Thirteen

A Tale of Two Hills

It was a bright cold day close to the very end of December. Steve and I had come to walk off the effects of Christmas, along with some Ulverston friends and their children. We met up on Birkrigg and set off walking the common’s eastern rim, where the view leads back over the fields and the Croftlands estate towards the town, and beyond that the frozen grey-white backdrop of Coniston’s ice-bound mountains. We dropped down by the bridlepath between drystone walls into the village of Bardsea and on to the edge of the bay. It was mid-afternoon and the light was changing all the time from flat grey to sudden intense bursts that turned the sands red. We walked along the shore below Sea Wood, then clambered up the raw earth bank that was knotted with exposed tree roots, some as long as branches, and on through the trees to return to the lower part of the common.

At the stone circle we stopped for a while. Looking back to where we had walked, I saw the village church’s white steeple pointing skywards from a circle of trees and beyond that, offshore from the great woods and stony foreshore by Conishead Priory, was Chapel Island. At either end of it sandbanks were slowly being inundated by the gathering tide. Further still, the wooded slopes of the Cartmel peninsula pointed into the bay, the piece of land that separates the two main river channels of the Leven and the Kent.

I grew up thinking the stone circle was a folly, something built on a whim. After all many of the town’s gardens and footpaths feature pieces or even whole walls of limestone plundered from Birkrigg Common or another of Cumbria’s outcrops of this characteristic weather and water-sculpted stone. But the circle is absolutely authentic. It is one of only 30 concentric stone circles in the UK, the best example of course being Stonehenge. This circle on Birkrigg is the only one of its kind in Cumbria, and forms part of a more complex picture of Bronze Age life in this part of the bay. Elsewhere on the common a number of tumuli, or ancient burial mounds, have also been found. The inner circle of 10 stones is self-evident, the stones reaching a height of just less than one metre, but the outer circle, made up of 15 stones and with a diameter of some 24 metres, is largely hidden in the bracken or overgrown by turf.

Excavations in 1921 unearthed five cremation sites, three in pits, one on some cobbles and one covered by an upside-down urn. There were a few small but significant stone implements found too, identified with possible ceremonial uses: a pestle, a palate and a piece of red ochre.

Being there beside Birkrigg’s stone circle brought to mind another of Cumbria’s remarkable megaliths, Swinside, off the road from Broughton to Millom. I’d planned a visit there many years ago, and decided to walk the route in reverse so that the stone circle came near the end of the walk and was a treat in store. Walking with my dog, as we came closer to Swinside Farm I came across a series of unequivocal hand-painted signs: ‘No Dogs Allowed’. But to walk back would have meant a two- or three-hour return journey without having reached the stone circle, and more importantly, with no food or drink left in my sack. I walked on, keeping the dog firmly on the lead. Skirting the flank of Swinside Fell, the circle came into view. I crossed the farmyard, almost holding my breath in case the irate farmer came out to shout at me and my dog. Looking over the wall the circle was made up of over 50 stones, some upright and some that had fallen, almost like a jawful of teeth in varying stages of decay. I love its other name, Sunkenkirk, brought about because of the local legend that whenever anyone attempted to build a church on the site, by morning the Devil had pulled the stones down and created the circle out of the spoils. There are well-documented examples of ancient sites being hijacked for new places of worship.

I liked too the idea that massive changes affected the celebration of rituals, with the building of open rings superseding gloomy chambers or covered tombs. As Aubrey Burl, the megalith specialist and archaeologist, wrote, the civilisations building stone circles were making a massive shift ‘from darkness to light, from the dead to the living, from the grave to the sky’.21

Walking down the farm lane, the way ahead was blocked by a tractor, and the farmer was digging out a drainage ditch, chucking out spadefuls of great clods of wet black earth. I was prepared for the assault but decided to get in first with a cheery greeting. Almost an hour later I was still there, unable to get away from a man who clearly didn’t get an awful lot of company, and who, having explained the number of out-of-control dogs who’d attacked his sheep in the past, eventually waved me off with a friendly goodbye. He even gave the dog a stroke too.

* * *

On Birkrigg Common, someone said, ‘Hold hands inside the circle. See if we can feel the cosmic energy,’ and as we did so a drone came flying past, remote-controlled, black, insect-like, and anything but cosmic. As we set off again, the machine returned to its owner, descending into last summer’s desiccated bracken.

As we reached the top of the common I saw a line of geese travelling in from the north, distantly, silently. They were side-on, but flying in characteristic V-formation as they appeared as two slightly interleaving lines. They covered the miles between the town and the common in slow-winged minutes, then circumnavigated the hill, moving east towards the bay and dropping out of sight. As they did, a scatter of rooks lifted from the roof of Sea Wood’s umbered branches. They dispersed, moving out over the bay. The wedge-topped summit of Ingleborough, the white Portland stone of the Ashton Memorial tower above Lancaster, the power stations at Heysham and the ancient stone tombs on Heysham Head passed underneath the tilt of their wings, then the birds coalesced, banking back over the wood and they melded, pouring over the fields and coming to ground a field away. Wings ruffled momentarily and the birds strutted the furrows, then settled and begin to forage in the earth. A train approached from the Cartmel peninsula, crossing the viaduct over the Leven channel then disappearing again into the contours of the land. A few minutes later it emerged again and rattled towards the town.

From the summit of the common, the soft hills and fields of Furness rolled out from beneath my feet, falling towards the hamlet of Sunbrick in its shelter-belt of trees, the geometry of farmland, the villages of Stainton and Gleaston sunk in the limestone dales and a castle ruined before it was completed. My gaze moved to Roose, where the shipbuilding town of Barrow begins to form, then along the coast to the winking flare of yellow burning off from the inshore gas terminal at Roosecote, to Rampside and the house with 12 chimneys. To Foulney, that thinnest and most insubstantial of islands, which on that day was just a painted line upon a sea of silver-grey. To Roa Island and across the narrow channel to Piel Island’s teardrop, the smallest of landfalls at the very edge of the bay.

Once only accessible by crossing the sands, Furness is even now accessed by only one major road and away from that a fusion of deep, lark-filled lanes, bordered in season by May blossom, hawthorn and blackthorn, each lane affording a new perspective on the land or the bay. As remote as you’d like it to be.

To the west great banks and bands of blue-grey cloud deceived the eye. In their midst was what might have been another land; it could almost have been just another cloud-country, glimpsed between the layers. But then we saw the summit of Snaefell and the neighbouring hills on the Isle of Man, just a line of sea visible between it and our coast. I remembered that on a really clear day it’s possible to see six kingdoms from here: England, the mountains of Snowdonia in Wales, the Dumfriesshire hills of Scotland, the Isle of Man, Ireland, and the Kingdom of Piel Island.

To the south-west, where Walney Island marks the end of Furness and of the bay itself, the Irish Sea seemed to flow into the sky. Both sea and sky were rosy, that particular cerise and orange glow of a late winter afternoon. Out of this light the windfarm emerged, a trigonometry of stationary blades. It is vast, marching across the sea as if pegging the land into place, or preventing the glacial moraine from sliding underneath the sea. Beyond it, across the Duddon estuary, Black Combe marks the swing to the north of the Cumbrian coast.

I looked across at the smooth, rounded summit of Kirby Moor, below it the dip in the hills where the town of Ulverston sits, backed by Flan Hill, its bracken-sloped, ancient, zig-zag, hawthorn-hedged fields marking the route north-west towards Gawthwaite Moor, the Coniston hills, to Broughton-in-Furness and the secret hills and valleys of Woodland. It was to Woodland that my father and I travelled every Sunday morning during my final year at home. As Dad sat drinking coffee and catching up with the market gardener and his family, I explored the fells and lanes by horseback.

Underneath Flan the stream of Gill Banks runs through open, footpathed fields where we caught minnows as kids in calm pools above a small waterfall. For some reason we called them snotty bullies. We took them home, keeping them in washing up bowls until they became horribly inert. Then Dad took us to release them back into the beck where they began, ever so slowly, to nose their way upstream. Below the field a metal gate and the stream dives into the deep, wooded valley of Gill Banks, one of those formative places of childhood where we sallied for hours, twining each other up on rope swings and unravelling in a headlong, sickening but compulsive spiral, over and over again.

Hoad Hill unwinds itself above the houses. On the summit the lighthouse and below, like a conduit from the monument to the sea, the line of Ulverston Canal. At its end the sealed lock gates that speak of another era when, from up here on the common, there would have been the sight of ships in full sail veering out to sea on the edge of the wind.

The lighthouse calls to the far north, to the ice-locked latitudes where the town’s celebrated son, Sir John Barrow, sent men to seek a navigable route through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and on to the Pacific Ocean and the trading nations of Asia, to worlds of plenty. The monument calls to John Ross and to James Clark. It calls to John Franklin and the men of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, sealed up in ice in 1845, succumbing slowly to scurvy, hypothermia, starvation and lead poisoning.

But the lighthouse also calls to a less well-known figure, and points to warmer latitudes. Whilst stationed in the Cape Colonies, now South Africa, Sir John married Anna Maria Truter, a remarkable botanical illustrator, who compiled the first known catalogue of Cape flowers.

By the time I had turned a full circle, the glow by Walney had begun to fade, but closer in, a single sunbeam broke from the clouds. Falling vertically it pierced the sea near Aldingham. A few minutes more and the beam had shifted over the water and slowly begun to dissolve. We dropped north-west from the trig point down the broad, steep pathway that runs down towards the road and the cars, and then moved on to our friends’ house to sit by the fire, eat more Christmas food and talk.

* * *

Another winter’s day and I walked out of the centre of Ulverston by its northern artery, turning right into Chittery Lane, the final road of houses where there is a view over the town then on towards the bay and the south. The road becomes a lane and at its end divides and goes off in two directions. Straight ahead there was a walled garden, a single, delightfully situated allotment where an older man looked at the ground, a plastic sheet in one hand. He looked down at sprout tops, at leeks and at kale.

I turned into the lefthand lane, walking along a walled lane and at its side was a stand of dark fir and sepia-toned larch. The tips of the tallest larches, wind-bitten, bent over at 90° from the trunks. On the other side of the lane, the fields dropped steeply away over the rooftops and there, just a stone’s throw away, was the roof of the house my father built in Whinfield Road. Out to the west the green, remembered hills of Kirby Moor that I looked out onto from my bedroom window.

The town clock chimed the three-quarter hour, the sound fading as the lane turned right and passed beside another larger and darker wood, where bikers had made a trackway with planks for obstacles amid the deep, sienna-coloured leaf-litter. Then there was the Victorian kissing gate, sagging on its hinges. A sign had been attached to it: ‘When the flag is flying on the top of Hoad Hill, the Monument is open,’ then, ‘Welcome to Hoad Hill. Drinking, Graffiti and Skateboarding are Strictly Prohibited.’

I wondered if I’d be rumbled, if sniffer dogs would find the flask of hot chocolate buried deep inside my rucksack.

Through the gate I walked out onto the open fell, the path winding ahead of me and leading to the top of the hill and there, glowing a soft white against the early morning sky, was the lighthouse. It appears like something from a book or a story, but I don’t question its presence. Having grown up here, of course I don’t. Its intrinsic eccentricity fits, this lighthouse without a light a mile away from the sea. As I grew older I began to understand that there was something particularly eccentric about the town and some of its indigenous characters, as if all had been part of some grand plan, or put together by a novelist with a flair for individuality and place. Ulverston was like nowhere else on earth. Even the sheep on Hoad Hill seemed to belong here, with the yellow patch over their backs, the ruddle mark from the tup to prove he’s done his job, but also pink marks on either side, a blue mark on the top of the shoulders, black faces and curly horns.

Overhead the clouds were red-edged, pewter-coloured, but blue patches were beginning to form. The cold tingled on my cheeks. A slight mist had begun to form over the town, occluding certain buildings and streets. The path wound on past slabs of rock and low-growing whin. For me the hill has a sense of friendliness about it. Can a landscape be friendly? Perhaps it’s just the memories I have, that Hoad Hill, being so close to our childhood home, became somewhere that made sense and that offered no threat. Indeed it became somewhere that offered stability. Somewhere that grown-ups, or more specifically, our grown-ups, never ventured. It didn’t matter what was happening at home – and that could often be difficult – here was an escape route and a place that was reassuringly constant. So yes, I think a landscape can be friendly. Perhaps even supportive; or at the very least, sustaining. And crucially, it was the place I can ascribe to my formative relationships with wild places.

Where the fell rose up and the path contoured along its side, there was a stand of three or four larch trees growing amidst a group of rocks. When I’d walked here as an adult, I thought of it like a Zen garden, an arrangement made by nature that has a feel of perfection about it. I looked back along the way I’d walked to see the path as a series of curves and bends and the landscape’s drystone walls parcelling out the land into workable pieces. The path climbed and then the view north towards the Coniston hills began to open out. The monument called me on. There was a group of people up there, a couple of adults and a handful of children. The children were doing exactly what all children do up there; they were running around the wall at the base of the monument, round and round and round. Cresting the final pull up to the summit, the sound from the road below came in, the A590, the main artery connecting Furness to the rest of the world. And it was the road that led back to where my mother believed happiness was to be found.

Over the rush of traffic I detected a different kind of noise and a train rattled over the viaduct, making landfall at Tridley Point, the sound of it echoing through the open spaces as it rolled in towards the town. Tridley, the place by the edge of the bay that a school friend and her mother had taken me one day for a picnic, and me leaving home feeling slightly guilty after my mother said she didn’t understand what the attraction was. ‘It isn’t the real sea after all, or the real sand.’

Then I was standing at the top of the hill with the monument beside me. And what a view! These days there are useful interpretive boards to pinpoint and name all the visible landmarks. Across the low-lying fields the bay, the Leven channel, the viaduct, then anvil-topped Ingleborough, Darwen Moor, Winter Hill and on south past Blackpool Tower and into Wales to Cyrn Y Brain and Moel Famau, closer in again, Birkrigg Common. Then further to Moel Siabod, Carnedd Llewelyn, Eldir Moel, Faw Eilis. The hills of Wales were not visible that day, but their names made up a litany of another place.

I approve of this naming business. When we first came to Ulverston and began making trips into the Lakes by car – only ever exploring by road – it was the names of things I wanted. I wanted to know the names of the mountains I saw, of the passes, of every hamlet and hill. I wanted to have those names at my fingertips so that each time we drove past I could look up and say to myself, ‘Fairfield’ or ‘Helm Crag’ or ‘Stickle Pike, Harrison Stickle and Side Pike,’ and for no other reason than I felt a need to know. There is, of course, a musicality to this, a kind of notation that is special to the area and is, in its own particular way, as significant as the Welsh language is to the Welsh. I felt, in acquiring the names of features in the landscape, that I was also acquiring the language of the area, the language of the Lakes. Give me a map even now and I’ll soon be sidetracked away from the job of searching for a route to instead finding the place names and their musicality.

The children and the two mums set off down the hill again. One of the girls said, ‘I think the cows have gone now,’ and looking in the same direction I saw at the far end of the hill one of the hardy cows that sometimes gather up here, just because they can.

From beside the monument it’s possible to trace underneath a pointed finger the streets and places familiar to me, and in a small town like this most places are familiar. At the base of the hill, and where the footpath leads towards the town, the huge piece of pilfered limestone resembling a rearing elephant, then the gardens and grounds of Ford Park House, part of my old secondary school and now a community centre and playing fields. Into town and the route to and from Dale Street Girls Junior School, which appeared to have been run by a triumvirate of ageing, wing-tip be-spectacled women. Possessed of the kind of twisted personality as if from a book by Roald Dahl, amongst them was fearsome Sweaty Betty, and though I can’t recall her real name, I remember well the vicious lunchtime attacks, stabbing some unfortunate girl in the back with a set of painted red, sharpened finger nails, for failure to eat up every scrap of liver and onions. These days you could take a case against her to the European Court of Human Rights.

Into Fountain Street and past the Walker Brothers’ old shop, which became a magnet for Angela and me. Pony mad, we’d call in after school to stand at the rough wooden counter as the ‘younger’ Mr Walker fetched pieces of saddlery and bridles, halters and horse bits we’d asked to see – how he entertained us I’ll never know. He’d disappear through the door into the warehouse and as the sound of his feet faded away, we’d look at the 1950s posters for Cherry Blossom shoe polish and heel replacements – all glamourous women and new heels and Brylcreemed men smoking pipes. Mr Walker might be gone for ages searching for whatever it was, but back he’d come. We’d hold and examine and talk forever about whatever the thing was, and then we’d leave again.

I followed the line of the street to its confluence with Soutergate, the narrow road to the north, past Angela’s house, then further up the hill and, there, the roof of our house in the new estate on Whinfield Road.

Somewhere, I have a postcard. It’s a picture of me, riding my bike through the middle of town, past the market cross where, unknown to me, someone had taken my photograph. I’m riding my three-speed bicycle with the wicker basket attached to the handlebars that had been concocted from many parts by Eric Bibby, the bike man. For all I know I might’ve been sent round the world on that bike; or at least to Manchester, or Cleethorpes, or Luton. Come to think of it, it was the best bike I had for years.

I looked up at the clouds moving against the solid, unmoving tower, conspiring to bring feelings of dizziness, of disconnection, of not having one’s feet solidly planted on the earth. Yet it was this place, this town, where I firmly planted my feet and which sustained me once my parents had moved back to Merseyside. I came back to Ulverston in my early 20s after two attempts at college, neither of which worked out. Whenever I could, I walked in the mountains or went down to the bay, to the places where I felt I intrinsically belonged.

And then I stayed put, working at a variety of jobs and also working out my place in the world, and what it was that I needed, and where I needed to be. Although I didn’t yet know it, I was asking myself the question, as the poet Mary Oliver asked, ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’

* * *

Before I left the monument I saw another sign: ‘Enjoy England, Place of Interest’. I was glad that someone pointed this out – I suppose it keeps them in a job. I turned and retraced my footsteps down the path and this time, instead of looping around the far end of the walk, I cut off left where the winding path runs down between two narrow drystone walls and comes out again on Little Hoad. Here there had once been a secret garden and a cottage screened from sight by tall conifers. We’d sneaked in one day, my brother Andy and other friends, and then we’d hidden behind dense shrubs as an old man began to call out, ‘I know you’re there.’

I looked through the screen of trees: the cottage had gone, burned down. Inside the garden a solitary robin sang a wintery lament. I walked down the final field, coming out by a terrace of tall Victorian houses and on, walking past the lamppost at the edge of a small wood where I’d once thought I might find Narnia, and where we’d thrown ropes over the crossbar at the top of the lamp to turn it into a swing. Below there, the churchyard of St Mary’s, and a memory of walking there one Sunday morning before anyone else was awake, of picking snowdrops to take home for Mum. Making her breakfast in bed and taking everything up to her on a tray.

I wonder though, about how it was that my parents seemed so unable to make a connection with the landscape. How could you come here to live and not learn to love it? How is it possible to ignore the landscape, or to disdain it, or to feel no sense of its emotional pull? But I have Harold Wilson to thank for making it all possible for me, for the happenstance of my father’s redundancy and finding work in Barrow. Now I’ve boys of my own and when one of them says (and they frequently do), ‘Don’t we live in the best place?’ I feel a sense of self-righteous and wholly smug satisfaction.