Cernunnos

We embarked on a mammoth trek across Greetsdale, Anvil Hill and Half Stile Hill, finishing up at Morton Castle Earthwork overlooking Thwaitegarth, a walk that was a pleasure from beginning to end.

We began late—about twelve—and took the track straight up Stileside beside Cow Pasture Wood to a shooting hut which stands overlooking the valley, padlocked and forgotten. It was a hard slog in the sun and we stopped frequently for rests as Pinshaw Hill, majestic against the sky, rose across the green huddle of the Calver.

From the shooting hut, we took a broad green track across the moor towards Currackdale, climbing up through a small grassy valley rent with black peaty fissures and bright yellow green sphagnum. As we climbed to the very top of the moor the heather became less abundant, and we walked through a desolate and barren landscape of deserted mine workings that stretched to the horizon on every side. This was the highest point of the walk, 2400 feet above sea level, a fence marking parish boundaries winding from one brown horizon to the other. Currackdale ahead, hazy and miles away.

We paused to eat at the side of a bell pit filled with water in whose shallow fringes congregated hundreds of tadpoles. In the deeper water we caught glimpses of dark newts, and Dad captured one, a large male in full breeding colours, but I made a comment about him upsetting the balance of the pond’s population which caused him to throw it back with a resigned, irritated look. We passed the place we had stopped to have our dinner last summer and then dropped down into Greetsdale, a narrow isolated flat-bottomed valley about half a mile long. It was very warm here, very remote, very haunted, with nothing but silence, the wind, the calls of sheep or the burble of a curlew or lapwing. Occasionally, an RAF Jaguar on some low level exercise would streak overhead, soon to be lost below the horizon, a dull rumble reverberating in its wake around the lonely sky.

We trudged down through limestone crags that glittered white in the sun, and I explored a small gorge that retreated into the hillside to the dark mouth of a cave. A dead sheep lay near the gorge entrance, its skull picked clean and white. We met a stout red-faced man on a motorcycle, who was a member of a mine research group searching for “Yew Level,” his greased back grey hair smelling of oil. He was abrupt and humorless and I showed him the cave, but he said it wasn’t what he was looking for, in fact was “toss all.” We left him scanning a map.

Greetsdale is a balmy spot amid the sweep of forbidding moorland, populated only by sheep and rabbits; the most perfect of places . . .. A clear stream runs through it into a man-made dam and then down the valley towards a ramshackle collection of sheep pens and a stone shooting hut. I found myself imagining I lived here in this remote valley with the rabbits and the sheep, nothing but sky and moor as far as the eye can see.

We stopped again at the end of the valley by the sheep pens before turning left and climbing back up the moor to its summit, Anvil Hill, before dropping gradually down towards a thin thread of tarmac road which runs from Forefield to Owlands. We followed this for a way until we reached a track which branched off across the moors for a couple of miles to Half Stile Hill, overlooking Calverdale.

For days now I’ve been looking forward to a partial eclipse of the sun visible for two hours at six, and although it was cloudy most of the day, soon a gap appeared in the darkness above and a shaft of sunlight played across the valley below, throwing fields, walls and trees into sharp relief, the dark ramparts of hills and moors giving way to a luminous light, a vision of verdant glowing green . . ..

“Paradise,” declared Dad.

We sat high above the limestone scar of Half Stile Hill, on the very edge of the moor, and milky shafts of light crept towards us, the glare of the sun’s disc filtered by ragged rafts of dark cloud; we could see a large semi-circular bite missing from the lower limb of the sun’s disc. I tried projecting the image onto the back of a map with binoculars but this experiment was a dismal failure and finally the clouds closed up again, the wind grew chillier, and we cut down through limestone crags and heather clad hillsides until we were overlooking the prehistoric fort of Morton Castle.

The fort is approximately ninety yards wide by one hundred and forty yards long and a ditch, that in places is 10-15 feet deep, runs all the way around beneath a raised rampart. At the western side the rampart and ditch give way to an opening, the remains of two roughly circular buildings and two long avenues of grey limestone that run west towards an associated barrow. We walked around the heather-choked rampart, very impressed at the scale and extent of this site that gets none of the publicity meted out to its grander cousins in Wiltshire yet which is, in its own way, just as spectacular. It was fascinating to see surviving sections of walling buried beneath heather and grass. A legend says that gold lies buried beneath the lonely and desolate barrow, a silent witness beneath empty skies. If only stones could speak.

We walked slowly back along the tarmac road, affected by the mood of the evening, a peculiarly perfect harmonisation of mood, time and situation. As we approached the bridge by the caravan a clattering of hooves on tarmac made us look up just in time to see the grey-brown form of a roe deer bounding away among the junipers and heather and up onto the moor.