Free The Wild Places (Penguin Original) by Robert Macfarlane Page A

at such moments that you realise how much of the Moor is made of water.
    Later that same warm autumn, I drove through the Moor at night. The crossing seemed to go on far longer than I had thought possible, mile after empty mile of it. It was as though I had driven into a pool of black and limitless space, and were passing through another, not altogether earthly, place. On the downslope of the Moor, I had to brake sharply and slow almost to a standstill, for deer were flowing across the road before me, making for their haunts in the Black Corries. In the brightness of the car’s headlights, I could see the deer crowded closely together as they crossed the road, each laying its nervous head against the back or flank of the one in front. In the cold air their breath clouded out from their nostrils, and the whites of their eyes caught and returned the car’s light, so that they glowed orbishly in the dark. As I drove down the waning slope of the Moor, towards the Bridge of Orchy, two or three more herds crossed the road before me, off to the corries of the Black Mount.
    Four years after that deer-haunted crossing, I returned to Rannoch Moor to keep the promise I had made on the Buachaille’s summit, and to add another panel to my map of the wild. I had also been drawn back to the Moor by W. H. Murray, whose essays I had been reading in the weeks after Coruisk, and who was, along with the monks and Sweeney, another quester for the wild, another precedent for my own journeys.
    Although he was brought up in Glasgow, Murray had not thought of venturing into the Highlands until in 1933, when he was nineteen, he heard an acquaintance describe a winter traverse of An Teallach in Wester Ross: ‘clouds lifting off a high and rocky mountain ridge, sun-shafts lighting a glen deep below’. Murray was entranced; a desire to experience such things struck him, he remembered, ‘with all the suddenness of a conversion in faith’. From then until the outbreak of the Second World War, he explored the islands, moors and mountains of Scotland whenever he could - in all four seasons, and by night as well as by day - journeying up into what he called the ‘wildland of the skies’. He came to know the glens and the peaks superbly well: their weather habits and weather histories, the natures of their rocks, plants and animals. Wildness assumed for him a near-mystical importance: it would also, though he was not then to know it, save him from madness.
    Several of those who met Murray in adulthood, noting his curved nose, his precise, observant manner and his capacities for sustained calm and sudden action, spoke of him as a raptor - ‘a frugal, contemplative eagle’, as Hamish MacInnes put it. Of all his wild eyries, none was more important to Murray than Buachaille Etive Mor, with its dove-grey and pale pink rocks, and its vantage at the brink of Rannoch Moor.
    On 3 September 1939, Murray was crossing the Moor en route to Glen Coe. He stopped at the King’s House, the inn on the western edge of the Moor, and there he was told that war had been declared. He knew that mobilisation would take him away from the Scottish landscape he loved, perhaps for ever. ‘My instinctive reaction’, he remembered afterwards:
    was to turn to the mountain that had given me most - the Buachaille. So I walked across the moor in a smirr of rain, and climbed the Crowberry Ridge to the summit. I remembered many days and nights on this mountain - the beauty and brilliance of moonlight, ice glinting, the climbing hard. I remembered the stillness and the music of silence when it seemed to merge with the mountain . . . Were those days over? Days of inner and outer exploration? . . . I spent a full hour on the top, and came down as slowly as I knew how. Every rock and stone seemed familiar to me.
Murray joined up in April 1940. After training, he was commissioned and posted to the Highland Light Infantry. His crack battalion, the 2nd, was posted to the deserts of