An ethereal gravity

Night-walking, what to look for in autumn, and an opportunity to help connect people to nature

I’m at it again, out after dark, night-walking. October, and there are still a few crickets in the verges of the village lanes, whispering their secret songs; still the odd bat flickering in stop-motion against a velvet sky. Male tawnies waver their notes from distant, blacked-out copses; the warm bodies they crave rustle now and again in the hedge banks, close to my passing feet. No street lights, and we are far enough from main roads here that there is no sound of traffic. The moon hides behind shifting, grubby veils.

No torch – well, there’s one in my pocket, but I rarely use it. If a car passes I’ll shine it at my feet to show I’m there, try not to look at its beam or the headlights. It takes about 20 minutes for your eyes to develop night vision, and the protein involved, rhodopsin, is instantly destroyed by light. But there are hardly any cars to worry about anyway: everyone’s inside, watching the telly, and I nearly always have the village lanes to myself.

I’ve loved walking at night for years now, though I still remember the first time I did it on purpose, by myself. I’d rented a little cottage in the Blackdown Hills to finish my first novel, Clay; it was a converted stable in the grounds of an old stone farm built on the line of a geological fault that ran along the side of its valley and allowed springs to bubble up from the ground. The water that ran from the taps there was incredibly pure and sweet.

I’d found an active badger sett on one of my daytime walks along the valley’s flank, and decided to go back after dark in the hopes of seeing them emerge. I remember how my heart beat faster than usual as I set out to walk the dim, quiet field path in the last of the light. It wasn’t stranger-danger I was worried about, knowing the statistics were comfortably on my side. It was more the sense I had of pushing myself forward to occupy space that I had a right to, but which I had until then been denied. Like going for a drink in a pub by myself, or eating alone in a restaurant, it required a sort of stubbornness, a putting-on of courage to do something I had been socialised to believe I must have a chaperone for. I would find the same thing a couple of years later when I walked a section of the A5, by day but alone, as research for another book.

I remember it was windy, and as I walked, alert to every sound around me, a low moon was caged by the tangle of a bramble bank; I tried to take a photo, but the light was low and the bare bramble branches kept moving, blurring its face. On the opposite side of the valley a few faint, yellow lights were strung out along the springline, showing where other ancient farms had been built. Then the strangest of apparitions: masked, at first, by the sound of the wind a large, grey-painted aircraft approached and passed me slowly, at my elevation, following the deep valley’s contours in the almost-dark. I could see the pilot, lit up in the cockpit, though the rest of the plane’s windows were dark. Then the low roar of its engines blended back into the sound of the wind in the winter branches, and it was gone.

I didn’t see any badgers on that first night walk in Somerset; in fact, I think I went straight back to my rented cottage after that eerie flypast. Since then, though, I’ve encountered several, along with foxes and fallow deer, hares, nightingales and nightjars, flocks of migrating redwings, roding woodcock, glowworms, hedgehogs and ghostly barn owls. But even more than the wildlife, the thing that draws me out after nightfall, again and again, is the way it changes my relationship with both time and place. ‘In cities the architecture takes on an ethereal gravity and in the village all occupancy appears on a short lease,’ wrote Ronald Blythe, another inveterate night-walker who died at home, in January, at the age of 100. Out after dark in another Suffolk village, in another October, he finds a friend’s farmhouse ‘looks like a fort and their cropped fields have ceased to belong to anybody and are just earth.’ Not only are places defamiliarised but their relationship to time becomes uncertain: when at last he nears Bottengoms, his beloved, ancient yeoman’s cottage, he finds it ‘wide awake in its hollow and dazzlingly illuminated by a single bulb. It too has slipped ownership as the workhorses once slipped their traces and I might be running towards it in 1696.’

I might take issue, now, with his dazzling bulb. A settlement not far away has become a ‘Dark Sky Village’ and I wish mine was, too. Not that I have a great deal to complain about: lying in bed at night the darkness here presses on the eyes like a blindfold, while on a clear night the Milky Way arches breathtakingly overhead. But a couple of house do have bright, unshaded porch lights that are sometimes left on overnight, and I have to admit, it bothers me – and not just because of the energy they waste.

The Bortle Scale runs from one to nine, one being a completely dark sky in which up to 6,000 stars and other objects can be seen with the naked eye, and nine the sky above London, in which only the moon and – on a very clear night – the Plough or Orion are visible. Light pollution is rising at about 2% per year, driven by building illuminations, security lights, major road expansion, office lights pointlessly left on and even undrawn curtains and decorative garden lights, so that the night skies I grew up with in Surrey – then Class 2, the same as the skies today over my village – are in 2023 a polluted class 5. A child gazing up at night from that garden now won’t be able to pick out the same constellations that my dad so painstakingly taught me 40-odd years ago.

But the issue isn’t merely one of the loss, to people, of a view of the stars. As I learned from reading The Darkness Manifesto: how light pollution threatens the ancient rhythms of life (Johan Eklöf, translated by Elizabeth DeNoma) our insistence on driving away the dark is having catastrophic impacts on everything from insects to wallabies, birds to bats. Learning to manage our galloping light addiction better could be one of the quickest ‘easy fixes’ for wildlife available to us.

Tonight the village hedges are full of invisible roosting birds, many, no doubt, with their black eyes open, fearfully watching me pass. I know that one or two of the bigger oaks I pass under host nocturnal congregations of wood pigeons, and were I to switch on my torch and point it upward they would explode into the darkness with a great clapping of wings.

I once wrote, in my book about rain, that to restrict your walks to days when the weather was fine was like only listening to music written in a major key. To only ever walk in daylight, too, is to limit what you can know about a place, to circumscribe your relationship with it – and that’s something I’ve found I’m not willing to do. In my thirties I discovered how to walk at night, how to sit in a pub with a drink and a book, and how to eat in restaurants by myself. Bit by bit, since then, I’ve been working out what I need from the world and how I want to occupy it, and now, with practice, it’s become my norm.

These days I don’t feel nervous when I go out after dark. I’m old friends with my moon-shadow and once, on a moonless night in January, I encountered my star-shadow, ghostly as a Brocken spectre, on the old flint wall of the church. These are ordinary, human miracles, familiar to every generation of our ancestors: they show us, quite literally, our place in the universe.

I need experiences like that as much as I need books to read, music to dance to and city crowds to lose myself in from time to time; as much as I need the company of friends. Glimpsing, for even the briefest of moments, the mysterious intersection of place and time is what drives my writing and fires my soul. Darkness can sometimes open the door to that kind of immanence – though frankly, even the sight of a badger’s waddling back end is often enough for me.

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If you want to walk at night, start by choosing nights with a good moon – and remember: try not to use a torch (be patient: your vision will improve). Wear something hi-vis if you’ll be walking on roads, or at least stick a couple of reflective snap bands somewhere on your person, and make sure your phone is charged. If you want to see wildlife, leave the dog at home, walk into the wind if you can, and try not to talk to anyone you take with you (or to yourself).

If you prefer the comfort of your well-lit living room – well, you’re missing out. Still, you could always read Chris Yates’s magical Nightwalk: A Journey to the Heart of Nature, Matt Gaw’s Under The Stars: A Journey into Light or Peter Davidson’s The Last of the Light: About Twilight; and make a note in your diaries to order Arifa Akbar’s Nocturne: Scenes of Light and Dark when it’s published in the spring of 2025 (Arifa and I went nightwalking in my village when she was researching it). You should also follow Dave Borthwick on Twitter or Instagram, whose fleeting nocturnal postcards are like visual (and verbal) haikus, little masterpieces of compressed movement and shadow.

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What to look for in October:

At last it feels like autumn has really arrived. Here are some things to look out for right now, when you’re out of doors:

Spangle galls on fallen oak leaves – skeins of geese flying overhead – on clear nights, including in cities, the high ‘peeps’ of redwings migrating inward – sloes bletted by the first frost of winter – wigeon whistling on waterbodies – leaf prints on city pavements – the nacreous seed discs of honesty, also known as moonwort – jays caching cropfuls of acorns – ladybirds massing indoors for winter – mixed flocks of small birds feeding together.

Don’t forget, these seasonal miracles are transient, rather than ongoing. Catch them while you can.

For more seasonal inspiration, consider subscribing to Lia’s Living Almanac, or even better, buying next year’s almanac, which will make a really magical Christmas gift.

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News

The Britannias: An Island Quest by Alice Albinia will be published in a couple of days’ time. I’ll be interviewing Alice at Daunt’s Marylebone on November 2nd. The Britannias delves into stories of our archipelago’s lost female gods, leaders and rulers, something that really chimes with the novel I’m reworking. It’s a fascinating book and I’m really looking forward to meeting its author. Come along!

I had a lovely few days in the Lake District at the end of September. The mountain weather forecast meant I had to climb Helvellyn on the first day I was there; I’d have preferred to get my walking legs in beforehand, but it looked like being the only dry day with good visibility, so off I went. Striding Edge is always a challenge, particularly alone, but I managed it with a little help at the ‘bad step’ and wrote about it for The Times. Less fun was a wet walk on another day when a man fell into step with me and began asking me for my beliefs about evolution and whether there was a Creator. Guys, whatever your hobby horse is, don’t do this. Seriously.

There have been some exciting developments when it comes to the Encounter app I’m making: HMRC have granted us an SEIS advance assurance certificate. SEIS stands for ‘Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme’; it was set up by the government to support new companies like ours, and help get them on their feet. It means UK taxpayers who invest in our app can claim tax relief on 50% of their investment, up to £200k, and that any returns they receive are exempt from capital gains tax. I’m told that’s a pretty sweet deal.

Encounter will be a beautiful, guided nature journal that lives in your phone. We’ll be making it with the help of Miles Richardson, professor of nature connectedness at the University of Derby; the plan is to help more people connect to nature via the act of reflective writing, something studies have shown to be a really powerful tool. If you’d like to help us make the app there’s an enquiry form you can fill in here; this initial funding round closes at the end of the month. You’ll be joining our anchor investor who’s already contributed 60% of our £50k initial target.

Enough of the business talk, something I am still very much not au fait with. In writing news – much more familiar ground – my upcoming book about nature, due out next year, now has a title, which is very exciting… but I still can’t tell you about it! I’m properly itching to, though – in fact, it’s killing me – so watch this space.

All Around the Year, Michael Morpurgo’s very first book – a farming diary with poems by Ted Hughes and photographs by James Ravilious – has been republished by the excellent Little Toller. I wrote about it here.

Earlier in the year I took part in a podcast recorded on Blaxhall Common for the Suffolk Library Service, and it came out a couple of weeks ago. You can listen back to it on Spotify here. Here I am looking gormless with Sally Garwood, the producer, and Suffolk Wildlife Trust’s heaths and meadows warden, Ben Calvesbert:

Finally this month: £3.50 a month is the least Substack lets people charge, but I’m aware that it’s still not something everyone can afford right now. If you know of someone who would really benefit from the paid part of this newsletter, about writing and creativity, but who might not manage the cost, let me know by replying to this email; I’ll contact them to find out if they’re interested. I have a couple of comps to give away and would like them to go to people who couldn’t sign up otherwise.

A quick question before we end the free part of the newsletter:

Below the fold, in the section for paying supporters, I’ll be thinking out loud about the overlap between writing and therapy – and the differences between them. If you’ve enjoyed this edition of Witness Marks, please consider sharing it on Substack via Notes, on your socials, or by forwarding the email.

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