The Joy of High Places Read online

  He listened to the confusion about the multiplying nature of the map, then added a few complications. What about the weather? How far each day? I became practical. Given that it was autumn, it would make more sense to start in the north and walk south at that time of year in that hemisphere. And it had to be finished by a certain date. I had a writing class to teach in Paris at the end of it. There wasn’t enough time to walk from John O’Groats to Land’s End, but a series of walks from Scotland to Cornwall looked possible. The facts started to make a neat little wall against the vastness.

  I found a walking site online that described paths all over Britain. A list of day walks appeared: the Cairngorm Highlands in central Scotland, Hadrian’s Wall, the Lakes district, the Yorkshire Dales, the coast of Cornwall, the Cotswolds, and finally, part of the Ridgeway, one of the oldest walking paths in the country. I printed them out and located them on the map, and felt the relief of making limits: it gathers in sprawling infinity and defines what is possible. The walks had been followed by others many times, tracks worn into the earth, at times metres deep. The Cairngorms were first, the Lairig Ghru loop. It’s time to trace the first lines on the map, to start the first walking story.

  It flows out of childhood, but this walk isn’t the beginning of my story with Barney. Our stories don’t follow from one another, they run alongside each other and at times bend and cross over. He is not in my story for long periods, and I am not in his – although I am there, watching and listening, as he recounts them. We are not in the same geography for most of the time, and the chronology is staggered, in different time frames and measured in different units, his in moments, mine in years. I don’t know that connecting places or time is what matters in our stories; it’s more to do with what we each found, Barney and I, on our separate journeys, me on the earth, him in the sky.

  What are you doing out here?

  Scotland and England

  At the loch where our first walk, the Lairig Ghru loop, began winding its way towards the pass into western Scotland, a dense mist had fallen. It wasn’t far from the pub where we were staying, but the mist gave the loch a detached, otherworldly air. It enfolded and then silenced ordinary conversation. All thought, all language, muffled. It was still, not swirling, allowing a world made only of the path and a few dim metres of lake. There were two white rowboats tied to white buoys in the whitish water-air, a monochrome world reduced to essentials like a Japanese meditation garden. Apart from the line of rope from one of the boats to its buoy, delicate as a thread of black ink, nothing was distinct. Sky and water were one. It was the kind of beauty that makes the breath almost stop, slowed down to the breathing of stones, of water.

  The sky and loch were the colour of the soul I had imagined I had as a child – a whitish slightly grey colour, insubstantial and dense at the same time and impossible to grasp. In my child-mind the soul also had a shape, a long oval, but the loch and sky were without shape. At the time, when I stood at the water, gazing, and again now as I write about it, part of me wanted to stop there forever, as if I had arrived at the right place. Here I am.

  And then I kept walking. It’s the way of the world, and besides, it was much too soon to stop. The path led away from the loch into Rothiemurchus Forest through native Caledonian pines, gnarled and spare, and birches and purple-berried juniper. Unlike the bare and often ugly understorey of pine forests in Australia, where very little undergrowth has adapted to survive under pines, here grasses, sedges, mosses, liverworts, lichens and heather covered the ground. Rocks and fallen branches, the ‘bones of the forest’, in a quiet carpet of mottled sea-green and lemon yellow. Lichen-covered mounds looked like ancient woodland graves, as if bodies had fallen in ages past and were being absorbed into the earth. Although the forest was open and light – a soft, grey light – the spongy flora created an undersea feeling, a cool greenish quietness. Wood sedge, rock hair, witch’s hair, spotted black foot, golden pine lichen, little clouds, coral crest, tree lungwort, heather-rags, woolly hair moss; their names a chant of old cures and spells. I couldn’t help thinking magic must have been enacted here.

  The thrill of difference made my heart seem louder in the stillness. I kept exclaiming about the quietness until Anthony’s lack of response made me hear my own voice rattling around the pines.

  After an hour or so, the path turned upwards and into heathland with wiry grasses and heather at the end of flowering. The mist had lifted but was threading around the mountains rising in front away in the distance. My spirits lifted. Although I grew up on low flat country, gentle undulations that could hardly be called hills, high country stirs an excitement in me, the same kind of electrical thrill that storms create. Wide desert with only horizon and sky is also powerful, but in a different way, calm and wordless. It’s as if there are different chambers in the soul that respond to different landscapes: childhood plains for comfort and reassurance, deserts for peace, mountains for wild exhilaration. I remembered fragments of a poem from long ago – a man who lived on the lowlands whose wife yearned for the mountains; I’ve forgotten the poet’s name but remember the desire for a mountainous landscape that could not be assuaged by anything else.

  Anthony and I didn’t talk much, just a few words about the map and written directions. It looked as if a storm might be coming in behind a dark mountain to the south-west – we could be caught without shelter. I didn’t know how to read this landscape, whether it was dangerous to be out on such a bare and rocky route in an electrical storm, but neither of us was inclined to turn back. Every time I looked up, the mountain changed as veils of mist lifted and fell, making it difficult to estimate how far away it was and how far we had walked, but ahead I could see the lairig, the pass, drawing me on. I took a photograph on my phone, the foreground brown heather, a rocky dry watercourse, and ahead the pass, grey clouds swirling. It looks like a nineteenth century painting, its murky grey-brownness speaking of wildness and longing. We would not walk right through the pass, just the 20-kilometre return to the loch, but I could feel the ancient pull of a pass, the desire to see what might lie on the other side.

  Below in a gorge was Allt Druidh, which in Gaelic means ‘Snake Stream’, although druidh, confusingly, could also mean ‘charmer’. We reached the level of the stream and walked along it for a while until the path turned at right angles up a dangerously steep slope, heading away from the pass. I found myself on all fours, afraid of slipping on such a steep incline, ungainly, no longer a biped. It felt somehow disgraceful not to be two-legged, even for a short while.

  On the heathland above, there was an art gallery of lichens: pale green, blue, frilly white and purplish black on large rocks of pink granite. I tried to identify them, but there are more than 1700 species of lichen in the British Isles, many of which grow in Scotland because of the purer air, and lichenologists – that’s what they are called – can study one rock for hours to make an identification. Lichens were used for dying cloth: the greys and browns of Harris tweed came from crottle lichens right up until 1997, and a much sought-after purple or red came from cudbear lichen. The speckled shades and mottled patches on the pink rocks reminded me of the paintings of Indigenous Australians, the subtle colours and the patterns creating a geography of stories, if only I could read them. It was a wild landscape where only rough, scratchy trees and plants grew – too cold, too wet, too windy for gentle flora. Like the deserts in Australia, and much of the dry sclerophyll bush, it was not welcoming, not suited to an easeful human life. ‘The nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird,’ said Henry Lawson of the Australian bush, but he could just as well have been writing of the Scottish Highlands.

  The path reached the Chalamain Gap where it disappeared into a ravine under a huge fall of boulders. The whole ravine was blocked and the only way through was to clamber over the boulders for at least half a kilometre. It needed concentration and careful use of walking poles not to twist an ankle or fall into a crevice, so the going was very slow. I was nervous, we
ll aware that a slip would mean the end of our walking. The guide notes described it as ‘easy scrambling’ but not having done it before, I found it difficult and dangerous. At the same time, the stretching long-limbed ape-like movement of reaching from boulder to boulder was oddly pleasing. It felt as if I were turning into some other kind of creature, a rockmonkey-woman, stretching out each leg, steadying a foot, balancing with both pole-arms, swinging across empty space.

  Halfway across we met up with the only other walkers we had seen, three men in their twenties who asked us to take a photograph of them on a huge boulder. They were elated at being halfway, and in high spirits, playful creatures leaping from rock to rock rather than the stretching, testing animal I’d been.

  ‘Where are you from?’ they asked, the usual question when a differently-accented English is spoken. ‘What are you doing out here on this tough walk in the Highlands?’ It wasn’t really a question to answer, just a kind of compliment, an acknowledgment that none of us really knew what brought us here but that it was irresistible. It wasn’t something anyone ever mentioned in the years I’ve been walking, but it was always there, the almost embarrassing mystery of why we walked pointlessly across the countryside. We know where are going – we have maps, there are signposts – but why? What are we doing out here?

  On maps and signposts in the Highlands there were geographical words I didn’t know at all and words I knew from books but had wrongly imagined. Lairig is the Gaelic word for pass, Brae is not a stream but the slope of a hill; allt is a stream; linn is a pool; tobrach, a spring; strath , a wide valley; ben, a mountain; clach means stony; creag is a cliff, rock or hill; còinneach is mossy.

  The words became a connection to place as much as my boots on the ground, a spell-path to the heart of the wild country. The names let me hold what I saw in my mind, a kind of possession. A kind of power, perhaps. At any rate I felt powerless when I didn’t know what something was called.

  It was the same when I started emailing questions to Barney. The answers were prompt and thorough, but I often didn’t know what the words meant. Half-joking, I said he would have to write me a dictionary for his new sky-world language. The very next day, pages of definitions arrived. I was impressed – and disconcerted – by the fact that he had taken me literally and by the amount of work he must have done to assemble the ‘dictionary’ for me in such a short time. Some of it was technical: carabiners, pod-harness, variometer, anti-G chute; some of it explained shorthand terms: cus for cumulus clouds, cumnim for cumulonimbus, CX for cross-country flight; and then there were poetic words like ridge-soaring , cloud-street, cloud-suck, bomb-out, spiral dive. I could see the phrases flowing across the sky, describing arcs and leaps and falls, opening up a world I had not seen before, or at least not from that angle. I skipped over the technical words, but had to go back to them later. The exact language, the terms, mattered. I read and re-read his dictionary of the Foreign Language of Flying, delighting in the word-map and the way it revealed Barney’s mind and the mind of his tribe. This was their language. I pictured him and the other flyers sitting on the mountain side and watching the weather, waiting for the wind to change or the drizzle to clear and speaking their own language, safe and whole in their shared net of words.

  I didn’t know what fell meant either until I came to the Lake District, a landscape that had become the sacred well of the English soul, especially since Wordsworth lived and wrote here. It wasn’t until I arrived there and started walking that I realised the sacred well was not really the lakes at all, but the fells above them. Fell, a high and bare landscape, from the Old Norse fjall. It’s not a word used to name any geography in Australia and I’d only come across it in passing in English novels. From the ordinary associations – a fell deed, fall, the fallen – I imagined fells as doom-laden lowlands. So strong was this wrongly pictured image that even now when I have walked across the extraordinary stark beauty of these highland moors, my first reaction to fell is still as if to gloomy lowlands.

  There are 14 lakes in the district, scattered among hills and craggy mountains; one of them, Scafell Pike, the highest peak in England – pike is a local word for a pointed hill. The cold Atlantic winds sweep 140 inches (3555 mm) of rain across the district each year, creating a damp geography of becks and burns, peat bogs, cataracts and tarns nestled in hollows high on the fells. The lakes are marked by pretty tourist villages, but the fells have been left to themselves, except for hardy walkers and a few sheep.

  We had driven down from the Cairngorms to Hadrian’s Wall where we had stayed the night and walked the next morning along the misty wall. We arrived in the Lakes District late afternoon and stayed in a small bed and breakfast with a badgers’ den at the bottom of its fields. The first walk towards Easedale Tarn began near Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s house, which I didn’t visit. I wasn’t here to pay homage to a Romantic poet, but I was impressed by his extensive walking – estimated at a mind-boggling 175 000 miles (281 600 km) over his lifetime – and by the fact that his writing was born from this landscape.

  Perhaps the one thing I know is how a landscape forms a person. For me it hasn’t so much been culture or the drama of experience that has formed the core of identity, but land itself, Wiradjuri land. For Wordsworth it was this place, its streams and lakes and fells, which he mapped almost inch by inch, moment by moment, in his poetry. Hundreds of his verses, he said, were written at Easedale Tarn and alongside the beck that ran down from it.

  The path climbed steeply out of the town towards Silver How – how, from the Old Norse haugh, meaning ‘hill’. Even in late September, it was hot work climbing the slope of slithery stones under a bright blue sky and I soon stripped down to a singlet. I stopped every few metres for water and to regain my breath; there was no shade and nowhere to sit down without having to brace my feet against slipping. It felt more like the stony badlands in a cowboy film than the wild and misty romance Wordsworth’s poetry had led me to imagine:

  While thick above the rill the branches close,

  In rocky basin its wild waves repose,

  Inverted shrubs, and moss of gloomy green,

  Cling from the rocks, with pale wood-weeds between …

  We reached a cairn of stones the guidebook had described. The guide then went on to say, ‘there are a number of paths to choose from and I would advise keeping to the one that maintains the highest ground. It does look a difficult task of navigation on the map but it really is a case of following your nose.’

  As might be expected, our inexperienced noses led along a sheep-track through thick yellowing grasses and heathers – bell heather, bilberry, crowberry, cow-berry, according to the guide – that ended after a couple of hours in bracken and gorse. We had a detailed topographic map, but the phone-compass was out of range, so, without knowing where any of the features were, nor even their general direction, our best efforts at reading the place failed. By backtracking for a while we could see the lake on the left, and, using it as a direction marker, eventually found the way down to its furthest end. We had wandered 15 kilometres in almost exactly the opposite direction from Easedale Tarn.

  The next day we walked again towards the tarn, this time by a different route that led directly to it along one of Wordsworth’s becks. We carried small backpacks, walking poles, water bottles, a thermos, and sandwiches made by the bed and breakfast owner. There were a few tourists out in the early morning town, all of whom nodded as we passed them, but by the time we headed away from the houses, there was no-one else. It was a pretty walk, first along a stone wall–lined lane, then steeply up along the stream and then past a cataract that fell into a pool,

  … and made a song

  Which, while I listened, seemed like the wild growth

  Or like some natural produce of the air …

  Below were fields of dried-out grass and tangles of bracken and stone sheep pens, now empty and unused. It was a sunny day again, the world felt at ease. There were herbs – agrimony, alpine blue-sow-th
istle, crocus, basil, thyme, harebell, heather – on either side of the path. When we arrived at the tarn the sun was shining on the blue-grey water, giving it a sparkling air, nothing like the ‘black and sullen’ appearance Wordsworth remarked on, and not inducing the ‘melancholy natural to such places’ he wrote of. He had walked all over this countryside in every sort of weather and saw it on bright sunny days as well – some of his poems are full of light and air, but the pervasive feel is of the deep power of melancholy places and days. It sounds like romanticism and I don’t trust romanticism any more – but I do trust someone who has walked every day in every weather.

  The mists were swirling in when we set out for Derwentwater the following day. The walk began at the small village of Grange, headed up to Cat Bells, back and over Maiden Moor to High Spy, then down through slate quarries. On paper, it was a reasonably easy walk, a stroll along country lanes under oaks, birch, larch and pines, surrounded by Enid Blyton country with wooden fences, flocks of sheep and stone houses, all gentle under a still mist. Shortly, the path left the country lane and became a narrow steep track towards Cat Bells, a long promontory overlooking Derwentwater. At one point, where the track seemed to wander in several directions at once, we met two walkers coming in the other direction.

  ‘Where are you from?’ The usual question, and the usual surprised response to finding walkers from so far away on this fell.

  ‘It’s a bit tricky after High Spy,’ one of them said.

  Anthony pulled out the sketchy map, and both walkers looked at it briefly.

  ‘Can’t really see it on there, but as you are coming down, just before it levels, you head off to the left. It’s a bit marshy, but then you get to a stile and after a while you head down through the shale mines.’