The Hermit of the Lonely Loch
Loch Treig is a deep freshwater loch, fourteen kilometres from Ben Nevis, in a steep-sided glen east of Fort William. In Gaelic, the name apparently derives from a word meaning ‘abandon’, appropriately enough for a place also known as ‘the lonely loch’. Submerged under its waters are two hamlets, sacrificed when the loch was made into a reservoir. A 19th century travel guide describes it as “a most striking sheet of water”, bordered by “precipitous hills.” It is also home to a hermit, whose story is told in the recent book, The Way of the Hermit (Amazon UK, Amazon US, Publisher).
Ken Smith, The Way of the Hermit: My Incredible 40 Years Living in the Wilderness. With Will Millard (London & Macmillan, 2023). ISBN: 9781035009824, 256 pages.
Ken Smith, the ‘Hermit of Treig’, was born in Derbyshire, in 1947, one of four children. His youth was one of extreme poverty, but, like many of the post-war generation, marked by an appreciation of ‘graft’ and camaraderie. It also instilled in Smith a “lifelong sense of duty to record all my comings and goings”, a habit he continues as a prolific diarist and photographer. Quiet and introverted, he was possessed of a love of nature — a presentiment of his later life. Aged twenty-six, he was violently assaulted by a gang, suffering severe injuries and memory loss. After weeks recovering in hospital, his psychological recovery took the form of committing to travelling — his “wilderness days” — to never again put himself into a position where others could cause him such suffering. Initially with a friend, later alone, Smith travelled through the west of Canada — British Columbia and the Yukon Territory in the sub-arctic regions. Dodging cougars and escaped convicts, such travels taught important lessons of self-reliance, as well as furnishing him with the skills needed to survive.
On one of his occasional returns home, however, Smith discovered his father had died. He fell into a depressed grief, having missed the death and the funeral. When not travelling, he worked in the UK in construction, until an accident put paid to that, and, later, as a ghillie, “a real steward and scholar of the land”, guiding and assisting those on fishing and hunting expeditions. Eventually, however, he had enough of even these arms-length connections to mainstream social life. Cities, he found, were “suffocating places”, full of “busy, mistrustful people.”
Unable to live at ease in such places, Smith went to seek out something that afforded what he found in Canada — “a rarefied sense of belonging”, eventually finding it in the Scottish Highlands. This choice of locale was not made for considerations of convenience and ease. In winter, these remote environments bring “unrelenting brutality and extreme hostility,” able to test even the most skilled. Smith was persuaded by a “feeling” — a felt conviction of having found a place “where you were meant to be.” At Loch Treig, Smith felt an “ancient sense of peace and security”, and a confidence of “future comfort.” From then on, he became a hermit.
From the Garden of Eden to urban allotments, gardens have accompanied and enriched human history and culture from ancient times to now. In this article, Ian James Kidd traces the spiritual history of gardens as places of refuge from the world.
Hermit life
The hermit life is entangled with romanticising illusions. Many people underestimate the difficulties, work, and dangers — weather, wild animals, injury, and so on. Surviving requires skill, constant self-discipline, continuous planning, and a good amount of luck. “Count your blessings,” says Smith after a harsh winter, “then count yer bleeding toes.” Hermits toil — cutting, piling, and carrying wood, and fishing, building, and repairing. (Smith also makes wine, in preparation for his funeral party). Surviving is the main business. Thriving is a further goal, contingent on forces one cannot control.
Going ‘off grid’ is not “pure primitivism”, since knives, axes, and other tools are necessary. Smith is happy to use radio, a camera, and the emergency distress beacon, which saved his life a few years ago. Abandonment of technology, then, is neither necessary nor possible. Smith’s life is enabled by human skill and ingenuity as well as understanding and appreciation of natural places, processes, and creatures. Surviving requires “a firm instinct for the rhythms of the natural world”, as well as the practical skills needed to build, repair, fish, cook and survive outside the systems of convenience of modern life.
Aspiring hermits have many motivations. Smith eloquently testifies to his reasons, some of them deeply personal. Hermit life, for a start, can only be possible to someone, like himself, with a “single-mindedness and determination to win”, coupled to a honest awareness that the “authentic rawness” of hermit life can become “seductive”, even “addictive.” Of course, single-mindedness by itself cannot explain the desire to be a hermit. Mainstream sorts of life can require single-mindedness, too. What’s specific to hermits, then, is an awareness that, for them, following “convention” means “conceding something fundamental about who you are and are always going to be.” Hermits, then, need a single-minded determination to a kind of life possible only outside the confines of conventional life.
Second, hermits like Smith must experience a sense of deep connection to a place, one affording that “ancient sense” of security. Some hermits, it seems, don’t mind where they live: their criteria — such as geographical isolation — can be met by many places. Others, though, have more precise kinds of needs, even if these cannot always be spelled out. Smith felt secure and at ease — and felt that he belonged — in the environment of Loch Treig. The Germans would call this Heimatgefühl — a feel for, and sense of deep connection to, a place.
Heimat is one of those words with no clear English equivalent, though it captures something of the sense of ‘home’, being at ease in a place. For Smith, the toil of his way of life is “an insignificant price to pay for peace.”
Peacefulness, of course, isn’t enough for a happy life. A further motivation, then, is the desire for a rich engagement with the natural world. In the 2022 documentary The Hermit of Treig, produced by Scottish filmmaker Lizzie Mackenzie, one sees the beauty of Smith’s world — a testament as much to her skill as to the Highlands itself. In many poignant sections of the book, Smith’s aesthetic sense is plain to see: “rowan and larch”, he explains, “have a good density to them”, and “beautiful colours … deep rusty reds, tangerine oranges” and, at times, a “sweet resinous smell”, which is at its most intense “just after an early summer’s rain.” Nature, while often frightening, is really “unfathomably complex.” Smith explains his interest in photography by speaking of sometimes witnessing something “so beautiful that it would feel wrong not to have shared it with others.” I see beauty, too, in Smith’s life and character. In many scenes of the documentary, one sees and hears — in his voice, actions, and demeanour — such virtues as gentleness, kindness, thoughtfulness, sincerity, and attentiveness to his environment.
A single-minded commitment to independence, a desire for deep connection to a Heimat, peacefulness and beauty — these are among Smith’s motivations for his hermit life. This set of motivations, while not comprehensive, may also be one-sided. The book suggests that various negative experiences drove Smith first into the Canadian north, then to the Highlands, and from there into four decades (and counting) of hermit life. The violent assault was traumatic, as was his complicated grief at the death of his father, compounded with guilt at his absence. Trauma, grief, and guilt can drive a person away from others and into the wilds — wilds which, compared to the realities of the human world, may seem far safer by contrast. (Another incident, briefly mentioned, concerns Smith’s mother almost being blackmailed into sex). When Smith spoke of the “unrelenting brutality” and “extreme hostility” of winter, he could just as well have been speaking of human social life. The difference, of course, is that human brutality and hostility are morally culpable, unlike those which occur in nature.
The motivating roles of grief, trauma, and guilt suggest a deeper, darker dimension to the aspiration to pursue a hermit’s life. Smith’s case is instructive, here, since his realism — about the physical travails of his way of life, for instance, and the increasing challenges posed by his age — is also accompanied by a kind of realism about human life. This other kind of realism involves clear-sighted appreciation of the moral harms integral to mainstream human life. City life, as Smith might call it, is a “greedy system”, incompatible with “living simply and compassionately.” Conventional life is dominated by “planning” destructive of spontaneous responsiveness, respect for nature, and other virtues.
This realism, then, takes the form of a clear apprehension of the vices and failings woven into mainstream life. One starts to fear the corrupting risks of ongoing immersion in the poisonous streams of life. A good name for this kind of disquieting realism about the moral condition of humankind is misanthropy.
Robert Rodriguez: The Book of Hermits
Robert Rodriguez’ “The Book of Hermits” is a work of impressive scholarship, covering the global history and lore of eremitism from antiquity to the present.
Misanthropy
Misanthropes, according to my dictionary, are ‘haters of humankind’. On the testimony of the documentary and the book, this does not describe Smith.
Unlike some hermits, he is no sullen recluse, throwing stones at unwanted guests. Smith has friends and, by all accounts, is genial and good company. Misanthropy, though, isn’t necessarily a hatred of people — that is one extreme form it can take. Instead, for philosophers, a misanthrope is someone who passes a negative judgment on the moral condition of humankind. Collectively, our world is dominated by failings — greed, cruelty, selfishness, indifference to suffering, mindlessness and other ugly qualities. Individually, there are good people, and, if we are lucky, good times, marked by reason and virtue. Overall, however, any honest verdict on our moral condition will be a bad one.
Smith, while not hateful, certainly expresses misanthropic moods, judgments, and attitudes. I already noted his “healthy mistrust for some human beings.” Wickedness prevails and justice is “hard won in this world.” In our treatment of animals and nature, we seem incapable, as a species, of “seeing anything from any other perspective.” Our desires for profit, pleasure, convenience, and rapid gratification consistently overrule compassion, humility, good sense, and other virtues. We are brutal to animals and nature and to one another. It is a “shame”, rues Smith, that we have “moved so far away” from a natural kind of “reciprocity” which was “the foundations … of human society.” Increasingly, people seem unable to follow “the most basic of moral codes.”
In the wild, one’s survival depends on the kindness, hospitality, and considerateness of others. Alas, many hikers will burn through all the firewood without replenishing the stocks; others burn the wooden furniture. Selfishness and thoughtlessness easily grow into mindless destructiveness. People could live “a sustainable life”, up in the wilds, if they are “careful and responsible”, but most can’t or won’t, given our “self-sabotaging ways.”
Smith only sometimes connects his misanthropic outlook to his desire to retreat into the wild. Sometimes, he explains he “needed a break from humans.” At other times, though, these reasons are downplayed. “My decision to immerse myself in this place”, he says, was a means to “give myself wholly to this wild space”, not about “pulling away from all of you.” Love of wild nature and the freedom it offers - and not misanthropic judgment on humanity — is presented as the main motivation.
In many cultures, misanthropic discontent with humankind has been closely related to love of nature. Wild places, contrasted with cities, have two main attractions. First, they are refuges: spaces offering a secure protection against the vicious and corrupting realities of social life. Smith, in an intriguing remark, felt the “elemental wilderness” of northern Canada “somehow capable of repelling man’s most malign influence.” In the Yukon or the Highlands, one finds “solace, a sanctuary of sorts”, being places “set apart” from the “noise and problems” of mainstream life, relatively protected from the corrupting inducements of a restless, relentless world.
If nature can protect us against the corrupting pressures of the human world, it also affords opportunities to cultivate the virtues, especially ones out of favour in mainstream life. Calm, gentleness, humility, sensitivity to natural places and creatures, spontaneity, and self-reliance are among the virtues that Smith mentions, and, indeed, exemplifies. These ‘quiet’ virtues have little role to play in the busy, harassed realities of conventional life, fixated on ambition, achievement, and consumption.
Nature therefore serves a hermit as a refuge against corrupting vices, an arena for the exercise of virtues. It is also a theatre encouraging experiences of beauty and connection to the particularities of a place and its natural inhabitants.
In other passages, Smith intimates a pessimistic perspective on mainstream human life, an appreciation that it is, at a deep level, hostile to happiness and contentment. Work and worry appear in any kind of life, of course, but they are intensified in the kinds of “soul-crushing life” required by society. Mountains, forests, glens, and other wild places, by contrast, “represent freedom from the pressure and suffocation of the cityspace.” Smith, rightly, emphasises that not everyone is fitted for a hermit’s life. It is toilsome and risky, not at all the “monkish, meditative” one of romantic imagination.
Still, those of us incapable of eremitism can reflect on our lives. In rather Buddhistic terms, Smith sees most people as “trapped” in a “cycle” of aspiration, constraints, duties, and exhaustion. Were they to live differently, “people could be a lot happier.” Unfortunately, their “dreams of living differently”, if seriously entertained at all, are usually “voluntarily resigned.” The hermit life involves trade-offs most of us will not make — convenience for self-reliance, unthinking ease for wholesome effort, “suffocating” artifice for untrammelled spontaneity.
“A deep sense of calm purpose and a connection that is almost religious in its feel”, is, for Smith, only possible in “the truly wild.” For the rest of us, suffocating in the cities, we face dim prospects for happiness, peacefulness, and contentment. A critic may accuse this judgment of a kind of elitist “machismo.” Certainly, Smith speaks of self-reliance, independence from attachments, and bucolic activity. The motivation, though, is not masculine self-assertion. Peacefulness, intimacy with the natural world, and sober quietude are not indexed to an ethics of “machismo.” Watching the documentary, the contentment and solicitude of the Hermit of Treig clearly do not belong to an overheated ideal of masculinity.
Hermits are quietists who seek to find ways of living that manifest their aspirations to tranquillity, virtue and a truthful understanding of the human condition. Smith, humbly enough, recognises his life is not for everyone and that not everyone shares these aspirations. By documenting his life, in his diaries and photographs and a documentary, he is describing his own way of life, not arguing for it.
What is especially intriguing for students of eremitism is the intimate interplay of personal motives and philosophical commitments behind Nanavira’s decision to live alone.
Nature
Smith wryly challenges descriptions of himself as an “anti-social hermit.” In modern technological societies, he is told, it is now normal for people to shop, socialise, and work “without leaving home.” Many people pass whole days “without seeing a soul, having a conversation, or experiencing life outside.” In a world of instant downloads and next-day deliveries, one can avoid physical and social engagements with people and the world. ‘Digital natives’ need not even live on the same continent as their colleagues. Smith notes the “oddness” of his being called anti-social. His life is social as well as solitary. On his sojourns to Fort William, he hitches lifts, chats to strangers, posts and receives correspondence, shops, and looks forward to a pint and “a back slap off an old mate.”
The social nature of Smith’s life includes his relationships — even friendships — with many animals. Beaver, moose, trout, squirrels, rabbit, wolves, and many other creatures fill many pages of the book. In a few episodes, unknown creatures draw near, too, as do a couple of ghosts. Such creatures feature in Smith’s life in many ways. Fishing, hunting, photography, admiration, and caring are all ways of relating to animals that reflect the many kinds of meaning they have. By relating to animals in the right ways, one experiences them in richer ways. Smith notes “how extraordinarily confident” some animals are, when “well away from the threat of humans.” In his earlier life, Smith hunted deer, too. During his days as a ghillie, working the hunts was his day job. One day, though, he “started to think about deer in the same way I think about people”, imagining them “hunting us.” Such reflections slowly dissolved the desire to hunt them — “the life of a deer was still a life” — even if Smith is still hostile to certain creatures, such as the “most hated miscreant of summer”, the tick.
Attitudes to animals are complex, with admiration and respect structured by our complicated needs and interests. Bland talk of “love of animals” obscures the complexities of how we relate to them. “Predators are pragmatists,” to be understood in ways quite unlike their prey. Animals should be seen for what they are. Unfortunately, most people tend to “imagine animals as we imagine ourselves,” projecting our sensibilities onto them. Sentimental, sensational descriptions of animals is coupled to obliviousness and indifference to others. The result is that we “deprive” those creatures of “the right to behave in [their] most natural way.”
As our vision narrows, mistreatment of animals becomes easier. In an interesting passage, Smith describes a “vital” dimension to the choice to kill an animal. Most meat eaters, today, though, have little “real engagement” with the chickens, cows, pigs, and other animals they eat. The slaughterhouse to supermarket system creates “a gulf between the consumer and the producer”, which sustains a sanitised illusion, “free of blood, guts, and gore.” As Smith laments, in the meat aisle, price-tagged and wrapped in “shiny packaging”, “everything [the] animal is or was or has been [is] stripped away.”
Smith is hardly unique in discerning a range of human vices and failings in our mistreatment of animals. Callousness, greed, malice, mindlessness, and “our warped sense of superiority”, to name but a few, are inscribed in our practices and institutions, as well as in the hearts of many people. Of course, one hopes living in the wild, “off the grid”, is not the only corrective. Few of us, as Smith says, can do that in a serious way. Fortunately, there are other options, such as appreciating the beauty of animals, attending to their needs and natures, and quietly working to check our own patterns of ignorance and enmity. Such self-transformations become easier, surely, if one can witness their fruits in the wholesome ways and genial character of hermits.
Early in the book, we are reminded that, in many cultures, the hermit was “celebrated” as someone “outside of politics, corrupting influences and wider social ills.” In their detachment from the demands, fads, and distractions of social life, a hermit became a source of “apolitical and acultural opinion.” They also acted as “a barometer as to what was right and what was wrong.” Epicurus, the Desert Fathers, and many modern eco-misanthropes honour this ideal. Smith, in his own modest way, does the same. Without earnest moral theorising, his life and character exemplify kinds of goodness — kindness, considerateness, sensitivity to living beings, a humble respect for limits, appreciation of beauty. Appreciating these qualities does not require clever argumentation or sophisticated theory. The Daoist Zhuangzi, too, saw self-conscious preoccupation with “cleverness” and “righteousness” as symptoms of the deterioration of our moral sensibilities. “You should do good because that’s the right thing to do,” opines Smith. If this sounds banal, the response is that our world is hardly ruled by goodness.
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The book closes with a reminder that “life is a gift, but it is so fleeting and fragile.” The metaphor of a gift is attractive for several reasons. What makes our life possible — the natural world, its water, air, forests, and food — is given to us. Like a gift, it should be received gratefully and appreciatively. The gift of an individual life, too, should be appreciated as “extraordinarily humbling.” Our individual life could only become possible given an immense natural and social history — a vast world made up of family, social practices, human traditions, and natural places and processes. Our emergence as an individual is a gift made possible by the richness of the world. If measured on a cosmic scale, a life can seem “pointless.” Properly seen, however, this humility should not inspire nihilism, but wonder at the richness packed into our brief time on Earth. If the Hermit of Treig is right, “the revelation of this brevity” is just one of the many rewards of the hermit life.
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Ian James Kidd on Daily Philosophy:
