Yesterday

Wigber Low between Bradbourne and Kniveton in Derbyshire. Up here our ancestors brought their dead and left them as carrion for the birds and animals. I think that I should like to go out in that way - returning to The Earth. But would the authorities allow Shirley and the kids to drag my hefty carcass up this hill and leave it on the ancient limestone cairn close by? I guess they would have to keep it all secret, stuff me in the boot of a car and honour my request in the dead of night. A side benefit is that it would save on outrageous funeral costs but as they huffed and puffed up the hill I doubt that they would be humming funereal melodies from long ago. Instead they'd be complaining - "What the bloody hell did he want this for?". At dawn, the crows would already  be circling.

Anglo Saxon wire and glass bead pendants
found on Wigber Low and now displayed in The British
Museum. Only the two green ones were from Wigber
Low, the other was found near Dover in Kent

Yesterday - the funeral cairn on Wigber Low

Hope

Hope. That's a good name for a village don't you think? Most of us live in hope with a small "h" but very few of us live in Hope with a capital "H". If I could choose I would rather live in Hope than in Purgatory, Envy or Greed for example though they could all be interesting places.

Hope is a village in The Hope Valley. It boasts three pubs, a  cement works, a little railway station on the Sheffield to Manchester line, a much extended fourteenth century church, a chicken called Kylie, a little methodist church, a primary school and a little secondary school that serves the entire valley. There are also two cafes, a village shop and an antiques and collectables shop called quite imaginatively, "Living in Hope".

I have driven through Hope many times and have sometimes stopped there but last week I decided to make a special trip to Hope, hoping to take some good pictures. In Sheffield we had lovely blue skies and sunshine but twenty minutes later when I reached Hope, clouds were impairing the illumination I hoped to find in Hope.

Hope pinfold

I discovered an old "pinfold" in Hope by the lane that leads to Pindale. It was used as recently as the the nineteen sixties for penning stray farm animals. The man in charge of a pinfold was known as  a pinner and it was his job not only to round up stray animals but also to collect release fees or fines from the animals' owners. In Hope, the occupants of the pinfold were invariably sheep but a few minutes later I considered carrying Kylie the Killer Chicken there.

She came running from her dilapidated chicken hut to attack me... or perhaps she was simply hoping for some corn. After all, like the human residents of the village, she also lives in Hope.

Kylie the Killer Chicken

Causeway

Last Sunday in the late afternoon, Shirley fancied a little country walk so I whizzed her up to the little car park at Dennis Knoll. We donned our boots and headed for Stanage Edge at the only point where it is traversed by an old track. The track is called Long Causeway and in past times it was used by Romans and later by jaggers and drovers moving goods or animals across the country. The Romans were in this area mostly because there was lead in the Derbyshire hills. A lot of it was shipped back to Rome and some was even discovered in the ruins of Pompeii.

Nowadays the track is mostly used by ramblers and mountain bikers but occasionally vehicular access is needed - especially when rock climbers have had painful trysts with gravity but also when the grouse shooting brigade are lusting after those cackling and unsuspecting moorland birds.

We walked for about an hour, up The Long Causeway and then northwards along the millstone escarpment. The light kept changing as clouds passed and evening approached and on the way back home for a late Sunday roast, I snapped the sun setting over the southern bulge of Stanage Edge. It was all a nice memory of the outdoors for Shirley to take into her working week  at the medical centre. And that is all this little post is about. Full stop or - as Americans say - period.

Now

Just now - the view from our kitchen door as late winter snow flutters down - beginning to blanket our extensive grounds. It has obliged me to telephone our rustic gardeners - Yankee Bob and Old Adrian, instructing them not to come in today. Meanwhile a closer view of Bo and Peep, shivering in the flurry of flakes. Peep is probably saying to Bo, "Mummy! I'm cold." And Bo is saying, "Shaddap! And carry on grazing!"  

Aliens

There are aliens amongst us. Not refugees and economic migrants from faraway places but real aliens, space aliens. You see them everywhere. They have merged almost seamlessly into our society. They come from the Planet Momby and are known as Mombies, a name that is in fact a compound noun, combining "mobile phone" with "zombie".

The behaviour of these Mombies is both fascinating and frightening. They are continuously in touch with their home planet as they walk around our city streets. Sometimes you see them chortling to themselves in the manner of nineteenth century lunatics. At other times, with earphones in, you may be aware of them trying to communicate with Invasion Control back on Momby:-

"Yeah. So I sez to him what ya going on about an...yeah...right. Shaddap! No way! Cool man... Yeah.  Did ye see it on Snapchat? ...Yeah. Wicked..." etc. etc..

They are oblivious to the world around them - to other pedestrians, to traffic dangers, to potential muggers and to the fascinating sights and sounds of the city. It is as if they are drugged and the only thing that matters in the whole world is what's happening on their little mobile screens. Many's the time I have had to dodge them. Otherwise we'd be colliding and you don't know what you might catch through physical contact with a Mombie!

Walking

"The Old Ways" by Robert Macfarlane is a challenging read. Though the main text finishes on page,364, the book contains a further seventy pages that variously include indices, notes, acknowledgements and a bibliography. For the author, it was all undoubtedly a well-considered labour of love.

This is mostly  a book about walking. Not a series of recommended routes or how to read a map but about the history of walking, about its spiritual dimensions, about how walking affects people and what it means to walk where others have gone before.

Following paths and the processes of walking are woven into our DNA like the arteries and veins that criss-cross our bodies just beneath the skin. Ancient hunters and gatherers walked and so did pilgrims. Soldiers walked back from battles, brides walk down aisles, we have funeral processions and today desperate Syrians walk to safer, happier lives. 

And when we walk the rhythm of our footsteps echoes the beating of our hearts. Paths and steps and strides. Moving onward. Leaving the past behind. And where there are junctions, where routes cross, we try to pick the best paths though sometimes our judgement fails us.

Some of these thoughts, my own experience of walking and the immediate aftertaste of "The Old Ways" made me create this poem before dawn today...

* * *

The Path

After a mile
You will cross an old stile
Walk on by a chirruping hedge
Then cut across
That broadening field
Following a line
That others have trod.

Down to a brook
That burbles its way
Through a sycamore stand
Then over a rustic bridge
And up to a grassy ridge
Where
If you look back
You will see
Where you have been.

Ahead the tower of
Saint Cuthbert’s
Will be visible
Beyond the ruins of a barn
With a copse
Sitting squat
Like a bonnet
On a bulbous hill
To the west.

Walk on
Along an old green track
That clings to the contours
Of the rising land
Till you come to a sign
By a galvanised gate
Then head straight
Along the line
In the sod
Where others have trod

Across a tapering meadow
Beside a hedge of laurel and beech
Where unseen sparrows
Quarrel and screech
Soon to cross an old stile
With another mile or so
Still left to go.

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