Having met (just) a book deadline for the end of July, I began August with a few
days reading for pleasure - catching up on new outdoors writing & naturalism. I’d patched up my old
Westwind tent (so damaged by blizzards in 2009 that I'd considered it a write off) & spent a couple of nights out amongst trees not far from the back door…
But this
couldn’t go on long: two work-related things needed doing in earnest. I had
to catch up with some challenging writing on the experience of time
(reading I’ve been putting off for a while) and to reconceptualise a
historical project about the 1890s that has been coming together (and falling
apart again) for two years.
This
kind of thinking – which needs to shift established habits of thought but also embed
itself deep in the memory – demands dramatically new surroundings: it's aided by unique images & atmospheres that become bound up with particular trains of
thought. So I packed myself a mini-library (formed around the vast granite
massif of Francois Hartog’s Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences
of Time, but including some poetic outliers too)…
…and set
off North.
In the summer, days outdoors work wonderfully for intensive
thinking. With 16+ hours of light & no distractions but sky, crag & creature, it’s possible to intersperse 10 hours walking with 8 reading. And
walking must surely be the best thinking time there is: it’s no surprise, I
guess, that ideas formed while moving slowly through geological & ecological
drama just seem to stick deeper & burn brighter than ideas made at the same
small desk that’s forever associated with daily routines.
This
habit began fifteen years ago when I was a student. Back then it was partly a
response to lack of private space; when I had time to travel I’d head into
the most secluded spots I could find, often in the Rhinogs or the Dark Peak,
with a bag of books. These were usually on a single theme – the cultures of
Late Antiquity, early-medieval Scandinavia or the visual arts in the early twentieth century – and I’d stay & read for as many days as I
could make my food last.
It took a little longer (until I had more by way of
resources) to get further afield. But soon I could indulge extraordinary
luxuries: to get deliberately lost for several days in Fisherfield (with writing about ancient Sumer) or ensconce
myself for a glorious September week on Rum (with books about George Eliot & a copy of Middlemarch). Thinking about those landscapes now leads to involuntarily recollection of precisely what I read there, and many of the books that have been most formative of my historical thinking were carried on these trips. Here's a book by John Berger, over breakfast on Foinaven:
So this
trip was a departure. It coincided with the perseid meteor shower & a
new moon: a perfect time to be out under the stars. I’d also decided to break
the habit of spending mountain nights in just a sleeping bag (in case I was forced to
sleep among the midgies) so this was an outing for my lovely old Terra Nova
bivi bag - after 7 yrs no longer waterproof but still cosy. Arriving
at Linn of Dee mid-afternoon I set off up Glen Lui and through the pine forests of
Glenn Laoigh Bheag, full of ancient fallen trunks…
…then
made my way onto Carn a’ Mhaim.
Tall
enough to guarantee freedom from the August midge-plague, this provided a great
spot to sit on rocks, lean back on my rucksack & dig deep into books. I
read Hartog as the clouds turned slowly pink, with stunning views in all
directions.
By
sunset, though, the cloud cover was consistent: no perseids tonight.
Next day
would be exactly what I’d been craving: a span of unbroken
reading-walking. This kind of craving - fixating on outdoors thinking time - doesn’t seem to be unusual among
historians. Some of it, I guess, is down to the old connections between
history, antiquarianism & archaeology. It's intruiging, for instance, that a formative moment in Kathleen Jamie's career in landscape writing (recounted in the chapter of Sightlines entitled ‘The
Woman in the Field’) came when volunteering on an archaeological dig: Jamie’s prose conjures how the lives of many who interpret the past are tied to places that are now sparsely populated. There are illustrations from the beginning of the modern history boom too: Walter Scott wrote one novel - The Antiquary - that's more intricate & ambitious than any of his others. It's full of characters representing different kinds of historical interests & different aspects of Scottish society, with a
tramping chief protagonist who tries - and fails - to comprehend historically the land he lives on. One of the first
texts I ask my second-year history students to read is a 1966 essay by Keith Thomas. He criticises his peers for assessing things 'by feel rather than by figures' but the way he expresses this is telling: he says that the
computer must replace ‘the “stout boots” worn by the advanced historians of
the past generation’.
The
stout-booted writers Thomas had in mind surely included George Macaulay Trevelyan (right), perhaps
the most celebrated of all hill-walking historians.
Trevelyan created histories
– which he thought of as primarily imaginative things - while he wandered the
fells of northern England. And Trevelyan was one of the first historians I ever read for leisure.
On a family visit to South Wales, aged about 13, I used my holiday spending
money to buy (for some unfathomable, fateful reason) a copy of Trevelyan’s
1926 History of England that happened to be in a tiny bookshop in St Brides. I
had no real idea what it was (I'm not sure I even registered that it might not be cutting edge). But discovering that this book had been conceptualised
while walking Hadrian’s Wall gave it enormous appeal to me.
At that
age I couldn't see the complete worldview that lay behind Trevelyan’s expertly-told
narratives & informed his outdoors pursuits. For him, landscape was a religion, scenery
a site of pilgrimage & walking a form of worship. He was fond of phrases like
‘sacred union with nature’ & supported causes like the Pilgrims Trust &
Outward Bound as a kind of crusade against urban life. He was the first
president of the Youth Hostel Association (their headquarters is still called
Trevelyan House). Writing mainly in the interwar years, Trevelyan had
been profoundly unsettled by the connections between modern technology, social
change & war. This - added to a deep distrust of religion - led him to pursue a
new kind of creed: ruralism was inseparable from his literary romanticism & liberal
vision of history. What I
failed to pick up as a teenager was the profoundly disturbing English exceptionalism & mystic nationalism that lay behind all this. Weighed down with assumptions of
imperial destiny & fear of national decline, Trevelyan hoped that ‘natural beauty’ would ensure
that ‘the English people’ didn’t ‘perish in the spiritual sense’.
So Trevelyan
has lived with me for a long time, as a reason for wanting to do history &, later in my teens, as
a source of the realisation that all history is ideological, never morally
neutral or non-partisan. Whenever I see really old fashioned walking boots, his
is the name that pops into my head. And his less nationalistic writing still does
make far better reading than the texts of his contemporaries – many of whom made
their history utterly dry in futile pursuit of scientific professional status.
As the
sun came up on the following morning, everything was engulfed in cloud. I walked onto the
ridge that leads to Scotland’s second highest mountain, Ben Macdui, and stopped
for the day’s first read. Rich, early-morning light had begun to break through & a better, airier reading spot would be hard to imagine.
As I looked down at the gleaming
white walls of Corrour bothy (above) I thought of Trevelyan, who would surely have been wildly enthusiastic about what the Mountain Bothies Association do (for more on that see this book by Phoebe Smith, which has been getting lots of good BBC coverage recently). The beginnings of the River Dee:
Once
onto Ben Macdui itself, every reading stop brought hordes of inquisitive
snowbuntings (hordes is no exaggeration). These were perfectly willing to pose
for photos, and showed a remarkable range of different summer plumage, some
adapted strikingly well for camouflage among Cairngorm boulders.
From
Macdui, apparent patterns in cloud formation could be identified, banks
clinging to the western & southern sides of the plateau. One mountain in
particular seemed to stay clear of all of this: Beinn Mheadhoin.
Topped by looming granite torrs (the Barns of Beinn Mheadhoin), this seemed like
a wonderful place to spend tonight, so I began to make my way across via a circuitous tour of corries, full of sub-Alpine flora & fauna, that are the real glory of
the Cairngorms. These are the sites of crystaline streams whose praises
Nan Sheppard sang in The Living
Mountain (a must-read for any Cairngorms visitor).
Even at
the lowest points of today’s walking, snow fields were plentiful.
And
glorious reading spots, looking out towards the evening’s target, were easily
found:
This was
by far the best walking of the trip – perfect conditions, verdure underfoot, ever-changing
scenery, and total solitude. Plus Ptarmigan:
I investigated Carn Etchachan & Castlegates
Gully before climbing down the waterfall to Loch Etchachan &
beginning the last slog up Stacan Dubha, then the Bheinn itself.
The
summit provided plenty more opportunity to read/think history…
...but as
the sun set, clouds were amassing on both the western & southern horizons. My
perseid views seemed threatened once again.
I needn’t
have worried. What followed was a perfect star-gazing night, in which the milky
way stood out against the sky & several meteors per-minute crossed my
field of vision, with no need to close the bivi bag all night. This was one of
the best nights I’ve spent on the hills recently, the only drawback being the guilt every time I allowed my eyes to close. Only when the
sun rose (bivi in mid-ground)...
...did I discover what had happened to all that encroaching cloud. The atmospheric spectacle continued below…
The walk
back towards Derry lodge and the Linn of Dee would be a long one, but down some
of the E highlands’ most beautiful glens:
This
left time for just one more venture before home, but a weather front was pushing north: clouds were beginning to veil most tops & heavy rain was promised. After weighing up several
options I decided that, since I’d driven all the way up here with a boat on the car,
I probably ought to use it. The canoeist’s (and whisky drinker’s) paradise of
the River Spey was just a few miles away, providing low-level views of the Cairngorms,
and passing through several hotspots of avian & aquatic life. After a quiet night in Kingussie, I drove to Kincraig, pushed off into Loch Insh & headed upstream. With
a different kind of beauty from the plateau above – serene after the bleakness –
this stretch of the Spey is lined with lichenous alders & passerine-filled willows...
...many of which are veterans, with all the splits, rot & fractures that turn a tree
into a habitat.
Moths & butterflies, dragonflies, spiders & warblers abounded, flitting through the William Morris wallpaper...
...and the
water itself was alive with minnows, water beetles & water boatmen – this felt more vigorous & teeming with creatures than the rivers - Severn & Wye - near home. When I pulled up
on a shingle beach beneath a stand of Scott’s Pines, I left a wagtail to
guard the boat...
...and climbed the bank to read for a while. Flocks of lapwings passed,
as did a surprising array of birds of prey, one particular young buzzard making
an outlandish racket as it tried to draw food from reluctant parents. A little
later, the sparrowhawk hidden in these branches snatched a long-tail from the willows and settled down to eat:
Over four days I'd got through around 450 pages of tightly-packed history & scribbled pages of ideas triggered [thanks Ben] by what I'd read: it had all felt like a different kind of work from what I'd do in the office, but a very valuable one. It's interesting that an increasing number of outdoorsish historians seem to be finding ways to blend their two interests. Helen MacDonald, author of H is for Hawk might be the most celebrated example, but Matthew Kelly's recent & wonderful Quartz & Feldspar: Dartmoor - A British Landscape in Modern Times provides another model. From a different generation, Jonathan Parry (whose whole career has been formed around nineteenth-century religion & politics) now turns to write in earnest the history of mountaineering he's been talking about for decades. Once the current projects are done, perhaps I should try to find myself a topic...
Leaving
the highlands or islands always feels bad, this time more so because
the stay had been so short & uncompromised by adverse weather. But leaving was less agonising knowing I’ll be
working like this for most of September, housed in a beautiful cottage on
the banks of Loch Torridon, Shieldaig pub just a short row across the water. Can’t wait:
