Back of Beyond Read online

  Oh, but the walking was. I slipped down into the broad gap of the Aire valley graced with velvet meadows, winding streams, and a canal lined with vacation boats and barges. Nearby Skipton has become a popular center for this recent form of summer recreation but somehow it keeps its market-town charm for all the bustle.

  Malham does too in spite of coachloads of tourists, and I approached the tiny village after an arcadian walk alongside the youthful river Aire, moving deeper into white limestone country with white dry stone walls, white farms, and the towering white crags.

  This is a magic land. Starting at the rock wall of Malham Cove and the waterfalls of the Gordale Scar canyon, I soared up through dry valleys where the water runs underground and hopscotched across strange limestone “pavements” of broken wobbly blocks (clints) separated by deep fissures (grykes), onto the lonely plateaus where silence seems to go on forever, cut only by the cries of curlews. Fragments of rainbows (glints) floated in high cirrus clouds above the still surface of Malham Tarn. This anomalous lake in limestone country rests on a bed of Silurian slates and is held in place by a glacial moraine left by the ice sheets that gouged and rounded the region in the Pleistocene era.

  The moor was all mine again and I felt fat with time, a born-again walker, striding across the limitless tops easing away to hazy horizons in a procession of purple domes. Far below were tiny tight-walled fields, huddled farms, and sheep shining like scattered salt on emerald pastures. Then—quite unexpectedly—came another bout with bogs on Fountains Fell. I’d forgotten that most mountains in the limestone country have a spongy cap of millstone grit and peat, which gives them distinguished “stepped” profiles but does little for the spirits of a walker whose boots have just dried. Peaty pools lay still and hidden in malicious anticipation, and I squished into every one across those claggy brown summits.

  A final teeth-gritting haul up the long slope of Pen-y-Ghent and then down into cave and pothole country known to the world over as the best in Britain. I spent a good part of a night trapped down one of these sinister shafts.

  It was an event I intend to forget one day.

  “Fancy a bit of potholing then?” they said—they being a burly bunch of spelunkers I met by chance, bathing in the buff in a Pennine stream. “Maybe,” I said. “It’s a new one,” they said. “Just found it a couple of weeks back. Simple stuff.” “Fine,” I said, pretending I went potholing and caving every weekend like a regular Dales troglodyte.

  We met next day at the local pub, then trekked four miles of open fell east of Pen-y-Ghent mountain. Lovely bright afternoon, no one about. Easy entry too, through a crack in the limestone. Utter blackness for a while until our eyes got used to the helmet lamps, then a bit of squeeze down a narrow shaft until we made it to the first tiny cramped cave in twenty minutes or so. Lovely sinuous stalactites, white against a blue-gray roof. “Wait till we get to the next,” one said. “Oh, oh!” another said. “What?” said I. “Must be raining up top,” he said. “So it is,” the other said as a trickle of water turned into a stream and then into a raging torrent of mud pouring down the shaft we had descended. “Won’t last,” they agreed.

  Half an hour later the little cave was half full of water, and we were up on sections of old fallen roof, sitting among the stalactites. “Won’t last,” they said a bit less certainly. “Can’t!” But it did. Another three feet of swirling water. Our helmet lamps were running low. We were all quiet now. The songs and the sandwiches were long gone, and the brandy too. (I won’t describe the thoughts that go through a mind about to be doused out forever in a black cellar hole of a cave three hundred feet under the limestone cap of Ribblesdale, but they’re not pleasant.)

  Hours later, when the water finally seeped away into deeper caves, we managed to haul and crawl our way out. That was my one and only encounter with Yorkshire’s subterranean world. And it will be my last.

  After the mountains the next few miles were sheer self-indulgence along an ancient packhorse trail, one of the green roads that once formed the main links between the dales. Potholes abounded again, some enclosed by walls for safety, others less obvious, lurking open-mouthed in the hummocks. The path skirted the edge of Ling Gill, a two-hundred-foot shadowy cleft in the limestone, before climbing to an old Roman road over Cam Fell. Long views here across Langstrothdale and the graceful twenty-four-arch, 1,328-foot-long span of the Ribblehead viaduct, which has carried one of the most spectacular railroads in the country since 1874. British Rail keeps threatening to close the line and public outcries are led by the ever-vigilent Rambler’s Association.

  Three pied wagtails stood on a nearby wall apparently awed by the scenery. They ignored me as I began the long descent into Wensleydale, famous for cheese, sheep auctions, and dairymaids. The charms of the last were once so overpowering that monks, who administered vast monastic estates in the Pennines from their dale-end abbeys during the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, were given strict instructions to employ “only old and ill-favored females.”

  “You’ll be lucky to find any dairymaids nowadays,” Elizabeth Calvert of Keld told me. “A few of the lads stop on but t’girls generally go away. I’ve heard tell of a couple of lady shepherds up in the border country, but they’re both married.”

  A few miles farther on a walker sat studying his contoured map—an elaborate colored confection of whorls, scrolls, spurs, swirls, and sudden edges in the high hills, then a sinking of the land back into the plain, giving up its humps and fissures in a slow, grinding leveling….

  “Ice did all this,” he said. “The last Ice Age, ten thousand years ago, glaciers moved past here scouring out the valleys, rounding the hills, and dumping great piles of debris all over the place.” We sat quietly looking at the land. “Can you see it?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes I can see.”

  We sat together for a long time, looking. I tried to define what it is that draws me so closely to this land. Although this was my first shot at the Pennine Way, I had been a lover of this part of England for far more years than I care to remember. I’m an Englishman. Better still, a Yorkshireman, and this is my stomping ground, first as a scout, then in my brief career as a rural planner, and now as a writer.

  I jotted down some notes in my bog-smeared notebook:

  The constant presence of water: in sinister dark pools on the high peat, tumbling down gulleys and gylls, leaping off gritty cliffs in veiled sprays, squelching in moist meadows, scurrying in becks down to the slow, sleepy rivers, easing past village churches, under ancient bridges, where bowed fishermen wait for trout, then sweeping out toward the flattening hills and fat fields of York’s plain…

  Dales villages and the green rolling hills all around. Seem to have a natural affinity for one another. Places like Burnsall, Buckden, Dent, Kettlewell, Muker, Askrigg, and to the south, Haworth and Heptonstall, seem “reet suited” to their settings. You feel that with the people too. A true Dalesman away from his dale is a sad sight. “Tha’ wants for nothin’ round these parts,” an elderly farmer from Starbotton told me. “Mayn’t look s’much to them as can’t see but it’s only place I’d ivverbe. I ’ave t’ go t’ Bradford once a month f’ t’ bankin’ and suchlike and I’ll tell thee, I’d as soon as lose me big toe in a rabbit trap as stay down yonder a minute more than I ’ave to. I don’t feel reet till I’m on’t backside of Kilnsey (Crag) and smellint’ fells again.”

  The empty moors: unruly land, soggy with acid water, raped of everything but color; the moors that nourished the Brontë sisters, that kindled their love of its secrets and its deep, wild melancholy—that killed Emily, victim to their eternal indifference; places of purple gloom broken by patches of dazzling green and burnished bronze; lands loosed from the silly structures of men.

  A melding of things: farmers with faces like old walls and hands veined with heather-colored lines; sheepdogs as wise as witches and witches (yes—they’re still here) as mystery-filled as ancient caves; bowed churches—some a thousand years ol
d—full of pre-Christian secrets; fragments of lost ley-lines as straight as today’s power lines (but once tapping far greater sources of energy?).

  From my wallet I pulled out a worn fragment of a poem by a friend who loved this unique part of Yorkshire and who is no longer around. I always carry it with me:

  Listen, and I shall sing a spring song;

  Not in the muted flats of sterile fashion,

  But on the major notes of all

  The old melodies. I move to sing

  And praise the flap of a half-made wing,

  The sky in the stones, and the wobble

  Of calves and foals in an air of full,

  powerful emanations, rising.

  (From “Spring Song” by James Mayer)

  Once you spend time in these Yorkshire Dales, you never quite lose them….

  Coming down to Hawes through the huddled hamlet of Gayle I met the “old men on the bridge” lined along the parapet, watching the waterfalls of Duerley Beck cascade over a series of stepped ledges. The peaty brown water frothed and foamed and Eddie, the most vocal of the group, explained: “It’s bin a bit clashy an’ floudby on’t tops recent’ but river’s bin reet daan—just drippin’ offt’ rocks int’ summer—nobbut nearly dried out it was.” The Wensleydale dialect is decidedly thick, and it can take time to decipher even simple sentences. I asked if he thought the unsettled weather would improve for the day’s big event in Hawes, the Great Annual Sale of Mule gimmer lambs. “Alopod tha’ll be alreet lad,” Eddie assured me with absolute authority. “It’s when that can’t see yon moor tha’l have rain—when it’s packy an’t mist’s rollin’ abart.”

  And he was right—the day turned out just fine. As the local saying goes, “T’old men on’t bridge know afore thee knows.”

  The fell side was one enormous parking lot for Land-Rovers and sheep trucks, and the aroma of bacon “butties,” hot meat pies, “mushy” peas, and chips fried in beef drippings rolled up the hill and around the beaming Ron Goodwin, a farmer from Staffordshire who had just acquired fifteen “bonnie whites.” “You usually get good deals at these big sales—they’re auctioning close on thirty-four thousand over these two days and Mules are good breeders—cross between Swaledales and Blue-faced Leicesters. I could have got Black-faced gimmers (females)—they don’t show their age so quickly, but they’re more expensive.”

  Farmers and shepherds in flat caps, deerstalker hats, and Wellington rubber boots clustered together around the pens, leaning on carved horn walking sticks and discussing with almost biblical reverence the relative merits of the lambs, most of whom seemed nervous about the whole affair and bleated pathetically. One farmer described a hobolike character on the other side of the pens as “bow-legged wi’ brass,” and they all nodded, impressed by wealth worn modestly.

  Clouds scudded across the Wensleydale fells, and shafts of sun moved over patches of browning bracken, purple heather, brilliant gold gorse, and a palette full of greens in the fields—exactly the same colors worn by the farmers in their tweed and oiled-cotton jackets, olive anoraks, and twill working trousers.

  The auction room was crowded and distinctly muttony. The sale had started at 9:30 A.M. prompt, and the auctioneer was now hoarse. His pretty female assistant, who recorded sales in a large brown register, seemed far more interested in the contents of her Cornish pasty lunch than in the subtle nose-scratching, chintickling bidding antics of the various lineages of Crabtrees, Pratts, Masons, Baines, Beresfords and Metcalfes, ranged in tiers on posterior-polished benches.

  The sheep were driven in, usually in lots of thirty-five or more, and circled the ring warily until released in a flurry of butting heads and flying tails. It was all very quick and businesslike; the auctioneer obviously knew that by evening he’d have to sell over sixteen thousand animals and at 1:30 P.M. the prospect ahead seemed daunting.

  I started sketching some of the faces, an encyclopedic array of Dales characters, but was distracted by two girls who sat in equestrian finery on the far side of the room. Hardly more than teenagers, they projected an aura of landed wealth and power and were obviously known to the local farmers, who tipped their hats respectfully. I tried to be surreptitious but one of the girls spotted me, blushed, and turned to speak to a very large, red-haired male companion, equally well groomed and holding a riding crop. He was distinctly unamused. I decided to stick to farmers’ faces.

  Hawes itself has a hard, gray charm that brightens on market days when the broad main street is lined with stalls selling horn-handled walking sticks, Wensleydale cheeses from the creamery just up the hill, hand-knit sweaters using wool from valley sheep, and a motley assortment of lotions and potions for animal husbandry.

  The Crown pub was filled with farmers supping pints of strong Old Peculier ale from Theakston’s small brewery down-dale at Masham. I wandered across the road into Kit Calvert’s one-room store of second-hand books looking for “the complete Dalesman,” as they call him locally. I’d met him here in the past when he entertained customers from his battered armchair, telling tales about the “old life” in the Dale he loved, while puffing on a white clay pipe. All from personal experience he would describe the local hirings of farm laborers at the market outside, the baking aroma of big flat “havercakes” made from oatmeal, the intricately carved “knitting sticks” used by the “terrible knitters” of nearby Dent, the “witchstones” that farmers hung around cows’ necks to ward off evil, and the special spades used for cutting peats, a different design for each dale.

  He was always reticent about his own achievements, particularly in saving and expanding the production of Wensleydale’s famous cheese (“just a bit of cheek and chivvyin’”). But someone obviously noticed, and he went to Buckingham Palace for an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in 1977, in honor of services to his dale.

  “Why me, for th’ Lord’s sake,” he once asked me bashfully as he pulled his battered trilby down over his large ears and lit his pipe again, scattering sparks all over an ancient waistcoat.

  But things had changed since my last visit. Kit had died a few months previously and someone else was running the bookstore.

  There were other, happier changes in Hawes. “It’s that vet chap, James Herriot, with all his books on the Dales,” said John Jeffryes at Simonstone Hall hotel. “He’s put the whole area on the map.” Brian and Cherry Guest at Cockett’s Hotel in the town center, and the Jutsums at their newly refurbished Rookhurst Country House, all agree that a new surge of tourism has raised standards. “It’s not just a whistle-stop any longer,” said Susan Jutsum. “People come to stay now and walk. It’s very different from before. Very exciting too. We can serve dishes we’d never dare to ten years ago.”

  A constant source of curiosity to explorers of these hills are the often bizzare traditions still proudly maintained by towns and villages in and around the Northern Pennines. Appleby in the Vale of Eden hosts a week-long Horse Fair in June, which attracts hundreds of gypsies, complete with Romany caravans and palm readers, and the tiny community of West Witton down Wensleydale dramatizes the Burning of Bartle in late August. Allendale Town celebrates New Year with a Norse pagan “fire festival” serene and secluded Semerwater holds a “blessing of the water” ceremony in August, and at Ripon, a market town on the eastern fringe of the Dales, a centuries-old custom of horn-blowing every night in the main square is still preserved. A similar ritual takes place every evening at the nearby village of Bain-bridge.

  I hitched a lift to this model twelfth-century village built for foresters around a broad green. Every night at 9:00 P.M. prompt, from September 28 to February’s Shrovetide, a villager (invariably a member of the Metcalfe family) has given three long blasts on a horn for the past seven hundred years. Originally it was intended as a guide for travelers in the forest but the forest has long since gone and the tradition is kept alive by ten-year-old Alistair Metcalfe, who dutifully steps out onto the green and blows the three-foot-long South African Cape Buffalo horn
“just before I go to bed.” His uncle, Jack Metcalfe, who died in 1983 after thirty-six years of horn blowing, was once asked if it was true that a good blast carried over three miles. His reply was typical Yorkshire: “How should I know? I’m at this end.”

  A few miles farther across more wind-torn wastes, the Pennine Way does its vanishing act again, and then comes Tan Hill Inn, the highest pub in England. Scattered around in the heather were the tops of stone-lined shafts, relics of “brown-coal” mining, which has flourished here since the thirteenth century, when the soft peaty coal was transported by packhorse to the great abbeys down-dale.

  A chart inside the cozy pub indicated more than one hundred miles of tunnels on the plateau, and a blazing fire suggested the landlord is never short of supplies. “He can nip out and just pick it up,” said the barman, stroking the comb of Eric the cock and the neck of Nasher the dog simultaneously. It’s a zany kind of place, ideal for bedraggled hikers looking for light relief. A group in the corner huddled over dominoes, a bearded giant snored on the sofa with a tiny waiflike girlfriend in his arms, and a woman with wild eyes told witching tales to no one in particular by the fire. A well-dressed couple arrived, took one look at the odd mélange, and vanished.

  After Tan Hill, I descended through a silver world of moist mists, and in the buzzing silence I sensed the timelessness of these ancient hills—flickers of infinity rarely found in the frantic little worlds far below.