Day Fifteen

This morning was so gorgeous. Sunshine, blue skies, frost. I didn’t take my camera when I went out early with the dog, then wished I had. These are the photos I would have taken.

- Looking down from the fields, and the valley is full of mist like a huge white serpent coiling out of Hebden Bridge into Mytholm and on towards Todmorden.

- Then looking up the field towards Old Town and the grass is golden with sunshine, glittering with frost. A huge tree at the top against the blue sky.

- A single bird flying across the perfect blue of the sky, like a cursor across a blank screen.

- Brown cows munching in a field, half in sunshine half in shade.

Johnny has gone running up to Shackleton, Horodiddle and Blake Dean. I’m jealous. It will be utterly beautiful up there this morning. But today has other treats in store for me. 

Two weeks into the Walk and Ride Festival and at last I’ve been riding. Izzy and I took two buses and a taxi over the border into Lancashire and went pony trekking. These are the lovely fell ponies we rode on, Danny and Target.

It’s years since I used to ride horses, and it was strange to begin with. But two hours in and the rhythm felt completely right. The horse was moving and I was moving with it in a way that was familiar. They were very well trained well-behaved ponies. They went forward when we told them, and stopped on command. No frisking or pushing our legs into fences and gate posts. By the end I wanted to trot, and so did Target. But we were very good and kept to the sedate pace we were meant to.

I could imagine myself on a long journey, across the country, in the days when horses were the main type of transport. Distance seemed achieveable and desirable, I wanted to stay on the horse for a long time. But it was only a two hour ride, and we had to dismount, feed the ponies some carrots, and return to Yorkshire.

Oh, and here are some pictures I took when I went out with Bet later this morning and remembered the camera.

Day Fourteen

Today it rained again. When Bet and I went out in the morning Nutclough Woods were loud with water. It used to be that you could gauge the amount of rain that had fallen in the night by the stepping stones. If there had been a lot the stones might have nearly disappeared. If they were completely submerged, then it had been really tipping it down. And sometimes there was no sign of them at all except a crease in the water surface where they were disturbing the flow from beneath. Those days you risked a soaking crossing even in wellies, and you might lose your balance in the current.

But this summer’s floods changed all that. The water that came down from the hills in July made everything else seems like kids playing with toys in a paddling pool. That water lifted the stepping stones from their long held foundations and swept them off god knows where. It carried stones, branches, anything even vaguely loose, anything that wasn't the actual bedrock, all the coverings of  earth and vegetation, carried the whole lot before it and dumped it in what we used to call the pond, took some of it on into the town. It carved deep gullies from what used to be footpaths, it crumbled drystone walls, leaving them looking like lace and dust.

The ‘pond’ is a heap of rubble now, with a couple of channels of water running through it. Further up the ravine, the water runs over bare rock where there used to be plants and pebbles. Bet gets confused when places she used to run across easily are suddenly carved deep and she loses her footing. She loves swimming, but doesn’t like it when it happens to her unexpectedly.

This morning I don’t think the stepping stones would have been under water. Only their tops would have been showing, flat stone surfaces with the water folding up around them as it rushed past.

Nobody really knows what Nutclough pond is any more. There have been a few attempts at creating new stepping stones, but none of the stones are impressive enough and there’s no obvious place to put them. The stream hasn’t decided which way it wants to go yet, even though people have tried to guide it by heaping the rubble up in channels. They always break down - each time you go in it’s a bit different.

I suppose time will do it’s thing. Things will gradually begin to grow and colonise the heaps of stone, and they’ll look less as though they’ve been dumped. The stream will find a route it likes and settle. A new footpath will form, and people will forget the way it used to be. That’s the way the world changes I guess. Things happen, stuff changes, we move on. 

Day Thirteen

Another day of rain and shine, though more rain than shine earlier on. Izzy and I went for an early run along the canal and got soaked, so I managed to bagsy the afternoon dog walk, when the rain was supposed to have gone away. 

This morning Mick Chatham was leading a walk up to Blackstone Edge for the Walk and Ride Festival. The first time I went up there it was sitting in a cloud and everything was white, except for the nearest stones which loomed out at us, black and threatening. Having not been there before, we weren’t quite sure what the ‘edge’ bit consisted of and were a bit anxious that we might discover it in the process of falling off. It was atmospheric and very beautiful. I think the walkers had a great time today, judging by this picture of Rebecca Yorke.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151266469186289&set=p.10151266469186289&type=1&theater

This afternoon Bet and I didn’t go quite so far from home.  The rain had stopped and I thought I’d like to look at the Hebden from a different angle. We went down to the train station and then along Moor Top Road, up above the railway line and into fields, past well-dressed horses and a wonderfully remote post box up a cobbled farm track.

Walking up to Old Chamber we could look down on Hebden Bridge basking in the valley in the afternoon sunshine. It feels like you’re getting up high quite quickly when you go up this side of the valley. Maybe it’s because you’re looking down on the town and it looks so far away. Also, as you walk along towards the junction with Horsehold Road, Stoodley Pike looms suddenly into view and it looks really near.

Something up there smells really nice. Whenever I go up there I get a whiff of it , and I have to stop and look. It's very elusive, you can only smell it in a few places. I'd like identify it, but I’ve never succeeded. It’s like chamomile or sweet hay. Johnny says it might be some sort of moss or liverwort, but whatever it is, it smells gorgeous. Though if you linger for to long in the same spot it starts to fade, as is the nature of smells. 

We walked down through the hamlet of Horsehold which is lost in time, with chickens walking in the road, sheep in the gardens and eggs for sale on the doorsteps.The cobbled road down, and the sign forWeasel Hall. I love coming down this way. It’s so steep it makes you laugh, and when Hebden comes into view it seems like it’s almost directly underneath you. The valley chimneys burst into sight and add to the effect of throwing you back a hundred years. As long as you don’t look the other way and see the traffic on the A646. 

Day Eleven

Today Alan Greenwood led a walk from Jumble Hole Road up to Stoodley Pike. It’s been a funny old day with rain followed by sun followed by rain. They probably got buffeted about up there, got wet, got dry again in the sunshine. I hope they had a fantastic time.

A couple of years ago Johnny and Bet and I set off on a 22 mile walk – the route of The Hebden, a walk organised by the Long Distance Walkers Association (Calderdale Branch). We had entered the walk/run and were doing a recce. When we set off it was raining. It rained all the way to Old Town and Peckett Well, and even harder through the Crags. The paths on the way up to Slack were streams in full flow, and by the time we got up to Blackshaw Head we were heads down in driving horizontal rain, right across the top of the hill with no protection or shelter in any direction. The fields were a soggy mess beneath our feet and Bet looked miserable.

It was the first time we’d been to Jumble Hole Clough. You slide down the fields from Blackshaw Head, to some steep and precarious steps which lead to a bridge over the stream. It was terrifying. The stream was a raging force hurtling under the bridge, and the path was slippery and unstable. We crossed and wound our way down past the ruins of Jumble Hole Mill, the water a thundering accompaniment below the narrow path. It was exciting, exhilarating and very, very wet.

When we reach the bottom of the hill, the junction of Jumble Hole Road and the A646, we were meant to head off up through the hills to Stoodley Pike – the route Alan Greenwood will have taken today. The rain was still lashing down. In front of us was the canal, its tow path urging us quietly to abandon our foolhardiness and return home the short way, through the bottom of the valley, sheltered by trees. We looked at each other and didn’t really need to say anything. Bet had her tail between her legs and made no complaints when we took the easy way out.

Then to top it all, she managed to fall into the canal on the way home.

We did the Hebden a few weeks later. I walked it with Bet and Johnny ran. It was a lovely day, and Jumble Hole Clough was one of the best bits then too. In fact, it’s probably one of my favourite places. At the bottom, near to where Alan G was starting his walk today, was the food stop where they served fruit cake and dripping sandwiches to keep you going on the slog up to Stoodley. I think that first time, we’d done enough dripping by then – nothing would have got us up that hill.

This afternoon Wilf ran up to Stoodley Pike with Calder Valley Fell Runners and came back covered in mud from head to toe. I’ve been at work all day, sitting at a desk in an office. It would have been nice to be walking with Alan and friends, but I was quite glad today to be warm and dry.

Day Ten

Well, so much for me saying I’d write everyday for the Walk and Ride Festival. Poppy left home yesterday. We drove her down to university in London, and didn’t get back home until eleven at night, by which time I was too tired to blog. And anyway, the only walking I’d done was along London streets and the riding was all in a car, and I don’t think that counts.

It was a lovely day though, and one which brought up all sorts of mixed emotions. The most obvious being to do with our eldest daughter fleeing the nest and going out into the big wide world. Like Johnny said, it felt strange taking our little girl to the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world and leaving her there alone. Everyone asks if I cried, but I didn’t. I think missing her will be something that creeps in slowly, in tandem with getting used to her being gone. And now I’ve got an excuse to go and visit her in London as often as I can anyway.

Because part of the weirdness of the day was wishing it was me. Not going to live in student halls with a bunch of eighteen year olds. That would be a bit strange. But going to live in London, having a new place to live and carving out a new life. It’s years now since I lived in London, but I never really meant to leave, and a part of me has been hankering ever since to go back.

We’ve lived in Hebden Bridge for nine years now, the longest I’ve lived anywhere in my adult life, and the roots I’ve put down are pretty deep. I feel connected. I walk in hills and know what I will see at every turn. In the woods at the end of our road I know the individual roots which cross the path, I notice if a stone has been moved or a branch has fallen. When the recent floods changed the whole structure of the ‘pond’ in Nutclough, it felt almost like a personal assault. I love it here.

But walking along Mile End Road yesterday, seeing the tall terraces and the traffic, the sun shining through the plane trees and the people around the tube station, entering and leaving like bees in a hive, I felt the tug of older roots, and a longing to be back there, in the Great Wen, the Smoke, the busy cosmopolitan hub of life which never fails to thrill me whenever I visit. Every time I arrive in London I feel something wake up inside of me, a person I’ve forgotten existed, a person I love being. A freer, more dynamic, excited person.

Even when I lived there I had to get out into the countryside. I haunted Hampstead Heath, visited parks, squares, cemeteries, any of the green breathing places with which London abounds. Every few weeks I’d hop on a train and escape – to the sea, or to my home in Warwickshire where my roots are buried far into the depths of childhood.

The trouble is you can’t have everything. You have to make choices. And for now my choice is here, the beautiful Calder Valley.

Yesterday there was a walk up to Stoodley Pike called Obelisk of Peace. I love Stoodley Pike. You can walk for miles and miles in any direction, look back an there is the monument sitting on its hilltop. It’s the pivot around which we all move, still and serene, decorated with a peace sign and wearing its history of  pacifism on top of shadier undergarments – stories of murder, freemasonry and feudal ownership. When you’ve been away and you’re returning and take a bend in the road and see it there on the hill – that’s a homecoming.

But sometimes it feels like it’s pinning you in your place and you want to run away. Thank you Poppy for providing a bolt hole.