Layby in the landscape, buffeted by history
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Version 0 of 1. If there was a league table for roadside laybys, ranked according to the grandeur of the landscape that they overlook, then this one, on the B6282 two miles east of Middleton-in-Teesdale, would be a strong contender. It’s perched on the edge of a steep escarpment, high above the river Tees. With the valleyblanketed in snow, the bare branches of birch, alder and ash below stood out in minute detail, as if drawn on a blank canvas. I could hear the mewing of a buzzard, circling above the road, searching for rising thermals to carry it aloft. The bleating of sheep rose from fields below, where a lone walker and his dog followed the Teesdale Way footpath beside the river; Bruegel’s painting The Hunters in the Snow came to mind. Snow has a magical effect here on days like this, when the shallow angle of the sun’s rays and the shadows they cast emphasise subtler features of this post-glacial landscape. Across the valley to the south, where the land rises towards Harter Fell, some fields are dome-shaped, in stark contrast to the steep broken rock of the fell edges and the flat, rectangular enclosures of the cultivated valley floor. They are drumlins, mounds of boulder clay, smoothed by ice from a melting glacier that slithered over them 11,000 years ago. Their gentle contours are traced by undulating boundaries formed by dry stone walls. Just above them stands Kirkcarrion, a burial mound marked by a copse of pines bounded by a circular wall. There, in 1804, a funerary urn containing charred bones, perhaps 4,000 years old, was unearthed. The popular consensus is that it is the burial site of a bronze age chieftain. It is easy to imagine why that location, at the gateway to Upper Teesdale and its summits, might have been chosen for the funeral pyre of a revered leader. Even now, as I stood buffeted by the noise and slipstream of traffic heading up the dale, this seemed a mystical place, with the distant Pennine fells drifting in and out of view as snow showers crossed the horizon, where land and sky become one on days like this. |