The Environment:Unlike the egoist eccentrics who trudge or scramble their way into the Guinness Book of Records via both Poles or the highest mountains in every continent, Robert Macfarlane does not pit himself against the rigours of wild places but submits himself modestly to them, writes Tim Robinson
He ascends Ben Hope, on the north coast of Scotland, on a winter's night, clears a patch of rocks for a bed, and becomes "cold to the core"; unable to sleep, he walks around the summit plateau at 2am, finding nothing human, just the marks of fossils and glaciers. He has been drawn there by "a spatial logic, a desire to reach the coincident point of high altitude and high latitude" - but then cannot wait to leave it.
In the Lake District, again climbing by night, he finds the most comfortable site for sleep is on a frozen tarn; here he feels as if ice were forming inside himself, and dances himself warm in the moonlight. When he arrives at the beginning of the "Inaccessible Pinnacle" in the Black Cuillin mountains of Skye, which has been described as "a knife-edged ridge with an overhanging and infinite drop on one side, and a drop on the other even steeper and higher", and he sees it slanting away up into the clouds, it is a relief to the reader when he backs off and declines the challenge.
The word "accommodating" recurs. In the snow-filled Black Wood east of Rannoch Moor Macfarlane feels himself "accommodated" by a fallen birch tree against which he can lean a few branches for a shelter, whereas Ben Hope is one of the "least accommodating" places he had ever visited. There is another echo of King Lear's "unaccommodated man . . . a poor, bare, forked animal" in a passage Macfarlane quotes from the historian William Stegner about wild places teaching us that we are "single, separate, vertical and individual in the world . . . brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong to it".
BUT SUCH STARK existential realisations are far from being the only rewards of sojourning in the wild places. There are descriptions of nocturnal phenomena in this beautifully written book that, one hopes, will teach us to cherish what darkness is left to us. At night on the Lleyn Peninsula in Wales he finds that the seawater phosphoresces purple, orange, yellow and silver when he stirs it with his hand: "Then I walked out into the deeper water, and slipped forward and swam in a squall of tangerine light. I rolled on to my back, kicking my legs so that complex drapes of colour were slung outwards . . . I realised I could not see myself, only the phosphorescence that surrounded me, so that it appeared as though I were not there in the water at all: my body was unclear, defined only as a shape of darkness set against the swirling aqueous light".
Glow-worms, he tells us, are in decline "because their pilot lights, the means by which they attract mates, are no longer bright enough to be visible at night". Stars too are becoming rarer because of "the disenchantment of the night" through artificial lighting. This "blinding of the stars" is part of our "turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world". Admirably, Macfarlane does not merely state these losses but makes the reader feel them through the exactitude and inventiveness of his prose.
THE FORM OF the book is a chain of essay-like chapters each dealing with one place and usually pursuing one line of thought arising out of its contemplative exploration. Those tricky moments for the topographical writer, the transitions from description of the place to the musings it suggests, are discreetly managed. Anger at despoliation of the countryside is not allowed to sour his love of it or to dim his faith that "we are fallen in mostly broken pieces, but the wild can still, somehow, return us to ourselves". A change of focus is enacted half-way through the linked sequence of chapters; initially he identifies "the wild" with those places in which one can step out of human history into the elemental, the vast and perhaps the "annihilating"; but then he begins to realise wildness in its more gentle and neighbourly forms. The turning point comes in the Burren, which he visits with his elder friend and mentor Roger Deakin (founder member of Friends of the Earth and author of the recently published Wildwood). They investigate a gryke, a deep fissure in the bare limestone surface, and find that it shelters a rampant jungle of ferns, mosses and flowers: "'This', Roger suddenly said as we lay looking down into it, 'is a wild place. It is as beautiful and complex, perhaps more so, than any glen or bay or peak. Miniature, yes, but fabulously wild'".
Another expedition in Roger Deakin's company takes us into the "holloways" of southern England, the ancient, deserted and overgrown roads worn into the soft chalklands by foot-passengers and carts over past centuries, a labyrinth of ways respecting a topography of hills and streams that is brutally overridden by our modern road systems, and which, folded away secretively in the most agriculturally abused and debased parts of the country, conserves an exuberance of plant and animal life.
Macfarlane's friendship with Roger Deakin - their shared love of the wild, their joint expeditions, the planning of others that did not come to pass, Deakin's illness and death last year, and Macfarlane's mourning for him - is a theme that threads unobtrusively through this book. And a host of other figures who haunt the wild places of Britain and Ireland are brought to mind in it: mad king Suibhne flitting through the forests of Irish myth, the anthropofugal monks who settled on near-uninhabitable Atlantic islands, poets and writers such as waterfall-hunting S T Coleridge, and George Orwell at work on 1984 in the island of Jura, landscapists Samuel Palmer, John Sell Cotman and Paul Nash, and many more to whom it is good to be introduced or redirected in this particular perspective. The solidarity of solitudinarians embraces anonymous figures too, such as the providers of a cottage near Cape Wrath which, according to a note pinned to a wall in it, is "maintained in remote country for the use and benefit of all who love wild and lonely places".
Writers whose concern is the relationship of humankind to its natural environment can be divided into those who impute intentionality to elements of or even the totality of nature, and feel that they are communing with whatever mountain or forest or starry sky they are engaged with, and those who find it not just more realistic but strangely healing to acknowledge the otherness, the responselessness of the non-human world. Robert Macfarlane is of the latter persuasion. The land, he says, "has no desires as to how it should be represented. It is indifferent to its pictures and to its picturers". But this is not a matter of indifference to us humans, inveterate picturers of the world. We need a language clearly differentiated from that of spirituality and the sacred, and more immediate than the jargon of the environmentalists, in which to express our wonder at our strange, frightening and sustaining home universe, and The Wild Places makes a notable contribution to the unending task of finding language adequate to reality.
Tim Robinson's Connemara: Listening to the Wind (Penguin Ireland) won the Irish Non-Fiction Book Award in 2006
A tour of Britain's remotest parts reminds us of our connection to the natural world The Wild Places By Robert Macfarlane Granta, 352pp. £18.99