Stepping out of the car, we’re met by a moderate rain. Mid-morning at Vaughn’s Café – again. This time, our plan is a circuit, taking in a slice of the Roddlesworth plantations, then up onto Darwen Moor. We have a new lens for the camera, which we were hoping to try out. It’s a super-wide format, the aim being to add a touch of drama to our lone trees and sky, but we’ve left the camera at home. The forecast just didn’t justify bringing it out.
The lens is an old one, and designed for use with my make of camera – though, it turns out, not my specific model. It still works as a lens, but it doesn’t automatically focus. Now, this should be no hardship since, once upon a time, all our focusing was done manually. We chose the subject, then turned the dial until it was sharp. I could have got the lens a lot cheaper from other sellers if I’d known. Anyway, that’s another story, but it has us thinking about focus and doing things automatically, in metaphorical ways, like sometimes how we roll from bed of a morning, draw back the curtains on yet another flake-white Lowry sky, before rolling automatically back in.
So, we click our imaginary lens from auto to manual, we pick our day, and just go for it. And here we are, the sky more the colour of lead than flake-white, cloud-base so low you can reach up and touch it, and then the rain. It’s never a good sign, having to pull on full waterproofs at the start of a walk, but may the rain wash us clean. I imagined I had found a way of stepping aside from the news cycle, of no longer being triggered by ‘events’, but the world has more recently caught onto me, changed tactics, and now I cannot look at it without feeling unclean.
The forest ways through Roddlesworth are heavy going, dark, and the trees dripping, the paths doubling as lively streams. The body warms quickly under several layers, though the fingers still ache from cold. I have a new waterproof outer which is performing well, the rain beading up and running off, at least for a time. But after a couple of hours, the fabric is starting to wet out and no longer breathable, so we begin to wet from the inside as condensation soaks back into the mid-layers.
We make our way over towards Darwen, through Sunnyhurst, then a brief rest and a stand-up lunch in the shelter of the lych gate, before tackling the climb onto the moor. There’s been no let-up in the rain, and a stiffening breeze now, as the landscape becomes more exposed. But the wind is to our backs, so it helps, rather than hinders. I’m still exercising the legs of a morning with a dumbbell – still not sure if it’s making a difference on the hill, but anything that gets the heart pumping is doing some good, so long as we’re not overdoing it.
There’s a forbidding bleakness to Darwen moor at the best of times, but on a day like this, it’s particularly challenging to the spirit. Interesting now, the proliferation of leaky dams and berms – the moor being engineered to hold water, of which there is plenty today. We make a somewhat bumbling return through the woods, past Sipper Lowe, back to Vaughn’s, slithering in mud as we go.
The car is a relief to see, though I’m almost too weary to pull the gear off. The waterproof trousers have leaked through the pocket slits leaving big cold patches on my thighs. And, as suspected, I’m wet down to the mid-layer from condensation. It was a longish walk, about eight miles at pace, not much by way of meditation, no messing about with photographs. I’m not sure if the day has washed me clean, but that cup of tea in Vaughn’s café was most welcome. We emerge from the steamy interior mid-afternoon to an already fading light, and the rain had stopped.
We’re feeling cold of a sudden, and in need of a hot bath. Back at the car, we set the heater on full and reach for the radio, then think better of it, and drive home in silence. It is plain now that, at a certain elevated – indeed stratospheric – level, the world has always been this dirty. Yet, I’m sure the majority of us bring our children up to believe in magic and kindness, and I still think that’s right. We imagine the damage comes only from the stranger, the predator, the one who lurks at the margins of society, yet some of them are also riding very high, indeed running and shaping the world in their own image.
Perhaps the rain did not wash us entirely clean then, but for a short time at least it has brought the world back into a cleaner focus. It’s shown us how it’s not always wise to go with what comes to us automatically, because it may not be trustworthy. And it reminds us that in order to see clearly, to choose what we look at, instead of having it chosen for us, we have to switch that imaginary lens back to manual. And if we can do that, then even splashing through the wet and the cold of a Lancashire upland in the depths of winter, carries its own form of innocent grace.
I used to find my work interesting. It was about making things with computers and other complex machinery. It was specialised, unusual, technical – came out of research we did around the millennium, employing the computers of the day to the very hilt of their abilities. That got easier of course as the machines evolved, became faster, smarter. Meanwhile, outside of the little back-room where I worked, the company evolved too, over the years – became more corporate. It expanded, shrank, expanded, shrank again. Departments disappeared, new ones were invented, reorganisations swept the ranks like stormy squalls. But, unlike the computers, and for all of its self important re-shuffling, it didn’t seem to grow in capability – indeed quite the opposite. On the surface, what I saw was a drift towards offices that were vast open spaces, everyone sitting at an identical machine, typing emails, filling spreadsheets, time-sheets, booking meetings. But what they were actually doing – I mean delivering – grew more and more opaque.
I’ve always wondered about that, I mean the way the corporate machine eventually seemed to hold us all captive, immersed in this bullshit. Me? I’d started to feel – somewhat arrogantly – like I was the only one doing anything real – something that went into a box and got put on a wagon and shipped out at the end of the day. But otherwise, that back-room suited me – the isolation, I mean. I’ve always been comfortable in my own company. It’s not a path I’ve consciously chosen, more one that seems to have chosen me. As others submitted meekly to capture, to immersion, suffocation, I allowed myself to gravitate to that little basement back-room, wedged between other forgotten functions like the janitors, and the maintenance men. And there, I felt I could still breathe.
In theory I had a line manager, but I was just a name on his spreadsheet and so long as my head didn’t pop up on his radar, I never heard from him. The radar swept for employees who had insufficient funding to cover their time. I always had plenty of funds. Although what I did was unusual, my services, my little widgets, seemed to be in quiet demand. At any rate, I alwasy seemed to muddle through. Requests came in by email. I’d do my thing, and deliver the goods. I could go weeks and not see anyone at all – just clock in, tend my machines, then go home again.
But then this one time I came into the back-room of a morning, coat still dripping wet from the rain outside, to find a couple of guys logged on and huddled over my machines. Like I said, my set-up was special, unusual. I’d adapted those machines to serve a unique purpose, though they’d still do the more mundane corporate functions, and that appeared to be what these guys were up to.
I didn’t recognise them. They were from another office, another part of the country, visiting. There was a hot-desk policy in play by that time, which was working out a bit like musical chairs. I was usually okay of course, my machines being special purpose. Things must have been particularly tight up in the offices for these guys to wind up poking about in the basement for seats.
I explained to them I couldn’t work until they’d finished, and they replied that they’d likely be all day, and since hot-desk was first come first served, and what they were doing was important too, or so they said, I was out of luck. They came off as a bit arrogant, even a bit offensive. So I laid it on and told them I hoped they’d logged me off properly, otherwise they’d probably lost the company a month’s work. This wasn’t true of course, and anyway, they weren’t having any of it, said if that was the case, it was my fault for not logging myself off like I was supposed to.
So I put my coat back on and prepared to leave them to it – go have a coffee in the canteen or something – when one of them started rooting in my desk drawers. I don’t know what he was after, but I explained I had personal stuff in there, and I’d appreciate it if he didn’t go rooting, but he came back with the corporate line that we weren’t supposed to have items of a personal nature on site – I mean even the kids weren’t allowed Smurfs on their desks any more.
The only remaining salvo at my disposal was a little black book which I took from my pocket. I asked both their names and wrote them down. I didn’t make a fuss about it, or tell them why – that I was going to report them up the line or something – because I wasn’t. I could see it unsettled them. Funny that. Even in this age of hyper-surveillance you get blase about the spy in the machine, but no one likes to think of their names hand-written, in a little black book in someone’s pocket.
Naturally, I was puzzled by the intrusion. I mean, contrary to what they claimed, they weren’t doing anything of any importance. Most likely they were costing the company money – travel and hotels and such – and here they were holding me up, so I couldn’t deliver anything either. But I was fine, I had a funding code to cover diversionary activities. So, I could just go sit in a corner of the canteen, drink coffee and pretend to shuffle papers, while actually writing poetry. You couldn’t get more diversionary than that could you?
Poetry was my hobby – though hobby’s perhaps too small a word for it. Naturally, it wasn’t permitted on company time, but better than staring into space, and easy enough to pretend I was doing something legit. Protocol perhaps demanded I’d better pass word up the line that some random bods were hogging my machine, but then I needed a machine to do that, and all were taken. We were at a Kafkaesque impasse, then. So, yes, I wrote poetry.
Were I a different kind of guy, my ego in hock to the corporate libido, I would have been obliged to get angry at the disruption. But I viewed these itinerant hot-deskers more as a kind of virus infecting a system by now so sick, it couldn’t see that most of its functions had been taken over by performative box-ticking. So few of us actually made anything any more, I mean seriously added value, and we had to carry these jokers as well. But the real mystery? None of it seemed to matter. The company didn’t collapse under the weight of its own absurdities. And then you look around and the same might be said for much of what was going on in the wider world of work, too. Nobody was making anything. We were all just staring at screens, pushing digits.
So there I sat. The canteen was quiet at that time of a morning – just the chef and kitchen people, back of counter, preparing lunch. These were still your “doing” sort of people, and I felt a kinship with them. At the end of the day they could point to what they’d done – so many meals served, so many plates washed. Others would drift in for coffee refills, nod their vague acquaintanceship, then drift back up to the offices, a kind of zombified look about them. And I wrote my poem.
It was blank verse thing. At the back of my mind there was still that old school insistence poetry should rhyme – no fair tennis without a net and all that – but blank verse lets you get your thoughts down quickly – sense impressions, visitations from the imagination. That always felt more important to me, and you could tidy it up later, look for rhythm, even rhyme if you still wanted it.
The thing with a poem is, it’s like an inner part of us wants to see itself expressed in words. And that was odd because it’s such a literal thing, while much of the pointlessness I saw in the day to day lay precisely in the way we took everything so literally: why the spreadsheet had become more important than the data it recorded, that the data had become more important than the values it expressed. Value, real value, lay somewhere else. It wasn’t literal, yet still sought expression, risked corruption at the hands of the profane. It was for the poet to realise that, and protect it.
I took lunch in the canteen when everyone else piled in, then took a walk down to my back-room to find the hot-deskers still hard at it, doing nothing. I asked if they’d be all day, and was met with the snippy reply that they’d take as long as was necessary. Sure, when a company reaches that point where it’s no longer making anything, it becomes a haven for arseholes. Arseholes don’t last long when the key performance indicator is: did you deliver that box out the door?
My wife thought I was joking when she asked me, over dinner, if I’d had a good day, and I’d replied yes, that I got a decent poem out of it. But then she realised I was serious and asked me if I was happy turning up every day like that, trying to maintain the light in my eyes, while the lights were going out everywhere else. I told her it was just the nature of things, and anyway, thinking about it in the quirky way I had always gave me something to write about. But she had a point.
Then, that night, I had a dream – well, it was half dream, half total recall. I was back at primary school – so I could only have been about nine or ten, and I was about to join the football team on the mini-bus to go play another school. I wasn’t that great at football, and I was only picked to play that day because the number one striker – we’ll call him Bruiser – had bunked off school, so they were a man down. Then, as we were boarding the bus, he turned up, albeit without his boots.
I could see the way the teacher was thinking – he was a competitive man, so even a kids’ inter-school football league was life or death to him. Some people are just like that, aren’t they? He knew, and I knew, if I played they had a less than even chance of winning. If Bruiser played, they were going to win for sure because Bruiser took no prisoners.
Now I didn’t care if I played or not, but it seemed pretty obvious to me the way everyone else was thinking – the teacher and my so called team-mates – and it puzzled me they couldn’t see how easily I saw through their hemming and hawing. They got around to it eventually of course, which just left the question of Bruiser’s boots, which is when I saw the teacher looking at my feet.
Sure enough, Bruiser fitted neatly into my boots, and off they all went. Did they win the game? Don’t know – never asked. I got to go home on time, but without my boots. When I got them back, they were scuffed to blazes, and my dad went and played hell with the teacher. I was sorry about the boots because my dad wasn’t made of money. But other than that, I didn’t mind and had quite enjoyed playing in the garden instead of standing there freezing my nadgers off on a muddy pitch.
So anyway, still feeing a bit weird after that dream I turned up bright and early next day, and there they still were, my pair of hot-deskers, camping out in my little back room. And they had a look on their faces as if to say you’ll have to get up much earlier than that to catch us out. So I spent another day in the canteen, and got another poem out of it, this one about the value of touching grass, a kind of echo of the dream. You can’t put that into a spreadsheet, can you? What it’s like to touch grass.
In the end I gave it a week, to see if anyone would come and fish me out of that canteen, ask me what the hell I thought I was doing. But they didn’t. Come Monday my hot-deskers had finally moved on. I wiped their fingerprints off my screens, and settled back, ready to catch up. But I could still feel their sickly presence in the air. Something had changed. Even the little bit of work I did, and which I’d drawn some satisfaction from over the years, just didn’t seem important any more. So I went home.
That was years ago. And, so far as I know, no one’s noticed I’m missing
Touching Grass – a meditation
I used to make things. Now, I walk the meadows, touching grass. Both real and imagined.
Palms down, fingers splayed, I snag the waist-high drooping heads – the texture of rabbit’s tails, and crow’s foot.
Such vast landscapes these, places of presence, and past. Imagination too, of course, like the sheep cropped fields, dewy-sweet, that lick my boots, now, to a varnished glaze.
And those fresh mown swards, scented of all the homes I’ve ever known, where, eyes gently closed, I am returned to other versions of myself – boy and man, callow youth and would-be sage.
Yet it was once the all of me, to fashion, to shape and change, to alter this world in my own image. But it’s only here lies the more authentic reality, and a nameless soul-meaning, in the feel, imagined and otherwise…
We begin the week with a lady asking me to undress. Naturally I hasten to obey, then await, rather awkwardly, the administrations of a second lady who, contrary to my expectations is very gentle and, in spite of her pressing schedule, takes as much time with me as is necessary, so to speak.
Yes, I find myself at the hospital, where I’ve been led to expect a biopsy, this being a procedure that is sometimes a prelude to life-changing, and profoundly intrusive treatment – yet also, for all of that, still ending in death. But this second lady, this young doctor, after careful examination, deems it unnecessary and sends me away with a prescription for a humble tube of cream. The first lady then takes care to make sure I know where I’m going, and assures me they’ll be in touch with a future appointment to see how I’m doing.
I admit I’d rather been bracing myself for that biopsy, so it’s a relief to find myself sitting in the dispensary instead, here amongst the walking wounded, waiting on topical antibiotics and steroids. And as I wait the mind turns, as it does, to the subject of intimacy, and to the sacred nature of certain interactions between human beings. In any other context, my earlier encounter with members of the opposite sex would have had entirely different connotations, but the medical setting carries with it as much of a sense of the sacred as perhaps a religious ceremony. It seems we each then carry with us a sense of the sacred, and can switch it on whenever the occasion demands.
It can be a life or death thing, or just a mild illness which we wish would go away, but won’t, and we need the magic of the medical profession to make it so. Last time I enquired it was 12 years of training to become a GP, 15 for a hospital consultant. These are seriously committed and uncommonly driven individuals, and thank God there are such still amongst us.
My own case may still come to a biopsy, but I wasn’t given the impression there was much urgency, so I take comfort in that. And non-urgent waiting times for dermatology in the NHS, these days, are of the order of 20 weeks. Yet still we talk of the need for efficiencies, rather than investment, in order to save a failing system, as though this sacredness were a mere “process” to be streamlined. But the sacred cannot be made efficient; coming from within, it is a distinctly human phenomenon, and it takes the time it needs. To believe otherwise is to commit a category error.
Anyway, my name is called. I rise to collect my little tube of cream, surprised to find I don’t have to pay for it. When I enquire the guy checks his paperwork. You’re over sixty, he reminds me. Ah, yes… considerably over sixty, I remind myself. The flesh is perhaps drifting now into that time of life, when more maintenance is required, but at least my medicines are free.
The rain is lashing when I recover daylight, and attempt to decipher the parking machine. It takes a while. Everyone is struggling with it, and queues have formed. I thought I had mastered this thing on previous occasions, but that was a while ago, and the machine has changed its tunes. People lean in to help. The hospital does not benefit from the fee, though it could clearly use the funds. Instead, the machine collects rent for private investors — thus are our human frailties exploited, all of which strikes me as a grave profanity. Yet there are some nations where hospital parking is the least of it.
Having paid our dues to that great rentier in the cloud, we venture into town, in search of coffee, and crowds to watch. All told, the week has got off to a wobbly start, and I find myself wrong-footed. I had no plan beyond this morning and presenting my corporeal form to the doctor. I had even wondered if I might be hobbling now with stitches. But then the weather forecast is looking like there’ll be no “out and about” this week anyway.
Pulling up on the car-park in town, I note a warden splatting a penalty notice on the windscreen of the car next to mine. The little red square sits amongst a fall of orange and gold leaves — its artificiality in shape and tone offensive to the eye. This is not a job I would relish, indeed the warden looks even less happy than I imagine the recipient, when they turn up. But by contrast, the girls in the coffee-shop smile, address their customers as love and darlin’.
I’m reminded of Hermione, a girl I made up, and whose opening line this was – “So, what can I get you darlin’?” – a woman who embodied warmth, a sense of hearth, home and an authentic cheerfulness. That was what? Seven novels ago. My… I wonder how she’s going on.
There is something sacred in that too – I mean what these girls do – indeed, any act of service or care, freely given. After all, these girls don’t make enough money to warrant such warmth. But that’s the difference between us and the machines. And it may just be the reason this is the busiest coffee shop in town. You can’t account for that on a spreadsheet.
We linger over coffee – just ten minutes left on the ticket. We imagine the warden prowling, so return to the car. The rain comes on again, squally and cold, autumn settling in. No matter – the gods are smiling on us. The sacred isn’t only to be found in the grand or the holy, but in these fleeting moments, even amid days of prolonged rain. It’s just a question of knowing where, and how to look.
I can’t remember the last time I had a cold. I suppose it’s just that I’ve not been getting out to the places you normally pick them up. But I was at a wedding at the weekend and, sure enough, I’ve come away with the classic symptoms – headache, sore throat, runny nose, and feeling… well… rubbish. I rooted about in the cupboard for COVID tests – still have a few in date – and refreshed my memory of those awful times, shoving the swab up one’s nose and trying not to sneeze. But the test comes back with an unequivocal no. It’s just a cold. So here I am sprawled out on the couch at home, drinking coffee, nursing myself with Paracetamol and reflecting on, well, stuff.
The season is turning – September. The days are noticeably shortening, with a sudden return to wet, and the moody skies only emphasising the fading season. Of course there will still be some bright, warm days ahead, and September can bring with it a gorgeous light, so a good time to be outdoors – as soon as I’m feeling a little better.
Such a lot of nonsense going on out there at the moment, though the much talked about “civil war” I’m pleased to note, did not transpire – at least not any further than the pontifications of the usual agents provocateurs and social media punditry. That said, driving home from the Dales at the weekend I found the bridges on the M6 hung with combative flags, then I clipped the suburbs of Leyland to find every roundabout graffitied. In Chorley the crossing in the town center had been similarly daubed.
Too tired to engage much with these things in any depth now, but a scroll of the phone paints a picture of world affairs too horrid to contemplate, at least in my present woolly headed state. Closer to home, I note the Green Party has just elected a new leader, Zack Polanski, who is immediately quizzed by our cartoonish media about his past work as a hypnotherapist, and advice given to a woman on the size of her boobs.
This reminds me of the philosopher and writer Colin Wilson who once arrived in Germany, astonished to find himself most earnestly questioned by their press about his actual philosophy, when in the UK, all the journalists were interested in was taking him down a peg, and his views on sex. I would ascribe this to the fact a tedious ad-hominism is a part of the British national character and, though regrettable, fair enough, except some of the most odious characters do seem to get a free ride. It depends, I suppose, on the stories they’re telling.
And speaking of stories, Polanski did say something that caught my attention, which was that he could talk policy until he was blue in the face, and he would never cut through the current nativist noise. What he needed was an effective story – one, I might add, as effective as that which has people run out and daub flags everywhere, but of more progressive values and inspirational enough to have us go out and clean up the mess. He has some progressive ideas on taxation, and on the environment of course, is charismatic and speaks well. I would like to hear more of what he has to say, but am unlikely to find mention of it in the usual sources.
And perhaps that’s it. Though we all like a happy ending, there’s nothing like triggering the darker emotions for getting our attention. And is it not often said the baddies get all the best lines?
Wading into the mud of politics just a little more, whilst trying not to get our feet too dirty, it’s interesting, I note that by some measures, the Green Party is now the only major left libertarian political party in the UK, all the others are right-authoritarian, or drifting that way. I suspect the new Corbyn/Sultana party, when it emerges properly in the autumn, will occupy a similar space to the Greens. And both will bear the full force of the usual monstering.
And so here I am, sprawled on the couch, chasing the wagging tail of my thoughts round and round, watching the season turn in its usual quiet way as the leaves begin crisping up and the garden sinks gently back to sleep. I suppose September more than any other month reminds us of how life is a mixture of light and shadow. We have the small personal dramas, and then the sprawling, often absurd theatre of the world outside.
Some of it deserves attention, while some of it deserves no more than a weary shrug. Some of it, like Polanski’s challenge to tell an effective story, reminds me how ideas, even small ones, can ripple outward if chosen with a care for their mythic resonance. And then perhaps all we can do is tend to our own patch of earth, keep our minds and our hearts open, and our hands busy while we let the rest unfold as it will, or as it must.
I’m a bit nervous, parking the car by the wayside here at Roddlesworth. It looks like the cows are gathering at the gate, in the meadow up ahead. It’s a bit early (or maybe late) for milking, but I’m wondering if they’ll be herded down this narrow lane, in my direction. A cow’s flanks can crush the side of a car and not even notice. Anyway, after watching them for a bit I don’t think they’re coming out. I’m just catastrophising – an increasingly tempting response to uncertainty – a kind of capitulation ahead of time.
I blame my Substack feed, which has been growing increasingly hysterical and intemperate of late. If you write on there you have to accept back this tide of stuff you neither wished nor asked for. I’ve un-followed everything of a “current affairs” nature, thinking that was driving the algorithm into depths of despair since – let’s face it – things are pretty desperate at the moment. But if anything it’s made it worse. Unlike writing on WordPress, I can’t control what comes back at me, which is too much of everything: America, Ukraine, Gaza,… And yes, I know all of that is real, and growing darker by the day, but there’s nothing I can do about it directly. And that rubs up all wrong against the natural instinct most normal humans have for altruism – that where there’s suffering we want to help out.
Still, here we are, West Pennine’s again. We’ve had a long cold spell through late May and early June, with lots of rain, but things look to be taking up again. Mid-June and we have a riot of colour in the hedgerows with foxglove and cow parsley, comfrey and campion, also a strong scent of herbs rising with the heat. We’re off over Brinscall Moor today, tracing a little trod way among the lost farms, then an even thinner trace of a route along the upper Hatch Brook, across heather and bog cotton, onto Great Hill.
I’ve been lost on Brinscall Moor, depth of winter, a thick mist, and an hour from sunset, so I’ve been making a point of getting more of a feel for it, over the years. On a clear day like this, you navigate by the trees, knowing which of the various lost farms they’re attached to, and then orienting yourself on the map. I could probably get by on a bad day now, but I’d rather not. Days like this are best, when the views are far-reaching.
The Grouse Cottage Sycamore
The curlews are out in force, and musical. I think they must have young in the grass, and they’re anxious about my intentions. We have skylarks too, and I hear a grouse somewhere. I’ve been reading George Monbiot on the creeping desertification of our uplands – or rather their reduction to a monoculture – namely purple moorgrass, which is about the only thing sheep won’t eat. It’s what gives so much of our moorland that uniform beige colour – sheepwrecked, he calls it. But the moors around Brinscall are green – haven’t seen sheep up here for years now, and I count a wide variety of grasses and heath bedstraw – even some opportunistic shrubs beginning to establish themselves. I don’t know if this is planned or the result of economic circumstance rendering sheep worthless.
Remains of Grouse Cottage
Our first milestone is the ruin of Grouse Cottage, and its magnificent sycamores. Then it’s south-east to the fingerpost, and south-west for Popes – just a pile of rubble by the brookside, which we cross by stepping stones. From here we pick up the distant marker that is the stunted beech tree at the ruins of Botany Bay, where we break for lunch.
As a symbol of tenacity in the face of insuperable odds, and terrible weather, the Botany Bay Beech is an inspiration. And we could all use some of that. I have a rummage in the grass for any beech nuts it might have dropped, thinking I could grow one on, but it’s a big tree, a beech – not exactly the sort of thing you’d rear in a pot. Quite a statement though in the back garden, and in a hundred years, it’s not going to be my problem. I pop a couple into my shirt pocket for luck anyway.
Here’s another, slightly more impressionistic shot from several years ago. I think I was trying too hard with the effect. Some say less is more. I don’t know – I do remember the day and the picture sums it up fairly well – gritty sky and squally rain while today is clear blue and blustery, at least on the moor – hot and sultry in the vale.
They’ve erected one of those information boards by the ruin, telling you all about the farm, including a group portrait from the days when it was known as the Summer House. Hard to believe it was a scene of revelry once, a long walk up from Brinscall on a Saturday night, remote and lonely now. Haven’t seen a soul since leaving the car an hour ago.
Another stand of trees brings us to Solomons, then the Far Temple, hardly anything to go on underfoot here – just following the lay of the land as this little isthmus of pastures narrows down to point at Old Man’s Hill. Then we’re up onto the black waste of Withnell Moor with its heather out of season, and contrasting shadings of cotton grass. We can see Great Hill now, the broad green flank of it, and quite intimidating from this angle.
Great Hill across Withnell Moor
We’ll be picking up the main route from White Coppice shortly, which is always busy even on the grimmest of days. So we slow it down and soak up the sound of solitude. It’s different, out here – silence I mean. It’s a silence woven from a million micro-sounds – distinct from popping on a pair of ear defenders – and then you’ve the sigh of the wind and the curlew, distant now, but lovely.
We rest a while on a stile, take in the wide sweep of the moor, views out to a distant Darwen Tower, beyond to Pendle and Longridge fell. I’m feeling quite done in, actually, and not a bit sweaty. It was a late night last night, writing, researching stuff for the new novel. I thought I’d reached a point in my creative years when the flame was beginning to die down – the last few novels have been difficult, but this one’s writing itself – something daemonic driving it, like a deep and powerful engine. So many threads to chase up, and all of them stimulating. It’s no coincidence, I think, that the year has also been rich in dreams – long may it continue.
I know it’s no solution to the problems of the world, cutting oneself off from the fire-hose of online media, but so few of us are in a position to do anything constructive about it. And to shout all caps in the comments section is the same as shouting at the wind, or worse, peeing into it, and only damaging to oneself.
It might sound overly poetic, but those of you struggling with all of this, if you can cultivate your dreams instead of your social media, it’ll put you in a much better place. I’ve long believed we each have inside of us something that knows best what we need, and we have to find a way of trusting it. Better that than some machine algorithm which treats us as a package to be manipulated and sold on. But the world makes such a noise, it’s harder these days than ever to be a dreamer, and be taken seriously.
Anyway, off we go – picking up that main path from White Coppice and, sure enough, we encounter company, but not the chatty sort. This old beardy gent gives me a blank stare in exchange for my greeting. Funny, he has the look of an experienced rambler, and they’re usually good for a passing chat. Then again, he’s neatly togged out in expensive gear – something ironing-board fresh about him – and looking respectable – he perhaps didn’t think the same about me.
At the cross shelter on the summit, someone’s been to the toilet in one corner of it, so we move on, find somewhere else to snack, and top up on water, and where better than the ruins of Pimms – another oasis of green and soaring sycamores on the moor’s edge?
Things are changing. I’m changing. I read it in the dreams. I remember those early years of retirement, and how they felt like I was on holiday. Four years on and it’s different now. This is the way things are – settling in, and no great desire to make an impact in the world. The big camera gets left behind on trips like this more often than not – having worked the fantasy landscape photographer out of my system. Instead, I take this old small sensor zoom, light as a feather, and just for the blogging, which seems a constant, and still satisfying to me as a way of ordering my thoughts. And there are the books, of course. There will always be books to write, for as long as I can keep dreaming.
Down to the old turnpike now, and the sudden shock of traffic. Pick your moment and run, make the crossing, and plunge back into the cover of Roddlesworth. Here, we follow the run of Rocky Brook, pausing only briefly for a shot of the falls. Never managed a good one of this yet – including today. Look at those purple speckles on the water! Here’s another go, more artistically “imagined” by AI.
And then we’re back at the car, cows still safe in the meadow, doing what cows do, and just the lazy hush of a late afternoon. Silence, again, but somehow different to when we set out.
I’m reminded that even when everything feels like it’s falling apart, there are still places – real places, beyond our screens – where you can go and things still hold together pretty much the way they always have. And then perhaps, each of us, by tending to these inner and outer paths, by way of intention, mindfulness just calming the hell down, we might yet heal the world in all those places it really is coming undone.
Five and a half miles round, six hundred feet or so of ascent.
Just a quick plug, then back to my normal rambling self. Looking back through my old blog posts, I found rather a long one on Jungian Individuation and dream interpretation – territory I’ve explored deeply over the years. Some of it lacked nuance, and at times, it even veered into ranting, which reminded me just how much I needed these ideas back then. But the core themes remain deeply relevant, especially in light of the meaning crisis we’re facing today.
A particularly troubling narrative has taken root – one that tells men they’ve lost status, purpose and meaning as a result of society’s move toward a more inclusive and diverse perspective. The proposed solution? Regaining dominance and reasserting a rigid, often misogynistic form of masculinity. Evidence suggests this path leads not to growth, but to resentment, and stagnation.
I think true strength comes from something deeper. We men don’t need to regain dominance; we need to regain balance. We are at our strongest when we integrate both our masculine and feminine qualities – the latter often being misunderstood by males as weakness, when in reality, they are a vital source of intuition, empathy, and emotional intelligence. They are also the gateway to restoring meaning.
This reflection led me back to an old draft – 10,000 words of rough notes on dream-work and Jungian psychology. Revisiting them, I saw they still spoke to something urgent. So, I refined and expanded them into something more structured, more accessible, and, I hope, more practical. The result is The Morpheus Code, a Pathway to Inner Transformation, now available through the Draft2Digital portal and available (for free) from various online publishers.
Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, speaks to us in symbols and allegory – what can seem like a coded language of the unconscious. Hence the title. My previous book on men’s mental health has resonated beyond expectations, easily out-clicking all my fiction titles, reinforcing the sense that people – perhaps especially men – are searching for something deeper. My hope is that The Morpheus Code can help answer that hunger, offering a path toward self-discovery, resilience, and meaning.
March now and we’re enjoying a bit of warmth. We step out, dressed for winter and realise we’re wearing too many layers. I count the fence panels, destroyed by winter storms, contemplate whether to cobble them back together, or just pay to have them replaced. We wash the garage grime from the little blue car and note the bottoms of both front wings are starting to bubble with rust.
Entropy. All things tend to disarray, to disintegration. I have dreamed of tall buildings, earth coloured, turning to dust and falling down like sand-castles. There is a third person aspect to it, like we’re viewing things happening far away. But then it’s closer to home, a town I know, but projected a little into the future, its own towers turned to dust by an unseen force. They’re held there in defiance of gravity for a moment, before they too, come tumbling down.
Perhaps the dreams are responding to the daily scroll, and news of an ongoing assault on institutions (towers) once thought sacrosanct, impregnable, in a land far away. Or it’s closer to home, and a reminder it’s impossible to keep a twenty three year old car looking like new, no matter how much it represents for you a symbol of something eternal, timeless and true.
Anyway,… we drop the top, and head over to Ryal Fold. Road tax and insurance are coming up, and now a bit of welding, and paint. Spring is always the season of doubt for the little blue car. Shall we keep her going another year? A few outings with the top down, and the exhaust burbling as we thread our way along little country lanes always answers that one.
It’s a mostly clear sky, ice blue, heavy clouds banked up to the south, but held at bay for now by the prevailing winds. The moors have a paleness about them, a mixture of straw and rust. It’s warm in the sun, but it takes only a thin drift of cirrus to remind us we’re not that far done with winter. We’ve packed the big camera, but I’ve shot this route to death and probably won’t use it much. Only the header picture is from today, the rest are from the archive.
First stop, the little bench on the skyline, above Lyon’s Den, and lunch. Not much going on, very little bird life here, but still the reassurance of a lone curlew. I hear it’s call from somewhere, but can’t see it. Visibility is stunning, views beyond the moor, out to the coast, to the Lakes, to Bowland, Pendle and the Dales.
Lyon’s Den is a little copse on the otherwise bare moor top. It surrounds a pile of mossy rubble, all that’s left of a former cottage. It looks a hodge podge but look closely and you can trace the outlines of its gardens by the linear planting of now massive trees. There was love and life here. Children brought into the world. There were Sunday lunches, long walks to and from school, and chapel. All gone now, names no more than traces in the archives – yet who would bother to search? Impermanence. All fallen to dust. Yet the paradox of living is we feel ourselves immortal. Is it arrogance, ignorance, or a hidden insight that keeps us going in the face of all evidence to contrary?
Retired four years now, and the seasons are accelerating. Blink and I shall be nearing seventy. That’s as far forward as I am looking back to the day I walked out of work for the last time. And that seems five minutes ago. Five minutes, two novels, and perhaps a million other words, blogged, poemed, journalled, and more lately Stacked, somewhere along this path we’re all walking. Some say it’s a path to nowhere but, again, experience denies it, or at any rate disregards it.
There are people up the tower. It’s a long time since I coaxed myself up there. I suppose that’s another thing about retirement, the feeling I don’t need to challenge myself for no reason. Long commutes over winter, and at night-time were a nightmare of blinding headlights, more stressful than the job itself. But I haven’t driven at night now for four years, and it’s been no inconvenience. I’m sure there are those who still crave the thrill, and the cut and thrust of ambition. I can afford to be more selective. No sense dying on a hill of others’ choosing.
Down to the Sunnyhurst pub, now, and the tail end of a group of crusty old ramblers spilling out from lunch. Looks like they’ve got fifteen or twenty years on me. There’s always an element of the older generation to inspire. Sure we’re not much to look at as we age, but the spirit can still shine, if we let it, if we’ve managed to avoid it getting crushed, or simply wasting away. There are two aspects to ageing, I suppose, two versions – one’s the lure of the old person’s armchair I keep getting adverts for, and from which to consume a junk-food diet of daytime TV. The other is a trusty waterproof coat, a woolly hat and pair of boots – out and about with a gregarious bunch like this, whose number perhaps dwindles year by year, and which goes marked with a sage nod, and a closing of ranks against the inevitable.
I listen to their chatter as I pass them by, unseen. They remind me of group I was once a part of, seven or eight years old, walking to school. In some ways we do not change, time circles, things fall apart but they are also eternally renewed.
We take the little road across the embankment of the Earnsdale Reservoir. Some water-birds here – noisy gulls, your common mallards, and a couple of Canada Geese, diving and dabbling. Nothing like a body of water for raising the spirits, for bringing the sky down to earth. We’re just a short way now, up the steep brew of Dean Lane, then across the meadow, back to Ryal Fold. Though it’s not yet 3 pm, the shutters are about to come down on the cafe, but we manage to scrounge a cup of tea to go, and sit out with it. Another large rambling group returns from their adventures, well heeled gents this time, at least judging by the cars they drive – old friends, long time colleagues, perhaps, now long retired, and keeping themselves going. A pity it shut so early, the cafe could have made rent there.
It’s still warm. Sun shining. We’ll take the scenic way home, the moors all around us, shapes, colours, little changed since I was a boy – vast, and quietly dominating. Their permanence is an illusion of course. They’re changing too, but on a longer timescale than that in which cars rust, or people age. Even stone is worn down in time. Towers fall, rust spreads, roads crack. There’s no fighting entropy, no keeping things as they were. We move with them, patch things up if we can, let go of what we can’t. But right now, the road is open, the sky is clear, and the day is ours.
Myth, memory and the search for the eternal lost sovereign
The good King is dead. He was slain in battle. Barbarians rule the kingdom, all has fallen to chaos and ruin. Generations have passed, but the old king is not forgotten. He is remembered in songs and stories that tell of how he was perhaps not slain after all, but gravely wounded, and carried from the field to a place of safety and hiding. His crown, and his sword were hidden, too, and are still waiting to be rediscovered – in the deeps of a mountain tarn, or the depths of a cave, or beneath a mysterious mountain cairn. For though he was near death, the King, in truth, awaits now the call, biding his time in a land that is both far away and near, and from which one day he will return, to liberate his people.
There is a half real, half supernatural element to such stories – the king exists in spirit form, along with a circle of his trusted warriors. Or the spirit is embodied in a flesh and blood individual, whom the people all recognise as the true King, come to banish the tyrants, send them like darkness fleeing before sunlight. The myth of Arthur is such a tale, as is Tolkien’s “Return of the King”. Other cultures around the world tell similar stories, while in my own locale we have the legend of King Dunmail, defeated in battle in 945. And with him also fell the last of the ancient Celtic strongholds in the lands now known as England.
Legend has it Dunmail’s body was interred beneath a huge pile of stones, which is still there today. His sons had their eyes put out, and with them the light and the visionary world of the Celt died, here in the North. His crown was spirited away, carried high up the fell-side, and cast into the mysterious deeps of Grisedale Tarn, symbolic now of a lost Celtic sovereignty.
The Celts are a people with a unique tradition, a race of bards, of poets, descended from divine beings, the Tuatha Dé Danann. But the Tuatha were themselves defeated in battle by the Milesians, before recorded time began, and thereafter they retreated from common sight, into the underworld. There, they became the Sidhe, or the fairy folk. Other stories describe how they were absorbed by the land itself, became nature spirits, granting the Celts their visionary mode of being. Thus, Dunmail’s crown becomes not just the symbol of a lost King, but of an older, supernatural legacy.
The lakes, the mountain tarns and the tumuli of ancient times are gateways to the underworld, a place never far from where we stand. All it takes is a sideways, glance and those of a visionary bent see miracles, where others see nothing. I saw nothing either, dreams crushed beneath the weight of making way in the stony world of men. Thirty-one years old, and an ego wrestling with whatever in me was divine, shutting it out, rendering the inner world a wasteland.
The ego, our sense of self, maker of the masks we wear, is not the king. We think it is, but therein lies our ruin. Like Dunmail’s lost crown, my own sense of sovereignty had been cast away, hidden beneath the waters of an unconscious mind I did not even know existed. I had followed the roads of reason, of ambition, but the visionary world was lost to me. Worse, it seemed a world of charlatans and fools, for only fools believed in fairies.
I remember February, 20th 1993, as a day of infamy. It was a Saturday, bleak as hell. I was climbing the path alongside Raise Beck, the route said to have been taken by Dunmail’s warriors, with his crown, the fateful day he fell in battle. I was rising into a bank of ominous, green-tinted cloud, flecks of snow circling like moths in the wind. The IRA had bombed the gasworks at Warrington the day before. A police officer had been shot, and a near catastrophic gas explosion had been narrowly averted. As I climbed the beck, two more bombs went off in the high-street, not fifty miles away, claiming the lives of two little boys. I wouldn’t know about that until I was driving home in the dark of a winter’s night, and caught the news on the radio.
Grizedale Tarn was a black and stormy eye that day, riven with silver blades. It would be enough for me now, an older man, to have settled for the tarn, but the indestructibility of youth spared it no more than a glance before it took me on, up the mountain, and across the Pikes to the Arctic waste that was Helvellyn’s plateau. A driven mist, a howling wind, ice underfoot – I managed well enough without spikes in those days – and navigating without fear of looming precipice, to the summit, to a cairn coated with more ice, and dendritic tendrils of frost growing into the teeth of the wind. And bombs below, and the world shaking, and my routes leading to the summits of an experience that seemed only to leave me empty, craving something that was not there. And it was not there because I was looking in all the wrong places.
I remember those years as a time of energy, of something bursting through my veins, and driving me on. Not knowing what else to do with it, I had it carry me up mountains and take me on long car journeys to the wild northern places. I had it face down the fierceness of the weather. I had it claim legendary summits like badges of honour. But to climb Helvellyn the once, in the thick of winter leaves behind a curiously transient memory. Once is not enough but, even if you did it every day, old age would eventually catch up and deny it, and still leave you asking the question. I remember the date only because those dreadful bombings lodged it there with six-inch nails, hammered home with a stark brutality. And I remember the storm, because I was the storm.
Behind the mask I presented, I was struggling. The energy of youth was leaving me fragmented – outwardly calm, but inwardly fearful, jittery, panicky in crowds. I was also curiously and increasingly averse to the limelight of a career others would have made more of, had they been given the chance. I had thought it fated, but now it seemed as treacherous as peat bog. For the thing with peat bogs is the paths bifurcate at every turn, no indication of a clear way through, with many a dead end and only more of the same stretching out to a far horizon.
I did not know the story of King Dunmail, then. It was only years later I was to take an interest in the meanings of myth, years later when a subtle, sideways glance of my own granted the vision of a doorway, and another way of seeing. The myth of the Return of the King is not a piece of dead history, but a living and universal truth, constantly offered up to us, if we will only listen. It speaks eternally of a deep yearning for justice and renewal, and the hope that a lost wisdom and the rightful order of things will one day be restored.
The IRA no longer explode bombs in English towns. But there have been plenty of other horrors served to us since those days, so we would be foolish to go looking to world events if we expect confirmation of anything other than that the good King is still well and truly dead. Old Dunmail lies beneath that pile of stones, and is deaf to the entreaties of his people.
Or is he? If we turn it around, if we accept the inner world, if we press our ear to the cairn, we realise the King is not gone, that it is we who are deaf, and he has been calling us all long. He is pressed down under a weight of stones that we ourselves have heaped upon him. And if we listen, we realise his release is not something to be waiting for. We have to climb the trail, into the teeth of the storm that assails each of us, and seek the crown in the waters of the tarn.
But it’s no good looking with a storm blowing, or you’ll see nothing but your own anger staring back at you. The crown does not return to those who rage blindly at the world – no use shaking your fist at it. We must learn to see with different eyes. Then we discover the good King is closer to home than we realise. Yes, we remember him in the quiet places, and we seek his crown in the still waters which mirror the depths of our own being. But we do not need to wait for his return. We answer his call, we remove the heap of stones from where we’ve buried him, one by one, and in doing so, restore to ourselves the sovereignty and the wisdom of the good King.
Inspiration and healing in the Lancashire landscape
My apologies to those who come to the Rivendale Review looking for walking directions. I try to cover that with a map at the bottom of these “out and about” pieces, which should tell you all you need to know. The rest – the ramble – is what follows, and these are just the impressions that come and go as we walk the route, shaped by the times in which we walk it. Today’s theme: inspiration and healing.
News from America is coming thick and fast, and sounding like a fiendishly well-crafted perma-crisis unfolding in real-time. Those undignified scenes from the Oval Office landed like a bombshell, here in Europe, carrying an import I found deeply disturbing. It’s hard to resist falling into a spiral of alarm at such times. Diplomacy and foreign affairs, I’ve read, require a strong stomach. If this is how it’s to be from here on, I don’t doubt it. While it falls to our politicians and statesmen to wrestle with these matters, the rest of us – bamboozled by headlines and social media froth – must find our own ways to maintain perspective. So today, we walk.
But first, I must tread carefully. Yesterday was a pixie-led day, one of those where things inexplicably vanish – car battery charger, various adaptors, memory cards, notebooks, indeed nearly everything I turned my hand to. You know they’ll eventually turn up just where you swear you’ve already looked, but for now, the Good People, the fey, are hiding my stuff. In Celtic lore, this can mean I’ve offended them, or sometimes they’re just teasing, so we’ll hope for the latter, and take it in good part.
It would have been better to charge the car battery last night, which is very low after the cold weather, but of course the pixies have my charger. We manage to start her on the last turn anyway, and a longer run today will give her a bit more juice. We’re off to the Ribble Valley, to the leafy car park at Marles Wood, near Ribchester. The little route I have in mind took me a while to figure out but, thanks to sage advice from fellow blogger Bowland Climber, I cracked it last October. Now, it’s a firm favourite.
We begin with a short climb from Salesbury Hall towards Copster Green. Even more trees have been planted here since last time – yellow-green tubes everywhere, protecting saplings. This is a dramatic shift in land use. In twenty years, it will be a different place altogether. But these are native species – thorn and hazel among them. Were they planting Sitka Spruce, as they did throughout these isles, forty years ago, it would be a disaster.
Which brings us neatly us to the first meditation of the day: landowners have the power to transform landscapes, shaping the lives of thousands who never asked for change and might not want it. In a rules-based society, checks and balances rein in executive overreach. But when the cry goes up to slash red tape, follow the money. Who’s making the demands? It’s a safe bet they’re the ones the rules are meant to protect us from. This is not to say that’s what’s happening here – indeed I’ve no idea – and can only speculate on an agricultural grant, an incentive that encourages native reforestation.
Down now to the bridge at Ribchester, where the tricky egress from the little gated community always raises my hackles. It sits on the right of way like an elephant on your foot. A minor issue in a world full of greater problems, perhaps. But missing footpath signs, and impeded rights of way encroach upon our freedom to explore. And why do we want to do that? Because landscapes can inspire and heal – not just those who own them, but those who need them most, the ordinary folk from the towns and villages.
Snowdrops, Ribble Valley
Following the Ribble upstream, the riverbank is thick with silt and winter’s debris – looping brambles, and last season’s dieback. But then we stumble upon a clump of snowdrops, sunning themselves. Next will come the wood anemones, the ramsons, and the bluebells – the full glory of spring.
The trees are still bare, stark against a fair-weather sky. The hazels show catkins and, down by the mill at Salesbury, an early cherry is in blossom. Colour is rare, then, but change is stirring. If we can get our head into this space, if we can let our thoughts be shaped by the curve of the land, the sweep of the meadow, the reach of the moor, the scent of meadows, then healing begins. And we see the words of liars and fools for what they really are.
The bubbling call of a curlew – always an arousing sound to an outdoors-man – roots us in the wild, stirring something deep. A buzzard cries as it rises, painting broad circles in the sky. We follow the path into Haugh Wood, then over open pasture, towards the farm at Hey Hurst. This is a lovely stretch, undefined, barely trod, offering a rare sense of freedom.
There’s a grand old oak here, one for my list of favourite lone trees. It reminds me of a short story I wrote about a man called Tim Burr, who wrote a book called “a little book about trees”. Nobody got the joke. Some thought it was about a real book. Maybe I’ll pinch the title and write it anyway. This impressive oak will definitely make the cut.
The world’s troubles don’t disappear on a walk, but neither should we let them consume us. Just reading about crisis after crisis while feeling powerless takes its toll. Today, the walk puts us back on our feet. Don’t get angry at what you see or hear. Anger is like stirring the silt from the riverbed – you can’t see through it, can’t see to the bottom of things. So take a breath. Let it settle, before you do or say anything.
We cross the Ribble again by the footbridge at Dinkley. Just a short way downstream now, and we’re back at the car, our legs nicely stretched, lungs filled, mind quieter than when we set out. The world beyond the Ribble Valley still turns, and in troubling ways. The headlines will keep coming. But for now, they feel more distant. The land has worked its magic, restoring balance. The seasons turn too, heedless of human folly, and clarity comes, not from obsessing over every crisis, but from finding the stillness to see through them.
The car starts more eagerly than it did this morning, and we head home, not exactly detached from the world, but steadier, as the Ribble Valley’s quiet wisdom sustains us. Let’s hope the pixies have returned my battery charger.
About five and a half miles round, three hundred and twenty feet of gentle up and down.
I’m gripped by a puzzling resistance at the moment, all too eager to make excuses for not getting out. I lie in bed with coffee until mid-morning, doom-scrolling. Then I linger over breakfast, more coffee, more doom-scrolling, though I preach against it. There is something magnetically grim about it all. The seriousness of events cannot be doubted, but at some point, the deluge of commentary becomes its own kind of dangerous assault upon the senses. And we have to force ourselves away from it. Force our selves out of ourselves.
Which is why you catch up with me in the meadows between Jepsons Farm and Lead Mines Clough, an area the old maps call Twitch Hills. Here, a lush, rolling pasture snuggles up to the rougher, darker shagginess of Anglezarke Moor. The sky is mostly cloud, but driven by a stiff wind, patches of fast-moving light break through, lifting the scene from dull flatness to something at once beautiful and dramatic. Blink, though, and it’s gone, like the memory of last night’s dream.
Except last night’s dream lingers. I was living in a house with a sickly philosopher who kept a pet snake. If the snake was caged, the man could barely move, shuffling weakly from room to room. So we released the snake – a big, beautifully patterned python – giving it the freedom of the house. I wasn’t happy about this, uncertain it wouldn’t vanish into the fabric of the building, never to be found again. But the philosopher revived at once, striding off to his study, his strength restored.
Freudians would have a field day with that snake, but my dreams tend to be more Jungian in character. To the Jungians snakes are symbols of the unconscious, of transformation and healing. Yes, they’re dangerous, insidious, yet also capable of rejuvenation by shedding old skin. We lost the snake, of course. Later in the dream, I searched for it, only to find it draped serenely along a curtain pole, watching over the room with an ancient, knowing stillness. Sometimes, we have to trust the snake. Let it out. Let it be.
As I ponder this, I meander, camera in hand, coming up from a muddy Parson’s Bullough, where I’ve left the little blue car. My usual lay-by bore the scars of a recently salvaged, burned-out vehicle. I did not want to leave her in the shadow of such violence, so I moved on to another space. We seek the peace of the natural world, but even here the ugliness intrudes – discarded bags of dog poo, the occasional burned out car.
There’s a lone thorn tree here, one I’ve often photographed. I wait for a break in the clouds, hoping for a pool of light to sweep over us, illuminating it against the moody sky. I read that lone trees symbolize the psychological self – rooted in the world yet standing apart from it, and in a way that’s not pushed out of balance by its environment. Don’t get lost in the forest, doomscrolling. Be the tree, properly grounded.
From here, we carry on towards Lead Mines Clough, past Jepsons Farm, now transformed into luxury holiday lets. One of the apartments has taken a battering over winter, its balcony window hanging at a precarious angle, the exterior cladding torn away. Heavens, that looks expensive.
A short stretch of narrow road, now, up the brew to Jepson’s Gate. From here, the long track leads us toward Lead Mine’s Clough, then curves round to the moor. By Holt’s Flat, there’s an old plantation, ruined by fire – long dead pines hanging in grotesque expressions against this moody sky. But today, something is different – movement in the undergrowth, flashes of bronze. The place is alive with ring-necked pheasants, strutting, foraging. So many of them! And scattered among the trees are blue barrels on legs – feeders, industrial in their number.
As we approach, the birds scatter, flapping noisily, their coppery iridescence flashing against the gloom. Among them, I spot a white one – rare, a mutation. The shooters call this a marker bird. It will be spared the gun, not by mercy, but by tradition, which dictates a fine for killing it. The others won’t be so lucky.
The sheer abundance of them is unsettling. Bred solely for sport, they are a reminder of how wealth shapes our environment in dramatic ways and with scant regard or consultation. There is an imbalance here, an excess that unsettles the natural order. It echoes something larger – a world where resources are bent, not toward sustenance, but spectacle, toward a kind of pleasure that demands dominion over life itself. Perhaps it’s always been this way, but these days, the veil is thinner. There is no pretence.
We circle back to Lead Mines Clough, following the dashing brook where we once picnicked as children. We kept a coin hidden in a section of dry-stone wall here. Over the decades, it morphed from a pre-decimalisation penny to a threepence, then a modern twenty pence. Amazing how, in all that time, no one stumbled upon it – or if they did, they covered it again, preserved the secret for us, and perhaps adopted it also as their own.
Today, it’s gone. We’ll say the rains have washed it out.
Times change. We move on.
About three miles round, three hundred feet of fairly gentle up and down.
The Rivendale Review 
