Step into nature as we explore the Celtic landscape of my island home.
This walk takes place in mid-March, starting in Druidale, in the central hills of the Isle of Man.
As Spring awakes, something too awakes in me. A fresh breeze stirs in my chest, and I feel the need to get out there, into nature. As much, in fact, as is humanly possible.
We park up next to the Rhenass River, as it slips under the road and away into marshland, coiling through tussocked pasture and fringed with porcupine rushes. It’s one of my favourite views on the island. The kind that tugs at a wanderer’s heart like a land-bound siren. I see a pastoral idyll unfolding, of squamous walls and sunlight splintering on water, inviting the eye to meander and explore. But walkers—as I have lived to regret—will quickly become lost in a patchwork quagmire, a maze of waterlogged false trails that lead you ever away from the safety of the next stile.
Which is why we are heading up the road today. Up, and further. High into the hills, to seek elevation and be uplifted in the process. But first, a quick game of pooh sticks, to divvy out bragging rights. Twigs are cast into the flow. A sidelong glance between father and daughter. And a dash to the other side to witness a champion emerge. Having been handed an inferior stick, I lose, as usual, but I watch with a sympathetic thrill, as my twiggy vessel rides the tumult and off into that impenetrable landscape.
We begin our walk, and we are surrounded by a thriving moorland busying itself for Spring. It is the first truly warm day of the year, and it may yet prove to be a false start. With this caveat in mind, it evokes the kind of excitement found at a dress-rehearsal. In the light breeze, a cast of debutant greens, veteran straw yellows and scene-stealing blossoms take to the stage and jostle for position before opening night. We stride alongside, separate from the performance, like Broadway columnists at a preview.
We tread a grey tarmac ribbon, stitched with uniform white markings. It is interrupted by a blaring yellow cattle grid—across which we tiptoe and wobble—and decorated with a triangular red and white traffic sign prophesying bends. The contrast between grown and made could not be starker, and I yearn to be off and away from all things civilised. Into the thick of it—into the wildness of nature.
Though I have to admit, quiet byways and their weathered furniture do add a certain something to a landscape. For who does not feel pulled by the invitation of a country road, as it slinks off into the promise of distant things? It’s just, I’ve had a week filled with right-angles and smooth, regular surfaces, and predictable time-slots. I’m in the market for unfettered, beautiful, living disarray.
We pass a ruined farmhouse, or tholtan. It’s still in decent shape, but a family of young beeches has recently moved in, and are in the process of renovating it to their needs. Upon the still-intact gable, there lies a smattering of white lichen colonies. When viewed on a moonlit evening, they appear as bright stars against a black rectangular void—as if I stare upon a doorway unto foreign constellations, Kubrick style.
A pair of Sphinx-like sycamores guard the road, statuesque. They allow us passage, and soon after, we spy our footpath into the hills. It accompanies an unbending dry-stone wall that marches upward, away from the road. The path seems deceptively easy, though I know from the map that it breaches a generous sheaf of contour lines.
Here is a lithic line of intersection extending for a kilometre, as straight as a rule. It is an incongruous imposition on a terrain of curlicue gestures. And it is impressive. At times the wall falters, then stumbles, spilling out across the neighbouring pasture. Discombobulated rocks. Evidence of a shattering blow landed by the landscape. Defiant, it picks itself up again and continues its assent, without deviation.
As do we. And as the climb progresses, so our legs burn in protest. Our small party becomes strung out. A strand of striders and stragglers. We take ‘beauty-breaks’, to stop and admire the view. To concertina inward, and to catch a rarefied breath in the process. A shot of brown fur crosses our path, field mouse or rat, I know not.
Rodents not withstanding, I am happy here. Surrounded by singing grasses and their dry, rattling forebears. Yesteryear’s heather protrudes in puffs—tangled and confused, and burnt black by winter winds. The gorse is getting going though, sending forth tendrils of unseen coconut for bees and noses to follow, into yolk-yellow blooms wearing crowns of thorns.
I take out my binoculars and scan the vista before me. A fine haze is draped silk-like across loping hills. Just over there, a fairy tale cottage nestles into a stand of firs, and I recall, from a bygone age, my father weaving it into a bedtime yarn. And westward, a handsome farmhouse overlooks a dogleg reservoir, and I spot the path where my eldest daughter once slipped on the ice. And shimmering in the distance, the peak of Snaefell hosts a hibernating cafe, a mast, and a windowless hanger for the Ministry of Defence.
With the wall as our guide, we stomp ever onward. On its other side, ewes chaw and lambs frolic. At once, my youngest daughter stops in her tracks, her arm outstretched, signalling us to halt as if she were a black-ops Marine. We approach in silence. There, with black-bead eye glinting in the sun, lies a lizard. No, two—three! Basking at the base of the wall, their tails and bodies a study in sine waves. I spy tiny scaly hands with elongated fingers, engineered for gripping at shear angles.
We watch in wonder, hardly daring to breathe. It’s so rare to be afforded more than a blurred glimpse of these beautiful creatures. Stolid and motionless, they adopt the repose of a photo-shoot model. One of them sports a mosaic hide of green zigs and tope zags. The other, a Navajo loom-pattern in clay reds and ochres. Skulking in the crevasse between stones, there’s a third lizard, stubby-tailed and skittish.
Over a period of minutes we watch, as my youngest daughter inches closer, her hand outstretched. Four inches away from her fantasy, they turn and flee.
At the top of the climb, the wall ends, and we are on our own. Boundaries are for dene-dwellers. Up here, on the central pate of the island, there is only freedom. Up here, a congress of hilltops clash heads, allowing ramblers to crown-hop without limit. Or to drift as grains of pollen. And so much silence! Broken only by the contemplative Wheatear, as it chirrups its philosophy on timelessness. By the sprig-skipping pipit, and the raptorial harrier, and a hesitant breeze whispering soliloquies older than words.
We catch a ride on a rutted path that tapers out into a fine filament arc, stretching up and up into the sky. The slope is slight, but hillside keeps peeling away, the crest invisible or not yet made. A bumbling bee barrel-rolls through our party sounding as thunderous as a biplane, and then is off on some daring quest. I believe it’s the first I’ve seen this season. Perhaps it is the only wakened bee on the island. There has to be a first.
As we reach the top of our trail, the silence seems to swell even further, to a crescendo. It alloys with the sky, and the last audible strains sublimate into the azure abyss like impurities burnt off in the forge. The soundlessness is dazzling silver. It is thrilling, and flawless. Brilliant and tricksome to the ear. It quenches some need deep inside of me—to hold and to have such a precious thing. And it is assuaging too, smooth and cool upon the soul, like a balm. This—this shining silence is what I have been searching for.
Utterly relaxed, we pad softly, as if over sacred ground, so as not to disturb the peace. Now, we are truly elevated, in body and in spirit.
Underfoot there are now forests of moss, swollen and lush. Rivulets emerge from effusive ground, pooling, trickling, gathering. I watch as the feathered flows conjoin like an inverted delta, running off into the valley below as the first sketch of Ballaugh River.
When conversation bubbles up once more, no longer do we grouse about inclines and breathlessness, but rather speak words of hope. We share our plans for baking, or creating new clothes, or conjuring protagonists and villains for stories yet to be penned. Height, I have found, lets you literally rise above your problems. When you are hill-walking, the world of money, or the pressures of work, or leaky chimneys and packed calendars seem like abstract shapes from a murky dream. When houses appear as faraway specks, then the bills on the kitchen table are but specks within specks. Politics, and drama, and stress are merely the folly of ants.
No more are we bogged down in our tangled quagmires and waterlogged labyrinths. Up here is where the truth of it lies. And the air tastes so much the sweeter.
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