On the way to Arncliffe for our seven days in the Dales, we stop in Grassington to top up our already bulging bags of provisions. Although we’re up north, true to southern form we head to the deli for tahini and brown rice and top-of-the-range locally-made granola. Even our glove-buying takes on an unexpectedly gentle direction when the shop-keeper belies his Yorkshire burr by smoothing the fabric into the spaces between my fingers. Not much in the way of northern grit here.
As always it’s an absolute pleasure to perch on the edge of country lives, especially at this time of year. New lambs, the first primroses, larch budding like raspberries, lapwing nesting. The bubbling spiral of the curlew accompanies us everywhere. Evenings in The Falcon provide good company. The skies are big, the weather kind. Still, we are reminded often, in broken fences and ailing sheep, tractor breakdowns and all-night lambing, that this is no easy life. Our nearest of the ‘three peaks’, Pen-y-Ghent, nicknamed ‘Doom Mountain’ by Carole’s family, broods over us, snow-capped. Is it male or female? We can’t agree.
Mid-way through the week, we head for Settle. From the Market Square, the lady in the Tourist Information Office explains, you can walk along Kirkgate, past the fire station and Booths Supermarket and onto the river. I’m tempted to step back in time by the open doors of the Victoria Hall, apparently England’s oldest surviving music hall. Built in the 1850s, it has a history of continuous musical and theatre performances and, in the early 1900s, as ‘The Picturedrome’ cinema. An ‘act drop’ (a scenic alternative to closing the curtains during a performance interval) this one showing Settle Market Place in 1822 and painted by Edmund Handby, fronts the stage. A dance floor was installed during World War Two. Now run by a charity, the refurbished hall was reopened in 2001. Outside, I’m not quite returned to the present: next door, a double-fronted villa, peeling pale green paint, suggests grand designs and better days. No clues about its owners, past or present, though.
Photo: Alexander P. Kapp My route takes me along the edge of a fifties council estate – a woman walks a dog, another wanders into her front garden in slippers, her bare legs raw in the sharp wind. The smell of coal fires transports me back to childhood Carnforth and our own bit of then new social housing – and through a much-renovated mill complex before I reach a footbridge over the river. I dawdle by an information board, reading about the geology of the Ribble, millstone grit upstream and limestone down – or is it the other way round? – and the history of the riverside. I learn that there were mills on this stretch of river from the middle ages onwards and that the present buildings, dating back to the 1800s, were water-powered mills for spinning raw cotton which was imported to Liverpool and delivered here by canal. Families from all over the country were brought in to work the mills and other burgeoning industries, and housed in terraces of workers’ cottages built for the purpose, children working part-time until they were old enough at 14 to be considered adult. Which is where my mum was destined, did in fact land in one of Lancashire’s neighbouring mills until she was rescued by that other flourishing industry, the railways, in the person of my father. Despite extensive memory failures, she can still speak eloquently of the horrors, though I don’t think she mentions the fire risk, an occupational hazard apparently from all that fluff floating about. At any rate, today’s children avoid such fates: at my back the students of Settle College chatter and play happily on the field during their lunch break. I watch one skinny rip in a t-shirt clamber about on mossy rocks and lichened branches and roots chasing a rugby ball which has landed in the river, for the hundredth time by the look of his expertise.
So, north (or is it south?) to limestone, or the other way for grit? I choose north, but it could as well be the other direction, as the polarities persist: permeable or impermeable? Poor or rich? Victorian villa or mean back-to-back? Certainly plenty of the mill owners made their fortunes at the expense of the lives of ‘hands’ like my mother. For her, growing up on the edge of the town, the moors were as dark and satanic as the factories themselves, and the north has always been somewhere to escape from, rather than to. Still, sixty years on, I’m pulled both ways. My path takes me along the river bank for a mile or so – from waste ground to verdant pasture, from the faint chemical tang of the water near the factories to the rich smell of farmyard manure – and then follows the course of the railway before allowing me a way through an underpass (road or rail?) and up onto the hills above Langcliffe. All along the Dales High Way down into Settle, the urban and the rural jostle for the foreground.
Back in Arncliffe and thereabouts, the sense of duality stays with me. I revel in the pleasures of the countryside, the space, the near-silence. I love the mass of the hills, the way the landscape folds into itself, the textures of marsh and meadow, the skeletons of winter trees. And the colours! Green pales to dove-grey and sable in the mist; marram grass glows peachy pink in the late afternoon. On our last morning, the sky is suddenly clear blue, the fields bathed in real spring sunshine, the thrush loud in its celebration of the season. Pen-y-Ghent still looms over us, though, both hard and soft, limestone and grit. True north? it seems to say. Neither hard nor soft, neither one thing nor the other. Or maybe a bit of both.
RSS Feed
