by Roger Deakin
Jan and Andy. Aug ’97.
That evening, I swam alone at nightfall in one of the village swimming holes: the black pool below the Beezley Falls on the River Doe. The falls drop twenty feet down rock walls to a deep pool, with wooded cliffs rising perpendicular either side of it for forty feet. I undressed on a ledge by the pool, noticing all the right signs; the worn, precarious bough of an old stag-headed oak at the cliff-top stretching high over the water like a gibbet, dangling a frayed and weather-beaten rope. The air had cooled suddenly under a clear sky and the water felt thick with mystery when I climbed down the shadowed rocks, dived, and swam across the eddy to the waterfall, circling the boiling epicentre. In the night, the place was that much noisier, with a sound like continuous wild applause; at once beautiful and menacing. It seemed to swell and die, then redouble, then fade again, as though a ghostly audience were all about the rocks. Swimming through invisible force-fields of turbulence, I rolled over on my back and looked up at the night sky past the brooding rock and the canopy of oak. The sleek, black water tasted fresh and peaty as I leant into the shuddering current with each new stroke in the deep, high-sided cauldron. It brimmed over a slender lip of rock into a second waterfall that in turn sent others dashing down the steep ravine, winding darkly out of sight towards Ingleton, echoing through the lichened oaks. I felt acutely alone, not so much lonely as a rank outsider to this adventurous place, one of the ‘offcumden’, as Ingleton people still say; literally ‘people who have come from afar’.
Curious to witness the daytime comings and goings in this theatre of seething water, I returned at noon next day to an astonishing scene. Swimmers thronged the banks, above the waterfall, in the pool, on every rock. Some even launched themselves recklessly into the falls themselves, tumbling helter-skelter into the pool below. Before a gallery of admiring teenage girls across the water, the boys queued up by the worn oak bough I had noticed the night before. It seemed to have no life in it at all, yet was springy enough to bear the weight of the average Ingleton daredevil. Boys teetered out along the touch-and-go springboard to a point directly above the centre of the pool, poised themselves, and jumped. They seemed to hang suspended for an age, treading the air, before hitting the water. I half-expected the crack of the tired branch snapping, but it never came. Some swung out on the rope, judging the moment to let go and sail on into the void, rising before falling. Once you kicked off, you had to let go else you would be dashed against the cliff. The informal air-traffic control was too haphazard for swimming under the waterfall, so I swam in the river pools above the falls, grappling my way upstream from pool to pool, pausing to cool in the eddies in rocky bays along the banks.
I had made my camp two miles away in Kingsdale the night before, in the lee of the Cheese Press Stone, overlooking the single-track road from Ingleton to Dent. Beneath me, hidden under the limestone, ran a seven-mile system of underground rivers, submerged passages and flooded caves. A group of skilled and daring cave-divers, centred around Ingleton and Dent, have dived and swum through miles of these subterranean streams, exploring and mapping them for the first time. I had naively enquired in Bernie’s Café whether I, too, might swim underground. ‘It all depends how long you plan to stay alive,’ was the reply.
In the morning, a swaddling of white mist hung over the rivers that converge on Ingleton as I breakfasted in my camp. A pair of rabbiters came downhill off the moor, out with their guns for some early sport. They were from Oldham and had set out in the middle of Saturday night in a battered red Ford GT Manta to be on the moor by four o’clock. They were both short, wiry and moustachioed, dressed in camouflage fatigues and black woollen bobble-hats, each with several rabbits slung jauntily over one shoulder. Describing their previous weekend’s expedition to a field on a farm across the dale, they said, ‘There were that many rabbits, it were like a shag-pile carpet.’
*
At Kirkby Lonsdale that afternoon, a hot wind ruffled the blanket of Virginia creeper on the walls of the Royal Hotel by the town square. I walked down through the churchyard to the elevated viewpoint known as Church Brow, and got into the River Lune, a hundred feet below, down a steep, wooded bank. I swept along with it in a great bend past the water meadows below the town. This was the landscape of woods, river and meadows Turner painted. It was described by Ruskin in Fors Clavigera, as ‘one of the loveliest scenes in England’. The river was broad and often shallow as I swam down past the town parkland, then in faster water that surged through giant dark-grey boulders towards the stone-arched Devil’s Bridge.
The river ran down into a deep pool fifty feet beneath the highest point on the bridge, and I found myself suddenly surrounded by fellow bathers. Groups of them sat about the banks, waded about the shallows, and swam. Most were bikers, out for a Sunday ride. There must have been a thousand motorbikes parked up by the bridge, so there were probably nearly 2,000 bikers, including a chapter or two of Hell’s Angels, leaning over the vertiginous parapet, besieging the hot-dog van, or crowding the banks. A blinding aura of chrome heightened the scene. Everything glistened and scintillated in the sun: leathers, studs, Raybans, and the river, snaking off beyond the old stone arches.
What I witnessed on the bridge stopped me in my tracks. A Byronic young biker, stripped to the waist, stood poised on the parapet as if to leap to his death. There was a big commotion and a lot of shouting, which I assumed was fellow bikers trying to talk him down. One false move and he might jump. A series of images flashed up in quick succession; Harold Lloyd up a skyscraper, James Dean, Evil Knievel. The youth kept poising himself to leap, raising his arms into the swallow-dive position, stretching out his fingertips, and going up on to the balls of his toes. The crowd would hush. Then his resolve would waver, and he would step back an inch or two for a moment. The shouting would begin again. Swimming closer, I realised to my horror that the crowd was egging him on. ‘Go on, yer bugger! Yer’ve bottled it seven times now, mon.’ I had heard of Hell’s Angels’ initiation rituals, but wasn’t this going a bit far? Just then, it all went quiet again and this time he jumped, sailing down in the silence for what seemed like an eternity into the pool between two massive rocks. Deafening cheers and mingled obscenities rang round the gorge as the jumper shot back up like a yo-yo, apparently none the worse, and hauled himself on to the bank. In no time at all another kamikaze candidate was up on the parapet at a point at the centre of the bridge, which I later examined and fancied was distinctly toe-worn. A chorus of chicken mimicry instantly ensued, punctuated by such encouragements as: ‘Wanker!’ ‘Get ’em off!’ ‘Get on with it!’
A more or less continuous procession of lemming leapers continued to hurl themselves off the bridge all afternoon, sometimes in pairs like Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It was a time-honoured custom, they told me, and the Devil’s Bridge has long been a rendezvous for daring young men on flying machines from all over the North of England on summer Sundays. The chief peril of the Devil’s Bridge leap lay in the necessity of targeting the deepest part of a pool that looked relatively small from such a height, and in keeping well balanced for a streamlined entry at high velocity. Meanwhile, a break-away chapter of rope-swingers diverted the audience with Tarzan leaps (with matching vocals) from the official Kirkby Lonsdale Dangling Rope. There were Janes too, although heavily outnumbered by the Tarzans. They queued on one of the big rock slabs beneath the bridge, swinging off a sycamore branch into the same pool. One proud biker-father even launched his little son swinging into the river off the rope. The boy was barely four years old, and still without tattoos. Steep banks formed a natural amphitheatre to the afternoon’s drama, and the huge audience showed its appreciation. A group of wags even yelled marks out of ten, holding up flattened paper cups like score cards at the Olympics. In the foreground were the usual notices forbidding bathing or canoeing, draped with wet trunks drying out in the sun.
Such a display of anarchy and sheer joie de vivre was inspiring; and miraculous
ly, no one seemed to come to any harm at all. Nobody dived; everyone jumped, and when I asked about this I was told the pool was ‘deep, but not that deep’. The entire scene was straight out of the pages of Three Men in a Boat, and Jerome K. Jerome’s description of the Sandford lasher on the Thames:
The pool under Sandford lasher is a very good place to drown yourself in. The undercurrent is terribly strong and if you once get down into it you are all right. An obelisk marks the spot two men have already been drowned, while bathing there; and the steps of the obelisk are generally used as a diving board by young men who wish to see if the place really is dangerous.
Diving is a declining art in Britain. Few pools even allow it, and the boards have mostly been dismantled. The minimum safe depth recommended by the ASA for diving off the poolside is your height with your arms outstretched above your head. There are plenty of swimmers over six feet, so the minimum has to be eight or nine feet. Many pools are not even this deep, and diving boards would logically require yet greater depths.
I still remember the first time I went off the top board at the Watford Baths and, that same summer, at the Kenilworth Baths. Such moments were important rites of passage, climbing that extra set of steps, holding on to the rails with shaky hands you hoped no one would notice. An even greater day was when instead of jumping, you dived. Once you had taken that fateful walk along the coconut matting to the edge, you knew all eyes were on you; there was no going back. If your nerve failed, you would jump instead of diving. In the school swimming pool, the top board was close enough to the roof to reach up and grasp a girder, dripping with condensation, and go out swinging hand over hand, then let go. I still dream of such moments.
Samuel Beckett would have been at home in Kirkby Lonsdale. As a child it was his habit to fling himself out of trees; he once climbed to the top of a sixty-foot fir and launched himself to the ground, relying on the lower branches to break his fall. He became obsessively keen on perilous diving, in pools, off cliffs and in dreams.
Richard Hoseason Smith, a sea-swimmer and diver born and raised in the Shetland Islands, wrote and described to me how generations of Shetlanders have learnt to dive off a rock called the ‘Giant’s Leg’. It is 150 feet high and there are ledges all the way up to the summit. As children, they simply graduated one notch higher up the rock as their confidence, or bravado, grew. There was no swimming pool in the Shetlands at all until 1969, so everyone swam in the sea. Richard used to spend part of his summer holiday in Norfolk, and swam in what was once the largest open-air pool in the country at Great Yarmouth. High-diving displays were held at the pool every afternoon during the season, and a £5 prize was offered to anyone who would dive off the high board. It was thirty metres high and the pool was twenty-four feet deep. Richard was eleven or twelve years old at the time and already a skilful Shetland rock-diver. Volunteers were first invited to dive from the eight-metre board to demonstrate their competence. Richard passed the test and went on up to the high board. A hundred feet up, all you see are the tiles on the bottom, but you need to aim for the surface; and above all you want to be certain it is there. So Richard got a friend to sit at the side of the pool and splash his feet to disturb the water. He took so much prize money off the Yarmouth pool with his spectacular dives that he was eventually banned from entering the display. On his farewell appearance, he dived from another man’s shoulders. Another swimmer there used to execute swallow dives wrapped in flaming hessian. Yet another dived off a ladder he had lashed to the high board.
During the 1920s there was a wild gang of boys and market-traders in Norwich who used to swim in the River Wensum and dive off the bridges for small change. The painter Edward Seago, then in his mid-teens and always fascinated by gypsies or wild outsiders of any kind, knew them, and used to go and watch. Like the boys at Ely, the daring ones used to go higher, off a crane that unloaded the barges. But the craziest of them all was Sonny Goodson, grandson of the famous Norwich poacher Billy ‘Pitler’ Goodson. Sonny would climb to the roof of a tall dye-works in the St George’s district and dive into the river from the parapet. Then one afternoon in 1924 Sonny attempted the most astonishing feat of his diving career. No doubt the bet of a pound by a couple of the local traders seemed attractive to the fifteen-year-old, and there was a family daredevil tradition to honour. He climbed over the roof of the Norwich Art School just downstream from St George’s bridge, on to a brick ledge below the copper dome of the tower, sixty-nine feet above the pavement. Then, instead of diving straight down into the river below, he launched out in a great arc upstream, taking an outward trajectory that would clear the bridge and land him in the river beyond it. His feet are said to have missed the parapet by inches as he shot down. The distance he had to travel through the horizontal was some forty feet. Goodson later said that he thought there was about twelve feet of water in the river at the time, although it has silted up a good deal since. The little crowd who watched Sonny’s dive took up a collection and gave him the two shillings and fourpence on top of his bet money. He took a group of them to Yarmouth on the proceeds for the day. The police got to hear of the incident and gave Sonny a ticking off. And that was all the recognition he received.
It was too warm not to be in the river, and the bridge-jumping was strictly a spectator sport for me, so I set off back up the cooling Lune as the bikers saddled up and rode away in little swarms. Some had lit barbecues and small wood fires on the rocks, and smoke hung over the water in the reddening evening. What I liked about this river was the way it combined the play of wild life with the play of human life. Wild salmon still run up the Lune each year from Lancaster, and the egrets and herons that fished along the banks had been quite unruffled by the angels on the bridge not far away. I swam, waded and walked back to my rucksack, hidden by the bank, and repaired to the public bar of the Sun to plan my Monday morning expedition to Hell Gill. Dropping off to sleep up Barbondale in the tent that night, the limpid cadences of remembered Cumbrian speech from the pub mixed with the song of the running beck as I lay trying to imagine Hell Gill, and feeling some apprehension about my total lack of potholing experience.
21
A DESCENT INTO HELL GILL
Yorkshire/Cumbria border, 18 August
BACK IN BERNIE’S Café at Ingleton, they had told me to expect an experience somewhere between potholing, swimming, surfing and rock-climbing if I ever ventured down the inside of Hell Gill. To find it, I was going to have to trek over the wild moorland of Abbotside Common beyond Wensleydale and Garsdale Head. After an indolent morning in the wilds of Barbondale, I drove up through Garsdale, took the road towards Kirkby Stephen, and parked the car half in Yorkshire, half in Cumbria, astride the county boundary. To walk up the Hell Gill beck on a sunny afternoon out of the vale of the River Eden (of which it is the headwater) was my idea of heaven. There were foxgloves and trout, and a buzzard sailing lazily aloft. From here, the Eden runs north through Appleby to Carlisle, and something odd must have happened in the upheaval of the Ice Age, because Hell Gill is only yards away from the source of the River Ure, which flows the opposite way, to the Humber.
I had packed a rope and wetsuit boots in the rucksack and followed a track over the Settle to Carlisle railway line and uphill past Hell Gill Farm, following the beck to a bridge and a small wood that grows around the precipitous gorge that brought me here. I skirted past it uphill, and there, suddenly, was the entrance to the canyon. The beck just funnelled between four rocks and disappeared into the hillside in a steep, concealed cleft. Even from a few yards away, you wouldn’t know it was there, and the hidden character of the beck is one possible origin of its name, from the old Teutonic Hala, ‘the coverer up, or hider’, and the verb hel, to hide. Looking down into the chasm, listening to the wild clamour of the hissing water pressing forward over the brink, I felt like a child at the top of the helter-skelter, or some equally dubious fairground ride: not at all sure this was such a good idea.
The Hell Gill gorge is like a pothole who
se roof has cracked open sixty feet or more above. It plunges almost vertically down the hillside for four hundred yards in a continuous series of waterfalls dropping into overflowing pools of hollowed limestone. Geologically, the tunnelling of the limestone probably began at the end of the last Ice Age, 11,000 years ago, when the melt-water from above, finding no other way out, flowed down through alternate strata of limestone, shale and sandstone higher up the hill, and, still trapped by the glacier overhead, burst down a weakness in the limestone layer it encountered here, and bored out the gorge by dissolving the rock.
My temporary state of funk took the form of an impromptu exploration of the upstream beck in the afternoon sun. It forms the county boundary here, and with all the energy of the serious procrastinator, I waded and swam my way upstream, criss-crossing from Yorkshire to Cumbria between huge slabs of grey limestone crammed with fossils. Trout lay in the riffles and darted into shadows. I wallowed in a five-foot-deep waterfall pool, and found vast water-slides, twenty-and thirty-foot tablets of the smoothed limestone that was once coral reefs rising out of a tropical seabed 280 million years ago. Here you could bathe all day without meeting a soul, and better still, know in your heart that you would be undisturbed. A hawk had been killing pigeons, butchering them on the rock beside the water here and there. The black stains on the limestone, and stuck feathers, accentuated the desolation of the moor.
Courage up, I returned to the turbulent rim of the gorge and did what I knew might be an unwise thing. I couldn’t help it. I began to slide into the mouth of the abyss itself. I found myself in the first of a series of smooth limestone cups four or five feet in diameter and anything between three and five feet deep, stepped at an acute angle down a flooded gulley of hollowed limestone that spiralled into the unknown. In the low light, the smooth, wet walls were a beautiful aquamarine, their shining surface intricately pock-marked like the surface of the moon. All my instincts were to hold on, but to what? The ice and the water had polished everything perfectly. The torrent continually sought to sweep me with it, and so I slithered and climbed down Hell Gill’s dim, glistening insides, through a succession of cold baths, in one long primal scream.
