Dan Snow's History Hit - Underland with Robert Macfarlane

Episode Date: October 10, 2020

Robert Macfarlane joined me on the podcast to talk about his new book, Underland. We talked about cave communities in Cappadocia, underground bunkerism, the catacombs in Paris, and the worlds beneath our feet.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Recently voted the best and greatest podcast in the world. Such a great honour. Wonderful, wonderful. You don't need any details of how that vote was conducted, who the electorate were or where it was published. Don't worry about it, just take it from me. On this episode of the podcast we have the absolutely brilliant British scholar

Robert McFarlane. He's written a book called Underland, and he's talking about all the hidden worlds beneath our feet. This is a very interesting interview. I was particularly taken, as you'll hear, by his description of going to massive raves in the catacombs underneath Paris. I mean, he's got a stronger head than I have. But it's a remarkable tale of our species and our relationship with the ground beneath our feet. Now, the good news for you guys is that History Hit TV is having one of its insane autumnal sales because this week is the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings. So because of that, we've launched our huge new documentary,

our original content on that Battle of Hastings, the tumultuous year of 1066. You can see that, lots of other 11th century content. If you go to historyhit.tv, it's like the Netflix for history, and if you use the code 10661066, you get a month for free. Then you get three months, which is one pound, euro or dollar for each of those three months. So you're deep into 2021 and you're only paying a dollar a month. Crazy. So head over there and check it out. In the meantime, everyone, here is the brilliant Robert McFarlane. Enjoy. Rob, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Everyone, if anyone follows you on Twitter, because you very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Everyone, anyone follows you on Twitter because you post beautiful pictures and calming thoughts and scenes. But this book talks about what's beneath our feet.

What's the fascination with the history of the underground? We know so little about it. I think that's the first answer. We know more about the surface of Mars than we do about a great deal of what lies beneath us. We're only just beginning to fathom some of the extraordinary mysteries it holds. The deep earth biome that has a greater diversity than the Amazon and the Galapagos, its microbial biome that runs to about seven miles down, probably further in the crust. It's got more biomass than all human population on earth. The wood wide web, the fungal mycelial network that lets trees communicate with one another. Well, modern

science only just discovered it. We've been walking over it for as long as we've been human. It makes you think when I read your booklet, from the microbes' point of view, they're fine. As we decide to destroy our own atmosphere and make it toxic for human life, they're doing just fine down there. So well, they're extremophiles. They love this stuff. We're not, but we're turning ourselves, our atmosphere, into an extremophile environment. That is happening fast. But we won't adapt in time. How have our human ancestors dealt with the subterranean? This fascinates me. When I began writing this book, I thought it was going to be all about stone and ice and time and trees and nothing to do with humans except insofar as they crossed into the veins of those beings that matter every now and then. In fact, it turned out to be all about humans. The first book I wrote was about mountains and why we climb them, why we love them. That's a very young feeling in us, actually, probably about 250, 300

years old. The urge to go into darkness is arguably older than we are anatomically modern humans. So there's a recent disputed dating of some of the earliest cave art in western Spain puts it at about 64,000 years ago. That's about 20,000 years before we think that modern humans got to that part of Europe. So that's Neanderthal art making basically. There's incredible archaeology done by a female team in Rising Star Cave which has dated a really early human relative as a barrier of the bodies of its kind. That's about 300,000 years ago. It goes way back and deep down. Isn't that astonishing that we seek to put our dead into the earth? And that's before we knew that we are made from the same

atoms and the same elements as that earth. I've just got shivers down my spine just listening to you say that. It strikes me as an astonishing... It's not even a habit. It's an act. Every time, it's an act. Of course, we don't do it necessarily so much now. Since cremation came in

as a powerful sort of body disposal force in the... Well, depending on how you date it, around the time of the First World War. But yes, as long as we have been human, we have been burying our dead i went down into avalyn's hole in the mendips which is the earliest known cemetery in britain if we want to call it that it's about 10 000 years ago that mesolithic hunter-gatherers who lived unbelievably hard marginal lives nevertheless went to the trouble of taking their dead over the course of about a century we think and placing them in that dark secure place where the calcite ran down off

the cave walls and crystallized lacquered the faces of their dead and then they would roll stones pile stones over the entrance we think to protect those bodies what was happening there so apart from that i don't even know how we'd describe it. Is that sacramental? I don't know what that is. But in terms of artistic and defence and storage, the underground has provided all those functions as well. Yeah, it's incredibly versatile. I think we associate it culturally broadly now with sort of confinement, ickiness, exploitative labour practices, all sorts of bad stuff. It's negative associations buried deep in our language. People are depressed. When you're low, you're down. But when you're up, you're high. There's a pretty clear gradient of qualitative relationship there. But actually, the underworld is full of

marvels as well. And it has been in many of the stories that many cultures have told. It's a place of vision, paradoxically, somewhere you can see in the dark. And that came to absolutely fascinate me, that it's a place of protection for the dead, for the valuable, as well as a place that we get rid of things that we fear or hate. What about protection? What about living? The problem with caves is food, isn't it? But other than that, we'd be very happy hiding and living in these caves. You can think of so many examples from fiction or from history

in the Second World War when Italians found themselves re-inhabiting all these cave systems, particularly in that campaign. We can't see their amazing place of shelter and habitation. That's a really good point. They're not permanent dwellings, really. It's really tough and rough to stay out of the light and, as you say, food supply and, to an extent, water supply become a problem. But as places of protection, we might think of the Global Seed Vault up in Svalbard in the Arctic, which is a place of protection. We might think of the global seed vault up in Svalbard in the Arctic, which is

a place of protection for the rebuilding of a future agriculture after apocalypse has scorched the land. So in the Svalbard seed vault, we are placing, or they are placing, millions of varieties of seeds from cultures and geographies around the world in order that, in the case of effectively a catastrophe that affects the entire surface world a diverse agriculture could be regrown from that unfortunately it's not really working as a storage system because climate change is melting the permafrost so fast that water began leaking into the seed vault which was thought to be one of the most secure underground spaces that we as a species could construct it reminds me of the water leaking i've been to a lot, I'm sure you have too, a lot of nuclear bunkers.

And they realise that, particularly ones like, for example, Dover Castle, and they quietly tell you as you're doing the tour, as you're talking to the expert, that actually this would have provided virtually no safety from the aftermath of a nuclear fallout because the water would have managed to get it, you know, water ingress. These underground spaces are connected to the surface, aren't they? They are, and they are a sort of paranoid architecture, a kind of bunkerism, which goes way back, goes back to Cappadocia, to the buried cities of Derinkuyu and others in Turkey, which they're generous bunkers designed to hold whole societies. They're extraordinary

underground cities. But now we have the, as it were, the selfish bunker, the billionaire's bunker, who's constructing it to sit out a pandemic underground or a nuclear conflict underground in New Zealand. So it's hard to make a foolproof bunker. You mention in the book Invisible Cities and Catacombs and these ones, Cappadocia, they're not a long term solution to enemies scouring the land. I mean, why do you think we were driven underground and went to enormous trouble to hollow out these giant spaces? I keep thinking of us as an animal. I mean, we are animals and we're a species and we are a burrowing species. I came to realise this. We are warren makers as much as rabbits are or as ants are. We think of our warrens and our burrows as very well planned and rationally constructed.

I was in Bulby Potash mine where I drove five miles out under the North Sea, where the miners have followed the, and the mining machines have followed the seams. You've probably been down in the Cornish tin mines, which likewise sort of wander out under the sea. And if you look at an underground map of Britain, if you could imagine one, if one could be drawn, it would show us to be termites, astonishing termites. So one answer is I think we make them because we like to think of ourselves as an above-ground building species, but we're also a below-ground burrowing species. Going to the top of mountains and building gigantic skyscrapers is a very recent innovation in human behaviour.

Yeah, we've been going down for much longer than we've been going up. Certainly our cities have become more and more vertical in their axes. I think that's true. We, again again imagine ourselves perhaps typically as moving laterally around within a city, along the pavement, along the street. But actually more and more we move vertically up into buildings, down into subways, satellites connect us with our glowing blue dots from tens of thousands of vertical feet above us. But Paris was doing this from the medieval period. Paris, much more visibly than almost any other famous world city, has an invisible city, has a negative image of itself

because it quarried its own stone out of the bedrock below southern Paris and it created this immense catacomb network that was originally a quarry network. But then in the late 18th century, when Paris ran out of places to store its dead, an ossuary became a catacomb network. I spent three days down there dodging various authorities and moving from party room to hellhole to flooded tunnel. I mean, it was one of the most intense three days I've ever spent without seeing the sun once. What? I thought you were about to say you went down there, like I did, with a sort of historian to do a filming project. So you went

down there and hung out with all those wild people down in the bits that you're not meant to go into. Yeah, yeah, the cataphiles, les cataphiles, and they carry sound systems with them for a bit of le cataboom. And they genuinely do play Going Underground by The Jam at full volume in the party rooms. But yeah, I was down there for, well, two and a half days. We slept a couple of nights, once in a former resistance bunker and once in a former quarryman's chamber. And, yeah, up to our waist in flooded water, crawling through these strange semi-collapsed tunnels,

finding our ways into 18th century mineralogy chamber. I mean, it's history on speed down there. It's astonishing. And then people will turn up in costumes. Indiana Jones appeared at one point. And I was just... Anyway. Well, take less speed next time, is all I can say. How does that make you feel? You're someone who I associate with standing on mountaintops and taking panoramic Twitter photos with beautiful quotes from romantic poets. So you're happy underground, are you?

I mean, I'm not happy, but I don't get claustrophobic easily. But no, I mean, I don't go down there recreationally, but I did find myself drawn back and back and back again. I mean, there are things that you find in the dark that'll never be found on the surface world. I dropped down to the River Tamarvo, which runs out of Slovenia and into Italy for about 12 miles more. It runs fully underground as a river, about a thousand feet underground through the limestone it comes off sandstone and then burrows down into limestone and I descended a thousand foot shaft dropped through a little abseil trapdoor in the roof of a chamber the size of a cathedral which was filled with black sand dunes of black sand the river had washed down

and then walked through that desert that underworld desert to the banks of the river and that I went to another planet there And I only travelled a thousand vertical feet. I feel like that. And also, it's the fact that it's so near the Titan Cave in Derbyshire, which is like, yeah, I've been in. And it's like a bus ride from Sheffield. You're on a different planet. I mean, it's completely, as you say, a cathedral-sized space. It's extraordinary. And I love the fact that they discovered that, what, was it the new year of 2000 or something? Very recently. And you imagine, what would it be if somebody suddenly reported, we found a mountain bigger than Ben Nevis somewhere in the west of Scotland. That's unthinkable. But you can find a cave space bigger than any we've ever known in the country

on New Year's Day in the year 2000, slightly hungover. So Rob, there's a beautiful section in your book when you talk about the history of ice and what it tells us. Do you want to read it out? Sure, yeah. Ice has a memory. It remembers in detail and it remembers for a million years or more. Ice remembers forest fires and rising seas. Ice remembers the chemical composition of the air

around the start of the last ice age. It remembers how many days of sunshine fell upon it a summer 50,000 years ago. It remembers the temperature in the clouds at a moment of snowfall early in the Holocene. It remembers the explosions of Tambora in 1815, Mount St Helens in 1482 and Kumai in 1454. It remembers the smelting boom of the Romans and the lethal quantities of lead that were present in petrol in the decades after the Second World War. It remembers and it tells, tells us that we live on a fickle planet capable of swift shifts and rapid reversals. Ice has a memory and the colour of this memory is blue. Yeah, I love that. I found that so profound. And on that note, in terms of the

great sweep of history, that is both enormously broad, and yet moments will be identified within it. I like your idea of being good ancestors. We think of ourselves as being good ancestors for all those people in the future that will look back at the ice that's, well, not much created, in our world at the moment. But what will that ice tell them? Absolutely. They'll look back. They'll have to read records other than ice because there won't be much left, if any, by the time we've gone. Yeah, the idea of good ancestry isn't mine, I should say. It's many people's, it's indigenous nations.

And the question itself or the phrase itself is formulated by Jonas Salk, the great American Nobel Prize winning immunologist. And yeah, he says, his question is, are we being good ancestors? And it just stopped me and searched me that question. And it became the animating, ethical and indeed political question of the book. And the answer clearly at the moment is no. But we find ourselves in COVID times, even less able to think in the long term as individuals and as polities. And yet it's so depressing, the COVID time, because our capacity for spending vast amounts of money and pursuing radical solutions like the vaccine that will be ready unimaginably quickly,

if we hope, shows me what we could achieve if we turned this energy and this money and this direction towards getting rid of our 19th century technology which produces so much crap. Absolutely, absolutely. If we recognised, I mean we're speaking as climate fires are burning most of the west coast of America and we find it very, very hard to recognise crisis even as it absorbs us. I mean Salk's a really good example of the success of that kind of thinking. I think it was only two weeks ago that Africa formally declared itself polio free. And that was Salk and his team and the doing of them and many others. But it was done. I mean, incredible vaccines working and you can eradicate a horrendous disease from a mega continent. So

it can be done. It's a question of focus and long-term forward thinking. And I guess that idea of deep time, the geological histories of our planet, it also needs to be turned to the future. We have deep time futures to think of as well as deep time pasts that we inherit. And we are the legacy leavers now. Again and again, it strikes me that the one lesson we learn from this crisis, if we didn't know it from the Second World War, is the ability of modern states to borrow money. There is a magic money tree if you've got a 300-year decent credit rating like the UK or the US. Absolutely. The money's there, but the will isn't. I mean, I was dismayed to see actually how little

in the way of carbon emissions was reduced during the great anthropopause, as they called it, the full sort of global lockdown. Global emissions only went down around 14% in April to May, which just shows how embedded so much emissions are in terms of systemic output. But also so much of that was road transport. That was the predominant contributor to what was missing during the great pause. So we have this chance to remake cities to remake transport systems to build nature into them and to take carbon out of them and we we have to seize it oh i couldn't agree more and let's finish on a slightly less optimistic note you're talking about your nuclear waste eternity tomb well to me this is a very optimistic note this is good ancestry in action so the book ends or nearly ends in in onkalo which means the

hiding place in finnish which is a finnish well the only high level nuclear waste deep storage facility that anyone has managed to construct anywhere in the world successfully and the fins have done it and they've done it for their nuclear waste and it's about 400 meters underground on on the gulf of bothnia and i went there thinking i was going to the end of the world but in fact what where i was going was a place where good ancestry was practiced these were people who were taking care of a legacy that would remain toxic for tens certainly of thousands of years and they were making a trying to create an architectural space which would hold this stuff safely for that duration of time long after the lives of any of these people or their children or their grandchildren, probably arguably after the human species. This was a post-human architecture.

The pyramids were around 4,600 years old, something like that. These people were trying to design a tomb which would last for 100,000 years. The seed bank story doesn't fill me with much confidence, but you reckon they've done that? Yeah, they've done it better than anyone else they took a basically put a penny on the energy tax back in the 1970s and that slowly filled up the immense war chest as it were necessary to construct this thing so a very communal democratically mandated structure so i found it an intensely hopeful place i mean there are naysayers and there were there are there will be problems but they uh probably by the time this the tomb is backfilled

with two million tonnes of gneiss and granite and smoothed off and the forests grow back over it and the ice age comes in due course, the waste will be safely deposited there. That's what we hope. But the problem is that no other country in the world has managed to do this and we have hundreds, literally hundreds of thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste sitting around on the surface without very developed long-term disposal and storage solutions.

Sorry, I ended with doom. I promised you hope and I ended with doom. The Finns, the Finns, look to the Finns. Scandies, the Scandies have got it all right. Robert McFarlane, thank you so much. What is the book called? Underland, A Deep Time Journey. Everybody go out and buy it immediately.

Thank you for coming on the pod. Great to talk. Hi everyone, it's me Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this but now I'm doing it and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes

wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five star rating and a review. It really helps and basically boosts up the chart which is good and then more people listen which is nice so if you could do that i'd be very grateful i understand if you don't subscribe to my tv channel i understand if you're not by my calendar but this is free come on do me a favor thanks