One Man and a Mule: Across England with a Pack Mule

Their feet generally are strong, the horn tough, thick and quick growing, so that on unmetalled roads mules are frequently worked unshod.

The War Office, Animal Management (London, 1923)

DOWN THE ROAD from Ravenseat was an establishment called Swaledale Yurts for those who wanted more luxurious accommodation than a traditional tent could provide. What with the shepherd’s hut at Ravenseat, any visiting Lynda Snell would be spoilt for choice.

Five big and brightly coloured yurts stood proudly out in the open. It wasn’t something that Jasper, Jethro and I were tempted by – or could afford – but the principle was terrific. Who wants to be in a tent so small your toes stick out? When you can bring your own Mongolian throw-rug and live large, with a roaring fire and perhaps a goat turning on the spit? They even offered a hot tub, although whether Jethro would have fitted in was debatable.

I consoled myself with a simpler pleasure: a toasted cheese and pickle sandwich at the handsome Keld Lodge, which stood proudly by the roadside in isolated splendour. This far end of Swaledale saw only the most determined of walkers or motorists. The sandwich was drowned in pickle, a signal that we had truly arrived in Yorkshire. We had crossed the boundary earlier that day on Nine Standards Rigg.

Ahead lay what was almost the perfect bridle path for Jethro, stretching out wide and green alongside the river; what Wainwright described as ‘the royal way to see Swaledale’. Swaledale is a long handsome valley that runs the width of the Yorkshire Dales. As the river descends from Ravenseat and the head of the valley, it widens and the towns become more substantial, as do the farms.

Above Muker, another good Norse name just meaning ‘place’ – the Vikings liked to keep things simple – there were some fine stone barns and even more substantial longhouses, another part of the Norse heritage of this part of the world. Traditionally, families would have lived at one end of the longhouse and kept animals at the other; although in the larger and more prosperous farms we saw as we descended the valley, farmers would have lived separately in their own houses and put the labourers in the barns.

The history of these labourers was fascinating. Called ‘hinds’, their status was somewhere between servant and employee. An unusual feature of their employment contract was that they received most of their benefits in kind rather than in cash. While they received accommodation in the longhouses, they would also be paid in grain, beans and potatoes, with perhaps a small bit of pasture to keep their own few personal cattle if they had them. Any additional money payment would be relatively small, and just enough to keep them clothed.

If the hinds came as a family, one of them – usually the wife or daughter – would be specified as a ‘bondager’ who had to provide labour on request for the farmer. It was a paternalistic arrangement, which of course gave far less freedom to the labouring class than if they received straight wages.

And just to show that ‘zero hours’ contracts are not a modern innovation for agricultural workers, farmers could often be mean in their contractual arrangements. The young hinds were typically in their early twenties, and hired by the year at the great fairs around the country, particularly in spring (Lady Day) and autumn (Martinmas). It had been at such a fair that George Fox had ignited the Quaker movement, perhaps because of the dissatisfaction felt by those putting themselves out to hire. A small retainer fee would be given, called ‘earnest money’; but because if employed for a full year, the servant would then be eligible for local Poor Law payments, farmers often issued contracts for exactly fifty-one weeks to deny them this.

We could always tell a longhouse that was used by the hinds, as it had a chimney at one end and often a separate, higher entrance on the uphill side. The hinds slept directly above the cattle, which at least would have kept them warm in winter, if also making them liable to disease.

Now, though, the longhouses were less used for cattle because sheep had become more dominant; the shape of the longhouses was also incompatible with modern farming techniques for storing hay. As Amanda had said, farmers these days preferred round bales in favour of the old square ones. Whereas in the past a man could lift a square bale, you really needed a machine for a round one, unless a man had the arm-span of a Hercules. You couldn’t get a machine into a longhouse, so they had needed to construct more modern farm outhouses in the usual ugly mixture of prefab panels and corrugated iron.

This was why the old stone longhouses of the Yorkshire Dales were falling into disrepair – or rather disuse, as there were some handsome grants to keep the buildings maintained, given the character they added to the landscape. At least, there had been landscape grants. Many of those had come from the European Union, so what would happen now we were leaving was anybody’s guess. British governments in recent years, both Labour and Conservative, had seen little advantage in promoting the countryside, other than as a potential source of new housing.

As we walked along with Jethro, I had time to take in what an extraordinary landscape this was, with field systems preserved to an unusual degree. The bottom of the valley was a maze of immaculately built stone walls, designed to keep sheep in, with small, narrow ‘squeezer’ stiles as their only exit. Even if anyone wanted to keep a bridleway open, it would have been difficult to do so. As a result, Jasper and I had to circle up and around above Reeth, skirting high up the hills with Jethro.

But this was no bad thing. The going was good and the heather beautiful. The views each way down the Swaledale Valley were sublime. Our spirits were excellent. When we stopped for a picnic, we let Jethro off the rope so he could graze freely; although by this stage we had bonded with him so well, he preferred to loom above us as we lay on the grass – at one point trying to eat Jasper’s hat.

Jasper took this philosophically. ‘At least, I’ve got a buttercup’s view up Jethro’s nostrils. And he didn’t try to eat the chorizo.’

If anything, Jethro preferred nibbling heather, which surprised me, although by now I’d realised he had a far tougher digestive system than a horse’s. He disturbed some grouse who started shouting in their tinny way: ‘Go back, go back, go back.’

And it was true. They gave out an odd muffled sound, almost half-hearted. Nor were they terribly clever in the way they displayed themselves so provocatively, as if tempting a gun. But then, like pheasants, there’s a reason grouse never live long enough to become terribly clever.

Look at the picture-postcard landscape of the Dales – the lush green valleys with stone barns dotted over their neat fields – and you might think this a model for the prosperous countryside.

Of course this brings in the tourists. And of course the sheep pay their way. But in many ways, it’s window-dressing, heavily subsidised and not the real engine behind the continued survival of places like Swaledale. For centuries, the real money has not been made here in the fields at all, but in the scraggy moorlands that fringe the tops of the valley.

First it was the lead mining, which has left a strange industrial archaeology of deserted mills and spoil heaps hidden above the ridge-line. But then, after cheaper Spanish lead knocked the bottom out of that market, it has been grouse shooting.

And these were not just any old grouse moors. They were some of the finest in the country. When Earl Peel sold part of his nearby estate to American billionaire Robert Miller in 1995, he received £9 million for the deal. And Robert Miller was thought lucky at the time; the old money that owns the grouse moors rarely needs to sell.

As grouse have become more important to the local farming economy than sheep, rich men have flocked here. Other neighbours of Earl Peel included Lord Bolton and the Duke of Norfolk.

The economics of grouse shooting were mad but compelling. Guns could pay upwards of £150 for the pleasure of shooting two grouse – birds worth only £3.50 a brace from the local game dealer. And they would expect to shoot a great deal of grouse to make sure they were losing money in a satisfactory way. An upmarket grouse shoot could command between £5,000 and £10,000 a day from each of its guns. And that was before they added tips.

But the estates didn’t have it all their own way. Grouse liked to eat young heather. Older plants therefore needed to be burned each year, in careful rotation. This could get out of hand. Locals had told me stories of widespread heather fires that often went under-reported in the media. On Earl Peel’s estate, a blaze had recently spread across thirty acres, needing fourteen fire engines, water bowsers and slurry tankers to put it out.

Moreover, a troublesome and debilitating gut worm spread easily between grouse if their numbers were not carefully controlled. For this and other reasons, the number of grouse could often go down. The season was a limited one, between the so-called ‘Glorious Twelfth’ of August and the end of grouse shooting on 10 December. The best – and most expensive – shooting took place early, in August and September. By October, the period when we were travelling through with Jethro, the guns had gone quieter, for which I was grateful; I wasn’t sure how Jethro would react under fire.

The owners groused themselves about all this. They claimed their huge revenues ‘went back into the estate’; that by the time they paid for the gamekeepers, beaters and maintenance, there was no profit from the twenty-five or so days shooting they might sell a year. These claims needed to be taken with a judicious pinch of snuff. (Eighteenth-century sportsmen liked to leaven their snuff with lead-pellet filings from the guns, as it was said to improve one’s aim – although it can’t have done much for their health.)

There was a lot of money in grouse shooting, which may be what attracted Robert Miller to buy his enormous 32,000-acre estate in the first place. This was a man who had made his money from building an empire of duty-free shops across the airports of the world.

But talk to the locals, as I had in many a pub up and down Swaledale, and they were clear who was making all the money: the gamekeepers.

I’ve had many run-ins with gamekeepers over the years, partly from a fondness for trespassing, and partly because gamekeepers have a justified reputation for being bloody-minded and difficult individuals. But the days of Richard Jefferies (whose The Gamekeeper at Home is still for me his finest, if neglected, work), when the gamekeeper lived off the scraps from the shooting party lunch, are long gone.

Gamekeepers have become the new rural aristocracy. They can make £40,000 a year – and that is before the substantial tips, which come in cash.

Picture the scene: a group of obscenely wealthy self-made men and aristocrats are milling around their Range Rovers at the end of a day’s shoot. There is only so much showing off they can do about the quality of their guns – preferably older Purdy twelve-bores that have been in the family rather than anything too nouveau-riche – and the satellite Wi-Fi in their vehicles. Or patronising of any newcomers who have shot the birds that were flying too low. When it comes to a simple bit of flashing the cash to tip the gamekeeper, they can be ostentatious – and by God, they are. Not least because if the gamekeeper has done well, then so, by inference, have they.

‘You gave us a tremendous day’s shooting, George.’ Meaning, ‘I did tremendously well, even if nobody else did.’ And here’s the wonga to prove it. My money’s on the table. Hope you all saw it. Now, beat that.

At the pub in Muker, I had heard a story – one I later heard repeated, with variants, elsewhere, so clearly a developing rural myth – about the gamekeeper who turned up at a Range Rover dealership and bought the most exclusive model, for cash. A lot of it. The dealership accepted this happily, but reported the transaction of almost £100,000 to the bank, who duly, as they must, turned over the inquiry to HMRC, Her Majesty’s tax inspectors. This, it was discovered, was only the tip of the iceberg. The gamekeeper had been salting away undeclared cash from his tips for many a season.

At this point, the man telling the story pointed out the moral: which was not that the gamekeeper ‘got done’ for undeclared back tax, although of course that happened; but that the gamekeeper, unbelievably, did not get fired even though convicted – because he was too valuable to the estate. And next time around, should be a little more careful how he spent his cash. ‘He could buy a round in here for a start!’

The ‘my Range Rover is bigger than yours’ world was not one I found appealing. Thousands of grouse being driven by lowly-paid beaters to fly over a ridge and present a phalanx of wealthy men with something to shoot at. The suspicion also persisted – voiced by Chris Packham, among others – that gamekeepers were using devious means to control raptors and other predators who might get their fledgling grouse.

But if it was managed ethically and kept the rural economy going, there was something to be said for it. And having accompanied a shooting party once out of journalistic interest – although not to shoot, as I have no desire to kill any animal – it would be churlish to deny that I enjoyed the considerable pleasures of the shooting party lunch. Because another thing the very wealthy like to show off about is the quality of their cellars. Nothing quite beats a good vintage claret after you have been walking across the countryside in the crisp autumn sun; accompanied by a freshly grilled grouse on toast with bacon – and perhaps a traditional sprig of heather shoved up its rear vent.

As we walked on through the heather – without shooting at any of the grouse that talked to us – I felt a sense of tranquillity descending. Between us, Jasper and I had established a good rhythm for looking after Jethro and as long as the going was good, he fell in with us well. If we really reached an impassable stretch, we could always walk it ourselves and then ship Jethro around in the horse van.

Swaledale was a revelation. Outside of the James Herriot series, which like every other child of my generation I had dutifully watched, I knew nothing about the Dales. The handsome market towns of Keld and of Reeth in particular, with its big, broad square, lined on one side by no fewer than three pubs, came as welcome surprises.

Outside one of those pubs, the Buck, I got talking to a man in his forties who was sitting at the next table. He was lean, dark-haired and, I guessed, a local, because he wasn’t wearing trekking gear. From where we sat, there was a magnificent view down from the top of the square over its cobbled expanse. It was a market day and there were stalls set up alongside the road that threaded diagonally across the hill.

‘It may look pretty to you, but it’s different for those of us who live in the place.’ The man leaned closer over towards me, as if wanting to confide a secret. ‘I’ll tell you something about Reeth.’

I wasn’t quite sure how to take this; or whether he was going to elaborate further on quite what had led him to this conclusion. But he retreated to his own table, as if he had said too much. The conversation was over.

It was in Reeth that I suffered a galling loss. Somehow between one of the pubs and the small museum, I managed to lose the large notebook I was using as a diary.

Perhaps the lunchtime pint of Black Sheep had lulled me into a false sense of security; or the sense that the most difficult part of our journey was behind us. My guard was down. When travelling in Peru or the Himalaya, I protected my diaries with paranoid levels of security – not from fear that anyone else might read them (friends and family thought my handwriting illegible), but because they were also my principal resource when it came to writing up a trip. I had never lost a diary when travelling abroad; so how come I now had when pottering around a small Yorkshire market town?

I put up notices in the post office and other likely venues; even offered a reward. Nothing. The diary, which of course had my name and address at the front, had vanished into the ether. I had copied all the entries onto my laptop, so at least no information had been lost. But that was not the point. My journals were talismanic objects for me; a row of them at home encompassed my entire life. To mislay one was a tragedy. Although perhaps, like my ancestor Robert Bragg’s wedding ring, it will one day re-emerge.

The worst thing about losing something is that you can’t stop thinking about it. The loss was nagging away at me as I walked. Was there somewhere that I hadn’t looked?

It was a good long walk as we continued across the heather from Reeth. Time for my mind to settle and to get into my stride – up to a point.

Many of my journeys in the past had been taken on my own. I was not used to having company, although lucky to have in Jasper and Jethro companions of such varied and stimulating temperaments.

Although in a way I had never travelled on my own. For if we are honest, we are always accompanied by other voices when we walk: voices of old friends, of family, of the past. We may have moments of ‘mindfulness’ when we do nothing but take in what is in front of us; but these will be varied by long stretches when the mind is anything but present. When it loops off in long circles, remembering other times and other places. There is nothing wrong with that, of course; indeed, I see it as part of the purpose of a walk to stimulate the memory – to reawaken long-forgotten thoughts.

But you can have too much of a good thing, and spend so much time letting the mind drift that you don’t appreciate the landscape in front of you. I had been increasingly conscious of this: that there is so much noise in our lives, from iPhones, iPads, iPods and all the other media which keep us so social that we never have time to reflect. Inevitably, some of it ends up buzzing around inside our heads – worst of all being the repetitive, boring thoughts that can plague us all about plans or unresolved conflicts, within ourselves or with others.

My father’s illness had brought the whole question of our attention to the present even more into focus. My mother often commented that while he had lost his short-term memory, his enjoyment of the moment was that much more intense as a consequence.

When we had all gone for a walk through the bluebells in spring earlier that year, he had frequently stopped to exclaim at their beauty. Each turn of the path had brought him a sight he had never seen before.

Conversations were also more interesting – or could be, if steered in the right direction. Dad was unable to remember short-term plans, so there would be none of the usual discussion of what we were doing today and what we were doing tomorrow. Although naturally, as he could not remember such details, he often became anxious about what he was supposed to be doing.

But if we started to talk about something where clear, rational judgement was involved, his faculties were sharp. And if he asked what you were doing at the moment, this needed a much fuller answer than you might normally give; an answer in which you really had to present your life as it was, on the assumption that he might not know anything about it.

With family members, it is easy never to discuss the most important things. There is often an assumption that somehow they have been shared by osmosis over the years. But I found that these days with my father I needed to give a much fuller and clearer account. And as he would forget what I had said and ask again at some later stage, I got better and better, Groundhog Day style, at giving a coherent answer.

I thought of my father now, as we crossed the heather-clad expanse above Reeth; I also allowed myself simply to take in the landscape as well, with not an empty head but a clear one.

This was a landscape that was impossible to look at without remembering W. H. Auden. As a poet, he made this part of Swaledale very much his own, at a time when it did not figure on anybody else’s poetic map. He told his friend Geoffrey Grigson that ‘my great good place is the part of the Pennines bounded on the south by Swaledale’, and he used often to come here.

I liked to think of him now in his scoutmasterly shorts and hiking gear sprawled out in the sunshine beside Upper Kisdon Force which we were passing. The lines he wrote there for his poem ‘Streams’ were some of the finest of his later career, deliberately using a skaldic, northern meter:

Lately, in that dale of all Yorkshire’s the loveliest,

Where, off its fell-side helter-skelter, Kisdon Beck

Jumps into Swale with a boyish shouting,

Sprawled out on grass, I dozed for a second …

… dearer, water, than ever your voice, as if

Glad—though goodness knows why—to run with

the human race,

Wishing, I thought, the least of men their

Figures of splendour, their holy places.

Around the same time as this poem of 1954, he did a little-known piece for Vogue, which had asked some eminent writers to nominate their favourite travel destinations. Most had chosen sunlit spots in the Mediterranean or Caribbean; Auden, with mischievous perversity, proposed Swaledale and the north of England.

Entitled ‘Six Unexpected Days in the Pennines’, he begins the journey at Keld, extolling the landscape and letting slip the unexpected news that T. S. Eliot had always been very fond of Wensleydale cheese. (There is an interesting or at least unexplored thesis to be done on the relationship between poetry and cheese: Wordsworth and Coleridge regularly demolished whole truckles of Cheddar in the Lake District.)

Auden’s love for the area was partly geological. His famous poem, ‘In Praise of Limestone’, ends with the declaration that:

… when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water.

The way limestone dissolves gives many of the hills of the North their particular shape – and also created the geological strata and mining that so fascinated Auden. This, after all, was a poet who had read Mines and Mining in the English Lake District by John Postlethwaite. His signed copy is in Carlisle City Library.

But more than anything else, Auden loved ‘the idea of the North’, not least because it was going in a completely different direction from everybody else. After the First World War, writers from D. H. Lawrence to Norman Douglas headed south for the warm embrace of the sun: Capri, Italy, Mexico, the Greek islands. Auden was proud of having been born in York and liked to position himself as a northern outsider.

He went even further north to Iceland not just for its wild beauty but also for its poetry. Auden loved the epics of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons and built their alliterative jangle back into his own work to disrupt the expectations of the conventional iambic pentameter.

‘North is the good direction,’ as he once said. I had always liked the North myself, but it was a guilty pleasure: in general, southerners are quietly patronising about the North and northerners more bluntly rude about the South. Would a soft southerner writing about the North be considered, to use a PC term much favoured by North American intellectuals, ‘voice appropriation’? Could you only write about the North if you came from there?

There’s a good moment in John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, one of my favourite books. Steinbeck is driving with his dog, Charley, and heading out of Chicago through Illinois. He describes it as a noble land of good fields and magnificent trees, neat and white-fenced. But he goes on to make the telling point that this is a subsidised countryside, without ‘the thrust of land that supports itself and its owner. Rather, it was like a beautiful woman who requires the support and help of many faceless ones just to keep going.’

I felt the same about the south of England. The counties I knew well – Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Kent – all had rural identities and areas of such outstanding natural beauty they didn’t need a designation to tell us so. But they were kept women. They relied on the money that flowed out of London.

Whereas the North had a starkness to it. This was land that had to work for itself.

The road over from Reeth towards Barnard Castle must be one of the most beautiful in England and was much filmed for the James Herriot vet books: picturesque bridges, the sweep of a narrow lane across the high fells and then the descent out of Arkengarthdale as the sheep scatter; all perfect for negotiating at great speed in an Austin 7.

I made a detour down it because I wanted to see someone I had last visited thirty years ago: Brian Russell, the blacksmith who I had stayed with when Fred and I were trying to collect a forge.

It was a shock when I arrived at Little Newsham, the village where he lived with his wife Hilda – a shock, because so little had changed. The outside of the forge still had the same familiar sign swinging. The village looked exactly as it always had.

Brian greeted me at the door with his large, reassuring presence. ‘It hasn’t changed much, has it? At least on the outside. Although inside I’ve expanded a bit.’

He showed me round. The forge fire was burning. There were enough tongs and heavy-duty instruments to satisfy the most industrious team of devils. Most of Brian’s commissions were now for large-scale decorative gates, with iron flowers hammered cunningly into intricate patterns, then shot-blasted and galvanised to be weather-proof.

‘There’s no money left in farm gates. They can just get any old cast ironwork, from the fabricator. We depend on people who want something a little fancy for a house, or maybe a public building. A lot of work comes from local authorities and developers.’

When Brian started in the 1970s – ‘and I’m sixty-four now’ – he found there weren’t any blacksmithing courses he could do at the local colleges. Instead he found some books in a library about German wrought ironwork. Luckily, one of his tutors had worked as a blacksmith, so could give him some help outside class. When he left college, he couldn’t find anybody to apprentice himself to either. ‘And in those days, there was no internet to give YouTube instructional videos.’

In some ways, he told me, that had been the lowest period for blacksmithing in this country. But since then, there had been a very clear revival.

His young assistant Tom was helping him with what would be a month’s work of hammering out a gate. Tom made a good point: that when he told people he was a blacksmith, they all assumed he was part of some nostalgic revival and that, as a trade, it had died out. Whereas in some ways it was flourishing and had been growing strongly in recent years, with more female blacksmiths as well. Discerning customers had come to appreciate the value of wrought ironwork – and I could see why. Fred had once made me a wrought-iron fire guard, as well as wall brackets for a hanging basket. Both had a more robust quality than the moulded mass-market work you could buy off the shelf. And both had lasted well.

‘We still have quiet patches,’ Brian told me. ‘But nothing like as hard as when I started out.’

I reminded him that when we’d first met, not long after he had opened the forge, he had been lucky with an enlightened landlord. He had been given six months’ free rent to get going, partly out of the landlord’s desire to see the forge occupied again, as it had been empty since the 1890s.

‘That same man owned the whole village. It’s an estate village. He’s dead, but his daughter runs it now.’

I walked with Brian back from the forge to his home; not exactly a long commute, as while when I had first met him he lived a little distance away, he had since rented a cottage in the village with his wife Hilda. We passed a small paddock where they kept a pony, which I eyed up with professional interest.

‘You’re welcome to bring your mule any time,’ said Brian. This was kind, but I had left Jethro in comfortable quarters near Reeth; and unlike me, Jethro hated to make any detours that involved additional distance when he could stay in the same place and look over a gate.

Their garden was filled with roses, peonies and immaculately hoed vegetables, which put my own small allotment back home to shame.

Hilda herself was at the doorway. A small and alert woman, she kept the books for the business. Her brother was a miner from County Durham, who had been forced to take on a wide variety of other jobs after the pit closures, and we talked over the evening meal about the changes that had taken place in the north-east. The closures at the old steelworks in Redcar had been much in the news – as had the tactless claim by Michael Heseltine that ‘if you are going to lose your job, this is as good a time as any. Because the number of new jobs in the economy today is one of the most exciting features of this economy compared with many others.’

‘They always say things like that,’ said Hilda. ‘They said things like that during the pit closures. Look what happened to those communities. The other thing they do is make the claim that people doing courses – retraining, health and safety, IT and stuff like that – have somehow found work. They haven’t. They’ve just been taken off the unemployment register.’

Brian looked through his old record collection to find ‘No Mule’s Fool’ by Family, with the immortal couplet:

We’re sitting here, me and my mule

We make our own rules, and it’s cool.

The late evening sun was coming through the large glass windows they had built onto their dining room, as we listened to Roger Chapman sing about a boy and his mule lazing around at the end of a summer’s day. The crops in the field outside came right up to the windows. It was a peaceful setting.

‘The only problem with this house,’ said Brian, ‘is that we couldn’t buy it. Because the whole village is owned by the one estate. So, we’re still renting, which isn’t great. We did try to build our own place, but we couldn’t get planning permission. That’s a big problem in all these villages. Not enough new houses.’

Their son Ivan arrived home to join us. The last time I had seen him was as that baby in the kitchen sink when I had travelled with Fred. Ivan was now thirty and helped Brian part-time in the forge, but didn’t particularly want to take the business over.

Brian got out the whisky and we talked of travels around the world. He had visited the States several times for international blacksmithing ‘forge-ins’, which were popular in places like Memphis. They questioned me about Peru and Mexico and my previous walk across England for The Green Road into the Trees.

‘Colombia. And also the Orkney Islands. Though it probably takes less time from London to get to Colombia.’

They put me up for the night on a sofa. There was a curious incident when I was bringing in my bag. A young man, who I guessed to be a neighbour, was mowing the grass on the communal verge. He looked at me oddly – in a small village, I realised that strangers must be rare – so I mumbled some explanation about how I was getting things in from the car. He waited, as if for more. So I made a few inconsequential remarks about the weather, in the way the English do, before moving on.

Hilda explained his potential confusion. ‘That must be the new neighbour. We haven’t seen them yet as they’ve only just arrived. So I’m pleased to see they’re cutting the grass already. But he obviously thought you were living here – and that you must be the blacksmith!’

She was too polite to add that I didn’t live up to anyone’s image of a blacksmith, given that Brian himself, at sixty-four, was still a tall, imposing presence who looked as if he could bend a ductile bit of iron with his bare hands.

But I was happy to be taken for a blacksmith, if only for a brief moment. There is satisfaction in making things – in being a maker, as Auden used to say (‘A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects’). And in some ways, as a writer and filmmaker, I have been one. But words and images are more insubstantial. To be able to hold something in your hand that you have fashioned out of the fire must be a truly primordial feeling.

The countryside started to change as we descended down the Swale River from Reeth. It became softer, more inviting. By the time we got to the village of Marske (pronounced ‘Mass-k’ by the locals, with a soft ‘a’ and no ‘r’), there were more trees, for a start. Alder lined the pretty banks of the small Marske Beck, which ran up from the village and the picturesque packhorse bridge that Jethro clattered over with some aplomb, and perhaps even a sense of ownership.

Even more pronounced than the alder were the ash trees. It is estimated that 70 per cent of the trees in the Yorkshire Dales are ash – so if and when ash dieback ever reaches the North, the landscape will change irretrievably, as it has in Denmark, where the disease has almost wiped out the nation’s stock of ash.

The Dales are a far more changeable landscape than is often presumed. It is only in the last few centuries that sheep have become so predominant; there would previously have been far more cattle. And the greenness of the valley that we were travelling down was due to generations of farmers improving the soil: first applying lime in earlier centuries when the local lime kilns could provide so much, and then from the nineteenth century using bone-based fertiliser, and even South American guano.

Nor were the most dominant features of the valley – the walls that divided up the fields – as straightforward as they might appear. People who don’t live in the country often view dry-stone walls as an almost organic part of the upland landscape. But there are well-made stone walls and badly-made ones. Nowhere could this be seen better than a short way along Marske Beck, near one of the farms which lay on the opposite bank from the bridle path we were taking. We could look across to a patchwork of these dry-stone walls dividing up the hillside.

Some of the walls meandered in eccentric wavy lines like a kid’s drawing; but other sections had been completed in rigid rectangles, like city blocks. The meandering walls were, perhaps counter-intuitively, the better-built ones. These walls followed the contours of the landscape, so kept a natural line and were often very ancient.

It was the walls that looked so neat and rectangular that were the shoddy ones. They had been thrown up quickly after the Parliamentary Enclosure Acts of the nineteenth century. Labour gangs from South Yorkshire were brought up to enforce the new division of what had always previously been common land for grazing. These unskilled gangs, who had no background in building dry-stone walls, were shipped in because there was not enough – or particularly willing – local labour. And rather than follow the contours of the land, which kept a wall level and gave it strength, they simply marched the walls in rigid lines over whatever lay in the way.

Dry-stone walling is an attractive and complicated art. It requires great skill to bind together stones without mortar so that they are strong enough to withstand the stresses of weather and livestock. I had already noticed throughout Cumbria and Yorkshire that walls in the North were subtly different from the ones I was used to in the South. In places like Devon, they often incorporated large boulders, while here, the walls were double-skinned, with frequent ‘tie stones’ right through both skins to bond the wall together. These sometimes protruded far enough out for a walker to rest the edge of their buttocks on while eating lunch, as long as their figure was suitably callipygian.

To select local field stones – which by definition are irregular – and lock them together firmly enough to give stability, so that ‘the hearting’, as they call it, of the stone can bind, needs a knowledgeable eye as well as strong arms. The stones must be graded on the spot for suitability as either foundation, hearting or capping material.

There are still a dozen or so professional dry-stone wallers working in North Yorkshire; some estimates say there are over 7,000 kilometres of dry-stone wall in the Dales Park alone. It is an important part of managing the land. But I could see they had a sizeable job on their hands. Jethro, Jasper and I often passed walls that had sagged like old washing lines. Some had broken down and collapsed, often to the extent that it would have been easier to build a whole new wall than restore them. Where several courses had come away, we could see a cross-section of what was clearly a wall that had been put up in a hurry: shoddy work brought on by what some would say was a shoddy piece of legislation in the first place, which deprived many people of their livelihoods.

The village of Marske itself also showed some of the changes that had taken place over the centuries: for, even by the standards of English villages, it was an extraordinarily ancient one. While the bleaker upper end of Swaledale near Keld had been Viking, this lower end of the valley had been a Saxon enclave; to the extent that after Lindisfarne was sacked by the Vikings in AD 793 – a pivotal moment in the history of the North – the bones of St Cuthbert were rescued and kept in the church here for safety until they were finally moved to Durham Cathedral. These were revered relics and a measure of Marske’s importance, as St Cuthbert was almost the unofficial patron saint of northern England: his cross, with its bowed ends, was a symbol emblazoned everywhere on gravestones and memorials, and on the flag of Northumberland.

As soon as I stepped into the small church, it felt both cold and indescribably old. Small white stalls lined the nave. Although the present church had Norman foundations from 1090, there must have been an even earlier church on the same site to house St Cuthbert’s bones. The churchyard outside – ‘God’s acre’, to use the lovely medieval term – was a peaceful place with yews; a local man told me that in winter it was always covered in snowdrops, which grow well in this part of the world.

Across from the church was Marske Hall, the old squire’s house and another sign of the times. This had once been an absolutely typical local manor house, whose shadow fell over the village and controlled both the church and estate. Attention is often focussed on the grand aristocratic estates in the North, like those belonging to the Duke of Northumberland or the Marquess of Zetland, for obvious reasons: they have the glamour and the huge landholdings.

But the influence of a local squire could be of much more importance. In this case, one family had owned the estate continuously for many centuries after Matthew Hutton, then Archbishop of York, bought it in Elizabethan times. The church was full of the tombs of his descendants. The Huttons steered the estate through all the changes that took place over the following centuries: the mining, the move from sheep to cattle and back again, the many architectural changes to the church itself. However, after 1900 the family became absentee landlords. In 1960, big country houses were going to the wall because of death duties – the property was sold by the next surviving descendant, who had never even seen it.

Now the village had no resident squire, parson or doctor – or for that matter, publican. Nor was there a shop, although the church sold a few supplies. The bus service was meagre, and the message was clear: like so many smaller villages in England today, unless you could afford a car, you certainly couldn’t afford to live in Marske.

Chapter 8

The Idea of the North