This peatbog I had chanced upon was within daily reach of my cottage, and became a favourite destination. It was the closest thing to wilderness I had. These hills may have looked remote and untouched, but in fact they were shaped by the hand of man, and more specifically by man with sheep. If grazing were to stop, the grass would first be overtaken by heather, and eventually all but the highest peaks would be blanketed with sessile oak woods as they once had been. Even in this desolate bogland I found a few thick stumps of ancient oak emerging from the black mud, perhaps many thousands of years old. But it was isolated, bleak, and alien in its beauty, and it drew me back again and again. It was like taking a trip to another world.
On the first warm, sunny day after that first visit, I returned in the hope of seeing the plovers again. It was a fine walk of about three hours each way. I took my trusty staff and set off slowly up the back field, pausing occasionally, not wanting to tire myself before I had begun. Where the hillside levelled was the last gate on to the moor, the last gate in twenty miles. I didn’t need to cross the summit of my hill, rather I followed the drystone wall where the highest fields joined the moor. A sparrowhawk was cruising the line too, relaxed in the sunshine. A swallow flew up from the fields below, where it had been scooping up insects hovering above the grass. It began to swoop in graceful arcs around the hawk, then was joined by another and another, until finally the hawk was trailing a retinue of perhaps a hundred of them in a whirling, darting cloud. They were drawn to the hawk like iron filings to a magnet.
My hill was a spur of the mountains, joined by a boggy saddle to a much bigger black hill that stretched miles to the west. I didn’t often cross the top of this mountain. For one thing, it was covered with thick tussocks of moor grass that were extremely hard to walk through; in fact, local people refer to this grass as disco grass, because of the strange contortions you have to go through as you make your way across it. Also, the vast open expanses that topped this mountain were tilted southwards, so while they afforded great views many miles to the south, I would not be able to see the mountains to the west and north where I was headed until I was halfway there. It is good to be able to see your destination getting steadily nearer as you walk. This hill was fine for a short cut home, but for now I made a diagonal crossing of the boggy ground that was the source of my stream, and headed for the northern slopes of the black hill. Here it was quite different from the open top; the sheepwalk was close-cropped turf amid a scree of rocks where the wheatears bounced, and though it was very steep to walk across there were sheep trails to follow. Sheep trails are not reliable; they diverge, converge, fade away to nothing, but the sheep were at least good at picking the safest way to cross the frequent rain gulleys that dissected the mountainside. There was a fine view down to the sheltered valley below. The bottom end of the valley, to the north of my own hill, was forested with oak below the slopes of head-high bracken. This was beautiful mature woodland, in the midst of which raced a stream hidden in a deep dingle, a succession of cascades and pools. The upper reaches of the valley were the most marginal of marginal land; fields that had never been drained or improved, where the hares played. The whole valley was dotted with the ruins of abandoned farmsteads, the ruins outnumbering the handful of occupied dwellings.
As I picked my way across one of the dry gullies, I put up a kestrel from the hillside below me, and he flew across the valley to join his mate hovering opposite, making use of the thermals that rose up the mountainside, as was a solitary soaring kite. As I watched them, the female dropped three times in quick succession, snatching up dung beetles, I assumed. A peregrine came sailing into view over the hilltops, and the kestrels immediately stopped their hovering and ascended fast to rise above the intruder. They knew that it wouldn’t be safe to stay low. The peregrine circled lazily above me, taking a break from her eyrie, her wings outspread, her tail slightly fanned, and gave me a fine view of her hooded head. And above her circled the two kestrels, one of which repeatedly made fleeting swoops at the much bigger peregrine, taking great care not to drop below her. The peregrine for the most part ignored the attention, until at last the kestrel’s pestering got a little too bold and she flipped on to her back and presented her claws.
She began to circle more determinedly, rising fast in a true hunting flight, with the kestrels struggling to stay above her. They seemed tiny in comparison to her, like wasps buzzing about her head. Eventually she rose so high above the valley that she was herself no more than a speck, while the kestrels had disappeared from view altogether. When she finally drifted down, one of the kestrels had slipped away, but the other was still hanging above her, still bothering her, and she finally tired of these attentions and began to chase the kestrel across the valley, mirroring its every move like a merlin pursuing a pipit. She peeled away and resumed her leisurely circling, unmolested now that the kestrel had hotfooted it across the valley, but there was no prey for her here. She folded her wings and began to slip downwards, at first slowly and then with gathering speed. For a brief moment I thought she was about to stoop on some unseen victim, but then she levelled off and raced for the hills, an anchor in the sky.
At the head of the valley, a vast glacial sweep links these hills to the mountains opposite, wild and featureless save for a scattering of collapsed cairns and a lone standing stone, their significance lost in time. As I picked my way slowly across this bare expanse, a curlew suddenly flushed from close by and began to circle above me, calling in alarm, and its mate flew up from further off and joined it. Wader nests are notoriously hard to find, and the curlew would not have flushed from the nest but would have crept some distance away before rising. But there it was, right at my feet, the merest scrape in the earth among the tufts of grass, four mottled eggs beautifully camouflaged. I attempted to triangulate the spot using the nearby peaks for reference, but I knew I would never find this nest again, the ridge was so huge and bare and open, the exact location so indistinguishable from any other.
The end of the ridge was marked by a solitary boulder, abandoned there long ago I supposed by the retreating glacier, and I paused there and looked back before I began the ascent of the winding path up the mountainside. The curlews had settled back on to their nest and ceased their constant calling. On this mountainside was a single steep ravine, and in that ravine was an isolated rowan, a mountain ash, far, far above any other trees. And in that rowan was a crows’ nest. The pair of carrion crows that nested here had faced a challenge: how to build a nest in a place where there were no sticks. The nest was constructed entirely out of the bones of sheep.
The track that cut across the face of the mountainside was probably only used a few times a year, for rounding up sheep on horseback, or in a very, very carefully driven Land Rover. Where the track levelled off and switched back, we parted company, and I set off across the roughest of rough ground into a boggy, rush-filled hollow, where snipe jinked away as I picked my way through. One more climb, steep but short, and I was looking out over the peat-hag. With no fog to obscure the view, I could see the extent of the place for the first time; it reached as far as the eye could see, as if it was a whole barren world unto itself. The view shrank as I stepped down into it. It was like entering a maze, the heather-capped hillocks between which the soggy black runnels twisted and turned were hedge high, and I knew there would be no chance of identifying the place where I had found the plovers. I listened out for them instead, but this was a still, silent place, and even the pipits and larks were hushed. In the midst of the bog was a low, grassy ridge, and as I rounded this I came upon a hidden tarn. A little female teal, a mountain duck, saw me and quickly led her brood of ducklings into the cover of the rushes that fringed one side of the tarn. On the thick mat of brilliant green sphagnum moss that lined my side of the pool was a toad. It seemed unlikely that toads would breed here; unlike frogs, which will spawn in any available pond, toads are loyal to their traditional breeding grounds, and will travel considerable distances to get to them. At the nearest breeding lake that I knew of, the toads gathered in the spring in vast numbers, and the nearby roads had toad-crossing signs to try to keep the number of casualties down. But that lake was at least fifteen miles away. I had been surprised enough to find a toad taking up residence under the brick pedestal beneath one of my water-butts, but to find one of these sedate, slow-moving creatures so far out in the hills seemed extraordinary.