Around the world

I have been involved with the Romans one way or another for over 60 years, and when I finally visited Rome itself it was one of the great experiences of my life. It was like coming home. It is difficult to choose which of the things I saw on that visit made the greatest impression on me, but I think that the equestrian statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, in the Capitoline Museum, was very near the top. Not only is it a statue of my favourite emperor, but the lively pose of the horse is a beautiful piece of art.

Marcus Aurelius was born in 121CE and was emperor from 161 to 180CE, at first ruling jointly with his brother Lucius Verus until Verus’ death in 169CE. He succeeded his adoptive father, Antoninus Pius, and is often referred to as the last of the five “good emperors”. His reign was the last in a long period of peace and stability for the Roman Empire.

Marcus Aurelius had been deeply interested in philosophy since his childhood, adopting the Stoic ideal. In his later years he jotted down his private thoughts on various subjects, which survive today and are known as the “Meditations”. For the most part they are very gloomy, perhaps because of his solemn character and his poor health, but probably also because a long period of ‘pax Romana’ was ending, and the empire was entering a troubled period, with continuous war on both frontiers, invasions, civil disobedience, and outbreaks of a devastating pandemic. The ‘Antonine Plague’ also known as the ‘Plague of Galen’, is believed to have been either smallpox or measles, spread by soldiers returning from war in the Middle East.

The larger-than-life-size statue of the emperor on horseback is made of gilded bronze. Its date is not certain; it probably dates from early in his reign, to honour a victory, but possibly from just after his death. He is shown without armour or weapons to signify his peaceful role, his right hand is outstretched and his left hand may have originally held just the reins, or an object such as a globe surmounted by a figure of the goddess of Victory. He rides without stirrups, not yet in use in the western world, but with a fringed Sarmatian saddle cloth, possibly a reference to victory over the Sarmatians.

It is suggested that the statue survived when so many other masterpieces of Roman art were melted down to re-use the metal because it was believed for many years to show the Christian emperor Constantine. It is now in the Capitoline Museum, on the Capitoline Hill. A replica stands outside in the courtyard and the statue itself is preserved inside.

In my reminiscence box, in the drawer marked 1960s, I am going to add a piece of rock. Maybe a piece of coal, maybe a piece of green serpentine, maybe a piece of Old Red Sandstone. This will be to remind me that it is during my lifetime that something tremendous was discovered, something that changed the way we all think about our planet, as totally as Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection changed our view of ourselves. And I don’t mean the invention of computers.

When I was in the sixth form, I was studying for an A-level in Geography and an O-level in Geology and I had to learn about Wegener’s Theory of Continental Drift. The idea that the continents changed shape over time, and that the pieces moved into different positions all over the planet, was not a new one. Many people had suggested it over several hundred years. Alfred Wegener had published the most systematic version in 1912. However, it was not until the sixties that the fully-fledged theory of plate tectonics was developed, with an explanation of the mechanism by which the continents might behave like this. We now have maps showing the configurations of the landmasses at most periods in earth’s history.

This is why what is now  Scotland was once situated at the equator, home to rain forests that formed today’s coal, and why the beaches of Orkney are covered with bright red pebbles and St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall is built of red and yellow sandstone.  The bedrock over most of Orkney is Old Red Sandstone (well, not all of it is red), formed between around 420 to 360 million years ago, during the Devonian period, when the climate where Orkney then lay, 10 degrees south of the equator, was hot and dry with heavy seasonal rains.

Between 480 and 420 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, two continents moving across the surface of the Earth collided and part of the ocean floor was pushed to the surface. The piece of green serpentine I picked up on the island of Unst in Shetland was part of that ocean floor.

Today this is as much part of everyday knowledge as the reason for day and night, or the seasons, or why some people have blue eyes and some brown. It is as great a revolution as the invention of computers. I recently watched a TV programme in which David Attenborough talked about having the same experience – it was a new thing when he was going through university, too. My generation have seen a lot of new things.

The tourist season is upon us. The camper vans are rolling off the ferries, the cruise liners are disgorging thousands of passengers into the streets of Kirkwall, and the bus tours are heading for the World Heritage Sites. And the puffins have emerged again. Not only from their burrows in the cliffs of Marwick Head and Westray, but in every tourist shop in Orkney. In fact, puffins might be said to be one of the signature images of the Orkney tourist industry. Their brightly-coloured clown-like faces are easily recognizable by the most amateur of ornithologists, and lend themselves to small gift objects in every media from postcards to soft toys. There is not a gift shop or tourist attraction in Orkney that isn’t stuffed with images of puffins in one medium or another, to varying standards of artistic competence. For me, puffins rank in aesthetic appeal with those yellow plastic ducks. Give me an atmospheric row of cormorants on a wave-lashed rock any day.

However, I wish the birds themselves no harm. In particular, I have no desire to eat puffins any more than bonxies, although in the past puffins were regarded as food in many places from Ireland to Iceland by island families struggling to get enough food to survive. They are still eaten, fresh or smoked, in Iceland and the Faroe islands, although they are a protected species everywhere else in the world.

I wonder how many of our visitors know that seabirds of many species, including puffins, cormorants, fulmars, kittiwakes, guillemots and eider ducks, were once a very common source of protein. For centuries, the poverty-stricken crofters of Orkney used to lower themselves over the cliffs on the end of straw ropes to gather seabirds and their eggs. There are early photographs showing men doing this. It was a dangerous business, and there were fatalities. The men used nets, nooses, fishing lines and their bare hands. Puffins were taken out of their burrows using hooked sticks or gloved hands (they pecked).

Seabirds were eaten fresh, or salted or smoked for winter. They do not sound very tasty to me. I do not fancy eating something that tastes better if it has been buried in soil for a few days to get rid of the fishy taste. Mind you, I don’t actually like the idea of eating pheasants that have been hung up to go slightly rotten for a week or so either. Some of the eggs and feathers were used by the men’s families; some eggs were sold in local shops. To get really fresh eggs, the men might go over the cliffs, destroy all the eggs in the nests, and then come back a few days later when the birds had laid more. Feathers were traded or sold to merchants from the continent for stuffing pillows and feather beds (“The Northern Isles: Orkney and Shetland”, Alexander Fenton 1978, Chapter 59, pp510 – 23).

I was intrigued to discover that in 18^th century Anglesey, puffins were preserved by pickling. Pickled puffins were not just eaten locally, but barrels of them were sent to be sold in London. And they were considered such a delicacy that one ‘lady of the manor', Elizabeth Morgan, boasted of having a recipe for making pickled pigeons look like puffins (“Portraits of an Island: Eighteenth Century Anglesey”, Helen Ramage 1987, pages 103-4). What a horrible thought!

1% of 67.1 million = 671,000 

A very small percentage of a very large number is a pretty large number in absolute terms. Last autumn while the pandemic and lockdown were still in force, someone expressed their opinion to me that lockdown should be lifted and the covid virus allowed to run its course naturally, because only 1% of the population died of the illness and lockdown was causing too many people to suffer from mental health problems. I was so taken aback by this statement that I couldn’t think of a really good reply until afterwards.

One percent means 1 person in every 100 people. The population of the UK in 2020 was estimated by the Office for National Statistics as 67.1 million people. 1% of 67.1 million is 671,000. If drought and famine were killing nearly 700,000 people in Africa, we would all, quite rightly, be fundraising for Oxfam.

0.1% of 67.1 million = 67,100  

Hopefully, with most people now vaccinated, the pandemic is on the way out, but it has left another problem which relates directly to that population of 67.1 million. Everybody wants to escape from their cells and go on holiday. They are being told that their mental health requires them to go on holiday, preferably somewhere where they can immerse themselves in “nature”. Women’s magazines, social media, travel agents, are all spreading the message. Since it is still quite difficult to go abroad, what with the price of covid testing, and the unpredictability about possible weeks in quarantine, many people are opting for a staycation within the UK. This is a perfectly reasonable wish. The trouble is, there are 67.1 million of us.

Wild camping is the current fashion. I have already posted a blog about the problems caused by so-called wild campers  in remote Scottish islands. Recently I read a very detailed blog post about the problems caused by wild campers in Caithness. It has led to so much misery for the locals that caravans have been pelted with eggs, and camping associations are discouraging their members from using that route.  I found a BBC article on similar problems in Pembrokeshire (Wales). I have found others describing the problems in Devon and Cornwall and Cumbria. Cornwall council has banned people from sleeping overnight in mobile homes and caravans in 17 council-run car parks.

All of these beautiful rural areas are reporting the same problem: the sheer numbers of people on the roads using facilities which cannot cope with them. They are used to tourists, they welcome tourists, but not in these numbers. Single-track roads with passing places and cattle grids which were never intended for campervans, let alone a steady stream of them; highway maintenance crews which have been cut over the years and now can’t keep up with the potholes caused by the volume of heavy vans; campers spending the night in passing places on single track roads or in village car parks;  barely-regulated ‘pop-up’ campsites; the inadequate number of countryside rangers; overflowing rubbish bins which are not big enough or emptied frequently enough.

It is constantly stated, and I am sure it is true, that only a small percentage of these holidaymakers behave that badly. That is the problem. A small percentage of a very large number is a pretty large number itself.  Shall we make a wild guess and say that less than 1%, maybe 0.1%, of the population of the UK are antisocial enough to drop their litter and go to the toilet in a car park? That means one person in every one thousand people. 0.1% of 67.1 million people is 67,100 people.

Worst of all is the lack of sufficient public toilets, which has resulted in public areas being fouled with excrement. Does no-one remember that during the 19^th century, before modern sanitary measures, there were constant epidemics of diseases related to poor disposal of human waste? We’ll be lucky if it’s just the norovirus that gets loose.

0.01% of 8.982 million = 8,982

It gets worse. Even if they don’t want to go on holiday, people want to escape from confinement and start socialising. They want to go out for meals. They want to go out for a drink with their mates. They are told that it is now safe and are encouraged to do so. As a result people in cities are now suffering many of the same problems as those in rural areas. I have recently read a post from the Guardian newspaper, describing the situation in Soho this summer. The government is so keen to support hospitality businesses trying to recover from the pandemic, that they are allowing streets to be pedestrianized and cafes to expand into them. These people are as closely packed together as sardines in a tin, and the noise is so bad that local residents have to keep their windows shut all the time. Furthermore they are treated to the sight of drunken customers urinating and defecating on their front doorsteps. And they have to clean up the excrement next morning themselves. It’s not that people haven’t done this before on a Friday night. It’s the sheer numbers of them who are doing it at the moment.

The population of London in 2019 was 8.982 million. Let us make another pure guess and say for the purposes of argument that only one in 10,000 Londoners would behave like this. 0.01% of 8.982 million, i.e. one in 10,000 people, makes 8,982 people. Nearly 9,000 people pooing and peeing in doorways is really no joke. The sight of streets or urban parks full of people packed together in these numbers, shoulder to shoulder, not because they all have to be at work at the same hour, but because they are desperate to get outside their homes again and socialise normally, is terrifying. There are just too many people in the UK now.

When I was a young woman working in Greece, there was a petrol shortage. The government decreed that cars could only be driven on alternate days of the week. I can’t remember if it was done by the registration number or the owner’s surname. If we are not careful, our government will have to organise a similar system for when UK citizens can go on holiday. Unless of course you are wealthy enough to export yourself abroad, where you can give the locals in some other country the pleasure of coping with you. I visited Rome in 2016 and couldn't get near the famous Trevi Fountain because there were so many of us trying to view the historic site at once.

I think this summer should be a wakeup call to make us think seriously about two problems. One is the overpopulation of the British Isles. The other is the fragility of an economy which relies so heavily on tourism and hospitality, a bubble just waiting to be burst.

What exactly is “wild camping”? Let us consider the following two scenarios…

1. It is the year 1960. The population of the UK is around 52 million. Two students take the train to the Highlands of Scotland and go on a walking holiday. They climb up a mountain, meeting only a forester, two other hikers and a deer, and pitch the small tents they are carrying on their backs in a forest glade. They cook their supper over a small fire in a ring of stones. They get their water from a mountain stream, which at this date is still unpolluted. The next morning they bury their organic waste (apple cores and human faeces) in a hole. Nobody visits that glade for another three months so there is plenty of time for it to biodegrade. They take their other rubbish with them when they move on. This is the sort of camping which I myself did as a young woman, sleeping under the stars on a hillside in the wilds of Greece at the time when you could do so without meeting anything except a few sheep and an occasional shepherd.

2. It is the year 2021. The population of the UK is around 68 million. A ferry docks at a small Scottish island and ten large camper vans drive off it, carrying in most cases a single elderly retired couple. We will follow one of them. They drive along the two-lane road in a convoy mixed with tractors and supermarket delivery lorries, emitting diesel fumes as they admire the lichen growing in the unpolluted air. Every time they meet a hill, the convoy is slowed by cyclists with loaded panniers and scarlet faces struggling up the slope. It takes time for the line of vehicles to overtake them, because of the hills, bends, and lack of a fast lane.

The camper van couple eat their lunch in the parking space at a local beauty spot, along with two other camper vans, thus taking up all of the six spaces intended for cars. They do not seem to realise that their vans may not have a logo painted on the side but they are exactly the same size and shape as a delivery van and detract just as much as commercial traffic from the beauty of the view. That night, they park their van in a layby in full view of several houses. Although the population density of the island is low in comparison to a large city, there are no places nowadays that you can reach in a motor vehicle which are not overlooked by one or two houses. They dispose of their rubbish in the roadside bin, to be dealt with by the local council at the tax-payer’s expense.

There is nothing wild about the camping in the second scenario. What is romantic about spending the night at the edge of a road and sharing your view of the sea or the woodland with all the local home owners and anyone driving down that road to get to work? What we are talking about here is free camping.

In the past, people in much of Scotland earned their living farming, game-keeping or foresting. Those occupations are more or less obsolete except for a very small number of people. The tourist trade has stepped in to fill the vacuum, and local authorities do everything they can to attract tourists to their area to provide employment. You can hardly blame them. But the exercise is self-defeating, if the product you are advertising is the opportunity to Be at One with Nature. By attracting ever-growing numbers of people from the big cities, themselves now massively over-populated, you destroy the silence, the peace, and the solitude which many of your visitors seek. There is no longer any nature to be at one with. There is no ‘wild’.