Walking Home: A Poet's Journey

by Simon Armitage

  The descent from Pen-y-ghent is the closest the Pennine Way comes to rock-climbing, a vertiginous scramble down exposed boulders and loose stones on the hill’s most exposed and narrowest aspect, with not much room for manoeuvre and little margin for error. Coming up would be easier, without having to see the land falling away at a disturbing angle or the path disappearing over a precipice, or feeling the hillside crumbling underfoot. In two or three places I even turn around and go down backwards, remembering advice on how to negotiate a stepladder from a friend’s loft. A handrail would be good, though frowned on, obviously. Or even a rope – anything for the hands to reach for and the fingers to curl around instead of grabbing at tufts of loosely anchored grass or flapping at thin air. Towards the bottom where the path spills out like broken biscuits we pass about thirty kids and a couple of teachers setting off for the peak, and wonder about the risk-assessment form associated with this kind of day trip, which presumably has to allow for several types of gravity-induced injury all the way from a sprained ankle to death by plummeting.

  *

  One of the unspoken and perhaps unconscious reasons for choosing geography as a degree, apart from shortcomings in other subject areas at exam level, was the lure of the field trip, the notion of hacking through virgin forest and happening on an undiscovered Amazonian tribe, or tracking the behaviour of a barrage balloon from a weather station somewhere in the Arctic Circle, or driving sand buggies across the Gobi Desert in search of water. The reality of course was far more prosaic: one visit to Welwyn Garden City for a module on new towns, and a tour of the M25. Admittedly things got a little more exotic in the second year, with a trip to the Netherlands then another to Paris. But in Holland, instead of plotting population statistics using records in Nijmegen Public Library, I went in search of other kinds of records, the ones played at thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute, rarities on obscure labels, imports and bootlegs not available in the UK, and instead of grasping the fundamentals of postwar Dutch demographics I came home clutching Bleke Hender Jeg Har Elsket by Eyeless in Gaza, and considered it a major requisition. In Paris, the predominantly male geography department had shared the cost of the trip with the entirely female and completely glamorous French studies department, and this time I returned with no understanding whatsoever of Le Corbusier’s idealistic proposals for relieving the urban housing crisis (and no vinyl either) but with a passionate interest in Anglo-French relations. It says a great deal about Slug’s undergraduate experience, when we start reminiscing, that he can’t remember where he went on his field trips, but vaguely recalls standing somewhere near the sea with a soil auger in his hand.

  In a field at Rainscar, next to the lane, in a saddle between two valleys, where the gradient decants Silverdale Gill to the south-west and Pen-y-ghent Gill to the north-east, we applaud a young black bullock in a field, so contoured and muscled, so sculpted in every part of its flesh that it looks like a diagram in a butcher’s shop displaying all the various cuts of meat. Then we turn ninety degrees and plod towards the top of Fountains Fell, reaching the strange landscape of its summit at lunchtime, old coal workings being responsible for the craters and bunkers that extend across its plateau. Two large cairns, which Wainwright christened the Two Stone Men, stand just to the left of the path, wondrous, defiant and improbable. For two walkers they provide a good backrest, and plenty of shelter, and now that the clouds are beginning to lift for the first time today, a well-deserved view. And to two geographers that view looks like classic limestone country: wooded river valleys cutting through grazed green slopes, and above them, bold and distinctive hills, shaped and formed rather than angled or peaked, with steel-grey terraces and scars along the shoulder of each ridge, and bone-yards of grey stone on the lower slopes where time and the weather have prised boulders out of their settings and rolled them down the hills. One thing I’ve learned to expect with the Pennine Way is that even across featureless plains and over wide empty moors, you’ll suddenly find yourself in a more localised setting with its own particular atmosphere and boundaries, like the territory we stroll through next, a long easy descent through an area of marsh and bulrush, decorated with wild flowers, strewn stones and docile cows. It could be an idealised scene in a Romantic painting, or even something from the Renaissance, as if a glance over to the right might reveal the Virgin Mary with the infant Christ in her arms, or to the left a satyr carrying a golden spear. The cattle are English longhorns, ruminating and contemplating and not in any way disposed towards confrontation as we pass through the herd, which is a relief, given the armoury available to them. At one point in the mid-seventies there was a craze for replacing the drop-handlebars on a standard racing bike with far wider ones known as cowhorns, which could well have been modelled on this breed. They looked cool but made it difficult to escape down narrow ginnels or snickets after a misdemeanour.

  The big glittering mirror set into the landscape in the far distance is Malham Tarn, which is where we’re heading, and Adrian saves us the bother of having to track him down by intercepting us just south of Tennant Gill Farm, his frantic sheepdog Maggie rounding us up and bringing us in. Adrian Pickles is the director of Malham Tarn Field Centre, the stately house overlooking the water, and after only a few minutes in his company I begin to get the sense that not only is he one of those experts of the landscape that I’ve met along the Pennine Way, but in relation to this neck of the woods, its guardian and stock-taker and auditor as well. Barely anything grows here it seems, animal or vegetable, without Adrian’s knowledge or even permission, and every millimetre of rain, hour of sunlight or change in wind speed is dutifully measured and entered in the logbooks. A walking encyclopaedia of upper Malhamdale, Adrian is also full of anecdotes and details that put flesh on the bones of the raw data, such as his story about the rare lady’s slipper orchid which flowered here last year, so rare that it required round-the-clock protection, which meant someone standing above it during the day and sleeping next to it at night, like the priest at Nemi guarding Diana’s sacred grove. Adrian also tells us that during last year’s big freeze he ran right across the middle of the tarn, a form of walking on water I suppose.

  Not far from his house he leads us through an overgrown meadow, pushes down a clump of nettles with his boot and points to a medium-size puddle, which to Slug and myself, even as two qualified geographers, is a just a medium-size puddle among a clump of nettles, but which is, apparently, the wellspring for an entire river system. Given the eager way Maggie paws and barks at the clear eye of water issuing from the dark hole in the ground it might be the Amazon or the Nile, though for such an excitable creature the dog seems strangely underwhelmed by the presence of a shrew in Adrian’s porch, which his wife, Jacqueline, eventually corrals in a Carte D’Or ice-cream tub (Cherry Blossom flavour, I think, or possibly Macadamia Night) and repatriates to the next field while we’re drinking tea and eating cake. But there’s no time to rest, because I want to walk to Malham, where I bought my first ever pair of walking boots and wrote one of my first ever poems, and want to walk there today rather than add it to tomorrow’s journey, even though it means overshooting by a few miles then coming back to the Centre. Plus, Adrian still has a million other things to show us before sundown, many of them rocks.

  There’s a service road running along the eastern side of the tarn, and the sound of water lapping against a shore is a sound I haven’t heard before on this walk. Not a coastal noise of strong wind and big waves and raucous gulls, though no doubt Malham Tarn can boast all those things on its day, but just the composed, rhythmic sound of calm, inland water shushing and slushing against a shallow bank, counterpointing our footsteps on the stony path, and accompanied by the mournful fluting of the odd curlew. The sun is out now, in the south-west, and for a minute or so we walk straight into it, the lake’s surface reflecting its glare directly into our faces.

  This gentle acreage of upland is the reception area for one of the most remarkable geological features not
only along the Pennine Way but in the whole of Britain. Before we go any further though, and because me and Slug have been using the terms loosely and interchangeably, Adrian explains the essential difference between a sink-hole and a swallow-hole, and between a swallow-hole and a shake-hole, and detours us towards a large boulder, a glacial erratic mistakenly known as the Malham meteorite, which is acting like a wobbly plug above some open wound in the ground, around which soil is certainly sinking, or maybe shaking, or perhaps being swallowed. Underneath it I notice a small Tupperware box, and pull it out, thinking someone must have misplaced their picnic. But it turns out that this is a well-known geocache site, a place frequented by geocachers while out geocaching, a practice which has been going on for over a decade now, apparently, without anyone telling me about it. A cross between treasure-hunting and orienteering, geocaching seems to involve navigating to a specific location using a GPS device, finding a waterproof container, signing the logbook with a personalised code name, then making a kind of primitive trading gesture by swapping one trinket or knick-knack for another. Peeling back the lid, it’s like looking at the contents of my sock after a particularly eventful reading. Inside there are a few pencils and pens, two gonks, two buttons, an old watch, a golf tee, a badge saying ‘Winner’ on it, a zebra finger-puppet, and something altogether darker and ritualistic in the form of a lock of hair attached to a poem about cot death. There’s also a magpie feather and a polished stone. Adrian says I should make a swap, but the hair and the poem make me feel as if I’ve intruded, and that taking anything would be tantamount to grave-robbing. Also, the only sentimental things in my wallet are a couple of passport-size photographs, one of my wife and one of my daughter, and I don’t feel like leaving either of them in a sandwich box on a lonely moor waiting to be traded for a penny whistle or shark’s tooth. So with a little sleight of hand I pretend I’ve made a transaction, then press the lid onto the container and slide it back under the rock.

  No sooner does water pour from the lip of Malham Tarn than it famously disappears again through a hole in the earth. But having talked up this phenomenon as the geographical highlight of the day, the physical reality is something of an anticlimax, water draining away through an ill-defined area of boggy grass either side of a dry-stone wall rather than plunging into a bottomless pit above which vultures circle and rainbows form, although the presence of a couple of hundred glittering silver perch, all lying dead in a small pool, certainly adds a touch of mystery to the scene. Adrian puzzles over the deceased fish, bewildered as to the cause, and a little annoyed, as if this is something which has happened behind his back, some glitch in the local environmental system which will have to be looked into and addressed. I offer my own investigative insight by saying that all the fish appear very healthy-looking.

  ‘Yes. Except for being dead,’ he replies.

  At the end of the last ice age, melt-water streamed in torrential quantities over the exposed plain of limestone below the tarn, scoring the deep channel that is now the south-running valley known as Watlowes. But limestone is soft, not much more resilient than candy by comparison to certain other rocks, and the constant chemical and abrasive attention of rainwater opened up new channels and short cuts below the surface. Adrian is in his geological element now as we wander along the eerie corridor of the dry valley, which is essentially a dead river. He explains how dyes have been poured in at the top to try to trace the course of the stream as it burrows and tunnels through the complex system of caves and potholes underground, and apparently the water which sinks into the ground at the expertly named Water Sinks is not the same water which eventually emerges as Malham Beck, a mile or so downstream. And we do what we can to preserve our reputation as geographers by going toe-to-toe with him on the terminology, throwing in clints and grikes, then freeze–thaw action, and Slug finally playing an ace by referencing the classic ‘karst’ scenery associated with the limestone landscape. But no technical explanation can adequately describe what lies ahead. The empty gorge, flanked by sentinels of white stone, littered with rubble and bisected with precarious walls, eventually relaxes its narrow embrace and opens its arms to the astonishing limestone pavement of Malham Cove, ushering the traveller onto a wide, white platform with a wider panorama beyond. I’ve only ever approached the Cove from below, from where it looks like a convex dam wall or eighty-metre fortification, a great slab of concrete-coloured rock, forbidding and closed, the end of something, a stop. But from up here it is a beginning. Underfoot, the fractured rocks seem to have been assembled, like large pieces of a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, and have a distinct dental look about them – molars and lateral incisors with all the associated cavities and cracks. Tufts of grass sprout from the fissures, even the odd rowan tree, so it’s a hop, step and a jump to the front, minding the gaps, being careful not to lose a leg down one of the faults. Standing above the precipice, in the spotlight of late afternoon sun, there’s an undeniable sensation of being on stage, with the whole of the world as an audience, or North Yorkshire at the very least. Scanning the horizon I can see a mast to the south-east, which I’m shocked to realise is the television transmitter of Emley Moor, which is only a few miles from my house, and for several moments I pretend to myself that my heart is racing, looping the loop and making some irregular and quite alarming beats. But it’s just the mobile phone in my breast pocket, the drone of messages and missed calls that had been circulating the planet all day suddenly spotting me here on top of this cliff and coming swarming into the handset, making it shudder and twitch.

  *

  Having charmed his way into an evening meal, including an individually cooked vegetarian alternative and a bottle of real ale to wash it down with, Slug is now on the point of being offered a bed for the night. Judging by the way the question of sleeping arrangements is tentatively broached I sense there has been a little bit of behind-the-scenes discussion as to the exact nature of our relationship, not helped by Slug’s mischievous references to his many friends in Brighton and his appearance at the dinner table in a pink floral shirt, and eventually I intervene by saying that single rooms would be much appreciated and that I get first use of any shared bathroom and toilet facility. The reading is to take place in the Field Centre itself, leased from the National Trust and converted into an eighty-five-bed residential research facility used mainly by school parties on educational trips to the countryside. Immediately inside the grand entrance there’s an office, buzzing with computers and stuffed with handbooks, followed by a couple of high-ceilinged reception rooms and parlours which have been converted into seminar and dining facilities, backed by a couple of kitchens designed for mass catering, and several store rooms stocked with bulk foodstuffs and industrial quantities of ketchup. A Cluedo-like central staircase sweeps upwards to a maze of interconnected dormitories, with ship-style bunk beds built into every recess and heavy fire doors protecting every room. Places like this can never quite shake off the atmosphere of the institution, be it hospital, school, prison or sanatorium, but the many posters and exhibits do their best to conjure up a friendlier ambience, as does the illuminated fish tank crawling with native and under-threat blue crayfish, one of Adrian’s pet causes. There’s more accommodation across the courtyard, where Slug and myself have been stabled, and another outbuilding converted into classrooms, one of which is tonight’s venue.

  I don’t know where the audience comes from because Malham is a long way from most places and Malham Tarn is a long way from Malham, but they duly arrive, and their numbers are swelled by what I assume to be the enforced attendance of a group of geography students from a school in Norfolk and their two teachers. This week’s residents at the Centre, they were probably looking forward to an evening of cigarettes and cider behind the log-shed after a hard day classifying lichen or dissecting owl pellets, but have now been marched along to a poetry reading. ‘You don’t have to stay,’ I tell them, and wait for a minute or so, in silence, with my arms folded, until half a dozen of them
pick up their bags and leave.

  I read in front of a backcloth of wallcharts and posters showing frogs in their various developmental stages and wild flowers of the British countryside, and to a soundtrack of birdsong and the occasional aeroplane on its way to or from Leeds–Bradford airport. Every now and again I look up at one of the geography teachers, wondering if that could have been me, wondering if, in some other version of reality, it IS me, and that in a moment I’ll come to my senses and find myself listening to a poet while trying to plan a lesson on fluvial geomorphology in my head. At the end of the evening the forty-seven people in front of me donate a grand total of £86.96. The sock also contains two corn plasters and an illustrated leaflet describing how to put an injured person in the recovery position: ‘Move the patient’s nearest arm as though they are stopping traffic.’ I assume this contribution has come from a bored student who wanted to let me know how it feels to be the victim of a poetry-trauma, but I find out later that it came from Slug. I also find out that the students were actually looking forward to hearing me read, because they’d been studying my poems for their exams, and only left because I seemed annoyed. I slope off into the kitchen looking for a knife to cut out my tongue, or a slice of humble pie. Other items on the menu are my own foot, which I find I can put in my mouth quite easily, and a bite from the hand that feeds me.