The Unremembered Places E-Book

Patrick Baker

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 316

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for the The Great Outdoors Award for Outdoor Book of the Year and the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature There are strange relics hidden across Scotland's landscape: forgotten places that are touchstones to incredible stories and past lives which still resonate today. Yet why are so many of these 'wild histories' unnoticed and overlooked? And what can they tell us about our own modern identity? From the high mountain passes of an ancient droving route to a desolate moorland graveyard, from uninhabited post-industrial islands and Clearance villages to caves explored by early climbers and the mysterious strongholds of Christian missionaries, Patrick Baker makes a series of journeys on foot and by paddle. Along the way, he encounters Neolithic settlements, bizarre World War Two structures, evidence of illicit whisky production, sacred wells and Viking burial grounds. Combining a rich fusion of travelogue and historical narrative, he threads themes of geology, natural and social history, literature, and industry from the places he visits, discovering connections between people and place more powerful than can be imagined.

Leseprobe

THE UNREMEMBERED PLACES

First published in 2020 byBirlinn LimitedWest Newington House10 Newington RoadEdinburghEH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Patrick Baker 2020

The right of Patrick Baker to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 78885 266 1

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Papers used by Birlinn are from well-managed forests and other responsible sources

Typeset by Initial Typesetting Services, EdinburghPrinted and bound by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

For Rachel and for Andrew

Contents

List of Illustrations

The Unwritten PlacesThe Glen Loin Caves, Succoth, Argyll and Bute

Blood and ConcreteThe Blackwater Reservoir, Lochaber, West Highlands

The Memory PathJock’s Road, Braemar to Glen Clova

Wild IslandInishail, Loch Awe, Argyll and Bute and Eilean Fhianain, Loch Shiel, Lochaber, West Highlands

Land of the Left BehindThe Atlantic Wall, Sheriffmuir, Clackmannanshire and the Ardnamurchan Peninsula

Islands of IndustryThe Slate Isles, Firth of Lorn, Inner Hebrides

Sea FortressInchkeith, Firth of Forth

The Bone CavesInchnadamph, Assynt

Wood of the Ancient WellMunlochy, the Black Isle

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

Glen Loin Caves, Succoth

The navvies’ graveyard at Blackwater Dam

The dam-edged western end of Blackwater Reservoir

Jock’s Road descending from higher ground into Glen Doll

The tiny Davy’s Bourach shelter on the Jock’s Road drovers’ route

On the beach at Inishail island

The cemetery on Inishail

The remains of the replica of the Atlantic Wall, Sheriffmuir

An illicit still hidden in Ardnamurchan

The Clearance village of Bourblaige

Paddling across the Firth of Lorn towards Belnahua

The flooded quarry on Belnahua

Military ruins on Inchkeith Island, Firth of Forth

The unique geology and landscape of Assynt

The Bone Caves, Assynt, and the Allt nan Uamh stream

The Clootie Well, Munlochy

Air cruas nan creag

tha eagar smuaine,

air lom nam bean

tha ’n rann gun chluaine

On the hardness of rocks

is the ordered thought,

on the bareness of mountains

is the forthright verse

from ‘Craobh nan Teud’ / ‘The Tree of Strings’by Somhairle MacGill-Eain / Sorley MacLean

The Unwritten Places

The Glen Loin Caves, Succoth, Argyll and Bute

The words seem conspiratorial: secretive, colluding. I mumble them in a half-whisper, trying again to reference them on my map. It’s no good. The directions are too vague, too inscrutable for precise placement. I found them online two months ago, and I’ve been trying to decode them ever since. But maybe that’s the point. They are deliberately equivocal, to deter the undetermined, maintain the elusiveness of the place.

‘Once in the glen,’ they instruct, ‘take the forestry road northwards along the valley floor. When the track ends, carry on. Cross an area of broom and gorse, past a hill stream until you reach a high-voltage pylon. Find the narrow path (you’ll know it when you see it) and move uphill for a while. Look hard, and eventually you will spot them, not easily at first, but they are there, hidden amid a landslide of colossal boulders.’

The torch beam bounces across the darkness, finding nothing. We keep walking, crunching out a kilometre or so on the rutted forestry track. Mist settles on my face in cold pinpricks, quickly drenching. From somewhere nearby there’s the smell of peat smoke, pungent and sweet, lingering in the nostrils and sharp on the tongue. Clumsily we vault a gate, boots slipping on shiny aluminium, the sound of metal ringing in the blackness. I am with my friend Chris – a willing accomplice in these kinds of ventures. We don’t talk much; each of us puzzling the clues in the text, searching for a response in the landscape. Soon we have left the road and drifted into thick forestry: birch trees at first, their springy limbs whipping against us; then tightly packed pines, eye-level branches so sharp and brittle I walk with my hands in front of my face, flinching.

We’re lost. Or at least, we have lost our way, turning circles in a dead end of rotten tree stumps and dank undergrowth. But then, from close by, I hear something. The purling notes of falling water. I move towards it, suddenly reinvigorated, clutching the soggy sheet of directions, looking for the hill stream. Instead I find a tiny burn; though it’s not even that. At best it’s a streamlet, a pathetic gurgle of water sluicing between tree trunks – hardly the way-marker we have been looking for. The ground is soft, I’ve sunk ankle-deep and my boots are now sodden. I’m tired and I’m thinking of returning in daylight, when Chris motions from a break in the treeline.

I know it’s there, even before I reach it. The air is charged, a fizzing hum that I can feel as much as I can hear. The pylon rises in a small clearing of heather and gorse as power lines angle in and out from above the tree-tops. We walk underneath the giant structure, and I’m convinced that I can feel the loose energy intensify; a disturbing thrumming in my gums, and a prickling at my fingertips. We search the perimeters of the open ground and find what we are looking for. Part covered by low branches, we spot the beginnings of the path.

There’s no doubt now. The directions are right, and the sight of the path removes any uncertainty: it’s narrow and deeply gouged, a time-worn furrow, the result of decades, perhaps even centuries, of discreetly acquainted footfall. We scramble upwards, clutching at rocks and stepping between the knuckles of ancient tree roots. I can sense the passage of others here. The delicate tracery on the forest floor of those who have surreptitiously, knowingly, trodden these slopes before us: climbers, brigands, drovers, outlaws. And now, on this remote hillside, we’re searching for the same thing.

Although I cannot say when or how I first became aware of the Glen Loin Caves, it feels like they have always been there, hard-wired into my imagination. Most people will never have heard of them, but I have come to think of them in near-mythical terms: an unconfirmed place, conjured somehow within my consciousness over the years by the slow drip-feed of rumour and folklore. When their name occasionally surfaces, in stories about the early days of climbing or mentioned as the hideout for some dubious historical figure, it always stirs a strange restlessness in me.

There is something inherently beguiling about caves anyway, a powerful sense of attraction and foreboding. To consider entering a cave is to experience a conflict of feelings, a potent and contrary rush of curiosity and trepidation, inquisitiveness and apprehension. Caves are portals, breach points where the surface landscape is pierced and an inner world is reached. They are often retainers of mystery as well as space, an ingression into past happenings as much as they are themselves an ingression into the land.

The Glen Loin Caves are loaded with a similar duality, a peculiar and opposing combination of significance and secrecy. On the one hand is their historical importance. Among other claims, they were the reputed resting point for Robert the Bruce and his routed army in 1306 after his defeat at the Battle of Methven. More recently, the maze of fallen rocks on this Argyll mountainside was the focal point of a unique, sporting counterculture.

It was here for almost two decades from the 1920s that groups of working-class young people, mainly from the poverty-stricken tenements of Glasgow and shipyards of Clydebank, congregated to climb the huge rock walls of the Arrochar Alps. They created an almost permanent weekend residence in the caves. Small groups arrived at first, each with its own particular rules and hierarchies, then more established affiliations evolved. Clubs formed here whose names still resonate with modern mountaineers: the Ptarmigan Club and the infamous Creagh Dhu. The influence of these pioneering climbers was immense, providing a surge in climbing standards and techniques that was unequalled anywhere else at the time. They also redefined the sport, dismantling existing class barriers and creating a makeshift society in the Glen Loin Caves whose values and ethics became imprinted on generations of climbers that were to follow.

Yet the caves and their whereabouts have managed to remain largely unknown for decades. Hidden partly by the obscurity of the landscape, but also by an unwritten code of fraternal discretion. ‘The lad with the clinker-nailed boots and the rope in his rucksack who told me how to find the cave made me promise to keep the secret,’ wrote Alastair Borthwick in 1939, in one of the earliest and most detailed descriptions of the caves. ‘I was to follow a track to a forester’s cottage, pass through a gate . . . and there search for an old sheep fank. Behind it I should find a faint track leading up the hillside; and if I followed the scratches on the rock it led to, I should find the cave and good company.’

Even at close proximity, however, the caves are frustratingly hard to locate. In 1996 the writer Rennie McOwan described his efforts to find them. ‘This huge tangle of steep rocks, high up a hillside in Glen Loin . . . is not easily found. The ground is rough, very steep, often cliff-like and a mass of tree-covered holes, fissures and crevices.’ It took McOwan, an accomplished outdoorsman, several attempts to pinpoint the exact position of Borthwick’s earlier description, leaving no doubt about the visual indiscernibility of the caves. ‘You can trace these historic caves if you know where to look’, McOwan advised matter-of-factly, ‘but it can be both time-consuming, and exasperating if you do not.’

I am captivated by these kinds of places. Although compelled is perhaps a better word to describe the slightly obsessive nature of my interest. For many years I had regularly roamed Britain’s largest and most inhospitable mountain range – the Cairngorms – searching for something akin to what the writer Roger Deakin had described as ‘the unwritten places’: fragments of human and natural history that had somehow become lost in that vast granite landscape of plateau and corrie. Like the Glen Loin Caves, these were peripheral places, existing at the edges of our collective memory and often hidden by dint of sheer geographical remoteness. I had come to think of them best described as wild histories. Wild, certainly, in that they were located in wilderness areas, but wild also in an almost anthropomorphic sense: feral, uncared for, mostly unknown or nameless, and outside the boundaries of public consciousness.

It is hard to believe that in such a densely populated archipelago as ours there are features of our landscape that could remain undocumented or unexplained, that there are places beyond our comprehension or recollection. Perhaps this is because we have become disconnected – distanced both physically and in thought – from the familiarities of wild places. So much so that we have come to regard our history with a distinctly contemporary, geographical bias: a predominantly categorised, class-bound and urban interpretation of the past. But this is forgetting that we have only relatively recently become a nation of city-dwellers, and that Britain’s northern latitudes are still a place of wildness, a littoral-edged domain, full of mountain and moor, forest and fen. And it is from these places that we have ancestrally travelled.

When thought of in this way, the landscape of Scotland becomes a vast diorama: the setting for countless narrative scenes, lives and stories overlaid, some more vivid than others. These wild histories define us, perhaps more than any iconic building or national monument, for they are records of things inconsequential and commonplace. They are the simple transactions of life and land, of life in land. The same repetitive priorities that echo distantly in our own lives today.

Our islands are deep in time, but limited in their boundaries, and are therefore densely layered in mystery and significance. Anyone who has spent time in Scotland’s more remote regions or has purposely explored its less-visited nooks (and crannogs) may well have come across some fragment of a recent or a long-forgotten past – for wild histories are profuse here, often hidden in plain sight but invariably difficult to reach. They are the strange anomalies in the landscape encountered by chance on an isolated ridgeline or discovered on a stretch of deserted coast. They appear without explanation or ceremony, harbouring stories of uncertain origin: apocryphal tales with a hint of truth, enough to seed intrigue or perpetuate a myth.

It would be impossible to search for or catalogue all of Scotland’s wild histories. To do so would involve a lifetime’s exploration and would, by the passage of time, be rendered incomplete even before it was finished. But I wanted to reach certain places which, through their location and mysteriousness, had for years exerted on me a powerful imaginary appeal. They were often sacred but unremembered sites, such as medieval burial grounds, hidden on remote Highland lochs or the abandoned graveyard for itinerant construction workers of the Blackwater Dam – perhaps the most desolate cemetery in the whole of Britain. There were also curiosities: the chance to visit one of Scotland’s highest (and smallest) mountain shelters, situated – if I could find it – somewhere on an ancient drovers’ route, as well as the derelict sea island once used as a prison, quarantine site and military garrison, which still guarded the wind-strafed waters of the Firth of Forth. In the Inner Hebrides, I intended to spend a night on Belnahua, one of the uninhabited Slate Isles, where a ghostly village stood watch over the deep lagoons of abandoned slate quarries, flooded by Atlantic storm surges. Underground places would also feature in my journeys, and I would travel to Assynt’s karstic landscape in search of the enigmatic Bone Caves. Elsewhere, I would track across empty moorlands looking for the remains of illicit stills and the clues to a secretive bootlegging past.

The journeys would be neither definitive nor conclusive. Neither would they be a search for the unsurpassed: the most ‘wild’, the most ‘remote’ or the most ‘obscure’. Instead, they would be more folly than analysis, personal rather than primary discoveries. By necessity, they would also only be possible to experience first-hand, by self-made journeys on foot or by boat, and because of this they would also be an exploration of the landscape itself and the forgotten links between people and place.

We’re not having much luck. Chris lowers himself into another opening in the rocks – the third we’ve tried. I stand over the gap and peer in from above, seeing his head torch sweep the interior. The light disappears. I hear shuffling and some words I can’t make out, followed by silence – then a call from lower down on the other side of the rock. ‘No good.’ Chris emerges from a vegetated crack in the hillside below. ‘Too small, too damp. That can’t be it.’

By now the rain has stopped and the cloud cover has thinned. I can see clusters of stars through breaks in the forest’s canopy. It’s close to freezing and my breath lingers in the thin cone of torch light. We continue higher, zig-zagging steeply through pines, tracking a chute of massive boulders. I have the feeling we are getting closer, but I’m being careful, remembering another description I have read about the area. The mountaineer Hamish Brown had struck a cautionary tone. The place, he warned, is ‘riddled with caves and howffs of all sizes. Some overgrown gashes can provide booby-traps every bit as dangerous as crevasses’.

The gradient eases and then I see it. Ahead of me is a curtain of rock, glossy and bright in the moonlight. But there’s something else – a thin pleat of darkness. I move closer, and as the angle changes the crimp becomes a wide triangle, a large void of textureless black. The opening is huge: a story-book cave entrance, an eight-foot-high archway with tendrils of gnarled tree roots snaking along the threshold. It’s so perfectly formed it could be straight from a fairy tale: a bear’s den, the home to an ogre or a band of thieves. We enter slowly – in real life, caves can still be places for those not wanting to be found.

It’s dry inside, despite the rain. The ground is dusty and strewn with boulders. Sound redoubles, each movement carrying a louder, secondary reverberation. It feels like we have entered a crypt. A large, cold space: vaulted and full of dark air. I scan the cave walls, seeing ripples and folds appear in the torchlight, waves curving and bending in the schist, ridged to the touch – a kind of metamorphic graffiti. It’s laughable, but I’m ridiculously pleased to have found the cave, finally closing a loop of such long-standing fixation. More immediately, though, as the temperature plummets, it also means we have shelter for the night. Chris sets about making camp, arranging his sleeping bag between the rocks. From his jacket he has unstowed a plastic bottle with whisky swilling inside, straw-coloured and gleaming.

I take off my pack and explore further in. There’s an anteroom, a narrower chamber that I clamber into. It leads back into the open and I find myself at the bottom of a small chasm with rock walls rising either side of me. Water falls in thick, rhythmic droplets from the branches above. I work my way along the fissure, wading through slippery rock pools and pressing my hands sideways to balance, my fingers sinking into sponges of damp moss.

My route is soon blocked by a steep ramp of boulders. About halfway up I see another large cavity, hard to reach in the wet conditions without climbing gear. Borthwick had described finding something similar – ‘holes’ which appeared ominously ‘to lead directly into the bowels of the earth’, and I wonder if this is the same huge cave ‘about forty feet square with a roof fifteen feet high’, that he had discovered.

Borthwick told of a boisterous place, noisy but welcoming, where ‘someone was always arriving’ – the cave being home to a rowdy and garrulous lot: ‘As the shouting grew, others arrived. We had eighteen in residence in the end . . . Then they told stories . . . They seemed to have been in every conceivable variety of scrape on every conceivable variety of mountain, and the bigger the scrape the louder the laughter.’

I picture the scene as if I were arriving many decades ago. Not much would have been different; the same uncertain, perilous route to get here. But there, in the cliff face high above me would be the cave’s fire-lit entrance: a hot coal, bright and singular in the darkness, with loud voices barrelling out into the night.

Blood and Concrete

The Blackwater Reservoir, Lochaber, West Highlands

At the start of the twentieth century, in a remote glen in the West Highlands, the clatter of pickaxes and voices rings out: hard metallic sounds and the great compound noise of human commotion. A dam is being built, an alien shape in the landscape, linear and distinct, cleaved into the steep undulations of hillside.

The place hives with activity. Rock and peat are blasted away, and smoke blows through the cranes and rigging, billowing past small shanty-town huts and out across moorland. Thousands of men are at work, an army of the desperate and dispossessed. There’s blood and toil to be found in the mud and heather here, and hardship and death.

‘There was a graveyard in the place . . .’ wrote Patrick MacGill about the building of Blackwater Reservoir in his thinly veiled autobiographical novel Children of the Dead End. ‘A few went there from the last shift with the red muck still on their trousers and their long unshaven beards still on their faces. Maybe they died under a fallen rock or a broken derrick jib. Once dead they were buried, and there was an end of them.’

MacGill’s book is one of the most brutal I have ever read. It tells the story of Dermod Flynn, a feisty adolescent forced from his home in Ireland into bonded labour in Scotland. Years of itinerant work and unremitting poverty eventually lead him to Kinlochleven. It is here, along with so many other Irish and Scottish navvies, that he finds employment in the hydroelectric scheme: a massive civil-engineering project which included the construction of the reservoir, a six-kilometre aqueduct and an aluminium-smelting plant.

The chapters describing Flynn’s (or rather, MacGill’s) life at Kinlochleven are among the most powerful and disturbing in the novel. The squalor of the workers’ encampment, where the ‘muddle of shacks’ looked as though they had ‘dropped out of the sky’ and out of which ‘a spring oozed through the earthen floor’, is only matched by the danger of the tasks they are required to carry out: ‘As he struck the ground there was a deadly roar; the pick whirled around, sprung upwards, twirled in the air like a wind-swept straw, and entered Bill’s throat just a finger’s breadth below the Adam’s apple. One of the dynamite charges had failed to explode on the previous day, and Bill had struck it with the point of the pick, and with this tool which had earned him his livelihood for many years sticking in his throat he stood for a moment swaying unsteadily. He laughed awkwardly as if ashamed of what had happened, then dropped silently to the ground.’

Children of the Dead End is deeply affecting: in equal measure hard to read and hard to forget. It reverberated deep in my subconscious long after the last page was finished with the kind of protracted background hum that all potent books seem to leave behind. The characters and their place within the Highland landscape were like nothing else that I had ever come across. This was no idealised version of nature, no celebration of a wild, but ultimately beautiful place. Neither was it a setting that prompted any prospect of spiritual reclamation, nor transcendental enlightenment for the navvies. The place was pitiless and unforgiving.

MacGill describes an almost dystopian society, a farflung outpost of lawlessness where ‘all manner of quarrels were settled with fists’, and drinking and gambling are the only possible distractions from the savagery of working life. The mountains, the moor, the sheer scale and grandeur of scenery are no solace. No succour is to be found in the landscape’s aesthetics. Instead, the environment is merely another agent of misery for the men. The navvies are thus caught between two contrasting but overlapping adversities, asperities to be endured that are both wild and man-made, natural and industrial.

It’s not just the matter-of-fact wretchedness of the Kinlochleven descriptions, though, that render MacGill’s book extraordinary. More significantly, the prose, in all its awkward mixture of autobiography-cum-fiction, is an otherwise untold story. It becomes the counterpoint legacy to the mass of concrete and steel, a parallel and forgotten voice to be measured against the cold, physical reality of the Blackwater Dam. MacGill’s text provides a human narrative, the collective testament for the thousands of men who were once part of this wild history.

Of course, many never left the place. For some, all the inherent danger of the work would coalesce in a single instant. With a sudden evaporation of luck – the misplaced sledgehammer blow, a moment’s loss of balance or the abrupt death-strike of unseen rock-fall – lives were ended in the wind-torn reaches of the moor. They were laid to rest near where they fell, in a small, improvised burial ground situated below the steep walls of the reservoir. This was the place MacGill had described in Children of the Dead End – the navvies’ graveyard. Over a century after the book was written, it retains a strange literal and literary identity, a gangplank extending between fiction and reality, existing both on the pages of MacGill’s novel and on the empty moorland: a handful of weather-beaten concrete headstones in a scarce, vacated landscape.

It was my fourth attempt to reach the place. A couple of years earlier I had made the journey north after work, my eyes gritty and screen-burnt from hours of working at my computer. That autumn night I had driven into the remnants of a tropical cyclone. Hurricane Gonzalo, the most destructive Atlantic storm to occur in several years, had spun its way out across the ocean and was making landfall again, a condensed set of isobars and weather fronts hitting the west coast of Scotland in a maelstrom of gales and heavy rain.

In some idiotic form of logic, I was hoping for a weather window. If I were to go directly into the weather, I had concluded, I would – at some point on my journey – encounter the storm’s eye, and thereby be graced with several hours of benign, tranquil conditions.

Forestry lorries thundered past me, orange lights flashing, washing up walls of spray and surface water. For several hours I assumed a white-knuckle driving position, hunched forward on the steering wheel, squinting through the windscreen, the wipers knocking out a frantic rhythm. I eventually gave up. Fraught and tired, I pulled off the road somewhere before Rannoch Moor, pitching my tent on rain-soaked ground, the fly sheet snapping violently in the wind.

I tried twice more: beaten back before I had even started by thick winter snowfall; then, in spring, halted after only a couple of hours of walking, a back sprain leaving me almost immobile five kilometres into the disturbingly empty moorland. This time, I had subconsciously decided, I would definitely get there.

Conditions were good as I reached the Devil’s Staircase. High-altitude clouds moved in slow south-westerly convoys, the sun behind them, chalky and bright. The fivehundred-metre-high pass rose ahead of me in a switchback of loose grit and polished rock. Despite the supernatural association, it looked innocuous enough, hardly befitting such a foreboding name.

Similar toponymic curiosities occur frequently in the British Isles. There are over eighty places that Satan has laid a proprietary claim to across Britain. Often, they are some of the country’s most spectacular and unusual landforms, from fragile sea arches and precipitous gorges to strange rock formations and large cave structures. The names are equally memorable and explanatory; I knew of several first-hand. There was the Devil’s Beef Tub in the Scottish Borders, a deep hollow at the intersection of several hills plunging from the moorland above, and the silver-grey granite tor that forms the Devil’s Chair in Shropshire.

Most familiar to me was the Devil’s Point, the huge sentrymountain guarding the entrance to the Lairig Ghru pass in the Cairngorms. Its notoriety comes not from the name itself but how the naming came about. As the story goes, the mountain was diplomatically rechristened by a royal attendant. While visiting the area, Queen Victoria enquired after the Gaelic translation of the mountain. ‘The Devil’s Point’, replied a quick-thinking ghillie keen to spare the monarch’s (and his own) blushes – a euphemism hastily stumbled upon to conceal the peak’s actual name, the Devil’s Penis.

The Devil’s Staircase was, by comparison, quite unremarkable: appearing neither topographically conspicuous nor malevolent. My contemporary interpretation, though, was skewed. Many years ago this had been a place of ultimatum – the lowest section, and only crossing point, on the spine of hills that separates the vast expanse of Rannoch Moor to the south with the back country above Kinlochleven to the north. In bad weather, a fateful calculation would often have needed to be made – negotiate the pass and save a day of travel, but run the risk of being caught in lethal winter conditions.

Such a deceptive landscape proved fatal for the navvies. ‘They used to climb over the back glen there, down to [the] Kingshouse Inn,’ wrote Borthwick, retelling the story of a local stalker. ‘And then they would try and get back over the glen again, in the dark, and the snow. I used to go up with the pony in the [s]pring, when the snow melted. I’ve brought down as many as twenty. Poor devils. You’d see maybe a boot or an arm sticking out of a drift . . . I came on a skeleton . . . Thirty year it had been there. There was moss on the bones and a bottle in its hand.’

I knew the stalker’s tale was probably tinged with the theatrical, just as Borthwick’s account may have extended the truth even further. Nevertheless, it welled a sad admiration in me. The desperation of men willing to commit to a round trip of at least fifteen kilometres, through bog, tussock, snow and darkness for the ‘hard stuff’ piqued both my sympathy and my respect. From the top of the pass, I could see some of the distance the navvies would have walked, through the narrow breach in the hills, on to the tawny moorland, and, beyond that, the cliff-armoured north-east face of the Buachaille Etive Mor. The Kingshouse was a further five kilometres away, tucked out of sight behind the flanks of another mountain, out there somewhere on the vast moor.

Leaving the pass’s summit, I cut across folds of empty moorland, stumbling mainly. For an hour I fell in and out of contour lines, the rhythm of my footfall constantly disrupted by the uncertainty of the terrain: hidden burns, spine-jarring rocks and mossy sinkholes. Eventually I passed the point of my previous attempt and reached a stretch of light-green woodland that flickered in the sunlight and breeze. It was here that I hoped to locate a strange-looking vehicle track that was marked on the map. Something about its description didn’t seem right. Its sudden height gain, its elaborate twists and turns, and its elevated position above the glen hinted at some kind of eccentric folly, a mad man’s foolish endeavour.

What I found was completely unexpected. I dropped down through a shrubby incline, brushing my way through a thicket of birch and heather, until, without warning, my feet landed solidly on concrete. I was in a lateral clearing, with trees parted either side of me, left and right. I stood on what looked like a walkway, the surface a metre or so wide, perfectly flat and laid in large rectangular sections spanning ahead like tightly packed railway sleepers. Below it, the land continued to fall away so steeply that the structure became a viewing platform onto the glen below.

I moved gingerly on the concrete, uncertain it would hold my weight. Each step rang with a hollow echo. After a few metres, I noticed several bore holes an inch or so wide, spaced at intervals on the surface. They revealed not only the thickness of the concrete, but something much more remarkable underneath – water! Silver and black and moving at incredible speed. This was no walkway. I was on the aqueduct, inches above a man-made torrent of incredible power, the sight of which left me momentarily rooted to the spot.

MacGill’s characters in Children of the Dead End are part of the unseen: a soluble, temporary population that, at the time of the book’s writing in 1914 until roughly the 1950s, existed across Britain in a state of permanent migratory anonymity, uncountable and unaccounted for.

‘I was not the only one on the road,’ observed Laurie Lee in his wayfaring classic As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. ‘I soon noticed there were many others, all trudging in a sombre procession.’ They went by many (often pejorative) names – tramps, journeymen, vagrants, vagabonds, tinkers – drifting through the countryside from city to city, and from job to job in what the historian E.J. Hobsbawm ironically described as ‘the artisan’s equivalent of the grand tour’, their journeying both essential and often purposeless, driven either by economic necessity or simply by a life of habitual wandering.

Little is known about these people either collectively or individually. Yet their presence in Britain’s landscape was once ubiquitous; a continuous movement of human traffic that ebbed and flowed across the decades, through winters and summers, in fields and villages, roadsides and towns. They were often reviled and demonised, but accepted somehow as part of the natural order of things. This unconsidered part of society has now become an equally unconsidered part of history. Shadow figures: shambling regiments consigned to memory and old photographs, silently padding along lanes and byways, bedraggled images fading into the landscape.

Britain’s itinerant past, then, is defined by transit and transience. A drifting, unanchored way of life which, although long forgotten in its habits and customs, has left a resounding echo in literature. In writing, as in life, the unrooted, the homeless, the wanderers are often portrayed as outsiders, peripheral beings beyond understanding and therefore prefixed with symbolism or mystery.

In Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, the most enigmatic character is Diggory Venn, a travelling ‘reddleman’ who wends his way aloofly across Egdon Heath. Venn sells reddle, a dye used for marking sheep, which stains his clothes and skin red, turning him into a surreal ‘bloodcoloured figure’. The reddleman has an almost supernatural significance in the novel: visually demonic and displaying an uncanny luck at gambling, he is an interloper of other-worldly associations, a loner whose influence is subtle but constant, observing and interceding from a self-imposed distance. Likewise, Samuel Beckett’s tramps in Waiting for Godot are loaded with similar metaphoric power. Stripped of identity and place, stranded somewhere far apart from society without knowing why they are trapped, imprisoned by both their circumstances and their hope.

It was George Orwell, the intellectual champion of the downtrodden and marginalised, who was the writer perhaps most influenced by what he described as ‘the tribe of men, tens of thousands . . . marching up and down England’. Between 1928 and 1931 Orwell regularly ‘went native’, dressing in ragged clothes and frequenting workhouses in order to research his subject. The experiences were formative (providing the basis of Down and Out in Paris and London), but contrived. The Old Etonian and ex-policeman was always an outsider looking in, and must have appeared desperately out of place. ‘I dared not speak to anyone,’ confessed Orwell’s narrator, ‘imagining that they must notice a disparity between my accent and my clothes.’

Few writers could claim the credentials of true vagabondia. Robert Louis Stevenson’s verse ‘The Vagabond’ waxed lyrical about a life (very different from his own middle-class existence), with a ‘bed in the bush with stars to see’. And the Edwardian writer Stephen Graham confusingly extolled the virtues of wayfaring in his book in The Gentle Art of Tramping, while at the same time expressing open contempt at those who did so without choice. ‘They learn little on their wanderings,’ declared Graham acerbically, ‘beyond how to cadge, how to steal, how to avoid dogs and the police. They are not pilgrims but outlaws.’

By contrast, authenticity came from harsh experience. Jack London, a veteran of multiple hardships, wrote The People of the Abyss, having stayed for months in the slums of East London, often sleeping rough on the streets. Few people could have been more qualified to write about the conditions he witnessed. By the age of twenty-one, London had survived a tough childhood, provided for his family by working twenty-hour shifts in a cannery, scraped a living poaching oysters in San Francisco Bay, sailed the Pacific, lived as a tramp (and had been imprisoned for vagrancy) and had prospected for gold in the deathly grip of the Yukon winter.

The Welsh poet and author of Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, W. H. Davies, shared a similar pedigree of hoboism, and the physical distresses to prove it. While attempting to jump a freight train, Davies slipped. His foot was crushed under the carriage’s wheels, resulting in an injury so severe his lower leg was later amputated.

The literature of the open road is therefore both diverse and revelatory. It has become, by absence of formal record, a prism, refracting and dispersing an unacknowledged part of our social history: a medium of transfer and reflection for lives and stories otherwise untold. But of all the books, journals and accounts that I have come across in this sprawling genre, Children of the Dead End is perhaps the most articulate and the most truthful. ‘Most of my story is autobiographical,’ wrote MacGill. ‘I have endeavoured to tell of the navvy; the life he leads, the dangers he dares, and the death he often dies.’

At the time when the novel was first published, in 1914, most written works largely ignored the working classes, either in their subject matter or intended readership. Proletarian literature had yet to fully emerge as an established literary form, and any references to the working classes (even when well-intended) were always made by those of a more educated social standing. MacGill’s book, though, was radically different, and instantly successful because of it, selling 15,000 copies in its first three months.

Although a work of fiction, its content was mined from abysmal first-hand experience: ‘it must be said that nearly all the incidents of the book have come under the observation of the writer,’ declared MacGill, and ‘that such incidents should take place makes the tragedy of the story’. Knowing this, and reading the first-person narrative, it is impossible at times to separate author and protagonist.

We follow Flynn/MacGill through a series of adversities. As a child, alone and on the road, he trudges through winter nights to keep warm, sleeps in hedgerows and ditches, and is both threatened and pitied by the adults he encounters. Descriptions are precise and sensory, proximate and compelling. The feeling of water ‘gurgling’ in his leaking boot, the sound of wind as it passes through telegraph wires, or the sensation of being ‘close to the earth, almost part of it’, with ‘the smell of the wet sod . . . heavy in my nostrils’. Details given are also appallingly graphic. In one particularly gruesome passage, MacGill recounts the death of a railway worker caught beneath a ballast train, the ‘soft, slippery movement of that monstrous wheel skidding in flesh and blood’, and the sombre act of his colleagues to retrieve the body, finding ‘scraps of clothing and buttons’ that were ‘scrambled up with the flesh’.