On Ilkley Moor2

It was Ilkley, a small, prim town in the Yorkshire Dales, the heir to a fashionable spa of Victorian times, that incubated my interminable adolescence. Delirious hordes of ecstatic corpuscles raged through my veins in those days. One moonlit night in high summer they goaded me into slipping out of the house, almost running up Parish Ghyll, the steep residential road we lived on, and through the three little wooded parks that cling to the skirts of Ilkley Moor. Ahead, the sky had to muster all its stars to differentiate itself from the hulking mass of the moorland plateau. I pressed onwards up shaggy heather steeps and across dells breast-high in bracken, to the line of low cliffs and scarps that announces the wide wild acres beyond them. Out of breath, I paused to look back at the dim glimmers and roving sparks of the somnolent town below. A misshapen moon, almost full, hung above it. I found that in my violent scramble I had cut my finger on the razor-blade spine of a bracken stem, and blood was oozing, slowly. I raised my arm until my finger was silhouetted against the moon’s disc, and watched as a black beadlet swelled and then fell as if cut off by its sharp edge. Appeased by the blood-sacrifice, I wrapped a handkerchief round my finger and began to pick my way home.

Ilkley Moor has been made world-famous by a dismal Yorkshire dialect song, ‘On Ilkla Mooar baht ’at’, that used to make me ashamed when, in the course of school trips to the Continent, we Ilkley Grammar School pupils met up with foreign school groups who could enchant us with lovely songs from the Auvergne, the Black Forest or Connemara, while we could find nothing better than this tedious rigmarole. However, the story that unfolds in the first lines of its verses, each followed by a triple dose of ‘On Ilkla Mooar baht ’at’, has a certain down-to-earth truth in it:

Tha’s been a cooartin’ Mary Jane

On Ilkla Mooar baht ’at

On Ilkla Mooar baht ’at

On Ilkla Mooar baht ’at

Tha’s bahn’ to catch thy deeath o’ cowd

Then us’ll ha’ to bury thee

Then t’worms’ll come an’ eyt thee up

Then t’ducks’ll come an’ eyt up t’worms

Then us’ll go an’ eyt up t’ducks

Then us’ll all ha’ etten thee

That’s wheear we get us ooan back.

In my schooldays a teaspoonful still survived of the folk-world of this song, in a few lanes of small houses that geographically and socially lay on the other side of the railway embankment from the three-floors-over-basement gentility of Parish Ghyll, and have long been swept away. There I found cramped but friendly kitchens and interesting backyards with ferret-hutches and tethered dogs. My friend Jim lived here; my mother disapproved of him, and another mark of his superior status was the jackdaw that rode on his shoulder and accompanied our caterpillar-hunts on the Moor. On one of these expeditions we found a fledgling, probably from a curlew’s or a golden plover’s nest, that had been mauled by a predator. After some debate we decided that it had to be killed. Jim picked it up and deftly twisted its head off as casually as if he were opening a screw-top bottle. Then he held the head up before him, beak to nose, and apologized to the little creature in a few serious and fitting words, which, regrettably, I do not remember, but which were as unsentimental about the cycles of birth and death as the folk song.

The old song lent itself to parody, at least. When a noticeably well-formed girl named Mattingham or something like it joined my class in the middle of a term, the less mannerly of us were soon singing ‘On Ilkla Mooar with Matt’. While I was probably the only member of the class who spent much time on the Moor, I was too inhibited for it to be an arena for even the most juvenile groping towards the satisfaction of lust. Once with a girl who was vaguely identified as my girlfriend of that period I climbed the Moor to an abandoned quarry. A fine drizzle filled the rocky void plus the time spent in it with damp. At a loss, I stood disconsolately throwing pebbles into a puddle. The girl observed me curiously, and then pronounced, as if she were giving the scene its title: ‘Tim, disconsolately throwing pebbles into a puddle.’ Later we began a tentative game of tag; I chased her round the puddles; we slipped in mud and laughed and shrieked – but I took care never to catch her inescapably.

It was not until the early years of my life-partnership with M that the Moor revealed – but chastely – an erotic potential. We were in Ilkley to visit my parents in the family home, and had escaped from the tensions of the domestic situation by climbing to the crest of the Moor, just above the cliff and the huge cube of rock fallen from it known as the Cow and Calf. There we had a row, but made it up sufficiently well to continue our walk. It was a very hot day in a dry season, and in one place up on the plateau we noticed threads of smoke rising from the turf underfoot. We were a long way from any source of help, so we set about stamping out the incipient blaze, which seemed to transfer itself underground to another spot nearby. Eventually we managed to stand on all necks of the monster simultaneously, and went on our way uneasily aware that the first puff of wind could resurrect the fire.

A mile or so further on we paused to admire the feather-light, snow-white heads of countless bog-cotton plants filling a damp hollow. They flickered and wavered like cool flames. On impulse I took off all my clothes and waded out to sit among their soft caresses. M did not join me, but her alert gaze was enough to mend the distance left between us by our smouldering disagreement. Soon, though, it felt as if all the long bare horizons of the Moor were watching us, and I came out of the pale shape-shifting otherworld to join her on firmer ground.