A miscellany of Paul’s published writing
Words on a page work a strange magic. The Albères…the hot sun of the Mediterranean, shady forests of cork oak, dolmens and vineyards. Plateau de Sault…where birds of prey fill the sky and the agricultural life of the Middle Ages can still be tasted. Cadí…so remotely beautiful that life in a town may never be palatable again. Ordesa…sheer canyon walls and on them the shadow of the lammergeier. Europe’s largest vulture. Brèche…the freedom of a high mountain frontier crossing without customs. Ossoue…where marmots fight to the death.
From Pyrenees, Sunflower Books, 2003
I’m attempting the Llech (pronounced Yek) on the Canigou massif, the ‘sacred’ mountain of the Catalans, where the waterfalls are so immense that only a few of them can be jumped. The rest have to be abseiled. I don’t know why I say ‘attempting’ because canyoning is one of those sports, like parachuting, in which there’s no going back. No way of being able to fail. The only way out is down, down, down.Guy has already placed the necessary pitons and slings along the route. Wherever we have to abseil, a rope is fed through the sling and the two ends are thrown down to the bottom of the waterfall. All I have to do is feed the doubled rope into a cunning little bit of hardware well known to climbers, the figure-of-eight. OK, says Guy, look down to check where you’re going and then do it. No, no, I say. If I look down I’m not going anywhere. I can look horizontally. Maybe upwards. But downwards – never.
I pull the abseiling rope as tight as I can and let go of the security – a short length of rope with a clip that attaches me to the piton. Now all that’s between me and disaster is friction. It seems a rather flimsy thing to have to rely on.
From The Only Way Out Is Down, The Observer, 11 th April 1999
The Arabian Nights tells of them. Marco Polo heard them. Charles Darwin studied them. They may explain the legend of the lost monastery of the Sinai Peninsula. They are the singing sands and they occur all over the world on beaches, in deserts and in the mountains.What is it that makes some sand hum, wail, shriek or even boom like drums when most sand simply crunches? Apparently, it’s all to do with the uniformity of grain size – the more uniform, the more musical.
Sinai’s Mountain of the Bell is one of the world’s most famous examples. The 19 th century naturalist Sir David Brewster solved the puzzle by having a Bedouin guide climb up. The sand set in motion was first said to resonate like a harp, reaching a drum-like crescendo as the resulting avalanche of sand poured into the valley below.
From The Landscapes Walking Companion, 1998
No landscape of the Pyrenees has quite the same impact as that immediately to the west of Pic d’Anie. There is scenery more ravishing, but nothing as surreal as the karst country around Tres Reyes, the border mountain of the Basque Pyrenees, and of the Atlantic-facing slopes of Pic d’Anie, the westernmost peak of Béarn. The upper slopes are rain-carved into fantastic shapes and sluiced clean of every particle of earth, yet the heights are streamless, the Atlantic rainfall dropping instantly through waist-deep fissures and bowl-shaped dolines, and eroding the rock underneath into something resembling Gruyére cheese. Between the two lies a zone cracked into boulders, between which occasional stunted black pines erupt. Yet the valleys where the waters reappear – sometimes weeks later – are of an almost tropical lushness, with dense forest and pastures of brilliant green from which the few red-tiled barns stand out with the luminosity of a Matisse painting.From The Pyreneees – The Rough Guide, Harrap Columbus 1990 (1 st edition).
At the beginning of life the earth’s atmosphere is believed to have contained 30% carbon dioxide, a level intolerable to humans; today the proportion is around 0.03% (due, according to the Gaia Hypothesis, to the action of developing life forms). However, the proportion is now increasing, particularly due to the burning of fossil fuels and the world’s forests. This in turn will create a “greenhouse” effect, leading to an increase in global mean temperature. Carbon dioxide is not the only gas involved; methane, nitrous oxide, other oxides of nitrogen and chlorofluorocarbons are also believed to add to the effect. The present-day level is around 350 parts per million and the annual rate of increase seems to be 1.5 parts per million. … a widely accepted forecast is that the global annual mean temperature will be around 2 degrees Centigrade higher in 2020 than it was in 1980. This in turn could lead to thermal expansion of the oceans, the disappearance of the Arctic ice cap, the breaking away of the Antarctic ice sheet, the inundation of coastal cities, regional climatic change, the redistribution of productive land and new patterns of drought and desertification. Some scientists believe the impact is already detectable; it has been postulated that increased carbon dioxide has already caused an increase in hurricane intensity and there appear to be anatomical differences in the leaves of several tree species when compared with herbarium species collected during the past two centuries.From The Environmental Business Handbook, Euromonitor 1989
When you have registered in all manner of no-star to five-star hotels, sheltered in miscellaneous huts, snow caves, rock caves, tents and bivvy sacks, or just crashed on the ground beside a camp fire in Zimbabwe and got up in the morning smoked like a fish; when you have bunked in – and on the deck of – various yachts; when you have dozed, half-hour by half-hour, in cars and aeroplanes or made a bed in a vacant compartment of the Basel to Vienna express and woken in the night to find not one but two strange women sleeping beside you, then there seem few other sleeping arrangements left to try.But what about a monk’s cell – the candle, the jug and the enamel basin, stone and sackcloth and water dripping hollowly, and the cold from the stone stealing through the sackcloth in the night? Now that would be different, and on Cyprus you can do it.
From A Walk To Kykko, Great Outdoors, April 1985.
In 1978, with money provided by the New York-based Fund for Animals and the RSPCA, Watson was able to purchase and operate an ex-Yorkshire trawler. On March 2 nd 1979 (with 100 tons of concrete in its bow to cope with ice) Watson, Cleveland Amory (President of the Fund for Animals) and 30 other environmentalists sailed for the Gulf of St Lawrence. Launched in 1960 as the Westella, the trawler was now the Sea Shepherd.In the early hours of the morning before the planned seal cull, a party of eight left the Sea Shepherd and by 7 a.m. had saved the lives of 1,000 baby seals by spraying them with red dye to make their pelts valueless. The eight, Watson among them, were then arrested under – this is bizarre – Canada’s Seal Protection Act.
Watson’s next target was to be the Sierra; Sea Shepherd sailed from Boston on July 3 rd. Reports of the pirate’s movements were coming in from various sources…
On July 15 th, Sierra was whaling 180 miles due west of Oporto, when Sea Shepherd appeared on the horizon, the bright rainbow stripes almost immediately distinguishable. Watson menaced. Sierra ran for Leixoes. Watson shadowed.
“Of course we expect violence,” Watson had told a reporter before leaving Boston. “We are going to confront them physically to stop them and expect they’ll retaliate.”
Whatever the original intention, and the Fund for Animals denies ramming was part of it, early next morning as the vessels neared the Portuguese coast Watson decided on precisely that course. At 10.30 a.m.on the 16 th, Sea Shepherd entered Leixoes, disembarked Captain David Sellers and 13 others and put to sea again, without formalities, Watson at the helm.
Sierra was in sight of the harbour when Sea Shepherd came at them. Watson, “terrified I was going to get killed or arrested,” but resolute in the exhilaration of action, circled then lined-up for the starboard bow, striking a glancing blow by way of warning and ripping along the harpoon area. The whalemen were too shocked to move.
Sea Shepherd bore away, went about astern of Sierra and renewed the attack to port at the full 12 knots. When the vessels broke apart this time there was a hole in Sierra, just aft the bows and running from above the deck to just above the waterline, some three metres deep in a narrow bow-shaped V, a metre wide at the top.
From Hunting The Sierra, Vole magazine, December 1979
