In the heart of the hidden countryside, there are secrets and fears
PAUL JOHNSON
In theory, the British countryside, unlike many parts of the world, is not frightening. No one need feel threatened by it. It was not always so. Lord Burghley, in Queen Elizabeth l's day, during a journey through Sussex, complained cravenly of the tremendous 'mountains'. The early visitors to the Lake District, in search of the picturesque, coined phrases like 'the Jaws of Borrowdale' and 'the Horrors of Skiddaw' (surely the world's tamest peak, often ascended on bicycles) to express the frissons which were part of their pleasure. The early drawings of the Lake hills, say 1750-80, show violently jagged rock formations which do not exist in reality; what Gerard Manley Hopkins was to call 'mind-mountains'. The young Wordsworth, susceptible to this spirit, stole a boat to explore Ullswater better, and was punished by suddenly seeing an immense and terrifying precipice, invisible from land. This precipice may not exist, but it is curious that Thomas Wright of Derby, quite independently, painted a superb view of the lake in which a daemonic rock formation makes its appearance at this spot. This masterpiece now hangs in the Wordsworth Centre in Grasmere, a reminder that English 'cliffs of fall' can really exist.
Moreover, there are genuine terror spots. One such is Loch Coruisk in Skye. This deep and dark sea-loch takes you right into the heart of the Black Cuillin mountains. You can land at its head to begin the immediate assault of their razor-sharp ridges, built of the savage, gabbro rock which rips the skin off your hands like sandpaper. I once made this daunting journey with the late and muchloved Master of Lovat. who may have been as frightened as I was but did not bat one of his languid eyelids. Oh, the terror of those black precipices, the only ones in Britain to raise Alpine difficulties. The scene at their foot is one of total desolation. It is brilliantly recorded in a large oil by the great Victorian landscapist George Sherwood Hunter, which hangs in my London dining-room. It frightens ladies, one of whom complained to me, 'It's enough to make my teeth chatter during the hottest mulligatawny.'
More subtly scary are the impassive Cairngorms, an immense Tibetan plateau of about 4,000 feet, misty and somewhat featureless, like Dartmoor, where it is easy to get lost despite meticulous map-reading. When lost above the mist-line the best course is to find a gorge, beck or corrie, and follow it down. It will bring you out somewhere in the end. But the Cairngorms possess a sinister feature, unknown anywhere else, called a False Carrie. Lost and anxious, you follow it down, thinking you are on the path to safety, and it suddenly peters out at the foot of a cliff, and you find yourself surrounded by higher ground in all directions. It is like being at the bottom of a mist-shrouded saucer of impenetrable rock. I shiver just to think of it, and bones are there to show proof of its fatal deceptions.
But, in addition to such celebrated mountain ogre-places, there are, to my eyes anyway, certain parts of the innocuous English countryside, so green and sylvan and seemingly hospitable to man, which harbour spine-chilling reflections. There are many in Somerset, nestling in its miniature ranges — Mendips and Quantocks, Brendons and Blackdowns — and then Exmoor. One such gave an icy edge to Coleridge's 'kubla Khan' before 'a person on business from Porlock' interrupted his laudanum-tinted musings. Last month I discovered a new one, in one of the deep, shuddering river valleys which gouge out dense woody channels in the west Somerset hills. I will be a little imprecise because I do not wish to betray its exact location. We drove for many difficult miles along byways and through minute villages, crossing the fast-flowing rivers where game fish are to be found. Eventually we came across a crude concrete bridge, small and narrow, with wooden palings by way of a parapet. Nosing our way across, we found a track, deeply pitted with immense foot-holes and rivulets, leading up the dark valley. We followed this Calvary route at walking pace, taking half an hour to cover less than two miles, while the river burbled on our right, weaving, dipping and tumbling, spawning deep icy pools, while trackless hills stretched up on our left. In the fullness of time, shuddered and shaken, we reached a Somerset longhouse, whitewashed and tidy, and equipped with the bare necessities of modern life, but virtually untouched since the 17th century, and in origins much older. Within living memory, the top end had been a cow-byre, as intended by its stonemason-architect, and the bottom end could well have been a home for fowl even more recently. Ancient stone barns stood around, and beyond them — nothing.
But was there nothing? Under a low sky of leaden, lowering cotton wool, I walked further up the valley, with the round but precipi tous hills closing in. It seemed to stretch, limitless, right into the entrails of Exmoor. Knots of age-old, self-propagating birch and oak trees clung to the valley sides. Overhead, two buzzards wheeled and stooped, appraising me carefully. There were a few sheep: this is mountain-grazing country, nothing more. The silence was so intense as to be almost oppressive. I feared to break it by the softest whisper. There was no sign of man or his activity. On the hill opposite, an ancient track was overgrown, evidently not used by human feet for decades. There are hidden parts of England, such as this, which have become depopulated in the last century, for marginal hillfarms have contracted or disappeared, and city-dwellers, searching for second homes and paying fancy prices for those in favoured villages, will not venture so far into the unknown, where a visit to the one, distant shop is an expedition taking half a day.
So loneliness descends, the wildness moves back in to claim its own, and there is a strange mystery about the scene, almost a hint of menace. This is Doone country, to be sure, and it is not hard to imagine a posse of desperadoes, a broken clan (as they call it in the Borders) thundering down on their rough, hairy mountain stallions, sabres slung across their hacks, pistols in their saddle-pouches. Not hard, either, to believe that the last of the Stuarts found it difficult to root them out, short of sending in a regiment of expensive regulars, as they did to win Sedgemoor, not far away. But in the 17th century these hill valleys were populous, providing wealth for such as the Doones to plunder and farm by terror. Signs of human activity, indeed, stretch well back through mediaeval times into the Dark Ages and beyond.
1 am not thinking of these times. Rather, the silence and solitude take me back, in my mental time machine, to aeons before, when Homo sapiens was himself a rarity or even a stranger. There was no track at all in those days. The sheep were wild. If you saw a cow, it would be one of the prescriptive white cattle with formidable horns, to be disturbed at your peril. If a man appeared, he would be prognathous, skin-clad, hirsute, frightened and aggressive, armed with a stone-tipped spear. No Beaker Man, he: long before them. So I mused, in this hidden country, empty of humans but rich in history and nature, secrets and fears. Let us guard such places, but God spare me from living there,
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