The Wild Places (Penguin Original) by Robert Macfarlane Page B

returned after the war to cross the Moor on a hot August day, with only his dog for company. Halfway across, he had taken off all his clothes, put them in his pack, walking naked for the rest of the day, bathing here and there in pools and loch bays. Perhaps, I daydreamed, on the right winter day - bright sun, no wind - it might be possible to combine the traverses, and ice-skate naked from one side of the Moor to the other . . .
    Later, on the top of a fifty-foot-high knoll, we sat and ate black rye bread with cheese, watching rain fronts gather miles away in the mouth of Glen Coe and then billow towards us over the ground. Velvety rags of lichen hung from the rocks on the drumlin and rippled as wind passed over them. My father pointed west: a kestrel, hunting fast over the ground. Then it stopped, hung, collapsed its wings and dropped hard into the heather.
    That far into the Moor, the vast space we were in resolved the land around us into bacon-like bands: a stripe of sky, a stripe of white cloud, a stripe of dark land, and below everything the tawny Moor. The Moor’s colours in that season were subtle and multiple. Seen from a distance it was brindled; close up, it broke into its separate colours: orange, ochre, red, a mustardy yellow and, lacing everything, the glossy black of the peat.
    It took us all that day to reach what I had come to think of as the Moor’s centre, the Abhainn Bà - the point where the River Bà flows into Loch Laidon. We stopped there, for dusk was spreading over the Moor, and pitched a small tent. We lay talking in the dark: about the ground we had covered, the ground still to go, about the odd mixture of apprehension and awe that the Moor provoked in us both. Our sleeping-place was cupped in a curve of the river, on a miniature flood-plain that the winter spates had carved out and flattened: a shelter in the middle of the Moor’s great space.
    In a land as densely populated as Britain, openness can be hard to find. It is difficult to reach places where the horizon is experienced as a long unbroken line, or where the blue of distance becomes visible. Openness is rare, but its importance is proportionately great. Living constantly among streets and houses induces a sense of enclosure, of short-range sight. The spaces of moors, seas and mountains counteract this. Whenever I return from the moors, I feel a lightness up behind my eyes, as though my vision has been opened out by twenty degrees to either side. A region of uninterrupted space is not only a convenient metaphor for freedom and openness, it can sometimes bring those feelings fiercely on.
    To experience openness is to understand something of what the American novelist Willa Cather, who was brought up on the Great Plains, called ‘the reaching and reaching of high plains, the immeasurable yearning of all flat lands’. To love open places - and they have, historically, not been loved - you have to believe, as Cather did, that beauty might at times be a function of continuous space. You have to believe that such principalities might possess their own active expansiveness.Anyone who has been in an empty sea, out of sight of land, on a clear day, will know the deep astonishment of seeing the curvature of the globe: the sea’s down-turned edges, its meniscal frown.
    Open spaces bring to the mind something which is difficult to express, but unmistakable to experience - and Rannoch Moor is among the greatest of those spaces. If the Lake District were cut out of Cumbria and dropped into the Moor, the Moor would accommodate it. The influence of places such as the Moor cannot be measured, but should not for this reason be passed over. ‘To recline on a stump of thorn, between afternoon and night,’ Thomas Hardy wrote in The Return of the Native , ‘where the eye could reach nothing of the world outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything around and underneath had