Seven

Silverdale

Garlic tang on the back of your nose. The wide floor of the wood was greening up, intense viridian. Leaves pushing upwards, migrating toward the light, each single one a scimitar arc, the tip nodding back down towards the earth. In a short number of days the woods would be full of the white globe stars of ramsons (wild garlic).

The sign, leaning slightly, pointed us through the woods and towards the shore. The footpath began as a lane, bordered by mossy drystone walls. The Silverdale area is riddled with paths that wind through its ancient woodlands of hazel, sycamore, beech and sweet chestnut, ancient ways that forged crucial links between one small community and another. Silverdale, from the Norse ‘Silure’s Dale’, is a place of clearings and woodland, enclosures and wild places side by side. A random patchwork of fields cleared where the rocky outcrops allowed, woodland for field borders and margins. Tree roots plunder the clints and grikes of great bluffs of limestone. Pathways forge themselves between and around the silvered rocks that give these woods their character.

A woodpecker drilled pneumatic, unseen. Diffuse sunlight measured the spaces, bands and beams of light came in, trees just beginning to show their colours again on the back of our longest winter for years. The pungent scent of wild garlic filled the air and filled us up; it was impossible to breathe and not take it in. It bordered the wall bottoms and spread in drifts, claiming the whole woodland. Just a couple of weeks ago the woods were in thrall to bluebells, casting their own particular spell. In Beckmickle Ing, near our home bordering the River Kent, and in Dorothy Farrer’s and Mike’s Wood too, we’d go frequently to take in the evening magic of them, the low sunlight slanting into the woods and the cobalt distances receding towards the woodland horizon.

We went to Silverdale en famille – my husband Steve, son Fergus and Milly the dog. She was alive to the scents of the wood, following and chasing lines of communication left long ago by foxes and rabbits and voles. Other dogs too. But there was something else also, and Milly knew it. I could tell by the set of her eyes and the way she charged about, head extended. Then there it was, bounding and looping across the ground and up into a tall beech. A grey squirrel that gained the upper storey in seconds and ran along a branch, then off into another tree and away into the intertwining canopy. All Milly could do was to stand with her paws as high up the trunk as she could manage, trying to work out, as she always does, exactly where the squirrel has gone.

At the bottom of our lane in Kendal there’s an old yew tree extending a gabled branch out over the tarmac. In snow the lane is impassable by all but sledges and boots. One New Year we’d had a fall of the most crystalline snow I’ve encountered. The flakes fell and froze as the temperature dropped and stayed down for days. I’d walked down the lane with Fergus and the dog on our way to the Green, Fergus fiddling about with something, I can’t remember what, but he was behind me, travelling in my snowy wake. Milly got the scent of a squirrel. It crossed the lane in a grey flash, then up onto the trunk of the yew. From my position further down the lane, I turned to watch and laugh at the dog adopting the squirrel-hunting position, paws up on the bark.

The sun had just risen over the fell back up beyond the house and was still low to the sky. As the squirrel ran out along the broad branch over the lane, it dislodged a shower of frozen crystals. I watched the sun catching each super-lit particle as it fell, turning them celestial, and into it all, unaware of the effect, Fergus walked, so that he became lit with the sparkle and shimmer of it all. It was an extraordinary moment, this falling of fire-lit snow and my son caught in its magic. The dog oblivious, still nosing skywards, bemused.

* * *

My husband Steve lived in Silverdale when we met, and a pattern of weekend visits to my home in the North-East or to his in Silverdale evolved; best of both worlds. It wasn’t an area I knew very well, and it was good to walk the mazy network of paths with an expert, setting out from the front door with two dogs, though frequently returning home again with only one. The area is home to every deer species in the UK, unsurprisingly, as the woven landscape gives them places to feed and leap back into the wood in seconds. Steve’s dog, Kim, a golden retriever-Labrador, was incapable of resisting the scent of deer. We’d go walking and then the dog would shoot off, deaf to our calls to come back. She ran and ran until exhaustion eventually overtook her, then she’d come back to the road and always managed to find some hapless dog-lover. We’d reach home and later, there’d be a phone call.

‘I’ve just found your dog.’

And Steve would reply, ‘OK, that’s great, thank you. I’ll come and get her. Where is she this time?’

The path gently descended towards the saltmarsh at the edge of the bay. A series of creeks act as drainage channels wicking excess water away from the pools of Leighton Moss RSPB reserve, and a signpost points to Quaker Pool, the footpath running along the top of flood defence banking. Beyond it are fields and further still the ochre swathes of bulrushes at the reserve. Further away towards the east the sloping and folded strata of Farleton Fell. The Furness railway line passes close and, as if spirited out of nowhere, a train comes, horn blaring a warning for the level crossing ahead.

We separated. I headed off to the newer hides of the Allen Pools and Steve and Fergus set off to walk the dog around the coast towards Jack Scout. They have to round the small, low headland at Jenny Brown’s Point, where there’s a strange intrusion in the landscape. It’s a lime kiln chimney, all that’s left over from another era and another view of how the landscape was used. In the 1790s a copper-smelting works was built there, laboured by migrant Welshmen at a time when copper was in great demand for the manufacture of cannons to feed the Napoleonic wars. The machinery and boiler for the works were brought in by boat to a purpose-built quayside, and then removed again by boat when the industry declined. All that remains of the quay is a toppled pile of limestone blocks. The chimney itself is an anachronism, but I think it fits; it seems to belong. It puts me in mind of the Mannerist landscapes that followed the High Renaissance. How were artists able to move on from the perceived idea of perfection? They began to exaggerate, to create visual puzzles and odd perspectives. Here, the visual puzzle of the lime kiln chimney that speaks of another era.

I turned to look back at the woods we’d walked through. They were still so brown, as if the life has been singed out of them by this ridiculous measure of cold weather. Looking harder though, and I thought I saw just a rebellious tinge of pale green; spring moving in at long last.

From the top of the bank and just above sea level, the bay itself was a thin, silver band pegged into place by the Heysham Power stations and the hazy line of Morecambe’s sea-front buildings. On the journey around the liminal spaces of the bay, I learned about orientation, about how the bay comes at you in unexpected angles and how you see places from a new perspective. A swathe of saltmarsh swelled out towards the tidal zone and sheep grazed the surface. Pairs of shelducks rested, occasionally ruffling feathers and settling again.

A single swallow skimmed the air – my first of the year. I walked underneath a hazel tree, its emergent leaves not yet fully unwound and hanging in pairs, like insect wings held out to dry. Coming closer to the Allen Pools the clamour of black-headed gulls was unmistakeable, raucous, the sound travelling over the low-growing willow and tall grasses that gave shelter to the pools.

I had heard that avocets had come in to Leighton Moss and that their numbers had been increasing, but going into the first hide, I was completely unprepared for the sight from the windows. Wading, probing, investigating the underworld of water, resting on innumerate small islands or checking out the airwaves were some 50 or 60 avocets, stilt-legged and distinctive; a black and white spectacle of birds. Some of them were so near to the hide and the open window that I could hear the quiet plash of bird-foot rising out of and entering back into the water; in and out, up and down. Taking the time to tune in, and tuning out the squawks and squabbles of the gulls, there was the sweeter, more simple and quieter piping of the avocets.

Avocets were once relatively common in many areas of the UK, but with significant losses in their wetland habitats, by 1840 they had died out completely. Their rebirth as a breeding species was down to the flooding of the coastal margins of East Anglia during the Second World War. Gradually, a very few birds returned to British soil. In May 1997, a single avocet was seen on the saltmarsh close to Leighton Moss, a single bird that must have had the twitchers jumping. Five years later a pair bred, an even more remarkable event given that Morecambe Bay was considered far north of their typical breeding grounds. The first nest failed, but the birds persevered and two chicks hatched that season, one fledging.

Slowly, more birds began to arrive, though it took years for their numbers to grow. In 2011, nine young fledged, but in 2012, some 48 young fledged. Well over a hundred avocets have now been added to the UK population through Leighton Moss.

Previously I’d seen avocets only once before. Arriving at Minsmere in Suffolk whilst on holiday one August, the warden’s answer about the best place to see them was not what I’d anticipated.

‘I think you’re a bit too late. They’ve already gone.’

Walking the circumference of the reserve, each hide drew a blank. Then at the final hide a man looked up from his telescope, and smiling he said, ‘You want to have a look?’ and there in the sights, avocets. It was brilliant seeing them for the first time, and sharing the man’s similar delight in these semi-exotic creatures. But to see all these avocets here by Morecambe Bay, a world of them, was just great.

Eventually I tore myself away. Leaving the hide I sensed a movement overhead, and looking upwards a marsh harrier was passing over the pools, mobbed by a single oystercatcher. They flew off together. The harrier, a male, its undercarriage hazelnut brown and with paler wings, banked and dropped over the density of the reed beds, tumbling as if weightless in the air and giving an occasional one-note, cat-like call. The harriers are mostly migrant birds that return from wintering in Africa during the spring. Occasionally single birds have been spotted during the winter months, and it’s thought that some individuals stay put because of the milder winter climates of more recent years. Even though this particular spring has decided to be later than ever, the birds have returned to Leighton regardless. They were already on the look-out, and being looked-out for.

There must be something in the air at Leighton Moss; the much rarer raptor, the hen harrier, is seen occasionally flying over the pools and reed beds. These birds have been subject to persecution on an unprecedented scale. Perhaps as few as three pairs remain in England, though they fare much better in Scotland. In England hen harriers breed on areas of open moorland that are used for shooting grouse, and mysteriously, whenever a brood hatches, the young don’t seem to survive. Sometimes the adult birds are shot dead. But there’s a tide beginning to turn, and perhaps the raising of the persecution of hen harriers in a wave of press articles, together with peaceful demonstrations close to the birds’ habitat, may eventually bring about change.

* * *

A lone lapwing wavered across the sky and out towards the bay, joined by another, and both disappeared over the reed beds. The hides were quiet that day. In the second, just one man sat looking out, his telescope trained on the dark forms of hundreds of birds on the lagoon. I’m admittedly rubbish at identifying waders and I asked him what species they were.

‘They’re black-tailed godwits. They should really be gone by now.’

‘Where to?’ I asked.

‘These birds from Morecambe Bay head up to Iceland for the summer, but I’ve never known them stay this long. It’s this winter, it’s just going on and on.’

I told him I’d seen my first swallow, and that it must be spring soon, surely?

Coming in through the open windows of the hide, the call of the godwits had the distinctive sound of the marsh about them, of liminal places, a lilting, wistful repetitive tune of three short notes. More lapwings wafted above the pool and out towards the saltmarsh, pee-witting as they travelled. The godwits had settled in groups, mostly sitting tight, either in the water or on the small islands. Most had their heads turned and tucked into their back feathers, and those that hadn’t were aligned with their heads to the north-west. With the weather apparently settling down, I wondered how long it would be before they left, and I looked up to a sky that was a pale, washed blue layered with milky bands of high cloud. Occasionally a bird lifted from the water, skimming the surface like a moth, white wing-bars flashing before settling again. The birdwatcher packed up his kit and moved on. A moment later I followed and as I walked down the wooden ramp a bearded tit landed on a fencepost a few feet ahead of me, its feet planted wide. I stopped stock-still to take in the orange plumage, the head the same colour as the sky, the white chin and long tail feathers. Two dark curving patches below the eyes, like heavy mascara that has bled in the rain, or a heavily made-up Japanese kabuki actor. One of those eyes turned towards me, head to one side, then he flashed away into the high hedgerow, and though I could no longer see him, he poured forth his song: sweep churrrrr, sweep sweep churrrr, sweep churrrr.

* * *

Out on the thin sliver of the bay a distant heat haze had risen and, seen through it, the hills of Furness broke up and were pixellated into indeterminate shapes. Above, the inevitable vapour trails melting into nothing. Clouds were beginning to break up into small shapes like cats’ paws on the surface of a lake. Buds were forming on willow and, seen from a short distance, were like lime mist. Another songbird, a carmine-chested bullfinch, chirped and whistled as I passed below. The first insect hum of spring evolved from underneath the tree canopy. Swallows came, gliding and hunting for airborne morsels. One sweeps low and passes in front of my face. It almost touches the end of my nose.

Further along the path there’s a barn and a hole in a gable wall where swallows dived in and out, chirping. I closed my eyes and as the warmth of the day pulsed and grew I sensed that spring was here, and that the trees were pushing out leaves responding to the shift of season – the ‘green fuse’ of Dylan Thomas.12

I walked back along the bank and saw Steve and Fergus walking towards me, rounding the point by the chimney, the dog bounding on ahead. I called to her and she came running flat out along the path, skittering to a halt and then setting off back towards the others. It’s the collie in her; she likes to keep us rounded up.

I looked out at the edge of the bay and there, crossing the saltmarsh, heading away from the pools and then following the line of the land-edge, a large flock of waders were winging towards the north. Too far away to identify clearly, but I fancied they were the black-tailed godwits, released by warmth; as if they too felt the green fuse and knew the time was right.

* * *

When our firstborn son, Callum, was two weeks old, we left my house in the North-East and came to Silverdale so that the new arrival could be duly shown off to family and friends. He was born at the end of July and we were blessed with good weather. As I slept on in the mornings Steve wrapped Callum into the sling and took him with the dogs for a walk and to fetch the paper from the shop. We walked every day, introducing the boy to the quiet beauty of the Silverdale woods and shore.

We’d walk along the road, passing the Lindeth Tower house in the grounds of a high-walled garden. The writer Elizabeth Gaskell used the three-storey tower in the 1840s and ’50s when she escaped the Manchester smog for recuperative holidays. She wrote her novel Ruth in the newly built tower, and her short story The Sexton’s Hero is set on the bay (see Chapter 5, ‘David Cox – The Road Across the Sands’). In 1858 she wrote to a friend that she was due to visit Silverdale for a six-week trip. ‘The house,’ she said, ‘is covered with roses, and great white Virgin-sceptred lilies and sweetbriar bushes grow in the small flagged square court. At the end of the garden is a high terrace at the top of the broad stone wall, looking down on the bay...’13 And Silverdale is where Charlotte and Emily Brontë spent just one night, staying in The Cove, a house owned by the Reverend Carus Wilson, headmaster of the girl’s school at Cowan Bridge, over the border in a north-eastern corner of Lancashire. This school with its diabolical regime, and where the two older Brontë girls contracted and later died from tuberculosis, was reconstructed as the unforgettable Lowood School in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre. It was mindboggling to read that the girl’s father continued to send them to the same school after the death of their sisters.

With our new arrival we’d walk on towards the limestone headland of Jack Scout and stay a while on the Giant’s Seat to look out over the wide bay. We’d take in the view, the tide in or out or travelling, the headland further north with trees sculpted by the wind, the branches of each one rolling over and intertwined within the branches of the next. Oystercatchers and curlew gathered on the sands below, or called as they passed, skirting the cliffs below us on the wing. In the scrubby vegetation of the headland, blackbirds surfed the air from one hawthorn to the next. I have photographs of us walking home in the sunset, each of us smiling – always – the baby carrier strapped to our front and the evening sun turning the silver-grey limestone cliffs rosy.

The holiday became a procession of visitors. Steve’s parents came, the wonderful John and Peggy, finding themselves doting grandparents for the first time at a fairly advanced age. Our friends from Ulverston came as a gang, kids and parents bearing gifts for the baby and alcohol to wet the baby’s head. We flew kites on the shore with the children and talked and laughed. Steve’s stepdaughters from his first marriage came, Anna just returned from New Zealand, and Eleanor living down the road in Lancaster. All this evident pleasure for us and the new arrival was truly moving.

I am writing of a period when time seemed suspended. Not merely through the broken nights of a baby’s demands, but because my memory tells me that we lived by the light. It called us out in the day and evenings and we went to bed with the late sinking of the sun. I learned the network of lanes and trods and footpaths and discovered the idiosyncratic wells of Silverdale – Woodwell, Elmslack, Burton, Bank and The Row. Walking the footpaths then, and looking down at our new child with the sunlight and shadows from the woods passing over his downy head, and thinking now of those days, what blessed times.

In a previous year, on one of my first visits to Steve’s house on Lindeth Road, I went walking one morning with Kath, the friend who’d introduced us. Along one of the village’s hidden pedestrian arteries was a cottage set in a walled orchard with a hand-painted wooden sign that we’d seen the day before: ‘Plums for Sale’. We walked towards the front door, which, like all the windows, stood open, curtains from another era blowing in the breeze. The walls of the building were faded and yellow like an ancient Normandy farmhouse. Loud, transistorised classical music poured out from the open ground floor windows and door. We knocked, but there was no reply. After shouting hello and knocking again, we peered inside and saw, there in the kitchen, his back towards us, the old man whose plum trees groaned in the orchard under the season’s weight of red and yellow Victoria’s. We watched the man, his arms moving through the warm air as summer flies droned in bozzy patterns above his head. He was conducting music coming from a small radio on the kitchen windowsill.

We knocked again and tried shouting louder, but eventually Kath walked closer and called again during a lull in the music. The man was, unsurprisingly, a little taken aback, but then seemed pleased to see us.

‘I rarely hear people knock first time,’ he said. ‘I’m very deaf.’

Once we’d made our request and he’d understood, he took folded brown paper bags from a drawer and filled them brimful with plums, taking hardly anything in exchange. We talked for a while, us two speaking clearly, and then took our leave. Walking back to Steve’s, I thought of the man, struggling to hear much at all but still finding an emotional connection with the music, or even with the memory of the music. I thought too of his pared-down life, of an interior world that belonged to another time.

Years later Steve and I walked that way again. The cottage and orchard had been bulldozed, replaced by a much larger house and a garage the size of the original building, four-wheel drives outside on the gravel. The garden was all raised beds and trellises and archways in new timber. I wondered then if the memory was real, or if the man had been woven from magic and helped me to fall in love, not just with Steve, but with Silverdale too.