Walking with vultures

Miguel and I had been corresponding for several years, but this was the first time I had come to Spain to see him and his library. I wanted to find out more about his obsession with walking and wayfaring, and his unconventional way of recording his journeys.

So, early one morning, Miguel and I went to the mountains. We drove north out of Madrid, whose suburbs give way abruptly to holm-oak scrub. We crossed parched-earth plains for miles. The land became disturbed by teeth and fingers of granite. Stone walls divided the landscape where previously there had been wire fences. The Guadarrama mountains stood sharp on the hazy horizon, fine-ridged and implausible: born in the Tertiary and far older than both the Pyrenees and the Alps. Scots pine stood about in ones and twos, then groups, then groves: blue-green needles, orangey bark.

Finally we reached the village of Cercedilla, at the mouth of the Fuenfria valley, and from there we set off on foot up into the pines and the high ground. Miguel was obviously delighted to be out, and so was I. The sun was already high and hot. The forest air smelt musky, antiseptic. “I have to walk each day, or else I feel lame,” said Miguel. He stepped lightly, with a bounce in his stride. I had a heavy pack, and plodded.

We wandered through the valley, following routes that at times were perceptible only to Miguel. He led me along the side-streams that fed the main river. One year he had walked and mapped the course of every waterway in the village.

Later, we emerged out of the shade of the pines into a high pasture area grazed by patient cows with long, blunt tongues. The turf, dried yellow by the sun, was starred with pink autumn crocuses, ­between which butterflies were picking paths. Miguel led me across the pasture and over granite boulders to a rock outcrop that ended in a small cliff. A dead pine leant away over the drop, stripped of its bark by the wind and sun, down to pewter cambium. He reached out and grasped one of the pine’s low limbs, as though shaking hands.

The turf, dried yellow by the sun, was starred with pink autumn crocuses, between which butterflies were picking paths “This is my observatory,” Miguel said. “I knew this pine when he was green, and still do now he is... seco, dry; he’s one of my oldest friends.” We looked out over the wooded bowl of the valley, its northeast rim jagged with seven bare granite peaks.

The Fuenfria Valley gathers towards a high pass over the Guadarrama — the Puerto de la Fuenfria — which for cen­turies has been a key crossing point of the range. As a result, the valley is woven with old paths from different eras. There is a Roman road, the Calzada Romana, whose building was commissioned by the Emperor Vespasian between AD69 and AD79. There is a branch line of the Camino leading from Madrid to Compostela, which largely follows the route of the ­Roman road. And there is the Calzada Bor­bonica, constructed in the 18th century to transport the Spanish monarchs from their hunting palace on the north side of the Guadarrama down to Madrid.

The two main paths meander uphill like partnered streams, crossing and recrossing. The cobbles of the Bourbon way have been heavily polished by the traffic of centuries.

Miguel and I picked up the Roman road at the valley floor and followed it up ­towards the Puerto in diminishing shade and among pines of diminishing height. The path wandered like no Roman road I’d ever before known, drifting back and forth over the riverbed, passing among granite boulders fleeced with green and grey moss that was as soft to the touch as jewellery-box velvet. “The monks of the nearby monasteries would gather pillows of this moss,” said Miguel, pressing it with his fingertips, “and sleep with their heads on them. The moss drew away bad thoughts from the mind, and soaked up dark dreams.” I liked the sound of that: moss as nightmare-proofing absorbent, a dabbing cloth for ill feelings.

Miguel left me at a crook in the track, an hour or so short of the pass, walking back downhill with his quick step until the path folded him out of sight. I sat for a while in the shade, drank water, shouldered my pack and walked on up. The heat was drowsying. I was already looking forward to finding somewhere to sleep the night, and perhaps before then a good siesta site. For the night, I had in mind some sunbaked outcrop, which — like a stone left in the fire to heat — would then release its day’s warmth into me once dark had fallen.

I was now into the pine forests of the upper range. The cherries and oaks that dotted the lower reaches of the valley had disappeared. Through a gap in the canopy I glimpsed an eagle with white wings; far above it in the blue, the glint of an aeroplane. I felt happy among the trees, glad to have had Miguel’s company but glad also now to be alone in the forest. My feet crunched through drifts of red-gold bark. Great tits and crested tits made quick flits between branches.

From a clearing, I looked across to the hill slope on the facing side of the valley, two miles or more away. Gliding above the canopy was a bird so big that its shadow slipped over the treetops beneath it. Light glanced from its mantle and wings. It was a black vulture, the ­emblematic bird of the Guadarrama. The big females easily reach a 9ft wingspan; the biggest, 10ft. Among birds of prey, only the Andean condor has a greater wingspan than the black vulture.

I reached the Puerto de la Fuenfria about two in the afternoon, and rested in the hot shade. I ate the smoked ham, fresh bread and ewe’s cheese that Miguel and Elena, his wife, had packed as provisions for me; drew cool water from a spring and drank deeply. Then from the pass I pushed northeast through steeply forested ground, towards the summits I’d spotted from Miguel’s “observatory” — the Siete Picos; the Seven Peaks. The path zigzagged, its route marked by little cairns of white granite that were perched anywhere available — on the ground, on flat-topped boulders and even in the crooks of young trees: a path-marking method I hadn’t ever seen before. As I climbed, the pines thinned in number and then failed altogether, having reached the limit of their range.

I passed from their care out into open granite fields. To the north, over pine-forested slopes, I could see the mesa — ochre plains stretching to the horizon — and rising out of the mesa was Segovia, standing like an imaginary city, complete and close-knit within its medieval walls, illuminated by the orange sun. There was a low heat haze on the plains, shivering out of the base of the walls, and briefly but intensely I ­experienced the illusion that the city ­itself was floating aloft from the plain.

I reached the first of the seven peaks, and found that I’d stepped into a Zen rock garden. The ground was covered in a fine white quartz gravel, out of which emerged wind-stunted juniper, thigh-high pine trees and granite boulders. Alpine succulents, plump-leaved and audacious, crammed the rock cracks. And from the gravel also reared the peak itself, a granite castle 60ft or 70ft high. The rock had been rounded by water erosion into a tumbling drapery of swathes and ruches, fulsome and pillowish — pure Henry Moore.

Although it was only late afternoon, I was already sure that I wanted to spend the rest of the day and the night here, up in this magical ridge-garden, with Madrid glinting far to the south and Segovia ­orange to the north. I slipped off my rucksack, socks and shoes, left them all in the shadow of the first peak, and set off to investigate the ridge and scramble its rocks.

I found a wide grooved channel in the rock, like a gutter of a bowling alley, and lay back in it, my shoulders comfortably cupped, the soles of my feet buzzing from the rough hot stone. The granite extended thousands of years below me, and above me two black vultures gyred slowly on the peak’s thermal. The warmth of the granite soaked up through my body, and I dozed off.

I woke to find a vulture about 50ft away from me, flying inquisitively past. It was the size of a hang-glider, and had a ­tortoise-like neck and head, baggy with skin. It passed on creaking wings. It ­appeared to decide if I was carrion, or at least some version of Prometheus, chained to the rock and vulnerable to inquisition. I sat upright, making vigorous signs of life and freedom, and it veered away. I don’t need any help damaging my liver.

Late in the afternoon, between the first and second peaks as counted from the east, I came across a natural cave in a subsidiary granite outcrop, big enough to hold two people lying side by side. It had been part adapted as a shelter. One end had been blocked up with piled stones. There were two tea-light candles, and a half-full bottle of water. I couldn’t have asked for better accommodation, combining as it did shelter with remoteness. I moved my belongings to the cave, and when dusk came I lit the candles, and my shadows flickered off the rock interior.

The night: a milk-white half-moon, cool air. Owls in the forests below, their hoots pushing through the dusk. The light soughing of wind in the pines. Sounds drifting, two shooting stars.

This is an edited extract from The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane, which is published on Thursday (Hamish Hamilton £20). To buy it for £16.50, inc p&p, call 0845 271 2135 or visit thesundaytimes.co.uk/bookshop