It was autumn, and there were few trees for shelter on the exposed, south-west peninsula in Cornwall that is known as Penwith; only the small, stunted woods that cling to the steep valleys where streams cut their way to the sea. The season was marked by a succession of gales and rain-battered days, occasionally lifted by the odd fresh and luminescent day with the cliffs bathed in sunshine, gulls and fulmars flying low over the waves out at sea, chasing the shoals of mackerel that come in with the swells. One rather more murky morning, I walked down onto Botallack cliffs through the old mine workings to do a litter-pick in the mizzle – that peculiarly Cornish blend of fine rain and mist that can hang over the coast and moors for days at a time, till it becomes hard to tell where land and sea begin and end.

It was early on in my new job as a ranger, based at a National Trust site at Botallack, near St Just, helping to look after an area of coastline which stretches from Land’s End to the village of Pendeen on the north coast. A rugged stretch of cliffs, old mine workings, small farms, coves and villages of low granite houses, sandwiched between the sea and the brooding massif of the moors that runs down through the spine of Penwith. As I descended that morning below the line of fog, the heather-clad cliffs and twin mine engine-houses known as ‘the Crowns’ perched on the edge far below came into clear view, seemingly empty and forsaken of people. The low winter sun that was now dipping below the clouds cast a luminous grey-gold light over the ocean where gannets dived. 

Following a random path down the cliff face, I stumbled across the entry to the Cargodna mine shaft, where a memorial commemorates the Wheel Owls disaster. On 10th January 1893, about forty men and boys were underground when the shaft flooded with water. The mine surveyor had used old mine charts and had failed to account for magnetic declination (the variation of magnetic north over time), throwing his calculations out. They had excavated into an old, flooded shaft running adjacent to Cargodna. Nineteen men and a boy were killed, and their bodies remain in the mine to this day.  As I walked on along the cliff path, I imagined voices here, spirits of the dead, miners entombed in their sea-girt graves, in tunnels that lay under my feet in these cliffs and out under the sea, voices filling this realm where only they and the seagulls cry.  Exploring the warren of paths and lanes, sheltered in places by overgrown stone hedges, it wasn’t hard to imagine how, not so long ago, weary miners once trod the same paths on their way home to St Just and other nearby villages, after their shift of long, dark and hot hours toiling below ground. I felt sure they must have found some comfort in the small birds darting between hedges that in spring and summer would have been full of evening song. 

Although the history of this place felt, at times like this, almost tangible in the sea mist-laden air and the lichen-clad granite stone ruins of the mines, it is a history that I couldn’t claim any close personal connection to. I’d grown up in Cornwall, but not in Penwith. Mine was a rural upbringing, but on small farms further east and inland – the son of a farmer, not a fisherman or a miner, and for the majority of my childhood, brought up by my mum, a social worker, and my stepdad, a stone mason. I left at eighteen to go to university in London and had periodically come back, as a juvenile peregrine will return to the place of its birth long after having fledged, until it has firmly established a territory of its own. This latest return had been presaged by the breakdown of a long term-relationship, followed by a painful love affair, and a struggle to find direction and stability in life after the completion of a long period of academic study. Instead, I was caught up in that common trap of people today in their twenties and thirties and without means – of high rent and low paid and relatively unfulfilling labour. But probably the roots of the pervasive anxiety and lack of confidence that shadowed me stemmed back to long before all that. 

Seeking a fresh start, I left my job as a bookseller in a small town in Sussex nestled in the South Downs. It was a place where I had only just begun to build a new life after running away from London, and one which I had a growing affection for. Yet I was acutely aware I had no history or roots there, no deep-rooted familial bond to the landscape around me. And this was something I had a profound longing for. 

Having returned to Cornwall, the chance of a job working for the National Trust as a ranger seemed like just the opportunity I was looking for: to reconnect and ground myself, to find a new path – one in which my connection to the landscape around me might be less a cerebral, romantic and nostalgia-riddled one, instead grounded in the practical skills and knowledge of how to look after and care for the land and for nature. It was to prove a difficult journey. It isn’t always easy to return to a place of origin, especially with complex family relationships and troubled histories to navigate. Living in a caravan on my dad’s farm, with only this temporary job to hold me above water, I was aware of the precariousness of my position should things not work out. 

So far, the job hadn’t been quite all I had imagined it to be. There was the long list of relatively mundane maintenance tasks that had been neglected since my predecessor went on long-term sick leave. Then there had been the ominous threats made on social media against staff and volunteers by one or two extreme locals. An atmosphere of mistrust had developed around the National Trust’s presence and work here, especially since the filming of Poldark. The latest TV series, in which the Crowns in particular featured as a prominent backdrop, had brought many more visitors to the area, but had also aggravated some locals, who believed that the National Trust was an outside corporate intrusion on the place, seeking to ‘cash in’ on the area’s history and natural beauty. 

In the early days of my relatively brief ranger apprenticeship, this atmosphere of conflict only served to exacerbate my sense of alienation and unbelonging, the opposite of what I had come back to Cornwall to seek. However, part of my role as a ranger, and of the National Trust more generally, was to help conserve not only the wildlife and ecology of the area, but also the distinctive material remains of its history: written like a palimpsest in the network of ancient pathways and stone boundaries that criss-cross the landscape. Not only markers of history, careful upkeep of these features enables visitors and locals alike to continue to form and maintain their own connection with the land. Helping to repair them would become my way of forming a bond with it too. 

*

Many of the hedges in Penwith date back to the Bronze Age and are older than the Egyptian Pyramids. Others are more recent, having been thrown up by miners who were often also small-scale farmers. Some of these are over six feet high and built with huge boulders at waist and even shoulder height. I had to marvel at the strength and technique it took to get them up there without mechanical assistance. Some were dry-stone walls, others built in the traditional Cornish style, typically from granite with a core of earth in the middle. This is what distinguishes a Cornish ‘hedge’ from a stone ‘wall’, as found in other parts of the country, such as Yorkshire and the Lake District. The earthen core not only binds the stone but becomes a seedbed for trees, shrubs and flowers, so that in time it becomes a living hedge, home for many plants and animals. 

My interest in Cornish hedging had begun seven or so months previously as a full-time volunteer ranger working at Godolphin, a historic estate east of the Hayle River. There I had discovered a love for working with stone, repairing hedges that formed the field boundaries and that had collapsed in places – under the weight of a fallen tree, livestock, or just time and weather. After a long estrangement, I had reconnected with my stepfather, a stonemason and quarryman, who ran a business supplying fine architectural granite. Hearing of my new-found passion and my need for some cash to support my volunteering he set me up with his friend Mark, an expert Cornish hedger who agreed to take me under his wing. In return for my help and in the little time we had while I was labouring one day a week for him, he taught me what he could of the craft. 

A small, quiet, but energetic man, in his mid-sixties I guessed, Mark seemed to me to resemble the sparrows that flitted around his yard at my stepfather’s quarry. He fed the birds every day, whistling to gather them to him, throwing some seed amongst the old pieces of granite he was collecting – milling stones, bird baths, cattle troughs, some dating back to medieval times. An ex-miner, I quickly learnt that Mark was a humble and principled character – a lover, like my stepfather, of nature, of old things and values, of hard work, history, heritage and craftsmanship, of friendship and helping one another out, putting people before money. On my first day out with him we drove around the narrow Cornish lanes in his small flatbed builder’s van, looking at examples of hedging that he thought were particularly well-constructed and others that he thought were bad. It wasn’t just that a Cornish hedge should have a gently concave face, wide at the bottom, tapering in towards the middle, before gently widening again towards the top. The outward facing stones should be clean and flush with each other, tightly packed with earth and with no holes or gaps. Longer ‘key stones’ should be laid with the length going back into the hedge to give it strength. 

As pleasant as these days out with Mark were, they were also days of persistent, low-level frustration, like working on a giant jigsaw puzzle, picking through piles of stone, trying to find the perfectly shaped one to fit next to the ones already laid, struggling to learn fast enough to meet my own and Mark’s high expectations. Yet I found the flow and pattern of it calmed my mind, typically prone to anxiety. I could lose myself in total, focused attention on the task at hand. And I enjoyed being with Mark working on a hedge in some quiet out-of-the-way spot. We’d have our tea and packed lunches (or ‘crib’ as he called it, using the old miners’ term) sitting in his van, and we found a common interest in history. He was a gentle and good-natured chap and I felt privileged that he agreed to take the time to try and teach me what he knew. 

Knowing of my enthusiasm for hedging, the Lead Ranger asked me to lead a project to repair a section of hedge on a tenant farm, and in the process share the skills I was learning with some of the younger volunteer rangers. Working alone one weekend morning, as my role often entailed, I drove the Land Rover out across the fields of Boscregan, a remote farm that looked out to sea between Cape Cornwall and Land’s End, with Bob Marley playing loud on the stereo. Earlier in the week, I had been out there working with a couple of the volunteers. As much as I enjoyed their company and questions, teaching them the modest amount I had learnt about hedging, it was trying sometimes to get them to stop chatting and larking around, and instead to focus on the work at hand. I was looking forward to cracking on with the job on my own for the day. 

The fields had been sown with an arable crop and allowed to go to seed to provide food for the birds. The crop was interspersed with weeds and wildflowers such as corn marigolds, a riot of colour in spring and early summer, but now nodding lifelessly in the autumn sea breeze. A monotone of pale gold and browns under a low grey sky, to a casual observer’s eye it might have looked as if the farm had been allowed to go to wrack and ruin, gradually being overcome by nature again. But this was all part of the Trust’s conservation management plan for this tenant farm. Buzzards and kestrels soared, hovered and dived in the sky around me as I worked. Unfortunately, the stone hedges had also been long neglected and allowed to go to ruin by the tenant farmer, as the hooves of cattle climbing the hedges to reach more inviting grass on the other side gradually took their toll. The stone we were using for the repairs was a mixture of reclaimed granite from around the farm and some we had brought in from further afield, all Penwith stone. Some of the stone on site was of the quality known as growan, a local dialect term for decomposed granite, especially common in Penwith, for here the granite has often lain on or close to the surface of the ground for a very long time, exposed to the eroding action of the weather. Some of it was so crumbly that we could practically break it apart with bare hands or a tap of the lump hammer. It was ideal for using in the core of the hedge, alongside earth.

The fields ran right to the cliff-edge, to the headland where long-horned cattle grazed, and the surf curled and broke. Later that morning, the weather began to roll in, a thick sea mist that became heavier and more persistent till it became rain, enclosing me in my own little world. With the roar of the surf, it was almost as if I was at sea, and I felt nauseous and sick with it. That, and an undefined anxiety, as I slipped around in the mud, attempting to heave the big grounder stones into place (the boulders that would provide the foundation for the hedge). The wet and weathered rock tore at my hands as I went backwards and forwards with my wheelbarrow of earth to backfill the hedge, tamping in the soil around the stones with the butt of my lump hammer. Eventually I was forced to take shelter in the Land Rover, and I had my tea and sandwiches as the rain ran down the windscreen. I texted my girlfriend Nika, who lived far away in Sussex, to tell her how much I was missing her. Our relationship, still tender and new, had sprung up since I had moved away from Sussex and returned to Cornwall, but already I felt keenly her absence between visits.  Receiving a heartfelt message in return, I found tears running down my face. How far away she felt and how I longed to have her beside me, to be able to share all this wild and raw beauty with her, even on a day like today. 

After lunch, the work began to flow better, and I found a rhythm and a calm as I took pleasure in finding the stone that would fit just right next to the one laid before. The weather was beginning to clear too. I lost track of time and after a couple of hours, I stopped to rest and have another cup of tea, finding a grassy spot to sit and lean against the old, rambling hedge. Before me lay a silver, mist-shrouded sea, sunlight moving across the waves, and the string of rocks that jutted out from the sea, known as the Longships, fading into obscurity. A buzzard seemed to hover over the fallow corn crop and the dead marigolds. Had he learnt to do this from the kestrels, one of which hovered nearby, I wondered. 

That day, my body and will pushed against stone, until some internal resistance in me was overcome, and I was free to receive these gifts, the mystery of this place, waves cresting the Longships and spotlights of sun searching the grey sea. My eyes and ears searched too, picking out a tumble of stones on the headland – a cairn or Iron Age cliff castle, a deer grazing in a neighbouring field, the mewing cries of a family of buzzards. Suddenly I felt whole again, resistance and struggle turning to acceptance: of my tumultuous feelings that day and of the person I was, someone in whom excitement often co-exists with anxiety, in whom an earthy self, needing a tactile and physical connection to nature and the outdoors, co-habits with a more intellectual and creative self. So often in the past I had struggled to reconcile these different parts of myself, but now I knew they were part of an organic whole, with a common origin in the life that led back, via these ancient stones being reused in the landscape, to my stonemason stepdad and his quarry, to the smallholding where I grew up, to my mum and her love of literature, her passion, intellect and wit, to my dad, a farmer, and his love of history and of the land. All these streams and rivers running through a person, like the lodes of precious minerals that Cornishmen and women have chased through the hard granite that persists and goes on forever, living its different lives, but always remaining in essence the same. 

How strange a thing, to feel love for a hedge, I thought. To stand back again and again, admire how snugly the stones fit, how the shadowed lines between them meet and flow, how each stone and the hedge as a whole belongs in this landscape, as much as the kee-kee of the buzzard, the kestrel hovering perfectly still into a keen wind, the hardy cattle and the granite farmhouse that bears the wind and rain. 

The mist had cleared now, and the late afternoon light was beautiful. I packed up my tools and walked around ‘the Gribba’, as the headland is called, where a group of choughs wheeled and spun in 360 degree turns, eschewing their distinctive, clattering call as they cruised by. Once commonplace in Cornwall, this small black bird with a red beak, similar in size and of the same corvid family as the rook and the jackdaw, had until relatively recently all but disappeared, with only a few breeding pairs clinging on in remote parts of Wales. Now they are gradually returning to the Cornish coast, with colonies establishing themselves in a few remote spots, including Rinsey, Lizard Point and Botallack. Swooping around the mines and cliffs, cloaked with the aura of myth and mystery that has accumulated around them, associations with King Arthur, Merlin and the Celts, they were a joy to behold.

I looked down to the beach below, littered by huge, round, white rocks like dinosaur eggs, and along the towering cliffs – steep stacks of angular, wave-cut stone – swearing under my breath at the beauty of it all. Back inland across the golden arable fields, the farmstead of grey and brown-hued granite was aglow in the evening sun, glinting off the Land Rover where I had left it in the field.  Beyond, small green parcels of land stretched away across the valley. This is what it is to care for a place, I thought, this dilapidated farm and twenty-first century refuge for wildlife, the essence or spirit of it unchanging, even as the old forms of culture and community have changed or have fallen away forever. 

Some time ago, I wrote puff pieces for the drinks trade in exchange for cash, holidays or free booze. On a press junket to a top distillery in Islay, I realized why it is that I write, and why it is that I drink. The revelation hit me in the oldest whisky cellar on the planet, where I was covering the release of a rare 1957 single malt that would eventually sell for $150,000 a bottle. 

Mine was a private tasting—just the distillery manager and me—in a cellar below sea level where whisky breathes through the casks, picks up flavours of Spanish oak and matures at its own pace. All writers for the release were promised drams of whatever we wanted, but only one solitary sip of the coveted ‘57.   

The manager led me between the barrels, aging away on their tall wooden racks. The prized hogshead stood in the distance under a spotlight. On my writing and drinking table, a jug of water and dram glass waited beside a pad of paper and ballpoint pen. The twitches crept across my lips. For twenty-four hours, I’d abstained for fresh taste buds and a clear mind.   

In the fourteenth century, whisky emerged in Scotland—the Irish dispute the claim—when the hereditary MacBeath clan of medical professionals produced a distillation using mythical herbal lore. Whisky is a relatively simple concoction. The only three recognized ingredients are water, barley, and yeast. These days, of course, everything from mashing to storage is analysed at a molecular level. The premier single malts are created, debated, and refined, again and again, like an overly workshopped poem, long before bottling.  

I can still hear the distillery manager’s steady tap, tap, tap as he banged open the bung on the hogshead with his wooden hammer. He dipped his glass valenche into the barrel and held out my sip. The vintage carried an ominous colour of rich, dark caramel. He poured the whisky into the sipping dram, waited for the last drop to plop into the glass, and stepped back.  

I took my post under the spotlight. I held up the glass. The manager looked away, as if to allow the two of us space—my drink, and my writing self—as I brought the aroma to my nose.  

I hesitated, and put the glass down. It was nerves. More words have been written about whisky than any other spirit. The crowded descriptive space features ludicrous claims, strained similes and comical hyperboles. I heard a voice—my own voice—telling me not to bother.  

As a writer and a drinker, I had entered the maelstrom. The waves crashed against the distillery walls, and a revelation came: I write, and I drink, because I am uncomfortable in the presence of my own self.  

*** 

George Orwell claimed, ‘One cannot write anything readable, unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality.’ I have acquired a lifelong companion in this struggle. The effacement from a well-constructed sentence equals that of a drink. The writing and the drinking work on independent tracks toward the same goal—so that I can become other. 

I am still learning to understand how words and drinks have such power to displace me. Every day, I want to gorge myself with them, whether printed or pixelated, decanted or poured. So I have learned to respect certain rules. 

Quality matters. The best writing invites interpretation, challenging our ability to comprehend the forces behind them. Unique or complex drinks have the same capacity, inviting us into an experience we only partially understand, and reconstituting us as we try.  

Amount matters. I have underwritten scenes, or made only a cursory exploration of a subject or character, and left the reader wanting. Likewise, I sometimes dabble with a small drink, overcautiously taking too little to do any good.  

On the other hand, too much writing or drinking reveals a lack of control. After writing binges, I discover on my desk a record of manic enthusiasm. Someone inside me created those unpublishable passages, but who? His cousin has a three-word vocabulary. He says, ‘Have a drink.’ The morning after, I take out the empties in pain. Perhaps every binge writer and drinker hides a weaker self, a vulnerable sap unable to resist the false friends he fears but cannot avoid.  

It’s true that my drinking sometimes interferes with my writing. More often, my writing interferes with my drinking. If I am making a good run at an article, shaping a story or finishing a chapter in a novel, my urge for a drink disappears. I enter a kind of trance similar to being drunk. Scenes appear unbeckoned. Pages of dialogue flow rapid and true. I look up at the clock to find hours have passed, without the intrusion of my own needling thoughts. It’s like a pint in a pub, or cocktails with friends. I am together with characters cultivated with love. I listen to their stories. I laugh at their idiosyncrasies. I am drowned in the wonderful cacophony of other voices. 

During the shifting lockdowns of pandemic Britain, I wrote and I drank even more than I should have. This increase was due to the stifling closeness of myself—a singularly frightening experience. To try and get away, I chased words with drinks, and followed drinks with more words. 

I should have read the warning signs. Whenever I produce material I know to be subpar, I write and drink too heavily. It happened once before, in the immediate aftermath of divorce. To avoid financial collapse, I worked hard: editing manuscripts for literary consultancies, hustling commissions for any magazine still in business, ghost-writing novels for which mediocrity was rewarded. Writing for others eclipsed the novel I’d neglected, the short stories orphaned.  

Excessive writing produced excessive drinking. Or was it the other way around? During my divorce, it went like this: I woke at dawn and worked all morning. Lunch might have happened. By sunset, I’d had four or five pints at my local, followed by a bottle of wine with dinner—or, no dinner to keep on drinking. Typically, this meant a stack of double gin martinis followed by a life-and-death sprint back to my local before last orders.  

During the pandemic I returned to these habits, only at home. Further misdeeds arose like foul fumes in the attempt to combine writing and drinking alchemically, yielding what I can only describe as toxic poetry: wobbly life-writing, laden with authorial indiscretions, and a drunken avoidance of any responsibility for my protagonist. 

I relay these facts with no particular alarm. The quantity of my writing and drinking does not seem inordinate, only true to my needs. I certainly don’t boast, like some writers and drinkers, of the number of books penned or shots drained. I do want to avoid becoming a drinker like my father, who in his last years drank morning to night, cleanly divided by a midday purge. One eye of mine keeps watch on this inheritance, even as the eye itself grows foggy. 

I am also aware of certain danger areas. I tend to drink more at social occasions, especially literary ones. The combination of writers and alcohol can create the most hideous circumstances, further duplicating the worst elements of my personality and my chronic need to escape the sound of my own thoughts. Going to book launches, or conferences where writers stand around the bar, talking about recently published books, or recently signed book deals, or even books-in-progress, makes me drink in extremely high amounts.  

When the evening is young, my increased thirst carries a thrill of doing two things I love at the same time: discussing literature, and drinking. This pairing carries a short and poisonous shelf life. I should know to leave early. Instead, I stay at the bar, escaping myself in plain sight. 

I have also learned not to entertain old romantic notions of the drunk writer. Those who say the best writers drink are sloppy thinkers. Sure, literary luminaries like Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams were famous alcoholics. More were not— Shakespeare, Milton, Haldor Laxness, Flannery O’Connor. It’s not the drinking behind good work, it’s adhering to Kierkegaard’s faith in the strength of the absurd, reading widely, and logging time at the desk. No matter how well you write, alcohol will eventually sap your vitality. Finally, it removes the self. A few years before his death, F Scott Fitzgerald confessed, ‘there was not an “I” any more—not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect—save my limitless capacity for toil.’  

Many tragic heroes provide guidance. Malcolm Lowry, the most infamous writer-drinker, happens to be my favourite British novelist. You’d have to be a fool to suggest Under the Volcano could have been written without excess alcohol. Most passages of this gimlet-eyed, hallucinatory novel were influenced by extended binges of mescal, tequila, gin, cheap beer—anything Lowry could get his hands on. Perhaps no other writer drank in such miraculous fashion. He drank for weeks on end. He drank and awoke in different countries. In the end, he died from his addiction as many alcoholic writers do, chasing the decay of booze-induced visions. 

Underneath Lowry’s impulse to write, I’d wager, boiled good old-fashioned self-loathing. This was the opinion of his mentor, the Jungian poet laureate of the American South, Conrad Aiken, who harnessed his own alcoholic alter-ego for the page. Aiken’s writing and drinking came from the same self-annihilating source. He never let himself forget, for artistic reasons, the bright Savannah morning when he was awoken at the age of nine by gun shots. Walking down the corridor to his parents’ bedroom, he found them dead. Aiken learned they’d had yet another drunken squabble, and wrote out the plot of their murder-suicide.   

*** 

Writing about the rarest bottled whisky on Islay should have been fun. When asked to join the press junket, I imagined all the .pleasures I’d have. I pictured my name in print, testifying in poetic language to the calibre of the vintage. But there is a difference between a simple pleasure, and one that only relieves anxiety. The former presupposes a unified self. The latter points to its fragmentation. 

What are new flavours? What is the self? At the moment we taste something unique, we are forever changed. Perhaps it is the case that all of us run away, at every chance, from our so-called original selves—through work, reading and writing literature, watching films, tasting wine, or reproducing yet another self and hoping for the best. I conned myself into believing that a press junket to Islay would extend my creative work. These blandishments were simply the components of an elaborate rationalisation, my personal defense mechanism of choice.  

That morning at the hogshead, my rationalisations were broken wide open. The fog cleared, and I finally understood. My writing and my drinking were cloaking devices. They needed to be exposed and reconciled, or I was in danger of disappearing entirely. 

‘The chemists think they’re onto what happens in these casks,’ the distillery manager told me, as I stood there frozen at my table. He had a soft, feathery voice. He reminded me of those medics who relieve anxiety by talking about the mundane. He told me his first job had been digging drains outside the distillery, forty-six years ago. ‘I hope they never find out what goes on with this whisky,’ he said. ‘If they ever do, they’ll fix it to suit themselves.’ 

I asked him a few questions about the ’57 vintage. I expected routine replies to do with peat smoke and barrel time in Spanish sherry oak. He was more interested in discussing fiction.  

‘You’re a novelist, aren’t you?’ he asked. ‘What are you working on at the moment?’ 

I stared at the dram in my hand. I told him about my novel Scorper, about a disturbed American chasing after his ancestral roots in Sussex. It would come out the following year. ‘My protagonist has psychological issues,’ I said. ‘Insecurities about life.’ 

‘I thought that was your first novel.’ 

‘That was about a gravedigger.’ 

‘Oh. You’ve made progress, then.’ 

In 1957, eight years after winning the Nobel and short on funds, William Faulkner began a two-week lectureship at the University of Virginia. The first night, he stepped to the bar to pay his five-dollar tab. The next night, he hailed the bartender to pay. Not necessary, he was told, five dollars was to be his flat bar bill—for all fourteen days of his residence.  

Faulkner reportedly went white as a sheet. He had twelve days of free booze before him, and he knew what that entailed. ‘Aw, no,’ he reportedly said, slowly shaking his head. ‘That just ain’t right.’  

Writers are experts at deception. They deceive others, and they deceive themselves. If you dangle something desirable under their noses, such as money and publication, they improve at their own game. When offered something too good, this self-deception comes crashing down. They sniff danger—a danger that lies within.  

Writing and drinking to efface the self means that highs are soon followed by lows. In 2004, after I inexplicably won an award for my manuscript The Gravedigger, I was flown to New Orleans, handed a check for $10,000, and draped with a gold medal embossed with Faulkner’s profile. Top editors and agents from New York appeared at my side. They were the very ones I’d already sent my manuscript to, months before, without reply.  

Naturally, I became over-excited. Nervous, arrogant, over-confident and insecure, both grateful and suspicious of their company, I simply drank, and drank, and drank, for five straight days. I didn’t eat. I just drank. A few kind souls tried to intervene. The organisers assigned me a ‘minder’, a Vietnam War vet and Pulitzer Prize winner, but even he gave up. When I looked around, at the end of my unveiling, the agents and editors had gone.  

I had done it—manifested my low self-worth, and made my fears come true. Nobody would ever want to publish my work now. The next logical step was projection. I angrily decided they weren’t worth my attention. And I set out to prove it.  

It was the lowest point in my literary life. I have an unfortunately clear memory of tracking them down to tell them off. Still wearing the medal around my neck, I stormed out into the night. They hadn’t gone far. There they all were, the top literary agents and heads of publishing houses sharing a bank of tables in an exclusive French Quarter bar. Seeing me stumble toward them, they suddenly went quiet. 

Finger wagging, I listed the worst novels they had recently published, one after the other. They had betrayed their calling, I told them. They didn’t really care about the written word. 

‘It’s actual dog shit you’ve been publishing,’ I said. ‘Literary dog shit.’ 

My bar bill at the end of my stay in New Orleans came to $1145. Checking out of the hotel, I held the document in my trembling hands. It was a paper river of gin martinis. Each had its own time stamp. Between noon and midnight, each day, I’d drunk enough to kill myself. It would be six years before I found an agent across the Atlantic willing to look at my so-called winning manuscript, and eight years before the novel finally appeared.  

*** 

The distillery manager smiled as I still struggled to begin. ‘After that ’57,’ he said, ‘you know you can taste anything you like.’ He waved up at the wooden racks, rising like the archways of a cathedral, where hundreds of silent hogsheads nestled in their chambers. ‘You know, to get some context. Over a hundred years of single malts, just for you.’ 

‘Aw, no,’ I muttered. ‘That just ain’t right.’ 

It must have showed that I was nervous. The only writers worth anything were poets—my dad’s refrain. He had tried his hand, of course. He knew. Of all those published, he’d insisted, only a handful ever meant anything. The rest, he liked to say, were nothing more than dog shit.  

I was writing the last chapter of The Gravedigger when he collapsed under a hedge in Worcestershire. He’d been barred from his local and walked eight miles to get served, then died of a heart attack walking home. The day before, he had burned everything he owned in one of his many acts of suicidal rage. Maybe he too had voices he wanted gone. During his last years he stopped reading his favourite poems. He no longer drank English ale, but the most rancid scrumpy. He carried a heady stench of this sour concoction which corroded nasal passages. When they found his body, he had no ID, making his own self-effacement come true. He remained unidentified in the morgue for weeks.  

I finished the novel. I buried the man. I had worked as an apprentice gravedigger for research, and knew what to do. Not long after, I won the Faulkner prize.  

There wasn’t even a short-lived triumph. Apparently, the sudden death of a parent can create an ‘incomplete mourning,’ a fractured self that widens if not reconciled. William Styron wrote, ‘Such reconciliation may be entwined with the quest for immortality…no less than that of a writer of fiction, to vanquish death through work honoured by posterity.’ 

Posterity from work—what a strange, delusional, if comforting concept, probably invented by fiction writers. Recently, my third novel Seaweed Rising finally appeared. It wasn’t an easy process. The same agent who took on The Gravedigger and sold Scorper told me the novel was too strange. The writer she’d signed on was unrecognisable. I can’t imagine anyone will publish it, she warned me.  

It’s true that ‘I’ had become someone else. So I found another agent, someone who found the novel strange in a good way. I wrote this novel, I explained, because I know that seaweeds are coming for me. They’re coming for all of us. I know this because I sleep with them. They surround the boat I live on. They creep toward my head each night, waiting for the end. He understood. Writing and drinking can unveil all sorts of terrors.   

‘Go on, then,’ the distillery manager urged, down in the cellar. ‘Give it a go.’ He politely averted his gaze again. 

I lifted the glass to my nose. This time, the aroma evoked desire. I closed my eyes and saw a field of wildflowers. I heard bees, and smelled honey. In the vault stood a man with an awakening palate, a man who realised he’d never really had whisky, not like this. It was the stuff of epiphanies.  

One smell of the ’57 created a wish for life, for love, for immortality. Sipping it—well, that uncovered the substratum. There were three discrete stages: the embrace of a delicate mouth-feel, followed by pine smoke along the palate, then a long, lingering finish of sea salt. And pepper. And caramel. And heather. I chased that complex finish up and down the vault, never to find it again. My taste buds were both awakened and tormented, long after my flight home.  

*** 

Back in my flat, I had a difficult time writing the article. Even though I’d made my tasting notes, I was stuck. I usually wrap up my shorter pieces in one or two sittings, but as the hours passed, I still couldn’t do the vintage justice. My father stood in my mind’s eye, waiting for mistakes. I was both exposed and returned to myself, and the unwanted voices had grown louder.  

The distillery manager had given me a bottle of their signature 12-year Scotch to take home. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a double. I still hadn’t had breakfast. So I write and I drink because I want to be erased, I told myself. Now it seemed impossible—the mirror just wouldn’t go away. Holding the whisky above my dirty dishes, I consulted a darker future. I couldn’t hear the waves of Islay. I couldn’t see fields or bees. I only smelled epitaphs on gravestones, and wet soil. After a moment, I put the glass down. I covered it with a tea towel, like silencing a parrot.  

I returned to my desk. I wrote and wrote. Gradually, my self dissolved in the only way that gives me peace. With each sentence, a new person emerged that thwarted the last, the one that forever tells me I’m useless. The voices of creation and annihilation reached a temporary agreement. 

This is what writing does. It permits us to find our way, the morning after. It leads us away from our old selves in a continuous journey of insights, experiments and amendments. Perhaps the effort alone proves we are never completely effaced.  

It is also what drinking can do. After I filed my piece, the beautiful cocktail sunset came at last. I returned to my kitchen. I released my whisky glass from its cage. I drank, poured another, and drank again. This time, I didn’t have to write about it. I just introduced the multiple voices in my mind, like so many arrivals to a party, and listened at a distance.  

You know the trees I mean. On that first deep stretch of the A30 heading west, after the tawny shoulders of Dartmoor have fallen behind; the stretch that always seems longer than you remembered, though it’s hard to keep the needle from nudging towards ninety. 

And then, just as you begin to despair of ever getting through the billowing infinity of Devon, there they are: a spinney of slender beeches, slewed off the crown of a small rise where the dual carriageway bends to the right. They look like the remnants of an army, a last centuria at bay. And as they whip past on the passenger side you know that inside of three minutes you’ll be barrelling across the Tamar and up the rise onto home ground. 

There are other way-markers, of course, multiplying and diverging as we swing left and right off the grand trunk, narrowing to the tendrils of the purely personal. I have some eighty miles of them still to go: the point where the western half of Cornwall opens ahead on the edge of the clay country; the rough gauge of current tide times with a rightward glance at Hayle; the wind-whipped blackthorn on the hedge at Bull’s View; and the final rise from the Mên-an-Tol lay-by to the point where the ocean opens ahead. 

But the trees are the first. A rousing signal: almost home. You might make some flashing obeisance to them as you pass, or at very least offer a nod of acknowledgment. And three miles outside of Cornwall, they are common to every traveller who crosses the Tamar. 

 * 

On a heavy August afternoon, heading homewards, I finally did something I’ve long been minded to do: at the first distant glimpse of the trees I swung south off the A30, pulled in at the side of a quiet road, unfolded the map, and tried to work out how to reach them. 

The trees, I believe, are known as Cookworthy Knapp, but the Ordnance Survey gave them no name. This was the cause of a small outrage. I felt that they should be marked with some portentous symbol – a pair of crossed flags, perhaps, of the sort that guidebooks use to show international border crossings. But they were scarcely even present on the sheet: the smallest dab of green, sitting on the 120-metre contour line and containing a single non-coniferous tree and seven miniscule scratchings suggesting some kind of pit. And to get to them, I would have to go the long way around. 

This was Devon at its deepest. The knapped blue lanes seemed to have fallen, ten, twenty, thirty feet down into the clammy base layers of a blanketing jungle. The contours were as convoluted as those of a human brain, but there wasn’t a single hard edge to knock against. Once or twice I saw the trees, suddenly leaping into distant view across the groundswell of the country, as distinctive from this side as from the other. They’d chosen their defensive spot well: I had little chance of creeping up on them. 

A lone cow at the bottom of a long field. A faint smell of treacle rising from the verges. White signposts to stows and hams and cotts – the nomenclature of another, Anglosaxon land, without the familiar Cornish tre and bos and pen that would begin just a few miles further west. A glimpse of two policemen, thumbs hitched to their shoulders, bending at the door of a shop in an empty village; then a turn into a narrower lane. 

The hedges were still higher here, and the foliage pressed in tight on either side of the car, brushing at the doors and windows. It was like edging through a silent mob. The trees swam into view again, tall and close, with the light coming through the fence of their trunks. The sky behind them was dishwater-grey. An old blue tractor, expired at the roadside with the weeds growing through the chassis; squalid barns with slurry and straw calcified in deep layers; and then I was on a lane running parallel to the A30, and the trees were standing ahead. They could certainly see me coming. 

I drove up onto a grassy bank, and stepped out. There was a gate into the bottom of the long, triangular field which the trees dominated, but I walked towards them up the lane instead. The A30 was whining noisily to the right, but this strip of tarmac carried no traffic. In the hedges: hazels showing a faint rosiness on their crenelated leaves; the port-wine colour of the hawthorn branches behind the green; and blackberries as ripe and melting as foie gras. In the distance behind, Dartmoor faded into sloe-coloured murk. 

There was something wrong with the optics of the afternoon. The light was dull, and neither I nor the hedges cast a shadow. But somehow the trees were preternaturally dark, near-black amid the flat grey-green two-tone of the afternoon. I should have taken it as a warning. 

At the top of the rise, a muddy gateway, a padlock and a faded “no entry” sign. Clearly I wasn’t the first person to have had this idea. But the trees were all of fifty feet away beyond the barrier, their great cumulus of foliage shifting darkly in the electric air. There was no one around, and these trees were our trees. They might lie in Devon, but it was we who nodded at them every time in gratitude for their signal: almost home. Surely they had the status of an embassy, a little pocket of Cornish territory islanded in an alien land. 

I awarded myself diplomatic immunity, vaulted the gate, and was across the strip of pasture in half a minute. 

It was like being in a great colonnaded hall. There were maybe 150 trees. Their trunks were slender and supremely tall, none quite true, each wavering slightly like a rocket contrail on its skyward trajectory. High above, the light came as through a vast stained-glass dome, with a susurration and the muffled clatter of wood pigeons on the move. 

From the inside, the genius of the spinney’s form was plain to see. The trees had been planted – sometime in the nineteenth century, judging by the height of them – with perfect spacing, ten or twelve feet apart, but without any grid arrangement. It gave the thing the perfection that marked it out so clearly from the road – a single compact unit that nonetheless allowed the sky to show through from the furthest side. 

The pit marked on the map lay at the eastern edge, open towards the A30 at its lower end. Approaching it from uphill, I thought for a thrilling moment that it was some kind of portal, that it led to a tunnel. But it terminated in a blind slope. 

Something about the place made me uneasy. I’d expected a sense of sanctuary, protection. Seen from the road, these were the friendliest of trees, offering encouragement for the home stretch to all passers: almost there! But this inner space felt deeply private, exclusive, and I had no share of it. It was the feeling you get when you come unexpectedly upon a site of uncomprehended ritual: burnt-out incense sticks; broken bowls; ragged votive fragments – the kind of place you walk away from with a sickly sense that you may, in your unintended trespass, have picked up an occult contagion. 

I stilled such lurid thoughts and sat down at the base of one of the trees to make some notes, but the lingering unease made it hard to concentrate. The main road was in view below, carrying a thick floodtide of caravans. But the hissing canopy overhead managed to block all but the lowest hum, like the sound of beehives on a hot day. 

I wrote a date and a first scribbled line, then stopped. There was some other mechanical noise, not from the A30, but from higher up, closer at hand: the harsh clatter of agricultural machinery. A sudden surge of alarm. I was back onto my feet and clutching at the trunk of the tree, trying to shrink behind its slender column. It wasn’t so much the “no entry” sign that had fired the panic, as that faint intimation of the uncanny within the spinney. 

The engine noise seemed to be very close, and getting closer. It sounded, in fact, as if it was right at the edge of the trees. I ducked and dipped behind the sheltering trunk, glancing wildly left and right. But the field was empty. Behind me, I could see my car through the lower gateway, five hundred yards downhill, away from the noise of the approaching, but still invisible, engine. Should I hunker down, try to hide? But the spinney was open through and through. It was a wood that offered no cover at all for a fugitive. Was that what made it an unsettling place? 

The engine was drawing closer still. Why couldn’t I see its source? Then finally a flicker of movement on the other side of the uphill hedge: the figure of a man riding some machine. I didn’t know if he had seen me, but he might as well have had a bayonet and a grey helmet. These were not my woods, and whose woods they were I did not know; I was a trespasser here in every sense. With a queasy jolt I understood that theirs had never been a friendly signal to the wayfarers below. I’d smiled doltishly at them countless times in passing without once recognizing their filigreed form for what it so obviously was: a cage. I had wandered into a trap… 

What happened next is not entirely clear, but I know that suddenly I was fleeing, a mad helter-skelter dash down the slope, pitching forward, away from the trees, in terrified expectation of something from behind – a shout, a shot, a grasping tentacle. Then I was over the lower gate and into the car, fumbling at the ignition with the metallic taste of my heartbeat high in my throat. 

In many years of wandering with blithe disregard for rights of way, confident in my ability to signal that I am, in fact, from this side of the border, that I’m alright to walk across these fields even if they’re not, I have never experienced such a moment of unhinged panic. I could make no sense of it. 

I drove on up the lane the way I had earlier walked – the quickest route back to the A30, it seemed from the map. My hands were unsteady on the wheel. I passed the higher gateway with the “no entry” sign, and then a second gateway into the next field. There was no sign of any man or any machine. 

*

It was only hours later, eighty miles to the west, lying in my bed, that it struck me. Chances are that there was someone who knew the spinney driving westward along the A30 at a particular moment on that heavy August afternoon. And as they raised their head to the left, feeling the small surge that comes with the first signal of home, they would have seen something strange, inexplicable, even uncanny: a small figure, pelting away from the trees, propelled by the unmistakable velocity of terror. Surely the unexplained image, torn past at 80 miles an hour, would have left them faintly unnerved. Perhaps they carried that unease on westwards, across the Tamar, across Bodmin Moor, past all the other signals, all the way home. Perhaps at that same moment, lying in their own bed at journey’s end, somewhere not so far away, the image was playing out again and again on the backs of their eyelids, fixing itself in their memory as a small, unquiet scar: a madly fleeing figure on a green hillside beneath the border trees. Who was he? What was he running from? And did he escape?  

It may be, then, that there are now two people who will never look at those trees in quite the same way, ever again.