Where the wild things are
‘WILD’. The chances are, if you’re reading this magazine, that this word conjures positive feelings. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” wrote Henry Thoreau, and for many of us, that sense of returning to something elemental that we otherwise don’t get enough of in our daily lives is what we look for when we go hiking and hillwalking in high places. As a much younger man, I used to think that finding wildness was a simple matter: you just go where there are fewer people. I would seek out places for their remoteness alone, typically ending up moping around on some sour grouse moor or an obscure, sheep-shorn fell in an overlooked part of Cumbria, with a nagging sense that I was missing something. On a level, of course, this…
