Landmarks

by Robert Macfarlane

  Sheep like soldiers, sheep like picture-restorers, sheep like stones, stones like cheeses, sheep’s eyes like frog skin, sheep’s pupils like slate baths – this joyful promiscuity of comparison, this sprawl of simile, is characteristic of Roger’s prose. The finding of ‘likeness’ was a function of his generosity and his immense curiosity; it was also a literary expression of the idea that, as John Muir put it, ‘when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to the whole world’. Roger loved language for its capacity to connect and relate, and as he swam through Britain he collected some of the wondrous words that ran through its waterways:

  dook (noun, Scots) – a swim in open water

  gull (verb, East Anglian) – to sweep away by force of running water

  tarn (noun, Cumbrian/northern English) – an upland pool or small lake

  winterburna (noun, Old English) – an intermittent or ephemeral stream, dry in the summer and running in the winter

  bumbel (verb, Shetlandic) – to flounder around in water

  Waterlog, unlike much that gets labelled as nature writing, is very funny. There is plenty of bumbelling in it. Roger’s gently subversive sense of humour recalls that of Kenneth Grahame, Jerome K. Jerome and A. A. Milne: all of them, in their ways, water-men and river-rats. In one chapter, Roger decides to swim up the estuary of the River Erne in Cornwall. He discovers that by catching the incoming tide in the estuary mouth, he will be carried rapidly upstream:

  I threw myself in and … felt the incoming tide lock onto my legs, and thrust me in towards the distant woods along the shore. Each time a frond of sea-lettuce lightly brushed me, or glued itself around my arms, I thought it was a jellyfish, and flinched. But I soon grew used to it; seaweed all around me, sliding down each new wave to drape itself about me. I kept on swimming until I practically dissolved, jostled from behind by the swell. Then, as the tide rose higher, the sandy estuary beach came into focus. The woods reached right over the water, and began accelerating past me. I found I was moving at exhilarating speed, in big striding strokes, like a fell-runner on the downhill lap. It was like dream swimming, going so effortlessly fast, and feeling locked in by the current, with no obvious means of escape. I was borne along faster and faster as the rising tide approached the funnel of the river’s mouth until it shot me into a muddy, steep-sided mooring channel by some old stone limekilns on the beach. I had to strike out with all my strength to escape the flood and reach the eddy in the shallows. I swam back up to the limekilns and crawled out onto the beach like a turtle.

  Much of the magic of Waterlog is apparent here: the adventure, the unostentatious bravery, the sense of life as a game with joy as its gain, a pleasure at moving with the world and being swept along by its rhythms rather than sweeping it along with ours – and the soft bathos of that final image. He crawls out onto the beach ‘like a turtle’, which is at once comic and true, for he has been transformed by the water, much as Wart – the hero of T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone – magicked by Merlyn, dives into a river and becomes a trout as soon as he breaks the surface. Roger felt himself at various times in the course of his swimming journeys to have become part otter, part fish, part turtle: a compound being, a merman, some of his humanity ‘dissolved’ away and replaced with the creaturely. Metempsychosis, metamorphosis: these were ideas to which Roger and I found ourselves returning in conversation – talking about Hughes and Hopkins and J. A. Baker, or the frontiers we perceived to exist within even familiar landscapes (hill-passes, watersheds, snow-lines; the move from chalk onto greenstone, or from boulder-clay onto breckland), and the transformations that might occur as you crossed them.

  To enter water is, of course, to cross a border. You pass the lake’s edge, the sea’s shore, the river’s brink – and in so doing you arrive at a different realm, in which you are differently minded because differently bodied. To Roger, treelines and forest fringes also offered such frontiers. ‘To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed,’ he wrote; ‘it is where you travel to find yourself, often, paradoxically, by getting lost.’

  For Roger was a woodsman as well as a wordsman and a water-man. ‘The woods and the water as two poles in nature,’ he scribbled in one of the dozens of Moleskine notebooks he filled and kept over the years: ‘The one ancient, cryptic, full of wisdom. The other the vitality of water. The wood and the wet … would be good for us to understand more thoroughly.’ Roger dedicated his writing life to improving our understanding of the woods and the water – the volatilities of the latter, and the patient engrainings of the former. After the demands that followed the success of Waterlog had ebbed, he began work on what was to become a life-absorbing and eventually unfinishable book about trees and wood. It was the natural next subject for him – an investigation of what Edward Thomas elected as the ‘fifth element’.

  Trees grew through Roger’s life. His mother’s maiden name was Wood, the third of his father’s three Christian names was Greenwood, and his great-grandfather ran a timber yard in Walsall. Roger worked for Friends of the Earth on campaigns to protect rainforests, and he co-founded the charity Common Ground, which among its many good offices championed old orchards and the pomological diversity of British apple culture. The house in which he lived was named for the big walnut that flourished alongside it, and that in autumn thunked its green fruit down onto the orange pantiles of the farm, and rattled the wrinkly tin of the barn roof. Walnut Tree Farm was surrounded by water and by trees: in hedges and copses, and as splendid singletons – walnut, mulberry, ash, willow. Roger planted wood, coppiced it, worked it, and he burnt it by the cord in the inglenook fireplace at the heart of the farm, which was itself timber-framed, its vast skeleton made of 323 beams of oak and sweet chestnut, some of them more than four centuries old, held and jointed together with pegs of ash. In total, around 300 trees were felled to make the house, and the result was a structure that was organic to the point of animate. Truly, it was a tree-house, and in big winds it would creak and shift, riding the gusts so that being inside it felt like being in the belly of a whale, or in a forest in a gale. ‘I am a woodlander,’ Roger wrote, ‘I have sap in my veins’ – and as such he was a waterlander too, for ‘a tree is itself a river of sap’.

  Roger once sent me a list of the apple varieties in the orchards of Girton College in Cambridge. He read them out when we next met, dozens of them, each a story in miniature, making together a poem of pomes: King of the Pippins, Laxton’s Exquisite, American Mother, Dr Harvey, Peasgood’s Nonsuch, Scarlet Pimpernel, Northern Greening, Patricia and (my favourite) Norfolk Beefing. It was a celebration of diversity and language, and it represented, Roger said, only a fraction of the pomology recorded in the Herefordshire Pomona, the great chronicle of English apple varieties.

  In the years he spent researching Wildwood, Roger travelled to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, the Pyrenees, Greece, Ukraine, Australia, North America and all over Britain and Ireland. He gathered a vast library of tree books, the pages of which he leaved with jotted-on Post-it notes. As it took root, the project also branched, digressing into studies of the hula-hoop craze, Roger’s anarchist great-uncle, the architecture of pine cones, the history of cricket bats and Jaguar dashboards, hippy communes, road protestors, the uses of driftwood … but returning always to individual trees and tree species.

  This specifying impulse distinguished Roger’s approach. In September 1990 he gave a World Wildlife Fund lecture on education, literature and children at the Royal Festival Hall, in which he spoke passionately about the virtues of precision. ‘The central value of English in education has always been in its poetic approach,’ he said, ‘through the particular, the personal, the microscopic observation of all that surrounds us.’ It was attention to such particularity, he argued, that best permitted a Keatsian ‘taking part in the existence of things’, and ‘the development of this ability to take part in the existence of things’ was in turn ‘the common ground of English teaching and environme
ntal education’. Roger ended the lecture with an attack on generalism as an enemy of wonder because it suppressed uniqueness. He quoted a passage from his beloved D. H. Lawrence in support of his argument:

  The dandelion in full flower, a little sun bristling with sun-rays on the green earth, is a non-pareil, a nonsuch. Foolish, foolish, foolish to compare it to anything else on earth. It is itself incomparable and unique.

  Foolish, foolish, foolish Lawrence, though, for even as he celebrates the ‘non-pareil’ and berates the comparative impulse, he cannot prevent himself figuring the dandelion as a ‘little sun’, so that it is itself and not-itself at once. But Lawrence, like Roger, would have defended the metaphor as an intensifier rather than a comparator – a means of evoking the dandelion-ness of that dandelion, instead of diffusing its singularity. Some of Roger’s most precise observations of natural events used figurative language to sharpen, rather than to blunt, their accuracy. When he writes that ‘[r]edstarts flew from tree to tree, taking the line a slack rope would take slung between them; economy in flight is what makes it graceful’, it is the aptness of the ‘slack rope’ that makes the observation itself graceful. Like Baker, he was unafraid of elaborate comparisons: the ‘park-bench green’ of a pheasant’s neck; a hornet ‘tubby, like a weekend footballer in a striped vest’.

  ~

  In the spring of 2006 I drove over to Walnut Tree Farm with my friend Leo and my son Tom, then only a few months old. Leo and I swam in the moat, and we noticed that Roger did not join us. We hung our towels on the Aga rails, and Roger pressed our swimming trunks into waffle grills and dried them out over the hot plates, returning them to us crispy. Roger held Tom, and we talked about Wildwood, and how close Roger was to finishing it.

  But he had been close to finishing it for what felt like years. The problem seemed to be that there was just too much material. I had read several chapters as they had been drafted; had heard Roger speak of ten or twelve more. I had seen the black lever-arch files, containing hundreds of printed pages of finished work, lying on the various wooden desks at which he wrote. No one could quite understand why he hadn’t been able to shape all this into a full first draft. Was he lacking an ending? A form? Could help be given? Roger seemed more than usually uneasy about discussing the book, and more generally distracted. He spoke little, and picked at the food he had cooked for us. Leo and I, troubled on the drive home, agreed that his quietness had to be due to anxiety over the book: such a vast and divergent subject to hold together, such a long project to shorten to a final form. Privately, I worried that I had upset him somehow. I wrote to him that night, apologizing for phantom faults.

  We have forests inside our minds. Nano-scale imagery shows that the structures of human nerve cells closely resemble the spreading canopies of certain trees. Indeed, the outer landscape has provided us with a language for the inner: our neurons possess dendrites, from the Greek word dendron, meaning ‘tree’: the branching projections that conduct electrochemical stimulation from synapse to nerve cell, and that overlap to form what neuroscience memorably calls a dendritic arbour. And deep in the arbours of Roger’s brain, on one of his frontal lobes, a tumour had begun to grow, well nourished in terms of blood supply and therefore highly aggressive. As such a tumour swells, it exerts pressure upon the brain and starts to affect memory and language. Tumours of this type are generally inoperable due to the tentacle-like structures they extrude into the tissues around them, and because they contain mixed grades of cell, they are hard to treat in other ways. Even if caught early, chemotherapy tends to mitigate rather to cure. Roger’s tumour was caught late. A few weeks after our odd visit to see Roger, he was on the telephone to Alison, his partner, when he mentioned that several Japanese schoolchildren were staying at Walnut Tree Farm as part of a touring theatre troupe. It was nonsense, of course, and weird enough nonsense that Alison made an appointment for Roger with his GP. From there the diagnosis was quickly made, and a prognosis too: a few months at most.

  In early June, Roger called to ask if I would act as his literary executor. I said I would. It was a difficult conversation. His illness was seriously advanced. He was having trouble forming speech. I was having trouble not crying. He died soon afterwards. The coffin he lay in had a wreath of oak leaves on its lid. Just before it glided through the velvet curtains and into the cremating flames, Loudon Wainwright’s ‘The Swimming Song’ was played, full of hope and loss. It brought me to shuddering tears that day, and whenever it pops up now and then out of the thousand songs on my phone, it still stops me short like a punch to the chest.

  ~

  Roger rarely threw anything away. He was an admirer of old age, and he lived in the same place for nearly forty years – so whenever he ran out of space to store things, he just built another shed, raised another barn, or hauled an old railway wagon or shepherd’s hut into a patch of field and began to fill that up with stuff too. In the strange months after his funeral, it became clear that the main question facing me as his executor was what to do with all the language he had left behind: the hundreds of notebooks, letters, manuscripts, folders, box-files, cassettes, videotapes and journals in which he had so memorably recorded his life.

  Six months after Roger’s death, Walnut Tree Farm passed into the ownership of two remarkable people, Titus and Jasmin Rowlandson, friends of Roger and now friends of mine. They moved into the farm with their two young daughters and began – slowly, respectfully – to make it their home. As they moved from room to room and barn to barn, so they found more of Roger’s papers, stashed in trunks and boxes, pushed under beds or shoved into sheds where the mice had made nests of his notes. They kept everything, storing it all in the attic room of a steep-eaved barn that Roger had raised in the early 1970s.

  Four years after Roger’s death, I could no longer put off confronting his archive. I drove across to the farm on a warm early-summer day. Jasmin led me up one ladder to the first floor of the barn, then pointed up another that led through a flip-back trapdoor and into the narrow attic.

  ‘Up you go! Good luck. It’s going to take you a while …’

  Dusty light fell from a gable window. The air was hot and musty. There was a single bed under the window, a clear aisle down the centre of the room leading to it, and otherwise the attic room was full, floor to slanted ceiling, of boxes and crates. Eighty? A hundred? I felt overwhelmed. How could this volume of documents ever be brought under control? I sat down on a box, took a notebook from the top of a crate and leafed through it. ‘Angels are the people we care for and who care for us,’ read the sentence at the top of one page, in Roger’s spidery black handwriting. There followed a jotted thought-stream on angels, which moved out to the double hammer-beam roof of the church in the fenland village of March – where the wings of the 200 wooden angels in the roof are feathered like those of marsh harriers – and then back again to further reflection on the nature of friendship.

  With Titus and Jasmin’s generous help, I began the process of working out what Roger had left behind. Digging through boxes; brushing away mouse droppings and spiders’ webs; scanning letters from friends and collaborators; putting letters from lovers and family to one side unread. Each box I opened held treasure or puzzles: early poems; first drafts of Waterlog; a copy of the screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette sent to Roger by Hanif Kureishi; word-lists of place-language (tufa, bole, burr, ghyll); a folder entitled ‘Drowning (Coroners)’, which turned out not to be a record of coroners that Roger had drowned, but an account of his research into East Anglian deaths-by-water. It was hard not to get distracted, especially by his notebooks. Each was a small landscape through which it was possible to wander, and within which it was possible to get lost. One had a paragraph in which Roger imagined a possible structure for Wildwood: he compared it to a cabinet of wonders, a chest in which each drawer was made of a different timber and contained different remarkable objects and stories. The notebooks, taken together, represented an accidental epic poem of Roger’s life, or per
haps a dendrological cross-section of his mind. In their range and randomness, they reminded me that he was, as Les Murray once wrote, ‘only interested in everything’.

  ~

  The last three boxes of Roger’s archive were found in 2013, in the dusty corner of a dusty shed. Jasmin called to let me know that more material had turned up; would I like to come and collect it? I drove over, had lunch, walked the fields with Titus and Jasmin and took the boxes home. That evening, kneeling on the floor of my study, I began to sort through the contents. There were files and notebooks from Roger’s schooldays, A4 notepads with scribbles and jottings, a new clutch of letters and pamphlets from the early years of Common Ground, and then, with a jolt of shock, I found a blue foolscap folder with a white label on the front, on which Roger had written ‘ROBERT MACFARLANE’.

  I paused. I thought about throwing it away unopened. What if it held hurt for me? I opened it. It contained five letters. The letters weren’t about me – they were from me, to Roger, all written in 2002–3, when I was first coming to know him. Two were handwritten, two were typed, and one was the printout of an email. I had no memory of any of them, and for that reason I encountered my own voice almost as a stranger’s:

  Tuesday 11 February 2003

  It was great to get your letter, Roger, and to be transported out of my bunker-office in Cambridge, to the walnut woods of Kyrgyzstan. The word that really leaped out at me, oddly, from your description, was ‘holloway’ for the sunken lanes you saw. My wonderful editor is called Sara Holloway, and reading your letter, her name – which I have said often but never thought of as possessing an origin in the landscape – suddenly became rich with association and image. I could infer a meaning for it from your description, but wanted to know more, so went to my Shorter Oxford Dictionary. It wasn’t there, so I hauled out the complete OED, and discovered, buried in the small print of the ‘variants’ of meaning No. 7, the following: ‘hollow-way, a way, road or path, through a defile or cutting, also extended, as quot. in 1882)’. That was all, but it was enough. I wonder where you picked the term up from? What a word it is! It made me think of the description of a holloway – though he does not call it such – in Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne. A friend and I are fascinated by ways, paths, ancient roads, ley-lines, dumbles, cuttings and – I now know – by holloways. So: thank you for the gift of the word.