the Orkneys, and his dog Bramble. Our various mutual friends (we are all based at the Rannoch Station Hotel) have turned back quite early on in the expedition at a swollen river. They did not wish to face the delicate tip-toeing across slippery rocks that could end in soaking disaster. Richard and I are a little more insouciant about it, however, and Bramble the labrador – after some thought – seems happy to swim across.
Having negotiated the river, we rise higher and higher. Before us, the stern aspect of brown hills; behind us, the great peaks that shoulder Glencoe. The most striking thing, this many miles into the wilderness, is the depth of the silence. There is not an animal to be heard anywhere. No rabbits, no hares, nothing. There are large buzzards wheeling and floating, tasting the air, but they too are soundless. Apart from the strengthening wind in our ears, and the sound of our conversation, there is nothing else out here at all in this world of dark brown land and blue sky. Richard is a keen, experienced walker, who has travelled all over Scotland in search of beauty like this. At one point, we see the blackened wood that is often found buried in the peat around here. Some argue that such submerged wood proves that, centuries ago, this land was once covered with great forests which were gradually cut down and destroyed by man. However, a different view is taken by the eminent natural historian Professor Oliver Rackham; that such fragments of wood on Rannoch Moor have blackened naturally as a result of their contact with the peat. My companion Richard goes with the first theory. In an extension of his line of thought, there are very few vistas, at least in Britain, that have not been affected in some way by man’s influence. So in some ways, there are very few genuinely natural landcapes left in the British Isles; the rest are the results of tinkering, whether intentional or not. From this angle, Rannoch is not an authentic wilderness.
It is local landowner Lord Pearson’s belief – now shared by some other conservationists all over Scotland – that countless years of sheep and deer grazing in the area of Rannoch inflicted a grievous wound on the landscape, and in effect reduced it to acidic peat bog, whereas once it had flourished with a variety of different species. In short, they believe, this was a landscape created as a direct result of the Clearances. ‘Rannoch Moor is dotted with derelict crofts,’ said Lord Pearson in an interview. ‘Around these would have been fields for wintering the cattle.’ Added to this, he said, ‘in a three year spell from 1837, an adjacent estate listed the killing of 246 pine martens, 15 golden eagles, 27 sea eagles, 18 ospreys, 98 peregrines, 275 kites, 63 goshawks, 83 hen harriers, and hundreds of stoats, weasels, otters, badgers and crows – all in the name of increasing grouse numbers.’4 Where once were trees and a wide variety of flora, man’s activities left us with the desolation we see now. It might be attractive desolation, but it was not strictly nature’s intention.
Experienced walker or not, Richard has somehow failed entirely to notice what is coming towards us. So have I. Some 10 miles to the west, there is silvery cloud obscuring the hills, and what looks like a mist. It sweeps over quickly and the first heavy drops tell us that this is rather more than a little light rolling fog. The ensuing storm is so spectacular that it made all the newspapers the next day. In the area of Rannoch, it brought trees down across the railway line, and across the one driveable road leading out of the place. For a few hours, Rannoch was literally cut off from the rest of the modern world.
As for Richard, myself and Bramble, we spent the next ninety minutes picking our way back across the moor in the midst of a tempest so violent that even King Lear would have had difficulty shouting in it. The world blurred into grey, silver and black: all colours were washed away. My glasses were near impossible to see through. The marshy puddles on the path became mires. The large stones on that same path became slippery. The wind – screaming horizontally from the west – was so strong that the rain on bare skin actually hurt. Bramble quite often tried to find shelter behind my legs. It blew on, relentlessly. The hood of my waterproof was repeatedly blown back and soon filled with icy rainwater. A small area near my throat that was insufficiently covered admitted yet more icy water. Soon the front of my shirt was sopping beneath the coat. Even the pockets of my waterproof were inundated. A spare fiver I had in one pocket was reduced to a blue-white mush.
Throughout it all, Richard and I were yelping with laughter, and failing to hear each other’s enthusiastic shouts. Even as we came down from the hills, the wind, which was tearing at distant trees and shrieking through the heather, was freezingly ineluctable. Our faces, by the time we got back on to the road and along to the hotel, were puce with windburn.
The fact of it is that this is the sort of place, and even the sort of wild weather, that urban dwellers yearn for in their imaginations, as runners thirst for cold water. We think ourselves like Richard Hannay, children of nature who have simply been denied the countryside that we desire. But this is also a countryside that we can take refuge from. Even if the hotel is miles away, you still know that it is there. The knowledge of comfort enables us to sentimentalise desolation. Imagine if there was no such shelter to be found anywhere, within several days of walking. However much you may yearn for those hills and that peat, the landscape has no use whatsoever for us. You will never really be a welcome part of it.
The romance of an empty land is a pre-conditioned, learned thing; there is no particular reason why it should be inherently natural for us to seek out that which so many of our antecedents would have flinched from. In some generations past, the idea of drawing spiritual succour from the country would have been seen as eccentric. In the eighteenth century, Dr Johnson, for instance, was baffled by the contemporary passion for pastoral poetry. He wrote: ‘though nature itself, philosophically considered, be inexhaustible, yet its general effects on the eye and ear are uniform, and incapable of much variety of description.’
During that period, there were those who were more concerned with wrangling with nature’s effects, and contriving their own landscapes artificially, rather than leaving the land as it was. Before then, in the Middle Ages, observes Timothy Brownlow, ‘nature in the medieval world existed as a decorative backdrop or as a narrative or moral device. Indeed,’ he added, ‘the word “landscape” did not emerge until the late sixteenth century.’5 In Milton’s poetry, it is rendered as ‘lantskip’.
After the Restoration, there was still very little appetite for seeing wilderness as an attractive, unspoiled ideal; instead, many of the grander landowners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sought harder than ever to bend nature to their own will. This period saw the rise in enthusiasm among the gentry for landscaped gardens. The earlier highly-mannered, geometrical style inspired by French gardening began to give way to a new sort of landscape, as championed by Capability Brown and Humphry Repton among others. This new sort of English garden was in the ‘picturesque’ style and had features such as follies, grottoes, or ornamental ruins, blended with artfully sloped lawns, carefully placed trees, running streams and waterfalls. In this milieu, even walking took on a measure of artifice. There were specially constructed ‘lovers walks’, along which wooing couples would be framed with fragrant pergolas. One such eighteenth-century effort in the Borders was praised highly in the Edinburgh Review.
This sort of artifice was not to last. By the late eighteenth century the emphasis would be placed on the virtue of the natural, and untouched. This was a direct result of the rise of the Romantic movement, with its emphasis on unschooled innocence. The movement was trailed in the mid-eighteenth century by essayist and philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau – himself an enthusiastic walker, and observer of nature. For a coming generation of poets and philosophers, walking would be central to their understanding of the world; the untamed wildness of nature had both a primal innocence and an awful majesty. The philosopher Edmund Burke wrote an influential treatise in 1756 concerning ‘the sublime’ and ‘the beautiful’:
The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature is astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. The mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other, nor reason on that object which fills
