The pace of mule transport is from three to four miles an hour, the mule being a quick walker. A short stepping, active pace is preferred to a long striding action.
The War Office, Animal Management (London, 1923)
I HAD ARRANGED stabling for Jethro just off the Yorkshire Moors in one of the villages that line their flanks. We met up with Jasper, who was going to accompany us again for the final stages of the journey across the Moors to the sea. It was good to see him. I had missed his company and quick wit.
A cousin of mine, Elizabeth Kirk, came to see us as she was interested in Jethro’s ride across the country and lived nearby. Elizabeth was the most remarkable person. She instantly impressed Jasper – not an easy thing to do – with her knowledge of horses.
Now in her eighties, Elizabeth had ridden over much of England and had dedicated herself to opening up old bridleways that had been closed. In North Yorkshire alone, she and her friends had managed to get a hundred miles of bridleway added to the ‘definitive map’, the legal document which every county council has to keep about the rights of way in their area. And during a long lifetime of diplomatic campaigning, she had helped restore some forty bridleways around the country which had fallen into disuse for all sorts of reasons.
Until I had tried to get Jethro across England, this had not been an issue I had needed to confront so urgently, and it had puzzled both Jasper and me as we struggled with stiles and lack of access. I told Elizabeth my story about the bridleway that kept turning into a footpath from the day before, and she explained how some of these problems had come about in the first place.
The ‘definitive maps’ in use today were mainly drawn up in the 1950s. At the time, the Ramblers organisation was strong. It had built up momentum since the early part of the century, when Edward Thomas had been so preoccupied with historic rights of access to the countryside. Since the mass trespass on Kinder Scout in 1932, it had also gained a political edge. The Ramblers lobbied effectively to keep many footpaths open and for them to be included on these new ‘definitive maps’.
However, the organisations representing the nation’s horse-riders were far less effective, perhaps because riding in the country is not such a communal activity. Moreover, riding was at a low ebb after the Second World War, and local authorities, then as now, were keen to minimise the perceived maintenance burden of bridleways.
Among countryside riders, there was also an assumption that routes which had always been used as bridleways would somehow remain so, whether legally or not; a false assumption, as unless given official status, they could easily be treated like a footpath and ‘grubbed up and ploughed out’, as Elizabeth put it. Around 65 per cent of the footpaths in the North York Moors National Park had originally been bridleways but were no longer so – a quite staggering proportion, mirrored elsewhere in Britain and one about which the wider public (like me up until this point) were often blithely unaware.
By 1979, the situation had become so bad that concerned riders like Elizabeth set up the Byways and Bridleways Trust to protect our network of ancient minor highways. ‘We got a lot of stick from people for “making a fuss” – but we were right!’ And while she had been a formidable negotiator, writing many letters to local councils, she had also sought much wider publicity for the issue.
Only that year, she had ridden with friends for 300 miles from Devon to Dorset to draw attention to the way in which many a bridleway had an electric fence slung across it, or was so overgrown it was impossible to use. The local council remonstrated that the South Dorset Ridgeway was almost entirely a bridleway, so why didn’t they take that? Elizabeth pointed out in reply that the whole point of the exercise was to draw attention to small local bridleways: precisely the ones most at risk.
‘What gets me so annoyed,’ she said, ‘is the assumption that somehow horse-riding is an aristocratic, upper-class pastime. Which is why councils can ignore bridleways. But there’s the shop-girl on her pony and the nurse who wants to ride after work as well. And it’s just not safe on roads any more. If we’re not careful, we’ll end up with a generation of riders who are too scared to go out of the stables and the training ring.’
Jasper agreed wholeheartedly. ‘Exactly. The whole point of riding is to be able to take off across country. Or you might as well not get on a horse in the first place.’
Like Tolstoy or the celebrated Tschiffely (who rode from one end of the Americas to the other for his book Southern Cross to Pole Star), Elizabeth seemed to have spent a large part of her own life in the saddle. Only ten years ago, when still in her sprightly seventies, she had ridden with some friends from the Yorkshire Moors right down to the Brecon Beacons in South Wales. And in earlier times, she had taken part in horse endurance events, riding fifty miles a day – although with characteristic modesty, she pointed out, ‘that’s nothing these days. They can easily do a hundred.’
Elizabeth was a great advocate for the New Forest pony, particularly for the larger, sturdier ones that can reach just over fourteen hands in height.
‘It’s too much to take a thoroughbred right across country. They can go wrong so easily. And it’s such a long way to go. You’re doing the right thing in taking a mule.’
She inspected Jethro with an experienced horsewoman’s eye and pronounced herself satisfied, particularly with his unusual colouring. Jethro, perhaps conscious that he was in the presence of a connoisseur, demurely bowed his neck to let her stroke him.
Elizabeth asked about the route we were next taking across the Moors, which was not always straightforward. Our natural, most direct route lay along footpaths not bridleways. She warned us to be careful when walking in any old mining areas, as her horse had once slipped up to the girths in the loose washings that had been left in the chambers of a similar hazard.
‘Of course, what we would really like to see,’ said Elizabeth, ‘is the Right to Roam Act extended to riders as well as walkers.’
The Countryside and Rights of Way Act that was brought in for the new millennium in 2000 – popularly known as the ‘Right to Roam Act’ – allowed walkers untrammelled access to open country, like the Moors. But it didn’t do the same for horse-riders. And as Elizabeth pointed out, there was no reason that a sensible rider shouldn’t be able to pick their way across the Moors in any direction, as they would certainly have done in previous centuries. However, there was a new complication.
‘When the definitive maps were being drawn up in the 1950s, off-road mountain bikes weren’t invented. Cycling was never a concern. Whereas now, of course, it’s become a predominant one. And it’s difficult to differentiate between cyclists and horse-riders in any legislation, but they often have different needs.’
I could see that the owners of shooting estates might not like the idea of cyclists beating through the heather, even in low gear; although who knows, that could be as cost-effective a way as any of managing a shoot.
After some tea, Elizabeth headed back to her house before it got dark as, while still driving in her eighties, she didn’t like to do so when the light was going. I was impressed by how much time she had given to this cause during her long life, while also having a family and running a small farm on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors. Let alone that she was still riding for hundreds of miles.
What I liked most of all was her air of quiet deliberation about these issues. She was not a tub-thumping, bossy horsewoman of the Thelwellian school, who made grown men quake in their boots. Instead, it was her very reasonable and patient articulation of the sorry state of affairs that I suspected made her such a formidably effective campaigner. And having tried to get Jethro across the country, it was a campaign with which I now had every sympathy.
It was also a campaign with a deadline. All the revisions to the definitive maps based on historic evidence had to be in place by 2026. At that point, any ‘unrecorded public rights of way’ would be extinguished by statute, even though the maxim ‘once a highway, always a highway’ has stood the test of time in England since 1189. Ten years might sound like a reasonable window of opportunity, but county councils react to legal challenges at glacial speed. There were an estimated 20,000 bridleways and byways which needed to be reclaimed. Elizabeth and her colleagues were facing a formidable challenge.
We drove back up onto the Moors in the old Dodge horse van, which only just managed the steep gradients, and parked up at Clay Bank Top. As we got going for that day’s walk, we met a man and a boy who had come up from Middlesbrough, the man told us, ‘to get out of the town for some peace and quiet’. They looked very urban in tracksuits and hoodies. The boy was his nephew.
‘That yours, is it?’ the boy asked about Jethro.
‘Well, we wouldn’t have stolen it, would we!’ said Jasper, with some asperity. ‘That’s a leading question.’
‘And is it a male?’
‘Jethro used to be a male. But he’s had the snip.’
‘Poor old sod,’ said the man.
‘Mules are sterile anyway. Because they’re a cross between a donkey and a horse. So they can’t breed between themselves.’
‘Well, that’s a bit of a disadvantage. Must take the wind out of his sails.’
The man came up quite often to do a five-mile circuit around Bloworth Crossing, he said. But it was the first time on the Moors for his nephew, who looked unsure about proceedings – although he was interested in Jethro.
‘Are you sure it’s not a donkey?’ he asked. ‘And how do you get it down? Or do you just throw it?’
‘Throw it? Well, for a start he’s a “he”, not an “it”. And he’s a mule, not a donkey. And he’s got a name – Jethro.’
‘I know,’ said the boy perkily. ‘That’s why I asked the question. “D’ya throw?” “Je-thro”. Get it?’
We groaned. It had been a while since we had been in the playground with the tough ten-year-olds.
‘So what’s your name?’ we asked the kid.
He looked hesitant. ‘Bob.’
The man laughed. ‘No, it’s not. It’s Joshua. You’re just embarrassed by it.’
‘It’s Bob. And tomorrow it’s going to be Jeff. Did you know that Michael Jackson died on the toilet?’
‘I run a business down in Middlesbrough,’ interjected the uncle, to get us back on track. ‘It’s go, go, go down there. Then you come up here and they all stay down there. It’s all peace and quiet. I’ve been coming for twenty years. My dad used to bring me when I was a kid, when I was just seven – up to the Wainstones and round. And now I’ve brought him up. Although he keeps asking embarrassing questions about my girlfriend.’
‘So can you ride him?’ interjected the nephew, who was displaying more and more Just William characteristics.
‘No, he’s too small. We’re doing what people used to do,’ explained Jasper, who liked the romantic history of muleteering. ‘We’re travelling with a mule as a pack animal. That’s how you could keep going for days in the past.’
‘So what you’re doing is “olden-days style”?’ said ‘Bob’. Or ‘Joshua’. Or ‘Jeff’. His ten-year-old face wrinkled in distaste.
‘Yes, I suppose we are,’ said Jasper.
‘Now that is sad. No offence. But that is really, really sad.’
Jasper looked crestfallen. ‘Is “sad” one of those words like “sick” that these days means it’s actually good?’ he asked me, hopefully.
‘No, Jasper. I’m sorry,’ I told him, ‘it means “sad”.’
‘And your mule’s got stupid ears,’ said ‘Bob’. He laughed knowingly.
The kid was obviously too young to have seen Clint Eastwood’s A Fistful of Dollars, with the immortal line, ‘My mule don’t like people laughing. He gets the crazy idea they might be laughing at him.’ Or he would realise what happens next.
It was time to come back off the ropes.
‘You’re wearing a smart pair of green trainers,’ I told ‘Bob’. ‘They must be the smartest trainers on the Moors.’
I knew my ten-year-old psychology. There is nothing they dislike more than having attention drawn to their clothes. Or to be told they’re smart.
‘Thank you,’ he murmured bashfully.
Jethro, Jasper and I walked on with our heads held high. Nobody messed with us in the playground. If I had found one under my poncho, I would have lit a cheroot.
As we climbed up the Moors on the northern side, the remarkable profile of Roseberry Topping came into view in the distance, looking like a miniature Matterhorn. The young Captain Cook had grown up nearby and was said to have climbed Roseberry Topping as a boy, which gave him his taste for adventure.
‘It’s quite phenomenal among these rounded hills to have this sharp fang sticking up like a canine tooth,’ said Jasper.
There was a reason for its distinctiveness. The Topping’s original, more conventional sugarloaf shape collapsed in 1912, possibly because of all the mining that had been done, or due to erosion from the incoming weather.
Jethro was moving well along the difficult path up the heather. Jasper was pleased with the progress our boy had made during our journey. He was even carrying a little bit more in his saddlebags: some Yorkshire pork pies, among other essentials, which I had sourced in Stokesley, and of which I had high hopes.
‘Look at him,’ said Jasper. ‘On his dainty little dancer’s feet, he’s tangoing up the whole way!’
Yet again, we had been lucky with the weather. It was one of those sunny days that sometimes come to Yorkshire when you can see for miles and miles, and it truly did appear to be ‘God’s Own Country’. Up on top and crossing to Urra Moor, there was a carpet of heather rolling forever away from us – one of the largest expanses in Europe.
Over the ridge, we chanced upon a group of Lycra-clad cyclists sprawled in various attitudes of recovery and lassitude. With their legs hidden, they seemed to be rising up from under the heather. The group reminded me of Signorelli’s famous resurrection fresco at Orvieto, in which young men in equally tight hose emerge from the ground as angels trumpet the Second Coming; but I thought I’d get talking to them first before I suggested this comparison.
They were experienced cyclists doing a mountain bike leaders’ course. Their own leader cast an expert eye over Jethro. ‘So how many gears has that got?’
‘Twenty-four. Although some of them are rarely used.’
Jethro took advantage of the conversation to go and nibble some of the heather while stocks lasted.
‘Where have you come from?’ asked the leader in a friendly way.
We explained how we had travelled over from the Lake District.
‘Haven’t come across a mule before. But I did have a close encounter with a horse in Mongolia once.’
His pupils looked up expectantly from the heather as their man in the green jersey began his story.
‘I was crossing Mongolia …’
‘As you do,’ interjected Jasper.
‘… and I went to sleep with my bicycle chained to my tent with a padlock. I woke up in the middle of the night when the whole tent, with me in it, started to move at great speed across the Mongolian steppe. A horseman had come along, taken a fancy to my bike, tied it up to his horse and galloped off, not realising that the whole tent was attached to the bike as well. So I came too. It was a bit of a bumpy ride for a few moments before he realised what had happened and let go.’
That was the advantage of a mule. They were extraordinarily hard things to steal. I remembered once travelling in Morocco with some mules out of Taroudant – as you do – and coming to a small market town with my guide, Ali. We left our mules in a clearing outside the town where everyone else had as well. None of them were tied up or secured in any way.
‘Don’t they sometimes get stolen?’ I had asked Ali, naïvely.
He looked at me with pity. ‘Have you ever tried to move a mule that wasn’t yours? It’s hard enough to move a mule that is yours.’
Ali was right. It was the ultimate vehicle protection device. A mule was its own natural immobiliser. Nobody could ever steal one. Thieves had to stick to horses and bicycles.
Ahead lay Bloworth Crossing, from where we could take the disused railway track to Blakey Junction. We could see how it wound its serpentine way across the top of the ridge, keeping to the contours.
The Rosedale Ironstone Railway had been the most remarkable, if short-lived, achievement of the nineteenth-century mining boom on the Moors. The iron ore needed to be transported down to the big blast furnaces of Teesside. Roughly ten million tonnes were taken on the railway between 1861 and its final closure in 1929. The rails had long been taken up, but the cinder path still ran straight and true across the landscape, and made for a remarkably efficient way of travelling with a mule.
As we marched at some speed along the old railway track, I was surprised by the deep and green valleys that cut through the Moors to either side as, in my ignorance, I had always presumed they would be one continuous upland plateau. I was particularly taken by the beautiful green bowl of Farndale to the south, fringed with a purple lip by the heather and shaped like a shallow oyster shell. This was another valley that at one point had been threatened with flooding for a reservoir, but had somehow mercifully escaped.
Ahead lay a lone building on Blakey Ridge. We knew this, with some anticipation, to be the Lion Inn. I was hoping for a lost rural pub in the middle of nowhere, of the sort that had blackened timbers and a few pickled eggs to go with the beer from the cask. We were, after all, almost in the centre of the Yorkshire Moors, and had walked for miles without seeing a soul. But I was wrong. The place was jumping. It had one of the largest dining areas I had seen for some time and a fruit machine in the corner. The menu alone ran to six pages. And all this because there was a car park.
The Lion Inn lay on the Castleton Road, one of the few north–south axes that run across the Moors, so was a magnet for motorists as well as stray walkers (let alone mules). It was clearly not a locals’ pub. While Jasper escorted Jethro to his accommodation for the night, I decided to head down into the enticingly green valley of Farndale and the Feversham Arms, in search of fresher alcoholic pastures.
It was still early hours when I met Dave Maynard, a large, cheerful Yorkshireman who took great pleasure in the fact I could only understand two out of every three words he spoke. He was sitting with his wife, Sue, in the snug single room of the Feversham Arms.
Dave had worked around Farndale and the valleys of the Yorkshire Moors for all his life. Initially he had worked for individual farms, but as these had consolidated into a few large farms, with fewer workers, he had gone freelance with his own fencing business.
He remembered often getting snowed up as a child in the remote farms where his father lived.
‘It were nothing to get blocked in for three weeks in winter sometimes. The snow would get so high, you couldn’t use the gates, so you would just step over the walls. The dogs would have to tell you where the sheep were buried. They would stand over them in a deep drift as they could smell them through the snow. Gave a lot of local employment as well, for the snow cutters. All the local men would get work cutting. It was too difficult to get the snowplough up.
‘We had some hard winters in the 1970s, I remember. We once got locked in for six weeks. Now, that was difficult. My mother had to shift to make the food last. Although we always got big sacks of everything anyway. Big sacks of potatoes and flour.
‘It was different in those days, because there were so many travelling salesmen. They would come to you. Not often, mind – maybe once a month – but that was all you needed. The Clarks van would come with clothes and shoes; Colin Challoner with the groceries. Even the postman would always have a few sacks of potatoes on the van. If you live in Farndale nowadays, you have to drive to get everything you need. And there are a lot of incomers who work elsewhere. So they bring their stores with them.
‘Time was when there were lots of small farms and everyone knew each other, so Christmas would last until Easter because everyone had to have a party and invite everybody else round. That took a while. Of the twelve or so farms on one side of the valley, there’s only three left now. Of course, there are a lot more gamekeepers on the grouse moors. That’s where the money is. There’s one estate that used to have maybe two or three keepers when I was a boy. Now they have seven or eight.
‘That said, the poachers these days are a bit rougher. It’s not just a few locals looking for one for the pot. It’s men up from Middlesbrough with lurcher dogs, wearing balaclavas.
‘Isn’t that right, Sue?’ he asked his wife.
‘What I think’s a shame,’ said Sue, who had recognised Dave’s question as purely rhetorical, ‘is that it is so difficult for young farmers today. There aren’t any starter farms of 100 acres for them to begin on. I don’t see how a young farming couple can get started at all, now that farms are so big.’
‘Some days I used to do sixteen- or seventeen-hour shifts,’ said Dave. ‘Quite often in the summer. I’ve no regrets, though, about working here all my life. I mean, it’s a grand office window, ain’t it.’ He waved outside at Farndale.
Dave was interested in the mule trip.
‘Be careful with the boggy areas up on the Moors. You can always tell the horses that know the Moors, as they’ll avoid the bogs. I’ve always done a lot of riding and if you go slack-reined, the horses that know the area will find their own way round. But the horses that come from off-Moor will just wade in and go up to their chests.
‘What’s your mule like? Is he clever and obedient?’
‘Well, he hasn’t gone into a bog yet,’ I said, loyally, and skirting part of the question. ‘And he’s come all the way from the Lake District, so he’s not done badly.’
‘Oh, aye. You can do owt if you get your head set, as they say.’ This last was delivered in such a gravelly accent, with consonants backwashing across each other – ‘Y-c-n do-owt-if-ye gyr-ed soot’ – that I had to ask Dave to repeat it, as he knew I would.
‘You haven’t understood a word I said, have you?’ he said with a broad grin, before Sue and he left.
The pub started filling up. The Feversham Arms was small and homely, so it didn’t need many people to make it feel like a full house. Everyone in the bar joined in the one general conversation. The landlady, Rachel, told me that the same locals tended to come in every night. They all knew each other’s jokes so well they started laughing before anyone reached the punchline.
The conversation got more raucous as the evening wore on, fuelled by Black Sheep and, in my case, Jack Daniels, for which I had conceived a sudden yearning. A black-haired fellow called Norman was holding forth about how plastic drainpipes were useless if you were trying to climb down from housewives’ windows because they broke so easily. From which the conversation flowed quickly and easily to how many times everyone present had been married.
‘I’ve been married three times,’ said a bald gentleman called Steve.
‘Yes, and you’ve bought a house for every one of your wives,’ said Rachel. ‘I’ve often thought I should marry you myself.’
‘Three times! Three times!’ shouted Andy, a voluble character who had enough facial hair to stuff a pillow and whose volume control had been turned up to eleven. ‘One’s been quite enough for me!’
Once they had established that I had been married twice, so stood somewhere in the middle of the pecking order, and after another round of drinks, the talk turned to weddings.
I had a showstopper up my sleeve, and proceeded to use it. My mother had a favourite tale about how she had attended a wedding at which the bride arrived even later than was customary. Turning to the congregation, she had begun a speech straight away, without waiting for the service to start. At first her audience were unfazed – we live, after all, in an age when couples make up their own rules as to how they get married – but after the bride had thanked them all for coming, she delivered her bombshell.
‘And I particularly want to thank the chief bridesmaid,’ she announced. ‘Because by sleeping last night with the man who was to become my husband, she showed me exactly what sort of a man he is.’ And with that, she had flounced out of the church.
It was a great story and I had told it before, so could include some curlicues and flourishes that kept my pub audience alert and wanting more.
A farmer’s son called Darren was intrigued. ‘So what did the fellow do who was still standing at the altar waiting for her? Must have been a bit awkward.’
‘And more to the point,’ said Norman, ‘what did the chief bridesmaid do? I bet she could have done with a drainpipe to escape down!’
Andy started laughing again. He had a laugh so loud it was like a foghorn in the small room of the pub. It certainly would have scared any American werewolves out roaming the Moors.
‘And that was your mother’s story,’ he boomed. ‘So it must be true!’
Steve bought me another Jack Daniels. Rachel’s dog was brought into the room to sniff at me to check whether I was up to scratch. I felt a benign warmth spread through my body from both the fire and the conversation, although the alcohol was helping as well.
They had a few rooms at the pub and I thought it sensible to sleep over, as Jasper was with Jethro. After the extra shots of Jack Daniels, I was in no condition to be heading back, and it was getting late.
The next morning, I woke not feeling at my brightest. Even a substantial breakfast – ‘that’ll fill you up’ – and copious coffee didn’t help.
I opened some email on my laptop, as there was a whole raft of things that had floated by while I was travelling across country – including the delivery of the vintage ice axe, bought in that exuberant moment back at Jeff’s place. A note had come from FedEx, who I assumed had been trying to drop what must have been a large package at a house that was empty during the day. And my wife was hardly expecting it.
Except it wasn’t a real delivery note from FedEx. It was an exceptionally strong virus which threatened, with menaces, to blow up my computer unless I paid money in Bitcoin to some address on the dark web. All my files had been locked, a message on the screen announced, with an algorithm of the most powerful sort known to mankind. In a generous, caring sort of way, the hackers gave me a full three days to pay off the ransomware or all those same files would be wiped. Forever.
It was the sort of thing that only ever happens when you have a hangover. I envied those nineteenth-century drovers who had come this way with their pack animals. They could have a drink and not have to worry about email. The experience taught me a valuable lesson: never handle a computer unless strictly sober.
I turned off the laptop and let it look after itself. Outside, a country lane led back up the hill. The tarmac was shining with a light sprinkling of rain that had fallen during the night. October was coming to an end. As I walked along the lane, a northerly wind was bringing down a cold burst. The tops of the hedgerows had been stripped bare and only the shoulders were still covered in hazel leaves. Rosehips shone out bright red from the bare branches, while green wreaths of morning glory were draped in swathes across the boughs. The hedge was under-planted with ferns and the last shoots of angelica, perhaps my favourite herb, and one I had seen in remote valleys of the Himalaya as well as English country lanes like this. The oaks along the lane were ageing with the year so much more gracefully than the other trees, still keeping their handsome structure with just a hint of fading to the leaves, like old roués.
Who needed data anyway, I thought to myself. And I was certainly not going to pay a bunch of internet pirates some exorbitant ransom. They could go and take a running jump off the plank into cyberspace. Not least because I had, in a rare moment of foresight, backed the whole thing up only a few days before. At this happy thought, I whistled as I walked.