The Wild Places (Penguin Original) by Macfarlane Robert

Author:Macfarlane, Robert [Macfarlane, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2008-06-24T00:00:00+00:00

10

Ridge

For four days in late March, snow settled unexpectedly across Britain, taking it by surprise. Spring had arrived a week previously: black buds had popped green on the ash trees, and I had seen brown hares making curved runs in the Suffolk fields as I drove across to see Roger in Mellis. But then the wind changed direction, northerlies brought freezing temperatures, and spring stopped. Gritter lorries moved over the roads, whirring out fans of salt and stone. Children made an ice slide on a quiet road near my house, and queued up in jostling lines, polishing the ice to the consistency of milk-bottle glass. John, who had sailed me out to Enlli, wrote from his home in Hope Valley in the Peak District, to say he had spent two days out tracking hares. He spoke of big beluga drifts of snow, and of the hares, still in their white fur, moving unhurriedly between them.

I had been hoping that spring would hold, for I wanted to see the fizz and riot of the land coming to life again after winter, to feel some of the warmth I had glimpsed in the gryke but that I had so far missed on my journeys. My plan had been to go to the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire, where I could explore the rich green valleys of the Ribble and the Lune, and sleep out on riverbanks. Roger was going to join me. But the return of the snow changed things. I decided instead that I would go alone for a proper night walk in the Cumbrian mountains.

Snow perpetuates the effect of moonlight, which means that on a clear night, in winter hills, you can see for a distance of up to thirty miles or so. I know this because I have experienced it several times before. Several, but not many, because in order to go night-walking in winter mountains, you require the following rare combination of circumstances: a full moon, a hard frost, a clear sky and a willingness to get frozen to the bone.

I watched the forecasts. They anticipated that a further ‘snow-bomb’ - the remnant of a polar low, dragged south by other fronts - would hit north-west England, before quickly giving way to a high. When the snow-bomb landed, temperatures over the hills were expected to drop as low as -15°C, with winds gusting at speeds of up to fifty miles per hour. It seemed too much to hope that I would be rewarded with such conditions . . . But the chance was there, and so I left Cambridge and travelled up to Buttermere, in the mid-western fells of the Lake District: back on to the hard rocks, the granite and the tuff.

‘Is the Lake District another bourgeois invention, like the piano?’ Auden had asked in 1953. Certainly, with its tea shops and eroded footpaths, it could feel like that; as though it had been loved into tameness by its millions of visitors. But I hoped that, out by night in the snow, I might catch at some of its remaining wildness.

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