Right out there on the sea edge, in the depressed land, wading calf-deep through green fields of lucerne, we flew the tiercel. He launched himself from Ron’s wrist, flapped his wings clumsily twice, three times, seemed as if he would sink to the grass, and then lifted and flew out on a steep upwards diagonal. We watched him diminish.
He climbed with little hinged flaps, in an effortful but controlled motion, moving in a wide helix, until he reached a high pitch, perhaps 200 feet up, and at that height he levelled off and began to move in big circles, looking down on the land, surveying it.
‘The peregrine sees and remembers patterns we do not know exist,’ wrote Baker, ‘the neat squares of orchard and woodland, the endlessly varying quadrilateral shapes of fields. He finds his way across the land by a succession of remembered symmetries . . . he sees maps of black and white.’ The tiercel, up at an altitude greater than any land point in the county of Essex, would have seen out over the sea wall, to where the flocks of waders and gulls were massing on the edge of the incoming tide. He would have seen inland, through the haze, to the rectilinear pattern of the fields and ditches. Beneath him, he would have seen three human figures, moving in a line across the baize of a lucerne field, two figures on one side of a drainage dyke, one on the other. And then he would have seen two partridges startled up from cover, moving trackable objects, one flying south and seaward, the other north-west and inland, out across the crop field, a single feather falling from the northernmost bird as it fled.
The partridges clattered out from our feet, and glancing up I saw the tiercel suddenly tilt into a steep stoop, the lateral bird becoming a near-vertical bird, the ground rising to meet the diving falcon at around 230 feet per second. He missed the partridge, pulled up from his stoop, and began to climb again, regaining his pitch. The partridge had taken cover in the lucerne; when we flushed it out, he stooped again. A longer, more angled dive, perhaps at sixty degrees to the ground, and at the last extension of this stoop he extended a taloned foot and struck the partridge with an impact inaudible to us.
We walked across the field, and when we reached the tiercel we found him mantling: hooding his blue wings over the dead bird, and looking up at us, fearfully.
Later, after the tiercel had fed, we walked up on to the sea wall, where the warm light onshore wind blew the smell of salt and mud on to us. The tiercel perched on Helen’s hand, and all four of us sat there, looking out over the saltings, and watching the high migrations pass. Behind us, the late sun blazed in the evening haze, red as an aged sparrowhawk’s eye.
14
Tor
A sequence of clear nights in early November brought the first frosts. Skim-ice formed on standing water. The moon hung low over the city, yellow as it grew, then silver on the wane. After the frost came gales, and the leaves of the horse-chestnut trees, loosened by the frost, ticked down in their hundreds of thousands and drifted up against the kerbs and hedges.
On a day when the wind was buffeting rooks from the trees, I went to the Hope Valley in the Peak District, to see my friends John and Jan Beatty, who had sailed me out to Enlli many months before. I wanted to bring my journeys to some sort of end, and it seemed right to do so in the company of those with whom they had begun. Besides, John had promised to take me to see the snow hares.
John was born and brought up in the Peak, within sight of the Kinder Downfall, and became a park warden while still at school. After working around the world, he settled back in the Peak, in the village of Bamford, near the Ladybower reservoir. Decades spent walking and climbing in the region meant that John rarely used a map, because he carried one in his head. He knew all the Peak’s aspects: its bleak upper reaches, its gritstone edges and its wooded cloughs. He knew what time of year each species of migrant bird arrived. Redwings and fieldfares in autumn. Golden plover, sandpipers and dunlin in spring. Occasional snow buntings after a midwinter northerly gale. He knew the locations of particular trees: star-leaved field maples, big lone beeches, and the black-barked sweet chestnuts, which flamed a sulphurous yellow in autumn. He knew the locations of the snares and stink-pits set out by gamekeepers on the private swathes of moor, to trap anything which might prey on the grouse. He knew on which south-tilted rocks the adders sunned themselves on hot days. He knew in which larch-tree a pair of goshawks kept their nest, and at the bottom of which heathery down-slope hen harriers had once successfully hatched.
He also knew where the snow hares lived.
The hare had long been my totem animal, and I had been pleased to find hares, like the hawks, appearing throughout my journeys. I had seen them all over the country: hunched discreetly in their forms on Orford Ness, sitting attentively on the turned fields of Suffolk, and scooting over the snow-slopes of Meall nan Tarmachan and the karst shires of the Burren. They had been there too, less expectedly, in the name of Edward Thomas’s First World War training camp, and in the hare’s ear flower I had seen out on the Dengie Peninsula.
The hawk and the hare: they were the perfect pair of familiars for my map-making. The hawk turning its sentinel circles in the air, looking down on to the land. The hare knowing the land peerlessly at ground level, able to move faster over it than anything else earthbound. My sleepings-out, in cups and dips of rock and earth and snow; this was the habit of the hare. But the pull to the high ground, to the summits and ridges, to look down upon the land; this was in mimicry of the hawk.
Of all hares, it was the snow hare, Lepus timidus, that fascinated me most. Smaller and more ancient than their low-altitude cousins, Lepus europaeus, the snow hares flourished across Europe during the Pleistocene. When the glaciers retreated, they followed the cold: their winter colouring allowed them to survive in snowbound conditions. Pliny thought that the snow hare went white from eating ice; in fact, it moults into its winter whiteness, shedding the smoky bluish-brown coat that lasts it for most of the year. Its winter moult is instigated by a reduction of the light received through the eyes. Decreased day-length begins the moult in autumn, and winter’s low temperature sustains it.
After the recession of the glaciers, the hares were marooned on islands of high ground - Wales, the Pennines, Cumbria, Scotland - before dying out everywhere but the Highlands. Then in the 1840s Scottish snow hares were introduced to the Peak District, in order to diversify the shooting bag on the grouse moors. They survived without flourishing: perhaps 200 hares now live across the many miles of high moorland plateaux that spread between the cities of Manchester, Sheffield and Derby. This is the paradox of their presence in the Peak: they have become for many people, including me, a sigil of wildness, but their presence here is entirely a consequence of human management. Even in the Cairngorms, their true fastness, they are under threat from climate change, and severe culls by gamekeepers who believe they are the secondary carriers of a tick-borne grouse-disease.
Snow hares possess, as well as the ghostly beauty of their winter pelage, an exceptionally graceful nonchalance. Poise at rest and elegance in motion: this distinguishes the snow hare. Watching one make its curved run over a steep snowfield, you understand why the Egyptian hieroglyph of a hare over a zigzag of water meant the verb ‘to be’, in the particular gerundive senses of ‘being’, ‘existing’, ‘persisting’.
For years, John had followed and watched a particular colony of hares which lived in and around a scatter of gritstone tors. The stones are set at 2,000 feet in a remote reach of the moors. There is little cover on the high tundra of the Peak, so it is natural for the hares to be drawn to the tor complexes that extrude here and there, and each of whose stones has its name, its history and its resemblances: to flying saucer, howdah, ostrich egg, quernstone.
It was this colony which John had watched during the great snows of March, when I had gone night-walking in Cumbria, and he had written to tell me of them playing among the ice dunes. In early November, a week before I went to see him, he had called to say that he had been up to the stones, and had found the hares there, on the turn into winter
pelage, their brown coats blotched with white. He also said that if I wanted to sleep out, he had found a possible bivouac hole for us: a tunnel, open at both ends, weathered into the north-west face of one of the tors, its floor a blond grit-sand beach. A hare’s scrape, really. To sleep inside a tor! I couldn’t wait.
We began walking late in the afternoon, with a big wind driving rain into our faces, and chopping up the water of the reservoir. We walked north first, through a mile of larch and birch forest. The frost followed by the wind had knocked billions of golden needles from the larches, and they lay in glossy saffron reefs by the side of every road and path, glowing even in that low light, possessing a lustre rather than a colour. John talked as we walked, pointing out birds, trees, plants, describing his love for the moors. There was nothing showy about John’s knowledge; his manner was the emanation of a deep passion. He possessed an integrity and an enthusiasm that reminded me constantly of Roger, and I wished they had been able to meet.
After two miles, he stopped and pointed up to the skyline: the tors, a mile or so from us and 300 feet above, just visible in the dusk. They were formed of gritstone, layers of submarine sand laid down around 300 million years ago, and then compacted over time in a subsiding basin to become rough rock. Ice, wind, and water had eventually carved sections of exposed gritstone into the eccentric shape of the tors. They reminded me of the ventifact sandstone outcrops of the Hoggar Mountains around Tamanrasset in Algeria, which have been abraded by sand-carrying winds into structures impertinent to gravity: boulders the size of houses, balanced on stems of rock.
We began to move steeply uphill, over boggy ground, slipping on bracken and grass. Our clothes, already wet with rain, became slicked with mud. We neared the rocks. Then - Hares! Hares! Two shouts from John, and two hares breaking from cover in the rocks above us, bobbing away uphill. And they were white! They moved so easily, little ghosts slipping between the rocks, over the bilberry and heather. Five seconds and they were gone, leaving my heart thumping.
We walked up into the heart of the tors, alert for more hares. The tors were spread over the rim of the plateau, and they faced twenty clear miles of high moor. At that height the wind was colossal, hurtling out of the black west, and of such strength that it was impossible to stand straight in it. We moved from rock to rock, reaching out to steady ourselves, as though on a ship’s deck in a storm. The rain was pelting now in heavy cold monsoon droplets. I took shelter behind a pair of twenty-foot tors that tilted in towards one another to form a wind-gate, and when I stepped from the shelter into the gate itself, the force of the gale was such that it pulled the flesh on my face tight and back. I remembered another gateway to another upper world: the Chalamain Gap, the granite portal that marks the northern entry to the centre of the Cairngorms.
John located the bivouac cave, and I knelt to examine it. It was already flooded out, a pool of water glinting on the mica-sand at its near end. This was a wild night, a wonderful night in its way, and I was glad to have seen the moor in this mood. Certainly, I would have liked to wake among the hares. But it was no night to be out. Sixteen hours of storm-soaked darkness, with almost no cover, would only have been a mortification. The hares could tolerate this, but not us. I found and kept a lozenge of gritstone from the bivouac, and then we retreated behind a tor, blew on our fingers, drank hot coffee from a flask, and shouted at each other above the wind, planning our return in the near-dark over these miles of rough steep ground.
Looking for cover, we walked up and over a shoulder of moor, and there, suddenly, were more hares, dozens of them, white against the dark moor, moving in haphazard darts, zigzagging and following unpredictable deviations, like particles in a cloud chamber. They must, like us, have been driven away from the rocks by the wind, and come here to the peat-troughs for shelter. Their white fur drew the very last of the light, so that they glowed against the dark moor. One, a big male, still dabbed here and there with brown fur, stopped, glanced back at us over his shoulder, and then spun away into the dark.
So few wild creatures, relatively, remain in Britain and Ireland: so few, relatively, in the world. Pursuing our project of civilisation, we have pushed thousands of species towards the brink of disappearance, and many thousands more over that edge. The loss, after it is theirs, is ours. Wild animals, like wild places, are invaluable to us precisely because they are not us. They are uncompromisingly different. The paths they follow, the impulses that guide them, are of other orders. The seal’s holding gaze, before it flukes to push another tunnel through the sea, the hare’s run, the hawk’s high gyres: such things are wild. Seeing them, you are made briefly aware of a world at work around and beside our own, a world operating in patterns and purposes that you do not share. These are creatures, you realise, that live by voices inaudible to you.
By the next morning the storm had blown itself out almost completely, and long slants of sunlight flashed across the moor’s edge and down through the village. The sky had a rinsed after-storm sharpness. It was Remembrance Sunday, and at eleven o’clock the Reveille sounded through the cleared air. John and I took part in the service, which was held in the main street of the village. I thought of Gurney, of Thomas, of unnamed and unnumbered others.
After the service finished, we walked up on to Bamford Edge, the broken gritstone rampart that extends along the moor directly above the village. After two or three miles of walking, we found ourselves above a deep wooded valley which dropped steeply away from the moor.
Below us, the valley was ablaze. The great conflagration of autumn was underway. Hundreds of acres of trees on the turn: larch, birch, beech, sweet chestnut, carrying leaves that were orange, carmine, brimstone and gold. The sight ignited in me a sudden series of memory flares, back through my journeys, to the different kinds of phosphorescence I had seen: the glowing seas off the Lleyn Peninsula, the rainbow in Coruisk, the pollen drifting through the pines of Morlich, the northern lights visible from Ben Hope - and now this autumn wood, a mile from a village.
Autumn leaf colour is an expression of a death which is also a renewal. Through spring and summer, green chlorophyll is the dominant leaf pigment. But as day-length decreases and temperatures fall, chlorophyll production is reduced, eventually to the point of extinction. As the chlorophyll content declines, other pigments begin to shine through: carotenoids - sunlight-capturing chemicals that flame orange, yellow and gold - brown tannins and the rarer redder anthocyanins. The anthocyanins are produced by the action of sustained strong light upon the sugars which get trapped in leaves as the tree’s vascular system prepares for leaf-drop. In these ways, deciduous trees burn themselves spectacularly back to their bare branches, in order to survive the winter and prepare for the resurgence of spring.
It was on high ground above the clough that we found the beech tree. A single old tree, no more than twenty feet tall, thriving in a little marshy hollow. This dip was all the beech needed by way of protection from the wind, and it had grown to precisely the level of the surrounding land. It had also created a raft of solid ground in the marsh, binding the bog with its roots so that turf could form. It was a survivor, this tree. Each of its hundreds of branches corkscrewed complicatedly, turned this way and that over the years by the wind. The ground beneath it was golden with shed leaves.
It was a tree that invited ascent. John sat beneath it, looking out over the valley beneath, while I climbed. It was the finest climbing tree I had ever met: the next branch always there, perfectly curved and kinked to take a foot or a hand. It seemed almost to help me up. I perched near its summit for ten minutes or so, thinking south and east, to my own beech tree on top of its little hill. Far beneath, the church clock struck one.
I climbed down, and John and I sat together under the tree for a while. Suddenly we heard a high cheeping, and looked up. A handful of tiny birds had blown in and settled on the upper reaches of the beech. Goldcrests! After a minute or so, swarming the top branches, the birds gusted off, down towards the deeper wood in the
clough, to gild some other tree.
15
Beechwood
We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. ELIOT
The evening I got back from the Hope Valley, I took down my stones from their storm-beach on the shelf, and laid them out on my desk, adding my gritstone lozenge to the pattern. I began to move them around. First I arranged them into a long line of their finding, with the earliest to the left and most recent to the right. Then I moved them into order of their ages, as best I could: Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Permian, Jurassic . . . Then I dispersed them into a rough shape of the relative places of their findings, so that they made an approximate mineral map of the archipelago itself, and my journeys within it. Each stone still carried with it some residual memories of the moment of its finding: the smell and temperature of the air, the light’s texture.
The blue basalt heart from Ynys Enlli, from the gulch-edge of the pearly sea. The olive-shaped quartz pebble from Coruisk, which I had rolled in my mouth as we left on that hot bright day. The two eyeball-shaped stones, plucked from the peat of Rannoch and the stream-cut near Sandwood, staring back at me. The blue and white oblong taken from the frosted root bole in the Black Wood, which still had winter-wood magic trapped in its layers. The frost-cracked shard from the summit of Ben Hope. The hooped rhombus from the Naver estuary, whose lines recalled wood grain and sand terrace. The mapstone from Blakeney. The dolmen of chalk from the cockle beach at Essex, and the flat red wedge of brick from the Wilderness. And - last of them all - a squashed egg of pale granite flecked with mica, which I had taken from a shelf at Walnut Tree Farm on a visit after Roger’s death, to mark the wildness of his home. Other talismans, too: raptor feathers, the dolphin of wood, the broken whelk, the catkins.
The Wild Places (Penguin Original) Page 25