Our base in the Burren was an old low-slung house in its centre, belonging to a friend of Roger’s. The house blended New Age and old age. Guarding the front door was a row of ancient hawthorns, quiffed eastwards by the onshore winds, from which silver wind-chimes hung and rang in the ceaseless breeze. Behind a gnarled gorse bush in the garden stood a three-foot plaster statue of Jesus, his right hand raised in permanent and startling blessing.
The evening of our arrival, we moved round the house, looking out of the windows on every side. Visible in the grey dusky light, midway up the glass of each window, was a flat horizon-line of dark rock. It felt as though we were in a diving-bell, part-submerged and gazing out at the water as it encircled us. That night, we sat in half-darkness round a peat-fire, reading out passages from books to each other and talking. I told Roger about my night on the summit of Hope, about the sudden fear I had felt instead of the exultation I had expected, about the intractability of that place.
At dawn the next morning, we began our explorations, carrying with us a map of the area made by the cartographer and landscape historian, Tim Robinson, who lived up the coast in Roundstone. Roger had been unusually and mysteriously ill in the month before we left, and he was still weak, so we moved gently, walking for slow miles across the limestone, pacing out the Burren’s reaches, trying to begin to understand this heavily encrypted landscape.
The solubility of limestone, its acquiescence to water, means that the Burren - like its sister limestone lands in the Peak District and the Yorkshire Dales - is rich with clandestine places: runnels, crevasses, dens, caves, hollows, gullies. It is a landscape that has the vast, involuted surface area of a coastline, or a lung’s interior. Things pool and hide in limestone, including meaning: it forms a lateral landscape, but not a shallow one.
The soft worn beauty of limestone has also made it a commodity. From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, a trade in the stone grew; it was desirable for rockeries and municipal flower-beds. Legal and illegal quarrying means that in Britain, where a scant 6,000 acres of surface limestone pavement exist, only around 200 acres remain undamaged.
Limestone, I found during my time in the Burren, demands of the walker a new type of movement: the impulse to be diverted, to wander and allow the logic of one’s motion to be determined by happenstance and sudden disclosure. We learned, or were taught by the ground, how to walk without premeditation: turning corners when they came, following bends in valleys, our paths set by the ancient contingencies of geology and the immediate contingencies of footfall, our expectations quickened - ready for surprise when it happened.
It happened often. Birds sprang from invisible crannies in the stone: a woodcock rolling away through the low air, a snipe exploding out of a scrubby hollow. Hares pelted up from their forms. On a summit, out of sight of the sea, we found a cow’s skull, green with mould, and then, scattered over half an acre, like the wreckage of an air crash, the rest of its skeleton. In gullies we found groves of ancient hawthorns and blackthorns, lichen flourishing on their thin trunks, giving them the look of shaggy centaur’s legs.
Once, in a rain-filled midday dusk, we watched a peregrine fly from an escarpment of wet limestone cliffs facing the Atlantic. It launched from its rock sill, flapped its wings clumsily twice, three times, seemed as if it would sink, and then lifted and flew out and over the wooded hillside until it was only a black star in the grey sky.
Early on another day, we crested a pass to find three hundred acres of bright water shining in the valley beneath us, unmarked on our map. It was a turlough - one of the temporary lakes which form in limestone country after heavy rain, when the water level rises up from beneath the rock, like a bath filling from its own plughole. This turlough had overwhelmed the valley, and we could see dozens of trees standing in their own reflections, like playing-card kings. A sparrowhawk circled above the water, covering miles in minutes.
Hours further on, at the junction of three remote valleys, we discovered a silver acre of limestone pavement. These pavements, like those of the Yorkshire Dales, are divided into clints (the glacially polished horizontal surfaces) and grykes (the vertical fissures which divide the clints, and which have been worn out by water erosion). The openness and polish of the pavements lend them an air of expectancy, as though some entertainment or spectacle is soon to be convened there. They make you think of plazas or town squares in winter, empty except for pigeons and shadows. Roger spoke of their resemblance to the Dancing Ledge on the Dorset coast: the broad sea-smoothed rock plinth where the men of Swanage used to take their ladies to dance and more, while the waves broke and the sun set. I remembered the hard igneous summit of Hope, and felt surprisingly happy to be on this softer stone.
We stepped down on to the pavement from the hillside, and as we did so three feral goats - chocolate-and-cream coats, fish-hook horns - graciously ceded the space to us, and began to climb the steep moor on the other side. We picked our way over the grykes, their rims weathered into curves, into the centre of the pavement. Their form was exquisitely complex, and the ridges and valleys induced brief losses of scale, so that they could have been satellite maps of mountain ranges or river deltas.
Near the centre of the pavement, we reached a large gryke running north to south. We lay belly-down on the limestone and peered over its edge. And found ourselves looking into a jungle. Tiny groves of ferns, mosses and flowers were there in the crevasse - hundreds of plants, just in the few yards we could see, thriving in the shelter of the gryke: cranesbills, plantains, avens, ferns, many more I could not identify, growing opportunistically on wind-blown soil. The plants thronged every available niche, embracing one another into indistinguishability. Even on this winter day, the sense of life was immense. What the gryke would look like in the blossom month of May, I could not imagine.
This, Roger suddenly said as we lay there looking down into it, is a wild place. It is as beautiful and complex, perhaps more so, than any glen or bay or peak. Miniature, yes, but fabulously wild.
After we had crossed the pavement, we found, beneath a steep limestone escarpment, the remains of a ring fort. All that was left of it were concentric ridges under the grass, made visible by their shadow more than their substance, arranged around a sunken central pit. We stepped over the berm and down into the fort’s interior, and stood, turning, looking down the three valleys that radiated from it.
The fort would probably have been built, like the hundreds of others in the region, around 3,500 years ago, by settlers who moved out to the coastal regions from the wooded interiors of the country. The name we now give these structures is misleading: the ‘forts’ were primarily domestic rather than military in purpose, with each one being the centre of a small community, and denoting a dominion or territory of about one square mile.
There was so little to indicate the fort, just the vestiges of its form, but stepping down into it I felt the swift deepening of time, the sharp sense of the preterite, which occasionally comes in such places. We stood quietly together inside the fort’s circle, working out the sight-lines down the valleys, trying to imagine how the people who lived and worshipped here had perceived this landscape. The long late sunlight lay on the settlement like cloth, shaping itself to the grass and the stone.
In the aboriginal culture of New Guinea, landscape possesses two distinct surfaces of existence. The archaeologist Christopher Tilley describes them well: ‘One is fixed, the land of the dead, ancestral forces; the other, the land of the living, is mobile, but always gravitating in relation to the first. There is an invisible and underlying order of spirit beings, including totemic ancestors and ghosts of the dead.’ The Burren, it seemed that sunlit afternoon, also possessed these different orders of existence, moving in relation to one another. They worked like skins, differently holed and punctured, sliding over one another. At certain times and in certain places the holes aligned, and one could see through the present land, the land of the living, backwards into another time, to a ghost landsc
ape, the land of the dead.
The wild and the dead have long been involved with each other. Although we are now accustomed to orderly burial in sacralised ground - acre on acre of ranked graves - this has not always been the way. The wild has often been a place to which the dead are returned, slipped into earth as if into water.
On 18 April 1430, John Reve, a glover from the village of Beccles in Suffolk, was summoned to the bishop’s palace in Norwich to account for his heretical belief in the rightness of burial in wild places. Reve’s defence was recorded. ‘I have held, believed and affirmed,’ he declared courageously to the tribunal, ‘that it is as great merit, reward and profit to all Christ’s people to be buried in middens, meadows or in the wild fields as it is to be buried in churches or churchyards.’
Reve’s moving belief in the righteousness of wild burial would find many later historical counterparts, both within and without the Christian tradition. Seventeenth-century Quakers took to burying their dead in orchards and gardens as a mark of dissent, while the Marquis de Sade ordered in his will that, at his death, his body be collected on a cart by the local woodseller, taken to the woodlands on the Marquis’s estate, and there interred in a freshly dug grave. ‘Once the grave has been filled in,’ he stipulated, ‘it will be planted with acorns so that in time to come the site being covered over and the copse being once again as thickly wooded as it was before, the traces of my grave will disappear from the surface of the earth.’
Wildness and death are strongly linked in my family. My great-grandfather, who moved to Switzerland in an attempt to cure his bronchitis, was buried in the Veytaux cemetery on the shores of Lake Geneva: his grave has a view up a steep valley towards the Rochers de Naye, the distinctively indented rock ridge that rises above the Lake. My maternal grandparents had four children. One of them, Charmian, was born with spina bifida. She died on 25 October 1954, after a month of life: her body was cremated at Honor Oak Crematorium, and her ashes were scattered on One Tree Hill in the North Kent Downs, looking out over the Weald - Weald, from the Old English for ‘forest’, or in its sixteenth-century version, ‘wild’. My father has asked me to spread his ashes on the slopes of Beinn Alligin, a mountain in the Torridon range on the north-west coast of Scotland. Alligin is a fortress of old red sandstone: it rises over 3,000 feet almost straight out of the Atlantic. To its north stretches the treeless expanse of the Flowerdale Forest, one of the largest areas of unroaded terrain in Britain and Ireland.
An Irish friend once told me a story about how his aunt had upset the family. One summer, a salesman had come knocking on the door when everyone else but she was out. She had let him in, heard him talk and bought his product, which was a grave plot. The family were worried that she had been gulled, and they wanted her to get her money back. But she would not do so. The grave site was on a cliff-top, she said, a rare site, and she showed them the map. It had a beautiful view over the Atlantic. It would be a good place, she said, to spend the rest of eternity.
So many of the wilder landscapes of Britain and Ireland are filled with graves, marked and unmarked. So many ancient burial places are located within sight of a river or on bluffs and promontories overlooking the sea. There are the chambers at Maes Howe on Orkney, the barrows of the southern counties of England - Wiltshire, Dorset - and the circles and stone-lines which brood on the moors of Devon and Cornwall, and on the Scilly Isles. In Northumbria, there are communal graves on Dod Hill, Redesdale and Bellshiel Law dating from 2000 BC. At Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, a burial site from around AD 500 is set on a bluff above the River Deben, and contains the bodies of the Wuffingas, an elite cadre of noblemen who ruled the area at that time. The name Hoo is derived from the Old English word haugh, meaning ‘high place’.
To travel to somewhere like Maes Howe or Sutton Hoo, or to walk between the graves out in the wild reaches of the Burren, is to find yourself unaccountably uplifted. There are beliefs expressed here, you think, which might be learned from. A sense of orientation, perhaps, or connection. The exhilaration you feel has something to do with the innocence of the assumptions embodied in such a grave site, with its unbashful vision of a continuity between life, death and place. That, and the simple fact that so many people, of so many ages, should have set their dead to gaze out over space.
We moved through dozens of weathers in our time in the Burren. Black angled rain, bleaks of cloud, sunsets that turned the watery hollows of the limestone to mercury or blood. A dusk that came in the form of a grey line of cloud with a sharp straight edge, drawn over from the east like a swimming-pool cover. On a beach where the sand swirled in a yellow and grey Messerschmidt two-tone, we watched ten-foot combers queuing up and breaking perfectly along their length as they neared the beach.
I came to feel, during the days we spent there, that the significant form of the Burren was the circle. It was there in the ring forts, there in the mountains, with their stepped profiles. And there, too, in the closed chemical loop of stone and bone that made the Burren: the limestone of which it was composed being itself the consequence of the settling out of boned and unboned bodies; the richness of the limestone attracting humans to the landscape; and then the death and burial of those humans. Bone returning to stone.
The Burren, like the Yorkshire Dales, is an antique sea. Hundreds of millions of years ago its limestone was the bed of a shallow tropical ocean, upon which the bodies of oysters, sea-snails, ammonites, belemnites, coccoliths, sea lilies and corals rocked gently down in their billions, to form a limy silt. Each fragment of the Burren is a mausoleum, each hill a necropolis of unthinkable dimensions, containing more dead organisms than there are humans who have ever lived.
To be in the Burren is to be reminded that physical matter is simultaneously indestructible and entirely transmutable: that it can swap states drastically, from vegetable to mineral or from liquid to solid. To attempt to hold these two contradictory ideas, of permanence and mutability, in the brain at the same time is usefully difficult, for it makes the individual feel at once valuable and superfluous. You become aware of yourself as constituted of nothing more than endlessly convertible matter - but also of always being perpetuated in some form. Such knowledge grants us a kind of comfortless immortality: an understanding that our bodies belong to a limitless cycle of dispersal and reconstitution.
Of all the stones of the archipelago, limestone has always been the best accomplice to metaphysics. W. H. Auden, who so loved the karst shires of the Northern Pennines, adored limestone. What most moved him about it was the way it eroded. Limestone’s solubility in water means that any fault-lines in the original rock get slowly deepened by a process of soft liquid wear. In this way, the form into which limestone grows over time is determined by its first flaws. For Auden, this was a human as well as a geological quality: he found in limestone an honesty - an acknowledgement that we are as defined by our faults as by our substance.
One afternoon, walking back through a silky cold sunlight after a day out on the limestone pavements, Roger and I met a man, perhaps sixty years old, with a thick brown moustache, and a shotgun crooked in his arm. He had, he said, taken three woodcock. They were stowed in the game pockets of his jacket; I could see the shapes of their long hard beaks showing through the cloth. Bright red domed beads of blood stood out on the waxy sleeves of his jacket, and in one I could see a fish-eye reflection of me and the land behind. He was a Clare man, he said, and had been shooting here for more than forty years. He spoke of the changes over the time he had known the area; of the return of the hazel scrub during the past decade, a sign that the land was not being farmed as hard, that more food was being transported into the area from outside. I asked him about the hares of the Burren, for we had seen several of them that day, long-legged and long-eared, sitting like sentries, or sprinting gracefully off around a hillside. He said that hares were a special animal here. Thirty years back, when times were hard, his father had shot hares, and they had eaten them as a family, but now no one did, because they were
scarcer, but also because they were considered to be animals of poetry. There would be uproar in the gun clubs if anyone was heard to have shot a hare.
The hares were still chased, though, by men on foot and with dogs, he said, but they were always left to run free at the end of the chase. He turned and pointed to the far end of a long low hill of grey karst to our east, softened by purple hazel scrub, and said that a running hare, leaving from the spot on which we three were standing, would make for that end of the hill, and then - he swept his finger along the horizon of the hill, and we followed its indication - race all the way along its top, before coming back, in an arc of nine or ten miles’ distance, to exactly the point from which it had set off. He spoke beautifully about the form of this run, and the instinct which brought the hare back to its starting point, so turning arc into circle.
On our last night in the Burren, the sky cleared and the air cooled. The moon was a waxing crescent, bone-coloured, about a third of full, and bright enough to see by. The stars were myriad. I wanted to be out in the Burren by night, so I left the house and went walking alone in the clear winter darkness. I hoped I could find my way back to a big ring fort we had reached on our first day - the triple-ramparted Cathair Chomain. It was close to freezing, and my breath fletched in the air. Roosting birds, unidentifiable in the dark, rose from the ground with flaring wings and eyes like jewels. The only sound I could hear was the stony krekking of a raven. Every now and then a car passed distantly along the single road that crosses the Burren’s centre, its headlight cones floating in the darkness.
I walked slowly, following short sunken valleys, picking my way carefully over the limestone pavements, scrambling up little rock cliffs, and pushing through the dense dwarf hazel thickets, beneath whose shoulder-high canopy the moonlight had little reach. I was feeling proud of my nimbleness - until I slipped and banged my right shin so hard I had to sit and wait for the pain to ebb.
The Wild Places (Penguin Original) Page 14