It’s shot over by royalty, flown over by the RAF, or trampled underfoot in the wind-farm gold-rush. It’s turned into prairie, or designated by this or that acronym it’s subject to planning regulations and management plans.
There’s nothing wild in this country: every square inch of it is ‘owned’, much has seen centuries of bitter dispute the whole landscape is man-made, deforested, drained, burned for grouse moor, long cleared of its peasants or abandoned by them. It’s different in winter, but St Kilda is busier on a summer’s day than many mainland places, what with the radar base and the cruise liners. There were too many birds and basking sharks to watch, too many ruins to explore and projects to help with, too much conversation, too many general comings and goings, boats and helicopters. But I never read a line, even when it rained. Both islands are now uninhabited and St Kilda is, of course, an icon of remoteness. Last year I took The Wild Places with me to St Kilda and to Mingulay. But, I admit, only those of us privileged to get there can bore on about how unwild the wild places are. In big landscapes, to see wildness might require a suspension of disbelief, like at the theatre. It would be too easy to scorn this notion of the wild as precious and romanticised. In the wild, size matters, or so it seems.) A dandelion poking up between paving slabs is natural and wild – and cheeky and subversive – but it doesn’t carry that special wide-eyed sense of ‘wild’. (I think ‘nature’, ‘natural’ and ‘wild’ are almost synonymous here, though ‘wild’ ups the rhetorical ante. Many of their interventions are designed to undo or ameliorate previous interventions: to remove footpaths, say, or dismantle cairns or plant forests or reintroduce species now locally extinct. But does this ‘material’ exist any longer? Is there any ‘wild land’ in this congested country, if it’s on the scale of landscape and requires protection or, worse, ‘management’? The various quangos, charities and interest groups (the John Muir Trust, the RSPB, Scottish Natural Heritage, the National Trust, Natural England, all that kind of thing) are forever managing and intervening. By ‘wild’, I think is meant openness, expansiveness, that sense of land, as Willa Cather wrote, which is ‘nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made’. The John Muir Trust, which has now bought eight estates in Scotland, has a remit to ‘protect wild land’. What it intrudes on is the other person’s sense of ‘the wild’. One person’s loving memorial, however discreet, is another person’s intrusion. And the problem with the plaques? They’re being removed because they are ‘intrusive’. It’s just what they’d be seeking to avoid. I should imagine that people who want to scatter someone’s ashes on a mountain, or leave a memorial there, do so because they consider a ‘Memorial Site for Contemplation’ municipal and tame. As for ashes, well, the Nevis Partnership says: try throwing them into the air on a windy day, or into a corrie so they disperse more widely, or under a tree on the lower slopes. The John Muir Trust and the other owners of the land around Ben Nevis have constructed a ‘Memorial Site for Contemplation’ at the foot of the mountain, and are removing the memorials from the open hill. Furthermore, so many people’s ashes are being scattered on the summits that it’s changing the chemical balance of the soil, fertilising it with phosphorus and calcium, to the detriment of rare alpine plants.Ī delicate issue. These are not memorials to people killed on the hills necessarily, though there are those too, but to those who felt some affiliation with the outdoors. Apparently, the biggest hills are covered in so many memorials – plaques and little cairns – that it’s becoming an issue. The situation I have in mind has also arisen on Snowdon and Scafell, and it concerns the dead. I don’t mean a rescue, although as it happens the RAF and mountain rescue teams are bringing down a man and two boys who, the report says, ‘didn’t read the weather forecast’.