Remains Of Elmet

Broad track on the open moor.

Encouraged by one or two others (thanks George and Ruth!) I've decided to try to put together a collection of short travel essays on my experience of walking the Camino. I intend using some of my former blog posts as a starting point, then reshaping and extending them. I'll also be adding completely new pieces. Leafing through some of my old writings today, I came across this account of a walk I did in Yorkshire's Calder Valley. I hadn't seen it for ages, so I thought I'd give it another airing.  

Remains Of Elmet

The Calder Valley in the South Pennines forms part of the old Celtic kingdom of Elmet. It's the birthplace of Ted Hughes, and the place to which he returned constantly throughout his life. Read anything from his collection, Remains Of Elmet, and you are immediately transported to this land of sodden moorlands and ancient trackways, bubbling curlews and blackened gritstone; a harsh, brooding landscape littered with deserted cotton mills and abandoned hill farms.

Heptonstall hunkers down on the high buttress above Hebden Bridge. It was here I began my walk one cold and misty February morning. But not before exploring Heptonstall itself — an authentic example of a hand-weaving village from the pre-industrial era. Much like a mini-Haworth, in fact, but without the tourists and the commercial tat. Terraced rows of houses, faced with blackened stone blocks, slope down to a churchyard wrapped in peaceful, Gothic gloom and paved with gravestones laid end-to-end like a mosaic. There are two churches almost side-by-side: the Victorian New Parish Church of St Thomas the Apostle, and the atmospheric ruin of the earlier Church of St Thomas à Becket — built around 1260, destroyed by storm in 1847 and condemned by the itinerant preacher, John Wesley, as 'the ugliest church I know'. However, even in its derelict state, it's still a lot prettier than the octagonal Methodist Chapel (designed by Wesley in 1764) which lies marooned in the architectural warp and weft of numerous gritstone weavers' cottages. Before leaving, I sought out the grave (second row in the new churchyard) of the neurasthenic poetic genius, Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963. The headstone, inscribed by her husband, Ted Hughes, reads:

  Even Amidst Fierce Flames The Golden Lotus Can Be Planted.

Sylvia Plath's grave.

Pondering this quotation from the great, allegorical Chinese folk novel, Monkey, written in the sixteenth century by Wu Ch'Eng-en, and delighting in the wonderful strangeness of its setting among the scores of conventional Christian epitaphs, I turned my back on the village and scampered down a steep, rocky bridleway (the Calderdale Way) to a stone packhorse bridge spanning Hebden Water. On the eastern bank an entertaining riverside path followed a frothy, rust-coloured and dipper-haunted stream, which was enlivened by weirs now and then, and pacified by mill ponds. The next landmark was Gibson Mill. This was a cotton mill — built by Abraham Gibson in 1800 — which employed mainly women and children. Despite the installation of a steam engine, boiler and chimney in the 1860s, manufacturing ceased in the 1890s due to unreliable water flow and competition from much larger mills in the Calder Valley. After the mill, a short woodland stretch rose to Hardcastle Crags, a beauty spot popular with Victorian excursionists.

Gibson Mill near Hardcastle Crags.

Emerging from the trees, a remote lane wound over a culvert where a beck tumbled down into Rowshaw Clough. Just before Walshaw Farm the call of birds suddenly filled the silence. Finches twittered and swooped, and a party of fieldfares flew off chacking madly, their grey rumps prominent. From the moorland above a solitary grouse croaked loudly. Close by the farm I made a right-angled turn up a muddy walled track and headed through tussocky intake fields towards higher ground. I contoured round Shackleton Knoll alongside an enclosing stone wall until a gate led on to the moor itself. This was the high point of the walk in every sense. The sun was now out, illuminating high mooorland and intake pastures, and burning off the tendrils of mist which still lingered in the valley of Crimsworth Dean beyond. I rested a while on this soggy bump between the two valleys, and enjoyed the sun, the view, the silvery gleam of Gorple Lower Reservoir to the west. There are many places higher, many places more remote, many places more obviously spiritual; but for me, today, this was a contemplative viewpoint of space and freedom.

And so I went down again into the Vale, as go down we must, and met the first walkers of the day, who were struggling up the hill I now descended. The route back led through Crimsworth Dean and past a stand of tall Scots Pine trees, which clung to the steep slopes above the beck. I remembered how Lord Savile had given this woodland to the National Trust in 1951; and how, a few years later, he and the local people had scuppered plans to flood this valley and turn it into a reservoir. Eventually, after taking a minor road by Spring Wood, then following a lovely riverine path strewn with moss-covered stumps and stones, I reached another packhorse bridge and, finally, the delightfully scruffy backstreets of Hebden Bridge. These were lined with factories and new developments — and also with tiny, terraced houses, dark inside, but on the outside hung with wind chimes and festooned with plant pots placed on old, rescued, treadle-driven spinning machines. This textile town has a claustrophobic, gritty charm: rough, unmodernised pubs, sixties-style signage, no McDonalds — thankfully — in sight. But the relentless economic decline over the years has been oddly reversed by a kind of latter-day New Age flowering. The shops are chock-full of candles, tarot decks and occult books; and artistically printed cards in newsagents' windows advertise courses in reiki, shiatsu and meditation.

Reluctantly tearing myself away from this hippie settlement, with its stone setts and its Little Theatre, its shabby Rochdale Canal (where Ted Hughes used to net loach as a boy) and its grey wagtails bobbing on the now non-poisonous River Calder, I returned by bus up the steep hill to Heptonstall in the mid-afternoon sun, and looked down through the bus window at Hebden Bridge in the valley below. I saw rows and rows of terraced houses striating the hillside, home-factories (three, four, five-storied and many-windowed for maximum light) in which women used to turn wool into the yarn and cloth that was conveyed originally by packhorse, then later by canal boat, to the merchants in the piece halls of Halifax. At least I could see the place — a hundred years ago it would have been hidden by a vast, toxic pall of smoke generated by the cotton mills of the Industrial Revolution.

Five hours had passed and I was sitting once more on a wooden bench in Heptonstall's old churchyard and listening to the chattering jackdaws, thinking about literary and industrial heritage, and of what Ted Hughes had written about this very spot:

A great bird landed here.

Its song drew men out of rock,
Living men out of bog and heather.

Its song put a light in the valleys

And harness on the long moors.

Its song brought a crystal from space
And set it in men's heads.

Then the bird died.

Its giant bones
Blackened and became a mystery.

The crystal in men's heads
Blackened and fell to pieces.

The valleys went out.
The moorland broke loose.

Heptonstall Old Church from Remains Of Elmet by Ted Hughes.

Heptonstall Old Church.

(All images sourced from Wikimedia Commons)

The Gift Of Swifts

They've made it again,/Which means the globe's still working, the Creation's/Still waking refreshed, our summer's/Still all to come - Swifts by TED HUGHES.

I just happened to be looking out of the window this morning when I saw a buzzard soaring high over the house, the sunshine clearly picking out its brown and white markings. You'd never have seen buzzards here 10 - 15 years ago. Since the banning of many types of pesticide in the UK, the increase in raptor numbers has been a great success story.

And then I saw the swifts, shooting through the blue air on dark, scimitar-like wings. Yes, the swifts are back - for me, the true heralds of summer. I watch for them every year, and my heart leaps unfailingly each time I witness their arrival.

Anne Stevenson, in her poem Swifts, calls them earth-skimmers, sky-scythers, air pilgrims, high crosses cruising in ether, and sleepers over oceans in the will of the world's breathing.

This is the 1st verse of Anne Stevenson's poem:

Spring comes little, a little. All April it rains.
The new leaves stick in their fists; new ferns still fiddleheads.
But one day the swifts are back. Face to the sun like a child
You shout, 'The swifts are back!'

(I once briefly met Anne in the Poetry Bookshop, Hay-on-Wye - that mecca for bibliophiles and oenophiles where almost every building is a bookshop or a pub - in the early 1980s, I think it was. I'm pretty sure she co-owned the business at the time. I used to sell books myself back then, and managed to flog her some Dylan Thomas titles as stock for her already overburdened shelves. Her poetry is well worth checking out - and this would be a good place to start.)

I've touched on swifts before, in a piece that also reflected on my favourite months of the year and which described in a not-too-sombre way a friend's funeral I went to. You can read it here.

Ted And Sylvia

For a poet to marry a poet it's a dangerous thing. But for a poetic genius to marry a poetic genius it's nothing short of disaster. But would we have Birthday Letters had Hughes married a tart-baking housewife and card-carrying member of the WI? And would we have Ariel had Plath married a kindly but boring young curate or carpet salesman? And does it matter anyway? It's only poetry, after all.

After Plath's suicide in 1963, Hughes' lover, Assia Wevill, also took her own life 6 years later. To lose one wife may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. However he did achieve some kind of stability after marrying Carol Orchard in 1970.

Biographers tend to side prejudicially on one side or the other, pro-Hughes or pro-Plath. Myself, I prefer the more balanced approach favoured by Elaine Feinstein in her excellent biography Ted Hughes: The Life Of A Poet. But who, even Feinstein, knows the real truth of their relationship? It will remain a mystery, thank God - like all relationships.

Some time ago I took a walk in Hughes Country and just recently I dug out my account of it. Here it is.

Remains Of Elmet

The Calder Valley in the South Pennines forms part of the old Celtic kingdom of Elmet. It's the birthplace of Ted Hughes, and the place to which he returned constantly throughout his life. Read anything from his collection Remains Of Elmet and you are immediately transported to this land of sodden moorlands and ancient trackways, bubbling curlews and blackened gritstone; a harsh, brooding landscape littered with deserted cotton mills and abandoned hill farms.

Heptonstall hunkers down on the high buttress above Hebden Bridge. It was here I began my walk one cold and misty February morning. But not before exploring Heptonstall itself - an authentic example of a hand-weaving village from the pre-industrial era. Much like a mini-Haworth in fact, but without the tourists and the commercial tat. Terraced rows of houses, faced with blackened stone blocks, slope down to a churchyard wrapped in peaceful, Gothic gloom and paved with gravestones laid end-to-end like a mosaic. There are two churches almost side-by-side: the Victorian New Parish Church of St Thomas the Apostle, and the atmospheric ruin of the earlier Church of St Thomas a Becket - built around 1260, destroyed by storm in 1847 and condemned by the itinerant preacher John Wesley as 'the ugliest church I know'. However in its derelict state it's certainly a lot prettier than the octagonal Methodist Chapel (designed by Wesley in 1764) which lies marooned in the architectural warp and weft of numerous gritstone weavers' cottages. Before leaving I sought out the grave (second row in the new churchyard) of the neurasthenic poetic genius Sylvia Plath who committed suicide in 1963. The headstone, inscribed by her husband Ted Hughes, reads:

  Even Amidst Fierce Flames The Golden Lotus Can be Planted.

Pondering this quotation from the great allegorical Chinese folk novel Monkey, written in the sixteenth century by Wu Ch'Eng-en, and delighting in the wonderful strangeness of its setting amid the scores of conventional Christian epitaphs, I turned my back on the village and scampered down a steep rocky bridleway (the Calderdale Way) to a stone packhorse bridge spanning Hebden Water. On the eastern bank an entertaining riverside path followed a frothy, rust-coloured, dipper-haunted stream, which was enlivened by weirs now and then, and pacified by mill ponds. The next landmark was Gibson Mill. This was a cotton mill built by Abraham Gibson in 1800 which employed mainly women and children. Despite the installation of a steam engine, boiler and chimney in the 1860s, manufacturing ceased in the 1890s due to unreliable water flow and competition from much larger mills in the Calder Valley. After the mill, a short woodland stretch rose to Hardcastle Crags, a beauty spot popular with Victorian excursionists.

Emerging from the trees, a remote lane wound over a culvert where a beck tumbled down into Rowshaw Clough. Just before Walshaw Farm the call of birds suddenly filled the silence. Finches twittered and swooped, and a party of fieldfares flew off chacking madly, their grey rumps prominent. From the moorland above a solitary grouse croaked loudly. Close by the farm I made a right-angled turn up a muddy walled track and headed through tussocky intake fields towards the higher ground. I contoured round Shackleton Knoll alongside an enclosing stone wall until a gate led on to the moor itself. This was the high point of the walk in every sense. The sun was now out, illuminating high mooorland and intake pastures, and burning off the tendrils of mist which still lingered in the valley of Crimsworth Dean beyond. I rested a while on this soggy bump between the two valleys, and enjoyed the sun, the view, and the silvery gleam of Gorple Lower Reservoir to the west. There are many places higher, many places more remote, many places more obviously spiritual; but for me, today, this was a contemplative viewpoint of space and freedom.

And so I went down again into the Vale, as go down we must, and met the first walkers of the day who were struggling up the hill I now descended. The route back led through Crimsworth Dean and past a stand of tall Scots Pine trees which clung to the steep slopes above the beck. I remembered how Lord Savile had given this woodland to the National Trust in 1951; and how, a few years later, he and the local people had scuppered plans to flood this valley and turn it into a reservoir. Eventually, after taking a minor road by Spring Wood and then following a lovely riverine path strewn with moss-covered stumps and stones, I reached another packhorse bridge and the delighfully scruffy backstreets of Hebden Bridge. These were lined with factories and new developments - and also with tiny, terraced houses, dark inside, but on the outside hung with wind chimes and festooned with plant pots placed on old rescued treadle-driven spinning machines. This textile town has a claustrophobic, gritty charm: rough, unmodernised pubs, sixties-style signage, no McDonalds (thankfully) in sight. But the relentless economic decline over the years has been oddly reversed by a kind of latter-day New Age flowering. The shops are chock-full of candles, tarot decks and occult books; and artistically printed cards in newsagents' windows advertise courses in reiki, shiatsu and meditation.

Tearing myself away from this hippie settlement with its stone setts and its Little Theatre, from its shabby Rochdale Canal, where Ted Hughes used to net loach as a boy, and its grey wagtails bobbing on the now non-poisonous River Calder, I returned by bus up the steep hill to Heptonstall in the mid-afternoon sun, and looked down through the bus window at Hebden Bridge in the valley below. I saw rows and rows of terraced houses striating the hillside, home-factories (three, four, five-storied and many-windowed for maximum light) in which women used to turn wool into the yarn and cloth that was conveyed originally by packhorse, then later by canal boat, to the merchants in the piece halls of Halifax. At least I could see the place - a hundred years ago it would have been hidden by a vast, toxic pall of smoke generated by the cotton mills of the Industrial Revolution.

Five hours had passed and I was sitting once more on a wooden bench in Heptonstall's old churchyard and listening to the chattering jackdaws, thinking about literary and industrial heritage, and of what Ted Hughes had written about this very spot:

A great bird landed here.

Its song drew men out of rock,
Living men out of bog and heather.

Its song put a light in the valleys
And harness on the long moors.

Its song brought a crystal from space
And set it in men's heads.

Then the bird died.

Its giant bones
Blackened and became a mystery.

The crystal in men's heads
Blackened and fell to pieces.

The valleys went out.
The moorland broke loose.

Heptonstall Old Church from Remains Of Elmet by Ted Hughes.

In The Midst Of Life

Days

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in.

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

PHILIP LARKIN

I don't know if this happens to other bloggers, but I sometimes wake in the middle of the night with whole syntactical chunks of blog ready-formed in my head. And unless I get up at once and write them down, they've vanished into the ether by morning. Occasionally the same thing happens with poems. The bare bones of this one had already coalesced in my mind on waking abruptly at 4am in a tent in Borrowdale a few years ago. I've blogged before about the relationship between sleep and creativity here. This blessed visitation has just occured again tonight.

May and September are my favourite months of the year. Though I've learnt not to have favourite months. Now I like them all. After a certain age you're more conscious of the finite number of Mays and Septembers left. But, if all months become your favourites, then you suddenly have 6 times as many more months to enjoy. I've been reflecting on all this as I'm in a somewhat sombre mood - despite the most beautiful warm weather this week, which coincided with the return of the swifts, screaming and skydancing in the blue bowl of sky overarching the garden. ( ...The swifts/Materialize at the tip of a long scream/Of needle. 'Look! They're back! Look! And they're gone/On a steep/Controlled scream of skid/Round the house-end and away under the cherries... From Swifts by Ted Hughes.) Yes, I've been in an unseasonably reflective mood - more September-ish than May-esque you might say - because I had to attend a funeral yesterday.

I wasn't the only mourner (or thanksgiver as the lady vicar later reminded us) to be completely caught off my emotional guard by the Scottish pipe music being played as we followed the coffin into Lincoln Crematorium. At once my eyes filled and my lips began to tremble. I could barely sing the 1st hymn. In an attempt to control myself, I stared fixedly out of the window at an unfocused spot in the middle distance somewhere between a foreground bush and some trees further out.

Rita. Feisty, generous, cantankerous, chaotic, warm-hearted, strong-willed (no - downright bloody-minded), intelligent, outgoing, outrageous. Courageous too - she'd suffered from ill health all her life: bronchial chest, swollen legs, knackered kidneys, diabetes. She finally gave up smoking, but not the cream cakes, when she retired. Her car had more dents than a tin can used for shotgun practice. She'd nearly died several times. Now she had really gone.

Rita. A one woman band against authority. A tireless fighter against social injustice. Schoolteacher, Area Director of Social Services, local councillor, volunteer worker for STRUT, the Lincoln-based charity providing respite care for children with disabilities and learning difficulties.

Rita. Once her bungalow was burgled. A police officer came round. He surveyed the anarchic destruction in every room. "I'm afraid they've made a bit of a mess, Miss Hodgson," he commiserated. "Nonsense," countered Rita breezily. "They've tidied the place up!"

As the blue curtain closed on the coffin I looked away through the window once more. In the distant trees some magpies, feathered in funereal black and white, lurched from one branch to another. And 2 chaffinches bounced up from the bush in front of the window and fluttered frenziedly up and down the pane, tapping their heads repeatedly, insistently against the glass. Just as if they were trying to gain entrance for some obscure, avian reason. Then, after what seemed an eternity of knocking, and some harsh looks from the lady vicar, they suddenly flew off, disappearing over the Garden of Rest.

I Long For The Hills

Big gales in the Midlands last night and throughout this morning. The electricty has only just come back on. No computer, no work, no blogging. And, more importantly, no electric toaster and no daytime TV (only joking). Ted Hughes puts it rather more vividly...

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye...

From The Hawk In The Rain (1957), his first collection of poems.

Not that there are any hills to see from this, my Nottinghamshire window. I wish...

The Unknown Bird

As well as Dylan Thomas and R. S. Thomas, there is another poet called Thomas I like very much, and that is Edward Thomas (1878-1917). A somewhat melancholic and solitary figure, his life was cut tragically short when he was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in WWI. He scraped a living as a hack writer, producing reviews, nature essays, topographical works, even a novel - anything to earn a crust.

But his friend, the great American poet Robert Frost, encouraged him to uncover his true, literary talent - which lay in the writing of a type of unsentimental, acutely observant, rather melancholic nature poetry. His poems had a strong, posthumous influence on later English landscape and nature poets such as Ted Hughes. Thomas was a keen walker and walked through much of Southern England and Wales in his travels.

This poem, The Unknown Bird, is one of his finest poems, and one of my favourites:

The Unknown Bird

Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him:
Though many listened. Was it but four years
Ago? or five? He never came again.

Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off -
As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream.
Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. All the proof is - I told men
What I had heard.

I never knew a voice,
Man, beast or bird, better than this. I told
The naturalists; but neither had they heard
Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
I had them clear by heart and have them still.
Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
That it was one or other, but if sad
'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
If truly never anything but fair
The days were when he sang, as now they seem.
This surely I know, that I who listened then,
Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
A heavy body and a heavy heart,
Now straighway, if I think of it, become
Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.

There's a hint of mysticism in this poem I find very appealing, a sense of something being just out of reach, a communion with a spirit in nature which can give momentary release from the pain and suffering of human life. This chimes in very much with the theme of my recent post A Gift From The Gods.

Time Out Of Mind

A final poem by R. S. Thomas, one of my favourite poets. Despite the bleakness of many of his poems, I find them ultimately consoling, as is all great literature, all great art. Somehow it helps, makes us feel better, that a gifted writer or artist shares with us his or her very human doubts and fears. The poet Ted Hughes describes poetry as consisting of things we don't actually want to say but desperately need to share.

Correspondence

You ask why I don't write.
But what is there to say?
The salt current swings in and out
of the bay, as it has done
time out of mind. How does that help?
It leaves illegible writing
on the shore. If you were here,
we would quarrel about it.
People file past this seascape
as ignorantly as through a gallery
of great art. I keep searching for meaning.
The waves are a moving staircase
to climb, but in thought only.
The fall from the top is as sheer
as ever. Younger I deemed truth
was to come at beyond the horizon.
Older I stay still and am
as far off as before. These nail-parings
bore you? They explain my silence.
I wish there were as simple
an explanation for the silence of God.

Incidentally the phrase "time out of mind" in the 5th line of the poem is taken from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and was also used by Bob Dylan as an album title in 1997.

Baa Baa Black Sheep

Feeling I gave sheep a bit of a bad blogpress in yesterday's post, I thought I'd try to redress the balance. But it's difficult. I researched quickly the poetry field. There seem to be very few good poems about sheep.

There's Ted Hughes' blood-and-gutsy description of a stillborn lamb in February 17th from his collection Moortown Diary (1989) and his long poem Sheep from Season Songs (1976).

There's the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa's book of poems The Keeper of Sheep - but this is more about God, nature and metaphysics.

So I fear sheep are still getting an indifferent coverage in these pages. With one notable exception - William Blake's delightful The Lamb from his Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789-94):

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed,
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and he is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child and thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee!

Final thoughts about sheep. When I walked the Pennine Way in springtime this year I was accompanied throughout by the sight and sound of lambs - which was a continual joy. To watch their protective mothers constantly keeping an eye on them was very touching.

And lastly, let's not forget Black Sheep Ale from the Black Sheep Brewery based at Masham, North Yorkshire - one of the finest of British beers.