Stuart Maconie
Define adventure: the mysterious path; the misty moor; the island just out of reach…
WHEN I WAS a small child, I was mildly obsessed with TV shows just slightly older than me that would flicker in eerie, compelling black and white on my Nan’s old TV set: Supercar, Stingray and, best of all, Fireball XL5, with its thrilling music and tales of derring-do in space with Steve Zodiac, Venus, Professor Matt Matic and Robert the Robot.
For reasons that are now unclear but would have been compelling and cogent to the five-year -old Maconie, I decided that the titular rocket ship’s Space City base, whence it departed on its adventures, was just across the road from my Nan’s house in an area of Wigan called The Flashes, great sheets of water and hills of slag left over from the old coal mines there. And so it seemed perfectly reasonable to set out to find it and maybe get to meet the glamorous blonde academic Dr Venus who, I seem to recall even at my tender age, was inspiring feelings of ‘confusion’. Cue an hour or two of terror for my family as I was spotted across the busy road and behind Woodcock’s garage beginning to navigate my way across a vast post-industrial wasteland.
Something of that tiny romantic adventurer must remain. Ever since then I have sought out places that are fantastic, and those which tantalise my over-active imagination.
I write these words at a table in a garden high on the south coast of the Dalmatian island of Hvar. Below me in the crystal blue waters of the bay sits a tiny, perfectly circular island of sand and shingle with a lighthouse at its centre called Pokonji Dol. It is something you might see in a slightly disquieting dream. Beyond that, rising from a sea mist, are the mountains of the remote island of Vis, mysterious even to locals and cut off from the world through Tito’s reign. Both are luring me with a pull I can almost feel in my chest.
I get these feelings a lot. I’m no great adventurer, but hills and islands and coves that are just out of reach, just that bit further; the path that stretches away into the night or the mist or the distance, especially if lonely or unfrequented: these I find irresistible.
Last summer I made my first trip to Shetland and immediately fell in love with the wild beauty of the islands. But no sooner had I arrived then I was looking out to a black smudge of sea-stack out in the lonely, roaring ocean.
‘ What’s that?’, I asked, awestruck.
Foula, I was told, most remote of the islands, a chunk of unyielding rock wreathed in spray and populated by a handful of hardy souls. I was already planning my trip.
When I spent my first night in the lovely Cornish port of Fowey, I sat on my balcony and watched a tiny red light criss-cross the bay, and I knew I would not settle until I had made the boat trip across there, whatever ‘there’ was. It was Polruan, and in the dark, the little lights of its harbour and pub glittered with all the allure of Angkor Wat. And I owe my love of fellwalking to one moment when I stood at the bottom of a ghyll next to a sign that read ‘Helvellyn via Brown Cove’ and a path that snaked up and out of view. What was up there? How long would it take? Would I like it? And thus began a love affair that has led me to both this magazine and the presidency of the Ramblers.
They say it was George Mallory who originally answered the question ‘ Why climb it?’ with ‘Because it’s there.’ But I reckon that axiom can apply to smaller targets than mountain summits.
Why visit that island, cross that moor to that lonely house, go into that dark wood, climb that slope in the dusk ? Not ‘ because it’s there’, but because it’s just over there, slightly out of the way, but not too far. Enough to be calling.