Landmarks

by Robert Macfarlane

  shuggi drizzly Shetland

  skat brief shower Northamptonshire

  skew driving but short-lived rain Cornwall

  skiff light shower Northern Ireland

  slappy rainy West Yorkshire

  slottery of weather: foul, rainy Exmoor

  smirr extremely fine, misty rain, close to smoke in appearance when seen from a distance Scots

  smither light rain East Anglia

  soft of weather: overcast, lightly misty or drizzly Hiberno-English

  teem to rain Northumberland

  thunder-lump rain-cloud hanging over a place Shetland

  thunner-pash heavy shower, with thunder Durham

  upcasting uprising of clouds above the horizon, threatening rain North Sea coast

  very heavy rain rainfall with a precipitation rate of between 16 and 50mm per hour meteorological

  very light rain rainfall with a precipitation rate of less than 0.25mm per hour meteorological

  virga observable streak or shaft of precipitation that falls from a cloud but evaporates before reaching the ground meteorological

  water-dogs, messengers, small floating clouds separated from larger masses, which signal rain Norfolk, Northamptonshire

  watery-headed anxious about rain Essex

  weet to rain slightly Cheshire

  wetchered wet through after being caught out in the rain Lincolnshire

  williwaw sudden violent squall nautical

  Riverbed, Riverbank

  aa ford, shallow place in a river Manx

  æ-stán stone taken from a river Old English

  alluvial fan fan-shaped deposit of sediment left by a fast-flowing river or stream that has lost velocity due to a change in gradient or profile geographical

  áth ford Irish

  beul-àtha ford, shallow part of a river Gaelic

  bior-shruth old bed of a river’s former course Gaelic

  bodha bank jutting out below the water level, good for fishing from Gaelic

  brink-ware small bundles of wood, generally whitethorn, used to repair the banks of a river East Anglia

  bun of a river: bottom or bed Irish

  carse level land by river Galloway

  ceulan riverbank, river brink, especially one that has been hollowed by the current Welsh

  draw-ground stretch of riverbank on which a draw-net was pulled and the fish removed Suffolk

  dubhagan deep part of a pool; also the pupil of the eye Gaelic

  faodhail narrow channel fordable at low water Gaelic

  fleiter prop or pile used to support the bank of a brook or bridge damaged by flood Northamptonshire

  foolen space between the usual high-water mark in a river and the foot of the wall thrown up on its banks to prevent occasional overflowing Suffolk

  gaffle of ducks: to feed together in the mud Northamptonshire

  laid of a river or stream: frozen to the bottom East Anglia

  plumb deep hole in the bed of a river Scots

  redd, rud hollow or nest made in the gravel of the riverbed by fish prior to spawning English

  soss navigable sluice or lock Fenland

  srath level ground beside a river Gaelic

  stickle river rapid south-west England

  thalweg deepest part of the bed or channel of a river or lake geographical

  trabhach rubbish of any kind cast ashore by the flood on the bank of a river, or on the seashore Gaelic

  watering road or path liable to flooding Essex

  wath ford in a river, place through which one can wade Cumbria

  Springs and Wells

  eylebourne intermittent spring that overflows, usually at the end of the winter rains Kent

  fenten well Cornish

  gofer overflow of a well Welsh

  peath sunken well Cornish

  pulk-hole small open ditch or well Suffolk

  rock-spring perennial spring, the channels of which are in the fissures of rocks Northamptonshire

  shute well Cornwall

  stone-water petrifying spring (found in limestone landscapes) Northamptonshire

  upboil water springing in the bottom of a well or drain, and powerful enough to cause the appearance of boiling on the surface Cumbria

  willis rill from a spring Exmoor

  wilm of water: a fount or stream that surges Old English

  Swimming and Splashing

  bumbel to flounder around in water Shetland

  dook to swim in open water Scots

  endolphins swimmers’ slang for the natural opiates (‘endorphins’) released by the body on contact with cold water (Roger Deakin) poetic

  glumadh big mouthful of liquid Gaelic

  jabblin, jappin, jiddlin, jirblin, jirglin playing around with water as children do Galloway

  plab soft noise, as of a body falling into the water Gaelic

  plumadaich making a noise in the water Gaelic

  puddle to play messily with or in water Galloway

  skiddle to throw flat stones so that they skim on the surface of water Galloway

  skite to splash, usually with muddy water Northern Ireland

  squashle to squelch, make a splashing noise Kent

  wæter-egesa water-terror Old English

  Water’s Surface

  acker ripple on the surface of the water North Sea coast

  beggar’s-balm froth collected by running streams in ditches, or in puddles by the roadside Northamptonshire

  caitein first slight ruffling of the water after a calm Gaelic

  cockle ripple on the water caused by the wind Exmoor

  cuairt-shruth stream abounding in whirlpools or eddies Gaelic

  cuilbhean cup-shaped whirl in a stream or eddy Gaelic

  eynd water-smoke East Anglia

  giel ripple on the surface of the water Shetland

  jabble agitated movement of water; a splashing or dashing in small waves or ripples; where currents meet, the surface of the water may be jabbly Scots

  lhingey-cassee whirlpool Manx

  luddan-mea oily slick on water Manx

  raith weeds, sticks, straw and other rubbish in a pool or in running water Herefordshire

  sgùm patch of white foam on an eddying river Gaelic

  shirr ruffle or ripple on water; also a gather in the texture of a fabric Cumbria

  skim-ice wafer-thin ice that forms especially on the surface of puddles and pools meteorological

  smother foam on the edge of a river when it is in flood Cumbria

  swelk whirlpool, especially the eddies and swirls of the Pentland Firth Scots

  twindle of stream-foam: to divide into two rows or braids (Gerard Manley Hopkins) poetic

  Wetlands

  allan piece of land nearly surrounded by water Cumbria

  amod green plain almost encircled by the bend of a river Gaelic

  crannóg prehistoric lake dwelling Irish

  dòirling islet to which one can wade at low water Gaelic

  eyot small island, especially in a river English

  feorainn grassy area of riverside or shore Irish

  haft island in a pool Midlands

  halh nook; spur of land between two rivers (place-name element) Old English

  holm river island; land formerly covered with water Fenland

  peninsula piece of land that is almost, but not wholly, surrounded by water geographical

  wæter-fæsten place protected by water Old English

  warth flat meadow close to a stream Gloucestershire, Herefordshire

  ynys island; raised area in wet ground Welsh

  5

  Hunting Life

  What did I see that morning? Hot winter sun on the face’s brink, felt as red but seen as gold. Air, still, blue. Tremors at the edge of vision: quick dark curve and slow straight line over green, old in the eye. Intersection, shrapnel of down, grey drop to crop, flail and clatter, four chops and the black star away with quick wing flicks.

  Let me tell that again, clearer now,
if clearer is right. What did I see that morning? A green field dropping citywards. The narrow track at the bronze wood’s border. The sun low but strong in the cold. Then odd forms glimpsed in the eye’s selvedge. The straight line (grey) the flight-path of a wood pigeon passing over the field. The fast curve (dark) the kill-path of a peregrine cutting south from the height of the beech tops. The pigeon is half struck but not clutched, chest-feathers blossom, it falls to the low cover of the crop and flails for safety to a hedge. The falcon rises to strike down again, misses, rises, misses again, two more rises and two more misses, the pigeon makes the hedge and as I rush the wood-edge to close the gap the falcon, tired, lifts and turns and flies off east and fast over the summits of the hilltop trees, with quick sculling wing flicks.

  And let me tell it one last time, clearer still perhaps. What did I see that morning? It was windless and late autumn. The sky was milky blue, and rich leaves drifted in the path verges, thrown from the trees by a night frost and a gale not long since dropped away. That afternoon I was due to drive to Essex to see the archive of a man called John Alec Baker, author of The Peregrine, and among the contents of the archive were Baker’s binoculars and telescopes, with which he had spent a decade (1955–65) watching and tracking the falcons that wintered each year in the fields and coastal margins of Essex. Before leaving, I decided to go for a run up to the beech woods that stand on a low hill of chalk, a mile or so from my home in south Cambridge. A thin path leads to the woods; a path that I have walked or run every few days for the last ten years, and thereby come to know its usual creatures, colours and weathers. I reached the fringe of the beech wood, where the trees meet a big sloping field of rapeseed, when my eye was caught by strange shapes and vectors: the low slow flight of a pigeon over the dangerous open of the field, and the quick striking curve of a sparrowhawk – no, a peregrine, somehow a peregrine, unmistakably a peregrine – closing to it from height. The falcon slashed at the pigeon, half hit it, sent up a puff of down; the bird dropped into the rape and panicked towards the cover of the hawthorn hedge. The falcon rose and fell upon it as it showed above the surface of the crop, striking four more times but missing each time. I ran to get closer, along the fringe of the wood, but the falcon saw me coming, had known I was an agent in the drama since before it had first struck, and so it lifted and flew off east over the beech tops, black against the blue sky, its crossbow profile – what Baker calls its ‘cloud-biting anchor shape’ – unmistakable in silhouette, as my blood thudded.

  I had followed the path to the beech woods a thousand times, and I had seen kestrels, sparrowhawks, buzzards, once a tawny owl, twice a red kite – but never a peregrine. That one had appeared there on that morning seemed so unlikely a coincidence as to resemble contrivance or magical thinking. But no, it had happened, and though it felt like blessing or fabrication it was nothing other than chance, and a few hours later, still high from the luck of it, I left for Essex to look through Baker’s eyes.

  ~

  J. A. Baker made an unlikely birdwatcher. He was so short-sighted that he wore thick glasses from an early age, and he was excused National Service during the Second World War on grounds of his vision. But this myopic man would write one of the greatest bird books ever, the fierce stylistic clarity of which must be understood in part as a compensation for the curtailed optics of its author’s eyes. As an elegy-in-waiting for a landscape, The Peregrine is comparable with Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986). In its dredging of melancholy, guilt and beauty from the English countryside, it anticipates W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995). Along with The Living Mountain – with which it shares a compressive intensity, a generic disobedience, a flaring prose-poetry and an obsession (ocular, oracular) with the eyeball – it is one of the two most remarkable twentieth-century accounts of a landscape that I know.

  If Baker’s book can be said to possess anything so conventional as a plot, it is that one autumn, two pairs of peregrines come to hunt over a broad area of unspecified English coastline and hinterland – a mixed terrain of marshland, woods, fields, river valleys, mudflats, estuaries and sea. Baker becomes increasingly obsessed with the birds. From October to April he tracks them almost daily, and watches as they bathe, fly, kill, eat and roost. ‘Autumn,’ he writes, ‘begins my season of hawk-hunting, spring ends it, and winter glitters between like the arch of Orion.’ The book records these months of chase in all their agitated repetitiveness. Everything that occurs in The Peregrine takes place within the borders of the falcons’ hunting grounds, and with respect to them. No cause is specified for the quest itself, no triggering detail. No other human character of significance besides Baker is admitted. His own presence in the book is discreet, tending to paranoid. We are told nothing of his life outside the hunt: we do not know where he sleeps at night, or to what family – if any – he returns. The falcons are his focus.

  ~

  I reached the University of Essex soon after noon. I was shown into a room with a large table, in the centre of which had been placed two big clear plastic packing crates with snap-lock lids: a life reduced to 100 litres. The table was otherwise empty, so I unpacked the boxes and laid out their contents.

  There were several maps: half-inch Ordnance Surveys of the Essex coast near Maldon, a road atlas, a large-scale map of northern Europe. There were rubber-banded bundles of letters by Baker, and other bundles of letters to him from readers and friends. There was a folder containing yellowed newspaper clippings of review coverage of The Peregrine. There was a curious collection of glossy cut-out images of peregrines and other raptors, scissored from magazines, bird-guides, calendars and cards. There was a list of the contents of his library. There were drafts – in manuscript and typescript – of The Peregrine and his second book, The Hill of Summer. There were proof copies in red covers of both books, every paragraph of which, I saw as I flicked through them, had been arcanely annotated by Baker using a system of ticks, numbers and symbols. There were the field journals he had kept during his years of ‘hawk-hunting’. There was a sheaf of early poems. And there were his optics. A pair of Miranda 10x50 binoculars in a black case with a red velvet interior. A brass telescope, heavy in the hand, which collapsed to ten inches, extended to a foot and a half, and was carried in a double-capped brown leather tube. A featherweight spotter-scope, light and quick to lift, from J. H. Steward’s in London. And a pair of stubby Mirakel 8x40s, German-made, in a carry-case of stiff brown leather lined with purple velvet, the base of which had at some point come loose, and which had been carefully repaired with pink strips of sticking plaster that still held it together.

  There were also dozens of photographs, some of them still in the branded envelopes of their developers (‘Instamatic – Magnify Your Memories!’). Among them I found a black-and-white shot of Baker taken in 1967, the year The Peregrine was published. He was forty-one at the time. I had not seen it before, though it was the photograph he chose as his author image on the jacket flap of the first edition. He is seated in an armchair and dressed in a collared white shirt and a dark woollen tank-top. He has wavy brown hair and an owlish gaze. He is resting his chin upon his hand, and looking away from the camera, over the left shoulder of the viewer, towards a sunlit six-paned window – we know this because there is a curved reflection of the window visible in each of the thick lenses of the spectacles he is wearing.

  There was something unusual about the image, though, and it took me time to realize what it was. Baker’s right hand, the hand on which his chin rests, is distorted. The knuckles of the first and second finger appear to have fused together, and the back of his hand has swollen and stiffened into a pale spatulate shape, so all that can be seen is the plain white paddle of the hand’s back. His fingers are invisible to the viewer, curled tightly into his palm like talons.

  ~

  Baker was born on 6 August 1926 in Chelmsford, Essex, the only child of an unhappy marriage. His parents were Congregationalists: his father, who worked as an electrical designer, suffe
red prolonged mental ill health due to a bony growth that pressed onto his brain (his treatment was, brutally, a lobotomy).

  At the age of eight, Baker contracted rheumatic fever, the after-effects of which would be lifelong. It induced arthritis that spread and worsened as Baker aged, and at seventeen he was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory form of acute arthritis that fuses muscle, bone and ligament in the spine. Codeine managed but did not eliminate the chronic pain, and Baker underwent agonizing long-needle ‘gold’ injections into his joints, hoping to slow the progression of his disease. But his body nevertheless succumbed: his knees and hips first, and then his hands, which were thoroughly stricken by the 1960s. Thus the fused knuckles, the curled fingers, the stiffened shield of his right hand – so bravely on show in his author photograph.

  Despite the pain, photographs from Baker’s youth show him as a cheerful and sociable young man. Golden hair, hands in pockets, always the thick spectacles. Arms round his friends, drunken embraces in wartime pubs, walks along the sea wall. He was six feet tall, deep-voiced and strongly built, though the spondylitis diminished his stature. He was an eager reader and a prolific correspondent: his letters from the war years speak of an intellectually adventurous teenager – passionate above all about landscapes and literature. He would often spend weeks writing single letters, and because of this tended to double-date his letters ‘Comm:’ and ‘Conc:’. A letter to his friend Don Samuel was ‘Comm: Sept 19th 1945’ and ‘Conc: Oct 4th 1945’, and ran to sixty-four pages of blue notepaper. ‘Dear Sam,’ it opened. ‘Here beginneth what promises to be indeed a “weird” if not a “wonderful” letter. Many subjects will drift leisurely across the pages – vague substances phantasmal, trailing clouds of unwieldy imagery …’ It ended with loving descriptions of the ‘delicately balanced’ Essex landscape: ‘green undulating fields, rugged, furrowed earth, luscious orchards, pine clumps, rows of stately elms’. ‘In things beautiful there is an eternity of peace, and an infinity of sight,’ concluded the myopic Baker, longingly.