Essay of the week: A walk on the dark side

Suddenly, from somewhere behind me, there is the sound of a twig snapping. In that dark, silent glade, it is as loud and unambiguous as a gunshot. I'd like to say it is not so much fear as trepidation that pins me to the spot, but in those first fleeting moments, fear is what I feel. My blood turns to ice. My heart bangs against my ribcage.

I reach for the torch, with fingers now of the heaviest lead, and shine it in a wary semi-circle. At that same instant, a bird in the branches above takes flight.

Thoroughly spooked, but trying not to show it, I keep the torch on and walk, noticeably faster than before, to the place where I imagine the woods will start to thin out. What caused that twig to snap? A woodland mammal, perhaps. I do not care. As the woods begin to grow less dense, I can't believe my stupidity: how could I have let myself be rattled like that? I tell myself there was nothing to worry about. Of course there wasn't. For God's sake, get a grip.

At the same time, I am glad to be out of the woods. What if it wasn't a woodland mammal? What if ...?

Above, the sky is already beginning to grow lighter. Night is nearly done.

This nocturnal rambling was prompted by a new book, titled At Night: A Journey Round Britain From Dusk To Dawn. Its author, Dixe Wills, makes a convincing case for the pleasures of travelling at night. He visits Galloway Forest Park, home of Britain's first-ever Dark Sky Park, where the stars can be glimpsed in the purest inky-black skies. He spends a night awake on the London-bound sleeper train from Fort William. He mentions, in another chapter, two men who spend the night at a haunted mountain pool in west Wales; one man woke up screaming.

On reflection, that wasn't the best chapter to have read just before setting out on my own walk. Primitive fears, ancient folklore, and all that. The absence of light, the power of our imagination.

What really persuaded me that a nocturnal walk was a good idea was Wills's introduction, or "preamble". Venturing out into the night, he suggests, especially to remoter spots where night's power is untainted by artificial light, "is perhaps the closest we'll ever come to entering a magic kingdom of trickery and illusion".

He often takes walking parties out on nights when there is a full moon, and many of the walkers experience an "entranced awe at the night and its beauties". He talks, evangelically, of how, if we do not encounter the night, we reduce the realm we inhabit by roughly a third.

So much for the upside of night, as it were. The downside - well, Wills has that covered, too. "It is strange, then," he writes, "that we humans tend to associate the night with evil and have done so for far longer than we have nursed within our breast any conception of right or wrong."

The night hours gave our prehistoric forebears a means of concealing their own wrongdoings but, night being an equal-opportunity sort of entity, it also gave others, whether animal or human, the chance to harm them. Lighting a fire not only meant warmth, it also cast light into a darkness where, he says, "death could take a person unawares in an instant".

We've come a long way since then but the thought persists that evil is out there, stealthily biding its time in the dark. The notion is reflected in concepts as diverse as horror films, fairground ghost rides, movement-sensitive lights outside our homes. Wills is right. We also fear housebreakers prowling around our houses, silently turning handles to see if the doors are locked. A sudden shriek of car-tyres that wakes us up at 2am sounds far more sinister than if we'd heard it at lunchtime.

Danger and anarchy are not to be found in the darkness itself, counsels Wills. They exist in our wild imaginings of what might happen to us, simply because we cannot see.

I SET out with a sense of adventure but also with a sense of apprehension in a minor key. Some lingering fear from childhood, probably, about stumbling across a clearing in the dark in which a hunched group of masked ne'er-do-wells was plotting something nefarious. Something else came to mind: a Graham Greene short story, written 85 years ago, about a young boy, Francis, who has an unreasoning fear of the dark. His twin brother, Peter, is stronger. They go to a children's party. There is a game of hide-and-seek in a darkened house. Peter finds his brother's hiding-place, and seeks to reassure him. His hand touches Francis's face. The shock stops his brother's heart.

This being near the summer solstice, it isn't dark for long. The sky is indigo and black: dawn breaks long before 4am. Wills says when our eyes fail us in the gloom, our other senses, sound and smell, come into their own. He's right: the air, at 1am, smells fresher, earthier; a tree-trunk, caressed in the darkness, feels a lot more textured when you can't see what it is you are touching.

I walk along the familiar path of a canal where, each morning, I feed the ducks and swans. Sometimes there's a glimpse of a motionless grey heron on the opposite bank; often, you can see some deer or wild rabbits scurrying for cover at your approach. Tonight, all is utterly still, and quiet. There is almost a subversive thrill at being out and about, wide awake and walking with a purpose.

Wills says he teaches his nocturnal walkers how to navigate by the stars. I have yet to learn the basics. Is that twinkling light in the distant heavens a star or a late-night flight to somewhere on the Continent? It takes me several minutes to decide it is a star.

My gaze is caught by a movement on some sloping ground that runs down to a quiet road. A fox. I feel a quiet thrill. Momentarily, the fox looks in my direction, ever so casually, before darting off. To my inexpert eye, it seems to be hobbling slightly. I walk down a darkened, tree-lined path. A heavy branch creaks in the wind, sounding exactly like a creaking door. I feel a flutter of indigestion. I walk past a row of darkened houses. Some of their movement-sensitive security lights switch on, like guards snapping into a smart salute.

The moon is not quite full, but strong enough to cast a strange, lunar spell on the landscape. One fence is rendered bone-white against the darkness beyond. The contrast is so stark, so perfect, that I stare at it for an inordinate length of time.

The moon ... I think of the references to it in the poetry of Philip Larkin: "the strong/unhindered moon"; "the moon thinned/ to an air-sharpened blade"; the moon's "cleanliness", its hardness and brightness above wedged-shadowed gardens one 4am. Emily Dickinson, another of my favourite poets, had the moon "turns Her perfect Face/Upon the world below ... "

I round a bend in a woodland walk, where there is a car park. It is deserted. A light breeze is blowing. Something makes me look at a wooden bench. I freeze, and hold my breath. Is that a figure seated on the bench, looking out at a landscape beyond? Thump-thump goes my heart. I look again. It's just a shadow, a trick of the moonlight.

A short walk away is a monument in honour of a battle that was fought around these parts, long ago. January, 1746, Jacobites versus the Hanoverians. A book I have at home describes the coming-together not so much as a skirmish but as perhaps the largest battle of the entire uprising. I think of the carnage that was wreaked here. The book mentions a small copse of trees, five or 10 minutes' walk away, right in the middle of a housing estate, and says it is traditionally known as the "English graves". In the dead of night it seems a melancholy little expression.

I continue walking. Something - a deer? I wish I knew more about nature - scuttles away swiftly at my approach. Back onto a roadway. No cars. Nothing. I am lost in my own thoughts but am enjoying the night-time experience.

An idle thought strikes: what if a passing police car should stop? What if the constable in the front passenger seat should wind down his window, look curiously at the suspicious figure in the hoodie and ask: "Any particular reason you're out at this time of night, sir?"

"Actually, officer," I'd say with a panicky half-grin, "I know it's hard to believe, but I'm researching an article about the night ..."

He would pause before replying: "Would you mind getting into the back of the vehicle for a few moments, sir? We'd like to ask you a few questions."

I return the way I came, back into the wooded area. Just before it begins, I hear a whinny from the other side of a high hedge. Cautiously, I stand on tiptoe and shine the torch. Its beam is reflected back at me by the eyes of a cluster of horses. That is all I can see of them in the darkness. But the horse on the left is lighter in colour. Its coat appears as a ghostly milk-white. It's an eerie little tableau: the spectral presence of that lighter-coloured horse, the torch beam picking out the creatures' eyes. It burns itself onto my brain.

Back into the woods, and that snapped twig. Moments later another fox, decidedly more nimble than the last one, sprints across my line of sight.

I carry on walking until first light. Just before 4am, I reach home. My cat wakes up and looks at me. Our roles have been reversed: normally, he is the one coming home in the small hours, sometimes with a dead mouse in his jaws.

It takes a while before I fall asleep. That long nocturnal walk has left me vibrantly awake. I feel like getting up and putting some music on. A little night music.

I read Dixe Wills instead. If we do not venture out into the night, he says, we reduce the realm we inhabit by nearly a third. I now know what he means. My nocturnal walk was an interesting experience: the way in which perfectly familiar daytime locations looked otherworldly under the cover of night; the scents, the sounds (owls hooting, the wind in the branches of trees); the stirring, unexpected sights, like those horses in the field; the leaves on trees illuminated in sharp detail by nearby street lights; the fence rendered bone-white in the moonlight.

But it strikes me, too, that, this being midsummer - light nights, and all that - there hasn't exactly been a full night's worth of darkness. I should try this again, I think - venture out one winter's night, when darkness has descended long before midnight, and walk that same route, through dense woods. Not on a calm, still, June night, but on a wild, rainy, freezing night in the depths of winter. Let's see how I react to twigs that snap in the dark then.

The last word goes to Dixe Wills. (His book is worth reading, by the way). If we don't go out at 3am, he insists, we'll never know whether the world at that time is an improvement on the world at three in the afternoon. We'll rarely see nocturnal wildlife; we won't allow our senses other than our sight free rein to show us what they can do.

"Perhaps most importantly of all," he says, "if we do venture out, we will discover that the night is not a place to be feared but embraced, a place where everything is fundamentally the same but nothing is actually quite the same. To misquote LP Hartley for a moment: 'The night is a magical country; they do things differently there'."

At Night: A Journey Round Britain From Dusk To Dawn, by Dixe Wills, AA Publishing, £16.99