Читать книгу Ramble On: The story of our love for walking Britain - Sinclair McKay - Страница 7

There are times when open countryside by itself is not quite enough. Walkers – especially city-dwelling ramblers – instead feel the need to seek out raw, authentic wilderness; areas that are remote, untouched and bare. This compulsion to shake free from oppressive urban life seems relatively modern, yet has its antecedents in the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, and the first stirrings of an organised walking movement in the nineteenth century.

These days, many hardy ramblers are drawn to Rannoch Moor, in the north-west of Scotland; a stark landscape that can make you feel that you have swirled back in time to the very beginning of the earth. The wide empty prospect of echoing hills can evoke an odd mix of leaping euphoria and quiet unease. The term ‘prehistoric’ does not quite cover it: this is an elemental realm of sparse grass, wet mud, freezing clear water, and lonely peaks. For a walker stepping, slightly dazed, off the Caledonian Sleeper train at 8.40 a.m. and standing taking cold breaths on the platform of tiny Rannoch station, it is rather disorientating. It is one thing to yearn for such prospects while sitting at home, to arrive at them always feels just a little different.

The question of whether Rannoch – or many other parts of the Highlands – can be strictly termed ‘authentic’ wilderness is one that we shall return to. This plateau seems in some ways the perfect distillation of what the modern rambler is looking for: the implacable, unbeautified face of nature: a plain upon which one would struggle to survive a winter’s night in the open; yet also a sanctuary for rare plant species that one would never find anywhere else. It is the sort of terrain that the enthusiastic walker cannot wait to test him or herself against. It promises the deep pleasure of heavy exertion, with the corresponding sense of wide open freedom. In the nineteenth century, as molten furnaces billowed blackening ash over darkened cities such as Glasgow – just 60 miles or so to the south – healthful, open hills and glens became places that men would dream of.

It is partly through Glaswegians that we see the organised walking movement first coalescing. In 1854, Hugh MacDonald published Rambles Around Glasgow, which described in detail long walks out of the city, along with examples of flora and history. In 1892, it was a group of working-class Glaswegians who formed Britain’s first ever rambling federation: the West of Scotland Ramblers Alliance. It should also be borne in mind that for a few of the manual workers, trapped by economics in Clydeside’s squalor in the earlier years of the nineteenth century, the wilds of the Highlands and Loch Lomond were just a few miles away. This represented a treasure that had been stolen from them, this is where some of their families had once lived and farmed before the notorious Clearances.

On Rannoch railway station platform, you drink in the silence after the train moves away. Look up at the low-pressing clouds, and you think: surely this land of hills and water and heather has always been like this. It cannot have changed in over 100,000 years. Yet can this be true? James Hutton, an eighteenth-century Scottish farmer who was also a pioneer in the science of geology, was among the first to grasp the vast yet infinitesimally slow processes that are wrought across the millennia. In 1785, Hutton wrote wrily:

As there is not in human observation proper means for measuring the waste of land upon the globe, it is hence inferred, that we cannot estimate the duration of what we see at present, nor calculate the period at which it had begun; so that, with respect to human observation, this world has neither a beginning nor an end.

That is, human observation as it stood; yet Hutton was to bring his own human deductions to the subject and, in doing so, spark a religious uproar akin, if on a smaller scale, to that of Galileo. For Hutton was among the first to understand, and assert, that the earth is very, very much older than the Bible seems to say. He was among the first to see that the earth has been here rather longer than humanity itself. This sense of an unfathomably ancient landscape is certainly what pulls walkers here.

In this age of ubiquitous car travel and GPS orienteering, Rannoch Moor remains a formidably inhospitable prospect. It covers a vast area, with very few signs of habitation for miles around. There is only one road in and out, the rest is rough track, often leading nowhere. The nearest big town is Fort William, and Fort William is not a big town. Rannoch itself comprises two or three private houses, and a larger house which is now a popular hotel among keen walkers. Nor is this easy territory, by any means. Even though the Scottish authorities have been assiduously laying down paths and cycle routes all over the country, Rannoch remains one of those ancient regions that should always be hard-going.

Before the twentieth century, the remoter regions such as Rannoch were regarded by many travellers as utterly deadly. It was impossible to live upon, and difficult to cross. The forests were thought to be filled with lurking wolves with a taste for warm flesh. There was no perceived beauty here, just harshness, and silence, and everything inimical to human comfort. In the winter months, the vast black tarns that mark this watery plateau freeze over. The lochs quiver with tiny ice-cold waves. The earth sparkles with frost. In the nineteenth century, Robert Louis Stevenson’s historical adventure Kidnapped features a lengthy passage in which Alan Breck and Davey Balfour cross the treacherous ground of Rannoch Moor. They attempt to conceal themselves from troops and nearly perish in the process. More harrowing was the real-life construction of the West Highland railway line across the moor. Not only were the workmen fighting against the most savage weather conditions, they were also pulling off the unthinkably complex engineering feat of laying heavy steel lines across bog-land.

Even the doughtiest of poet-walkers William Wordsworth, weathered and wind-beaten after years tramping his beloved Lake District, could not find it within himself to recommend Scottish wildernesses to his readers. ‘In Scotland and Wales are found, undoubtedly, individual scenes, which, in their several kinds, cannot be excelled,’ wrote Wordsworth, ‘but in Scotland, particularly, what long tracts of desolate country intervene! So that the traveller, when he reaches a spot deservedly of great celebrity, would find it difficult to determine how much of his pleasure is owing to excellence inherent in the landscape itself: and how much to an instantaneous recovery from an oppression left upon his spirits by the barrenness and desolation through which he has passed.’¹

Surprisingly, Wordsworth failed to see what many other walkers could: that the ‘barrenness and desolation’ could actually be powerful attractions in their own right. It is the perpetual draw of these places that takes us right back to the paradoxical roots of walking for pleasure.

In a centrally-heated, fleece-swaddled age, it is often difficult for us to imagine just how harsh some British landscapes can be. One dark December a few years ago, I was visiting family in Scotland. Fancying a brief taste of wilderness, I took a train to Kingussie, not too far away from Rannoch Moor, and from there followed a path directly up to the great shouldering hills that encompassed the little Highland town. There had already been snow that day, and more was falling; the air was so cold that I could feel it sharp in my lungs. Good though my boots were, the road I was walking up was glassy with impacted ice. The going was slow, but it was so intensely enjoyable that there was no question of cutting the walk short.

On this particular road – private, though without any of the big, irritable signs that remind you so – the gradient was acute and it was not long before I was above the tree-line, looking upwards at shimmering hills of white, luminous against a sky of solemn dark grey. Save for my boots croaking and crushing the snow beneath, there was not even the riffle of any wind in my ears; the falling snow was sound-proofing the entire world.

But then came the reminder of just how indifferent to life this beautiful world was. There was a small iced hummock on the left of the road, on it sat a small, shivering hare. I wondered why it did not leap away at the very sight of me and as I drew closer to it, I saw the snow dappled with the brightest red, and one of the hare’s legs seemed to be hanging half off. The hare watched me as its tiny muscles shook, and its entire body rippled with convulsive shudders. I drew closer, a weight of dismay in my stomach. Then I walked on. To this day, I still feel a pang of remorse about this. Could I not have put the small animal out of its pain? Or perhaps – on the wilder shores of compassion, and utterly absurd, but it did flit through my mind – have tucked it inside my coat and taken it to a local vet? The notion of killing it did fleetingly occur to me: perhaps stove in its small skull with a big stone? But I also knew, almost without having to think about it, that I would bodge the job through urban squeamishness and incompetence. I wouldn’t hit hard enough, or would hit the wrong spot, or the hare would try to escape and the leg would become even more mangled. I would somehow end up adding to its pain a hundredfold.

In that one moment, the winter wonderland feel of this land had been exposed for what it is: a perfectly impervious, blank wilderness. The snow was still falling, big fat chunky flakes. I walked on, higher and higher up this road, which now, in its dazzling whiteness under that dark iron sky, was snaking up between two glacial hills.

It never occurred to me on that mid-December afternoon – with the temperature falling still further – that I was vulnerable too. I was stupidly oblivious to the never-ending snow, and the distance that I was covering. I didn’t have a hat, or gloves. I was, quite simply, not dressed properly. There came a point, after about two hours of walking, that I was still not at the peak, nor within sight of any pleasing views of lochs or forests. There was now just the whiteness that seemed to throb and pulse. And the sun was very low; looking eastwards, the clouds had shades of both pink and green in them. It was time to turn back.

The road down was slippery, and after two tumbles, which left me winded, I felt a flutter of apprehension. My hands were numb and my fingertips were stinging and pulsating with icy pain, but I couldn’t jam them into my pockets for warmth because I needed to balance properly on that hazardous snow. Then the idiocy of what I had done began to dawn on me. I was just another inadequately dressed townie, the sort which Highland rescue teams despair of. I had completely failed to appreciate the true nature of the landscape that I was walking into. It was a mixture of ignorance and urban arrogance, at the root of which lay the simple misguided conviction that, here in modern Britain, we have tamed the land and no harm can come to us when we are walking on it.

Perhaps I am overstating the case, especially since, after ninety minutes of sliding, shuffling and crawling, I eventually made it back down. The sun had set behind me and the rich blue snow-capped peaks of the Cairngorms in the far distance seemed to hover in that indistinct twilight, with the stars out above, and the lights of Kingussie beneath me, looking like an old-fashioned illustration on a Christmas biscuit tin. The sheer physical discomfort of that journey back rather outweighed the earlier pleasure of walking and climbing without care. Yet I would do exactly the same walk again without hesitation. One crucial element of the rambling movement in Britain is the paradoxical belief that old wildernesses are disappearing, but that we can preserve them in all their purity by walking on them. Rannoch Moor stands as the most perfect example of this strange, nostalgic, in many ways completely counter-intuitive yearning.

The idea of preserving wild landscapes is older than we would perhaps think. The year 1824 saw the formation of the Association for the Protection of Ancient Footpaths In The Vicinity of York. This was followed two years later by the Manchester Association for the Preservation of Ancient Footpaths. Despite the formality of these titles, the groups were more to do with a sense that working people needed a sanctuary, a guaranteed place of escape.

As nineteenth-century journalist Archibald Prentice wrote of the environs of Manchester at that time: ‘There are so many pleasant footpaths, that a pedestrian might walk completely round the town in a circle which would seldom exceed a radius of two miles from the Exchange.’ He also noted that other northern towns were similarly close to excellent country, and that ‘thousands … whose avocations render fresh air and exercise an absolute necessity of life, avail themselves of the rights of foot-way through the meadows and cornfields and parks of the immediate neighbourhood.’

The closure of many footpaths at a time when urban populations were beginning to increase dramatically also started to attract attention. A petition was drawn up in 1831 to protest against the ‘stopping up’ of such paths. Then, in 1833, a Select Committee on Public Walks was formed. It found that there were no common lands around Blackburn and that the inhabitants had nowhere that they could walk. Meanwhile, in Bury, there was some ‘uninclosed heath’ – but it was over two miles away from the town. In the same period, this idea of walking and escape percolated into popular literature. In 1842, John Critchley Prince wrote an essay, ‘Rambles of a Rhymester’, which was published in ‘Bradshaw’s Journal.’ In one passage, he declares: ‘What relief it was for me, after vegetating for twelve months amid the gloom, the filth, the squalid poverty … to find myself surrounded by green fields, luxuriant hedgerows, and trees just opening to the breath of Spring!’² Similarly, local newspapers in towns such as Burnley would often publish readers’ verse to do with the beauty of the countryside. They were appealing, not merely because of the conditions in the towns, but also because each family would have in its antecedents all sorts of memories of the rural life that had not long passed away. The preservation and protection of footpaths was also a metaphor for the preservation of treasured family memories.

These rights of way had a political dimension as well, though. From the eighteenth century, Parliamentary Acts of enclosure had been parcelling up the land: areas that had once been common land were acquired by landowners, and the result had been countless bitter disputes, not just about rights of way, but also about wood and berry gathering, and the trapping of rabbits and hares. By the late eighteenth century, poaching was, in some cases, a capital offence. Enclosures had been going on rather longer; common grounds had been encroached upon heavily in the wake of the Reformation, when new landlords made grabs for former monastery lands. Hedges – which these days stand as one of the beloved metonyms for the English countryside – were once extremely unpopular. They marked the boundaries of seized land. Asserting the right to walk on what had been regarded as an ancient footpath was a symbolic way of redressing the balance a little. It seems that this in turn had the effect of making rural landlords rather more hostile to the old Rights of Way that bisected their lands. There was further fencing, and hedging, and stone walls were built. Although this was partly to do with new agricultural techniques – in essence, not allowing cattle to roam as far as they used to – there was also an undeniable effort to keep labourers off private land.

On the banks of the Clyde in the 1830s, there was the case of one landowner who decided to prevent walkers – usually working men from closer to the centre of Glasgow – using the river path. The case grew so heated that it was put before the local authorities, who ordered that the path be opened again. But for every such victory, there were countless cases up and down the country of the Enclosure Acts making landowners consolidate their rights of ownership.

Nevertheless, this nascent walking movement very swiftly spread to other industrial cities such as Liverpool and Leeds. These were all cities where the rivers reeked with effluent, and where the unsanitary nature of the accommodation made terrible diseases inevitable. The vast manufactories were monolithic, the opposite to anything that anyone would find in the openness of country. The desire to walk was to do with space, physical as well as mental. Home and work darkly mirrored one another. In ‘miasmatic courts and alleys’, an entire family would be crammed into one room; here they would eat, sleep and live. Then at work, men and women were hemmed in tight, in occupations that required them either to stay in one place to carry out repetitious mechanical tasks, or move through intensely claustrophobic tunnels, unable to stand up or stretch out.

The Scots, with their even greater abundance of wild countryside, had their keenness for walking made even sharper by recent memories of the Clearances. What once had been the wide open common land, upon which whole communities had thrived, was seized in a series of brutal land-grabs perpetrated by Scottish aristocrats, intent upon maximising the profitability of their land by turning thousands of acres over to sheep grazing, and later to game and to forestry. We might timorously say – for the sake of some kind of balance – that the landowners in turn were not always acting out of malice, but were sometimes simply responding to different sorts of economic pressure. One of these pressures was the rate of emigration among the young in rural communities – even before the Clearances. Before such journeys were enforced, increasing numbers of young labourers had been beginning to set sail for Canada, to lay claim to their part of a New World, in search of greater prosperity.

The crofting communities these young people left behind were part of a way of life that simply, inevitably, was going to go – much in the way that, two centuries later, the remote island of St Kilda had to be evacuated. The point about any period of economic turbulence – regardless of cruelty, intentional or otherwise – is that it is always those at the bottom who find that their security and stability have been ruthlessly stripped away. So it was during those decades that, for the sake of landowners grazing their sheep or turning their estates into hunting grounds, men, women and children were herded out of villages; some were sent to the western ports, from which they were expected to emigrate. Others went to the towns. Villages were burnt to the ground and old traditions destroyed in a matter of hours. And perhaps for this reason above any other, in Scotland the very notion of private land continues to this day to be of the most fantastic political sensitivity. There are those who still want revenge for the Clearances.

After this came a Scottish version of enclosure, or emparkation: rich Victorians who gazed upon these vast glens and moors and who closed them off as far as possible for the purposes of hunting. For example, much of the south of the Cairngorms came to be owned by the Atholl Estate, having been seized in the early nineteenth century. In the 1840s, the Duke of Atholl became involved in a much-publicised skirmish with ramblers. These men – a professor of botany from Edinburgh University called John Balfour, and seven of his students – were trying to walk up Glen Tilt via the old drover’s road. The party was stopped by the Duke of Atholl’s ghillies. The result: Professor Balfour brought a lawsuit, the aim of which was to establish firmly the public’s right to use the route. The Duke of Atholl was having none of it. A couple of years later, it was students from Cambridge – botanists again – who took up the Glen Tilt challenge, resulting in yet another skirmish with ghillies. This led to even more court action, to seek the protection of this and other routes throughout the Highlands. The Duke of Atholl remained stoutly unrepentant, and the practice of establishing gates across old roads was subsequently picked up by neighbouring landowners. It took an Edinburgh lawyer called Thomas Gillies to come up with an idea that even the most recaltricant landowner would find it difficult to argue with: calling for shepherds and drovers to attest in court that these roads had an established history of public use.³

The Royal Family must shoulder some more of the blame for the increasing inaccessibility of the Highlands during this era. Thanks to Queen Victoria’s sojourns at Balmoral, the craze for hunting, shooting and fishing – not merely among landowners, but also wealthy mercantile figures – took hold. It was not just old Scottish aristocratic families eating up the land, thousands of acres were also being bought up by American millionaires who fancied that somewhere down the line, they had some form of Scottish ancestry.

Indeed, in 1884, it took a Scotsman to present the first effort in Westminster to allow walkers full access to moor and mountain. James Bryce – an MP with an extremely colourful hinterland – made valiant efforts to push through an Access to Mountains Bill. What made this striking was that at that time, Bryce was the Liberal Member of Parliament for Tower Hamlets – one of the very poorest districts in London, encompassing St Katharine’s Docks, Limehouse and Whitechapel. His constituents – from the stevedores to the prostitutes – were extremely unlikely to catch any views of any sort of countryside. Despite this, his concern was for them, and all men and women who lived in conditions of horrific urban poverty. Bryce understood the restorative power of wilderness.

He also was a keen climber and, on one occasion, he had scrambled up Mount Ararat. When, at the summit, he found a fragment of old timber, this was a source of huge excitement to him. He was convinced that it was a tiny part of Noah’s Ark. Back in London’s East End, he was instrumental in setting up the charitable foundation Toynbee Hall.

His Access to Mountains Bill failed to get a second reading. But he and his brother, Annan, fought on, though. They tried to push the Bill through the Commons repeatedly. And there were also attempts – not merely through Parliamentary means, but also through speeches and articles – to establish the idea that the open Highlands should be available to all, and not just the very rich.

Even as Bryce’s political career rocketed ever higher, and he was sent to the US as ambassador, he never lost sight of the walking movement. And now, in the twenty-first century, Bryce’s view that every man should have unhindered access to all parts of the Highlands has prevailed.

Over the last few years, Scotland has become increasingly adept at turning its landscape into a sort of commodity, not just for hard-core walkers (incredibly lucrative and important though this is) but also more casual visitors. In the 1996 film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, Renton, Begbie and Sickboy very briefly leave their squalid needle-filled Edinburgh lives and come to Rannoch Moor for a ‘healthy hike’. The images are now replicated on specialised walking websites recommending Rannoch to visitors from around the world.

Meanwhile, simple wilderness is nominated as a ‘Site of Scientific Interest’ and vast tranches of land are signposted as ‘Nature Reserves’. It is one of the ways a nation feels good about itself. Walkers are invited to discover a pre-lapsarian organic purity. But then, for many ramblers, Scotland has always carried that lofty sense of somehow being a purer, less spoilt place than England. Even in John Buchan’s 1915 thriller The Thirty Nine Steps, gung-ho hero Richard Hannay, on the run for a murder he did not commit, finds the time to have a quick revel in its beauty. Despite the desperation of his circumstances, Hannay acquires a sort of exultation as he makes his way out into Scottish open country:

Over a long ridge of moorland I took my road, skirting the side of a high hill which the herd had called Cairnsmore of Fleet. Nesting curlews and plovers were crying everywhere, and the links of green pasture by the streams were dotted with young lambs. All the slackness of the past months was slipping from my bones, and I stepped out like a four-year-old.

When it comes to igniting that sense of child-like delight, sometimes a cheesy touristy label actually does do the trick. About a mile from Rannoch station is the start of a simple track heading northwards called ‘The Road to the Isles’. One can almost imagine this road name being set to music and sung by Sir Kenneth McKellar, dressed in shortbread-tin tartan. But even if that is the lure, ‘The Road to the Isles’ really is rather gratifying, especially if, like me, you are fortunate enough to find yourself caught on it in the middle of a howling tempest. The track makes a steady climb into the quietly forbidding hills, northwards, towards Corrour. With me on this walk – deceptively blue-skied in its opening stages – are Richard, a land management expert who lives in 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 it … No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as terror; and whatever is terrible with regard to sight, is sublime.

A little earlier, poet Thomas Gray was so thrilled by the ‘terrible’ spectacles he saw of the Alps on his Grand Tour with Sir Horace Walpole that he later toured the Lake District in 1769 and, in an extended account, ascribed to this region similar turbulent natural scenes. With the writers that followed – who were responding, however unconsciously, to the Industrial Revolution – there came the sense that nature had to be freed from mankind’s manipulations. They felt that in authentic landscapes were to be found atmospheres, a sense, a feeling, that would have an answering chime within every soul, like Coleridge’s Aeolian Harp.

Over 200 years later, the modern walker in a region such as Rannoch clearly has similar desires. Here, as the sun is setting its final fiery orange rays across these hills and tussochs, you see a perfect example of the sublime: the prospect that can at once unsettle you and yet leave you marvelling at its gaudy beauty. Such a sunset is not that far removed from J. M. W. Turner’s depiction of an erupting Vesuvius; the sky raging and glowing, the people below just dim, phantom-like silhouettes.

We can balance romanticism against the implacable rationality of eighteenth-century proto-geologist James Hutton, and his revolutionary observations of the cycles of nature. His understanding of the rocks and soil being washed into the sea, forming bedrock, forced volcanically to the surface and then being worn away over infinite years back into sediment. Even then we might feel an odd poetic link between local legends of the ageless faerie folk who ‘dwell in the hollow hills’ and Hutton’s awe at the eternity-old land. ‘The result, therefore, of this physical enquiry,’ Hutton told the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1788, ‘is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.’

The new learning was teaching men that the ground beneath their feet had been there long before Eden. Some of the walkers who were to take up the pursuit with such vigour in the Victorian age did so in part as a challenge to the church, and to the hold that it had on society. But even before them, the idea of walking as a genteel pursuit, a subtle pleasure that could reveal much about personal character, and which could even be enjoyed by refined women, was to be immortalised in English literature.