Dufton to Langdon Beck
12 MILES
OS Explorer OL19 North Sheet, OL31 West
Friday 16 July
At the end of last night’s reading a man called Brian approached me and said, ‘So where are you heading tomorrow, like?’
‘To Langdon Beck,’ I told him.
‘I’ve done that walk a few times. Need some company?’
‘The more the merrier.’
‘Right,’ said Brian. ‘But I’m a bit of a fair-weather walker, like, so . . .’
And as an indication of today’s weather forecast, suffice it to say that I am not expecting to see him. But Brian is standing under a tree in the rain with two other men, gathered around a cigarette belonging to my friend Rick, who has given up smoking, and must have left Huddersfield at an ungodly hour to get through the morning traffic and arrive in Dufton by 8 a.m. The other spectral figure, with water dripping from the rim of his hat, is Chris Woodley-Stewart, director of the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) Partnership. This is his patch, and he’s very kindly offered to guide me across it pointing out outstandingly beautiful natural features and highlighting AONB concerns along the way. He’s also a bit of a poetry fan. He certainly reads it, from what he knows about Larkin and Hughes. He even quotes some of my own work, and if that’s meant to impress me, it works. And like most people who read poetry I suspect Chris writes it as well, though I’m always careful not to ask.
The Pennine Way follows the proper road out of Dufton then veers left at Billysbeck Bridge and indeed runs parallel with Billy’s Beck along a farm track towards Bow Hall. It feels unnatural to be turning due east when the whole point of the journey is to make my way south, and even more counterintuitive when the path starts angling north. In fact the whole of today’s section describes a massive dog-leg, a reminder, if one were needed, that the Way is an artificially engineered trail rather than the retracing of some purposeful trade route from an age when travel through these hills was difficult and expensive and when leisure had not yet been invented. So no matter how much the course of the Eden Valley offers an easy and obvious way ahead, the rule book says that we must decline the invitation of the line of least resistance, me, Rick, Brian and Chris, and climb again through the contours, isotherms and isobars, into the clouds.
Like just about everyone with a thorough knowledge of this area, Chris’s starting point seems to be geology, the bedrock which ultimately gives shape, structure and meaning to the territory we walk through. Even as a geography graduate I have to admit that not only have the finer points of geology eluded me, so too have most of its general principles. Either the time periods are too enormous to contemplate, or the processes too convoluted to understand, or the names too long to remember. I often equate it, at some unconscious, synaesthetic level, with the system used to acknowledge and celebrate wedding anniversaries, a system involving a hierarchy of naturally occurring minerals and one that spans less than a century, and since I can’t remember that ten years is a tin wedding and forty is ruby, then I’m unlikely to remember what happened several million years ago and which particular stone it produced. Rocks, I’m happy to understand, are very old and very hard, and as long as they support my weight and don’t move around too much, like they do in Iceland and other untrustworthy portions of the planet’s crust, I’m quite content with that level of ignorance. Chris, though, reads the landscape vertically, from the bottom up. Every hundred yards or so he points out what to my eyes is an undetectable variation in the texture of the stone or the formation of an outcrop, and I admire anyone who can animate and give character to what on the face of it is the world’s most inert and lifeless substance. Stopping to appreciate a high and long dry-stone wall that bisects two valleys, Chris explains how the shape, size, colour and consistency of the stones begins to change along its course, a consequence of wall-builders using the nearest available material while quarrying across a fault-line, so the wall becomes a kind of cross-section of the bedrock below us, and a timeline also, and after a few minutes of looking I almost convince myself that I can see the difference.
The Whin Sill is still the dominating geological subtext here, the massive volcanic plateau I first encountered at Hadrian’s Wall, its exposed northern edge forming a dramatic stone palisade across the Northumbrian fells, whose eastern reaches promise an even more spectacular natural phenomenon if the guide books are to be trusted, something that has to be seen to be believed. In fact the only reason the Pennine Way makes such an inconvenient detour as it does today is to take in what some have referred to as the ‘Grand Canyon of England’. High Cup Gill is a U-shaped chasm scooped from the earth by ice, the glacial action exposing breathtaking, almost architectural dolerite columns towards its top end, leaving epaulettes of the same volcanic rock along its flanks, especially along High Cup Scar on the south side, opposite the path, and creating the magnificent high-altitude waterfall of High Cup Nick at its head. Along with Malham Cove it is probably the most eagerly anticipated and frequently photographed landmark on the trail, a cover image for at least two trail guides, and one of those places which make the whole enterprise worth it. I’ve never been to High Cup before or anywhere close, but the internet bulges with images of its sweeping, elongated emptiness and its giant, intricate rock formations, and I’ve been looking forward to this day more than most, perhaps more than any. I’m excited about seeing a great big nothing, because for several days I’ve been staring at great big somethings in the shape of hills and mountains, and I’m hoping for a kind of clarifying and cleansing experience, a much needed obverse to yesterday’s tangle with the brooding hulk that was Cross Fell, although unless the clouds lift I won’t see anything at all. We have turned off a drove road and ascended a hill pockmarked with old mine workings and disused quarries, and are now fording several roaring streams, every one of them bursting and bubbling with brown water the colour of mild ale or porter, and edged with a creamy-looking froth to complete the beer analogy. The walker following the orthodox direction of the Pennine Way would approach High Cup from the north-east; in fact the trail is designed to maximise the effect, a gradual upstream trek alongside Maize Beck leading to a slow plod across the wet moor, then the sudden vista, and out come the cameras. Walking up the Gill, as we are, means the impression should be incremental rather than spontaneous, and even though visibility isn’t more than about twenty yards, after another half-hour or so of climbing I sense a space opening up to my right, the presence of a void or hollowness, becoming deeper and more profound as we gain height and scramble up the mountain pass which the map refers to as Narrow Gate. This might have been an old packhorse route but I certainly wouldn’t want to be up here on any kind of quadruped, having to trust its balance across the wet rocks and sections of slimy green grass. In truth I don’t have too much confidence in my own footwork either, and find myself leaning noticeably away from the edge, crouching a little, favouring the left bank and stiffening my right leg as a prop against the overhang, even though there’s no overhang to see. At Nichol Chair there’s just enough visibility to make out the basalt column which a cobbler from Dufton supposedly once climbed, and while sitting on the top proceeded to mend a pair of shoes. Is he, I wonder, the Cumbrian version of Simeon Stylites, or St Simeon the Stylite, the son of a shepherd, who from an early age sought spiritual fulfilment through many forms of physical austerity? Before he was sixteen, Simeon began a fast from which he eventually had to be rescued, and could well be credited as the inventor of the gastric band, having tied a restrictive girdle of palm fronds so tightly around his stomach that the fibres had to be surgically removed from his flesh. He then spent a year or so without sitting down, then another year or so in a hut, followed by a period living in a narrow fissure in a rock face, which he eventually abandoned because of visiting pilgrims and rubberneckers. Finally he found himself a stone pillar in a ruined building, climbed up and stayed there for the next thirty-seven years, an achievement unlikely to
be outdone, although I note with some disappointment that for all his effort he has never been officially recognised in the Guinness Book of World Records. Neither is there an entry for the fastest traverse of the Pennine Way, a record currently held, according to the internet, by one Mike Hartley, who covered the distance in two days, seventeen hours, twenty minutes and seventeen seconds, stopping for fish and chips in Alston and completing the last forty miles in a borrowed shoe which was two sizes too big. I also heard a rumour in one of the pubs that a blind Chinese man had run the Pennine Way in not much more than three or four days, a feat which I cannot begin to contemplate, especially when walking along the edge of High Cup Gill. Nichol Chair also brings to mind a scene in the seventies action thriller The Eiger Sanction, starring Clint Eastwood as an art-collecting, mountain-climbing assassin and George Kennedy as his double-crossing mentor and ‘ground-man’. Training in the Arizona desert, Eastwood and Kennedy climb an extraordinary pinnacle or stack, one of those isolated fingers of stone which protrude vertically out of the sand and look ready to collapse at any moment, and while sitting on the summit Kennedy says that he could murder a can of beer. Eastwood replies something like, ‘Who’d be mad enough to haul beer up here?’ and Kennedy says, ‘You would,’ fishing two cans out of Eastwood’s rucksack. None of us has been mad enough to haul beer up High Cup Nick, but we do have flasks, and we stand above the cleft in the rock where the stream plummets over the edge then comes flying back into our faces when the updraught gets underneath it. Then suddenly, in a moment of grace, the wind stirs the cloud and the mist parts, and just for a few seconds the whole of the valley is visible, the silver thread of the stream in the middle and the graphite-coloured path running alongside, the boulders and rocks littering the bottom, the sheer swooping descent of the valley sides, some of it grassed, some of it steep grey scree, the occupying ranks of tall, black, columnar stone along its upper border, but more than anything the sweeping majesty of its height and breadth and length, a dizzying vastness full to the brink with nothing but light and air. It seems too enormous and intangible to be caught on camera, so I try to experience it rather than capture it, memorise it as a sensation rather than a sight, by the only method that seems to make sense at the time: by breathing it in. Then the curtains close.
There’s a frog splashing around in the spray from the waterfall, and some fairly nonchalant sheep, indifferent to both the view and the dangerous drop, but no sign of the peregrine falcons or ravens that make this habitat their home. The area directly behind the Nick is a flat, grassy no-man’s land, not heath or hill or moor but an undecided, becalmed transition between the booming gravity of the Gill and the lumpy, swampy fell to follow. Between pulls on his cigarette, Water Drainage Manager Rick argues that a few linear miles of concrete channelling wouldn’t go amiss up here, but also concedes that God or whoever has done a pretty decent job of sorting out the irrigation issues. Because this is a true watershed, the type we might imagine and hope for, where one watercourse very visibly makes its way over the lip of the falls, and another trickles very visibly in the direction of Maize Beck, which we find and follow, and which surprises me with its size and volume. A beck, in my book, is a stream, a classification based on the waterway that gurgled along the back of my auntie’s house on Palace Avenue in Bridlington, never more than a couple of foot deep and four or five foot wide, ideal for damming with bricks and fallen branches, and always referred to as ‘the beck’. Surely Maize Beck is a river, long, wide, fast and proud, with its threats of deluge and promise of trout. A few years ago it swelled so much it took out the bridge near Dobson Mere Foot, the only crossing point, and regularly floods to such an extent that an alternative route to the north has to be taken. What else must a watercourse do to prove itself not beck but river? Just before we reach the new bridge, Chris stops and nods in the direction of something murky and tall in the mist about thirty yards away, which at first glance looks to me like a very big, solidly built man in black clothes, a miner, or the ghost of a miner, a revenant. But it’s a horse. They call them ponies here, fell ponies, but they also call a river a beck, and this is most definitely a horse in my dictionary, and so are the other four that materialise and dematerialise as the mist thins and thickens.
The area to the south is MOD land and there are signs warning against trespass, though no evidence of shelling or artillery fire today. After rounding the lower reaches of Meldon Hill the path begins to descend and the weather starts to improve. Chris says that the scarring on the far hills is where land-owners have mechanically cropped the heather so that grouse can feed on the young shoots. The tracts are unsightly, an unwitting form of graffiti without pattern or shape on the wide open canvas of the moor. I’d often wondered about those peculiar markings, and hoped they had a higher purpose than supplying forage for red grouse, birds introduced to the moor each year for no other reason than to provide target practice for shooters. Now I know different. And just for a few miles the notion of walking freely across the nation’s wild and untamed regions is crowded out by thoughts of government intervention and private enterprise, or a feeling that this stretch of the Pennine Way is little more than a rat run between military bombardment on one side and gratuitous field sport on the other. The thinner lines which zigzag the landscape are vehicle tracks, laid down by 4x4s, allowing shooters to be driven right to the kill-site rather than stalk their prey and earn their trophies. When we shelter under a bank of crumbling black earth, it’s like hunkering down in a trench, out of the firing line, though the sense of natural and ancient history is restored when Chris points out a silver birch twig protruding from a lower layer of peat, perfectly preserved for many millions of years. It’s hard to imagine, but like so many desolate uplands in Britain this treeless and exposed plateau was once a wood. And as if it flies the flag or carries the candle for that particular idea, a lone sycamore stands outside the remote and lonely Birkdale Farm, sometimes said to be the highest occupied farmhouse in England, a somewhat convoluted and unwelcome distinction to my mind, like being the world’s most southerly polar bear-watching station, or Britain’s fattest potholer. Birkdale is a useful bearing on the wet slog between Moss Shop, a ruined mine, and the hideous concrete slab of Cow Green Dam, holding back some four hundred million gallons of water. Cow Green Reservoir was constructed between 1967 and 1971 at great expense and amid furious controversy. Conceived to supply the needs of the great manufacturing industries of the north-east, the project involved the flooding of a sensitive and unique ‘alpine’ environment, home to rare plants with a continuous history of survival dating back to the last ice age, including spring gentian, the Teesdale violet and several species of orchid. The famously bearded naturalist David Bellamy was one of many who lent his voice to a chorus of disapproval when the reservoir was first proposed, and although some good came from the project inasmuch as the surrounding land was designated a nature reserve, the large body of water which now fills the valley has something of a redundant reputation, the furnaces of industry down on the coast no longer building up anything like the same thirst these days, kettles and water coolers in open-plan call centres not generating quite the same demand. Whether by design or coincidence, the actual reservoir never becomes visible from the Pennine Way, the path cutting below the waterline in front of the dam wall and the car park before becoming a serious scramble down the fantastically named Cauldron Snout waterfall with the equally fantastically named cliffs of Falcon Clints running high alongside. Water bounces vigorously over the tumbled, light-coloured rocks, though it isn’t quite nature in full flow since the rate of discharge from the dam is electronically and presumably remotely controlled. Where Maize Beck is finally upgraded to the River Tees at what used to be the intersection of the counties of Durham, Yorkshire and Westmorland, I watch a dipper in the foaming water, and a grey wagtail on a boulder, and two sandpipers scuttling along the riverbank, and an obliging falcon over Falcon Clints. The Pennine Way follows the north bank of the river, which bec
omes the west bank when the trail seems to want to steer back towards Scotland, and the path here is virtually indistinguishable from the littering of boulders that have either rolled from the slopes or been washed downstream. It’s less like a walk and more like an archaeological assignment among flooded ruins, leading to wet feet and bruised ankles. The river truly rushes along here, not deep but fast and noisy, garrulous even across the bed of stones and around small islands formed of bulrushes and clotted reeds. In fact we are now picking our way through a ravine, a narrowing passage of steep and high-sided valley walls, the first place on this trip that would lend itself to a successful ambush. When the valley eventually fans out onto a flood plain where the weather is altogether kinder and calmer than it was just half an hour ago, we sit and eat, and a shaggy-looking tup comes right up to Rick and takes a cheese sandwich out of his hand. I was wrong about the beer; I hear the unmistakable sound of a ring-pull being torn backwards, and when I turn to look, Brian is downing a can of lager. He’s also taken off his waterproof to reveal a Carlisle United strip. The rivers here might run to the east but his loyalties flow in the opposite direction, and the conversation turns from environmental issues in the north Pennines to football trivia, notably the subject of legendary Carlisle goalie Jimmy Glass who came lumbering upfield in the ninety-fifth minute of his side’s must-win match against Plymouth Argyll and duly volleyed home the winner, sparking a pitch invasion, in which Brian took part. The last time I read anything about him was in one of those ‘where are they now’ pieces, which found our hero now driving a taxi in Dorset, though his upbeat manner and positive attitude provoked the perhaps inevitable comment that ‘for Jimmy the Glass will always be half full’.
Walking Home: A Poet's Journey Page 11
