A visit to see my grandad in the craggy wilderness of Derbyshire
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Version 0 of 1. People find it very hard to agree on the exact point where the north of England begins. This is one of the north’s defining characteristics: it doesn’t matter which part you come from, there’s always someone more northern to tell you what a soft southern moron you are. In my mind, the north starts at the village of Crich, in Derbyshire. It might seem a slightly arbitrary threshold, and it’s one chosen largely for personal reasons, but Crich feels like the beginning of something. In the excellent film Sightseers, Crich marks the start of the homicidal journey its two central characters take to the top of the country. Getting a first haunting view of Crich’s Memorial Tower, scowling on Crich Hill, from the westbound lane of the A610 feels like passing through a curtain in the landscape: one of those powerful unofficial changes in terrain, like the one in Lincolnshire where fen abruptly becomes wold or the one travelling south west into Devon where the hills become vast green walls, that are more visibly defined than any recognised borders. Four weeks ago, I drove past Crich Tower, in remorseless rain, with my parents, and immediately felt overcome. We were on the way to the hillside where my grandad’s ashes are scattered, but that’s not why I felt overcome. I hadn’t realised it, but the same view had been popping up in my dreams for months. When you first see that view, it means that the bleak, in-between landscape of Codnor, Langley Mill and Eastwood is firmly behind you. What’s ahead is more craggy and wild and vertiginous: more westerly and northern, in all the best ways. I lived in that in-between area for most of my childhood: a landscape of spoilheaps, disused collieries and surplus chip shops. Here, people greeted one another as “duck” or “sery”: a word now so obscure, none of the three people to mention it online can agree how to spell it. Perhaps nobody ever did spell it? “Going up pit road, sery?” my friends and I would ask each other. The answer was normally “yes”, as there wasn’t much else to do. The pit road was OK, as pit roads went, and I made some good dens on the spoilheap beside it. But Derbyshire – the real Derbyshire, which began around Crich – was special. Derbyshire had caves and the Heights of Abraham and the Matlock Raft Race and campsites and the children’s section of Scarthin Books in Cromford. The difference between the two sides of the curtain were unintentionally summarised by my dad on our journey. “THIS IS WHERE YOU GOT FOOD POISIONING OFF A HAM SANDWICH AT A TRANSPORT CAFE IN 1987,” he recalled, as we drove through Ripley. “WHEN YOU WERE FOUR, YOU WENT OVER AND NICKED ANOTHER FAMILY’S BISCUITS THERE BECAUSE THEY WERE NICER THAN OURS,” he said, later, pointing up towards Crich. I’d been thinking about Derbyshire a lot recently, and yearned to revisit it. The eternal resting place of my grandad, Wolfscote Dale, seemed a good place to start. My grandparents were part of the generation of walkers who came to Derbyshire in the 50s and 60s as an escape from their factory jobs, freed by the greater access to the countryside paved by the Kinder Scout trespass in 1932. They walked a lot, through numerous types of rain, and Wolfscote Dale was one of their favourite places. As my parents and I began our walk, in Alstonefield, it was very rainy and very windy. I realised it was windy because, when I stopped for a wee near a dry-stone wall, the wind blew my wee over the wall and in to the adjacent field. I don’t know where my wee ended up. In fact, it’s quite possible that my wee is still airborne now, more than three weeks later, making its way steadily towards Glossop. We began to descend the ravine towards the Dove and my dad and I admired a herd of Belted Galloway cattle through the soupy downpour. “THEY WERE MY FAVOURITE AS A KID,” he remarked. “THEY’RE HALF PANDA, HALF COW. I WANT TO PAINT THEM!” His mood became more sober as we reached the hillside where Ted’s ashes were scattered. “FOOKIN’ HELL,” he said. “IT’S GOT STEEPER SINCE 2002. I’M GOING TO SLIDE DOWN ON MY SIDE.” As I helped my mum down the slope, and my dad slid behind us, two professional-looking hikers coming from the opposite direction stood kindly aside for us. “MY DAD’S JUST UP THERE,” my dad said, gesturing over a craggy knob in the hillside behind us. “Oh, there are more of you to come, are there?” asked one of the hikers. “NO. I MEAN HIS ASHES. HE’S BEEN DEAD ALMOST 13 YEARS.” He picked up his pace at the bottom of the slope, and nipped ahead of my mum and I, across the river. By the time we’d reached the bottom of the ravine, he was talking to a party of teenagers on the other side of the footbridge. “Oh, God,” said my mum, as we admired some bracket fungus. “I bet he’s telling them about Cottesmore.” Cottesmore was the inner-city Nottingham secondary school, where my dad taught in the 1970s, and it remains one of his favourite conversation topics, along with African music, courgettes and firewood. “Were you telling them about Cottesmore?” my mum asked him. “YEAH. WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT? I TOLD THEM ABOUT THE TIME I BROUGHT MY CLASS HERE ON A SCHOOL TRIP IN 1974 AND THEY CHARGED SOME CATTLE AND ALMOST GOT SOME PICNICKERS TRAMPLED TO DEATH. BARRY LASKOWSKI WAS THE RINGLEADER. AND VINCENT BROWN ... HE WENT ON TO WIN MR UNIVERSE.” “Were they interested?” I asked. “THEY PRETENDED TO BE BUT I THINK THEY WERE BEING SARCASTIC. THEN I TOLD ONE OF THEM OFF FOR SMOKING BUT IT TURNED OUT HE JUST HAD A PEN IN HIS MOUTH.” A couple of miles down the river, near Milldale, the weather cleared. That is to say: we were sometimes able to see trees and rocks more than 20 feet from our faces. I said “hello” to a farmer who was rebuilding a dry-stone wall on the hillside, and I thought about how happy and in the zone, dry-stone-wall-wise, he seemed. With the rain soup thinned to mere consomme, Derbyshire looked a lot like Devon in a different jacket. It was hard to conceive that there was no coastline just over the horizon, let alone within 60 miles. I understood why Derbyshire had been nagging at my subconscious: this bleak, craggy up-and-down terrain and damp climate was a deep, ingrained part of me. By moving to south Devon last year I’d finally made myself aware of it. Dartmoor was my Kinder Scout, the Teign and Dart were my Dove and Derwent (the original meaning of both “Dart” and “Derwent” is roughly “river valley thick with oaks”). It’s been a remarkably hot, dry April in Devon. Many of the trees, still leafless, have seemed palpably harassed, like people who aren’t fully dressed being hurried out of a house. The heatwave has come with benefits: I’ve swum in the sea and walked miles barefoot along dusty coastal paths. But I’ve missed the rain and, last weekend, as it finally returned in a big way, I threw myself in to a long walk, unhatted and unhooded. This is the trick with rain, I find: you just need to commit to it. “HAIR IS LIKE GRASS,” my dad has always maintained. “IT NEEDS SUN AND RAIN OR YOU GO BALD.” I used to think this opinion was nonsense, but I’m coming around to it. So many old people in Devon have good hair. Maybe it’s the rain. So why did Ted lose his hair young, I asked my dad, if he was so often out in the rain? “IT WAS BECAUSE HE ALWAYS WORE A HAT,” he replied. Ted’s mum grew up on Dartmoor, so perhaps that was why he was drawn to rainy landscapes a long way above sea level, and why I am, too? On my wet weekend walk, I thought about what a shame it was that my passion for walking had surfaced late: that I never got to enjoy a day like this as an adult with Ted, who loved Devon, too. On the entire 14-mile route, I did not pass one fellow walker, even when I stopped to look at Berry Pomeroy Castle: legendarily the south-west’s most haunted building. I was soaked to the skin, alone, 250 miles from my family and the place where I grew up, in fading light in a medieval ruin high on a hill filled with ghosts, bats and crows, but I had rarely felt more at home. Tom Cox’s latest book, The Good, the Bad and the Furry is published by Little Brown. Follow him on Twitter @cox_tom. |