'The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree...'
I have long held with something akin to veneration the huge ash tree that sits so proudly at the top of Higher Hill. We walk along the parish boundary stream and up along the steep sides of Combe Park Meadow, now woodland and today a mass of bluebells. We pass the deep holes of badger setts wondering whether they are sleeping immediately beneath our feet, before crossing the bank into Great Field and Lower Hill at which point the ash tree becomes visible. I've even taken (this might be a little excessive) to calling it Yggdrasil, the eternal green ash tree of Norse mythology, whose branches stretch out over all of the nine worlds, because sometimes. when you stand underneath it you get a very powerful sense of a single tree's import, and to that end it is stitched into my Textithe map of the fields around us here.
If I ever need to really think about what lies beneath, I stand and watch our spring water supply flowing at the corner of the woods.
So when I read the first line of Underland - A Deep Time Journey, the new book from Robert Macfarlane, I was immediately there and I make no apology for a longer than usual post today. Maybe put the kettle on and share one of the best books I will read this year
In truth, Robert Macfarlane is about to head down, between the roots of the ash tree, into a system of chambers in the Mendip Hills with poet and writer Sean Borodale...
'Time moves differently here in the underland. It thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows.
The passage turns, turns again, narrows - and leads into surprising space...'
And I soon discovered that this would also be the route that Underland took in those short grey midwinter days and long nights by the fire. I had received a proof copy in November but decided to to save it as a treat for my January reading, once we had waved Offpsringette back to New Zealand, and time did move differently for the next few weeks as I disappeared into its depths, and through narrow passages into surprising space.
'The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs : the shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful.'
and as Robert Macfarlane elaborated on those three tasks in his introduction I could feel myself rising to the challenge of Underland's journey into deep time. Enough to unwrap the new Leuchtturm 1917 notebook with dotted pages which would become my 'Travel Journal' for the year ahead, and this would be my first excursion.
Shelter (memories, precious matter, messages, fragile lives),
Yield (information, wealth, metaphors, minerals, visions),
Dispose (waste, trauma, poison, secrets),
This is only page eight and already I am thinking differently. I am thinking beneath, and what we place there and why.
'Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.'
There will be plenty of time and space ahead to ponder this, and thankfully Robert Macfarlane kindly guides his reader to places that many of us might not want to go so that we don't actually have to, whilst weaving in engaging and fascinating trails that led me in all manner of new directions...
The caves underneath the Mendip Hills... and claustrophobia laced with astonishment breathes from the pages, my own sense of rising panic kept in check, though this journey already feels so profound and real that it's little wonder I have to keep coming up from its pages for air.
I immediately ordered a copy of Asylum, Sean Borodale's series of poems written in the caves, mines and quarries of Somerset. You need to be of a particular physical and mental strength to cope with caving; Sean and Robert have both, I have neither,
But then I wrought a trail of destruction through the loft looking for (and sadly not finding) my full-colour guide book to the caves of Postojna in the former Yugoslavia, possibly my only real trip underground back in 1973. The £48 student nurse package holiday to Lake Bohinj, the four trainee Catholic priests on pre-ordination retreat (less said about that the better. May the Lord forgive us, we were only nineteen) and the excursion deep into the caves on the little train and wearing the floor-length woollen cape supplied against the cold.
I digress because meanwhile Robert is waiting for me to head miles out under the North Sea, to the potash mines that also hold a research station seeking dark matter, and all the while my notebook is filling with questions...
Quoting Jonas Salk, Robert Macfarlane asks 'Are we being good ancestors?' What will they make of us in 1000 years time, and I wonder...
Is ours the first generation to have worried about what we leave for future generations to the extent that we do...
Is this about increased knowledge and awareness...
Greater wealth...
Better technology...
Did those who came before us worry as much as we do and apply themselves to finding solutions to ameliorating the damage, or are we guilty of the greatest harm...
I probably know the answers but it's good to focus on it for a while.
From caves to woodland, and a sojourn in Epping Forest with Merlin Sheldrake, born on the night of the Great Storm of 15th October 1987, and plant scientist and fungi expert extraordinaire. Merlin elaborates on the wood wide web, an interlinking underground mycorrhizal fungi support system for trees.
I walk to the woods for some fresh air and look at the ground with very new eyes.
It didn't last long because the next excursion is to the catacombs under the streets of Paris about which I knew next to nothing ; the 200 miles of tunnels, galleries, rooms and chambers that lie beneath the city. I felt the fear but also the finite nature of my mind as Robert descended ...will the latter-day graffiti be found in a 1000 years time, when all else above may have collapsed, and be a mystery to those who find it....
Much of the stone used to build Paris came from here, beneath, and I found myself readily imagining a city in reverse, every building upside down, a mirror image of itself and from there just a hop of the imagination to Neil Gaiman's superb novel Neverwhere. In Paris in 1786 the cemeteries had been overflowing, six million corpses were evacuated into this 'quarry'. The extent of the operation is astonishing, bodies exhumed, bones stacked underground.
Time to go for another walk.
No peace for the wicked...there will be more caving, this time actually not far from my one and only underground excursion, in the karst landscapes on the Italian border with Slovenia, and with it some excellent myth-related stories which do nothing to slow my galloping pulse. Really, I'm delighted that Robert descended into the Abyss of Trebiciano so that I don't have to, but it is fraught with danger and again I kept thinking 'Does his mother/ family worry?'
There is a dissonance in this landscape too, one 'that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past', can a person be allowed to be happy here knowing that the many sink holes in the landscape were used for mass murder in 1943 following the Italian surrender.
Much more pondering about all this followed.
If my anxieties have been contained until this point they are about to go off on a frolic of their own, off the scale as Robert heads North, to the Lofotens in Norway in search of 2,500 year-old cave paintings. Think Game of Thrones (if you watch, or have read it) and the sense of menace and fear that accompanies The Wall in winter, as Robert tackles the Lofoten Wall solo in his quest to reach Kollhellaren...
'The gully is much steeper, but will probably hold less snow. The shoulder is a less severe slope, but looks more avalanche prone. I decide on the gully. I like gullies. They hold you. You feel you're likely to fall less far.'
The dangers of a solo attempt are rife. I think about his mother again...I'm the mother of a son who does dangerous things like kayaking the Zambezi, and the truth is I don't worry as much as people might think. He is trained to risk assess and I trust and have absolute confidence in his ability to do that.
As we were, I'm sure Mrs Macfarlane Sr. is fine.
Meanwhile Robert is up against it...
'This is probably the most intimidating above-ground landscape in which I have been, It is a place for whatever self-reliance and composure I can muster...'
Throughout the book Robert hasn't been afraid to share his fears, moments of terror and with any rising sense of panic well-controlled . He freely admits to them, there is nothing gung-ho about this and I find that awareness of fallibility reassuring and heartwarming. This particular journey becomes pure adventure, makes superb reading and a sense of real achievement awaits; honestly I felt as if I'd done it myself by the end. My was I glad to see those Red Dancers on the cave walls.
Further excursions to the Knud Rasmussen glacier in Greenland and Olkiluoto in Finland follow, both salutary and sobering accounts of 'things' of which I, and I suspect many others, know very little. In my mind, from that day to this, the thought of a quarter of a million tons of nuclear waste in need of storage underground, and how on earth do we let future generations know that we have buried it and where. How do we warn those who may not necessarily speak our language, or be able to interpret our signs, of the dangers that we have buried beneath them,
Had I ever given this a thought...no.
I was fascinated by Robert's interpretation of the haunting Finnish folk epic The Kalevala...
'The Kalevala is a long poem of many voices and many stories which - like the Iliad and Odyssey - grows out of diverse and deep-rooted traditions... '
I ordered a copy immediately and I confess I was rocked by Robert's interpretations as if hit by an earthquake. They made complete sense; premonitions and embedded warnings, the dangers of disinterring, was this part of an ancient messaging system...
'the warnings of which we have not heeded or even heard...'
I am chilled to the bone and the entire premise of so much that underpins Underland fell into place. We need to be paying attention and now.
It's time for another walk.
I've already used far too many words to get us this far, but by now it is January 24th, I had been reading the book for eleven days and spent as much time out walking and thinking as reading, and as I approached the final pages I took some time to write these thoughts (in my beautiful skyblue Leuchtturm 1917 and with heavy reliance on my new-found love of washi tape) which you can read (click to enlarge) or leave as you wish....
I emerged blinking into the light, well-read and well-exercised, grateful for the reorientation offered in Surfacing, the final (and very moving) chapter in the book. What a journey this was and what a precious and prescient book this is for the now. My parting words, doubtless joining the chorus of much-deserved paeans of praise for Underland which is published this week, are predictably that you definitely don't want to miss this one.
Further reading : An essay by Robert Macfarlane about Underland in The Guardian Sat 20th April
Further travels : Horatio Clare will be interviewing Robert at Hay Festival on Sunday May 26th
Further looking : Robert's much-loved Word of the Day on Twitter (you don't have to be signed up to read it) and and also his Instagram feed
John Macfarlane (Robert's father)has recently started posting his images on Instagram too
Further scribbles : Team Underland have been reading the book too, and some of us plan to meet at Hay Festival to have a good talk about the book an hear Robert talk about it. There will be much more about Underland to come I am sure.
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