Thank you, David Craig

A special shout-out to David Craig for leading me to William Atkins’ The Moor (2014), one of the best books I’ve ever read. Craig, in a piece titled “Fox and Crow” (London Review of Books, July 31, 2014), reviewed The Moor, describing its subject (Atkins’ exploration of England’s wild, waterlogged moorland), praising its beauty and “fine focus.” He says of Atkins, “He is a fine reporter, not exactly impartial, letting the details speak for themselves.” I read Craig’s review when it first appeared in the LRB, noting to myself that The Moor seemed like my kind of book, blending travelogue and natural history. But it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I finally got around to reading it. What an extraordinary work! The writing is exquisite. Here are a few samples:

The wind up here was an assault: in the bracken it sang rich and loud, in the grass it was piping; between the boulders a hollow roar: it was a thousand voices and one, and each buffet hooted across my ears like a blast across the mouth of a bottle.

But try to name its colours and you’ll exhaust yourself. Beyond the white-grey of moss-spotted clitter, the moor sank through chartreuse slopes, down to the dulled emerald intake of Penhale Farm, to a motley lowland of pale lime dashed with tawny and dun and fawn, and then the intricate tapestry of purple moor-grass, cotton-grass, mat-grass, heather, moss and lichens: chamois, bronze, taupe, walnut – a hennaed, mouldering, rusting vastness shot with saffron, carmine and topaz, with swathes of reflectivity that shimmered like raffia in the low sun.

The moor ahead of me was a foaming, surging mass, a sponge squeezing itself, a waterlogged lung. I could feel its spume coming down on me, hear its roar. The track petered out into a handful of deep-cut trenches that ramified further until all that was left was a shorn expanse of dirty turf, and then, there, by the gate to the moor, was the lumpen sandstone artifact known as the Saddle Stone, which marked the boundary of the old Royal Forest.

Where drainage ditches had been cut, the peat’s profile was exposed: dark brown and knitted with rootlets at the surface, a fibrous velvet below, and darkening and distilling as it deepened to the blackest jelly at the cutting’s floor.

Lay out your right hand, palm up, fingers pointing left. Between your little finger and your ring finger runs Kinsford Water; between your ring finger and your middle finger runs the Barle; between middle and index, the Exe; and between index and thumb, Badgworthy Water, home of the blood-loving Doones.

Someday I’ll post a longer review of this great book. My purpose today is to thank David Craig for bringing it to my attention.