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10 top wild places on your doorstep
Christopher Somerville seeks out the wildest corners of Britain and Ireland that are steeped in history, magic and superstition.
See more wild places in our gallery
* Christopher Somerville
* guardian.co.uk,
* Wednesday July 2, 2008
Rollright Stones, Oxfordshire
All the king's men ... myth tells that the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire are a king and his retinue turned to stone. Photograph: Homer Sykes/Corbis
"The call of the wild" is one of the most seductive and stirring phrases ever coined, but the wild is not simply an absence of man's control; it also expresses something fundamental in the character and the appearance of a living creature or a landscape.
When I set out two years ago to search for wild places throughout Britain and Ireland, I imagined they would all be windswept, rugged, lonely and far-flung; moors and mountain-tops, remote islands and craggy cliffs. I found plenty of those, for sure. But what shocked me and made me really switch focus was to discover how many truly wild places wait for us on our own doorsteps, in flowery meadows, in bat-haunted canal tunnels or overgrown city cemeteries. Britain and Ireland are crammed full of wild places. The wild is here and now, as much as it has ever been.
Perhaps the greatest revelation was to find the wild lurking deep within my own psyche, in my response to the shadows of a medieval doom painting, the legend of a buried city, a frisson from a gothic novel or a folk tale of giants or witches. Everyone I spoke to about the wild acknowledged it, too: the unsettling power – more unsettling than ever to a modern-day traveller though these islands, so thoroughly explored and tamed - of strange tales, of unfathomable mystery still to be tasted in the woods and beyond the hills.
1. Penhale Sands and the golden city
Legend declares that under the 200ft dunes of Penhale Sands lies the fair city of Langarrow, where rich men blanched with luxury would look on as their wives had hot sex with muscular slaves, toned and honed by the hard physical work the decadent masters would not soil their hands with. A blasting sandstorm descended to smother the wicked city and silence its golden bells – a morality lesson wrapped up in a fable.
· Near Perranporth, Cornwall
2. Long Mynd – a night in the snow
The rolling whaleback hill of the Long Mynd was the setting for a 19th-century epic of survival in the teeth of wild weather. The Rev Donald Carr, benighted and astray on the moors in the worst blizzard in memory, lost hat, boots, gloves and scarf, was snow-blinded, tumbled down ravines and toppled over cliffs. He was found after 24 hours, "crowned and bearded with ice like a ghastly emblem of winter". Carr survived - tough guy.
· Near Church Stretton, Shropshire
3. Plynlimon and wild Wales
One of Wales's wildest mountains, Plynlimon gives birth to three major rivers – the Severn, Wye and Rheidol. When George Borrow, author of classic travelogue Wild Wales, passionate would-be Celt and opinionated know-all, tried to reach the marshy Severn source in 1854, his wily guide saved himself a muddy slog by taking Borrow to an easier, prettier spring. Borrow was thrilled, and never knew he'd been fooled.
· North of Castell Dyffryn Inn on A44 (2 miles east of Ponterwyd), Powys
4. Dance of the Rollright Stones
Sober archaeology says that the Rollright Stones consist of an ancient tomb 5,500 years old, a solitary standing stone, and a late Neolithic stone circle. Wild myth insists that the standing stone is a king petrified by a malevolent witch, the circle of stones is his retinue, and the great slabs of the tomb are the whispering knights plotting against him. At midnight the king's men dance in their circle, and the whispering knights go down to the brook to drink. Don't spy on them, or you'll go home stark mad.
· Near Long Compton, Oxfordshire/Warwickshire border
5. Wenhaston Doom
The sexton of St Peter's Church got a nasty shock in Wenhaston churchyard in 1892 when a rainstorm started sluicing the whitewash off some chancel arch boards that had been thrown out. Evil eyes a-staring were revealed, followed by a complete medieval doom – a ferocious depiction of the torments meted out by red-skinned devils to naked sinners. Now preserved inside the church, the doom explored the darkest crannies of a guilty psyche.
· West of Blythburgh (A12), Suffolk
6. Whitby and Count Dracula
Whitby is a beautiful and characterful fishing town, famous for its Captain Cook connections – and infamous for its association with Count Dracula. Bram Stoker was enchanted by the superstitions of the local fishermen, and wove his sinister gothic fantasy around them. Follow the dark count's trail through the town as he flits up the 199 church steps to feed on lovely Lucy's white neck in the graveyard of St Mary's Church.
· North Yorkshire coast
7. The wild man of Gight Castle
In the 16th century a Scottish laird could do as he pleased. That was the case with William Gordon, 5th Laird of Gight Castle. He stabbed, he beat, he murdered, he torched wherever he pleased. In 1605 the Wild Man of Gight managed to die in his bed - no mean feat – but his ghost still haunts the crumbling ruins, where it is sometimes seen feasting with the devil.
· North of Oldmeldrum, Aberdeenshire
8. Kill or cure in County Roscommon's sweathouses
It was kill or cure with the rough medicine administered to our ancestors in the sweathouses around Lough Allen. You stoked up a choking-hot fire in the tiny stone-built hut, inserted the sufferers, blocked up the door and left them to sweat out cramps, fevers or chills. When cooked, out they came, to be plunged into an ice-cold stream. They lived or they died. That's the way it was back then – no namby-pamby doctoring for the poor of rural Ireland.
· Near Arigna, Co Roscommon, Republic of Ireland
9. Sunken town of Leash Fen
Leash Fen stretches low and boggy, a great sodden expanse of heather, gorse and coarse grass tussocks. Frogs, dragonflies, kingfishers and water voles thrive in this kingdom of damp. Is there more to sedgy, secretive Leash Fen than meets the eye? Legends persist of a sunken town lying beneath the fen; pottery and pieces of carved oak have surfaced during drainage work. Perhaps the mysterious old rhyme is rooted in truth:
When Chesterfield was gorse and broom,
Leash Fen was a market town;
Now Chesterfield's a market town,
Leash Fen is but gorse and broom.
· Off A619 west of Chesterfield, Derbyshire
10. Witches of Pendle Hill
The most ill-reputed hill in England, Pendle rises steeply as a south-east outlier of the Forest of Bowland. It could be the whale-backed hill's tendency to attract threatening cloud and rainstorms that give it an ominous air, but more sinister is its association with the Pendle Witches. Old
Demdike and Elizabeth Device, Old Chattox, Mouldheels and their cronies were hanged for sorcery in 1612. They were most probably harmless eccentrics. But back in that era of hysterical witch-hunts, a spiteful neighbour's denunciation was all that was needed to put an innocent neck in a halter.
· Between M65 (Jcts 12-14) and Clitheroe, Lancashire
· Christopher Somerville is the author of Britain and Ireland's Best Wild Places – 500 Ways to Discover the Wild (Allen Lane, £25).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2008/j ... s?page=all
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