We kick on up the gradient, the dog fussing here and there, forward and back. A couple of gamekeepers drive by in what appears to be some kind of amphibious landing craft, like a big bathtub on wheels. They’re laying down piles of feed for the grouse, mounds of white, flaky-looking stuff like crystallised porridge oats. They’re also checking us out, I think, making sure we don’t stray from the path, disturbing the birds and disrupting revenue streams. Long Man Hill comes and goes on the left. Looking occasionally towards the lowland we’ve left behind, the odd shaft of sunshine, like a searchlight, tracks across a meadow or makes a sweep of a valley, and there’s certainly a brighter, drier, calmer world to the north. But we’re heading south, up the mountain, into the cloud. The path is silver against the dark green of the moor, and I can see it swing round to the west, rejecting a steep, direct approach to the top and circling instead around the collar of the hill, below a scree slope and a line of tumbled boulders, looking for the best angle of attack. The ground to either side of the track is gouged and scarred where shovels and picks have gone in search of valuable metals and where machines have clawed and buried their way into the earth. Spoil is heaped in useless, ugly piles, half-hearted causeways lead nowhere, disused quarries have filled with rain, low tumbledown walls mark the sites of abandoned buildings or collapsed sheds. It’s ghostly and depressed. Nothing has properly healed, and some of the stones and workings have oxidised to a rusty red, the colour of dried blood.
Greg’s Hut, perched at the end of the track, is described variously as a bothy, a shelter, a refuge and an ex-mine shop. Whatever its true designation or provenance it is certainly a welcome sight, the grey stonework acting as camouflage against the grey landscape for much of the approach, but on closer inspection being quite a characterful cottage-style building, like a hillside dwelling belonging to some mad and ancient man of the mountains, with an ornate chimney, painted yellow windowpanes and a lime-green door. There’s even the hint of a walled garden with a couple of fir trees within it, the trees being the only vertical features in a landscape dominated by the horizontal, except of course for the two sweating and steaming walkers who push open the hut door and close it behind them. With my voice recorder I make a tour of Greg’s Hut like an estate agent valuing a new property. The vestibule is a lean-to lobby-cum-log-shed containing several spades and, well, logs. This opens into a surprisingly light and airy stone-flagged common room or function area, with plastic chairs tipped up against the wall, like a classroom at the end of the school day. There’s a solid-looking table which appears to have been constructed from breeze-block and Meccano, and a string of Tibetan prayer flags which, if the blue sock pegged in the middle is anything to go by, also functions as a washing line. Above the mantelpiece there’s a portrait of Greg himself, and a plaque, and on the windowsill a bottle of amber-coloured liquid, labelled PEE. There’s probably some very sensible, survivalist reason why the stranded walker should pee in a bottle rather than on the several thousand acres of empty moorland outside, but for the moment I can’t work out what it is. The third room, furthest from the door, is the business end, with a stove, nightlights, candles, kindling, matches, walking magazines (to either read or burn depending on the severity of the crisis), and a raised wooden platform which I describe as the ‘stage’. ‘Sleeping platform,’ corrects Richard. Obviously my inclination to see every structure on this trip as a potential venue for a poetry reading is getting the better of me. There’s also a palm cross resting on two nails above the fire. The visitors’ book is full of tales of woe and endurance, of which Greg’s Hut is always the saviour. An entry from a few days ago reads, ‘PS If you see Simon Armitage, tell him he nicked my idea.’ Finding my pen I make the point that the idea of a book based on a long journey was originally Homer’s, then we break out the biscuits and the flask.
*
Unless you have been lost in mist on the moors or in the hills, it is probably difficult to understand the true horror of the experience or to fully sympathise with the sufferer. Admittedly, it is not the same level of danger as stumbling around in Death Valley without a water bottle, or dangling from a rope down the north face of the Eiger, or being shot at by bandits in the Khyber Pass, or a million other such situations associated with intrepid adventure or extreme sports. But it is frightening, and on the few occasions it has happened to me, I have noticed a very alarming and rapid change in my psychology, as if the claustrophobia and disorientation brings about a particular condition, the symptoms of which include fear, panic and loss of logical thought, but also less expected and harder-to-define sensations akin to sadness and melancholy, something like hopelessness but also close to grief. In other words, it is upsetting, and as we leave the foursquare Alamo of Greg’s Hut and begin the climb to the top, I feel the sorrow and unhappiness welling up inside me, anticipating what is to come. And it’s a matter of minutes before we enter the realm of mist, because the cloud base has a surprisingly well-defined border, so after only ten yards the view behind us is no longer available as a reference point, and the view ahead is nothing but a silvery, swirling mass, and we have disappeared. It is also raining, or at least the air is very wet, and the gusts of wind now sheering across the upper slopes are laden with water vapour, so we are soaked. Right on cue the track, which had narrowed to a path, then to vague ruts in the ground, gives up the ghost. We make more strides, onto what feels like a plateau, and now there are six or seven trails to choose from, none of them especially convincing. Something about the acoustics, or perhaps the air pressure, tells me that we are on but not yet at the summit, and from the guide books I digested this morning and a quick squint at the map I know there are another hundred yards or so to walk before reaching the stone shelter at the top. Richard takes the lead, which is his prerogative, having been up here many times, but instinctively I disagree with the direction. After five minutes I say, ‘I don’t think this is right.’ I don’t think Richard thinks it’s right either, but we don’t have a better plan, so we walk some more, until even the dog looks a little distrustful, and I say, ‘Shouldn’t we be walking uphill?’ Richard says, ‘This is uphill, isn’t it?’ And I say, ‘We’re going downhill, I reckon,’ though now he’s said it, I’m no longer confident of my own judgement. Because when the clouds fold in and the horizon disappears, it’s not only the internal compass that goes haywire, it’s also the altimeter, the gyroscope, the chronometer, the sextant and the inclinometer. And the lid that battens down the emotions, keeps them locked away and packed tight in a little box, that flies open as well.
The one advantage of being lost today is that for as long as Richard doesn’t know where he is, he can’t go home. He’s offered to get me to the top, from which the subsequent peaks of Little Dun Fell and Great Dun Fell mark an obvious and unmissable route to the south-east, so in my own mind, until those summits and the path which apparently forms a kind of trapeze between them becomes visible, or unless the cloud miraculously lifts and the whole of the north of England becomes an illuminated page rolled out before me, he’s going nowhere. We try to retrace our steps, but we’ve no idea which direction we came from, so we have to guess. We find a place which looks vaguely like a place we saw a quarter of an hour ago, a stone next to a peaty ditch, in a terrain which is all stones and peaty ditches, then make an exaggerated and purposeful turn to the left, as if being assertive and decisive might rescue our situation. I’m now in charge, or at least I’m in front, my instincts having pulled rank on Richard’s experience. A truly impressive Dalek-like cairn comes forward out of the cloud, about eight foot tall. But a cairn is just a pile of stones, not a signpost, not a policeman, not a tourist information centre, and after failing to find it on the map we have to leave what little comfort it offered and let it disappear behind us into the void. Finally there’s nothing else for it but to pull out the GPS device and to convince ourselves that it isn’t lying. It seems to be pointing in absolutely the wrong direction, to a laughable degree, so much so that it is a triumph
of mind over matter to just believe in its assessment of our position let alone follow its course, but five minutes later we find the trig point and the cross-shaped shelter, and hunker down out of the driving wind.
*
On some days, the guide books promise, the summit of Cross Fell offers views as far as the Solway Firth. It probably does not need saying that today is not one of those days. Visibility is at most five yards; seeing my hand in front of my face is about as good as it is going to get today, and even though we’ve finally made it to the top of the hill, there’s no obvious track leading away into the distance, and absolutely no prospect whatsoever of lining up the next two fells. I know for certain that if Richard turns back now I will turn back with him, because I simply don’t have the bottle to go wandering into that mist on my own, and if I turn back, all the scheduled readings and offers of hospitality will collapse like dominoes, the whole project will unravel, and I will have failed. I don’t know how I convince Richard to walk a little bit further, whether it is through some humiliating confession, or if he hears the quavering desperation in my voice, or smells the fear, or feels compelled by some ineffable sense of obligation to go the extra mile, but we set off together. And get lost again, this time in a bewildering moonscape of angular boulders and strewn rocks. Unknowingly, I’ve gouged open an old cut on my finger with my thumbnail and made it bleed. Feeling the brunt of the wind, almost an updraught, I’m guessing we’re on some sort of escarpment or ridge, but no matter which direction we walk in we can get no higher or lower, just further into the rocky wilderness, deeper into the milky atmosphere. The melancholy comes over me again, the dismal misery of not knowing where I am, or perhaps losing any sense of who I am, as if the mist is bringing about an evaporation of identity, all the certainties of the self leaching away into the cloud. I don’t cry, but I could easily let it happen, if I wanted to, and I’m close to wanting to. Out comes the GPS, which this time offers an even more stupefying conclusion to our predicament, but with the compass in one hand, balanced and delicate, and the map in the other, we follow the dithering red needle for twenty yards, fifty yards, two hundred yards, a quarter of a mile, and eventually we are heading downhill. Not only that, we seem to be on a path, and on that path, in the distance, are human beings, four of them, plus a couple of dogs, although it could be a mirage because two of the figures appear to be semi-naked and the other two not particularly dressed for a hike on the moors. The four apparitions are also jogging, jogging towards us, and suddenly remembering a very loose arrangement concerning four fell-runners agreeing to meet me on the way to Dufton, I go running towards them, bounding along the stone slabs. Receiving them like long-lost friends I give one of them a big hug, the nearest one, not even one of the two women but one of the slightly surprised men, and introduce Richard to these four wonderful people whose names I don’t know and who might be my fell-runners but might just as easily be random fell-runners, bemused by the rapturous welcome and the uncontrollable display of back-slapping and hand-shaking and cheek-kissing coming from my direction. And suddenly there are even more people here, two strangers in full walking gear, who have recognised me and want to know if I am Simon Armitage the poet. ‘Yes,’ I say. Because I am. I am Simon Armitage, lost but now found, sad but now happy and absolutely confident of my name and purpose. And because they sense that I am somewhat delirious and likely to agree to anything, they ask me if I will come and give a reading in a pub in Harrogate, and because I am ecstatic and elated and in love with everybody in the world who is not a cairn or a cloud, I say yes. Richard and his dog go off with the Harrogate contingent, and now I am walking with the runners, who can’t help breaking out into a sprint here or a scamper there, which must be infectious because suddenly I’m putting in little surges of pace as well, the adrenalin and euphoria carrying me over Little Dun Fell, then past the eerie ‘golf ball’ aviation station on Great Dun Fell and across a metalled road onto another moor. It’s still misty, still raining, but the runners don’t seem to need any kind of navigational equipment, and their dogs go leaping and tumbling through the tuft grass and across the peat hags, and so do they. We stop for something to eat but I don’t manage much food because I’m too busy gushing and babbling and running away at the mouth with all the excitement of an escapee. God knows what I tell them, or what they tell me that gets drowned out under my own stream of verbiage. The descent from Knock Fell and the house-shaped cairn of Knock Old Man is rapid, five hundred feet of altitude being lost in what seems like minutes, the finishing post not far away now, the conical and comical protuberances of Dufton Pike and Knock Pike providing a natural gateway into the appropriately tranquil Eden Valley. On the old clapper bridge over Great Rundale Beck I force Mars Bars on each of the fell-runners, draw breath and shut up for a while. Alastair, Andrew, Hester and Claire, aka Freckle, are not only my rescuers but poets themselves and organisers of tonight’s reading. In a few hours’ time they will emerge from tents round the back of Dufton Village Hall and I won’t recognise them at first, no longer caked in mud or plastered with rain but miraculously transformed into clean, beautiful people, welcoming the audience at the door, checking tickets and running the little book stall and the makeshift bar. But they’ll recognise me. I might have spent an hour steeping in one of Mrs Kindleysides’ ornate baths, soaking up the products, scrubbing my nails, shampooing my hair, and I might have shaved and cleaned my teeth and applied lip balm, and I might now be swaggering towards the microphone in a smart jacket and ironed shirt, with a book of poems in my hand and a few one-liners up my sleeve. But they saw the gibbering ninny who came off that hill today, the expression on his face, the look in his eye, and it won’t wash. Who am I trying to kid?
Walking Home: A Poet's Journey Page 10
