I invite you into my secret world—of Celtic landscapes, quiet spaces and glimpses into the wonder and meaning of life. Leave your day behind for a time, and walk with a friend, as I show you my favourite parts of the Isle of Man…
Today’s walk takes place at the end of August, in the central hills of the island, starting near the hill of Sartfell.
We decant ourselves from our wheeled bubble, into a bright and frisky breeze. It sweeps ever down from those radiant clouds, ferrying a coolness, and a moistness, delivered from on high. With a scent of ozone, it brings tales of wide open sky; of misty nooks to be found up amongst the rafters of cumulus kingdoms; and of marble-white parapets and crockets, and of those shifting rooftops that always know sunshine. What a welcome to the outside world.
Today, at Chibbyr y Phunch—The Brandy Well—with my wife and two daughters, we venture into the undulant hills of the island’s heart, and after weeks of inescapable heat, this touch of shining cold is just what our skin calls out for. In late August, the last heatwave stole quietly away into the night, migrating south for winter; but much of the island is still branded with the mark of desiccation. Kindling pastures, awaiting an errant spark.
Just here, though—as the grouse and the partridge lurk, invisible, in the heath—you might never know. Even after a long arid summer, where the farmed lowlands appear as the parched, brittle pages of some dusty tome, the high hills still boast a lush, exuberant green. So we set off into this greenery, along a sinuous footpath that travels companionably with a contour—an old way—and all about us, there are the signs of rich, deep foliage sprouting up wherever the heather allows; such as the soft-rush and deer-grass, whose spines protrude like the rear-end of a startled porcupine.
Everywhere seems to be enjoying the zest of an extended youth. How funny, then, that green—such a perfectly familiar colour—can feel so impossible, after this driest of Augusts. We set off along the path, one backpack stuffed with a picnic blanket, the other laden with snacks and a good supply of water. Indeed, the land seems well-stocked in that regard too.
By a mossy boulder, I plunge my hand into a drift of wet common-haircap, and this simple act hints at subterranean reservoirs, manifested, surely, by some dark divination. But no, the magic actually lies with the great hands of the hills, and their artful capacity for cupping a passing downpour, drawing water deep into a capacious loam and saving it for a sunny day. Here, the peaty mosses can hold up to 44 times their dry weight in water. The sponge that keeps on taking.
On our left, the hill ascends to make conference with a low-slung cloud, merging into a tawny smudge. And on the right, the upland rolls and ranges lower towards a bifurcated valley. I can sense a stream down below us, where the land drops away more steeply. Skulking beneath the sighing breeze—as a wren hides in the bush—I detect the quiet murmur of travelling water. Barely a trickle, and not a drop to be seen. It scores its way down the slope, like a crease in green linen, its moisture seeping outward as it goes, to be lapped up by the matte of rooted earth. And even though the stream is well disguised, by fringe of fern and grass and scrub, it is betrayed by the vivid, emerald slough that accompanies it wherever it goes, flaring outward like a fan.
This is especially so where the sphagnum underlay has been left to grow over centuries, layer upon layer, to produce that deep under-tissue of spongy, sodden peat. Carbon sink and wellspring, rolled into one. I remember a time when we surveyed the health of the sphagnum, here in the central hills, with a pole and a yardstick. At points, the sphagnum was at least four foot deep. Which is why this crucial species needs to be protected and nurtured—retaining life-giving moisture during dry seasons, and in winter, acting as a buffer against run-off, quelling flash flooding further downstream.
A brief gust comes dashing over to greet us like a happy dog, whipping about us, tail wagging, and then off across the landscape once more—probably chasing the scent of rabbit.
I look out across the furrow of the valley, nestled between two bulging muscles of moorland. There, the wind peels away across the downs, brushing past a modest plantation, and hence towards a distant, shimmering sea. Before it reaches water, however, it meets those dry, wheaty straits and their trawling tractors, fine columns of dust rising high into the sky. That poor land is the work-horse of the island. Always on the go and rarely a time to rest or lick its wounds. Down there, economic necessity dictates. You can tell when an area has been over-farmed, because after heavy rain, the rivers run brown—sweeping away more precious nutrients from an already struggling soil.
Farming is one of the hardest jobs—as my wife’s side of the family can attest. Before WWII, most farming was small and mixed, and what we would today call organic. Post-war, there was a drive for food independence across the UK, and bomb factories were retooled to produce nitrogen-based fertilizers. Farmers were encourage to use pesticides, to specialise, seeking to maximise yields. Now we are learning that there are limits to this approach. Hope springs, however, from a crop of young farmers, whose minds are fertile with greener, gentler approaches—but as supermarkets continually apply their heft into pressing down prices, theirs will always a be an ongoing battle between ideal and compromise.
Those fields down there are a mirror onto society. At times, as overworked as the people they feed, and trapped in a cycle of restlessness. I am glad to escape the sleepless industry of humankind for a while, even as I carry a sourdough loaf: bread of those fields.
So into the lofts of the hills we traipse, the feldspar and granite fragments and purple moor tempered into a fine thatch. It looks magnificent today, the bright, pin-prick flowers at the peak of their honey-scented pomp. I hear the screech of a distant pheasant, stung into motion, and across the way, the cry of a strafing buzzard as it harvests mice from the straw.
Good spirits grow plentiful in the hills, and we chat brightly, of trivialities and observations. Gravel crunches pleasingly underfoot, reminding us that we walk upon the last, grasping fingers of the economy—for on this first stretch, the track must be maintained for the shepherd to drive, with her quad-bike or trailer, keeping watch on her flock. Here on the tops of the central hills, these nomadic sheep are unbound by fences, allowed to roam across the wold as they like. As I look out over a distant patchwork of neat, heritable properties—all fenced or walled—I suppose escape is not high on the shepherd’s list of worries; for where left is there to run but the open hills?
I feel a hand snatch my hat, and my youngest daughter skips away, inviting chase. And as I break into a jog, I recall another time when we were driven, in haste, along this path. You see, underfoot there are ants nests. We know this, because one day a year—when there have been 72 consecutive hours of warmth—the ants decide to march. The sky here becomes black with millions of winged scouts, seeking fresh pastures. And the ground wriggles and floods, as a legged liquid bubbles up from every crack for miles about; and our clothes become spaces to explore and burrow. It is such a strange thing to witness—and one I care not to witness again!—and how unsettling and awesome to think, that even now, there lies just underfoot, a vast, labyrinthine queendom of interlaced tunnels and its countless, industrious subjects. Just waiting…
But I suppose we humans are not so different. From here, I see the roads that connect the island’s settlements, and their string of marching cars; lines of ants. Seen from this point of view, society could be perceived as a single sprawling palace—an engineered, interconnected set of functional chambers—its corridors both roofed and open, carpeted and tarmacked.
Picking out a distant town, I sense the roasted aromas of coffee shops, and their burble of percolating ideas. Quiet libraries with green lamps, the inner sanctums of government, the litter-strewn alleys that hum with conditioned air, pedestrian rivulets that flow past windowed canyons; bright sunny foyers, soft-lit front rooms, dark, shady backrooms…
And up here, with the hare and the shrew, we walk the highest, remotest attics of that palace; and even though this old way is called Governor Locke’s Road—named after the island’s representative of the King or Queen of England—we are unlikely to bump into a monarch, unless it is a butterfly, or the queen ant herself. Nor the oligarchs, or the commodity magnates, or the captains of finance and industry. They are in the thick of it, minting profit and power and stress, at the centre of the ant’s nest. Here we walk the very margins, so untamed and illimitable; picking blackberries, picking our way over uneven ground, picking tranquillity over tumult. For a time. Perhaps we are the winged scouts; for up here, the sky unfurls before me, and I feel I might fly.
As we round the gable end of the hill, I unsheath my binoculars to thrust my gaze, and my awareness some five hundred yards further into the moor. I feel I am standing, invisible, next to the hare and her mate, as they nibble at the dandelion and clover, unconcerned.
Soon, autumn’s mizzle curtains will draw once more, across this dale, rusting the hill’s mantle, quenching mosses; darkening the aged grass into a rich sisal canvas, on which winter can apply brushstrokes of snow and frost. And soon the light will skim the land at sharp, stinging angles; or else filter through drenched tissues of cloud and emerge into the sullen undersky as a wash of bleach, bled into grey, wet cloth.
Today, as the heat of summer grows weary, I find myself looking forward to it. Dryness tends to blind the nose, and I long for that evocative scent of decay and harvest. Of falling conker or chestnut, and of sprouting mushroom, and rotting leaf. All is change. All is in flux. Like the dark murmurations of rook or crow as they wheel and squall about the reddening, gingery slopes, and bind the sky with their witchery.
I restow my binoculars and set off once more, to catch up with the party, and I smile, watching their teasing and jokes etched into their easy mannerisms, as if I could hear every word.
Nestled in the lower valley, I see one of my favourite ruined farm cottages—a tholtan—a slate grey monument to another time. It would be the perfect setting from which to observe these passing seasons. In my mind, I reconstruct the crumbling eastern wall, the chimney stack and the outhouses. I imagine herbs growing in the kitchen garden, and crops in the surrounding land. A step-down well, dressed with an arch. Perhaps a thoughtful horse in the paddock. Each year, as the winter takes another swipe at the farm, there is less of it come springtime. Part of me longs for a project such as this. To restore and breathe new life into a structure that’s slowly being drawn back into the land. Those Manx stones were only ever borrowed, though I would dearly like to extend their stay. To re-stamp their ticket at the lithic library.
I love working with lime and stone and wood—and when horse hair is mixed into the plaster, those fibres lend it strength, and also something of the vast skies and windswept, hoof-pocked plains. And when the plaster is worked into oak laths or reed matting, it creates a rolling, rugged curve, and an complex surface reminiscent of something living. These traditional building methods work so well with old structures. They let them breathe.
Yes, it gives me great satisfaction to build something with my hands. Something that lasts. And I just love the smell of organic materials. The sensual feel of it as I apply great lashings with hand or trowel.
Peering down into the valley, I imagine myself writing at a desk, or painting by the sunny window, occasionally lifting my gaze to look out over this soulful landscape. Perhaps the dream that is dreaming us may yet twist and turn in this direction. But, being in my middle years, more than half the night is passed, and morning’s light draws closer all the time.
I catch the others as the road starts to whittle down toward a path unfit for wheels. A pippet clothed in olive perches upon a stem of teasel, chirruping in clipped, cheerful tones.
Over there, in the midst of a bracken swale, a solitary raven sits upon a fence post, a wrought iron weathervane. She surveys the land with shoulders hunched, weighing the wind’s tendency and bearing. Her lustrous coat of black serves to propel her form from the low-contrast surroundings. In design terms: she pops.
As I watch, she turns her head to the right, crooked beak dominating her profile, slate grey and matte. In her eye, I see the glint of contemplation, and in her mien, I see solemnity. She broods, in sad similitude with the quiet moor.
I wait for her to take flight. She returns my eye with a coolness, and refuses.
A little way on, a trail peels off to the left that I have never trod. I always glance over towards those jutting boulders, and the heaving contours, and the auburns and spring-onion greens of its harled marsh. We tried a couple of times, but the land always seems waterlogged beyond passing. But I do so wonder where it leads. Across unmet hills, with unmet features, skirting unmet valleys…
An un-chosen path is a mark of the Great Unknown. Mystery incarnate. It defines who we are as mortals and human beings; our intrinsic limitations. We finite beings may know but a few pieces of the great puzzle. And anyway, mystery gives life that smokey, velvety, spice that sets the taste-buds of our mind a-tingling. Sometimes I wonder that I would sooner know nothing for certain, than everything at once. For whilst knowledge quenches the intellect, mystery feeds the imagination, and keeps one wanting more—the speculation, the investigation, the wonder—it’s what makes life so fun. I don’t think I could live without that.
Over a rickety stile we wobble, never sure which step will take our weight. A hop down onto grit and sod. And away once more as the path and the contour part ways, and we lean into an incline.
The sheep, it must be noted, are far from sheepish, here on the hillside. Under that tempestuous, wiry fleece, they are gnarly and toughened. They survive all the elements thrown at them. Year long. Their demeanour claims they have seen it all, and as one especially horned matriarch emerges from the crest of a rise, it looks upon we fair-weather ramblers with a challenging stare. I am master of these parts! This highland is mine, and I have earned it!
I give her a respectful nod. I’m not here to de-thrown you.
Beyond another gate. A final barrier, and the last of society’s pen-strokes upon the land. Now, at last, we are in the unbroken hillside, and we climb a rutted trail toward a distant peak, which even now, only shows as a dusty, flattened shadow against the sky.
As we walk, I watch the ground as the spidery grass and clumpy heather coast by. Years ago I remember reading a science-fiction novel set inside a Dyson Sphere—an artificial spherical land wrapped around the sun, at a distance roughly that of our Earth. The inhabitants would live on the inner, terraformed surface, their civilisation spanning enough territory to fill half a billion Earths.
I look now upon the heath at my feet, and mentally shrink my size down to that of an ant, or a midge, as it flits from tiny bloom to bloom. Down here, there is a metropolis of activity. Minuscule moths, ground-bound crawlers, subterranean burrowers, or else thundering bumblebee juggernauts and pterodactyl butterflies, swooping out of the blue. And the heather, as I lift my stare, continues on and on, and ever on, purpling into the haze. Across the sweeping curve of the hill, downward into the slopes of the valley, and back up again onto the next hill, and the next.
If I were a bilberry hook-wing, or a barely-there thrip, then this vast territory may well feel like a Dyson Sphere. A city that never ends. The countless tiny leaves, each leading the stem-crawler down and away into a hive of tangled corridor and passageway. Look closely and the land soon begins to writhe. There are red mites and shield-bugs and tiger beetles and centipedes. There are aphids and spiders and grubs and grasshoppers and woodlice. The variety is rich and colourful—an invertebrate mosaic.
Down at street level, there are echoes of the narrow derb and driba of a Moroccan medina, which then bleed into the interminable sprawl of an LA suburb, or else elevate themselves into the tenement cram of Lower East Side Manhattan. Districts and wards thick with mingling rootsong and clotted with six-legged life. I can almost hear the beeping horns of big yellow taxis.
Onward we ply, a borough passed with each step, as we nonchalantly snack on our packet of crisps.
This time-worn road is a road I have trod for many a year. When the girls were little, their capacity to hike was limited to under a mile, and so we could never get beyond the first straight. In those days I made use of a baby sling. I was so keen to get my nature fix, and to introduce its wonder and magic to my daughters, that I was known about town as the friendly chap who wandered with a girl on his back and a girl on his front.
But wherever we could, we would explore the land by foot. And that first gravelly stretch of the road, level and wide, became a dear friend to us all. Every few yards, we would need to stop, to admire niche or cranny or knoll—where the road cut into the hillside, where the turf spilled over a peaty shelf, dripping all year round with aquaphone dribbles and percussive tremolos; pouring song into puddles, and drumbeat into slews. In winter, where the world was blue-white with snow, and robbed of sound, those very same dribbles became generous icicles, which could be snapped off and used as the sword of a battling ice-queen.
And the day we reached the first five bar wooden gate, was deemed a magnificent success. And each time we came, little legs—just a little longer—would stride a little further. Over the ramshackle stile. Over the marshy dike that runs under the path. Through the second gate and on, where the path steepens and narrows. No more gravel. Just the bare peat trail forged by a sundry million footfalls across a thousand years. Funny, to think back now at those days. We seem to store so many of our memories in these precious hills.
In summer we walk barefoot, feeling every fold and granular tincture of sunbaked earth under our soles. In the small hours of the year, we escape the warm fire and endless mince pies to commune with an iron-hard landscape, and its churning, towering sky, stacked with icy clouds. There’s always something deeply significant about the hills at the turn of the year. Stoic and knowing—as if the profundity of Christmas is not lost on them. Except that theirs seems to be a fathomless, stirring reverence that springs from the very roots of the mountains and of the roving wind, evoking some of the oldest magic known.
One time, when the girls were five and seven, we reached our new limit. It was the first of January, and I wore my thick woollen trench coat—Danish Civil Defence—wrapped tight about me to ward away the biting winds. I was desperate to walk a little further. Desperate to see over the next rise, and onward, into a new vista. As primary carer during the day, I was bound, most of the time, to walk at the pace of a small child. And during the darkest months, there were wet and windy periods where the majority of our time was spend indoors. So in the weeks after Christmas, cabin fever would hit hard. As the elements gathered me up in their tempestuous vigour, that day, I had the overwhelming urge to stretch my gait; to stride, to forge, to feel the bliss of being out of breath. The good hurt.
My wife suggested I take a few minutes to enjoy walking at my own pace whilst she and the girls headed back toward the car. After all, I would no doubt catch up. And so off I went, into the unknown. The grey January cloudbank scuffed the moorland ahead of me, siphoning away all colour, and leaving only the browns and silvers of a dormant hilltop.
I was walking into a burning sky, and it was as if I trod upon some great hearth, around which titanic Norse gods might sit.
I felt exhilarated. Up and up I walked, practically at a run. I was overcome by the sense that I had somehow skipped backward in time by a thousand years. There was no trace of modernity left up here on the moor. I had become my Viking ancestor, or a perhaps an even earlier Celt, trying to get back to his hillfort-home before nightfall.
As I climbed, up and out from the shelter of the mid-hill, to the high hill, the wind picked up. To move at my own natural pace felt freeing. To see the world move past me in slow parallax was thrilling. And as the wind cut into my cheeks, and tore at my clothes, and buffeted my body, it felt like that moment when music takes a hold of you and animates your limbs into dance.
Up the last hundred yards I ran, for the light of the day was withering into a pre-dusk sundering. Finally, I reached the crest of the rise, to see a brand new view. Radiant, even in the gloaming. I was hot, and overcome, so I took off my coat and let it drop to the ground. I wore the wind, and its train billowed out across hills and ploughed into the lowlands.
On a small island like this, there are many precious things to be found in nature. Small surprises lying in wait—under rocks, in crags, or nestled amid the spilt slate scree of a desolate mountainside… But the most precious and rare of all is an unfamiliar view. A new and startling perspective on a familiar terrain feels like unearthing a diamond.
Yes, on a small island like this, looking upon a new perspective is looking into the eyes of a loved one and finding, to your delight, a new-found source of intimacy, that deepens everything else you knew about them.
By a sedge-lined pooling that receded from the path and into bog, I came to a halt. The sun had now set, and I felt the smoulder of exertion along my back. My breath added to the clouds, and I did not feel the cold. Here the hills rolled away into a spillage of dark peaks, like the stones of a now extinguished campfire, blackened but still heavy with heat. I felt a kind of fierce heat too; inside. Behind the charred hilltops, the day’s embers glowed with a cadmium orange, and an inky sky came seeping up from the east, a wash of cobalt blue.
These days, we walk much further. When I pass the spot where I stood that day, I recall that sense of electricity, as I pressed into a personal frontier. Now, this point is just a third the way along our walk, an opening cadenza to the expansive moorside. I so love the confident openness of this landscape—so free and unguarded; hiding nothing, seeking nothing, seeing everything. There is often not a sound up here. Just the sense of utter stillness, and a counterbalance to that sleepless activity of peoplehood, that I can see scattered across the lowlands.
Eventually, around the shoulder of Colden, and after dips through streams and false peaks, and across lonely vales, and a final, steep climb, we reach the top of Lhargee Ruy—slope of ginger. We set down our bags at the base of a large pile of stones that mark the crown—the cairn. This is the view we’ve been chasing. Only here, does it reveal itself fully.
From the top of the cairn, we can see both sides of the island—east and west—laid out like a tabletop game for those Norse gods to wend away the hours. Fifteen miles separates the two coasts on this, the narrowest axis. On the eastern shore there lies the capital, Douglas, and its expansive bay and harbour. Between it and us, there spreads a quilt of fields, gullies and woodland, fractured by lanes, and peppered with grey farmyards and white manors.
On the western side there lies the heather-clad hills that march northward from the south, before turning inland to rally around the central mountain of Snaefell. And between two of these peaks, a glimpse can be caught of my hometown, Peel, its castle stamped upon the glittering sea as a lavender silhouette. Beyond even this, I see the sunken mountains of Mourne, as they wallow below the horizon, showing only their dusty heads, peeping above the waves—the only hint today that there are other realms that await across the sea.
It is a rarity to sit down in the middle of the land, and yet see the sea on both sides. And it drives home the fact that we ply a small life upon a small island. Indeed, upon a small planet. That we, like so many others, became washed up on these shores—for one reason or another— or else were fashioned from the very ground from which the ants forge their halls and aerate the soil: and from which the farmer grows the wheat that makes the sourdough, that feeds our pregnant mothers.
To be an islander is to know a life of boundaries and boundlessness. To feel the safety and isolation of this small rock, limited in land; endless in mood. And to experience the sea in all its fierce freedom. That every lapping wave, every crashing breaker has come, like us, from all parts of the world, bringing with it the flotsam of other shores. Stories half told, or endings washed away.
We lay our blanket upon a halo of rocks partially subsumed by mossy hillocks and alpine succulents; and we sit with our backs against the cairn.
Irish folklore and Celtic traditions tell that people once looked out across from the east coast of Ireland and, on a clear day, could see a shining realm rising from the sea—this island—and mistook it for the golden shores of the afterlife, where, upon those peaks, the gods dwelt, and warriors journeyed onward in glory.
Up here on the hilltop, breaking bread amongst radiant clouds and cumulus kingdoms, I feel a little of what they saw.
Learn with me, as we try to feel the world more deeply…
We only get one life, and so much of my efforts go into finding ways of living to the fullest, and feeling the world as deeply as possible. I hope it comes though in my writing.
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