Deep Country

by Neil Ansell

  This peatbog I had chanced upon was within daily reach of my cottage, and became a favourite destination. It was the closest thing to wilderness I had. These hills may have looked remote and untouched, but in fact they were shaped by the hand of man, and more specifically by man with sheep. If grazing were to stop, the grass would first be overtaken by heather, and eventually all but the highest peaks would be blanketed with sessile oak woods as they once had been. Even in this desolate bogland I found a few thick stumps of ancient oak emerging from the black mud, perhaps many thousands of years old. But it was isolated, bleak, and alien in its beauty, and it drew me back again and again. It was like taking a trip to another world.

  On the first warm, sunny day after that first visit, I returned in the hope of seeing the plovers again. It was a fine walk of about three hours each way. I took my trusty staff and set off slowly up the back field, pausing occasionally, not wanting to tire myself before I had begun. Where the hillside levelled was the last gate on to the moor, the last gate in twenty miles. I didn’t need to cross the summit of my hill, rather I followed the drystone wall where the highest fields joined the moor. A sparrowhawk was cruising the line too, relaxed in the sunshine. A swallow flew up from the fields below, where it had been scooping up insects hovering above the grass. It began to swoop in graceful arcs around the hawk, then was joined by another and another, until finally the hawk was trailing a retinue of perhaps a hundred of them in a whirling, darting cloud. They were drawn to the hawk like iron filings to a magnet.

  My hill was a spur of the mountains, joined by a boggy saddle to a much bigger black hill that stretched miles to the west. I didn’t often cross the top of this mountain. For one thing, it was covered with thick tussocks of moor grass that were extremely hard to walk through; in fact, local people refer to this grass as disco grass, because of the strange contortions you have to go through as you make your way across it. Also, the vast open expanses that topped this mountain were tilted southwards, so while they afforded great views many miles to the south, I would not be able to see the mountains to the west and north where I was headed until I was halfway there. It is good to be able to see your destination getting steadily nearer as you walk. This hill was fine for a short cut home, but for now I made a diagonal crossing of the boggy ground that was the source of my stream, and headed for the northern slopes of the black hill. Here it was quite different from the open top; the sheepwalk was close-cropped turf amid a scree of rocks where the wheatears bounced, and though it was very steep to walk across there were sheep trails to follow. Sheep trails are not reliable; they diverge, converge, fade away to nothing, but the sheep were at least good at picking the safest way to cross the frequent rain gulleys that dissected the mountainside. There was a fine view down to the sheltered valley below. The bottom end of the valley, to the north of my own hill, was forested with oak below the slopes of head-high bracken. This was beautiful mature woodland, in the midst of which raced a stream hidden in a deep dingle, a succession of cascades and pools. The upper reaches of the valley were the most marginal of marginal land; fields that had never been drained or improved, where the hares played. The whole valley was dotted with the ruins of abandoned farmsteads, the ruins outnumbering the handful of occupied dwellings.

  As I picked my way across one of the dry gullies, I put up a kestrel from the hillside below me, and he flew across the valley to join his mate hovering opposite, making use of the thermals that rose up the mountainside, as was a solitary soaring kite. As I watched them, the female dropped three times in quick succession, snatching up dung beetles, I assumed. A peregrine came sailing into view over the hilltops, and the kestrels immediately stopped their hovering and ascended fast to rise above the intruder. They knew that it wouldn’t be safe to stay low. The peregrine circled lazily above me, taking a break from her eyrie, her wings outspread, her tail slightly fanned, and gave me a fine view of her hooded head. And above her circled the two kestrels, one of which repeatedly made fleeting swoops at the much bigger peregrine, taking great care not to drop below her. The peregrine for the most part ignored the attention, until at last the kestrel’s pestering got a little too bold and she flipped on to her back and presented her claws.

  She began to circle more determinedly, rising fast in a true hunting flight, with the kestrels struggling to stay above her. They seemed tiny in comparison to her, like wasps buzzing about her head. Eventually she rose so high above the valley that she was herself no more than a speck, while the kestrels had disappeared from view altogether. When she finally drifted down, one of the kestrels had slipped away, but the other was still hanging above her, still bothering her, and she finally tired of these attentions and began to chase the kestrel across the valley, mirroring its every move like a merlin pursuing a pipit. She peeled away and resumed her leisurely circling, unmolested now that the kestrel had hotfooted it across the valley, but there was no prey for her here. She folded her wings and began to slip downwards, at first slowly and then with gathering speed. For a brief moment I thought she was about to stoop on some unseen victim, but then she levelled off and raced for the hills, an anchor in the sky.

  At the head of the valley, a vast glacial sweep links these hills to the mountains opposite, wild and featureless save for a scattering of collapsed cairns and a lone standing stone, their significance lost in time. As I picked my way slowly across this bare expanse, a curlew suddenly flushed from close by and began to circle above me, calling in alarm, and its mate flew up from further off and joined it. Wader nests are notoriously hard to find, and the curlew would not have flushed from the nest but would have crept some distance away before rising. But there it was, right at my feet, the merest scrape in the earth among the tufts of grass, four mottled eggs beautifully camouflaged. I attempted to triangulate the spot using the nearby peaks for reference, but I knew I would never find this nest again, the ridge was so huge and bare and open, the exact location so indistinguishable from any other.

  The end of the ridge was marked by a solitary boulder, abandoned there long ago I supposed by the retreating glacier, and I paused there and looked back before I began the ascent of the winding path up the mountainside. The curlews had settled back on to their nest and ceased their constant calling. On this mountainside was a single steep ravine, and in that ravine was an isolated rowan, a mountain ash, far, far above any other trees. And in that rowan was a crows’ nest. The pair of carrion crows that nested here had faced a challenge: how to build a nest in a place where there were no sticks. The nest was constructed entirely out of the bones of sheep.

  The track that cut across the face of the mountainside was probably only used a few times a year, for rounding up sheep on horseback, or in a very, very carefully driven Land Rover. Where the track levelled off and switched back, we parted company, and I set off across the roughest of rough ground into a boggy, rush-filled hollow, where snipe jinked away as I picked my way through. One more climb, steep but short, and I was looking out over the peat-hag. With no fog to obscure the view, I could see the extent of the place for the first time; it reached as far as the eye could see, as if it was a whole barren world unto itself. The view shrank as I stepped down into it. It was like entering a maze, the heather-capped hillocks between which the soggy black runnels twisted and turned were hedge high, and I knew there would be no chance of identifying the place where I had found the plovers. I listened out for them instead, but this was a still, silent place, and even the pipits and larks were hushed. In the midst of the bog was a low, grassy ridge, and as I rounded this I came upon a hidden tarn. A little female teal, a mountain duck, saw me and quickly led her brood of ducklings into the cover of the rushes that fringed one side of the tarn. On the thick mat of brilliant green sphagnum moss that lined my side of the pool was a toad. It seemed unlikely that toads would breed here; unlike frogs, which will spawn in any available pond, toads are loyal to their traditional breeding grounds, and will travel considerable distances to get to them. At th
e nearest breeding lake that I knew of, the toads gathered in the spring in vast numbers, and the nearby roads had toad-crossing signs to try to keep the number of casualties down. But that lake was at least fifteen miles away. I had been surprised enough to find a toad taking up residence under the brick pedestal beneath one of my water-butts, but to find one of these sedate, slow-moving creatures so far out in the hills seemed extraordinary.

  It was a hot, sunny day, and the walk had been arduous, so I decided to see if the tarn was deep enough for swimming. The water was icy cold, and the lake bed was soft and spongy apart from a few scattered boulders. It had been impossible to see the bottom through the peat-tinged water but it was just deep enough for a swim, and it was like bathing in red wine. After I had dried myself in the sunshine, I took a circuit of the lake. As I picked my way through the peat at the far side, there was a single call of alarm from right by my feet, and a bird ran off, then stopped, then ran again, trailing a convincingly broken wing. A classic distraction display that could mean only one thing — that a plovers’ nest was not far away. It was four eggs in a little scrape; just like the curlews’ only smaller. It was a beautiful site, in miniature, at the very tip of a little grassy promontory that protruded far out into the black sea. Having established that golden plovers were nesting here and that I had not simply stumbled on a party lost in the fog, I called it a day and set off back to Penlan. As I crossed the glacial ridge on my way home, the curlews were in the air and calling repeatedly, locked in battle with the crows from the nest of bones.

  Back home on the hill, this was a time of visitors, of trips out with friends to places I would never otherwise see; to far hills and lakes, and to the coast. A time of making use of people’s transport to stock up with cans and bottles in preparation for leaner days to come. A time of cooking outside, of long summer evenings sitting out as the sun set and the bats began to emerge from under the gables. My garden, all yellows in spring, was a riot of pinks and purples from the mallows and foxgloves that were in full bloom. The summer silence was beginning to fall as the chorus of birdsong was snuffed out, one species at a time. Eventually, only the last chiffchaffs were calling in the woods, and the last yellowhammers on the hill, and then they lapsed into silence too. In June, the woods had been hectic with birds hunting food for their young, and in July there had been newly fledged young birds everywhere earning their wings, but as summer began to peak, the birds vanished into the depths of their annual moult. Even birds that were a constant presence in the spring, such as the pied flycatchers, seemed to disappear into thin air. August is notoriously the quietest month of the year for birdwatching; it is perhaps ironic that in the weeks when most people have the chance to get out into the countryside, there is less to be seen than at any other time of the year. Fortunately the birds of prey came into their own on these late-summer days; with the exception of my missing goshawks they seemed more active, more visible than ever. In part it was the dearth of most other birds that brought them to the fore, that made their presence more conspicuous, and in part it was that, as their prey hid itself away, they had to spend more and more time out hunting.

  Some birds of prey tend to breed late. Like all birds they try to make the period when they have a nest filled with hungry mouths to feed coincide with the time when food is most plentiful. While for the ravens this meant breeding early to catch the lambing season, for the sparrowhawks this meant waiting for the bonanza of newly fledged birds in the early summer. As the summer wore on and so many birds disappeared into the thickets for the moult, the hawks struggled to find enough food for their young, pushing the young hawks to leave the nest. By August, overcrowding and the young birds’ impatience to be the first to be fed had led to them all abandoning their home. They hadn’t gone far though; they still weren’t ready to hunt for themselves and would wait in the woods in the vicinity of the nest, calling their hunger, over and over. I would listen out for them; the call was instantly recognizable once you knew it, the sound of an oversized squeaky toy. One August I found three new nesting sites by tracking down the relentless squealing coming from deep within a wood. The young birds would be scattered among the trees surrounding the nest, hunched up and cross-looking, all trying to ignore one another. Near by would be the plucking post, a drift of feathers around a tree stump that was the hawks’ midden and would show you precisely what the birds had been catching and killing.

  It was time for a final trip to the quarry, to try to catch sight of the peregrines one last time before they abandoned the hills for the winter season, so I set off over the ridge on a short cut to the north. I was barely halfway there when I surprised the tiercel from a trackside oak. He alighted from the tree and circled above me, winnowing his wings and screaming beautifully, and I wondered if this sighting meant that they had already left the eyrie. When I finally reached the quarry, a light drizzle had begun, and I was even less hopeful. But there was the falcon, soaring in the rain in front of the high crags, racing after a passing swift. Right behind her was her youngster, just the one, working hard to copy her every move. The two birds began to make false passes at one another, then little dummy stoops. It was a flying lesson.

  On my way back, the drizzle stopped and the sun came out, so I took a break by the riverside, north of my usual beat. There was a long sweeping bend in the river here, and the water ran slow and deep. Dragonflies hovered over the stands of rushes and yellow flags that fringed the opposite bank, and on the grassy slope that led down to the water bounded a mink, a dark chocolate-brown female, spiky from the wet, which looked like a cross between an otter and a stoat. Normally when I saw them they were in the process of disappearing from view, but not this one; she scampered back and forth, back and forth, as if she were looking for something she had lost.

  Leaning from the bank at the furthest reach of the river’s curve was a dead tree, and on a branch of it that overhung the slow-moving water was perched a falcon, a hobby, my first here. It had the crimson thighs and rump of an adult, but not the black chevrons on white that make the adult bird look almost like a miniature peregrine. Instead of white, its breast was the russet of an autumn leaf. This bird’s plumage was midway between that of a juvenile and an adult; it was a wandering first-year bird that had roamed far north of its usual haunt. Soon it would have to turn its face back to the south, for these are migratory falcons and it would have an unguided journey to Africa ahead of it. It slipped off its branch and darted low across the water towards me. Over the bankside rushes its talons snapped at a dragonfly like it was plucking a flower. It ate the insect in flight as it circled around and flew back to its perch, but not before it had snipped off the wings and discarded them. The diaphanous wings of the dragonfly floated down to the water below and drifted slowly past me. The hobby flew again and again, and never missed; it would take a lot of these insects to satisfy its hunger. But eventually it was found on its perch by a pair of magpies, and they began to mob it so relentlessly, so unceasingly, that it admitted defeat and flew on round the river’s bend, and was lost to view.

  8. The Still Point

  Moving water has its own magnetism. It always drew me back; I must have visited the river at least twice a week, in every season, in every weather. Some of the creatures I saw there I would never see anywhere else. A solitary female goosander may have had a bizarre annual excursion to my rooftop, but other than that I would only see them on the river: either swimming, or resting on a boulder midstream, or flying directly above the water. I don’t recall ever having seen one on the riverbank. Not only did the river have its own distinct set of resident species, but it also had its own summer and winter visitors. It had its own array of passage migrants too, such as the goldeneye, or the osprey — just occasionally, tantalizingly glimpsed as they passed through — which had neither their breeding grounds nor their wintering grounds here, but used the river as a highway between the two. I never knew quite what to expect when I went to the river.

  What happened beneath
the surface was a mystery to me. I knew there were salmon and trout here, though this was no longer the fishing river it once had been. And I knew there were pike here too, because I could sometimes make out a monster lurking at the edge of a deep pool by the bridge. But I had no idea what other coarse fish there were, or what the fish that rose for floating insects and left fading ripples in their wake were, or what the huge shoals of tiny fry that scattered from the shallows in the summer when I waded in to bathe were. And I had no one who could fill this gap in my knowledge. I was no fisherman; my only experience of fishing was a short spell on a commercial fishing boat in the Baltic, and what I had learned there was not going to help me here. I could see the attraction of spending long days at the river’s edge, away from it all, my attention fully focused, but I didn’t feel I needed to justify this with a rod and line.

  The river here was totally different in character from the reedy, winding, slow-moving rivers of the lowlands. The steep banks were heavily wooded. Where the river bent, beaches and islands of discs of pale grey shale gathered and built on the inside of the bend, and here alders tried to get a foothold in the shifting stones. Where the river narrowed, and in its shallower reaches, the water raced and tumbled over the boulders in miniature rapids. There might be quieter stretches too, where the clear water ran slow and deep beneath the overhanging trees, and all seemed calm and placid, but this could change dramatically. A sudden spate could see the water levels rise five or ten feet overnight. And occasionally the river would burst its banks, and the flood pools in the riverside fields would fill with dabbling mallards escaping the chaos of the river. After a storm or a sudden thaw I would go down to the footbridge and watch the roiling waters below, the colour of a pale lemon tea yesterday but a frothy cappuccino today, seething and churning down the valley, carrying everything with them. This bridge was suspended high above the water, and it needed to be, for the force of the storm water could wrench full-grown trees from the banks and send them sailing seaward, at least until the waters abated and they snagged somewhere downriver.