‘There’s a silent voice in the wilderness that we only hear when no one else is around’.
In a couple of weeks’ time, I have to walk through about 15 grid squares of a highland map to meet a small boat in a remote bay and then go over to an offshore Hebridean island.
The idea of this, which is exciting enough in itself, is made far more so by the fact that just about all of those 15 grid squares have no words on them at all; no towns, no villages, no houses, no nothing. Instead, they are filled with the old Ordnance Survey symbols of long-ago geography lessons: crags, cliffs, marshes, waterfalls and lochans- the insignia of my dreams on long evenings when I just sit and stare at maps.
In our hemmed-in, up-tight world of deadlines and sharply delineated borders, my walk provides me with a rare opportunity to rely on my own (slightly suspect) navigational skills, and to ensure that I have the right things in my backpack if something goes wrong. If it’s wet and cloudy- not an unthinkable chance in that part of the world- I will need to take frequent compass bearings and then concentrate on following them to the letter. I quite need to avoid falling over and putting some part of my body out of action, as it would be boring for someone to come and pick me up.
I am not expecting to see anyone else on the walk; indeed, I have kind of planned it so that I don’t. Just the odd red deer on the hills above me, and whatever wildlife happens to show itself.
And if this is all a bit artificial, which I would accept it is, it is all the final chapter of research for a book that I have been working on for the last fourteen months, and the solitude is a deliberate attempt to enter into the last days of research in the right frame of mind, uncluttered by what I am temporarily leaving behind. ‘The wilderness,’ said the American photography critic Nancy Newhall, ‘holds answers to more questions than we have yet learned to ask’, and I strongly agree with her.
And, although the central character of my book is the 450 gram master mariner, the Manx Shearwater, who will fly the oceans for around 4 million miles in a 50 year lifetime, it is also about the importance of finding space in our lives for wilderness, and for awe at the little pieces of nature that we have yet to entirely tame.
Thirty five years ago, along with my comrades on the sub-antarctic island of South Georgia, we spent five months wandering over hills, mountains and glaciers that were still thrillingly marked ‘insufficiently surveyed’ and therefore left entirely blank. The very term ‘insufficiently surveyed’, whilst clearly being an invitation to adventure, held out the faint but alluring promise that we might even be the very first humans ever to have set foot on wherever we were. At the top of one minor peak, I pointed this out to my soldiers.
‘Lucky bloody them is all I can say,’ remarked Rifleman Patrick unromantically, in the finest traditions of soldiers being unmoved by landscapes. ‘Missing out on miles and miles of f****g ice like this.’
And after he spoke, I looked out to the west to the ice bound fastnesses of Annenkov Island out in the storm-bound seas that Ernest Shackleton once had to cross in his tiny whaler, the James Caird, and realised, like I still realise all those years later, how very much I just wanted to be there. On my own. Doing nothing. Just there.
I never made it, and never will, so Ardnamurchan will have to do for the time being.
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