Landmarks Read online

  But we are and always have been name-callers, christeners. Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes grained into our words. ‘Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind,’ in Wade Davis’s memorable phrase. We see in words: in webs of words, wefts of words, woods of words. The roots of individual words reach out and intermesh, their stems lean and criss-cross, and their outgrowths branch and clasp.

  ~

  ‘I want my writing to bring people not just to think of “trees” as they mostly do now,’ wrote Roger Deakin in a notebook that was discovered after his early death, ‘but of each individual tree, and each kind of tree.’ John Muir, spending his first summer working as a shepherd among the pines of the Sierra Nevada in California, reflected in his journal that ‘Every tree calls for special admiration. I have been making many sketches and regret that I cannot draw every needle.’ The chapters of Landmarks all concern writers who are particularizers, and who seek in some way to ‘draw every needle’. Deakin, Muir, Baker, Nan Shepherd, Jacquetta Hawkes, Richard Skelton, Autumn Richardson, Peter Davidson, Barry Lopez, Richard Jefferies: all have sought, in Emerson’s phrase, to ‘pierce … rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things’. All have written with committing intensity about their chosen territories. And for all of them, to use language well is to use it particularly: precision of utterance as both a form of lyricism and a species of attention.

  Before you become a writer you must first become a reader. Every hour spent reading is an hour spent learning to write; this continues to be true throughout a writer’s life. The Living Mountain, Waterlog, The Peregrine, Arctic Dreams, My First Summer in the Sierra: these are among the books that have taught me to write, but also the books that have taught me to see. In that respect, Landmarks is a record of my own pupillage, if the word may be allowed to carry its senses both of ‘tuition’ and (in that ocular flicker) of ‘gaining vision’. Thus the book is filled with noticers and noticings. ‘The surface of the ground, so dull and forbidding at first sight,’ wrote Muir of the Sierra Nevada, in fact ‘shines and sparkles with crystals: mica, hornblende, feldspar, quartz, tourmaline … the radiance in some places is so great as to be fairly dazzling’. How typical of Muir to see dazzle where most would see dullness! Again and again in the chapters that follow you will encounter similar acts of ‘dazzling’ perception: Finlay MacLeod and Anne Campbell detailing the intricacies of the Lewisian moor; Shepherd finding a micro-forest of lichens and heathers on the Cairngorm plateau; Baker scrying a skyful of birds; and Richard Jefferies pacing out a humble roadside verge in a London suburb, counting off sixty different wild flowers, from agrimony to yellow vetch.

  Books, like landscapes, leave their marks in us. Sometimes these traces are so faint as to be imperceptible – tiny shifts in the weather of the spirit that do not register on the usual instruments. Mostly, these marks are temporary: we close a book, and for the next hour or two the world seems oddly brighter at its edges; or we are moved to a kindness or a meanness that would otherwise have gone unexpressed. Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we have left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates. The word landmark is from the Old English landmearc, meaning ‘an object in the landscape which, by its conspicuousness, serves as a guide in the direction of one’s course’. John Smith, writing in his 1627 Sea Grammar, gives us this definition: ‘A Land-marke is any Mountaine, Rocke, Church, Wind-mill or the like, that the Pilot can now by comparing one by another see how they beare by the compasse.’ Strong books and strong words can be landmarks in Smith’s sense – offering us a means both of establishing our location and of knowing how we ‘beare by the compasse’. Taken in sum, the chapters of Landmarks explore how reading can change minds, revise behaviour and shape perception. All of the writers here have altered their readers in some way. Some of these alterations are conspicuous and public: Muir’s essays convinced Theodore Roosevelt of the need to protect Yosemite and its sequoias, and massively to extend the National Park regions of America; Deakin’s Waterlog revolutionized open-water swimming in twenty-first-century Britain. Others are private and unmappable, manifesting in ways that are unmistakable to experience, but difficult to express – leaving our attention refocused, our sight freshly scintillated.

  Strange events occurred in the course of my travels for Landmarks – convergences that pressed at the limits of coincidence and tended to the eerie. You will read about them here: the discovery of the tunnel of swords and axes in Cumbria; the appearance of the Cambridge peregrines (first at sillion, then at sill); the experience of walking into the pages of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain in the Cairngorms; the widening ripples of a forgotten word, found in a folder in Suffolk that had been left behind by a friend who had died; and then the discovery – told in the Postscript – on the day before I finished Landmarks that its originating dream had, almost, come true. In all of these incidents, life and language collapsed curiously into one another. I have tried to account for these collapses, but such events – like many of the subjects of this book – are often best represented not by proposition but by pattern, such that unexpected constellations of relation light up. Metamorphosis and shape-shifting, magnification, miniaturization, cabinets of curiosity, crystallization, hollows and dens, archives, wonder, views from above: these are among the images and tropes that recur. The chapters here do not together tell the story of a single journey or quest, but all are fascinated by the same questions concerning the mutual relations of place, language and spirit – how we landmark, and how we are landmarked.

  I have come to understand that although place-words are being lost, they are also being created. Nature is dynamic, and so is language. Loanwords from Chinese, Urdu, Korean, Portuguese and Yiddish are right now being used to describe the landscapes of Britain and Ireland; portmanteaus and neologisms are constantly in manufacture. As I travelled I met new words as well as salvaging old ones: a painter in the Hebrides who used landskein to refer to the braid of blue horizon lines in hill country on a hazy day; a five-year-old girl who concocted honeyfur to describe the soft seeds of grasses held in the fingers. When Clare and Hopkins could not find words for natural phenomena, they just made them up: sutering for the cranky action of a rising heron (Clare), wolfsnow for a dangerous sea-blizzard, and slogger for the sucking sound made by waves against a ship’s side (both Hopkins). John Constable invented the verb to sky, meaning ‘to lie on one’s back and study the clouds’. We have forgotten 10,000 words for our landscapes, but we will make 10,000 more, given time. This is why Landmarks moves over its course from the peat-deep word-hoard of Hebridean Gaelic, through to the fresh-minted terms and stories of young children at play on the outskirts of a Cambridgeshire town. And this is why the final glossary of the book is left blank, for you to fill in – there to hold the place-words that have yet to be coined.

  2

  A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook

  I

  In Which Nothing Is Seen

  Five thousand feet below us, the Minch was in an ugly mood. Grey Atlantic water, arrowed with white wave-tops. Our twin-prop plane reached the east coast of the Isle of Lewis and banked north towards Stornoway, bucking as it picked up the cross-buffets of a stiff westerly. The air was clear, though, and I could see the tawny expanse of Mòinteach riabhach, the Brindled Moor: several hundred square miles of bog, hag, crag, heather, loch and lochan that make up the interior of Lewis.

  Across the aisle from me, two people looked out of the window at the moor. One of them laughed.

  ‘We’re flying over nothing!’ she said.

  ‘Remind me why we’ve come here?’ the other asked.

  ‘We’ve come to see nothing!’

  ‘Then we have come to the right place!’

  They pressed their shoulders together, both laughing now. Whirr. Thunk. The landing gear lowered, engaged.

  ‘We’re about to land on nothing!’

  ‘Hold on tight!’

  IIr />
  In Which Names Are Spoken

  It is true that, seen for the first time, and especially when seen from altitude, the moor of Lewis resembles a terra nullius, a nothing-place, distinguished only by its self-similarity. Peat, moor and more moor. It is vast, flat, repetitive in form, and its colours are motley and subtle. This is a region whose breadth seems either to return the eye’s enquiries unanswered, or to swallow all attempts at interpretation. Like other extensive lateral landscapes – desert, ice cap, prairie, tundra – it confronts us with difficulties of purchase (how to anchor perception in a context of immensity) and evaluation (how to structure significance in a context of uniformity). Or, to borrow the acronym that Welsh farmers fondly use to describe the hills of the Elan range in mid-Wales, the Brindled Moor can easily be mistaken for MAMBA country: Miles And Miles of Bugger All.

  I had come to Lewis to visit a friend of mine, Finlay MacLeod, who loves the moor, and who lives on its western brink in a coastal township called Shawbost. Finlay is known to almost everyone on Lewis and Harris. Even those who have not met him are aware of ‘Doctor Finlay of Shawbost’. His fame is born of his remarkable range of expertises (he is, among other things, a teacher, naturalist, novelist, broadcaster, oral historian, archivist and map-collector) and his rare combination of intellectual curiosity, gentle generosity of spirit, and eloquence as a communicator in both Gaelic and English.

  Finlay met me at Stornoway, and we drove across the island to Shawbost. The journey was slow and digressive. Often Finlay pulled over to greet people out on the moor (walkers, peat-cutters), or to point out moor features I would otherwise have missed (the start of shieling paths; cairned islands in the centre of lochans). We took two detours, one to a beehive shieling hard by a sheep-fank, and one to a huge Iron Age broch, whose inner stones of gneiss were cold as steel to the touch.

  That evening, after we’d eaten, we sat in Finlay’s living room and he played me a crackly recording of Gaelic psalm-singing, made on the remote skerry of Sula Sgeir in the early 1950s. It set my scalp tingling. Then he passed me a stapled sheaf of paper. ‘I’ve been working on this recently,’ he said, ‘and I thought it might interest you.’

  Oh, it did. The document was a word-list entitled ‘Some Lewis Moorland Terms: A Peat Glossary’. Together with his friends Anne Campbell, Catriona Campbell and Donald Morrison, Finlay explained, he had been carrying out a survey of the language used in three Lewisian townships – Shawbost, Bragar and Shader – to denote aspects of the moor. The Peat Glossary ran to several pages and more than 120 terms – and as that modest ‘Some’ in its title acknowledged, it was incomplete. ‘There’s so much more to be added to it,’ Anne told me later. ‘It represents only three villages’ worth of words. I have a friend from South Uist who said that her grandmother would add dozens to it. Every village in the upper islands would have its different phrases to contribute.’ I thought of Norman MacCaig’s great Hebridean poem ‘By the Graveyard, Luskentyre’, where he imagines creating a dictionary out of the language of Donnie, a lobster fisherman from the Isle of Harris. It would be an impossible book, MacCaig concludes:

  A volume thick as the height of the Clisham,

  A volume big as the whole of Harris,

  A volume beyond the wit of scholars.

  I sat and read the glossary that evening by the fire in Finlay’s house, fascinated and moved. Many of the terms it contains are notable for their compressive precision. Bugha is ‘a green bow-shaped area of moor grass or moss, formed by the winding of a stream’. Mòine dhubh are ‘the heavier and darker peats which lie deeper and older into the moor’. Teine biorach means ‘the flame or will-o’-the-wisp that runs on top of heather when the moor is burnt during the summer’. A rùdhan is ‘a set of four peat blocks leaned up against one another such that wind and sun hasten their drying’. Groups of words carefully distinguish between comparable phenomena: lèig-chruthaich is ‘quivering bog with water trapped beneath it, and an intact surface’, whereas breunloch is ‘dangerous sinking bog that may be bright green and grassy’, and botann is ‘a hole in the moor, often wet, where an animal might get stuck’. Other terms are distinctive for their poetry. Rionnach maoim, for instance, means ‘the shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day’. Èit refers to ‘the practice of placing quartz stones in moorland streams so that they would sparkle in moonlight and thereby attract salmon to them in the late summer and autumn’.

  The existence of a moorland lexis of such scope and exactitude is testimony to the long relationship of labour between the Hebrideans and their land: this is, dominantly, a use-language – its development a function of the need to name that which is being done, and done to. That this lexis should also admit the poetic and metaphorical to its designations is testimony to the long aesthetic relationship between the Hebrideans and their land. For this is also a language of looking, touching and appreciation – and its development is partly a function of the need to love that which is being done, and done to.

  I take the Peat Glossary to be a prose-poem, and a document that gives the lie to any idea of the moor as terra nullius. ‘Glossary’ – with its hints both of tongue and of gleam – is just the right term for this text’s eloquence, and also for the substance to which its description is devoted: peat being gleamy as tar when wet, and as dark in its pools as Japanese lacquer. The glossary reveals the moor to be a terrain of immense intricacy. A slow capillary creep of knowledge has occurred on Lewis, up out of landscape’s details and into language’s. The result is a lexis so supplely suited to the place being described that it fits it like a skin. Precision and poetry co-exist: the denotative and the figurative are paired as accomplices rather than as antagonists.

  Ultra-fine discrimination operates in Hebridean Gaelic place-names, as well as in descriptive nouns. In the 1990s an English linguist called Richard Cox moved to northern Lewis, taught himself Gaelic, and spent several years retrieving and recording the place-names in the Carloway district of Lewis’s west coast. Carloway contains thirteen townships and around 500 people; it is fewer than sixty square miles in area. But Cox’s magnificent resulting work, The Gaelic Place-Names of Carloway, Isle of Lewis: Their Structure and Significance (2002), runs to almost 500 pages and details more than 3,000 place-names. Its eleventh section, titled ‘The Onomasticon’, lists the hundreds of toponyms identifying ‘natural features’ of the landscape. Unsurprisingly for such a maritime culture, there is a proliferation of names for coastal features – narrows, currents, indentations, projections, ledges, reefs – often of exceptional specificity. Beirgh, for instance, a loanword from the Old Norse, refers to ‘a promontory or point with a bare, usually vertical rock face and sometimes with a narrow neck to land’, while corran has the sense of ‘rounded point’, deriving from its common meaning of ‘sickle’. There are more than twenty different terms for eminences and precipices, depending on the sharpness of the summit and the aspects of the slope. Sìthean, for instance, deriving from sìth, ‘a fairy hill or mound’, is a knoll or hillock possessing the qualities which were thought to constitute desirable real estate for fairies – being well drained, for instance, with a distinctive rise, and crowned by green grass. Such qualities also fulfilled the requirements for a good shieling site, and so almost all toponyms including the word sìthean indicate shieling locations. Characterful personifications of places also abound: A’ Ghnùig, for instance, means ‘the steep slope of the scowling expression’.

  Reading ‘The Onomasticon’, you realize that Gaelic speakers of this landscape inhabit a terrain which is, in Proust’s phrase, ‘magnificently surcharged with names’. For centuries, these place-names have spilled their poetry into everyday Hebridean life. They have anthologized local history, anecdote and myth, binding story to place. They have been functional – operating as territory markers and ownership designators – and they have also served as navigational aids. Until well into the twentieth century, most inhabitants of the Western Isles did
not use conventional paper maps, but relied instead on memory maps, learnt on the land and carried in the skull. These memory maps were facilitated by first-hand experience and were also – as Finlay put it – ‘lit by the mnemonics of words’. For their users, these place-names were necessary for getting from location to location, and for the purpose of guiding others to where they needed to go. It is for this reason that so many toponyms incorporate what is known in psychology and design as ‘affordance’ – the quality of an environment or object that allows an individual to perform an action on, to or with it. So a bealach is a gap in a ridge or cliff which may be walked through, but the element beàrn or beul in a place-name suggests an opening that is unlikely to admit human passage, as in Am Beul Uisg, ‘the gap from which the water gushes’. Blàr a’ Chlachain means ‘the plain of the stepping stones’, while Clach an Linc means ‘the rock of the link’, indicating a place where boats can safely be tied up. To speak out a run of these names is therefore to create a story of travel – an act of naming that is also an act of wayfinding. Angus MacMillan, a Lewisian, remembers being sent by his father seven miles across the Brindled Moor to fetch a missing sheep spotted by someone the night before: ‘Cùl Leac Ghlas ri taobh Sloc an Fhithich fos cionn Loch na Muilne’ – ‘just behind the Grey Ledge by the Raven’s Hollow above the Mill Loch’. ‘Think of it,’ writes MacMillan drily, ‘as an early form of GPS: the Gaelic Positioning System.’