The Wild Places (Penguin Original)

by Macfarlane, Robert

  Eventually I reached the fort, navigating by a mixture of map, memory and luck. Three rings of pale stone, partly grown over by grass, and the central enclosed circle a jungle of thorn and briar. I sat between the first and second walls, under the guardian arm of an old elder, which had curled round and down upon itself to form a nearly closed hoop. Beneath it, I found and kept a little squashed sphere of limestone, which was soapy to the touch.

  I stayed for a while, there in the elder’s kind crook, on the cold grass, watching the stars shed their impassive light. I thought about the historical shadows that had fallen across my journeys, up in the cleared glens of Scotland and now here in the Burren. I had expected to find evidence of contemporary damage, contemporary menace, but I had not thought to encounter these older darknesses. I had passed through lands that were saturated with invisible people, with lives lived and lost, deaths happy and unhappy, and the spectral business of these wild places had become less and less ignorable. My idea of wildness as something inhuman, outside history, had come to seem nonsensical, even irresponsible.

  But I also thought about what Roger had said as we peered into the thriving floral world of the gryke. His comment about its wildness had jolted my mind unexpectedly, brought previously unrelated thoughts into configuration and thrown others apart. It had made me see how wedded my old sense of the wild was to an ideal of tutelary harshness - to the scourges of rock, altitude and ice. Down in the gryke, though, I had seen another wildness at work: an exuberant vegetable life, lusty, chaotic and vigorous. There was a difference of time-scheme between these kinds of wildness, too. My sense of a landscape’s wildness had always been affected by the gravitational pull of its geological past - by the unstillable reverberations of its earlier makings by ice and fire. The wildness of the gryke, though, was to do with nowness, with process. It existed in a constant and fecund present.

  When the cold became too much to bear, I got up and set off to steer a safe course home. The stars performed their slow whirls around the pole, as I moved in the dark past orthostat, capstone, ruin and famine grave.

  The main material causes of the Irish Famine are well established: a rickety system of estate management based on absentee landlordism, and a monoculture potato diet among the peasantry. There was, too, the rapidity and virulence of the potato blight itself, which moved with appalling speed, afflicting entire fields overnight. Potatoes, usually rummaged firm and gold from the ground, came up stinking and mushed. Despair spread with the blight, and with the hunger came epidemic disease: dysentery, typhoid.

  In 1847, the height of the Famine, at least a quarter of a million people died. In the thirty years from 1841 to 1871, Ireland’s population was nearly halved by death and emigration, from around 8,175,000 to 4,412,000. The most conservative estimates of the dead of these years, taken from the Census, suggest that between one and one and a half million people perished. The highest mortality rates were in the western and north-western regions. Connaught, the province comprising Galway, Leitrim, Sligo, Roscommon and Mayo, lost over a quarter of its population.

  Death rarely came rapidly. Starvation could take months to kill a person. An American missionary, Asenath Nicholson, who travelled through Ireland during the Famine, distributing Bibles and food, wrote of how, as flesh fell slowly from the bones, hope left the mind, until the starvation victim moved into a state of depressed inanity. She recorded that, in the ‘second stage of dying’, the starving would stand in the same spot for hours, ‘giving a vacant stare, and not until peremptorily driven away will they move’. Those even closer to death, Nicholson wrote, could be told because of the way their heads bent forwards; they would walk ‘with long strides, and pass you unheedingly’. In the workhouses, children lay for days before they died, eerily motionless. ‘In the very act of death still not a tear nor a cry,’ observed an English clergyman, Sidney Osborne, visiting a Limerick workhouse. ‘I have scarcely ever seen one try to change his or her position . . . two, three, or four in a bed, there they lie and die, if suffering still ever silent, unmoved.’ William Carleton, in The Black Prophet, his Famine novel of 1847, described the ‘fearful desolation’ he had encountered in the western parishes: gaunt figures, ‘their eyes wild and hollow, and their gait feeble and tottering’, the roads black with funerals, the death-bells pealing forth in every parish ‘in slow but dismal tones’, and how in the soup shops ‘wild crowds’ swarmed, ‘ragged, sickly, and wasted away to skin and bone’.

  In the worst affected villages, there was no one well enough to dig graves, and so bodies were stacked in ricks. Where interment could take place, the dead were buried in pits, thousands of which were dug, and from which bones are still turned up. In the coastal parishes, the burying grounds were often excavated on the borders of the sea, where the soil was loosest, and the dead were piled into the earth on top of one another. In the shallower pits, as the corpses swelled, the topmost layer of dead would be pushed to the surface. Feral tribes of dogs roamed and fed on the corpses. The animals came to look, said one witness, ‘so fat and shining’, plumped as they were on human flesh. Dogs ate the dead, and the living ate the dogs.

  People began to commit crimes deliberately, so that they could be transported to penal colonies - to anywhere but foodless Ireland. A British magistrate who visited Skibbereen in County Cork, on Christmas Eve 1846, found himself in a world dreamed up by Bosch or Goya. ‘In a few minutes [I was] surrounded by at least two hundred phantoms, such frightful spectres as no man can describe. By far the greater number were delirious, either from famine or from fever. Their demoniac yells are still ringing in my ears, and their horrible images are fixed upon my brain.’

  Many of those who died in the western counties, however, did so in their rural huts and cabins, quietly. In a dark expression of the politeness and dignity which characterised much behaviour during the Famine, the last to die in a family would often save the strength to reach, close and fasten the door of the cabin, so that the corpses would not be visible to passers-by. The cabin would then be pulled down upon them for a grave.

  In August, months after my journey to the Burren with Roger, I returned alone to the west of Ireland: to County Galway in Connacht, just to the north of the Burren. Trying to get a perspective on the land, I climbed Bin Chuanna, the highest peak in the Garraun range. Chuanna rises above the Killary peninsula, on whose westernmost tip Ludwig Wittgenstein lived near the end of his life, in a house built to store Famine relief aid, when he was trying to finish his Philosophical Investigations.

  I ascended Chuanna on a windy bright day. Partway up its pathless north face, a heron launched itself from high rocks above me - a foldaway construction of struts and canvas, snapping and locking itself into position just in time to keep air-bound - before beating seawards on its curved wings, away towards Rosroe. Around noon, I reached the summit: a rough broken tableland of flat rocks, perhaps a quarter of an acre in area, and planed smooth by the old ice. There was a single small cairn, and on its top sat a horned sheep’s skull. I picked up the skull, and as I did so water streamed from its ragged nose-holes in sudden liquid tusks, and ran on to my hand and up my sleeve. I put it back on the cairn top, having turned it so that it faced eastwards and inland, looking over miles of empty land glinting with lakes, on which thousands of wild geese over-wintered each year. The sun came out, breaking fitfully through the clouds and warming my hands and face. Seawards, I looked across the intricate tasselwork of inlet and peninsula. Close at hand, sheets of mica scattered the sunshine, so that even the dry rocks shone in the light. I found a rough pyramid of quartz, and took it for my storm-beach.

  From Chuanna’s summit I followed the course of a nameless stream back off the mountain’s western side. The stream flowed into a loch, and the loch formed a river, so I continued to follow the river until, late in the afternoon, I reached the sea: a semicircular white sand beach, a mile or so to the south of Rosroe, its curve perhaps half a mile long from tip round to tip.

  When I stoop
ed and caught up a handful of the sand, I saw that many of its particles were sickle-shaped fragments of shell, pale and small as cuticles, which recalled in their form the larger curve of the bay. Here and there people were sitting on the sand, or wading in the shallows. At either end of the semicircle, arcing out in a chain into the sea, was a run of two or three small islands, perhaps twenty yards apart from one another, separated by channels of blue water through which the ebbing tide ran.

  The sun fell brightly on those islands, so I thought that I would swim across and explore them. I walked round the beach as it curved south and west, until I reached its outermost point, a small triangular headland of golden sand, formed by the meeting of two sets of waves which came together transversely from north and south, making parallelogram patterns of water, diagonals sifting into diamonds.

  I waded out into the first of the tidal channels, carrying my rucksack above my head, feeling the firm ripples of sand upon the soles of my feet, and the transways strikes of the little waves on my shins. Small unspecifiable fish darted away from my feet, and once a little dab or plaice raised itself up in a puff of sand and glided off. The channel deepened quickly. Soon I was up to my chest in the water, whose colour had changed from the friendly green of shallow sandy water to a chillier blue. I could feel, too, that it was flowing faster, and that the warmth of the shallower water had become riddled with bands and tubes of cold.

  I reached the first of the islands, and then walked out into the second of the channels. This one was deeper, and at its centre the water reached up to my chest, and the currents swayed me off balance, so I was relieved when it shallowed again, and I walked out on to a golden beach, leaving slight footprints on the hard scoured sand.

  I sat down on the beach for a while, and let the sun and the wind dry me, and then I set out to explore my Crusoe island. There was not much to it. It was about twenty yards across and thirty wide, rising to ten feet or so above sea-level, rock-bound on its seaward side, and topped by green machair and golden sand. I checked the high-water wrack lines as I walked, which lay like rusty contours around the island. They suggested that it would not be overwhelmed, even in a storm. The forecast was good, and the island was a wild and beautiful place, so I decided to sleep there.

  As afternoon graded into evening, I sat with my back against a tall rock and watched the Atlantic, while the rock pulsed the day’s stored heat into me. I ate sardines and rye bread, and cut hunks of cheese with my knife. Gentle water glittered in the bay. As the sun lowered, the air became colder, and the turn and rise of the tide deepened and quickened the water in the channels which I had earlier crossed. I felt a calm settle into me; there was no way of leaving the island now, and no easy way on to it, and the impossibility of either escape or disturbance had a tranquillising effect, quite different to the alarm I had felt on the summit of Hope. This was a happy marooning. What was it that W. H. Murray had written? ‘Find beauty; be still.’

  Some time later, the sun set into the western sea, laying out a swaying ferrous path which reached the shore of the island. Almost immediately, the stars began to prick into sight: the sky was cloudless and clear of light pollution. I counted them as they appeared, until they came too quickly to count, filling the sky in bright complex specklings, so that the air seemed to become soft and mobile with them.

  I slept unexpectedly well in my dip of sand on the summit of the island, and did not wake until after dawn. I felt a rush of surprise and then of happiness to be where I was. I had slept on an island! The dream of every child who has read Swallows and Amazons. This gentle place had allowed me to use it as home, and although I knew that such anthropomorphic fancies were absurd, I felt briefly as though I had been guarded or cradled in some way by the place. It was the obverse and balance to the sensation of being on the summit of Ben Hope. This island was the salutary wild; that summit the indifferent wild. Each was remarkable, though, and I was grateful to have known them both.

  The sea on both sides of the island shifted evenly, its surface smooth and shining, its interior clear. Looking at the channels, I saw that I had an hour or so before the tide would let me cross back to the mainland again. I undressed, and padded across the black rocks on the bayward side of the island. Their stone was cold underfoot. I slipped gently into the water, breathing sharply at its coldness, then lolled back in it, and let the low humped waves, which were barely perceptible except as shrugs of the water, raise me up and lower me down again, as though I were being courteously lifted to make way for something passing underneath me.

  Around eight o’clock that morning, when the sun had risen above the eastern mountains, I walked down the sloping beach and into the tidal channel, and began to wade back across it, feeling the water heavy against my legs, smelling the salt rising off the warming surface, back across to the sickle-shaped beach.

  Later that morning I drove north to the town of Westport and climbed Croagh Patrick, the sacred mountain which rises there, from land once called Mureisc Aigli, the Sea-Marsh of the Eagle. My hope had been to spend the night on Patrick’s summit, where there had once stood a Celtic hill-fort and, later, a drystone oratory. But it happened that I had inadvertently chosen a holy day, the Feast of the Ascension, for my climb, and the path up the mountain was busy with hundreds of pilgrims - ordinary men, women and children from the surrounding towns and counties, who had come to test the strength of their Catholic faith against the mountain, for reasons I could not fathom. I started up the mountain among them, listening to them talk. Many of the men had chosen to walk barefoot and bare-chested, and most of these had blood seeping from the wounds the mountain’s rocks had left on their feet.

  I had not expected the pilgrims, nor had I expected the litter on Patrick’s summit: chocolate-bar wrappers stuffed into rock crevices, rotting banana skins lying outside the door to the new oratory. It was an uneasy mix of the sacred and the profane; I left it to the pilgrims.

  After my magical coastal night, though, I still wanted to sleep at altitude, and so I drove back down to the southern flank of Mweelrea, the great mountain that rises above Doo Lough - the Black Lough. As I had passed Mweelrea earlier, I had spotted a hanging corrie, nameless and difficult of access, overlooking the Lough, and had thought that it might make a good place to spend the night.

  I reached the corrie as dusk was falling, cresting its lip about 1,000 feet above the valley floor, to find myself in a wide, sunken bowl of grass and boulders, with encircling rock walls that rose 600 feet or so on every side and were washed by a series of fine waterfalls.

  Few people would have been into this corrie before, I guessed. There was no reason to come this way: no water to fish, no easy route through it up on to Mweelrea itself. The corrie was its own lost world, with only one way in and one out. What a place it was to be in that dusk, with the waterfalls misting in the thickening light.

  Within an hour, pale cloud had gathered around the mountain above, and clothed the summits of the crag curtain, so that through the dusk the waterfalls appeared to drop coldly and sourcelessly from the sky. The silence in the corrie, save for the waterfalls’ white noise, was absolute. I could see down into part of the valley beneath, and to Doo Lough, whose surface had become still and uniform as a sheet of dark iron.

  The valley I overlooked that evening was allegedly the site of one of the worst episodes of the Famine. At Louisburgh, the town to the north of the valley, in the cold spring of 1849, a crowd of around 600 people gathered. Many were close to death from starvation; all were hoping to find food at one of the relief stations that had been established in Louisburgh. Food, or an admission ticket to the Westport workhouse, which would at least guarantee them some sustenance. But the Relieving Officer of Louisburgh told the crowd that he could not supply them either with food or with tickets. He said that they should instead apply to the two Poor Law Guardians of the region, Colonel Hograve and Mr Lecky, who were due to meet the following day at Delphi Lodge, the big house at the southern end of the valley, t
en miles away, beyond Doo Lough.

  Two accounts exist of what then happened, of contrasting gravity. The more distressing is collected in James Berry’s Tales of the West of Ireland. According to Berry, that night, the crowd slept in the streets of Louisburgh. It was a clear night, and the temperature dipped consequently low. The next morning, an estimated 200 people were found dead where they lay. The survivors began the long walk south, up over the Stroppabue Pass, and down round Doo Lough. There was no road at that point, and they walked on sheep tracks. Nor were there bridges over the rivers, and at two points the marchers had to ford the Glankeen River, which was turbulent with water from the previous days’ rain.

  When they finally arrived at Delphi, the Guardians were still at lunch, and sent word that the people should wait. So they sat down among the trees at the brink of the estate, where several died of exhaustion. When Hograve and Lecky had at last finished their lunch, they went down to where the people were, and told them that neither food relief nor workhouse tickets would be forthcoming, and that the people should return to Louisburgh.

  The survivors set off northwards, retracing the path they had just so effortfully taken. The weather had worsened by this point, with the wind veering round to the north-west, bringing hail and sleet. Their clothes, soaked by stream-fording and sleet, froze quickly about their limbs to the ‘stiffness of sheet iron’. Many died where they fell by the side of the track, killed by hypothermia and exhaustion. When those that were left reached the crest of the pass, at Stroppabue, above the Doo Lough, the wind was of such strength, and the people of such weakness, that scores were buffeted into the water of the Lough, where they drowned.

  The next morning, Berry recorded, the path from the Glankeen back to Houston’s house was covered with corpses ‘as numerous as the sheaves of corn in an autumn field’. The Relieving Officer at Louisburgh, having heard of the tragedy, gathered together a group of near-starving men, and they walked along the corpse-strewn track, interring the dead where they lay. When the burial party reached Doo Lough, where so many had died, there was not enough earth to bury the bodies, except in the little glen or ravine which ran down the brow of the cliff between Stroppabue and Doo Lough. ‘So,’ recorded Berry, ‘they had to gather all the corpses and carry them to the little glen where they buried them in pits just as on a battlefield, and there they lie sleeping where the sighing of the winds through the tall, wild ferns which wave above their nameless graves forever sings their requiem.’