon. Long ago, much care had been taken over this trail, many man-hours spent on laying flat stones over the boggy ground. Although there were occasional muddy hollows that had to be skirted around, it nonetheless had a look of permanence, the look of a trail that was going places. Seeing it wind over the wild moor into the far distance brought to mind the Yellow Brick Road, for all that it was not yellow, and not brick. This uninhabited peninsula had once held three small crofting villages on its outer reaches. For hundreds if not thousands of years, people had called this place home, and generation upon generation of crofters would have used this exact route over the hills to move their livestock.

  The sky had cleared and the sun was shining. The trail skirted a pair of high lochans, a sudden glimpse of cobalt blue beneath the hills, and then it was downhill all the way, off the tops and down to the sea. The trail dropped alongside a steep burn that poured down the hillside from the lochs, then over stepping stones and back into woodland. Not birch woods now, but oak, and not the shrunken oaks of more exposed shores; this was a mature ancient woodland of full-sized sturdy trees. I stopped and sat on a trunk and listened out for birdsong, but heard nothing but the mewling of a buzzard. Fallen wood lay everywhere, and I wondered if I should be gathering it for firewood, but didn’t know how much further I still had to walk to reach my destination, or whether there would be any source of firewood closer to the bothy.

  The trail dropped out of the woods and into a flat river valley. The gushing burn suddenly slowed and wound gently between dense reed beds. Over the tops of the reeds and sedges I could see the bothy on its shore in the distance. Backing on to the dunes was a low turf ridge, and lined up all along the curve of the bay were the remains of a lost village. A heron followed the course of the little river, and a solitary snow bunting blew in from the sea and into the reeds; a bird of the winter, of the far north, with a pure white breast and neck. They normally come in little parties, like drifts of snowflakes, but this one was alone.

  I dropped my pack in the bothy and wandered around the ruined village. These blackhouses had long since lost their thatched roofs but were otherwise intact. Unlike the ruined crofts of Arisaig, which left little more than a footprint or a low crumbling wall, these had survived until much more recent times. Lintel stones still hung over their low doors and narrow slotted windows. They had no hearths; the smoke of their fires had been allowed to sift out through their thatched reed roofs, which would have perhaps been held in place against the elements by weighted fishing nets. Though they would have housed entire fami
lies, they mostly consisted of a single room. They were well made, though; they had no sharp corners but rather elegant curves of bevelled stone that would have deflected the wind. The inside of the shell of each ruin was thick with brambles, and a wren flew from house to house as I approached. I imagined that the bramble patches of the ruined village formed this bird’s entire territory, and it was now the village’s solitary permanent inhabitant.

  This peninsula had not suffered from the clearances in the same way as much of this area; or at least the impact had been deferred. People forced out elsewhere had gathered here, and the population had grown to unsupportable levels for a place where life was already hard and lived on a very narrow margin. It was poverty that ultimately drove people away. The last house to be occupied was the one that had been converted for use as a bothy. A woman, born here in the village, had lived here alone right up until the Second World War, when rationing, not of food but of candles and paraffin, had finally driven her out. It would be impossible to live in a place like this on one candle a week. I wondered what it must have been like for her, to have had all her childhood memories here, to have been left behind, alone in an abandoned village. Walking the empty village was like visiting the scene of a disaster, yet it had not been a sudden catastrophe; rather, a long slow process of attrition.

  Now that the skies had cleared, the weather was strangely warm for the time of year. I peeled off my T-shirt and walked down to the beach. It was hot enough in the sunshine for it to be sunbathing weather. Over the dunes was a beach of white sand, as fine as dust. The tide was low and the beach was stony down by the sea shore, and thick with mussels. A party of ringed plovers patrolled the water’s edge, running ahead of me. The damp sand was a maze of footprints, a perfect record of the whole day’s events, waiting for the tide to turn and wipe the slate clean once more. I took off my boots and socks and left them there while I waded the river, pausing to cup mouthfuls of water for quenching my thirst, and to wash. Among the rocks of the low hill at the bay’s end was a scatter of scrub and small trees; there would be enough fallen wood for the night.