The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play

by Stuart Maconie

  Even sans leaflet, and if I hadn’t known the way from Hawse End jetty to Catbells, navigation wouldn’t have been a problem any more than it would finding your route up Wembley Way on Cup Final day; it was simply a case of following the crowds. Like the passengers on the Princess Margaret Rose, the hardy adventurers came in all shapes and sizes. There were elegant Italians with chic leather handbags, large noisy Asian families with recalcitrant toddlers, lads in replica Newcastle tops, sweet elderly couples, crocodiles of children. Faced with his first glimpse of Catbells’ rugged south face, a young Yorkshire lad in a Superdry T-shirt turns to his dad aghast, ‘If ah falls off to my death, it’s tha fault.’

  You’d have to be supremely unlucky or daft to fall to your death this way, but nevertheless you shouldn’t underestimate the ascent. This is the way everyone comes, the winding path that lures you as you sit sipping your latte in a Keswick café. But it’s no ‘hands in pockets’ stroll. The path winds up Skelgill Bank, in and out of rocky excrescences and tumbled stones with the views across the lake and into Newlands Valley unfolding as you climb. In Hugh Walpole’s hugely popular Lakes potboiler Rogue Herries, they were always going backwards and forwards over Catbells, as you and I would go in and out of the kitchen, but they were clearly made of sterner stuff back then. Dip into Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and marvel at how they would think nothing of walking a tipsy Coleridge the 13 miles back to Keswick over Dunmail Raise after an evening’s declaiming and chatting.

  Even with stops for the flask and the views, getting your breath back over a quick and unnecessary look at the map and the best sausage rolls on the planet (which you will have bought from Cranstons of Penrith in advance if you are wise), you will still be at the top in an hour or so. At the summit on this day, we all commented on the sheer brutal force of the wind and the magnificence of the view. Small dogs abounded, displaying as all dogs do, that infectious boundless zest for life that make them such great company. (Is there any more joyous expression than that on the face of a dog with its head out of a moving car window?) At the top, I offered to take a group shot of a man and two ladies from Liverpool. They wanted one on each of their phones, and as I put one into my pocket briefly to use the other, one lady remarked, ‘Eh, I bet you get a fair few mobile phones like that.’

  And it was lovely. All of the books and guides will bang on about the crowds and suggest all manner of detours and circumnavigations to avoid the day trippers and I love a spot of high mountain solitude myself. But really is it so bad to spend some time shoulder to shoulder with one’s fellow folk? After all, diverse as they are, these are the best of people. On a day of freedom, they’ve chosen not to slump before a screen or plod around a shopping centre, but to take England’s free air on the top of a mountain. They are good company to be in.

  It’s different kind of pleasure from that of having the viewable world to oneself, to stand upon a lonely summit in splendid isolation. But it’s grand to see so many people of so many different races and types enjoying the open air and the joys of the British countryside. William Blake once wrote, ‘Great things are done when men and mountains meet; this is not done by jostling in the street.’ Here on proud little Catbells, work, mortgages and jostling in the street are forgotten for one day, and somewhere here a lifelong love affair was being kindled. A love of the outdoors, of putting one foot in front of the other, and the landscape of the north.

  Of course, to some people, I’m a Midlander. A son of the soft south even. Penrith and The Border MP Rory Stewart has made TV programmes about Cumbria and Northumbria describing them as The Middle Lands, which technically they are I suppose. Meriden in Warwickshire is the centre of England, but the centre of Britain is, as the board proudly reads as you enter the town, Haltwhistle. But, this is surely only if you are working merely from map latitudes rather than casts of mind and outlooks on life. This is the danger in trusting too much to facts, figures and statistics for me. It’s said a statistician is someone who, if you put his head in the freezer and his feet in the oven will say that, on average, he feels fine. I’d add that a statistician is someone who will tell you that Haltwhistle, Northumbria and County Durham are in the Midlands.

  Picture me this then. Picture me ‘a northerner’. Hold that thought. What do you see? A sooty-faced man emerging from a cage at the pithead? Elsie Tanner? Eric Bloodaxe doing a spot of light berserking? Geoffrey Boycott speaking as he finds and not suffering fools gladly? Someone with a whippet, a flat cap and rickets? Liam Gallagher perhaps?

  The image that probably hasn’t formed in your mind is a flamboyantly gay, privately educated, communist poet called Wystan wearing a floppy hat and possibly a cravat. And yet W H Auden was perhaps the quintessential northerner. He called the north his ‘Mutterland’ and memorably said of it ‘my great good place is the part of the Pennines bounded on the South by Swaledale, on the North by the Roman Wall and on the West by the Eden Valley.’ Even in the American exile of his later years, a battered Ordnance Survey map of Alston Moor hung on his wall in New York.

  Auden was born in the original York. As an 11-year-old, when his peers might have pored over stamps or strikers or steam engines, he was obsessed by County Durham’s lead mining industry and wrote in his diary of the magical places he hoped to visit one day, not Disneyland or Narnia, not even Blackpool Pleasure Beach but Rookhope, Allenheads and Killhope.

  And from my sixth until my sixteenth year

  I thought myself a mining engineer.

  He first came to County Durham in 1919, and the love affair was consummated swiftly and passionately and affirmed for life. He was 21 then, and when he was 60 and remarkably well travelled, he still called himself a ‘son of the north’. His friend Christopher Isherwood said of him that ‘his romantic travel-wish was always towards the north. He could never understand how anyone could long for the sun, the blue sky, the palm-trees of the south. His favourite weather was autumnal, high wind and driving rain.’

  No wonder then that he loved the lonely, north-eastern corner of England; the North Pennines, Weardale, County Durham and its Dales. He even tried to lure American tourists up here, away from the soft, easy, moneyed pleasures of the Cotswolds and Piccadilly Circus, in an article about the North Pennines he wrote for Vogue in 1954 called ‘Six Unexpected Days’. Sixty years later, I had a few days of my own there, as I wanted to see some of the region’s mining country, the places that so obsessed Auden and had now, strangely, become tourist destinations in themselves.

  I say strangely since it would have appeared that way to the Pitmen Painters. They were from this area, Ashington in County Durham, though largely they worked the huge Durham fields for coal, rather than lead in Weardale. The group, whose latterly famous members included men like Oliver Kilbourn, George Blessed, Jimmy Floyd and Harry Wilson, came together in 1934 through the Workers Education Association to study art appreciation. However, their tutor Robert Lyon encouraged them to learn by painting themselves and this they did with great skill and success, being critically feted by the London art world and artists like Henry Moore.

  If the genesis of the group was artistic, other forces were at work too. Most of the group were members of the Independent Labour Party and drew up an extensive list of regulations by which all members had to abide, and they always preferred the name Ashington Group to Pitmen Painters. Also of course their art, which covered everything from life underground to domestic scenes to evocations of the northeastern landscape, was an escape. These were men whose working lives were spent in conditions we can barely imagine. To sit and paint in the fresh, lonely air of Weardale and Country Durham must have been bliss after the filthy and dangerous world of the mines.

  The group lasted until the early 1980s, still meeting weekly, producing new art and taking on new members. In the 1980s, the group’s ‘Permanent Collection’ became the first Western exhibition in China after the Cultural Revolution. Though their meeting hut was demolished in 1983, you can still see the paintings free in Wood
horn Museum and a book about the group has been adapted into a hit play by Lee Hall of Billy Elliot fame.

  Headed for those harsh uplands, I arrived via Teesdale, one of those places that guidebook writers are so fond of calling hidden gems that they can soon become neither. Not so Romaldkirk on a Sunday evening in August. The timing is nicely appropriate as I find myself in the midst of a scene straight from ITV’s summer Sunday evening TV schedules of comfort viewing re-runs and cosy old favourites. Except that if the writers of Miss Marple, Downton, Midsomer Murders or anything of that ilk had produced this, it would have been dismissed as fanciful, de trop, cheesy even.

  The sun is dipping behind the ash and beech trees that nestle the village green. There is a dreamy late-summer mood to the air and in it the first hint of sweet, warm rain to come. Across the green, from a high and handsome church, comes a bright peal of bells suddenly augmented by, from the village hall, a lustily sung, stirringly harmonised version of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ by – it would seem – everyone in the village. One of them, the doctor, tells me that ‘the footpaths hereabouts are all kept open thanks to the efforts of the village people.’ Sipping my single malt, I smile at this. I’d have thought they’d have been too busy perfecting their act and trying out those construction worker and motorcycle cop outfits.

  The next morning is squally, bright and wet, and I arrive at breakfast with my maps and books just as a lady is leaving with a partly consumed breakfast in a doggie bag. ‘For the dog,’ she explains, lest I think she is taking it back to her room for a furtive slice of black pudding and congealed egg at midnight. Romaldkirk is one of a series of villages that are strung along the dark rope of the slanting River Tees like pearls along a necklace, Romaldkirk, Mickleton, Cotherstone. I plan to get a little of the lie of the land with a ‘leg stretcher’ along the old railway path towards Middleton-in-Teesdale.

  In 1963, between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP, sexual intercourse was invented according to Philip Larkin but in a less welcome development, a bristling moustachioed chap called Beeching made himself the most hated civil servant in British history by closing a third of the nation’s railways. The good doctor thought that trains were there simply to make money. He understood or cared nothing for railways as a resource for the community, or had any feeling for the unique place railways have in our national psyche, from Brief Encounter to Conan Doyle, Thomas the Tank Engine to The Railway Children. But the one good thing to come from Beeching’s miserable and short-sighted plan was that now these long-dormant lines make perfect flat and navigable walks along old lines, passing though gentle countryside, each echoing in one’s imagination with ghostly rattles and whistles, the waving of little flags and the slamming of carriage doors.

  Middleton-in-Teesdale is, so say those guidebook writers quoted above, a hidden gem of a village, well a town actually. It has the gentle, pastoral feel of village life to a degree but also a briskness and sense of purpose. People are coming and going, tourists and dawdlers, yes, but also men with paint brushes and buckets, and women with books and bags of shopping.

  ‘Hello stranger,’ says one to another in one of Middleton’s many real shops, selling fruit and kettles and dressing gowns as well as postcards and scented candles. ‘I did wave t’other day,’ comes the reply. The feeling that these are living places of home, school and work, as well as leisure, is what sets the Teesdale villages apart from those somnolent picture-book hamlets of Oxfordshire and the West Country, where hedge fund managers from the square mile pretend to be country squires for the weekend. Of course, there’s a deal of that up here too of course. The moors around here are ideal for the slaughter of tiny birds, should that be your thing, and they come in their tweeds and their SUVs from Clerkenwell and Canary Wharf to do just that.

  From Bowlees you can walk along the river to High Force, the big scenic draw around here, and take in some public art along the way. Or, if you have been rendered inert by the Teesdale Farmer’s Lunch at the visitors’ centre, you can try something smaller and pay a little toll to descend the accessible path, remade after the bank was all but destroyed in a storm in 1992. This new path winds slowly down, with views improving all the time on the left across the yawning ravine. Below the clear cold Tees moves along the valley floor with the an easy serpentine muscularity, swirling and eddying through a jungle of dense mixed woodland and bouldered shores that, it strikes me, must have looked exactly like this millennia ago, maybe even during the Carboniferous era when we were on the equator. While trying to get my head around this geological titbit, I turn the corner and something else strikes me.

  High Force is England’s ‘largest’ waterfall. Not highest – that is Cautley Spout, on the other side of the Pennines, but High Force trounces it in terms of the size and length of the downfall. Essentially, all of the River Tees plunges here over the huge precipice of the Whin Sill, a grand high and bony shoulder of igneous rock that is one of the North Pennines’ most dramatic features. If you wanted to be deliberately, deflatingly prosaic you might say that it looks initially, as you turn the bend, as if an enormous bowl of used washing-up water were being tipped out by some slovenly giant in a huge primeval kitchen; a frothy, dirty torrent crashing down with a manic roar of rage.

  I get nearer and leave the path to descend over the rocks. You need to watch your step here; the boulders are always slick and in winter positively treacherous. But I want that jolt of the visceral, to feel the spray and the churn, the amoral but not immoral power and force that courses through nature and that draws some of us to precarious, wild and lonely places.

  High Force does not care what you earn or how new your car is. It doesn’t give a damn about the price of your house. The granddad on the riverbank path ahead of me knows this as, seeing his grandchild beginning to clamber unsteadily over the wet, black rocks, he sweeps up his little charge into his arms. ‘I don’t think so, littl’un,’ he says with a smile, and we all look back at the Force. To the left and right of the great downfall of water, there are thin-webbed fingers of tiny cataracts sneaking down the rock face. Driven remorselessly by current and gravity, unless we interfere of course, in another few thousand years, maybe a few million, these will be as mighty as High Force, and I wonder who will see them.

  The hills of the North Pennines, of County Durham, Teesdale and Weardale, are lovely but harsh, compelling but unforgiving. In the 1970s, an ITV documentary made an unlikely star of an unassuming Daleswoman called Hannah Hauxwell. Hannah was living a solitary, frugal, isolated life at remote Low Birk Hatt Farm when firstly a Yorkshire Post article and then a TV programme in 1973 made her famous. Viewers all over the world were moved and gripped by her story and her gentle, gracious stoicism in the face of the barely endurable winters of the High Pennines.

  I’m looking at Hannah’s old farm now from the high ridge across the valley, and wondering what life for that kindly, middle-aged spinster must have been like for all those winters before the world knew of her. Eventually those winters grew too much, and Hannah went down to live in a little house in Cotherstone, a neat village down in the dale where she still lives. I’ve been to Cotherstone once before and remember it chiefly for two reasons, a tasty, chalky local cheese, and a pub landlord who came out to supervise somewhat hawkishly our parking. So today I’m staying high, perched with the lapwings on the moors that Hannah would have known, loved and maybe feared. I can see Low Birk Hatt Farm across the reservoirs, which today are as black and choppy as the North Sea, and with names that when traced with a finger on the map sound as incantatory as a poem: Grassholme, Selset, Hury, Blackton; echoing across the page like something from Beowulf or the Icelandic Eddas.

  I’m on the flat, rocky top of Goldsborough Rigg, a gritty outcropping riven by freeze-thaw action high in a vast squelching morass of boggy moorland. The stony, shattered summit looks uninviting but must be a welcome waymarker on this stretch of the Pennine Way which picks a shrivelled thread across Cotherstone Moor. The rain scu
ds in over Clove Lodge Farm and the forbidding sounding Hagworm Hall, and even in August the going is spongy and, should you be walking the Way, will surely give you calves of iron and a sense of wild exhilaration tempered by deep bottom notes of discomfort and despair. Just as at High Force, the thought occurs that most of this landscape won’t have changed since William the Conqueror harried the north.

  Later, back in the lowland dales, like the Normans might have done, I go harrying the north in search of a charger. But whereas with William it would have been a war horse, in my case it’s for my iPhone.

  I’m in Barnard Castle now, one of the jewels of a county that’s described on some of the brown signs hereabouts as ‘the land of the Prince Bishops’. The Prince Bishops always sound to me like a northern club circuit comedy pop troupe of the seventies, rather like The Grumbleweeds or The Black Abbots, but they were in fact the ecclesiastical rulers of County Durham in the wake of the Norman Conquest. The town sits imperiously on a high perch of rock overlooking the Tees and is named after the fortification that Bernard De Balliol built here when he owned the gaff and before it fell into the hands of Richard III, or Dickie III as he is known among the luvvies of Stratford Upon Avon.

  On the trip where I first encountered the fine cheeses and limited parking of Cotherstone, I visited Barnard Castle, too, and was very taken by it: by its wide and bustling high street called the Galgate, that curious circular octangular bandstand thing which is actually the old Butter Mart and by its general air of brisk attractiveness; again a purposeful town and a pretty one, but one that doesn’t spend a great deal of time preening itself in the mirror. Charles Dickens stayed at the King’s Head on one of his ‘rock star’ style tours, and popped into the local clockmakers to ask who made a particularly fine clock in the window. He was told by the clockmaker that it was the handiwork of his boy Humphrey and Chas is said to have been inspired to call his new periodical Master Humphrey’s Clock in which Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop first appeared.