Lakeland Eskapade

For a while now it's been an ambition of mine to go to the Lake District and walk the skyline of Eskdale: a horseshoe of hills beginning on Little Stand and Crinkle Crags and ending on Scafell. It's an imposing ridge: it ends on the highest hills in England and is pierced in the centre with the -from Eskdale- pyramid-like form of Esk Pike. I had a free day this week and thought I'd go over and at least have a look at it. If I got up early enough and if the weather turned out to be good, there was a chance I might do it all. I'd be pushing myself to the limit (a very modest limit when I compare it to some people's ideas of mountain walks and runs) so I had decided this was one walk I'd do alone.

The weather sounded reasonable - that is to say, no rain was forecast. So long as it wasn't going to be a wet day, some sort of pleasant walk would be possible... Unfortunately, with regard to the whole ridge, I didn't get going nearly early enough and, in the end, I did only a small part of it. Nevertheless, I had a good day out. To reach Eskdale I had to drive across the Dales to Windermere and then, rounding the Northern end of lake, take the single-track road that threads its way West over the Wrynose and Hardknott passes. These are not particularly high (there are higher passes in the Yorkshire Dales) but they are notoriously steep. Wrynose is not that bad for anyone used to hilly, rural driving. Hardknott, though, is a real challenge. Soon after leaving the bridge and farm at Cockley Beck the road -rutted and potholed at this point- rears up in a series of insane, steep z-bends. You might very soon decide it would be best to turn back but by that time you've passed the point of no return. The ascent -so long as you don't meet people coming the other way in bad places- turns out to be not quite as bad as you expected. What I dislike, though, is the descent of the Western side. Rocks throng the bends. In places it slopes down so steeply you wonder if you have a gear low enough to stop you careering off the unfenced edges of the road into space. The worst bends are smeared black with skidmarks. You mentally rehearse unclipping the seatbelt, throwing open the door and jumping out. If the technology fails you, would you have time to do this before the car plunged into space?

I felt unusually apprehensive and wondered why? Then it occurred to me I had probably never driven over Hardknott from East to West alone before. East to West has to be, I think, the most daunting way to tackle it. It had been a lot easier with a passenger or two to help lighten the atmosphere.

I arrived at the far side and parked just down the hill from Hardknott Roman Fort. It was noon. Not only that, but the tops were in cloud. The whole ridge would be impossible (well, for me) but I decided to set off anyway and drop out when I'd had enough. If I did manage the whole route later, it would help to have prior knowledge of the early stages. My plan was to walk back the way I'd come, back over Hardknott to the farm at Cockley Beck in the Duddon Valley. From there, I planned to ascend Little Stand, the rocky summit at the Eastern end of the route and from there to follow the ridge over Crinkle Crags and beyond. I'd see how far I could get. When I'd had enough, I'd drop off the West side of the ridge (not literally - I'd choose a comparitively gentle slope) and make my way down Upper Eskdale back to the car.

It didn't take long to walk back over the Pass. It was reassuring to see other drivers approaching its challenges as apprehensively as I had, minutes before. Once back in the Duddon Valley, I set off up the slopes of Little Stand, stopping for a rest just below the summit. I ate a sandwich and admired the view. I was now looking down on the area of Hardknott Pass. Beyond it, the rocky summit of Harter Fell rose up.

Shortly after Little Stand the cloud closed in and the wind got up. Walking into a strong wind, navigating with map and compass across rocky terrain, I found myself slowing down to a snail's pace. Everything but my immediate surroundings was shrouded in cloud. My fear was that I should accidentally turn to the East and find myself in Langdale, miles from my starting point. This approach to the top of Crinkle Crags was unfamiliar to me. The path boasts a "bad step" - a short, easy climb - which concentrates the mind wonderfully on a windy day when the rock is wet. I found this film on Youtube of a party surmounting it in better weather - the sort of day when you feel like hanging around and pulling out the video camera.


As it happened, the bad step was far less intimidating -I thought at the time- than driving over Hardknott Pass. The rest of the route to Crinkle Crags summit is straightforward. Once there, I stopped to eat again. Progress was painfully slow, so much so that I decided to continue along the ridge towards Bowfell but to then drop down into Eskdale as soon as I felt it was safe to do so. I did not want to descend a short way, only to find I had to reascend as I'd reached the top of an area of crags. I perused the map and chose a suitable-looking place - not only was descent there relatively crag-free, but the point where the descent route turned off the ridge looked easy to find,  as it coincided with a cluster of tarns.

I had not descended far before I found myself stepping out of the cloud. The ground was steep but at least I was out of the wind and could see my surroundings again. It was reassuring to see that the patterns made by the mountain streams in the valley below me corresponded exactly to the ones on the map and it wasn't long before I found myself walking along the bank of the infant Esk. I kept looking behind me just in case the mountains decided to have a laugh at my expense and shake off their woolly hats. It was good for morale to see that they did not. The whole ridge was reduced to a brooding mass of the grey stuff. Down in the valley the weather was wonderful.The forecast had been right. For all the wind and cloud, it had never really rained: wind, wet rock and dampness in the air, but no rain.

The Esk looked very inviting as I walked alongside it and I regretted not bringing a towel. Then, seven hours after I'd left it, I found myself back at the car. Time to go home, stopping off on the way to see friends in Windermere for coffee, conversation and (thank you) a timely bowl of chopped fruit.

I've recently been reading about Coleridge's forays into the Lakeland mountains and the day reminded me of his exploits in several respects. My wild afternoon on a rocky ridge would have been right up his street, I think. In particular, the "bad step" had me thinking of his descent of Broad Stand -an easy rock climb on Scafell, during which:

every Drop increased the Palsy of my Limbs — I shook all over, Heaven knows without the least influence of Fear, and now I had only two more to drop down, to return was impossible — but of these two the first was tremendous, it was twice my own height, and the Ledge at the bottom was so exceedingly narrow, that if I dropt down upon it I must of necessity have fallen backwards and of course killed myself. My Limbs were all in a tremble — I lay upon my Back to rest myself, and was beginning according to my Custom to laugh at myself for a Madman, when the sight of the Crags above me on each side, and the impetuous Clouds just over them, posting so luridly and so rapidly northward, overawed me. I lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance and Delight...

I did not find myself overwhelmed on this occasion -either by a palsy of the limbs or a prophetic trance- but it reminded me that one has to know one's limits. I am not a good rock-climber and I have a well-developed sense of self-preservation: there is a line between the bad step on Crinkle Crags and the precipitous drops of Broad Stand which I personally would not cross without the security of a rope. However, with a little creative re-writing, Coleridge's account could almost apply to my earlier motorised descent of Hardknott Pass.

I was reminded of Coleridge again as I walked through the valley beside the Esk. The valley twists and turns, so that in the upper reaches of it one is surrounded by nearby fells and is denied any distant view. Did Coleridge walk here? (Anyone who has read more of Coleridge than I will probably know). If he had he would have seen almost exactly what I saw: water, rock, grassland, sky, just as now. There were no buildings, pylons, wind turbines, power stations, or cities to be seen. I tried to imagine what it would be like to see my surroundings through Coleridge's eyes. I found myself thinking of part of Wordsworth's Prelude I've been reading recently:

Those incidental charms which first attached
My heart to rural objects, day by day
Grew weaker, and I hasten on to tell
How Nature, intervenient till this time
And secondary, now at length was sought
For her own sake. But who shall parcel out
His intellect by geometric rules,
Split like a province into round and square?
Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits were first sown, even as a seed?
Who that shall point as with a wand and say
"This portion of the river of my mind
Came from yon fountain?" Thou, my Friend! art one
More deeply read in thy own thoughts; to thee
Science appears but what in truth she is,
Not as our glory and our absolute boast,
But as a succedaneum, and a prop
To our infirmity. No officious slave
Art thou of that false secondary power
By which we multiply distinctions, then
Deem that our puny boundaries are things
That we perceive, and not that we have made.
To thee, unblinded by these formal arts,
The unity of all hath been revealed,
And thou wilt doubt, with me less aptly skilled
Than many are to range the faculties
In scale and order, class the cabinet
Of their sensations, and in voluble phrase
Run through the history and birth of each
As of a single independent thing.
Hard task, vain hope, to analyse the mind,
If each most obvious and particular thought,
Not in a mystical and idle sense,
But in the words of Reason deeply weighed,
Hath no beginning.  

from Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 2: Schooltime 

There's so much in there that seems so perceptive - and modern in it's outlook. I like the way he looks forward to the ground to be covered by psychology and psychoanalysis (even though he concludes that it's a "hard task" and a "vain hope to analyse the mind"):

But who shall parcel out
His intellect by geometric rules,
Split like a province into round and square?
Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits were first sown, even as a seed?
Who that shall point as with a wand and say
"This portion of the river of my mind
Came from yon fountain?" 

And I like his description of

...that false secondary power
By which we multiply distinctions, then
Deem that our puny boundaries are things
That we perceive, and not that we have made.

There, in Eskdale: earth, rock, water, sky, cloud, ant, me - were these all merely "puny boundaries" imposed by me, myself, on my surroundings? I was reminded then of a Zen koan, collected in The Gateless Gate:

Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: "The flag is moving."
The other said: "The wind is moving."
The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by. He told them: "Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving."

There is a verse attached to this koan:

 Wind, flag, mind moves,
The same understanding.
When the mouth opens
All are wrong.

Local Art Event

This weekend there's been an Art Festival in Leyburn, the small town just down the road from our village. It was designed to coexist with the rather more urbane Food and Drink Festival for which Leyburn has, over the years, become famous. Our friend Denise had a stall there - she also has one online, here (and a facebook page here), so I won't reinvent the wheel by posting grotty flash photos of the stall she had in the marquee (I didn't take any). They wouldn't do it justice.

Of course, I'm biased, as she once painted me alongside my two colleagues when I played in Trio Gitan. I've posted this before. As I probably said then, the hedgehog crept in because my partner, Karen, is famous for  feeding waif and stray hedgehogs:

The blurb for the exhibition talked about a current craze for "pop up" galleries - putting art in spaces such as empty shops and derelict buildings etc. It struck me that the first attempt to do this during the Leyburn Food and Drink Festival was made by my friend Howard and me, eight years ago - an exhibition appropriately titled All the Animals I've ever Eaten. We set it up in an empty shop in the market square. We didn't manage to attract coachloads of punters though - just a trickle of interested folk, just enough to make it worthwhile, looking back. I've just realised that there's a page about it still online, on an old website - where you can still download the wherewithal to build your own centaurpede.

The Long View

Do you ever find yourself wondering what on earth we are? I do. For me, the wondering often starts when I'm out walking. I wonder what it would be like to be wearing animal skins and carrying a spear, wandering over the hills in search of food. I wonder what my assumptions about life might be. How would I think about the past and the future? What stories would I tell to make sense of it all?

We've been around for a while: the oldest stone tools we've found are around 2.6 million years old.  On the other hand, the invention of the wheel happened less than 0.01 million years ago. For millions of years technology developed at a snail's pace. On this timescale the discoveries of Newton and Galileo count as contemporary - and almost all of our scientific knowledge and technological expertise has been acquired in the blink of an eye.

One could -and people do- argue that we should turn our backs on further technological development and concentrate on developing a fairer world. I don't see the two as mutually exclusive. If there are developments as life-changing as penicillin, pain relief, central heating, etc., around the corner then we should not deny ourselves the benefit of them. Michael Pritchard's invention of the Lifesaver water-filtration bottle springs to mind. As for space, the recent warning shots across our bows from meteors and asteroids are ample demonstration of the need for us to be concerned for our environment not only on earth but in the wider solar system.

Where will we be in another 2.6 million years? Will our knowledge and expertise continue to expand at their current phenomenal rate? If so, speculations that seem far-fetched now could seem quaint by then. And then there's the even bigger question: what will we evolve into?

Harter Fell

I went to the Lake District on Saturday to meet a group of old friends who were staying at Eskdale Youth Hostel. It took ages to get there: why I thought there might still be snow on Hardknotts Pass I don't know. I set off early in the morning and perhaps I was feeling over-cautious, or perhaps my memories of negotiating its tight hairpin bends of mind-boggling steepness with their black-rubber skid-marks left me thinking I didn't want to risk the road if there was even the tiniest chance of encountering any ice. I decided to make my way along the Northern edge of Morcambe Bay instead and then travel to Eskdale via an alternative route that took me past Broughton-in-Furness and through the village of Ulpha.

I got there in the end. Eskdale is a magical place: for some reason it isn't overrun by people the way so much of the Lake District is. I think this goes for most of the Western side of the region. There are people around but in moderation.

We decided to climb Harter Fell. This rocky hill separates Eskdale from the Duddon Valley. A good path from the foot of Hardknott Pass crosses a stream and ascends diagonally across the foot of the Fell. Once it disappears over the horizon it turns leftwards towards the summit and steepens noticeably. To the left and right small outcrops tempt anyone with a taste for rock-climbing to interesting deviations from the route. Before long, the path arrives at a collection of rocky tors, the highest being the summit of the Fell.

The sky was clear and the air, when you could shelter from the wind, warm. We spent a happy half hour at the summit, eating our sandwiches, scrambling around on the rocks and enjoying the view of Morcambe Bay to the South and, to the North, of the Eskdale Horseshoe: a long, inviting ridge that stretches from Scafell in the West to Crinkle Crags in the East via Scafell Pike itself and the shapely peak of Eskdale Pike. The position also affords an excellent aerial view of the ruins of the Roman fort at the foot of Hardknott Pass.

Leaving the summit and the path behind, we made our way with the aid of the map to the top of Hardknott Pass. We sat there for a while, watching the efforts of cyclists heroically turning their biggest gears on those steepest of slopes. At one point we considered shouting in unison Get off and push! but decided it would be rude and didn't. Now and again motorcyclists roared by, leaving behind them a smell of hot oil, a smell that always takes me back to my childhood and the machine my father used to ride on to work.

Photo: Mike Knapton

We crossed the road and made our way down the path to the Roman fort. This is a wonderful place. I never have the patience to read the short essays displayed on boards at strategic points in such places and prefer to soak up the atmosphere.

Back at the Youth Hostel, we decided to make for Ulverston, as it boasts a first-rate fish and chip shop.

Cwm Croesor

Cwm Croesor is one of my favourite valleys in Wales. I'm not sure why. Sometimes a landscape is just the right shape. Everything there, to my eye, is just as it should be. To the left, Cnicht rears up its pointy head. To the right, the bulky form of Moelwyn Mawr rises up. In between, the sun, falling on trees and slate-fences, casts  intriguing shadows. Every time I go there, there's washing out on a line across the middle of the valley, the sleeves of the shirts waving as if to say "Oi! You with the camera - over 'ere!".
 
And there's an art gallery-cum-café, the Oriel Caffi Croesor. Don't be put off by the fact that they haven't updated the exhibition information on their website recently. It's a great place - the art is as good as the coffee. When we were there the art on display included works by David Pritchard. I'd never heard of him but liked what I saw. I'd like to provide a link to his work but I just can't find it online. There was also a number of pictures by  Sonja Benskin Mesher. I've seen her work before and like it not least because it's never afraid of being experimental. Local artist Bev Dunne also has a number of striking pictures there.

Reading Capital

No, not the doorstep by Karl Marx - rather, the doorstep by John Lanchester. The double entendre is obviously intended, although anyone expecting a forensic dissection of the labour theory of value or a lurid explanation of "commodity fetishism and the secrets thereof" will be disappointed.  However, as I read Lanchester's Capital I found myself thinking less  of Das Kapital and more of Middlemarch. For the fictitious Midland town, read Pepys Rd, a street in London transformed by rising house prices. If Eliot's book is a study in provincial life, then this is a study in metropolitan life. And where Eliot focuses on the otherworldly Dorothea Brooke, Lanchester focuses instead on her trivial, materialistic sister Celia, in the form of  the jaw-droppingly monsterous Arabella Yount - a dominatrix among commodity fetishists if ever there was one.

Among other things, this is a book about powerless people navigating the world without a map - or with old, confusingly out-of-date maps. The remnants of the past -its assumptions, its belief-systems- spin like plastic fragments in some Pacific Ocean gyre. Artists, shopkeepers, housewives, footballers, nannies, builders, bankers, even the traffic warden, are all in there too, all trying to keep their heads above water, all dreaming of making it to the beach. The book is a virtuoso study in research: Lanchester paints a detailed picture of the everyday life of people from wildly different backgrounds, all of them convincing, I thought. Some you like and some you don't but you care what happens to them all and you keep turning the pages -all 577 of them- to find out.

Victor Jara

I was reminded the other day of the Chilean singer-songwriter, Victor Jara. I wondered if there was any footage of him singing on Youtube as I'd heard a lot about him but not, I'm ashamed to say, actually heard him. He's there, I'm pleased to say. Jara was one of the thousands tortured and killed by the Pinochet regime in Chile. In this song On the Way to Work, Jara wrote and sang about how he and his beloved

weave our dreams together,
working at the beginning of a story
without knowing the end.

Raining Quinces

The other day I took delivery of a new book of poetry I'd ordered: Raining Quinces, by Robert Wilkinson. Robert -for those who don't know- blogs as The Solitary Walker among other things and edits the online poetry magazine The Passionate Transitory.

Many things are incorporated into the poetry of this substantial book - spiritual insight, comic wordplay, personal confession. The first third is devoted to poems about pilgrimage. Robert seems not to be a conventional Christian, nor is he a conventional Zen Buddhist. He seems to inhabit what I consider to be a rather attractive nether world between these two and somewhere else  -a nether world encapsulated by his short poem, Brief Candle which combines a suggestion of Christian ritual with a koan-like conundrum:

The flame is out, but scent and smoke remain.
Is absence presence by another name?

Robert longs to be on the move, on foot, and seeks an enlightenment which might be glimpsed like a "glimmer of shook foil" (A Camino Sonnet). It only takes a glimpse to set him off. In A Vagabond Life he piles images one upon the other, ending:

at the flare of a match
at the gleam of a knife
I'd be off again
to a vagabond life.

There is a Romantic simplicity about much of Robert's poetry - at points I'm reminded of Rilke and, in the lighter pieces, Wendy Cope and John Betjamin. This is poetry which lays its tune frankly on the air (as Basil Bunting put it). And he can be very funny. For a start, anyone who has not yet read his celebration of Nigella Lawson should buy this book.  Of the more serious poems, I particularly liked his poems Orpheus and Eurydice and Two Worlds in One - it was worth the price of the book for these two poems alone, I thought.

If you want to buy a copy of Raining Quinces yourself, it's available both on UK Amazon and US Amazon.

*

Totally off the point, I was driving past the Howgill Fells in Cumbria the other week. Their snowy tops caught my attention. Not having time to stop and walk up them, I took a photograph instead (click on the photo to expand):

William Turnbull

Watched a documentary recently about the Scottish artist, William Turnbull. It was spellbinding, I thought. It's not all online but there's a trailer and a few clips:

Beyond Time - William Turnbull Trailer - Newport Beach Film Festival 2012
The Influence of Flying
BEYOND TIME -New York 1950's

  Beyond Time- the 1952 Venice Biennale
The film included examples of the work of Turnbull's wife, the sculptor Kim Lim and an interview with his friend and fellow-artist, Richard Hamilton:
The Sculpture Of Kim Lim
  Richard Hamilton Interview-The Beatles "White Album"
And if that's not enough to be going on with, then there's always the williamturnbullart.com website.

Invisible Graffiti

I found myself getting quite nostalgic about rock climbing the other day.  I haven't done any for years.  I threw out my rope and harness a while back: man-made fabrics, even the toughest, don't last for ever and both were well past their sell-by date.

I found myself remembering how, when it went well, a vertical, rocky environment was a wonderful place to escape to. Oddly, one can feel securely cocooned among the cracks, corners and bulges of a cliff. The surface is close to your face, it demands that you be aware of it, in a way we are rarely aware of the detail of the ground beneath our feet. Anyone who has climbed on a warm, Summer day will remember the smell of hot rock. Arranging one's protection -taking in ropes, paying them out, clipping and unclipping karibiners- one looses oneself in a relaxing, meditative way.

And then there are the routes.  I was never any good and so had to cultivate an interest in old, easy routes - routes that were difficult in the old days as "protection" was limited or non-existent but easy enough in these days of chocks, hexes and "friends" (spring loaded camming devices).  I didn't need a lot of encouragement to stay with these old routes. The history of climbing makes for great literature and, fortunately, the literature of climbing is prolific, from the Victorian Edward Whymper's Scrambles Amongst the Alps, through WH Murray's accounts of his Scottish climbs to more modern writers such as Joe Simpson, David Craig and Al Alvarez, to name but a few.

And then -and this is what set me off writing this post- there are the names climbers give to the routes they devise. Few people realise when they look up at a cliff that, to a climber who consults his or her guidebook, it will most likely be covered with a tracery of routes. And the names? They range from the boringly descriptive -such as "Central Chimney"- to the outright poetic. Often a name's significance derives from it's pre-existing neighbour. On Pic Tor in Derbyshire, Diagnosis runs up the crag next to Prognosis. Humour abounds. The late Arthur Dolphin (a climber active in the 1940s) named a route he'd climbed in the Lake District Kipling Groove. When asked why, he said "because it was ruddy 'ard." All the best route names tell a story, although usually we'll never know what it was. Sometimes it's obvious. On Kinder Scout there's a crag known as Chinese Wall - up one side there's a Communist Route, up the other a Nationalist Route.

To name but a few, picked at random from the pile of guidebooks I have beside me: Tranquillity, Hades, Gehenna, Cinderella's Twin, Cucumber Groove, Ulysses or Bust, Soyuz (next to Apollo), Soho Sally, The Flute of Hope, Tales of Yankee Power, The Mangler, Time Machine, Piranha Wall. Most are short. Some are longer: Float like a Butterfly, Land like a Tomato.

Although many great books have been written about climbing, some of the best mountain literature is out there, invisible to the naked eye, the rambling collaborative poems the lines of which are the names of the routes themselves, words composed by those who first climbed them. Although, in the days when I climbed, I never composed any  lines myself (in words or on rock) I enjoyed reading them.

Cobram Duo

On Friday night we went to a concert. The Cobram Guitar Duet were performing at a local village hall. There was a generous buffet laid on too and I have to say coffee, fairy cakes and live classical guitar music go together very well.

The first half of the concert was dedicated to transcriptions of early music. This began with a rare chance to hear (in a North Yorkshire village hall, at any rate) a Suite by William Lawes. Lawes had worked as "a musician in ordinary for lutes and voices" for Charles I and had the misfortune to be shot in the English Civil War. The Lawes was followed by works by Dowland, Frescobaldi, Praetorius and that most prolific of composers, Anon.

The second half was dedicated to more modern guitar music - from Tarrega's famous tremolo-marathon Recuerdos de la Alhambra and Albeniz' Asturias to a super-cool arrangement of Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

It was a magical evening. I found myself reflecting on how much more alive live music is compared with the recorded equivalent - and, particularly in the early pieces, what it must have been like in the days before mechanical recording when to hear a piece at all you had to either play it or have it played.

Although I'll certainly post it when they do, The Cobram Duo are yet to put any examples of their playing on Youtube, so I'll post some music I've been meaning to post instead. It's certainly related to what I've been writing about, though. Rather than early music transcribed for guitar, this is twentieth-century music played on lutes - some of Stockhausen's Zodiac pieces for musical boxes, Tierkreis. The first in this series is Leo, the lion, which is perhaps the most clearly characterised of the pieces and, as such, a good "way in". I always think Stockhausen's lion is vaguely reminiscent of Saint-Saens' portrayal in The Carnival of the Animals:



The gig we went to was - I think -  in aid of Gilling West Village Hall repair fund. If you're looking for ways of fundraising, the Cobram Duet are, I believe, looking for gigs! You can find out more about them at their website.

Gunnerside Gill

This week some friends of ours have been staying nearby in a holiday cottage in Leyburn. On Wednesday we went for a walk up Gunnerside Gill in Swaledale.

I'd forgotten just how magnificent it is. The village of Gunnerside stands at the foot of the Gill, almost on the banks of the Swale itself. This is the closest the road gets to the Gill, so we parked there and set off. The path on the map is slightly confusing - in fact, it doesn't seem to exist on the ground - but we soon found another, which led us to a land-rover track that contours along the steep western side of the valley. We found ourselves looking down on the stream that runs along the valley floor and across to another path that meandered across the hillside above the far bank and which would take us back to Gunnerside later on.

After a couple of miles this path arrives at the most industrialised part of the Gill. Why do we consider industry to be such an ugly intrusion on a landscape while at the same time preserving and promoting industrial heritage? The upper part of the Gill has been scoured down to bare rock by intensive mining operations. Here and there you come across the picturesque ruins of mine buildings. At first glance everything seems to be the colour of rock, or the colour of storm clouds (perhaps they're the same, or so my memory seems to tell me). The place has an austere beauty about it and, in fact, a lot of England's bleak, beautiful places were created by human industry. One need look no further than its deforested moors.

At one point on the path we came across the entrance to a mine - a drystone arch that, on closer examination, formed the start of a tunnel that ran in a straight line far into the hillside. Two of us ventured a short way in - we had to bend down as the roof was low. Ferns grew from the walls. Water trickled between the rocks on the floor. We shone the torch ahead of us. The further we ventured, the further on the tunnel seemed to go.

We didn't go far - just three or four paces. Fools rush in and all that. A complete novice, I'd been lucky enough to be taken down a Swaledale mine once before with a team experienced in mine rescue. I'd been well-drilled in the dangers at the time. Unlike caves, mines are man-made. From the moment they're first dug, nature patiently begins to reclaim them. The walls and the roofs become unstable and prone to fall in. In an old mine, I'd been told, never touch the ceiling or the walls. Carry a good supply of spare torches and batteries and woe betide anyone who gets lost underground in a maze of tunnels. The picture Tolkien paints of the Mines of Moria (well-known to Lord of the Rings readers), if anything, understates the potential awfulness of it all.

On that previous mine trip we were walking down a passage when the person ahead of me suddenly cried out and stumbled backwards. In the darkness he'd put his foot down into empty space. Fortunately, his instinctive reaction to throw himself backwards saved him on that occasion. We could hear gravel he'd dislodged from the edge of the pit clattering below us in the darkness for several seconds before it came to rest. Our torches revealed a sheer-sided hole of unknown depth that spanned the whole width of the passage-floor.

In lead mines one can come across deep, vertical passages divided horizontally by wooden floors. Spoil from side passages used to be indiscriminately heaped on these wooden platforms. Wood rots. One can stumble over -or under- one of these and set off a collapse of platform after platform. We're talking the stuff of nightmares here.

Needless to say, although the tunnel we'd discovered in the hillside went on and on, I had no desire on this occasion to go on and on into it. Instead, we stepped back into the daylight, where the others were waiting, and set off on the return leg to Gunnerside. Our outward journey had been a bleak land-rover track. This part of the walk was more interesting: the path wove up and down the steep fields of the Gill's Eastern side, in and out of drystone walls and ancient structures built by the lead miners. Towards the end it wound through a wood, running along the bank of the stream that had accompanied us -usually at a distance- all afternoon.

Who was the man in the macintosh?

A while ago, I posted a quiz based on Joyce's Ulysses. I thought it was perhaps time I produced the answers!

If you want to read the questions before you see the answers, click here, quickly, before you read any more...

1. What three things should an Irishman be wary of?
 "Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon." (An Irish saying).

2. What did Mr Deasy think Stephen would find very handy?
 A savingsbox.

3. What is the live dog called?
 Tatters.

4. What did Milly buy her father for his birthday?
 A  moustache cup of imitation Crown Derby.

5. What did the soap smell of?
 Lemon. "Mr Bloom raised a cake to his nostrils. Sweet lemony wax."

6. Who darns Mr Bloom's socks?
 Mrs Fleming. "Glad I took that bath. Feel my feet quite clean. But I wish Mrs Fleming had darned these socks better."

7. What opera is like a railway line?
 "Lenehan announced gladly: - The Rose of Castile. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee!"

8. What sort of cheese does Bloom have in his sandwich?
 Gorgonzola. In Davy Byrne's pub, "Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese."

9. What did Stephen drink with Dan Deasy's ducats?
  "Three drams of usquebaugh" (whiskey).

10. What was not on the slab?
 Wolfe Tone's statue.

11. "From the saloon a call came, long in dying." Who had forgotten what?
 The piano tuner his tuning fork.

12. Who won the Gold Cup?
 Throwaway.

13. Who kissed Molly under the Moorish Wall beside the gardens?
 Lieutenant Mulvey.

14. Who is the "remarkablest progenitor barring none in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle"?
 Theodore Purefoy.

15. Bloom's real name is Higgins - according to whom?
 The man in the mackintosh (see below). Higgins was Bloom's mother's maiden name.

16. What flashed "through his (Bloom's) busy brain"?
 "All kinds of Utopian plans."

17. What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat?
 Incomplete.

18. What year did the Blooms marry?
1888.



I was going to ask the question, who was the man in the macintosh? However, I don't think we ever find out.

The caretaker put the papers in his pocket. The barrow had ceased to trundle. The mourners split and moved to each side of the hole, stepping with care round the graves. The gravediggers bore the coffin and set its nose on the brink, looping the bands round it.

Burying him. We come to bury Caesar. His ides of March or June. He doesn't know who is here nor care. Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I'd like to know? Now I'd give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of. A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life. Yes, he could. Still he'd have to get someone to sod him after he died though he could dig his own grave. We all do. Only man buries. No, ants too. First thing strikes anybody. Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.

Oh Poor Robinson Crusoe!
How could you possibly do so?
 

Poor Dignam! His last lie on the earth in his box. When you think of them all it does seem a waste of wood. All gnawed through. They could invent a handsome bier with a kind of panel sliding, let it down that way. Ay but they might object to be buried out of another fellow's. They're so particular. Lay me in my native earth. Bit of clay from the holy land. Only a mother and deadborn child ever buried in the one coffin. I see what it means. I see. To protect him as long as possible even in the earth. The Irishman's house is his coffin. Embalming in catacombs, mummies the same idea.

Mr Bloom stood far back, his hat in his hand, counting the bared heads. Twelve. I'm thirteen. No. The chap in the macintosh is thirteen. Death's number. Where the deuce did he pop out of? He wasn't in the chapel, that I'll swear. Silly superstition that about thirteen.                                                                   James Joyce, Ulysses: Episode 6: Hades

I like the theory that perhaps he's Mr Duffy (from the Dubliners story, A Painful Case):

He had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed. He lived his spiritual life without any communion with others, visiting his relatives at Christmas and escorting them to the cemetery when they died. He performed these two social duties for old dignity's sake but conceded nothing further to the conventions which regulate the civic life.

OK Alex

Just had a short story, OK Alex, posted at the online sci-fi short story magazine,  Nihilist Scifi. Astute long term readers of this blog might have caught a preview here, some years ago.

My - that's probably my shortest post ever. Almost a tweet.

Hopes and Dreams

I've just had a piece posted on Rachel Fox's new blog All Our Hopes and Dreams (thank you, Rachel). In case you're not familiar with it, it's a project extending an ongoing open invitation to anyone who wants to to send Rachel a piece about their hopes and dreams. If that leaves you scratching your head, she provides a few questions to help potential essayists to get going:

1. What were your hopes and dreams when you were a child?
2. Did any of them come true in any sense?
3. What are your hopes and dreams now?
4. Do you really think any of them are possible?

I don't think answering them is compulsory - in fact, I think she's open to all kinds of submissions on the theme of hopes and dreams in all kinds of media.

You can read what I wrote here.