The Road to Little Dribbling (46 page)

I have ridden the line several times and the views across this very austere end of the dales are sensational, but you can’t really appreciate the engineering from the train. For that, you must stand alongside it. I stopped at Dent Head Viaduct now and got out to have a look. The viaduct is 199 yards long with ten arches, and rises a hundred feet above the valley floor. That doesn’t sound spectacularly lofty when you just say it, but when you see it in three dimensions, it is stunning. I tilted my head so far back to take it in that I lost my balance and very nearly fell over backward.

British Rail spent years trying to close the line, and did succeed in running it down almost to nothing. Dent station was closed for sixteen years and many of the others received only minimal attention. Today, however, the line is a model of what you can do with a little intelligent management and marketing. Now seven trains a day run in each direction, and the number of passengers has soared from just 90,000 in 1983 to a staggering 1.2 million in 2013.

The most iconic structure on the Settle-to-Carlisle line is Ribblehead Viaduct, running a quarter of a mile across the rolling valley of the River Ribble. It has twenty-four arches and at its highest point stands 106 feet above the surrounding landscape. For years British Rail wanted to retire it, on grounds of cost, and build a modern steel bridge alongside. This of course would have ruined one of the classic views of Yorkshire. Fortunately sense prevailed, money was found, and the viaduct was restored. That is the crux of matters, of course. If you have a lot of good old stuff and you want to keep it, it will cost you. If you don’t pay for it, you can’t keep it. I believe I have just described modern Britain.

I drove on through lovely countryside on quiet lanes. Gradually the road climbed to higher ground and the landscape grew bleaker and rockier, but was still very beautiful. It is the contrast between the green valleys, with their herds of dairy cattle prettily dotting grassy fields, and the lonely uplands that makes this landscape so perpetually enchanting.

At Garsdale Head, a lonely pass miles from anywhere, I passed the famous Moorcock Inn (or Nymphomaniac’s Plea, as I always think it), then descended to the busy, tourist-clogged village of Hawes, where I became the first person in history to drive through without stopping to look in shopwindows for an hour. Why people choose to go there when everywhere else in the world is not there is a mystery beyond answering. I drove on instead to Swaledale and Wensleydale, two of the loveliest of the dales. I stopped at Thwaite and walked to the village of Muker and back, on a path through fields of dairy cows, which mercifully failed to molest me. Then I drove to Askrigg, which once teemed with tourists and tour buses because it was the village of Darrowby in
All Creatures Great and Small,
but it seems pretty quiet now, which must make it a nicer place to live if not to sell souvenirs, cups of tea, and planks of wood with inspirational sentiments on them.

About five miles beyond Askrigg is Aysgarth Falls, a celebrated beauty spot. It isn’t exactly Niagara, but rather a series of small falls, where the waters of the River Ure flow over limestone platforms, but what it lacks in drama it makes up for in comeliness, and there is always the pleasure of watching some idiot falling in the water while trying to cross the river on exposed rocks. Some noisy young oik splashed in while I was there to the delight of everyone present.

At length I arrived in Leyburn, a busy market town, full of cars. I stopped at a restaurant on the square called Penley’s, where I had a spicy cajun wrap, and wondered what odds you would have gotten thirty years ago that one day people in Yorkshire country towns would be eating spicy cajun wraps.

May I take a moment to say a word in favor of British food? It’s not that bad. In fact, it is often very good. The British are responsible for not only the two single finest foodstuffs ever invented (chocolate digestive biscuits and well-buttered crumpets), but also countless other wonderful and distinctive gustatory delights: Yorkshire pudding, hot cross buns, sherry trifle, shortbread, scones, mince pies, plum pudding, toasted teacakes, veal-and-ham pie, Lancashire hot pot, a galaxy of noble cheeses like Stilton, Wensleydale, and the obscure but delectable Dorset blue vinney, not to mention the ever reliable cheddar, red Leicester, and double Gloucester, and countless other scrumptious comestibles that have made me the indolent and contented lump I am.

To be sure, a lot of British foods don’t sound very attractive—toad-in-the-hole, bubble and squeak, bangers and mash, faggots in gravy, gooseberry fool, clotted cream. No one, as far as I can tell, has ever satisfactorily explained why the British insist on endowing their foods with strange and unseductive names. I am convinced that if the British had given their foods pretentious names like “galantine of pork saucisson en croûte” or “julienne of vegetables Wellington,” people would gobble them up and there would be no jokes about British cooking. But the fact is British food is pretty good and, more to the point, it is now accompanied everywhere by exotic foreign dishes like spicy cajun wraps. So let’s hear no more about British food being crappy.

Except sometimes when it actually is, of course.

—

Leyburn is not the most attractive of places, but it is the starting point for a wonderful, secret walk. Behind the shops at the western edge of the marketplace is a wooded bluff called Leyburn Shawl, which runs for nearly two miles high above Wensleydale and provides the most magnificent views. According to legend, it got its name when Mary, Queen of Scots, dropped her shawl there while trying to escape from nearby Bolton Castle, where she was held prisoner for six months in 1568. The problem with this story is that “shawl” isn’t first recorded in English until 1662, long after Mary had a neck to wrap anything around. The
Oxford English Dictionary
doesn’t have an entry for “shawl” as a landscape feature, which is a curious oversight, but there you are. Life sometimes bitterly disappoints.

Beyond the Shawl—considerably beyond, as it turns out—is the village of Preston-under-Scar and then the striking, solitary upright known as Bolton Castle, which stands like a giant forgotten chess piece on a hillside. For reasons considerably beyond my knowledge, the castle is called Bolton Castle while the village beside it is Castle Bolton. Bolton Castle dates from the late fourteenth century and is impressive in an austere sort of way. Admission to view the castle was £8.50, which was more than I was willing to pay by a multiple of about four. Besides, I was running very late. It was much farther from Leyburn than I had remembered. It had taken me nearly two hours to get there, which meant that I wouldn’t get back to my car till after 5 p.m., and I still had about an hour’s drive after that. This little side trip, glorious as it was, was costing me my happy hour. So with a certain scoot in my stride, I bade farewell to Bolton Castle Bolton and strode briskly back toward Leyburn and my trusty rental car.

—

I spent the night in Barnard Castle, a pleasant market town on the River Tees in County Durham. I arrived much too late to go to the famous Bowes Museum there, a disappointment. So instead I had a walk around the town as darkness fell, and found it entirely agreeable. C. Northcote Parkinson, I was interested to see, was born at No. 45 Galgate, a fact commemorated with a plaque on the house. Never has anyone milked a single thought more vigorously and successfully than he did. The line for which he is remembered was “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,” still known as Parkinson’s Law. It was first elucidated in a comic essay he wrote for
The Economist
in 1955 while he was a professor at the University of Malaya in Singapore. Parkinson then expanded the essay into a thin book, called
Parkinson’s Law,
which became a global bestseller and made him rich and more famous than anyone deserves to be for having one fairly obvious idea. He was given visiting professorships at Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley, and undertook many long, lucrative speaking tours. He wrote several other books, including some novels, though nothing he wrote enjoyed anything like the success of
Parkinson’s Law
. Nonetheless he made so much money that he became a tax exile in Guernsey. He died in 1993, aged eighty-three, having done nothing of interest for thirty-five years. Even so, he gets about fifteen hundred words in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
while poor old Charles Sharland, forgotten father of the Settle-to-Carlisle railway, gets none. Go figure.

Barnard Castle has many pubs, most of them pretty promising-looking. I called in at the Old Well Inn for a predinner beverage and found it most congenial, I must say. Beside my table was a recent issue of a trade magazine called
Pub and Bar,
which I picked up and read with interest and then admiration, for it was not only engaging but literate—and how often can one say that these days? I was particularly taken with an article about a pub called the White Post on Rimpton Hill on the Dorset-Somerset border. The county boundary runs right through the middle of the bar. In former times when Dorset and Somerset had different licensing laws, people had to move from one side of the room to the other at 10 p.m. in order to continue drinking legally until 10:30. I don’t know why but this made me feel a pang of nostalgia for the way things used to be.

Afterward, I went to an Indian restaurant and had a lavish, spicy meal and a not inconsiderable number of bottles of beer, then returned to my room and spent the next ten hours having pangs of quite another sort.

Chapter 25

Durham and the Northeast

I

J
UST OUTSIDE
G
LOUCESTER
R
OAD
tube station in London is an open area that used to have a large planter in the middle of it. The planter contained some hardy shrubs and was enclosed by a low wall on which people could sit to eat a sandwich or wait for friends. It wasn’t sensational but it was pleasant.

Then one day the council took the planter away, turning the open area into a kind of arid plaza. Soon afterward when I passed through, a couple of council officials in bright yellow vests were standing in the newly created emptiness making notes on clipboards. I asked them why they had taken away the planter, and they told me that the borough didn’t have the resources to manage planters anymore. And I just thought: Is that really what we have come to now, in this cheap, shittily dispiriting age in which we permanently reside—that we can’t even afford a few shrubs in a planter?

Now hold that thought just for a minute while we speed north to the fine old city of Durham and stand outside the majestic heap of stone that is Durham Cathedral. I once spent an enjoyable morning being shown around by the cathedral’s architect, Christopher Downs. I was a little surprised, frankly, to discover that a cathedral requires a full-time architect, but it does. It is in the nature of old buildings to want to fall down, and they need constant attention to prevent that happening. Stone, for one thing, isn’t nearly as eternal as you might think. Even hard stone tends to split and crumble after a couple of hundred years of facing into wind and rain. When that happens, Christopher told me, masons carefully chip out the old stone and slide in a new one. This puzzled me. Why, I asked, didn’t they just pull out the existing stone and rotate it to a new face?

He looked at me, surprised at my architectural naivety. “Because the stones are only about six to nine inches thick,” he explained. It turns out that the walls of Durham Cathedral are not solid stone, as I had always vaguely supposed, but consist rather of an outer skin six to nine inches thick and an inner skin of similar thickness and in between a cavity five and a half feet across, which the builders filled with rubble and hardcore held together with a kind of gloopy cement-like mortar.

So Durham Cathedral, like all great buildings of antiquity, is essentially just a giant pile of rubble held in place by two thin layers of dressed stone. But—and here is the truly remarkable thing—because that gloopy mortar was contained between two impermeable outer layers, air couldn’t get to it, so it took a very long time—forty years to be precise—to dry out. As it dried, the whole structure gently settled, which meant that the cathedral masons had to build doorjambs, lintels, and the like at slightly acute angles so that they would ease over time into the correct alignments. And that’s exactly what happened. After forty years of slow-motion sagging, the building settled into a position of impeccable horizontality, which it has maintained ever since. To me, that is just amazing—the idea that people would have the foresight and dedication to ensure a perfection that they themselves might never live to see.

Now I am no expert on the matter, but I am pretty sure that we are a lot richer today than we were in the eleventh century, and yet back then they could find the resources to build something as splendid and eternal as Durham Cathedral and today we can’t afford to keep six shrubs in a planter. And there is really something seriously wrong with that, if you ask me.