Landmarks (31 page)

Authors: Robert Macfarlane

BOOK: Landmarks

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‘I am a woodlander … a tree is itself a river of sap’
: ibid., p. x.

‘The central value of English … and environmental education’
: Roger Deakin, ‘Dark Horses: Environmental Education and English Teaching’, unpublished lecture delivered at the Royal Festival Hall, 21 September 1990.

‘The dandelion in full flower … is itself incomparable and unique’
: D. H. Lawrence,
Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays
(1925; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 358.

‘[r]edstarts flew from tree to tree … is what makes it graceful’
:
WL
, p. 91.

‘park-bench green … footballer in a striped vest’
:
NFWTF
, pp. 43, 208.

‘Angels are the people we care for and who care for us’
: Roger Deakin, unpublished notebook entry.

‘only interested in everything’
: Les Murray, quoted by Roger Deakin,
WL
, p. 3.

‘go on and on … settle for ever in one place’
: Edward Thomas,
The South Country
(London: J. M. Dent, 1909), p. 161.

‘I am Hansje, born and bred … to see the earth clarified’
: letter from Hansje te Velde to Robert Macfarlane, 15 November 2011.

Chapter 5: Hunting Life

‘cloud-biting anchor shape’
:
P
, p. 30.

‘Autumn … like the arch of Orion’
: ibid., p. 29.

‘Dear Sam … an infinity of sight’
: letter from J. A. Baker to Don Samuel, September/October 1945, Baker Archive, Albert Sloman Library, University of Essex.

‘a prickly customer’ … ‘loner’ as an adult
: Doreen Baker, undated interview with David Cobham, edited transcript, Baker Archive.

‘Binoculars and a hawk-like vigilance … myopic human vision’
:
P
, p. 93.

‘Patching Hall Lane … singing lustily’
: ibid., p. 282.

‘
Sunday May 9th
…
as a bird’s throat’
: ibid. Compare Nan Shepherd: ‘It is, it is, the blackbird singing! / The beat of time is in the note. / Yet its own infinite arises / From that small perishable throat.’ ‘Blackbird in Snow’,
ITC
, p. 17.

‘plunged into the wet wood … sharing that joy’
:
P
, p. 284. When Baker came to re-describe this incident in
The Hill of Summer
, he omitted Sid from his account and implied he was alone. See ibid., pp. 204–5.

‘
Saturday November 20th 1954
…
revellers in the wind’
: ibid., p. 289.

‘Tuesday November 1st 1955
…
autumn slum of trees’
: ibid., p. 311.

‘clear varnish of yellow … Rembrandt oil-painting’
: ibid., p. 296.

‘
Wednesday April 23rd 1958
… tricky and strange’
: ibid., p. 372.

‘glorious light … or a falcon, presumably’
: J. A. Baker, ‘Peregrine Diaries’, entry for 6 January 1957, Baker Archive.

‘the possibility of it’s … flashed across my mind’
: ibid., entry for 10 January 1957, Baker Archive.

‘The north wind … pleached lattice of the hedges’
:
P
, p. 103.

‘Four short-eared owls soothed out of the gorse’
: ibid., p. 67.

‘Savagely he lashed himself … rim of the black cloud’
: ibid., p. 70.

‘like a small mad puritan with a banana in his mouth’
: ibid., p. 105.

‘glowed purple and grey like broccoli’
: ibid., p. 113.

‘five thousand dunlin … gleamed with golden chitin’
: ibid., p. 52.

‘the pages dance with image … that marshland drama’
: Kenneth Allsop, review of
The Peregrine
,
London Evening News
, 23 March 1967.

‘sabring fall from the sky’
:
P
, pp. 124–5.

‘A falcon peregrine … splinters of white wood’
: ibid., p. 49.

‘The peregrine lives … maps of black and white’
: ibid., p. 46.

‘rings of small black stones’
: ibid., p. 55.

‘into dark twiggy lines … blue and silver mouth’
: ibid., p. 128.

‘Wherever he goes … there be purified’
: ibid., p. 48.

‘Evanescent as flame … the white helix of the gulls’
: ibid., p. 51.

‘a strong feeling of proximity, identification’
: ibid., p. 126.

‘The body of a woodpigeon … We shun men’
: ibid., p. 92.

‘The [book’s] strange and awful grip … hawk’s feathers, skin and spirit’
: Allsop, review of
The Peregrine
,
London Evening News
.

‘his usual loose-limbed panache’
:
P
, p. 73.

‘the hunter becoming the thing he hunts’
: ibid., p. 92.

a British raptor specialist called Derek Ratcliffe had published a landmark paper
: D. A. Ratcliffe, ‘The Status of the Peregrine in Great Britain’,
Bird Study
10 (1963), 56–90. Ratcliffe’s paper, among other factors, led to a control of DDT use in British agriculture, and the peregrine population saw a slow climb. In countries where pesticide use was not controlled the results were catastrophic: 2,000 breeding pairs in Finland in 1950 had been reduced to 16 pairs by 1975.

‘the filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals’
:
P
, p. 31.

‘Few winter in England … the ancient eyries are dying’
: ibid., pp. 108–9.

‘As I approached I could see … We cannot tear it away’
: ibid., pp. 112–13.

‘I hope to have the good fortune … Friday Feb 10th’
: undated letter from reader, Baker Archive.

Chapter 6: The Tunnel of Swords and Axes

‘rough sea-billows … among them are the lost-words that I sought’
: see
The Kalevala
, trans. John Martin Crawford (London: G. Putnam, 1889), Runes XVI and XVII, pp. 161–80.

one of which shelters a Quaker burial ground from the eighteenth century
: this plantation has been cut down since the time of writing.

‘limned the edges of its streams … eaves of its woods’
:
L
, p. 48.

‘seventeen thresholds that grant access to the moor’
: ibid., p. 133.

Hare-gate:
an opening in a hedge … winter is filled with a torrent’
: ibid., pp. 195–6.

‘Could I reconstruct … with which to sound the landscape’
: ibid., p. 149.

‘Where before I collected fragments … to call upon the landscape’
: ibid., p. 137.

‘Perhaps there is a glimpse … by virtue of their difference, their strangeness?’
: ibid., pp. 138–9.

‘place-name poetry … beauty of certain lexicons’
: Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton,
Wolf Notes
(Cumbria: Corbel Stone Press, 2010), p. 27.

‘Ulpha is still inhabited … can be uncovered and celebrated’
: ibid., p. 9.

‘
gathered pace, taking in tributaries … in the Late Bronze Age)
’
: Richard Skelton,
Limnology
(Cumbria: Corbel Stone Press, 2012), endnote.

‘receding below the threshold … of all melodies’
:
L
, p. 126.

Chapter 7: North-Minded

‘the malevolent north’
: see Margaret Atwood,
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

‘it is possible to live wisely on the land, and to live well’
:
AD
, p. xxviii.

‘stand toe-to at the water’s edge … boots in six hours’
: ibid., p. 252.

‘the classic lines … extended, and quiet’
: ibid., p. xxiii.

‘monotonic … plains of open water’
: ibid., pp. 229, xxiii.

‘chitinous shell … staghorn lichen next to them’
: ibid., p. 254.

‘the grace of accuracy’
: Robert Lowell, ‘Epilogue’, in
Robert Lowell: Collected Poems
, ed. Frank Bidart (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 838.

‘removed and exceptional part of Scotland’
:
DM
, p. 8.

‘a pencil-stripe of light … relentless daylight over Norway’
: ibid., p. 60.

‘green silence … the returning cold’
: ibid., pp. 63, 18, 21.

‘A little stone jetty … extraordinary water’
: ibid., p. 38.

‘noticed everything … put away for the winter’
: ibid., p. 73.

‘[f]ine gradations … runs the length of the room’
: ibid., p. 71.

‘to capture the moment, lost and yet preserved forever’
: ibid., p. 7.

‘which dies even as … catch its likeness’
: ibid., p. 147.

‘conservatorie’
: Thomas Browne,
Urne-Buriall
(1658), in
Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall
, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff (New York: NYRB Classics, 2012), p. 114.

‘the predatory loss that shadows all human pleasure’
:
DM
, p. 14.

‘basalt rocks bordering the Baltic … the high sun on the sea’
: ibid., p. 6.

‘black dog flickers … edge of the lawns’
: ibid., p. 65.

‘We have gathered things … the place where we live’
: ibid., p. 24.

‘moony silver … the bright sky into itself’
: ibid., p. 66.

‘breaks forward into the sunlight … light into itself’
: ibid., p. 74.

‘hold the dimming sky … islands in the archipelago’
: ibid., pp. 64, 70.

‘All the years I have been writing … laughing, painting out of doors’
: ibid., p. 40

‘In a winter-hammered landscape … ignorance falling away from us’
: Barry Lopez,
About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory
(1998; London: Harvill, 1999), p. 122, and
AD
, p. xxviii.

‘The sharpness of the morning frost … magnifying lens’
:
DM
, p. 165.

‘depthlessly clear’
:
AD
, p. xxiv.

Chapter 8: Bastard Countryside

‘drosscape’
: see Alan Berger,
Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007).

‘edgeland’
: see Marion Shoard, ‘Edgelands’, in
Remaking the Landscape
, ed. Jennifer Jenkins (London: Profile, 2002), pp. 117–46.

‘crapola’
: Philip Guston, quoted in Philip Roth,
Shop Talk
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001), p. 135.

‘bastard countryside … the noise of humankind’
: the passage was added by Victor Hugo to the 1861 edition of
Les Misérables
. I use the translation given by T. J. Clark in ‘The View from Notre-Dame’, in
The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader
(London: Routledge, 2004), p. 179.

‘the messy limbo … outer-Outer London’
: Kenneth Allsop,
Adventure Lit Their Star: The Story of an Immigrant Bird
(1949; London: Penguin, 1972), p. 9.

‘asphalt … noose’
: Iain Sinclair,
London Orbital
(London: Granta, 2002), pp. 17, 140.

‘frontier line to civilisation’
: Richard Jefferies, Preface to
Wild Life in a Southern County
(1879; Toller Fratrum: Little Toller, 2011), p. 15.

‘Why, we must have been blind … but we saw them not!’
: Walter Besant,
The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies
(1888; London: Chatto & Windus, 1905), p. 167. Besant, it should be noted, was not wholly approving of Jefferies, considering his talent narrow and certainly confined to non-fiction.

‘broke most radically with … human history’
: Eric Hobsbawm,
Industry and Empire
(London: Penguin, 1967), p. 15.

‘Wilderness! … I have never forgotten it’
: Charles Dickens,
Nicholas Nickleby
(1839), ed. Jill Muller (New York: Spark, 2005), p. 439.

‘London looks so large … so barren and so wild’
: Charles Dickens,
Little Dorrit
(1857), ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), p. 131.

‘unseen influence … under the calm oaks’
:
NNL
, p. ix.

‘quitting the suburb’
: ibid., p. 85.

‘rubbish heaps … garden flowers about the metropolis’
: ibid., pp. 90, 154.

‘coloured … like a continuous garden’
: ibid., p. 169.

‘very large cinder and dust heap … any stray morsels of food’
: ibid., pp. 87–8.

‘berry year … eight in a stalk’
: ibid., p. 119.

‘put forth green buds … flowers not sown in order’
: ibid., pp. 130, 133.

‘fully two thousand … their very wings seem to flap together’
: ibid., p. 129.

‘It would be very easy … method of knowing’
: ibid., p. ix.

‘Everyone must find their own locality … you find yours yonder’
: ibid.

‘keep[ing] an eye … as it really is’
: ibid., pp. xi, 11.

‘bluebells … unseen, except by rabbits’
: ibid., p. 23.