Genius Loci: The walk in

To do the place justice one should make the effort to get as far upstream as possible, press on up high up the moor, above the last tree then descend into the gill and follow the stream back down to the pasturable fields. This is a long day’s walk. You approach from the east, slowly and with great labour, swimming in a sea of bracken that wraps itself around you like the weeds of a river. There is no clear track, only a small pale line that threads across the moor, faint and easily lost. You press on, gaining and losing the line, aiming for the hanging stone on the western horizon. In the distance, if the weather is good, you may see climbers on the exposed crags. If the weather is wet or cold you will we certainly be alone on this empty hillside far from the last farm.

I have walked towards this place in the spring and seen ten thousand oak trees in leaf shining like an emerald serpent. Today the green has been replaced with brown and in the vastness of the autumn moors the hidden groves are shedding their cloak and preparing to sleep.

At the upper end of the gill, where the last tree gives way to heather and bilberry, I descend down to the stream. The world has changed. You are no longer walking on the moors with the sun and wind in your face. Down here your senses shift in their priority. In a place where the sound of water rushing over rock is omnipresent ones sense of hearing becomes uncertain and fey. The sound of the stream is a constant echoing babble, water against water, sloshing against the bank, rolling and gurgling over rounded boulders and slapping against tilted slabs of millstone grit. Sound bounces along the steep sided gill, reverberating and growing, imitating voices and sounds that are both familiar and strange. You turn because you thought you heard a deep rumbling voice, a calling ululating voice that rises up and swells and you find yourself quite alone in a sliver of wilderness, in a place where perhaps nobody else has stood in for years.

Genius Loci: The shining path

There are no paths in this place. You move like the water in the stream – jumping and running from side to side, stepping on boulders, falling down rocks. Water is everywhere, swirling in deep dark pools of peaty blackness, sparkling in tinkling sprays and dripping from beards of moss and lichen. You always get wet. Walking in this place is not always comfortable, the sides of the gill are steep and the strain tells on the feet and knees. The cold water seeps into boots and the river worn boulders, green and mossy and slippery, threaten to spill you into the stream in falls that will crack skulls and break bones.

Water is everywhere in this place. Its coldness fills the air, it seeps through boots and clothes, covers everything with its touch. I sit for a while, immune to the damp and the chill, inoculated by the beauty of small bubbles forming in the dark pool beneath a churning rapid, watching as they flow in line towards the next fall, carried always on and always down stream.

Genius Loci: Leaf and stream

Visiting this place in the spring I found deep clear pools where brown trout darted beneath rocks and hung motionless in the current. Now the autumn stream is dark, stronger, faster and fuller and if the trout remain in their depths they are hidden from my sight. Drifts of leaves lie in stacks, sculptured into tightly packed forms by the flow of the stream or covering the surface of slow deep pools, each new gust of wind adding to the assemblage.

It feels natural to be moving in the same direction as the water, travelling with the flowing leaves as if we share a common goal in our need to return to the lowlands of civilisation yet own a common pain in leaving the hills. You are drawn downwards, eastwards towards the lowlands and eventually the sea. This stream will grow and swell, conjoining and merging until it discharges into the brown muddy waves of the Humber a hundred miles to the south east. But now the water is in its youth, rushing and falling with the carelessness of young things that know no limits to their will.

Genius Loci: Lutra lutra

From the first I realised this place was a haven for otters and during my earlier visits under green filigrees of spring branches I have found spraint after spraint deposited on the deep mossy pillows along the side of the stream. Crumbling them in my hand I found the tiny translucent bones of fish, proof that the otters were predating the fish in this special, pristine upland beck.

In the upper reaches of the gill birch is the predominant species, bare and silvery in the autumn afternoon, their yellow leaves fluttering in a cold wind. Rowan and bilberry are also present, clinging to steep rocky walls and casting shadows in the water. As one progresses down the canyon sided stream birch gives way to oak, slowly and uneasily but inexorably until the pale yellow of the autumn birch is replaced by the dark rusty brown of the oak. These are not the tall stately oaks of parks and gardens. These oaks are twisted and gnarled into nightmare shapes, low gallows-branches reach out from stocky trunks. The holes and scares left by fallen limbs now homes for tawny owls and woodpeckers. Dried brown oak leaves rattle in the winds like the bones of a year almost dead. These are the trees of druidry and witchcraft. These are the groves of the mysteries.

Those few people who trouble themselves to find this place will see something that marks the midway point between the upper and lower gill – a spectacular waterfall hidden deep in the valley, surrounded by oaks and swathed in ferns and bilberry. At three or four metres high and maybe six or seven across the waterfall is not of the first order but it is a significant barrier to migrating fish and the wandering explorer. A thin path winding up the side of the gill, made perhaps by roe deer, otters or the scraggy hefted sheep that roam the moor is the only option. But if this waterfall marks the highest point that migrating fish can penetrate the gill what are the otters feeding on in the upper reaches of the valley? Their fresh globular spraint deposited on waterside rocks is testament to their presences beyond the falls – there must be enough to eat to make it worth their while to go that far. Crayfish? Amphibians? Slugs?

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.