they’ll become refuges for those seeking escape; pointy little islands of silence and space, too awkward to be developed, too inconvenient to be home.
Of course, for those who crave calm, said solitude and escape from the very real crowding of cities, the mountains are refuges already. They’re the greatest empty spaces in a country of otherwise relatively lean dimensions. Consequently, I was keen to find a mountain that might demonstrate exactly this, a wilderness close to something, but bare of anything; a kind of accessible antithesis to claustrophobia.
I spent some time trying to find it. It needed to be a place where you could feel like the only person in existence, where the landscape around you is so limitless and free of human meddling it has the potential to redefine perspective and blow any sense of claustrophobia or overcrowding out of the system. The trouble was – and this was a happy dilemma – there seemed to be too many places to choose from.
Arthur’s Seat, standing above the spired city of Edinburgh like a spook over a child’s bed, stood at one extreme, given its striking juxtaposition of the brimming and the barren. Such is the intimacy with which the city and the peak nuzzle up against each other you could honk a horn or even open a tub of particularly delicious soup in the city and someone up on Arthur’s Seat would notice. Not just that, the visual contrast was particularly unsubtle. The roots of a long-dead volcano hewn and squashed into its present form by glaciation during the Carboniferous period some 300 million years ago, its bold profile grinning with crags made for a strikingly bare companion to the twinkly steeples and townhouses of Edinburgh. But at 251 metres it’s tiny even by British standards, and didn’t so much offer an escape from civilisation as stand proud as a podium amidst it – somewhere to gaze from a pleasing point of observation down upon the city, but never to feel truly removed from it.
Dartmoor, in the south-west of England, seemed to offer almost limitless desolation with a pleasingly eerie footnote, thick as it is with folk legend and weird, gaunt tors. Much of it sits at around 500 metres above sea level, making it surprisingly elevated for a moor; look north from its highest point at 621 metres and the next comparably lofty ground in England doesn’t crop up until Derbyshire. But a quarter of the national park – and around half of the area you would call the ‘high’ moor – is used by the Ministry of Defence, who, for a few hours most days bounce around on it in jeeps and shoot at each other with rocket launchers and other noisy things entirely unfavourable to tranquillity. To give them their due, the military look after the moor rather well in the moments they aren’t using it as a kind of Devonshire Ypres. But to me, the process of having to check access times on a website to avoid the slim possibility of being shot – or inadvertently stepping on something that might cause me to be returned home in a carrier bag – sort of defeated the object.
My search area was beginning to spiral northwards again when a news story caught my eye. Suddenly the answer was obvious, and a decision was quickly made. And fortuitously enough, the solution to this quest for space came in the form of space – albeit space of a quite different kind.
Whilst the most obvious menace with the potential to collectively rob us of quality elbow room and the balm of tranquillity is hustle and bustle, cars, noise and overcrowding, it appears there’s another, more insidious, space thief at work in Britain. Disruptions of migrating birds, erratic breeding patterns of animals, falling populations of insects and even serious health conditions in humans are being blamed on it. I learned all of this one morning in February during a discussion on the news centred on an area of South Wales that had just become the fifth area in the world to be selected as an International Dark Sky Reserve. What this meant was that the quality of the night sky above this particular area was of such superior clarity, free of the sickly orange bleed of large population centres and their streetlights, that it not only warranted recognition, but also protection. The area was the National Park of the Brecon Beacons. The Brecon Beacons are mountains.
It made perfect sense. Where there are people there’s light, and therefore where there’s light, you can never truly be away from people or their influences. But there’s also light where there are only people some of the time: roads, warehouses, industry, infrastructure. Subtle though it is, understanding this relationship between human-manufactured light and the night sky will lead you to the emptiest parts of Britain.
During idle moments over the next few weeks I learned some interesting things about light pollution. I learned that light that falls away from the area where it’s needed or wanted is called ‘stray light’ and an unwanted invasion of this – be it a washed-out night sky with stars lost to the amber haze of a nearby town or the clumsily angled floodlight on your neighbours’ wall that lights up your bedroom like an atomic flash every time a cat walks under it – is given the apt term ‘light trespass’. Lighting used to throw dramatic illumination on a building or object is called ‘accent lighting’, and I also learned that all of these are in general bad news to lovers of dark skies and given the neat collective term ‘night blight’. One of the worst-afflicted places on the planet is Tsim Sha Tsui in Hong Kong, where the level of light has over 1,200 times the value defined as the international standard for a dark sky.* The facility where this is measured is, with unfortunate irony, the Space Museum. I also learned – thanks to a charming organisation called the International Dark Sky Association – that an unspoiled sky is visually packed with stars right down to the horizon and the starlight is strong enough to cast noticeable shadows on land. In such conditions, picking out individual constellations is almost impossible to the untrained eye given their sheer abundance above.
I also learned that, perhaps surprisingly, Britain has some of the largest areas of dark sky in Europe. This was illustrated by a natty map of the United Kingdom as if seen from space, with clumps of heat-signature colour spread over the country like an outbreak of digital pox. The largest population centres – London, Liverpool and Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow – were coloured an angry red, surrounded by a scab of yellow, gradually fading into pale blue. The areas of least pollution were deep navy, tonally seamless with the sea. On land, the places where these were darkest and most extensive were the mountains. Scotland blended with the sea just north of Stirling. The Pennines, the Southern Uplands of Scotland, the moors of the south-west, and the Lake District were all dark – as were blanket swathes of Wales.
The population-density maps had been one thing, but I hadn’t seen anything quite so starkly illustrative of this idea of mountain ranges as islands – or voids – amidst British civilisation. This map cut through the intricate camouflage of daylight, highlighting human intrusion like phosphorescence in a murky lake: a true map of British space. And a week into May, with my eye on the weather I picked the best of a bad bunch of moonless days and headed for South Wales, to spend the night on top of the mountain – all being well – that lay beneath some of the darkest, most spacious skies on the continent.
The mountains of the Brecon Beacons – like most British mountains – are totally unique. The name rather evocatively comes from the signal fires once lit on their summits to warn of approaching English raiders. But whilst many other mountains wear the suffix of ‘Beacon’ across the land, none is quite like the Beacons of Brecon. None is even a bit like them.
Such is the ancient, much-brutalised geology of the British Isles, that every bit of land sticking its neck up has been battered by a particular something, in a particular manner, at a particular point on its long journey, marking it as different to mountains not that distant from it. That’s why British mountains have long been of interest to geologists: they are some of the most scrawled-on and kicked-about creations nature has ever sculpted, and they wear these signatures like scars.
The Beacons are a perfect case in point. From a distance, as you approach from the direction of south-west England, their character is clearly seen. They look like they’ve been finely carved from wood by a carpenter with an eye for nautical lines; all elegant scoops, gorgeously concave faces and wedged prows, a natural symmetry that seems somehow too symmetrical to be natural.
