Alauda
arvensis & Fulmarus glacialis
“Exultation,”
wrote Emily Dickinson, “is the going of an inland soul to sea.” Dickinson lived her whole life in western
Massachusetts; she rarely left her family’s house and she kept her poems to
herself. She knew everything there was
to know about being an inland soul.
Anybody
who is given to inwardness, and who reads those words of Dickinson’s, is sure
to feel a surge of familiarity. For
those of us who sometimes choose to take comfort in our own company there’s
something about the vastness of a seascape that is mind-expanding. Australia’s national myth-building might have
had its foundations in the bush, but these days it’s towards the sea that the
nation is regularly said to turn its imagination – and little wonder: while the
vast inland may be too dry and harsh an environment to support a substantial
population, the fertile strip of land around the coast provides a relatively
comfortable lifestyle, and it’s there that the great majority of Australians
live.
Which
makes Canberra something of an anachronism, to an even greater extent than most
Australians already consider it to be: the capital of a maritime nation, yet a
city that is more than a hundred kilometres from the nearest coastline; a city
whose constitutionally mandated seaport is connected only by tenuous
imagination and a long, long road. It’s
the city I grew up in and since I became aware of the cultural hegemony of the
sea in contemporary Australia it’s a city whose very inland-ness – its setting
among hills and mountains, its plentiful woodlands and cold, clear nights – is
something I’ve embraced as my own.
So for
me the sea has always had an otherness, yet it’s an otherness that I’ve found
myself drawn to time and again. Not when
I’m far from it, on those rare occasions these days when I’m settled among my
hills – but when I get close to it, physically or emotionally, I feel its
tightening pull on me, like an outgoing wave sucking at my feet.
When at
the start of this year my family began planning a two week holiday to England
for April, there was only one event set in stone: my cousin’s wedding in
London, at the end of the first week, the sole reason for the trip. Beyond the wedding there were days to fill,
and it was almost immediately that I suggested to my father that we could go
for a walk along the coast of Cornwall. I’ve been visiting the south of England my
entire life, but Cornwall’s a place I’d never managed to get to. I grew up listening to my mother’s stories of
summer holidays in Looe, though, on the county’s southern coast, and the idea
of Cornwall had long captivated me, much as it captivated the Victorians who
extended a great railway line from London all the way to the tip of the Cornish
peninsula, several hundred kilometres distant.
It was
on that railway line that my father and I travelled to Cornwall, six hours or
more from Paddington Station to Newquay, across half a dozen counties. When we arrived in Newquay, a town of 20,000
people half-way up the northern coast of Cornwall,
it was late in the afternoon. The sun
was still bright when we checked into our hotel, though the wind was strong and
cold, but even in late April winter’s touch was still lingering, and when the
sun began to sink it sank quickly. When
we left the hotel to find some dinner the shadows were already long and
icy. Below the cliffs up which the town
rises we caught glimpses of beaches, their sand as golden in the last light of
the day as any Australian strand. The
waves were dotted with surfers, and on the road into town we were passed by a
tall man, his board under his arm, jogging towards the sea, his whole body save
for his hands, his feet, and the circle of his face enclosed in the protection
of a fluorescent orange wetsuit. Otherwise,
though, the town seemed nearly empty.
When we stopped for dinner in a large pub perched above the harbour
there was only a handful of other people in the long dining room, and my father
asked one of the waitresses if there were normally more people than this. “Yes,” she said, “normally we’re full at this
time of year.”
We left
Newquay first thing the next morning, eager not only to embark on our walk but
also to get out of the town, which was to the liking of neither of us. We’d come to Cornwall for its wild coasts;
for its sea-pounded cliffs and wildflowers and seabirds; not for what we saw as
the despoiled, touristic landscape of the town which we’d chosen as a departure
point only because of its relative accessibility. My father and I have walked together many
times before, in Tasmania and in the mountains of south-eastern Australia and even
in the Scandinavian Arctic, and each time we’ve walked it’s been in pursuit of
a fugitive wildness, a depth of isolation from the human world that can only be
achieved by slow and patient walking into the heart of nature. In Tasmania over a decade ago we walked along
the South Coast Track, eight days traversing the wildest part of a coastline so
remote that you have to be flown in.
Walking west to east and spurred on by the vastness of the Southern
Ocean always on our right, gazing south towards an imagined Antarctica
three-thousand kilometres distant, we walked because once the light aeroplane
had dropped us off at the western end of the track there was no other way out.
It was
with such memories in mind that we walked out of Newquay. Yet Newquay – the imprint it made upon the
land – was not so easy to escape.
Strictly following the Coast Path, we walked west and then north-west
around Towan Head, a long, narrow finger of land on the edge of the town, and
then south for nearly a kilometre down Fistral Beach. It took us all morning, but still whenever we
turned a corner we seemed to walk right back into Newquay and all its unwild
humanity. On Towan Head we passed two
buildings: one was the Headland Hotel, an enormous red brick edifice built in
1900 to the most luxurious standards of the day; the other was an ancient
hermitage, which in more recent centuries had been a huer’s hut: a low
whitewashed mound of a building high on a cliff above the sea, its interior
barely protected from the North Atlantic wind.
For hundreds of years men had sat in that hut, warmed by a fire, gazing
endlessly out to sea. Upon sighting a
shoal of Pilchard (Clupeidae spp) the
huer of the day would rouse the town’s fishing fleet to action with his
yells. A life spent staring at the
waves, in service of a town perched on the very edge of the land.
From
Fistral Beach we skirted around the Gannel Estuary. Though the path around the estuary took us
right back amid the houses and streets, on the far side of the estuary,
climbing up a muddy track towards Crantock, Newquay’s tiny neighbour, we at
last left Newquay behind us and found ourselves amid something resembling a
natural environment: a narrow beech-wood, the trees growing tall in the shelter
of a hill. Gliding above the treetops by
the estuary we caught a glimpse of a Buzzard (Buteo buteo). Later that
day, at lunch in the bright sun outside the thirteenth-century Treguth Inn in
Holywell, we saw two more gliding low and keen barely above the tops of the
powerlines, and I was reminded of the Wedge-tailed Eagles (Aquila audax)
which fly above my parents’ holiday house in New South Wales. Usually they’re high and distant, but not
always: ten or more years ago we became accustomed to seeing them fly low,
directly over the house – the largest of the true eagles, larger even than the
fabled Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos),
flying so close that we could see their eyes, and the curve of their beaks, and
the colours of each individual feather.
They were looking for food: it was a drought, a terrible drought, and
hunger and desperation had overpowered the birds’ instinctive wariness. In Cornwall, every time I saw a Buzzard
flying low over a village, or a Kestrel (Falco
tinnunculus) hovering right by the path, I wondered if these animals had
become accustomed to the presence of humans in this crowded land, or if they
were so fearless because the long winter had left them starving and desperate. Normally we’re full at this time of year.
Around
Crantock my father and I found ourselves walking past fields. Town or farmland; it was difficult to imagine
a more built environment than the one we were walking through. Any wildness in Cornwall seemed to end with
the waves crashing into the cliffs, as if those cliffs were a defensive
wall. As we walked down country roads
past the fields we found that the farmland went right to the edge of the sea,
and it was easy to imagine that if not for the heady cliffs the salt-water
would lap at the crops. Yet there were
few crops visible, even so late in spring: the fields were bare and rocky.
There
was noise in the fields, though. Not the
noise of the waves, nor the noise of the large and ubiquitous Herring Gulls (Larus argentatus) – though those were both continuous and ever-present, our
own out-loud ear-worms that would occupy us for the rest of the walk – but
something else, something new: clamorous and joyful, hurled across the sky
against the North Atlantic wind as if in defiance of the sea itself and all its
crashing.
You can
get too absorbed in a walk, you can get too locked-in to the rhythm of it:
sometimes you need something unexpected to pull you out of the trance, and make
you stop, and listen, and look. When we
heard this strange hectoring, clattering birdsong my father and I stopped
walking, on the narrow strip demarcated by the Coast Path between the field and
the cliff, and we looked for the singer.
We looked inland – for the first time since arriving in Cornwall we
turned our full attention inland.
Somewhere beyond that field, beyond the distant trees, beyond the roads
and the far buildings and the hedges, there were hills and mountains and rivers
and lakes; there were cities and bridges and forests and meadows. Behind us, forgotten for the moment, was the
vast promise of the sea, and ahead of us, beyond our gaze, was all the
multitude and variety of our own terrestrial habitat, and for that moment as we
stood and listened it almost felt to me as if the sum of it was pouring out of
this one bird’s song. There are many
birds that do not sing, and they belong to any number of biological Orders:
there are the Gulls and related birds (Charadriiformes); the Raptors (Falconiformes);
and on and on. All songbirds, though,
are of a kind: they’re all from the Order Passeriformes
– the Passerines – and there are no songbirds at sea. Sky-loosed, they yet cling to the land: they
sing from forests and from meadows and from the banks of rivers; they encircle
lakes and they perch on bridges and they share our cities. They fill our hedges with song, they sing out
their territories on mountaintops. They
follow us wherever we go – or we follow them, perhaps. But they have the better of us: because they
can take to the air, and perhaps none do it in quite such a way as the Skylark.
When we
saw him he had finished singing, momentarily, but he was still high in the sky,
a mere dot against the clouds. Having
finished his song he was falling, to catch his breath, and perhaps it was only
this movement that allowed our ancient hunter’s eyes to see him. Male and female Skylarks look alike, smallish
and streaked in brown and buff, their shape unremarkably birdish. Behaviourally, though, in early spring when mateships
are being formed and territories proclaimed, the two sexes could not be more
different. My father and I saw plenty of
the females: indiscreet, they ran furtively from almost under our feet along
the bare ground. They were silent and
they looked over their shoulders at us as they ran, only occasionally taking to
the wing in brief hops and spurts.
The
males, though, were nearly invisible to us.
I’d learn about the particulars of Skylark behaviour later, reading
about them in our hotel room that night, but when I saw that first male and not
yet knowing anything about the bird, all I could think of was how high in the
air he was, and how loud his song was. A
Skylark is less than twenty centimetres long from tail to beak and weighs only
a few dozen grams; the sea-wind was ever-buffeting, bowing even the few low
trees and bushes – and yet there he was, hurling himself up to one-hundred
metres into the sky, flapping with all his tiny might just to stay in place,
and all the while belting out his song for the whole damn world to hear. He stayed up there for what seemed like
minutes on end – in fact Skylarks can stay airborne and singing for up to a
quarter of an hour – and he came down for just a few seconds breather before
going back up, fighting gravity and wind and everything but instinct, and doing
it all over again. God knows how long he
kept at it, how many times he went up and came down: when my father and I
turned back to the path, keeping an even keel with the field on our left and
the sea on our right, he was still at it.
Usually when people name an animal, particularly a bird, we do so with
utter banality; but sometimes, we get it exactly right. Skylark!
A jaunt, a joy, a delight, broadcast direct from the open air high above
our heads.
But
time was pressing. On a long walk, time
is always pressing, and with twenty kilometres due to be covered in the day it
felt like we’d still barely left Newquay behind us. Wearily we left the Skylark singing above his
field and we continued down the Coast Path.
The
majority of the path was flat, and looking back or ahead along the coast we
could see that the clifftops were at an even height, all on a single plane like
the mountains of Virginia
with their crests blown off.
Occasionally, though, where the sea made inroads into the land, the path
would dip and descend before rising steeply again. In these places we were set amid the
seabirds, and as we walked down the path and back up they watched us coolly
from their nests on the cliffs. Only the
ones in flight ignored us, at home in the air and perhaps secure in the
realisation that we couldn’t reach them there, no matter how close they flew;
so as we walked down and back up again the gulls flew all around us, the
steadiness of their flight barely betraying the turbulence cutting the trailing
edges of their flight-feathers. We
watched them circle and swoop, circle and swoop, as they tried again and again
to master the wind and the cliffs and their own delicately balanced bodies and
land on the one tiny cliff-ledge that was their own: when one stuck the
landing, after three or four unsuccessful approaches, it was exhilarating to
watch.
Though he’s nearly
forty years older than me my father was walking faster, unencumbered on this
walk by anything larger than a day-pack and being a little taller than me –
and, probably, more than a little fitter.
So he was walking ahead of me and increasing his distance as we climbed
up a steep and narrow stretch of the path between thick tussocks of grass, a
great gulch of cliffs to our right and the immensity of the sea behind us. The gulls were flying thick in the air,
rising from below us almost vertically in the updrafts mere metres from the
path. I’d grown weary of them by now –
their monotonous presence, their constant cawing, their ceaseless flight – but
the simple proximity of them to this part of the path prompted me to turn
around and watch them for a few moments.
As I did so some remnant bird-watcher’s instinct in my eye noticed
something about one of the fleeting birds: its head was wrong. It was perhaps not quite as large as some of
the other gulls, but I’d noticed amid the ubiquitous Herring Gulls the
occasional even larger Great Black-backed Gull (Larus marinus) and I knew also about the tiny Kittiwakes (Rissa tridactyla) so I wasn’t surprised
to see some discrepancy in size. The
bird was white, as white as the gulls around it. But its head – its head was rounder, much
rounder, than the heads of the gulls – like a radar-dome – and its beak was
thin and knotted like an old tree branch.
I
stared in disbelief and mounting excitement, and conscious that my father was
getting further away from me I yet waited to get another glimpse, to confirm
what I was beginning to think. Soon
enough the bird – or another of its kind – cut past again, banking on its stiff
wings in the air pushing up off the vertical rocks. With a grin I turned again and ran after my
father, breathlessly pushing myself up the steep and winding path.
“I saw
something!” I yelled when I reached him; though I was panting from the short
run uphill, I may have yelled it twice to get his attention. “Not a gull, I think it was a petrel of some
kind” I continued. Then, recalling a
tourist information sign I’d read by the old lifesaver’s shed back on Towan
Head in Newquay: “It was a Fulmar, I think.”
I turned around and beckoned my father to follow me back down the slope
to where the view opened out into an encompassing V and the Herring Gulls and the
Fulmars danced through the air around their cliff-nests.
“There
goes one!” I shouted, my finger tracing a crude facsimile of a Fulmar’s flight
as one raced past. “See?” By now I was seeing the difference between
the two birds more clearly; I was picking the Fulmars out from the throng of gulls
with greater and greater ease.
My
father picked up on them, too, and took as much delight as I did in admiring
their easy, forceful flight. “They’ve
got longer wings” he said, and there was some truth to it: their wings were
different. Whether they were actually
longer than the Herring Gulls’ wings or not I don’t know, but they looked
narrower, and straighter. They were the
wings of a bird more used to the air than to the land, a bird which can ride
the waves across the sea without ever touching the surface. The gulls, sitters and floaters as much as
they are flyers, suddenly looked less natural in the air, and while the Fulmars
held their wings as flat and as straight as an aeroplane’s wings the gulls held
theirs slightly hunched from the shoulders, as if the air was a jacket that
didn’t quite fit.
Fulmars
spend nearly their whole lives out at sea.
Like other pelagic birds, they fly by gliding mere centimetres above the
waves, riding the air currents there just as they ride the wind up the faces of
the cliffs that they nest upon. They can
change direction abruptly in mid-glide, even turning around completely, without
flapping their wings or appearing to put in any effort at all. Out at sea they eat what they can find,
grabbing food from the surface or diving, propelling themselves under the water
with their feet or their wings, to hunt for fish, squid, jellyfish – whatever
small animals are available. Only when
they need to breed do they come to land, and then only barely: they establish
territories on coastal cliffs or on offshore islands, and they don’t even
bother to make a nest – as if even gathering nesting materials would bring them
too close to a terrestrial existence.
They lay a single egg directly on the rock or on the earth, and when the
egg hatches and the chick is raised, parents and offspring alike return to the
sea. The adult Fulmars will not
reproduce again that season. If
misfortune doesn’t befall them, they can live for up to forty years.
Australia’s coast is
vast, and its offshore islands innumerable; seabirds can nest far, far away
from people, and so they do. As my
father and I walked to Perranporth, our resting place for the night, my head
was dizzy with Fulmars: I stopped to watch them whenever I could; learned to
pick them out in an instant from the gulls; felt disoriented and delighted when
my bird-addled brain became confused and momentarily unable to separate species
from species. After dinner that night
while the news chattered from the television in our hotel room I read about
Fulmars: how in Old Norse their name means foul
gull, because of the vile oil that they vomit on predators as a last-ditch
defence. It’s said that if the oil gets
on your clothes, you’ll never get the smell out no matter how many times you
wash them. On the local news the leading
story was the mystery surrounding the death of hundreds of sea-birds, Fulmars
among them but also Puffins (Fratercula
arctica), Gannets (Morus bassanus),
Razorbills (Alca torda), and
particular Guillemots (Uria aalge),
washed up on the beaches of southern Cornwall a few days earlier. The chemical responsible had been confirmed
as polyisobutylene, a fuel additive, thought to have been dumped into the sea
from ships emptying their ballast or cleaning out their fuel tanks. I wondered what the Norsemen would have
called that. As I went to sleep the
Fulmars were settling into their cliff-top nests, each couple preparing to
raise its single child in the months ahead, before they all flew low and fast
back out to their true home.
---
The
next morning, just out of Perranporth, my father and I walked up Cligga
Head. Alternately looking around us and
head-down, doggedly walking, we passed scores of Fulmars, sometimes flying scattered
amid the Gulls but often also in discreet colonies, set apart from the Gulls
which inhabited their own cliffs, like separate nations. We were used to the cliffs now, but still
they took our breath away: vertiginous edifices, twenty or thirty metres tall
and monolithic yet crumbling, too: frequently the path took an abrupt detour
around some part of the cliff which had succumbed to the constantly pounding
wind and sea, and had slumped into the long fall to the waves below. A person fell from this location, we
read on a sign on a fence still newly pale, and was seriously injured. The Fulmars wheeled uncaringly on the wind
and rode it out over the heaving sea and back, out and back, out and back.
Cligga
Head was marked everywhere with signs of human use: the flat plateau of the
headland was studded with the shells of buildings, shafts, holes and hollows,
the leftovers of the mining industry that defined Cornwall in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. It was our
first sight of the remains of this great industry, but the next day we’d see
more: at the foot of St Agnes Beacon where the path cut a sudden diagonal line
down a steep slope towards the sea and the waves heaved into the land, and with
nothing visible but water and the close-cropped vegetation of the hill, we
clung to the path as if the earth itself might shrug us off over the cliffs we
knew were below us, just out of sight.
As we walked dizzily around the slope we saw in the distance a decrepit
building, looming tall and stark against the sky and empty-eyed like Sidney
Nolan’s Ned Kelly. When we got nearer we
saw that there were more buildings below it, lower than the tower we’d first
noticed: they were all that remained of the steam engine halls that in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had pumped sea-water out of the perilous
mines below.
By
chance my brother and I had taken a friend’s young son around the Science
Museum in London not one week earlier; in the first room of the museum we’d
learned about James Watt and Matthew Boulton, and about their steam engines,
and about how they’d made their names in the mining industry of Cornwall. Tin and copper and other metals have been
mined in Cornwall for millennia, but it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries that the industry was at its peak.
Mines dotted the coast, the dark stone buildings that capped them built
like implausible castles atop cliffs and crags, within touching distance of the
sea’s spray. So rich was the mineral
deposit, so fervent the hunger to excavate it, that the mines sometimes reached
below sea-level. At times only a thin
wall of rock separated the miners from disaster, and as they dug they could
hear the sea pounding and roaring all around them. Above their heads the great steam turbines
trembled constantly, pumping sea-water out of the mines, doing what they could
to keep people safe and the industry alive.
It was the Industrial Revolution; in the countryside the land was being
partitioned into private fields and people were losing their livelihoods, while
on the coast people were risking their lives for others’ gain. It’s not hard to imagine the impact all this
industry must have had on the environment, and the number of species of plants
and animals that must have had to adapt to the fevered activity of Cornwall’s
human inhabitants, or perish.
Yet as
we walked amid the old mining works there was still some life there. At those first leftover diggings, just out of
Perranporth on the second day of the walk, on open ground midway between the
path and the cliffs, we saw three birds.
My father scarcely got a glimpse of them and afterwards was unsure that
he’d even seen them at all, but I got a good look, and I knew them right away:
they were Choughs (“Chuffs”, Pyrrhocorax
pyrrhocorax). I’d never seen them
before but I’ve long gazed in curiosity at their likeness in my field guide to
the birds of Great Britain, a book so old that it still lists as “common” Red
Kites (Milvus milvus) and sundry
other birds that have stared local extinction full in the face. There are two species of Chough in Britain:
the Yellow-billed Chough, also known as the Alpine Chough (Pyrrhocorax
graculus); and the Red-billed Chough, more commonly known as simply the
Chough. The latter species is a bird
particularly connected with Cornwall: historically it appeared on the Cornish
coat of arms, alongside a miner and a fisherman; it’s sometimes known as the
Cornish Chough.
Choughs are passerines like the Skylark, but more
specifically they’re corvids, Family Corvidae, relatives of Crows
including the little Jackdaws (Corvus monedula) that played along the clifftops like
black-clad acrobats. The greatest of the
Corvids in Britain is the Raven (Corvus
corax), and I saw one shortly after I saw the Choughs. Ravens are birds of the wild but they live
most famously in the Tower of London; it’s said that should they ever leave the
Tower, the monarchy will fall – so the
Tower’s Ravens have their wings clipped, and are bound to stay where they are
generation after generation. The bird
that I saw in Cornwall was intact, though, in its natural state, and as I
unwittingly approached it I was startled by the sight of it flying up from a
point of the path only ten metres in
front of me; it croaked gutturally and flapped its great black wings against
the sky, disappearing from sight. If my
approach hadn’t disturbed it I may not have noticed it, so weary was I from
walking against the wind around the unsheltered headland; so weary from
trudging through the unlovely mine-scarred scenery. My head was bowed in tiredness and it’s only
because my head was bowed that I noticed – half a footfall before I stepped on
it – a Rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus)
lying in the middle of the path. Its
thick grey fur didn’t even move in the wind, and its body was curved against a
large grey rock, as if carved from the very same stone. As I approached it it kicked desperately with
its back legs, but it couldn’t get to its feet, much less run away. I was so startled that I barely even
registered what I was seeing, and my heart began thumping in a fight-or-flight
response as if the rabbit was something that could harm me. There was something unnatural about its
movements, about the way it flailed helplessly against the gravel of the path,
as if its body really had started to fuse with the stone at its back. There was something awful in its panic and it
was with a start that I noticed its face, before I forced myself to look away:
where its keen dark rabbit-eye should have been, there was instead an abyss,
pink and fleshy and empty like a newborn baby’s mouth. I stumbled and felt a wave of dread rise
within me; I remembered the Raven; I didn’t know what to do about the Rabbit so
I left it where it was, and warned my father about it lest he should step on
it, and I continued walking through the ghastly despoiled landscape, with the
Raven’s barking call ringing in my head.
The
sight of the Rabbit left me shaken in a way I couldn’t quite quantify. Not even the magnificence of the sea and the
cliffs could exorcise the haunted feeling within me as I tried not to speculate
on the animal’s fate. I was losing count
of the headlands by now, they were endless, so I can’t recall when it happened
exactly but at some point beneath a sky threatening rain we came to yet another
exposed headland, and upon it the remains of a military installation. There was nothing marked on our map – just an
empty space, the path skirting around the edge of the Ordnance Survey’s
uncharacteristic blankness – and we were left to infer what we could, peering
over the wire, and from remembering what we’d read online in our preparation
for the walk: was that a runway? Or was
it a decoy? Huts and buildings and
concrete blocks looked stricken and long-disused; but elsewhere mysterious constructions
hummed with electricity and formed an uneasy harmony with the sounds of the
wind and the waves. What looked like
radar installations sat beneath the broad lowering sky, staring out to sea:
waiting for disaster from afar. The path
squeezed us between fences into narrow passages like livestock runs; we
clambered over stiles and were wary of even taking photographs of anything
inland: every time we came to a corner or a confusion in the route there was a
sign on the fence, reminding us that we were walking on land that belonged to
the Ministry of Defence. When we photographed
the scenery accidental glimpses of military installations worked their way into
the edges of the frame, and we continued quickly as if we might be accused of
espionage. As we walked I remembered a
truism: that military land, firing ranges and training sites and the like, are
often wildlife reserves of unrivalled richness – because the public is never
allowed to encroach upon them. But this
military base was foreboding and seemed heavy upon the land. After the walk, back home in Australia, my
father left a message on my voicemail: he’d been going through his photos, and
something he’d seen in them had triggered an alarm. “I knew I had a funny feeling about that
airfield” he said. He’d seen in one of
his photos the name Nancekuke: “Put ‘Nancekuke’ into Google”, he told me
In the
Second World War Nancekuke, then called RAF Portreath, was an airfield,
operating initially upon its opening in 1941 as a Fighter Command Sector
Station. By the end of the War the
airfield had largely fallen into disuse, and in 1950 the Royal Air Force
returned the land to the British Government.
From then on the Ministry of Defence used the base as an Army research
centre, until finally in 1980 its ownership reverted back to the Air Force,
which used it as a radar station – which is what it remains to this day.
It was
those early years of Army use, though, that are Nancekuke’s most intriguing and
most unsettling. On the 18th
of January 2000, the local Member of the House of Commons, Candy Atherton,
raised in Parliament questions about Nancekuke’s troubled history and legacy
during this period. Addressing the
Minister for the Armed Forces, John Spellar, Ms Atherton recounted the
experiences of her constituents: people who had worked on the base in the 1950s
reported becoming seriously and mysteriously sick; people who lived in the
surrounding area reported similar ailments.
A large number of seals on Cornwall’s north coast had died suddenly. And 41 people who had worked at Nancekuke, Ms
Atherton reported, had died: nine during the term of their employment, and the
remaining 32 in the years since.
“Put ‘Nancekuke’
into Google”, my father urged me, his voice sounding almost anxious as he
rushed to get the words out, “the second entry will be ‘Nancekuke sarin gas’”. For an adult human, a lethal dose of sarin is
0.5 milligrams – one half of a thousandth of a gram. During its time under Army ownership, as
Britain built up a stockpile of chemical weapons in the dawn of the Cold War,
Nancekuke was home to the manufacture of twenty tonnes of sarin. When the base was abandoned by the Army,
contaminated material – buildings, production equipment – was buried on
site. That was in 1980; clean-up of the
land began only in 2001, with five waste dumps at Nancekuke being registered as
contaminated land in 2002. The manager
of the Nancekuke Remediation Project reported in issue 34 of the Defence
Management Journal that it was “highly unlikely” that chemical weapons
themselves were dumped at Nancekuke; but damage doesn’t have to be limited to
the end-product: in her long question to the Minister on January 18 2000, Candy
Atherton noted that the death of the seals, which occurred between the years of
1966 and 1979 when John Pardoe was the area’s Member of Parliament,
corresponded with the flushing of decontaminants into the sea through a cave.
---
The
poet Alice Oswald ends her epic poem Dart,
about the river of that name in Cornwall’s eastern neighbour Devon, with a
scene of a seal-watcher entering a sea-cave:
[I] float inwards into the trembling sphere
of one freshwater drip drip drip
where my name disappears and the sea slides in to replace
it.
When we
search for wildness, those of us with a yearning for it, we can be unprepared
for what we find. We’re inevitably
searching for some place in which the human touch is absent: we want pristine
forests; unspoiled mountains; unpolluted coastlines. But in these terms the search for wildness,
for true wilderness, is pointless: there’s barely a square metre of the earth
that humans haven’t touched in one way or another. More, though, the search for wilderness misses
the point: we learn most not in those few places where humans are absent
but in those places – temporal and physical, psychological and concrete – where
humans have touched the landscape, or where the landscape has touched them;
where the boundaries between human and non-human, more tenuous than we usually
care to admit, come closest to dissolving.
I remember from several years ago my shock at visiting Snowdonia
National Park, in Wales: the park celebrated not virgin wilderness but the
human relationship with nature, the human involvement in nature. This was most striking in the fact that since
the National Park’s establishment farmers had been encouraged to return to the
land, to work it as they had for thousands of years. This seemed utterly alien to my Australian
sensibility, obsessed as we are with preserving our shrinking bush, but in fact
the Australian landscape is more worked by human hands than those of us of
non-indigenous heritage, still to a large extent seeing the land with foreign
eyes, have ever acknowledged.
Cornwall
has been inhabited by humans since the end of the last Ice Age. The Cornovii, the people for whom we give the
County its name, lived there from the Iron Age until after the Romans had left
Britain. That’s a pittance when compared
to the Aboriginal inhabitation of Australia but it’s long enough for
people to know how to live with the land.
Such knowledge beds down slowly, like layers of sediment forming into
rock; but it may have to be un-learned much more quickly. Things are changing. In Portreath where we stayed on the second
night of our walk, in the shadow of Nancekuke, my father looked in horror at
the houses crowded into the low valley bottom, barely metres above the
high-tide mark of the broad beach and in a narrow space between two towering
cliff-faces. They’ll all be rendered
uninhabitable, he pointed out, when the seas rise. “There may also be some potential
opportunities for Cornwall as a region as a result of climate change,” the
Cornwall Council’s website says hopefully, before admitting: “However, most
impacts are potentially negative including the need for significant adaptation
in the design and location of buildings and infrastructure.”
Significant
adaptation. For humans and non-humans
alike; but the animals of Cornwall – animals everywhere – have long had to
adapt to the changes that humans have wrought upon the landscape. How, I wonder, might the Fulmar adapt? Ever since people have stared out to sea they’ve
put ships in the water; ever since they’ve put ships in the water there have
been consequences for the environment, whether from the felling trees or from the
dumping petrochemicals. Whenever the
Coast Path took my father and I down onto a beach the high-tide line was marked
not with seaweed and strewn shells but with styrofoam, and aluminium cans, and
the detritus of human civilisation: in a post from January 2012 the news
aggregate website This Is Cornwall states that each kilometre of Cornish beach
contains on average 2000 items of rubbish.
Cornish beach – I should say British beaches; I should say the world’s
beaches. We imagine the sea as wild,
impervious – but most of all we imagine it as infinite. We dump our waste in it at will and we do it
without thinking, or at best with the pained avoidance of thought. One imagines the Fulmars will adapt to this
choking pollution, if they adapt at all, by going further and further out to
sea; one imagines that they might be doing that already.
Animals
do adapt, though – some of them.
Whenever my father and I passed some barren ground along the Coast Path
we encountered Skylarks: we saw the females skip and flit over the humps of
earth; we heard the males proclaim their songs from the sky. Skylarks are ground-nesters: the reason the
males fly so high to announce their territories is so that when they sing, the
attention of predators is drawn to them but not to their nests. They’re birds of the open spaces, and the
disturbed soil of old excavations serve them just as well as a valley floor or
a hilltop. So each mine-scarred
headland, each steep slope and each ploughed and planted acre that we walked
past or through in our few days in Cornwall was in its small way being rewilded
by the Skylarks; for as we walked we passed not a single patch of land cleared
by human hand that didn’t have a Skylark singing his loud song from high above
it.
In the
afternoon of the second day, before the ruined steam engine halls, before
Nancekuke, in a cafe where we’d stopped in Churchtown in the village of St
Agnes, I’d flipped open a book of facts about Cornwall. Knowing no better I’d assumed that the
Choughs I’d seen around the old mine sites the day before must not be unusual,
but as I scanned the endless pieces of trivia in the book my eye alighted upon
that distinctive word, “Chough”. The
birds, I read, are not common in Cornwall
at all, but in fact are recent re-arrivals in the county: their return in 2001
was heralded as a great occasion, and an indication of a true triumph of
conservation and environmental restoration.
When
they returned it was the first time that Choughs had been seen in Cornwall for
nearly thirty years. After all that time
the first astonishing sighting, made by fishermen, was of four birds flying southwards
over the sea; one turned back, but the other three made land and remained. That I’d seen three birds myself – huddled in
a silent group, black bodies turned against the wind, their eyes watching me
cautiously over their long, decurved red beaks – seemed scarcely credible, and
I allowed myself a moment to indulge the thought that just maybe the birds I’d
seen were those same three original returnees.
Legend
has it that upon his defeat in battle King Arthur, a Cornish king above all
else, was transformed into a Chough; and that when all the Choughs leave Cornwall, and then return
again, so King Arthur will return. I can’t
speak to that particular restoration but the Choughs have been back in Cornwall
for twelve years now and they’ve been breeding that whole time. That original trio was made up of two females
and a male; the male and one of the females were a pair, and in the ten years
after their arrival in Cornwall they raised 36 chicks. Since then more adults have arrived and begun
breeding; and the chicks have grown up and have themselves started raising
their own broods, so that in only twelve years there are now generations of new
Cornish Choughs. So heralded has been
the return of the Choughs that the lives of the three original returnees in
particular have been unusually well documented: the Royal Society for the
Protection of Birds recounts, for instance, that the male was injured in a
battle with a Herring Gull, and was unable to walk for days yet still struggled
on to feed his chicks. The new Cornish
Choughs are being closely watched and there’s now a great cohort of them – a
clattering of Choughs, in fact, for that, wonderfully, is their collective noun
– and among other observations, it’s been noted that some of the birds have
taken to making their nests in the security of the long-abandoned mining works.
At its
peak nearly a third of Cornwall’s population worked in the mining
industry. When the industry collapsed
many Cornish people emigrated to Australia,
particularly to South Australia
where my father was born. Many years ago
when my father and I had walked along the South Coast Track in Tasmania, our
departure point had been Melaleuca, a tiny and long-abandoned settlement. We’d walked past bothies and Nissen huts that
had once supported a tin-mining industry, a pocket industry infinitely smaller
than the great endeavours of Cornwall and even more remote, on the edge of an
even greater and less gentle sea. Melaleuca
and the valley that surrounds it are also the last stronghold of the
Orange-bellied Parrot (Neophema chrysogaster), perhaps Australia’s most endangered
bird. There are only two-hundred of them
left in the wild; they flock in numbers around Melaleuca and are seen nowhere
else in Tasmania. There’s nothing to
infer from their presence in a valley once so despoiled by human hand; nothing,
except that one does not necessarily preclude the other; that whether human or
non-human, we make use of the land as we will.
For all the nobility of our increased awareness of the animals around
us, and our impact upon them, we still view them as an “other”, a group of
creatures collectively unknowable and alien.
Yet the fact that they still, some of them, find ways to make themselves
at home among us – whether Sklarks in a field or parrots by an old tin mine in
Tasmania or Choughs in the mined landscape of Cornwall – should be instructive:
for what could we possibly be to them if not just another creature in a world
abundant with them?
---
The walk was to end the
next day, in Hayle, from where my father and I would catch a bus through the
uninspiring streetscape to nearby St Ives, and from there a train back out of
Cornwall the day after. Before we got to
Hayle there was one last headland to navigate: Godrevy Point. As we approached it we could see that beyond
the tip of the point, on a small island, was a brilliantly white lighthouse,
the very building that’s reputed to have inspired Virginia Woolf, gazing at it
across St Ives Bay, to write To the Lighthouse. Small flocks of birds, pendulous and flapping
frantically, were patrolling the waves around the island: Guillemots, too small
and distant to be identifiable but written of with every mention of Godrevy
Point.
For the
last three days and sixty kilometres we’d been walking towards Hayle; but I’d
been walking more particularly towards Godrevy Point – for it was there, we’d
been told by a friend who knew the area well, that we would see seals. We’d seen a couple on the first day:
following the gaze of a fellow-walker we’d seen two heads, one grey and near
and the other dark and distant, upright in the waves, gazing back at us. Though they were too distant for us to see
any details of their faces, I fancied that there was yet something familiar
about their attitude: a particular poise that spoke of the kind of curiosity
that we often like to claim as our own.
It’s this attitude, this distant inquisitiveness, that gives seals their
magic: it makes them seem warmly familiar, even as they remain so utterly alien
to us in so many ways. It’s little
surprise that coastal cultures abound with myths about seals changing into
humans, and humans into seals: we can imagine them as something not so unlike
ourselves, and perhaps we fancy that if we returned to the sea we would with
time become like them.
When my
father and I reached the cliff above the seal colony on Godrevy Point the
location was conspicuous by the crowd of people lining the pine fence that
formed a viewing platform. Laminated signs
on the fence instructed us all to be quiet, but there was a kind of reverence
among the people gazing down at the seals that rendered such instruction
unnecessary. The seal colony, a beach
twenty metres below, was small and inaccessible except by sea; and from the sea
it was sheltered by the narrowness and the length of the cove in which it sat,
and by large rocks just offshore which broke the force of any waves that
managed to approach the sand.
On the
beach, some of them in bright warm sun and some of them in deep icy shade, were
twenty or thirty Grey Seals (Halichoerus grypus): grey or black or brown, they emerged from the stones
scattered along the beach as my eye adjusted to their presence, and to the
shapes of their cylindrical bodies, as if adjusting to darkness: the more I
stared, the more the seals became apparent, until I saw them scattered up and
down the beach and didn’t know where to look, there were so many of them.
We
noticed movement in the water and saw there a young seal playing in the
waves. While the adult seals basked in
the sun or lay oblivious, motionless, in the deep shade, this solitary pup,
dark-furred and wide-eyed, dived in and out of the water. It made exploratory forays towards the beach
before letting the undercurrent carry it out again; perhaps looking for its
mother, it made a motion to land at one end of the beach before swimming back
out and down to the other end. Once
there a wave swept its small, confused body up hard against a rock at the foot
of the beach; yet in its youthful resilience it bounced off the rock with a
bleat and an alarmed undulation of its little body before clambering out of the
surf and onto the sand. Some of the
adults stretched and looked up from their slumber, but if the youngster’s
mother was there she didn’t move towards it, nor make a sound. Yet it had swum, and it was safe, and it
continued along the beach until we decided to avert our eyes, and leave it in
peace.
We
pressed on to Hayle. Feeling closed-in
by the Hayle Towans, a series of huge sand dunes that run for five kilometres
or so from Godrevy Point all the way to the town, we made the decision to
descend to the beach instead; a poor decision, for though the heat in the tall
dunes had been intense, walking across that flat expanse along the line of the
sea was no relief at all. As soon as we
crested the dunes we realised that the wind that had been blowing hard and
relentless for the entire walk was here at its peak: it was so strong that we
could walk into it only by leaning at a steep angle, as if leaning against a
heavy door that yielded only reluctantly; at times we had to turn around and
walk backwards down the beach just to seek some respite. Sand whipped into our legs and the wind
knocked the breath out of our mouths and sucked the moisture off our lips so
that we became more thirsty than we had been at any time during the previous
two days. The beach went on for
kilometres and we walked nearly the whole length of it. The sheer mechanical simplicity of placing
one foot after the other was the only thing that kept us moving, like
automatons, and when we paused, to watch the local surf lifesavers practice
launching their enormous rescue boat, it was a relief to stop walking and yet
also an acute agony, after fifteen minutes of observing, to realise that if we’d
kept walking instead we’d be off the beach by now.
Though
the men were practicing to save lives, the act of getting the boat into the
water was painfully slow: the boat was driven down on an enormous truck whose
caterpillar tracks stopped it sinking into the sand; a winch was attached from
the back of the truck to the front of the boat; the truck then reversed
carefully into the sea to such a depth that the boat, when eventually lowered
off the tilting bed of the truck, could float of its own accord. Only once it was in the water – a slow
process of winching and shouted guidance from the men on the sand – could the
boat finally be released. Once in the
water it was piloted at speed, out across the breakers and back, up and down in
front of the beach, before being brought back to the truck, and the winch, and
the whole process being reversed.
Watching the whole slow process I wondered how on earth these men
expected to save anybody from drowning – was that even what the boat was for, or
had I misunderstood? It was okay now,
before the peak season, when the beach was empty – but soon enough the beach
would be crowded with tourists.
Or
would it? Normally we’re full at this
time of year. Perhaps there’s
something discomfiting about the sea, after all, and in times of stress we’d
rather stay away from it. Or perhaps it’s
too great a luxury, those idle hours on the sand, when money’s tight and work
is uncertain. As awe-struck as I had
been by the sea ever since arriving in Cornwall,
I was reminded at all times – by my own amazement, as much as by anything –
that I was merely a visitor there. The
riches of the sea and of the liminal margins of it are so immense that we seem
to create for ourselves a greater history there than in any other environment;
and human history is by necessity lived in, and ongoing. Watching the men lower their boat into the
surf and pull it back out again, I thought at first to describe them as
battling the elements – a familiar phrase, a knee-jerk response. But I realise now that that’s wrong: it was
not a fight they were waged in, but a negotiation. They were engaged in an endless
call-and-response with the sea, managing themselves around it as perhaps only
those with a deep and ingrained culture of sea-life can do. Like any sea-side province Cornwall has
always been a place of boats, whether incoming or outgoing, and the men
practicing their surf-lifesaving strategies were of the same stock as the
fisherfolk who for millennia have been harvesting the sea; they were in their
way of a kind too with the men who’d dug down below the sea searching for tin
and copper; and they were of the same lineage as those hermits and huers who’d
stared out to sea from the top of Newquay, waiting patiently.
Kathleen
Jamie, in her exquisite essay the Gannetry, writes of watching a
landscape endlessly, and by doing so learning its familiar shapes and patterns:
only with such knowledge can you tell at a glance what’s unfamiliar. In the essay she’s watching the sea and almost
unconsciously notices amid the waves “a vertical pencil line”: the dorsal fin
of an Orca (Orcinus orca) rising steep and dark out of the water. When I’ve walked in Tasmania it’s often been
the rainiest days that have been the most rewarding: with the panoramic views
of that island’s mountains closed off by clouds and fog I’ve been forced to
focus instead on the near-at-hand, and to really look at the forest, and the
path, and the rocks – all the things I wouldn’t normally bother looking
at. We tend to think that we know what
nature is, and we have expectations of what it should be and what it definitely
isn’t – but more often than not we don’t really bother paying attention to
it. If we did perhaps we’d realise that,
like Newquay and the coast it’s built upon, our world and the natural world are
entangled in one another: they are not discreet; they are perhaps not even
contiguous; but rather, they are continuous.
Skylark image and Fulmar image sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org
Cornwall images taken by the author
This essay is so beautiful it brings a tear to my eye and it should be published in a widely distributed book, as well as a blog. Superb observation and writing Harry
ReplyDeleteYou have an amazing eye for detail and moreover a capacity to make readers see it also. It is a lovely piece of writing Harry. It would be great if it could find its way into a publication for fellow walkers in Cornwell.
ReplyDeleteThanks, I'm glad you liked it!
ReplyDeleteHi Harry... i've shared a link to my F/book page... Enjoyed it thoroughly. And, tho perhaps 'off topic', your walking with yr father tickled me too. I had a few short walks with my old man, in Dorset mostly but once around Porlock (he said i'd almost killed him). Mine was an awkward relationship contrary to yours. I'll make further comment on my F/b page. Thanks very much indeed for alerting me to yr blog! Best wishes, Kris
ReplyDeleteThanks Kris, I'm glad you like it. The only walks I've done previously in the UK have been day-walks so it was interesting to go for a longer walk - it was certainly a contrast with the long walks I've done in Australia.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing the link. I need to get a copy of Eileen Chong's "Burning Rice" for the poetry book club I'm in so I'll probably see you soon!
Hi Harry. Kris put me onto your blog. I'm not a nature boy and I certainly can't relate to walks with my father but I have visited and read in Conwall in 2007 and I very much enjoyed your piece of writing. I agree with others that the article (or extracts) should be seen by a wider audience. My verse novel The Barrier Range of which a large part is set in Broken Hill has a section on Cornwall miners coming to Australia. Anyway, once again, thanks for exposing me to your story telling... Cheers Ray
Delete