The Pie At Night

by Stuart Maconie

  My old curiosity for the shops (sorry) takes me down the Galgate. One thing’s for sure, you certainly wouldn’t starve in Barney. Muffins and panini lounge alluringly in every window and alley. You wouldn’t perish for lack of art either. There are Goyas and El Grecos in the Bowes Museum, just a stroll out of town. You needn’t even go short of vintage clothes. There’s a vintage emporium on the High Street and I ask the young woman owner where I might get an iPhone charger. ‘You won’t find one in Barney. You might in Darlo or Bishop,’ which, with my almost Sherlockian razor-sharp deductive faculties I spot to be Darlington or Bishop Auckland. How far are they, I ask. ‘Sixteen miles and fourteen miles respectively,’ she replies instantly, adding intriguingly, ‘Don’t ask me how I know that.’

  I’m headed for the lonely lead mines of Weardale, and for a rendezvous with a reclusive rock star in the beautiful and faintly mysterious village of Blanchland, and so I bid Barney goodbye, thankful that, though the Scots tried, Simon de Montfort tried, King John tried and the Nazis tried, none have yet managed to reduce Barney to rubble. Thank you. I’m here all week.

  I break my journey in Durham, to get that charger and simply because you always should. You will not be alone in this. The late Jon Lord, organist with Deep Purple, wrote a fine, elegiac Durham Concerto, whose first movement ‘The Cathedral at Dawn’ is grave and beautiful, full of echoes and hints of the day to come. Leave it much later than dawn, though, and you will be sharing the green between the cloister and the castle with tourists of every nation, ice cream vans, joggers, buskers and choristers. But, even so, this is part of Durham’s charm. Again, it has none of the prissiness of Oxford. You will struggle to see canary yellow trousers here, or a straw fedora, or a crumpled white linen jacket. You are actually more likely to see a replica Newcastle or Sunderland top, and I enjoy this contradiction in its character. It’s an old and very lovely city, a beautiful place of charm and antiquity, and yet one that is known around the world for its miners’ gala rather than its May ball. I like that.

  The students bring life and youth and diversity to the town though which is a joyous thing. Durham University is prestigious and world-renowned and rightly so. And who wouldn’t want to be a student here, in this ravishing, fabulous, lively, lovely city on a grand river. The castle is a hall of residence as well, home to about 100 lucky students, and I’m told that they are so desperate for this very desirable accommodation that they will share rooms. If my hazy memories of college are to be trusted, this would seem to be a very major hindrance to the full enjoyment of student life and a testament to just how gorgeous the place is.

  It’s a flying visit for me. But I enjoy my night in the castle’s Chaplains Suite, with its ivy-shrouded windows and its arrow slits (which I don’t make full use of, to be honest). I am told that the Queen stayed in this room on her Golden Jubilee tour, and as I pour the bath foam under the steaming, rushing tap I realise that the Queen has probably been in this bath, which even for a mild republican is a proud moment in my bathing history.

  To Blanchland. When I’m ever in roughly this part of the world, I try and look up and drag out my old friend Paddy McAloon, whom some of you may know. Paddy comes from Witton Gilbert, lives now in Leadgate and is one of the greatest British pop songwriters of recent decades. His band Prefab Sprout are loved by millions around the world, even though they never play live and release records gallingly infrequently.

  I ring Paddy and tell him that I’m headed for Blanchland. He is a little shocked. ‘Blanchland? Have you been there? It’s like Brigadoon.’ Paddy wonders if I have read Jesse L Weston’s classic study of myth From Ritual to Romance, used as a source by T S Eliot when writing ‘The Waste Land’. (Incidentally, these are not the kinds of conversation you have with Liam Gallagher.) Apparently, in that work, Weston quoted a reference to Arthurian Grail mythology and a possible location for the Grail ‘in the tract known as the Blaunche Launde’. Early scholars assumed wrongly that this was in Shropshire. But Weston spotted that:

  … further north, in Northumberland, there was also a Blanchland, connected with the memory of King Arthur, numerous dedications to Saint Austin, and a tradition of that Saint driving out the local demons … I therefore suggested that … the Northern Blanchland, which possessed a Chapel of Saint Austin, and lay within easy reach, was probably the original site …

  He went on to suggest that the Arthurian court of Camelot may well have been situated in Cardoil, modern Carlisle, which will come as a shock to anyone who has found themselves outside the kebab shops of Botchergate on a Friday after the pubs turn out.

  How exciting then. I was on the trail of what could only be described as the Holy Grail of all romantic historians: the Holy Grail.

  I arrange to meet Paddy at my hotel in Blanchland, indeed the only watering hole in Blanchland. The Lord Crewe Arms has an enormous fireplace with a wonderful, crackling reeking conflagration, delicious food and rooms, and a Consett postcode but, and this is meant as no slur on that great old steel town, Blanchland is somewhat different to Consett. The Brigadoon comparison is perfect. As you crest the rise and drop down into the upper Derwent Valley, the sight that greets you is magical, but a little unreal, a touch disturbing even. A film set of a village in the middle of empty moors; all honey stone and pretty red-doored cottages, an ancient church, a welcoming inn, a slender river with a charming bridge, crenellations and crannies and architectural features I lack the knowledge to name. It seems too good to be true. Perhaps it is.

  The village was built in the twelfth century from the stones of a ruined abbey and has a population of 140. But today, 13 August 2014, they are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they are all behind their pretty red doors, watching me. The Post Office is shut for lunch but the noticeboard bears robust traces of life. There is bingo every fourth Saturday and Leadgate Working Man’s Club’s Leek Club now hold an Open Pot Leek Show (the Pot Leek is a north-eastern horticultural speciality) with a tempting 150 quid first prize. ‘Benching from 1–3.30’ if you’re interested.

  The promotional website talks of the village’s ‘special atmosphere’ and this is no PR puffery. Blanchland feels, in every sense of the word, enchanted. Lovely, enigmatic and a little eerie. Paddy and I put away a few in the bar of the hotel. In view of my earlier obvervations on County Durham fashions, I smile when I see that he is wearing canary yellow trousers, a straw fedora and a crumpled white linen jacket. He might have come straight from Oxford, which is rather splendid, as is the evening, full of drink and gossip and tales about figures as disparate as Eric Morecambe, Charlie Chaplin, David Bowie and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys.

  As we chat in the garden’s lengthening shadows, I tell Paddy that tomorrow I’m headed for Weardale, lured by those high lonely moors we can see all around, sombre grey purple in the late summer twilight, and more alluring to me than even the prettiest village. He tells me that over the hill lies Stanhope, a no-nonsense place where local boy Neil Tennant – he still has a house nearby – used to buy his records. It’s a picture of incongruity I find hard to shake, little Neil on the front seat by the driver – he is in short trousers in my mental version for some reason – excitedly clutching a 12-inch disco remix of Sylvester’s ‘Born To Be Alive’, as the bus rattles past a spoilheap and some rusting old winching equipment.

  This is, or was, lead mining country and the stuff runs through these villages, towns and hills both literally and metaphorically: a vein of blue-black blood that once pulsed life into Blanchland and Leadgate. For six centuries, lead lined the pockets of the bishops of Durham, the rectors of Stanhope and the moor masters. The miners themselves barely scratched a living from the rock and were often seasonal farmers too, working on the little farms that, seen from afar, dot the hills like sheep droppings. More accurately, many of these were ‘shielings’; temporary summer dwellings only used before the white, swirling hostility of winter set in.

  Now the miners have gone completely and left the moors to those few secretive farms
, the lapwings and me. High Aukside, Edge End, High Skears, even the farms’ names sound harsh and forlorn like the clang of a pick or the caw of carrion birds, and many of them – open to the sky, abandoned, ruined – make Hannah Hauxwell’s place look cosy.

  The fell road out of Eggleston Burn, like the one out of Stanhope, like all the roads around here, will sooner or later curl and loop into a high and keening bleakness that is breathtaking – if, like me, and Auden, your breath is taken not by Beatrix Potterish gardens but by wildness and solitude and mystery. I wander a lot that afternoon. To Coldberry Mine, abandoned and ghostly but still remarkably intact – the forbidding looking main building, the dormitories where the miners slept – marooned by the tides of industry in high hills like Outberry and Harnisha. To Pawlaw Pike and Monk Moor. Over those hills, in Killhope, they have recreated the mines and the miners’ lives in a justly popular attraction, a fully restored Victorian lead mine with a huge water wheel, a jigger house, and an underground tour which would have thrilled the young Auden. But there is something just as evocative about being up here in the wind and the last of the light; up here now on the moors above Blanchland, walking across the sparse, lingy moor towards Bolt’s Law, picking a way between the ragged sheets of water, the ruined chimneys, the haunted levels.

  My travels in Weardale and County Durham took place in the summer of 2014, a summer of national remembrance, when thoughts often turned to the summer a century before. As when leafing through that 1914 book of Wigan country rambles, it’s taken on the nature of a truism to see that summer of 1914 as a rupture in our national psyche. It was the summer when the blithely patriotic adventurism of British manhood was choked in the mud of Passchendaele and on the bullets of the Somme. ‘Never glad confident morning again’ after those horrors.

  Britain’s notions of national purpose and a sense of youthful innocence perished then. Often, as I walked through northern hills and dales, I wondered how many lads from the mills and the factories and the farms dotted across this landscape had left these happy stamping grounds in 1914 and never seen them again, deserted them willingly for the barbed wire and carnage of the Western Front.

  Googling for ‘most beautiful war memorial’ in Britain, I found Colchester making a bold claim along these lines. It’s certainly striking. But it is in a public park in Colchester which, with all due respect, cannot be as wonderful a setting as the one on Great Gable. In 1924, the Manchester Guardian said:

  On Great Gable, perhaps the most wholly beautiful of English mountains, there was dedicated yesterday one of the grandest and most appropriate of all war memorials. A tablet there will now record the names of those Lakeland mountaineers, members of the Fell & Rock Climbing Club of the English Lake District, who were killed in the war … The instinct of comrades has put this tablet far out of the way of indolent crowds, in the midst of the crags where life used to run highest in those whom it commemorates, and where it will bring them back to our minds in some of our moments of happiest effort and most radiant health.

  It is a simple tablet, but its solitude and the effort required to find it imbues it with a profound presence.

  But the finest I think stands sentinel on Werneth Low, a hill on the fringes of Stockport, silently watching over the little town of Hyde. Leave your car down in the country park and, before you know it almost, just a few yards up a good path, suddenly, thrillingly, something you did not expect, a view takes the breath away; especially on one of those sudden, unexpectedly fine nights in April or October, when the north seems rinsed clean, powder blue and laundry fresh after an afternoon rain storm; cool, clear, limpid.

  Werneth Low isn’t actually. Low that is, though its name has nothing to do with height but comes from the old Northern English ‘hlaw’ meaning hill or mound, a sense now obsolete except in places like this. But if it were a hundred feet higher, it would break that significant 1,000 foot barrier and some reckless types might even call it a mountain. It feels nothing like one though; just a proud arm of the rolling Pennines and a spot much loved by the folk of Hyde, Mottram and Romiley and the towns of the Cheshire/Lancashire border. It’s an airy platform and good for taking in the range and the richness of this corner of the north.

  Left and north is the compact knuckle of energy of Manchester, a glittering urban sprawl with the weird tuning fork of the Beetham Tower, bristling with self-importance, jutting towards the sky. Nearer is the black sheet of Audenshaw Reservoir, and behind it the whaleback of our old friend Winter Hill and its radio mast. Next Oldham and the bulk of Chadderton Power Station, then the Pennines start to bunch and get going, a backdrop to Mottram, a lovely village I’m told. In the foreground, near enough to touch, a Lego of redbrick that is Hattersley shelters under gaunt moors. Or look east into the shallow, inviting valley of Longdendale, the kind of high carved landscape you get used to on the fells but here it catches the eye, low and shallow, scooped between the rocky uplands.

  Turn back to Werneth Low, though, and its cenotaph on Hacking Knife, the bloodily named highest point of the hill, proud and solemn on the summit, guarded by a little railing in its own reverent patch. It’s made of Cornish granite, like its grander, Whitehall cousin, and on one face an inscription in black oxide reads: ‘They willingly left the unachieved purpose of their lives in order that all life should not be wrenched from the purpose’.

  When it was unveiled on the Saturday afternoon, 24 June 1921, 12,000 people assembled here. They still come. There are fresh wreaths here, tonight passed by dog walkers, a balding jogger, a young woman with an inquisitive daft spaniel. The scene is one of birdsong and peace and the quiet north below. This is the peace they fought for, the one they gave up, the towns and hills they loved, the lads from these factories. And the pride of place is entirely right. They didn’t have estates and titles, but this was their north, and it’s right they should be remembered here above it.

  The summer evening suddenly changes. When you’re down on the street, penned in by buildings and cars and the smallness of the streets, weather is an inconvenience, felt from the inside of a goldfish bowl. To know weather, you have to get up and see it coming, watch its theatrical movements, hear it, feel it. There’s another storm coming over Manchester, angry, bruised and bloody, a shroud of dark, a curtain of rain against a bloodshot sky and then, leaping down to flicker among the skyscrapers, white crackles of lightning. If you want to see the north arrayed like this, you usually have to buy an overpriced cocktail in a bar filled with braying property developers or footballers and their paramours. But here it will cost you nothing, and you can share it with spaniels, pensioners, cheery golfers.

  But the natural landscape is the star of the show, the Pennines in all their quiet, lonely unshowy glory; in the distance Ingleborough and the blue smudge of the Welsh mountains, the bowls of the hills that cradle the little towns.

  It was from these little towns that the lads who this simple obelisk commemorates came to stomp, act daft, fly kites and court girls. It was from these little towns that they marched in blissful ignorance and patriotic fervour, never to return. It was for the freedom of the hills, the joy in the simple physical act of walking, the pleasure of the fresh summer air on nights like this, the comforts of those little towns, that they sacrificed their lives. This is a perfect quiet spot to remember them.

  One such little town was Dobcross, a village really. You might even see it from here, on tiptoe maybe, 12 miles away over Stalybridge and Hollingworth Lake. Dobcross lost sons too in the First World War and it too will be remembering them over the conflict’s centenary. Dobcross is doing it the way it knows best, sending its world-famous Silver Band in their scarlet finery, with their cornets, ‘euphs’ and tubas, to play the last post at the Menin Gate, the memorial to the fallen at Ypres.

  This is brass band country, and on Whit Friday these hills are alive with the sound of music, as well as laughter, the opening of bottles, the clink of glasses and other rhapsodies of fun. The north likes a good tune, be it the Halle
or the Happy Mondays, northern soul or Musique Concrète, Grimethorpe Colliery or Arctic Monkeys. The north revels in the communality of music, either on the stage or in the audience, in the conservatoire or in the nightclub. The north has never been bashful about singing its own musical praises in its own lovely singing voice; nor shouting from the rooftops about its subcultural clout; its pre-eminent role in the nation’s musical life; its tacit, taken for granted status as the musical capital of Britain.

  Dobcross was on my list of places to visit as I went in search of the musical north, determined to make a song and dance about it.

  CHAPTER 9

  STRIKING UP THE BAND

  Prog rock in Huddersfield, opera in Leeds and brass bands in Dobross

  In the same way that no one boasts of having no sense of humour, I’ve never met anyone who claims to no taste in music. Someone who cheerily claimed they can’t stand the stuff and wouldn’t care if they never heard a note of it again. Your friends and kin and co-workers might admit that they have no taste buds, no appreciation of art, no enjoyment of the countryside, no ear for poetry (though that often doesn’t stop them writing it) and no great love of literature. But accuse them of having a tin ear for melody and they will bridle. You’re effectively saying that they’re a dolt, a dullard, a philistine. You’re accusing them of having no soul, no sexuality, no style. Everyone loves music and everyone thinks they know a good tune when they hear it. This would explain the otherwise unaccountable popularity of the dreadful … ah, you can fill in your own examples here. I know you will have them.

  A radio programme called Desert Island Sonnets wouldn’t run for eight weeks, let alone eight decades. They give you three books on that island, one luxury and no way of catching or cooking your food. But they let you have eight gramophone records. Significantly, they don’t think of these as luxuries. Those records are a necessity of civilised life even when you’re running around in a grass thong eating grub larvae and seaweed. You can see where our priorities lie.