nature writing – LAST WOLF

Cockleroy Hill

Posted on August 2, 2024 | by Last Wolf | Leave a Comment

The Hill Forts of West Lothian

Cockleroy is probably the hill I’ve been up the most. It’s close, it’s accessible, it’s easy, and it is these qualities that make it so charming. My daughters made it up ‘the mountain’ when they were barely able to walk. I’ve been up there with many classes and pupils over the years from the very fit, to the exact opposite, and they have all made it to the top. It is such an unassuming hill described in Canmore in a 1963 survey as ‘a most conspicuous, rugged and precipitous hill’.

The path and main route up lie facing south east and is pretty obvious from the car park just off the road from Bathgate to Linlithgow. To the west side lie some crags that would act fairy defensively though are an easy climb today.

Atop the 278m summit is the partial remains of an Iron Age fort. The earthworks are feint, though thick walls once went around the site, some 125m long and 60m at its widest point. Three ring ditch houses are visible, three close to the NE rear wall and a fourth closer to the entrance. Other than a stone arrowhead, nothing of interest to archaeology has ever been found here.

What Cockleroy does offer us is superb views. On a clear day you can see why it was chosen as a site for our ancestors. The whole of the Forth is visible, right out to North Berwick Law. We are afforded an excellent panoramic view of the Ochils and the Southern Highlands. On a clear day, apparently, you can see all the way to Goat Fell on Arran.

Again, as we are finding out during this exploration of hill fort sites, the wording is misleading. Yes these areas were defensive, situated on rocky outcrops, easy to defend, visible from miles around, but that was the point. A more modern word that should perhaps be used instead is community. And there is precious little evidence left of any community living here. However, Cairnpapple sits less than half a mile away, visible from the summit, as most things are. This is one of the highest points of the central belt and certainly of this area of the Bathgate Hills.

William Wallace is alleged to have slept here after the Battle of Falkirk. The location I am unsure of but it is known as Wallace’s Bed. It seems unlikely he would choose this place for a nights rest it being less than ten miles from Falkirk and would probably want to put a bit more of a distance between his pursuing enemies intent on a famous capture regardless of how tired he might have been.

The sheep may be the only things living on Cockleroy these days but it is well worth spending the fifteen minutes or so it takes to walk up. Look for us; the chances of us being there is high.

Live Deliberately

Barry

Currently listening to: Sparagmos the incredible new album by Spectral Voice.

https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/sparagmos

The Last Wolf

Posted on February 9, 2024 | by Last Wolf | Leave a Comment

The Sacred Texts of Last Wolf

The Last Wolf by Jim Crumley

This one seems obvious right. But I waited a long time to include this book because I like it so much, and its influence is clear. I can make it clearer still, Jim Crumley is the absolute man. He’s so good, The Last Wolf is not even my favourite book of his. That dubious honour goes to Nature’s Architect, his 2015 book on beavers, but it’s The Last Wolf that has given me the name for my website, my clothing and ultimately brought together a lot of my thoughts and ideas under one name.

First published in 2010, I didn’t get my hands on it until the paperback edition of 2016. Crumley is originally from Dundee. It is perhaps odd that I did not discover his work earlier, and odder that I arrived via a long history of mostly American nature writers. From Thoreau and Muir, to Leopold and Peacock and finally to Scottish writers; Seton Gordon, Nan Shepherd, and Jim Crumley. It took the giants of American nature writing to lead me to a guy who worked as a journalist at a paper based about 25 miles away from where I grew up. He still writes a Courier column. I’m glad he came back to it, and I absolutely put him up there with these greats.

The popular legend, well one of them anyway, says that the last wolf in Scotland was killed around the River Findhorn in 1743 by a six foot seven stalker called MacQueen armed with only a dirk and his bare hands. This was a huge black beast that had killed two children, and MacQueen took its head. This is the story I first heard, and the one that inspired me to start thinking about the last of a species within a land and whether or not it knew there was no others. The story, I think is particularly poignant to Scotland, partly due to what we now know happens to an eco-system without large predators, but also partly due to the political situation around Scotland at the time and the disaster that was to come a few years later, which was nothing short of a subjugation of an entire culture and way of life.

Of course the last wolf story is all bullshit, and called out by Crumley as early as page four. No this story is a Victorian invention, from a populous drunk on the stories of Sir Walter Scott and the thought of a tartan clad queen traipsing around the Cairngorms. Crumley pulls apart the myths surrounding the last wolf with detail. His background is journalism so you know the research is thorough, yet also with ease, because most of it is ridiculous anyway. Wolves in Scotland were neither black, nor huge. Also, speaking of size, isn’t it interesting that MacQueen is exactly the same height as William Wallace was reported to be? Fishy.

Crumley travels Scotland looking for wolf related stories and evidence from Waternish on Skye, to Strathnaver in Sutherland, south to the Findhorn valley and across Rannoch moor to Killiekrankie investigating claims and legends. This is contrasted with the story of wolves throughout the northern hemisphere, and crucially the world changing wolf reintroduction at Yellowstone. The Last Wolf is both Scottish and international.

But the most important part of it is not the fun stuff of debunking the Brothers Grimm nonsense that goes along with any talk of wolves, but what we can do about it, what we need to overcome as a society in order for these animals to eventually be ‘allowed’ back into Scotland. There is no land bridge here, they are never going to be able to just walk back as they have in parts of Scandinavia. But Crumley is confident that they will be here, and within his lifetime too.

And despite all that this book (and its author) have done for me, this book does feel frustrating. This is the nature of books like The Last Wolf, and others that deal with subjects that are long extinct; that things aren’t moving fast enough, or being taken seriously enough to do anything about it, when the benefits seem so obvious. Powers that be need to read this book, and not just people who are already sold on the idea of species reintroduction.

The Last Wolf by Jim Crumley has provided me with more than a name. It is central to the existence of Last Wolf and its influence can never be quantified. It takes its rightful place among The Sacred Texts of Last Wolf.

Live Deliberately,

Barry

Currently listening to True North by Ziggurath. Wintersynth for a cold northern winter https://unrealestaterecords.bandcamp.com/album/true-north

Celumë: Nature as its own Historian

Posted on October 6, 2023 | by Last Wolf | Leave a Comment

Celumë: Stream, flow in Quenya Elvish.

I’ve long been fascinated by the past. History was my favourite subject in school along and has remained a constant interest throughout my life. I’ve held particular time periods in high esteem in different parts of my life.

The Scottish wars of independence, the Russian revolution, WW2, Ancient Greece and Rome, the European medieval period, Renaissance Italy, Victorian London, the Viking expansion, Vietnam, feudal Japan. All conjure up memories, books I’ve read and even where I was when I read them.

Natural history, however, all though not new to me, is not as ingrained as other historical areas. Vikings, WW2 and Picts I studied at school and most of my undergraduate degree is in history. I’ve never studied natural history or science, not once in all the education establishments I’ve been to, and though I would like to, I wouldn’t even know where to start.

The term has always been a bit baffling to me. Is it not the study of almost everything in the world? And even then some. The search for water in space is the search for nature elsewhere.

Natural history can be grand, huge and even epic, one of my favourite overused words these days. Yet it can also be localised and miniscule, from the study of ants to elephants, seeds to Sequoias, the scope of natural history is enormous

While the study of history is essentially the study of people, natural history is the study of the other things on the earth, regardless of whether people are on it or not and surely it works best when people are not.

However, for as much as I’d love to do another degree in some natural or scientific area, I don’t think I’d be able to choose.

Nature has value in itself, without having to put an importance upon it as we would an impressive building, victory in battle or on the deeds of kings. Much as how history evolves, the way we view nature has changed and will no doubt develop in centuries to come, just as the words of Aristotle were once seen as ‘truths’.

Christianity changed this view, as did the industrial revolution. It’s crazy to think that agriculture, environmentalism, or even gardening wasn’t always a thing.

I like to think of nature as its own historian and this got me thinking of the ways we see the history of the world within it. Trees tell you their age once they are chopped down. Fossils can be found from beaches. We dig up peat for fires that is the vegetation dinosaurs would have eaten. Ancient shark teeth fall through our fingertips when we run our hands through the sand.

Easily visible, Hutton’s section of the Crags in Edinburgh gave us an idea of just how old the earth could be. These things are always there, the only thing that changes is our perception of them, and whether or not we notice them.

In Victorian era Scotland the study of nature was considered to be good for your mental health, now there’s a wholly modern idea.

Live Deliberately,

Barry

Currently listening to Timewave Zero by Blood Incantation

“I love to ponder the natural history thus written on the banks of the stream, for every higher freshet (stream) and intenser frost is recorded by it. The stream keeps a faithful and true journal of every event in its experience, whatever race may settle on its banks; and it purls past this natural graveyard with a storied murmur, and no doubt it could find endless employment for an old mortality in renewing its epitaphs.”

Henry David Thoreau ‘Journal’ 5^th July 1852

Aware. Awake. Alive.

Posted on February 17, 2023 | by Last Wolf | Leave a Comment

What is the number one things people say on their death bed? Possibly, I wish I’d had more time, I wish I had done more? I guarantee it’s not I wish I had worked more. Maybe I wish I’d seen Japan/Australia/ the moon, delete as applicable.

Psychologist William James said that consciousness isn’t simply existing and we must have an awareness of our being. It follows that that stems to wherever we are at the present moment. When we are completely aware of our surroundings we are truly alive, and for many that is most profound when we are outside. Whether it is having our faces beaten and bodies being knocked off balance by mountain winds, the roar and smell of ocean waves crashing around us, or the simple beauty of sitting in the garden on a summers evening, it matters not. ‘Without awareness we are not truly alive.’

Returning to our death bed thoughts, how about I wish I’d spent more time with my eyes open, enjoying what was around me? I wish I’d lived more in the moment. Time goes slow when we’re bored and also when everything is new. Apparently this is why your childhood summers seemed to last forever, because every experience was a new one, and now as cynical jaded adults we feel like we’ve seen it all.

Now as adults we sleep walk through life. We are on auto-pilot. We can drive to work after having dropped the kids of at school, after getting them all ready, after making them breakfast, and we do these things no problem, without even thinking because it’s what we do. How often have you caught yourself three minutes from work thinking, ‘I’m actually driving here’, and have been for half an hour? We haven’t realised because we’re coasting through life. Every morning is the same routine, but routine is good, organisation is key, organisation is freedom, thanks Jocko.

But I’m advocating awareness here. Active awareness of oneself and looking in on oneself, regardless of what it is that we’re doing. By all means be reflective, assess, journal, whatever it takes for you to be successful, but let’s try to do this for the majority of our lives. Can we be aware of our surroundings at all times in this world of constant distraction and a million advertisers competing for your attention? Think of an Australian Aboriginal on walkabout. Or a tribesman hunting on the Namibian plain. Awareness is everything. It leads to being alive and not sleepwalking through existence. And may even halt a few death bed regrets.

Live deliberately.

Barry

Currently listening to: The Pale Riders: L’Appel Du Vide

A quick internet search shows me the top answer is I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself and not the life others expected of me and, yup, there’s I wish I didn’t work as much straight in at number two.

Wanderings of a Naturalist

Posted on September 10, 2021 | by Last Wolf | Leave a Comment

The Sacred Texts of Last Wolf

Seton Gordon: Wanderings of a Naturalist 1921

Seton Gordon is hardly a household name anymore, but he deserves to be. He became world famous as a naturalist, folklorist and photographer in his lifetime and most of his works are still widely available and some still in print. He was born in Aboyne in Aberdeenshire in 1886 and died in 1977, coincidentally, the year I was born. This year sees the 100^th anniversary of his book Wanderings of a Naturalist, and it seems timely that this becomes one of the Sacred Texts of Last Wolf.

Wanderings of a Naturalist is one of those heralded books of Scottish nature writing that I heard about and saw mentioned by others many times before I even saw a copy. I can’t remember where, or even when I got it, but it is a hardback Cassell first edition from 1921 with ’78 Illustrations from Photographs by the Author and his Wife’.

Seton Gordon’s primary interest seems to be birds. Bird life overrides this book and a lot of his work and he wrote widely on the subject. His first book, published when he was only 21, was entitled Birds of the Loch and Mountain. He wrote some 27 books throughout his life, including a book entirely dedicated to his favourite winged species, the golden eagle that almost certainly had an impact on the bird still being seen in certain parts of the country today. One of the striking things about a lot of chapters in this book is the amount of times he sees an eagle, insinuating from beyond the grave that there was a lot more of them around a hundred years ago than today. He was one of the first people to photograph eagles in their eyries.

Wanderings of a Naturalist is written through the eye of an obsessive, not just an expert. Birds may be an overriding passion; he spends countless hours and days in huts and shelters to observe various birds, but he writes about the outdoors, mountain vistas, views from island hilltops etc. with the same passion and a poetry that brings the magic of the area truly to the fore. And it is almost exclusively about Scotland. He seems to be able to name every surrounding hill and mountain within eye-sight and even names those that he should be able to see as well if the weather didn’t allow it. In the chapter on Ulva for example, he names all the islands and as well as each of the peaks on them. He is firstly a naturalist but he never ignores the country or its people and he writes equally about both. He collected stories and folklore and does not shy away from our sometimes violent history.

As all these early 20^th century pioneer types seemed to be, Gordon is quite the character. He usually wandered wearing a kilt and a bunnet, or sometimes a deerstalker, no doubt cutting quite the figure wandering the moors, glens and mountains. Magnificently, he would often break out a bagpipe tune, something I find wonderful as I often sing when alone on the hills and find myself wishing for some instrumental accompaniment.

Gordon may have been Oxford educated but spent most of his life in the wilds of Scotland and when he died a memorial bench was erected on Skye in his memory. The plaque reads…

“In the memory of the late Seton Gordon, CBE, writer and naturalist whose twenty-seven books on the highlands and islands led many people to appreciate their beauty. His love of the Hebrides influenced his coming to Skye where he lived for more than fifty years among the people of this area.”

We will end with what is a fairly random section of text reproduced from Wanderings of a Naturalist.

“Landing in one of the sheltered bays-for the south wind blew strong- a short walk took me to the hill-top, where, on the cairn, the peregrine is wont to sun himself, and where on the heather and bramble plants stone-chats rear their broods, and whitethroats flit noiselessly as the busy themselves at their nest-making. Great fields of wild hyacinths covered the hillside, so that the air was heavy with their scent, and the quickly springing bracken fronds, which soon would cover the hillside in a thick canopy, could scarce be seen for the luxuriance of the bluebells and primroses that grew between them.”

This is very lyrical in its description. I have broken up the same text into lines. Read again, the same words but how poetic they are. This could be poetry:

Landing in one of the sheltered bays-

for the south wind blew strong-

a short walk took me to the hill-top,

where, on the cairn,

the peregrine is wont to sun himself,

and where on the heather and bramble plants

stone-chats rear their broods,

and whitethroats flit noiselessly as they busy themselves

at their nest-making.

Great fields of wild hyacinths covered the hillside,

so that the air was heavy with their scent,

and the quickly springing bracken fronds,

which soon would cover the hillside in a thick canopy,

could scarce be seen for the luxuriance

of the bluebells and primroses that grew between them.

Seton Gordon ladies and gentlemen. So happy 100^th birthday to Wanderings of a Naturalist. Take your rightful place amongst the Sacred Texts of Last Wolf.

Live deliberately

Barry

Currently listening to Exercises in Futility by Mgla for the zillionth time. An utterly flawless album.

https://no-solace.bandcamp.com/album/exercises-in-futility-lp-2015

The Living Mountain

Posted on June 18, 2021 | by Last Wolf | Leave a Comment

The Sacred Texts of Last Wolf

The Living Mountain by Nan Sheperd

Nan Sheperd was born in 1893 in Cults which is now part of Aberdeen. She lived in the same house for most of her life which since 2017 has had a commemorative plaque outside. Like me, Nan went to Aberdeen University, graduating in 1915, 80 years before I went. She went on, also like me, to be a teacher. Though unlike me, she taught teachers, employed at Aberdeen College of Education until her retirement in 1956. She wrote poetry, three novels in a similar style to Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and many essays. However, her most famous work, a short non-fiction book lay in a drawer for thirty years, Nan only publishing it four years before her death.

“To feel heather under the feet after long abstinence is one of the dearest joys I know.”

This book, The Living Mountain, was written in the latter part of World War II and thankfully saw the light of day in the glorious year that was 1977. This was quite a year. It brought the release of three of the top eight biggest selling albums of all time. It was the year of the Queen’s jubilee. Star Wars rose and the plane carrying Lynyrd Skynyrd tragically fell. It was also the year of my birth, three months after the death of Elvis, who weirdly died a year younger than I am now.

The Living Mountain is centred specifically in the Cairngorms and is a celebration of the mountain range; but this book is much more than that. It is perhaps easier to say what it is not. The Living Mountain is not a book about summiting. It is not a book about peaks, speed or victory. This is a spiritual journey, a pilgrimage even, and a fresh take on writing about mountains that is unconcerned with the more masculine pastime of conquering. There is more than one way of climbing a mountain.

”Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.”

Nan really explores this landscape, and she recognises the details and subtleties of the entire area, a range that is older than the Alps and the Himalayas. She looks upon the plateau of the Cairngorms as a whole, not individual mountains but one, with many tops. I love this idea, one that Nan called the Total Mountain. And unlike every other mountain, you do not look up at the peak, but look downwards, into the chasms and depths from the plateau itself.

The book is divided into chapters that reflect features of the mountain experience. It includes chapters on water, snow, plants and wildlife but also on man, on the senses and what Nan calls Being. It deserves its place amongst Walden and A Sand County Almanac as one of the world’s greatest books on the outdoors, and as a sacred text of Last Wolf.

“Man might be a thousand years away.”

One of my favourite sections is on Life: Plants and I love the descriptions of the various smells you might become acquainted with in the Cairngorms. Smell is important to my memory and sense of place and I can understand why she covers it. I can be taken away to a Highland loch or forest, a deserted winter beach or the summer Tuscan countryside with one aroma. Nan compares smells on the mountain to scones baking and jam on the boil.

In this same chapter she also laments the mass cutting of trees for the war effort, which began in the Napoleonic era and includes two, very recent at the time, world wars. She highlights the fact you can see how far up the mountain the tree line used to go. I suspect it is even much lower now than it was in 1945.

“So simply to look on anything such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.”

This is a factual book; a record or diary even of everyday detail in the Cairngorms. It includes a lot of ecology: it is sold as a celebration, but is mostly a meditation. The spirituality in this book is the reason it is a lifelong influence on Last Wolf. It feels closer to a Buddhist text rather than a book on mountaineering and it is this that makes it transcend and shine through in its unadulterated joy of the Cairngorms. Her descriptions of the flight of swifts are as sublime as those of the eagles; stags sing with tenor and sometimes bass voices.

This Zen like quality to the outdoors is something that has been written about before on this weary road to Word Mountain and no doubt will crop up many times on this journey. When we walk into the mountains, we walk into ourselves. We have “walked out of the body and onto the mountain” and are “a manifestation of its total life.” This is a beautifully written book that deserves far more recognition than it gets. I’ve read it many times and I know I’ll read it many more. The Living Mountain is the preeminent spiritual inspiration on Last Wolf.

Live Deliberately

Barry

Currently listening to: The new track from Wolves in the Throne Room.

https://wolvesinthethroneroom.bandcamp.com/album/primordial-arcana

A Sand County Almanac

Posted on December 11, 2020 | by Last Wolf | Leave a Comment

The Sacred Texts of Last Wolf

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold (1949)

A Sand County Almanac was in my Amazon wish-list for about ten years before I bought it. I don’t know why it took me so long. It was never expensive, only ever around £10 or so, I just never got around to buying it. I eventually got it a few years ago, just before Christmas, and I read it quickly.

Every Hogmany (New Year’s Eve non-Scots) we spend several days at a cabin in the west of Scotland. This had replaced the hubbub of Christmas and become my favourite time of the year. It is very quiet, rarely do we even see anyone. Before the bairns came along I used to use this as a time to drink whisky, sleep, walk and of course read. Reading uninterrupted with nothing but a log fire and a view of the mist on the loch, or the frost on the ground. What could be better? Some books fit this scenario better than others. Books on Scotland for example, especially Scottish history, fit very well. Stephen King’s It, not so much. I read A Sand County Almanac at our cabin, finishing it on New Year’s Day.

It’s a wonderful book, an undisputed classic of the genre. I haven’t been so affected by nature writing before or since. I reread parts of it over and over. I wrote down an entire chapter in my notebook and I am just going to repeat part of it here.

August: The Green Pasture

“Some paintings become famous because, being durable, they are viewed by successive generations, in each of which are likely to be found a few appreciative eyes.
I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all, except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush, and it is the same river who, before I can bring my friends to view his work, erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind’s eye.
Like other artists, my river is temperamental; there is no predicting when the mood to paint will come upon him, or how long it will last. But in midsummer, when the great white fleets cruise the sky for day after flawless day, it is worth strolling down to the sandbars just to see whether he has been at work.

The work begins with a broad ribbon of silt brushed thinly on the sand of a receding shore. As this dries slowly in the sun, goldfinches bathe in its pools, and deer, herons, kill-deers, racoons and turtles cover it with a lacework of tracks. There is no telling at this stage, whether anything further will happen. But when I see the silt ribbon turning green with Eleocharis, I watch closely thereafter, for this is a sign that the river is in a painterly mood”.

Leopold then goes on to end this section…

“Do not return for a second view of the green pasture, for there is none. Either falling water has dried it out, or rising water has scoured the bar to its original austerity of clean sand. But in your mind you may hang up your picture, and hope that in some other summer the mood to paint may come upon the river”.

Beautiful imagery, and nature writing at its very best.

It’s harder to pinpoint how this book has influenced Last Wolf directly but it has to do with how the simple things in life are all connected. Everything fits together in and we, as humans, need to respect that and fit in too. The best trophy of the outdoors, the wilderness, the wild, whatever you want to call it, is the experience itself, and that is ultimately human. He discusses ideas that were way ahead of his time, topics we have met already atop Word Mountain, and no doubt will meet many times before the day that this project ceases to be.

How do we encourage use of the land to ensure it remains protected and conversely protect it at the same time? Is governmental influence an answer? This book is a plea to value these places. Think the idea of tropic cascades came from George Monbiot? Aldo Leopold discusses this in 1949 within a heart-breaking yet life changing story of shooting a wolf mother and at least one pup. This was a time when the killing of wolves was almost considered good manners; less wolves equals more deer for the sportsmen. But the young trigger happy author instantly regrets it.

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realised then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes- something known only to her and to the mountain”.

When thinking of farmers clearing the range of wolves, Leopold writes…

“He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.”

And that,

“too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run”, he then goes on to quote or old pal Henry David Thoreau.

Think like a mountain. Be like Aldo Leopold.

Live deliberately

Barry

Currently listening to Winter Solstice by Black Pyre and Speak English or Die by S.O.D.