Thinking about the wild

That's me in a beech copse not far from home. It's one of my favourite places, especially in summer when the light is sea-green and always on the move. It's only a giant's stride from one side to the other, but it feels somehow a secret place even though I know plenty of people pass through because there's a path worn through the leaf litter, and invisible kids have made camps out of sticks.

I'm not sure I'd call it wild, but I'm thinking about that. Wild things live there, and it's a very different-feeling place at midnight. And if I lie on that leaf litter and look mighty closely at the soil, I see all kinds of things getting on with their lives, completely indifferent to me.

I'm wondering if it's that indifference that makes a place wild, however small or close to home?

My beech copse is a long way from Ardnamurchan, where we spent a little bit of this summer, as far west as you can go on the mainland before you have to swim.

One day I walked alone to the top of this small mountain, and it felt wild, though the sun shone and I had a cinnamon bun in my bag.

It was so little visited that there were no paths so I wound my way up through bogs and heather and over rocky lumps, up to the top from where I could see nothing but clear blue sky, hills, islands fading out to the horizon, and all around, the endless sea. And below me a pair of small lochs.

They were too tempting, so I scrambled down, stripped, and swam, safe in the knowledge that there was no one at all on the mountain to see.

That small mountain felt deeply wild, though I was never more than an hour from the village out of sight below the ridge. Is wildness all relative? My wild is your home? Your terror is my happiness?

I've been reading books on walking in the wild, on finding its edges, on loss, and death and rebirth in those edge places, on the creatures and plants that live in our wild places, on how we are as humans in the wild, and what earthworms taste like. Everyone's wild is their own, I'm finding, because it depends what you bring to it: grief, a warm bun, a bunch of strangers, or the person you love, a question, a desire for space, a need to know ...

I'm teaching a short course in a few weeks where we'll explore some of the latest writing about the wild and the natural world. I'll be sharing some of the best of the books I've been reading, and we'll write, finding words for the wild we seek, love, and fear. I can't wait.

Writing the Wild, University of Kent at Tonbridge
Two weeks: October 9 and 16
1.30 to 4.30