Walking the Invisible

by Michael Stewart

  It’s a beautiful autumn day with a clear blue sky. The sun is a copper coin levitating over the eastern horizon, and the fields here are ploughed and planted, seeded or reaped, dormant over winter, ready for spring. I’m looking for the hill that Juliet Barker mentions in her book, but everything is so flat it’s really hard to imagine a thing like a hill. It’s difficult to know what would be classed as one here – maybe just a slightly raised area constitutes a hill?

  An eviscerated pigeon lies on its back in a ditch. Its blood and guts ripped out of its chest. Perhaps this is what the red kite was after: a sparrowhawk’s sloppy seconds. It must be demeaning to feast on the leftovers of a smaller raptor’s success. I pass a dumped fridge freezer and a dumped oven, their white skin of paint already blistering with rust.

  I walk across the golf course and along the River Ouse to a footbridge that leads to the village of Aldwark. Everything is withering, except a hawthorn bush which is replete with luscious red berries. I stop by St Stephen’s Church, with its large round window paned with lead in the shape of a flower and the exposed Jenga of its brickwork arranged at odd angles. The information board in front tells me that the origin of ‘Aldwark’ may be Anglo-Saxon: ‘Ald-Weord’, which means ‘old fort’. But the Roman fort buildings are now nowhere to be seen. This is what the present sometimes does to the past: obliterates it. Whereas my project is an attempt to reconfigure it.

  The River Ure can be glimpsed from this spot. It was used to transport lead in Roman times, and until the previous century it carried farm produce, lime and coal upstream to Ripon, and downstream to York and Hull.

  There is a paucity of pathways in this region, the Vale of York. Instead, there are lots of B roads with thick, dense hawthorn hedges either side that hardly let in any light, very few public rights of way, and lots of voluminous farmers’ fields, hedged in, barbed-wired and mesh-fenced. This agricultural land would not have been so intensively farmed during the mid nineteenth century, but, even so, it would have been a huge contrast, especially to Branwell, who was a passionate walker, to the Yorkshire moors, with its open spaces that can be roamed in any direction, its bridleways, pathways, pack-horse trails and cart tracks, and its well-established trading routes connecting village to village and market to market, snaking, newting and lizarding across the land.

  I walk through the grounds of Low Farm, where there is a galvanised-steel carousel of caged red deer. This is the reality of the venison industry. Not the image of free beasts, hunted nobly by rugged country types, but barred boxes, with a pile of silage in the middle for the animals to feed on and nothing else for them to do, and little room to move. I’m sure in the summer months they get to roam the woods, but that is poor consolation for this lengthy incarceration. As we approach, the deer get a sniff of Wolfie, and they rut and jump as they try to retreat. I wince as I see them bash their bones on the bars. Possession and sale of venison was once tightly regulated under English law, to maintain its status symbol as food for toffs. These days, anyone is allowed to eat the flesh, but it still retains something of its status symbol. And now I imagine the nouveau riche feasting on it until it gives them gout.

  We leave the farm and the cages and walk along Ouse Gill Beck, and then through a newly planted wood. We reach the bend in the river where the Ure becomes the Ouse. The same water, the same river, different name. I’m thinking about where Branwell and Lydia Robinson must have done their courting, as secrecy would have been paramount. There would have been plenty of discrete places in this area to find intimate moments together. According to Juliet Barker, they went to a boat house close by, but it has been destroyed. There’s an RAF base near Linton on Ouse, and the peace and tranquillity of the vale is regularly interrupted by the flight paths of fighter planes. I come across what is now a holiday cottage that appears to be a log cabin. On closer inspection, it is clear that it is actually plastic made to look like timber. Next to it is an outside sauna in the Scandinavian style. This could well have been the spot where the Robinsons’ boat house was, whose walls concealed the illicit pair.

  Branwell wrote several poems about Lydia Robinson. There are two called ‘Lydia Gisborne’ (her maiden name). He used Greek letters to disguise the subject matter. One starts, ‘On Ouses grassy banks—last Whitsuntide, / I sat, with fears and pleasures, in my soul’. The fear of being caught; the pleasures of the flesh. It goes on to say ‘Where love, methought, should keep, my heart beside / Her, whose own prison home I looked upon’. He must have felt that his love could save her from the clutches of Mr Robinson, who was a much older man and close to death. It concludes by saying that the waters of the river are going far away to the Humber and that his hopes are gliding away too, rolling past ‘the shores of Joy’s now dim and distant isle’.

  I make my way back to Monk’s House, where Branwell stayed when he was private tutor to the Robinsons’ son Edmund. It is now part of the Thorpe Underwood Estate, which is built on the grounds of the Robinsons’ former estate home, which burnt down in 1895. It is expansive and includes the very prestigious Queen Ethelburga’s Collegiate, an independent boarding school, where students can bring their own horses. Yes, really. The school is not without its controversies. Brian Martin, the former chair of governors, faced multiple sexual assault charges until cleared in 2018. Monk’s House is the only remaining building.

  The Thorpe Underwood Estate is very security conscious. There are cameras everywhere and keypads on all the gates and doors. The way the rich secure their property has changed but not the reason why. The walls are sturdy and high. I attempt to climb a tree so I can get a better view of the house, but before I even get to a vantage point, two security men appear, wanting to know what I’m up to. I climb down and tell them I’m writing a book. But this doesn’t reassure them.

  I make my way back. As I do, I hear a gaggle in the sky and look up to see three Vs of geese above me. They appear to be flying north-west. Thorpe Green Lane is a very unpleasant walking experience. It’s just wide enough in some parts for a souped-up SUV to come racing past round blind bends. There are no pavements or passing points or anywhere for a pedestrian to hide, so that each time I hear a car approach, Wolfie and I have to squeeze into the thorny hedge as best we can, in the hope that the driver doesn’t Steven King us. Ever since I read his gruesome account of his near-death experience while out walking, I’ve been more cautious of cars. The hedge seems to go on for ever before I find a gap in it big enough for us to squeeze through, and we walk along the ploughed border of a field parallel to the road. The sun is now a yellow biscuit. There isn’t a cloud in sight. I’m anticipating tomorrow’s journey to Grafton Hill, to see the view that Branwell would have seen.

  I stop outside St Trinity Church, with its ornate rotunda, on the outskirts of Little Ouseburn. I know both Anne and Branwell attended the church, accompanying the Robinsons and their children. I imagine Branwell sitting on a hard, wooden pew, while the vicar or the curate preached about the sins of the flesh. I expect he blushed, or at least shuffled uncomfortably, as the sermon turned to the commandment of ‘thou shalt not commit adultery.’

  I walk across the river and back into the village of Great Ouseburn. There is a chimney sweep advertising his wares, and I’m sure there is a lot of demand for him in these parts. It’s the sort of place where everyone has reverted to burning coal and seasoned hardwood. I pass the boarded-up Crown Inn. It looks bedraggled and neglected. The middle classes don’t make a habit of session drinking, and most of the pubs round here that have survived have done so by turning themselves into restaurants that look like pubs. You know they’re not pubs because when you go to the bar and order a pint and ask, ‘How much?’ they say, ‘Don’t worry, sir, we’ll put it on your tab.’

  I have to drive more than four miles to Boroughbridge to find any signs of life. Here there are three or four pubs, a chip shop, a hardware shop, a shoe shop and an olde worlde sweet shop. There’s a gym full of high-tech equipment, set in the grounds of a medieval hal
l, two curry houses, a betting shop and a wine shop. I park up in a pub car park. I’ll sleep here in my van tonight.

  The next morning, stretching my legs and filling my lungs with good clean air, I stand by the bridge where a famous battle took place in 1322 between a band of rebellious barons and King Edward II. The battle included the death of the Earl of Hereford. As he crossed the bridge, he was attacked by a pikeman hiding beneath who thrust his spear up through Hereford’s anus.

  I drive back to Thorpe Green, stopping on the way to cook a breakfast of spinach, tomatoes and hash browns in my van. I didn’t like being fobbed off by the two goons last night, so I return to Queen Ethelburga’s Collegiate. It’s an open day, and as soon as I drive my van into the car park, I’m approached by two different security guards. They want to know what I’m doing here. I explain that I just want to look around. Have I been invited? Not as such. Is my name on the list? No. I look at all the 4x4 Porsches and Land and Range Rovers. All new models. Mercedes Benz, BMW, Jaguar. The mothers are glamorous, in that quilted jacket and tweed kind of way, and considerably younger than the fathers, who are in smart casual and well fed. Their tans are from holidays in Tuscany rather than the high-street sunbed shop. Their children look scrubbed and prosperous. I’m surrounded by sizeable sculptures and top-of-the-range sporting facilities. I drive back out onto the road.

  I park up and set off from Great Ouseburn on foot, on a circular trip that is going to take me to Grafton Hill. But unlike yesterday, which was characterised by blue skies, the weather today is very misty. There is a milky haze over everything, and visibility is about three hundred yards. I’ll not see much from the top of the hill if it stays like this. Hopefully, the sun will burn through and the mist will lift.

  I cross over the footbridge towards St Trinity Church that we know both Anne and Branwell attended. It’s not as idiosyncratic as the church at Aldwark but a very nice design nevertheless. A castellated tower and a wooden Tudor porch entrance.

  I pass Little Ouseburn village hall. There is an advertising bill pinned to the board: a quiz-and-supper evening this Friday, with hot-pork rolls and stuffing. I walk through Little Ouseburn and turn right at the boarded-up Green Tree pub. The path goes up towards Brunsell Field, and another path takes me to Brunsell Hill, which at fifty-eight metres above sea level is hardly fitting of the description. A dozen rooks, witches on broomsticks, flap and cackle above me. The path cuts through two ploughed fields that slope down like hip bones as Wolfie and I approach a wooded area called The Dale. The woods are scarved in mist. They have a haunted, Hansel-and-Gretel feel to them. A few leaves cling to the sycamores like sleeping bats. The rest of the branches are bare. In the middle of the wood is a clearing and a little wooden footbridge over a dried-up beck. It would be a great place to wild camp. Or to enact a pagan sacrifice.

  I hear the squawking warble of a pheasant as Wolfie gives chase. It takes refuge in a tree. Pheasants have the flight capacity to reach the top of the trees, but they don’t seem to like doing it for some reason. They much prefer low-lying branches. Or, even better, scooting around on the ground. It must just be down to the amount of energy it takes to achieve flight for these elegantly heavy birds.

  This area is intensively farmed. Industrialised agriculture has made much of England a green and unpleasant land, a monoculture, but these scraps of wooded areas, often left because of a geographical dip in the Earth’s surface, make it hard work for industrial machines. They are an oasis in an arable desert, providing welcome areas of seclusion and biodiversity. But there needs to be more incentive and more encouragement to reforest places like this. Flatness invites plough and tractor. Steepness and wetness are nature’s only defence against man and machine. But lakes can be drained, rivers dammed. So, these geographical corrugations offer essential refuge. I am struck, whenever I venture from the Yorkshire Moors that surround my home to gentler contours, how much we rely on glacial folds and river-worn ravines to experience anything approaching wildness. The natural world is vanishing.

  I quickly leave the brief oasis and meet ploughed paths again. The mist has cushioned and muffled the land, so there is an eerie quiet, like my ears are stuffed with cotton wool. A path goes over to Grassgills. I call it a path, but it’s really non-existent. Marked clearly on the map, the farmer has blatantly ploughed across it, reclaiming it by planting crops right along its length. Green shoots, about two or three inches in length, poke out of freshly turned earth that is claggy and soft and sticks to the soles of my boots. Without the OS map, there would be no indication of this public right of way. That’s not to say that the Brontës’ beloved moors were a free pass either. Getting access to rural spaces was then, and is now, an ongoing battle. At the end of the field is another wooded area with feeders for pheasants. It is obviously a shooting spot. There are dozens and dozens of pheasants, and the noise is deafening as they take to the skies.

  I walk through the grounds of Park House Farm, coated in animal effluence and odious silage. Again, there are no waymarkers and no way of knowing where the path is meant to be. I stop to ask the farmer. He tells me to walk straight across his field towards an ash tree. Once again, the path has been ploughed over, and the farmer’s theft is blatant. My feet sink into the claggy ploughed trenches, trampling on the fresh green shoots. I have to guess where the ash tree is, as visibility is not more than two hundred yards now.

  Next, I make my way through a field of sheep that look like mist on legs to Gallaber Lane, which I cross, and head towards Marton village via Reas Lane. Marton village is typically picturesque, full of little cottages called things like Orchard Cottage or Plum Tree House, and with wisteria, and other climbing plants, growing up the side, rich with orange-yellow berries.

  There is a church like something from a Constable painting with latticed windows. There are two bell towers – the main one has space to house two bells, but one is missing. The entrance to the church is at the side. Inside, there are two rows of pews, exposed brickwork and a fine Roman arch. There are homemade jams for sale and an honesty box. There’s a brass-cleaning rota, and this month, November, is the turn of Zoe Hartley-Metcalfe. I notice the brass work is sparkling. Good work, Zoe.

  I buy a Styrofoam cup of tea from the post office and sit outside the Punch Bowl Inn. It’s a good-looking pub, but a quick glance through the window reveals the tell-tale signs: clothed tables with upturned wine glasses. It looks like a pub but is really a restaurant.

  A path takes me across some playing fields. Steep steps lead up to the trig point of Grafton Hill. And here we are, at the top of the hill, standing next to the white triangular pillar that tells us we are seventy-five metres above sea level. It is called Grafton Hills on the OS map, which seems rather optimistic. The hill is really the biggest of a series of hillocks, like upturned pudding bowls. Although Grafton Hill is the highest point in the area, perhaps Juliet Barker is right to call it not a hill but an ‘eminence’ between Thorpe Green Hall and Boroughbridge.

  Visibility now is down to one hundred yards. I can just make out the children’s play area directly below me: swings, a slide and a climbing frame. There’s a bench close to the swings, and a huddled figure drinks from a tin of Oranjeboom. I can’t even make out the trees that line the field.

  I’ve picked probably the worst day of the year to take in the view. But I imagine Branwell standing here, on a good clear day, overlooking the Vale of York, taking in the spires of York Minster and Ripon, and thinking impure thoughts about Lydia Robinson. Full of lust, or love, or both. He didn’t really have much luck that way. He’d just come from Broughton-in-Furness, where he’d possibly sired an illegitimate child, and now here he was in the arms of a paramour some years his senior.

  They’re a funny lot, these vicars’ sons, caught between three worlds: they have the status of the middle class and the income of the working class but hang around with gentry. They don’t easily fit into any social group and are expected to carry on the tradition of piety and virtue
that their fathers have trained them in.

  Branwell’s untitled poem begins ‘O’er Grafton Hill the blue heaven smiled serene, / On Grafton Hill the grass waved bright and green’. It goes on to talk about the Vale of York as ‘England’s noblest vale’ and eulogises about ‘summer’s sun and balmy gale’. It’s very much a poem that a young man in lust and love would write.

  I watch the huddled figure below glug from his blue-and-silver can of extra-strength lager. He takes in a lungful of smoke from a vaping device and lets it escape from his mouth like steam from a kettle. I’m not feeling the love today. The air is damp and heavy, fretted and webbed with an ominous quiet. I think about Branwell and Lydia wrapped in one another’s arms, using hope to ward off a creeping despair, not quite at that point in their doomed relationship where possibility is smothered by reality.

  After heading down from the top of the hill, the path cuts across Gallaber Farm and down Gallaber Lane towards a Roman road. The grass is still limp and sopping wet, and it soon soaks through my Gore-Tex-lined boots. I walk briefly along the Roman road. These dead straight ways must have been a lot of trouble to make, but in the long run they would have saved miles of footfall. It’s a decision against nature. The paths and roadways that follow the curves and undulations of the land not only feel more a part of the landscape, but provide a more varied experience for the walker, the view ever changing as the path twists and turns.

  Wolfie and I jump over a stile and try to find a path that goes across the field that is clearly marked on the OS map, but, once again, the farmer has thieved it: ploughed and planted it. Dead straight lines as far as the eye can see. I join the road with no walker’s path. And although it is clearly marked with thirty-miles-an-hour signs, locals tear arse around in their souped-up Beamers, and pumped-up 4x4s, doing seventy-odd and I again hug the hedge trying not to get Stephen Kinged. I’m in a rather deflated mood, the opposite of the one Branwell would have been in as he meandered back to Monk’s House, thinking about his next illicit meeting with Lydia and the pleasures of the flesh.