Recently, I climbed Maol Chean-dearg, a mountain in the far north-west of Scotland. Down in the glens, it was not far above freezing, and the cold air pooled as mist. But up on the summits the sun blazed, and the temperature touched 15C. The result was one of the most dazzling cloud inversions I have seen in 30 years.
In the high corries of the peak, I climbed out of the mist and into clearness. To the west, jagging from a glowing sea of cloud, were the Black Cuillin of Skye and the Clisham on the Outer Hebrides. Nearby were the graceful Torridon tops: Beinn Alligin, whose Gaelic name means the jewelled hill, and Liathach, the grey one. Far to the east rose the white domes of the Cairngorms. I had a sight-span of almost 200 miles, across mountain, glen, sea and loch. There was nowhere I would rather have been than there.
There are certain places, wrote the Scottish climber WH Murray, “where the natural movement of the heart is upwards”. Our landscape is astonishingly rich with such places. It is easy to forget – from behind a desk or in front of a screen – that the landmass uneasily known as the United Kingdom comprises thousands of islands, hundreds of hills and rivers, and a coastline almost 20,000 miles long.
A passion for wilderness is grained deep into our literature. Among the earliest literary works are the poems of the peregrini, the early Celtic Christian monks who retreated to lonely peaks and skerries in pursuit of their faith. “Swarms of bees, beetles, soft music of the world, a gentle humming; brent geese, barnacle geese, music of the dark wild torrent,” wrote a nameless hermit one October in the 10th century. “O let them be left, wildness and wet,” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins almost a millennium later, “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
The languages and dialects of these islands also register our long, imagi-native relationship with the wild. We have hundreds of words for elemental phenomena, from grimlins (Orcadian for the “night hours around midsummer when dusk blends into dawn”) to moor-gallop (Cumbrian for “wind and rain moving fast over high ground”), and hundreds more for aspects of creaturely life, from airymouse (Cornish for a bat) to zebn-slaper (Somerset dialect for a dormouse, literally a “seven-sleeper”).
We also, though, live in an increasingly populated, urbanised country, where 64.5 million people share 93,600 square miles of land. Our road network is more than 246,000 miles long: stretch out that tarmac, and you could drive to the moon and beyond. Over the last century, nature has come under immense pressure. We have irreparably damaged remarkable landscapes, and pushed scores of species towards or over the brink of extinction. Wilderness is not vanished in these islands – as EM Forster once declared it to be – but it is endangered, and what remains is both hugely powerful and precious.
When I can’t sleep, and when I’ve been in the city too long, I occasionally send my mind out travelling through some of the wildest places I know. The Fairy Pools on Skye, where you can dive into gin-clear water, and swim under a submerged rock arch; the Undercliff at Lyme Regis, a slip-sliding jungle of gunnera and hawker dragonflies; the ridgebacked Snowdonian peak of Tryfan; and the salt marshes of the Essex estuaries, where waders flock above the shipping lanes. I also dream of places I’d like to reach: the Kielder forest on a clear night, where the skies are the darkest in England; or the pink sea-fan coral colonies that lie off the Cornish coast.
I think also about the importance of nearby nature: the wildlife that weaves with our everyday existence in cities and edgelands. Last year, a pair of peregrine falcons bred successfully on a building in the centre of my city, Cambridge. Gothic stonework gave them the perfect nest site. They used the spires of a nearby church as their plucking posts. This year, the falcons are back again. I cycle past their nest each day, and gawp skywards, hoping for a glimpse of the birds.
A peregrine nest in the heart of a city, a woodland near a suburb, a mountain-top with a 200-mile view: such places are vital to our imaginations, and to the ways we value and fight for the nature of which we are part. They are – as the great American writer Wallace Stegner put it in 1960 – “a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures; a part of the geography of hope.”
A passion for wilderness is grained deep into our literature. Among the earliest literary works are the poems of the peregrini, the early Celtic Christian monks who retreated to lonely peaks and skerries in pursuit of their faith. “Swarms of bees, beetles, soft music of the world, a gentle humming; brent geese, barnacle geese, music of the dark wild torrent,” wrote a nameless hermit one October in the 10th century. “O let them be left, wildness and wet,” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins almost a millennium later, “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
The languages and dialects of these islands also register our long, imaginative relationship with the wild. We have hundreds of words for elemental phenomena, from grimlins (Orcadian for the “night hours around midsummer when dusk blends into dawn”) to moor-gallop (Cumbrian for “wind and rain moving fast over high ground”), and hundreds more for aspects of creaturely life, from airymouse (Cornish for a bat) to zebn-slaper (Somerset dialect for a dormouse, literally a “seven-sleeper”).
We also, though, live in an increasingly populated, urbanised country, where 64.5 million people share 93,600 square miles of land. Our road network is more than 246,000 miles long: stretch out that tarmac, and you could drive to the moon and beyond. Over the last century, nature has come under immense pressure. We have irreparably damaged remarkable landscapes, and pushed scores of species towards or over the brink of extinction. Wilderness is not vanished in these islands – as EM Forster once declared it to be – but it is endangered, and what remains is both hugely powerful and precious.
Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks will be published in paperback by Penguin on 5 May at £9.99. To order a copy for £7.99 with free UK p&p, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
Top five wild hotspots
1. Fairy Pools, Skye
These crystal-clear waters lie in a sheltered glade of lilac rocks and rowan trees. There is also an underwater arch to swim through, and a good jump.
2. Undercliff, Lyme Regis, Dorset
A national nature reserve, where sandstone and chalk slipping over clay and limestone have created a dramatic coastline.
3. Kielder Dark Sky Park, Northumberland
This stargazer’s paradise boasts the largest expanse of dark night sky in the whole of Europe, thanks to minimal light pollution.
Expanses of salt marsh and mudflats are two of Britain’s last remaining natural wildnernesses; bleak but scenic, and teaming with wildlife. A hidden gem.
5. Coral colonies, Cornwall
Off the Lizard peninsula are the Manacles, a set of treacherous rocky reefs rich in marine wildlife that can be viewed on a scenic coastline walk.
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