The Wild Places (Penguin Original) (32 page)

I reached the sea wall near Bradwell late in the afternoon. Crickets and grasshoppers were chirring invisibly from the grass, and the wind was still strong and warm. Streams of birds passed overhead, most too distant or unfamiliar for me to identify. The tide was halfway in, and miles of glossy mud lay open to the air.

Only a few yards short of the beginning of the saltmarsh, next to a little copse of blackthorn, was a barn-like structure, perhaps forty feet at its apex, with a wooden roof, and walls made from mortar and rocks: hunks of ironstone, huge flints, chalky boulders.

I pushed open the front door, which swung silently inwards. The interior was undivided, high and huge. The air was still after the gusting northerly wind. Bluebottles did lazy buzzing laps of the upper space. Light fell at a slant through tall windows.

It was an abbey: St Cedd’s, founded in the seventh century. Cedd had been sent south as a missionary by St Finan of Lindesfarne, after much of the region around Essex and London had reverted to paganism. He had been the pioneer of the short-lived East Saxon Celtic Church which, like its western and northern counterparts, was distinguished by mysticism and nature-love.

I walked up to the rough altar. Sunk into its base were three stones. One, dolerite, had come from the Holy Island of Lindisfarne; the second, gneiss, from Iona, where the Celtic mission in Britain began; the third, lias, from Lastingham, in the Yorkshire Moors, the village to which Cedd had travelled from Essex and where he had eventually died of plague. These travelled stones reminded of my own collection, sitting on the shelf above my desk. And the abbey itself, standing out on these edgelands, recalled Ynys Enlli and its
peregrini
: a rare lateral rhyme, binding the country from east to west.

I left the abbey, and walked through the blackthorn copse. There, invisible from outside the trees, nestled a little house: Linnet’s Cottage. It was a bird observatory; next to its door a list of recent sightings was displayed, scribbled in marker pen on a whiteboard: peregrine, honey buzzard, marsh harrier, skua, greenshank, little egret, tern . . . The monks had gone long ago, but new watchers on the shore had taken their place.

From the wood I turned south, and began walking out along the sea wall. Swallows scudded overhead in twos and threes, moving with fast wing flicks. I saw what I thought was a hare’s ear,
Bupleurum tenuissimum
, snug on its short stem. Inland were vast fields, on which three or four black barns sailed like barges. To the seaward of the wall were the marshes, tinged purple.

Saltmarshes form in relatively sheltered coasts, where silt and sand accumulate, becoming colonised by salt-tolerant plants: sea purslane, golden samphire, glasswort, sea aster and others. The plants trap more sediment, and the marsh becomes a kind of filter for the tidal water, meshing off nutrients and foods with each receding tide. The architecture of saltmarshes, and the mudflats into which they dwindle, is formidably complex: a maze of rays, wriggling channels, creeks, fleets, gutways and swatchways, all of which are kept clear by the sluicing action of the tide.

As well as the unusual plants that form them, these saltmarshes are homes to hundreds of rare insects, and provide uniquely safe nesting grounds for waders. They are also among the most effective tidal defences known.

Even the wide saltmarshes of the Essex coastline, however, cannot cope with the rising tides of climate change. Over the past century, sea levels have increased by an average of eight inches worldwide. This creep is primarily due to the thermal expansion of the world’s ocean water, warmed by an atmosphere heated by carbon emissions from aviation, industry and energy production. Under pressure from the rising tides, the saltmarshes of the Essex coastline have been in steady decline since the 1970s. At present, around a third of a square mile of saltmarsh is lost each year along the Essex coastline alone: it is anticipated that half the world’s saltmarsh area will be lost within seventy-five years. And after the saltmarshes have gone, the sea will be freer to advance inland. The pattern of land-loss occurring in Essex has its parallels across the soft coasts of Britain and Ireland, and across the world.

I walked south along the sea wall for five miles, and in all that time I met no one, and saw only a farmer, turning distantly in his tractor. I stopped to pull fruit from a wild apple tree that was growing on the edge of a dyke and that was heavy with little yellow and pink apples, I ate salty leaves of sea-kale and sea-beet, and chewed on the liquoricey feathery fronds of the abundant fennel. Once, a weasel emerged from long grass at the foot of the sea wall, looked warily around, and then made off in its hooping run for cover in the long grass.

After five miles, I turned back north, and trespassed inland, along a drainage dyke between fields, to a small wood of poplar, hazel and ash. I had seen the wood across the fields, and had thought it might make a good place to sleep. I reached it, and crept into it, pushing low under poplar branches. I remembered exploring the oakwoods of Staverton Thicks in Suffolk with Roger on just such a bright windy day, a year and a half previously, stepping over dozens of fallen oak trunks that were rotting into the ground. Roger had explained to me how essential this decaying matter was to the health of a woodland, that the benign influence of trees continued long after their death. He had stopped by a big prostrate oak limb, and prised off a curved gule of bark; beneath it teemed hundreds of insects: woodlice, ants and others species I could not recognise. Then we had forged on deeper into the wood, to a cleared circle where Roger said he knew local Wiccan enthusiasts came to worship, sometimes naked. I wasn’t sure I believed him, but he held to his line. Talismans were hung by wool and string from oak branches; feathers, rags, fragments of text, spinning and swinging. On the way back through the wood, I had levered a long peat-brown wedge of hard wood from the root of a fallen oak. Later, I sanded it down and gave it to my father as a memento from the Thicks.

The poplars were noisy in the wind. I lay on my back there for a while, in the dense dry leaf-litter and the submarine light of the wood, thinking about Roger. The susurrus of the leaves and the density of the canopy meant that the few sounds I could hear - two gunshots, the honk of a distant ship’s horn - seemed to arrive having passed through wood; as though, in Baker’s phrase, I were standing at the heart of a tree.

I left the wood just before dusk. I had found it too enclosing: I wanted to spend the night out at the edge, on the sea wall. So I walked out to a remote curving stretch of wall, where only fifty yards of saltmarsh separated me from the high-tide mark. The wind had died away, and there was the smell of grass and salt in the warm air. The sun hung low and yellow over the western fields, diffusing a rich gold light that oiled my hands and face with its colour. I recalled Baker’s description of a coastal sunset: ‘The yellow orbital ring of the horizon closes over the glaring cornea of the sun.’

A line of dense grass grew on the seaward side of the wall, which hid me from the thousands of migrating birds - dunlins, redshanks, oystercatchers, curlews, gulls - that were gathering out on the mudflats and bright white cockle-shell beaches, which radiated an intense light. The incoming tide was moving the birds closer to shore, concentrating their numbers. Big waves would send them up in sudden clouds, and then they would rain down again on to the mud a few yards nearer to me. From my hiding place, I could watch without disturbing them.

High tide was reached at about six o’clock. Half an hour later, dusk started to settle on the land, and as it did so the grasshoppers began to stop their chirring, until I could hear only five or six, then two, then one, then none. I watched the light move through its late-day modalities. It became thicker, until just before dark it seemed to consist of single photons, which moved and swarmed with the drugged heaviness of bees.

Suddenly the sky above me was filled with a creaking noise. I looked up and saw a big flock of common gulls - 1,000 birds, perhaps more - flying over me from the west. They reached the water-line, and turned in a single shoaling movement, their white bodies flashing in the dusk as they caught the last light of the low sun, and then they spread and settled on the sea just offshore, turned to face the wind, and formed into a loose bobbing line, one bird every yard or so, that stretched away up and down the coast as far as I could see in both directions.

Full night came; moonless but clear. I lay on my back in my sleeping-bag, watching the silhouettes of the birds as they flew over, and watching the stars pricking into view: first one, then two, then five or six, then too many to count. A scatter of meteors fell - the Piscid showers of September. I started to notice other lit bodies, moving fast: the blipping orbital paths of satellites, but also others, lower than that, visible only as fixed moving lights against darkness. They were passenger planes coming into Stansted airport, 10,000 feet up or more. I realised I was sleeping in the middle of two flight-paths, two migrations: one avian and one human.

Around ten o’clock, I heard a dozen or so big birds move in over me. Geese, I guessed, probably brent geese: pioneers of the major migration of their species that would begin in a few weeks’ time. They splash-landed on dyke water only ten yards to my south, and stayed there all night, filling the air with their hound-like barking.

Northern European myth tells of an event called ‘The Wild Hunt’. On tempestuous nights, Wodan would lead across the land the troop of warriors who had died in battle, accompanied by their war-hounds. Travellers who found themselves in the path of the Wild Hunt were advised to lie face down. In this way only the cold feet of the black dogs who ran with the hunt would touch them, and they would not be harmed. The purpose of the Hunt was to collect the souls of the recently deceased; its riders were the summoners of the dead. Many different versions of the Hunt exist: in a Christian form of the myth, it was said to occur when Gabriel rallied his angels into battle. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle detailed how, on 6 February 1127, the Wild Hunt galloped through the deer park of Peterborough and then through the woods up to Stamford: a ‘furious host’ rushing through the dark forest paths, across the heaths, over the fells, along the coast, and between the places of ‘mirk’. Gervase of Tilbury recorded in the thirteenth century that Arthur and his knights still led a Wild Hunt along the holloway that ran between Cadbury and Glastonbury.

The ur-myth of the Wild Hunt was almost certainly an explanation of the autumn migration of wild geese - brent, snow, Canada. Most years, the geese travel in skeins, in groups of fewer than a hundred birds. Some years, however, they fly low and in large numbers, and when they pass overhead in the darkness, the noise of their wings is so loud that it can resemble a plane or - to pre-aviation ears - a war-host of angels. An eerie German soldiers’ song, composed in the trenches in 1917, spoke of how ‘The Wild Geese rush through the night / With shrill cries to the North. / Beware, beware this dangerous flight / For death is all around us.’

That night on the sea wall, I thought about migration: those strong seasonal compulsions that draw creatures between regions, from one hemisphere to another. More than two million migrating birds used the soft shores of Britain and Ireland as resting points each autumn and winter. Maps could be drawn - had been drawn - showing their flight-paths. They looked not unlike the maps showing the flyways of different airlines. But instead of linking city to city and runway to runway, the bird-migration maps linked wild place to wild place: connected the marshes, mudflats and inland lakes of Britain and Ireland outwards into a wider web of wild places - the boreal forests of Scandinavia, the wide tundra of Siberia. The migrating birds did not shun humans; they were happy to live round them. What they did assess when choosing where to land, though, was wildness: how far the water and the land would allow them to follow their own instincts and fulfil their own needs. Where they could not do this, they did not land.

I woke just after dawn. The sun, over the sea, was round and flat as a coin, orange in colour. Mist hung over the fields, and the wind had died away almost to nothing. I could see no more than 300 yards through the haze. The mist resembled water, as though while I slept a tide had swept in overnight, and flooded the land. The structures of the barns, footless in the mist, seemed even more ark-like. The copses and spinneys stood out like islands. I walked three miles north, back through the mist, to St Cedd’s. Near the abbey I sat down on a bench that faced out to sea, to rest and to watch the birds.

After twenty minutes or so, a man and a woman came and sat down next to me, laying their walking-sticks on the ground, parallel to the side of the bench. I made to leave. ‘Please don’t let us drive you away,’ the woman said. We introduced ourselves. They were about seventy, I guessed. Peter wore big Reactalite glasses, with side shields, and a brown collared T-shirt. He smiled slowly. Yvonne had a pearl necklace, and did most of the talking. They came out to St Cedd’s every weekend, she said, unless they were visiting their son in Hong Kong where he worked teaching English, which they did every two years or so - it was a good job he had, but it kept him away from England. Yvonne had spent years living on a yacht moored at Bradwell, when she was a young girl. Her father had been from the East End, and had moved up to Essex after the war because he couldn’t settle in the city. She explained to me how to walk on mudflats without sinking in. It’s not what you expect, she said, you have to angle your feet, tilt the insides up, don’t keep them flat. And make sure you keep moving. She got up from the bench, and did a walk up and down to show me the technique.

Peter told me about a famous photograph of one of the highest tides he had known, in 1960, when Walter Linnet, who had lived in Linnet’s Cottage, had been floated out of his house. Linnet had taken his possessions into his duck punt, and had navigated right up to the eastern wall of St Cedd’s, and that was what the photo showed: him in his loaded duck-punt, floating up against the wall of the abbey.