Mount Bogong

I live not in myself, but I become

Portion of that around me; and to me

High mountains are a feeling, but the hum 

Of human cities torture 

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – Lord Byron

I climb a mountain to raise me up. I climb to lift myself above daily routines. I climb to reach out and experience not only what is in front of me but also what is around the corner. I climb a physical path and it takes me into a metaphysical place where I sense the nature of life. The act of departure from the base is no different on Bogon than on Blencathra. What’s different about the next steps of ascent onto an Australian mountain are the trees, the birds and the enveloping warmth.

A humbling feature for anyone climbing a mountain outside of the highest of the Himalayas is that you know you are following in many thousand pairs of footsteps. When climbing Mount Bogong in the Australian state of Victoria this year I learned that 40,000 years separate me from the earliest climbers. The first indigenous people of Australia to climb up from the River Kiewa and over Bogong were the Dhudhuroa people. They came twice a year in almost a ritualistic manner. They travelled for a very important reason into this ancient, stunning and inspirational landscape. There are only around 2,000 Dhudhoroa people living in Victoria today and few of them visit the mountain; there is a modern moral here.

When I set off with my elder son at dawn this January (concerned about my energy levels and fitness to climb 1986 metres in thirty-five degrees of heat), the timeless question of why do I still climb mountains still entered my head. The answers, some listed above, came to mind. It is a ritual perhaps in part but only a very personal ritual. At least I spent a rare and valuable day with Matthew but it’s not a wider community thing. Yet for the Dhudhoroa people it was not only a ritual, it was an essential political event in their lives.

Climbing up from the valley of the River Kiewa, just as we did this year, the Dhuddhoroa took part in the Bogong Moth ceremonies. When they reached the open areas near the summit of Bogong they met up with other Aboriginal peoples such as the Yaithmathang who inhabited the high plains of this land. I learned many enriching new facts about Australia this day but these meetings of indigenous clans surprised me. Hitherto I believed that different Aborigine people were wary of socialising with other clans. Yet here I discovered that the Dhuddhoroa and the Yaithmathang not only collected moths for food but settled disputes, arranged marriages and made alliances between highland clans. (As I edit this piece on the seventh day of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine I am reminded that there are other ways of settling disputes. However, the Aborigines were the epitome of rationality in the way they lived their lives whilst Mr. Putin appears to lack all rationality.

I would like to arrange for Presidents Putin and Zelensky to be airlifted to the summit of Mount Elbrus in Russia and instructed to not come down until they have consumed a few moths and sorted out their differences. Sadly, it will never happen.) 

I should explain the ceremonies as it is astonishing to think that people could thrive on eating moths. Bogong Moths migrate twice a year to these mountains. They are big; up to 1.4 inches long and apparently they are meaty and tasty. The Aborigine men would trap large numbers of moths in nets. Then the moths would be roasted and the chaff removed. The residue was pounded into cakes and smoked to prolong usability. The result does not sound nutritious to me but clearly I have not tried them.

Once Matthew and I had set off from the base of the Staircase Spur below Bogong it was soon getting hotter. There was no wind. Around and above us came the calls and shrieks of birds such as Noisy Miners, parrots, lorikeets and wattlebirds. The narrow path - the width of one person - is extremely steep and rocky. The thick canopy of gum and box trees traps the heat in. A haze of eucalyptus mist enveloped us. After two hours my stomach was cramping and I required a dump. Matthew had warned of snakes inhabiting this area so it was with some trepidation I lowered my shorts. 

Feeling better after a clear out, then eating some Vegemite sandwiches and downing more water than I was used to, we set off in search of the Bivouac Hut which is roughly half way to the summit. There we found campers rolling their sleeping bags and about to continue the climb. There are notices at the hut about the dangers of being on Bogong in the winter months. Avalanches and cornice break offs occur on these slopes. Three climbers perished in a blizzard in August 1943. Two snowboarders lost their lives near here in July 2014.

After another hour of trudging through thick forest I was thinking this climb was a poor idea. My legs felt heavy and tired and I reminded myself that we had to descend as well; always more painful with wonky knees and hips. 

But gradually the forest thinned and we caught glimpses of distant mountain ranges. Finally, we broke out from tree cover altogether. Despite the thermometer reading thirty-six degrees the air was fresher. Lifting our eyes from the rocky path we could see for seventy miles across densely forested ranges of hills blue in the midday heat. Climbing at last to the highest point in all of the state of Victoria we were struck by the beauty of the summit fields with their backcloth of the vast mountain ranges in every direction. I then knew that the plan to climb this mountain was a good one.

Beneath our feet were patches of giant Bottle-daisies, Rosy Hyacinth-orchids, speedwell and violets. Around us fluttered huge white butterflies. There was still no wind. There was an immense sense of calm, it was so quiet. It was here where the Dhuddhoroa and the Yaithmathang peoples met and hunted moths, (none of which we saw, it was the wrong time of year). Here where they settled their differences and forged alliances. Yes, it is a reverential place. I had to prod myself and be reminded that Matthew and I had climbed to the highest point of the state; my head was still clearing from the numbing intoxication of eucalyptus oil. In a wild and remote landscape, we looked down on the world and it marvelled us as it must have marvelled our predecessors over 40,000 years.

There are many reasons for climbing a mountain as I have said - the mundane ones such as, ‘because it is there’ and feeling a sense of physical achievement also still apply. This year our extra reward for climbing this mountain is a feeling of separation from the crap of modern life that lately has fomented madness amongst some national leaders. Up here I could briefly forget that the art of political compromise, enacted by the Aborigine clans, is deserting some of our ‘elected’ politicians and seemingly leading us to war. I could forget too about climate change and the pandemic, but only briefly. Our beautiful planet, admired from this mountain summit, is being destroyed by the very people who inhabit it. The Dhuddhoroa and the Yaithmathang peoples knew how to live in the landscapes they encountered. They are the masters of sustainable living. Oh, how we Europeans abused them and the land, from the moment of Captain Cook’s landfall in 1770 until 1972 when the Australian prime minister declared the policy of White Australia was over. During two hundred years of arrogance and imposition of the British rule of law, the Aborigine suffered under the feet of our ancestors. That Western liberal democracy has now been under attack from within for some years. Now it is from the outside by a murderous Russian - not for the first time. Europeans eventually came to our senses with regard to our attitude to the Aborigine; we show signs of doing so again over Russian autocrats.

I felt reluctant to leave this wondrous mountain top. After having the place to ourselves for fifteen minutes our tranquillity was broken by the sounds of loud male voices coming from below on the Eskdale Spur track, our route down. So, we set off to let them take our place. Four boisterous South American lads, carrying enormous backpacks and clutching bottles of beer, greeted us with their story of having missed a turn on the mountains the day before and so had to camp out under the stars. Three were from Chile and one from Peru. They were an instant reminder of the kinship and harmony that can exist amongst differing clans.

After another three hours we arrived at the Eskdale Spur Trailhead. As we did we met two Australian men clad in shorts and tee-shirts - also clutching bottles of beer, but with no backpacks or water – in all seriousness saying they were climbing to the top. Crazy; no Australian beer I have come across, and I have tasted many in Matthew’s company, will sustain you on a mountain climb. Now if it was a pint or two of Black Sheep bitter from Yorkshire, that would be a different matter. 

We still had four miles to walk along the forest floor back to our car. I have not been in the Singapore jungle but imagined I was. I wondered how I would have performed as a prisoner of war, being force marched in such conditions as we encountered here. We were walking at speed in high humidity, descended on by swarms of insects and with the threat of snakes. Insects included the sizeable March Fly, the bite of which is suddenly painful and draws blood. And then we confronted our first black snake, sunning itself in the middle of our track. It slithered into the undergrowth, more scared of us than we of it.

A week after our ascent of Mount Bogong we again set out to climb, this time the second highest peak in Victoria, Mount Feathertop. Like Bogong it is a hard climb for a septuagenarian with dodgy hips. This time it took us over four hours to reach the summit. Feathertop’s summit is wholly different to Bogong’s. We could almost have been on the top of a beloved Lakeland fell. The peak is small and steeply sided, devoid of undergrowth, flowers and butterflies. Cloud cover swirled up and down around us, blocking out intermittingly the views of more vast ranges of hills in all directions. It was even cold enough to put a woollen jumper over our tee-shirts. 

The descent from Mount Feathertop along Razorback Track is over seven miles long. It hugs the side of a hill before twisting one way and then another before dropping down into a forest of ghostly eucalypts that was burned out by bushfires in 2020. 

The stems of the trees stand starkly bare and mysteriously white against the blue mountains and carpets of lush grass. We eventually ended up at Mount Hotham, one of Australia’s principal ski resorts. Here ski lifts and Alpine architecture stand out incongruously against the forested skyline. We were met by the rest of our family - the youngest aged nearly three chased lizards and skinks and hoped for a snake – they reminded us of their value to us, their essential part of us and what we live for. They brought us back to earth after our lofty conversations with God. We dined at a pub in the bizarrely named ski resort of Diner Plain. A ski resort in high summer is one weird place to be.

Climbing mountains can be a lonely activity but one in which I come close to understanding what life is about. Walking amongst the giants of Victoria and the lesser heights of Lakeland in Cumbria brings with it a sense of proportion. I look down on the earth and feel what is good, what is worth living for. (Yes, I reflected briefly on the past horror show in the White House and current one in the Kremlin but try not to let them spoil my view of the world.) Despite the clambering of millions of feet on the summits of Bogong and Feathertop I still gained a primal sense that this land reminds me of the most important aspects of life on earth. The Dhudhuroa people came to these mountains, transacted their business - both social and political – and left those landscapes as they found them. In the three weeks we spent in the High Country of Victoria this year I never once saw an indigenous Australian climbing the mountains. Some of them may do it when I am not looking but I have my doubts. The reasons are all too obvious.

Lord Byron wrote in Don Juan:

The mountains look on Marathon –

And Marathon looks on the sea;

And musing there an hour alone,

I dream’d that Greece might still be free

Let us substitute Ukraine for Greece.

Wise folk from ‘t East – particularly those without dogs

 It was a wet Sunday afternoon in February. For seven weeks the entire country’s population was compelled to live in a national lockdown. I was already hankering after travel. Any form of travel would do. A multi-day walk came to mind; these both soothe and invigorate me. The process of moving within a fresh landscape after incarceration at home wakes the brain and senses up again. Where should we walk next, I thought. Having lived in Yorkshire for nearly forty years an exploration of East Yorkshire was overdue. 

Anyone not familiar with God’s Own Country has a tendency to believe the landscape east of the Great North Road is flat and boring. 

This is not the case. In Yorkshire’s east country there are the Wolds - the word wold is an old English term applied to open and hilly country. My wife will attest to the fact that the Cotswolds and Yorkshire Wolds are anything but flat. Furthermore they contain some steep inclines; so she discovered on The Cotswold Way in 2004 and The Yorkshire Wolds Way in 2021. A week returned from the latter her knees and hips were still complaining about the hard work they had been put through and their residual discomfort.

It is true that the merits of the loiners from Leeds, the hill farmers in the Dales, the Wayers on the Pennines and the grouse on the Moors provoke much debate - both within the county borders and far beyond. They arouse more lively debate than do the wise and calm women and men of Kingston upon Hull, Filey and the Wolds. The city and town that mark the start and end of the Yorkshire Wolds Way are little talked about outside their boroughs. Hull has the stark looking Humber Bridge and a beautiful red brick university. It also has the most handsome public toilets in Britain. Lonely Planet reported in 2019 that the “93-year old brick-built loos in Nelson Street near Victoria Pier rub shoulders with the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the British Museum and the Giant’s Causeway featuring in the top UK tourism attractions”. It’s true. They are inspiring particularly when you are caught short. Hull is also the end of the earth (or if you are a Yorkshireman perhaps it is the beginning of the earth) for on my first visit to Spurn Head, the spit of land that reaches in to the Humber, I thought I was about to fall off the planet. I felt there was nowhere else to go.

My party of five that set off on foot into this urban landscape on a balmy September morning had 79 miles ahead of us. It would take seven days. It is exciting to set off on foot into an unknown landscape. I had seven overnight accommodations arranged yet had no image of what they looked like, just a concept from booking with their owners many months ago. South Cave, Market Weighton, Millington, Thixendale, Wintringham and Ganton were just names on a map at roughly 12-mile intervals. (Ganton has its championship golf course but it is far from typical of the wolds landscape.) As we set off along the track adjacent to the Humber and under its eponymous bridge I began to think about how the landscape ahead was formed and what manner of men and women bestrode this land before us, who were the first to arrive and settle it and who has left their lasting impression?

We left Hull behind us in a poetic mood for I was, of course, aware of it being home for thirty years for Britain’s greatest post-war poet, Philip Larkin. Whilst he was born in Coventry (being a Midlander myself, also an adopted Yorkshireman and a bookman I tried to feel an affinity with the man) he spent his later years as resident librarian at Hull University. Here he wrote his finest verse including The Whitsun Weddings, judged by many as his finest poem. Yet I never was a poet, or now a reader of verse, despite having studied it at school and built up quite a collection from John Keats to Leonard Cohen with Robert Service somewhere in the middle.

The amount of research we did before our walk also reminded us that Bradford born David Hockney has done more than most of his contemporaries to put East Yorkshire into the public eye through his colourful works of art. We looked forward to walking through Thixendale, Huggate and Warter where Hockney painted in 2007.

Before the Bronze Age the hinterland of the Humber, and the bank we were walking along, was covered with woodland of oak and alder trees. Then sea levels rose swamping the tree roots with salt and killing them off. Around 1800 BC it is proven that adventurers from Holland or Denmark managed to cross the North Sea in wooden plank-built boats and made landfall at Ferriby, a few miles inland from Hull. In our path we found a replica of one of these boats that was first excavated in 1937. I am not a good sailor. I have taken the ferry from Hull to Rotterdam on several occasions and before each crossing I prayed for a calm sea. At Ferriby I was in awe of anyone who could row across the sea, more so that they did four thousand years ago.

After Ferriby we turned our backs to the Humber. (Some folk call it the River Humber, but they do so incorrectly. The rivers Trent and Ouse meet to form the Humber Estuary that drains into the sea at Hull to the north and Immingham to the south.) We anticipated the chalk hills of the Wolds and almost immediately started climbing. I let my mind wander back to the first days of previous multi-day walking expeditions that I had made. As I settle in to the start of each I find it a liberating and calming experience to put behind the rush of everyday life at home and the constant invasion of my senses by media-led tales of woe. On this expedition I shall try to ignore the news media. For seven days I shall escape the accursed covid, the risible antics of our bizarre national leader and the distant ramblings of a madman recently ejected from the White House, perhaps to return in 2024 as a nightmare for all sane people.

The East Riding of Yorkshire has plenty of historic churches. I know my belief in Christianity is under serious attack - I am more of a Raddled Anglican Agnostic - yet I love to visit churches and cathedrals so I can marvel at the artistry of the designers, the stonemasons, the painters, the woodcarvers and the musicians. 

And in Brantingham there is, what a visiting American might say, the darlingest little church. We were denied entry – probably due to that dratted covid – so we sat quietly on a bench by the lych gate and admired the 12th century building. The church sits in a tranquil dale that was settled by the Saxons after the Romans had departed - the latter leaving evidence of their presence in the form of scattered buildings and roads. Sharing our quietude was an elderly couple (in other words much older than us). The husband walked with the aid of a stick but his wife strode around the flagstone path with vigour and an upright bearing. We smiled. They smiled back. We asked them if they were local.

“Yes,” said the wife. “We were married in this church sixty-two years ago. We still live in Little Weighton.” They are older than us. We can only hope we look as healthy and bright as they do, many years from now of course, when we reach that milestone.

Climbing once more up to the top of Great Wold – all of 145 metres high – we found views for twenty miles in every direction. We looked back to the Humber, glistening yellow-grey in the late afternoon sunshine, and eastwards to the bridge. At this distance it looked magnificent, two uprights of shining steel with the black ribbon of road slung below but appearing graceful, arched against a post-industrial backdrop. Turning back to the route northeast and downhill towards South Cave we found, from opposite ends of history, two examples of human ingenuity in the landscape; first the outline of an Iron Age settlement and then the vivid green vines at Little Wold Vineyard planted in 2018. I made a note to myself: come back here in 2026 when the first wines should be released.

An archbishop of York was the principal landowner around here in in the 11th century. He handed ownership on to other clerical worthies and then lay brethren. In the 1750s this small town boasted nine inns, a sign by our path reading rather prosaically this was “an indication of trading importance”. Come on, this is not about the importance of commerce. It’s about local men and women getting hammered on Friday and Saturday nights after a hard week in the fields, busting a gut for His Excellency and the other rich landlord farmers. We were booked in to one of the inns, The Fox and Coney, opened in 1739 and ready to dispense some amber nectar to me, a mere tramper, some two hundred and eighty years later. Long before the village boasted nine inns it had become inhabited because it lay on a Roman road between York and Lincoln and, as the contemporary sign reads, farmers brought their produce to market here. When we climbed again out of the village we found ourselves in typical wolds landscapes for the remainder of the day – gentle hills, dry valley bottoms and woodland – until after twelve miles we came to Market Weighton where we encountered tales of two very differing East Yorkshiremen.

As I have indicated, East Yorkshire folk are quieter than their counterparts in the North and West Ridings. Hereabouts people tend to let their exploits speak for themselves and so it was we learned of William Bradley. This is not a name that is immediately familiar. Born in 1787 in Market Weighton William became Great Britain’s tallest man ever. At his birth William weighed 14 lbs. By the time he was eleven he weighed in at 11 stones. Before his twentieth birthday he stood 7 feet 9 inches tall and weighed 27 stones. He had a prodigious appetite (it was a good thing he worked for a butcher), enormous strength (he broke all the normal hand implements on the farms he worked at), and tremendous strength and stamina. He made a bet that he could fill a farm wagon with manure in less time it would take two men. His fame spread across the county when he carried a massive stone a quarter of a mile through the village streets. It rests to this day opposite the church. He went on to join a group of travelling showmen and became known as The Yorkshire Giant. When the group wasn’t paid William set up on his own and charged a shilling a view. Sadly humans of outsize physical proportions are not destined to live a long life. William’s body succumbed to tuberculosis and the strain of travelling and exhibiting himself. He died aged thirty-three. This freak of nature, like so many hapless individuals throughout history, found the intrusion of fame and conmen would ultimately lead to his early demise. He is buried in the village church, rather than in an exterior tomb, because of the fear of grave robbers making a visit. 

Unlike most of the places through which we travelled Market Weighton became a significant town because of a railway. To be precise, it attracted four railway lines. Situated mid-way between Hull and York the junction became a key rail link for the transport of chemicals, farm products and the chalk from local quarries. The lines and busy station all closed in 1965, due to the devil incarnate, Dr. Richard Beeching. During the ensuing years locals bought cars to get around. Beeching’s Axe of 1963, as his closure programme became known, resulted in congestion on our roads today, leading to an increase of greenhouse gases which contribute to global warming; our age’s biggest problem. I doubt that the prime minister of the day, Harold Macmillan, nor any since, thought of the long term and harmful consequences of closing down a third of the nation’s railway lines. It was madness and altered the way the landscape has been managed.

As with any industry undergoing huge growth and generating large profits railways have always attracted entrepreneurs and colourful characters. I like to think of George Hudson as the Richard Branson of his day. Living a century and half apart Hudson (born in York in 1800) and Branson (born in London in 1950) both saw potential in railways after having made their names and business fortunes in very different commerce. Hudson started his career in linen and drapery. In 1828 he was fortunate to inherit the sum of £30,000 from his great-uncle. He played a central role in linking London and Edinburgh by rail and making his hometown of York a vital rail link. He became involved in merging companies and earned great wealth but his accounting practices were suspect. He bought magnificent local estates in Market Weighton and Londesborough. But he paid dividends to his rail company shareholders out of capital and he sold land he did not properly own. His downfall was predictable. He was prosecuted for fraud after which he fled abroad to escape his creditors.

The last two miles of our walk into Market Weighton was along Hudson’s Way, one of George’s disused railway lines. I thought about how different this landscape must have looked and sounded in his time, when the steam trains could be heard from the next valley, as they belched out smoke and sparks, disturbing the wildlife and frightening the cows. It is certainly quieter now even if pollution from the internal combustion engines plying their way up and down the narrow lanes is killing off the trees, insects and birds.

About the time that Hudson owned the local estate there was born to the vicar in the town a daughter who would make a name for herself. Barbara Foxley grew up at a time when discrimination against women was egregious. Denied a degree at Newnham College at Cambridge University because of her sex she nonetheless gained a certified teaching qualification through Trinity College in Dublin, which was a more enlightened seat of learning. She went on to teach at the University of Manchester and University College, Cardiff. It was at the latter institution she, hardly surprisingly in my view, became an active suffragist. 

Barbara Foxley and her father would have been familiar with the nearby village of Wharram Percy. They probably walked there and found solace and inspiration in the idyllic valley remote from the hurly burly of the town. It is now a lost and deserted medieval village yet in the 13th century it boasted two main streets, two manors, a church dedicated to St. Martin and a mill with a fishpond. The only survivors of this isolated and tranquil settlement are parts of the church and the pond. Whilst we stopped for a rest I reflected on how a once bustling village has now become a place where conservers of history and heritage have taken over and erected ghastly signs and scaffolding leaving an anonymous structure. Undoubtedly disease, poor diet and early death took its toll on the medieval families. This was not confined to Wharram Percy but to all the villages of East Yorkshire. By the 17th century the youngsters of the villages would find opportunities for work, travel and improved health outside this plateau of chalk upland that was becoming poorer as the south became richer.

When learning of the lives and achievements of William Bradley, George Hudson, Barbara Foxley, Philip Larkin and David Hockney I considered once again what part did this landscape play in their lives. It is certainly true that this sparse land failed to keep them within its confines forever. The land between Filey and Hull is less populous today than in much of its history. For the most part it is an elevated landform with steep sides and dry valleys. Unlike The Lake District’s fells where sheep graze above the valley’s crops, the Wolds tops provide huge spaces for wheat and barley and the valleys house the cattle and sheep. The Lakes attract trippers. The Wolds don’t. For centuries rich landlords bought up the land and employed poorly paid farm workers. Inequality abounded amongst folk here. As emancipation took hold amongst the mass of workers, undiscovered human talent left these broad acres and found life opportunities much easier to develop in cities to the south and west. Today a few landowners control vast acreages and require little labour. So more people have left.

At the end of the trek lies Filey. This town is the essence of the East Riding. It is a fitting finale to the entire wolds landscape. It nestles quietly and modestly between steep cliffs at each end of a tranquil bay. The many guesthouses and terraced houses are neat and genteel. There is none of the glitz of Scarborough, no noise of appalling funfairs as on the Bridlington promenade; this is a place where people come to walk, think and quietly count their blessings in life. (Sadly many come with their dogs. These would be much better left in a pound at the gates of the town so I could be spared both the exasperated cries of owners entreating me to help search for their pooches and little green bags of shit hanging from the hedges.)

I shall return to the Wolds. My lasting impression from our walk through their delights will be one of space, quietness and tranquillity. There are more churches and galleries featuring local artists to explore. A heritage is there to be discovered and treasured. A corner of England that is overlooked by staycationers and foreigners provides a looking glass into a past feudal agricultural culture. Not much is happening on the surface of the landscape but within it lie many treasures of history and memories of unique lives. 

Nidd

Dead Man's Hill from Rain Stang

If the day comes when I wish to commit murder – unlikely but you never know what lies ahead if Trump is re-elected - I have chosen the place where the body will be buried; Rain Stang. This bleak hill tops out at 1486 feet, five miles east from the source of the River Nidd in North Yorkshire. This is wild country, little known and almost inaccessible. The Stang glares northwards to Dead Man’s Hill and Little Whernside. Standing on the summits of these dreary hills I once looked across to the eastern flank of Great Whernside where the Nidd springs from underground. I wrote, in a chapter on Alkelda, that Little Whernside is covered in bogs and marshes and is tiresome to walk.

I was not the first person to contemplate murder in these parts. Another who actually did the foul deed, (in my case I hope I am being hypothetical), was an innkeeper named Maggie Thompson who was suspected, in 1728 along with her son, of murdering three pedlars on the track I had been recently walking. Their corpses were found buried in this very ground. (Now I have held a long affinity with pedlars as, at the age of eight, I played the part of a pedlar in my first stage role. My only words were: “I’m Luke Betterworth. I’m a pedlar, sir”, after I had been discovered sleeping in a cupboard.)

Where Maggie hid her victims is that same Dead Man’s Hill.  Harry Speight, in his book on Nidderdale published in 1906, confirms that the accursed hill 

received its present appellation from the horrible circumstance of three human (headless) bodies having been discovered here in 1728 buried in the peat. They were supposed to be the remains of three Scotch pedlars, who, after disposing of their goods, came to a foul end while traversing the lonely road out of Nidderdale into Coverdale. Yet some say they were murdered at one of the lonely farms in the dale, and that their heads were severed from the bodies to prevent identification.

Though the circumstances of the murder are but a lingering tradition in the dale, the fact that the findings of the murdered men ‘without their heads’ is duly recorded in the old township books of Middlesmoor, under date May 30th 1728. The following are the hitherto unprinted particulars:

May 30th, 1728. Three murder’d Bodies were found burrd. on Lodge Edge without heads.

Expenses at the time to the Coroner     £0.  13s.   4d.                                                For sending the warrants into Coverdale     £0.    0s.   8d.                                                For carrying the Biers                £0.    0s.   6d.                                              To Sexton for making the graves     £0.    1s.   6d.                                                To Antho. Hanley for conveying the murder’d bodies away when found £0.    1s.   0d.

When the crime was committed was never discovered, nor were the perpetrators ever found.

Middlesmoor is the highest village in the Yorkshire Dales. On my latest visit I went in to the church of St. Chad and it’s churchyard in which the “murder’d bodies” may well lie. The building is perched majestically on a steep hill looking over Upper Nidderdale. The remoteness and tranquility of this place enriches me on every visit but in this time of pandemic, lock-in and lack of foreign travel, it is the best I can get and I gulp it down like a drug. Alkelda may well have visited here too. So may have young Richard Plantagenet, as Middleham lies only nine miles to the northeast. The Archbishop of York consecrated a chapel in Middlesmoor in 1484 when Richard was king. Like remote corners of the North York Moors, the villagers near the Nidd were mostly Roman Catholic. An early seventeenth century Anglican cleric moaned that in his services he preached “sometimes to two persones, sometimes to three or fower...” He should be so lucky! Hereabouts in Lower Wharfedale today there are villages that don’t even open their church on some Sundays.

Two hundred years before Alkelda was in this area Anglo Saxons established a religious building in Middlesmoor. A cross from that time resides at the rear of the current church. It was in contemplation of these early inhabitants that I stepped out of the church, up the hill – passing one of my favourite upland pubs called The Crown Hotel - where the landlord is so grumpy he has a sign on the door that reads ‘Miserabilly’s Grotto’ - past the closely set stone-built cottages, through a couple of ginnels and then I had a surprise. Two large developments of stone clad apartment blocks were being constructed. In the mid-1800s around 130 people lived in the village. This shrank to 40 within the last ten years. So why are more houses being built? I was to discover the answer when I descended to the banks of the Nidd.

But first I climbed up Moor Lane, through wind and rain and into the cloud, towards the appropriately named Rain Stang. Great Whernside lay ominously dark and foreboding to the west. Dead Man’s Hill stared from across the valley at me through a swirling curtain of mist. Both summits were invisible through the cloud. There are no trees up here, just grouse butts, heather and marram grass. I heard the occasional red grouse with its ‘go-back, back, back’ call but no other birds, I wondered why. I tramped on down towards Scar Cross Reservoir.

It was at this point that it dawned on me why Nidderdale is not my favourite Yorkshire Dale. I think this partly because of the urbanisation of the lower dale. However, if an example is required of where man has taken a landscape and manipulated it to satisfy his needs then this is it. Scar Cross is the second in a chain of manmade lakes that lie in the natural path of the River Nidd. In 1921 the Lord Mayor of Bradford, (an industrial city to which I referred in my chapter on Kettlewell which is a mere seven miles away but seeming in another world), was impressively named Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Gadie, T.D., J.P. He was also chairman of the city council’s water committee which long held a strategic plan to build a reservoir up here in Upper Nidderdale. They knew then, what I know now, that it rains a lot here and Gadie and his men  - I can vouchsafe there were no women councillors on the Bradford City Council at that time – intended to get their baths filled with it.

'Gadie's Folly'

It must be said that the construction of ‘Gadie’s Folly’, as the scheme’s detractors knew it, was not only a hazardous and bold plan but also it turned out to be a triumphant success. It was achieved at the cost of £2 million. A temporary settlement, Scar Village, built during the 1920s housed over a thousand people – engineers, builders, stonemasons, tunnelers as well as their wives and children whose schoolteachers also lived there. And where you find men engaged in hard physical labour, in a remote location far away from the urban drinking dens and fleshpots, you will also find a few women eager to relieve the men of their hard earned pay through pleasures of the flesh. One such woman was Girtie who came, many years later, into the caring hands of my wife who tended her through her dying days in a nursing home. Girtie recounted colourful tales of life in Scar House. She liked to boast that “the young ‘uns today think they invented sex but I can tell you, we…..”

Fifteen years after Gadie cut the first sod at Scar House he laid the last stone on the upper wall of the dam on 7th September 1936. By now knighted for his metropolitan achievements, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Anthony Gadie proudly brought some good citizens of Bradford – attired in woollen suits, the women wearing their best hats, the men all under trilbies or bowlers – and they partied to celebrate a momentous occasion. Today this reservoir supplies Bradford with 100 million of litres a day. Even before it was finished it prevented water rationing during the droughts of 1933 and 1934 as it did again in the droughts of the 1990s.

On my latest visit I crossed the dam wall in pouring rain, yet stopped to read the words on the plaque mounted on Gadie’s final stone and peer over the edge at the seventy-foot drop to watch the Nidd reappear rather meekly and pathetically below. As I started off down the dale I felt sorry for this river, because all its gathering power and width three miles upstream had been taken from it. It is now just a trickle again, and remains so until it collects the run off from the moors to east and west. There was still no tuneful birdsong. Then I entered the fields at the top of the dale, home to Swaledale flocks, a few cattle and hundreds of pheasants. Now I had birdsong but only the monotonous crowing and clucking of this dim-witted game bird, a victim of some of mankind’s playtime. Before the river turns southwards at Bracken Ridge I walked past another, twenty first century symbol of man’s imprimatur on rural landscape. At New Houses, now renamed Home Farm, there have been built enormous ‘cow ‘usses’ (in Yorkshire speak), or cow sheds, with slatted wooden walls to allow air in and the smell out. The modern trend to maintain herds inside is a worrying thought when I like to believe my milk, cream and yoghurt comes from cows grazing green pastures for three quarters of the year. Another feature of this landscape is the redundant outlying barns that have been converted into dwellings with neat new window frames in Farrow and Ball shades of green and set in neatly tended lawns. But, they are empty of people. I was soon to find out why.

21st century cow 'uss

My curiosity about this managed and changing landscape drove me, at Limley Farm, to stop and talk to the shepherd James, who, with his dog was bringing a flock of sheep off the moorside into some pens in the yard. I stopped to admire his work and ask him about the new cow ‘usses up river. Happy to stop for a chat he explained that they and the land up above us belonged to a 1,500 hundred acres estate bought four years ago by a businessman from South Yorkshire. This man and his wife have set about restoring the land to the condition it was in many years ago. It is said that overgrazing by large flocks of sheep had caused the wildlife to diminish and the woods to die. This couple have renovated the outlying barns and converted some into luxurious accommodation for visiting ‘guns’ from the south. Only occupied for a few weeks of the year they provide income for an estate that will not survive from just the husbandry of sheep and cattle. The needs of the shooting business probably explain those new apartments in Middlesmoor. They’ll certainly not house local workers.

From a distance the moors up here give the appearance of being natural but they are anything but. They are carefully managed. In area such as these in upland Britain one of the ways by which landowners can draw income is to establish or maintain game shooting of grouse over the moors with pheasant and partridge shooting in lower areas. Hides for the guns are built of stone and project starkly above the treeless moors. Heather can be renewed with controlled burning as red grouse will thrive if the heather on which it feeds produces young shoots as well as flowers and seeds. Yet there are some in government who want to stop heather burning as they believe it destroys other wildlife and pollutes the air. Estates that house regular shoots attract customers from all over Europe but especially the Home Counties around London. Shepherd James and Limley’s farmer both complained of the “noisy, disrespectful visitors who are ignorant of the country way of life”.

I was reminded of the scrap metal dealer who bought the Kelling estate. Without his new money the farming heritage and timeless landscape of north Norfolk would have been left to decay. As with Kelling now with the upper reaches of the Nidd – as well as many other ancient landscapes of Yorkshires dales and moors. Traditional farming that enriched cities like Bradford and Leeds no longer pays. Farmers who made a good living in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries have dwindled. James is a comparative rarity in that he was born near Middlesmoor and has spent his whole life farming within a stone’s throw of his birthplace.

Whilst I may be uneasy about cattle being confined inside sheds throughout the year I feel thankful that a scrap metal dealer in Norfolk, an electrical contractor in Nidderdale – as well as an internet pioneer in the North York Moors and other entrepreneurs -  are not only working the landscapes (that have been worked for two thousand years) but are assisting the return of vanished species of wildlife. They provide employment for local people who have families and who send their children to local schools, all of which sustains a local economy. This economy would die - with the consequential loss of communities as well as solid English values and heritage - without their financial investment in a rural way of life. 

I have written about landscapes around the world that have faced the terrible impact of nature be it fire, flood or humankind’s warfare. So in a fashion, is this pastoral idyll in North Yorkshire under attack? In November 2009 overflowing rivers caused unimaginable damage to farming communities in Yorkshire and the Lake District. In 2018 the ‘Beast from the East’ brought a revival for Lochmaea suturalis, more prosaically called a Heather beetle. This little grub feeds on heather and its numbers were boosted by the cold weather. These pesky creatures are eating their way across the heather moorland turning it from its distinctive purple to a bronze colour and leaving little nourishment for the grouse. A consequence is the number of grouse is falling, reducing the appeal of Yorkshire’s moors for shooting game. In August 2019 came unexpected floods in Swaledale resulting in sheep and cattle being swept down the dale. Cottagers and small business folk in Reeth would have thought they lived high enough above the river to escape flooding. They were wrong. I have no doubt that flood and beetle are bad for business.

Before I left the Nidd I took one last glance back up the dale and then the sun came out. The golds, reds, yellows and greens of autumn hung on the trees with a backcloth of deep blue sky streaked with white and black clouds. Across the canvas of colours tracked the grey tarmac road and as I looked I spotted a convoy of black Range Rovers driving slowly up the dale. It seemed to me they were like a funeral cortege only this was before the slaughter of hundreds of pheasants and partridges. Yes, mankind certainly knows how to mould the landscape to his will.

For years the upper reaches of the Nidd have withstood the encroachment of builders of reservoirs, cow ‘usses, apartments as well as shooting parties. On the moor tops there is still a remote wilderness that collects our water and sends it rushing down to the river. In Lofhouse village the thankful inhabitants who survived the First World War and Spanish flu remodelled their ancient water drinking fountain as a war memorial in 1920. Its inscription contains worthy Edwardian good sense. One hundred years later the simple homily can equally be attributed to the warding off of another pandemic:

If you want to be healthy, wealthy and stout                                                                                                        use plenty of cold water inside and out                                                                                                            let animal and man drink freely.                                                                                                                    a pint of cold water three times a day                                                                                                               is the surest way to keep doctor away.                                                                                                                Whoso thirsteth let him come hither and drink.

Alkelda

One autumn day, as a thin youth of 19, Richard Plantagenet strode up the steep hill to his new home, a forbidding looking castle. Five hundred and fifty eight years later my historian son and I trod the same track, imagining Richard’s arrival. Richard was making his way to Middleham Castle in Wensleydale, where he would spend the next three years learning the arts of knightly conduct. He would live in the bosom of one of the greatest families of England. Middleham was the northern base of his future father-in-law, Richard Neville, the 16th Earl of Warwick, one of the most powerful and wealthiest men in England.

A year on from my earlier visit I was back in Middleham. With my wife we were ending our four-day pilgrimage walk from the church of St.Alkelda in Gigglesick to that same patron’s church in Middleham where, it is believed, the saint is buried. I hoped to discover more about people from the past and how they survived in this rugged landscape. We found evidence along the forty-mile way of Brigantes, Angles and Romans. We saw evidence too of twenty-first century man and his dog, leaving plastic bottles, sweet wrappers and canine poo on the path and amongst the ancient ruins. Above all, we came to find out how a little known saint left her mark on this place and enjoy the walk that bears her name.

Little is known about Alkelda. Some historians even doubt she existed; others believe she was from Iceland, with the name of Olkelda, and that the Vikings brought her story to Yorkshire when they raided the Yorkshire Dales. My construct from written records is that she was a beautiful Anglo-Saxon princess, (I was ever the romantic), brought up in Northumbria. Later in life she turned to the church and became a nun. She then travelled extensively across the vast expanse of upland England, using the many holy wells to baptise local children and bring the Christian faith to the outlying settlements. Some time in 867AD she was in Coverdale and had stopped off at a pub for refreshment, the way you do. There are excellent pubs today. There she was set upon by a crazy, probably drunken, Viking woman, still heady with rage after rampaging through York. The Viking throttled Alkelda with a scarf. She is buried in the church in Middleham.

Why Gigglewick church is remembered in Alkelda’s name is a mystery, other than she would have reached Ribblesdale on her lengthy expeditions. Today it is a tranquil village, happily avoiding the noise and bustle of nearby Settle where the tourists alight from the Leeds to Carlisle trains. Our pilgrimage walk took us from the church, over the Ribble, through Settle and a steep climb up Albert Hill. One moment we had been amongst stone built cottages beside cobbled lanes, the next we were out in an immense and high landscape with limestone peaks and crags set around millstone fells. At the base of Warrendale Knotts we came across signs of Roman occupation, there being the remains of a temporary camp. The way follows eastwards along Stockdale Lane for four miles to Malham. We stopped to look down on Stockdale Farm, now a collection of huge ugly cattle sheds and yards beside an old farmhouse. Just a Mr Cowperthwaite, his wife and one son look after hundreds of beef cattle and a flock of sheep. The fields in the valley appear startlingly green below the brown marram grass on the fell tops. This is part of Yorkshire than in decades past would have been under deep lying snow for weeks on end during long harsh winters. Now, the 4-mile winding single-track road from Settle is rarely impassable. The farmer can be confident of wholesome pastures for his herd until November having taken at least one good silage crop, sufficient to feed his herd through the, nowadays, shorter winter months. In the corner of a field lies a wreck of a tractor.

Romans camped here

In Alkelda’s day she would have walked this track amongst thin stands of birch and ash trees growing weakly in pockets on the land. The trees are all gone now. At the watershed of the Pennines we looked west to the River Ribble, south to Pendle hill and east to Malham Tarn. Here the land is only good for grazing sheep. Flocks of the handsome, black-faced Swaledale sheep greeted us at the base of Kirkby Fell. 

Like Alkelda, we chose Malham for an overnight stay. She would have regarded the limestone cove with awe and seen the River Aire tumbling over the crag. We had to elbow our way into the village amongst the urban day-trippers ambling up for a view of the cove under which the river now trickles. We strode down the hill tut-tutting at the urbanites on the wrong side of the narrow road. Why don’t the younger generations know that you walk against the traffic where there is no footpath? (These are the same types that walk on roads at night clad from head to toe in dark clothing and wonder why some are knocked down by cars and bikes.)

We were greeted at our farmhouse stay by the owners – Peter Sharp, aged 87, his wife Vera aged 83 and young son, Chris, 60. Afternoon tea was provided which included a large slice of Yorkshire Parkin. These are strong and redoubtable Yorkshire country folk who remember the old ways of farming and a village before the mass of Leeds and Bradford motorists clogged the narrow streets. Farms were small but made enough money for a family and its hired hands to live. Much to our concern Peter climbed precariously onto a wobbly chair to close the high window in our room.

“It’s a’right”, he said. “I went into hospital last week to have a stent put in. I came out with six.” I noticed he descended the stairs backwards. Peter also remembers the tractor at Stockdale Farm. “I remember old Cowperthwaite’s tractor. It were useless. It would never start!” Clearly one day it never did and finally the farmer left it in frustration to rust in his field.

Our way from Malham took us past Janet’s Foss. Foss is a Nordic word for waterfall and this twenty-foot drop of water into a clear pond below hides a cave where Janet, a fairy queen, lived. People who think I believe in fairies are dead right. Near Janet’s Foss is another massive pair of limestone cliffs making Gordale Scar. The way ascends the steep western cliff before climbing up to another long and straight lane similar to Stockdale. This is peregrine falcon country but alas, we saw none, but we stopped for sustenance and watched a herd of Belted Galloway cattle with half a dozen frisky calves playing in the grass. We picked up the start of Mastiles Lane, still metalled in parts from nearly two thousand years of intermittent maintenance, and were soon within the area of a Roman Camp. 

Alkelda's Way

Some eight hundred years before Alkelda trod this route the Romans were here, fighting off the pesky Brigantes. These were a Celtic people who occupied what is now Yorkshire before Julius Caesar ever set foot at Dover. I looked out across this high, flat landscape that in winter was inhospitable, devoid of much shelter but it was home to wild boar. I imagined what the good lads from Emilia-Romagna and Umbria thought when commanded to dig a marching camp at the end of a hard day slogging up hill from Kettlewell or Settle. For this is what they did; at the end of their day’s march young Marcus, Vitalius and their mates would take their trenching tools off their packs and dig a rectangular ditch, put up a bank inside, then drive wooden stakes into the ground to form a palisade. I can only imagine the muttered insults they threw at their leader, Quintus Petillius Cerialis Caesius Rufus, whose command it was to drive away the local inhabitants from their land. I was standing, not for the first time in my life, where violent death was perpetrated on locals who were driven from their livelihoods in the name of empire building. Marcus and Vitalius must have cursed this savage landscape and longed for the comforts provided by Helena and Livia back home in the warm Italian countryside. I tend to cut Petillius Cerialis some slack. He was governor of Britain in 72AD, a tough gig, and also the son-in-law of my favourite Roman Emperor, Vespasian.

Our pilgrimage continued westwards to Kilnsey, Conistone and Wassa Hill before striking north to Kettlewell. I have written before about Kettlewell, and the Bradford benefactor Graham Watson, as to me, it is the quintessential northern Yorkshire village that is successfully holding back the most harmful effects of globalisation and modern farming methods. My last visit had been in winter, before the pandemic, when I chatted with the locals at their weekly coffee morning in the youth hostel. Now, as we approached the village past Scargill House, the traffic was heavier, the three pubs were full of visitors and the streets were rammed with gargantuan BMWs, Audis and Volvos.

Kettlewell in Wharfedale

Despite a comfortable night in a village bed and breakfast I was keen to leave the next morning and arrive once again in the high country. As we climbed the steep Top Mere Road out of Wharfedale, wife was already living up to her nickname of ‘Moaning Minnie’. At this point it is timely to address the fact that there are two types of people in the world; those who enjoy walking for pleasure amongst hills, crags and wide-open skies and those who don’t. Minnie is in the latter category. However, we arrived at the summit of the track curling north around Diamond Hill and she was in good fettle. The sun was shining and we were looking forward to reaching Coverdale, the smallest and quietest of all the Yorkshire dales, treading new ground for us. 

Carlton in Coverdale, our objective and next night’s halt, lies at the eastern end of the dale. To reach it there are alternative routes; straight down the tarmac road or a climb across the northern flank of Great Whernside to Long Hill Sike Head and then on to the summit of Little Whernside (before dropping off sharply to the River Cover) from where I expected the views southeast to Scar House reservoir and northeast to the Yorkshire Moors would be spectacular. Little Whernside is not a friendly fell to climb. Its summit is barren. Being in the shadow of the Pennines it blows a lot around here. The spongy peat track threads its way tediously around bogs and marshes. It is tiresome. But Minnie had the sight of many horses to anticipate.

After the stark landscape we had been through there is an attractive softness about the mellow green fields and pastures in western Coverdale. The entire dale, and Middleham in particular, is an equine heaven. (Near Middleham castle is a storyboard about the village with a footnote that reads: “850 inhabitants, 500 horses”.) At Arkleside – surely named before the births of both the Irish thoroughbred and three-time Cheltenham Gold Cup winner called Arkle, and the incomparable Nottinghamshire cricketer and Aussie-baiter, Derek Randall, nicknamed Arkle for his speed in the field – we met a woman with sixty miniature Shetland ponies, some for sale. We could have bought one. 

The first hamlet of size in the western dale is Horsehouse, so called because this is where packhorses on the old drove road over to Kettlewell were fed and watered before their long climb out of the dale onto the moor. Locals would have to have given way to both the Romans marching in search of Brigantes and the merchants driving pack horse trains. In medieval times this was a leading monastic route. The monks of Fountains Abbey owned the flock of sheep that grazed these parts. By the eighteenth century this track saw cattle being driven down from Scotland through Coverdale. Now, or course, all that busy commerce and traffic has gone.

Coverdale

As we walked towards Carlton we saw that a good number of the old barns and farmers’ cottages have been converted into modernised holiday accommodation for town dwellers. It is good that the old built environment is still part of this ancient landscape but sad, yet inevitable, that there are fewer people living here than fifty years ago. One third of the Carlton houses are holiday cottages. The population is one third of that in 1841. Only one pub out of three survives, and that as a community cooperative. In this short dale village stores, post offices and pubs have closed through lack of regular trade. The pastures stretching back from the Cover still provide good grazing. We stopped in the late afternoon sunshine and lay down in a pasture to listen to the lazy late summer sounds  - the occasional sheep’s bleat; the snorts and blowing of the cattle; and the tinkle of the shallow river over rocks and fallen tree branches.

The one Carlton pub lies exposed on the edge of the village and was our refuge for the night. It must be gloomy here in winter. Like many incomers the tenant and his wife are ‘refugees’ from the North East. They need to provide an enveloping hospitality, just as the first licensee, Edward Wright, did in 1775, for travellers from the west like us arrive weary after a long day’s expedition over difficult terrain. There were few locals in that night. We dined next to eight young golfers from Catterick and two couples from ‘the city’. 

The last leg of the pilgrimage took us out of Carlton up onto Middleham Low Moor where ‘the Gallops’ provide over a mile-long exercise ground for the racing stables in the village. It being a Sunday, with low cloud draped over the moor, we considered it would be a day off for the hard worked lads and lasses from the yards. Yet a few were out, riding their mounts along the white rails and over the manicured turf on the moor. Whilst my wife’s keen eyes were taking in the magnificent horseflesh on show, my mind was turning to thoughts of King Richard the Third. I conjured up a vision of November 1462 when Richard first came to the castle to learn his military skills. He too would have ridden across this moor in the autumn fogs that blanket this high village. On special days he, the Countess of Warwick and members of this august household would ride to York.

Middleham Castle was, at this time, a grand home where the Nevilles entertained in opulent style. Distinguished guests from the in-crowd of the era would often be there when state business would be discussed. Royal banquets were regularly held when the young Richard would begin to participate in the political struggle between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians.

Half a mile north from the castle is the church dedicated to St. Mary and St. Alkelda, the end of our pilgrimage walk. Alkelda is buried here. It is believed that her bones were discovered when the church was restored in 1878. A commemorative sign marks the location. Due to the pandemic the church was locked and we could not gain permission to enter. This was a small anti-climax to our expedition, which overall had been uplifting. For we had escaped from the ‘virus on the landscape’ that engulfed our lives back home. We were able to observe how Alkelda and Petillius Cerialis, then later Graham Watson, the Sharps and the Cowperthwaites have created and nurtured a heritage that repulses the worst effects of modernisation. In spending four days in this special high country of Yorkshire we could forget the restrictions governing everyday life. I had a taste of what Richard Plantagenet and his young friends must have experienced back in 1462 when they too escaped northwards. They swapped the politics of intrigue and treachery of London for an outdoor life amongst the moors and dales of Wensleydale. We had left behind Brexit, life in a pandemic, Trump, Novichok and Belarussian bellicosity, which were all addling my brain. 

***

There is a bleak beauty to these northern hills. I have long liked to lose myself in them. As we walked the forty miles from west to east I rediscovered a real sense we were on the roof of England. I don’t get that feeling when climbing the Lake District fells because from many I can see Scotland and gain a sense of the whole kingdom of Great Britain. In the northern Yorkshire fells there is no long view north. This leads to a sense that this landscape is a place apart, independent of the rest of Britain. And that is how many Yorkshire folk have always seen themselves; different from the rest and proud to be so. I identify with these people. Yes, there is a remoteness amongst the fells, yet descend to the dales and a mystical feeling comes over me. Down in the dales emerald green pastures - chemically enhanced no doubt – lie between rough stone walls that crisscross the dale. The dale is the counterpoint to the fell.

This forty-mile stretch has seen no significant military battles, no major calamity no pestilence or flood. It is true that in 1070 King William 1 did commit atrocities on the local inhabitants as he searched for rebellious Anglo-Danish renegades but this was minor compared to what took place in other parts of England and France. It is rather a case that people’s lives have been shaped by the landscape more than most other parts of England where humans have shaped the landscape to their will. Low-tech farming and raising horses have been the principle activities for over a thousand years. Alkelda would not feel out of place if her reincarnation walked this way today. In her wake, over nearly twelve hundred years, pilgrims have made their way over fell and down dale, discovering for themselves this land of wild tranquillity. Globalisation is kept at bay and this landscape is to be cherished for that reason.

***

Books

Over fifty years I have collected a disparate collection of titles on North Yorkshire, some acquired before I came to live in the county. All have served to inspire me in this inimitable place. Some have remained untouched for several decades; it is time I re-read those.

The following is a short and not exhaustive reading list on the Yorkshire Dales and some will be out of print, but a second-hand copy of every book can be tracked down these days. 

S. Baring-Gould     Yorkshire Oddities. 1874. Re-print by Smith Settle. 1987

John Hadfield (ed.)     The Shell Guide to England. Michael Joseph. 1970

James Herriot.             James Herriot’s Yorkshire. Michael Joseph. 1979

Paul Murray Kendall.     Richard the Third. Allen & Unwin. 1955

John R. Kenyon     Middleham Castle. English Heritage. 2015

Kathleen Kinder     St. Alkelda’s Way. The Alkelda Press. 2019

A. Wainwright      Wainwright in the Limestone Dales. Michael Joseph. 1991

Zululand

The Battle of Isandhlwana by Charles Edwin Fripp

On the afternoon of 22^ndJanuary 1879 the might of the Zulu nation wiped out a British army column. Later that night further action took place with more bloodshed. In the evening, conditions in one field hospital were appalling. There was one toilet and one cooking stove. There was a single surgeon to care for twenty-nine soldiers recovering from combat injuries or illness. There were limited medicines. Then the hospital was attacked and the thatch roof caught fire. Temperatures inside reached 48 degrees. This was the next Zulu assault, now at Rorke’s Drift in Natal, South Africa.

Within a week news had spread of the earlier crushing and embarrassing defeat of the British army at Isandhlwana. This was quickly pushed aside by stories of the later courageous rebuff. Then came the books, and then came the films. After those came the construction of myths.

Who were these magnificent warriors? They were amongst the most strongly built inhabitants of Africa. “Their system was based upon an effective combination of universal military service and obligatory blood-lust. No Zulu was considered to be a man until he had ‘washed his spear in blood’.“ They measured their wealth in heads of cattle. Their kings were pugnacious both politically and culturally. To this day they are a successful tribe, described by my Africa born niece as loud, adorable and arrogant.

I am of the generation of English brought up in the 1950s on war films that depict British bravery and pluck. Most were filmed in monochrome and starred John Mills, Harry Andrews or Alec Guinness. They were gritty, dour portrayals of famous battles when the Allies won, often against superior troops. At the age of fourteen I went to see a different film, Zulu. It is dramatic and hardboiled. It’s difference being it was filmed in colour. What stood out was the red coats of the British soldiers, their starkly white pith helmets, the magnificent brown torsos of the Zulus and the glistening blood. It is gory, cruel and unrealistically romantic. The distinctive musical soundtrack is by John Barry. This film made a big impression on me. I promised myself that one day I would visit the site of this battle.

In December 1982 I made my first visit to South Africa. Despite making attempts to travel north from Durban to Rorke’s Drift I failed to make the trip. One day I shall, I thought, one day. That day came in November 2019, a day when the thermometer didn’t reach double digits and the rain came slashing sideways from the Oskaberg hill. Not until I was embarked on this expedition did I realise the significance of the defence of Rorke’s Drift in 1879. In reality, it had little significance on the passage of events that followed. Yet the outcome of the defence had made an impact back in Britain far greater than the actual subsequent operations in the war in South Africa. Before planning this latest journey I had barely heard of the battle for Isandhlwana (that is, apart from Richard Burton’s rich voiceover in the film). Oh but how that name takes hold of my senses now.

The result of the first action on 22^nd January exposed the arrogance and incompetence that senior British Army officers could demonstrate. There was incompetence in getting basic tactics correct in preparing for a battle that they knew was imminent. Petty rivalry and niggling personal slights played a part. I find all this barely understandable in a military force that had swept aside opposition in other parts of the Empire. A lack of true leadership shown by Lord Chelmsford, when coupled with his lackadaisical communications skills, produced disastrous consequences. With the sheer number of representatives of the Imperial Crown in the Cape, there was plentiful intelligence on the Zulus. Chelmsford, through hubris or lack of nous, chose to think he knew best. He should have known that successive Zulu chiefs from Dingiswayo, then Shaka, Dingane, Mpande and Cetshwayo had brought stealth and passion to unifying the Zulu clans into a potent warrior force. To me, Chelmsford wantonly underestimated the sophistication of the Zulu.

My two days exploration of both battle sites of Isandhlwana and Rorke’s Drift left me with a sense of great tragedy. A legacy of violence hangs over this land a hundred and forty years later. In 1879 service in the British Army in South Africa was not for the faint hearted. It was rough, often hopeless and for far too many, fatal. Officers and men, (there were few notable women in this quest to expand the British Empire), were facing Impis whose lives were based totally on combat. King Shaka ruthlessly forged a single nation of warriors whose manhood could only be proved in washing the spears. There is at least one notable woman in the background; Shaka’s mother Nandi, who in her girlhood was a “wild, strong-willed maiden”, influenced much of Shaka’s youthful development. Zulus grew up in the embrace of a binary culture of farming and warfare. If the redcoats came to steal their land and cows they must be killed. And not just killed; they were eviscerated. This was to let the evil spirits out and cleanse the body.

When the British forces were overrun by the traditional ‘horns of the bull’ formation of Zulus at Isandhlwana the death toll of Europeans was 858 alone. By dusk there were over 3,500 bodies - including Natal Kaffirs and the fallen Zulus - strewn across the land. Blood permeated the earth all the way to Fugitive’s Drift, a crossing over the Buffalo River five miles away. The river formed the border between Natal and Zululand. Fifty-five survivors of the battle attempted to ford the river in the belief they would be safe on the Natal side. Two of the ardent would-be heroes were named Neville Coghill and Teignmouth Melville. Melville had rescued the Queen’s Colour from the battlefield; it brought dishonour to the whole regiment if a Colour was lost. He reached the river with another soldier and attempted to cross with the cumbersome Colour. Midstream they got into difficulty when their horses were disabled. Meanwhile, an injured and incapacitated Coghill, still mounted, had reached the river ahead of Melville and had reached the Natal bank. Seeing that Melville was in trouble Coghill forced his horse back into the river in an attempt to rescue Melville and the Colour. Coghill’s horse was shot and he was thrown into the water. Despite pulling Melville out of the water they were too exhausted and injured to climb far up the bank to safety. They were both hacked to pieces by Zulus who had followed them through the water. The Colour disappeared off downstream but was recovered later.

I found my way to a steep bank overlooking the Drift. There is a cross here overlooking the river that commemorates the two officers. I spent a while surveying the scene of desperation and bloodletting, reflecting on the horrors experienced by men who thought they had survived the main battle. Lt. Coghill and Lt. Melville were the first two recipients of a posthumous Victoria Cross. (A regulation stipulating that the V.C. could only be awarded to living souls changed in 1907.)

The attack on Rorke’s Drift should never have happened. The Zulu chief Cetshwayo had instructed his reserve impis, who had not fought at Isandhlwana, not to pursue the fleeing British and cross the Buffalo into Natal. The leader of the 4,000 reservists was Dabulamanzi kaMpande. Disobeying Cetshwayo his impi wanted to prove themselves in battle and set off towards Rorke’s Drift that they knew to be occupied by the British. When they arrived there, some ten miles from Isandhlwana, they found the small settlement, a Swedish Mission station. (Otto Witt had taken it over when the founder, an Irishman named James Rorke, died in 1875.)

There were three officers at Rorke’s Drift to whom the eventual defeat of the Zulus can be attributed: James Dalton, John Chard and Gonville Bromhead (played by Dennis Folbigge, Stanley Baker and Michael Caine in the 1964 film that was in an inaccurate representation of the actual battle). They were junior, inexperienced and yet highly organised officers doing a job that was largely driven by common sense. In the context of the entire British war with the Zulus they ended up as minor characters. Fortunately, Dalton in particular possessed a type of strategic brain that was missing in those officers in the main army ten miles away earlier in the day of 22^nd January 1879.

The Zulu impi arrived late in the afternoon. By 9:30 the next morning 300 Zulus lay dead, many more were mortally wounded. Just 17 British troops died. There was one man, John Williams, whose behaviour in the defence of the hospital stands out. To me he was a hero. The makeshift field hospital was made up of a number of rooms that were not connected. Once the Zulus had set fire to the thatch roof the only exit from these rooms was onto a veranda; but this was occupied by the rampaging native fighters. 

So Williams took up a pickaxe and forced a hole in the room he was in and dragged through the hole the ill patients to the next room. All the while the temperature was nearing 50 degrees. He proceeded to make two more holes in neighbouring rooms, collecting more patients as he went, before escaping out of a window in the side of the building. As our party made its way around the recreation of the hospital at Rorke’s Drift, I could only wonder in horror of the conditions Williams was working in and admire the guts and bravery of the man. He was one of eleven men awarded the Victoria Cross that night.

For those British serving in South Africa the action at Rorke’s Drift quickly passed into history. The Zulu army, having experienced triumph at Isandhlwana, never recovered from the reverse it suffered later that night. The battles and skirmishes that followed brought more personal stories that cling to this landscape. Into the picture stride two men with the stout British names of Redvers Buller and Chops Mossop.

With a fellow officer, Brigadier General Evelyn Wood, Buller had a plan to take on 1,000 Zulus camped on a plateau at Hlobane. Accounts of the battle describe the valiant attempts by Buller, on horseback, leading his men up steep crags to scale the mountain. First Buller attacked from the east, then from the west. All night his troop fought in an electric storm. Flashes of lightening highlighted Buller’s whereabouts to the impi who quickly moved to cut the soldiers off. Mossop was a trooper mounted on an extraordinary horse called Warrior. Multiple times Mossop and Warrior rode round crags to encounter groups of Zulus. Through a close rapport between rider and horse they escaped each brush with death. Inevitably Mossop and Warrior were wounded by the Zulu assegais and both became exhausted. Warrior’s saddletree was broken and gouged into his withers. Despite the horse’s pain and Mossop’s smashed arm they eventually reached the safety of the nearby camp at Kambula. The next morning Mossop went to examine his poor horse. “He found Warrior lying down and obviously far gone. Chops knelt and took his head in his lap; the horse recognised him, whinnied once and died.”

Through that night Buller had ridden up and down his lines of troops, constantly urging his men on. Frequently they rode in to Zulus who had by now surrounded the British on the plateau. Buller fought, rode, harried and numerous times rescued one of his men from being hacked to pieces. For his work that day and night, Redvers Buller was awarded the V.C.

For fifty-five years since watching that film I had a yearning to know more about the war’s characters. Some of them have now brought this landscape alive for me. Their stories add a sense of romance, pain and irony to the living land, now managed by ancestors of warriors that fought in 1879. In 2019 I met Mphiwa Ntanzi, whose grandfather and great-grandfather both fought for Cetshwayo at Isandhlwana.  Mphiwa conducted our visit to the battle site. He speaks with passion and clarity, using the inimitable clicking consonants, a feature of the Khoisan group of languages. From the back of his throat comes the sound of a spear thrust forward into a British belly and then the flesh sucking at the blade as it is withdrawn. He became excited, transfixed almost, at the telling of the events which he has done so many times. He embodies today a pride in the Zulu impis that inflicted defeat on the power of the British Empire. To my way of thinking it is entirely right that he feels this passion. I rejoice in his people’s hour of glory that was fairly won in battle. At this time in our lives of reassessing the force of imperialist white men powering their way into black lives and their land, the history of the Zulu nation is worthy of a deeper reflection.

Mphiwa - his grandfather fought here

Another contemporary figure in this landscape is Douglas Rattray, a historian at Fugitive’s Drift. His father David established a guest’s lodge at Fugitive’s Drift in 1989. David, Douglas and Mphiwa acquired a shared passion for telling the stories of the men who fought over the Ntanzis’ landscape. They have shared a keenness for the oral tradition of Zulu history. All around we found reminders of the tragedies surrounding the men who died a mile from here on 22^nd January 1879. I found no jingoism within Douglas and Mphiwa. That is one of the beautiful aspects to spending time with them. They helped me understand what Chard, Bromhead and Ntanzi lived through on 22^nd January 1879 and also the part the landscape played and how it presents today a window into the awful events that day.

I found it both exciting and humbling to tread the ground which 140 years ago hosted great drama and feats of almost unbelievable human endeavour. Beneath the field at Isandhlwana lie the bones of men slaughtered in the pursuit of an age-old desire for land. For the British it was also action to gain supremacy over a native (and by implication inferior) race. For the Zulus, they wanted to farm. Yet, maybe for a race whose instinct was to fight, that was not enough. The conclusion of the war was a terrible outcome for the Zulus and South Africa, the legacy of which lasts to this day. I think back to my visits to Soweto and the townships at Cape Flats.

With our sundowners in hand my wife and I looked out from Fugitive’s Drift west to Rorke’s Drift and north to Isandhlwana and contemplated what we felt. Today there is just wilderness. Where the gently undulating terrain in 1879 was carpeted in scrub, today it is covered with stubby trees and bushes. The sphinx’s head of Isandhlwana Mountain still rises up above a landscape now largely devoid of human drama. The rolling hills are peppered with small settlements providing home for descendants of the warriors, perpetuating a vigil over a graveyard of ghosts.

There are many books, (some listed below), films and articles devoted to both the history of the Anglo-Zulu wars and the military men who fought in them. Deliberately I have not recounted the detail of the battles – these books do a comprehensive job of that. Yet what none of them did for me was get under the skin of the people described, nor do they convey the passion and culture of the individuals taking part. (Unlike so many accounts of the Somme battles that portray the human experience of warfare.) Nor do they weld together successfully the lives of exceptional human beings to a distant land and interpret the impact of one on the other. This land reshaped the lives of Cetshwayo, Ntanzi, Coghill, Melville, Dalton, Chard, Bromhead, Buller and Mossop as they became defined through their actions in Zululand. It seems to me that the British action was carried out in the name of hypocrisy. Many of the politicians and top military brass in London cared little for the quest for even more British Empire in remote country north of the Cape. William Gladstone said of South Africa “we have chosen most unwisely…to place ourselves in the strange predicament of the free subjects of a monarchy going to coerce the free subjects of a republic”.

Boers and British imposed a terrible life on native Africans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their imperial ambitions did not start out with a desire to subdue the Zulu, but that ended up being a consequence. The Dutch, British, German and Chinese settlers and conscripts who followed the ‘discovery’ of the Cape, raped the land between the Indian Ocean and the riches of the Transvaal and left it a poorer place. There is no gold here, nor precious stones. Maybe the Zulu nation, founded and built up on the basis of tilling the land and warfare, could not prosper after the arrival of men and women from Europe with a colossus of white civilisation. The Zulus are still largely based in the Natal landscape. They still have a king. Zulu is still the most widely spoken language in southern Africa, their tribe the largest. Zulu society has not changed much since the time of Shaka. Then the chiefs had land and cattle. Now they have land and a fancy car. The lack of both employment (in the modern sense) and a universal wealth from farming is keeping many Zulus oppressed. So they hang on to the past and in the process feel free of development and the threat of change. These proud African people deserve a better life than the one the white men bequeathed.

Bibliography

The Last Zulu King; the life and death of Cetshwayo; C.T. Binns; 1963

The Washing of the Spears: the rise and fall of the Zulu nation; Donald R. Morris; 1965

Heaven’s Command; an Imperial Progress; James Morris; 1973

The Covenant; James A. Michener; 1980

The Curling Letters of the Zulu War; ed. Adrian Greaves & Brian Best; 2001

Zulu Rising; Ian Knight, 2011

Zulu Warriors; the battle for the South African Frontier; John Laband; 2014

With special thanks to Shelley Pomeroy.