Tor Falcon: Diary of a Wild Place

March, Melbreak.

In amongst the complicated folds and ridges of the Cumbrian Fells sits Melbreak. Separate and dark. An armoured insect, legs pulled up under it. It’s flimsy carapace of peat drips into a lake on it’s eastern side while to the west it trails orchids in the summer.

To Chris, it’s grazing. His livelihood. He was born with it in his blood. To the never ending tourists who cut deep gashes down to it’s bones, it’s a day out. A conquest. To my eighty four year old father-in-law it was an unexpected triumph. To the falcons who nest in it’s needles, it’s the perfect place for a high speed ambush. To the ewe with the herbage map of generations in her blank head, it’s everything. To me, today, it’s a set of shapes within a set of shapes. It’s dark against light, solid in air. I’m trying to condense one hundred million years of geology through my eyes and into the fat chalk in my hand making marks on a small bit of paper in front of me

February, A Week Spent Quietly Among Friends.

It felt like I was last here in another life. These old friends I hadn’t given a thought to for a couple of months, I saw afresh in their mid-winter nakedness. Wide, wind blown, mossy and knobbled, these woody giants of the Cumbrian fells astound me every time I see them. And yet there is nothing particularly remarkable about them. They are just big trees. They are trees which have been, if not cherished, then at least left alone for centuries. Growing by becks, along walls or giving shelter to houses, no one has had any reason to remove them. 

To have come straight from a landscape devoted to the worship of intensive agricultural production and the chasing of short term grants, where hedges come and hedges go and where trees mostly go, to this place where trees grow unmolested for hundreds of years, is profoundly moving.

And so, I spent last week visiting my favourite Cumbrian trees. I sat snugly between the roots of the enormous High Cross oak, completely sheltered from the insistent north wind while I quickly drew Black Crag and High Nook farm. It’s bare oaks are as bright as emeralds and heavy with ferns. I walked through woods of soaring beech, into old oak coppice getting smaller and more tortured until the prevailing wind puts a stop to it. Down to the exposed bay at the end of the lake where twisted thorns have braved that violent wind for years. And into woods of huge Norway spruce and European larch. I marvel at the multitudes of warts on the holly growing out of a wall, I reverently walk between ancient ash coppice hedges. And finally I shelter under a wide sycamore branch as it begins to snow.

Silently, I begin to walk home in the freezing half light, when four luminously dressed mountain bikers flash past me. I hear their yells as they hit the bog below, eight wheels cutting through years of slow grown vegetation sink into wet mud. And then they are gone.

Deep silence accompanies me as far as the Scots pine behind the house, where the soft hissing of wind through needles tells me that I’m home.   

May, The Pace of Spring.

Coming and going between Norfolk and Cumbria has been like doing a seasonal tango. I move from high spring to early spring and then leap-frog back to late spring. I bid farewell to the last of the primroses in Norfolk and watch them opening in Cumbria a week later. I leave the northern oaks still hard skeletons and six hours later, back in the south, find them soft and mustardy. I pass a field of sheep in Norfolk, almost hidden by an abundance of long grass but the cows in Cumbria are still in the barn two weeks later. My woolly jumper and thermal vest have been put away and unpacked, put away and unpacked.

I read somewhere that spring moves north at a walking pace. It’s a compelling thought, Primavera herself, emerging young and naked from her clam shell, magicly banishing winter as she moves slowly north, with her hand maidens, the migrant birds, singing spring into being. Where a mere glance will bring a whole hedgerow shuddering into a climax of blossom in Norfolk, she has to work harder in Cumbria, winter’s icy tentacles are taking some shifting this year. The further north she goes the deeper the hibernation of the plants she has to wake. Weather sculpted hawthorns that endure winds funneled into frenzies down narrow valleys are understandably cautious about coming into leaf, never mind bud. Ferns unfurl begrudgingly. Ash is unmoved. Perhaps it’s the goose bumps and the shivering of this, by now, bedraggled beauty that makes her magic less potent? Or perhaps it’s only through the deepest and most powerful magic that spring arrives in the north at all.