Wild Land News no 70, Autumn 2007

Wild Places: Moor Article

An extract from Robert Macfarlane's new book

In the course of a congenial evening in the editor's bothy sticking hundreds of labels on envelopes and stuffing WLNs into them, we noticed one going to a Robert Macfarlane in Cambridge. Could this be the Robert Macfarlane, lecturer in English, who won the Guardian First Book Award for Mountains of the Mind? Since it was nearing year's end, we sent him a card soliciting an endorsement for our case against Beauly-Denny and all that goes with it. He responded in fullness of time with a ringing denunciation printed in Wild Land News 69:

And he offered us the chance to publish extracts from his new book, Wild Places, along with those equally august journals The Herald and the Telegraph. So here is the first, from Chapter 4 'Moor', with another to come next issue:

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 floodplain 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 been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New.'

For W. H. Murray, it was not even direct exposure to the spaces of moor and mountain that consoled him during his prison years, but the memory of that experience. He knew that these places continued to exist; this was what sustained him.

In 1977, a nineteen-year-old Glaswegian named Robert Brown was arrested for a murder he did not commit, and over the course of the following days had a confession beaten out of him by a police officer subsequently indicted for corruption. Brown served twenty-five years, and saw two appeals fail, before his conviction was finally overturned in 2002. When he was released, one of the first things he did was to go to the shore of Loch Lomond and sit on a boulder on the loch's southern shore in sunlight, to feel, as he put it, 'the wind on my face, and to see the waves and the mountains'. Brown had been out on the loch shore the day before he was arrested. The recollection of the space, that place, which he had not seen for a quarter of a century, had nourished him during his imprisonment. He had kept the memory of it, he recalled afterwards, 'in a secret compartment' in his head.

We have tended to exercise an imaginative bias against flatlands: moor, tundra, heath, prairie, bog and steppe. For Daniel Defoe, traveling in 1725, the moors above Chatsworth were abominable: 'a waste and a howling wilderness'. Reactions like Defoe's occur in part because of the difficulty of making the acquaintance of flat terrains. They seem to return the eye's enquiries unanswered, or swallow all attempts at interpretation. They confront us with the problem of purchase: how to anchor perception in a context of vastness, how to make such a place mean. We have words we use for such places, half in awe and half in dismissal - stark, empty, limitless. But we find it hard to make language grip landscapes that are close-toned, but that also excel in expanse, reach and transparency.

Robert MacFarlane's book "Wild Places" was launched at this year's Edinburgh Book Festival. ISBN: 978-1-86207-941-0. Publisher: Granta. RRP: £18.99