Deep Country

by Neil Ansell

  When the job was done, the hill looked bare and my cottage was exposed to the westerly wind. For the first time I could hear a cock crowing and a sheepdog barking from a farmhouse on the next hillside along. The logging team had been asked to leave any hardwoods and take just the spruce. There were a few standards, tall and strong, mostly around the edges of the wood where they had managed to get enough light, and a cluster of scrubby willows around a spring-fed boggy hollow in its middle. But the majority of the fifty or so trees, predominantly birch, that were scattered about the ruins of the plantation were spindly and frail, unnaturally tall and thin where they had raced for the light against the fast-growing conifers. They had no future; with the first strong wind most either snapped off or bowed right down so that their tops reached the ground and they bounced and swayed in the breeze. Birch is poor-quality firewood but is better than no firewood at all, so I took my own saw and logged most of them rather than letting them go to waste. All along the edge of the wood I lined up my woodpiles, which I would leave for a year or two to season and which would make the wrens happy, offering them both hunting grounds and secure places in which to nest.

  All that remained, a tangle of fallen branches, found favour with the tree pipits at least. They moved there in large numbers, with a territory around every standing tree or shrub. They would perch at the very top, then hurl themselves into the air and parachute down in their display flight. Tall spikes of purple foxgloves emerged everywhere, and then the whole site was taken over by the long pink-flowering heads of rosebay willowherb, fireweed. That first autumn after felling, when their flowers turned to seed, a breeze from the west would send vast quantities of down drifting across my front field, like a flurry of snowflakes. Then, after the land had been left to rest a little, it was replanted, but this time with mixed hardwoods. And one day, when the spindly saplings there now have matured a little, it will grow up to be a fine, fine wood.

  Penlan Cottage has a new roof now. First the well-weathered barge boards disintegrated and crashed to the ground one by one. Then the exposed beam-ends began to rot away too. Every year that went by found the cottage a little more decrepit. Everything about the cottage was original, more than a hundred and fifty years old. When the land agents came for an inspection, they thought at first that it might be enough to replace the ends of the beams and put in new eaves, but it was not to be: the damage was done, and had progressed too far. The work was overdue really, as was the replacement of the rotten window frames. The botching I had done over the years was just deferring the inevitable. All the roof timbers needed to be replaced, and the workmen also found that the entire weight of the chimney stack was resting on a rotten oak beam, so that had to be rebuilt too. I had sometimes wondered in a storm if the jackdaw ash was about to drop through my ceiling, but I had never suspected that the sudden descent of a half-ton of bricks was equally likely. The work had to be done in the middle of winter: not such a nice job for the roofers but the bat colony in the loft had to be protected from disturbance at other times of year. All the original slates, with their discs of lichen that had taken a century to grow, were replaced with perfectly even synthetic slates. My main concern was whether the bats would take to the new environment when they returned from their winter hibernation, for long-eared bats in particular are very loyal to their traditional haunts and seldom move into new locations. Most of their nursery roosts have been continuously occupied for well over a century. But I need not have worried; if anything their numbers seem to have risen a little since the new roof was put in. Perhaps the old roof was becoming a little too draughty for them as time took its toll and it gradually fell to pieces.

  My cottage is not the only place that has had a revamp. The crumbling old crook barn down the hill was sold off for development, even though it was in a state of complete dilapidation and had no redeeming features whatsoever aside from the one that mattered: its location. The ancient barn was listed, so the couple who bought it had to strip it down to its bare skeleton, the exposed ribs of its original timbers, and build their home from scratch around that framework. It took them years, during which they started a family in a mobile home at the site. They said that sometimes of an evening owls would come and watch them from the fence. Tawny owls are so sedentary that these are almost certainly the distant descendants of the owl that used to shelter on the cross-beams of the old barn all those years ago when I first arrived in Wales. Now that the barn has finally been rebuilt, Penlan Cottage has a new near neighbour; still not one visible from the cottage though. Before the work had even begun, the first job that had to be done was to put in a negotiable track the half-mile or so from the lanes. A part of its route followed the old cart track along the stream, and its starting point was at the bridge where I had put my postbox. Though, sadly, my postbox was no more. The lane here was a tight zigzag, following the stream closely, sticking to the valley bottom, first following one side of the stream, then a right angle over the bridge, then another right angle to follow the stream again on its far side. Late one night someone had been driving these lanes way too fast and had lost control at the bend. They had broadsided my postbox, crushing it beyond repair, and taken out the gate, gatepost and all.

  I had first moved into the cottage in the springtime, and it was in the spring a little more than five years later that I decided it was time to move on. Five years is a good long stint at doing almost anything. I had the feeling that if I didn’t leave soon then I probably never would; I would just stay put and spend the rest of my life there, growing old and no doubt gradually more eccentric, alone on my hill. This was not a prospect that in any way alarmed me; I knew my way around this lifestyle now and staying would have been the easy option. I had watched the turn of the seasons over and over, and knew the worst that would be thrown at me. I had lasted through hard droughts where my water supply had run out and I’d had to carefully ration water, and I had been through spells when it had rained unremittingly, torrentially, for weeks on end. I had been snowed in, and sat out the hardest of frosts and the wildest of storms. I had coped with illnesses severe enough that I’d been effectively housebound. Most of all, I had learned that I could live a life where I did not know how long it would be before I next had company, or even a meaningful conversation, but could be confident that the wait would be one not of hours or even days, but of weeks. And feel perfectly at ease with that. When I had first moved to the cottage, I had no idea whether I would prove capable of tolerating a life like this, and had seen it as a challenge. But I had long since ceased to see it in those terms. If it had ever been a test, I had long ago torn up the exam paper and walked out of the room; this was just me, living the life that I had chosen.

  After five years of watching the local wildlife I had encountered just about every species I was likely to, but I knew that there was no end to what I might see were I to stay. It is not a matter of going somewhere and counting off what it has to offer, as if using up its finite potential for new experience. It is more like peeling the layers from an onion, a series of reveals of deeper and deeper understanding. And some of my encounters were unique, unrepeatable moments. There would always be the possibility that something extraordinary, something totally unpredictable, might happen.

  Five years is long enough to become aware not just of what stays the same — of the repeated cycles of life — but of the changes that take place over time, in yourself as well as in the world around you. Not long before I left the cottage I took one of my occasional forays to the village for supplies, following my regular route along the riverbank and the long-abandoned railway embankment. As I neared the village through that last plantation of conifers by the riverside I saw slotted tracks along the badger trail I had been following. Not an escaped lamb, I knew. When I recalled my childhood it felt like something was missing here: a party of fallow deer out in the fields at dawn, perhaps, or a pair of roe deer emerging at the edge of a woodland glade at dusk, only to dissolve back into the trees as the darkness fel
l. But there were no deer in this part of Wales. Until now. On my next trip to the village I looked again, and looked more carefully, and this time saw droppings too, which made me sure of what I had found. So when I had bought my few requisites from the village shop and was on my way home, I dropped by the field centre to speak to the doctor. He was not surprised; the previous day he had been driving along the lanes past these woods when a muntjac had hopped out of the plantation where I had found the trail and run across the road in front of him — the first record for the county. But in fact over a year earlier the estate workers who lived by the river had been out one evening pushing their baby buggy along the old railway track when they had seen an unidentified mammal slipping between two woods. Like a fox but not a fox, was how they had described it, and with no tail. It now seemed highly likely that this was a pioneer among the deer that now seemed to be following the heavily wooded river valley into the heart of Wales.

  The most dramatic change of all in the natural history of the area has been the astonishing reversal in the fortunes of the red kite. When I first moved to Penlan it must have been a couple of weeks before I saw my first, high in the hills over the open sheepwalk, even though this was their heartland. In the whole of my first year at the cottage I only twice saw one from my window. Now I think that if you took any random skyscape viewed at any time, in any direction, from my hillside, it would be more likely to contain a kite than anything else — more likely a kite than a buzzard or even a crow. The kites spend so much of their lives aloft, hanging in the wind. The buzzards may be out in force when the sun shines, but the bad weather will ground them. Not so the kites. Their recovery has been incremental, unstoppable, and due in good part to the adoption of feeding stations. You can go and visit them; at the appointed time you wait in a hide while a tractor scatters butchers’ offal over the field before you, turning a whole field into a giant bird table. Overhead, the waiting kites will be circling, a hundred or two hundred of them. A single scan across the sky will reveal more kites than the entire British kite population those few years ago when I first moved into Penlan. There will be other birds waiting too, buzzards and ravens and magpies, but none of them has taken to this daily feeding by appointment as successfully as the kites. As the tractor that has brought the trailer full of meat scraps departs, the kites descend en masse. It is an extraordinary sight, for they do not settle to feed, but swoop and snatch with consummate grace. It is a trick they pull off extravagantly well: to look so beautiful and stylish, while feeding on carrion.

  So, as the years of my stay at the cottage passed, seeing a kite sail by my window became gradually less and less remarkable, and a good walk into the mountains would almost inevitably come with several sightings. Then a pair overwintered on my hillside. That winter an hour or two’s ramble around my local patch would always turn them up, even in the unusual event that they were perching. They were so big, and so conspicuous, and always seemed to choose to perch at the top of a solitary tree in full view on those infrequent occasions when they drifted down from their home in the sky. The next spring they stayed on and bred in a copse of trees high up on the steep hillside, close to the edge of the sheepwalk and looking out over miles of open air, and they have nested there ever since.

  Nowadays a second pair nests lower down the hill too, their big untidy nest balanced conspicuously on an oak bough. Their chosen tree is festooned with sheeps’ wool, which hangs in drapes from the branches like Spanish moss. The ranges of these two local pairs of kites seem to meet above the oaks that fringe the bottom of my front fields, so that I can see up to four of them almost continually just down the hill before me. For the most part they don’t bicker and squabble like the buzzards do. This is more of a cold war; they sail up and down above the treetops as if on border patrol, facing each other off, looking but not touching, not crossing the invisible line.

  But there have been less welcome changes in these hills too, most notably the gradual retreat of our moorland nesting species. It feels like a marginal habitat up there in the mountains at the best of times; it is a hard and barren place to make your home. The skylarks still call all spring — their song is the background music of the hills — but their numbers are visibly, or rather audibly, dropping, year on year. The grouse have retreated to smaller and smaller pockets where the grazing is light enough for the heather still to survive, and the whinchats seem to reduce their range a little further every year, disappearing completely from one valley at a time. Most of all I fear for our few nesting waders; we are at the southern limits of their range here and I doubt we shall have their company for much longer. The mountains will be a poorer place without the chance to stumble upon them and hear the sky ringing with their wild cries.

  I spent my final week paying an almost ritual visit to some of my favourite spots, key places in the iconography of my life in the hills. Of course I spent a day by the river, down by my swimming hole, just watching the water sparkle. Always changing, but always the same. On my way there I stopped off and sat on the drystone wall looking up the flank of the mountain to the copse of cedars where the ravens had nested, every single year without fail, and were nesting still, and waited until the pair appeared, cronking and flipping on to their backs. Even after all those years, the strange optical effect that a raven has on the landscape still held the power of surprise. You look up at a mountain, and, the moment a raven appears, find yourself looking at a hill. Their seemingly unnatural bulk can make an entire landscape contract around them in an instant. My last evenings were busy: with the bats emerging from my loft and the badgers on the edge of the moor. And with the woodcock too, for of course I went down over the old stone bridge to my clearing in the woods. The character of these fields had begun to change over the years as they became more overgrown by scrub, but they still retained their magic; this was still a place that no one would find reason to visit but me.

  On my last day I headed for the hills, on a full day’s walk to the peatbog and back. There were two pairs of curlews calling from the black hill as usual, one at each end where the peat pools were and where the ground was soft enough for them to feed. It was a slightly overcast day and the tops felt a little bleak and lifeless as they often do. I made my way across the blasted landscape of the peatbog towards the little tarn that would be my furthest destination that day, then sat to rest on the grassy ridge that overlooked the tarn and took off my army-surplus boots and boot-socks. I stood on the brilliant — almost fluorescent — green fringe of sphagnum moss that bordered the tarn, and cold water, icy all year round, oozed between my toes. I rolled up my jeans and waded out into the red pool. A golden plover called from near by but out of sight: just one single plaintive call, the loneliest sound in the world. I didn’t feel the need to go and look for it. It was enough to know that it was there.

  Leftover dried foods mouse-proofed to the best of my ability. Floors mopped and dried. Beds stripped and bedding packed away. I didn’t know when the cottage would next be used, though I was sure it wouldn’t be long. I left just as I had arrived: with a single bag of belongings. I slammed the door shut behind me but didn’t bother to lock it, though I did tie the garden gate shut with baling twine to make sure the sheep wouldn’t be able to get into the garden and nibble away at the trees that I had planted. Then I headed off down the hill to the river, over the footbridge, and along my short cut to the main road, through the pine woods along the old logging trail that was becoming steadily more overgrown. I crossed the road, looked up the valley, and waited for a lift.

  During the years I spent in the hills, I kept a journal. It is erratic, I wrote it only when the mood took me, and there are long gaps, as it never crossed my mind that I might one day want to make use of those notes. When I read my notebooks now I can see a dramatic change taking place from beginning to end. For the first year, it is a fairly straightforward diary, an account of where I went, what I did, and how I felt. By the second year it is strictly a nature journal: a record of my sightings
and perhaps some notes on the weather. And by the third year it is virtually an almanac: arrival dates for spring and autumn migrants; nesting records; perhaps interspersed with an occasional piece of prose capturing a fragmentary moment, say a description of the flight of a single bird. I have disappeared entirely from my own narrative; my ego has dissolved into the mist. I came to the hills to find myself, and ended up losing myself instead. And that was immeasurably better.

  I live in town in England now. I see foxes here almost every night, far more than I ever saw in Wales. There are sparrowhawks aplenty here too — for those who care to look — dashing along the hedgerows between people’s gardens, circling over the parks in their display flights. And from my window I can just make out the peregrine eyrie at the top of a tall tower block. But my life here is very different; sometimes I feel that I have not lived a single life but a whole series of quite distinct lives, perhaps because the change from one lifestyle to another has not been a gradual progression but the result of a snap decision here, a sudden switching of tracks there.

  I try to visit the cottage as often as I can, engineering my life so that at least once or twice a year I can make it to Penlan alone for a while. Of course this is a very different experience from that of the years when I had no other life, in the same way that a short package holiday is different from the open-ended travels of my youth, when I just kept going, on and on, until I ran out of money, or health, or inclination. But there is a curious thing that happens to me on these visits. For the first hour or two, I race around, checking the slates on the roof, bringing in firewood and lighting the fire, filling the lamps, unpacking the food I have brought, making up my bed. And then at some point I sit down in the old wicker armchair in front of the log fire, put my feet up and forget myself. It is as if there is a switch in my mind that takes me back in time. All the intervening years just fall away and are gone, and it is as though I had never left.