Twelve

Humphrey Head

The tractor hum faded away into the distance and I walked towards the west over the marsh. In places a slew of seawater remained from the high tides, making ingress up towards the flood banking.

Turning to look back at the limestone headland, I saw how it rolled out of the land in the long rise of a whale-back, anchored into place by the saltmarsh and the geometry of fields. I’d looked at the shape of it, seen from above on my computer at home, projecting out into the bay like an arrowhead. And I’d seen how its profile resembled the tiny, sharpened microliths from the late Mesolithic period that I’d handled in Lancaster Museum, tools that sat comfortably between my thumb and forefinger, and that felt as if they’d been fashioned to fit my fingers exactly. They were coloured of the bay’s landscape, the place they were discovered in: amber and limestone-white, grey, and black as obsidian.

I walked out towards the bay again, following a linear channel at the base of the cliffs. Barry had told me about a spring that emanated from a fissure in the rock. There was nothing to mark it now other than the merest trickle of rust-coloured water. He’d said that the waters were once thought to have health-giving properties, that there had been a house under the cliffs and that people came from miles away to take the cure. ‘Drink it now though, and all you’ll get is a gippy tum.’ Then Cedric said that a mate had once taken a drink just to see. ‘He said it tasted like iron, it was disgusting.’ I found it, nothing there more than a slight drip of water and broken bricks, greasy red-earth stain on the stones.

Further along a memorial had been carved into the rock:

Beware how you these Rocks ascend

Here WILLIAM PEDDER met his end

August 22nd 1857 Aged 10 years

I looked up and wondered about the odds of climbing the scrubby cliff face to the top. There’s a huge cave and rock arch high up on the cliff, though it can’t be seen from below. I would have liked to get at it, though I didn’t much fancy the climb alone; I’d need to research a route. A slight wind moved through the rowans and yew and there again, hanging in air, was the peregrine. Its eye worked the ground with tiny movements of the head. It hung so still, it was as if the air it balanced upon was a solid entity. Eventually, rising higher still, the bird swivelled and banked and disappeared from sight over the headland.

Where the creek widened and the limestone became too steep to scramble over, I took off my trainers and socks and paddled. Under the clear water, warm mud oozed up between my toes. I was suddenly aware of being alone and there was, I noticed, the slightest feeling of vulnerability; yet I hadn’t even reached the open sands.

Where the headland petered out to a jumble of large boulders, I sat down amongst sea-pinks, sea holly, daisies and grasses. Splashes of chrome yellow lichen covered the rocks and rabbit droppings littered the fissures between them. Looking out, had I drawn a straight line over the sands, the next landfall would have been Heysham’s two nuclear power stations, box-like and brooding.

The creek widened further, moving out into the sands in a series of bends. I tried to locate the place where we’d set brobs by the river, or where Cedric had stopped the tractor for coffee, but from that low viewpoint it was impossible to be sure.

A heat haze appeared near Morecambe and through it the facades of hotels and blocks of flats broke up, becoming fractal, and traffic fizzed along. Just a couple of weeks previously I’d spent some time on the island of Mull and whilst out on open water towards the Cairns of Coll, we’d seen dark abstract shapes forming and dissolving along the horizon. At first I’d thought it must be the island of Barra, the closest island in the chain of the Outer Hebrides, but the forms began to dissolve. They continued changing, shape-shifting, one minute making mountain ranges, the next becoming an elongated egg then stretching out and becoming thin to the horizon again. I knew this was some trick of the light that I wasn’t able to explain, maybe something to do with the way the optic nerve receives information, but I thought perhaps the islands were being modulated, as if there on the line between sea and sky they were magnified and shrunk again as lightwaves bended over the surface of the ocean.

A wide margin of saltmarsh filled the distance between me and the northern horizon. With the perpetual nature of change on the bay and the channels shifting their positions, the saltmarsh now grows where previously all had been sand. At Grange the derelict open air swimming pool was surrounded by an amphitheatre of grass. I’d been there a few times as a kid. Maybe we took the train, though I doubt it as that would’ve involved a bit of walking and my parents didn’t do that, not if they could help it. I had two clear memories of it though: one of the mind- and body-numbing cold water of the pool; and the other of looking out from the top tier of stone seats at windsurfers scudding past and waves lapping at the stone base of the building. Now the area around the pool was transformed, turned into pampas lands of ochre and green. Every few years there’s talk of restoring the pool again, making it into one of those places ubiquitously called ‘attractions’. If it ever happens, I just hope they make the water warmer. Whatever, it wouldn’t be quite the same looking out onto a sea of grass.

There was a good perspective of the rising slope of limestone of Humphrey Head and the sudden drop of the cliffs on its western side. A swathe of dark green hawthorns spread towards the deciduous woodland of the eastern slopes. I began to walk up the rise of land, passing through a kissing gate and following the spine of a fence onto meadowland. Two hawthorn trees marked the graphic nature of the prevailing wind; their trunks were bent completely horizontal and smaller branches rose up from them vertically in knotty clusters.

Even a small degree of elevation opened the view to a panoramic of the bay. A solitary white egret on the edge of a channel seemed the only living thing in that wide sweep of space. With the binoculars I located the flow and twist of the River Kent. The tracks of the tractor were still visible and I was able to chart our journey out to the river and from there it was easy to locate the brobs we’d set into place just a couple of hours ago. The breeze was growing stronger and I knew that a rising wind often signalled the returning tide. I followed the silvered kink of the river to where it dissolved to a shining thread and widened again into the forked tributaries of a delta. On the Irish Sea two ships ploughed the deep channel like counter-weights. Out there, sparkling and illuminated by the bright sun, was a moving edge of water. I looked at my watch; there were three hours to full high tide.

* * *

I thought of the legend about the last wolf in England having been killed here on Humphrey Head. It’s a dramatic enough setting; I’d buy the idea of it at least. There are other claims to the location too. I’d read of a last wolf legend in Devon, but they’ll tell you anything in the south. Below the headland there’s an interpretive sign about the last wolf story. As a child I had my fair share of literary indoctrination that identified wolves as slavering, mad, granny-eating beasts. On a rare family holiday in the Welsh village of Beddgelert, I’d learned the story of the medieval Prince Llewelyn the Great’s faithful Irish Wolfhound, Gellert. Whilst hunting, the prince realised that his dog was missing, and on his return home he found the animal smeared with blood. As the dog went to greet its master, the prince saw that his infant son’s crib was empty. Thinking the dog had killed his child, the prince plunged his sword into the dog. A child’s cry was heard, and Llewelyn found his son, covered by a blanket. Next to the child lay the body of a great wolf. Faithful Gellert had protected his master’s infant son from the wolf, and the prince realised his terrible mistake.

Although he wasn’t the first monarch to call for the desecration of wolves in the United Kingdom, King Edward I of England commissioned the killing of every single wolf in 1281 as an economic expedient, not only to protect sheep and other livestock, but because of the number of deer being killed by wolves in royal hunting reserves. The extinction of wolves became a reality. Given the rank antipathy of some landowners and gamekeepers even now to endangered species, for instance towards hen harriers that breed on moorland, it’s hard to imagine how landowners or sheep farmers would take to the re-introduction of wolves. But this has been called for by top zoologists over recent years. Bring back deer and other species currently absent or in headlong terminal decline would become established again.

Jim Crumley’s book The Last Wolf deals with the debunking of the myth of wolves as savage, senseless serial killers:

And the truth about the wolf – one truth about the wolf – is that it can be like a bridge in all our lives, a bridge where enlightenment may cross, a bridge to a place where we don’t make all the rules and where our species is not always in charge. And if some people are disadvantaged by our willingness to allow the proximity of wolves back into our lives, people like sheep farmers and hunters, then that is simply part of the price that we pay for the privilege of a closer walk with natural forces, part of the debt that we owe for all that we have taken out of nature for far too long. We cannot rationalise every decision we ever make as a species on the basis of whether or not it will be good for the economy; sometimes the greater good of planet Earth must come first, and the wolf, as the master-manipulator of northern hemisphere ecosystems, is an agent for that greater good.20

I like too his description of wolves as painters of mountains. The reintroduction of wolves to the Yellowstone National Park in the USA has seen huge regrowth of native species – of plants, trees and animals. ‘In the long wolfless decades they [the deer] forgot how to behave like deer. Then the wolves came back and they remembered.’ The land was able to regenerate, became painted with colour once again.

* * *

Mares’ tails and high cirrus merged with vapour trails and there was the glint of an aeroplane sewing a line of white in the intense blue. Above Morecambe an immense cumulus cloud grew a hammer head that moved slowly towards the upper atmosphere. It continued until, miles high, it began to reform and resembled the plume from a volcano. Dark on the far eastern horizon, the familiar anvil-topped summit of Ingleborough. Closer in, the ‘man brob’, isolated and uncanny, like one of Antony Gormley’s human sculptures set out in the middle of the bay. A lone curlew made a curved circumnavigation of the headland; the wading birds were beginning to move back to the bay from their summer breeding grounds in the hills.

The tide came on, filling first over by Morecambe, and slowly travelling north to join the River Kent. The water filled deep troughs and poured over sandbanks. In places it isolated areas and came back for them some time further into its flow. I watched the place we’d walked through the river’s shallow banks become submerged. I thought of it picking up the river water, of the river’s fight for direction and the mix and flux of it all going on beneath the surface while above it simply sparkled and shone.

As I reached the trig point at the highest elevation on the headland, the water had formed a parabolic arc around the headland. Then a movement by the cliff edge caught my eye: the peregrine, working the wind with all the dynamic force of its feathered engineering. The wind had risen blustery and the bird fought it, used it, dipping and diving in currents and eddies of air.

The breadth and complication of the bay was slowly being unified by that travelling sheet of water. Sandbanks were surrounded and subsumed and the sea moved on north, flowing under the piers of the viaduct at Arnside. Adjacent to Ulverston, Chapel Island was gradually surrounded. I wanted to stay on that airy viewpoint watching the tide shift and backfill until it was complete, but I had to move on; there was a birthday to prepare for and a cake to bake. The next day Fergus was to be 13. A faint line of oystercatchers flowed out from the land towards the vast distances of the bay, and I turned for home.