My favourite days are dawn-to-dusk exploratory meanders with my son, on paths that are seldom trodden in unheralded corners of the landscape. On one such shining day, at the beginning of this month, we found hidden, unnamed waterfalls in deep-shadowed ravines, gushing springs that once fed farmhouses now long vanished, traced a mile-long stream from end to beginning at its source in a quiet hollow among the high moorland grasses, and cast our eyes along the swells of the Pennine spine, 10 miles into the golden south to Way Stone Edge and 30 miles into the blue north to Ingleborough.
Mistle thrush rattled their alarm calls from larch trees, the thin seeping calls of meadow pipits accompanied us across rough pastures, a barn owl banked and sank into the long moorland grasses, a tangle of willow scrub straddling the torrenting stream fired off four disgruntled woodcock, we turned to follow a flock of piping golden plover until they wheeled into the sun and were lost to us, four lazy roe deer allowed us to approach remarkably close before vaulting away into a young wood, and at twilight, a pipistrelle bat peered out of a bat box high in a beech, surely having second thoughts about waking from its torpor on the coldest evening of the winter so far.
We chatted to four farmers along the way about their animals and the weather and the winter wind, but otherwise encountered all of a single runner and two local dog walkers in nine hours, spending more of the day conversing with livestock than fellow walkers, either trying to convince them that we were friendly, or else that we had no food: with piglets squealing from an ancient barn beside our path, with four quizzical and wary goats unused to seeing strangers, with indignant honking geese retreating into their yard, with the Derbyshire gritstone sheep scattering before us as we arrived at a ruined farm empty for 140 years; with the tiniest pony we have ever seen, who enjoyed a scratch behind the ears; and with 23 jet black wild fell ponies with magnificent billowing manes and feathers, who, after circling and sizing us up, gathered round to probe our rucksacks and pockets, and receive only pats for their trouble.
Besides endless conversation and questions and word games, my son spent the day deeply engaged with the landscape: harvesting icicles formed around streamside rushes and extracting their green core; tapping at puddles to explore the differing acoustics among their cloudy white and dark patterns, then testing them with his weight until they groaned and splintered and he broke through their crust, then picking up the icebergs and looking through them at the frosted world; and when he was not poking his seasoned hazel walking stick into every nook and cranny, including the eye socket of a sheep skull we found beside the cellar of a ruined farm which he then couldn’t get it back out of and waved around to the despair of nearby sheep, he was javelining it into mires and molehills.
All this vigorous activity fended off the frigid day, our warmth stoked in the morning at May’s village shop with a warm by her gas heater while he spent the customary 10 minutes choosing his sweets (always, as May pointed out, plumping for midget gems in the end), and revived in the evening at the New Delight pub with hot chocolate.
As the very last of the light leached from the sky, we marvelled at the brightness of the earthshine, diffused from our atmosphere and its clouds onto the 92% of the waxing crescent moon that was supposedly in shadow, pale against its gleaming crescent. Jupiter and Saturn and Venus winked on, but even more welcome were the warm orange lights of our little bus home.
Landscape Story 