The Wild Places (Penguin Original) Read Online Free PDF

must have felt, I thought. Yet perhaps they did not, perhaps their faith was so absolute that it resembled fatalism, which is a type of fearlessness. Certainly, many of them - unnamed, unchronicled - died there in the Sound, drowned by wave and current. ‘There is an island there is no going to / but in a small boat,’ wrote the priest-poet R. S. Thomas, whose parish of Aberdaron looked out on to Enlli:
    The way
the saints went, travelling the gallery
of the frightened faces of
the long-drowned, munching the gravel
of its beaches . . .
    We can know little for certain about the peregrini . We know few of their names. Yet, reading the accounts of their journeys and of their experiences on places like Enlli, I had encountered a dignity of motive and attitude that I found salutary. These men were in search not of material gain, but of a hallowed landscape: one that would sharpen their faith to its utmost point. They were, in the phrasing of their own theology, exiles looking for the Terra Repromissionis Sanctorum - the Promised Land of Saints.
    A long Christian tradition exists that considers all individuals as peregrini , in that all human life is seen as an exile. This idea was perpetuated in the Salve Regina, the chant often recited as a last night prayer. Post hoc exilium , the prayer declares: all will be resolved after this exile. The chant, when sung, sounds ancient and disquieting. It is unmistakably music about wildness, an ancient vision of wildness, and it still has the capacity to move us.
    Much of what we know of the life of the monks of Enlli and places like it, is inferred from the rich literature which they left behind. Their poems speak eloquently of a passionate and precise relationship with nature, and of the blend of receptivity and detachment which characterised their interactions with it. Some of the poems read like jotted lists, or field-notes: ‘Swarms of bees, beetles, soft music of the world, a gentle humming; brent geese, barnacle geese, shortly before All Hallows, music of the dark wild torrent.’ Others record single charmed instants: a blackbird calling from a gorse branch near Belfast Loch, foxes at play in a glade. Marban, a ninth-century hermit who lived in a hut in a fir-grove near Druim Rolach, wrote of the ‘wind’s voice against a branchy wood on a day of grey cloud’. A nameless monk, responsible for drystone walling on the island of North Rona in the ninth century, stopped his work to write a poem that spoke of the delight he felt at standing on a ‘clear headland’, looking over the ‘smooth strand’ to the ‘calm sea’, and hearing the calls of ‘the wondrous birds’. A tenth-century copyist, working in an island monastery, paused long enough to scribble a note in Gaelic beside his Latin text. ‘Pleasant to me is the glittering of the sun today upon these margins.’
    Gleanings such as these give us glimpses of the nature of faith of the peregrini . They are recorded instants which carry purely over the long distances of history, as certain sounds carry with unusual clarity within water or across frozen land. For these writers, attention was a form of devotion and noticing continuous with worship. The art they left behind is among the earliest testimonies to a human love for the wild.
    Ideas, like waves, have fetches. They arrive with us having travelled vast distances, and their pasts are often invisible, or barely imaginable. ‘Wildness’ is such an idea: it has moved immensely through time. And in that time, two great and conflicting stories have been told about it. According to the first of these, wildness is a quality to be vanquished; according to the second, it is a quality to be cherished.
    The etymology of the word ‘wild’ is vexed and subtle, but the most persuasive past proposed for it involves the Old High German wildi , and the Old Norse villr , as well as the pre-Teutonic ghweltijos . All three of these terms carry implications of disorder and