Just over a week ago, on the winter solstice, Mandy and I walked around in circles touching the ancient stones at Castlerigg and watching the last rays of light disappear over the western fells. These stones and this place draw people. Many came and there was a mood which I don’t often sense when in the company of gathered strangers. A kind of quiet and serenity. Each person accepting the presence of others but without a lot of casual chat. There was no collective ritual, no sense that this was a ceremony or a rite. There was a collective calm which was less like the marking of a passage of time—more of a still moment of presence.
As darkness crept over, I walked on from the stone circle by myself. Over fields and tussocks heading towards Walla Crag summit. It always takes me a while when walking in the dark to settle in. There is a very different rhythm and feel to walking in daylight, and a sense that distances have altered. Looking skywards the stars and planets appear close and yet, looking in front, the small world of my torch beam feels like the defining limit of my universe. Us mammals have an inbuilt and adaptive wariness of the dark; for millennia we have been potential prey. And yet sometimes I long for the dark. To be out at night alone in the dark feels both transgressive and awesome. Especially as a woman, to experience the dark alone and feel unthreatened. I wonder how many of us get to feel this.
Emerging from the eastern flank of Walla, onto the ridgeline path leading to the top, the black pool of Derwentwater came into view, given away by reflections of the lights from shoreline dwellings. I stopped at the top and made a brew of hot tea on my stove, but it was no longer dark. Keswick, a glittering metropolis, looked like a city. I watched as the flashing blue of an ambulance or police car made its way along the A66. All I could hear were the whisperings and creaks of the pines on the steep slope under my dangling feet at the edge of the crag. Ears work differently, more keenly, in the dark.
Turning my back to the bright lights of Keswick I walked on down to Lodore wishing the valley was darker and feeling disturbed by so much electric light. The festive glare of the spa and hotel, jarring and gaudy, spoiling my night sight and my mood. I wanted it to be dark and I had empathy with the other creatures of the night whose dark is spoiled. The woods rescued me as I descended the steep path into their welcome deep dark shelter. Thinking about the five thousand years that has passed since our ancestors assembled the stone circle—so much has happened. Wars, empires, the building of pyramids, the development of writing, the Sistine Chapel, the internet. And yet life really feels very basic at times. I’m just a little mammal longing for the dark, for the cold night air, for my ears and eyes to open and take in every decibel and photon. There are times when time itself feels irrelevant.
I stopped again at the bottom of Lodore waterfall. There was no moon and tall trees surrounded me, yet with torch switched off I could see the white water. Was it light making the image or a combination of memory and expectation conjured by the sound of the water’s flow? In the last five thousand years we have come a long way in what we understand, about this world and about ourselves and our perceptions. And we do not need gods or ceremonial rites to feel what we have known all along, and yet if we cease to know it—all will be lost. Simply that mystery is not just that which lies within the category of knowledge we are yet to discover, but mystery is a fundamental property intrinsic to our experience of life. I don’t know much, but this I do know… that for me the only way to live well is to be comfortable with mystery, to quieten my problem-solving mind, to feel close to the stars in the dark, to know I am living stardust and to imagine my ancestor’s breath as air shifting across the cold lake. Time does feel irrelevant when I feel this mysterious sense of having existed forever. The separate me has not lived forever but I am a component of forever. And I feel this bodily, in the same way I feel my heartbeat. We live as separate things. But really nothing is separate.
And now as we approach the end of a calendar year time rears its head again. I have a new diary. It is already well marked with plans. I have done two fell races in December. The only two races of my 2025. I hope, I do really hope that, in 2026, I will be able to enjoy more fell running again. I have other hopes and many of them. But a diary is just a book of pages (yes, I still do it on paper) and its pages of dates are future projections and not reality. I do not experience time in the way the diary lays it out. It’s not the circling of hands on a clock, dates to be ticked off like mile markers on a journey. After all, even the clever physicists say time is not really like that. Time is not a commodity but an experience. And if you want to know how to live forever then go for a walk in the dark alone in winter. The darker the better.