The valley was ablaze with the colour of brilliant decay as the cycle of winter began with a fresh palette. Crows blown like black handkerchiefs from a funeral feast into the tangled treetops exchanged shrill chatter there, a running commentary on all that was happening around them. Everything was in vibrant flux. All was decay.

The best of the heather had already been clipped and picked for the making of besoms. The longest branches and thickest clusters had been cut to size and bundled around a stouter pole – always willow – by those solitary bodgers and gamekeepers’ wives who had gained the landowner’s permission, and who sang the same song as they worked at home with blade and cord, always sung to a melody that followed a descending glissando of notes:

Buy broom buzzems,

Buy them when they’re new,

Fine heather bred uns,

Better never grew.

The heather’s flowers too had been taken and set to boil in pots or hung to dry in clusters from mullions and over inglenooks, their mauve colourings turning darker with the darkening of shortened days bookended by nights that birthed new mythologies from old fears.

The heather of the Calder Valley was burned at the behest of the few. Men unseen. Landowners who rarely walked the land they owned, let alone lived on. These were men from the cities, who spent their days away paving turnpikes and building mills. Sinking canals and striking deals. Buying and selling. Traders. Sons of the empire. Men for whom too much was never enough.

Their estate work was done by land managers and it was these who took the heather plant and used its gruit for brewing the ale that filled their master’s bow-roofed cellars, while others used the barren moorland spaces for housing hives for their honey-making. Sheep and deer grazed up there and grouse nested in it too, but mainly the heather was used for the dying of the wools.

The slow smoke drifted down to settle on the houses of those weavers and land workers who lived in the hamlets and farmsteads that sat below the moor line. The scent of it was the latest subtle signal to mark autumn’s tightening grip on the land.

The incoming season meant death and soon the trees were to become bone-like, and their leaves would gather in drifts down in the lanes, and the animals were already gorging themselves before winter inevitably announced itself in a famine of everything but frost and fire and flickering candles below the patch-blackened shapes of moorland that saw shouting men with their brooms and beaters and handkerchiefs tied tight around their faces from late September.

Come April the pitch-coloured rectangles of burnt heather shadows would be dotted with the white fingers of new shoots peeping through, though as this summer past withered and died, slowly curling in on itself into crisp husks and falling skeletons, the very thought of next spring’s re-birth seemed one beyond realisation for most in the valley, an impossibility, a wild, fanciful vision of the deluded.

Benjamin Myers, extract from The Gallows Pole, publishing 2017