Some of the places I found to camp in were magical, rock-strewn cirques cut off from the world below by deep plantations of spruce, enclosed and sheltered from the wind like an amphitheatre. A tumbling waterfall with a pool to bathe in. The white rumps of the wheatears darting from rock to rock. At dusk the piping of the ring ouzel, the rare mountain blackbird, and sometimes a glimpse of them feeding in the rowans. The bracken buzzing with whinchats. I found the whinchats a mystery: one valley would be full of them, the next empty. I never saw them down in the lower valleys, except at one single location on my lanes, where they nested in the hedge every year. I watched them here many times, asking myself what made this particular length of hedgerow, this particular field, different from all the others, and never finding an answer. On my nights out in the hills, I would wake chilled in the early dawn, and relight my fire to warm myself before I packed and set off for the tops again. I remember one morning waking to see a young vixen prancing through the long grass towards me, meadow pipits fluttering around her head like a cloud of flies. She was far from home, having probably spent the night searching for eggs. There were so many pipits nesting up here that I regularly stumbled on their nests. The vixen spotted me and paused in her tracks, front leg cocked like a pointer. She had probably never seen a human before and didn’t know quite what to make of me. I reached into my pack, found a biscuit and held it out towards her; she came a little closer before retreating, then started to close in again. This approach and retreat continued for a minute or two, with her gaining just a little ground each time. I don’t know if she would have eventually fed from my hand; I thought better of giving her the wrong idea about people and tossed the biscuit over to her. She flinched as I threw, then came and grabbed the biscuit and trotted off with it held proudly in her jaws.
Sometimes you can walk these hills for hours at a time without seeing very much at all. On these open expanses silence prevails, and they can seem empty, devoid of life. But any longueurs would suddenly be interrupted by moments when a whole host of birds would appear at once: a peregrine dashing over the crags, a hovering kestrel, a pair of soaring kites, a displaying curlew or jinking snipe. Many of our true upland species are rare and spread thinly over huge areas of seemingly featureless moor. The merlin for instance — the moorland falcon — has a population of perhaps only around a hundred pairs in the whole of Wales, so looking for them was like diving for pearls.
My first sighting of a merlin in these moors has never been equalled. I was deep in the hills, more than a day’s walk from home, and was following the ridge line west. There is a long stretch of concrete marker posts over the mountains, and from each one you can just about make out the next, so they make a useful waymarker across these vast open spaces. I believe they show the limit of the catchment area for the reservoirs many miles below. I was approaching one when a merlin slipped low across the hillside towards me and alighted on the post, ruffling up its feathers as it landed. It was a little male, barely bigger than a thrush, and sat only a few feet away. He was subtly coloured in delicate pastel reds and blues, except for his brilliant yellow legs with jet-black talons that made it look like he had been painting his nails. His minuscule hooked beak made me think of a parakeet or a budgerigar rather than a bird of prey. I had frozen, and he seemed quite unconcerned by my proximity. We waited like this, both still and alert, until finally he took off. He soared in a low arc just above the ground, and disappeared into a nearby bank of heather about fifty yards away. It seemed that I had found not only a merlin, but also a merlin’s nest, though I didn’t follow him to inspect the site, and I never found the territory again, even with the long line of posts to guide me. All that summer I watched out for merlins, in the hope of seeing them once more, but they eluded me until the very end of the season when I had given up hope of seeing another that year. It was to be my last overnight walk that summer; the weather was getting ready to turn. I was far from my previous sighting, having headed out to see the biggest waterfall in reach of the cottage, perhaps ten or fifteen miles out. At dusk, as I was preparing to camp beside the tumbling waters, a wheatear came hurtling down the steep hillside right alongside the falling stream, twisting and swerving and looping through the gorse bushes, with a female merlin right on its tail, just an inch or two behind it.
Once, early in the season, I was returning from one of my overnight expeditions when the clouds fell, a thick fog descended, and I became well and truly lost for the first and only time. I climbed to a mountaintop cairn to see if it would lift me above the clouds so that I could regain my sense of direction, but it was no use, I could see no further than ten or twenty yards. I looked at the cairn more closely; I had been here earlier, I had just spent an hour walking in a circle. I wasn’t too worried, for I knew that if I walked to the first stream I came to and then followed it down, it would eventually lead me off the hills, and even if I ended up many miles from home I would be able to get a lift back. It was still fairly early in the day, so there was no risk of being stuck here overnight with no remaining food. So I shrugged my shoulders and headed down in a random direction.
When I had come down off the steep side of the mountain I found myself in the most incredible blasted landscape that I had ever seen up here: a rolling sea of sticky black peat, studded with thousands of tiny heather-capped islands. The sides of these hummocks were often vertical or even overhanging, so I had to leap from one to the next over the deep runnels between them, or sometimes clamber down and wade ankle-deep through the bog if the gap was too wide. The landscape, lost in fog, looked primeval. I sat down for a while to soak up the atmosphere. A pair of red grouse burst from the heather beside me and clattered away, coughing like old men. Red grouse are a rarity on these moors; they feed almost entirely on young heather and there is very little heather on these hills because they are so heavily grazed. But not so many of the sheep that roamed this moorland in the summer made it out this far, and those that did would have been largely confounded by the steep sides of these mounds of peat. And then I heard it: a spectral wail that echoed through the fog like nothing I had ever heard before. This was the sound of broken hearts, a sound that could make the mountains weep. He emerged through the drifting fog, a golden plover already in his summer plumage, crisp black and white in front, spangled with gold on his back. He stood aloft a little hillock of heather only a few yards away, threw back his head and called to the skies. And then his answer came, again and again. There was a plover on every mound that was near enough for me to see through the fog; I could make out six of them in all, in a perfect circle around me, all facing inward, all calling. I don’t know how long this carried on for — time had stood still — but then they were suddenly gone; they didn’t fly, they just strode off into the fog and faded away. As I started to breathe again, there was a fleeting parting of the clouds and I was able to make out a few distant hills and work out exactly which way I should head for home.