Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills is a consistently engaging account of how the author, English writer and professional ornithologist Neil Ansell, went off to live alone in a derelict cottage in central Wales. Though actually only 50km as the crow flies from the English border, it was situated in the second most thinly populated region of the UK after the Scottish Highlands. The area’s emblem has long been the red kite, a bird that 30 years ago was so rare that the whole modern Welsh population of over 600 breeding pairs is thought to have descended from a single female.
The cottage stood at the top of a very steep field at the foot of which was a small, fast-flowing river thick with kingfishers and otters. Above it lay the heathery moors, home to larks and plovers and extending westwards virtually to the coast.
Sometimes Ansell sets off with a miniscule tent and enough food for three days into this wilderness, though most people would think where he was living was wilderness enough already. It was possible to walk west for 70km, he says, without coming across another house or road.
Friends occasionally come to visit, sometimes leaving early with a promise to return in better weather. Mostly, though, he’s on his own, a vegetarian stewing up blackberries, plums and crabapples for jams and jellies, and collecting forest mushrooms. He has no phone, no car and, needless to say, no TV or computer. When he needs to go to the nearest market town, to buy coffee and tea perhaps, he hitches.
And all around him are birds. Large numbers of species are observed and described in considerable detail — indeed this book is in some ways a specialist ornithological account disguised as a general-interest narrative. But viewed either way it makes an exceptionally absorbing read. I couldn’t put it down and finished it in under a day.
Little actually happens apart from what the birds make happen. He watches ravens flying upside down in a courtship display and is briefly adopted by one of them. He sees small birds at his bird table being picked off by hawks during cold winters, and actually relishes being snowed in one particularly bitter January. But all the time he’s sharing his hardships with the birds and animals, and he reports that he became the opposite of introspective over the time he spent in the cottage. Instead, he became an object in his own imagination, part of the very world he was observing.
Eventually he falls ill and is scarcely able to walk down to his postbox. He’s diagnosed as having a hormonal imbalance and begins on a slow recovery. A phone is installed in case of emergencies, but in the end he opts to leave. He now lives in Brighton, England, where he observes wildlife in a suburban setting, and contributes to natural history TV programs.
Accounts of men (rarely women, it seems) living alone in remote places go back a long way, from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe through Thoreau’s Walden to Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water. What’s the attraction? There is a long religious tradition of such retreats, and maybe modern recluses have a similar motivation — to be one with the pristine essence of things rather than cluttered up with the superficialities. But there’s always the question of what in particular is being escaped from, and Ansell is no more informative on this than most other voluntary solitaries. He has his own secrets, no doubt, and we have no right to demand to know what they are.
But in an article in the UK’s Observer newspaper last month he revealed that he sought his solitude at the age of 30 after years of rootless and near-penniless international travel, doing casual agricultural work when necessary. It was an irresistible desire to have children that made him leave Wales, he writes. He still goes back, though, letting the worries of town life slip away as he gets his wood fire going, collects water from a well, and lights his first candles.
But Ansell is certainly a very knowledgeable bird man and over the five years he was continuously in residence in his cottage he took part in bird-ringing and nesting-box-visiting programs on behalf of a local ornithological organization, claiming the first-ever sightings in the region of two species in the process. But these activities were incremental, and certainly not his reason for embarking on his retreat in the first place.
A pair of goshawks he sees startles him, and indeed it’s some time before he accepts that this is what they are because the species had been assumed to be extinct in the UK. Escapees from falconers, plus the occasional vagrant from continental Europe, must have been responsible, he thinks. Anyway, the local field center confirms their presence, plus a suspected breeding location close to his cottage.
To many non-Britons the scale of Ansell’s rural world will seem positively cramped. What are these Welsh distances compared to those available, say, in the US or Canada? But his is a foot-traveler’s world where journeys are measured by how many days’ walk somewhere is. And moorland, valley and the slopes between them constitute separate universes. They’re certainly home to different bird populations. Kestrels, peregrines, buzzards, the rare hobby, owls, sparrowhawks, magpies, pied flycatchers, nuthatches, goosanders, tits, finches and goldcrests — there can be few British birds that don’t get a mention somewhere in the text.
Despite being the author’s first book, Deep Country may well become a classic. I loved it because of the contrast between the author’s tranquility and the unceasing activity of the natural world he observes. I will certainly never part with my copy.
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