Summit

We took the riverside path via Syke House Farm to Stonesdale and from there, a walled track onto the moor beyond.

The weather was hot and sweaty but I insisted that we conquer Pinshaw’s summit: I have a fascination for the high, remote places, the lone outcrops of limestone that stand bare at the sky’s edge. So we plunged off the path and trudged uphill, the hillside looking steeper than it actually was. We paused behind a wall to eat dinner.

Near the summit we passed large rabbit warrens, the springy and park-short grass littered with droppings, the summit plateau itself a windswept platform of shale and limestone. We added to the summit cairn and spelled out our initials with rocks like others had done before us, and I picked up a piece of shale as a memento. We didn’t stay for long as the wind whipped fiercely and it was very cold.

On the way down we struck off through heather until the danger of crushing a grouse’s nest forced us to find clearer routes. Our descent towards Acorn Clough was gradual, and we stopped at a remote limekiln and quarry and a spot where the road fords a stream that was thick with trippers who fed and photographed the sheep.

From there it was a short walk along the road—verges alive with tadpoles—towards Kearshaw and Acorn Clough itself. The ruined and forlorn Acorn Smelt Mill was more evidence of Calverdale’s industrial past. It was a leisurely trip back down the road to Kearshaw and Friar Beck.

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.

Maze

We walked to Forefield and back along the road which passes our field, a trip of twelve miles altogether over the high moors between Calverdale and Currackdale.

We stopped at the highest point of our journey, nearly 2300 feet above sea level—1400 feet above the valley bottom—and had our sandwiches and coffee. The somber brown moors of Hurstdale Clough, Fair Moss, and Lockwith stretched away beneath bright clouds. There were no sheep and few birds at this height, but the weather was a little warmer than yesterday, so much so that on the outward leg I had to hide my face from the sun for fear of getting burned.

As we made the steep descent into Forefield the round mound of Birk Fell rose up against the sky from the surrounding hills. We paused in Forefield and Mum and Dad had tea at a café while I sat on a bench near the village cross before we set off back. It was a killing climb beneath glowering skies and a few heavy spots of rain, but I raced ahead and waited at our previous stopping place. We got back to the caravan after five and I quite enjoyed the return leg which had me thinking “this is what I traveled 300 miles for,” a thought I’ve tried hard to pin on one particular aspect or moment of this holiday but have so far failed to do so. I can only conclude that the greatest pleasure lies in anticipation of the future, but at the moment that future becomes actuality the essence of the pleasure slips away leaving a disappointed and let down feeling.

When I’m in Watermouth next week this holiday will seem full of meanings and poignancies. I’m a victim of nostalgia and sentimentality and I’ve been brought up to perceive the world in certain ways at certain times: I’m victimised by these perceptions, trapped in a cycle of conditioned thoughts as effectively as if I was a rat in a laboratory maze.

Rub out the word

Still grey today but the biting cold has gone. We set off along Blea Gate and walked to Gilsey, returning along the path which runs high along the edge of the moor, through Fordings and Birkslape to Shake Bridge and a rough track that dropped down from a lonely farm, squat against the grey sky, through wind tossed conifers to Thwaitegarth.

We walked back along the river, the sweet scented air full of summer balm, and I felt happy for once.

There’s sense of history in this area that’s impossible to capture in words. The owner of this caravan, Mrs. Metcalfe, comes from a family who’ve lived in this district for years and the tombstones at Barras Gill and Owlands are filled with the names of Metcalfes, Redmires, Wortons and Grimdens. These families must feel such a linear linkage with their past. Mum and Dad went out for a walk this evening and were accosted at the gate of our field by an old salt, a Redmire who was married to a Grimden of the Grimdens of Yealeth Hall, the Grimdens who, with their own private army of 400 men on white horses, turned out to support Edward in his campaign against the Scots in the early 14th century.

This caravan is quite comfortable and it’s equipped with a Calor Gas heater, stove and wall lamps, and we’re wrapped in a hissing glow warm against the grey scene outside the windows. I sleep on a mattress on the floor in a sleeping bag. I’ve brought quite a bit of work with me: The Victim and Herzog to read, a presentation on the former to prepare for Monday next, and Eric Mottram to make notes on.

I’m thinking of collecting together my Burroughs photocopies and beginning a scrapbook/ideas book to experiment with words, a place I can be free of the constraints of grammatical sense and typographical convention and where sentence and word structures can’t foul ideas at their source. There I can be less hampered by my attachment to the final text/bookish form of this journal. It’s an attachment that’s difficult to be rid of . . ..

What did I mean by my comment the other night about needing to take sides? The Burroughs tutorial set me off reading Mottram’s Critical Appraisals and looking closely at the cut-up technique, and I feel enthusiastic about these ideas. They’ve touched a chord somewhere inside and I think of my own struggles to resolve certain questions here.

Rub Out The Word.

This text terrorizes my need—my longing—to catch all things at once and in their truest form and in their very essence. “In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was God.” All these different moments forced into the same unremitting form. Literature is decades behind the other arts because it doesn’t rely as much on the immediate consciousness of the reader. The word isn’t sacred, but a means to an end, nothing more. Why should texts operate only on the one level of time-space, running a narrative plot in a narrow, strictly chronological and sequential way? Literature must depart from its rigid narrative beginning-middle-end style, just as film has done. Film’s editing, intercutting, and juxtaposition appears to operate uneasily in language. New forms demand a hearing and demand time for their exploration.

The Gysin-Burroughs cut-up technique seems to be one way to combat the tyranny of the Holy Word: “The cut-up method brings to writers the collage which has been used by painters for 50 yrs. And used by the moving and still camera. YOU CANNOT WILL SPONTANEITY. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.” Words/texts/language all a complex, well-entrenched and cohesive system of control to limit and delineate the boundaries of ‘the reasonable’ and the ‘only-to-be-expected.’ Cut-up, verbal collage and juxtaposition attacks the power-system of language (by power-system I mean an entrenched control system firmly regulating mind & thought).

Burroughs: “Capitalism is a system of dependences, which run from within to without, from without to within, from above to below, from below to above. All is dependent, all stands in chains. Capitalism is a condition of the soul and of the world . . .”

From birth our eyes and ears are not our own. Parents and the state implant meanings in the subconscious mind, an (unintentional?) act of programming and perpetuation we can intellectually reject, but this material resurfaces unwilled and unannounced like images from a nightmare suddenly remembered the following day. We are unconscious victims of a subtle form of mass control and mass conditioning, minds influenced by TV, by radio, the insidious banter of advertisements, the “condition of the soul.”

No man, no woman is free. We can only be partially free from this. For Burroughs, freedom is freedom from the “cycle of conditioned action,” and conditioning makes freedom near impossible to attain.

Caravan

Heavy rain today prevents us from setting out on a planned hike from Gilsey to Birkslape. There seems little point in going out just to get wet.

So we're marooned in the caravan while the grey skies close down over the fells behind the farm and the rain batters and the wind blows. There's nothing to do but sit and read Saul Bellow’s The Victim. Mum and Dad walked in the rain to Owlands and called at Stonesdale on the way back.

Dad returned feeling ill with diarrhea and an upset stomach and Mum even talked about going home on Tuesday if the weather hasn't improved. We stayed inside all evening where it was at least warm and snug, and Mum and Dad listened to Billy Graham on the radio and I read my book.

English eerie

I am writing this in the dim gas-light flicker of the Metcalfe’s caravan in the field at Friar Beck Farm, Calverdale. I got here at two this afternoon after a leisurely three-hour journey via Gillrigg and Washgram . . ..

We walked along Blea Gate and passed two men with shotguns cradled on their arms, their peculiar clothes ill-fitting and old-fashioned. Origins uncertain. I didn't look at their faces as we passed and somehow they appeared faceless anyway. Men with guns. We wondered if they were poachers and the encounter filled us with disquiet.

The countryside is full of hidden meanings, hidden menace. I thought of Flannery O’Connor. I imagined we three staring down the barrel of a gun, being taken into the woods . . . bang bang bang . . . Messy, grotesque, senseless . . . but the walls and fields stretch to the sky and there's no meaning there save that which we, in our fearful shrinking from emptiness, put into things.

Geist

I slept at Westdorgan Road last night, getting to bed after three, after a long discussion between Lindsey, Susie, Stu and I on the merits/demerits of learning a foreign language.

Lindsey and Susie opposed Stu and I who argued that learning another language is a waste of time. Susie said that learning other languages was necessary because there are just some concepts/ideas whose singular essence can’t be translated into English—she quoted the German ‘geist’ as an example. In ideal circumstances, I would have to agree with her, but practically speaking, we face more important tasks. We don’t have the time. We need to build upwards, towards knowledge, towards understanding, from a narrower linguistic base than those who are learning a foreign language. Susie’s German degree is giving her a broader base from which to attack the problem.

But why waste the time acquiring even more tools if you never have a chance to use them?

We also talked about how there’s no real provision for the stimulation of the imagination at University. Degree courses don’t take Creativity into account. It’s like going over old ground—there’s no room for true expression, and generally University is a factory unconcerned with the mental well-being or advancement of its inmates. It’s there to train them for jobs in the material world.

I got back to the Vicarage to find my electric fire gone, Alex wearing my clothes, and my records scattered about. I have to get away from here.

Alex and Gav sit in the former’s room with the ‘Aw What?’ types, watching television. I stay upstairs in my room. Ben has vanished again after a brief, one night sojourn in the Jervis ward of Watermouth General Hospital’s psychiatric unit and we haven’t seen nor heard sign of him in the last few days.

This morning I also attended my first Conflict and Consensus tutorial this term and I don’t know why I bothered. I simply sat glassy-eyed listening to the endless hyperbole around the subject of the 1948 Presidential Election, and reflecting on the unexpected knowledge (imparted by a fellow tutee) that Ian Pugh and Julian Banner hate one another’s guts. In my bag I had a letter to Mum and Dad that I’d written the night before at Westdorgan Road telling them I wanted to go to Calverdale with them next week.

Although the amount of work I have to do in the near future fills me with doubt about the wisdom of vanishing for a week, a little reshuffling of appointments makes it so that I can take that week without missing one tutorial. By the time I walked back through the evening streets of Watermouth hearing the lone cry of a gull so much like the call of curlews high in the hills, I was filled with a sudden and overwhelming pang of longing to be away, which just for a moment or two possessed me completely, like a passing shadow, but was gone when I turned my conscious mind to it.

Lee and I enjoy normalization of relations once more. Past incidents, if not quite forgotten, are never alluded to and we again behave as though nothing was ever wrong.

Doomed

The thought of the term ahead still fills me with weariness, and this is because I now realise wrong choices and past mistakes, and know that it won’t go away for as long as I’m at the University.

I missed my first tutorial of the term today (Conflict and Community with Ian Pugh), but feel remorse only when I think of Mum and Dad’s naïve trust that I’m pursuing my “studies” with a vigour and reward I know I can never muster. I also feel sad that I’m squandering their money—£400 already this year. Doomed.

I promised to go to Calverdale for a week with them in May. At times of mental crisis and EMPTINESS like this I discover a kind of solace in the pleasures of the past.

I went to see Marc Riley and The Creepers with Stu at the Lancaster. They were supported by UT—talentless thrash—and they played aggressive hard Fall-type songs. Riley himself sang and reminded me a great deal of Barry’s friend Patrick—he has the same youthful face and dry Manchester accent.

Pinball wizard

I’m sitting alone in the caravan, it’s mid-evening and it’s growing gloomy. The sun has just set behind the hills above Kearshaw. Purple clouds tinged with dull red are framed between the silhouettes of the wall behind the caravan and the leaves of an overhanging sycamore.

Everyone else has gone to the pub for the evening. I declined for no real reason apart from a general desire to laze about here, plus I was aware of these pages calling me.

We’ve been on a longish walk today. For once the weather suited me perfectly and as we tramped up the road from our field towards Forefield I felt as full of zap as I’ve done all week. It was a windy day and the sun and clouds played constantly across the lone bulk of Pinshaw Hill across the valley.

We could see Thwaitegarth and Stonesdale, two small insignificant grey smudges on the long shoulder of the hill which was stained with the colours of shale and heather. That great hump of rock rising majestically from the valley was impressive and reinforced how small and limited the valley bottom actually is. Calverdale is narrow and when you're down in the fields most of the high hills are lost behind the nearer horizons that frequently only extend up as far as the topmost fields.

From time to time the sun broke through and warmed us for a while but it was a weary slog until we reached the summit of the road. Once there we branched off across the moor and Calverdale opened out below us, the white streak of the stony path we walked on up above Gilsey visible against a gloomy grey hillside.

Up and up we trudged, across terrain littered with rubble and patches of shingle, passing small cairns until finally we reached a fence which marked the boundary of Greetsdale. Last year Mum and Dad were caught up here in a fierce thunderstorm and the area is notorious for lightning strikes that often kill sheep. Just beyond the fence we stumbled across two tiny ponds and Dad and I explored them, finding several discarded dry skins of dragonfly larvae still clinging to the tips of the reeds. We also found several frogs and both larval and adult newts. 

By this time we were all ravenous so a few hundred yards further on we sat ourselves on a partially overgrown slag heap to eat, and spent a good natured, light hearted and ridiculous ½ hour before walking back. We had a good view down into Greetsdale itself, a bleak and sinuous little valley amid heather and a wide flat dreary expanses of brown moor. Down at the head of the valley we could see an old railway carriage being used as a sheep shelter, and last time Mum and Dad were down there they found a wooden sled, built to be dragged behind a horse.

We retraced our steps through a chaos of old mine workings and turned right along the edge of the Calver valley. Robert and I lagged behind talking and for a little while I forgot the tiredness and weary stumbling of my boots.

Robert argued strenuously in favor of pacifism and opposes “lobbing bricks and splitting heads open.” As so often happens, I was pushed back on my heels, falling quiet and turning my eyes earthwards.

-- “You watch your mates who are in the RCP and see how much unhappiness and annoyance they leave behind them,” suggested Robert.

I immediately thought of Susie’s open dislike of the RCP, Shelley’s cool reserve, and Pete’s uneasy parrying of Carl Cotton’s sarcastic comments. I thought also of Barry’s claim that Universal Utopian Happiness would be attainable if only we could fulfill mankind’s material needs. I at least had the confidence to shoot that one down in my own mind. Robert said that he before he came across Buddhism he felt like a pinball being flicked helplessly to and fro from desire to desire and thought to thought. I could identify only too well with this familiar feeling.

I am that pinball at this moment, and have been for the past few months. I’m all at sea, rudderless, rolling from this to that, drifting onwards without a gleam of hope. All my past thoughts, opinions and decisions are insubstantial groundless cries, and the more I hear, the worse it gets, the more desperate I feel. The only things I’m certain of are mortality and how an appreciation of this can alter peoples’ perspectives in ways that are ‘meaningful’ and constructive. Any real political change only happens on the inside. I should use these truths as the foundation for my own new beginnings.

When Robert talks about pacifism I feel ashamed at my own loose agreement with the use of force as an instrument of change. When I read about Reagan’s moves in central America in the 'papers, his branding of the independent Roman Catholic Sandinista regime as a Communist threat, and Thatcher’s nauseatingly predictable defense of this policy, I’m filled with vengeful desire for retaliation.

To what extent is it justified to assassinate those leaders who, as a direct result of their personal decisions, threaten defenceless people? On a moral level, I suppose the answer is ‘not at all.’ “You make yourself as bad as the people you oppose once violence is used,” says Robert, but what good is a moral victory if you’re being beaten, humiliated and trodden on? He believes pacifism is effective eventually, and he uses the impermanence of everything to back this up, arguing that non-pacifists always fail to acknowledge this point and therefore fail to realise that violent change is fruitless.

But doesn’t this reduce everything to senselessness—even morality? Isn’t this just a morbid crumbling into hopelessness?

There’s got to be some personal standard set I suppose or we would all just disintegrate into gibbering despair.

Corpse road

Robert had to leave in the afternoon to drive to Bishophill for one of his Buddhist meetings so we did a short walk, setting out from the caravan along the road towards Owlands.

We turned off the road at Washfold Farm and followed a path alongside the river; here and there we could spot the overgrown and partially hidden remnants of Blea Gate. We picked up a walled section of the Gate again near Owlands and looked around Owlands Church, which wasn’t as dirty and dusty inside as I remembered from last time. We had a good pub lunch before wandering back.

Andrew and I diverted to Stonesdale and had a drink at The Plough, and got back just as Robert was setting off.

In the evening we went in search of the deer along Blea Gate. Sure enough, we spotted the female in the same field as before and watched her grazing and slowly wandering alone in the long grass for half-an-hour.

We walked right along the Gate to Sleightshaw and were accosted by a talkative Teesider who held us captive for twenty minutes or more. It came in dark quickly and Dad started to tell stories about hauntings and mysterious voices he said he'd heard outside the caravan. After this, Carol and I walked back at breakneck speed, both of us wanting to run but not daring to, our eyes darting nervously here and there.

We didn’t expect Robert back until tomorrow but he rolled up at about eleven, having driven back from Bishophill in only an hour-and-a-half.

Motionless world of time

I’ve felt much better today; my blankets remain dry and I'm not subject to the overbearing fatigue of the last few days. Mum's much better too; she felt fit enough to come with us.

We left for Foss Clough at about nine, parked the cars, and set out in sun and an already uncomfortable heat up towards Ansett. It was slow progress. We saw a pool filled to overflowing with toad tadpoles. Robert, who is like me, complained frequently about the heat, and after much suffering and sweating we reached Sedcott Falls, ate, and I bathed my feet in the cold brown waters of the Calver.

The next part of the hike was hellish; there wasn’t the slightest hint of breeze and the sun was merciless. As I stumbled up through the bracken on the slopes of Sedcott Hill, dogged by my usual cloud of flies, I complained constantly about the heat; it was so unbearable.

We finally staggered into Thornscar which was full of old ladies on coach outings who dominated the centre of the village, walking slowly from their coaches to either the gift shop or the tea place, talking in loud voices, all dressed identically. I can’t imagine myself old, but then everyone supposedly believes themselves immortal. I huddled in the shade of a building.

We walked back along the river to Foss Clough. It was still very hot, so we stayed awhile beside Foss Clough Beck and had our photo taken as a family. “One for the album” said Mum, fondly, and no doubt I looked my usual raggy self. We had a look around the church before coming back. The cemetery is full of Angrams and Arngills and Honeycotts, the names stretching back into the eighteenth century, beneath our feet the bodies of breathing, smiling, imaginative people who once looked out on these same horizons, entire family histories engraved in rock and remembered there alone.

It's a humbling thought.

The people in this area still cling to a kind of rugged practicality tinged with a kind of isolated oddness. We’ve had encounters with a few locals and they’ve all struck me the same way. On Sunday night as Andrew and I sheltered from the storm beneath a tree we were joined by an old wizened woman and her two sheep dogs. She oozed an old-fashioned eccentricity and spoke to us in such a low mumble we couldn’t hear a thing she said. She looked everywhere but at us as she spoke.

Our host at the caravan site is Mrs. Honeycott, and she seems the least like this of anyone I’ve encountered, and no doubt most people around here are thoroughly approachable. Robert remarked that the majority of people regard their urban lifestyles as the norm and all this rural slowness the exception, but really, the opposite is true, or certainly was so for many centuries. It’s as if we in the cities have forsaken so much that's worthy and of value, so much that gave us peace and helped us come to terms ‘with ourselves’ (for want of a better expression).

I’m not sure what it is I’m trying to say here, but in cities we're ruled by clocks and fret over things which are so unimportant and so inconsequential. Countless lives are expended in groping despair, in a misery of trying to find a lasting happiness that, I’m coming to think, just isn't there.

I think of Mum as I write this and I could cry as I remember her the other day sitting in the caravan. She's never at peace and the happiness she wants for us all so rarely seems to light up her own life.

Ill at ease

A hot tiring day in Bladeham. We wandered in usual tourist fashion around the town and Mum, Dad, Carol and Robert walked along the riverbank to Bladeham Abbey, I stayed instead around the town square looking for bookshops. I found just one and sat for a long time watching the crowds slide past in the heat, feeling ill at ease.

We got back to the caravan and Mum and I both felt ‘under the weather’; Mum stretched herself out feeling sure she’d got tonsillitis; she could hardly speak, was dizzy and uncoordinated, and by the time we turned out the lights she’d resigned herself to a day spent alone and suffering in the caravan. We were all worried.

I too was overcome by tiredness and a headache, and I could feel my pulse pounding in my throat. I sank into sleep, but woke up again at about ten as everyone returned. For the third night in a row they’d watched a pair of deer chasing one another through the grass before loping off across the fields in the direction of Thwaitegarth. The magic of the encounter still lingered in everyone’s minds.

I felt muzzy with sleep but went out into the dark field for a little while.

Cloud of unknowing

I had another poor night and woke up amid soaking sheets. I felt clammy and thoroughly out of sorts.

Everyone else was up making sandwiches, packing flasks and preparing for our hike. We set off in the cars to Gilsey and parked near the cottage where we stayed last time. Everything had stayed as it was; it's as if this place will endure forever.

We took the track up the eastern side of Gilsey Beck and sweated through bracken-choked woodland until we came out at an area where the beck widens and is bordered by wide grassy meadows at either side. Here, the grey refuse from lead mining is piled into small slag heaps. We stopped for a little while before pushing onward up the Beck. The lethargy of the previous day still seemed to dog me, weighing down my feet and deadening my responses to everything.

Finally we reached the ruined shell of an old lead mining office and Andrew took my photograph, just like 1980 when we were last here: I posed again in an identical stance, leaning against the same wall like before. Inside the structure, weathered carvings were scored into the stones, the dates and initials of people long forgotten. Across the narrow steep valley we could see another, more complete ruin staring back with empty windows.

We rested at the head of Gilsey Beck and ate our sandwiches. While everyone else went off up another little valley which led off into the hills, I fell asleep on the grass, but soon began to feel uncomfortable in the hot sun. I was disturbed a few times by inquisitive sheep.

An old grizzled shepherd descending from the hill tops with his white panting dog talked to us about his memories, as a six-year old, of this “fine, wild country.” Mum told him about our deer sighting and he wondered if perhaps it had escaped from a deer herd at Steadbeck Lodge: "I've only seen two my whole life.” He bade us goodbye and limped off up the track behind us with his dog.

It was a long wearying tramp back along the opposite side of the Beck. We followed the dusty straight track as turned up above Gilsey, and plunged down into the village on aching feet. We got back to the caravan at about four.

The evening was sunny, marked by a typical piece of Robert philosophizing and a silly argument between Mum and Dad after Dad tipped the cooking oil away. He felt humiliated in front of us all and sulked off on his own down the road while Mum sat sleepily in the caravan with a long face.

After the plates had been cleared away we got into a general discussion. Robert asserted that death gives life meaning and that it’s only because we lose sight of the inevitability of aging and mortality that we adopt shallow, transient attitudes. “Death could come next week or next month; people don’t appreciate that.” He pointed me out as a perfect example of this thoughtless attitude with my lounging and lethargy—(Robert:“I do it too!”)—and I felt my face colouring and heat springing into my cheeks.

But Robert doesn’t know how my thoughts go. I acknowledge these facts which condemn us all. For a moment too an old familiar sensation caught hold of me, a feeling of helpless not knowing, a sort of sudden desperate realisation that I’m not sure of anything and really am ‘all at sea’ as far as certainties are concerned. It’s a feeling I really didn’t expect to experience here. But what's the use of talking like this when I give myself up to sloth so consistently, so willingly?

Andrew and I wandered off after this, and we stood in the corner of the field gazing across at the adjacent mound. “I hate the mysticism and sentimentality attached to these places,” said Andrew quietly. Poor old practical Andrew. To him it's all just fields and trees and moors, which in a way I suppose it is, and nothing else. I can see why he says what he says, but I also appreciate the mystery of this place.

We went for a walk up the Forefield-Stonesdale Road, in the direction of Forefield. It was a soft evening, a hint of sun tingeing the stone walls, and Andrew had to go back because he’d forgotten his camera, so I stood and waited for him, leaning on a gate gazing across a field. As I did so, an old wellington boot-clad baggy-suited figure came clumping down the road towards me, and as I gave him a glance he turned, staring at me with hostile eccentric eyes.

When Andrew came back we climbed up and up, getting quite good views over towards Sleightshaw and the dark silhouette of the moor beyond. He took a few photos of the dark seething clouds rolling in before we had to sprint down the road amid a terrific downpour.

Back in the caravan we huddled in dim fluctuating gas light. Outside the sky echoed and shook to the thunder: in the enclosed valley, the reports of the thunder were much shorter and more concentrated Rob and Carol set out in the torrential rain for a walk along Blea Gate but we stayed behind watching the lightning fork all around. Mum, as usual, began to get worried at Rob and Carol’s absence, but after an hour or so they returned having just seen a family of deer quite near the caravan.

Robert was full of the “eeriness” of the area.

Souls

We set off at about half-past ten. It was drizzling and cloudy, but the sun began to break through as we drove through Gillrigg and Washgram. We met Rob and Carol in Stonesdale in the early afternoon, after a journey of over eighty miles.

We had a cup o’ tea and cheese-on-toast at a café in Stonesdale, the same café I remembered from three years before. Once again the family was all together, Mum and Dad and their three sons and daughter-in-law, together for perhaps the last time in a long time.

The caravan, a cream and brown contraption, sat in a corner of a small field near Friar Beck Farm, under great sprawling trees which darkened the sky. We unpacked quickly and wandered along the road towards the moorland by the ancient mounds of Wath Hill. It grew very warm; there were quite a few picnickers sitting about by their cars reading newspapers and eating.

We climbed up the short rabbit-cropped grass amid junipers and grey rocks and sat awhile gazing out over the haze-shrouded valley. Andrew took a few photos and Dad and Robert disappeared in search of what they thought was a shrike. We didn’t stay long and walked lazily back along the narrow road to our field beneath the trees.

I didn’t feel too good. Again I was overcome with tiredness and I slipped into sleep in the caravan. I don’t know why I’m so tired. I wonder if it’s anemia or something similar? I’ve not felt too good all week and when I wake up my sheets are sopping wet. I feel drowsy most days too. Too much inaction probably.

We had a quiet tea followed by a walk along the medieval Blea Gate, the wall of which skirts the lower end of the field in which our caravan stands. All was still, a silence broken only by the occasional chatter of a farm machine or the calling of sheep. Robert wandered off by himself.

He and Dad get on famously; as Robert gets older he slips more and more into a sad, melancholic and contemplative frame of mind which seems to strike a chord in the part of Dad that Robert springs from.

I felt so tired that I seemed to be having difficulty generating interest in anything; my eyes felt heavy and my feet leaden. We spotted a lone deer, standing solitary in the fields, watchful and alert below a clump of trees; two tiny fluffy wrens were rooted to a wall in static panic, desperately hoping they wouldn’t be seen.

As we approached the caravan, a group of Oystercatchers screamed and wheeled across the sky, circling round and round the ancient fortified mound that stands behind the caravan in a field. In myth, Oystercatchers are supposed to be the lost souls of drowned sailors, long dead. Around they flew, screeching and calling hauntingly, before winging their way across the fields away into the dusk.

It’s now nearly dark and I’m sitting outside the caravan in a camp chair, listening to the hiss and quiet roar of wind in the leaves high above my head, while in front of me Dad and Robert are deep in conversation about Alan Garner and Arthur Machen. Robert’s voice is insistent, exuberant, Dad’s low and droning.

They’ve just gone in. The wind is whipping at the pages.

[Audio version]

Shame

I got a letter today from Mum and Dad which included my deposit account number so that I can transfer money into my current account. Mum added a note to the end of Dad’s oddly uninspired news, saying that it was “a shame” that I had to “get tied up with a flat at this stage.”

They want me to go to with them to Calverdale in late July. I long for a change of scenery; this puts me in a grey mood from time to time. I went down to the accommodation office to see about sub-letting my room in the flat over the summer.