Free The Wild Places (Penguin Original) by Robert Macfarlane

across the empty sky above me. Nothing more than black marks at first, until my eyes started to sort them. Gulls turning on their wing-tips in the lower terraces of the air; three crows above them, crackling; and finally in the upper reach, a buzzard. Suddenly the sky’s depth was fathomable, its space divided into tiers and circles. And Coruisk itself was changed: this place, so alien to me, was home to these birds, the place in which they hunted, played and lived.
    I swam back to shore. Near the mouth of the loch, where the water was only eight or nine feet deep, I dived down to the floor, seized a big black fin-shaped rock and held myself there, so that my body and feet tilted up to the vertical, and then inclined downstream, nudged by the gentle current, like water-weed. As my breath ran out, I let go of the rock and bobbed to the surface, back into the bright air.
    We left the sanctuary by an old forester’s path, which followed a stream up and over the lowest of the passes to the south of the Basin. A hundred feet or so from the pass, which was indicated by a wide cairn, I found a little beach of stones, rinsed by the water and shiny white, as if in affinity with the ice that had shaped them. I took one for the cairn, and put one into my mouth to keep myself from getting thirsty, rolling it round, and keeping up a steady molar clatter as we followed the path upwards.
    At the cairn, which marked the point of exit from this magical place, I stopped and looked around. To the north-east was the cleared valley of Sligachan, where the scattered wall-stones of ruined houses lay in the river’s loops, grown over by grass and moss. Away to the west I could see the Inaccessible Pinnacle casting a sharp dark shadow. Far below it, Loch Coruisk gleamed and tilted like a mirror. We began the walk down into Sligachan, and the landscape watched us leave.

4
    Moor

    Years ago, on a warm autumn evening, I climbed Buachaille Etive Mor, the arrowhead-shaped mountain which stands at the eastern gateway to Glen Coe. When I reached its summit, the sun was low over the sea behind me, so that the Buachaille had become the pointer of a sundial, casting a triangle of shadow eastwards across the golden circle of Rannoch Moor. I stayed for an hour, watching the mountain’s shadow narrow and lengthen over the Moor, changing its form from pyramid to chalet gable to obelisk. I decided then that, at some future point, I would return to cross the Moor on foot, and spend a night out somewhere in its distant centre.
    Many people know Rannoch Moor, for they have looked down on to it from the mountains on its perimeter, or driven through it on the road that crosses its western marches. More know of it who have never seen it, for it is across the Moor that Alan Breck and Davey Balfour flee in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped . After travelling over ‘wild, and houseless mountains’ and ‘among the well-heads of wild rivers’, the two fugitives come across a region of ‘low, broken, desert land’ that lies ‘as waste as the sea; only the moorfowl and the peewees crying upon it, and far over to the east, a herd of deer, moving like dots’. This is the Moor, and crossing it nearly kills Davey. And people have died there in winter, lost in its expanses, harassed to death by the cold that settles upon it, hardening its extensive waters and binding its few trees in ice.
    Many know the Moor, then, but relatively few enter it, for it is vast and trackless and has a reputation for hostility at all times of year. Sea storms blow across it, funnelling down through Glen Coe. It is a high-level, hyena-coloured prairie - etched and roughened by glaciers, and still bearing the marks of those harrowings. Skeins of swans land on its two main lochs, intricate Loch Bà and antler-shaped Loch Laidon. On a clear night, from the top of one of the mountains that surround it, you can see its uncounted lochans, streams and rivers gleaming in the moonlight. It is only