David Pratt: Wind, sea, sand and stars – the landscapes I yearn for

Who really knows where our love of wild, untamed and elemental places comes from?

Books, especially those filled with tales of derring-do were the kindling for my fiery imagination. On opening them it was as if a gateway had appeared and my own adventures could begin alongside those larger-than-life explorers, mountaineers, sailors and aviators that inhabited their pages.

The boundless horizons of such heroes however were still a far cry from the childhood constraints of dank tenement closes and early adolescent ­uniformity of life on a Scottish housing scheme.

Wanderlust though is a strangely compelling thing just like the places it leads to. For a time, my boyhood cravings for adventure and hankering for the outdoors were only quenched by make do and make-believe. Looking back now though those days were also ones of endless possibilities.

In this pretend world, the blackened ash heap of an old local colliery pit bing became my ­Matterhorn while a disused crumbling railway bridge was the ­vertical stage on which to re-enact the dramas of those climbers who ventured onto the Eiger, that other mountain that both fascinated and terrified me at the same time.

Later real mountains would become my escape from the mundane and a rite of passage in terms of life’s experience, but in those early days such peaks remained as illusory as the shadowy figure in a ­broken spectre.

The shifting seasons only added to my desire to play out the role of the real-life and fictional characters from the adventures stories and Boy’s Own-style comics that I devoured.

One desperately bleak wintry day I set off with a friend to explore some moorland that lay beyond the perimeter of the housing scheme to which my family had moved in South Lanarkshire.

Later like so much of the area it too would be wiped away by the builders’ bulldozer as the demand for housing grew, but back then it was as close to a true wilderness as any 10-year-old like me was likely to get.

It was blowing a blizzard when we set out “sledge hauling” an old baker’s breadboard attached to our trouser belts by rough hemp ropes that had been ­“liberated” from a local building site.

That the board carried nothing didn’t really matter for as the spindrift stung our faces our journey was on a scale as epic as that of polar explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott in Antarctica.

For nights before our expedition began, I had steeled myself for the ordeal by leaving my bedroom windows open to the freezing night air to toughen myself to the cold.

Somewhere I’d read that Scott’s great Norwegian rival Roald Amundsen had done the same as a boy when he first dreamed of being a polar explorer.

There is much to be said for being a dreamer at that age, for who knows what adventures one might subsequently embark upon because of such a take on the world.

“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it ­possible,” wrote another of my boyhood heroes TE Lawrence.

It was back in the 1960s as a youngster that I first saw the celebrated film Lawrence Of Arabia made by director David Lean. It also marked a seminal moment in my growing love of adventure and elemental places. I was on holiday with my parents one summer on the Northumberland coast when one rainy day we retreated to the cinema, and I stared rapt as Lawrence played by Peter O’Toole crossed the seemingly endless desert vastness to the sweeping sounds of that now-famous film score.

Up until then I’d always imagined ­deserts as being like sandy beaches which never reach the water. But here before me on screen was this hard-packed ­desolation extending without end to the horizon.

After leaving the cinema speechless, I spent the next fortnight with friends, running around the beaches and sand dunes of our resort with a tea towel wrapped around my head, shouting: “No prisoners!” and making the long trek with an imaginary camel towards an imaginary Aqaba.

Born in great part from that film’s impact the allure of deserts like that of the mountains would stay with me for the rest of my life even if it would be many years before I experienced them first-hand.

IT was the great British explorer, writer and photographer Wilfred Thesiger who in his evocative desert books Arabian Sands and Across the Empty Quarter delved so wonderfully into this experience of and feeling for landscape.

“I knew instinctively that it was the very hardness of life in the desert which drew me back there – it was the same pull which takes men back to the polar ice, high mountains and to the sea,” ­observed Thesiger.

Each of us has a special place, or ­places, that we have a strong connection to. From very early on this sense of place was central to what made me tick as a person. Along the way cultural ­experiences and a greater and more intimate understanding of particular places or locations only strengthened that feeling, but above all it was the elemental aspects of ­certain ­landscapes to which I found myself ­inextricably drawn and addicted.

Shortly before his death I had the great privilege of meeting not for the first time the legendary Scottish mountaineer Hamish MacInnes. The occasion was the Glasgow Film Festival premiere of the documentary about his life entitled, Final Ascent.

Mountaineer Hamish MacInnes at his home in Glencoe

In one of the sequences in the film, photographs of MacInnes the master at work on mountains from the Alps to the Himalayas and beyond are shown as he narrates from the great verse The Golden Journey To Samarkand by the writer James Elroy Flecker.

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go

Always a little further; it may be

Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow

Across that angry or that glimmering sea.

THAT desire to go further, see nature in the raw and revel in its elements and landscapes was what led me to my very first encounter with MacInnes when one night as a 15-year-old I went to hear him speak after he returned from a recent expedition to the fabled Mount Roraima in South America, one of the last unexplored corners of the world.

Much of that evening in Glasgow was a kaleidoscopic journey into everything I’d ever wanted to do.

I listened transfixed by his tales, my eyes on stalks at the photographic images MacInnes presented that night following that great adventure in 1973.

His story of trekking through rainforests and swamps inhabited by venomous pit vipers, scorpions and giant bird-eating spiders was remarkable. The rock climb of the mist-shrouded 9000-foot sandstone wall to reach the plateau made famous in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ­haunting 1912 novel The Lost World, had me ­spellbound.

I knew then that such remote untamed places were for me, and climbing was my first step on that journey. Within the ranks of those I met in Scotland’s hills where fellow nomads and free spirits like my climbing pal Rab who was with me that night when we listened to ­MacInnes’s lecture. Little could I have imagined then though that some years later it would also be MacInnes and his Glencoe Mountain Rescue Team that would pull Rab off a gully on Buachaille Etive Mor after an accident that he luckily survived albeit after suffering a broken back from the fall.

In the years that followed during those long, sun-caressed summer days, grey blizzard-filled winters and endless ­dreich times in between, I discovered many things in Scotland’s mountains. Among them was how to pack a rucksack, coil a rope, tie a bowline, figure of eight or prusik knot, abseil, belay, brake with an ice axe and front point on crampons.

I discovered other things too. My limits and fears, physical and mental, for that’s what mountaineering is really all about, exploring the self just as much as the wild places.

As an adult in the decades that ­followed, even when working in the ­hectic news ­environment of a foreign ­correspondent - I would always, whenever possible, pause to soak up the natural richness of the often spectacular, sometimes harsh and heart-wrenchingly beautiful places in which I found myself.

Those oven-hot deserts in places like Libya, Niger and Jordan with their seductive austerity and clarity of thought they grant. The towering snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush among which flow crystal-clear rivers their water so cold that to drink it takes your breath away. The endless jungle canopy of eastern Congo and chasm of the Great Rift Valley in the highlands of Ethiopia which once seen from the cockpit of a small plane can never be forgotten.

I’ll never forget too one night sitting for hours in the grasslands of a remote ­region in South Sudan the sky full of stars ­seemingly so close they looked like grapes on a vine that you only had to reach up and pluck down.

“I am 20 miles or more from the ­nearest fellow human, but instead of ­loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation,” once wrote the American author, anarchist and environmental ­activist Edward Abbey whose book ­Desert Solitaire describes his experiences as park ranger in the Arches National Park in eastern Utah in the 1950s.

That night in South Sudan – and on many other occasions since – I too have experienced that “loveliness and quiet exultation”. Like many who relish such feelings, to be deprived of them leave me empty and restless. After years of ­roaming the world, I still yearn for those landscapes that bring such satisfaction.

Tarifa on the coast of Andalucia in southern Spain where Europe meets ­Africa and the Mediterranean kisses the Atlantic Ocean complete with its ­Poniente and Levante winds has always been a special elemental place to me.

Sitting at night as I often have looking out across the Straits of Gibraltar at the twinkling lights in the port of Tangier in Morocco is to be reminded of how close Africa sits to us and opens the mind to the endless richness of landscape beyond.

Likewise, closer to home the Kyle of Durness and Cape Wrath which takes its name from the old Norse word meaning “turning point”, reputedly because ­Viking explorers used it for navigation, epitomises another of those locations with which I identify, places on the edge or where oceans, seas or continents ­collide and adventure beckons.

As our enforced isolation, lockdown and restrictions on movement continue to ease and hopefully the coronavirus pandemic relents, what a prospect it is to once again venture out and explore such places here at home and further afield.

“I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be,” wrote Bruce Chatwin in his classic book The Songlines, which is as much a homage to nomadism and wanderlust as it is a search for the source and meaning of the ancient “dreaming tracks” of Australia’s Aborigines.

For so long now most of us have been in a place we would rather not be. But this hasn’t stopped us from relishing the thought of those places we would so love to visit.

Just as I did when a boy so too in the twilight years of my life I still dream of those snowy mountains, parched deserts, windswept seas and skies full of stars wherever they might be. So much still to see, so little time.