The age at which mules are fit for transport work is four years for light work, five years for hard work. They are better at six, and work satisfactorily until eighteen or twenty, sometimes even longer.
The War Office, Animal Management (London, 1923)
THE CHURCHYARD OF Bolton-on-Swale has one singular distinction: an obelisk commemorating a man called Henry Jenkins, who, it was claimed, died at the fabulous age of 169. There was another memorial inside the church, and he had become famous. In many ways, the mythology that had grown up around him was as interesting as the historical evidence, of which there was little.
He had certainly died in 1670, and was described then as ‘a very aged and poor man’. He had been a servant to Lord Coniers of Hornby Castle at one stage in his life and later worked as a fisherman before becoming destitute. When he died, Jenkins was receiving alms.
The astounding assertions of his longevity – most of them made in the centuries after his passing, not at the time – rest on his contention that he was born in 1501. He also claimed that he could remember the Battle of Flodden Field in 1513, and helped carry a horse-load of arrows to Northallerton for the archers. A Victorian antiquary pointed out that if he had indeed lived to be 169, and followed his legal obligations during those years, he would have needed to change religious allegiance eight times between the reigns of Henry VII and Charles II.
The parish records did not extend back to 1501, so there was no evidence for his birthdate; and of course, there were no records for those who had helped in the battle of Flodden Field.
But my own father had given me an insight into what may have happened here. Like many of those suffering from dementia, he had turned to what experts call ‘confabulation’. Confabulation is a disturbance of memory, defined as ‘the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive’.
In conversation with somebody, particularly a stranger, my father would often feel the need to produce a story; but as his memory was failing, could not remember any. So instead, he would invent one.
I was with him down by the Thames as we sat at a table by the riverbank with some friends who had not met my father before. ‘Of course, we had to repair the jetty,’ he told them, ‘when the Thames froze over a few winters ago.’ My friends knew little about the Thames but felt they had missed the story of it freezing over; as indeed they had, unless you went back a few centuries.
Confabulation is very different from lying. There is no intention to deceive and the person is unaware the information is false. They are accessing a random part of the memory bank, in which the distinction between knowledge and lived experience has broken down: some mysterious kink in the hippocampus. Moreover, it is easy for someone with dementia to have a confused memory of having told such a story once before; they will then go on to repeat it with even greater authority.
This was perhaps the most striking feature of confabulation – that because the person does not know they are lying, they present their story with startling conviction. Jenkins’ claim to have been present at the battle of Flodden Field was testimony he gave in court when called as a witness to a local case. It would have seemed unthinkable to contemporaries that an elderly, humble man receiving alms would have the temerity to lie in such circumstances.
In an age like the seventeenth century, when dementia was clearly present – King Lear is almost a case study – but not precisely diagnosed, Jenkins’ claim to have taken part in a battle 150 years before his death would have been taken at face value. And any disquiet would have disappeared long before the following century, when his long life began to be canonised.
In a way, the process of confabulation is continually taking place within our own national history. We forget those truths that are inconvenient: that Churchill allowed a million Indians to die by not sending a relief ship during their famine; or that we needlessly bombed Hamburg and Dresden to shreds, with more loss of life than at Hiroshima and with no corresponding military gain.
Instead, we lull ourselves to sleep with reassuring fables: how brave and right we were to retake the Falklands, even if almost half as many combatants died as previously lived on the islands – and each of those inhabitants could have received more than £1.5 million as a relocation package, given the cost of the war. How while the Spanish Empire was a dark satanic force that spread misery to South America, the British Empire brought democracy and fairness to much of the globe. And that while the southern states of America might have tolerated slavery, it was never something of which the British really approved.
After a while, we will have told these stories so often to ourselves that we come to believe them to be true.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, one of the greatest novels about England yet written in the twenty-first century, shows the whole country struggling under the deadweight of collective amnesia – a mist of forgetfulness, as he calls it, cast by a sleeping dragon.
Just as his protagonists can only make sense of what is happening – can only begin to remember – by making a journey, so my North-crossing was clarifying my thoughts about England and the last few decades. Nowhere was this more true than in the countryside, so often an ignored province for metropolitan politicians. When Tony Blair lunched with Gordon Brown in Islington – or for that matter when their Conservative successors chewed the marbled fat at the Connaught – I doubt the conversation ever turned to the price of milk or wheat. Or the people who made what they were eating.
Talking to farmers and those who live in the wilder stretches of the North was a deeply unfashionable pastime, but it was teaching me much that I had forgotten myself – or perhaps, had never known.
Between Richmond and the Yorkshire Moors lies the Vale of Mowbray, a broad stretch of ‘agricultural land’, a bland phrase that can conceal a great deal.
Land. The farm that you’ve always lived in. On the one hand, there can be the reassuring sense of roots – of something you’re part of. But then there is the darker side; the sense that you also can’t get away from it. That those same roots have got you by the ankle and are pulling you underground.
You look out at fields and you may have a sense of satisfaction, of ownership, of achievement, perhaps of family continuity; but you may also have a sense of nagging anxiety. That there is always more work to be done. Something waiting to go wrong, which can happen all too easily on a farm.
As a diversion from the plod across the plain – Amanda Owen had warned me that the Vale of Mowbray was the most boring stretch of the Coast-to-Coast, with too much tarmac and too few views – I went to meet an old friend who I hadn’t seen for years. He lived on his farm a little south of our route.
Hugo Hildyard was a few years older than me; I had known him at school and then, when he had gone on to study English Literature at Cambridge, I had followed him there, in part on his advice.
Our age difference now was immaterial, but as a boy, of course, it had seemed substantial. I looked up to Hugo and admired him. He was sardonic, intelligent, quick-witted and slightly rebellious, all attractive qualities in a schoolboy – just as they were at Cambridge, where he enjoyed life enough for a contemporary, Conrad Williams, to use his name for the central character in his novel Sex and Genius.
But I had not seen Hugo for many decades, and had always wondered if he had changed at all and what had happened to him. He was waiting for me at the end of the remote farm lane, older, of course, and with a farmer’s permanent tan, but, it struck me at once, remarkably similar to how he had been as a boy. And as to what had happened to him, the answer was ‘a lot’. He had founded a clothing company that imported clothes from India, and married a well-known art dealer, Fiona Stachowiec, who had in her turn founded the Lisson Gallery. But he had also taken on the family farm, which his father had bought in 1950. His mother, who still lived there, told me his father had not realised how heavy the clay was when he bought it, how unproductive it could be. And Hugo’s wife had died some five years before, while their son was still a teenager.
Hugo now lived at the farm with his Argentine girlfriend Florencia Clifford. She was such a good cook that they were opening up a restaurant together in York called Partisan – which, if the meal we had that evening was anything to go by, would be a spectacular success. I liked Florencia at once, not least for her South American candour, something I was used to from my travels there; she was outspoken – for instance about the fact that Hugo had invited various other friends round to join us on the evening that I arrived.
‘That’s so English. The two of you haven’t seen each other for thirty years. So the first night that you do, you get round lots of other people, rather than talking to each other.’
She was right. It was very English. But it also worked.
Hugo’s friends came round. We drank a great deal, and had some good conversation. Everyone cooed and fluttered over Florencia’s ‘roasted aubergine with pomegranates in a tahini sauce’, especially me after a substantial but relentless diet of ‘chorizo and Cheddar’, our muleteers’ lunch. But then in the morning, when the guests had all left and Florencia had departed to cook for a group convention up on the Yorkshire Moors, Hugo and I had a further conversation, just the two of us, sitting in the garden with his fields beyond.
The economics of farm life, he told me, were harsh. Hugo’s father in his day had employed three farm workers to help. Hugo did everything himself: a lot of work, even with improved farm machinery. He could be harvesting from dawn to dusk. And it was in some ways a never-ending battle. There was, for instance, the mounting problem of black grass, little commented on outside the agricultural press; but then we have become a nation increasingly divorced from what actually happens on our farms.
Black grass (slender meadow foxtail, or alopecurus myosuroides, to give its correct name) is a tall grass that comes up through barley and wheat, and can easily swamp the crop – not least because it has developed a strong resistance to pesticide. A neighbour of Hugo’s had been forced to plough up a third of his land and keep it in constant rotavation, in the hope that the black grass seeds would finally be eradicated. But only a few need to survive for the cycle to begin again. Black grass was fast becoming a serious national problem. The money needed to develop an effective pesticide would run into the billions, and would be unlikely to show a commercial return.
Hugo had barley, beans, oilseed rape – although the first crop had failed this year, so needed replanting – and some willow down near the river, which he harvested every three years for biomass fuel, an enterprising idea and a green one. He also had cattle. The farm was only about 300 acres, not large by today’s standards.
Nearby, the other small farms had all consolidated. In the local village of Scrayingham, with its population of a hundred people, the old farmhouses had lost their land, so to speak; or rather, the estate had bundled all of it into one big holding of thousands of acres to achieve economies of scale. The farmhouses themselves were now rented out by the estate – indeed, that was where they made most of their money.
This was a pattern that was being repeated everywhere I had been. In some places, there had been talk of keeping smaller fields near a rural community as a barrier between them and the big commercial prairies beyond. Modern tractors were so wide and could travel so fast – at forty to fifty miles an hour – that parish councils were speaking of the need to build rural bypasses around villages.
‘As a way of life, in some sense this is finished,’ said Hugo, with a wave of his hand at the small fields beyond the garden. ‘There will only be the big commercial farms in the future. That’s the financial imperative.
‘I haven’t tried to persuade my own son to keep the farm going. To be drawn to “the romance of farming”. Better to make money some other way, and then have a lovely house in the country.
‘Some years I’ve made a bit of money. But very few. And that was often because of the European subsidy, which provided a baseline for support. One which, as we’re leaving the EU, may no longer be available.
‘Barley was selling at £144 a tonne thirty years ago when I started farming. These days it’s selling at just £100. Wheat went up to £200 and the government told us to get used to it staying at that price. Now it’s down to £120.
‘It’s the age-old problem. If yields one year are good, then the law of economics means the price you can sell at is going to come down.
‘There are farmers near here who have hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of debt. Some of them don’t even own the land, but the banks will lend to them anyway. A lot of them get depressed, particularly in winter. I know because they’ve told me.
‘Sometimes I feel I’ve sacrificed a lot for the farm. And for what? Everything has always gone back into it, including time. When my wife died, I realised it was important to do things now. Things I would like to do, like travel.
‘It’s animals that bind you to a farm. If I didn’t have cattle, it would be easier. And while machinery has got more expensive, it has also got more effective. With some of these new seed drills, I could plant all my crops in a week and take the winter off – if I didn’t have any animals. Get a contractor in to spray the crops occasionally while I was away. I know that with some of these big arable farms up the road, there’s nothing much happening from November to February. They could all go off to the French Alps skiing if they wanted to, for all it mattered.
‘My son pointed out I could sell fifty acres and make enough money to pay off everything. It had never really occurred to me.
‘If this restaurant takes off, then maybe I’ll contract out all the land to one of the neighbours. But probably not. It’s very difficult to sever the bonds.’
I wanted to ask Hugo if all the years of farming had been worth it, although that seemed presumptuous. I was impressed by the sheer physical effort he had put into the farm over that time – despite some serious illness, for instance, just a year before – and said so.
‘I have always liked to work hard. There are times, though, when it’s difficult to do it on your own. Just simple things like linking up machinery. Much easier to do it with two of you. But needs must.’
I talked to Florencia later. ‘Hugo’s very strong. But he’s not getting younger. And last year he was ill, partly from spending long hours on a tractor, so I hope the restaurant takes off. The first time Hugo brought me to see the farm, I cried at the thought of coming to live here. The house was very run-down. We’ve done a lot to fix it up just in the last few years. But that was from money we got elsewhere. The farm itself would never have provided that.’
‘There’s no such thing as a happy farmer’ has long been a countryside adage. And of course, farmers moan, even those prosperous enough to afford top-of-the-range pickups and a month’s skiing in Courchevel. But over the last few years I’ve come to share farmers’ frustrations, albeit in a minor way, and to be more sympathetic to their complaints.
On our smallholding back home, all of five acres, we have enough pasture for a few alpaca to roam and crop the grass. We originally acquired these curious and lovely animals when we bought the place and I realised that the only alternative was to cut the grass myself – on a disturbingly regular basis, as it grows fast. Not a compelling option when I could be lying in the hammock having necessary and creative thoughts, as I described them to Irena; the sort of thing a self-respecting writer should be doing, not cutting the bloody grass.
And, I argued, even if I did want to do the cutting myself – which I didn’t – there was far too much for a regular garden mower, let alone a scythe of the sort the Quakers were practising with. We would need to buy an expensive sit-on mower for thousands of pounds. Whereas the alpaca came at a fraction of the price and were charming reminders of our travels in Peru.
Tough and self-sufficient, they have needed little maintenance since we bought them, other than an annual shearing. They are also good at scaring foxes away from the chickens. I had originally wanted to call them sensible, pragmatic names like Pedro, Sandro and Flymo, to reflect their Andean origins and grass-cutting function. But with teenage girls in the household, more whimsical notions took over, and they have ended up with names like ‘Aspen Moonflower’ and ‘the Archangel Gabriel’. Luckily no neighbours live close enough to hear me calling them.
We have all become fond of the alpaca as they wander the not-very-capacious grounds, peering at us inquisitively from above long necks, and eating both the grass and anything else they can get hold of. Like goats, they are omnivorous. I’ve seen them strip an entire rosemary bush, not to mention climbing roses, thorns and all; they can leave the low-hanging boughs of an apple tree quite bare. What they like most is to nip a flower bud off, like an appetiser.
Well – almost omnivorous. The one thing they won’t eat is pasture covered by weeds. And we have a lot: invasive weeds, of the sort that sweep across our modest meadows, colonising whole swathes and making the grass unpalatable. Creeping buttercup that looks attractive, but which livestock hate. Creeping thistle that doesn’t even have the virtue of looking attractive. A plague of giant spiny teasels that advance across the clay soil like triffids, emerging with speed in late summer. Even the woodland isn’t safe, carpeted by spreading brambles that prevent the alpaca from reaching their favourite branches.
Nor is chemical control an option. Alpaca are quite capable of jumping temporary fences unless they’re built like Camp Bastion. And we would not want to risk them eating any stray glypsophate-coated leaf as an hors d’oeuvre. So a lot of the weeds have to be topped or removed by hand.
As I’ve learned the hard way, a successful weed is one that has developed a root system that resists any form of control. The taproots of spiny teasels can become formidably entrenched. Creeping buttercup is more insidious, with fragile tendrils that melt away into the soil to reappear later. The roots of creeping thistle go ten feet deep and then spread laterally underground. Try digging that up. You can keep topping a thistle, but it will be a long time before it refuses to come back.
The battle modern farmers have with increasingly invasive and herbicide-resistant weeds – and on a massive scale across their hundreds or thousands of prairie acres – is one I can appreciate. Yes, it was more difficult for Job with his plague of locusts. But not that much more difficult. Job never had to deal with creeping thistle. Let alone black grass.
Jasper, very sensibly, was not with me for this stage of the walk and nor, reader, you will be relieved to hear, are you. An account of travelling the rest of the flatlands that lie between Richmond and the Yorkshire Moors might have the brisk austerity of late Samuel Beckett or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; but it would not be a pleasurable experience. A great deal of it was on tarmac along small lanes.
Wandering along, I started to get that song in my head that both Nancy Sinatra and Kirsty MacColl had made famous: ‘These boots are made for walking / And that’s just what they’ll do / One of these days these boots / are gonna walk all over you.’ I had been a bit inhibited at singing aloud when we had been with Jasper (as he had a much better voice than I did), but now I could let rip. Admittedly, I wasn’t sure it was good motivation for Jethro, who, like me, needed some. Even though I loved that line, ‘You keep lyin’ when you oughta be truthing.’ Why had ‘to truth’ never entered the language?
However, waiting for us across the Vale of Mowbray rose the massive bulwarks of the Cleveland Hills that edged the Yorkshire Moors – foursquare, like Mordor: the last and final section of my walk and in some ways, perhaps the wildest.
Osmotherley was the perfect entry point for the Yorkshire Moors, with its wide, handsome streets and houses in toffee-coloured stone. The little post office sold copies of Yorkshire Life; the cover proclaimed an illustrated lead story on ‘The Boycotts at Home’. Hydrangeas and montbretia flowered boldly outside the houses. The hydrangeas were blue on one side of the street and pink on the other, perhaps from some local ‘war of the hydrangeas’ played out by careful adjustment of soil acidity.
I stopped off for an early pint at the Golden Lion to give me strength for the afternoon’s walk ahead – and was hoping for a packet of crisps.
‘Cheese and onion! We don’t do cheese and onion.’ The barman looked as if I had asked for canapés.
‘We only do plain crisps here.’ Very proud of it he was too.
I had no idea what to expect from the Yorkshire Moors. Never having been before, my only preconception was of a vast open space across which Brontë heroines roamed to a Kate Bush soundtrack. But after the flat Vale of Mowbray, I was looking forward to getting up to the heights again.
What I hadn’t anticipated was the lushness of the vegetation as I ascended from Osmotherley. Along the edges of the Moors were forests of birches underpinned with exotic giant ferns and verdant azalea. Rowan trees – the mountain ash, to give them their more evocative name, and perhaps the most emotive of all Britain’s ancient trees – stood out with their red berries against the grey and the green of everything else: an incorrigible display of optimism in the face of Yorkshire weather.
I passed a birch tree blown over by the wind. The roots had lifted to create a natural cavern for wildlife underneath; like a Buckminster Fuller eco-dome, the voles and small animals of the heathland could congregate in a wonderful hollow space, with small amounts of daylight and ventilation coming through the roots from above.
Once I reached the top of the Moors, the heather was at its best. Natural England, the government agency, had a complicated scheme by which landowners who managed and burned sections of their heather were given large grants – which they hardly needed, as they would do that in any case to help the grouse, who liked young plants. Another case of ‘and to those who already have, will be given more’.
But then, what could you expect from an agency whose very name – Natural England, a suitably emollient rebranding that Tony Blair came up with – asked more questions than it answered? It presumed the countryside had a natural state to which it must always be returned. Whereas there has never been any such thing as a ‘natural England’, from the earliest of prehistoric times, and it would be far better to have an honest admission of this. There has only been a managed and manipulated England, with landscapes from the Dales to the Moors responding to agricultural change.
With purple heather in the foreground and the blue plains stretching away to either side, those same moors were giving me a grand view. Even Wainwright when he came this way let out the odd breath of exhilaration. Around the western edge, headlands extended in a sequence of rounded, alliterative peaks: Carlton Moor, Cringle End, Cold Moor and Clay Bank Top. To swing up and down from summit to summit along the stone-lined Cleveland Way must surely rank as one of the great walking experiences in England.
And yet, on a fine day I passed only one other person. There is a myth that we are a nation of walkers: a myth to a certain extent perpetuated by travel writers like me, as it is in our interests to presuppose a readership. Of course we were once – in prehistoric times when we drove cattle from one end of the country to the other, or more recent centuries when British armies marched phenomenal distances. But now, if truth be told, we prefer to cycle if we want to see the countryside.
The aspiration, when I was young, to walk one of the long-distance footpaths with a couple of friends and a tent, and have access to beer, pubs and other teenagers, well away from the prying eyes of parents, has long gone. Simon Armitage had told me that when he walked the Pennine Way he had a similar experience, and met few others.
In many ways, I can understand why. Cycling has always attracted me; and after a few weeks plodding along with a mule, it attracted me even more (although a mule tandem might have proved hard to design, let alone ride). When Edward Thomas did some of his ‘walking books’, such as The Icknield Way, a hundred years ago, he got so bored he cycled large sections – even if this never made its way into the text.
But it also seems a shame that walking is on the decline. We are lucky in England to have a quite unrivalled system of footpaths. Christopher Somerville, our foremost national gazetteer of the walks of Britain, who must have tramped more miles along them than just about anyone else alive, has also written about Ireland and told me that there, with no tradition of footpath access, you are forever walking on tarmac and along lanes. In France, there are intimidating signs saying ‘Chasseurs – Privé’ along every country road; an irate Frenchman with a shotgun does not make wandering off-piste an alluring prospect.
We, on the other hand, now have the ‘right to roam’ all over the uplands of Britain. We just don’t take it. As a nation, it seems, we would rather take a low-cost flight to the sun or get on our cycles. But when we do remember again the pleasures of walking across our own landscape, the hills will still be waiting for us.
I felt a little tired of walking myself, particularly after the Vale of Mowbray. It would be good to report that days spent crossing the flat agricultural plain had left me with a sense of Zen-like simplicity, or mindfulness, or connectedness with the Earth. But in fact, it had left me with a profound sense of boredom: boredom which had only fallen away now that I had reached the Moors and could become excited again.
It had also given me time, though, to consider again why it felt so appropriate to be travelling with a mule. I had always liked the way characters in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy had an animal that represented their inner self: a dæmon. By that yardstick, Jethro was my perfect companion. Other writers might have a horse, or if fleet of foot like Robert Macfarlane, perhaps a deer – while Benedict Allen had often compared himself to a camel, and William Dalrymple’s dæmon would surely be an Indian elephant. But a mule was more my sort of animal: intelligent, I hoped, yet with a streak of stubborn cussedness that sometimes got it into trouble.
At the moment, my dæmon was having problems. Jethro was finding some of the stone-laid track difficult to negotiate; while I had likewise to do some adroit navigation, as for reasons that were unclear, the Cleveland Way kept turning from a footpath to a bridleway and back again. What exactly did councils expect riders to do when a bridleway suddenly ended? Carry the horse on their back?
There was one terrific moment as the path swung round from north to east just after Beacon Hill, and the view extended in a broad swing of the compass from Swaledale on my left to the coast on my right. The white industrial buildings of Teesside, far from looking like dark satanic mills, seemed more like celestial apparitions in the shaft of sunlight that illuminated them.
This part of the track felt very ancient, as if there was a geographical logic for so many people to have come this way; to skirt around the edge of the wild moors, but keep above the valleys, as both a drier and faster way to the coast. As I entered a small copse, there were gnarled birches, ferns in the dry-stone walls, stunted oak seedlings and so many tangled roots spreading across the path that they almost tripped Jethro up. If this place had been a book, it would have been a manuscript whose pages of handwritten vellum blew out with dust as you opened them.
Another ancient place awaited me. After a day of rounding the headlands of the Yorkshire Moors, I arrived at Clay Bank Top and the Wainstones. The Wainstones – not named after Wainwright as a giant cairn in his honour, although he appreciated them – were monumental natural rocks that looked like menhirs stacked carelessly together on the side of a hill. Some had been carved with the characteristic cup and ring markings of the Bronze Age.
After the rolling heather and the moors, they came as a shock. It was impossible not to imagine how the prehistoric travellers of the Bronze and Iron Ages, with their fetishising of stone and its provenance, would have found this a place of power and significance. No wonder they wanted to leave their mark here.
It was almost sunset by the time I arrived with Jethro, and apart from one couple walking the dog up from Great Broughton below, I had the place to myself. Leaning back against one of the giant stones, sheltered from wind and with the sun going down over the west, I felt a quiet contentment at having come so far; along with the momentary sensation that I was catching at the hem of all those travellers with pack animals who had passed this way for thousands of years.
Once more I had a magnificent view of Teesside curving away below me, with the old ICI and steelworks plants fringed by the distant North Sea. But now we were close to sunset. And there were fires burning. The flames were pullulating from the chimneys down at Wilton like the entrance to hell, the smoke blowing away and dissipating in the thin half-light that streamed off the estuary. An estuary that had been used for shipping since prehistoric times, and had seen millennia of human habitation.
There’s nothing like having walked hundreds of miles to help take you back to an age when that was the only way to reach a destination. For I have often noticed a presumption that we invented travel; or certainly, that in the prehistoric age people tended to stay put.
More and more evidence shows that nothing could be further from the truth. DNA testing of skeletons is showing us how far Bronze Age man could travel in a lifetime. And the route I had now taken across the country would have been one used extensively in the prehistoric past. Archaeologists estimate that half the stone axes found in Yorkshire were quarried from sites some way to the west, in the Lake District; there would have been constant traffic between the two areas.
Another false presumption is that the Yorkshire Moors have always been just that: moors, open and wild. However, like Dartmoor to the south, they originally had a thin covering of trees, which was deforested and cleared remarkably early. Bronze Age man liked to wield his axe. The process of forest clearance accelerated during the second millennium BC. By 1000 BC, much of the country as we know it had already been cleared, including the Moors. So the Yorkshire Moors were settled and farmed earlier than we might expect, given what seems a hostile agricultural environment. But then, as one archaeologist pointed out to me, it would have been difficult to work the heavy clay of the valleys below without hefty iron ploughs, so the uplands had more appeal.
However, the shallow, infertile soils of the Moors and Dales could not sustain long-term cultivation. By 1200 BC, some upland areas had turned into the sort of bog we had encountered above Ravenseat; the sort of bog in which a man could disappear while carrying a rucksack and his girlfriend took photographs.
This may have been due to significant climate change after 1500 BC. The temperature fell, the growing season contracted, and altitude limits for crops came down.
There is another intriguing idea which archaeologists are still investigating: that a volcano in Iceland called Hekla erupted with great force in 1159 BC and sent so many millions of tonnes of dust into the atmosphere that it created the Bronze Age equivalent of a nuclear winter. Acid rain was produced, affecting both crops and livestock.
A much smaller eruption at a different Icelandic volcano a few years ago brought havoc to aviation across Europe. Hekla itself has continued over the millennia to cause problems for both Iceland and its southern neighbours: in the Middle Ages, it was described by Europeans as the ‘Gateway to Hell’.
I thought of Hekla now, as I looked down at the chimneys of Wilton flaring their nostrils. The twin towers of the Cracker were torching out smoke. I watched as the smoke drifted out towards the estuary to be lost in the mists of the North Sea. The faint shapes of ships were silhouetted like smudges on the water towards the horizon, part of the Teesside traffic with northern Europe.
It occurred to me that Britain has always been part of Europe – indeed, only some thousands of years ago was attached to it by a land barrier when that sea did not exist. Yet our national identity had been re-spun. We had chosen in a referendum to leave. Shorn of Empire, we had a choice either to be part of a collegiate Europe or to go our own way.
I had voted to remain in Europe – but I could see that we had done what a mule would do every time, for better or worse: strike out on our own with bloody-minded, sturdy independence, with a quick kick to the crotch of a government that had lost touch with its dispossessed. We are not really a herd nation.
Brexit was now stamped right through the north-east’s heart, like the kiss-me-quick candy-rock they sold on Scarborough beach. They had voted for it more than anybody else. And the people of the north-east were some of the most dissatisfied people in the country, with reason. The steelworks I was looking at down at Redcar had been decimated. Real unemployment, not that massaged by the statistics, was at a record high.
The process of confabulation about leaving Europe had already begun in the national consciousness. Many who voted for Brexit ‘hadn’t meant to’, or had not understood its implications. Immediately afterwards a new prime minister, Theresa May, had proclaimed ‘Brexit means Brexit’; but no one quite knew what either word meant. We were confused, disorientated, and would be for some time.
Brexit had been an accident, even if it had been an accident waiting to happen. The usual aftermath of an accident would unfold in the long years afterwards: shock, legal confusion and the undying conviction that it must have been the other driver’s fault.
But of one thing I was sure: in the years and decades to come, the memory of what had happened – ‘the story of Brexit’ – would morph into something rich and strange and unrecognisable today, whether as triumph or tragedy. We would re-tell the story to ourselves until we had created a historical fable, with some familiar and reassuring narrative. The real reasons would become as diffused and lost as the sea-mist that was billowing out from Teesside below me. And whatever story we decided on for this confabulation, we would recount it to others and to ourselves so often that we would come to believe it to be true.
Glyn Maxwell had put it beautifully: ‘England is the same, / cheering to order, set in its new ways / it thinks are immemorial.’
The chimneys were flaring alternately red and gold in the last of the evening light. The waters of the distant sea had become so dark as to look like oil washing against the land. A short-eared owl flew up from behind me, its white face luminous like a clock dial, and gave a hunting call as it flew off along the escarpment of the Moors looking for the last of the day’s prey. I felt a shiver run down my spine.