The gate is looking worse for wear. Clinging to its hinges for dear life with a lean, its top bar lost, its others loose. Stone gate stoops as big as megaliths shoulder it upright on either side, like friends at the end of a long night out, for now.
I’m fond of this gate – we passed through it on our first ever walk when we arrived in this Pennine valley 16 years ago – but now any swing could be its last. Will Peter replace it when it falls? With no stock to pen hereabouts, it’s not that it’s needed. Like so much of this landscape, really: its lanes, field drains, stone steps, stone walls. Crumbling, of no further use, built for a different time, different lives.
Still, in this life, my life, I go to the gate often. My son and I climb to it on school runs at winter dawns and on after-dinner rambles in the long summer evenings. I went there this morning, and sat a while on the curving wall, watching Paul on his quad bike on the other side of the valley doing the rounds of last night’s lambs.
All was quiet, until spaniel Henry exploded out of the heather, out of nowhere. Steve and Clare followed at a more measured pace. They’re keeping off their usual paths higher up among the fields, it turns out – Henry can’t abide the lead, and so can’t be let near lambs, or the curlews that nest among them. They, like most people, get it. We all love this place, but for some of us – and I like to count lambs and curlews among us – it’s life itself.
‘I’ll never grow tired of this view’, said Steve, turning round to take it in. Me neither, I agreed, and groped for the Johnson quote about London and life. Sixteen years after I first passed through the gate, I’m as enthralled as ever, looking, listening, learning of the life of the land, up here on the green hill.
Gathering
Loose ends from the week just gone, penned.
Mary Oliver reading her poetry and speaking of her life on BBC Radio 3, and a memory of when Canadian friend Kathryn first placed her poetry in my hands / The Pace Egg play in Weavers Square, our son with Bold Slasher sword and face paint, jeering and cheering and hurling liquorice allsorts in ritual misrule / With neighbours on the village green for the community spring clean, and the next day, the children again probing the crooks and crannies of the banks and boughs – but this time for eggs / A climb to Cruttonstall at dusk, a wave to his friend three hundred feet below in the gulf of the valley / After the thunder and splinters of the Royal Armouries’ jousting tournament, a visit to the bulging ‘Nature Writing’ shelves at Waterstones, a far cry from 20 years ago, when scouring among travel, memoir and science yielded slim pickings / A dreaming of this year’s Lake District adventures while we read Marjorie Lloyd’s Fell Farm Holiday, and, as if in answer, an invitation wings its way from Windermere.
Landscape Story 