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Potters’ and Planters’ Almanac, part three

Underland: A Deep Time Journey 

by Robert Macfarlane

496 pages, Hamish Hamilton

Review by Pat Black

There’s a lot going on under there, beneath your feet.

Underland is Robert Macfarlane’s most ambitious book. Instead of his usual trails across mountain ranges, clifftops or other high roads, this work goes low, looking at the relatively unexamined world of the underground. That can mean caves, caverns, sink holes, mine shafts, bore holes in bright blue glaciers, labyrinths, hidden rivers, hidden cities, ancient tombs, future tombs, and some teeny tiny wee crawlspaces that you just wouldn’t get me in, for all the lube in Lubya.

In his introduction, the author quotes from a section of Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen, a book I haven’t read. I have read descriptions of the passage in question before, though – a nauseating journey the characters take through an underground cave that’s too tight to turn your head in, with places that you can barely scrape your ankles through, as you literally inch your way forward in complete darkness, with no way back. And then it gets tighter, and tighter…

If you’re already white-knuckling it, then so was Macfarlane. He admits that this part of the book terrified him as a child. So, in the early part, there’s an element of confronting natural fear, or maybe it’s just masochism, as Macfarlane tries to squeeze through some similar gaps accompanied by a spelunker in the Mendips.

The book thankfully isn’t a series of palpitation-inducing compressions, but broadens out into an erudite examination of what goes on beneath the crust of the planet, and humans’ need to interact with it. That can be for simple exploration or adventure; or for burial and concealment, sometimes for nefarious purposes. On other occasions, the world simply collapses on us. There are sinkholes and shafts, which can open up without warning. There are almost certainly skeletons down there. And there is hidden treasure: most major cities have hidden layers underneath, such as Edinburgh, Paris and of course London. I can recommend one of those tours in the Scottish capital. If ghosts exist, then they must surely stalk those gloomy, dripping spaces.

Then there are hidden worlds that we couldn’t even conceive of until recently, such as the wonders of the wood-wide-web. This is a theory that trees can actually communicate and interact with each other in the forest via an underground network of fungi and spores. Regular readers will have run into this idea before in our coverage of the work of Roger Deakin – a close friend of Robert Macfarlane.

Along the way, of course, there’s some derring-do involving trips to places that I’m not sure I’d ever want to visit. Macfarlane does it, so you don’t have to – and isn’t that the essence of every great piece of travel writing?  

Throughout Underland, there’s a sense of extra dimensions, a trippy element that I thoroughly enjoyed. This starts with the author’s appraisal of a map. You can gain an idea of the terrain and the topography, but there’s no sense of true depth, with the world underneath us and all its riches occluded. Things get even spacier, literally, in one early chapter sees MacFarlane joining physicists in a former mine at Boulby in Yorkshire, underneath the sea bed, where they try to unlock the secrets of dark matter free from the interference of surface radiation. So, this texture and topography, this extradimensionality, can stretch out into the cosmos, as well as growing roots into the earth beneath us.

I was tickled by the section where McFarlane joins a plant scientist called Merlin Sheldrake to examine the wood wide web in Epping Forest. He rarely fails to address the man by his first name, every other sentence - and who could blame him when you can write stuff like: “I joined Merlin for a walk in the forest one misty morning”? The wood wide web shows us that there are states of existence on our own planet, never mind in outer space, which are almost beyond human comprehension. The book is packed with uncanny landscapes. In one chapter, Macfarlane describes beaches of black ash which have never seen the sun during a kayak trip through underground rivers in Italy, home to whole thriving ecosystems and animal populations which get by without human interference perfectly well. There must be loads of this we’ve yet to discover. It makes our blundering progress across the planet and the waste we choke it up with all the more disgusting.

The Anthropocene era casts a shadow over the whole book. Though he’s never preachy, the end of existence on earth – a process which might be well under way thanks to humans - is never far from Macfarlane’s thoughts. Everywhere he looks, there are signs of our impermanence, and proof that in deep time, our greatest achievements and mightiest edifices will be as significant as the gravel on someone’s driveway.

There are a couple of scrotum reducers, such as when Macfarlane visits the catacombs in Paris, and has to follow an almost supernaturally bendy guide as she angles herself through impossible turns in the pitch-black labyrinth ahead of him. On top of that, there’s our opening section when the author crawls through some tight spaces underneath the Mendips in Somerset, a prisoner of brutal darkness underneath a perfect English summer’s day.

This kind of thing is the height – and depth – of Nope, for me. This is a journey to the bottom of the Mines of Nope. This is two thousand fathoms down, inside a Nopeyscape. Verily this is the Nopey-ist of Nopes. This is Pope Nope the Noughth of Noples. And so on. I’m not claustrophobic, as a brief examination of the some of the places I’ve lived in would show you. But this doesn’t really qualify as an irrational fear. It’s a bit like saying you’re not arachnophobic, then having to style it out when a giant spider is dropped on your face. I loved my time on the mountains and I’ve swum with sharks, so I get the appeal of more hirsute pursuits. But that spelunking stuff doesn’t do anything for me. I’ve no desire to die this most Freudian of deaths.  

Macfarlane tells us one horror story, about a caver who got stuck so fast in a twisty pipey natural tunnel far beneath the English soil that he died. They couldn’t even get the body out. The poor lad’s father decided to concrete the tunnel up, with the body inside – ensuring no-one else takes the same path. What a nightmare. For me, that’s up there with “eaten by an animal”, “burned alive” and “plane disintegrates” for the absolute worst ways to go.

Macfarlane also looks at a pit in Slovenia where an atrocity took place during the war, a place so redolent of evil it seems to want to reach up out of the darkness and throttle you. It’s somewhere Macfarlane is quite sure he’ll never return to. It’s no place for us, down there, really.

It isn’t all about close, creepy places, though. There’s high adventure as Macfarlane gets his crampons on and checks out entombed places in the far north, with polar bears to worry about as well as avalanches and other dicey events in Norway and Greenland. In one episode, he abseils down a hole bored in ancient ice by glaciologists who can glean as much from the layers of permafrost as a geologist can divine from layers of rock. I’m guessing they have never seen The Thing, but we’ll let that one slide.

Then there’s a strange episode where Macfarlane checks out ancient cave paintings on an ultra-remote Arctic island, and postulates that ancient people left their artworks in one spectacularly inhospitable cavern of ice as a rite of passage, or an offering to a god. Macfarlane makes one himself, an obeisance to the spirit of adventure. This is fantastic Boy’s Own stuff, although I imagine that Macfarlane’s hairy moments would have led to his family Having A Word with him upon his return.

Macfarlane’s grand finale sees him examine how humans prepare for a post-human future – by trying to prevent an unknown population many years from now from disinterring nuclear waste which is likely to remain hot and extremely dangerous for millennia.

It poses a delicious problem: how do you effectively warn the descendants of the rats and cockroaches or the visiting alien societies that no matter how interesting the burial chamber is, they really, really shouldn’t mess with it?

You could leave all sorts of scary warnings or traps, but we’ve all seen Raiders Of The Lost Ark. That’s just going to spur them on. “Danger? Keep out? I click my chitinous mandibles at your danger.” You’ve got to play it a bit cooler than that… The techniques worked out by scientists are ingenious, but we’ve no way of knowing if they’ll work.

Thankfully, it’s somebody’s else’s problem. Or maybe nobody else’s problem. Nothing’s permanent. Even the ground beneath our feet must shift and change, given the passage of deep time; it could turn out to be desert, or a forest floor, or the top of a mountain, or a cavern half a mile underground that will never see the sun again, or more likely a seabed - and finally it might be nothing at all, turned to stardust within the fatal boundaries of our engorged red sun.

Everything that ever existed on this earth might have come to absolutely nothing, and been of no consequence, an interesting flash in the sky for whatever life might exist out there as we all boil away.

Imagine that? In deep time, nothing we ever do matters. I can’t decide if this prospect is terrifying, or awesome. All that remains might be what’s on the Voyager probe’s information disc. Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Goode might be one of the few things in all of human artistic endeavour to survive the passing of the planet itself. Strewth.

There is the smallest chance that Earth will survive the sun’s greed as it expands, billions of years into the future. It might just, just sneak into the “survival zone”, leaving a crispy outer shell and nothing still living, like one last round at the pub swiped on your bank card in the hours before your pay arrives.

Whether there will be anything left of the human race anywhere in the universe by then is debatable. There’s something in Macfarlane’s tone which tells me which side he’s on in that one.

Speaking of endings, I finished this audiobook when I went out for a walk quite late on New Year’s Eve, at the very end of the decade. I loved the poetry and synchronicity of this, and its entirely unrealistic sense of closure. The definition of a book.

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Potters’ and Planters’ Almanac, part two

The Living Mountain, by Nan Shepherd (160 pages, Canongate. Audio version read by Tilda Swinton)

Review by Pat Black

During her lifetime, Nan Shepherd achieved a degree of success thanks to her modernist novels. But her literary legacy has arguably been secured almost four decades after her death by a non-fiction book about her beloved mountains which she almost didn’t publish at all.

The Living Mountain has become a classic of its kind, a touchstone of modern nature writing. Since a modest first printing from Aberdeen University Press in 1977, it has acquired a quiet power and permanence which she would never have imagined when she wrote it, in the years after the second world war.

The Living Mountain refers to the Cairngorms, the type of mountain range in the Highlands of Scotland that demands to be placed on a postcard, or framed above a grandmother’s mantelpiece. As the title suggests, Shepherd sees the hills, peaks, lochs, wildlife and foliage as a constantly shifting, mutable thing, formed by the movement of glaciers during the Ice Age, and prone to the immense changes in geography and climate over time that render our lifetimes insignificant.

She speaks of the shifting colours with every season – the reds, browns and yellows of autumn, the stark white and black of the snowbound winters. And then there’s the sublime summers, when Scotland enjoys more light than many other places, edging towards the short Arctic nights when the sun plays up, refusing to go to bed, the skies dancing with the Northern Lights.

There’s plenty of rain, of course. You won’t read much about that on the Scottish tourism websites. Two good Scottish words for you learn, if you’re planning a trip there: drookit and dreich.

Water features prominently in this book; particularly how it forms the land and continues to have an effect on its topography, especially when transmuted into snow and ice. And she doesn’t half like swimming in it. When Nan Shepherd goes for a dip in the bitter waters of a remote loch, she reveals the sudden thrill, if that’s the right word, of seeing the rocky shelf at her feet drop away into untold depths. She might be a forebear of today’s wild swimmers, though she would have chuckled, as most of us do, at the sight of people in neoprene.

I am glad Robert Macfarlane picked up on the sensual thread that runs through The Living Mountain; I would have been a little bit embarrassed to talk about it here, otherwise. I’d say it runs beyond the sensual and edges into the erotic, at times. The thrill of cold water running over her body; the mention of companions alongside her, without ever identifying them in any way; even the bite of the wind, is all rendered in unmistakeably charged terms. Ekstasis is a good old Greek word to learn if you’re planning a trip through this book.  

There’s death on the living mountain. Shepherd details scary incidents involving mountain rescuers, who are sometimes sent out into appalling conditions with little hope of finding the lost. Sometimes the bodies are found within hours; sometimes you have to wait for the thaw. Shepherd highlights the case of two young lads, and their excited jottings in a communal logbook just before they set out to walk in snowy conditions. At time of writing, they had just hours to live. Confused and hypothermic, they got into trouble on the hills. Their bodies bore scrapes and abrasions which revealed they had been crawling on their hands and knees at one point. You could see their excited chatter as a ghastly joke from fate’s filthy mouth. I prefer to see it as a tribute to their destroyed, and yet curiously preserved innocence.

There is plenty of wreckage on the living mountain. During wartime, the Highlands were a training ground for air crews and commando units, and one plane crashed into the mountainside with no survivors. Shepherd details the work of the mountain rescuers in locating the wreck and retrieving the bodies. The work, the grim work, is often highlighted over the leisure by this author.

Shepherd has a bit of a sharp tongue for young people who arrive ill-prepared for the hills, or who subscribe to a more away-with-the-fairies view of this beautiful, but deadly place. She’s a tad unkind – surely Nan Shepherd used to be one of those young people, craving adventure and romance in remote, gorgeous places? This harkens back to a distinctly Presbyterian attitude we see in Scotland and Scottish writing which we struggle to throw off to this very day. In his afterword, Robert Macfarlane notes Shepherd’s references to the hard work involved in climbing the hills and the actual graft of people who earn a living off it.

It can be hard work at times, to be sure, but I would never relate the pleasure in climbing hills and mountains to anything as degrading as work. It’s been a while since I climbed any mountains, and I feel horror when I realise I might not climb another one. By the time my kids are old enough to take into the mountains, hillwalking might be the last thing I want to do.

Of course, Shepherd takes note of the creatures who scurry across the bleak hillsides - and the things that hunt them. There’s encounters with stags, with mountain hares whose whitewashed coats are life during the frigid months, but death should there be a mild winter or a sudden thaw. She has a keen eye for the birds of prey, in particular the awesome golden eagles. Shepherd is amused to note that some observers confuse these wheeling bringers of death up in the sky with planes and gliders. What’s my favourite animal? It’s got to be up there, Les. Top five answer for sure.

Where she is particularly strong is in describing the plants, trees and animals which thrive in seemingly inhospitable places. She notes that some of these flowers were proven to have actually survived the Ice Age.

Like JA Baker’s The Peregrine, this is a short book, but shot through with a profundity and a clarity that most books would kill for. Certainly it doesn’t hurt matters to have Tilda Swinton narrating the audiobook, a case of the poet and her figures being matched to lethal effect much as Odysseus might string his bow. Whether piped into your ears or sweeping across a page in your lap, this has become an essential book, and one you really have to experience if you’re a fan of nature writing. Or maybe just writing.

What of our author? She’s an enigma. I guess she liked it that way. Wikipedia tells us she was “unmarried”, which tells us nothing. If you go to that page, you’ll see an extraordinary photo of her, with a brooch fixed to what appears to be a bandanna wrapped around her head (it’s actually a length of photographic film – apparently she just took a notion). It’s an image the Royal Bank of Scotland saw fit to put on its £5 notes, which you might struggle to spend south of the border if you are faced with a particular kind of idiot behind a counter. She wouldn’t have taken kindly to that, I feel sure.

Considering her today, she looks like something from fantasy artwork and literature – not a figure of male lust from Frank Frazetta or Robert E Howard, but utterly formidable, someone not to mess with. A queen, or a mighty warrior. She was both of these things.

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Country Matters on Booksquawk

Planters’ and Potters’ Almanac, Part One

by Pat Black

Here’s a nice fresh bunch of the tulips I’ve been tip-toeing through this past while.

Still Water: The Deep Life of the Pond

by John Lewis-Stempel

304 pages, Doubleday

I’d happily read JLS’s diaries every year. Well, not his secret diaries. That would be weird. I mean his nature diaries, which he cunningly disguises as books.

Thankfully, his publisher sees fit to release them on a yearly schedule. The books usually have a distinctive underlying theme, but the format is pretty much the same each year, and I’m happy with that.

Still Water is framed as a look at the life of ponds, particularly in Britain. Beloved of those Victorians who had a bit of garden space, these plashy holes in the ground are a haven for creatures such as frogs, toads, ducks, dragonflies, water boatmen, moorhens, coots, pond skaters and sticklebacks. And not forgetting a creature beloved of conservationists but perhaps less so of town planners and construction companies - the great crested newt, Britain’s funkiest animal. If anyone finds one of these amphibians on a building site, then you ain’t building no buildings, folks.

JLS’s pleasant, meandering style skims over the history of ponds and references to them in other literature (we learn that the word pescatorian was an insult in days of yore). It perfectly sums up the tranquillity of sitting in his own English garden, waiting for the sun.

We jump between a pond in Argenteuil, France, and the author’s own backyard in Herefordshire, but there are also entirely pond-free digressions. One of these takes in JLS’s interest in the First World War, and a walk he undertakes in the Lakes in memory of the men killed at the front more than 100 years ago. You won’t mind a bit.

The First World War is one of the author’s common themes, and he returns to it and several others in this book. Sometimes I read bits and pieces that I’m sure I’ve heard about before, whether in Meadowland, The Running Hare or The Wood. I’m sure JLS has previously mentioned his first memory: being bitten in the face by a dog. New information is the fight he gets into as a kid, and his father’s refusal to stop the scrap, plus the bloody steak he is given as a reward for putting on a good show. Fathers are such strange creatures. He also mentions his parents’ divorce, which I don’t think he did before, either. Similarly, we learn that the author was desperate to join the navy, like his hero, Sir Peter Scott, but this was ruled out owing to a lack of facility with numbers. I feel his pain.

In the present day, JLS channels Roger Deakin by trying some wild swimming in a pond. He gets covered in muck and beasties, and is perfectly happy with it - until he encounters a leech. Cue a digression about leeches, and the staggering observation that the leech quacks of olden times might have been onto something.

These personal reminiscences and digressions bring colour and comedy to an already rich meal. And if the author leans a little too hard on John Clare and Edward Thomas references… Well, most of us come back to our favourite things, whether in life or in writing. Hence, this review.

The Peregrine

by JA Baker

224 pages, Collins

This one has been referenced in many of the modern era’s great nature books. It’s a slow-burner in publishing terms, written by a fiercely private man who tracked and recorded the movements of peregrine falcons through the flat countryside of his native Essex in the 1950s and 60s.

JA Baker’s slight volume is a condensed version of 10 years’ worth of journals. Championed by Robert Macfarlane and others after being out of print for a long time, The Peregrine could be described as a work of poetry rather than a conventional narrative. Taking a diary format, Baker’s masterwork underlines his remarkable gift for describing the exact same things in several different, but equally enthralling ways.

He can’t get enough of the peregrine’s stoop (or swoop, as muggles would call it), as the world’s fastest bird descends, tyrannosaur claws agape, to snatch other birds and mammals and then tear them to pieces. The language is sparkling, a visceral, immediate delight best consumed quickly. Like the bird itself, it’s all lean muscle.

Baker’s tone is curious. This book is as romantic as they come in terms of language, but there is not a shred of sentiment involved - and anthropomorphism is out of the question. The predator is brutal, and yet described as a thing of beauty. While Baker deplores humanity’s revelry in killing, he cannot help but luxuriate in it himself. The author asks us something like: ‘Blood red’ – was there ever a more useless description? What else could red look like that could match it better than the colour of blood?

He sees predation as a dirty business - all the more on humans’ behalf, because we have the luxury of being able to consider whether or not to kill, before doing it anyway. Even so, Baker has a kind of rapture when describing the falcon turning its prey into gore, strewn guts and feathers.

The author is not quite so keen on his own species. In light of his various disabilities and painful health problems, not least his myopia, you wonder if Baker gained a sense of freedom from watching the falcons on the wing. Perhaps he discovered the true meaning of ecstasy, or ekstasis, as Robert Macfarlane points out: being taken outside of ourselves.

There are signs of the environmental rage which has become close to the norm these days. The Peregrine was written in a time when the birds were being poisoned through the use of pesticides, after they had been shot as pests themselves during wartime. Baker deplores the use of chemicals, wholesale culling and other industrial horrors. Were he still alive, he would have been dismayed at our continued descent into the gargantuan act of self-harm that is the Anthropocene era, although not greatly surprised.

Going by Mark Cocker’s introduction, The Peregrine still attracts controversy. Some descriptions of the creature in the title do not tally with common observations by seasoned bird watchers. The amount of kills the raptor makes by Baker’s reckoning are under dispute, as is his observation of one of them eating worms. There is also a suggestion that Baker might have gotten confused with a kestrel, in noting hovering behaviour – something the peregrine apparently doesn’t do.

Countering this, Cocker asserts that it hardly seems likely that a person so deeply ingrained in the appearance and habits of his quarry would make such fundamental mistakes over details – or indeed fabricate them, as many have suggested. Perhaps it was just as he described it, at one particular time, with one particular bird?

Either way, if you’re a lover of gorgeous descriptive prose, I’d say these small details don’t matter too much. Baker is one of those writers with a great gift for making any scene, thought or image sparkly with unique light. If the price of making a true story gorgeous is Doubting Thomases getting sniffy about it, then it’s one he would have paid, no question.

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

320 pages, Penguin

We were robbed of Roger. He might still have been merrily turning books out, as he might fashion a table and chairs from driftwood in his workshop. Even better, he would have been all over BBC4, any given weeknight. Fate had other ideas.

He might have turned his ire over pollution and corporate slovenliness into a fulminating masterpiece fit for 2019. I feel sure he’d have been involved in the Extinction Rebellion protests.

It’s nice to wonder about this. But we can only make do with what we’ve got.

Notes From Walnut Tree Farm is Deakin’s third and final book, edited together posthumously by his partner Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker from journals written in his last six years. It follows a diary format from January to December, although it meanders back and forth in time, with one date sometimes having more than one entry. So it’s kind of a “greatest hits” of Roger’s diaries.

Apart from some seasonal framing, the author has a free hand. I think this style suited him.

We get reminiscences about his childhood, recollections of his adventures both close to home and far away, and impressions of the farm in the title, a semi-wild Suffolk retreat he called home for the closing decades of his life. That’s the place with the moat, the one he swum around every morning in Waterlog. What a life!

We get Roger’s thoughts on sleeping in his little shed in all weathers, fixing the house up, and looking after any human or animal that passes through his front door. He details all the little creatures he loves, and their readily accepted invasions of his home, from the birds in the attic, to the cats prowling the yard, and the spiders stringing silk across his furniture. He’s the type of guy who would become anxious at the idea of crushing ants as he steps onto the path outside his front door every morning – in fact there’s a moment involving a tiny creature on the loose in his study that shows a childlike empathy with all creatures great and small.

Countering this, there’s his disdain for human agency and petty rules affecting his beloved Common. Gentrification also annoys him. If you’d won the lottery and bought a big country pile down the road from Roger, I suspect it might have taken him a long time to like you.

This might be my favourite of Roger’s books. And yet, I’m struggling to give you an overview of what it’s like. The best example I can give is one entry on the joys of what he calls jotting - writing freeform, and letting your observations, memories, fears, ecstasies and personal mysteries tumble out onto the page any way they choose.

Roger was a wanderer, a freebooter with a bit of a gypsy heart - and yet also an ardent conservationist, with a strong sense of home. More conservative, you suspect, than he liked to admit, but no lover of fences or the inequalities they contain, and certainly a detester of chauvinism and disrespect for nature. He was every inch the English radical, with tones that remind me of Orwell at his best. His influence is still strong among writers, readers and lovers of British natural history, part of a pantheon that grows year on year.

In particular, the 20 years since Waterlog came out have seen an explosion of interest in wild swimming. He definitely had a hand in this.

Going by the esteem he enjoys from his proteges and contemporaries, it’s safe to say Roger Deakin’s legacy is secure. Many have reported an odd sense of familiarity with the author through his work that they don’t quite get with other scribes. He feels like someone we know and like; that rare friend you might feel compelled to actually pick up a telephone and talk to.

In part two, we’ll check out Nan Shepherd, Robert Macfarlane, Kate Humble and Kate Bradbury. Although I suspect we might have to wait out the summer before I get there…

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The Outrun by Amy Liptrot

304 pages, Canongate

Review by Pat Black

The Outrun is a patch of land on the sheep farm where Amy Liptrot grew up on the Orkney islands - a wild, wind-blasted archipelago off the north-east coast of Scotland.

When the author’s mother goes into labour and has to be airlifted to hospital, her father is carted off in the other direction to a psychiatric unit. They pass each other on the landing pad. Drama seems seeded in Amy Liptrot from day one.

The Orkney and Shetland Islands are so remote, they used to be represented in their own inset boxes on TV weather reports when I was a kid – as if they had tried to escape, and needed dragging back to mother. The Orcadian archipelago is an apostrophe to the mainland, and Orcadians feel a sense of detachment from the rest of Scotland; islanders, themselves excised from an island.

Perhaps the most famous Orcadian is the actor Robert Shaw, who lived there between the ages of seven and 12. He referred to being bullied on account of his English accent, or maybe just his plain Englishness. I’ve never been to Orkney, but it has an ends-of-the-Earth feel to it, and a strong Scandinavian influence clashes with the salt and flint of Scottish rural life. Every single photo could be a screensaver; every crashing wave wants to reach out and shake your bones.

People move there to escape. But you can imagine a teenager being desperate to go the other way, to the bright lights and big crowds. This is what Amy Liptrot does, heading – inevitably – for London and a party lifestyle, aged 20. After a full-blown descent into alcoholism, she bobs back, 10 years later, completely lost.

The Outrun is the story of Amy Liptrot’s ongoing recovery, and how she managed to transfer her love of alcohol’s brittle euphoria to a passion for the natural world.

The book clobbers you with metaphors for “the edge”. The Outrun is on the very edge of the planet, it seems, rocky and high above the sea, blasted with rain, seawater and high winds even on good days. Anything not securely fastened to earth has a good chance of leaving it when the conditions get really bad. They have to make sure the kindergarten children don’t get blown away. The sheep are, frequently. I imagine a handful of fluffy snowflakes being scattered off a cliff during the gale force winds. Liptrot makes an obvious connection with her mental state.  

She drinks. She has a talent for it. Tellingly, she reveals that when she experimented as a teenager, she was over-the-top from the very first, the one who always went from nought to noxious faster than anyone else. Her default position is “a bit much”. 

I have to confess to twinges of dislike for the author when she describes her proto-hipster lifestyle in London’s up-and-coming boroughs in her twenties. Although this charts her descent into an abject, bottom-of-the-fish-tank lifestyle, I can sense her relish for her crazy days. The language becomes flowery and a little bit pleased with itself. It reminded me of an open letter I read in a newspaper from a London scenester who was friends with Amy Winehouse, lamenting her passing. His attempts to turn the singer’s appalling tragedy into some sort of Byronic romance, both in his prose style and his recall of events, made me want to punch him in the head, more than once. I should stress, I never want to go there with Amy Liptrot, but her salad days chapters jarred.

This is unfair of me. It’s not really her fault. Perhaps it’s a little bit close to home. I recognise this impulse to turn partying into art. It isn’t. My lifestyle in my twenties seems hellish now – it probably seemed hellish at the time, in fact, but there were few other options available, and not much in the way of role models. My memories of squeezing into overcrowded nightclubs with sweat rolling down the walls are a vision from Bosch – something I can’t quite believe that I did voluntarily; that I paid to do. In my biggest highs, outside of my own head, I was an irritation at best, a menace at worst.  

Though her antics are refracted by the death of a relationship, Liptrot is honest enough to admit her behaviour was unacceptable. Her fella must have been a saint to tolerate her for as long as he did. This abandonment leads her into deeper water, ever more depressing and dangerous situations.

First of all – the dead giveaway for any out-of-control boozer – she starts losing jobs, turning up to work still drunk, having drinks on her lunch breaks, getting into high gear on the bus home, and then starting all over again the next day, escaping the shame of whatever mess she was in the night before.

She’s swimming in seas striped with shark fins. One drunken night she takes off on a bike ride through the dead city, and ends up in a canal. She goes to house parties and strips naked – about the most basic attention grab you can make, short of soiling yourself, or simply screaming. Finally, she encounters a psychopath and is seriously assaulted. This is rock-bottom, the classic point where substance abusers must decide whether to stay sunk, or start swimming. From here, she gets involved in rehab, takes the Twelve Steps, and sorts herself out.

It’s only when she arrives back in Orkney – single, sober, fragile – that the book finally takes wing. She finds a job counting rare birds for the RSPB, and gets herself the nickname of The Corncrake Widow (surely a strong contender for the book title). She drives around the island in the pitch dark, hoping to find nesting sites for the bird, one of many species which use the archipelago as a stop-off point. It’s weird, but thrilling work.

She joins the dots in the night sky, taking an interest in the constellations instead of igniting them at the bottom of a glass. She studies the landscape, considers how old the rocks are, and examines the wildlife surrounding them. And she heads into the dark sea itself, thrilling to the cold shock of wild swimming with a group of like-minded maniacs. She isolates herself in a cottage on an even more remote island, and writes – another addiction, perhaps even more deep-rooted than her drinking. She figures herself out, putting it all on paper. She reaches out to people through the internet, and begins to enjoy human company divorced from the bottle.

In the middle of this, there’s an inch-perfect examination of what it is that drives us to destroy ourselves with drink – the blessed relief, the initial rush of well-being, and deeper still, the love of mania, the craving of excitement. Liptrot likens mania to a wave, in its construction, its movement, its crowning glory, and its spectacular breakdown.

The Outrun is a natural history book, though it also serves just as well as a survival memoir. Every addict who’s lucky enough to break the chains has to play it cool, every single day of their lives, from that moment on. I can only wish them well. Liptrot is sceptical about the higher powers invoked during her time in AA – by that I mean the idea of a god – but the natural world is certainly a higher power she recognises. She does accept the things she cannot change.

But she must have realised, as the waves go to work every day on the cliffs buttressing the Outrun, that given time and effort, everything can change - and eventually does.

FIELD NOTES:

Country Matters on Booksquawk

Being A Beast, Adventures Across the Species Divide, by Charles Foster

256 pages, Profile Books

Review by Pat Black

I wouldn’t like to ask for this one over the counter at Waterstones. Imagine having to repeat yourself to the person at the till:  

“No, it’s Being – A – Beast.”  

The inquiry would go out on the public address system across the entire shop (which, naturally, would be the busiest bookshop in the world at that point): “Gentleman at the till wants Being A Beast, that’s Being A Beast… This guy here wants to Be A Beast…”

I picture something going terribly wrong somewhere – or, an evil gremlin getting involved. Perhaps it would be sniggering Rob – there’s always a sniggering Rob – who wrote and illustrated the shelf-stack index card blurb for Fear And Loathing with his own marker pen.  

Soon, a beautiful girl appears at the counter. “Was this the book you wanted, sir?”

Front cover: Jimmy Savile.

But, this book isn’t concerned with that kind of beast. Charles Foster’s natural history effort seeks to go that little bit further than his peers in an increasingly crowded field. He wants to know what some of Britain’s most famous creatures actually experience. He wants to go as close as he can to the lives of badgers, foxes, otters, stags and swifts. He wants to run, eat, sleep, pee and poo like these animals.

Surely, you think to yourself, this is a wind-up.

It might be a wind-up. Foster’s tongue is firmly in his cheek throughout, but Being A Beast is not just a journey into English whimsy, guided by someone who has worn tweed on purpose.  

There’s some scholarship on show, a physiological examination of how animals process the world through their senses, and how they differ to us in that regard. Foster carefully steers between the Scylla and Charybdis of nature writing: anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. He comes to the same conclusions as John Lewis-Stempel in Meadowland. We can never know precisely what goes through a badger’s mind, but there’s surely an equivalent, something both species can relate to. Most of us have eyes and ears and tongues, same as our fellow mammals. We share many characteristics with fish and birds. And we’ve all got to eat.

Foster says the experience of people who have synaesthesia (they might “taste” colours, or process sounds visually) is as close a match as we can get to trying to express the sensory world of the animals – the fox creeping through gloomy alleyways; the otter zipping after fish in the water; the badger prowling the forest floor by moonlight.

Sadly, Foster doesn’t engage with the animal kingdom by going Full Furry. It surely crossed his mind to don a giant badger or fox suit. When he heads into the forest accompanied by his son, I imagined them walking hand-in-hand in a cute parent-and-child badger onesie combo. Would that make it a twosie? Hmm.

Nor does he go naked, reasoning – persuasively – that most animals have highly specialised “natural” clothing that helps them survive the outdoor environment, which humans lack. This did beg a question from me: why are humans naked? But that’s for someone else’s book.

There’s something to learn in each of the sections. For example, badgers are highly social animals, with long-established hierarchies, even down to the generations that came before them whose bodies are incorporated into the walls of their setts. We are shown how the fox’s body is perfectly calibrated to the horizon to allow it to look around while it is depositing droppings. The otter’s world is always on fast-forward, its metabolism a nightmarish electrical crackle of activity. And then we are shown how far the swift travels in service of its unknowable rhythms.

There’s no disguising the foolishness of this enterprise, and Foster is happy to address that, recording the opinions of everyone around him as they tell him he must be off his head. Foster gets a farmer to dig him a trench near a forest, covers it over with branches and acts like a badger. He builds a den in his garden and comes out at night, like a fox. He dons neoprene and turns over submerged stones in rivers with his nose. He is chased through the Highlands of Scotland by friends with dogs, in an attempt to become a stag.

Sadly, he does not don Acme-style wings and leap off a cliff, Wile E. Coyote style, in an attempt to become a swift. They are things of permanent wonder, it seems. We’d best look to the poets for guidance there.

It’s very silly, but done in deadly earnest, and thankfully Foster gets the picture before he comes to any harm. Perhaps the most dangerous moment is when he becomes an urban fox, and a policeman comes across him while he is sleeping in some bushes. The conversation they have is straight out of a badly-dated sitcom (“Are you trying to be clever, sir?”), but Foster does come close to trouble more than once. Discretion might have been a better bet when he decides to stay in his badger sett during an immense, best-since-records-began storm. Later, when he mentions how lovely a woman looks through her bathroom window, as spotted from an alleyway, you’re bound to raise an eyebrow or two.

How animals eat, and how they go about obtaining their food, is the part that stuck out the most for me - but not for any palatable reason. If you’re squeamish, I’d recommend avoiding the next few paragraphs.

This book is disgusting. It opens up with the sensation of biting into an earthworm. Earthworms are a key part of badgers’ diet, and so they must become Foster’s, too. He ruminates on the different tastes of worms in different parts of the world. French worms are a gourmand’s delight, you won’t be surprised to hear, but some, unearthed close to urban landfill sites, taste of nappies.

Foster encourages his son to eat worms, too.

Scoffing creepy crawlies is not a problem. Biting into minnows which have bellies full of larvae similarly presents no difficulty. Foster can identify the types of maggot that can be found in different sources, whether that’s dead animals or dung, and encourages his children to do so as well. It’s all good nourishment.

So, too, is the stuff that humans throw away in the city, which foxes thrive on – half-eaten portions of rice in takeaway containers, chicken legs, spare ribs, and of course, dead pizza, enough to pave a city with. Strewth, we waste so much, Foster thinks, nibbling on a rancid spicy chicken wing.

As he roots through bins, Foster wonders at the human phobia of other people’s saliva. I think you might find basic hygiene reasons are behind that one, fella, which are similar to the reasons we don’t eat out of bins unless we really have to.

He’s undoubtedly playing with us here, but there is food for thought. Only, you might find you’ve lost your appetite somewhat.

Matters of dung are delved into with both hands – and kneaded, stretched, tenderised and sniffed. Foster seems to violate a basic rule by shitting where he eats in his sett, but I’d guess he had researched that one already and was quite happy with the decision.

While he lives as an otter by the riverbank, Foster and his four children take part in sprainting – leaving droppings, to mark territory. They all endeavour to identify each other’s spraints based on known characteristics of the members of the brood, as well as what the family was eating over the previous day or so.

The Foster pack’s momma bear is curiously absent from Being A Beast, but it’s not a stretch to imagine her thoughts and feelings on this and other matters.

And of course, in nosing through the long grass, Foster encounters a lot of dog turds. I half-expected him to stumble out of the vegetation like some English Rambo, smeared with the stuff as camouflage. “I wonder why we don’t use it as a natural skin cream? After all, it’s packed with nutrients.” He doesn’t say or do this, of course, but he is swimming along the same pipe. It would be no surprise if he did so.

So, the book’s an acquired taste, you might say. It led to one vivid nightmare where I was helping myself to squirming worms, as Foster does, like they were peanuts in a bowl at a party. I could well imagine their horrid final moments, their frantic struggle for life on my tongue. More tragic still (though slightly less disgusting) are worms who simply give up, just at the moment before they are crushed between two human molars. They stop moving, Foster informs us. They accept their fate, and their lowly place in the food chain.

In the stags section, Foster outlines his previous life as a hunter. After term time was over at his prestigious university, he would pack up and head to the Highlands. There, he would stalk and destroy magnificent red deer in sprawling estates, his progress steered and his shooting prowess flattered by tough but deferential wee Scottish men with terse accents and flat caps.

Now, Foster’s apology for this behaviour in his youth is explicit, and he is similarly transparent about his subsequent environmental enlightenment and his love for animals. He has no desire whatsoever to shoot anything now. Indeed, the section where he tries to be a stag could be seen as expiatory, as he reverses roles and tries to live his life as a hunted animal.

Foster is apologetic about his past life in blood sports, but he is not ashamed of it. He used to love it; he relished the sharpening of the senses, the tingling sensation of closing in on prey after hours of patient stalking.

I don’t know the guy. I don’t know where he came from. But Charles Foster appears to be a successful man in real life, a barrister, well-qualified with the relevant paperwork from Oxford or Cambridge. I presume he is paid well. Was it natural selection that allowed Foster to research, write and publish books about his crazy whimsical journeys through the British countryside and other parts of the planet? Some innate talent honed across the generations? Was it hard work - sheer graft - that pulled him up by the bootlaces? Did he survive and prosper by his wits, intelligence and raw instinct? Or was something else at play - some natural resource enjoyed only by a few?

That’s not to belittle his character, wit or intelligence. Foster is rough and ready enough, charging into canals with his clothes on after pub sessions, and making friends with live Glaswegians. But his progress calls to mind a treacherous observation I could not suppress about the lovely Roger Deakin: that it takes lots of money and spare time to become a gentleman author of natural history books. We’d all like to have a house in the country with a moat around it.

This, I am aware, is chippy on my behalf - my own flaw as a simple mammal. But the thought persists, and I have to let it run free. I can say no more without sullying my own happy experiences of nature writing, and those who write it.

Let’s not leave things on an uncomfortable note. This is a fine book, lots of fun with plenty of laughs. Crucially, it teaches without being didactic, a very difficult trick. It falters a little during the final section on swifts, but Foster has done enough by that point to allow us the indulgence of his travels in the bird’s slipstream.

I’ve read some truly great books as part of this journey through the fields and meadows, taken while there’s still some blue in the sky – and this was another one.

It’s colder, today. There’s a change in the air. Things are on the turn. 

FIELD NOTES:

Country matters on Booksquawk

The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot, by Robert Macfarlane

448 pages, Penguin

Review by Pat Black

It’s time to dig our old walking boots out from the back of the cupboard.

Of course they smell funny! Be something wrong if they didn’t…

Our guide is Robert Macfarlane. His bestselling The Old Ways is about the act of following paths, and describes journeys he’s taken in the UK and elsewhere.

Macfarlane isn’t afraid to get spiritual as he seeks to delineate the paths of the mind and the psychological topography our feet follow, on clearly signposted routes and uncharted territory alike. In considering the way, you will consider yourself, things that have happened, things that might happen, and things that happened to other people. These paths are internal as much as external, the author reminds us.

This type of thinking was old news to the Aborigines going Walkabout, or the peregrini and holy men of other religious persuasions, looking for enlightenment on the road throughout history. We’re travelling on a very, very old path indeed.

Macfarlane was friends with the late, great Roger Deakin, and indeed the Waterlog author haunts the early part of this book as Macfarlane considers a walk they’d taken through an ancient holloway. Other long-dead writers also keep step with Macfarlane, particularly Edward Thomas and Nan Shepherd. Indeed, Macfarlane pens a vivid reconstruction of the former’s last days as he prepared for the front line in the First World War – before the poet’s pathway was cut short in the crude straight lines of the trenches.

To follow Macfarlane’s line, writing about the natural world and our paths through it is as important as actually walking. Considering the act - reflecting upon the act - becomes as necessary as putting one foot in front of the other.

Macfarlane examines the literal bedrock of Britain – chalk, gneiss – and the shifting sands and silt above it as he walks, often in the company of fellow enthusiasts. The book’s sub-title is actually a bit of a misnomer, as a good portion of it is dedicated to following paths by sea to the Hebrides on a boat, where no footsteps have voluntarily treaded apart from those laid by maniacs in Victorian diving suits. Macfarlane’s companions aren’t quite in the “rich eccentrics and artists” category we see now and again in Roger Deakin’s work, though there are a few people who seem charmingly detached from the cares and hassles of ritualised, 4x4 beat wage slavery. Who doesn’t want to get away from that, frankly?

Special mention must go to the artist Macfarlane stays with, who has acquired a human skeleton. He wants to bore a hole in a gigantic rock, like coring an apple, place the bones inside, then replace the bore hole and leave it for a few millennia until someone discovers it, and wonders what was going on.

I have been thinking about this for months. To quote The Joker: “I don’t know if it’s art, but I like it.”

Other routes include part of the Camino de Santiago in Spain and a perilous track – for more than one reason – in Gaza.

Perhaps the most memorable walk is on the Broomway in Essex, a beach path which is swamped by the tide at certain times of the day. Under a strict time limit, in misty conditions, with the hard-packed sands like glass under their feet, Macfarlane and a companion dice with death. Their journey is hazy, almost psychedelic in tone, divorced from reality in a dreamlike state. Like the strange compulsion which might seize you to leap off a cliff face as you peer over the edge, Macfarlane’s feet seem to want to take him out to sea, even as it advances towards him, and certain doom.

Climbing can be a deadly serious business, of course – quite literally. The hairiest things ever got for me was a stroll along Striding Edge in high winds, but I’d bet that drop has accounted for surer feet than mine over the years. Macfarlane keeps loftier company, heading out among the big boys in the Himalayas. He focuses on the high country near Mount Kailash, a place of ancient pilgrimage for Buddhists in Tibet.

He enjoys the trip, but his guide tells horrendous stories about people who have been killed trying to reach the summit. Macfarlane successfully fights the urge to reach for the top. In considering that spectacular snowy peak, cut through with black rock, he echoes the thoughts of Roger Deakin, who planned to swim in the Gulf of Corryvreckan, only to think better of it on the day. Some natural phenomena are absolutely fine to just look at.

There’s more hair-raising stuff when Macfarlane recounts a hike in the Cairngorms, when he follows the footsteps of an earlier, unknown climber in the snow only to find that the tracks appeared to have vanished off a cliff-face. For a few decidedly hirsute moments, it seems as if the author might follow. He is candid about his feelings of panic and guilt at having veered off a safe route and come so close to a nasty end.

There are other-worldly fears in The Old Ways, too. Macfarlane joins Guy N Smith in the club of “British writers who claim to have seen a feral big cat in Britain” after a creepy encounter with a glowing-eyed creature as he drives through the Marlborough Downs in Wiltshire. A friend who is with him corroborates the sighting, and also thinks it was a big cat of some kind.

Even spookier is an experience he has while camping out alone in Chanctonbury Ring, a notoriously haunted copse in the South Downs where he is menaced at night by an unseen, shrieking creature outside his tent.  If it’s a bird, then it’s no bird he’s ever heard before.

Even if you’ve never experienced hillwalking outside of screaming abuse at Tomb Raider in the 1990s, or embarking on Peter Jackson’s entire Lord Of The Rings special edition saga on DVD, this is a gripping journey. It is infused with the spirit of adventure, but also a sense of wonder – an unbeatable combination.

If you’re like me – someone whose spirit would haunt less well travelled paths, should spirit exist – The Old Ways will make you hungry for the open road, and eager to head for that twilit blue world glimpsed only fleetingly, like the green ray, somewhere between the treeline and the far horizon.