A Land

Jacquetta Hawkes

• Publisher: Collins
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780007457465
• eBook ISBN: 9780007457472
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Collins Nature Library is a new series of classic British nature writing – reissues of long-lost seminal works. The titles have been chosen by one of Britain’s best known and highly-acclaimed nature writers, Robert Macfarlane, who has also written new introductions that put these classics into a modern context.

1 TWO THEMES

When I have been working late on a summer night, I like to go out and lie on the patch of grass in our back garden. This garden is a square of about twenty feet, so that to lie in it is like exposing oneself in an open box or tray. Not far below the topsoil is the London Clay which, as Primrose Hill, humps up conspicuously at the end of the road. The humus, formed by the accumulations first of forest and then of meadow land, must once have been fertile enough, but nearly a century in a back garden has exhausted it. After their first season, plants flower no more, and are hard put to it each year even to make a decent show of leaves. The only exceptions are the lilies of the valley, possessors of some virtue that enables them to draw their tremendous scent from the meanest soils. The sunless side of the garden has been abandoned to them, and now even in winter it is impossible to fork the earth there, so densely is it matted with the roots and pale nodes from which their flowers will rise.

Another result of the impoverishment of the soil is that the turf on which I lie is meagre and worn, quite without buoyancy. I would not have it otherwise, for this hard ground presses my flesh against my bones and makes me agreeably conscious of my body. In bed I can sleep, here I can rest awake. My eyes stray among the stars, or are netted by the fine silhouettes of the leaves immediately overhead and from them passed on to the black lines of neighbouring chimney pots, misshapen and stolid, yet always inexplicably poignant. Cats rustle in the creeper on the end wall. Sometimes they jump down so softly that I do not hear them alight and yet am aware of their presence in the garden with me. Making their silken journeys through the dark, the cats seem as untamed, as remote, as the creatures that moved here before there were any houses in the Thames valley.

By night I have something of the same feeling about cats that I have always, and far more strongly, about birds: that, perfectly formed while men were still brutal, they now represent the continued presence of the past. Once birds sang and flirted among the leaves while men, more helpless and less accomplished, skulked between the trunks below them. Now they linger in the few trees that men have left standing, or fit themselves into the chinks of the human world, into its church towers, lamp-posts and gutters. It is quite illogical that this emotion should be concentrated on birds; insects, for example, look, and are, more ancient. Perhaps it is evoked by the singing, whistling and calling that fell into millions of ancestral ears and there left images that we all inherit. The verses of medieval poets are full of birds as though in them these stored memories had risen to the surface. Once in the spring I stood at the edge of some Norfolk ploughland listening to the mating calls of the plover that were tumbling ecstatically above the fields. The delicious effusions of turtle doves bubbled from a coppice at my back. It seemed to me that I had my ear to a great spiral shell and that these sounds rose from it. The shell was the vortex of time, and as the birds themselves took shape, species after species, so their distinctive songs were formed within them and had been spiraling up ever since. Now, at the very lip of the shell, they reached my present ear.

As I lie looking at the stars with that blend of wonder and familiarity they alone can suggest, a barge turning the bend in Regent’s Park Canal hoots, a soft wedge of sound in the darkness that is cut across by the long rumble of a train drawing out from Euston Station. Touched by these sounds, like a snail I retract my thoughts from the stars and banish the picture of the earth and myself hanging among them. Instead I become conscious of the huge city spreading for miles on all sides, of the innumerable fellow creatures stretched horizontally a few feet above the ground in their upstairs bedrooms, and of the railways, roads and canals rayed out towards all the extremities of Britain. The people sitting in those lighted carriages, even the bargee leaning sleepily on his long tiller, are not individuals going to board meetings in Manchester or bringing in coal for London furnaces. For the instant they are figures moved about the map by unknown forces, as helpless as the shapes of history that can be seen behind them, all irresistibly impelled to the achievement of this moment.

The Thames flows widening towards the city it has created; the coastline of Britain encloses me within a shape as familiar as the constellations of the stars, and as consciously felt as the enclosing walls of this garden. The coast with its free, sweeping lines among the young formations of the east and south, and its intricate, embattled line of headland and bay among the ancient rocks of the west and north. The shape seems constant in its familiarity yet in fact is continuously changing. Even the stern white front that Albion turns to the Continent is withdrawing at the rate of fifteen inches a year. I remember as a small child being terrified by a big fall of cliff at Hunstanton, and I am certain that my terror was not so much due to the thought of being crushed – the fall had happened some days before, as by some inkling of impermanence. It was the same knowledge, though in a sadder and less brutal form, that came stealing in from the submerged forest, also to be seen at Hunstanton, a dreary expanse of blackened tree stumps exposed at low tide.

Always change, and yet at this moment, at every given moment, the outline of Britain, like all outlines, has reality and significance. It is the endless problem of the philosophers; either they give process, energy, its due and neglect its formal limitations, or they look only at forms and forget the irresistible power of change. The answers to all the great secrets are hidden somewhere in this thicket, those of ethics and aesthetics as well as of metaphysics.

I know of no philosophy that can disprove that this land, having achieved this moment, was not always bound to achieve it, or that I, because I exist, was not always inevitably coming into existence. It is therefore as an integral part of the process that I claim to tell the story of the creation of what is at present known as Britain, a land which has its own unmistakable shape at this moment of time.

There are many ways in which this story can be told, just as a day in the life of this house behind me could be described in terms of its intake of food and fuel, and its corresponding output through drains, dustbins and chimneys, or in terms of the movement in space and time of its occupants, or of their emotional relationships. All these forms, even the most material, would be in some sense creations of the storyteller’s mind, and for this reason the counterpoint to the theme of the creation of a land shall be the growth of consciousness, its gradual concentration and intensification within the human skull.

That consciousness has now reached a stage in its growth at which it is impelled to turn back to recollect happenings in its own past which it has, as it were, forgotten. In the history of thought, this is the age of history. Some forms of these lost memories lie in the unconscious strata of mind itself, these dark, rarely disturbed layers that have accumulated, as mould accumulates in a forest, through the shedding of innumerable lives since the beginning of life. In its search for these forms consciousness is working, not always I think very sensitively, through its psychologists. I am certainly involved in their findings, but as narrator am not concerned with them. Instead I am concerned with other forms of memory, those recollections of the world and of man that are pursued on behalf of consciousness by geologists and archaeologists.

Unfortunately they have not yet gone far enough to recall the formation of the planet Earth. In my own childhood I drew a crude picture in my mind of a fragment flying off from the side of the sun, much as a piece of clay, carelessly handled, flies from a pot revolving on the potter’s wheel. Then there were other, conflicting, pictures of the formation of planets by awe-inspiring cosmic road accidents, immense collisions. It seems that both were fanciful. Yet as we have not yet remembered what did happen, I must begin with a white-hot young earth dropping into its place like a fly into an unseen four-dimensional cobweb, caught up in a delicate tissue of forces where it assumed its own inevitable place, following the only path, the only orbit that was open to it.

At first the new planet was hot enough to shine with its own light, but so small a particle, lacking the nuclear energy that allows the sun to shine gloriously for billions of years at the expense only of some slight change in girth, could not keep its heat for very long. Its rays turned from white to red, then faded till Earth was lit only from without, from the sun round which it swung on an invisible thread. From that time night and day were established, the shadow of the Earth pointing into space like a huge black tent.

Writing in 1949 I say that night and day were established. It is, I know, foolish to use these words for a time before consciousness had grown in men and had formed the image of night and day as the spinning globe sent them from sunlight under the cone of shadow and out again at dawn. I should wait to use these words until this procession of light and darkness had formed one of the most deep-set images in the mind of man. But the concept is now so familiar that I cannot express myself otherwise.

I lie here and feel Earth rustling through space, its rotundity between me and the sun, the shadow above me acting as a searchlight to reveal the stars whose light left them long before there were eyes on this planet to receive it. Now the two little globes of my eyes, unlit in the darkness, look up at their shining globes, and who shall say that we do not gaze at one another, affect one another?

The first pallor of the rising moon dimming the stars over the chimneys reminds me of our modest satellite. I have known her for so long that she is an accepted part of the night, yet were I lying on Jupiter the sky would be radiant with ten moons, while on Saturn the rings would glisten day and night in a glorious bow. Now she has risen into sight, our one familiar moon. A beautiful world to our eyes, but cold and lifeless; without water or atmosphere she is a presage of what Earth might become. I should like to know whether in those icy rocks there are the fossils of former life, organisms that had gone some way in the process in which we are involved before they were cut short by an eternal drought. Do they lie in the rocks beneath the rays of a sun that once gave them life but now beats meaninglessly on a frigid landscape?

I feel them at their employment, the sun, moon, Earth and all the rest, even while more intimately I am aware of Britain moving through the night which, like a candle extinguisher, has put out her ordinary life. But if, which heaven forbid, I were at this moment to leap into a jet aeroplane we could catch up with day in a few hours, or could plunge into winter in a few days. It is difficult to remember for how great a part of history these thoughts and images would have appeared as the wildest delusions of a madman. We felt more secure when we believed ourselves to be standing on a plate under the protective dome of heaven with day and night given for work and sleep. If we were less confident in Athens it was only by intuition and native courage. Now knowledge of material facts imposes humility upon us, willy nilly. Not that I would allow myself to repent the divine curiosity that has led to this knowledge. Like everyone else within the walls of these islands I am a European, and as a European committed utterly to la volonté de la conscience et la volonté de la découverte. To enjoy, to create (which is to love) and to try to understand is all that at the moment I can see of duty. As for apparent material facts, I hope that in time we shall have come to know so many, and to have seen through so many, that they will no longer appear as important as they now do.

At present, certainly, they are powerful; we have allowed them to become our masters. Yet, strangely, as I lie here in my ignorance under the stars, I am aware of awe but not of terror, of humility but not of insignificance.

Meanwhile the moon has drawn clear of the chimneys. How ungrateful we have been to call her inconstant when she is the only body in the heavens to have remained faithful to us in spite of our intelligence, the only body that still revolves about us. She is riding high and I must go to bed before first the Isle of Thanet noses out, and then London itself emerges on the other side of night.

2 CREATION

Although I was born into a world which, at least in my part of it, had long made itself aware that it was not a plate but a sphere, and that it was the servant and not the master of the sun, I was not born too late to absorb some misconceptions from my nurse. Indeed I kept an unquestioned belief in one of these errors until only the other day, and I am therefore probably right to assume that many of my fellows believe in it still. I grew up with the simple image of Earth as a globe with an outer skin that was hard and cool but which grew progressively hotter and more wholly molten towards an unimaginably hot and molten centre. This picture, I now learn, is incorrect. Enormously the greater part of the earth’s sphere is very dense, perhaps an alloy of iron and nickel. It is this metallic mass which draws the compass needle so faithfully to the north and which made the iron filings scattered by our physics mistress on a sheet of foolscap dance so mysteriously and form radiate patterns over the northern end of the magnet lying below the paper. The core is enclosed in an outer layer about seven hundred miles thick which may have risen to the surface when the earth was still fiery hot, as the dross rises when ores are smelted, or as scum rises on boiling jam. The dross layer as it formed further divided itself into two parts, a heavy lower one of basalt and an upper one which on cooling crystallized into granite. This granite froth formed the first land masses of the world.

In deep mines men work naked and stream with sweat even when far above snow is falling on their houses. A few miles further down and the heat would become insupportable, deeper again and any shaft would begin to heave and close in, for it would have reached a depth at which the rock substance was molten. Whatever the temperature at the heart of the globe may be, radio-activity in the lower parts of its outer layer produces heat that accumulates in its deep imprisonment until it reaches such intensity that the substance melts. Only a score of miles below the surface on which we walk the crust is molten, though probably held rigid by the pressure of the solid rocks above. So the picture I formed in the nursery is not fundamentally misleading; we do in fact maintain our fragile lives on a wafer balanced between a hellish morass and unlimited space. Even that wafer wears thin, a fact accounting for many of the most stirring events in the history of the earth. In spite of the claims of gravestone merchants, granite can be gradually worn away by the combined and almost continuous assault of sun and frost, wind and water, and Earth’s skin of granite was so worn. But what is weathered away is not lost, it must be redeposited elsewhere at a lower level, often under water. It was in this way that granite became the basic stuff of the sedimentary rocks that now form the greater part of our landscape. Since life began it has, of course, added immeasurably to these rocks, building up vast thicknesses from shells, corals, the minute bodies of foraminifera, chemical deposits provoked by algae, from the accumulation of forests and peat bogs. But it began with granite and the basalt that gouted up when the hard skin cracked. It is curious to think that granite and basalt, with H₂O, N, and CO₂, the water and early atmosphere of earth, have made all the material paraphernalia with which man now surrounds himself, the skyscraper, the wine-glass, the vacuum cleaner, jewels, the mirror into which I look. And the woman who looks? Where did it come from, this being behind the eyes, this thing that asks? How has this been gleaned from a landscape of harsh rock and empty seas?

But to return to the wafer, and to the statement that it wears thin. The irregularities of the earth’s surface at the present time are slight enough – five miles up to the summit of the highest mountains, six miles down to the deepest sea-beds – less relatively than those of a smooth-skinned orange. Yet even this slight irregularity is always under attack by the powers already named, by sun and frost, wind and water, which erode the heights, transporting them grain by grain and molecule by molecule to add them to the low ground or to fill the hollows of the sea. Could this go on long enough a dead level would result and we should all perforce be plain-dwellers. There are many agencies working towards the achievement of rest, of quiescence. Gravity itself does much, through landslides, through streams and torrents that tear and batter their beds and carry down grits, pebbles, stones and boulders as their waters rush back to sea level. Frost splits, wind catches up grits and uses them like sandpaper to smooth and wear down exposed rock surfaces. The alternating heat and cold of day and night causes rock to swell and to retract until, weary of the process, its outer skin flakes off and is carried away by wind or water. To this last form of levelling down the geologists, who usually prefer such terms as isostatic readjustment, have given the pleasing name of onion weathering.

So, during a period of denudation, the levelling goes on. (Let it be remembered that the entire human episode has coincided with a very short stretch of a single geological period of denudation.) Everywhere the higher levels are being attacked, and their substance, broken into pieces ranging from dust grains to boulders, carried downwards. Most of the carrying is done by rivers that either redeposit the stuff along their lower reaches, fan it out in deltas, or sweep it right out to sea. It is the finer particles that reach the sea where they fall cloudily through the water and settle on the bottom, layer after layer slowly hardening into new rocks. New lands for old. There are two distinct kinds of sedimentary rocks. The rivers do not only carry these insoluble particles; some parts of the substance of the denuded lands are soluble and these are brought down in solution and then precipitated by chemical action. All the many varieties of sandstones and clays are formed by simple deposition, the limestones and dolomites mainly by precipitation. Chalk, once believed to have been built entirely from the bodies of minute sea creatures, is now recognized as a chemical precipitate, probably, however, created by the action of living algae and certainly crowded with the minute but elegant forms of the foraminifera. I like to think of the seas where chalk was forming clouded with white as though from a snow storm – a fall that lasted for thirty million years and lay to a depth of a thousand feet.

The character of new rocks accumulating on the sea bottom was naturally influenced by the character of the denuded lands that were their parents. Much of the New Red Sandstone still glowing warmly through Midland rain was laid down in great lakes or land-locked seas that covered central and northern England at a time when the surrounding lands were sun-baked deserts. The soft, bluish clay known as the Lias was accumulating when slow rivers were meandering down from a country of lakes and forests or swampy plains.

It is impossible to think of the blue Lias, of the mouldering cliffs of it along the Dorset coast, without thinking also of its fossils, of coiled ammonites, bullet-like belemnites, the huge skeletons of ichthyosaurs, and so also of fossils in general. The young are now kinder than they were and are more tender towards old age, more aware perhaps with the growt...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface to 1951 Edition
• Introduction
• 1 Two Themes
• 2 Creation
• 3 Recollection
• 4 An Aside on Consciousness
• 5 Creation of the Mountain Country
• 6 Creation of the Lowlands
• 7 Digression on Rocks, Soils and Men
• 8 Land and People
• 9 Land and Machines
• 10 Prospect of Britain
• Appendix: Geological Time-Scale
• Maps
• Searchable Terms
• Collins Nature Library
• Other Books by Jacquetta Hawkes
• Copyright
• About the Publisher