The old green-and-cream wooden station-house on the west side of the line at Slaggyford is crying out to become a cafe, but unfortunately for us no one has yet seized the entrepreneurial initiative. Somewhere above the old Roman fort at Whitley Castle we are suddenly enveloped by a flood of sheep streaming through an open gate, followed by a young farmer on his quad bike who looks like early Bob Dylan. I think at first he’s come to bollock us for trespassing, but he’s just passing the time of day. In exchange for a home-made shortbread biscuit he lets me perch on the bike for a photograph, and if I’d had a Victoria sponge to offer would have probably let me take it for a spin around the field as well. A couple of times he mentions a place called Cross Fell and points with a farmer’s finger in a southerly direction, but I’m too interested in the gearing mechanism of his all-terrain hill-buggy to ask questions or listen to advice, and after a few more biscuits he revs up and goes roaring off after his flock.
The route here isn’t exactly a tax on the body or a test of the mind, but I’m not complaining, the memory of going astray in the Cheviots still being very clear and not an experience I’m in a hurry to repeat. In fact a walker would have to be wearing a blindfold to get lost today, since several other routes and features running parallel to the Way act as handrails or stabilisers, including the South Tyne River, the A689, the South Tynedale Railway, the South Tyne Trail, and Isaac’s Tea Trail, a walk ‘in the footsteps of legendary itinerant tea-seller Isaac Holden’, a former lead miner forced to seek alternative employment when the industry collapsed. Some reports of Holden’s life also suggest that he sold poems to passengers on the railway as a way of raising money, and for a few miles I muse on the idea that I too have made a similar transition from lead to poetry and tea. The area around Alston was once a hub for the lead-mining industry, the earth being rich in deposits, and the landscape is scarred with evidence of extraction, some of it going right back to the Romans and even beyond. In the 1800s when the mining was at its peak, as well as being used for bullets, pewter and poisons, much of the malleable and waterproof element was being applied to the roofs and windows of large buildings such as churches and schools, and for a brief period during the summer of 1976 me and a bunch of friends were stripping it back off again. In one of the first poems I ever wrote, ‘Without Photographs’, I remember how we unearthed the makings of a small, illicit foundry buried beneath an old door under Bank Bottom mill in the village. It took us a while to work out what the brazier, bricks, pans and ladles had been used for, until we unrolled a length of sacking and two shiny blocks of lead spilled out at our feet. Then the penny dropped. So for most of that hot, unending summer we were a regular industry, building fires, melting down coils of lead flashing in a battered old saucepan and turning out stacks of gleaming, silver-coloured ingots that dimmed to a slate grey as they cooled. The moment when the lead suddenly lost all its solidity and ran like mercury across the base of the pan was never less than miraculous, an alchemical transformation, and before the liquid became sluggish and slow we spooned it into the well or ‘frog’ of a regulation red brick. And I learned the hard way that if any water was trapped in the well, the hot lead spat back in a volley of fiery pellets at the moment of contact. When one of those pellets hit me on the side of the knee it seared a hole in my skin; I still have the burn and have watched it migrate a couple of inches south over the intervening years. When the ingots were finally tipped or tapped out, they were indented or embossed with the names of famous brickworks, names like Accrington and Stewartby, and one highly prized brick (highly prized by me, anyway) carried the word ARMITAGE. The thrill was all in the process rather than the product, though we did eventually develop the commercial interests of the company, taking the blocks to a no-questions-asked scrap-metal merchant down the valley and weighing them in for cash. The lead, living up to one of its most famous characteristics, was not light, and we must have looked a suspicious and even comical bunch, four of us on the service bus in our shorts, in charge of a holdall we could hardly lift, even with two people to each handle. On one occasion I snatched up a carrier bag and jumped on the bus but the four lead ingots it contained remained on the pavement, resolute and inert. It was stealing, I admit, though the metal was usually taken from dilapidated woolsheds or the Electric Cinema which had collapsed after a snowstorm. But the guilt was always offset by the feeling that we were doing something ‘constructive’ with our time, as instructed, and anyway, the lead was so soft and compliant, and offered itself readily to our hands. It was also my first experience of manual labour, and of the manufacturing industry, and of the work ethic, going home filthy every night but glowing inside with the satisfaction of a mission accomplished and a job well done.
And now I write poems and drink tea.
*
Unfortunately we don’t have any tea with us when we stop for lunch by the war memorial just east of the river in Alston, only water bottles or my ‘drip’, and anyway it wouldn’t feel right to be sipping Earl Grey or a herbal infusion in front of the names of those who gave their lives to the cause. We’ve just clambered along ten yards of broken-down wall which the land-owner is obviously in no hurry to repair, and for reasons that I can’t explain I’ve taken several photographs of a goat. There’s another photo opportunity on the other side of the bridge, the same sign as the one in Kirk Yetholm, showing the Pennine Way as a dotted line winding among drawings of natural features and local wildlife, and this time I’m able to point to a position at least a third of the way down the trail, between the curlew and the merlin. For the next four or five miles the path follows the river, sometimes running close to the water, sometimes staying a couple of contours above it, and the river itself is the view, shallow and gossipy where it skitters across pebbles and stones, then soupy and slow in a dam or basin, then parting around some island of boulders colonised by reeds and ferns, then taking a wide arc around a sandbank or shingle beach, then snaking among the exposed roots of trees before tumbling over a ledge in the bedrock, diving into a pool of dark water before resurfacing as bubbles and froth a little further downstream. Almost everything is in bloom and in leaf, thick with life. I’m not a birdwatcher in the sense of keeping a list but I like to know what I see when I see it, and along here that includes dipper, lapwing, grey wagtail, the momentary iridescent flash of a kingfisher – just a travelling, coloured blur rather than the definable outline of an actual bird – then an enormous heron, packing up its one-man tent in a huff of flapping feathers, rowing away over the tree-tops, and when I look back a minute or so later, coming back to pitch camp on the same reef of mud. Josephine has joined us at Bleagate, telling stories of suicides, adultery and apparitions as we pass various tumbledown farms, and just before the path crosses the bridge back to the west bank of the river we meet Mike and his golden retriever waiting to guide us the last couple of miles.
The approach to Garrigill clearly hasn’t been orchestrated by the tourist board, because after the textbook tranquillity of the waterside the path sneaks furtively through what looks like a tipping area with heaps of spoil and rusting machinery to both sides, but it’s only a temporary diversion before the settlement appears up ahead, with its low stone houses and village green. For the first time in the journey I’m pimping myself in return for clothing, and have remembered to wear my ‘Count Me Inn – Save the George and Dragon’ T-shirt. Despite the fact that the rain has started to fall I unzip my coat to demonstrate my solidarity with the cause, until Mike points out that unfortunately it’s too late and that time has been called at Garrigill’s only licensed premises once and for all. The downpour also means that the reading won’t take place on the green, as was hoped, but in the village hall. They’d erected a marquee for the event, hoping for one of those summer evenings from the rose-tinted past, but already water is cascading from the awning, the wind has got hold of a couple of guy ropes, and a sizeable puddle has developed in front of the entrance. I feel like a bad Jesus, arriving too late, bringing a black cloud.
Mike is married to Janette, who was once my boss, in a previous century. The last time she saw me I was a trainee probation officer on loan to Huddersfield Social Services for a stint with their Fostering and Adoption team, but all that feels so long ago now it could have been another life. So it’s peculiar when she recognises me, because as far as those days go I barely recognise myself. Not only do Mike and Janette have a dedicated guest room with a big bed and a soft mattress, they also have an en-suite wet room and a do-whatever-you-want-for-a-couple-of-hours policy, so I stay under the scalding jet of the shower until the hot water runs out then lie down with the intention of getting a couple of hours’ sleep before the reading. When sleep doesn’t happen I pull out my notebook and begin making a record of the day’s happenings, and remember that on two or three occasions people have mentioned tomorrow’s walk, over somewhere called Cross Fell. Bob Dylan mentioned it while I was ogling his quad bike, and so did a man leaning over his garden fence the other side of Alston, smirking as he pronounced its name, and Josephine was polite but enigmatic on the subject as we glanced at the anvil-shaped profile on the horizon, and now I come to think about it, every time I’ve looked in that direction, all I’ve seen is a solid dark barrier to the south, barring the way ahead. I thought I’d figured out all the trouble-spots on this walk before setting off, places like the Cheviots and Tan Hill and Kinder Scout, factored them into my itinerary and made adequate mental preparations for each encounter. But somehow Cross Fell hadn’t been on my radar at all, which is a pretty glaring omission I now realise, pulling out one of the guide books and discovering that it is in fact the highest point in the Pennines and also the highest summit in England outside the Lake District. Not only that, it was once known as Fiend’s Fell, some believing it to be the haunt of devils and demons, and is prone to impenetrable mists caused by a recurring cloud formation known as the Helm Bar, and to a shrieking or wailing in the air, brought about by a local wind. Today’s saunter along that pleasant river valley was obviously one of those little games the Pennine Way likes to play, lulling walkers into false states of confidence, softening them up just prior to the next intimidating ordeal. When I peer out, I can’t quite see the Fell from the back window, but the darkness outside seems to be emanating from its direction, like a shadow, and when I unfold the map and spread it out on the hand-stitched bedspread, the contrast couldn’t be greater, the quilt being a thing of great colour and beauty and precision and love, the map being a big square of nothingness except contours and white space and spidery blue streams like varicose veins. It’s like one of those maps of the sea, all very meaningful, presumably, at some level, but to the layman in a boat, essentially just a vast area of cold featureless water without land or hope. I feel my heart sinking to my heels, and my nerves tightening slightly, and what there was of my smile dissolving from my lips.
*
Walking down the side of the river in the early evening (the river loud and excited with the water from Cross Gill, Cross Gill being an outlet from what I now imagine to be the rain-factory of Cross Fell), Janette asks a man fiddling around under a car if he is coming to the reading. Only his legs are visible, a pair of scuffed boots at the end of a pair of oily blue jeans, and from somewhere beneath the engine, through the open bonnet, a voice replies, ‘Er, no, not this time,’ as if this kind of thing happened every night and he’ll be sure to catch Les Murray or Wendy Cope on Tuesday. The George and Dragon is indeed well and truly closed, although some Banksy-esque wag has painted a very convincing open door on the boarded-up entrance, and scenes of boozy conviviality on the boards at each window. I also think the same trompe-l’œil effect has been applied to the Post Office, with its battered wooden door and barricaded window complete with a slot for the postbox, until Janette points out that it’s real. With its pebbledash surround and stencilled sign, the business is either very old, or has been attacked on many occasions, or represents a kind of knowingly antiqued regional chic, or possibly a combination of all three. In the village hall they’ve wheeled in a bar on castors with beer pumps G-clamped to the counter connected to barrels of local ale. Four squaddies are drinking at one table but they clear off at the mention of the word poetry. Someone tells me they are sleeping in the roof space but doesn’t explain why. The hall fills up over the next hour, until sixty-two people are sitting on an assortment of chairs and tables of varying size and style. It’s about one third of the entire population of Garrigill, apparently, the only notable absentee being the village poet, who I can only assume has decided to stay at home and sulk. £98.45 finds its way into the sock and Mike won’t let me pay for my beer. Several people leaning on the piano tell me that they’ll accompany me up Cross Fell tomorrow, but they’ve all been drinking. It’s late when we spill outside to make our way back to the house, on a night without moonlight in a village without street lights at a time when most people have gone to bed. Waiting for Mike to lock up I see a swinging torchlight moving away down the street. It’s Josephine, heading off through the village, to walk the three or four miles back to her house down the black valley, alongside the dark river, alone and in her silence.
Garrigill to Dufton
16 MILES
OS Explorer OL31 West Sheet, OL19 North
Thursday 15 July
It’s the end of the night and I’m being driven by a friend, Malone, back along country roads to the remote East Cumbrian village of Maulds Meaburn. It’s a few miles from the official Pennine Way but Malone is an acquaintance of 2004’s AA B&B Landlady of the Year, the well-named Mrs Kindleysides, owner of Meaburn Hill Farmhouse, whose evening meals and cooked breakfasts are not to be sniffed at. Dufton, the end-point of today’s walk, is disappearing in the rear-view mirror. A former mining centre, it seems more charming and softer-edged than other places with a similar history. Made a conservation area in 2005, it is, in outward appearances at least, a picture-perfect community, with its annual show, village green, lawned verges and local pub, the Stag Inn, where I’ve sunk a couple of pints of Black Sheep in front of an open fire. It also boasts a village hall to be proud of, a tidy black-and-white-painted, stone-built, slate-roofed construction at the heart of the settlement, ideal for a midweek poetry reading and comfortably housing the sixty-one-strong audience, who paid a total of £153.35 for the pleasure. For their money they heard me recite a number of ‘journey poems’ including a piece called ‘Before You Cut Loose’, based on a story my mother told me after returning from a hiking holiday in Ireland. Walking out of a village one day, a dog started to follow them, a black Labrador, and stayed with them for several miles despite well-intentioned discouragement, including verbal abuse, threats of physical violence with a big stick and stones hurled in its direction. After twenty miles the dog was still with them, and out of a sense of both guilt and Christian obligation (they were members of a church rambling society) they resigned themselves to getting to their destination, finding a taxi and taking the dog back. But as they began their descent from the hills and walked into a distant town, the dog suddenly sprinted off in front of them and pushed open the door of a house, where it lived. The story has always had a parable-like quality to me, the dog’s loyalty and resolve winning out over so many misguided interventions, its stamina and its sense of direction seeing it home in the end, and given the events of my day, I read it with a sense of irony rather than satisfaction, events involving lots of mist, lots of rain, a lost poet with none of the dog’s qualities whatsoever and four scantily clad strangers on a Pennine summit. From Malone’s car I glance up towards Cross Fell, high above Dufton, its angular forehead now basking in the pink sunset, its characteristic shape now visible for the first time in twelve hours, the outline of its sloped shoulders and jutting brow now clear and defined under a cloudless evening sky, and under my breath I say, ‘You bastard.’
*
Cross Fell is a truly terrible place. The word ‘fell’ conjures up images of Wordsworthian hills, their noble peaks and timeless profiles refl
ected in clear tarns and placid lakes, their foothills adorned with hosts of golden daffodils in full bloom. Cross Fell is some abhorrent strain of that particular fell species, the Caliban version, illegitimate and monstrous and exiled to the other side of the M6. Of course I haven’t yet formed this opinion when I rise at about seven in the morning and blast myself awake under the hot power-shower. The spare bedroom is on the ground floor at the front of the house, and while I’m going through the now mechanical process of applying various lotions and creams and practising expert origami with the map, I can hear a bit of a commotion outside. When I pull back the curtains, six or seven people are standing on the pavement or sitting on the wall, people I vaguely recognise from last night’s reading, whose pledges of company and support were more than just the beer talking, it seems. Giving them a nod and a wave I can’t decide if I’m the Pied Piper, about to lead a gaggle of locals out of town, or Edward Woodward in The Wicker Man, about to be guided by locals to a terrible fate up on the hill. It also puts me in mind of the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian when his mum goes outside and explainsto the waiting disciples that rather than being the Messiah Brian is simply a very naughty boy.
Much as I appreciate their backing, not everyone in the party looks particularly well equipped for an assault on a mountain which rises to just under three thousand feet above sea level. One woman tells me she is in training for a trek to Machu Picchu, the pre-Columbian Inca ruins which stand at an oxygen-starved altitude three times higher than Cross Fell, but she is wearing jeans and a cardigan and turns back just short of the one-mile mark. A breathless man with a very red face also turns tail not long afterwards, signalling his resignation with a hand gesture, his mouth and throat being fully employed with the business of breathing, and others fall away at each passing stile or cattle-grid. Admittedly this is a long and arduous ascent. All the guide books describe the old Corpse Road from just under the neb of Cross Fell to Garrigill village as boring at the very least, and at worst gruelling and tortuous, the pebble and cinder track being hard on the feet and the endless, unchanging landscape being hard on the eye. And that’s walking downhill! Uphill it is all those things magnified, and I can’t blame my escorts for eventually peeling off, especially since they’re not actually walking with me. Because for the first time on this journey I realise that I’ve developed something of a regular pace, and not a slow one, a pace and also a rhythm of motion that feels very natural in relation to the weight in the rucksack, the ground underfoot, the angle of incline, the fuel in my belly and several other variables related to the scientific principles of bipedalism. At a certain speed everything feels to be working smoothly, the motor purring, the escapement ticking, the cogs turning, everything at its operational best; to slow down isn’t painful but it’s certainly annoying, and I find myself sympathising with those lorry drivers on the motorway who get to within a couple of yards of the car in front, flashing their lights and honking their air-horns, drivers who would prefer to plough through the back of a family saloon rather than lose revs and momentum. So by the time I get to Pikeman Hill, having climbed about a thousand feet and covered a good three miles in little more than an hour, I’m out on my own. I kick the ground with my boot and scratch around at the side of the path for fluorspar, the bluish mineral which was once considered a useless by-product of the lead-mining process but is now mined in its own right and is reported to ‘litter’ this track, but I can’t see anything remotely colourful or attractive. Perhaps fluorspar needs sunlight to bring it to life and there certainly isn’t any of that around. If anything the sky has dimmed since this morning, and the air has become colder and sharper, partly because of the height, obviously, but also on account of the deteriorating conditions. I feel the occasional drop of rain, and up ahead a bank of cloud not only obscures the head of Cross Fell but appears to be overflowing down its shoulders and upper slopes. The route across it seems pretty straightforward on the map, but that’s only because I’ve highlighted it in dayglo orange. In reality, the path in front of me arcs away into that horrible cloud, and experience tells me that a track like this, as defined and unmistakable as it is right now, will simply peter out at that height. And except for the exaggerated chain of diamonds representing the Pennine Way, the only other cartographical features for the foreseeable future are curricks, cairns, sink-holes, shake-holes, hushes and shafts, the first two being piles of stones like unmarked graves, the other four being things you can fall down and die. I’m trying to process all this information and quantify my chances of actually making it to the other side when I see that I’m not on my own, because after politely walking at a more sociable pace for the first mile or so, Richard has now broken free from the peloton of stragglers and deserters, and put his foot down. Richard is in computers, something he can do without living in the big city, and has brought with him his camera and his dog. He’s been over Cross Fell several times, he tells me, and although he doesn’t want to walk all the way to Dufton he’ll come with me to the summit, or just below it, and point me in the right direction. I greet his arrival and news of his experience of this territory with a kind of studied coolness, but from the moment he hoves into view it is my secret plan not to allow him out of my sight until he has delivered me safely over the hill. It’s now only a question of how far I will go to ensure his co-operation, be it the feigning of some sudden injury, a crude cash payment or the promise of a thousand virgins and eternal life on the other side of the mountain.
Walking Home: A Poet's Journey Page 9
