The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane

following established trade routes to begin with – the ‘ tin road ’, the ‘amber road’ – and then just kept going, pausing on Lewis to erect his gnomon and take readings of sun height and day length, before sailing still further north, until he reached a latitude where the sea turned gelid with the cold and the air palled with freezing mists, such that the atmosphere resembled what Pytheas enigmatically called a ‘sea-lung’ ( pneumon thalassios ).
    I have heard a sailor describe night-sailing in the busy waters of the English Channel as a deeply relaxing experience. At such times, he said, the world is reduced to code: the lights carried by the different vessels, the shared rules known by all participants as to who should give way to whom. The number of data-streams is minimized; inputs limited to night-murmurs on the VHF, blips on the radar and sequences of lights. Provided that the codes are correctly interpreted by all participants, tankers will slide darkly past dinghies, ship will pass ship, and so the arrangement will decorously proceed. What it most resembles, he said, is a quadrille – a stately dance of vast and mutual order. There is also, he added, a calming relationship of disproportion between the nature of the game played and the stakes wagered, in that proof of competence is derived only from absence of catastrophe.
    That night, though, far out into the North Atlantic, there were no lights to be seen, for there was no shipping. The deep-water lanes that ducted the big freighters stayed much closer to the Lewis mainland. There was the Hebridean , 500 yards or so off our port stern, its green starboard lamp winking as it rose and fell in the waves. Otherwise, the only lights were celestial. The star-patterns, the grandiose slosh of the Milky Way. Jupiter, blazing low to the east, so brightly that it laid a lustrous track across the water, inviting us to step out onto its swaying surface. The moon, low, a waxing half, richly coloured – a red-butter moon, setting down its own path on the water. The sea was full of luminescent plankton, so behind us purled our wake, a phosphorescent line of green and yellow bees, as if the hull were setting a hive aswarm beneath us. We were at the convergence of many paths of light, which flexed and moved with us as we headed north.
    At some point I handed over the helm, crept forward to the bows and tried to sleep while the boat slipped on into the night. I lay on my back, head on a fender, hands pocketed for warmth, gazing at the sky. That night was the last of the summer Perseid meteor showers, and shooting stars came most minutes: bright dashes, retinal scratches. I counted a hundred and then gave up.
    I hadn’t expected this of the night sail; the serenity it induced in me. Perhaps the cold, the fatigue of the early hours and the lulling chuckle of the water were involved with the effect. Stray images drifted into my mind, thoughts from other tides and oceans. Perhaps it was the mirroring of the sky’s stars and the water’s phosphorescence which made me experience the illusion of absent volume to our boat and its people, such that it seemed we were made of paper, laid flat like a model ship ready to pass through the mouth of a bottle before being sprung back upright by the tug of a thread, or as if we were sailing on through a narrow mineral seam between air and water, up that old and invisible sea road.
    A hand on the shoulder, shaking me awake, and I sat up to find that I had woken into winter. There was Sula Sgeir, less than a mile away, surf sloshing about its foot, and it was covered in snow. Winter had come during that spellbound night; we had somehow sailed from August into January. No, of course, it wasn’t snow – it was birds. Gannets, thousands of white gannets and their white guano and their white feathers, on every ledge of every cliff, and the air above the boat filled with flying gannets: their stout nicotine-yellow necks, their stiff-winged