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Associations swarm out of the darkness. You become even more aware of landscape as a medley of effects, a mingling of geology, memory, movement, life. The landforms remain, but they exist as presences: inferred, less substantial, more powerful. You inhabit a new topology. Out at night, you understand that wildness is not only a permanent property of land - that it is also a quality which can settle on a place with a snowfall, or with the close of day.
Over the past two centuries in particular, however, we have learned how to deplete darkness. Homo sapiens evolved as a diurnal species, adapted to excel in sunlit conditions, and ill-equipped to manoeuvre in at night. For this reason, among others, we have developed elaborate ways of lighting our lives, of neutralising the claims of darkness upon us, and of thwarting the circadian rhythm.
The extent of artificial lighting in the modernised regions of the earth is now so great that it produces a super-flux of illumination easily visible from space. This light, inefficiently directed, escapes upwards before being scattered by small particles in the air - such as water droplets and dust - into a generalized photonic haze known as sky glow. If you look at a satellite image of Europe taken on a cloudless night, you will see a lustrous continent. Italy is a sequined boot. Spain is trimmed with coastal light, and its interior sparkles. Britain burns brightest of all. The only significant areas of unlit land are at the desert margins of the continent, and along its mountainous spine.
The stars cannot compete with this terrestrial glare, and are often invisible, even on cloudless nights. Cities exist in a permanent sodium twilight. Towns stain their skies orange. The release of this light also disrupts habits of nature. Migrating birds collide with illuminated buildings, thinking them to be daytime sky. The leaf-fall and flowering patterns of trees - reflexes controlled by perceptions of day length - are disrupted. Glow-worm numbers are declining because their pilot lights, the means by which they attract mates, are no longer bright enough to be visible at night.
To be out by night in a forest, by a river, on a moor, in a field, or even in a city garden, is to know it differently. Colour seems absent, and you are obliged to judge distance and appearance by shade and tone: night sight requires an attentiveness and a care of address undemanded by sunlight.
The astonishment of the night-walker also has to do with the unconverted and limitless nature of the night sky, which in clear weather is given a depth by the stars that far exceeds the depth given to the diurnal sky by clouds. On a cloudless night, looking upwards, you experience a sudden flipped vertigo, the sensation that your feet might latch off from the earth and that you might plummet upwards into space. Star-gazing gives us access to orders of events, and scales of time and space, which are beyond our capacity to imagine: it is unsurprising that dreams of humility and reverence have been directed towards the moon and the stars for as long as human culture has recorded itself.
Our disenchantment of the night through artificial lighting may appear, if it is noticed at all, as a regrettable but eventually trivial side-effect of contemporary life. That winter hour, though, up on the summit ridge with the stars falling plainly far above, it seemed to me that our estrangement from the dark was a great and serious loss. We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us - the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it. On almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world.
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