Landmarks
Authors: Robert Macfarlane
LANDMARKS
2 A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook
6 The Tunnel of Swords and Axes
10 The Black Locust and the Silver Pine
GLOSSARY X
:
Left blank for future place-words and the reader’s own terms
Mountains of the Mind
The Wild Places
The Old Ways
Holloway
For Anne Campbell, Will Macfarlane
and Finlay MacLeod
Where lies your
landmark, seamark, or soul’s star?
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1886)
Scholars, I plead with you
,
Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?
Norman MacCaig (1983)
The Word-Hoard
This is a book about the power of language – strong style, single words – to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to literature I love, and it is a word-hoard of the astonishing lexis for landscape that exists in the comprision of islands, rivers, strands, fells, lochs, cities, towns, corries, hedgerows, fields and edgelands uneasily known as the British Isles. The ten following chapters explore writing so fierce in its focus that it can change the vision of its readers for good, in both senses. Their nine glossaries gather thousands of words from dozens of languages and dialects for specific aspects of landscape, nature and weather. The writers collected here come from Essex to the Cairngorms, Connemara to Northumbria and Suffolk to Surbiton. The words collected here come from Unst to the Lizard, from Pembrokeshire to Norfolk; from Norn and Old English, Anglo-Romani, Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Gaelic, the Orcadian, Shetlandic and Doric dialects of Scots, and numerous regional versions of English, through to the last vestiges of living Norman still spoken on the Channel Islands.
Landmarks
has been years in the making. For as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to the work of writers who use words exactly and exactingly when describing landscape and natural life.
‘The hardest thing of all
to see is what is really there,’ wrote J. A. Baker in
The Peregrine
(1967), a book that brilliantly shows how such
seeing might occur in language, written as it is in prose that has
‘the quivering intensity
of an arrow thudding into a tree’. And for over a decade I have been collecting place-words as I have found them: gleaned singly from conversations, correspondences or books, and jotted down in journals or on slips of paper. Now and then I have hit buried treasure in the form of vernacular dictionaries or extraordinary people – troves that have held gleaming handfuls of coinages. The word-lists of
Landmarks
have their origin in one such trove, turned up on the moors of the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis in 2007. There, as you will read in the next chapter, I was shown a ‘Peat Glossary’: a list of the hundreds of Gaelic terms for the moorland that stretches over much of Lewis’s interior. The glossary had been compiled by Hebridean friends of mine through archival research and oral history. Some of the language it recorded was still spoken – but much had fallen into disuse. The remarkable referential exactitude of that glossary, and the poetry of so many of its terms, set my head a-whirr with words.
Although I knew Gaelic to be richly responsive to the sites in which it was spoken, it was my guess that other tongues in these islands also possessed wealths of words for features of place – words that together constituted a vast vanished, or vanishing, language for landscape. It seemed to me then that although we have our compendia of flora, fauna, birds, reptiles and insects, we lack a
Terra Britannica
, as it were: a gathering of terms for the land and its specificities – terms used by fishermen, farmers, sailors, scientists, crofters, mountaineers, soldiers, shepherds, walkers and unrecorded ordinary others for whom specialized ways of indicating aspects of place have been vital to everyday practice and perception. It seemed, too, that it might be worthwhile assembling some of this fine-grained
and fabulously diverse vocabulary, and releasing its poetry back into imaginative circulation.
The same year I first saw the Peat Glossary, a new edition of the
Oxford Junior Dictionary
was published. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included
acorn
,
adder
,
ash
,
beech
,
bluebell
,
buttercup
,
catkin
,
conker
,
cowslip
,
cygnet
,
dandelion
,
fern
,
hazel
,
heather
,
heron
,
ivy
,
kingfisher
,
lark
,
mistletoe
,
nectar
,
newt
,
otter
,
pasture
and
willow.
The words introduced to the new edition included
attachment
,
block-graph
,
blog
,
broadband
,
bullet-point
,
celebrity
,
chatroom
,
committee
,
cut-and-paste
,
MP3 player
and
voice-mail
.
When Vineeta Gupta, then head of children’s dictionaries at OUP, was asked why the decision had been taken to delete those ‘nature words’, she explained that the dictionary needed to reflect the consensus experience of modern-day childhood.
‘When you look back
at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers for instance,’ said Gupta; ‘that was because many children lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed.’ There is a realism to her response – but also an alarming acceptance of the idea that children might no longer see the seasons, or that the rural environment might be so unproblematically disposable.
The substitutions made in the dictionary – the outdoor and the natural being displaced by the indoor and the virtual – are a small but significant symptom of the simulated life we increasingly live. Children are now (and valuably) adept ecologists of the technoscape, with numerous terms for file types but few for different trees and creatures. For
blackberry
, read
BlackBerry
. A basic literacy
of landscape is falling away up and down the ages. A common language – a language
of
the commons – is getting rarer. And what is lost along with this literacy is something precious: a kind of word magic, the power that certain terms possess to enchant our relations with nature and place. As the writer Henry Porter observed, the OUP deletions removed the
‘euphonious vocabulary
of the natural world – words which do not simply label an object or action but in some mysterious and beautiful way become part of it’.
Landmarks
is a celebration and defence of such language. Over the years, and especially over the past two years, thousands of place-terms have reached me. They have come by letter, email and telephone, scribbled on postcards or yellowed pre-war foolscap, transcribed from cassette recordings of Suffolk longshoremen made half a century ago, or taken from hand-drawn maps of hill country and coastline, and delved with delight from lexicons and archives around the country and the Web. I have had such pleasure meeting them, these words: migrant birds, arriving from distant places with story and metaphor caught in their feathers; or strangers coming into the home, stamping the snow from their feet, fresh from the blizzard and a long journey.
Many of these terms have mingled oddness and familiarity in the manner that Freud calls uncanny: peculiar in their particularity, but recognizable in that they name something conceivable, if not instantly locatable.
Ammil
is a Devon term meaning ‘the sparkle of morning sunlight through hoar-frost’, a beautifully exact word for a fugitive phenomenon I have several times seen but never before been able to name. Shetlandic has a word,
af’rug
, for ‘the reflex of a wave after it has struck the shore’; another,
pirr
, meaning ‘a light breath of wind, such as will make a cat’s paw on the water’; and another,
klett
, for ‘a low-lying earth-fast rock on the seashore’. On
Exmoor,
zwer
is the onomatopoeic term for the sound made by a covey of partridges taking flight.
Smeuse
is a Sussex dialect noun for ‘the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal’; now I know the word
smeuse
, I will notice these signs of creaturely movement more often.
Most fascinating to me are those terms for which no counterpart of comparable concision exists in another language. Such scalpel-sharp words are untranslatable without remainder. The need for precise discrimination of this kind has occurred most often where landscape is the venue of work. The Icelandic novelist Jón Kalman Stefánsson writes of fishermen speaking
‘coddish’
far out into the North Atlantic; the miners working the Great Northern Coalfield in England’s north-east developed a dialect known as
‘Pitmatical
’ or ‘yakka’, so dense it proved incomprehensible to Victorian parliamentary commissioners seeking to improve conditions in the mines in the 1840s. The name ‘Pitmatical’ was originally chosen to echo ‘mathematical’, and thereby emphasize the craft and skilful precision of the colliers. Such super-specific argots are born of lives lived long – and laboured hard – on land and at sea. The terms they contain allow us glimpses through other eyes, permit brief access to distant habits of perception. The poet Norman MacCaig commended the
‘seagull voice’
of his Aunt Julia, who lived her long life on the Isle of Harris, so embedded in her terrain that she came to think
with
and speak
in
its creatures and climate.
As well as these untranslatable terms, I have gathered synonyms – especially those that bring new energies to familiar phenomena. The variant English terms for ‘icicle’ –
aquabob
(Kent),
clinkerbell
and
daggler
(Wessex),
cancervell
(Exmoor),
ickle
(Yorkshire),
tankle
(Durham),
shuckle
(Cumbria) – form a tinkling poem of their own. In Northamptonshire dialect ‘to thaw’ is
to ungive
. The beauty of this
variant I find hard to articulate, but it surely has to do with the paradox of thaw figured as restraint or retention, and the wintry notion that cold, frost and snow might themselves be a form of gift – an addition to the landscape that will in time be subtracted by warmth.
~
‘Language is fossil poetry
,’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1844, ‘[a]s the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.’ Emerson, as essayist, sought to reverse this petrification and restore the ‘poetic origin’ of words, thereby revealing the originary role of ‘nature’ in language. Considering the verb
to consider
, he reminds us that it comes from the Latin
con-siderare
, and thus carries a meaning of ‘to study or see with the stars’. Etymology illuminates – a mundane verb is suddenly starlit. Many of the terms in the glossaries that follow seem, at least to me, as yet unpetrified and still vivid with poetry. They function as topograms – tiny poems that conjure scenes.
Blinter
is a northern Scots word meaning ‘a cold dazzle’, connoting especially ‘the radiance of winter stars on a clear night’, or ‘ice-splinters catching low light’. Instantly the word opens prospects: walking sunwards through snow late on a midwinter day, with the wind shifting spindrift into the air such that the ice-dust acts as a prismatic mist, refracting sunshine into its pale and separate colours; or out on a crisp November night in a city garden, with the lit windows of houses and the orange glow of street light around, while the stars
blinter
above in the cold high air.
By no means are all place-words poetic or innocent. Take the familiar word
forest
, which can designate not a wooded region, but
an area of land set aside for deer-hunting – as those who have walked through the treeless ‘forests’ of Fisherfield, Applecross and Corrour in the Highlands of Scotland will know.
Forest
– like numerous wood-words – is complicatedly tangled up in political histories of access and landownership. Nature is not now, nor has ever been, a pure category. We inhabit a post-pastoral terrain, full of modification and compromise: this is why the glossaries contain plenty of unnatural language, such as terms from coastal sea-defences (
pillbox
,
bulwark
,
rock-armour
) that register threats both from the sea and of the sea, or
soft estate
, the Highways Agency term for those natural habitats that exist along the verges of motorways and trunk roads.
Some of the words collected here are eldritch, acknowledging a sense of our landscapes not as settled but as unsettling – the
terror in the terroir
, the spectred isle. Some are funny, and some ripely rude. Before beginning this work, I would not have guessed at the existence of quite so many terms for animal dung, from
crottle
(a foresters’ term for hare excrement) to
doofers
(Scots for horse shit) to the expressive
ujller
(Shetlandic for the ‘unctuous filth that runs from a dunghill’) and
turdstool
(West Country for a very substantial cowpat). Nor did I know that a dialect name for the kestrel, alongside such felicities as
windhover
and
bell-hawk
, is
wind-fucker
. Once learnt, never forgotten – it is hard now not to see in the pose of the hovering kestrel a certain lustful quiver. Often I have been reminded of Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s genius catalogue of nonce words,
The Meaning of Liff
(1983), in which British place-names are used as nouns for the
‘hundreds of common experiences
, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no words exist’. Thus
‘
Kimmeridge
(n.)
: The light breeze which blows through your armpit hair when you are stretched out sunbathing’; or ‘
Glassel
(n.): A seaside pebble which was shiny and interesting when wet, and which is now a lump of rock, but which children nevertheless insist on filling their suitcases with after a holiday’. When I mentioned to my then seven-year-old son that there was no word for the shining hump of water that rises above a submerged boulder in a stream, he quickly suggested
currentbum
.