Ring the Hill

by Tom Cox

  Clifton went missing again, for longer, in more severe snow. I called and called, walked and walked, whistled and whistled in the endless wild ground behind the house, a yawning secret valley all of its own, an extra valley before the official valley, walled in by staircases of dense woodland whose carpets were made impenetrable by scrub and eclectic stone coated in old moss: no place to even begin to find a lost cat. The snow began to drift and by the time she returned I had almost given her up for dead and was already beginning the process of looking for the situation’s bright side, telling myself that at least, in her current masticated state in a fox’s stomach, she was keeping a starving wild animal alive.

  Clifton had not been seeing eye to eye with Roscoe, who was repeatedly chasing her out into the cold, but I doubted that was the only reason for her disappearances. She had a wild streak, barely less wild than the place I’d brought her to. She’d been spotted in countless micro regions around The Hill That Never Ends, up to a mile away, strutting along the drystone wall at the summit near the old fluorspar mine, in tractors and barns, in fields, having her head licked clean by farm dogs eight times her size. Just prior to leaving Devon, I’d adopted her in a weak moment, as a favour to a friend who worked at the local vet surgery, and to myself. I named her Clifton because she looked so similar to a cat I’d met on the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol only a week earlier, and because I was moving to a house overlooking an inland cliff, and because she’d been initially found, as a stray, outside a bookshop run by my friend Cliff. She’d repeatedly run away from her previous home, and I’d thought it had been just due to the situation there, but it seemed a lot of it was just her.

  The snow did not appear to trouble her in the slightest, and she often returned home totally white, as opposed to the mostly white she was the rest of the time. So much was white here, in the final furlongs of the White Peak: Clifton, the face of every human I saw, the snow, that dark piercing daylight, the surname of my landlord. When we moved in, Mr White had promised me and my two sets of neighbours that his vehicles would clear the track if it got too snowy to negotiate, but it never happened. There was one other farmhouse half a mile away, but, besides that and our little clutter of buildings, there wasn’t another human in residence until you got a mile away and the houses of Eyam, in one direction, and Grindleford, in the other, started to materialise. My adjoining neighbours, Mr White’s other tenants, were two middle-aged sisters who’d come here from the edge of Buxton, in the High Peak, but said they were finding the weather conditions very extreme, compared to their previous house. On the other side of them, in the final part of the farmhouse, were a younger couple who’d come to Eyam following a long stint in Norway. Then, across the courtyard, there was Mr White and his wife. By the beginning of March, they’d all be gone – even the ghost dog. All that would be left would be me, two cats, and the snow.

  ‘It’s far more complicated than that,’ has become a bit of a catchphrase for me in recent times, albeit one I utter more often in my head than aloud. It’s something I find myself wanting to say a lot, especially when I see the shouty, unresearched condemnations of the Internet zip by, the back-patting knee-jerk opinion factory of social media. ‘It’s far more complicated than that’ would also be a fitting response to any attempt to neatly sum up why, in early 2018, I found myself alone, near the pinnacle of an almost mountain, snowed in, on the edge of a plague village which was not in one of the four main areas of the country where my friends and family lived. But who isn’t guilty of falling into the trap of oversimplification from time to time? We search for easy rules, so life doesn’t keep us awake at night with its contradictions, nuances and anomalies. I know, for example, that I have fallen into the trap, at least to an extent, of viewing the United Kingdom as a graph of empathy and meteorological remorselessness, all growing in a northerly direction. But, of course … it’s far more complicated than that. I knew it was far more complicated than that before I moved to the Peak District, and I knew it more profoundly afterwards. In north Derbyshire I witnessed more racist conversations, more anecdotal accounts of animals being killed for pleasure, than I’d witnessed in two decades of living below the UK’s midriff. I witnessed a significantly less hostile climate in the south, it was true, but it wasn’t as if it kept getting worse the farther north you went. During the heaviest snow, I’d see real-time photos of North Yorkshire and Cumbria and the Scottish Highlands looking positively Mediterranean by comparison. But, to be fair, that could happen in the valley directly below me, too. Down by the Derwent, the weather was sometimes so different, you wouldn’t even know it was white up at the top of The Hill That Never Ends, let alone white enough to make it impossible to leave your house by car. I had somehow managed to pinpoint the exact worst spot for winter weather in the whole of England, then go and live in it, 1,500 feet above reality. ‘You won’t find a driver who’ll take you back up there until March at the earliest,’ a taxi driver in Sheffield told me.

  Checking the forecast – which was taken from a point 300 feet lower than the house, so always needed to be embellished with an extra crust of ice – became an obsession. If I could safely get out via car to explore, even for a few hours, I was determined to do so. Despite being incontrovertibly snowed in for over 50 per cent of my three and a bit months in Eyam, I covered a lot of ground as a walker in the parts of the county beyond my immediate reach: the drowned stepping stones of Chee Dale; the standing stones of Arbor Low; Wirksworth’s Black Rocks with their timeline of lovers’ graffiti; the limestone cavities beyond Tideswell; Little John’s Grave at Hathersage; Kinder Scout, where I found two conjoined sycamores resembling a man with branch hands – Crooker himself? – raging at an unjust universe; the silent fields behind Monsal Dale, where my friend Sophie and I mooched around an abandoned cottage full of dead crows and mice. I escaped to Norfolk to visit friends and my dad, arriving at my house during another onslaught of snow, left his car at the top of the track, and sledged down to feed the cats and spend forty-eight hours shadowing Richard and his work, gathering firewood in the lost valley and living his 1980s fantasy life. He enjoyed the sledge journey so much he went back up to the top a few more times and zipped down again, for the pure pleasure of it. In August he would be sixty-nine. That is, if August ever happened.

  Spring and summer were barely rumours in Eyam in January and February. Nobody even mentioned them. On a rare day when the God of the Fields, John Barleycorn, peeked one eye out from behind the white curtain, I went walking a few miles away in the Moss Valley with Jim Ghedi. I had met Jim in a pub in Hathersage just before Christmas. He had been hungover, having been drinking the previous night with more than three blacksmiths. He couldn’t remember exactly how many blacksmiths but knew it was more than three. Jim is young and tall and never-married, with long, dark, flowing hair, but when he opens his mouth to sing it is as if his body has been taken over by the spirit of a ninety-four-year-old, three-times-divorced miner. He has a singing voice that somehow manages to be rich peat and molten iron at the same time, but he possesses the restraint and confidence in his own musicianship to only use it sparingly. We walked past St John’s Church in the village of Ridgeway and he noticed that the poster advertising his upcoming gig there had fallen half-down. I found some Blu-Tack which, having had a long and involved relationship with Blu-Tack, I arrogantly pledged to revive and use to re-affix the poster to the notice board, but it was no use: the Blu-Tack was old and could not be resuscitated. We walked downhill to an abandoned engine room and past a rope-swing Jim had attached to a tree back when he was in his teens. The songs he writes are entrenched in the working life and social history of the Moss Valley, where he has lived for most of his life. He told me about the packhorse mule which would bring tools down the valley from Ridgeway to a waterwheel near here, four times a day, all on its own, from Phoenix Works, a five-and-a-half-century-old scythe and sickle manufacturer that Jim celebrates in a stirring song of the same name.

  To get to Jim
’s from my house you curved around the bottom of the clock face of Greater Sheffield, from ten to eight to quarter past five. It is different terrain: rolling in a bumpy way, a little blasted and rough, but less epic. ‘Ordinary, working countryside,’ is how Jim described it. Because the Peak District is not ‘ordinary, working countryside’, I had perhaps been guilty of underestimating it. Due to its National Park status I viewed it marginally as an unreal, themed place, and took its darker side less seriously. Spring was revoked shortly after I saw Jim, and the dark side returned, in all its frightening nude whiteness. I walked outside my front door to call Clifton, who had been driven out again by Roscoe, and I felt a natural hostility to the air unlike anything I’d ever felt around any house I’d ever made my bed in. My heart turned arrhythmic as I took it in. It was as if the night had fangs. The house loomed behind me, like two tall and ashen undertakers. Beyond the old barns I was peering at through the gloom, hoping that Clifton would skip out from a low wall that she sometimes sheltered under, was the lost valley: hundreds of acres of wild ground with no public access owned by my landlord and his wife, scattered with derelict buildings, streams, rocks and jagged remnants of walls whose purpose nobody living remembered. Beyond it: untold numbers of unmarked graves, filled with plague bones – old bones from a different universe, but bones that in fact did their growing only thirteen or fourteen generations ago. Next to a small lake, the tall scarecrow skeletons of last summer’s giant hogweed stood strong, despite the snow. Martin told me a previous tenant once swam in the lake and almost froze to death. ‘What time of year was that?’ I asked. ‘July,’ he said.

  Martin had been working on the farm for decades, and – being a vegetarian, and a thoroughly non-materialistic soul – feeling different to the culture around it for just as long. Unlike my landlord, he took a passionate interest in all the nature in the wild ground behind the farm; that was why he was really here. He often spotted stags down there in the lost valley. Confusing paw prints in the snow had been reported. There were rumours of a large creature, like a cat, but not quite. It was unmanaged, elemental land: a taste of what will happen when we are all gone. When I was down there, I was astounded by the scale of it all, the way the trees and dead vegetation swallowed you. It pulsated as the sun fell. It was the kind of place where you could die a spectacular death of a morning and no-one would know. Besides Martin and me, nobody went down there apart from the foot hunts my landlord welcomed onto his property. I’d seen the hunters behind the garden, heading up from the lost valley: men with tight, mouth-like eyes. Hunting was part of the fabric here. Not long ago, my landlord’s son-in-law had shot a prize stag down in the lost valley. Before I discovered this, I’d said a cheery hello to the son-in-law outside my house. He’d glanced at me, then walked on, wordless. While I sat up in bed in the minutes directly after 3.44 a.m., as the furniture moved in the loft where there wasn’t furniture, it seemed that all the wild ground behind the house was breathing, under the ice.

  Searching for light relief, I drove south west, just over the Derbyshire border into Staffordshire, to the Manifold Valley. The lightness wasn’t as light as I’d hoped but the white was less dark. Thick upland fog. Scraggy, hardcase, shit-caked sheep. Viscous peat. A hint of comfort, knowing that the sea was only fifty-eight miles away, as opposed to seventy-three. Descending in the direction of Thor’s Cave, where Bronze Age humans fashioned amber beads and pottery and a few years later a photographer shot the cover for the The Verve’s Storm in Heaven album, I slipped on limestone and fell on my camera, amazingly breaking neither it nor me. In winter White Peak limestone is a glazed treadmill: it’s always being pulled away from you underfoot. A couple of hundred paces farther on I passed through a gate, noting the top section of a freshly, neatly decapitated deer on the path in front of me: a sight that would not leave me for a long time.

  When you have come directly from a few years of being a Devon walker, you notice a rhythm to walking in the Peak: you tend to do it on terrain that’s either a lot more controlled than any walking terrain in Devon, or a lot more fierce. There’s rarely an in-between. Having done an example of the safe, controlled bit down by the rivers Manifold and Hamps, I climbed the valley back in the direction of Grindon, passing king-sized yob crows, and arrived at a farmyard, where I was instructed by my map to take a path running through it to the left. As I did, a man with enormous dark grey sideburns emerged from the farmhouse and barked instructions at me to take a gate on the right-hand side of his garden instead. He complained about the National Park doing him ‘no favours’ and directing walkers to the place, which was called Oldfield Farm. He introduced himself as Graham Simpson and said there had been Simpsons at the house since the 1740s, when two of his ancestors, Jacobites on the run, had first built it. Its original outdoor privy remained standing. We began to talk about the weather and he told me about the winter of 1947, which was so cold that ‘your coat would stand up when you took it off’ and a plane flying over to drop supplies to the snowbound villages in the area crashed. ‘I remember listening to it go over – you could hear the ice cracking in the trees,’ he said. He looked good for eighty-three and I suspect he had looked truly magnificent at sixty.

  Two things Graham said he didn’t have much time for were Romans and computers. The way he explained this suggested that the Romans had come along, got a bit too arrogant, messed stuff up, then everything had been all right for a few years until computers had come along to mess everything up all over again. He told me there was a code you could type into a computer now and see inside people’s houses, including his. ‘People are too far away from the real world nowadays,’ he said. We talked for around three quarters of an hour and, thinking suddenly of my dad, I wondered how many times Graham had stopped other hikers and marshalled a similar conversation: these hikers whom the National Park directed across his land in a bothersome way but whom he patently loved to talk to. He wasn’t a religious man but believed it to be a travesty than many babies were no longer christened. ‘It’s like us tagging our cows: you have to do it so you know who they are and where they belong,’ he said. I did not tell him of my unchristened status. Was that why I’d had a little trouble deciding where I belonged lately, I wondered. It was a very different life, this one of Graham’s – staying in one place for so long, just like your dad before you, and his dad, and his dad, and his dad, and his dad, and his dad – and not one I craved, but I could see its pluses.

  The fog had lifted, just slightly, and it felt like this brief fog-raising of an hour or so was a harsh Peak District winter’s equivalent of what might count in many other places as proper daytime. Snowdrops were scattered all around, lighting up the world more than anything presently in the sky. ‘They’re amazing things,’ said Graham. ‘They’ll thrive under snow and ice but if it’s warm and dry, they won’t grow. You can’t tell me that can be explained. That’s not just nature. There’s something more going on there.’ As he said it, he swept with his brush at non-existent debris on his front path and a hen – the only one on his farm – pecked around him.

  I asked him what the hen was called.

  ‘Hen,’ he said.

  Graham, who’d always lived in the south-western corner of the Peak District, sounded easily as northern as an average native of the north-eastern corner of the Peak District. In the UK, accents rise in the west. The process begins long before the North’s diagonal, much argued-over border. Birmingham has immeasurably more of an accent than Peterborough, which sits eighty miles east of and very slightly above it, and seems more tethered to the South. People feel comfortable in staking a claim to northernness more quickly on the west side of the country. My house in the Peak District only needed to be another ten miles north to be level with Liverpool, which is west of it, but Liverpool is far more unchallengeably northern, not least because of its accent. I was reminded of this when I drove from my house in Eyam to Liverpool, to perform a spoken word event. The journey was a risk, but my Liverpool events always sold
out, and the crowds were the warmest and liveliest I’d ever had, and I didn’t want to let anyone down. I’d never lived there but, because I’d grown up close to my mum, her two sisters and my nan, who were all Scousers, it seemed like another home from home. I narrowly made it up the iced track from the house then drove west, going via Snake Pass as the snow worsened. My stomach tangibly descended from my throat back into its rightful place as I saw the lights of Glossop emerge, marking the end of the Pass. The event sold out, two knitters in the front row heckled me and I was glad I’d braved the trip, but on the way back, a few miles past Stockport, with the snow redoubling, my car skidded off the road. I clung to the steering wheel and somehow managed to avoid every obstacle flashing in front of me: the car directly ahead, the car coming the other way, a drystone wall, the small ravine to my right. To this day I have no idea how I made it back onto the road, the rest of the way to Eyam and the top of The Hill That Never Ends and the secret part of it containing my bed. The following day, still a little dazed and glad to be alive, I walked down into the lost valley and took some pretty photos of the white trees and icicles and uploaded them to Instagram. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ commented strangers. ’I hope you know how lucky you are.’