Pick a day, any day, and take the east road up to the moor. When you find the old place near the centre of the moor that is familiar yet unknown, put aside any lockdown stories you might have heard about discarded tents, crowded car parks and urban faces hungry for the wild. Take the north track and walk ahead of the lone birch tree that specks the horizon.
Trail your fingers through the bronze grasses, soft and feather-light, which blur the land like your tired eyes might on a different day.
When you cross the threshold, turn your head east and glance at the old wall that glows with moss, think how each stone was placed in pristine order centuries ago but is now a green cushion of delight. You may well shudder as you step into the plantation but put aside your prejudices of regular pine plantations that suck the daylight and diminish to dark recesses. This forest is different, for it is a place that has been left to the edges of nature that needle their way in.
On the cool February day we choose to find this place, we take the easy gravel path built for foresters an age ago and stop to touch the pale grey tips of young spruce trees that line the path. I catch the right moment and see a beam of sunlight illuminate a trio of pine trunks midway into the forest. I marvel at a tree that throbs with moss.
When we reach the old farm buildings, we note that their merry name - Laughter Hole - belies the sense of claustrophobia and abandonment of their location. My brother claims he would like to live here, but we shake our heads in horror. This place would bleed us, we’re certain of it. But, oh, there is something magical about these towering trees that are not just cloaked in moss but have become moss. Clouds of fruticose lichen, the lichen with the beard, fall like water from each seething green trunk. This dark place glows with life.
A movement from the corner of my eye pulls my attention from the flush of moss and over the field that opens out beyond the wall. A roe deer stares at us across the grass but doesn’t flee. Another moves through the field on the other side of the path, the two animals parted by humans walking through their land. Both watch us with interest but no obvious fear. This is a place, then, of moss and deer, but few humans. As they lose interest, they both turn away from us and flash vivid white rumps that beam across the field.
The river is a pleasant diversion, with no sign of the once-disruptive crowds from previous years. We eat egg sandwiches and don raincoats to avoid the splash of rain that moves swiftly from the south. On through the forest, along cleared tracks, we counter the water as it cascades down the road. We all grimace at the old wall with its row of severed beech trees, where only the muscular stumps that threatened the structure remain. Eventually, we leave the forest and squelch through blackened mud across the old hill fort. Nothing remains except a bare swathe of grass, some deep teeth of stone, and a thin wind that needles our faces.
It is a slow climb to the tor.
Slabs of granite look for all the world like they are balanced, but when we peer into the deep slices of rock - one stuffed with old crisp packets and drinks cans - they retreat into darkness. The capacious alleys of dark space lead to a solid immutable core. Of course, the balancing rocks are only a trick of the mind that lends a frisson of fear as we stand below. I imagine the toppling of rock on bone in a slow apocalypse. But today, of course, we are lucky and the centre holds.
I know the tor did not always look like this. To any observer in a living body like mine, its perched rock is always and forever, but I understand how its unique shape is the result of millennia of minute-by-minute erosion. I try to imagine each day that has passed in this place, days where each morning the sun rose, the wind blew and the rock abraded an unimaginable fraction. The days would have looked the same as they do to me, perhaps. A faint glow on the horizon, a swell of light, the distinction of rock against sky, the land braced against the passage of the sun, a spell of darkness. On such a day, the air might have lifted an atom or two from the rock, perhaps.
I touch the granite and, for the barest flash of a moment, I sense it all. The slow disintegration of land, the incessant disassociation of particle from rock, the inevitable disassembly of those who gather. Presence slips into absence. Fullness of heart is lost to the wind. Love passes through in the blink of a geological eye. Everything drifts.
My brother has a nosebleed. The only flecks of colour in this landscape are the bloodied tissue stuffed into his nostril to stem the flow and a pink plastic dog-poo bag that faceless others have tucked beneath a granite slab, to shelter its lumpy contents from the rain, perhaps. The rain is heavy now so we shrug our shoulders into damp hoods, set our faces into the wind, and begin the descent home.
This is beautiful and sad Lynne. The transience of our beautiful world and the transience of us! It has a mythical quality.
I love your use of tense here, and the inclusion of the photos is really sensory. X