Wild Land News no 71, Spring/Summer 2008

Wild Places: a winter's night Article

In the second extract from his new book, Robert Macfarlane describes a winter's night spent alone on Scotland's most northerly Munro

I had been told that if you climb Ben Hope on the summer solstice, and spend a clear night on its summit, you will never lose sight of the sun. The combination of elevation and northerliness means that the uppermost rim of the sun never dips fully below the horizon. A truly white night. In the autumn, too, it was said to be a fine place for watching the aurora borealis, which shimmered like aerial phosphorescence, green and red. But I was most drawn to Hope in its winter moods. For several years I had wanted to climb it when snow was on the ground, and spend a cold night on its summit: the sense of polar space opening out beyond me, the scents of berg and frazil washing down off the invisible Arctic Ocean.

Hope is a mountain which holds the solstitial opposites of north: it knows both the affirmation of the never-vanishing sun and the indifference of the eighteen-hour night. There could be, I thought, no other place in Britain or Ireland where you could better feel a sense of 'bigness outside yourself ', in Stegner's phrase. That 'bigness' had been there on Rannoch Moor and at Sandwood, and I had felt a chronic version of it in Coruisk. But I wondered if, once I began to move south, it would fall away, become unlocatable.

I drove through sleet, then sunshine, then squalls, with raindrops the size of berries pelting on to the windscreen. No weather system remained dominant for more than an hour. By early afternoon I was at Hope's south-western foot. Clouds bearing cargoes of snow pushed past to the north-east. Snow was falling lightly over Foinaven, to the west across moor. The sky above me was clear, a pale winter white. I looked up at Hope, remembering its shape from the maps I had studied.

I started up Hope as the day's light began to dim, feeling excited, almost jaunty, to be out there alone. Following a stream-cut, I passed big boulders worked by the water into curious shapes. As I climbed, the view over the surrounding landscape opened. Hundreds of empty miles of watery land radiating out in each direction, big peaks here and there - Klibreck, Loyal, holding snow in their eastern corrie - and Loch Hope leading the eye north, past the mountain's cliff ramparts, and out to the spaciousness of the Firth.

Hope did not give itself up easily. The ascent was nearly from sea level, and the huge summit cone, crag-bound, was steadily steep. By the time I reached the top, the air around me was dark and gritty, and the wind colder. The summit was bare, stripped by gales and frost weathering. Rime ice had formed in feathery windrows on shattered grey rocks, which were also marked with lichens the colour of lime and tangerine. Between the rocks, snow lay in stripes and furrows, dry and granular as sand. Working quickly, with numbing hands, and a growing sense of worry - was this too cold a place, too hard a place, to spend the night? - I moved rocks to clear a lozenge-shaped space of rough flatness, and arranged them into a low curving wall, a foot or so high.

That night the winds began a slow swing from west to north, bringing snow showers scattering against the canvas of my bivouac bag, and raking the summit rocks with hail. A moon was up there somewhere, breaking through the cloud cover. It was far too cold to sleep. I lay like a compass needle, head to the north, on my front, looking towards the sea, watching patches of silver open and close over the distant waters, trying to keep warm.

At two o'clock, still sleepless, I left the shelter, crossed back to the main top, and began to pace out the reach of the mountain's curving summit plateau. The cloud cover had thinned. Moonlight came and went in squalls. Each rock wore a carapace of ice, which cracked and skittered off in shards at the slightest contact. Little hail drifts had built up in the lee of the rocks; otherwise the wind had stripped away all the unfrozen snow. The air smelt bright.

I walked out to where the mountain's eastern ridge began, and from there looked down into the lost lochs, which were holding moonlight like snow. Moving across to the south-western tip of the plateau, I sensed more than saw the massive complex of Foinaven miles away, its snow-shires flashing silver, the rest of its black bulk invisible in the dark. The cold was pressing, constant, and I began to shiver; not a surface tremble, but a deep convulsive shaking. In that deep winter darkness, my sunny East Anglian beechwood felt suddenly hugely distant, the landscape of another continent or era, not just another country.

This was one of the least accommodating places to which I had ever come. The sea, the stone, the night and the weather all pursued their processes and kept their habits, as they had done for millennia, and would do for millennia to follow. The fall of moonlight on to water, the lateral motion of blown snow through air, these were of the place's making only. This was a terrain that had been thrown up by fire and survived ice. There was nothing, save the wall of rocks I had made and the summit cairn, to suggest history. Nothing human, only the mineral marks of fossils and glaciers. I turned east and south, straining to see if there was any flicker of light in the hundreds of miles of darkness around me. Even a glimpse of something lit, however distant and unreachable, would have been reassurance of a sort. Nothing. No glimmer.

There could have been nowhere that conformed more purely to the vision of wildness with which I had begun my journeys. I had been drawn here by a spatial logic, a desire to reach this coincident point of high altitude and high latitude. But now I could not wait to leave it. It was an amplified version of the discomfort I had unexpectedly felt at the Inaccessible Pinnacle in Coruisk.

If I could have safely descended from the summit of Hope in the darkness, I would have done so. The comfortless snow-shires, the frozen rocks: this place was not hostile to my presence, far from it. Just entirely, gradelessly indifferent. Up there, I felt no companionship with the land, no epiphany of relation like that I had experienced in the Black Wood. Here, there was no question of relation. This place refused any imputation of meaning.

All travellers to wild places will have felt some version of this, a brief blazing perception of the world's disinterest. In small measures it exhilarates. But in full form it annihilates. Nan Shepherd found this out on the Cairngorm plateau, another bare, stripped, Arctic zone. 'Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me,' she had written of the water that rises on the plateau. 'The water wells from the rock, and flows away. For unnumbered years it has welled from the rock, and flowed away. It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself. One cannot know the rivers till one has seen them at their sources; but this journey is not to be undertaken lightly. One walks among elementals, and elementals are not governable.'

At some point, the winds dropped, and the temperature rose by a degree or two. I returned to the shallow stone shelter and was able at last to sleep, for perhaps two hours, little more, longing for dawn and escape from the summit. When I woke at first light, cold to the core, the air was windless. My rucksack was frozen, the canvas rigid and pale as though it had been fired in a kiln. I found and kept a fragment of quartz granulite, irregular in its shape: sharp-edged, frost-shattered. Then I set off down the mountain, and it seemed as I did so that descent in any direction from that summit would be a voyage south.

Robert MacFarlane's book "The Wild Places" was launched at last year's Edinburgh Book Festival. ISBN: 978-1-86207-941-0. Publisher: Granta. RRP: £18.99 We are grateful to the author and publisher for permission to reproduce this extract.