When unsaddled, mules should be allowed to roll, a procedure they thoroughly enjoy and one which rapidly dries the heated back.
The War Office, Animal Management (London, 1923)
SUNLIGHT WAS STILL falling aslant the lane, but there were dark storm clouds ahead over the cliff scars that edged Crosby Ravensworth Fell, and the air had turned humid with the anticipation of rain. I was walking down the rough, unmade surface of Knott Lane, near the village of Orton, a day’s journey to the east. And I had come to see a place of great talismanic importance in the landscape. A detour from the bridleway – so I had left Jethro and Jasper for a while – but a necessary one.
I had no wet-weather gear with me. Instead I was wearing just an old white shirt with blue stripes. It occurred to me that this was one of the few shirts that crossed every boundary in a Britain that was still heavily demarcated: a shirt worn by gypsies, farmers and city businessman alike, over weather-beaten necks and those made pale by a lifetime of air-conditioned offices; perhaps because the thin blue vertical stripes have the universal effect of making the wearer look slimmer. Mine had a looser, more flattering cut – the time was long gone when I could get away with a tailored, fitted shirt – and let in a welcome breeze to combat the humidity.
The stones revealed themselves suddenly as I passed a wall. They were grouped in a field, looking not so much mysterious as a bit lost and forlorn after 5,000 years of existence. The Orton Stone Circle comprised thirty-three stones of different sizes, set in a wide ring of more than a hundred yards in circumference.
The grandeur of the original conception had been lessened by a stone wall built right up against one end of the circle – although nothing as intrusive as at its contemporary, Stonehenge, where roads have made the monument a virtual traffic island. But whereas Stonehenge received a million visitors a year, the only other audience at these stones were sheep. It felt like a forgotten place.
Yet the stones had presence. The grain and the soft pink of the granite glowed in the last of the sun before the rain clouds arrived. I remembered Robert Louis Stevenson’s lines:
Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places,
Standing stones on the vacant wine-red moor,
Hills of sheep, and the howes of the silent vanished races,
And winds, austere and pure.
‘To S. R. Crockett’, from Songs of Travel (1895)
A ‘howe’ is an old Scots word for a tumulus. While a stone circle can bring out the best in poets, I’ve often thought that something about them inhibits guide writers – as if they were such prehistoric oddities that all anyone can do is mention them and pass on briskly. The only extraneous detail about the Orton Stone Circle that commentators like Wainwright love to include, because it’s factual so they feel safe, is that these stones are ‘erratic boulders brought to this area by glaciers’.
The glacial action on the surrounding landscape is irrelevant, and not something of which prehistoric man would have been conscious. But what does matter is that these stones were so different from the local limestone. Were exotic. And there was nothing Neolithic men appreciated more than a wild bit of stone.
It has long been known that the Stonehenge bluestones were brought all the way from the Preseli Mountains on the western coast of Wales, a distance of 240 miles. The precise quarry they came from has now even been identified. Recent discoveries have shown that the vast interior of Silbury Hill, the man-made monument in Wiltshire, contains many stones that had equally travelled a very long way. And the previous summer I had made a pilgrimage up to the Outer Hebrides to see the stones of Callanish, shards of unusual Lewisian gneiss stabbing the sky in a cruciform pattern.
The provenance of stones had immense power for prehistoric man, and not just in Britain: I knew from my travels how strong an element it was in the archaeology of Peru, where stones were transported from great distances to other sites. No stone would ever be considered, to use our pejorative and dull term, just a boulder. If you lived that vulnerably and close to the ground, the landscape had far more meaning.
The Orton Stone Circle has been much reduced over the millennia. In 1862, the whole site was ploughed, with the irretrievable loss of archaeological evidence. Some stones were blasted into fragments. Much of the embankment on which the stones originally stood has been flattened. Even a century ago, there were forty rather than thirty stones. They have all fallen, so none now stand over a metre high.
This part of the country was particularly attractive to Bronze Age man. The map of prehistoric sites in Britain makes Cumbria look like a metropolitan area. Castlerigg, near Keswick, and the wonderfully named Long Meg and Her Daughters are two of the better-known stone circles in the Lake District. But even closer to Orton lay a whole nexus of prehistoric sites: including Kemp Howe, which once had an impressive avenue of stones leading to a wide ring until the Victorians built the West Coast Main Line railway right through it. Sensitivity to prehistoric – and therefore pre-Christian – culture was not high on the Victorian agenda.
Outside of a few new-age commentators like Julian Cope, and his eccentric almanac of prehistoric sites, the smaller stone circles around Britain attract little interest. There was a time when they were more admired. In the late eighteenth century, there was even a fashion for recreating them. The same Mr Pocklington who attracted Wordsworth’s ire for building a terrible house on his island in the Lake District also fashioned a mock stone circle. History does not record, sadly, Wordsworth’s reaction to this; one imagines it to have been apoplectic. Unlike Stonehenge, it never made it into The Prelude.
When Wainwright was taking his Coast-to-Coast route, he complained that such prehistoric monuments can only really be appreciated by aerial photographs. This seems a specious objection when it comes to the stone circle at Orton; a short walk up the steep slopes of nearby Great Asby Scar disturbed the local rabbits and gave me a fine overhead view; one that allowed me to see that strictly speaking it was not a ‘stone circle’ at all, but a ‘stone oval’. The long end of that oval pointed towards the north-west, along the alignment common to many other such rings, as the scholar Aubrey Burl has pointed out – for that is the alignment of sunset on 1 May, the ancient Celtic festival of Beltane, whose roots go very deep indeed.
From above, the stones were also set in their context, with the Howgills beyond – the hills where George Fox gave his tremendous seventeenth-century speech, which launched the Quaker movement, to an audience in the open air.
I wondered if it was something to do with the nature of the Howgills. They are not grand imposing mountains of the sort that dominate the Lake District, but manageable hills of fell and dale, of a soft and fecund green. Human in scale. A landscape that was farmed by prehistoric man just as much as by the shepherds who listened so much later to George Fox. A landscape that could be seen as sacred and full of potential for the human spirit. A green and pleasant land indeed: England at its best.
The scramble up Great Asby Scar had made me grateful again for my loose white shirt and I rested on the top, looking out at the view and the stone ring below. I took it all in for a while. There was a cairn of stones left by people who had taken this journey over the years and I sheltered beside it, as the wind started up. The same wind that was bringing the storm clouds across. Then the heavens opened and I let the rain drench me to the skin.
The rain was still falling as we travelled deeper into the Howgills, almost the first we had seen on our journey so far. Jethro’s coat acquired a glistening sheen; Jasper wrapped his cloak tighter around him. When we sheltered in the horse van to make cups of tea on the beaten-up old stove, the rain brushed along the corrugated roof like an artist painting it with watercolours.
The Howgills are the welcoming hills just to the east of the Lake District: a gentler land, outside of the national park boundaries, so less well- (or over-) preserved. They were not a part of the country I knew – so it was doubly welcome that we had a house to shelter in, with the artist Jason Gathorne-Hardy.
I had met Jason in a providential and satisfying way. His drawings of birds and sheep had become well known and sought after. Several of my friends had bought one of them over the years. I became acquisitive, a rare thing for me; but I see very little art I ever like enough to want to buy. Or for that matter, can afford. I rang him up at his gallery and home in Suffolk.
Jason, in a way I soon learned to be typical, was both welcoming and curious. He discovered I was a writer – and as, among other things, he ran an art and literature festival, I was signed up to perform. He asked about my next and future projects.
When I told him I was trying to get a mule across the north of England, he offered the use of an old farmhouse his family shared as a holiday base in the Howgills.
‘I think it could be perfect for a mule,’ he enthused. ‘There’s an old stable. We don’t have fields of our own any more but we could borrow a bit of pasture from the local farmer. Or our walled orchard may be big enough.’
Jason met us now when we arrived, wearing an old brown overcoat that covered many woollen layers, and with a cloth cap perched on his head from which a jaunty feather protruded. The flowery shirt that poked out from under his woollen sweater was the only clue that ‘you’re not from round here’.
Banks Farm was a little way up the lane from Ravenstonedale – a handsome village, large enough to have its own pub. Not that Banks Farm was unwelcoming in its own right, or lacked alcohol. A red front door in the white wall led through to a snug: a living room small enough for three men and Jason’s dog to sit round the table and put the world to rights. There was no central heating, but there was a wood-burning stove.
Jason had driven from Suffolk to greet us, a substantial journey made longer because he had, in an eccentric way, come via Wales in order to collect some Dexter beef steaks (‘I hadn’t realised it was so far, but they were giving them to me’), which he now proceeded to cook. He served them with vintage wine he had bought in a job lot at an auction for a knock-down price but never opened. The cork crumbled when extracted – a bad omen – and the wine tasted like cider vinegar.
‘Ah, well,’ he said with a shrug, ‘you can never know with these things.’ Jason was not a man to let anything trip him up.
Every room in the farmhouse had acquired a deep layer of family life. Jason’s grandfather had bought it at auction during the agricultural depression of the 1930s (by accident – he had wanted another farm but got this one by default) and the family had been coming here ever since. But while Jason shared the house with other members of that family, it felt imbued with his own artistic presence.
Just as with Edward Piper’s studio in Somerset and those of other artists I have known, there was a sense of place (and grace) that extended throughout the house: not only the paintings and prints scattered throughout, as one would expect, but everything from plates to old books to the sheepskin rugs.
The Bloomsbury project, of living the art as well as creating it, still seems a desirable quest. Jason avoided the self-indulgence that often attends this, with a scrupulous attention to the authenticity of place, the roots of the landscape (about which he knew much), and the authenticity of his own work.
And the farmhouse had an austerity to it. This was not Charleston, let alone Sissinghurst, in their comfortable South Downs settings. With only forty acres – which these days the family contracted out – the farmland would not have given much of a living, and the house was in an exposed position at the top of a hill. One previous farmer had hung himself.
Jason showed me the old cow-byres at the end of the farm which had been left unchanged: dark, damp rooms from which the cattle would have emerged blinking after many months in the winter dark. We retired to more commodious accommodation: deep, wide beds surrounded by dark wood furniture, while Jethro had the small orchard to roam.
The next day, Jason took us for a walk across the fields at the back of the farm where he and his siblings used to play when they were small. We crossed a stream tumbling down through the farm from the open fell. He told us that his family often came here on holiday from their own farm in the flatlands of Suffolk, so as a child these hills were a constant revelation and a surprise.
The Howgills sit discreetly and modestly between the Yorkshire Dales and the North Pennines. They are not well known. I would wager that a large proportion of the population of Britain has no idea where they are and, if asked, would guess Scotland. Or Australia.
Jason clearly found them a continuous source of artistic stimulation. He had his sketchbooks with him now as we walked, in an angular canvas knapsack. I could see how the long, lean undulating hills could give a satisfying horizon-line for a painter; mountains, by contrast, with their jagged edges, are notoriously difficult to fit into a frame. Even Turner struggled with the Alps.
To me, this landscape felt empty, and in a good way: the farms that we could see were few and far between. I asked Jason why.
‘Yes, the pattern has always been that you get the enclosed land with the farmhouses along the valley bottoms, which has the richer soil, and then as you get up into the Howgills themselves, the hills, you get large areas of open land like Ravenstonedale Common here. So you would climb from richer pastures out onto the fell, the heath.
‘And as you walk up the hill, you can almost hear the grass change underfoot. The fell grass often creaks, so it sounds like you’re walking over leather – whereas the richer, lower grass we’re on now, of the pastures, is soft and silent.’
We went quiet to put this to the test. I liked the idea of listening to grass – very Brian Eno – and the ground was lovely going after the stone and flint of the Lake District; sedge and a little bit of sphagnum moss were underfoot, as the flanks of the hills were often waterlogged, so the peat had a gentle bit of give. Small clouds of midges were rising from the sphagnum. Under normal circumstances this might have been foreboding, but the midges were content just to look picturesque silhouetted against the sun, forming a double helix that spiralled upwards.
Jethro was in his element. I suspected that if asked – loath as I was to ventriloquise – he would have been happy to stay in Howgills for the duration. And Jason would have been equally happy to host him. He had already been making acquisitive enquiries.
‘How much hay does Jethro eat? And do you think the RSPCA would let someone adopt him permanently?’
The RSPCA were desperate for someone to adopt Jethro on a long-term basis; I was just fostering him for the duration of the walk. But, quite rightly, they wanted a person who had other horses and mules as companions for him.
We could see sheep up above us on the fells. ‘That will be a hefted flock,’ said Jason. ‘They know their patch and won’t stray far.’
The idea of sheep being hefted, drawn back to a particular part of the land, is an attractive one. In a way, we speculated, many of us are hefted ourselves to a piece of land, although we perhaps may not realise it.
Jason told a story of two agricultural labourers in Suffolk who during the depression of the 1930s decided to chance their luck and emigrate to Canada. They sold all their possessions to get the tickets over to Liverpool and the boats. On the slow train across the East Anglian prairie, however, as they saw what they were leaving, they became homesick and abandoned the plan by jumping off the train and walking home instead.
History – or at least Jason – didn’t record whether they felt later this had been a good decision; although given the hardship other emigrants experienced in Canada, despite the enticing offer of free land, perhaps this change of heart was providential.
‘It would be interesting,’ I suggested, ‘and even appropriate if we were all marked with a stripe or a smit mark to show where we were hefted. Perhaps a discreet tattoo below the waterline. Jasper, I think you should be hefted. Although I don’t think Jethro would take to it. A mule has a right to roam, after all.’
‘I wouldn’t mind having a couple of clips taken out of my ears,’ said Jasper. ‘If it was under anaesthetic.’
He stopped to pick up some sheep’s wool that had got carded into the grass.
‘This is fantastic stuff to have in your pocket in case you get blisters. Full of natural lanolin. Not that I’m anticipating any blisters on this trip. But as they always say, better to be looking at it than looking for it.’
He added it to the mysterious depths of the poacher’s pocket in his jacket. Like a magician’s hat, I had seen many things disappear into this; but nothing ever seemed to re-emerge.
We headed up with Jason’s dog Toby clipping at our heels – although Toby sensibly gave Jethro a wide berth. There was no path, so the sort of meandering walk followed in which three men are more interested in the conversation than in where they are going; we were aiming for the top of nearby Harter Fell.
Jason explained how his family’s small farm here was part of a land stewardship conservation scheme, so some areas had been left for set-aside, with pastures gone to wild meadow and the old stone walls maintained. All admirable stuff, even if, he said, the farmer in him itched to see all available land used well.
We were learning more about Jason’s eccentricities. One of them stopped us in our tracks when he mentioned that he had been building a 200-metre-long picnic table back at his main farm in Suffolk.
‘Two hundred metres,’ both Jasper and I squealed. ‘Or do you mean feet? Or inches?’
I did the maths: 200 metres was about 660 feet. Which would mean a picnic table that was too big for most fields, even though in East Anglia they made them large.
‘Yes,’ said Jason, as if it was a natural ambition, ‘it may get into the Guinness World Records. Although to do so we need enough people actually having a picnic at the table at the same time – which would be a lot to cater for, let alone arrange.
‘At least you haven’t asked me, as some people do, whether it was all cut from the same tree! To which I always reply that, wherever you were in the world, you would probably have seen that tree growing.’
We asked how people sat.
‘Sawn tree trunks. Or they bring their own chairs. The planks we use for the table are bloody heavy. I’m always getting a bad knee or back from moving them around the farm.
‘I had an embarrassing injury two or three years ago when I was walking along at dusk, carrying my drawing bags, so my weight was off-balance. And I saw one of the planks had come loose from the table, knocked by a sheep, so I jumped up onto it to do some repairs. Which was all right. But when I jumped off again, I landed at an awkward angle and ruptured the knee ligaments.
‘And I had been conscious at the time there were a lot of things in my life I wasn’t really facing up to, which I needed to, because I had been too busy. It was as if God had said, “You idiot, you have to deal with this.” Flick. And my first thought was, “This is really painful, something has really gone wrong with my knee.” And the next was, “OK, this has got to stop now, I need to face up to some decisions.” And the third was, again, “This hurts like fuck!”’
We reached Harter Fell to see the ancient woods of Murthwaite below. I wondered if Tolkien had based his Mirkwood on this Viking name – the sort that would have appealed to him. It is a remnant of the original forest that once covered most of Britain, broadleaved and with orchids growing between its deep, dark glades.
A cold wind started up, so we sheltered under a scrape a little below the summit and had tea from a Thermos. It was a clear October day and we could see a long way in every direction. The big stone farmhouses across the valley were noticeably substantial.
‘Several hundred years ago, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century,’ said Jason, ‘the sheep industry was very profitable here. So they built these farms – and you can tell the stone has been dressed, so they’re not just dry-stone walls. The buildings have been assembled with a lot of care.’
To me, it didn’t have the ‘preserved in aspic’ feel of the Lake District – or for that matter, any tourists. Apart from the odd walker who goes to see the famous waterfall at Cautley Spout, few people venture this way. I liked the looser feel, with small communities and farmsteads placed higgledy-piggledy over a beautiful set of hills.
Jason had been here for the hay harvest a few months before. He told us he had sat on a ridge above the River Lune and seen the hay being gathered from the half-a-dozen farms all around; and how it had reminded him that this was still a working farm landscape. And how rare that was these days – how few places were left where agriculture still dominated absolutely.
‘What I like,’ said Jasper, ‘is that it’s a softer landscape than we saw in the Lake District. All those rocks we had to clatter across with Jethro. This is more undulating, more forgiving – although of course it would still be harsh in winter.
‘The architecture is comfortable. Good stonework. No draughts going through the walls. In Ireland, we would call these people “strong farmers”: farmers who are in charge of themselves.’
We could see handsome stone barns backing on to Wild Boar Fell, more common land where sheep could graze. The wool crop must once have been very valuable to sustain such investment. But the agricultural depressions first at the end of the nineteenth century and then in the 1930s had knocked the stuffing out of the prosperous local pillows. Some farmhouses in the distance had been abandoned.
More recently, the foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2001 had been savage in Cumbria, with a share of almost half of the national reported cases and the consequent widespread slaughter of livestock. To rebuild the flocks of sheep that had always been hefted to one part of the landscape would take patience and time.
‘It feels as though there are fewer sheep here up on the common now than when I was a child,’ said Jason. ‘So many were slaughtered during the foot-and-mouth, and so much damage and destruction was done to the flocks.
‘Outsiders think you can just purchase a whole new herd with the compensation money and off you go. But it’s not as simple as that. The Howgills must have had twenty to thirty flocks beforehand, each hefted to a particular place, and once one of those disappears, it’s like losing a piece of the jigsaw. The boundaries start to fall apart. The sheep stray.’
The burning of sheep and cattle carcasses that took place at the time of foot and mouth – some 10 million animals slaughtered, when many could have been vaccinated – was in some ways like the burning of a library, Jason felt. The loss of an inherited hefted knowledge that could not be replaced overnight, of herds that had built up for generations.
Not that sheep were an unmixed blessing. There are precious few trees in the Howgills. Jason had pointed out a rare covert of them as we passed a steep gorge – birch, rowan and ash, covered in honeysuckle – which had been preserved only because it was too difficult for sheep to graze. ‘Land,’ as Jason put it, ‘wants to be woodland – that is its natural energy and tendency – and sheep nibble that future out.’ The uniform green sward they create is not entirely welcome.
The environmental campaigner George Monbiot has been at the vocal forefront of this criticism:
We pay billions to service a national obsession with sheep, in return for which the woolly maggots kindly trash the countryside. The white plague has done more extensive environmental damage than all the building that has ever taken place here, but to identify it as an agent of destruction is little short of blasphemy. Britain is being shagged by sheep, but hardly anyone dares say so.
‘Sheepwrecked’, the Spectator (May 2013)
In reply, sheep farmers like James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd’s Life, would argue that a mixed, balanced economy was perfectly possible, while admitting there has been overgrazing in the past; and that, moreover, a Lake District without sheep farming would become an empty heritage centre. I had heard James lecture and agreed strongly with his concern that there was a current ‘disconnect’ from farming; that the long tradition of keeping sheep on shared common fells, without fences, was an important reminder of a time when the whole of England had yet to be enclosed.
It was a good example of how the ideological concept of a ‘natural England’, a state to which we could and should return, was fraught with contradictions. I asked Jason about the controversy George Monbiot’s criticism of sheep had caused here as well as in the Lake District.
‘The local sheep farmers all hated him for it. But what we perhaps need is some new balance between the open fells for sheep, with all the history they bring with them, and letting some land revert to woodland. And I mean revert – not planted. Just let the natural trees come back, which may take longer than planting up, but will be more in keeping.’
We could see the faint line of paths riding high over the ridges of the hills, slip-sliding between them.
‘There are bridleways,’ said Jason, ‘which go right across the top of the Howgills, some of them very ancient. A lot were abandoned at the end of the nineteenth century with the decline in farming. And sometimes over the years when I’ve been walking across them, I can imagine the faintest echo of the Roman legions tramping towards Hadrian’s Wall and the northern outposts.’
Jason knew how to entice his listeners. I immediately wanted to take one such drovers’ road with Jethro along Bowderdale, which would have been the old route for pack horses travelling south to Sedbergh, home of the Quakers.
We drove over to the beginning of the route in the horse van – a van which I noticed Jason was beginning to covet, perhaps because Jasper was talking it up: ‘Usually I hate driving, although I’ve ended up driving a lot on this trip. And I find I really like driving this lorry. It’s such a zen experience. It’s too loud to listen to the radio, and it’s a very difficult, physical thing to steer, so it’s a real retro experience. There’s no synchromesh.
‘You’re going along in a sort of time capsule with the rest of the world rushing past. It’s quite wide, and you have to be particularly careful in these lanes. It’s an instant mindfulness trip. You really can’t think of anything else except driving. And you’ve got the mule in the back, so there’s always that constant thought that you must be careful not to jolt or go around corners too sharply.
‘In a way, driving is one of the few forms of meditation that Westerners understand – you have to concentrate without thinking.’
I gave Jasper some mints from the stash in the glove compartment to help the concentration. My job was to navigate, listen to Jasper’s mule stories and provide occasional sustenance.
Jason hunched forward from the jockey’s compartment to put his head between us. ‘I always wonder if it should not be so much “I think therefore I am”, but rather more “I do therefore I am”.’
It was the first time we had had a philosophical conversation in the van. Usually while Jasper talked about mules, I talked about football. Jason’s presence had lifted the tone.
Jasper mused. ‘Yes, words are powerful creative forces in life but when it comes down to it, one judges situations and people by what gets done. The attraction of so-called “simple people”, the ones I work with on horses, is that they say what they’re doing and do what they say. It may not make them great conversationalists, but it doesn’t half cut to the chase. They’re quite often the people I go to for advice. They don’t faff around. They will give it to you direct. Whatever you are attempting, they might just say, “That’s stupid – you should do it like this. And get on with it!”’
As a writer, I was – like Jasper – all too aware of the truth of this. Words can be a displacement activity; so much easier to talk about things than to do them. In a way, the whole mule trip had come about with a loose way of words. I had talked myself into doing something I then had to fulfil.
When we reached the roadhead, Jethro came bucketing out of the van at tremendous speed, as if itching to get back on to the fells. Jason had already made admiring noises about Jethro’s fine mule accoutrements: the Iranian saddle lashed around his girth with my mother’s long leather belt from an ancient trunk in the attic; the elegant, if small, saddlebags; the striped saddle blanket. This was an equine starlet who could easily have made the cover of American Mule, the Bulletin of the British Mule Society or some other such fine publication. He fidgeted impatiently as we made our own small adjustments to boots and rucksacks.
And then we were off, up the long Bowderdale valley (‘a noble valley indeed’ as Wainwright called it) which heads south past the Calf: an unusual name for a mountain, given that, as the highest in the Howgills, it has no corresponding mother.
The bridleway had once been well trodden, when open-cast coal was taken by pack animals from Galloway Gate to distribution points like Sedbergh. Only in 1840 had such open-cast coal stopped being profitable, when the coming of canals and railways allowed the deep mining of pits in South Yorkshire to begin.
But now it had a faded, ghostly quality. The wide track curved satisfyingly up the long valley. For the first time, we were walking in a mist, although such a light one that it merely softened the views a touch, like a graduated filter on a lens.
This was how I had always imagined a pack-horse route: a green road across the landscape. And I felt man and mule were much more in harmony than we had been through the Lake District. I could walk with only a lead rope held loosely over my shoulder and Jethro following – not at all the regulation way I had done for the RSPCA, but how I was used to travelling in South America. And Jethro was responding at a good pace, ambling along behind me. True, he had playfully headbutted me in the chest when we had stopped for Jasper to take a picture; but a mule must have his fun.
Jasper was enjoying it as well. ‘Now, this is one of the first real pack-horse routes we have come across so far. Not just something people have managed to get pack horses over, with complicated chicanes and steep rock faces where Jethro’s been struggling to haul himself up – with great aplomb, it must be said, as he is a mule after all, and nimble of foot and strong of heart. But you can tell he’s got a real tempo under his hooves here, so it’s much more pleasant for him and also much more pleasant for us. It takes away the worry of what’s under your feet, or more to the point, what’s under your animal’s feet.’
We set off up the long gentle valley at a good clip of some four miles an hour; ‘song pace’ as Jasper called it. He sang us a few bars of folk songs he thought must have been written on the hoof: about marching off to war or of jolly packmen taking their wares up to a high village and courting fair maids. A musical tradition based on long walks and moving from one place to another, with all the accompanying joys and illicit pleasures – drinking and wooing and carousing; making a bit of money and moving on to see new things.
By the time we got back to the old horse van, we were in fine spirits. Jason announced that rather than ride back with us in the van, he would walk over the fells with his dog Toby. Jasper and I looked at each other. It was nearing dusk and the late autumn day was closing in. There were black clouds on the horizon. But Jason was our host and knew these hills well. He had also told us how much he liked to go out in the wind and the rain, and then draw the landscape – letting the water run down the marks he was making on the thick cartridge paper. It would have been churlish to question his decision.
So we drove back without him and enjoyed the warm house and the chicken I cooked, and the supply of beers we had brought. We put the world to rights. The hours went by. Even though neither Jasper nor I would qualify as responsible – we were, after all, both writers – the time came when even we started to be alarmed. It was past midnight and Jason had still not put in an appearance. A wild storm had started up outside. The farm had intermittent mobile reception and it was unlikely Jason’s phone would work across the Howgills as he made his way back home.
We both started up as one from our comfortable armchairs. Jasper headed out across the pitch black of one field to look for him, while I went up the hill on the small lane which led to the remote community of Adamthwaite. The moon coming through the clouds gave just enough illumination on the tarmac. There was a howling wind. I had a small torch to flash, hoping that might help Jason if he was out there.
The situation was becoming dreamlike. I could not quite believe that Jason was in serious trouble. But on the other hand, things can go wrong in the hills even for people who know them well – and Jason was on his own, or at least only had his dog.
I came to a small country crossroads right on top of the fells. By now I was soaked from head to toe. The rain was coming in horizontally. It was the sort of place where, in the legend of old blues songs, the devil would appear to make a pact – but then, I thought, surely the devil can only make a pact with a young man? I had little left to bargain with.
Still, it was a wild moment; an elemental one. It had been good to be tucked up beside the fire. But it was also good to be out on the wild heath in the middle of a storm with the elements raging. And if Jason was still out there, he needed all the help he could get.
I trudged back down the lane to the farm. Jasper had already returned. He too had found nothing. We consulted. Should we ring the emergency services? We would need to drive down to the village and use the pub phone. And we would look very stupid if it was a false alarm.
Just then Jason appeared, walking up the road, with Toby trotting at his heels. He looked insouciant and relaxed, if a little sheepish, as only a man can who has spent his life drawing them.
‘I realised I was heading into the storm pretty quickly, so I turned back down to the road instead and got a lift to Ravenstonedale. I’ve been in the pub for the last couple of hours warming up and drinking whisky. But don’t worry, before that I got some wonderful sketches.’
Because we were staying several days at Jason’s farm, I had the luxury of writing by daylight, rather than trying to keep a journal at the end of each long day. The night after the storm, I was able to sit in the sunny orchard, with my legs up in the crook of a tree, watching Jethro as he wandered around working out which gate or low wall gave him the best view. The sun was filtering through the sycamore trees from the east and lighting up the grass.
I was once shown Wilfred Thesiger’s journals in his personal archive. They were of a large foolscap size and must have been bulky to travel with, although Thesiger usually had plenty of native porters.
In immaculate copperplate handwriting, he detailed how he ‘rose at dawn, as is my habit, and circled the lake as the ibis were feeding in the shallows. Then I returned to the camp to write this journal before breakfast.’ Like Trollope knocking off thousands of words before beginning a day’s shift at the Post Office.
I was not made of such stern stuff. But I did try to get everything down straight away – often stopping to record thoughts in the middle of a walk, to the occasional frustration of travelling companions. To be able to write with a mug of coffee in my hand, sitting in the sun, was a rare treat. Although, as ever, there were displacement activities happening all around to distract me.
Two rams were getting frisky over in the next field. It was a curious dance of rivalry. They went alongside each other not head-to-head but head-to-tail – ‘measuring each other’, as Jason described it to me later – so that each was rubbing the other’s flank. Then they rubbed each other violently to see which would give way.
It’s remarkable how vague the great British public are about sheep, given that we live alongside 20 million of them. Some walkers get hysterical at the thought of walking through a field with cattle, let alone a bull; but assume all sheep are, well, sheepish by disposition. A ram can still have plenty of testosterone, some of it misplaced, and the advice I was once given by a shepherd – ‘never turn your back on a ram’ – still holds true.
This is easier to remember with the Texel rams that have been brought over from Holland in the last twenty years to toughen and ‘beef up’ our own breeds, as they look half bulldog anyway; sheep that have worked out in the gym, with impressive and alarming musculature. The time when young men in tough urban areas have a Texel on a lead when they make the rounds between off-licence, betting shop and drug dealer cannot be far off.
The orchard had a swing in it – another distraction. I amused myself by swinging low beside Jethro, so that his head loomed high above me as I passed. He looked puzzled at the sight I presented: puzzled but intrigued.
Jason arrived in his beaten-up old Mercedes; he had gone to the station to collect a friend, Gwennie von Einsiedel, a talented actress and musician who also had a radio show of her own.
We showed her both Jethro and the Dodge horse van, which was parked in front of the farm – indeed, was more than filling the entrance way, so hard to miss. I expanded on my theory as to how, once our journey was done, it could convert into a wonderful writer’s shed on wheels.
Jason’s eyes lit up. ‘So do you think it might make a good mobile artist’s studio? Which would make even more sense. You could just drive up to wherever you wanted to paint and flap down the back. And I’ve plenty of space to keep it at the farm in Suffolk. Only when you’ve finished the trip with Jethro, of course.’
There were some men for whom the idea of a challenge, of taking an old beaten-up van and lavishing time and enthusiasm to turn it into a cherished and loved object, was tremendously attractive.
I was not one of them. But I could tell that Jason was.
I considered further. I was not sure whether my wife would appreciate having a five-and-a-half-ton mobile writer’s studio permanently parked outside our house, even if I could always go and sleep there after any domestic altercation. As a bachelor, Jason didn’t have to worry about such considerations. The Dodge would be going to a good home. And I could still see the van in its new incarnation as a roving arts centre whenever I visited him. Moreover, the next time Jason decided to head out into the wild and the wet in the middle of the night to do some sketching, he would at least have a place to lay his head.
‘Well, the thing you have to remember about this van, Jason,’ I began, ‘is that it is reassuringly old …’
That night we lit a fire and gathered around it for the evening. Jasper played guitar and Gwennie sang; Jasper fetched his harmonica and they taught each other tunes as they played: folk songs from the north country, or a fragment Jasper had heard around the gaucho fires of Argentina.
Then Jason began to sing songs on his own – surprising plainsong that he had improvised about Suffolk rivers like the Stour, the Orwell and the one that ran through his farm, the Alde:
Beneath a half moon
the quiet waters rise
and the rushes they do move
as the hawthorn bows her leaves
He sang them almost as if they were psalms, with simple occasional changes of the note rather than a melody. I read some of my poems, which I rarely share.
I felt a great happiness envelop me. This was something that all my life I had sensed could happen, but rarely did: a coming together of people bound to each other by imagination and art. A fellowship. What writers in particular, in their natural condition of solitude, have often sought. I had come home to a vision I had always wanted: of being with friends in a warm house, reading and playing music, and brewing up a quiet storm of our own. A community of like-minded and creative souls, which happens rarely.
Jasper began to play his open-tuned guitar and harmonica at the same time, with Gwennie singing some old songs, including the strange and lovely one of how:
If all the young men were hares on the mountain,
how many young girls would take guns and go hunting?
If all the young men were fish in the water,
how many young girls would undress and go under?
It was similar to the feeling I had experienced in the beech grove near Avebury when staying with the Rainbow Circle, when I took the long walk across southern England described in The Green Road into the Trees. When the circle had taken me inside, and offered me music and food and storytelling. When we had sky-danced half naked with the sun sending out its shadows, and for a brief moment I could let go, of prejudice and self. Of that tendency the American poet Tony Hoagland described so honestly about his own character, of ‘persistent selfishness— / one of my hands offering the gift, the other / trying to take something back’: a tendency that is so easy to have in everyday life.
Loneliness is the Anglo-Saxon way. Beowulf is many things, but amongst them it is a study in early individualism. The hero must leave the community of the King’s Hall and go off on his own to battle Grendel: the loneliness of the long-distance axe warrior.
Arthurian knights spend very little time at the Round Table in Malory’s epic – an ideal which soon dissipates anyway into warfare and discord. They leave on individual quests to find the damsel or grail. And that was before the Protestant Reformation placed even more emphasis on a lonely pilgrimage to salvation. The northern European culture of rugged self-improvement is so ingrained in us that those rare moments when we can let go – in a choir or a team or a coming together, as now, of like-minded spirits – are as different and strange as when you dive deep underwater.
We talked around the fire late into the night. Of travels and of music. Of where we had been and where we wanted to go. But I was feeling too happy to write it all down, and next morning found the conversations hard to remember, not least because it had taken us around the world. I knew that at one point Jasper had produced a Berber cloak which he had used when taking a mule across Morocco, and Jason had tried it on; that Jasper had also told us how he had played at the desert music festival in Mali; and that it was apparently good to travel with reindeer because they radiate natural warmth. Campfire conversation of the best sort, but difficult to join up the dots.
I’ve noticed before that it is one of the tricks of memory for some of one’s happiest moments to be forgotten – as if it needs grains of resistant sand to stick to the paper. Is it because the brain is too busy in its own happiness, too satisfied, to bother with the usual bureaucratic procedure of filing those sensations to memory?
However, I woke next day with an unusual spring in my step to cook bacon for them all, well sourced from the local butchers, and enough coffee for even Jasper to be satiated; I reckoned he could get through about half a pack of ground coffee a day, a black powder habit that even a Colorado cowboy would find impressive.
Although the farm lay somewhere up the hill from Ravenstonedale, I had been down to the village a few times to get supplies and been impressed by its handsome streets and air of independence.
Usually, the history of these remote villages has been lost – but this was a rare exception, as an enterprising nineteenth-century vicar, Rev. W. Nicholls, had spent a great deal of time chasing down old court records in Ravenstonedale. In Elizabethan times, according to Nicholls, the local court at first sat in the old church. However, proceedings were so argumentative, it was considered unseemly, so the court was moved to an inn where liquid refreshment could aid those making judgements.
The jurors had considerable power and could sentence prisoners to death (there is still a Gallows Hill near Ravenstonedale), but they expended more energy on punishing slander within the parish. Those who spoke ‘unlawful words against their neighbours’ had to apologise in church and pay a hefty fine to the Lord of the Manor. Equal punishment was given to eavesdroppers, ‘who lie or hearken in any man’s doors or windows’.
Other fines were meted out to any woman pregnant out of wedlock – a harsh and cruel punishment given, as Nicholls points out with compassion, that there was no such punishment for her seducer; to anyone who cut timber without express permission from the Lord of the Manor; to anyone who played dice or cards; and most bizarrely, to anyone who played football.
More understandable was the requirement that every single parishioner teach their children and servants to use a longbow. This was border country, and had long been used to incursions from Scotland.
Those not born within the parish were considered ‘foreigners’. They could not come within the parish boundary to cut peat or buy property; but most importantly of all, they could not marry any of the inhabitants. Nicholls remarks that, ‘A young man could not commit a greater offence against the general feeling of society than to marry a lass from another parish,’ and goes on to quote the most extraordinary letter.
Whereas we ladies of Ravenstonedale have for many years past been much injured and abused by the illegal practice of our neighbouring parishioners, we are no longer able to contain and bear the sufferings of this insupportable damage:-
Notice is hereby given – To all gentlemen bachelors of the said parish of Ravenstonedale, who attempt to contract the bands of marriage, or try any experiment instrumental to the same, and not with a lady of their own parish, shall immediately pay the sum of £20, to be distributed amongst the poor of the said parish; and if any such offenders shall refuse to pay the said sum justly liable for their offence, shall be imprisoned during the first ten months after their marriage. Given under our hands this fifth day of September, 1776. – Majority of females.
Rev. W. Nicholls,
History and Traditions of Ravenstonedale (1877)
The turn of phrase ‘or try any experiment instrumental to the same’ is a delightful bit of casuistry; and the letter can, and perhaps should, be read tongue-in-cheek. But even so, the overall picture is of a closed and close society. One in which, like Hamlet’s Polonius, men hid behind the arras to hear secrets; where you were expected to marry within the community. One in which the Lord of the Manor had remarkable power, right up until the end of the eighteenth century. But one, also, of considerable autonomy.
And it is that independence which allowed the Quaker movement to begin and flourish here.
They came from a mercantile community of an independent bent, which to me was a familiar proposition. I have always been drawn to the revisionist view that the fishermen of Galilee from whom Jesus drew his initial support were not the ‘simple folk’ of popular imagining. They were relatively wealthy and sufficiently remote from Jerusalem to have both the resources and freedom to develop a new way of thinking – which Christianity clearly represented.
The Quaker movement began in Sedbergh and this part of Westmorland for a reason. So remote that, unlike Yorkshire, it was not even included in the Domesday Book, but with the independence that the wool trade later provided, this was receptive ground for a new and unconventional approach to religion.
I have always been intrigued by the Quakers – the lack of an authority figure like the priest, the communal way of taking services, the pacifism – without knowing much about them. And a little to the south of us, on the road between Ravenstonedale and Sedbergh, Jason told me there was a Quaker stronghold, the last surviving temperance inn in the country.