Looking For a Place to Belong
I dream about my old house a lot, the only place I lived until I left for university at 17. The dreams manifest in different ways. Sometimes they’re about sun-dappled days when the world shimmered with possibility outside my bedroom window. Sometimes I’m wandering the garden, barred from getting in by the new people who live there. And sometimes the dreams are filled with fear. The house is haunted by foreign and sinister things hiding in the attic or darkened corners outside.
I’m fairly sure it’s connected with stress, or times where I feel disjointed and out of place. The house is the constant I seek to bring me back to ground. Or maybe I’m trying to reach the version of myself I left there, the one that was unburdened by all that happens once you leave home.
I think we’re all looking for a place to belong. We’re just animals really, trying to scrape out our own patch of earth. Some people build houses, fortifying themselves against the world, but others walk or run or swim. Because moving lightly and swiftly is not only how you get to know a place, but how you come to love it.
We’re fortunate in Scotland, of course. The Land Reform Act of 2003 and the associated “right to roam” means people can go almost anywhere they like as long as they behave appropriately and responsibly, which really just means leave the land as you found it. For runners this is a gift.
I think I’ve always found it easier to connect with place than people. Running alone has helped me do that here, to deviate from well-trodden places and to forge connections with the land. But I’ve struggled when these places change.
There’s a place I used to go, a faded and overgrown path with a river on one side and a sloping band of mixed deciduous woodland and scrub on the other. Thick, dependable branches of big oaks stoop to deep, hidden pools. You don’t access it from anywhere obvious, and so it winds along by the river, forgotten and unused.
It’s nowhere spectacular, I didn’t discover it and it doesn’t belong to me. I likely wasn’t the only person to go there. But none of that felt true. I went regularly for years and saw only two people.
Once, a girl who seemed more apparition than human. She had flowers in her hair and a long flowing dress and was walking through the meadow with her arms low at her sides, fingertips stretched, stroking the long grass. We passed quietly and without greeting, startled into silence. And once, a foreign stranger in a tent, cooking dinner by the river in the gathering darkness. He stuttered an accented, wide-eyed hello as I passed.
My dog, Rubio, grew from a pup in this place, turning ecstatic circles in shades of autumn leaves. We hunted chanterelles together, finding obscure blooms in dips among the trees you might never discover other than by accident.
One day I sat with a dying buzzard while rain streamed down my face and beaded on his feathers and he looked at me with wide, helpless yellow eyes.
There’s a feral sheep in these woods. It carries years of unshorn fleece, bedraggled by mud and twigs. It felt like an old friend, accustomed to me and my dog and barely reacting when it saw us. I always liked that it had found an escape here, too.
Yet I haven’t been back to this place lately.
Under lockdown orders people began to explore places they’d never thought to go. People who rarely left their houses under normal rules suddenly ventured out. It was a bit like watching fox cubs come out of a den, stumbling into the light for the first time.
The path - once barely discernible - was beaten hard and certain. A pink plastic dog shit bag hung on a tree. There were motorbike tracks in the grass, churned up mud and snapped branches. Someone created a Strava segment. An Englishman with two huge, black retrievers appeared suddenly at a bend, the dogs smothering mine before he called them away.
One morning there were sawing noises in the trees and blue tarpaulin. A group of boys were constructing a hang out spot. They’d dug a pit and filled it with the detritus of teenage boys - crushed cans of energy drinks and a myriad of plastic packaging. They’d been cutting young beech and birch trees. They froze when they saw me. I walked straight into their camp among them, simmering with anger that wasn’t all their fault. Don’t fucking cut live trees, I hissed, and then left before I did something regretful.
I saw the sheep just after this, but it was terrified and half-wild with fear. It crashed through the trees and scrub, fleeing and tumbling down a steep banking.
I wanted to tear the place down. I wanted everyone to go.
The great conundrum of wild places is how we might share them but also protect them. Most of us want to share places we love, even me, despite my tendency towards introversion, but we know full well this can change the essence of a place. It’s not ours to say who goes where, but this doesn’t make it any less painful when somewhere is lost.
Of course, sometimes you change, too.
I spent some time back “home” recently in the place I grew up, a coastal village in the west of Scotland at the end of a road.
It’s an unsettling experience, inhabiting a familiar world full of strangers. Part of you wants to rage and fight and shout Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know how long I existed here? And part of you wants to turn around and never look back.
You hear laughter through hedges and unfamiliar accents that sound deceitful.
Expensive cars parked in wrong places cause amorphous offence.
You tread familiar paths, but the reassuring undulations are accosted by unfamiliar faces round corners. And you feel like that sudden, frantic flap of a pigeon against a window pane.
At other times the sense of impermanence is overwhelming, and you begin to understand what it must be like to be old and forgotten, fading even from memory, inconspicuous and unremarkable.
There were glimpses of the place I knew, and I saw some residual part of myself there, like tremors in the air. But they were just ghosts of what once existed, and all it did was make it more painful when it was lost all over again.
Some part of you thinks you should come back more often, to reclaim some sense of yourself. If you don’t belong here, where do you belong? And what have you lost?
I’m still not sure. I’m not even sure what I’m looking for, so maybe I should just stop searching. Maybe I’ll always feel like a stranger in the land, and maybe that’s how it should be. After all, it doesn’t need anything from me.
I do know that my feelings of rootlessness have faded in the place I now call Home. Most days I can call it that and actually believe it.
The trick is to keep moving.
If you love running, or grow to, you’ll understand it’s more than just something you do. It becomes a lens with which you view the world and a metaphor for everything in it. Subtly, it weaves itself into the fabric of your life. For me, it’s both a way into the world and a way out of it.
The first time I ran to the top of one of the hills near our house I sent my partner a picture of the view. There were endless peaks in all directions.
“Wow”, she said. “So behind the mountains are just…more mountains?”
I laughed.
Yes, I said. Yes.