In High Places
We jumped off the little rowing boat and onto the tiny island, my brother, my sister and me. Dad rowed us up onto the gravely shore and in our excitement to disembark and race each other on to the land, we soaked our feet in the gently lapping water.
Innis Chonnell on Loch Awe; just a matter of paces from one end to another, rarely visited now, even less so back then in the 1970’s. Charcoal remains of campfires and wavering scuffed paths through the low-lying undergrowth are the only traces of recent-past human-presence by fellow inquisitive explorers and imaginers. Although it is summer, the ground remains damp, a dark peat, under the herbage.
We knew our way to the hole that was the entrance into the dungeons, we knew the serpentine route to take through the gaps that were once doorways or are more recent passageways made by decay, to the room with the enormous fireplace. Was this the big hall where, in the 12th century, Sir Colin Campbell would have gathered his men for winter feasts, or the kitchens in which those feasts were created? We ran with an urgency to all the corners, as though sacking the castle with our childish enthusiasm and glee; emboldened and identifying with place, intent on becoming a part of its story, both transported back in history and now, in real time. Our voices called and hallooed to one another in that child’s high-pitched, un-tempered way that can’t be curtailed. Breathing a life of a sort back into the ruins, but a superfluous skein only, one that would trail away as we left, a cloak dragged in our wake; the castle, the island, taking its own breaths of mournful deep memory, reaching back to places we couldn’t begin to touch and settling itself back into oblivion, when once again left alone in peace.
I peeked through narrow arrow-shot windows, more likely over fallen walls and rubble-now-become-walls, as though the building was re-inventing itself by a gradual morphing, a sloping, creeping glide into a new being. I peered through the thick ivy, alive with insects feeding off the globular flower clusters and the trees growing like weeds, within, outwith and as part of the stonework; flora taking over with no respect for rocks carefully hewn to create boundaries between internal and external spaces. In youth, the façade would have stood in stark contrast to its surroundings, rising magically, vertically; vast planes of stone impossibly perpendicular, as if summoned by some higher power out of the very waters; solid, unassailable, powerful. Now softened and made curvaceous by flora, diminished by time and brutal winters, the green takes the aggression out of the stone assertions.
Clambering up the jagged remains of the castle husk, we gained height. No ceilings or floors, no roof; a lone flight of stone steps leading up to nowhere. A single truncated jutting all that was left of a tower, pointing into the sky, remaining, an echo. My brother ahead, walking along the weather-blasted walls as if he were strolling without a care along a pavement. Caught by his defiance of gravity and at odds with that lightness and liberty, I stopped, static, rooted, my head leaden in my gut as if trying to drill myself deep into the soil far below, as heavy and solid as a foundation stone. Resisting the impulse to perversely throw myself over the edge – just to see; how did it feel to fall? – I couldn’t look anywhere, not safely, not to the far distance of the forest-covered shoreline across the shining water, not to the glistening of the water itself, nor the ground under me speckled with wiry spiky wind-cropped vegetation, greens and pinks and yellows, nor to the dark grey red stone walls mottled with white and orange lichen. I couldn’t look at my siblings, moving around like ants on a giant anthill, I only wanted to look at my hands, to bring me back to myself, to turn my attention away from that lure of flying.
* * *
Grandpa made the arrangements; a phone call to someone who knew the person with the key. My parents and siblings and I picnicked and walked here many times in my childhood, with King Alfred’s tower emerging and retreating, behind and within the forest as we circumambulated it. And now, with special dispensation for access, we were to climb it.
The man with the key met us at the door. Within, it was dark, damp and musky, an earth floor? It felt elemental, indeed the light and the weather came in from high, high up, tumbling down from the hole that was the centre of the roof of the three-sided tower. One of the circular turrets – pinning the building into the ground at each point of the triangle, emphatically – housed the stairs we were to climb; a tight spiral, a tower within a tower. Again, dark; occasional light slipped in almost coincidentally from slit windows, casting light upon a few stone steps and then leaving us blind to clamber a few more before the next gash offered another momentary slim shaft of feint illumination. We mounted the stairs with varying degrees of confidence and tremulation. My hand in constant contact with the outer wall to my side; my feet pushed against the vertical edges of each tread, I wedged myself into the space as best I could, in order to feel solid and grounded, as we gradually gained height.
205 steps now below us, at last out into the open air.
The crenellations on top of King Alfred’s tower seemed ridiculously low, waist height to the adults around me? The undulating floor gathered puddles; the central hole that pierced through to the ground below, protected only by a feeble fence; the orifice itself covered in flimsy chicken wire. I curled down on my haunches, overcome – my back to the outer wall, unable to look over to the landscape I knew would be unfurled on all sides, nor down the centre of the tower to the point where our ascent had begun – impotent to move. I became fixated the more I watched my family walk around, looking, pointing, explaining, exploring the space, in awe of the views, emboldened not diminished by their elevation. After long moments, some courage arose, I turned my body to face the wall to peek cautiously over the top. Keeping tight proximity to the solid brick, retaining a glimpse of the wall in my sights, my palms in touch with its texture and reliable firmness, I dared to focus my gaze on the horizon.
The best views swept from the north-west to north-east, and they were breath-taking. I gulped in the vastness and then averted my eyes once more to the near at hand, catching my breath before giving in to the compulsion to look out again, sharing now the exhilaration of height, sharing with the birds the sensation of riding the undulations of the treetops, the sense of inhabiting the void of open space that is the sky, measuring the sensations of allure and repulsion that is vertigo, knotted together as one.
The environment stabilized and became familiar, my boundaries acknowledged. And then a sudden, alien sound in the far distance – as though an object had pierced through a brittle layer in the sky – emerged at speed towards us, bringing a booming, cracking sound like hundreds of claps of thunder rolled into one vast expulsion. We turned compulsively towards its origins and watched, our faces lifted upwards and our heads rolling in unison, as a jet fighter appeared out of the north-west sky and slashed through the air directly overhead, so close we could almost reach up and touch its taught, shark-like belly. In a split second it was gone, over. Laughter and exclamations filled the absence in the air now as our suspended breaths popped like a number of taught balloons. Grandpa, with his military background, confirmed that the Fleet Air Arm from the airbase at Yeovilton, used the tower as a navigation marker, and seeing our eager faces, awed by this monster from the sky, added dramatically, and with no little sense of the mischievous, that the pilot was almost certainly using us as target practice.
* * *
Standing on a hilltop, the eye is drawn gradually across the land, across and down, along the contours, with the presence of sky above and around as much a part of our perception as the earth that supports us. On a high, open space, we do not belong rooted in the soil, nor floating in the air, but we are a part of both, on top of one and reaching up to the other, or floating in that other, with our toes only tip-tapping along the surface below.
On my midwinter birthday, a bitterly cold day, we visited a favourite hill, my husband, our four-year-old son and our young daughter, swaddled in a baby carrier on my front. The wind, blowing occasional sleet horizontally over the hillside, made our progress towards the nearest tumuli, challenging. Icy air constantly gnawed at the side of my face, driving the cold into my eye that was already throbbing with the onset of a migraine. The sleet magically became a thin, delicate fall of snow, more like a lacy doily laid over the land, more holes than substance, and with our backs to the wind allowing our winter coats to take the brunt, we could at last enjoy the spectacle of this old, old site and the far distant wintery views. Our ancient ancestors lived here, buried their dead here, communicated with their neighbours in adjoining settlements on hilltops within their sights from here. Natural dips, falls, rises and undulations in the land are matched by the effects of their hand; embankments and ditches, burial mounds and causeways. Scrub and stunted woodland pepper the vast hill, obscuring the long views intermittently and finally disallowing a full 360° vista by just a few increments only, due south; a tantalizing obstruction to a desire for completion.
From the very western-edge of the hill I look south-westwards towards other ridges that lie between this place and the New Forest; Broughton Down and then Dean Hill in particular, a north-face stretch of which in spring is hued yellow with cowslips, and through all seasons is dotted with dark inkblots of rounded yew. Up there, a true ridge gives access to views further south almost to the coast, and northwards surely as far as 30 miles in clear weather. Salisbury cathedral spire, six miles away to the west, emerges from the landscape’s folds and remains as a solid punctuation mark amidst features otherwise erased into haze through distance. Once, through binoculars, men fell slowly, noiselessly through the sky far away on Salisbury Plain, floating like dandelion seeds, tipping gently this way and that in their fall, the parachutes mimicking the gossamer, the bodies mirroring the weightier seed, pulling the flight downwards. The landing; unseen behind trees, all silent, soft, slow.
Evening light on Dean Hill streams along its length, illuminating my path from behind as I walk eastwards along its spine. So high, so advantageous, such opportunity to look outwards and piece together. I imagine the corvids travelling with ease to roost up here, from daytime forays on the hill to the north, gliding across the divide, using the airway with a grace and aptitude that belies any need for exertion. If they could lay their aerial journeys through the skies, like vapour trails, what a cloth they would weave with their lines and crossovers, their dives and ascents, finally attaching to trees, snagging on twigs, burying into the soil, joining their groundings and linking their territories. While I lumber on foot and gaze with learning, my efforts to comprehend the landscape and its inter-relationship seem laboured and conclude fractured in comparison, to this natural knowing, this oneness, this intimacy with height.
Published in The Clearing
Photo by: Ashley Brook
