Landmarks (16 page)

From our meeting point at the stile, Richard and I turned back up towards the summit of Brock Barrow, talking as we walked. I wanted to show Richard the ravens’ perch where I had waited, and he to show me an old tuff quarry on the barrow’s west shoulder. We
climbed a zigzag path up a slope of tailings and clitter, then dropped down into the depression of the quarry itself. Cleaved and riven stone lay about, chaotic on the quarry floor, but stacked neatly as shelved books at its edges. Stone structures of uncertain purpose stood at the site’s perimeter: shelters in which to carry out the riving, perhaps. They had once been well built with the stone that lay amply to hand; now their walls had slumped and splayed to reveal flares of flat-faced tuff slabs.

The source of all this worked stone was clear: a bare cliff, twenty-five feet high or so, the lower face of which had been hollowed out in blocky chunks by fire or explosion, back when the quarry was active. The tuff had formed around 450 million years ago, during the Ordovician. Though densely welded, it split cleanly and this made it a desirable building stone, worth the vast human effort – for a few years at least – to blast it, rive it and dress it into slabs. The whole quarry zone had undergone a complex dilapidation, and it had about it now, unused, something of the air of a reliquary.

In the wind shelter of the quarry, we looked seawards. Richard pointed out the fold of fell that hid his cottage, and other landmarks that were familiar to him and new to me. ‘So many kinds of mist and cloud come in off the sea here,’ he said. ‘Haars creep in low, thicker mists rush over us. Some mornings we pull back the curtains and it’s just blank white beyond.’

He talked a little about the years after Anglezarke, when he had begun to re-emerge into the world. He had met a Canadian called Autumn Richardson, like him gentle of manner and fascinated by what she called
‘place-name poetry
’, ‘word-list poetry’, and ‘the economy and beauty of certain lexicons’. He and Autumn began to collaborate – and they also fell in love. While travelling in England in 2008, they passed through the spare landscape of the western
Cumbrian uplands, and both found themselves strongly drawn to the region. So they moved there, to a cottage in Ulpha, and began to close-map the area around their cottage and further up the Dunnerdale valley, making new works out of this old place. They delved into its natural histories and constructed lists of the grasses and flowers likely to have flourished in the area once the glacial ice had retreated, at the end of the Pleistocene.
‘Ulpha is still inhabited
by the ghosts of lost flora and fauna,’ Autumn wrote; ‘these are the echoes left in its place-names, traces that even now, centuries later, can be uncovered and celebrated.’ They learnt to navigate the linguistic-historical complexities of toponymy and language in Cumbria, heavily influenced as it was by the Scandinavian settlement that took place in the late eighth to eleventh centuries, but also by Gaelic and Old English: a mixture brought about by the impacts of trade, exploration and colonization on the region.

They moved to the Burren in the west of Ireland for eighteen months, and then in 2011 they returned to the Ulpha area to complete work they felt to be unfinished. They found a tiny cottage of three rooms, tuff-walled and slate-roofed, in a cluster of farm buildings high under Stickle Pike, on the south slopes of Caw. The first winter they were there the snow lay until May. After six months of snow came six months of rain. But the work poured from them in spite of or because of the weather: beautiful work in collaboration or individually, work that seemed unhurried and unshaped by the demands of anything but their own fascinations. Together they had made a booklet called
Wolfhou
, gathering text fragments and place-name poems about the Ulpha valley; and another called
Relics
, each page of which showed the cross-section of a different tree (ash, alder, birch, elm, hazel, juniper) printed white onto black pages, in which each growth-ring was a circle of increasingly ancient words
for that species, such that dendrochronology and etymology came to overlay one another. Richard also made a sequence of ‘text-rivers’ and ‘myth-poems’ called
Limnology
, through which flowed the terms in English and its commingled languages for rivers, streams, lakes and other inland water-forms.
Limnology
began life with water-words found in the Cumbrian dialect, and then, as Richard put it,
‘gathered pace, taking in tributaries
from Icelandic, Old English, Gaelic, Manx, Irish, Welsh, Old Welsh and Proto-Celtic (a hypothetical, reconstructed language thought to have been spoken in the Late Bronze Age)’.

~

It began to rain again, a spittery smirr, as we left the Brock Barrow quarry and picked our way south towards Hoses and the cottage.

‘I want to show you a raven’s nest on the way home,’ said Richard. ‘It’s in another quarry, a bigger one. Just a short diversion. There’s a tunnel there too you might like to see.’

The path was quick with running water, still rushing off the fells from the night’s soaking. ‘
Limnology
came about,’ Richard said, as we splashed down the track, ‘because of all the rain in our first year here. The summer and autumn were so wet that the tracks became streams, and the paths became rivers.’

A few hundred yards from the cottage, he led us up a rising side track that curved under the flank of a fell called Fox Haw. It ran to an area of old workings, much bigger than the Brock Barrow quarry. Every slope and shoulder of ground was covered with small shining shards of tuff: chain-mail for the terrain. Sound echoed sharply off the stone surface, the shards clinking and ringing as we shifted them underfoot.

The path led us into a tiny valley, its side-slopes shining with clitter and slip, that narrowed into the hillside. And the valley ended in a black hole, four feet high and two across. It was the mouth of a tunnel. Two great guard stones flanked it, and a thick-trunked holly grew across it, as if to bar the way. The holly rose to ten feet, and among its glossy leaves were berry clusters. From the lintel of the tunnel mouth ran a ragged fringe of water.

I felt an eerie tremor of recognition.

‘Have you been in?’ I asked.

‘Only to the entrance, never further.’

We reached the guard stones. I turned sideways and squeezed past the holly and under the fringe of water that ran icy down my neck. I shivered, but not only from the cold. Away from me stretched the tunnel, arch-roofed and shapely. I could see perhaps twenty feet along it; beyond that, blackness. It was flooded with clear water to the depth of twelve inches or so, and I could see that in the water lay hundreds of blades of tuff – sharp like the edges of swords, or the heads of axes.

The invitation to enter this intimidating place could not be refused. But neither of us had a torch or matches, let alone copper-soled shoes. We decided to go back to Richard and Autumn’s cottage, and then return to the tunnel with full bellies and green wellies.

Autumn saw us approaching along the road, and she came out to greet us, smiling warmly, instantly welcoming. The cottage had fresh-painted eaves. A pan of potato soup was bubbling on the stove, and a loaf of fresh bread made by Richard was on the table. I had wondered if their home would possess some of the austere spectrality of their preoccupations, but it was a busy, happy space: snug and sheltered, quickly full of laughter and kindness. A cello leaned in the
corner, two violins were held upright by hooks on a white wall, and next to them had been fixed three piebald oystercatcher feathers, decreasing in size from left to right. Everywhere were books, many of them glossaries, thesauruses and dictionaries. The wind flung rain against the windows with a fat clatter.

‘It’s getting even wilder out there,’ said Richard.

We sat on the floor, drinking tea, and words and stories spilled out of them both: about people we had in common, discoveries they had made, projects they had underway.

‘We don’t normally talk to anyone except each other!’ said Autumn, apologetically.

But I loved their company, and I admired their self-reliance: the nettle patch they cultivated for tea and soup, the tiny vegetable plot fenced off for them in the corner of a field by the farmer from whom they rented the cottage, in which they grew carrots and beetroot.

‘We eat well in the summer, at least,’ said Autumn.

And I admired the commitment needed to work together and produce such original texts. They pulled books from the shelves, told stories. I scribbled down etymologies, titles, words.

‘There’s a word I’m fascinated by at the moment,’ Richard said. ‘
Hummadruz
. It means a noise in the air that you can’t identify, or a sound in the landscape whose source is unlocatable.’ It was good to have a word for that: the white noise of a place, an ambient murmur that lacked referent or source.

They talked a little about their years in Ulpha, and about lonely Devoke Water, a lake that lay on the far west of Birker Fell, and the circuit of whose tear-shaped shoreline I had once walked. ‘If you keep going westwards from the tip of Devoke,’ Richard said, ‘you’ll find a scatter of cairns, not there for waymarking. A similar scatter lies at the east of Birker, between Rough Crag and Great Worm Crag. No
one’s been able to date them for certain, but they’re clearly of sepulchral origin, maybe Bronze Age. Birker is a funerary landscape.’

I thought about all the barrows, the borrans, the bields and the burial cairns I knew here in Cumbria. I thought, too, about the quarries Richard and I had seen that day, and how across Birker, as across Cumbria and so much British upland, the landscape is riddled with abandoned mines and quarries – copper, lead, slate, gold, iron, tuff – and their associated tunnels, adits, levels, scaurs and workings. The Lake District landscape had been dug into since the Neolithic, for the two main reasons that people ever enter the underland: to leave something within it (bodies, ashes, ritual objects) and to fetch something out of it (stone, mineral, metal, memory, metaphor).

I also recalled something Richard had written about the acoustics of landscapes: how, in certain places, sounds subside rather than vanish,
‘receding below the threshold
of hearing to commingle with the residual undersong – the map … of all melodies’. I liked that idea of ‘undersong’, and as the sound of the falling rain outside the cottage got louder and louder, I imagined the water finding its way along the paths and the gaits and the bournes, and down into the hills, through cracks, seams and runnels.

Late in the afternoon, as dark was falling, Richard and I left the cottage and walked back up towards the quarries and the tunnel. The rain was drenching now, the heaviest rain I had been in for months,
and within minutes we were wet through. I could feel rain streaming down the inside of my trousers and into my shoes. Richard had only found one pair of wellingtons, and they had holes in the soles. He was wearing the holey wellies. I was in trainers.

‘At least we don’t need to worry about getting our feet wet,’ I said.

We walked on up the quarry track, which was also a stream. I wondered if the tunnel would be so flooded as to be unenterable.

‘All Hallow’s Eve is the time when the veil between the two worlds is at its thinnest,’ said Richard.

‘Does that make this a good time or a bad time to explore abandoned mine-workings?’ I asked.

We reached the clitter valley.
Ting, ting
, the sounds of the stone as high as coin on glass. There at its end was the mouth of the tunnel of swords and axes, black and intimidating. There were the guard stones and the holly. I had a torch with a weak beam. I flashed it down the tunnel. Water was coursing through the roof, showing silver in the beam, like silk. The walls streamed with water – but the level on the tunnel floor had risen only by a few inches.

I slipped between the guard stones and stepped down onto the blades. Richard followed me. Quickly the outer world was left behind, as if a door had been closed, and we were in a space of darkness and new noises: an echo chamber reverberating with the sounds of moving water. I felt the prickle in the neck that signals risk. I sloshed onwards into the darkness, the blades rucking beneath my feet.

The tunnel led deeper into the hill. After a minute or two its route kinked to the right, and the acoustics altered. The further in we got, the less water came through the roof of the tunnel, until it slowed to a trickle, then to drops. Richard lit a tea candle, cupping it in his
hand, though the wax ran onto his palm and set there. I switched off my torch, preferring the flame light, which flickered warmly on the walls.

‘There’s a breeze coming towards us,’ Richard said.

We stopped, and he held the candle still. Its flame leaned back towards him, and now I could feel the breeze too, fresh and white on my face.

Suddenly, out of the darkness, I could see that the tunnel roof had collapsed. Slabs and hunks of tuff crammed the passage. There was no way through. So we sat on the rubble of the ruckle, lifted our feet from the blades and the water, and waited there silently, listening, far into the hill.

‘Look at the candle,’ said Richard. The flame was behaving curiously again: now it was being sucked towards the collapse, then held at a slant for a second, and then released, so that it sprang back to the upright and flickered there, before leaning again, as if something vast were inhaling, then exhaling, out beyond the collapse.
Lean, release, flicker; lean, release, flicker
.

‘Can you hear that?’ I asked. Richard could; a sound that was not water, a high murmur or note, whose source we could not identify – an undersong, a hummadruz.

We stayed for perhaps five minutes at the collapse and then returned as we had come, emerging at last between the guard stones and into the owl-light, the still-heavy rain, and a white mist that was thick enough to stop sight at a few yards. Sounds came from the mist: a raven croak, the hiss of raindrops striking heather stalks, the rush and rickle of stream over gravel. We left the quarry and walked back down the path which had become a rill, a strife, a strint, and a thousand other magic words for water.