When I woke in the corrie above Doo Lough that night, at some point in the small hours, the cloud had passed away, and the moon was pouring its light down on to the valley. I was thirsty, so I took my metal cup and walked to the side of the corrie, and held the cup beneath the spill of one of the waterfalls. The water hit the tin and set it ringing like a bell. I drank the cold clear rainwater, and looked down over the dark valley. The shadows of the mountains on either side of the lough were cast over its floor in clear black shapes. The starlight fell upon the scene, old light from dead stars, and where it fell, the boulders and swells of the landscape cast dark moon-shadows, and I could see the night wind rippling over the grass of the valley, stirring it into ghostly presence.
10
Ridge
For four days in late March, snow settled unexpectedly across Britain, taking it by surprise. Spring had arrived a week previously: black buds had popped green on the ash trees, and I had seen brown hares making curved runs in the Suffolk fields as I drove across to see Roger in Mellis. But then the wind changed direction, northerlies brought freezing temperatures, and spring stopped. Gritter lorries moved over the roads, whirring out fans of salt and stone. Children made an ice slide on a quiet road near my house, and queued up in jostling lines, polishing the ice to the consistency of milk-bottle glass. John, who had sailed me out to Enlli, wrote from his home in Hope Valley in the Peak District, to say he had spent two days out tracking hares. He spoke of big beluga drifts of snow, and of the hares, still in their white fur, moving unhurriedly between them.
I had been hoping that spring would hold, for I wanted to see the fizz and riot of the land coming to life again after winter, to feel some of the warmth I had glimpsed in the gryke but that I had so far missed on my journeys. My plan had been to go to the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire, where I could explore the rich green valleys of the Ribble and the Lune, and sleep out on riverbanks. Roger was going to join me. But the return of the snow changed things. I decided instead that I would go alone for a proper night walk in the Cumbrian mountains.
Snow perpetuates the effect of moonlight, which means that on a clear night, in winter hills, you can see for a distance of up to thirty miles or so. I know this because I have experienced it several times before. Several, but not many, because in order to go night-walking in winter mountains, you require the following rare combination of circumstances: a full moon, a hard frost, a clear sky and a willingness to get frozen to the bone.
I watched the forecasts. They anticipated that a further ‘snow-bomb’ - the remnant of a polar low, dragged south by other fronts - would hit north-west England, before quickly giving way to a high. When the snow-bomb landed, temperatures over the hills were expected to drop as low as -15°C, with winds gusting at speeds of up to fifty miles per hour. It seemed too much to hope that I would be rewarded with such conditions . . . But the chance was there, and so I left Cambridge and travelled up to Buttermere, in the mid-western fells of the Lake District: back on to the hard rocks, the granite and the tuff.
‘Is the Lake District another bourgeois invention, like the piano?’ Auden had asked in 1953. Certainly, with its tea shops and eroded footpaths, it could feel like that; as though it had been loved into tameness by its millions of visitors. But I hoped that, out by night in the snow, I might catch at some of its remaining wildness.
Noctambulism is usually taken to mean sleepwalking. This is inaccurate: it smudges the word into somnambulism. Noctambulism means walking at night, and you are therefore etymologically permitted to do it asleep or awake. Generally, people noctambulise because they are in search of melancholy, or rather a particular type of imaginative melancholy. Franz Kafka wrote of feeling like a ghost among men - ‘weightless, boneless, bodiless’ - when he walked at night.
I had found another reason for being out at night, however, and that is the wildness which the dark confers on even a mundane landscape. Sailors speak of the uncanniness of seeing a well-known country from the sea; the way that such a perspective can make the most homely coastline seem strange. Something similar happens to a landscape in darkness. Coleridge once compared walking at night in his part of the Lake District to a newly blind man feeling the face of a child: the same loving attention, the same deduction by form and shape, the same familiar unfamiliarity. At night, new orders of connection assert themselves: sonic, olfactory, tactile. The sensorium is transformed. Associations swarm out of the darkness. You become even more aware of landscape as a medley of effects, a mingling of geology, memory, movement, life. The landforms remain, but they exist as presences: inferred, less substantial, more powerful. You inhabit a new topology. Out at night, you understand that wildness is not only a permanent property of land - it is also a quality which can settle on a place with a snowfall, or with the close of day.
Over the past two centuries in particular, however, we have learned how to deplete darkness. Homo sapiens evolved as a diurnal species, adapted to excel in sunlit conditions, and ill-equipped to manoeuvre at night. For this reason, among others, we have developed elaborate ways of lighting our lives, of neutralising the claims of darkness upon us, and of thwarting the circadian rhythm.
The extent of artificial lighting in the modernised regions of the earth is now so great that it produces a super-flux of illumination easily visible from space. This light, inefficiently directed, escapes upwards before being scattered by small particles in the air - such as water droplets and dust - into a generalised photonic haze known as sky glow. If you look at a satellite image of Europe taken on a cloudless night, you will see a lustrous continent. Italy is a sequined boot. Spain is trimmed with coastal light, and its interior sparkles. Britain burns brightest of all. The only significant areas of unlit land are at the desert margins of the continent, and along its mountainous spine
The stars cannot compete with this terrestrial glare, and are often invisible, even on cloudless nights. Cities exist in a permanent sodium twilight. Towns stain their skies orange. The release of this light also disrupts habits of nature. Migrating birds collide with illuminated buildings, thinking them to be daytime sky. The leaf-fall and flowering patterns of trees - reflexes controlled by perceptions of day length - are disrupted. Glow-worm numbers are declining because their pilot lights, the means by which they attract mates, are no longer bright enough to be visible at night.
By the time I reached the mountains, it was late afternoon. The snow-line was regular at 1,000 feet, dividing the world into grey and white, lower and upper. It was clear from the mood of the sky that another big fall was coming. Dark clouds had started to hood the earth from the east, and the brown burnt light of imminent snow was tinting the air. Scatters of thin sleet were falling. My cheeks and nose buzzed with the cold.
The path to the upper ground switchbacked from the lake shore through tall oak woods. Old coarse snow lay in rows between the trees, and in rings around their bases. Where I brushed against branches and leaves, snow spilled on to me like sugar. I met three other people, all of whom were descending. On each occasion we spoke briefly, acknowledged the extraordinariness of the land in this weather, and went our ways.
After half an hour, I reached the wide valley that holds Bleaberry Tarn, and behind which rises the line of peaks including Red Pike, High Stile and High Crag. Looking to my east and north, all I could see were white mountains. Distant snowfields, on mountains whose names I did not know, gave off bright concussions of late light. The wind was cold, and blowing into me. It was already so strong that I had to lean into it at a five-degree vaudeville tilt.
Above the hanging valley, the path was thick with hard compacted snow, its stones grouted with ice. To the right of the path, I noticed an irregular trail of tiny red crooked poles, an inch high at most, standing out from the snow like stalagmites. Two days previously, when the snow first fell, someone must have dripped blood as they walked, and the blood had frozen as it trickled down into the snow. Since then, a steady wind had chafed away the loose snow, so th
at what remained standing were the poles, each one a drip of blood.
By the time I reached the ridge, at over 2,000 feet, the snow had thickened to a blizzard. Visibility was no more than a few feet. The white land had folded into the white sky, and it was becoming hard even to stand up in the wind. I would need to find somewhere to sleep out the worst of the storm, so I cast about for sheltered flat ground, but could see none.
Then I came across a tarn, roughly circular in shape, perhaps ten yards in diameter, pooled between two small crags, and frozen solid. The tarn ice was the milky grey-white colour of cataracts, and rough and dented in texture. I padded out to its centre, and jumped gently a couple of times. It did not creak. I wondered where the fish were. The tarn was, if not a good place to wait out the storm, at least the best on offer. It was flat, and the two crags gave some shelter from the wind. My sleeping-bag and bivouac bag would keep me warm enough. And I liked the thought of sleeping there on the ice: it would be like falling asleep on a silver shield or a lens. I hoped that when I woke, the weather would have cleared enough for some night-walking.
The painter Samuel Palmer and the poet Edward Thomas both knew and loved the wilding quality of darkness. In twilight, dawn and full night, Palmer would walk the countryside around the village of Shoreham, in Kent, where he and a tribe of fellow painters known as the Ancients lived in the 1820s and 1830s. Sometimes, when they walked together by night, they would sing the witches’ songs from Macbeth. Palmer’s watercolours and etchings brim with his astonishment at the Kent countryside.
Learning from the work of his acknowledged master, Blake, Palmer developed an artistic language that allowed him to record that astonishment: how leaves seem to dance before the eyes at dusk, or the indigo of early-morning and late-evening skies, or the vast creamy intensity of a harvest moon. To him, even the heavily farmed landscape of Kent teemed with a marvellous wildness, which expressed itself in energies, orders and rhythms. To Palmer, the growth of an apple from a branch was cause for wonder, as were the ripe synchronous patterns of a cornfield in a windy dawn, or the mackerel mottling of moonlit clouds.
Edward Thomas was, from a young age, a walker, both by night and day. In his mid-twenties, when he was suffering from depression, he would often set off on long walking tours, alone, in the march-lands of Wales and England. Like so many melancholics, he developed his own rituals of relief, in the hope that these might abate his suffering, and that he might out-march the causes of his sadness.
He left a record of one of these tours in his extraordinary short book of 1905, Wales. It reads like a dream-story or song; an entranced account of the months Thomas spent exploring the wild places of that country - its rivers, mountains, estuaries, forests and lakes. As he moved between these places, he spoke to those he met along his way; he noted down the stories they told him, and the songs which on occasion they sang him. He wrote his book using a wild goose feather he had found on the sands of Kenfig, and cut into a quill pen.
In Wales, Thomas exults in the joy of walking fast in darkness, the joy of seeing the summits of the hills ‘continually writing a wild legend on the cloudy sky’ by day. He describes how, at night, the land becomes cast into ‘no colour’, and then how, when the sunlight returns, the world awakens again to its hues. Once, on the winter hills, the temperature falls so low that he has to stop and warm himself in the moist breath of a flock of sheep. And one dawn, having walked in the mountains through the night, he comes to a narrow pass between two peaks, and stops for shelter in a little copse of oak and hazel. The mist has risen from the low ground around him, and in the dying moonlight, he wrote, he sees ‘a thousand white islands of cloud and mountain’.
Up in the mountains at night, Thomas remarks near the end of Wales, ‘It becomes clear, as it is not in a city, that the world is old and troubled, and that light and warmth and fellowship are good.’ A year after the declaration of the First World War, Thomas enlisted. He joined the Artists’ Rifles - a large volunteer battalion for the London and Middlesex areas - and was posted first to Hare Hall Training Camp in Essex, where he worked as a map-reading instructor, using the skills of land knowledge he had learned as a walker. In January 1917, he was posted to the Western Front. He wrote to his wife Helen on 29 January, the day before he left England, to say that once he was ‘over there’, he would ‘say no more goodbyes’. From the letters and the journal he wrote while at the Front, it is clear that Thomas often recalled his walking days, and that the memories of those years of openness, and of freedom to move, were a steady consolation to him, until he was killed by a shell-blast on the first day of the Battle of Arras, just after dawn.
Up on the ridge, the blizzard blew for two hours. I lay low, got cold, watched the red reeds that poked up from the ice flicker in the wind. Hail fell in different shapes, first like pills, then in a long shower of rugged spheres the size of peppercorns. Over half an hour, the hail turned to snow, which had the texture of salt and fell hissing on to the ice. I had begun to feel cold, deep down, as though ice were forming inside me, floes of it cruising my core, pressure ridges riding up through my arms and legs, white sheaths forming around my bones.
I must have slept, though, for some hours later I woke to find that the snow had stopped and the cloud cover had thinned away, and a late-wintermoon was visible above the mountains: just a little off full, with a hangnail missing on the right side, and stars swarming round it. I got up, and did a little dance on the tarn, partly to get warm, and partly because if I looked backwards over my shoulder while I danced, I could see my moon-shadow jigging with me on the snow.
I appreciated the effort that the moonlight had made to reach me. It had left the sun at around 186,000 miles per second, and had then proceeded through space for eight minutes, or ninety-three million miles, and had then upped off the moon’s surface and proceeded through space for another 1.3 seconds, or 240,000 miles, before pushing through troposphere, stratosphere and atmosphere, and descending on me: trillions of lunar photons pelting on to my face and the snow about me, giving me an eyeful of silver, and helping my moon-shadow to dance.
I had woken into a metal world. The smooth unflawed slopes of snow on the mountains across the valley were iron. The deeper moon-shadows had a tinge of steel blue to them. Otherwise, there was no true colour. Everything was greys, black, sharp silver-white. Inclined sheets of ice gleamed like tin. The hailstones lay about like shot, millions of them, grouped up against each rock and clustered in snow hollows. The air smelt of minerals and frost. Where I had been lying on the tarn, the ice had melted, so that there was a shallow indent, shaped like a sarcophagus, shadowed out by the moonlight.
To the south, the mountain ridge curved gently round for two miles. It was as narrow as a pavement at times, at others as wide as a road, with three craggy butte summits in its course. To the east and west, the steep-sided valleys, unreachable by the moonlight, were in such deep black shadow that the mountains seemed footless in the world.
I began walking the ridge. The windless cold burnt the edges of my face. These were the only sounds I could hear: the swish of my breathing, the crunch my foot made when it broke through a crust of hard snow, and the wood-like groans of ice sinking as I stepped down on it. I passed an ice dune which was as smooth and glassy as the sill of a weir. My shadow fell for yards behind me. Once, stopping on a crag-top, I watched two stars fall in near parallel down the long black slope of the sky.
When I came to a big frozen pool of water, I took a sharp stone and cut a cone-shaped hole in the white ice where it seemed thinnest. Dark water glugged up into the hole, and I knelt, dipped my mouth to the ice and drank. I caught up a handful of snow, and patted and shaped it in my hands as I walked, so that it shrank and hardened into a small white stone of ice.
Where the ground steepened, I moved from rock to rock to gain purchase. On the thinner sections I walked out to the east, so I could look along the cornice line, which was fine and delicate, and proceeded in a supple curve along the ri
dge edge and over the moon trench, as if it had been engineered.
Several small clouds drifted through the sky. When one of them passed before the moon, the world’s filter changed. First my hands were silver and the ground was black. Then my hands were black and the ground silver. So we switched, as I walked, from negative to positive to negative, as the clouds passed before the moon.
The human eye possesses two types of photo-receptive cells: rods and cones. The cone cells cluster in the fovea, the central area of the retina. Further out from the fovea, the density of cone cells diminishes, and rod cells come to predominate. Cone cells are responsible for our acute vision, and for colour perception. But they work well only under bright light conditions. When light levels drop, the eye switches to rod cells.
In 1979, three scientists, Lamb, Baylor and Yau, proved that a rod cell could be tripped into action by the impact of a single photon. They used a suction electrode to record the membrane current of pieces of toad retina with high rod-cell density. They then fired single photons at the retinal pieces. The membrane current showed pronounced fluctuations. It is agreed that this is among the most beautiful experiments in the field of optics.
The Wild Places (Penguin Original) Page 16