Landmarks (29 page)

List of abbreviations used in the notes

AD
: Barry Lopez,
Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape
(1986; London: Vintage, 2014)

AFG
: Deb Wilenski with Caroline Wendling,
A Fantastical Guide: Ways into Hinchingbrooke Country Park
(Cambridge: Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination, 2013)

AL
: Jacquetta Hawkes,
A Land
(1951; London: HarperCollins, 2012)

DM
: Peter Davidson,
Distance and Memory
(Manchester: Carcanet, 2013)

ITC
: Nan Shepherd,
In the Cairngorms
(1934; Cambridge: Galileo, 2014)

L
: Richard Skelton,
Landings
, 4th edn (Cumbria: Corbel Stone Press, 2012)

LM
: Nan Shepherd,
The Living Mountain
(1977; Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011)

NFWTF
: Roger Deakin,
Notes from Walnut Tree Farm
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 2008)

NNL
: Richard Jefferies,
Nature near London
(1883; London: HarperCollins, 2012)

NW
: John Muir,
Nature Writings
, ed. William Cronon (New York: Library of America, 1997)

OED
: online complete
Oxford English Dictionary
,
www.oed.com

P
: J. A. Baker,
The Peregrine, The Hill of Summer and Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker
, ed. John Fanshawe (1967, 1969; London: HarperCollins, 2011)

POB
: Clarence Ellis,
The Pebbles on the Beach
(London: Faber and Faber, 1953)

WL
: Roger Deakin,
Waterlog
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1999)

WW
: Roger Deakin,
Wildwood
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007)

Epigraphs

‘Where lies your … soul’s star?’
: Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People’, in
The Major Works
, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 176.

‘Scholars, I plead with you … the grasses?’
: Norman MacCaig, ‘By the Graveyard, Luskentyre’, in
The Poems of Norman MacCaig
, ed. Ewen MacCaig (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005), p. 431.

Chapter 1: The Word-Hoard

‘The hardest thing of all … really there’
:
P
, p. 33.

‘the quivering intensity … thudding into a tree’
: ibid., p. 30.

‘When you look back … the environment has changed’
: Vineeta Gupta, in interview with the
Daily Telegraph
, 6 December 2008.

‘euphonious vocabulary … become part of it’
: Henry Porter, ‘The Pity of a Child’s Dictionary’,
Observer
, 14 December 2008.

‘coddish’
: see Jón Kalman Stefánsson,
Heaven and Hell
, trans. Philip Roughton (London: MacLehose, 2011).

‘Pitmatical … yakka’
: see Bill Griffiths,
Pitmatic: The Talk of the North East Coalfield
(Newcastle: Northumbria University Press, 2007).

‘seagull voice’
: Norman MacCaig, ‘Aunt Julia’, in
The Poems of Norman MacCaig
, ed. Ewen MacCaig (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005), p. 204.

‘Language is fossil poetry … their poetic origin’
: Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Poet’, in
The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series
, ed. Joseph Slater et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 13.

terror in the terroir
: I borrow the phrase from Joe Kennedy’s fine essay ‘Terror in the Terroir: Resisting the Rebranding of the Countryside’,
Quietus
13 (December 2013).

‘hundreds of common experiences … no words exist’
: Douglas Adams and John Lloyd,
The Meaning of Liff
(1983; London: Pan Macmillan, 2013), p. xi.

‘
Kimmeridge
(n.) … after a holiday
’
: ibid., pp. 91, 64.

‘the Anglo-Saxon peasant farmer … subtle topographical vocabulary’
: Margaret Gelling,
Place-Names in the Landscape
(London: J. M. Dent, 1984), p. 7.

‘British Bengalis, Gujaratis … such vocabulary to get established’
: Debjani Chatterjee, personal correspondence, 20 June 2014.

‘landscape is lost’
: see Oliver Rackham,
The History of the Countryside
(London: J. M. Dent, 1986), and Danny Adcock, ‘Water Meadows’,
Caught by the River
, 16 November 2013,
http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2013/11/water-meadows/
.

‘convivial’
: see Ivan Illich,
Deschooling Society
(London: Marion Boyars, 1970) and
Tools for Conviviality
(London: Calder & Boyars, 1973).

‘encouraging creative relations … people and nature’
: Jay Griffiths,
Guardian
, 10 March 2014,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/10/michael-gove-coding-education
.

‘People
exploit …
love what we particularly know’
: Wendell Berry,
Life Is a Miracle
(Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2000), p. 41.

‘Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind’
: Wade Davis, ‘Dreams from Endangered Cultures’, TED talk, February 2003,
http://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures
.

‘I want my writing … each kind of tree’
:
WW
, prefatory note.

‘Every tree … cannot draw every needle’
: John Muir,
My First Summer in the Sierra
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), in
NW
, p. 181.

‘pierce … visible things’
: Ralph Waldo Emerson,
The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, Addresses and Lectures
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1854), p. 30.

‘The surface of the ground … as to be fairly dazzling’
: Muir,
My First Summer
, in
NW
, pp. 242–3.

‘an object in the landscape … beare by the compasse’
:
OED
; John Smith,
A Sea Grammar
(London: I Hauiland, 1627), p. ix.

Chapter 2: A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook

‘Some Lewis Moorland Terms: A Peat Glossary’
: a fuller version of the glossary was in due course published by Anne Campbell as
Rathad an Isein: The Bird’s Road
–
a Lewis Moorland Glossary
(Glasgow: Faram, 2013).

‘A volume thick as the height … beyond the wit of scholars’
: Norman MacCaig, ‘By the Graveyard, Luskentyre’, in
The Poems of Norman MacCaig
, ed. Ewen MacCaig (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005), p. 432.

A slow capillary creep of knowledge has occurred
: as has occurred in many other languages where people have spent generations inhabiting a particular ecological niche and practising a particular life-way. The Marovo people of the Philippines, for instance, have a rich language for classifying the schooling manners of fish: the lexis includes
ukuka
, which designates ‘the behaviour of groups of fish when individuals drift, circle and float as if drunk’, and
sakoto
, meaning ‘quiet, almost motionless resting schools of certain fish looking like a gathering of mourners’. The Tuvan language spoken by Siberian nomads is peculiarly attentive to the aural properties of the boreal landscape:
chyzr-chyzr
means ‘the sound of treetops moving, swaying, cracking or snapping as a result of bears marking trees by clawing at them and by scratching their backs up against them’;
koyurt
is the sound of ‘human feet treading deep snow’; and
hir-hir
is ‘both the crackling of a campfire or the sudden rustling of a grouse’s wings in the grass’. See K. David Harrison,
When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 50, 125.

‘natural features … the steep slope of the scowling expression’
: Richard V. Cox,
The Gaelic Place-Names of Carloway, Isle of Lewis: Their Structure and Significance
(Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 2002), pp. 69–85.

‘magnificently surcharged with names’
: Marcel Proust,
Swann’s Way
, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1913; New York: Henry Holt, 1922), p. 437.

‘lit by the mnemonics of words’
: Finlay MacLeod (ed.),
Togail Tìr
/
Marking Time: The Map of the Western Isles
(Stornoway: Acair and An Lanntair, 1989), p. ii.

‘Cùl Leac Ghlas ri taobh … Gaelic Positioning System’
: Angus MacMillan, ‘Machair’,
Archipelago
2 (Spring 2008), 39–40.

‘a modest capacity for wonder … made to perform’
: Keith H. Basso,
Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), p. 44.

‘bold, visual, evocative … bottom of a canyon)’
: ibid., p. 23.

‘requires that one … sitting at a particular spot … precision’
: ibid., p. 89.

‘I like to. I ride that way in my mind’
: ibid., pp. 45–6.

the total number of native speakers … now around 58,000
: according to 2011 Census results, summarized at
http://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/news/census-2011-release-2a
.

‘some of the place-names are forgotten or becoming incomprehensible’
: Tim Robinson,
Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara
(Dublin: Lilliput, 1996), p. 3; see also Robinson,
Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage
(Dublin: Lilliput, 1986), pp. 13–14.

‘important role … recently’
: Cox,
Gaelic Place-Names
, p. i.

‘working relationship with the moorland … the language which accompanied that sense’
: Finlay MacLeod, ‘Counter-Desecration Phrasebook Needed’,
Stornoway Gazette
, 14 February 2008.

We are
blasé
about place
: see Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in
On Individuality and Social Forms
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 329. For Simmel, the
blasé
was a function in part of the numbing effect on perception that the ‘shocks’ of modernity had administered to the subject, and partly a function of the rise of the capitalist use-value model, which leads to what Adorno called ‘a generalized equivalence of all things’.

‘long-cultivated knowledge … the knowledge mostly unrecoverable’
: Harrison,
When Languages Die
, p. 17.

‘Without a name made in our mouths … purchase in our minds or our hearts’
: Tim Dee, ‘Naming Names’,
Caught by the River
, 25 June 2014,
http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2014/06/naming-names-tim-dee-robert-macfarlane/
.

‘the knowledge or belief that … master all things by calculation’
: Max Weber,
From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology,
trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 139.

Weber noted the widespread reduction of ‘wonder’
: I draw here on Patrick Curry’s illuminating discussion of enchantment and its ‘immiscible’ relation to modernity, ‘On Not Saving Enchantment for Modernity (Even as Religion)’, in Tom Crook and Mathew Feldman (eds.),
Sacred Modernities: Rethinking Modernity in a Post-Secular Age
(London: Continuum, 2011).

Our language for nature is now such that the things around us do not talk back
: writing four years before Weber, in a chapter of
Swann’s Way
(1913) on place-names and place-relations, Proust made a similar distinction between the rise of the scientific and wilful, and the retreat of the unintended and enchanting: ‘[There are] those natural phenomena from which our comfort
or our health can derive … an accidental … benefit,’ until ‘the day when science takes control of them, and, producing them at will, places in our hands the power to order their appearance, withdrawn from the tutelage and independent of the consent of chance’. Proust,
Swann’s Way
, p. 438.

‘the whole universe of beings … standing reserve’
: Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology,’ in
Basic Writings
, ed. David Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 325.

to have their own lives if they are to enrich ours
: I thank Tom Gilliver for our conversation about these matters on 3 November 2009.

only that by instrumentalizing nature … we have largely stunned the earth out of wonder
: see Peter Larkin, ‘Scarcely on the Way: The Starkness of Things in Sacral Space’,
http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2010/03/scarcely-on-way-starkness-of-things-in.html
.

‘One must wait for the moment … something that knows we are there’
: Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney (eds.),
Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape
(San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2006), p. xviii.

‘That rivers and streams … nearly meet one another’
: ibid., p. 159.

‘a type of low brush thicket … shin oak (
Quercus harvardii
)’
: ibid., p. 325.

‘[I]t is along the banks of slow-moving creeks … only a second change of temperature’
: ibid., pp. 89–90.

‘to recall and to explore … slipping off into abstract space’
: ibid., p. xxiii.

‘the effect on the landscape resource … major and long-term’
: ‘Lewis Wind Farm: Non-Technical Summary of the Environmental Statement’, submitted by Lewis Wind Power Limited, 17 October 2004,
http://www.cne-siar.gov.uk/windpower/lewiswindpower/documents/NTS%20final%20version.pdf
.