Table Of ContentDeep Country
Five Years in the Welsh Hills
NEIL ANSELL
HAMISH HAMILTON
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
HAMISH HAMILTON
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First published 2011
Copyright © Neil Ansell, 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted All rights reserved
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illustration by Andrew Farmer
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-141-96133-
0
Contents
Prologue
1. The Empty Quarter
2. A Gathering Silence
3. The Sheep in the Trees
4. My Familiar
5. Restless Creatures
6. The Bird in the Bush
7. The Thief
8. The Still Point
9. What Remains
Epilogue
Prologue
The drivers always seem bemused when I tell them where to drop me.
On a long, fast sweep of the road flanked with serried ranks of pine,
there is a track through the woods, but it is invisible to anyone who
doesn’t know exactly where to look. It is the merest whisper of a trail; I
doubt that anyone other than me has trodden it for many a year. I step
into the cool hush of the pine forest and make my way down to the
valley floor. Through the trunks I can see the glimmer of light on water
far below. Way above me a sparrowhawk is circling in her display flight.
There is a footbridge over the river, an old suspension bridge, and I
pause midway to lean on the rail and look downriver at the water
boiling over submerged rocks and veering around little mossy islands.
The hours I have spent watching this river roll by, sometimes at a crawl,
sometimes in a raging brown torrent. And then I look up; the day is
wearing on and I still have a mountainside to climb. The steepest of
steep fields, if you stretch your arms out in front of you as you are
walking up it you can almost touch the ground ahead of you. It is May
and the field is a haze of blue, the air thick with scent. Bluebells are
flowers of the forest, not the field, but long, long ago this field was
wooded; the biggest stumps, those too big to be dragged out by tractor,
still stud the ground. And the bluebells still emerge in their thousands
every spring in remembrance; the ground layer of the ghost of a wood.
Over a crumbling gate is the moor. The tight coils of bracken are
unfurling, the whole hillside is bursting into life. Before long the bracken
will be head-high and the trail will be a green tunnel. A pair of red kites
circles lazily above the valley, and a solitary raven flies straight and
determined above the fields below me, cronking as he sees me. I follow
his course; I know exactly where he is headed. The liquid, bubbling call
of a curlew trickles down the mountainside. The hills are calling; they
always call me back.
Unless you know where to look the cottage is singularly hard to find,
and that’s the way I like it. I reach it just before nightfall and kick open
the back door; this is the only way to open it. I don’t have long before
dark, and there is plenty to do while there is still enough light to see by.
I must fetch in water, bring in logs from the woodshed, and fill the
lamps. I must get the fire lit and make up a bed, and hang a kettle of
water for cooking dinner. Then I’ll sit out front with a cup of tea, look
out at the view as the sun sets, and count the bats out of the loft. It’s
good to be back.
There are some mornings here when I could be on an island. In the
night the valley fills with fog, in the darkness I can just make out a snake
of it settling on the valley floor, following every twist and turn of the
river. But when I wake the sunshine is streaming in through the curtains
and I throw them aside to look out across a sea of foam. Here, at a
thousand feet, it rarely reaches me. The tops of the nearest trees emerge
like mangroves but beyond that it is twenty miles to the nearest dry
land, the looming whale-backs of the Black Mountains, the spires of the
Brecon Beacons peering over the long ridge of Mynydd Epynt.
Sometimes the fog is so thick that when I step outside it laps at my feet
in waves, and if I walk a few paces downhill I can barely see my hands.
And then as the sun rises higher it starts to burn away, the tide turns and
the fog retreats down-valley, leaving a hillside glistening with dew.
Morning comes, and I am alone but not alone. There is a redstart on
the wire and a wagtail bobbing on the roof. Blackbirds are nesting in the
woodshed, on an upturned hoe hanging from a nail on the wall. The
redstarts seem to be nesting in the gables, they must approve of the new
roof. Their nesting box they have surrendered to the great tits; when I
open the lid eight hungry mouths gape up at me. After a few seconds,
four of the baby birds slump back down, but the hungry ones keep
pushing up, refusing to accept that I have nothing for them. The hole in
the ash out front, which becomes home for some bird or another every
year, has been occupied by a shy pair of stock doves; it is finally their
turn. In the early-morning sun they display together in celebration,
launching themselves from their nesting tree, and flying in a tight circle
together, so close they are almost touching. The lead bird holds a little
twig in its beak, as if it is returning to the ark.
I sit in my front porch looking way down across the valley to the
faraway hills while sharpening my saw. Twenty-one strokes to the right,
and twenty-one strokes to the left. There has been a dry spell, so it
makes good sense to saw as many logs as possible while I am here, to
split them and shed them before they have a chance to get wet. With the
weather here so unpredictable it is reassuring to have several weeks’
wood in reserve in the woodshed; a backlog. As I sit preparing my
chainsaw I see that the swallows have built their nest in the porch; I
reach in and run my finger around the smooth mud lining. There is a
single egg, she has laid her first today. She will lay another egg each day
until the clutch is complete and she can start to incubate; then it will be
time to abandon my porch to the swallows, and just use the back door.
I was always surprised by the number of birds that chose to nest in
close proximity to the cottage when I lived here full-time; now the place
is even less disturbed there are more than ever before. For the very first
time, a pair of goldfinches is nesting in the garden. It takes me a while to
find the nest in the blackthorns just inside the gate where the
chaffinches sometimes make their home. The goldfinches are delightful
little birds with cherry-red faces and brilliant golden bars on their wings.
The nest is far from the trunk as is their habit, where it will be tossed
about in the breeze, but the little mossy cup is built so deep that it will
not be upset by even the wildest wind. The nest is about two metres up,
too high to inspect, so I hold up a mirror over it to see the four tiny eggs
nestled within.
I have picked a fine time for a visit; the spring evening is as balmy as
any summer’s night. Tomorrow, if the weather holds, I shall head for the
hills. As darkness begins to settle lightly on the land, a falcon appears
over the front field. Birds of prey can be hard to tell apart on the wing,
but not this one. I have it pinned immediately as a hobby, from its arc,
its spirit. It is far from its usual haunts; even after all these years, the
place can still bring me surprises. The falcon doesn’t seem to be hunting,
more just celebrating life. As night falls, I watch enraptured as it swoops
and banks and swerves on its scimitar wings, until I can see it no more.
Never before have I seen a bird that looked so like it was dancing in the
air.
The grass in the garden, fenced off from the sheep, has grown tall and
rank in the months since I was last here. I can barely make out the shape
of where my vegetable beds used to lie. I would cut it back were it not
for the hares. Hares are the hardiest of creatures; they live out in the
fields all year long and can breed at any time of the year. But this year
they have chosen the spring, and have chosen my garden. There are two
leverets now grazing just a few feet away in the lush grass of the fertile
soil where my vegetables once grew. They are almost the size of rabbits,
and must already be weaned as the jill is leaving them largely to their
own devices; I have only seen her once. The two little hares watch me
watching them but don’t seem to mind me so long as I keep my eyes
fixed on them. If I glance away for a moment they seem to just melt
away into the long grass.
I lived alone in this cottage for five years, summer and winter, with no
transport, no phone. This is the story of those five years, where I lived
and how I lived. It is the story of what it means to live in a place so
remote that you may not see another soul for weeks on end. And it is the
story of the hidden places that I came to call my own, and the wild
creatures that became my society.
1. The Empty Quarter
I first came to the cottage on an autumn night the year of my thirtieth
birthday, setting off at four in the afternoon from London straight after
working a double shift. I hadn’t expected to make it that night, and had
arranged to stop over with friends in Swindon and continue my journey
in the morning. But the first truck that picked me up from the start of
the M4 took me clear through to Leigh Delamere Services, so I decided
to press on. Things slowed down after that as the roads got less and less
busy. I was dropped off at midnight in the village by the last lorry driver
of the day, said my thanks and got out my hand-drawn map. I took the
bridge across the river, then headed into the lanes. The cottage is three
miles from the village, along lanes that get progressively narrower and
steeper and finally give way to a dirt track. As I walked, tawny owls
called my way, the too-whit of the females, the too-whoo of the males. I
counted five territories, it felt as though I was being handed from one to
the next like a baton in a relay race. There was no moon but the Milky
Way was a bright smear across the sky. From the last farmhouse there
were seven gates to open and close, and I followed the track rather than
cut across the fields even though it was so steep the trail wound
drunkenly back and forth.
Although later I would prefer to take my night walks by starlight
alone, everything was new to me then and I carried a torch. Everywhere
it shone, eyes were reflected back at me; there were rabbits lined up
along the edges of every field. I didn’t know it then, but they were at
their peak. Soon, myxomatosis would hit again, and the population
would crash to almost nothing, before slowly beginning to rise again.
Although if you know where to look you can see the cottage like a
beacon on the hillside from the main road ten or fifteen miles south,
once you leave the village the lay of the land makes it disappear from
view until you have closed the last gate, turned the last corner, and the
track finally levels off. And there it was that I caught my first glimpse of
Penlan Cottage, nestled against the hillside, surrounded by a ring of ash
trees. After the steep trek into the darkness of the mountains it was a
welcome sight. It looked like home.
From its northern aspect at least, the cottage looked like a child’s
drawing of a house; four square windows, a central door, a steeply
pitched roof, a tall smoking chimney stack and a tree to either side.
From the south, it looked more like a shed, as it had been
weatherproofed with corrugated-iron cladding and painted cream. It
looked bad, but was probably necessary, for it was so exposed to the
elements. A friend once described it as the only place he had ever been
where it rained uphill. There was a porch too, a slab of stone, a timber
frame clad again with corrugated-iron sheeting. This was a fine place to
sit and look out across the valley, and when it was wet the rain would
clatter on the metal roof like gunshot. Beside the porch was a sprawling
cotoneaster, and I would transplant a wild honeysuckle from the woods
which would grow to drape over the entire porch and fill it with a nectar
that would attract hawkmoths, including sometimes the elephant
hawkmoth, in pastel pink and mossy green, to my eyes more beautiful
than any of the butterflies we have here in Britain. There were two
windows facing south, from the living room and the main bedroom
above, and the stone walls were sufficiently thick that the sills inside
were deep enough to sit in should the weather drive me in from the
porch. It was a view that never ceased to draw the eye. Either side of the
house there was a single narrow slotted window. The place was a
Victorian gamekeeper’s cottage, and these windows were designed for
keeping an eye on the pheasant pens on each side of the building. The
one to the west looked out across the moors. You could cross two fields
and you were on open moorland; you could walk west for twenty miles
without seeing another house, or a road, or a fence. This uninhabited
swathe of the Cambrian Mountains right in the very heart of the country
has been called the green desert of Wales, its empty quarter.
Just downhill across the track there was once a farmhouse,
presumably Penlan Farm. An overgrown rocky mound in the
approximate shape of a large building from which now sprout full-grown
ash trees, it is not so much a ruin as the ghost of another era. This
landscape is far wilder than it once was; the hundred-and-twenty-acre
