Under the Rock E-Book

Benjamin Myers

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 416

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The astonishing new work of non-fiction from the prize-winning author of Rare Singles, The Gallows Pole and The OffingUnder the Rock is about badgers, balsam, history, nettles, mythology, moorlands, mosses, poetry, bats, wild swimming, slugs, recession, floods, logging, peacocks, community, apples, asbestos, quarries, geology, industrial music, owls, stone walls, farming, anxiety, relocation, the North, woodpiles, folklore, landslides, ruins, terriers, woodlands, ravens, dales, valleys, walking, animal skulls, trespassing, crows, factories, maps, rain - lots of rain - and a great big rock.-----**Shortlisted for the Portico Prize**'Extraordinary, elemental ... never less than compelling: this is a wild, dark grimoire of a book'TLS'Exceptionally engaging ... beguiling ... this is a startling, unclassifiable book' Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman'Compelling ... admirable and engrossing. Myers writes of the rain with a poet's eye worthy of Hughes' Erica Wagner, New Statesman'A bone-tingling book' Richard Benson, author of The Valley and The Farm'A truly elemental read from which I emerged subtly changed... It has all the makings of a classic' Miriam Darlington, author of Otter Country and Owl Sense

Leseprobe

‘Extraordinary, elemental . . . never less than compelling: this is a wild, dark grimoire of a book’ – Times Literary Supplement

‘Thoughtful, engaging and beautifully crafted . . . the writing is lyrical yet muscular and elemental, transporting the reader to this place of rugged beauty and dark secrets’ – The Yorkshire Post

‘Compelling . . . an atmospheric exploration of the landscape and its history’ – Irish Times

‘A daring new work . . . make[s] the unremarkable truly remarkable. It’s a work that is focused on landscape and place and is another step on this special writer cementing himself as more than just a cult favourite’

– NARC

‘Prodigious, awe-incurring . . . few are as impressive as the formidable Benjamin Myers, who has developed a voice as pure and authentic as it is stark, honest and resolutely northern . . . creates an overall sense of dreamy, quiet beauty, born of love for the lie of the land’ – The Big Issue

‘A visionary work of immense power and subtlety which establishes Myers as one of Britain’s most consistently interesting and gifted writers’

– Morning Star

‘Best known for his bleak and brilliant crime fiction, Myers turns his focus to nature writing with absorbing results in this lyrical exploration of Scout Rock in Yorkshire’s Calder Valley’ – i-news, Best Books to Take on Holiday 2018

‘The writing is perfectly poised and seductive, luminous, an earthy immersion into the granular dark of place. The prose has an intense, porous quality, inhabiting the reader right from the stunning start with the voices of rock, earth, wood and water. This is a truly elemental read from which I emerged subtly changed. The writing has a shamanic quality; Benjamin Myers is a writer of exceptional talent and originality . . . it has all the makings of a classic’

– Miriam Darlington, author of Otter Country and Owl Sense

‘Richly layered, densely and elegantly structured, discursive, elegiac and beautiful. Under the Rock is a stunning exploration of place, mind and myth’ – Jenn Ashworth, author of Fell and The Friday Gospels

‘One of the many joys of Under the Rock – this absorbing, compelling, moving book – is its language; it trickles like a rivulet, thunders like a cataract, and sticks to you like mud. It is full of crannies and dips and peaks wherein wonders hide; explore it for a lifetime and you will not exhaust its mysteries. Unafraid of blood-drenched history and the darkest of despair, this is nonetheless a defiantly life-praising book; it accompanied me to bed and bar, train and plane, and each situation was enriched and brightened by its presence . . . It is utterly vital’ – Niall Griffiths, author of Grits, Sheepshagger and Stump

‘I really, really loved Under the Rock . . . it truly stands out and confirms Ben as one of the most original and engaging British authors currently writing about landscape. He describes brilliantly the emotions that nature and place trigger in us, and the endless fascination we have with them. It’s a bone-tingling book about both a beautiful location, and about the nature of our engagement with our environment’ – Richard Benson, author of The Valley and The Farm

‘What distinguishes Under the Rock is Myers’ unshakeable commitment. He writes at all times with rock-solid conviction, fashioning a book which is less a work of simple description than a new contribution to the mythology of Elmet’ – Will Ashon, author of Strange Labyrinth, Clear Water and The Heritage

‘Place-writing at its most supple: both deeply considered, and deeply felt’

– Melissa Harrison, author of Rain: Four Walks in English Weather

‘I have become a Benjamin Myers junkie in the last 12 months . . . Myers’ place-writing is as good as anything being scrawled in Britain today’ – Horatio Clare, author of Down to the Sea in Ships and Orison for a Curlew

‘Terrific . . . It’s a book which doesn’t just discuss or describe landscape, but immerses you within it . . . if this doesn’t put Ben Myers on everyone’s radar then I don’t know what will’ – Daniel Carpenter, Bookmunch

‘[A] beautifully poetic, passionate and elegiac book . . . Myers’ writing left me with a heart-wrenching desire to be there’ – Harry Gallon, Minor Literatures

‘An extraordinary blend of power, poetry and grit . . . Benjamin Myers has made his rock sing’ – Richard Littledale, The Preacher’s Blog

‘Myers’ prose is outstanding’ – Marcel Krueger, Hong Kong Review of Books

Contents

Introduction

PART I:Wood

Field Notes I

PART II:Earth

Field Notes II

PART III:Water

Field Notes III

PART IV:Rock

Field Notes IV

CODA:Beyond

Sources

Acknowledgements

Index

About the author

Introduction

Picture a hill half blasted into history.

Imagine one side of this great hill torn away, hewn and cleaved, quarried and pillaged, dumped in and raked over, hacked and scarred, its face forever disfigured, like that of a Passchendaele survivor.

Now fill this blackened space with seeds and spores. Slowly, now. Let things settle. Let trees reach downwards, their curling roots grasping deep into the underworld. Let weeds wander, and life crawl and colonise and entangle.

Let the seasons set the pace. Months, not minutes. Decades, not days.

See a century that feels like a second. Let life breathe.

In time creatures will come. All the indigenous species of the North Country: the deer and the fox, the badger and the squirrel. Rabbits too, though far fewer than you would imagine.

And birds, of course. Here birds will find a haven in the upper reaches of the looming cliff face, or create crowns of thorns in the tops of trees that in the wet and windy months sway like the masts of ships. Birds of many varieties will pass through the thick woodland’s clotted corridors, some feeding and flitting, others in full-throated joyous song.

Willow warblers and chiffchaffs.

Woodpeckers and wagtails.

Goldcrests and nuthatches.

Blackcaps and red kites.

In the trees there will also appear owls, exploding from branches like white fireworks, their magnesium feathers shimmering beyond the reaches of the old tallow candles, the oil, gas and kerosene lamps that illuminate the ages, before finally, silently, crossing the searching beams of alkaline-powered torches and the dipped headlights of distant growling cars.

This way ghosts were born: in wooded dells, down dark lanes of hedgerow and holloway, across clodded fields, when drunk men took fright at the unblinking brilliant xanthous eyes of an ice-white barn owl in flight, its talons stowed, wings beating a rhythm into the night, and had to create a new mythology to save face. Centuries later the nocturnal call of the owl runs the length of the woods and permeates the dreams of those of us who live close by, prone under duck down, the night world at our window.

Insects thrum and hatch and hover before filling the beaks and bellies of the bird life, and so the circle spins.

NOW IMAGINE MAN coming here.

Imagine man coming with pickaxes and chisels.

Imagine man coming with jackhammers and flak jackets.

Imagine man coming with dynamite and diggers and drills.

The crows take their temporary leave as industry makes its mark. The deer too will tread lightly through the mud and sandstone colluvium and rise to the top slopes, carving a new path up, up and away to the moor beyond.

In time they will return. In time they will all return, the wild creatures of this unknown place. The mammals, the birds, the insects. New burrows and dens and setts will be unearthed, latrines dug out and nests lined. The cycle will start again, and again. But not before the land has been blasted and quarried, dug and drained and filled, tipped into, dumped on and polluted with the death-making products of the accelerated industrial age. Fence it then, they will say. Shut it down and block it off, and create a cursed mythology of toxic soil and bottomless mineshafts and cliff-diving suicides and unexpected landslides in the night. Fence off this scar across the pocked face of the curiously named Mytholmroyd in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire, a piece of England sliced away.

Imagine this wild place. Summon it from the thousands of colours that swirl and merge in the prickling abyss behind your eyelids. See it now as the sun rises and sets behind this sparkling bluff of stone, and then open your eyes and there it is once again: Scout Rock. Here I sit now within its creeping shadow, a dark presence blackening my bitter coffee darker still. I drink it in.

Sometimes – especially in the depths of another dank, dreek autumn or on a sunless winter day too sallow even to grant us the thinnest of frosts, or perhaps at the dizzy height of summer, when the sun rises victoriously over its ragged crest to win the push-and-pull battle between light and dark – it feels as if The Rock is guiding my every movement. It is dictating my moods, my emotions. Steering hand and mind in every word I write.

It’s there looking over my shoulder now – see it, always? – a folded shroud for the town, a black dog stalking the sleep of all who lie below it, a tombstone erected in memoriam of old sky creatures unseen.

Tomorrow the sun’s rays will reach the lower canopy of this fenced-off green cathedral, and the nettles and balsam and ragwort and hogweed will reclaim their kingdom once again. The deer will dance, the badgers will snitter and the single pair of nesting ravens will kite the warming updrafts, their fullthroated croak, like a digital chuckle full of malice, will echo down the valley, and though no locals would consider entering this place, which they deem cursed down the centuries, I will vault the sagging wire and take to the slopes, home again.

PART I

Wood

Chapter One

Unremarkable places are made remarkable by the minds that map them.

Carved from the south side of the Calder Valley at Mytholmroyd, Scout Rock is a sheer slab of crag overlooking wooded slopes and undulating, weed-tangled plateaus. To most, it is unremarkable, a fleeting backdrop gone in a slow blink from a passing train or car window, or perhaps more akin to a dirty grounded iceberg if seen from a slow-gliding canal boat; an umbral form flitting briefly across the mind’s eye. Subliminal, almost.

To others The Rock might serve as a marker for the widening out of the dale between the more heavily populated conurbation of Halifax to the east and a narrowing at Hebden Bridge to the west. Here great wooded walls harbour hidden ante-valleys, ruined mills and the ghostly remains of hamlets, which appear to squeeze inwards, restricting daylight and shortening the breath for just a few hard miles to the valley town of Todmorden and, beyond it, the hinterlands of Lancashire (as an old saying goes: ‘Yorkshire is all hills and moors; Lancashire is all mills and whores.’)

For some of the more mature generation Scout Rock is a doomed place. Foreboding mythologies took seed in the fertile imagination of childhood and made it a no-go area, where eighteenth-century thieves hid out, where the town tip once was, and later where industrial refuse was dumped without forethought or environmental consideration.

Charles Dickens passed through the area in 1858 and later wrote of it in a lengthy piece entitled ‘The Calder Valley’. Dickens charted the rich history of the area in fascinated detail. Of Scout Rock he wrote: ‘Beyond Mytholmroyd by the precipitous crags of Hathershelf Scouts – a rampart-like range of weather-worn rock, very conspicuous in the neighbourhood, and in places the sides are richly wooded. This place was the head of a feudal district, the forest of Sowerbyshire.’

Too doomed to be a playground for the modern valley’s children, Scout Rock was yet significant enough to imprint itself upon the memory of a master of words who came of age facing this very arboreal stage, Edward James ‘Ted’ Hughes, described on his death by Seamus Heaney as ‘a great arch under which the least of poetry’s children could enter and feel secure’. This man is remembered in blushed recollections and with a reading voice like thunder rolling down off Midgley Moor; his life is commemorated with a Westminster slab, and with him rest the fading memories stored in muscle and bone of the black-stone scarp that haunted his adolescence, the ‘memento mundi over my birth; my spiritual midwife at the time and my godfather ever since’.

Scout Rock is remarkable in the eyes of those who have decided it is so. Anything can be if it is willed into being: a pebble shaped by centuries of tumbling in the oceanic backwash, a single falling feather so light it barely succumbs to gravity, a mysterious gash in the landscape dense with trees, now fenced off and left to rewild itself.

Today The Rock still inspires dark utterances from the tongues of elders, their weather-worn faces creasing in admonishment at my confession that I like to explore this place that is, officially at least, hazardous and out of bounds to all members of the public: stay away from the Rock, lad, they say in voices as deep as ancient wells. Nothing good ever happened up there.

WE LEAVE LONDON early one June morning, Della and I. It is a decade ago and all our combined possessions have been crammed into a removal van that left the night before. What remains is shoved into the back of my car.

The last item we pack is half a tin of treacle, whose lid, almost inevitably, will be prised open during the journey by the dumb-bell that it is pressed up against. We will arrive at a new life dripping sticky syrup and curses.

Before we set off, one of the removal men, whose limbs give the appearance of having been elongated from years of lifting, tells us that his team had recently helped a mother and her four children relocate to ‘that neck of the woods’.

‘It was a house somewhere up on the tops,’ he explains, lifting a filing cabinet beneath one arm. ‘Same valley. Remote. She said it would be a new start for her.’

I nod. He sniffs.

‘She killed herself after two months.’

We hit the morning traffic and an hour later are still edging along Vauxhall Bridge Road into Victoria. Our mood is strained, conversation terse. The stress of a house move is underpinned by the knowledge that once you leave the city it is very difficult to return; one only moves to London when either young or wealthy, and now we were neither.

Twelve years earlier, during the first weeks of Tony Blair’s New Labour government, I had tracked a similar journey in reverse, driving a borrowed car full of clothes, books, records and treacle down from the north-east of England to find myself circling Piccadilly Circus at five o’clock on a Saturday evening, Eros looking down at me as I attempted a U-turn, much to the chagrin of the dozen black cabs caught in my slipstream.

Eventually I edged my way south of the river over the same bridge I crossed now, to move into a dilapidated transpontine squat in a labyrinthine Victorian building inhabited by social workers, punks, teachers, Finnish sonic terrorists, drug dealers, Greek artists, council workers, tennis coaches, Irish dissidents, passing backpackers, male prostitutes, an ex-Alpine goat herder, heroin addicts, academics and petty criminals. Here I lived rent-free for four years.

But now it was the height of a recession, and London was no city in which to be poor. Where once it was a dizzying maze to be navigated one day at a time, a playground for constant reinvention, now it was a place owned by the property developers, the oligarchs. The old one-bedroom flat, with its bath on breeze blocks in the kitchen and infestation of mice, abandoned by the local council for thirty years, had recently sold for £800,000.

What pleasure I still found in London for free was the many hours either exploring the overgrown Victorian splendour of Nunhead Cemetery, one of the ‘magnificent seven’ that circle the city, or tracking the abundance of urban foxes, themselves squatters living beneath the decking in our back garden. I passed hours watching the wild screeching parakeets that soared over Peckham Rye, which were rumoured to have descended from either Henry VIII’s menagerie at Hampton Court, or the Ealing Studios set of 1951 film The African Queen or – my favourite – liberated by Jimi Hendrix during a moment of clarity on Carnaby Street in the late 1960s.

Nevertheless, I was in danger of becoming parochial, so Della, a fellow Northern exile and herdsman’s daughter from a long line of cattle men, and I were doing what many like us had done before: seeking space, silence and the suggestion of financial survival.

We turn off Park Lane and its alien world of wealth, circle Marble Arch, then drive on up the Edgware Road, under the Westway with all its connotations of Ballard and The Clash, past the Turkish cafés, the old Irish pubs of Kilburn High Road and along Shoot-Up Hill to Cricklewood. As the high-pitched thrum of the city’s hive-like centre gives way to the retail parks and unknowable suburban conurbations whose historic names – Burnt Oak, Canons Park – suggest places of musket smoke and great intrigue, we pass through and under the overlapping flyovers like concrete ribbons, and I slither from my old city skin and finally breathe out.

IT IS JUNE, the month that Pablo Neruda describes as trembling like a butterfly, and the Yorkshire valley is in wild bloom. Whispering fields wave hello, and the river banks are lost beneath blankets of barbed nettles and the soured honey scent of balsam.

The varying shades of green are almost overwhelming, and with the car windows open I hear the cadence of birdsong.

The cottage sits down a narrow lane in a hamlet a mile from Mytholmroyd. It has an old stone inglenook fireplace and original warped beams supporting the ceiling. There are three bedrooms and a garden that is a landscaped, fenced-off corner of a semi-wild meadow, and the water is supplied by a spring up the hill. Rent is affordable, even on the sub-minimum wages of a mature student and freelance writer.

There is a stone water trough out front, and an old man sporting a trilby, a red neckerchief and a sheriff’s badge leaning on a five-bar gate, squinting into the sunlight. I will later learn that he is Arthur, a chipper pensioner who likes to dress as a cowboy and take long, looping daily walks from Hebden Bridge, always stopping for a moment of reflection at this favoured view.

The house is a stout weaver’s cottage, built from sturdy rain-blackened stone in 1640. The removal lorry cannot make it down the narrow lane so we have arranged a changeover with some local men into a smaller van.

When one of the local guys leans against the drystone wall of our new garden to roll a cigarette I ask him about the silted pond down the lane that I saw when we first viewed the cottage a few weeks earlier.

‘That’s Stubb Dam, is that,’ he says, gesturing towards the hawthorn-lined lane that disappears down into a darkening green tunnel. ‘It used to be a lovely little spot. We’d swim in it as kids, and you could fish it too. Plenty of different fish down there. Some nice trout at one point, and giant pike that had been down there years. A few of them. Beasts. Aye, it was a lovely place. But then some fella down south bought the land and fenced it off. Put up barbed wire and “Private: No Entry” signs, and what have you. So obviously we weren’t having that.’

He pauses to lick his cigarette paper, and then lights it up. He exhales slowly, enjoying the telling of the tale.

‘So what happened?’ I ask.

‘What happened was, me and some of the boys loaded an old digger that was ready for scrapping with a sack of something nasty and rolled it down the hill and into the pond. Poisoned it.’

‘Poisoned it?’

‘Aye, chemicals. The fish were floating belly-up by the morning.’

The man pulls on his cigarette and then exhales two plumes, bull-like, from his nostrils.

‘Yes, a lovely spot, Stubb Dam. Here, I bet you think we’re a right bunch of hillbillies.’

As he says this his phone vibrates. The ring-tone is ‘Dueling Banjos’. The theme from Deliverance.

THE HOUSE is the end cottage of three. It is cold, dark and solid, a stone box with small mullion windows set by a stonemason nearly four centuries ago. Two larger houses and an ancient converted barn comprise the rest of what was once a township settlement known as Saxokakaurhs.

Habitation in this little collection of homes is believed to date back to the eleventh century: Norman times, when lords ruled over villages and hamlets in the Upper Calder Valley. It then became part of a wooded game park, owned by an earl and managed by foresters. Today’s dwellings came later, when they were likely to have been built in a clearing and named Burnt Stubb, meaning a wooded area cleared for cultivation. It eventually became known simply as The Stubb.

Our weaver’s cottage was built for £2 10s and it remained unchanged for 250 years. Gas and electricity were installed in the 1920s. According to local historian Steve Murty, who has lived in Great Stubb house all of his life, and whose book Summat A’ Nowt is a valuable history of the hamlet: ‘Some [tenants] didn’t want electricity as they simply did not trust it – uneducated people needed to see or smell something to trust it.’

The space where sheep shearings once hung from hooks in the cracked and warped ceiling beams is now an attic room that I use as an office. A Virginia creeper covers the entire face and half the side wall of the cottage, reaching around the windows. Come autumn its waxy leaves will run the full colour chart of decay through to the most brilliant burgundy, but for now our end of The Stubb looks like it is losing a battle with nature. The effect is that of something being consumed and pulled under; drawn back to the root source.

The old lane out the front leads down to the doomed mill pond, Stubb Dam, and once settled I find myself on the water by eight each morning, casting a fishing line baited with sweetcorn into the small and slightly sorrowful murky circle.

Every ten minutes or so a train rattles past my back, transporting valley folk to work in Leeds and Manchester. I see their faces only fleetingly, as they too might get a glimpse through the trees of a man alone as the morning sun lays strips of silver across the water. The sense of freedom and privilege I feel is almost overwhelming. What luck. A new chapter is beginning.

THE POND HAS certainly seen better days.

In the 1870s Stubb Dam provided a head of water to drive wheels that powered lathes in a nearby wood-turning business. Old photographs show a neat, stone-lined basin roughly parallelogram in shape and surrounded by a raised bank. At one end a stone dam controls the overflow. One particular photograph I find in an archive shows clusters of people reclining in the neat grass, and below them in the antique water four children cling to an airbed. It looks like a desirable destination; an upland oasis of sorts. A sunken Arcadia in the West Riding interior.

Today it is a place defined by absence, neglect and decay. The absence of its original industrial purpose, and the decay of its stonework and the slow rusting of the dumped digger that, sure enough, I find submerged in the long grass. The dam itself has collapsed too, so that one end of the pond drains away into a slow-flowing outlet partly clogged by snagged branches, silt, weeds and rocks.

Here and there around it I find dumped beer cans, broken bottles, railway sleepers, black plastic bags containing nothing but the rotten memory of tossed dog shit, and unlabelled oil drums that I would not care to open. I discover a pile of smashed window panes and strips of plastic sealant dumped, perhaps, from a kitchen renovation job. I also discover a tonne of anthracite coal, which I gradually remove bucket by bucket to heat the house.

A passable path runs around the circumference, but it is surrounded by brambles, snatches of barbed wire and broken, useless fencing. The narrow lane that leads from the cottage is as dark and tunnel-like as the ancient holloways of Dorset and the Downs, and here during one early night’s wandering there flashes a huge badger across our path, hunched like an old woman.

Despite appearances, the place is wildly, gloriously alive. In fact, nature is winning here – in the tree trunk that has consumed the line of barbed wire, and the abundance of weeds and roots and creepers that will slowly pull a shed-sized empty metal storage container down to the ground over the coming years. The landscape is erasing man’s mistakes and reclaiming the space from its industrial past. This is a process that I will come to see often in the valley.

If the pond was once poisoned, then it has recovered now, for the water is busy with perch and roach feeding on newly hatched flies. I lift out several. Most are only a hand’s length or less, and I gently release them back into the murk. Several times I glimpse the long, ridged spine of something far bigger, a muscular tail flick thrashing at my peripherals. It is surely the ancient pike, archetypal as the mythical pike of almost every village pond in England, what Hughes described as being ‘of submarine delicacy and horror’. Like other elusive indigenous species – the deer, the badger – the pike is a mystery that stalks the cool and shadowed underworld. It is so briefly seen that it is barely there at all. It exists only for a splinter of a second, a creature that Hughes famously called ‘as deep as England’.

Stubb Dam pond was where Ted Hughes learned to swim. In his book Ted and I, his older brother Gerald describes the warm summer days spent here between 1927 and 1938 and records their sister Olwyn’s recollection of the nascent poet’s first dip: ‘I was sitting with Mam and Ted was paddling at the edge of the dam – he couldn’t swim then – when suddenly he was in quite deep water. Mam tore down to get him out, but he was swimming away happily, doggy-paddle style – his first ever swim.’

Gerald also writes of an incident at this pond in 1937, when Ted was six. The family were enjoying a picnic when, in an act of bravado or wild abandon, their father dived head-first into the water. William Hughes plunged straight into an abandoned bicycle. He surfaced quickly to discover that he had torn his chest and arms on the jagged metal and was bleeding from his injuries.

There is a very good chance that it was here too, on this obscure bowl of water down the lane from my new house, where Hughes also encountered his first pike, and where began a lifelong fascination with the fish that represented to him the essence of the life force.

‘Pike had become fixed at some very active, deep level in my imaginative life,’ he revealed to Thomas Pero in an interview for American angling magazine Wild Skeelhead and Salmon in 1999. ‘This recurrent dream was always an image of how I was feeling about life. When I was feeling good, I’d have dreams full of giant pike that were perhaps also leopards . . . They’d become symbols of deep, vital life. That’s how I see it. My obsession with pike maybe was my obsession with those energies. It was a psychological thing. This went on for years. A very bad time might produce a nightmare dream of the lake lined with concrete, and empty.’

Hughes went on to describe how the day before his marriage to Sylvia Plath he dreamed of hooking such a pike from a tremendous depth. ‘As it came up, its head filled the lake. I brought it out and its girth filled the entire lake. And I was backing up, dragging the thing out.’

In fishing the river, canal and local ponds such as this, Hughes found a focus for his thoughts, in what we would now identify as mindfulness, a practice that he would later apply to poetry. The closest I come, however, is lifting out the palm-sized perch and roach that are said to have consumed the brown trout which once stalked the shallow waters of this mill pond. I am a terrible angler, with little of the skill or desire to catch fish; in fact, in time the guilt I am wracked with at the thought of harming even the smallest bottom feeders will become so great that I will hang up my tackle. But for now, each morning on the water, I enter a sort of becalmed trance that, nearly a decade later, I have begun to identify as a process of decompression. Many anglers will tell you that fishing is rarely about catching fish; instead I was learning to breathe and to think, to master the art of patience and to broaden my horizon.

And I was surely lucky, for most of those June and July mornings the pond was as still as a mirror, a sepia looking glass reflecting my form as I stood and watched and waited to see what shape life would take next, though as A. E. Housman wrote: ‘June suns, you cannot store them / To warm the winter’s cold.’

The tragedy of summer is that it never lasts.

ONE MORNING EARLY in our relocation to the countryside I draw the curtains and watch a long and slender stoat slink the length of a field’s drystone wall. A hunter returning, it moves without urgency or fear, as swaggering in its ownership of the space around it as a solitary bull in a paddock awaiting breeding time.

Scattered like the lines of a net cast out over the North Country, each such drystone wall houses a city. A universe. These veins of the land harbour within them lives unseen.

The dawn stoat’s tiny spine ripples like the crest of a low-slung wave riding through the shallows to the shore. From this distance only its size differentiates it from the much smaller weasel, and it wears its sandy-brown summer jerkin; its belly is as white as daisy petals.

Here the wall is an arterial route, the stalking ground of this fearful killer of rabbits and rats, this tree-climbing, nest-raiding sneak thief of eggs. Perhaps it is a mother returning to attend to its litter of squeaking kits.

Two fields over from the house I see a bank above another drystone wall come alive with shrews, the tangle of grass busy with dozens of these scuttling long-nosed mammals working in unison towards some shared common cause – a relocation perhaps, or preparations for a great midsummer party. Shrews are territorial and can be aggressive when their home turf is impinged upon, so it is an unusual sight.

The drystone walls of England are the through-lines of our natural narrative, and home to a variety of fauna that so often goes unnoticed at first glance. Here lowland wagtails seek safety from predators and toads lurk in cool, dark crevices, and wasps build their paper-lantern nests of delicate beauty from an architectural blueprint held deep within their DNA and refined over tens of thousands of years. The nibble marks of these pulp-making machines can often be found on their discarded building materials – an old wooden palette, for example, or the chewed remnants of a cardboard coffee-cup holder.

The eyes of owls, robins and redstarts can be seen watching from cracks and gaps and cavities too.

RURAL LIFE WAS new to me then, a present continually being unwrapped with wonder, though I have since come to recognise that my existence barely qualifies as rural.

Instead this is countryside that is lived in, on and through. Perhaps life here in the valley could be described as ‘post-rural’ – a world where the cottages of old have fast Wi-Fi connections and the old stone wells out front are nothing but water-filled reminders of other times, portals of the imagination; where the shrinking territories of the deer and the fox and the badger are sliced through by roads, rivers and railway tracks.

Post-rural is an emerging lifestyle choice, one that is slowly reshaping the topography and demographics of Britain’s countryside, offering the best of both worlds: the comfort and convenience of modernity coupled with the otherness of the hills, woods and moors, and the deep-rooted symbiotic relationship with nature which still lingers within us after centuries of an agricultural existence, despite the accelerated migration that followed.

A census taken in 1801 found that the proportion of the English population living in cities was just 17 per cent, but by the close of that century, as landowners were displaced and industry boomed, the figure had jumped to 72 per cent. At the dawn of the twenty-first century the census found that 83 per cent of us now live in urbanised areas, while a mere 7 per cent of the population live in rural communities that qualify as villages or hamlets.

My own childhood was a suburban one, spent in the clean streets and cul-de-sacs that sprouted from the post-war/postindustrial English soil like mushrooms in an autumnal dawn. The countryside was close by, right where the tarmac oozed to a halt by the fields, lanes and scrublands, but it was nature contained. Beyond this shrinking triangulated space and across the cornfields were more houses, more estates, slowly linking up. I go back there often, and stepping out of the front door of my parents’ house into the still summer night of a housing estate in the English suburbs now is like slipping into a warm blue memory pool of longing. The past surrounds me in a swirl of emotions. Everything remains the same – neat, trimmed, ordered – yet somehow different too.

The trees on the small communal patch of grass out front – when did they get so big? I remember them being planted, but now their loftiness is unfathomable.

The cul-de-sacs are each named after an English county, and the similarity between houses and gardens is disorientating enough to strangers to create a maze-like effect. Dropped in the centre of the estate, a visitor might find themselves wandering for a long time down alleyways and cuts, only to arrive Escher-like, back where they started.

I like to walk the streets at night, especially in summer when the flat north-eastern skies stretch wide, and gaze into living rooms illuminated by the cool blue wash from the oversized flat-screen televisions. The estate is silent whenever I walk its velvet pavements, save perhaps for the sound of cars moving at high speed along the A1 only a mile or so away.

To me as a boy, lying in my bedroom, the motorway sounded like the sea, and I envisaged great waves of asphalt rising curling over shores of shifting shale. And now, still, the inland motorway at night is akin to something nautical – as cold and lonely as the vast ocean is to a solitary sailor adrift miles from land, at other times oddly comforting as a landing lamp to a child that is afraid of what might reside in their wardrobe.

Ballard once wrote that ‘the future is just going to be a vast conforming suburb of the soul’ but never commented on whether this was something to fear or embrace.

Culture paints the suburbs as a drab counterpoint to the visceral thrills of cosmopolitan living, where the city, with its promise of reinvention and anonymity, and endless potential for experience, is given a higher standing in our nation’s psyche. Rather than representing community and convenience, for many the suburbs signify a bedding-in, a sense of settling down and therefore, by extension, an acceptance of death. Their uniformity is dismissed by intellectuals.

The countryside, meanwhile, is idealised by some and dismissed as retrogressive by others, a fearful space where death is visible in tooth and claw, where ‘old ways’ are viewed as ‘wrong ways’ and all that existential silence and space is insidious, and therefore needing to be filled. Samuel Johnson may have famously said that ‘when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life’, but I would counter that ‘the man who fears the countryside fears himself’.

In the suburbs, nature is kept at arm’s length. It has been tamed, existing mainly in a plant pot sitting on a driveway, a hanging basket in a conservatory. A swinging bird feeder, the occasional hedgehog scratching across a dawn lawn. Weeds pushing through gaps. Things dumped in the tangle of the back lanes.

It is a world best portrayed in the artist George Shaw’s paintings of Tile Hill, the suburb of Coventry in which he grew up, and which formed the basis for his collections The Sly and Unseen Day and My Back to Nature. Using cheap Humbrol paint, Shaw captures a place devoid of people, but where the familiar scrublands are invested with meaning, where each stray carrier bag or abandoned stash of pornography is elevated to the status of the iconic, each underpass, alleyway or peephole through a creosoted fence suggesting a portal to another dimension.

The suburbs’ creeping encroachment upon our rural landscapes has had knock-on sociological effects: research shows that the behavioural patterns of the young have changed significantly since the 1970s. According to the writer George Monbiot in a New Statesman article entitled ‘The Age of Loneliness’, the ‘unaccompanied home range’ of children has declined by 90 per cent. ‘Not only does this remove them from contact with the natural world, but it limits their contact with other children,’ he writes. ‘When kids played out on the street or in the woods, they quickly formed their own tribes, learning the social skills that would see them through life.’

Distance from such explorations only breeds a fear and ignorance of the natural world, though the cruel irony is that, having moved away from agrarian life towards urban and suburban living, it is not now the strange natural world of poisonous plants, dirt, death and decay, and the potential for injurious accidents, that parents or their children need fear at all, but the dark and distorted digital world where faceless revenants stalk the most shadowy corners.

Perhaps it will be nature and the natural world in which succour and solace will once again be found by future generations.

And that, perhaps, is why I moved here, to a house by a wood and a moor and a river and a rock. To navigate a new way.

Chapter Two

Walking defines my earlier days in this new terrain. Up hills, into woodlands, along ancient packhorse tracks, through sulphurous bogs, under rocks, down caviar-black banks of slick soil. These lung-burning perambulations are undertaken without direction or a purpose other than to get an overview of the topography. I am doing that which I promised myself I would during a decade of sleepless city nights: I am seeking equanimity.

There is much to see and touch. The gnarly pocked bark of an ancient ash tree; the loaded seed pods of the Himalayan balsam; the moss-covered gritstone needles poking through the soft soil like the pinnacles of deeply buried obelisks. I taste stringent leaves, sour berries and water from a stream that looks like a stained-glass window laid flat across a meadow. I gain my bearings.

From the field that extends beyond our front garden’s perimeter, where three grazing horses which smell of warm, wet old socks wander over to snort and nibble at my jumper, I can see a mile east along the valley to a place I have not yet explored in these first weeks of losing myself: Scout Rock.

It is a densely wooded hole in the hillside beneath vertical drops of exposed rock that plunge down like a waterfall petrified by Medusa’s glare, and frozen as stone for ever. Viewed along the tunnel of the valley from the small black cottage, it looks like an amphitheatre reclaimed by nature, a lapsed volcano. The suggestion, perhaps, of a lost world.

An old map tells me that this wooded quarry was once known as Hathershelf Scout, unseen from the guts of the valley, but is more colloquially known as Scout Rock. In time, to me at least, it will become known simply as The Rock.

I first walk up there on a still day that smells like freshly sliced cucumber, the sky a rippling banner of blue that hangs over the swaying greens of an Arcadian summer.

SCOUT ROCK LOOMS silently over Mytholmroyd, part-protector, part-illegitimate cousin cast out to the limits of the parish boundaries of a small Pennine town with a population of approximately 4,500 people.

Mytholmroyd is best known as a place with a difficult-topronounce name seen from a rain-streaked train window as people pass through on the TransPennine Express route. The book Yorkshire Past and Present, published in 1871, claims that ‘Mytholmroyd’ is a compound of mey (girl), holm (a meadow) and riodr (a clearing), and therefore means ‘the girl’s meadow clearing’. More likely Mytholmroyd means ‘the meeting of two waters’, as it was here at this juncture, where Elphin Brook feeds into the shallow-running River Calder, that a town which feels more like a scattered village has spread like moss over the centuries, watched over by the frowning rock that blocks the sky to the south in a valley that John Wesley called ‘The most beautiful in England, with the most barbarous people.’

It is also known as the birthplace of Ted Hughes. Sitting on the south side of the valley, Scout Rock glowers down upon 1 Aspinall Street, where Hughes was born in 1930. In the opening lines of his study, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, the biographer Jonathan Bate observes that ‘The Rock lowers over an industrial village called Mytholmroyd. Myth is going to be important, but so is the careful, dispassionate work of demythologising: the first syllable is pronounced as in “my”, not as in “myth”. My-th’m-royd. For Ted Hughes it was “my” place as much a mythic place.’ (Hughes might have been amused had he attended the local screening of the 2003 Sylvia Plath biopic Sylvia, in which Daniel Craig, as miscast in the role of her husband as Gwyneth Paltrow was as the lead, loudly declared, ‘If I close my eyes, I could be back in Mith-mroyd’, much to the mirthful vocal disdain of the local filmgoers.)

Mytholmroyd sits a mile or so down the valley from Hebden Bridge, a town of a similar size that is internationally known for having once been voted by a newspaper the ‘fourth-funkiest town in the world’ and also for having the most lesbian residents per capita in the UK, therefore statistically making it the unofficial gay capital of Britain.

Unlike working Mytholmroyd, Hebden Bridge’s population is comprised of a colourful mix of old, deep-rooted Yorkshire families and offcumdens – that transient population of outsiders with a propensity towards bohemia, the arts, freethinking, dissidence, radicalism and the eco-movement. It is a unique and energetic town where old and new ways merge in a confluence of a thousand ongoing ethical arguments. It is, some have joked, ‘a drug town with a tourist problem’. By contrast, Mytholmroyd is more grounded, more stoic. It has few pretensions, and does not flaunt its Hughes connection as Haworth does with the Brontë sisters. Today, ’Royd exists with one foot in a modern era of industrial estates, small businesses, repurposed mills and post-war housing estates, and another in its pre-industrial past.

At the foot of the woods is Scout Road, a street that begins with an imposing Methodist Church perched vulture-like at its base. It’s empty now. The grip that this austere strain of Christianity once had on this valley is no more. The worshippers have lost faith or died out.

The road takes in some skulking factory buildings and a series of streets of back-to-back terraces. There’s a community-managed park too, with a communal vegetable patch and a pond, before the remaining terraces of houses narrow out to follow the road up to a primary school, an incongruous caravan park tucked away in a paddock and then nothing but the trees closing in as you enter Scout Rock Woods.

Here the road rises and winds with The Rock on your right until finally you ascend to the sky, the narrowing road meandering onwards towards the hamlets of Hathershelf and Boulderclough.

Up on the tops, where the valley meets the moors, there still exist tenant farms whose inhabitants have grazed the harsh land for centuries – the soil is no good for cultivation – and scattered around the length of the Upper Calder Valley are the ruins and remnants of eras reaching deeper into Albion: Iron Age, Celtic, Norman, Roman, each piled upon one another, peeling back here and there like the pressed-flat pages of a book, to give a glimpse of past epochs and the lives of our toiling ancestors.

And there like a ghastly curtain, the great slab of plunged earth, Scout Rock, to which no sign points. Though not visible from the valley floor, behind Scout Rock – above it, obscured – is a cloud-world of further farmed fields and brief hamlets and then the unforgiving moors themselves: foreboding and inclement barren plains; a massive flattened mausoleum from which new life springs forth in the cough of a deer or the call of grouse and curlew. Here Hughes’s ancestors worked the land, living in a farm ‘that seemed to be made wholly of old gravestones and worn-out horse troughs’.

The moods of these West Yorkshire moors swing like those of a stroppy teenager, and art and literature has imbued them with a strong sense of retrospective romance, a canvas on which to project the fancies of office-bound academics. Charlotte Brontë’s opinions on the delphs (a delph – or delf – is defined as that which has been dug or excavated, such as a mine, ditch, pit, quarry or even a grave), dingles and cloughs of the area only partially lay claim to the moorlands as muse to the three enamoured sisters. ‘The scenery of these hills is not grand – it is not romantic; it is scarcely striking,’ she wrote in her prefatory notes to Selections from Poems by Ellis Bell. ‘Long, low moors, dark with heath, shut in little valleys, where a stream waters, here and there, a fringe of stunted copse. Mills and scattered cottages chase romance from these valleys; it is only higher up, deep in amongst the ridges of the moors, that Imagination can find rest for the sole of her foot.’

The moors stretch away for miles to merge in one direction with the cursed Saddleworth Moor, where the bodies of children were buried in the mire by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, and then over to the Brontës’ stalking grounds of Haworth in the other.

Halfway between sits The Rock, where the moor suddenly drops away to give a glimpse of the black mass beneath it. In his recent guidebook West Yorkshire Woods – Part 1: The Calder Valley, local author and cartographer Christopher Goddard describes The Rock: ‘Its savage crumbling face was originally formed by an ancient landslip and later scoured out further to build some of Halifax’s buildings. It consists of two beds of gritstone separated by 20 feet of loose shale which is why so much of it has fallen into the wood below. Despite the amount of loose rock it was used by climbers in the early twentieth century and there was a viewpoint from the projecting rock in the middle of the Scout.’

Goddard describes this landmark as ‘frustratingly inaccessible and it is difficult to get any sort of close-up view of the precipitous face of Scout Rock’, noting that ‘a couple of footpaths run through Scout Wood but are closed off due to falling rock in Hathershelf Scout delfs’.

Such hazards ensure that The Rock remains a threat, an enigma, an inscrutable and evasive geological landmark avoided by most, yet its mute malevolence exudes a sort of charisma.

Its true name of Hathershelf Scout derives from the sloping fields above that are now stone-walled into geometric acres grazed in rotation by sedate yet curious cud-stuffed cows. Later the cliffs and woods that sit below came to be known as Scout Rock, ‘scout’ being a widely used term to refer to a hill or overhanging cliff, and originating from the Norse word scuti. Scuti Rock. Overhanging cliff.

Norsemen passed through this valley and stayed long enough to bestow etymological epithets that endure today like messages sent from a time when, as now, Britain was an island in transition, a land mass in a state of identity confusion, simultaneously arrogant and fearful, stoic and divided, inward-facing and adrift. Drunk on delusion.

Slice through the four counties of Yorkshire that collectively dominate the North of England and you will find a layer cake of time zones and narratives. We sit upon a massive compressed palimpsest of different strata formed over 500 million years. Britain has been part of a continental shift caused by the continually changing sea floors created by volcanic vents that line a ridge deep in the mid-Atlantic, at the rate of several inches per year. Where once the county was 3,000 miles south of the equator, it is now the same distance in the other direction. And doesn’t a Yorkshireman – and it is usually a man – like to remind you of his Northern-ness.

The folded laminations of rock beneath my feet range from sticky clay through cream-coloured limestone to golden sandstone, each holding the fossilised remains of species utterly alien to today’s world, skeletal frames buried deep amongst the bedded-down leftovers of steamy tropical rainforests now known as Barnsley, the sandy tough-grit deserts of Doncaster or the dinosaur delta of Scarborough.

Some 320 million years ago in the Carboniferous Period the country was part of a vast granite mountain range whose crenellated crowns were gradually worn down by rainstorms and then washed away in deluges of debris, each new sedimentary layer replacing the previous one, capturing any living thing in its path (fossils of relatives of squid and octopus have been found in gritstone fifty miles or more from any sea). Mainly the stone is comprised of that bejewelled bounty of boyhood explorations, quartz, and rock-forming mineral feldspar – veins of crystallised magma that make up more than half of the earth’s crust, and whose name originates from the German compound of Feld, meaning field, and Spat, a rock that does not contain any ore. Fieldspat. Feldspar.