Genius Loci: The Holt

I have found many examples of otter spraint in all its seasonal variations. I have found their slides down muddy banks into the water and occasionally large bold tracks in wet clayey mud but despite many, many hours of searching I have yet to find a holt. If I am ever to find a holt it will be here amongst these narrow miles of boulders and fallen trees. But ones initial excitement at the possibilities of finding their hidden home soon fades when it becomes clear that every step of the journey reveals another pile of rocks, another uprooted tree, and another deep hole into which no light shines. This is not a search for a needle in a haystack; it is a search for a needle amongst a mountain of other needles.

It would take weeks to investigate every hole and small cave. Some are merely spaces enclosed by jumbled falls of rocks whilst others go back deeper into the earth. I have found no fox tracks or sign in this place, perhaps not surprising given the attitude of gamekeepers and farmers to the animal. Whilst the three mile walk in was strewn with viscous oily black badger scat, indicating that a large troupe of the animals had passed along the trail that morning, making a circuit from the spruce plantation to the foot of the crags I have found no badger sign down in the gill. This seems to be otter habitat – a place too wet for badgers and too narrow for foxes.

On a slope overlooking a wide shallow rapid I found an overhanging rock with a bare sandy area beneath. In contrast to the rest of the gill which was dripping with run-off from the moor and splashed with spray here was place that was safe and dry and afforded clear views up and down stream. In a dark corner of this space I found a small black green scat with the twisted shape characteristic of the mustelidae but it’s location in this small dark space caused me to ponder; the low space would suit an animal with short legs and a liking for water but all the otter spraint I have found has been sited in connection with territorial marking on prominent waterside rocks and mounds and along tracks used by the animals. Was this animal marking the space, letting others know of its presence and ownership?

Genius Loci: The lower gill

Time is always against me in this place. Down in the dark valley the afternoon light quickly passes and the shadows lengthen. A jay is startled by my presence and flies almost vertically up to the light. Large birch groves, wild and thick, overhang the stream. In a place where there are no paths you are forced to crawl beneath low branches, flat on your belly in the wetness with the smell of mud and leaves filling your senses. I find a cuckoo feather, spotted and neat, lying where it fell on the brown oak leaves.

In the area downstream from the waterfall this place reaches its full splendour. The sides become steeper, in some places precipitous. The sky a thin ribbon of pale grey light glimpsed between branches. Colonies of mosses drip down rock faces. Lichen crust branches, making ancient trees appear green and grey. The bracken has fallen back to a golden brown but down in the gill large ferns, descendents of plants that were ancient when the first animals climbed from the seas, display themselves in vivid clusters of vibrant green. Even in the cold chills of an autumn afternoon their will to live has not been broken and they will not sleep easy like the common bracken.

During the green days of a May spring I had found the gill alive with insects. In one place I had felt a billion billion eyes mark my step. I stood still and heard the tiny roar of an ancient oak wood alive with wood ants, unnumbered legs scratching across the leaf litter, running up and down grass, branch and stem. To stand still too long was to invite their bites, large hinged jaws that close on all flesh regardless of shape or size. Now in the last weeks of the year all silent. No insects, few birds. Sometimes a flock of wood pigeons fly high over head. I do not hear their flight, they come from a long way to the north and cross my narrow field of vision in a blurred instant. They are the only movement I see down in the deep places of the gill. Apart from myself and the water all else is still. I feel like I am walking through a camp of sleeping giants, I tread carefully so as not to betray my presence.

Genius Loci: The final mile

Now the valley broadens and the woodland becomes richer. The stunted and fantastically twisted oaks of the upper gill, trees that were almost bonsai due to the thin rocky soil and cold climate are replaced by the tall majestic trees of an established woodland. The sun has crossed to the west and throws golden pools of light onto the eastern slopes of the valley. In some places the bracken is still green, rocks are still warmed by the weakling sun and I imagine sleeping adders ruing the lost opportunity for one last meal before the torpor and living death of winter. But this is an illusion, as the sun is lost the woods are revealed for what they are; sleeping, silent places that have their own funereal beauty and grace but a grace that is to spring and high summer as the widow is to the bride.

By now the waters are moving through well kept fields, mowed by sheep and rabbits and enclosed by dry stone walls. The waters barely babble, they have lost the loud carefree manner they possessed in the wildness of their youth and now move with a self-conscious decorum. The place is no longer a wilderness. It no longer feels as if you have intruded on a place that is content to live apart from people, you are now moving closer to cultivation and civilisation. The woodland changes as well. Ash and poplar mix with the oak, alder and sycamore droop branches into the stream.

I walk through the final mile of woodland in regret and sadness. Climbing the last fence I pass a woman walking her dog along the single track road. We are miles from the nearest village, still deep in a rurality that most modern people can not imagine but to me, after the hours of perfect solitude I have just experienced, it feels like I am in a metropolis. At the place where I parked my car hours earlier there is now a jumble of vehicles parked on grass verges and blocking the access to the farm, cars and vans of the climbers that have come to boulder on the crags round about. A flock of fieldfares, hundreds strong, throng the valley. In their centre a single blackbird, a solitary local amongst an invading army. They strip the hawthorns and holly of their berries and now I see by their presence that winter is almost here and this will be my last visit to this place until the spring.

WAP 8

Where would we be without Paul and Barbara Brown’s Prehistoric Rock Art In The Northern Dales? PRAND has become for me something of a bedside companion, never out of reach and always useful for planning trips and treks. I recently made another visit to Colsterdale in North Yorkshire and whilst in the area decided to check out the rock art site at West Agra Plantation (WAP), in the hills west of Masham.

PRAND goes to some trouble to explain that not all the sites discussed are accessible to the public because of land owners reluctance to have the great unwashed traipsing across their grouse moors but as we know, and I have said before, trespass is a civil matter not a criminal offence and they’ve got to catch you first – so, with that in mind and with enough local knowledge not to get caught I set off to look for WAP 8.

In the gazetteer included in PRAND WAP 8 is described as being inscribed on a flat slab measure 5.5 metres by 3.1metres. It is also given a ten figure grid reference but even so during my previous visit in May I was unable to find it. Sometimes this happens to me, sometimes I feel as if I find things when I need to, not when I want to. This time I walked straight up to the rock and immediately found the beautiful design of a central cup with six concentric rings linked by deep grooves. No need for head scratching, compassing gazing or measuring of steps.

In the pale light of a still autumn afternoon, with the cold of an early evening beginning to creep over the land the design was something of a loadstone pointing its way to sacred and special places. The West Agra site is itself special, comprising over a dozen panels with complex art on a south facing slope above the river Burn but for me WAP 8 is the heart of this mystery because of its special location and its simple, elegant design.

Why did people feel the need to mark this place with rock art that would last for millennia? As we know there is a wealth of ancient monuments to the east in the Vale of Mowbray, along the length of the scared river Ure and at it’s confluence with the Swale but why was this site, high in the hills, worthy of making a special effort to mark and remember. PRAND suggests the site may be connected to the Mesolithic flint working site at nearby Little Haw or possibly to the trade in Langdale axe-heads to the lands east of the hills but whilst these explanations may go someway to explain the context of human settlement and movement in the prehistoric Colsterdale I find them unsatisfactory in explaining why West Agra Plantation has so much high quality and complex rock art.

I feel that rock art is as much about the significance of the location as it is about the designs inscribed on the rocks and it is the location and it’s specific Genius Loci that hold the keys to interpreting the symbols. When one stands on the hillside at West Agra the dominant feature of the landscape is the flat topped mountain of Great Whernside to the south west. The peak stands framed in the valley of the river Burn, which draws the eye up across the moors to its summit. All the rock art at West Agra is in this line of sight, up the valley of the Burn to Great Whernside and whilst there are many hundreds of suitable millstone grit slabs along the ridge to both the east and west the artists only chose those ones that had views to the mountain.

How many hours work did it take ancient shaman-artists to mark out each cup and ring, each linear mark? Over how many years or generations was this art completed? Not in a weekend, not in the time a hunting band or a foraging party camped by a spring but over many lifetimes as people returned again and again to the place, to look up at the mountain and experience the genius of the valley. There is a tradition that is all but lost to modern people, a tradition that has echoes in the later lore of later peoples but has been overwritten and watered down with tales more suited to people who work with metal and live in one place but these panels high on the hills still point the way to their mysteries and hold the key to the secrets of an ancient British animism.

Famous People Wearing THB Shirts

November 2010 - Reverend Al. Outta Sight!

Lord Dunsany, To The Birds

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany died 53 years ago today, 25th October 1957. I visited Dunsany's grave in the church yard in Shoreham in the summer and spent a day walking among the hills and woods that he knew. A series of essays about my Dunsany Pilgrimage will be posted on this blog in time but for the moment, and to mark the day of the death of a man who loved wildfowling as much as he loved writing, I post his poem To The Birds.

TO THE BIRDS

When I am dead and the bird

That through the long reeds go,

Though they hear no man's words,

Those Wandering Birds Will know.

The duck, the snipe, the teal,

All folk of heath and fen,

The news will hear or feel

Before it comes to men.

In ferns where woodcock hide,

By bays where widgeon lie,

And where the bog goes wide

And gleaming to the sky.

By Many a reedy lake

And many a mile of ling

Its speed will overtake

The golden plover's wing;

By glint of moon or star,

Through darkness among trees

The news will wend as far

As the far-travelling geese;

And grouse on windy moors,

Jack-snipe on coloured moss,

And birds the love lone shores

Far north will know the loss.

And nought have I to say

Against their myriad voice

Arising on that day

To sing, "Rejoice! Rejoice!"

MusiqueMachine Interview October 2010

MusiqueMachine, who made "Hunts & Wars" their album of the month for October have published an interview I did with them some weeks ago. Read all about my undying love for Venom, Dio-era Sabbath and Arthur Machen. www.musiquemachine.com/articles/articles_template.php?id=199