Landmarks (30 page)

Authors: Robert Macfarlane

BOOK: Landmarks

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‘a vast, dead place … swept by a chill wet wind’
: Ian Jack, ‘Breathing Space’,
Guardian
, 26 July 2006.

‘abominable … a waste and a howling wilderness’
: Daniel Defoe,
A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Divided into Circuits or Journies
, 3 vols. (London: Strahan, 1724–6), vol. III, p. 74.

‘hideous blank … dreary, dismal desert’
: Argus,
June 1858. See, for a discussion of the perception of the Australian interior as
terra nullius,
the third chapter of Roslynn Doris Haynes,
Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

‘so much [of it] is unproductive wilderness’
: James Carnegy-Arbuthnott, quoted in the
Guardian
, 10 August 2013,
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/10/scotland-land-rights
. Compare the July 2013 comments of the Conservative peer Lord Howell during ‘Lords’ Questions’ that the north-east of England contains ‘large and uninhabited and desolate areas’ where ‘there’s plenty of room for fracking’, ‘without any kind of threat to the rural environment’,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthvideo/10211388/Lord-Howell-frack-the-desolate-North-East.html.

‘it is precisely what is invisible … a place to another’
: this is Barry Lopez’s gloss on Yi Fu Tuan’s arguments in his
Topophilia
(1974). See
AD
, p. 278.

‘Those who wish to explain to politicians … sounding either wet or extreme’
: MacLeod, ‘Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’.

‘An Talamh Briste, Na Feadanan Gorma
… or to commemorate stories’
: Anne Campbell and Jon MacLeod,
A-mach an Gleann
(Stornoway: privately published, 2007),
passim
.

‘Scotland small? Our multiform … marvellously descriptive! And incomplete!’
: Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘Scotland Small?’, in ‘Dìreadh I’, from
Complete Poems
, Vol. II (Manchester: Carcanet, 1994), p. 1,170.

‘What is required … a Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’
: MacLeod, ‘Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’.

‘something emotive abides in the land … invisible to the ironist’
: Lopez and Gwartney,
Home Ground
, p. xviii.

‘a narrative not fully known … larger chains of events’
: Adam Potkay, ‘Wordsworth and the Ethics of Things’,
PMLA
123:2 (2008), 394. This deep-buried meaning of the word
thing
is likely to be a residue of the Old Danish
Thing
as designating a community meeting where legal issues were disputed and settled; i.e. a parliament or a court. In such a context, the idea of a
Thing
bears within it a judicial space of uncertainty, the connotation of a matter whose resolution has yet to be determined.

‘galvanized against inertia … as our natural reticence allows us to be’
: Marianne Moore, ‘Feeling and Precision’,
Sewanee Review
52:4 (October–December 1944), 499–500. I am compelled, too, by Moore’s fanaticism for rhythm as a means of cognition, a kind of precision: ‘it [the effect] begins far back of the beat, so that you don’t see when the down beat comes. It was started such a long distance ahead, it makes it possible to be exact.’

‘For knowledge, add; for wisdom, take away’
: Charles Simic, quoted by Jan Zwicky in
Wisdom & Metaphor
(Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2005), p. 74.

In this respect it would inhabit … reciprocal perception between human and non-human
: see John Llewellyn,
The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
(New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991).

‘John Locke, in the seventeenth century … he had perceived or imagined it’
: Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Funes the Memorious’, in
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings
(New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 65.

‘tendered … alterity were itself pure gift’
: Potkay, ‘Ethics of Things’, 401. Potkay draws on the work of Sylvia Benso; see also Larkin, ‘Scarcely on the Way’.

‘having language to hand’
: Zwicky,
Wisdom & Metaphor
, p. 32.

‘Tact: 1 (a) …
translating Andreas Ornithoparcus)
’
:
OED
online.

Tact as due attention … as rightful tactility
: see Valentine Cunningham,
Reading After Theory
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001).

Chapter 3: The Living Mountain

‘the elementals’
:
LM
, p. 4.

‘heaven-appointed task … to the approved pattern’
: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 2 April 1931, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

‘I have had the same bedroom all my life!’
: Nan Shepherd, quoted in Vivienne Forrest, ‘In Search of Nan Shepherd’,
Leopard Magazine
(December 1986–January 1987), 17.

‘all movement … those limbs move as you look at them’
: letter from Nan Shepherd to Barbara Balmer, 15 January 1981, private collection.

‘library-cormorant’
: Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Collected Letters 1785–1800
, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 156.

‘a tall slim figure with a halo … an awe-inspiring dispatch case’
: anon., quoted in Louise Donald, ‘Nan Shepherd’,
Leopard Magazine
(October 1977), 21.

‘
long lean man … need not cease to exhilarate’
: Nan Shepherd, quoted in ibid., 20.

‘dark wisdom, almost sorcery … giant ruffled eagle’s feather’
: Erlend Clouston, personal communication, 30 April 2014.

‘Poetry … burning heart of life’
: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 14 March 1930, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

‘possess[ed] … kind of thing that comes out of me’
: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 2 April 1931.

‘snow driving dim on the blast … green as ice’
:
ITC
, pp. 3, 53.

‘does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself’
:
LM
, p. 23.

‘not out of myself, but in myself’
: ibid., p. 108.

‘Oh burnie with the glass-white … over stone …’
:
ITC
, p. 1.

‘I’ve gone dumb … for the mere sake of making a noise’
: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 2 April 1931.

‘Dear Nan, You don’t need me to tell you … hill & country lovers’
: letter from Neil Gunn to Nan Shepherd, 30 October 1945, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

‘a traffic of love’
:
LM
, p. xliii.

‘Parochialism is universal … a man can fully experience’
: Patrick Kavanagh, ‘The Parish and the Universe’, in
Collected Pruse
[
sic
] (London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1967), pp. 281–3.

‘
irradiate the common … make something universal’
: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 2 April 1931.

‘lust … effect upon me’
:
LM
, pp. 8, 9, 107.

‘merely to be with the mountain … but to be with him’
: ibid., p. 15.

‘I am on the plateau again … stay up here for a while’
: ibid., p. 22

‘The plateau is the true summit … eddies on the plateau surface’
: ibid., p. 2.

‘a legendary task, which heroes, not men, accomplished’
: ibid., p. 107.

‘thirled me for life to the mountain’
: ibid., p. 107.

‘Birch needs rain … can be as good as drunk with it’
: ibid., p. 53.

‘the coil over coil … leggy shadow-skeleton’
: ibid., pp. 61, 52, 65.

‘Beech bud-sheaths … brightness to the dusty roads of May’
: ‘The Colour of Deeside’, Nan Shepherd,
Deeside Field
8 (1937), 9.

‘bland as silk … rooted far down in their immobility’
:
LM
, pp. 93, 92.

‘I knew when I had looked … hardly begun to see’
: ibid., p. 11.

‘the eye sees what it didn’t … whose working is dimly understood’
: ibid., p. 106.

‘snow skeleton, attached to nothing’
: ibid., p. 42.

‘I could have sworn I saw … I never saw it again’
: ibid., p. 2.

‘Such illusions … but steadies us again’
: ibid., p. 101.

‘impossible to coerce
’
: ibid., p. 91.

‘On one toils … toil[s] upwards’
: ibid., pp. 10, 16.

‘as the earth must see itself’
: ibid., p. 11.

‘twisted and intertwined … secret of their formation’
: ibid., pp. 55, 57, 69, 33.

‘interlaced … frozen floor of a hollow’
: ibid., p. 70.

‘interlocks … hidden hollow’
: ibid., pp. 70, 106, 72.

‘patiently adds fact to fact’
: ibid., p. 58.

‘Slowly I have found my way in … I should know’
: ibid., p. 105.

‘too much … resumed formation and direction’
: ibid., pp. 28, 70.

‘The mind cannot carry away all … what it has carried away’
: ibid., p. 3.

‘strong white … limber’
: ibid., pp. 23, 98, 102, 51, 92.

‘That’s the way to see the world: in our own bodies’
: Gary Snyder,
The Practice of the Wild
(San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), p. 106.

‘roaring scourge … purple as a boozer’s’
:
LM
, pp. 1, 44, 36.

‘boys … high-spirited and happy report’
: ibid., p. 39.

‘the body may be said to think’
: ibid., p. 105.

‘incarnates … medium for having a world’
: Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception
, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962),
passim
, but see especially pp. 144–6.

‘something moves between me and it … except by recounting it’
:
LM
, p. 8.

‘The body is not … identity for the hand as much as for the eye’
: ibid., pp. 106, 103.

‘This is the innocence we have lost … all the way through’
: ibid., p. 105.

‘out of the body … soil of the earth’
: ibid., pp. 106, 92.

‘one has been in … That is all’
: ibid., p. 92.

‘coveted knowledge … pursuit of learning’
: Donald, ‘Nan Shepherd’, 20.

‘I can see the wood … that reverberates/illuminates’
: letters from Nan Shepherd to Barbara Balmer, 15 January and 2 February 1981, private collection.

‘reticent about herself … grace of the soul’
: Jessie Kesson, quoted in Forrest, ‘In Search of Nan Shepherd’, 19.

‘striking power … he said yes to life’
: Nan Shepherd, Introduction to Charles Murray,
Last Poems
(Aberdeen: Charles Murray Trust/Aberdeen University Press, 1970), p. ix.

‘I hope it is true for those … has been so good, so fulfilling’
: Nan Shepherd, quoted in Forrest, ‘In Search of Nan Shepherd’, 19.

‘a peerer into corners’
:
LM
, p. xlii.

‘recesses’
: ibid., p. 9.

‘It cannot be seen until one stands almost on its lip’
: ibid., p. 10.

‘The sound of all this moving water is as integral … a dozen different notes at once’
: ibid., p. 26.

‘journey to the source … and flowed away’
: ibid., p. 23.

‘total mountain … being’
: ibid., p. 105.

Chapter 4: The Woods and the Water

‘part-islanded’
:
WW
, p. 4.

‘a great inland sea … the pleasures of living beside it’
: ibid.

‘sit[s] lightly on the sea … like an upturned boat’
: ibid., p. 8.

‘It’s extraordinary what you see in an English moat’
: Roger Deakin,
The Garden
, BBC Radio 4.