Time and again, wildness has been declared dead in the British Isles. 'Two great wars demanded and bequeathed regimentation,' wrote EM Forster in 1964. 'Science lent her aid, and the wildness of these islands, never extensive, was stamped upon and built over and patrolled in no time.' To the American author William Least Heat-Moon, writing 30 years later, Britain seemed 'a tidy garden of a toy realm where there's almost no real wilderness left and absolutely no memory of it'.
An abundance of hard evidence exists to support these obituaries for the wild. Over the past century in particular, disaster has fallen upon the land and the seas of Britain and the Republic of Ireland. The statistics of damage are familiar and often repeated, more as elegy now than as protest. In England, between 1930 and 1990, more than half of the ancient woodland was cleared, or replaced with conifer plantation. Half of the hedgerow mileage was grubbed up. Three-quarters of heathland was converted into farmland, or developed. Across Britain and Ireland, rare limestone pavements were cracked up and sold as rockery stones, peatbogs 30 million years in the making were drained or excavated. Dozens of species vanished, with hundreds more being brought to the point of crisis.
Nevertheless, I have never been prepared to believe in the death of the wild. They do not square with my own experiences of this country: its ecologies, its natural history, its geology, and its weathers. So three years ago, I set out to discover what wild places still remained, and to explore the different meanings and histories of wildness.
I journeyed from the cliffs of Cape Wrath to the forests of Ardnamurchan, from the storm beaches of Suffolk to the salt marshes of Essex, from the moors of Rannoch and the Pennines to the estuaries of Sutherland, and from the sea caves of West Wales to the islands of Ireland.
I travelled widely - and I also tried to travel wildly. I walked, swam and climbed through the landscapes and seascapes I reached. I slept out wherever I could. I travelled in all four seasons, by night as well as by day, and in sunlight, rainstorm and blizzard. I attempted to find unusual logics of motion - following the migratory paths of birds, the tracks of deer, and the flight paths of bumblebees, and seeing what came of these pursuits. And I sought the company of native guides: people who had lived in those landscapes for many years, or come to know them intimately as scientists, artists, shepherds or foresters.
I tried, in short, to find new ways of approaching this island group of ours. Ways of 'coming at the landscape' - as the travel writer Stephen Graham once put it - 'diagonally'.
And I had a lot of fun. I spent nights on cliff tops and on distant beaches, and in snowy woods, on peaks and pilgrim islands. I climbed winter mountains in moonlight so bright I could read by it, I walked up frozen rivers, and watched a red sunrise over an England that could have been Antarctica. I slept in a shearwater colony (noisy), and under the sky route of thousands of migrating geese (exceptionally noisy). I got cold, high, lonely, hot, tired, low, wet - and most often of all, very happy.
The most extraordinary experience was night-swimming in phosphorescent seas off the coast of north Wales. I was sleeping on a boulder beach near the tip of the Lleyn Peninsula when, at around midnight, the sea began to glow. Phosphorescence! I'd seen phosphorescence in the Mediterranean. But in the Irish Sea? Never. There it was, though: the water flaring gold, purple and tangerine-orange. So I walked down the beach in the darkness, shrugged off my clothes and swam. In the shallows, I found I could fling fire from my fingertips, like Merlin or Gandalf. In the deeper water, I couldn't see my body at all, just the colours it provoked. It was like swimming in a rainbow.
