I was originally invited to write this as a short monologue for BBC Radio Stoke as part of a series of programmes associated with the BBC's "Walk through Time" project in 2006.
Ever since I was little I’ve been in love
with wild, lonely countryside. That’s part of the reason I became a Geographer,
studying landscapes: it gives me the excuse to travel all over the world,
exploring wild lonely places. The wildest and loneliest of them all was
way up beyond the Arctic Circle in Greenland, living alone in a tent by
the edge of the ice sheet with temperatures down to minus 30. That makes
Stoke feel like a tropical paradise when you come back.
I’d never actually travelled outside the UK at all while I was growing up. I was brought up in a world where the top layer was man-made. The bones of the landscape were covered by layer upon layer of human history, and the sand and the clay and the soil that make the skin of the earth were clothed over by the fields and the farms and the factories and the forests; and generations of men have dug pits and built cities and drawn up boundaries that parcel and package the land so that every piece is owned and accounted for. In the city, when we move around we move along lines that generations before us drew in concrete and steel over the ground.
In Greenland, in the wild and lonely places where I like to work, there are no lines on the ground. The land isn’t parcelled or packaged and the people that were there before have left no mark. There’s barely even any vegetation to cover the rock, and the things that make the landscape are right there in front of you: glaciers, huge torrents of meltwater, sandstorms… all the things that in Britain we think of as being “long ago” happen right there while you watch. I wrote in my field book the first time I was there that “Here are the bones of the earth laid bare”, and when I came back home I saw the world differently. In Greenland I had seen the Earth laid out like a patient in theatre under the surgeon’s knife with the layers peeled away. Suddenly, everything was clear.
When I look at the landscape back here at home now I still see the layers of human life: the roads and the houses and the men who used to work underground and the farms and the forests and the students walking along the lines with their eyes closed. And I still see the skin of sand and soil and clay. But now, having recognised them in the wild, I can see more clearly the bones of the earth where they poke through and give form beneath the skin. I see that the skin was laid down by the ice and the water because I saw the same skin being laid down fresh in Greenland, and I see the valleys carved by glacier meltwater as they run like veins right through the centre of the city, and the ridges of debris pushed up by ancient glaciers that furrow the skin beneath the fields and the farms. And when I teach geography, all I want is for the students to open their eyes.