Landmarks

by Robert Macfarlane

The Icelandic novelist Jón Kalman Stefánsson writes of fishermen speaking ‘coddish’ far out into the North Atlantic; the miners working the Great Northern Coalfield in England’s north-east developed a dialect known as ‘Pitmatical’ or ‘yakka’, so dense it proved incomprehensible to Victorian parliamentary commissioners seeking to improve conditions in the mines in the 1840s. The name ‘Pitmatical’ was originally chosen to echo ‘mathematical’, and thereby emphasize the craft and skilful precision of the colliers. Such super-specific argots are born of lives lived long – and laboured hard – on land and at sea.

Language is fossil poetry,’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1844,

Take the familiar word forest, which can designate not a wooded region, but an area of land set aside for deer-hunting – as those who have walked through the treeless ‘forests’ of Fisherfield, Applecross and Corrour in the Highlands of Scotland will know. Forest – like numerous wood-words – is complicatedly tangled up in political histories of access and landownership.

In The History of the Countryside (1986), the great botanist Oliver Rackham describes four ways in which ‘landscape is lost’: through the loss of beauty, the loss of freedom, the loss of wildlife and vegetation, and the loss of meaning.

Like other extensive lateral landscapes – desert, ice cap, prairie, tundra – it confronts us with difficulties of purchase (how to anchor perception in a context of immensity) and evaluation (how to structure significance in a context of uniformity).

The existence of a moorland lexis of such scope and exactitude is testimony to the long relationship of labour between the Hebrideans and their land: this is, dominantly, a use-language – its development a function of the need to name that which is being done, and done to.

For their users, these place-names were necessary for getting from location to location, and for the purpose of guiding others to where they needed to go. It is for this reason that so many toponyms incorporate what is known in psychology and design as ‘affordance’ – the quality of an environment or object that allows an individual to perform an action on, to or with it.

It is not, on the whole, that natural phenomena and entities themselves are disappearing; rather that there are fewer people able to name them, and that once they go unnamed they go to some degree unseen. Language deficit leads to attention deficit. As we further deplete our ability to name, describe and figure particular aspects of our places, our competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with non-human nature is correspondingly depleted.

The crux of the debate concerned the perceived nature and worth of the moor itself, and the language that was used – and available – to describe it. It was in the interests of AMEC to characterize the moor as a wasteland, a terra nullius.

I relish the etymology of our word thing – that sturdy term of designation, that robust everyday indicator of the empirical – whereby in Old English thynge does not only designate a material object, but can also denote ‘a narrative not fully known’, or indicate ‘the unknowability of larger chains of events’.

Kavanagh, like Aristotle, was careful not to smudge the ‘universal’ into the ‘general’. The ‘general’, for Aristotle, was the broad, the vague and the undiscerned. The ‘universal’, by contrast, consisted of fine-tuned principles, induced from an intense concentration on the particular.

By means of this accumulation of exact attentions we are brought – in her memorable phrase – to see the earth ‘as the earth must see itself’

Knowledge is never figured in The Living Mountain as finite: a goal to be reached or a state to be attained.

What Shepherd learns – and what her book taught me – is that the true mark of long acquaintance with a single place is a readiness to accept uncertainty: a contentment with the knowledge that you must not seek complete knowledge.

This is not a book that relishes its own discoveries; it prefers to relish its own ignorances

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Baker gained his effect by a curious combination of surplus (the proliferation of verb, adjective, metaphor and simile), deletion (the removal of articles, conjunctions, proper nouns) and compression (the decision to crush ten years of ‘hawk-hunting’ down to a single symbolic ‘season’, its year unspecified).

We are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away.

To exercise a care of attention towards a place – as towards a person – is to achieve a sympathetic intimacy with it.

To observe the city edge is to observe an amphibian. End of trees, beginning of roofs, end of grass, beginning of paving stones, end of ploughed fields, beginning of shops, the end of the beaten track, the beginning of the passions, the end of the murmur of things divine, the beginning of the noise of humankind.

She brought the distant past and the living present into vibrant contact:

The oddest contradiction of A Land is between its island patriotism and its planetary holism. On the one hand, Hawkes compelled her readers to imagine themselves in ways which make mockery of the idea of individual beings, let alone of nations. Seen from the perspective of the Cretaceous, the notion of the nation seems ridiculous, and fighting for a ‘country’ as ludicrous as going to war on behalf of a raindrop.

He showed that certain landscapes might be precious not in terms of the economic or agrarian resources they provide, but in terms – far harder to measure, far harder to prove – of their effects upon the spirit and the mind.

‘Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees,’ Muir had said in 1895. ‘Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.’

Shortly after first reading the Guide, I found myself recalling the story of the T’ang Dynasty artist Wu Tao-Tzu, who is said one day to have gathered his friends to show them his most recent painting. The friends huddled round it in admiration: it was a vertical scroll painting of a mountainous landscape with a footpath that led along the bank of a stream, and then through a grove of trees to a small cottage or hut. But when the friends turned to congratulate Wu Tao-Tzu, they realized he had vanished. Then they saw that he had stepped into the landscape of the painting, and was walking along the path and through the grove. He reached the entrance to the hut, and on its threshold he paused, turned, smiled, and then passed through the narrow doorway.

I was reminded, too, of Emerson’s beautiful description of language as ‘a city to the building of which every person has brought a stone’.

For as John C. Sawhill puts it, ‘In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create, but by what we refuse to destroy.’