Bramble mobbed and sure-shod I clamber up the glen on a soft camber of path under trees that shout in the merest breeze; and a slick of stream – more a dribble really, last loosenings of rain – partners me as I climb next to the tram line. Running off from the hill up top and making its asides, sometimes shrill but now a silver jumble of stone-jostled sounds. The water-tumble is joined by a sharp, distinct line of birdsong; no choice: bright day, sun out in everyone’s faces and the birds are loud in all places. Summer rejoices, everything exceeds itself, getting bigger and bigger with vitality of sap. A wren sends a voice out into the world larger than its own thimbleful of body.
How does it do that?
I walk under beech and oak, beside birches broken in anonymous storms before – perhaps – anyone thought to give storms names. I touch their cracked, lichenous skins and get in close to them, running a finger into their lines to find the paths far smaller things than I make their ways to and fro in. The trees overspread themselves and together enmesh the eye that would see through them.
Lines over lines over lines.
I walk the glen edges as if I’d know my limits, drawing my own line by Baildon Moor, up around the crags irresistibly down-looking into a dark crease of valley where the river can be heard as a whisper of something far greater hidden under dulled green canopies of trees. The crags are hard on the knees, up-reared and sheer, opening here into a crevasse, there onto a platform. Further on they perform the way itself; stretching out as bridges where the sandy silt of this sandstone grit which overlays the clay’s been washed away in – perhaps – those same nameless storms.
Take a lungful of air deep and try to preserve it as long as I can; become a bellows, and air and spore, sap-breath and moor-dust travelling through me. Eyes close to the view and turn inward to the view there. Spare.
And for the first seconds when I open them again, only blue as through a filter.
This is common land that endures for common folk to walk, to own, to share, and make lines across. Up by the woods-deep tramway; up Prod Lane; until the world opens out on top of me: sky blue, scudded with vapour lines and falling away limitless above. Rocks belowfoot become quarries and precipices at sheer horizon lines, leaving signs of violence; a landscape aggressively made to fit around and between.
I have seen rocks not as infinite in their roundness, nor as inviting of touch. My hands drag across them, invisibly marking lines on them as I try to decipher the marks other hands have carved on, not through, them.
Even these are not indelible to the rain.
Then through the grasses between as I go from monolith to monolith of rock – my steps older than Jurassic up here – carboniferous grit works itself into the grooves of my boots; the sleeves of my smock. And I pick a stalk for something to hold onto: its papery gold crackling in my palm as I squeeze the seeds of this almost cropped barley top.
Feet other than mine have made deep, dry-banked line-trenches on this rock-buttressed upland; walking a resolute yes to the rights of common ways: dog-walkers, runners, school-returning kids, lovers – these have all helped to lay down the lines of the glen.
Their sunken hollows – light lines between grasses and boulders – forcing and shaping the landscape around them, give the illusion of permanence.
May these lines never fade and may feet always walk-read them.