Summer |

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.

Soak-walking

Posted on Nov 5, 2019Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

I sit on the train after work homeward-bound, watching raindrops pearl on the outside of the dirty, fogged window pane. They skitter down the strange reinforced plastic which half hides the Aire-valley-view, muddying it and keeping it beyond reach. I decide, as though it were an act of rebellion, that I’m for a walk. I turn the thought around for a while, wondering if I really mean to risk the rain. My mind anticipates the sharp cold shock to my skin, but part of me knows the glory there can be in rain: in the loosening of the sky’s burdens, a catharsis. Having filed into the station and then the train – acquiescing grudgingly to diesal air – I suddenly want out of the funk, the many small irritations that amass cumulatively through the work day which slowly compress and dull the soul: make the body small. When I enter the train, my body is no longer mine but communal – here just to sardine in with strangers for a vexed 20 minutes. I float somewhere above myself, above the hot press of bodies and odours. But out of those scratched barrier windows, beyond the faces bluescreen-illuminated, cramped over their phones, I know that everything is getting a little greener in the washing of the rain. So I alight at my stop with jittery anticipation and, coming back to myself by slow degrees, let my feet take me for a soak-walk down by the canal, where I may get a little greener too.

It is June and the elderflowers are opening up clotted cream umbels and the rain is knocking scent off them like a child emptying perfume bottles. The air is all citrus and grape and nectar as I round the corner over the railway bridge and down to the canal. It has been a naive Spring of warmth, blossom-plenty and precocity as though it fancied itself Summer, jealous of a younger sister. May pressed days of close heat upon us – signs of the year brewing to its best – but the chill slap of rain today gives the lie to this. Rain on my glasses and in my eyes is constant pinprick surprise to my senses: feel this, it says.

I have walked the Leeds-Liverpool canal towpath many times, but today’s rain renders it at its active best: making the canal anew, freshening it and adding to its watery DNA. I don’t take in anything but the action of rain on water at first – and I am literally taking it in, absorbing it into my skin, become amphibian. Rain in its different grades has different personalities and thus a rich lexicon has endeavoured to express the different types of rain and its differing moods. This rain is kelching, hossing, siling down: a soss, a sope, a soak of rain. More than a shower but shy of a storm. Stairrods perpendicular to the canal and ground. It is insistent yet playful: hard and nagging like a child with constant questions at your ear, but refreshing and ozone too. It keeps company with me until I am all sensation: wet-waxed hanks of hair snake my forehead and neck; rain-wash coats my hands; cool humid damp is between my clothing and back. It is all encompassing. Constant white noise as a myriad raindrops crack the surface tension. Water, at least for a while, is the dominant element, coating everything in its thin chromatic, electrifying sheen. It brings harsh percussion to the canal’s surface, and turmoil underneath, as silt and sediment are churned and tossed over – more likely than not – discarded shopping trolleys, pallets and pipes, the usual canal finds. I am reduced to membrane, taking in the rain and giving up the day in exchange.

My new-made selkie-skin, after the deadening train commute, is brought to life again, goose-pimpling with hairs raised on end. My eyes search hungrily for the fish-kisses that fat raindrops make on the water, sounding out desire. Transformed from its usual sluggish drawl, the canal is come to muddy life, its surface respiring and dancing as it pocks and heaves, fumbling for rhythm with bubble-jumble. Today it is made river, moving and acting a part, no longer still but vital and full of flow. At the lock it sluices down the overflows, bordered with valerian at their margins, and making right the levels above and below.

The path bubbles angrily between the rain-blatters that are little reservoirs under my boots. Sensation is forcefully returned to me and I begin to notice other life around me. A heron is hunting on the opposite bank, though its manner of hunting is entirely patient, still, watchful; waiting for its prey to swim close. Its head is down-bent, intent, death in its ancient gaze. Blackbirds love the rain, jouncing along in the open, turning their mustard beaks into the soil for surfacing worms. No birds sing. There is now an almost-skip to my step along the clashy churn of the path. Unpeopled by the rain-shy, this path is my chosen company. Under the action of the incessant rain, I feel myself become buoyant, light-hearted, acted upon too, as I pass below the waxy-wet canopies of ivied hawthorn, oak and chestnut, that drop heavy raindrops on my head and shoulders. The oaks were slow to leaf in Spring, their acid green buds opening minutely, conjured slowly, as though the sap were still sleeping. How ebony their barks look now under the darkening of the rain as their branches twist against the sky, the green of their fledged leaves brilliant and popping on the eye.

Down below, something dark and little is moving awkwardly from the canal and across the tow path, almost perfectly camouflaged under the rain’s tumult, making me pause to identify it from its hobbled movements. Something emerging from the primordial ooze, carefully, articulating its disgust for land with slow joints and crabbed, webbed fingers. Moving like the first life form that ever left the first swamp, unimpressed by the uncooperative nature of this new element. Its webbed hands, almost bent back upon themselves, bear it along with obvious effort: its skin bears a hallmark gnarliness. A toad! With surprise and delight cast upon my face, I approach. The rain has made its bumped back reflective and glossy like volcanised rock, polished to a gleam. It seems heedless of my presence, shoveling its feet laboriously behind it, but I see it knows I’m here with that preternatural sense that wild things have. It stops at my advance even though it’s facing away from me. Has the fury of the rain driven it from its accustomed swimming holes? And, half-drowned, is it making for the cover of tree scrub, hauling itself doggedly over slick mud and grass, for a break? I leave it to its task.

I am walking past the stream where I saw a dipper skip down the water bubbling down to the river. The memory of this encounter always provokes me to examine the place closely for a second sighting – but all I have ever conjured is the afterglow of that first encounter. After almost three years of living here (and still a newcomer), I am slowly mapping the neighbourhood with my memories of the things I have experienced here. Such mapping is the mind’s way of working itself into a place, of connecting. The vestiges of things seen and experienced are – as the word suggests – like clothes or skins we shed along the way and then put on again when we are inclined to walk these ways again. These kinds of topographies are personal, particular and one of the most important ways in which places work themselves into us as well. Maps are another kind of membrane, allowing for exchange between personal encounter and memory and place. There are vestiges of myself left forever in the wild, as long as memory and place co-exist.

Wetchered, that is to say wet through after rain, I return to my own front door unburdened like the sky of its load. Rain is such a small word.

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.

At the time of hay-making

Posted on Aug 22, 2018Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

The air hangs in heavy skeins about us, thick as threads to walk through and swollen with pollen almost tasting on the tongue. Unlike in the cities, the sky is split wide open here in the Dales and stripped by the hungry cries of the swallows winging it above, skirting the stone barns and scooping their dinners out of thin air. They swing loose on invisible paths, their characteristic forked tails making perfect stabilisers as they sail gracefully through each arc. It is pleasing simply to watch them belly out across the view and join up the two halves of the valley like a pendulum. Is it my fancy that they seem to fly southerly, as if rehearsing the end of year exodus to warmer climes? The snap and glide of their wings is nearly all one hears on this sultry day in the stillness of the meadow, and I think to myself: their dynamism is mine too. My thoughts follow them freely, hitched to their flights.

We’ve come to the hay meadows at Muker like pilgrims, humbly and seeking something rare: Yorkshire’s wildflowers grown undisturbed on Yorkshire soil. We are pilgrims in spirit at least, because in terms of transport we’ve cheated and driven in the VW to get here, parking up under a tree where the bank falls away into the river. The busyness of Muker envelops us from first footfall on its soil: sounds of water and laughter, ice creams being bought and slurped outside the general store which has faded postcards on sale at the door for 30p, proof that some things stand still. As we made our way over country-cambered roads, the farmers of Swaledale were out in force making hay while the sun shone, big machinery methodically cleaving, releasing into the air the acrid tang of newly cut grass so that it smelled ozone green, sappy and harsh to the nose. But at Muker the grass and flowers are left long until late in the season, an agreement between the conservationists and farmers to let the native wildflowers and the biodiversity they encourage thrive for as long as possible. It’s June. The meadows are not for harvesting yet, but are still in their growing season. Borrowed time.

The heat is not yet the smothering heat that will settle in this summer and cram like cotton wool in the ears and the mouth. It lilts on the tops of the buttercups, the yellow rattle and the delicately lobed flowers of the stitchworts. The shepherd’s purse is not leggy, stressed or dessicated with it yet, nor have the speedwells faded to palest blue, the edges of their petals crisped by the scorch of the sun. The tiny white tubular trumpets of the eyebright are still stout and unwavering in the embrace of the rattles and grasses; the cranesbills livid bruises of colour. Time for wilt and running to seed all too soon. There’s the promise of it even now in the building noonday heat.

Meadows like those between Muker and Keld are many decades in the making. Yet you can make a meadow in just a year too, proving that endurance is harder than beginning. They are part of the DNA of Muker and Swaledale now – a “unique selling point” the guidebooks depressingly averr, as if here were to be found a commerce of flowers; nature’s supply and demand. People travel to Muker specifically to see the meadows, as did we when first we visited in May, walking slowly but purposefully up the hill from the main street, anticipating our first view of them laid out under the sun, our imaginations having conjured great tempting images of meadows flower-full and an orchid in every patch. To see a wild orchid was the apotheosis of my desire and I coveted it like a child that wants the most prized sweet in the shop. I knew such images were traps for disappointment, but no one can control their wishes. Such was my wistfulness when, stopping to admire some flowers accidentally-on-purpose growing in a trough, we were accosted by one of the residents who took this as her cue and nipped in to provide botanical assistance. Cuckoo flowers, she informed us: pale, lavender-pink and lovely, clustering on slim-throated stems. The visual counterpart to the bird which (if you’re lucky) you hear calling at this time of year. The encounter savoured of the professional Mukerist, I thought at the time, fully aware of the town’s draw and perhaps assuming that the average Joe doesn’t know the names of Britain’s wildflowers. And I don’t really blame her – there are few enough of the native species about these days to make their names familiar.

To say their names out loud all together is my kind of liturgy – lady’s bedstraw, yellow rattle, eyebright, meadow cranesbill, self-heal, stitchwort, shepherds purse, speedwell. Sacred almost, and to be spoken of in hushed, reverential tones – or a jubilant incantation: a spell. And in one sense, these flowers were thought of as spells: self-heal for minor aches, cuts and pains; buttercups to tell if you like butter; stitchwort to relax spasms. All your cures at your feet, as it were: nature’s walk-in pharmacy for those who lived on and worked the land.

Now that it is June and our second visit, we approach the start of the way through the meadows knowing a little of what to expect. It’s the buttercups we notice first, as though the tips of the meadows unfolding before us have been burnished with yolky liquid light. May was good for this – but June! June is godly. To see them now, numbering in the thousands and clothing the earth with gold is mirage-like. You or I would dream a place like this. It is this vague elusiveness that enriches the sense of the meadow’s impermanence. You walk through it aware of the cycle of the seasons and each flower seen is as flash-by-soon-die as if it were already cut and dried.

My gaze snags on the roughened walls of the stone barns on the approach, already looking ahead greedily, but as with so many national trails and popular beauty spots, there is a bombardment of signage at the start which arrests you just as you’re ready to begin. At Muker, these signs are mostly wooden with some plastic and metal ones for variety. Variations on ‘keep your dog on a lead’, ‘stick to the paths’ and others trumpeting the rarefied nature of the meadows jostle on a crowded wooden post. Admonitory salutations to get us on our way with the appropriate air of solemnity for the task at hand. Meadows are not to be tripped through lightly, you know.

When we embark into the first, we do so paying the required fee – the cost is to our dignity by having to push ourselves through the stone squeeze, like camels through the eye of the needle. The passing from each meadow into the next is conducted in this fashion: through the sutures of stone squeezes in various sizes. The effect of so many uncomfortably close encounters with the local stone is to transform the simple act of passing through a gate into an event, and entry into each meadow is bargained for in this way. That’s fair enough, I think to myself, secretly enjoying the ceremony of passing through each different stone ‘cwtch’.

I find the meadows themselves slightly self-conscious of their draw for the tourist: divided by a flagstone path up the middle with a to-ing and fro-ing of dog-walkers, families and hikers processing up the line. One man calls out in our general direction as he passes, “I’ve not seen a single insect in any of these meadows!” It’s a baffling salute to strangers on the way, as if the meadows are not performing satisfactorily in his eyes. We ourselves have witnessed many insects, and bees in particular, and I share a look with my companion, again thinking of the profesional Mukerist, preoccupied with demonstrating their conservation-mindedness, here to affirm their allegiance to the local flora and fauna.

The valley is so far removed from its glacial founding that it feels a little like a large open nave, with worshippers treading the old stone aisle cutting up the centre. Curious. The flagged path serves the twin purposes of keeping the wilful worshipper along the straight and narrow (and in case you don’t get the message there are signs telling you to keep to the path), and forcing your momentum as you proceed ever onward. There is of course an onward inclination to every path, and I am driven by the hunt for the elusive orchid too, my heart a little sore at not having found any. But I must confess what is most attractive in the idea of a meadow is the dilatoriness it invites. The way in which it calls one to meander in amongst, not simply through. Dogs illicitly off the lead have made canine desire paths through the long grass, and Oh how I wish I could join them. With regret, I discover that the Muker hay meadows do not encourage dilly-dallying, and you are certainly actively discouraged from all thoughts of wandering in amongst them. Bent backed, our heads at flower-height, we must appear oddities to those toeing the line. At this level, the bouffant heads of the clover are rendered in beautiful and particular detail. Our survey of the flowers on offer is of necessity limited to those which can be glimpsed from the path, and our naming of them is something between tentative skill or guess work and clumsy misattribution.

It is not that I do not understand that the walker is corralled in this way to protect the flowers, but that I regret that such prohibition should be necessary at all. The path through a meadow feels as unnatural as a corset and the experience of walking it – for one who has come to see the wildflowers – thrums with latent frustration. I am heartened to see one woman, having abandoned the path, sitting against the dry stone wall of the last meadow before the river and simply relaxing into the moment as swallows jettison their bodies with abandon above.

You can stare at a clutch of flowers against grass for a long time until the mind slowly unstitches them into their different forms. Sense is made slowly of them. More enchanting perhaps than any orchid are the heart-shaped seeds of the shepherds purse. And plantain – which I’d been used to think of as a playground weed, so sad and lank in tarmac crevices – when in flower has brown heads dusted with white pinpricks like sugar. My favourite flower glimpsed this day? The eyebright, once thought to be a remedy for soreness of the eyes; its little hairy stems support spires of brilliant and tiny white lipped flowers, not unlike those of the penstemon family. Beautiful, all clustered together, like nuns’ wimples or arms stretched wide.

Names trees give themselves

Posted on Aug 1, 2017Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

Rain lashes through a whimple of cloud. Days of dirty skies have succeeded one after the other lately and whenever I look out of the window with a fool’s hope, the rain whitens everything with its diagonal, dashing fall, making a mystery of the view: a veil between me and the world. My slate-grey mood prowls withindoors to the tattooing droplet-driving dance. Everything is variously damp and dank-smelling inside as well as out and the house is, for a time, unhomely and I a fidgeter indoors. But, after a morning’s fall from a granite firmament, now the belt of rain-pall has slackened and I step out into mizzle — a good word — which is to say a something or nothing rain; half-masted between a mist and a drizzle; short-changed out of full onslaught; a cobweb of wet on the eyelash; rain’s last resort. The onomatopoeia of ‘mizzle’ suits the barely-embroidering dew of it on my skin and clothing. By using it, I think with a deft complacency, I am keeping this scarce-heard word alive, breathing life back into it as it wets my tongue. Mizzle. It’s one of many words we’re helping to lose through the slow erasure of non-use.

Hand in glove with the elements, my walking today is warm and muggy — almost cosy — in my spangled mizzle-sheen and I lift up a round face into the lea of where I think the sun might be, there in the opaque, blinding white halo. The valley has been washed by heavier morning showers than this and now the very last dregs in the sky-cup are filtered through a fine cheesecloth of cloud leaving only this light haze to drowse upon the grass banks and the willowherb. Its speckling on my skin is almost pleasant; a light refreshment after the stale indoors. I’ve timed my walk with the weather and, in a sudden access of exuberance at the lessened rain, the postman hulloes me and calls that I’ve brought the sun out with me. I am word-stumbling in denial, but he’s curiously adamant as though I had the power — a weather-charm weaver — and, cheerfully amused at the thought, I press on.

Looking out across the valley as my steps draw me down into the crease of it I see — whoosh! — a swift performing its sky-dance, its black wings the merest lilting on the wind. Insects must be drawing it to thread itself back and forth across the scree of cloud, and with what a swooping joy it cleaves the air! Such effort for just a mouthful on the wing, I think, hoving onward though back-glancing at its dipping display. Around me, nature is turning herself to the business of fruiting. Where once were the delicately white-anthered blossoms of the hawthorn, now berries thicken in perfect curvatures; apples are approaching shop-worthiness on the tree; and the rowan berries are already choleric with red, their orange anger earlier than ever this year. I see a whole cycle from flower to fruit on one bramble bower: the pink-white rose-like blossoms, the green fruit still tightly unripe, and the rich blood-black berries, as heavily hanging as antique ear-bobs. It is a worry what the birds will do as a result of this too-soon bounty when the year draws on to dearth, and I send my thought up with supplication: not too hasty, autumn. As if drawn by these forebodings, my eye is caught on goose-stepping lines of black rooks and crows patrolling the playing fields for worms. There is something morbid about their presence as they move forward in forensic searches, like a police line punctuating the green with their funereal sweeps.

The top of the Glen shows itself dazzled and imperfect; the stone houses rendered softly indistinct; and the tree-bank losing its sharpness. The sun, making a brief appearance, sets the haze to silver and I know that somewhere there must be a rainbow, beyond my sightline and beyond my gift today. Trundling on down the hill, my steps mechanical having walked this path so many strides now, I am headed (I know it with sudden clarity) for Hirst Wood: for just-in-case cover; my native tree-patch; nature’s ancient thatch in serried rows of leaf upon leaf. Sometimes my feet draw me down to the wood with the instinctive understanding of sole to soul.

Hirst Wood emerges as a shadow on my left, its darkling silhouette of beech, birch and oak hugging the side of the Leeds Liverpool canal; occasionally dipping a toe in it. Now that I have the shortcut by Caroline St and Dallam Ave by foot-rote, the prospect of being ensconced, enveloped and covered over with green is only ever a mere 10 minutes’ walk away. As with other ancient woodlands, admittance to this hallowed, treed sanctum has been bargained for with many walkers’ feet. If we stopped turning in at the side of Hirst Lane, it would forget us and close the gap over again with irrepressible green as though we had never been here at all; never pressed the leaves with our feet; nor watched the squirrels’ scampers; not heard the invisible birds’ calls. No respecter of people this wood, and I am heartily glad of it. I tuck myself away into the fold of its trees, my steps cushioned on a thick layer of rich black loam: good growing soil that roots you if you stand still for too long, but pleasant to push a toe into. A complicated black, textured and coarse, with bits of bark and moss returning to the earth. Centuries of leaf mould worked over by worms, beetles and mud-boring bees have connived at this good grounding.

I crane my neck up in an arc of longing at the top-lofty beeches and birches; their branches crackle-glazing the sky in stilled squiggles; their cover giving me dry underfoot. Their arms uplifted are greedy snatchers at the hemisphere: ’tis the lure of drawing upward to the highest height; to the point at which the wood tries to leap out of itself into the sky; where the mist rests on the tops of the trees; where the smallest branches quiver their littlest leaves into the air. And then in meteoric rush, like ball from bat, stone from sling: a wood-pigeon casts itself aloft from its cover — a signal to others of the presence of an intruder — and though I provoked its flight with an incautious step, it’s my heart that seizes in the relative stillness. The alarm raised, it’s many minutes of patient waiting before the woodland creatures disclose themselves again. A grey squirrel in stops and starts frets its way from one tree to another, keeping me in sight out of one obsidian eye before scarpering up skywards again. Birds begin their calling-on songs again.

Deep in the heart of the wood, the trees tell me the names to call them by: wood-waker; root-delver; bark-bone maker; timber-teller; crown-weaver; sky-tracer; storm-quaker; trunk-bracer; root-throne forger; wildling-wose; spring-bloomer; ring-worker; skin-splitter; treacle-sapper; burl-wound bearer; heartwood-wedded; wind-singer; groan-swayer; nut-hatcher; place-crowder; high-yammerer; close-creeper; leaf-twitcher; branch-creaker; breeze-shaker; autumn-surrenderer; leaf-looser; rime-wearer; dryad-dancer; rough-cladder; sky-stretcher; stone-breaker; whack-shiverer; rain-taker; squirrel-friender; south-bender; soil-anchor; ground-gripper; sun-chaser; bough-lacer; mage-whisperer; sooth-grower; seed-blower; whip-branch tickler; sometimes-sickener; blast-bowled sentinel; night-moaner; woodpecker-martyr; earth-sifter; light-blending dapple-sender; path-riddler; way-pointer; fey-shifter; branch-lifter; star-gazer.

All the names of the trees suggest themselves in the crook’d, bent and twist-turned forms I walk between; in the soughing of the wind about and through them; in their wood-barked complexions. Oaks are best for gnarliness; the birches straight but ghosting in their white papers. The beeches, taller than all the rest, have by far the highest conceit of themselves. This wood holds a queen of beeches, burled and cankered about her large waist; bent with age; over-crowding the path. She is so generous in size that many Merlins could have been enchanted into her. Surrounding herself she has sown a circle of her young: satellites to her parent tree. She reaches out arms to her progeny. Nothing much will grow under beeches because the shade they manufacture with their leaves is so complete; not so the shiver-leaved birch whose tremble of leaves is so light-permissive as to be almost translucent — and so they are when a shaft of sunlight hits them. The floor of this woodland, under birches and between, was so thick-carpeted with bluebells in spring that walking here was, for a month, entirely blue. Now the cracked pods of the spent bells have all but unburdened themselves of their black seeds; just a few still await a forager to help spill them.

Though it is a modest woodland, barely half a mile from end to end, to enter Hirst Wood as I do today, fugitive from mists and the threat of more rain, is to claim sanctuary from the world without for a quiet while: a pause between two breaths on a walk. I begin to appreciate this wood as meaning more than its parts: the accumulation of the years of its trees told in countless hidden rings; its centuries of leaves; yearly nests and egg-hatchlings; squirrelled nuts and acorn-ripenings; parent trees and be-treeings. And indeed, with barely a week passing without my accustomed pilgrimage to Hirst Wood, it has acquired for me now the savour of a walk-familiar: that is, a place one may walk and let the mind spin-drift because the peculiarities of its ways are so known to foot and memory. To go through, into and under it day after day — to know it in all its guises — is to walk, I have found, still partly in the wood when away.

When bees dance

Posted on Jul 19, 2017Jan 15, 2022 by kylienorman

In drowses of movement, in winged occlusions, bees dance;
their wings sound furies, their humming never single but
joined in buzzed harmonies; tiny fidgeting fledgling beings
trimmed in flower dust and seed: carriers of living things;
carriers on the wind, nectar-drunk and plenty-eyed,
busy about the honey-glide. Wish I had enough eye to see
and ear to hear the single hymn each sends through hive:
shopping lists of which nectar’s choice and where
the yellow dust pollen waits in sufficiencies.
I wonder do they dance of my garden and of me,
of the honeysuckle and the bells of the penstemon,
these soft-furred, furious things? A heartbeat in one;
a squeeze against the breastbone drawing on in drones;
sometimes still in secret strokings of antennae –
a sociable etiquette, wiping pollen from oval eyes;
more often a ritual vibration gives tongue to the hive nation.
A colloquy on the wing – mapping terrain since first
spring – claiming each flower between. The dance begins
on the landing board in feints; a single split from the whole,
stirs itself up, sloughing subtlety – all uppity – no longer
moving in general mass, but individuated articulated
energy. Perhaps it is ordered, orderly frenzy, but to me
it seems bee anarchy: dense, tense clenches of sound;
all wound up, and I batten down my body hatches at the
approaching buzz-flights, tightly wound as a spring
myself; bearing the agglomerated sound as long as I can.
Later, I still hear still feel the ghosts of their wings;
and visions of bees dancing entrance my dreams.

Remainders of Coal Ways

Posted on Jul 13, 2017Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

Six kilometers from Rombalds Moor and adjacent to Hawksworth lie the brute passes of Baildon Moor. This is coal country and we send our steps into the still-black paths of it with presentiments of steep slopes choked with slakes of coal dust. The crag which makes the Moor’s topmost point up-rears before us with taunts of unclimbability; the paths clawed into the sides of it leave raw, differently-coloured, untidy edges in its fascias, like candle wax dripped down its sides which has melted the land away in its wake. These deep, hollowed-out half-moons of paths cup our feet awkwardly as we place our steps; their rocky bottoms pocked with eruptions along the way. Our boots grapple and scrabble, our ankles wobble and struggle on the shifting shale of coal glass, graphite dust and slate shard that clog such paths. There’s grist in this walking: eyes down, heavy frowns alert to where the way might betray us, shoulders round and bound forward into the uphill strikes of the paths. Lung-puffed and quad-tight we three labour to the top, occasionally calling a thin strain of encouragement to one another: keep going father; keep going sister; keep going daughter. The going is slow and the paths know our every stumble, every founder and falter, like haltered horses wearied by the uphill on these deep-dug ways. Coal wagons laid them as early as the fourteenth century, but it was the Victorian corves that entrenched them, greedy for mill brimstone; grinding into the ground expedient traffics from the shallow surface pits, with some days more, but increasingly less, coal to show for their back-and-forth trips.

The element up here is an alchemy of gloss-faceted carbon mixed with sand- and limestone sedimentaries and shale. In some places the coal could be mined just under the surface skin of the Moor – its black dermis – easy pickings for colliers but low-grade at the top; the quality stuff harder got at and lower down in the dense, adamantine clutches of the ground. A messy craft of shaft and shovel to draw the deep, eighteen-inch-thick black treasure out. Now, if you scud a boot across the thin-grassed hillocks up on the crag, near the old pits left like belly-craters to fill up with rain, you uncover still a jet, dusty shale. Shards lie in smudges of smashed and broken pieces that hardly resist the boot, littering the path in compressions of primordial trees squeezed with economy into dark mysterious seams through stretches of time. A gobbet of coal from up the moor-path is a surprise of lightness in my palm: fetched through three millennia to my small hand, attesting to lost topographies, an inky remainder of strange oversized ferns and giant forests that once covered this land in close, pre-coal darknesses. Here now – after oozes of swamp, harsh glaciation and vice-like pressures – only grasses dare to shuttle up from earth to sky. Now the terrain is bald, the once-buried swamp forests in their secret pressings are forced to light again through its peeling, friable skin. And I think: everything falls apart at the seams at last. Coal remainders – uncanny when thought of as archaeology – show the Moor has not forgotten its ages-old biography. Its history has been matter-of-facted into place names and topography with Lode Pit Lane and Colepit Close.

A map of the Baildon Moor ‘Inclosures’ made by Robert Saxton in 1610, shows the craters of four surface coal pits like navels in the landscape. The workings were open; but later day-holes were dug into the sides of the hill for miners to disappear into like moles; bell-pits sunk down to seams and opened out at the top to collect up their black. These are now grassed over and boggy at bottom; the putters and huryers who worked and umbilicalled them more than a century since, dead, perhaps forgotten. In the 1852 Ordnance Survey map, several of the pits were already marked as old and out of use. Extensions to local railways and problems with floods would eventually close the remaining three mines worked by William Midgley after the 1870s. A census in 1881 shows only 3 men left working the pits, like fossils themselves, stuck in a monotony of work, scratching a living out of a land where the quality coal had already gone. Nothing left but the bits and pieces that I see today – carbon drawing on to dust – fit for home fires only. Now not even the tenements and settlements of the peripatetic coal workers remain at Low Hill or Moorside: in the end as transitory and finite as the black stuffs they excavated, no sooner uncovered than gone and moved on to the next seam of inky black sheen.

We make for the trig point on the topmost plateau of the hill to claim the lie of the land with satisfaction in our eyes, lungs, and feet braced wide apart against the wind. Cross-hatchings of putters paths, flecked with coal, go down from here near the old pits. Shards of the erst-landscapes lie at my feet like jumbled words that perhaps made sense all in a line down there in the stratified dark: a reflective gloss in the light of a lantern. A wilderness is available to us in 360 degree vistas and we see the enormous pock-marked leavings of nineteenth-century smeltings along the Dobrudden access road as though a volcano had extruded them in sulphurous loads. They lie quietly now in large cankers of surface slag, partly cladded over with grass and moss. The birds have marked this territory as theirs now: the meadow pipits, skylarks and plovers in numbers as the strong, vital sound attests. All heard but hardly seen. On the way back down I collect a banded curlew quill discarded in a tussock and put it carefully away to take home in my pack.

The coal ways of Baildon Moor have become something other than they were originally carved out for. As early as the 1890s, day-trippers from Bradford – weekenders getting away from the cloying monotony of Victorian inner city smog with advice from zealous doctors; golfers anticipating the tee; butterfly collectors crazed with their nets; tweeded twitchers – all swarmed the Moor and overran the villages in pillages of the middle class at play. In 1910 the Shipley Times declared, “The country is tempting just now.” But industry itself was once powered from here: the traction engines, steam machines, the factory wheels, the tall valley chimneys issuing their smuts; these all got their spark from deep in the heart of the Moor.

With thanks to Joyce W. Percy whose article, ‘The Lost Villages of Baildon Moor’ was very informative, published online on the Bradford Historical & Antiquarian Society’s website.

Lines made while walking

Posted on Jul 3, 2017Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

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.

Meadow walking with Moths

Posted on Jul 2, 2017Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

Summer burst with its glory into my corner of Airedale in the week leading up to the solstice; the sun having discovered that it could be brilliant again and sending down its heat; the magpies almost dazzle-shy from the reflections off the water; and the sky a porcelain blue overhead. I spent the precious mornings once got out of bed in this hot heady week like a bluebottle at the window, my heart dashing itself between chores against the panes of glass to be outside and about my walk. Heat with the smother of a blanket enrobed me when first out of doors, and then it sat like a baked stone in the mouth. The infinite palette of green and the flowers with their newness still upon them were chromatically burned onto my retinas, so that there was the ghost-blindness of them when I closed my eyes to summer’s wild happenings in the tucked-up shade of those nights. Outside, down the hill, past the canal and the boat club, the desiccated riverbanks dusted me as I clambered over squeezes in the dry stone walls, my dress trapping warmth and insects under it like a collector’s net or a bell jar; specimens for later. The river was lazy and slow, haloed with murmurations of flies, caught in the spangled reflections off the ripples of the water. I trained my strides to their pace, my gaze resting in dream-visions of sun-caught fire on water. It’s all going on in there, I thought. The gill-filtering fish; the spawn in its molecular gluts; the tadpoliest prefaces to frogs; the reeds and weeds quiescent to the river’s course; the silted clouds starting up round newts. But on the surface, there was just the gentle hum of fly-swarms and my thick thirst.

Every summer in some sense recalls the first summers I experienced when a girl and in it I recognise again the features of my child – my tadpole – self. The grass tickles now as it used to tickle bare legs under blue and white school summer gingham as I looked forward to an impossibly long holiday, like a thief waiting to steal into the hot outdoors. Every seasoned tree I now see in its already-antique, spring-lost green is descendent of those in Richmond Park, holder of the trees I used to climb, the bark sharp to the skin and the nooks within its shape ready to be dens. The baked sizzle of asphalt now summons memories of the baking of the roof tiles under my childhood windowsill when they radiated heat into summer evenings for dangling little feet to warm themselves on. In that impossibly furnace-like week, before the solstice and Midsummer’s Day would come to jinx everything, my eyes – like the eyes of the child inside me – were on stilts to cram in everything they could see.

Then came the rain, lording it over the last week or so, making the world soggy, the paths bogged, and the river almost solid with flood. I experienced walking only wetly and uncomfortably. Now it is the last day of June: plenty into summer, post-solstice, and more than midway through the year. All harum-scarum today, the year seems busy fashioning a gilded shell for itself to climb back into in autumn; its thought turned inward and busy and private. It is a day that casts its gaze forward to a cold winter to retire into. Or so it feels now with bulging rain clouds ominous above, cousins only once removed from the deluges that have been falling ceaselessly this week in days-long tyrannies of showers. The Aire is in spate, the weir at home overflown with it – nigh to bursting its banks with it; and the red clay chokes it, muddles the fish in it, so the fishermen by the way have an easier catch of it. The churning red makes some of the mallards fastidious of dipping a web-toe in its fast flow. This watery world is strong-currented, swollen, with whirlpools eddying near the banks ready to catch at the shanks of the unwary walker. The minnows’ spring shoaling to glean the warmth from the shallow water’s surface seems many weathers ago now. I would not have been a fish these last few days in the spated river, blind to the world and the fisherman’s hook, of a sudden tossed and tumbled in amongst the rocks, fast-driven and knocked about pell-mell. Only the week before under the blaze-balled sun the river was a sluggish, lucid drawl, its pace philanthropic to the fish in its run.

I have misgivings, caused by these sudden summer rain deposits, about the solidity of the path under me today as I begin my walk: my purpose to discover what lies beyond the patch of woodland at the base of the Chevin. The ground up top on this ancient ridge is millstone grit, so called because it was formerly a preferred substance for quarrying millstones; but today the foot of it is mud-locked. Avoiding the worst of it with walking on the grass either side of the track, still my feet suck into clay leaving deep foot wells behind me; something of myself on the way. In spite of this I make steady uphill progress under a thicket of branches, between tall stems of sorrel, grasses crowned with their heavy heads of seed, and nettles grown up tall as weeds. There is white clover at my feet along stretches of the path, but not further into the verges – the grasses won’t make room for it there – and, smiling, I am made like Olwen of the Mabinogion who sows flowers into legend with her steps. The way opens up from close quarters between trees into a meadow on the cusp of gold from green. Sending my eyes out across it, I see there is no evidence here now of winter dearth; any scars there were have been completely covered over with straight grassy glyphs searching upward for the sun behind its shroud.

The air over the meadow is close. At first all I see in the shifting sea before me is the grass and the aged green, but gradually the eye trains itself to look more closely at spots of colour shifting among the screen of stems that are wattled and webbed together. Are those flutters? A distinctive clap of papery wings dragging a body up in the air with it, clumsy, colourful, its course unplotted and full of darting diversions. More of them, riding the undergrowth, give purpose to my steps as I pick one to follow. I send my feet after it, like untidy ploughs imperfectly bending the stalks of rough meadow-grass, and they start up clouds of ringlet and small skipper butterflies as I pass, their dusky soot and sunset wings flapping the air jubilantly. It’s a tussocky wilderness in here: a micro world of seed, spider and chrysalis husks on knapweed stalks; everything busy from first peep of dawn until the late long-day dusk. The narrow-bordered five-spot burnet moths have hatched here perhaps in the last week or so and are now busy drinking nectar, mating, and stretching their black and red wings, it seems, with relief after a week of rain-soaking. A couple, holding themselves delicately and tenuously among grasses, are wedded together in the quiet cool underworld of the meadow, perhaps to be meddled with by cobwebs and spiders as others have been. These meadow spiders have their nurseries under dew-crystalled canopies of cobwebs slung between the grasses. They loom them over their eggs with morsels in wait for their hatching. I tread carefully round them, spider-fearful and not wishing to crush their gauzy confections that are dew-lapped in the grass.

Butterflies and moths do not like to be abroad when it rains: they hide themselves in the low-leaved nooks of their host plants or cling to the undersides of trees and hang there in stillness, letting a sort of catatonic calm settle over them. They do not sleep, but they enter a state approximating it. There are so many here today that I cannot see how they could all hide themselves from the wet. But, wonderful though it may seem, they have; and as soon as a dry dawn arrives they emerge again with a fevered industry, ready to mate and gather energy and begin the cycle again. They fly like thimble-sized hummingbirds for two months only, furiously working and laying their eggs under leaves. And then, weary at last and having ensured their progeny, they die.

Today, here among them, following them in circles, my joy sits on the wings of this day-loving moth.