All language subtitles for The Wild Places of Essex Natural World Collection BBC 2010 BLURAY 1080p EN

I cannot say when I first grew
to love the wild

but I know that a need for it
will always be strong in me.

I'm Robert Macfarlane,

and I've spent much of my life
seeking out Britain's wild places

and writing about them.

As a child, I imagined a wild place
to be somewhere remote,

somewhere I could look out to a horizon
untouched by human hand.

But I've come to realise that
this innocent view of the wild

just won't hold any longer

because no pure landscape exists
in modern Britain.

There's no inch of land
that we've not influenced.

Take Essex, of all places.

Essex...

so often dismissed as England's
most run-down, built-up county.

At first glance, it seems
that wildness is extinct here.

But I think otherwise and want
to prove that it can still be found.

It's for this reason that
I'm going to spend a year

exploring Essex'sjumbled landscape...

...to try and find those places

in which beauty, strangeness
and depth still linger.

I've read so many obituaries
for the wild in England,

the idea that we've Tarmacked and farmed

and developed and roaded
ourselves out of wildness.

But these arguments,

they seem to me both false
and dangerous - premature, really,

like mourning for somebody
who isn't yet dead.

I've come to Essex, this most typical,
in its way, of English counties,

in the way the human and the natural
weave and butt up against each other,

to see what remains, what wildness
is left, how and where it survives.

When I tell people
I'm looking for the wild places of Essex,

they have two reactions.

The first is to laugh
and the second is usually to say,

"You'd better get yourself to Basildon
about pub closing time on a Friday night".

Essex is stereotyped as the county
of Flash Harrys and fast cars.

It gets a terrible press.

Essex is the butt of a hundredjokes.

It's dismissed as the home
of light entertainment...

and heavy industry.

Myjourney into the wilds of Essex

starts here, on the north shore
of the Upper Thames.

This is Essex's badland.

Just the other side of this sea wall
is Tilbury coal-fired power station

and next to that,
there's some sewage works.

And this whole area of the Upper Thames,
that used to be marshes,

has taken pretty much the worst that
London can throw at it

in terms of industry.

There has been asbestos here, explosives,

the petrochemical industry, obviously, up
at Coryton, with the oil refineries there.

This is, in many senses, a toxic place.

Amazingly, up on the power station,

there's a peregrine falcon
hunting over that area.

This, to me, is extraordinary,

and it's Essex...in a microcosm, really -

the angelic and the toxic
close up against one another,

the falcon and the power station.

It's not really where you expect to find
nature, but of course, nature is here.

It's there in the cracks and crannies.

It's taking advantage,
being opportunistic.

The weeds thrive here,
the scavengers, gulls.

There's another curious thing about this
place that struck me as I've walked it,

and that's how closely the industrial and
the natural come to resemble one another -

there's these odd exchanges.

This sea wall has been marked
and decorated by graffiti artists.

They've tagged it.

But nature's tagged it too, with lichens,
bright orange, spray-can orange lichens.

The razor wire that defends
the power station and the sewage works

finds its rhyme in the briars and the
brambles that coil sharply just behind it.

This is Essex mashed up, mixed up,
the human and the natural.

There's nothing easy here.

It's hard, it makes you think hard,

it requires effort of you
to become involved in it.

That makes it a very interesting,
very complicated place to be.

Find Tilbury on a map of Essex

and you'll see that it feeds
a sprawling web of roads...

(HORNS BLARE)

...a web so dense that petrol and Tarmac

seem to have replaced the natural
elements of water and stone.

But ifyou read between the roads,
and look hard enough,

there are still remnants
of the wild to be found.

I take the footpath that starts
at the church of Woodham Walter

and head east to a place
whose name intrigues me...

...the Wilderness.

Centuries ago, this was
the name given to a forest

that was far greater in size.

But the Wilderness has shrunk.

Today, it's a splinter of woodland
surrounded by arable fields.

Strangled but still breathing,

it seems to me an emblem
of the Essex landscape...

...and a natural place
to continue myjourney.

In dawn mist, I enter the wood like Alice
passing through the looking glass...

...or down the rabbit hole.

Stepping into a wood like this feels
to me most like a border crossing,

into another country.

You step inside, everything changes.

Light and sound move differently
and space behaves strangely too.

Small woods like this, they often
seem much greater in extent

once you're inside them
than they appear from the outside.

To me, it feels like
ducking into a bungalow

and finding yourself in a cathedral.

It's as though you could wander
for hours in a wood less than an acre

without reaching its edges.

And it's for all these reasons,

this sense of space and time warping

and shifting in woodlands like this,

that they've played such
an important part in our literature.

They're the stage set for fairy-tales
and dream plays and time-travel.

Unexpected encounters
happen in woodlands all the time

because you can't see very far in them,

so you never know
who could be behind the next tree.

They're places of surprise.

CHILD: One, two...

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

Coming to find you, ready or not.

ROBERT MACFARLANE: Woods
inspire thoughts and feelings

that can be had nowhere else.

This is why even shards
of woodland are vital to us

and why, when we diminish them,
we diminish the realms of our imagination.

My friend, Roger Deakin, knew this well.

He was a wonderful writer
and natural historian.

Roger saw that trees and woods
can be crucial in helping us to grow,

learn and change.

He once wrote, "A forest
is where you travel to find yourself,

"often, paradoxically, by getting lost".

It was my friendship with Roger

that transformed
my understanding of wildness

and how I see the natural world.

For most of his life, until
his too early death, Roger lived here...

...Walnut Tree Farm,

a wood-framed farmhouse
set in acres of meadows and hedges.

For 40 years, Roger immersed himself
in the wild life of this land.

He came to know its owls and foxes,
its trees and its streams, as friends.

Places always tell a story about a person,
and being at Roger's place,

or it used to be Roger's place,
brings him back, brings it all back.

I'm inside his...
what he called his shepherd's hut

and this was one of the several satellites
that he had around his house,

by which he meant his railway wagons,

the shepherd's hut
that he bought and towed

and moved out into places
on his land, in his meadows.

He put beds in them and stoves in them
and he'd come and sleep here

when he wanted
to get out of the main house

and wanted to be further out into nature.

There's a sense that he could turn up
this evening and light the fire

and settle down at the desk.

He kind of haunts
in a very benevolent way -

haunts places and haunts people -

and his influence still lives on for many
people, and very strongly for me too.

He wrote in different places because he
thought differently in different places.

He loved to come out here
in thunderstorms in particular.

It's got a hooped corrugated iron roof
and then these cladded sides.

When a big storm was on, he said,

and you had the rain crashing down
on the iron and lashing against the sides,

he said it was like being in
a wraparound stereophonic thunderstorm.

He felt part of the storm.

(THUNDER ROLLS, RAIN PATTERS)

He was all about that relationship
with the world, in a way.

Roger had a unique way
of looking at the world.

A child, really.

I mean, I put it like that because
he saw through the eyes of a child,

which is to say he was kind of
perpetually amazed by the world.

He was astonished by it,
by the smallest thing.

I guess what Roger changed
most of all for me

was my sense of scale
and its relationship to nature.

I'd always had this idea that wildness

and the kind of great spectacles
of nature were vast - mountains

and dramatic waterfalls.

Rog wasn't so interested in that.

I mean, he saw the beauties of it,

but he was interested in what was
close by, under our noses, almost,

but easy to overlook.

He explored, I guess,
the undiscovered country of the nearby.

(FOG HORN IN DISTANCE)

(BOAT'S BELL TINGS)

Seen from the sea, Essex feels to me
like an undiscovered country.

Out here, where land peters out
into water, and water into land,

I cross a border
into an eerily intricate region.

(CACOPHONY OF GULL CRIES)

Liquid and solid melt into one another,

different worlds meet and overlap.

I'm out in Bramble Creek
in the Walton backwaters,

in a kayak that was handed down
to me by Roger.

He used it for his own adventures.

It's decades old and made from
a bubble-thin layer of maple wood.

It's a stealth craft of a kind,
offering a way to approach creatures

that slip between two worlds...

...two elements.

A head rises like a periscope.

Big, liquid eyes lock onto mine,

watching me with a calm,
intransitive attention.

I see pups less than a day old,

swimming on the first
high tide of their birth.

Two males spar
with one another in a blubbery battle

for rule of the foreshore.

I can understand
why seals have long figured

in the folklore of our coastal fringes
as possessing an uncanny double nature -

in-between creatures,
half-human and half-marine.

(GURGLING GROWL)

The common seals that live here
are incredible colours -

russets, coppers,

burnished browns.

These colours are a result of the mud
on which they haul out.

It's London clay,

naturally rich in iron oxide.

Rust, basically.

Wild creatures, stained the colour
of iron and industry.

Steel skies of autumn
fill with migrant birds...

...visitors from the North,
from Siberia and Scandinavia.

They arrive on the Essex coast
in their tens of thousands.

I've seen starlings
flocking in huge numbers,

but to me, the knot flock
is something even more extraordinary

and it has to do, I think,
with the winter colour of knots.

They're silver and white,
and the effect of this

is that as they flock,
when the light hits them on one side,

they ping brightly
like little flecks of snow or ice,

then they turn as a group
and they vanish.

It's almost as though they've slipped out
of our dimension into another,

and then they turn again and they're back
into our world, visible again.

It's absolutely mesmerising to watch.

This other-worldliness,

this feeling of creatures moving
in and out of our dimension

and our perception is part of
what fascinates me about Essex -

these portal moments
or border moments

when you glimpse through
into another world

that isn't quite ours
but that runs alongside ours,

almost in parallel with it.

My grandfather was very involved
in the development of radar

during the Second World War

and he told me once about what
the radar scientists called "angels".

By this, they meant flocks of birds big
enough to register on those early radars

which came in off the coast
or up river estuaries.

The radars detected these
palping, strange shapes

and the scientists called them angels.

Perhaps the beauty of the knots finds
its sharpest relief at an industrial site,

like the north shore of the Thames.

There you see the birds
playing and shimmering

in the shadow of factories,
swooping in front of chimneys

and the big container ships
that chug down the river.

Their presence seems miraculous -

like a kind of natural smoke.

(SHIP'S HORN BLARES)

(LOW GUTTURAL ROAR)

Wild birds flocking over the Thames.

Deer bellowing within earshot of the M25.

It's surprising juxtapositions
like these which intrigue me

and which have brought me to
Epping Forest, deep in the heart of Essex.

Watching Epping's fallow deer
leap and buck on the forest edge

puts me in mind of gazelle
or springbok out on the Serengeti.

Epping was once part of
the medieval forest of Essex,

a vast royal hunting preserve set aside
for the sport of kings and queens.

But today, anyone is free to come here
and enjoy its sanctuary.

It's very early November.

The weather up until today
has been extraordinary -

a cold snap, followed by
a big wind and rain last night

has bashed billions of leaves
from the Epping Forest trees

and they've fallen to create
this extraordinary copper carpet.

Being in the forest today,
when the sun is streaming down,

is like being in a light box
or a kaleidoscope...

...because the leaves act as filters
of extraordinary colour.

There's sulphur yellow,
there's lime green

and there's a kind of fox red,

and the light falls through them
in incredible hues.

Epping Forest
has a curious doubleness to it.

You can walk for half a day through it
without leaving its shelter, practically.

It feels in many ways like a wild wood,

a great wild wood
just on the fringes of London.

And it has been a retreat,
a refuge for people.

During one of the 1 7th-century
plague years, people fled here,

hoping in some way that the greenery
would shield them from the pathogens.

CHILDREN: #...A pocket full of posies... #

ROBERT MACFARLANE:
During the Second World War,

this was where people evacuated
during the air raids.

(FAINT AIR-RAID SIREN)

They've come, and continue to come,
in their millions,

people in search of beauty,
calmness, tranquillity,

and they leave their marks, these people.

Graffiti, beech graffiti, is one of
the ways they leave their marks.

You can cut messages, names,

as lovers, walkers, visitors
have for many, many years,

and then as the tree grows,

the letters
balloon and rise with the trunks.

There are trees like
tattooed circus men round here,

so thick with lettering.

And people have left their marks
in other ways as well,

some of them slightly less appealing.

Litter is one of the ways that we humans
mark the places we inhabit,

even those we cherish,
and there's litter of all kinds here -

dumped mattresses, fly-tipped plyboard
and paper, discarded condoms.

These are signs of some of the other
reasons people come to Epping Forest.

They come here
for escape of different kinds.

Signs of our impact on the land
are visible throughout Essex.

The most obvious of these,
to me, is the sea wall,

which dominates
the county's 350 miles of coastline.

Sheltering behind the tamped earth
sea wall at Old Hall Marshes

are some of Essex's
most beguiling landscapes.

Coastal grazing marshes
that humans brought into being...

reclaiming the land
from the sea centuries ago.

Humanly made, these left-alone places

are now home to hundreds of species
of insect and bird.

Bearded tits come here in winter.

They're among my very favourite birds.

And their name,

which makes so many schoolchildren,
and grown men, giggle, is a misnomer,

because the males
aren't bearded at all.

They're moustachioed, with the droopy
tache of a Victorian strongman

or an Australian cricketer.

Feeding on seed heads,
they perform as acrobats,

using the reeds to ride the buffets
and surges of the wind.

The charm of these birds
has cost them, though.

Over centuries,
they've been popular with collectors,

egg-hunters and taxidermists.

I find it difficult to see
why anyone would want to cage

one of these exquisite, spirited birds.

They belong out here, in this landscape
of freedom, movement and flight.

We think of barn owls
as birds of dusk and night,

haunters of the dark,
creatures of the moon.

So to see them hunting by day,
out here along the Essex sea wall,

startles me.

In daylight, they resemble apparitions...

...the closest thing to ghosts
in the bird world...

...flying with a supernatural vigilance.

To me, they set the land
over which they move alight with wildness.

They pass through the air,

these birds,
with the silence of falling snow.

Even a familiar landscape
feels wild in snow.

Edward Thomas, an English poet
whose writing I love, knew this well.

Thomas lived here in Epping Forest
during the winter months of 1 9 1 6 to 1 9 1 7,

just before he went off
to fight on the Western Front.

To Thomas, the forest in snow

seemed even more ancient
and even less inhabited.

"The untrodden snow
made wild of the tame, " he wrote,

"casting out all that was not wild
and rustic and old, and we were glad.

"We had seen nothing fairer
than that land. "

(BIRD CAWS)

Many writers have tried to express
what it feels like

to experience the nearby wild.

No-one, in my opinion, has managed to
do so quite like a man calledJohn Baker,

who lived his whole life here in Essex.

He describes
the low blaze of the polar sun,

a day when the sun
has no grip of warmth in it,

and I can really feel his words today.

When you step into the Essex countryside
on a bleak day like this,

it's almost unexpectedly as though
you've stepped into the pages

ofBaker's own book, The Peregrine.

Baker was a bird-watcher and a fanatic,

and for ten years between
the mid-'50s and the mid-'60s,

he became obsessed
with the Essex landscape

and in particular with the peregrines.

For him, they sprang the Essex landscape
into a wildness

that most people
didn't think it possessed.

But for Baker, the Essex landscape
was as wild as the Arctic or the Pamirs.

The document that he produced
in memory of these peregrines

is one of the greatest landscape visions
that I've ever encountered.

It's also an elegy, it's an elegy
for the Essex countryside,

that as Baker saw it, was disappearing.

It's an elegy for Baker himself.

He thought he was dying,

or at least he was beginning to suffer
from rheumatoid arthritis

that was curling his fingers
and his hands into talons.

So, he himself
was almost becoming a bird.

And the third thing it was an elegy for
were the peregrines themselves.

And they really were dying.

Pesticide use had led to
eggshell thinning among the predators

at the tops of the food chains

and the peregrines
were no longer able to breed,

and so Baker was living at a time
when it looked as though the peregrine,

the migrant peregrine, would become an
extinct species in the context of Essex.

He was astonishingly moved
and troubled by this

and he saw it as the fault of human
behaviour, human irresponsibility,

towards the natural world,

and so the book is a document about a man,
almost embarrassed by his own species,

who wants to abscond into the form
of another creature, the falcon.

This longing to leave humanity behind

and to begin to see
and feel like a peregrine -

when you read the book,
something similar happens to you.

It's absolutely extraordinary -
your imagination is pushed aloft

and you begin to see and feel
and think like a hunter

and you see the Essex landscape
astonishingly differently.

As the months pass,
my vision of Essex is changing.

I've seen so much evidence of
a continuing human need for the wild.

(BIRD CHIRRUPS)

But as Baker knew, the creatures of
a landscape need their wild spaces too.

Often, this can lead to conflict and loss.

But sometimes, it can lead
to unexpected collaborations.

After a careful conservation effort,

the elusive bittern is back in Essex.

We caused the bittern's extinction
in the late 1 9th century,

but, against the odds,
it found its way back in 1 9 1 1,

and now its numbers are increasing...

slowly, stealthily.

A cause for hope.

And there's hope to be found here, too,
in this apparently desolate landscape.

This is a former MoD firing range,
ten miles from central London.

To its west is a landfill site.

To its east, a scrap yard.

And to its north runs a dual carriageway
and the Eurostar.

On the face of it, it's the last place
you'd look for wildlife.

A decade ago,
the RSPB acquired Rainham Marshes.

It was truly knackered land
when they took it over -

burnt-out car wrecks and dumped fridges,

the air ripe with sewage reek,
the ground water rancid with chemicals.

Shells and hand grenades
lay buried in the mud

from when the MoD were blasting the land.

(EXPLOSIONS)

So, the RSPB cleaned it up.

The transformation has been incredible.

At first glance, Rainham
might still appear a dead landscape.

But taking a closer look, I discover
it's absolutely bubbling with life.

(WILDLIFE CHATTERS)

Down here in the marsh,

you're walking through
an extraordinary spring soundscape.

You've got the sedge warblers
and the reed warblers,

chirping away like gossipy neighbours,

you've got the coots squabbling,
and above all,

you've got these marsh frogs which make
such a belching chorus in the background.

When you see them there,
they're down in the algae,

spread out like sunbathers,

popping big bubble gums
out of the sides of their mouths.

And the noise they make -
well, it's kind of like laughter.

They're like the best comedy
audience you could imagine,

continually laughing at yourjokes.

(LAUGHTER-LIKE CROAKING)

Everywhere you look here, there's life.

Out where the marsh is more open,
away from the reeds,

you get the lapwings
performing these incredible

springtime courtship flight displays.

Immelmann turns, flip-flacks,
all the tricks of the Red Baron.

They're really audacious aeronauts
at this time of year.

It's hard to know in the end

whether to find Rainham
a depressing or an optimistic place.

Depressing because it requires

such careful and intensive
management for it to exist.

But optimistic,

and I think in the end,
I do find it optimistic,

because it's here at all, hemmed in
by the A1 3, by rubbish tips, by factories,

by the river, and the fact that it's
sprung up so recently, under a decade,

and all this life, this tumult of nature,
has settled here and thrived.

And there's no better example
of that life returning,

no better cause for optimism
than the fact that the water vole's here.

One of Britain's rarest mammals
is thriving in this place.

The water vole has recently suffered
a massive population decline.

Its numbers have dropped
by around 95% in Britain.

But here they are, plump-cheeked,
bug-eyed and ridiculously cute,

back in Rainham, in sight of the Eurostar,

and within sniffing distance
of the municipal tip.

To me, the water vole's return
is a version of the modern wild,

creeping back where it's least expected.

- IAN DURY: Good evening...
- CROWD: Good evening.

IAN DURY: ...I'm from Essex

In case you couldn't tell.

My given name is Dickie,
I come from Billericay, and I'm doing...

Two, three, four...

# Had a love affair with Nina
In the back of my Cortina

# A seasoned-up hyena
Would not have been more obscener... #

ROBERT MACFARLANE: The cockneygenius
of Ian Dury's rhyming slang

put Billericay on the map.

But the town is renowned
for another reason.

I've come to Little Norsey Wood
on its eastern edge.

But it isn't the badgers
that have brought me here.

It's the bluebells.

Remarkably, Billericay is home

to one of the world's densest
concentrations of bluebells.

For a few days each year, towards
the end ofApril or the beginning of May,

between the warming of the soil
and the closing of the leaf canopy,

the bluebells bloom.

This brevity has something to do with
the miracle of being in a wood like this

at this time of year -

a feeling that the circus has come to town
for a few days only.

Transience is everywhere at play
in a bluebell wood.

It's there most obviously

in the way that light falls and changes
the colour of the woodland floor.

When the sun is high at noon,
you get this sapphire dazzle

that leaves an imprint on your retina
when you look away.

And the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins,
who was fascinated by bluebells

and was consoled by them
even at his darkest moments,

of which there were many,
he wrote wonderfully about this flower.

He spoke of the blue buzzed haze
and he also wrote a line that I'd read

but not really understood
before I came to this place.

He wrote of how woodland banks,
"wash wet like lakes".

It is brilliant, it's brilliant.

I understood it as soon
as I walked into this wood -

this sense of a kind of aqueous shimmer,

a marine wash
that you're walking into, and through.

There are millions of bluebells
in this wood

and that's what gives
this sense of hue and wash

stretching between the trees
as far as you can see.

And there's this lovely illusion
conjured up

that they might extend
limitlessly outwards,

carpeting all of Essex and all of England
in a deep, deep blue.

But of course, this is only an illusion,

not least because English bluebell woods,

like so many of our traditional
wild places, are under threat.

Among the enemies of this wild flower
are bulb-poachers

who strip woods bare of bulbs and then
sell them on illegally to gardeners

who want a piece of the wild
in their back garden.

Our troubled love affair
with wild flowers

is written into the street names of
a low-lying and little-known Essex town

that gazes out over the North Sea.

Sea Lavender, Sea Pink,
Sea Rosemary.

When this area was salt marsh,
before people arrived,

these plants flourished here.

Now they're gone.

The street names ofJaywick
are memorials to a lost wild

and they add to its air of melancholy,
dilapidation and temporariness.

Paradoxically, Jaywick was built
on the dream of wildness.

It was founded by East Enders

longing to escape the smogs of London
for the freedom of the sea.

In the 1 930s,
they bought up cheap seaside plots,

built ramshackle holiday homes,
and then moved in permanently.

WOMAN: I like you! (LAUGHS)

I like someone who can make me laugh!

The result, 70 years later,
is a seaside shantytown...

...at the mercy of the elements.

The sea wall is a foreboding
presence inJaywick.

This wave of concrete
was built as protection

against the sort of tidal surge

that devastated this place
during the winter of 1 953.

35 people were drowned
on thatJanuary night

and hundreds of flimsy houses
were flattened.

Today, Jaywick, like so many places
on England's North Sea coast,

faces an uncertain future.

Threats from climate change
and rising sea levels

make it hard to imagineJaywick
surviving the coming century.

Essex has been defending itself
from the sea for thousands ofyears.

Breakwaters, groynes,
and weed-slicked sea walls

run the length of its coastline.

But in this ongoing battle
between the land and the sea,

the sea usually prevails.

Look, for instance, at the pillboxes

that once defended the cliffs
from human invaders...

...now abandoned to the sea.

As the coast has been eroded,
these structures have tumbled,

Humpty-Dumpty-like, onto the beaches

and are now being overwhelmed
by the ocean,

claimed by the wild.

I go for a swim over the low-lying muds
ofJaywick bay.

I know that the tides of climate change
are steadily rising, but in dead calm,

it's hard to imagine the sea
as a murderous force.

Just in from the coast, at Mundon,
there are more victims of the sea.

Where salt water has seeped inland,
there's a field of ancient oaks,

killed by salt and drought,
but still standing.

Grey as elephants, grand as giants,
like the flower street names ofJaywick,

the trees are monuments
to a vanished wild,

relics of a time when Essex
was thick with ancient woodland.

Climbing a tree like this,

you get to see and feel
the remarkable quality of its dead skin.

It's cracked into parched earth patterns.

It's bullet-holed by beetles and worms.

It's gnarly as coral.

Looking out over this place,
it's a kind of...

in daylight at least,
it's a little enchanted wood.

You step into it and you're
stepping into a fragment of magic,

surrounded on all sides by arable Essex.

This is also, of course,
a graveyard, this place.

It's filled with the dead
and nearly dead bodies

of probably the greatest organism
in the English landscape - the oak.

And these oaks, with their long taproots,
have quested down for water

and haven't found it,

leaving these fabulous,
contorted corpses.

And all in all,
it's a wonderful place to be

and I'm looking forward very much
to being here when dark falls,

when I think its character
will change a great deal.

Night is a form of wildness.

It frightens us, exposes our limits,
exaggerates our fears.

We think of night as robbing us of sight.

In fact, it can sharpen
our experience of a place.

By moonlight,
we become more optically sensitive.

The world resolves
to subtle greys and silvers.

Sense, colours and connections
swarm out of the darkness.

But it's becoming harder
to find true darkness now.

Cities stain their skies orange.

We have come close to blinding the stars
and to banishing night.

We have this super flux
of artificial lighting now

and that interferes with all sorts of
natural rhythms, our own included.

But especially over
the past two centuries,

we've evolved lots of ways of depleting
darkness, of shutting out the night,

so you get this strange artificial
daylight cast by our cities.

Many of us live our lives
in this permanent sodium light,

once the sun goes down.

The extent of lighting in our cities
and towns is now so significant

that for many of us, seeing the stars
is quite a rare experience.

Satellite images of the Earth at night

show England as a sparkling rink of neon,

with the southeast of the country
gleaming the brightest of all.

We've nearly forgotten, I think,
the power of darkness.

I've decided to spend the night
sleeping out on the sea wall,

here on the edge of the Dengie peninsula.

It's the darkest place in Essex.

Night, to me, brings a special
wildness to any landscape.

Like snowfall, mist or fog,
it confers a great strangeness on a place,

and it's happened here this evening,

it's been absolutely magical
to be out here.

The sunset, nuclear behind
the Bradwell power station,

and then a gorgeous harvest moon
rose orange overJaywick sands

and flung its light down on the mud desert
that the tide has shown me.

And I've been walking the foreshore
and the sea wall in the darkness

and listening to the sounds that
a landscape like this throws up.

(SHRILL BIRD CALL)

Penny whistle piping of oystercatchers
coming in off the sea.

And a million sand hoppers

snap, crackling and popping
down on the shoreline.

And on a clear night like this,
with the moon two days after full,

on the wane,
and the stars visible, 360 degrees,

the sky feels like a dome

and you look up into it
and you feel almost as though

your feet might latch off from the ground
and you'll fall upwards.

It's a kind of inverse vertigo.
It's a very wonderful and strange feeling.

Extraordinary, and it reminds me of why,

for as long as human culture
has been recording itself,

it's directed dreams of reverence
up at the moon and at the stars.

I'm coming to the end of my time in Essex,

and everywhere I've been,
everything I've seen,

is characterised by that same meshing,

this warp and weave
of the human and the wild.

And now it's a September dawn,

out on the very edge of this edgy county.

There's miles of salt marsh
stretching as far as I can see.

It's a kind of ocean of grass, really,
I guess, Essex's prairie.

And even here, though,

even in this remote place
at this lonely time of day,

you can't escape the weave.

I'm standing here and above me I can hear
thousands of birds coming inland.

But above them, higher up, I can hear
the planes coming into Stansted -

their roar and their boom.

And I realise that I'm standing
in the path of two migrations,

one of which is avian
and the other of which is human.

There's something close to mythic
about migration -

this strong seasonal compulsion
to move that these birds feel.

They arrive from the North
with the Arctic trapped in their feathers,

bringing the wild to Essex.

Brent geese start appearing in September
to overwinter here.

Their numbers build and build
through the autumn

until they're up to many thousands.

The corridors that birds migrate down
are called fly ways.

Britain and Ireland
are in the east Atlantic fly way.

When we think of migration in these terms,
it becomes a rather more human action.

For we have our own fly ways
along which we move.

Stansted links Essex outwards
to the capitals of Europe, to America,

but the birds link Essex outwards

to Siberia and Scandinavia
and their remoter landscapes.

On the one hand,
this suggests collaboration.

We fly, we travel,
the birds fly and travel,

we're all species drawn
by similar compulsions.

But it can also signify conflict,

because ourjourneys
are not always compatible

with thejourneys of the creatures.

My time in Essex has helped me
to reassess my sense of the wild.

On the one hand,

this expanse of salt marsh
is the wildest place I've found here.

But I've also learnt to see
other kinds of wildness,

the wild that exists
in a fragment of woodland,

a motorway verge or a coastal sky
scored with vapour trails.

When I started my travels,

I hoped to find that wildness
would still be here in Essex, and it is,

it's everywhere, and when
I've found it, wherever I've found it,

it's astonished me.

I've needed the wild
as long as I can remember.

It's something to do with feeling
a bigness outside yourself

and you get that here, in space like this.

It's hard to find
space like this in Britain,

a place where you can see
to the horizon, your eyeline unbroken.

Out here is a kind of paraphrase
of infinity, really.

Your eye and your mind are drawn
outwards and onwards, endlessly.

And that's an extraordinary feeling,
that there's a world that exceeds us,

that is greater than our capacity
and our knowledge.

Wild places offer reminders
of that bigness outside ourselves,

a reminder that the wild prefaced us
and will also outlive us.

Landscape was here
long before we were even dreamed of.