Grit in a Walker's Boot: A Nature Writing Essay

On writing a landscape you mean to become part of

Words by Alden Carrow

On writing a landscape you mean to become part of

Peat under the fingernails. Rain finding the seam in an old coat. A boot sole worn thin by the same miles, walked a hundred times. This is where the real question lives — not in the abstract, but in the wet ground underfoot.

The question is this: what does it mean to write about a landscape not as a visitor passing through, but as someone who intends to belong to it completely — even, in the end, to become it?

Because most nature writing is written from the outside. The poet arrives, observes, admires, and leaves. The mountain is a subject, held at arm's length, described. And there is nothing wrong with that — much of the poetry I love is written exactly so. But there is another way of writing a place, and it’s quite different, and Wainwright's story on Haystacks points straight at it. It is the writing of a place you have decided is yours — not that you own it, but that you belong to it, that you have given yourself to it, that you would want, at the last, to be scattered into it and become its grit and its water and its wind. That kind of writing has a different quality altogether. It is not observation. It is closer to love, and closer to vow.

I want to talk about what changes when you write a landscape that way, because I think it is one of the deepest things a poet who is also a walker can learn.

The first thing that changes is the humility. When you write a place you merely visit, you are the important one — you are the consciousness, the eye, the maker of meaning, and the landscape is your material.

But when you write a place you intend to become part of, the proportions reverse. The mountain was here five hundred million years before you, and it will be here long after the last atom of you has been absorbed into it. You are the temporary one. The fell is the permanent one — or as permanent as anything gets.

Writing from inside that knowledge strips away a great deal of ego. You stop trying to master the landscape in language and start trying, instead, to be worthy of it — to see it clearly enough, and love it truly enough, that your becoming-part-of-it would not be an insult to it.

That is a very different posture, and you can hear it, I think, in the best of the poetry of place. It does not stand over the land. It kneels in it.

It does not stand over the land. It kneels in it.

The second thing that changes is your relationship with your own mortality — and this is where our theme returns, and where I want to tread gently, because it touches all of us. To choose a landscape to become part of is to make peace, in a quiet and particular way, with the fact that you will end.

But notice what kind of peace it is. Wainwright did not look at Haystacks and see an ending. He looked at it and saw a destination — a place to change into. He did not want to disappear; he wanted to become grit in a walker's boot, water in the tarn, part of the view he had spent his life teaching others to love.

That is Shelley's cloud, exactly. I change, but I cannot die. The man did not believe he would be erased. He believed he would be transformed — dispersed into a landscape that would carry him, in altered form, for as long as the mountain stood.

And whatever you believe about what does or does not survive us, there is something in that vision that is true at the plainest physical level: the matter that is us is not destroyed when we end. It is released, and taken up again, and it goes on, changing state, part of the world's long unbroken cycle of becoming.

And this, I think, is the gift that writing such a landscape can give — not only to the poet, but to the reader.

Last week we stood in Cleator Moor, and I spoke about a town waiting for the turf to close over it, and there was no comfort in it, and I did not offer any, because there was none honestly to give. The turf closing over Cleator Moor was an ending that nobody chose.

But the turf on Haystacks — the peat that holds Wainwright's ashes — is an ending that somebody chose, gladly, as an act of love. Same soil. Same closing-over. Utterly different meaning. And the difference is the choosing, and the loving. To write a landscape you want to become part of is to practise, in language, that second kind of ending — the kind that is not defeat but belonging, not disappearance but a change of state.

So how do you actually do it, as a writer? You do it by going back to the same place, again and again, in every season and every weather, until you know it not as a view but as a companion.

You do it by learning its real names — the tarn called Innominate, the specific rock, the particular tree — because you can't give yourself to a generality; you can only give yourself to something known in detail.

You do it by writing it without flattery, as I tried to write Haystacks — the fractured stone, the ghost quarry, the cold astringent peat — because true love does not need its object to be perfect, and a place you would die into deserves to be seen whole, hard edges and all.

And you do it, finally, by letting the place be larger than you in the poem — by not making yourself the hero of it, but making yourself, instead, a small and grateful part of something that will outlast you.

And so we return to where we began: nothing here is lost. It is only changing state. The mountain is coming apart, and that isn’t loss — it is the slow, patient work of time, turning rock into scree into soil into the roots of the next living thing. The cloud disappears, and that isn’t death — it’s only vapour, waiting to build itself again. And the man in the peat of Haystacks did not vanish when he was scattered there. He changed his state — from a walker who loved a mountain into the mountain itself, grit in a boot, treated gently by strangers who read his books. That is what it can mean to write a landscape you want to become part of. Not to conquer it. Not even, in the end, to describe it. But to love it so truly, and see it so clearly, that becoming part of it feels not like an ending at all — but like coming home.

A Note on Nature Writing for Fellow Writers

If you want to try this yourself, pick one place — not a country, not even a valley, just one gate, one tree, one bend in a path — and return to it at least four times this year, in different weather. Write down its real names before you write anything else. Then write it once without a single word of praise, and once more as if you loved it. See what changes between the two drafts. That gap is usually where the real poem is hiding.

If you've enjoyed this journey through Cumbria's landscapes in words, you may also like to explore it further in verse. Consider ordering "Cumbria In Verse - Lakes To Fells In Poetry", a wonderful collection to accompany your own wanderings through this landscape.