Landmarks Read Free Page B

like many of the subjects of this book – are often best represented not by proposition but by pattern, such that unexpected constellations of relation light up. Metamorphosis and shape-shifting, magnification, miniaturization, cabinets of curiosity, crystallization, hollows and dens, archives, wonder, views from above: these are among the images and tropes that recur. The chapters here do not together tell the story of a single journey or quest, but all are fascinated by the same questions concerning the mutual relations of place, language and spirit – how we landmark, and how we are landmarked.
    I have come to understand that although place-words are being lost, they are also being created. Nature is dynamic, and so is language. Loanwords from Chinese, Urdu, Korean, Portuguese and Yiddish are right now being used to describe the landscapes of Britain and Ireland; portmanteaus and neologisms are constantly in manufacture. As I travelled I met new words as well as salvaging oldones: a painter in the Hebrides who used
landskein
to refer to the braid of blue horizon lines in hill country on a hazy day; a five-year-old girl who concocted
honeyfur
to describe the soft seeds of grasses held in the fingers. When Clare and Hopkins could not find words for natural phenomena, they just made them up:
sutering
for the cranky action of a rising heron (Clare),
wolfsnow
for a dangerous sea-blizzard, and
slogger
for the sucking sound made by waves against a ship’s side (both Hopkins). John Constable invented the verb
to sky
, meaning ‘to lie on one’s back and study the clouds’. We have forgotten 10,000 words for our landscapes, but we will make 10,000 more, given time. This is why
Landmarks
moves over its course from the peat-deep word-hoard of Hebridean Gaelic, through to the fresh-minted terms and stories of young children at play on the outskirts of a Cambridgeshire town. And this is why the final glossary of the book is left blank, for you to fill in – there to hold the place-words that have yet to be coined.



2
A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook
I
In Which Nothing Is Seen
    Five thousand feet below us, the Minch was in an ugly mood. Grey Atlantic water, arrowed with white wave-tops. Our twin-prop plane reached the east coast of the Isle of Lewis and banked north towards Stornoway, bucking as it picked up the cross-buffets of a stiff westerly. The air was clear, though, and I could see the tawny expanse of Mòinteach riabhach, the Brindled Moor: several hundred square miles of bog, hag, crag, heather, loch and lochan that make up the interior of Lewis.
    Across the aisle from me, two people looked out of the window at the moor. One of them laughed.
    ‘We’re flying over nothing!’ she said.
    ‘Remind me why we’ve come here?’ the other asked.
    ‘We’ve come to see nothing!’
    ‘Then we have come to the
right
place!’
    They pressed their shoulders together, both laughing now.
Whirr
.
Thunk
. The landing gear lowered, engaged.
    ‘We’re about to land on nothing!’
    ‘Hold on tight!’
II
In Which Names Are Spoken
    It is true that, seen for the first time, and especially when seen from altitude, the moor of Lewis resembles a
terra nullius
, a nothing-place, distinguished only by its self-similarity. Peat, moor and more moor. It is vast, flat, repetitive in form, and its colours are motley and subtle. This is a region whose breadth seems either to return the eye’s enquiries unanswered, or to swallow all attempts at interpretation. Like other extensive lateral landscapes – desert, ice cap, prairie, tundra – it confronts us with difficulties of purchase (how to anchor perception in a context of immensity) and evaluation (how to structure significance in a context of uniformity). Or, to borrow the acronym that Welsh farmers fondly use to describe the hills of the Elan range in mid-Wales, the Brindled Moor can easily be mistaken for MAMBA country: Miles And Miles of Bugger All.
    I had come to Lewis to visit a