History |

Potter’s Field

Posted on Feb 8, 2022Feb 8, 2022 by kylienorman

The Potter’s Field is full of bones that no one claims or knows whose ulna or stapes these were: what works they wrought or sounds heard. And no one comes here but the crows to pick it over, scratching at the earth as at a wound; turning over, instead of sherds, pale shards of bone that are twice-buried when thrown in again. Buddy Bolden, he was buried so in New Orleans, forgotten in clay; some women tried as witches long ago; a few pigeon bones muddled withal found their way into that claggy grave. The unquiet excommunicants a righteous Church excised for suicide were here cut off from sanctuary. A child without a name also was disposed of in this way: she they put to work too hard for chapped and little fingers. Orphaned of the world, belonging to none, their dead eyes turned up to sky as they were rolled into the clay mould. All the nameless folk the world forgot are planted deep here in the damp cool ground: all lost, not found. Some too poor to buy a plot to fit their bones before death came for them. A pauper’s grave in Potter’s Field costs nothing.

Here, the massing poor stack deeply in obscurity. There, a jawbone lies uselessly unhinged, undone from any skull it might have cleaved to in life: the teeth stained and marshalled like witnesses. See, a person was this: a kind of man who smacked his chops about his spoon, gnawing it when hunger gnawed at him. This maw’s rictus grin is only half-human, half a story of him.

Fragments. Old bones and histories now locked in trenches potters cut for clay to make their vessels once. The potter’s art made this a tombyard. You do not think the potter has a double craft until you see the fields of pot-holed clay left in their wake – waiting to receive their dead, swallowing them whole in pitchers bottomless and cold. And do you know of the originary field – the one began it all – bought in blood for thirty pieces of a traitor’s silver? Good for nothing but putting away those we do not dare remember. Did Judas hang himself there and slip unremarked into clay, the first to go to a potter’s grave?

I will not think it strange then that no one likes to walk the way beside a Potter’s Field. They rightly fear, who creep away, a fate that brings the world’s lost limbs together in one great grave forever (or at least until the dead shall rise and call to account their dispossessed state). Unfriended, disappointed, unanointed. Those whom no rites ushered on their way. Their strangled voices crowd upon your tongue. Speak for them, the disarticulated vertebrae and cracked pelvic bone that bore a babe once – now infertile: a reliquary for the worm.

So many potters and potters’ fields the world over: the great leveller. There will always be clay to work and fashion whilst the living want new-fangled things, and people always to forget and bury in its awful place. For pity, give not to me a potter’s plot: bury me high up somewhere beneath the starlight. Let me not be exchanged for a clay cup, an oil lamp, a painted pot. Give to me some ceremony when I go, and a clayless memory to keep alive some part of me.

Of Meadowland

Posted on Jul 25, 2021Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

The slow-going amble of a hedgehog had welcomed our first evening, its stretched body almost lost to us in the creeping dusk as it pulled night down slowly around it. Bothersome flies mobbed us, determinedly unspooked by waving hands, troubling the eyes and tickling at the nose. Loosening our strides down towards the river for some relief (past the honeysuckle, scenting sweet nectars), our eyes chased the evening’s swallow flights as they gulleted airborne suppers. This. This is what we had come for: space to breathe and to collect nature’s gleanings.

We had driven through moors of welted thistles and lapwings whose cunning kept them hidden in the stooked marram grasses; a snipe on a brief respite from its young; and grouse that only made themselves known by an antic chuckle: all throat and no song. Taking the narrowing country lanes that corset you between jumbling stone walls, we had seen the dying back of the cow parsley, and the emergence of the hogweed – all elbows and knuckles – evangelising to the sky. Loudly-proclaimed umbels; finest lacework before our eyes. We had looked doubtfully at glowering clouds of grey, against which the moors hulked sullenly. Here and there skulked hen pheasants, dun bodies carried low and a wary eye trained on all passersby. But as we got down into the valley, the creamy, tasty elderflower blooms saucered in the lanes: gone the hawthorn-blossoms that made the Dales white in May. Down, still down, through deepening lanes almost completely overarched in tiring summer greens of ancient oaks and sycamores, the road flushed us out like two partridge into the village of Low Row.

Fetched up in the bowl of Swaledale, away from wild unknowable moors, with their secret pockets of heath thymes, trefoils and bedstraws, our eyes claimed the downy meadows as our own. Stone-barned and stone-bordered living links, threading the valley’s geography, and as old as anything else here that the eyes can see, save only the brooding treeless hills. Their brute aspects are millenia-old limestone, crumbling in loosening shale at the top: slate-grey and warning of the folly of trying to climb them. They preside over layered volumes of stone, laid down almost-accidentally like forgotten books over centuries of time; little creatures, fish and plants, ossified forever in sedimentary secrecies. A day is but an eye-blink to these Yoredale geomorphologies; they deal in deep time. Stacking up silt and organisms in archives of rock; each one speaking to a different age of the world, differently charactered, with plants and animals discoverable in distinct typologies. I have been at Wain Wath force, the river licking at the rock like a tongue at gap-toothed gums, and found the minutely-preserved frond of a palm, and the impression of a bivalve shell. I have held them in my hands and felt the telescoping of time to when each of them thrived, in a landscape I would not have recognised.

And lying so lightly atop it, as seemingly impermanent and ephemeral as fossil is tough, meadowland is a temporary greening crust. The surface glamour to buried treasure. It does not know the words ‘lasting’ or ‘forever’, yet year on year, seed by seed, it incorrigibly grows itself again. To see a meadow is to see nature’s optimism writ large. Their vernal grasses were in the process now of oldening, some farmers already busy about the first summer cutting, leaving silvery waves of sillion hay in their wakes. Touched with a million yellow stars – buttercups, upturned faces transfixed skywards, the sun reified in each one – they were taking energy and laying it down for winter. Hard not to see them without the mind playing chin-tickling, fleeting tricks. At a distance, gold and green were the valley’s mantle: a straightforward dales greeting.

I am not deceived by their delicate glamour. However fragilely they may seem to cling upon the earth, there is something antique also in the meadow’s temporary armour. Some of these dales meadows have taken centuries of persuasion to come into being and are truly medieval. Years of sunshine have sung their petals and grasses open to make this rich lexicon of flower; countless winds have dispersed and deposited their seeds; floods of rain have watered them well in and been drunk down deep. Meadows are one of nature’s finest paradoxes: they are old and at the same time constantly renewed. They speak to decades, sometimes centuries, of patient craft and alliance between nature and farmer. If it is an orchid meadow, you can reckon that at least a century of sympathetic farming – leaving the meadow to its own devices for the majority of the summer; only mowing in August or September – has allowed the orchid to establish and bloom. Each one is only ever a temporary display of splendour, and I am smote with the nostalgia of looking over old things made crisply new.

Etymologically, the word meadow carries its own doom within it, deriving from the OE mǣdwe, which is in turn derived from the proto-Indo-European for ‘mow or reap’. Its name speaks of its unique relationship with farming, but also of its yearly ending. There is the undeniable risk that, mown too early, species of wildflower can be lost from meadowlands, and far more quickly than it took to grow and habituate them there. The farmer, working with nature, keeps the meadow alive and gets the benefit of the hay bounty as winter feed for the herd. The wisdom it takes to farm in this way is perhaps what George Ewart Evans meant when he called his account of the dying way of Suffolk farming life, ‘Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay.’

The next day – a birthday – we had come to the meadows from waterfalls where I’d sluiced my feet in sharp-cool water, and felt the touch of millenia in the peat-reddened rock and silt between my toes. I’d let abluvion wash the cares from world-weary bones. Now, under skies vastly blue, and standing in the midst of meadows pulsing with life, heat seethes over everything. It beats its velvet wings at the neck and limbs, as though it were a living thing itself; it crowds and sits like flannel in the mouth, and all the air is filled with the acrid tang of green growing things and dry dusts and grass seeds. The sun is a bright white disc above, with nowhere to hide from it in the wide-open cleft of the dale; fermenting the air to a heady cider in the blood. Everything about the meadows is wanting to get in: to get under the skin. It is oppressive and at the same time friending. I look on them as presiding mysteries. I want to chlorophyll up my lungs, and make them a little into my own chemistry.

Details come slowly from this cabinet of curiosities. I look upon the meadows with a collector’s avidity: wanting to claim and name every wildflower I see; to store up memorial specimens for my mind’s eye to take out and pause over later. My eyes, illiterate at first glance, see only grass, encompassed by walls of stone which trees have bitten through. All colour is made monochrome under the bleaching sun. In the blinding light, I have only mere impressions of blooms on the retina as I stoop-bend to uncover them from the grasses that crowd them. The grasses themselves – cock’s foot and meadow fescue, sedges and timothy – are brittling before my eyes. Bees and flies rise and fall, flower to flower, in lazy flights, absorbing the stark heat into their wings. Though newly July, the meadow’s hedging trees begin to show the oldening green of their leaves, left too long out in the sun. A percussion of cricketty strings from a myriad unseen grasshoppers clamours at my ear drums. All noise and no sight of them – I kneel to look. Ghostly things. A tinnitus of leg-squeakings. The meadows are a veritable factory of such things. A world in miniature, busy in the throes of industry: so alive that I feel the more so simply from being here under the same skies, breathing their goldening air.

Time was, we believed there was a signature for every ailment here: a plant resembled that which it was designed to heal. Eyebright to mend the vision because the flowers looked like little eyes; heartsease for an erratic pulse because the petals form a heart. The doctrine of signatures was the country folk’s herbal, and how many of the common names came about: lungwort, lady’s mantle; self-heal. This kind of physick was very literal.

I bind the Dales: I am flower-whisperer, way-maker, step-slower, rain-drinker, seed-shaker, stem-quaker, wind-friender, bird-bringer, ankle-kisser, hand-tempter, bee-fetcher, cure-grower, grass-singer, leg-clinger, lung-filler, soul-lifter, dew-sparkler, wave-bearer. See my pink storksbill, jewelled to perfection in magenta with a white eye; and here the perfect white stars of my stitchwort-flowered eyes; here tormentil to stud the grass and wink up at the sky with yolky yellow. These my treasures: come try, come try. See here, this harebell, here this bell of robin’s-egg blue, for you. Here, I’ve brought the colour of sky to earth. I sat on this through a hard-bitten winter, worked all the springtime on it, awakening seed and soil to this alchemy. It is a love song I prepared for thee. Self-heal for the hurt you carry; orchids to show you that there can still be beauty; betony to knit and clean your open wound; stitchwort to sew you back together; eye-bright to help you see all my treasures laid before you. I implore you, do not pass me by without brushing a hand through all my bounty. I am the layman’s apothecary: come try, come try.

Meadow speaks the most eloquently of the two of us – with the fluency of flower and grass – so that I read its arrangements, every time, slightly differently, and always with wonder. Its fragility is inherent in the careful parasitic balance of yellow-rattle (sometimes called meadow-maker) and its host plant, grass. Like hedge bindweed, and other plants that make their way through symbiotic, mystical pairings – the yellow rattle binds itself to the grass and exhausts it, strangling its ambition to take over. Its smothering love makes space for smaller and yet more delicate flowers: dainties like the harebell, which the meadow conjures on the slenderest of stems for its little knell, such that a stiff fall of rain could lay it out.

These meadows are a vital link in the old Dales Corpse Way – the way in the medieval period linking Keld to Muker, to Reeth, to the final destination at St Andrew’s Church in Grinton. St Andrew’s was known as the Cathedral of the Dales and was the only church for centuries where mourners could bring their dead for burial. What hard-grafting business it must have been. We had walked some of the way from Keld in the morning’s heat, stifled by it with only our own bodies to carry, whilst noting the pale yellow and purple of the heartsease like a drift of snow upon the grass. The thought of bearing a body on hill-climbing and steepening ways, round about the valley until final reaching its bottom filled us with awe and horror. Did the meadows midwife them through her passages as they do me now? Through snug stone squeezes into meadows new, past green upon green of ripening winter feed: fattening and not-quite-mature-yet seeds. And did they pick some of her summer blooms to arrange in the funeral bier? Heartsease for remembrance; harebell for grief; agrimony, an old physick for melancholy.

They are sustenance in every sense, these meadows: in the practical sense, they keep a dwindling array of insect life alive; they feed the farmer’s sheep come winter; and they meet, perhaps least importantly, a deeply-felt need in me now, with the immediacy of a shot taken to the bloodstream. I inhale and draw the sillage of the meadow deep into myself: embrace the feeling of being pollen-bothered and spore-gathered and petal-fuddled in the waning light. My cantering heart won’t be still, but is attuned to smell; to the powdery puffs of pollen from the cock’s-foot grass; to a fescue’s touch. Remnants of living things thick-tickle my throat until my tongue is dumb from their clamouring.

It occurs to me that, across the whole country, meadows are kin – a dynamic chain of natured, inexhaustible being, which the bees, hoverflies, butterflies and moths, know the particularities of, and the byways between. Each one colludes to form a living map whose job is to sustain all manner of creatures. As we turn steps homeward out of the final stone squeeze, I know that soon enough it will be the time of the reddening sorrel, blazing its red-caped leaves to quarrel the grass; when all else will have gone to seed and sorrel alone will stand different and special. Then the ancient insect flight-paths, unmarked on any map, will once again lie dormant and unused: flower, seed and bee all buried, for another year at least.

Carry me to my Burying-ground

Posted on Jun 12, 2021Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

She wakes with a sharp aching of limb and unfolds herself, heron-like, as though having waited too long and still for prey. On her box bed under the window, she is half between waking and sleeping, still trying to catch at the mist of her dream even as it looses from her mind’s grip. She had been on the moor, her fingers pushed into moss as she scrambled over stones, her whole body vital and moving as one mechanical bellows, propelled along by her thought. It was glorious and a taunt. She was her lungs and her legs working in tandem, a furiously strong bodied being; breathing the landscape as much as she walked it. Her long strides cut up the moorland and carved it. The muscle memory of those moors was strong, as though their contours were alive under her skin; that dip in the heather there, her sinewed bone. The fizz and crackle of the wind on the moors was in her like the whistle in a pipe or the glamour on water. Essential, but it’s fume was murder.

Even now, her fingertips have the dream-memory of the green, wet tickle of starry sphagnum – soft as tongues. But there is something else waking from sleep within her, bringing with it steel bands and the stale smells of sweat and the sickbed which won’t be repressed. As the wallpaper comes into focus, she feels the dream dull and slip awfully out of reach and she flinches as bands of pain tighten about her chest.

There is a stillness muffling the house. She shifts and is surprised – as always on waking now – to feel the lancing of pain and a confinement of being. Her body – once the vehicle to her liberty outdoors – is tightly wound as if by springs. Steel wires run to red-hot brands in her throat and there is a growing choke. As she cramps inward, a book, forgotten, slides off her lap and, puppeted by her pain, she shakes out of torpor with wracking coughs. Downstairs a chair leg scrapes across stone flags and she is frozen for a moment, holding her breath with effort, her eyes on the stairs like a hunted animal.

She lists to the side, trying to trick the beast within, the mass of her chintz skirts folding like paper. The hem of her dress has been raised over the years to allow for lengthening strides and give her greater liberty across the moors. Now her feet are cold in her stockings. But as she trembles a hand down her skirts, her legs misgive, and she sinks down with a curse, a floorboard giving her away. “Emily?” – from below. The word is a pinched frown. Charlotte. Not now! As the beast in her chest claws to get out, she thrusts her fingers into the wall for support and touches the graven impressions they had made as children there. Her brother had written his name over and over – he had always wanted to see his own name. That had been his trouble. Feeling it under her fingertips – where so recently she had dreamed the feel of moss – renews the sense of loss, sharpening its edge from beyond the window; from beyond his nearby grave. She traces the letters in the plaster on a gasp and the beast’s bands cinch tighter.

As though her brother’s ghost has got into her, the clawing of the beast renews its savagery, and her body – once so reliable and sure over rough moorland – betrays her and falls. Darkness rushes up to meet her; she hears little feet slapping on the stairs and the beating of skirts like the flapping of crows’ wings. And even as unconsciousness takes her, she resents those busy little feet and their easy movement. That has always been her trouble.

***

This was a walk that happened to us with all the merciless bluntness of a Yorkshire hossing. I had wanted it, though; had angled and wheedled for it using all the guile of the youngest of the family because it is into their country. And it was my turn to choose. I wanted it with a desperation born of wishing to feel close to those women and the flame of their genius. To walk quite literally in their footsteps along paths of the Dean valley which had daily carried them and shaped their words and imaginations, as though by walking the same paths I could awaken – and somehow claim – their memory. I did not articulate it to myself then, but I hoped that a creative magic still lingered in the soil of this Yorkshire valley, like firefly trails of wonder that I might pick up and weave about myself. But, in counterpoint to my sentimental notions, a ragged inclemency prevails and what we will get from this walk is mudded, bone-cold and land-lashed by a haily squall that will beset us halfway through. This seems, in hindsight, comeuppance for an ambition to enshrine and attempt to memorialise this landscape; for being consumed by others’ histories and not walking my own present.

Even though, in the annals of our walks together, it will be remembered with shudders and grimaces, it is almost as if it never really happened: dream-like and insubstantial, but for the storm which drenched us. And this because I walked it stepping between worlds – between a past never mine, and a present I was (if only temporarily) denying. I will shiver, when eventually we get home, for at least an hour as someone seems to cross my grave, yet I am the trespasser over graves and disturber of ghosts: my intention to walk as a means of conjuring, however imperfectly. Yet the way will remain silent; keeping its own counsel; and untrusting of the non-native.

Latterly, my feet may be able to recall the path through Goose-Eye, along and across the valley and up to Newsholme Dean, but at the time our steps riddle with uncertainty and we continually lose our way. It is a landscape that resists any attempt to know it. Doubt is the predominant theme. My mind has wrapped these memories into a few unstable impressions, like volatile elements ready to disperse at the effort to fix and grasp them.

There is, for example, the memory of the tang of saltpeter on the air as of spent fireworks. Grey and unremarkable, the sky is dirty pale, not romantic – not moody or atmospheric – just sullen. The trees look flat against it, their moss sleeves lending only a little colour. Branches bib and spook, black against white. And we have made a false start, the first of many mis-pathings. We make our way down a field which has been sculpted into steps by the passage of sheep over several years’ grazing: latitudinal bands slicing through the grass ready to trip the steps of the unwary walker. At the base of the field’s sharp decline, the stream in spate, over which we are bidden to find our way “at rough stepping stones (tricky after rain)” warns that this is to be no ordinary walk. The stepping stones about which the walking guide makes its parenthetical warning are submerged under a swollen torrent and the banks, mud-slicked and steep, make an optimistic jump foolhardy but necessary. We stand for a while surveying with townie reluctance. By a mixture of bravura and the stream’s alchemy, we each make land safely on the opposite bank. This is the first pact we make with the path: you may try to throw us off into the wet, but we will not be leaving anyone behind.

We enter woodland shushing with leaves, all its clothing at our feet, its branches revealing the secrets of their nests like clotted arteries. In spring the wooded slopes of the valley are primrosed and the nap of new tender grasses flushed around the bases of the trees. This is that in reverse, everything turning its face away from the year that has been and pulling on decay and fall with the familiarity of widow’s weeds. The leaves that remain – mainly beech and oak – are delicate and crimped as funerary crepe, fragilely hanging onto the year with a tenacity that belies its end.

It is a colourless November shuffling affair through dripping woods and again we lose our way up a steep incline where the mud is thick and oozing, purchase-shy, daring us to try for footholds. I am finding it difficult to interpret direction in the valley. My feet are not reading the path correctly while my mind is as doggedly alive as a tuning fork for any residual ghost of their presence. Senses stretched wide as dowsing rods to detect the patter of their words, I attempt footholds like well-worn verbs. Yet too often our feet are turned aside.

More by accident than luck, we make the sleepy hamlet of Goose Eye with its old mill chimneys like sheared-off bobbins. The mill windows are eyes marshalled to watch our stop-start progress with unfriendly aspect. We stitch our footsteps through the cotton village, following the mill race over its sill of stone to where it falls into a still pool. The surface throws us back at ourselves, its depths an absolute mystery of black. Everything here keeps its secrets with a back-end-of-the-year complicity with the coming winter.

We follow the river – sluggish, occasional glinter – out and through, and the smothering quiet forces quiet and smallness upon us too. Funneling into walled and flagged ways, deeply mossed, we pick up the threads of the path and try to mend the broken or missing parts by rehearsing it with our feet. That way there? No (consult guide), back again; other way. There is no rhythm to this walking: it is constant broken delays, opposite of their walking, whose feet and memory stepped in tune with the way.

No bees heard, and very few birds. All creatures mummified by cold with half-hearted shuffling above us as we go. The crowns of bare trees hold up the tenting sky with their black, as if vital sap has gone to ground in them. They are tomb-quiet in a windless pass, their mossy furs moth-eaten and no match for this hard-as-bone season of the soul. Clusters of them over-root and huddle together through accidental seedings. Crowded and growing in surprise at the closeness of one another. Everything suspicious of its neighbour.

It is a freezing day, a nithering day. And with the often-losing of our way, there is not much joy between our company. None of the wonder I had foreshadowed in my hopes for a walk with their familiars. We continue, but there’s effort in it, as though grasses and heathers are hands about the ankles, drawing us down into treacherous footholds at the catchings between rock and ground. Punch-sudden, we’re down at the utter neon-green bottom of the valley, the grass lit up with phosphorescence as often happens before a storm vamps the sky. While we look up at the scramble we must make on the opposite side, rain starts to fall in cheek-cold jets. There is no poetry in the valley for me. Instead it seems to ache of absence and blank melancholy.

We throw dubious looks at the stone bridge at the valley’s base, shaped like a henge lying flat – big stone balanced on big stone and somehow holding the path together over air, space and river. It carries the way and knits the two sides of walk, and valley, together.

With desultory strides, we walk the great distance up the valley’s other side – in fact not very far, but effort, unreliable scree-stones and earth made molten by successive rainfalls make it seem so. A gill winds its way down the hill in tear tracks: the aspect sad and numbing. All notions of finding their spirits out here are washed clean of sentimentality and I look for them only incidentally, as one might spot a darkly coloured feather – and think of the bird that left it – as its reminder. We reduce to mere fumbling onwardness, picking carefully the best route to the top and a guiding view of the way we must follow. A little way off, a pheasant’s cry splinters the air.

Several hawthorn trees later, we pass farm houses and newer, boxy homes, prosaic and shunning the past as if to mock me in my search for the landscape’s hidden memory. Doves sit in a cherry tree, ungainly and plump on ruby branches. Farm machinery with articulated limbs lines the way and litters the yards. All wet and rusting as the rain increases. On barbed wire fences are snagged bits and pieces of plastic sacking – witches’ knickers hanging still as furniture and belying the humour of their folklore. The rain hardens into kelching hail. We double down against the harsh sting to our faces and hustle, blattering through the puddles that imbue the path with mischief.

The sky pitches all its misery down on us and I borrow its mood for a while. Our clothing hangs about us as second skins, close and sagging. I am slow to go on; knees knackered and hands knuckle-frozen. Cold numbs the toes. The cheeks are rimed with rain. I do not feel my nose. Boots release haltingly from the oozes of unwanted mud-kisses. Thoughts of them are pressed out of mind by a dozen discomforts. We are rank and file up to Newsholme Dean, circumventing a field’s livestock by keeping to the edges; minds on nothing but getting done with the walk and getting on home.

Newsholme Dean – our landmark and our end – hits us on the approach with how commonplace it seems. A bucket under a little beck running down through a hedge is collecting water for dog-walkers. No remainders of them to be seen. This is Brontë country, and my mind has clutched at thoughts of them walking these rough moorland heights. How important these capillary footpaths must have been then – the lifeblood of a community for whom a few miles’ walking was a daily ritual, entered into not with romance but real necessity.

I feel foolish, bone-weary and cold, exhausted in mind and body by the dis-jointings of this walk: by its refusal to form a rhythm, by the words that I had expected to come but do not, and by my own morbidity. I am a latter-day Heathcliff disturbing graves – or Jane, fugitive from pain across the moors. I have tried to hold the ghosts of those women inside me as companion wayfarers, but instead feel the deep silence from beyond the grave. I join my sister and father on the path homewards, flat and empty and silent about the fissure of self-doubt and alienation within me.

***

Emily nods by the crack and sizzle of the kitchen fire, her breathing a thin rattling thread onto which her sisters cling. Anne’s hand is holding tight to hers with the desperate knowledge that it will not be long now, but Emily is beyond their reach in dream-memory again…

She bustled by her eldest sister to the back door and felt her disapproval follow her. “I’m going out”. A tut from Charlotte. “There’s darning still – father’s stockings -” Reading her sister’s frown as easily as one of their father’s books, she went in spite of her disapproval, eager as a fish to water. Anne saw her off with a sneaked apple and a smile, and her heart was a little soothed by this kindness. She would stride gullies and valleys, moors and erratics; let her mind loose to grub down among the damp ground – anywhere but the church and graveyard, the strongholds of the safe and the familiar. Her strides took her along ways she mapped easily with her feet – up Balcony Lane and farther onto Pennistone Hill; to the gully, the gill and her particular rock. Her skirts bellied out in the wind and bore her up like a sail upon the seas of heather as she put miles between herself and the confinement of home with its unutterable dullness, until all her frustration retreated and the words came to her. Here on the moors was wildness and wuthering so gusting and strong as to get inside of you, to whimple your hair, make your eyes cross with tears, and buffett you out of your plain, dreary self. This place held all her love, even in the darkest seasons.

Emily rouses from memory, fevered and still under the confusion of her dreams. Charlotte’s face swims above her, frowning still and holding fast to her hand as if it might fade away before her. Emily recoils from the sight and whines to be let go, never seeing the sudden hurt in her sister’s eye.

Later in the evening, as Charlotte keeps vigil beside her, Emily’s voice rises from her sickbed in an awful whisper, “She’s a coughin’ girl, a coughin’ girl, a coughin’ girl now; dead to the world, dead to the world, away she goes now.” The words send a chill through the air, and Charlotte pricks her finger on her needle. “Dearest?” Emily’s look shivers right through her with sudden consciousness. She knew her sister had caught her death when they buried their brother, but she had ruthlessly pressed the painful knowledge down, doing everything she could for her sister’s comfort. But now, in the dead of night, her tiny frame vibrates with anger and fear at another sibling being taken from her. Emily senses this between deliriums and clings to her. Charlotte reminds her of an agitated bird, all a flutter of feather and her heart softens a little towards her.

Her sister’s hands are clenched into fists now and she is as vulnerable as Emily has ever seen her. “Don’t go from me, Emily. You are the other half of myself.” The words cost Charlotte a choked sob and she bites down hard on her fist. Emily can speak only gaspingly, her chest labouring for breath. “H-have to. You’ll m-mend.” It is not heartless; she says it with the conviction of truth. Charlotte bends in pain over her sister’s hand. The tears start in her eyes but will not fall, and a few angry swipes dash them away. Fixing her in her fevered gaze, the beast clawing up her throat, Emily starts with a shudder and tries to smile but the beast snatches it from her. Her eyes start wide and with a last clasp from her strong-boned hand, she passes beyond her sister’s grasp.

Treading the sea glass

Posted on Sep 19, 2018Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

When we arrived at Dunstan and walked down to the castle, I heard them. Unmistakably alien-sounding and causing a quick lance of joy in my chest: the seagulls were hawking their cries. Though gulls are ubiquitous almost everywhere these days, encroaching onto the thin, begrudging borders of our towns – wheeling over dumps and nuisancing the outsides of eateries – there is a difference my ear cannot miss in the rationed and contained cries of the gulls inland and the vast ache of cry the seagull emits on the wing above the sea. The sea wind does something in carrying this cry that enlarges it. Its voice fills an emptiness I did not know I was carrying around inside me, like a faint echo. The sea, the sea.

I have hoarded a desire to see the sea for a while now, having been absent from it for 23 months. Waves have been frozen in my mind; a restless sea halted without me to dip my toes into it. This week on the Northumberland coast, the sound of the sea haunts me at night, delivering restless visions. I listen to sterile digital waves in the wee hours of the morning to conjure sleep when it doesn’t come, buzzed from seeing so much of my family on this holiday to celebrate my dad’s 70th. My mind’s eye sees the sea spume, and the white membranes stretched like a sheep’s caul across the bob and lift of the waves. I lie awake feeling wired – all too aware of the sea no more than a mile distant – the knowledge of it like a whelk shell pressed to my ear. Now, today, I will walk the sea floor and I’m dumb with awe before it. Made a child again. The cries of the gulls interpret for me how wide and fathomless are the sea and sky. My soul has missed them.

I had decided weeks ago that I wanted to walk out to Lindisfarne, knowing that I could at the very least walk the causeway but hungry for a walkers’ counterpart to the road. A little research yielded fruit – the Pilgrim Way has been the footway in use since before Aidan first came here in the 7th century (that was when the original set of 15ft way-finding poles was erected). The “path” is navigable when the tide is out and has 2 refuge stations en route which resemble treehouses on stilts (in case of need). I possess a map, advice and tide times (and a healthy dose of well-meant familial concern about the wisdom of walking out to sea, which of course serves only to strengthen my determination).

Like one arm of a tuning fork, the Pilgrim Path veers away from the causeway and out into the silty and part-submerged sandlands of Beal Bay. The mainland curves in the distance down towards Bamburgh on the right, and the causeway leading to Lindisfarne’s Snook Point curves to the left, giving the illusion that you are in a land-locked lagoon, but for a small gap on the horizon straight ahead, between the southern tip of the Island and the twin Leading Lights. Fishermen use these “lights” to get their bearings when out in their fishing smacks, bringing back their sea hauls. They are beacons that represent home but also the dangers of rocks lurking on the sea bed.

It surprises me how tame it feels here, as I prepare to leave the road and cross the ancient slick of path to the Island. But it is low tide and the sea, for the time being at least, has relinquished its claim on the bay. Sucked back out to the main, gathering itself, waiting.

I’m feeling a little sharp and out of sorts at the outset, tired from the turmoil of sea-dreams, and impatient for the sand to take the edges off the corners of my mood. It is strange to farewell my family carrying on in the car, and to trudge the causeway road behind them; strange to walk beside the cars, but be marginalised into the silty-sedgey grasses by the wayside. There is a sense in walking the route to the Island of cutting myself off – of intentional marooning – that is irresistible and at the same time very vulnerable. I am fugitive, harbouring the fierce intent of walking out to sea, daring it to come back in ahead of time and catch me out with its on-rush of water. I imagine the tide leeching irrevocably and unstoppably across the flat sands of the bay, inching higher and higher by the minute, gaining momentum with nothing in its path to halt it. I am quite alone, left to my own devices for three miles until I make land like flotsam on the opposite shore, fending for myself in terrain in which I’m not native and where quicksands and bogs have been known. I am like any other pilgrim stranger here then, with nought but a vision and the way beneath my feet.

Somewhat prosaically, the Pilgrim Way begins on the road, and I am jealous of the farne monks and pilgrims of old who walked the whole of the original path – umbilicalling the motherland to the Island – unencumbered by tarmac, traffic and exhaust fumes. It has become the tradition that once a year the islanders walk the Way from Lindisfarne to the mainland, and partway along the St Cuthbert Way, in honour of the Saint’s memory. Soon enough comes the point of deliberate departure: at the bridge, crossing the Lindis river (the wand of water leading out to sea), and following the long marching line of way-marking poles which curve away from the safety of the road into sand, silt and water. From hereon, the shifting seascape is all silver. I cast my eyes adrift on it to land on any feature in the view that is not the monochrome movement of the water or the reflected sky, but there’s nothing between me and the mercury of the sea.

Keen to be off the road and away from the cars, I leave just before the bridge and have to spend some time finding a shallow enough place to cross the river. Wading out into it, I feel the strong suck of its resistance. It laps over my knees with freezing cold, washing off some of my mood, and salting me for the path ahead. My goose-pimpled flesh pays the toll as if this were a lesser Styx at the outset of my journey, stealing the warmth from my bones as the required fee of passage.

The Way yawns before me. I had not known what to expect from a path that the sea submerges for 10 hours of every day. My eye tricks along the horizon line and I am surprised at the horseshoe of land that, albeit distantly, surrounds me here and at how much water still remains on the sands, rippling out from my feet, an hour after the spring tide is out. My footsteps fall wetly, often making no impression at all, ghosting my progress through this watery world. The sky reflected in it gives me the impression of walking out onto glass, but for the kythins left by the lug worms which squirt spirals of black silt up through the sand. Two days before, I’d waded out from the golden sands of Embleton Bay and been chastened by its chilly North Sea grip. With some relief, I discover that here the sea lies sun-warmed: tepid and luxurious. Not a pilgrim’s penance at all. The saltwater is soft, lapping at my feet in warm transparencies that catch and in-prism the light. Letting it wash over me is keen pleasure. With a renewed sense of comfort, I relish the wind at my back and the sun strong and spangling on the water.

I make for the poles that articulate the way. Their barnacled skins and ropes of seaweed are blunt reminders that this path is washed out twice a day by the sea, but they stand against permanent erasure and, marching in succession, set me right. I cleave to them. 123 of them lead to the far shore, dwindling to the size of matchsticks as my eye tries to count them. Ten of my strides make the space between each one: 1230 strides (or thereabouts) to the Island. A modest pilgrimage.

The poles were last replaced in the 1970s as part of an initiative from the Manpower Services Commission to provide work for the unemployed. I wonder what those men, down on their luck, felt about digging deep into the darkening silt below the sand to give the poles a good grounding, one eye cocked to the east to watch for the sea’s return; about the forest that the poles were grown in; and whose task it was to choose trees so ramrod straight for the task. Out here in the middle of the bay, the poles and I are the only verticals in an otherwise flat world; the only signs to give some permanence and presence to a semi-permanent path.

The view is mono-lateral and there is a faint anxiety in it for me – dweller of valleys and more familiar with the geography of Yorkshire. It is flattening, and initially I am flattened by it, finding that there is nothing to do but to succumb, let the way bear me upon it, and wash out my thoughts tinged with disquiet and distraction. Without my usual markers of flowers and wildlife to look out for, I notice more about the shifting quality of the light and clouds; the change from sand which shifts in gentle depressions beneath my feet to silty mud which squelches, squidges and slip-slides me along until I almost lose my balance, causing my heart to spike at every almost-fall. A bog mires the midpoint of the Way in a slake of mud. You think you know mud from woodland floors, garden beds, rammed-earth tracks – but that’s just dirt. In the choiceless bog, I disturb primordial ooze which covers me to the shins in the total ancient black of crude oil. I sink slowly and surely down into it, forcing foul gassy air to the surface in wet mud-burps. With some manoeuvring, and like a fish caught on a line, I contort and wriggle my legs free from the mud’s resisting kiss. A narrow miss.

Through the bog and past the second refuge tower (its wood desiccated and salt-dried as bone), the sands stretch before me streaked with livid green swad – a miniature kelpie forest with its streamers of seaweed pulled in the direction of the retreating tide. Caught in the fronds is a collection of cockle shells: the pilgrim’s badge. They lie treasured amongst the shifting weeds of the tidal pool, motionless for a brief borrowed while before the sea sweeps in again to toss and claim them in its foaming hands. I have not earned my cockle shell yet, I tell myself, moving on, my footprints fluid underwater.

I leave few marks of my going. Occasionally I spy the footprints of others, some similar in size to mine and similarly barefoot and I wonder about these strangers – about their reasons for treading the sea glass – whether they are pilgrims or tourists or both. There are others ahead of me on the Way, yet I feel a privacy in this levelling world which is at ironic odds with the cars on the causeway no more than 200 yards to my left. Sometimes these other prints are muddled and crossed with those of wading birds: green shanks, bar-tailed godwits and curlews (not forgetting the gulls). So absorbed have I become by what’s beneath my feet that it’s a while before I realise I’m being accompanied along the last mile by green shanks, scuttling the sand a few paces to the side of me looking for choice morsels in the sand-beds. I am tickled that they seem unfazed by my presence, this acceptance of me in their flatlands more precious than any cockle shell.

For a long time it seems I walk the Way without the farther shore getting any closer, and it’s at just this point that the bay feels at its widest too, stretched taut as if caught on the tenter-hooks of Island, beacons and headland. I am completely exposed on all sides: a small moving dot in the bowl of the bay. Any sounds I catch above the wind whistling in my ears are warped beyond safe recognition here. I think I hear a woman cry out, the sound seeming to come from the expanse to my right and advance towards me. It’s a thready moment while I scan the sands for signs of anyone in distress, but there’s no one and I tell myself, still with a glimmer of worry, that it must have been a dog’s bark that the sea wind distorted and bounced about the bay, only for a moment indulging my fancy.

I arrive on the Island at last, slightly regretful, with my wits a little pickled by my sea walk. I would not wish to spend too long out here on the tidal sands, caught and pent in a refuge tower, waiting for the sea to release me and subside again. But I’m already wistful for the freedom I found on the silvered sands, the clouds reflected at my feet. Already the sea is working to remove the impressions of my passage, undoing the traces I’ve left behind me. As if I never trod the Way, and none of this ever was. In the end, the Pilgrim Path’s as resistant to impression as glass that’s renewed with every change of the tide.

A Dinner of Herbs

Posted on Nov 8, 2017Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

Follow the river Wharfe up from Cawood where it joins the Ouse; up through Tadcaster, westward through Otley, Ilkley, and the Strid; past Bolton and northwards well into the Dales proper. Now go further, through the rolling patchwork of Grassington; still deeper following its sinuous flow through Kettlewell, to where the river fancies itself young again in Langstrothdale. Here the river is parented at Beckermonds, a name which means meeting of the becks, of Oughtershaw and Green Field. At their confluence the river is born. A mile or so from the river’s source and up the dale’s southern fell you come to the old farmstead, Cowside. This is where we have holed up for the week, vacating the humdrum of our workaday lives in this stone-built, homely and eminently practical farmhouse, steeped in its own agricultural biography, which survives in its name; in the ‘poultiggery’ which still stands beside the farmhouse (though empty now of poultry and pigs); and in its wholesome painted plaster epigrams: Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith. This is wisdom that still holds true even in the fast-paced and all-encompassing world of technology from which we are escaping.

The steading is embraced on its northern, southern and eastern sides by tall sycamores – now edited of their summer green – which form a natural windbreaker. We’ve watched throughout the morning as the wind has raised itself with louder and louder moans, whipping up wild wintry weather and sending it down the dale with mischief and bluster. It is with some surprise, then, that we find ourselves setting out for a walk. Harsh and inhospitable, the weather is throwing everything it has against the notion of mere walking for pleasure. But there’s a wildness in the fugitive holidaying self that answers in the future affirmative: I shall go. And so – gloved, hatted, zipped and well-wrapped – my companions and I make a party of three somewhat naively turned loose onto the fell.

Of a sudden I feel an ooof! to the chest as the wind steals my breath. They say that if you fall into icy water your lungs contract and you go into near-instant ‘cold shock response’. Never having had this misfortune, I can’t be sure, but this feels a little like that with the easterly wind barrelling into us full tilt. The wuthering gets into you, reaching icy fingers into the bones and lungs and meddling with your wits. Eyes streaming and breath steaming, I look down at the raw, hard beauty of the dale, whitened with cobwebbing frost. A few stunted and wiry hawthorns are wind-martyrs, bent-backed and crookedly veining the sky in inky friezes. A cry and a circling overhead is perhaps a kite lilting on the wind, seeming to defeat gravity and motion all at once. So cold is the hard smack of wind to the forehead that the very thought of the keen-eyed predator freezes in the mind and when I look again it is gone. The gale resists our every step down the fell towards the river and, stubbornly, we dig our heels deeper.

Slowly my mind unseizes and I can appreciate the frozen world around me. Though it is afternoon, the ground remains bound in frost, the branches of sparse trees furred into mystery with it, and the grass and leaves underfoot stiff and crackling to the boot. Puddles shatter like hardened sugar as we go. We cross the sluggish river spilling over its pitted stones where mallards have fastidiously abandoned the icy flow to stand on the limestone like fair-weather bathers. Cowlicks of moss cleaving to the stones are washed greener, their vibrant colour courtesy of the clean fell air. Strange to think of a stretch of county being united by this thin ribbon of river and for a moment I feel a kinship with others who will marvel at it as it tumbles over fosses, under bridges and through towns.

Our steps take us along the old packhorse route – the valley’s spine – that used to connect Lancaster with Newcastle. We are overlooked by the scarred fell sides, gouged by countless winter snowfalls that melt into action every spring. Still there’s the bite of the wind. Bodies battered, we begin to assume postures of apology for having dared to venture out on such a day, and are driven deep into ourselves even as we’re driven deeper into the valley for any sort of shelter. But the days of the medieval Forest of Langstroth, one of several royal hunting grounds, are over – the trees having given way to open moorland. Stone wall enclosures for grazing are the valley’s spiny architecture, marching down improbably steep hillsides. I wonder at those who assembled them at such unlikely gradients; whose hands were bloodied and callused by them.

Alone in the valley, we do not see another person as we go. The black-headed sheep grazing the lower pastures give us uncanny stares from eyes fathoms deep, following us with gazes that seem to say it is their land and we ofcumden are tolerated under sufferance. Walkers come and go with their temporary tracks, but the sheep leave lasting impressions. They are the masters of this landscape, each one shaping it by habit, cutting terrace paths into the fell-side.

The walk is, of necessity, shorter than we would like, our toes and noses urging us home to hearth, hot chocolate and warmth. We look out for the landmarks that signpost our way back: the bent tree bussing the wall with its branches; the two bridges; that farm ascending the northern fell. Now that we have relinquished our ambitions to walk further, the wind is a help-mate, tidying us homeward. Seeing the smoke from our chimney, we’re a collection of smiles. I think of the farmer returning, more respectably than we, from a hard day’s work up the fell in days gone by and how much more he must have welcomed this sight. The sky is milky, flushed with rose and lavender hues into soft opalescence, but even as it darkens to mauve in the east and a few stars peep, I think of the farmer’s family, their hardiness, and their dinner of herbs.

Memory Lane: Part Two

Posted on Nov 5, 2017Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

… It is not clear why a permit used to be required to pass through these woods, but I suspect it has something to do with the state in which the land had been left (especially the exposed and treacherous cellars of the house) after the demolition gangs had done their work in the 1960s. I make a polite farewell to my well-met stranger and approach the gate into the woods. As I step from Higher Coach Road into its sequel, I am conscious that I am walking down her memory lane and at the same time forging my own. It is an odd sensation.

As I start along the path through the wood I have a strong sense of having just crossed a threshhold and – like Lucy Pevensey looking back towards the Wardrobe – I cannot help but look back down the road, my eye telescoping to its presumed, unfocused end. The mist still idles in the hollow places and everything I see is revealed by slow degrees at the whim of the path and the weather. Beside me, South Lodge with its intricate but softened gable ends – portents of what once might be expected of Milner Field House – has clearly seen better days. New windows have taken the place of the old sashes which lie stacked, smashed, their frames rotten, a stone’s throw away. A playground for invertebrates and other woodland creatures. The shed is webbed over and its locks and hinges rusted shut. Already I am aware of decay and of the wood’s reclamation of this strip of land. I pass by quickly, wary of watchers in the Lodge who may be suspicious of my curiosity.

The start of the path through the woods is densely over-canopied, with branches forming a low rough vault over the way and holly (a favourite plant of the Salt family) hemming me in on either side, appearing oddly overdressed in its solid waxy green beside the slapdash nudity of the other trees. Over-braced by the flying buttresses of beech and horse chestnut, I am as secluded as one is ever likely to feel on a path and, funnelled through the wood, driven through to its secret hiding-places, am quickly lost to the wider world. A magpie twirls out from a tree in search of treasures, its wings a pied fan opening, and it is my turn to start, my heart pumping fear in my chest. The walking is not unpleasant, but it is tomb-stone quiet, and perhaps because of the stranger’s equivocation over access, there is a feeling of pacing through someone else’s privacy here, the leaves underfoot confirming the impression with their unmistakable shushing. I feel at once tucked away from the world and a keen sense of – not going back in time exactly – but a conspicuous awareness that the wood is keeping mum about the abandoned remains at its heart. Its secrets will perhaps not so easily be given up.

The trees that line the way show no signs of being managed, having seeded themselves at will, over stones and on top of one another, and encroaching on the path. There are multi-stemmed trees here as are more commonly found in a hazel coppice, except these are untended and their trunks sprout unchecked and unharvested. Gossamer strands spun out optimistically onto the breeze by orb weavers and other spiders which love the nooks of the cross-stitch trunkery catch unexpectedly, unwelcome, across my cheeks. Little snares, warnings perhaps. I am put strongly in mind of Kipling’s poem The Way Through the Woods and my steps begin to pace out its rhythms: “They shut the road through the woods/ Seventy years ago./ Weather and rain have undone it again,/ And now you would never know/ There was once a road through the woods/ Before they planted the trees.” When the road was in use by the Salts, it was open and there were certainly fewer trees. These are mostly incomers after the fact, like me, and that’s reassuring. Back in the day, the road was lined on either side with fashionable rhododendron bushes, many of which remain like clues, though most without tending have grown leggy and wilded themselves to the wood, making way for trees and sometimes stooping under them. The clumsy fall of my foot snapping a twig is as vital a crack in the stillness as the report of a gun and a jay leaps into flight, its chinoiserie plumage painting the sky.

The breeze is communicated up the canopy of the trees in whispers behind me, getting nearer and nearer: leaves catch the trembling flit of it from their neighbours and together they are made one seething organism, moving up the path behind and then overtaking me. Occasionally a following tread sounds on the path and I am backward-glancing and self-admonishing at the ghost of fear that spikes into me. There’s no one behind of course – probably a conker from a horse chestnut, though it’s late in the season for their fall. I stand for some time transfixed with my gaze directed backwards down the path, convinced I will see my mystery walker solidify from phantom to pedestrian reality if I look long enough. Nothing. And yet the treads had fallen with pronounced and unmistakable walking accents behind me. But I am alone on the path, in the wood, in the past.

When I reach the cross roads in the wood, I am assailed by a strong sense of deja vu; I’ve been here before. In the spring, whilst searching out the local flora I stumbled upon a public footpath called Sparable Lane (a corruption of Sparrow’s Bill) bounded on each side by dry stone walls. Looking across the clearing now, I make out the sloping of that other path and realise in a sudden moment of spooked uncanniness that I am indeed walking my own memory lane.

Though access is not legislated nor official through the wood, the fact that the path remains clear and easy to traverse (I can see that branches that would have struck across the way have been cut cleanly back) speaks of the local will to keep it open. This is a path informally maintained by common (if somewhat illicit) consent. Though presently alone in the woods, I see evidence of human activity here and there: empty beer cans and crisp packets, but also elective desire paths through the ground ivy, which I assume dog-walkers have made in their journeys through the wood.

I take the path to the left, accompanied by the ticklish sound of water running in little draining ditches at its sides, and ascend to where I know the house was situated. Even though I’m climbing up, it somehow feels like going down – like Orpheus going down into Hades. An old fir throws out a bough to mark where to turn aside for the area I believe the house to have occupied, and I feel a moment’s guilt at the discrepancy between Orpheus’s rescue mission and my own morbid quest to pick over old bones. I ignore the feeling, weaving a way between fallen trees until I see the first of the sizeable and haphazardly cast aside masonry pieces. They are wrapped lushly in blankets of moss and appear unmoved from where first they fell when discarded by the demolition gangs. As my eye deciphers the undulating mounds of greenery and stone, I begin to see pile upon pile of building materials, careless cast-offs like scattered thoughts that once made a house. Weather and rain have undone it again – or in this case the sledge hammers of demolition gangs who perhaps put more store in bricks and stone than in tales of terror and hauntings and shook their heads over such a waste. I walk gingerly between open tunnels and access hatches into the original cellars, testing the load-bearing capacity of patches of ground doubtfully with my toes.

My tip-toe exploration turns up salt-glazed bricks which were supplied by Joseph Cliff & Sons of Leeds, window glass and giant hefts of stone quarried from the top of the hill I passed on my way through the wood. Local materials and trades for a local house – a respectful approach from an incomer. Curiously I feel my own incomer status here even more keenly, looking at the wreckage of another’s dreams strewn at my feet.

Close-covering ivy and bursts of lush frilling tongue ferns clamber the ruins, redacting stone and brick so that the sense one might have been able to make of the building’s vocabulary – there a coping stone, there a window lintel – is all but lost. These plants are some of the typical ‘reclaimers’ when a once-developed area is left abandoned for any length of time. With the industry of soldiers, they move in and efficiently revert the land, steadily editing out all traces of cultivation and habitation. I find it difficult to overlay this chaotic and shambolic scene with the palimpsest of the Milner Field House which I hold in my mind’s eye, an image in which the house stands self-importantly in a desert of lawn and gardens. Few trees at all. This wood can be no more than sixty or perhaps seventy years old then: a comparatively young wood, surging into being through its own will and the simple neglect of the land. Here too there survive great bushes of the original rhododendrons, and I make a promise to myself to return the next spring to see them in bloom.

There’s one final sight I want to find – the wood’s incongruous mosaiced floor, along from the rubble heaps, and following the lines of where the winter garden used to stand. A soiled and leafed-over dance floor it seems in the middle of the wood, nothing could be stranger. It is the floor of the glass conservatory which housed all manner of exotic plants when owned by the Salts – perhaps to the delight of the visiting Prince and Princess of Wales. Now a muddy floor which leaves skip over. I push the toe of my shoe into its soil dermis and fresh, new-babe pink peeps out at me, and in other parts the original mosaic patterns can still be seen. Too difficult and too costly for the demolition gang to break up and remove, so here it lies still, creating its own little clearing, a landmark and fixture of the wood. Squirrels, foxes, shrews and hedgehogs perhaps navigate by it, their trails making room for it, crossing and re-crossing it, scenting it with scat: a posh woodland toilette. A happy thought.

A light rain starts up making me turn my steps homeward, flushing me out of the wood and out of the past. It is an odd parting: me full with the remnant history of this place; the “undone” house silent but eloquent. As I move gradually further out of the wood, leaving the remains of the house feels a little like coming up for air. With Higher Coach Road in sight, it is tempting, like Orpheus, to look behind to check that the path through the wood is still there; that I didn’t dream the house, the rubble, the mosaic floor in the guardedly slumbrous wood.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.

Rudyard Kipling, The Way Through the Woods

No, there is no longer a road through the woods, just a path that we keep open.

Memory Lane: Part One

Posted on Oct 27, 2017Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

A sky like bleached bone, the leaves of the horse chestnut trees blushing and burning against it, leaching their tizer colours into the dampening air. In their crinoline cages of colour they’ve caught the sun, and the edges of their leafy fingers scorch, curl and turn to butterscotch and rust like bright corroding nails. The trees are discarding their leaves as though trying to put out the fire, but the autumn sun has worked on them until the whole crown makes a pyre in spite of itself and all those flaming hands are held up in surrender, smouldering and sizzling in the mist. I am glad I waited for this: a spectacle of colour that fizzes, pops and licks the autumn air.

Some weeks ago now it had been in the back of my mind to visit Higher Coach Road – a dirt track really, one of those small signs that suggests you’re escaping the urban and heading for the country – which hyphenates two of my more habitual walks in Saltaire. The road was never intended to be an end in itself, but these days you could be forgiven for thinking of it as a road to nowhere, unremarkable but for its tall cathedralling horse chestnuts trees. Arcades of holly and hawthorn hedges underneath complete the church. In the springtime, the chestnuts had been very fine with their candles of scented blossom and leaves that particular naive shock of green, and I knew then that in autumn they would be glorious again. They have been readying for their second showing, forced to it by cooler weather and the pell-mell October gales. I’ve been judiciously monitoring other trees, waiting for the sweet spot between enough autumn colour remaining on the trees and too many leaves having already given up their ghosts. Today, I judged the time to have come.

So down the hill, over the canal where workers are pondering how to mend the lock gates, past the overgrown shells of former nurseries – and hello Mrs Wren, flick-tailed in the brambles by the way – through the spinney, over the bridge and up by the rill. Standing fox tails of sheep’s sorrel punctuate the field to the left as I bend my steps upwards. An eager school party, clipboarded, heavily marshalled, and somewhat bemused at being out of doors, prompts me to turn early up the track to where it comes out on Higher Coach Road. The lane’s a furnace of colour: I am folding friable origami in red, orange and yellow below my feet. And yes. The horse chestnut trees are indeed glorious in their autumn flutter, their leaves the stained glass hung upon the cathedral trees. I’m a little smug – shamefully so – at how well I have timed my visit. The wash of leaves on the ground reflects those still on the trees and there’s a beautiful, warm symmetry to the ochre-ginger double glow.

Someone’s dog noses at my feet, horse riders pass, and others I do not know wander down the road: we’re all witnesses to the confetti of colour, wondering together. Through the hedge break I expect to see the ebony and ivory of the cows in the field, but the farmer’s put them to pastures new today. I hear them lowing in the distance, not far away. The sharp slipstream of their scent remains, a rank tang on the air. I am wary of the thrumming clouds of flies that have been charmed here by the inducements of cow dung and damp, warm weather, unseen in their flitting pockets until I’m almost upon them and must dodge at the last minute. I’m only ten minutes from town but still I feel deep into countryside here. A flock of dozy Canada geese have set themselves up as temporary field tenants in the cows’ absence – a pitstop on their way to their wintering homes abroad – looking vulnerable with their heads tucked trustingly under wings to catch forty winks before taking off again. In the opposite field on the right of the lane, two herons sit imperiously and companionably until my eager step launches them skywards. I have read that the fat of a heron killed at the full moon was arcanely believed to be a cure for rheumatism and I wonder in a moment of whimsy whether the efficacy of the remedy came from ingesting the fat or through topical application. Thankfully, even should I suffer rheumatic agonies, I will never be tempted to either.

Higher Coach Road, as the name suggests, is an old carriageway and was the main approach road to the Milner Field Estate, commissioned by the eldest son of Victorian businessman and Alpaca wool factor, Titus Salt. Salt-Aire, you see; the village and Mill owe their existence to him. Having watched his father colonise this part of the Airedale valley for his great enterprise, Titus Salt Jr set about inaugurating a suitably grand home for himself and his family, siting it on the northern face of the valley overlooking the village: close enough to the Mill for the convenience of business but not so close that the family would be disturbed by the bustle of its comings and goings. I like to stand here and think of the ghosts of sprung carriages tooling down the lane, conveying their master and mistress home after a county dinner or soiree at one of the neighbour’s houses. The road is peculiarly rich in nostalgia and a heavy sense of its former significance lies on it as palpable as dust. It is rammed earth – though after rains, not quite so rammed, its loosened stones are the rocky bed for rivulets of rain water streaming down its length. Higher Coach Road as it is today is really only used by the farmer at Milner Fields, dog-walkers, and the residents of South Lodge. Embarassed out of its original importance, it is but a remnant of the former significance of the estate.

Rubble. Reclamation. A prick with a thorn. The past at slumber in a wood. Building the house at Milner Field in 1869 was a substantial undertaking. Its gothic, towered design was suitably grandiose, as befitted a family pre-eminent in West Yorkshire society. A prickly silhouette for a prickly place. Indeed, with its large glass conservatory, lush gardens and parkland, and over-sized marble fireplaces, it was deemed fit to entertain royalty twice, first in 1882, then again in 1887.

Though the estate’s South Lodge still stands at the end of the road, the great house of Milner Field has long since been razed to untidy rubble and masonry heaps due to its blighted history and no one wishing to live in it after the 1920s. A fey place; a cursed place; a tomb. Local superstition has, it seems, delighted in licking its lips and pronouncing the house haunted because of its attributed role in the tragic deaths first of Titus Salt Jr himself, and then of those children of the next owner of the house and Mill, Sir James Roberts. Heart attack. Illness. Drowning. The next owners after him, and then the next, suffered similarly precocious-seeming deaths, including Ernest Gates, who met with arguably the most curious death of all. His wife passed away from illness only months after they took up residence in the house in 1923, and two years later Ernest himself reputedly injured his foot on a rose bush in the garden of the house, contracted septicaemia and died. Skin broken by a thorn; a life is torn. Whether this is true or not, no such rose bush still survives in the now overgrown grounds – I know, I have looked. The last owners who moved into the house in 1925 were also both dead within three years. Being final proof of the house’s reputed malicious intent, and no one else wishing to live in such a “cursed” place, it was shut up thereafter and, having defied explosion by dynamite in the 1950s, was finally dismantled by demolition gangs in the 1960s. Local opinion generally found the whole business of Milner Field Estate to be a bad lot, and condemned the house as the villain of the piece.

If you look down the lane towards South Lodge today, you will see the pillared gates that marked the original estate entrance, now merely a gateway into a wood. Within this unremarkable-looking wood lie the remains of that once grand house, and today I have ambitions to go beyond the apparent end of the road to explore where the path takes me and see them. But I’m unsure of the access rights. The excellent Baildon Heritage Trail: Coach Road to Shipley Glen walking guide helpfully comments, in parentheses: “Please note that there is no public right of way through Milner Field Estate, but it is used extensively by the public.” A paradox of a path.

A stranger, dog in tow, exits the small gate at the end of the lane – little do I know it but she is the past walking towards me on the path. I fall into step with her to ask whether there is public access beyond the gate. There is a pause pregnant with the ambiguity of access permissions here before she answers. Assuring me that no one will challenge me if I venture through (not exactly what I was after), she goes on to say, more tantalisingly, you used to have to have a permit to pass beyond the gate. She worked at the Mill, she says, before it ceased being a working mill in the 1980s – and do I know the Mill? I can tell from the way her lips purse around the admission with a slight fond smile – as though savouring this rarefied connection to such a locally significant institution – that she is proud to have worked there. It makes her a bit of a walking legend in my eyes and I marvel at the serendipity of bumping into her on the lane. As she talks, we walk both in the past and the present, seeing everything in the present day through her memories. It is not clear why a permit used to be required to pass through the woods, but I suspect it had something to do with the state in which the land had been left (especially the exposed and treacherous cellars of the house) after the demolition gangs had done their work in the 1960s. We make our polite farewells, walk in opposite directions, and I approach the gate into the woods. As I step from Higher Coach Road into its sequel, I am conscious that I am walking down my stranger’s memory lane and at the same time forging my own. It is an odd sensation.

Continued in Memory Lane: Part Two.