I was fairly sure I was in possession of everything I needed for whatever I was about to face; the problem with our seesawing climate was knowing exactly what that was likely to be. Eventually I gave up on trying to pack the perfect bag and instead lugged the now considerable pile of clothing and kit in various states of garage-induced mustiness to the car boot. Most of it would remain there for almost a year and less than half of it would get used. But as I packed the last pieces in, it was empowering to think that I’d be comprehensively covered should I be seized at any moment by the notion to turn north in search of mountains. You can choose your cliché. To get away from it all. Escape the rat race. To get some headspace. For many who habitually head for the high, wild places, this idea of space, of solitude, is a key part of the appeal. For many, it’s the whole point.
Of the many things you get used to hearing when you live in Britain – the moans about the weather, the speed at which the government of the day is sending the country to hell on a skillet and the fact that petrol isn’t as cheap as it used to be – one gripe that’s particularly difficult to escape is how hopelessly, intolerably crowded the country is. It would be easy for an outsider to visualise Britain as a kind of unstable skiff of disgruntled, over-jostled passengers that at any moment will crack loudly and spectacularly discharge its contents into the North Atlantic. But in practice this preconception is really complete nonsense.
The next time you find yourself travelling long distance across the country, allow yourself for a moment to be struck by just how physically empty much of Britain is. We’re not talking boundless, unmolested wilderness exactly; just space. Leave London by car in most directions and minutes after you’re outside the M25, the number of buildings falls away and you’re amidst the most bewitching countryside. Even in the industrial north – where, if maps were to be believed, cities seem to spill into each other in an arc that starts at Liverpool and doesn’t really stop until Leeds – there are huge expanses of not an awful lot. There doesn’t seem to be anything sizeable at all between Lancaster and Whitby (the span of the entire country) except high, savage moorland; ditto between Carlisle and Berwick, and Newcastle and Penrith. Of course this is difficult to appreciate from King’s Cross or central Birmingham. And on the face of it, the numbers do disagree.
According to the 2011 census, 56,075,912 people live in England and Wales. This equates to just under 371 souls packed into every one of a combined 151,174 square kilometres. That’s a lot. But that’s also presuming they’re spread uniformly, which of course they’re not. The 70 most populous towns and cities in England and Wales cover a total of 7,781 square kilometres – around 5 per cent of the two countries’ total area. Into that a staggering 60 per cent of the population is shoehorned. A total of 33,899,733 people live in one of these built-up areas, which means the average population density of the remaining 95 per cent of the country exhales to a rather more spacious 154 people per square kilometre. This is a third of England and Wales’ ‘official’ population-density figure, but again in practice this is a rather misleading measure as the remaining population is also by no means evenly spread, being instead compartmentalised even more by the many thousand smaller clumps of population: big towns, small towns, villages and so on.
Scotland belongs in a different class altogether. Covering 78,387 square kilometres and home to 5,313,600 people, its average population density of 67 people per square kilometre drops to a decidedly thin 37 when the ten largest settlements – which cover just 769 square kilometres, or a fraction under 0.9 per cent of Scotland’s total area – are disregarded. So really, when you think about it, Britain consists of a small amount of space in which a huge amount of people live, and quite a lot of space where relatively few people live.
Mountains are the unconquerables. They are, in every sense, the last frontier of Britain – and its emptiest places. By their very nature, they will be the last bulwarks to be overcome by the rising flood of population and development that the gloom-mongers tell us is relentlessly on its way. Inhospitable and extreme, they’ll become refuges for those seeking escape; pointy little islands of silence and space, too awkward to be developed, too inconvenient to be home.
Of course, for those who crave calm, said solitude and escape from the very real crowding of cities, the mountains are refuges already. They’re the greatest empty spaces in a country of otherwise relatively lean dimensions. Consequently, I was keen to find a mountain that might demonstrate exactly this, a wilderness close to something, but bare of anything; a kind of accessible antithesis to claustrophobia.
I spent some time trying to find it. It needed to be a place where you could feel like the only person in existence, where the landscape around you is so limitless and free of human meddling it has the potential to redefine perspective and blow any sense of claustrophobia or overcrowding out of the system. The trouble was – and this was a happy dilemma – there seemed to be too many places to choose from.
Arthur’s Seat, standing above the spired city of Edinburgh like a spook over a child’s bed, stood at one extreme, given its striking juxtaposition of the brimming and the barren. Such is the intimacy with which the city and the peak nuzzle up against each other you could honk a horn or even open a tub of particularly delicious soup in the city and someone up on Arthur’s Seat would notice. Not just that, the visual contrast was particularly unsubtle. The roots of a long-dead volcano hewn and squashed into its present form by glaciation during the Carboniferous period some 300 million years ago, its bold profile grinning with crags made for a strikingly bare companion to the twinkly steeples and townhouses of Edinburgh. But at 251 metres it’s tiny even by British standards, and didn’t so much offer an escape from civilisation as stand proud as a podium amidst it – somewhere to gaze from a pleasing point of observation down upon the city, but never to feel truly removed from it.
Dartmoor, in the south-west of England, seemed to offer almost limitless desolation with a pleasingly eerie footnote, thick as it is with folk legend and weird, gaunt tors. Much of it sits at around 500 metres above sea level, making it surprisingly elevated for a moor; look north from its highest point at 621 metres and the next comparably lofty ground in England doesn’t crop up until Derbyshire. But a quarter of the national park – and around half of the area you would call the ‘high’ moor – is used by the Ministry of Defence, who, for a few hours most days bounce around on it in jeeps and shoot at each other with rocket launchers and other noisy things entirely unfavourable to tranquillity. To give them their due, the military look after the moor rather well in the moments they aren’t using it as a kind of Devonshire Ypres. But to me, the process of having to check access times on a website to avoid the slim possibility of being shot – or inadvertently stepping on something that might cause me to be returned home in a carrier bag – sort of defeated the object.
My search area was beginning to spiral northwards again when a news story caught my eye. Suddenly the answer was obvious, and a decision was quickly made. And fortuitously enough, the solution to this quest for space came in the form of space – albeit space of a quite different kind.
Whilst the most obvious menace with the potential to collectively rob us of quality elbow room and the balm of tranquillity is hustle and bustle, cars, noise and overcrowding, it appears there’s another, more insidious, space thief at work in Britain. Disruptions of migrating birds, erratic breeding patterns of animals, falling populations of insects