Back of Beyond Page 23

  At the reservoir in Baldersdale I celebrated the Pennine Way halfway point with handfuls of ice-cold spring water and then—just as my ankle gave way for the third time that week after another tumble on tussocks—came Hannah.

  “Tha’s gone and hurt thisself, then?”

  A middle-aged woman in a tattered purple pullover and baggy black trousers held up by a loop of string stood with a shovel in a pile of manure. Her cheeks were holly-berry bright, her hair, brilliantly silver, haloed her head.

  “Come n’ sit thisself down a bit, please” she said, indicating a tiny milking stool in the cow byre. “Just give me a minute. Bessie’s got excited and made messies. I’m a bit particular and I hate walkin’ in clarts. If there’s one clart about you carry it around all day.”

  She cleaned up meticulously and let me into her dark farmhouse where she’d lived alone since her mother’s death in 1958. The kitchen was crammed with cardboard boxes piled halfway to the ceiling, and it was only later that I found out what they all contained. We huddled around a tiny electric heater and she served me glasses of fresh milk while her Jack Russell terrier, Tim, pranced around trying to get a sip.

  She told me about her love for her little valley. “I don’t go far but I don’t need to. There’s nothin’ I like better than goin’ through that iron gate and down among the trees and the water. That little stream by the first bridge. I go there a lot.”

  We talked about her five cows. “I can’t afford more but I enjoy what I have. They’re just like people—some have a calm temperament, others are excitable, and a few can be downright bossy and nasty.”

  I wondered if she ever got lonely. “Oh never, never. I’ve so many things I want to do. There’s the wallin’, slatin’, there’s weedin’, muckin’ out. I’m going to make jam. I used to make butter too. I can still hear that sound when it, what we call, ‘broke’—a lovely slushin’ sound as it got thicker. Oh no, I’ll never catch up with myself. Some people free themselves up and they’ve got lots of time and no idea what to do with it.”

  She noticed I was still limping. “I’m a great one for walkin’ sticks,” she said and vanished. Five minutes later she was back with a fresh-cut ash stick. “It’s a clumsy brute,” she apologized. “I’ll just dress it up a bit to neaten it, please.” I held it while she stripped the bark from the handle and tip with a pocketknife.

  She seemed one of those people gifted with a natural earthy wisdom. “Success seems to me to be much more than just a lot of things lying around—there’s as many ways of success as there are people.”

  Very reluctantly I left Hannah and limped up the long hill from the farm with my new stick. She stood waving all the time. “Come back, please, if it hurts” was the last I heard.

  Later that night the barmaid at the Rose and Crown Pub in Mickleton told me I’d just spent the afternoon with Hannah Hauxwell, whose happy face has become the stuff of legends following a TV documentary on her life. And the cardboard boxes? “Oh, they’re full of letters,” she said, “from people all over the world. She’s living in a house bursting with love.”

  Middleton-in-Teesdale, a nineteenth-century lead-mining center, has a demure charm, and I should have remained there safely sketching under the shade trees on the green. Instead I hurried around buying sugary supplies (for instant energy I told myself) and was quickly alongside the cascading river Tees on what I hoped would be one of the big walks of the journey.

  The day sparkled and the light seemed to have its source not in the sun but in the valley itself which glowed a fluorescent green below the darker fells. Near High Force, where the narrowed river tumbles dramatically over an outcrop of hard dolerite, there were people peering intently at the ground looking for the last summer showings of rare plants. At Widdybank Fell, a rare band of “sugar” limestone creates special alkaline soil conditions ideal for the elusive spring gentian, the pink bird’s-eye primrose, the bog sandwort, the purple mountain pansy, and a host of other species. Botanists flock here, and the construction of the vast Cow Green Reservoir above the Cauldron Snout falls in 1971 brought howls of protest from around the world. The bleak geometry of the dam wall seemed out of place in the wild scenery, and I was glad to be climbing into the hills again.

  High Cup comes as a surprise, an abrupt dropping of the land down dolerite cliffs and a graceful easing of Pennine hills into the Vale of Eden, edged on the far horizon by the dramatic fells of the Lake District. This is one of the most impressive vistas along the Pennine Way, and I sat for an hour in a patch of wild thyme, watching the weather. I counted five simultaneous patterns from valley floor mists to thunderstorms in the Scottish border country where lightning played over the hills like snakes with broken spines. I waited in vain for the Helm wind, a unique local phenomenon caused by the abrupt meeting of mountains and plain.

  “Waitin’ for t’ Helm?” A tall, rake-thin figure with a gray beard hanging down his chest appeared suddenly from behind a tumble of boulders near the precipice. His torn coat and trousers were the same muddy brown color as the rocks, and he walked slowly with a limp, supporting himself on a stick as angular as the lightning in the distance.

  “T’ Helm—it’s a wild wind that blows here where t’ mountains drop off to t’ vale. There’s a cloud too—hangs over t’ fell for days.”

  “Oh,” was all I managed. I was still wondering where he’d come from.

  “Aye well, you won’t get none today. It’s all wrong for it.”

  And then he was off, limping around the edge of High Cup like some wild prophet in the wilderness.

  Later I made the long descent past Narrowgate Beacon and Peeping Hill down to the pink-stone village of Dufton nestled around a sycamore-shaded green.

  “Did you see Moses?” two young hikers asked as I dropped my rucksack by an enormous pink fountain. “He gave us a hell of a scare!”

  We asked one of the locals about the odd character in the hills.

  “Well we get strange ones now n’then on t’tops. Likely some old shepherd.”

  The three of us sprawled on the green, rubbing weary feet and waiting for the youth hostel to open. A raven joined us, legs wide apart like a gunslinger and staring with eyes like black holes until we offered it the remains of a beef sandwich. It gave a look of disgust, shook its head violently, and flapped off across the treetops.

  “Moses in disguise!” said one of the hikers.

  Why the dog bit me I shall never know.

  It was a docile-looking creature, hardly more than rabbit-sized—lolling in a muddy hollow by a barn wall (obviously his favorite resting place, a comfortable earthy couch shaped by years of lolling). I smiled and mumbled some gentle endearment as I strolled by, but it just lay there, watching me, indifferent to my greeting. But it was all an act. Suddenly the fickle creature leaped up, gave a sudden sharp snarl, and sank its teeth into my calf. I whirled round, backpack flying off my shoulder, but it was already in retreat, scarpering around the corner of the barn. I gave half-hearted chase but it knew its game well and vanished.

  My leg stung so I sat down, opened up the first-aid kit, and quickly poured some purple iodine over the teeth marks. They were not deep (it takes quite a lot to penetrate two layers of thick walking socks) but I’ve always had a dread of rabies ever since I witnessed the agonies of the traditional injection cure given a friend of mine many years back. He couldn’t sit down—or do much of anything else—for almost two months! I poured more iodine on the wound and it ran down into my boots. The dog was nowhere to be seen but somehow I felt it was still watching me. As I hobbled away I turned for a last look, and there it was, brazen as brass, back at its muddy hole, preparing for the next victim.

  The next day was anything but balmy. The morning hike back up onto the open moors was in a petulant drizzle, which became a pitchforked rain as I climbed higher. On the summit of Cross Fell, at 2,930 feet, the highest point of the Pennines, the clouds suddenly descended in clammy tentacles, and I was swallowed up in the first sno
w of the season—a howling white fury. I could see only a few feet ahead. The path became confused with sheep tracks, and my compass failed to reassure me. I felt very lost and cold on this “Fiends Fell,” its ancient name until St. Augustine brought his Christian influences here in the sixth century and chased out the bogeys by sticking a cross on the summit. I groped around through remnants of old lead mines. There was supposedly a hiker’s hut somewhere for emergencies like this, but I never found it and, looking like a snow monster, I burrowed behind a wall until the storm eased. Much later I sloshed and skidded down the mountainside to the pretty village of Garrigill.

  At the George and Dragon a morose group of grouse-shooting “guns” sat around the fire on high-back benches conducting a postmortem on the day’s activities.

  One stout gentleman in “plus twos” (breeches-like trousers), with a tiny deerstalker hat perched on his head, explained, “I never shoot well when I have to look after others.” The group nodded and went on to moan of wet shooting butts, slow beaters (“a bunch of lazy school kids”), wily ground-hugging packs of grouse that were hard to spot, and half-blind pickers-up who collected the “bag.” “I know for a fact they missed four of mine,” grumbled one elderly participant with a purple face. A gamekeeper sitting nearby had heard it all before and winked slyly at the barman.

  The “glorious twelfth” of August—start of the grouse-shooting season—is a key date for Pennine landowners who depend on the substantial income from wealthy “guns” (many from the United States, Germany, and Japan) for effective moorland management. Anti-blood-sport groups and Ramblers protest the occasional closure of moors for shooting, but Lord Peel, owner of a 32,000-acre shooting estate around Swaledale, gave me his emphatic rationale: “Shooting is part and parcel of good moor management. The heather habitat is very vulnerable, and its retention falls squarely on the shoulders of the landowners. Overgrazing of sheep and inadequate ‘burning’ can soon ruin a good moor.” I didn’t quite understand the logic. Spending small fortunes just to bang away at a few harmless grouse still seems the epitome of idiocy to me. But I suppose it fills the coffers of wealthy landowners.

  I stayed that night at the Alston Youth Hostel sharing a room with five other Yorkshire walkers and learned a terrible secret in the morning. I awoke around 6:00 A.M. to find all eyes on me.

  “Tha’s kipped well then?” asked the biggest walker.

  I thanked him and said I’d enjoyed a splendid night’s sleep.

  “Well—tha’s one out’a six then.”

  Five puffy-eyed heads nodded in unison.

  The penny, as they say, had not yet dropped.

  “Tha’ snores like a bull in heat,” said the big one.

  I was stunned. Could it be that my wife has never told me the terrible truth or was it just a chance occurrence? I mumbled apologies and decided it might be more considerate to fellow walkers if I slept rough or used farmhouse bed-and-breakfasts for the rest of the journey.

  Alston was once known as “the town of widows” after the high proportion of married men killed in the lead mines that litter the fells here. It is also the highest market town in England, set on a ridiculously steep hill—a lumpish huddle of bowed roofs and thick stone walls; a place with a sturdy enduring character.

  And Alston has surely needed endurance. A few years back the town’s steel plant, the major source of local employment, closed with the loss of hundreds of jobs. But rather than dismay here I sensed some of the same optimism and determination that helped bring new life to the Calder Valley. Small businesses seem to thrive; the Congregational Church is now a craft gallery; there’s a narrow-gauge railway (one of several in the Pennines) for tourists along the beautiful South Tyne river to Haltwhistle; Moira McCarty runs a second-hand bookstore with a café where people can drink tea and browse through books by the fire, and Kate Webb produces 180 pounds of cheese a week at her home in The Butts, a tiny square behind main street where local archers once refined their long-bow skills.

  “Hold your nose,” she warned me as we entered the tiny dairy complete with pasteurizing machine, brine vat, and cheese presses. She produces three distinct types: a pungent and crumbly goat cheese, a Tynedale from Jersey and Ayreshire cow’s milk, and a blend “for those a bit nervous of a real goat cheese.” Upstairs in the aging room were around sixty cheeses on the shelves (traves), all at various stages in the aging process. “I never keep many more than three months, they go so fast. The problem is the goat’s milk—I can’t get enough locally. So this winter I’m going to France to find out more about the small cooperatives they have over there with the goat owners. I’m sure I could do the same.”

  Other residents here take their gardening very seriously, particularly in the fall when most pubs around Alston hold their leek and onion shows. “Blood, beer-barrel dregs—you name it, ivrywoon has their ooon concoction for feedin’ the soil,” said David Thompson in a singsong Northumberland (“Geordie”) accent as he laid his three-foot-long leeks on the judging table at the Miner’s Arms show in nearby Nenthead.

  Ken Armstrong was bashful about his first prize at the Turk’s Head show but was impressed by what one of his competitors had just offered him for half a dozen of his shoots. Jimmy Walker, who came in second, nodded and smiled: “Aye well, its the Swan’s Head show next week and my best’ll just be ready for then.”

  The woman serving at the fish-and-chip shop across the road was fed up with it all. “Nothin’ but blinkin’ leeks and onions for weeks now. Roll on Christmas!”

  I had intended to take a ride on the narrow-gauge diesel railway, but the lady in the ticket office whispered: “Someone’s gone off with the key,” adding mysteriously, “and I know who it is!” So, no train, and instead, a slow walk through flowery pastures, along a section of the Romans’ Maiden Way, to the ruins of Thirlwall Castle and the great bastion of Hadrian’s Wall.

  The Wall takes a while to become impressive. For centuries local builders found a source of cheap cut stone in the abandoned structure, ordered by Hadrian in 120 A.D. to mark the northern limit of the Roman empire. In addition to the wall itself a series of milecastles with gates every Roman mile were constructed along with major forts, a parallel ditch to the north, and the great Vallum ditch to the south. If all this elaboration were not enough, the central section follows the craggy undulations of the Whin Sill, an enormous sheet of dolerite that emerges in a waved line of shattered cliffs—such a natural form of defence that Hadrian’s additions seem almost incidental.

  The partial reconstructed wall rollercoasts along the sill, offering splendid opportunities for photographers and artists, who (if they sit atop the wall as I did) have problems holding their sketchpads steady in the wind that always seems to blow here.

  Another one of those ravens joined me for lunch—large, shaggy, and obviously ravenous. It stood, giving me the most unnerving stare from eyes like black holes until I submitted and shared my cheese and onion sandwich. When finished, it took a lopsided look at my apple, shook its head, and flapped off over the crags.

  Turning north from the remnants of Housesteads Fort, I could see little else but angular blocks of Sitka spruce massed along the ridges like legions. I had reached the southern tip of the vast three hundred-square-mile Border Forests. The Forestry Commission has often been lambasted for blanketing popular tourist landscapes with its “pole factories” of spruce and pine plantations and chose these hills and heaths for their remoteness and inaccessibility to car-borne travelers. Walkers however must contend with muddy tracks through dark crypts of conifers, shadowly regimented.

  Silence reigns here; sounds sink into thick blankets of pine needles. All that can be heard are the soft sighings of breezes in the highest branches, like ocean lappings on a lonely seashore. Mosses and fungi flourish and the most delicate of mushrooms with stems as thin and straight as horsehair. Warty toadstools ooze a deadly looking black fluid, and puffballs wait to explode under piles of pine cones. In the gloom, nothing moves, and it
all smells of a slow rotting death. I was glad to be out on the open moor again.

  Down in cozy Bellingham the menu at the Cheviot Kitchen restaurant read like a poacher’s priority list—venison, hare, wild duck, grouse, teal, partridge, woodcock, pheasant, and pigeon. I ate every nuance of a very gamey grouse in front of a roaring fire and wandered off over the bridge to enjoy an hour at Jubson’s traveling fair, newly arrived in town. But something had gone wrong. Poor Luke Jubson stood by his motionless dodgems gazing at the empty shooting galleries and unclaimed Teddy bear prizes.

  “If I could just get the men’s wages I’d be satisfied. My father did this most of his life. Started just after the great war when it used to be really good, but this is just plain daft.” Luke’s displeasure was shared by the three other families who traveled with him around the small villages of “Geordie-land” (Northumberland). They agreed it was the evening dance that had eradicated trade although in their hearts they knew times were changing and little fairs were not so popular nowadays. So I went to the dance and pranced the floor with the village lovelies until my blisters burst for the second time.

  At the Upper Redesdale Show the next day in the hamlet of Rochester I peered inside the main exhibits marquee where a dozen granite-faced judges were testing a wonderful array of homemade sausage rolls, scones, rock buns, slabs of treacle toffee, swiss rolls, “edible necklaces,” chutneys, and fruit wines.

  Up the hill, beyond sheep pens full of Swaledales and Black-faces “bonnied-up” for competition, the three judges at the sheep dog trial sat huddled in a horsebox lunching on beer and hefty beef sandwiches. Six shepherds stood around, leaning on crooks, waiting their turn in the pasture.

  John Dixon, a local farmer, quietly explained the essentials. “The shepherd stands by that post and his dog’s got ten minutes to get the three sheep round and do a ‘shed’—he gets the sheep facing all one way and sheds the last one before taking them into the pen. Looks easy when it’s done well.” He stroked the head of his dog Phyl. “There’s no dog in the world with a brain like a border collie. She’s not too fit though, are you lass? Pregnant again. You’ve got to look after ’em—a good one can cost you over three hundred pounds nowadays.”