The Wild Places (Penguin Original) by Robert Macfarlane Page A
Authors: Robert Macfarlane
confinement, he recalled, ‘I had not once thought of myself as imprisoned. I lived on mountains, and had the freedom of them.’
On May Day 1945, Murray’s prison camp was liberated by American troops. A month after his release, Murray returned to Rannoch Moor. Weak and emaciated in body, but exhilarated in spirit, he climbed the Buachaille again and on its summit he stayed, looking out over the Moor, in the space of those wide skies.
By the time I set out to cross the Moor in November, Coruisk’s rich summer light had ceded to autumn’s browns. The air was cooler, and in place of the long evenings of July and August were quick dusks.
I had hoped for an early onset of winter, because I wanted to make an ice-bound traverse of the Moor, following its frozen waterways from one side to the other, on skis or even ice-skates. This was something which I knew had been done once before, in the 1950s, and I greatly liked the idea of keeping to a single element for the crossing, of using only water to cross such an expanse of earth. But my father, who had agreed to accompany me on the crossing, pointed out two minor problems with my plan: neither of us could ice-skate, and the weather was damp, so we would sink. I acknowledged the force of his logic; walking it would have to be.
We caught the sleeper-train north together from London. The romance of the train, its Edwardian miracle of conjuring you to a different land while you sleep, was still perceptible. We left Euston Station - fast-food outlets, the tannoy’s squash-ball bing-bong , crushed beer cans in corners, the shifty body-mass of the crowds - and woke to chilly air, white mist and a stag disappearing into the drizzle. Fog pooled in the low ground. At Rannoch Station, we stepped down from the train and on to the Moor.
That morning, we began to learn the habits and the obligations of the Moor, its resistance to straight lines of progress. As Murray knew, going on the Moor is slow, to be measured in hours, not miles. Much of the Moor is loch, and much is peat hag, and between the lochs and the peat hags bog streams wriggle, their water dyed black and shiny as oil.
We leapt from hag to hag, jumped peat crevasses and picked our way through the maze-work of stream and tussock. Later, crossing a nameless river, I saw a big trout arrow across its pool and set chevrons rippling out over the surface. Here and there, sunk in the peat, we came across the big swooping roots of ancient pine trees, thousands of years old. How I would love to have climbed one of those great pines, I thought. Peatbogs are so preservative of wood that, during the Second World War, the US Navy used 3,000-year-old white cedar logs, recovered from sphagnum bog in New Jersey, to build the hulls of their motor-torpedo boats. From one of the stumps I took a loose dolphin-shaped fragment of wood, stained a deep brown by the peat. In another black bank, I found a white stone, bedded like an eyeball. I brushed it clean, and turned it in my hand as I walked.
The Moor’s vastness and self-similarity affected our perception of distance. Objects and movements showed more clearly in its spareness. So extensive was the space within which we were moving that when I glanced up at the mountains west of the Moor, to try to gauge the distance we had come, it seemed as though we had not advanced at all: that, like explorers walking against the spin of pack ice, our feet fell exactly where we had lifted them.
Hours into the day, we stopped for shelter in a ruin named on our map as Tigh Na Cruaiche. A rusted iron brazier stood in one corner. Otherwise, the interior was empty. It smelt green. We sat on stones, and looked out through the doorless entrance. Beyond the series of wooded islands slung across the centre of Loch Laidon we could see the Black Corries - the high holding grounds of deer, snow and fog - and the air which gathered in them had a deep cold blueness of tone. I thought enviously of Murray, who had
On May Day 1945, Murray’s prison camp was liberated by American troops. A month after his release, Murray returned to Rannoch Moor. Weak and emaciated in body, but exhilarated in spirit, he climbed the Buachaille again and on its summit he stayed, looking out over the Moor, in the space of those wide skies.
By the time I set out to cross the Moor in November, Coruisk’s rich summer light had ceded to autumn’s browns. The air was cooler, and in place of the long evenings of July and August were quick dusks.
I had hoped for an early onset of winter, because I wanted to make an ice-bound traverse of the Moor, following its frozen waterways from one side to the other, on skis or even ice-skates. This was something which I knew had been done once before, in the 1950s, and I greatly liked the idea of keeping to a single element for the crossing, of using only water to cross such an expanse of earth. But my father, who had agreed to accompany me on the crossing, pointed out two minor problems with my plan: neither of us could ice-skate, and the weather was damp, so we would sink. I acknowledged the force of his logic; walking it would have to be.
We caught the sleeper-train north together from London. The romance of the train, its Edwardian miracle of conjuring you to a different land while you sleep, was still perceptible. We left Euston Station - fast-food outlets, the tannoy’s squash-ball bing-bong , crushed beer cans in corners, the shifty body-mass of the crowds - and woke to chilly air, white mist and a stag disappearing into the drizzle. Fog pooled in the low ground. At Rannoch Station, we stepped down from the train and on to the Moor.
That morning, we began to learn the habits and the obligations of the Moor, its resistance to straight lines of progress. As Murray knew, going on the Moor is slow, to be measured in hours, not miles. Much of the Moor is loch, and much is peat hag, and between the lochs and the peat hags bog streams wriggle, their water dyed black and shiny as oil.
We leapt from hag to hag, jumped peat crevasses and picked our way through the maze-work of stream and tussock. Later, crossing a nameless river, I saw a big trout arrow across its pool and set chevrons rippling out over the surface. Here and there, sunk in the peat, we came across the big swooping roots of ancient pine trees, thousands of years old. How I would love to have climbed one of those great pines, I thought. Peatbogs are so preservative of wood that, during the Second World War, the US Navy used 3,000-year-old white cedar logs, recovered from sphagnum bog in New Jersey, to build the hulls of their motor-torpedo boats. From one of the stumps I took a loose dolphin-shaped fragment of wood, stained a deep brown by the peat. In another black bank, I found a white stone, bedded like an eyeball. I brushed it clean, and turned it in my hand as I walked.
The Moor’s vastness and self-similarity affected our perception of distance. Objects and movements showed more clearly in its spareness. So extensive was the space within which we were moving that when I glanced up at the mountains west of the Moor, to try to gauge the distance we had come, it seemed as though we had not advanced at all: that, like explorers walking against the spin of pack ice, our feet fell exactly where we had lifted them.
Hours into the day, we stopped for shelter in a ruin named on our map as Tigh Na Cruaiche. A rusted iron brazier stood in one corner. Otherwise, the interior was empty. It smelt green. We sat on stones, and looked out through the doorless entrance. Beyond the series of wooded islands slung across the centre of Loch Laidon we could see the Black Corries - the high holding grounds of deer, snow and fog - and the air which gathered in them had a deep cold blueness of tone. I thought enviously of Murray, who had