Walking the Invisible

by Michael Stewart

  In the centre of the square is an obelisk erected in 1810 to commemorate the fiftieth year of King George III’s reign, which was also the year that the king, who suffered from recurring mental illness, finally relapsed and a regency was established. All this was brilliantly dramatised in Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III, which was made into a film, retitled as The Madness of King George, starring Nigel Hawthorne as the king and Helen Mirren as his long-suffering queen.

  Underneath the obelisk are the village stocks, a double device, consisting of wooden boards and hinges, so that two miscreants can have their ankles fastened. They were originally sited beside the entrance to the lane leading down to the church. They would probably have been fully functioning during Branwell’s stay. And he may have witnessed unruly artisans fastened there for a few hours, a day, or even longer. Close by are the fish slabs, where trout and salmon from the River Duddon would have once been sold.

  The square consists of the Manor Arms, a real-ale pub, and another extant feature, the tourist information centre, and an arts and craft centre that was once the market hall and includes a fine clock tower. The weathervane perched on top consists of a man whipping a fox that is chasing a rabbit. There is also a restaurant and a café. But the houses and buildings that face this square, built with the grey slate characteristic of this area, are all pretty much unchanged from what Branwell would have seen.

  This is all very different to the Broughton of my childhood, an area of Salford where I used to play, with its red-brick terraced houses and scrubbed steps, its cobbled ‘backings’ and washing lines drooping with damp clothes and bedding.

  Just beyond the square is Broughton Tower, which is now a school for children with special needs. It has a history going back to the twelfth century, and the tower itself dates from the early fourteenth century. Further on is a park that ascends to a steep raised copse that overlooks the town. I assume this is what Juliet Barker refers to as High Duddon, although it is not marked on the map. The view from here is spectacular, surrounded on all sides by Cumbrian mountains that in this morning light on the day before May Day glow green and orange. Above me, two buzzards rise on a thermal, spiralling upwards. I can imagine Branwell standing here, his spirits lifting as his lungs breathed in the pure Cumbrian air and his eyes feasted on this spectacular view, watching buzzard, kite and osprey soar. The sky is blue all the way to the horizon. There is not a cloud in sight. The gorse close by blazes with bright yellow flowers, and the bluebells beneath the oak trees glow like cobalt crystal. As he stood on this promontory, perhaps he was thinking about the Lakeland poets – in particular William Wordsworth, whom he had written to in 1837, at the age of nineteen, but also Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his son Hartley, whom Branwell wrote to a few months later. Wordsworth composed a lyric sequence called ‘The River Duddon: A Series of Sonnets’ between 1804 and 1820, celebrating this area of beauty.

  I walk around the village. There are three pubs (which were all around in Branwell’s time), a post office, an accountant and a solicitor; a handcrafted furniture shop, two petrol stations, one with brightly coloured fairground bumper cars on the roof; a library, a cattle market, a village notice board, advertising yoga classes and a film club; a butcher and a baker, but no candlestick maker. And there are no signs of the hoop makers, saddlers, nail makers and swill makers that were here during Branwell’s stay.

  Broughton was once the centre of the swill-making industry. A swill is a shallow oval basket, usually about two feet long, made of oak strips woven from a rim formed from a hazel rod. They were sent to Scotland, where they were in demand for use in potato picking.

  Walking these bustling streets, Branwell must have felt a huge sense of freedom mingled with one of isolation. Unlike his sisters, he never went to school, and he had no qualifications. He spent his childhood at the parsonage, being educated by his father. And here he was now, a private tutor to two boys, still only in his early twenties.

  I’m standing outside Broughton House, the residence of the Postlethwaite family, a three-storey merchant’s house opposite the Old King’s Head tavern. It is now, not quite ironically, home to an educational publisher. Robert and Agnes had two boys, John and William. Juliet Barker states that at this time Robert Postlethwaite was the second largest landowner in the area, but, as Tim Cockerill has pointed out in Brontë Studies, the source of his wealth is something of a mystery.

  It perhaps seems odd that Robert Postlethwaite would entrust his sons’ education to a failed portrait painter with no qualifications, and despite having at first made a good impression, within six months Branwell was dismissed from his employment. A pattern repeated with every job he took.

  Walking out of town up the hill towards Branwell’s lodgings, I come to the parish church. It is an odd-looking building, with a chunky bell tower rebuilt somewhat from the sketch Branwell drew of it in 1840, when it was more elegantly proportioned. At the top of the hill is High Syke House, where Branwell stayed. This is the oldest part of Broughton. ‘Broughton’ is derived from Anglo-Saxon, and it means ‘the settlement by the brook’. ‘Syke’ is Norse, indicating a brook coming from swampy ground. In 1840, the house was home to Edward Fish, a surgeon. It is well positioned, overlooking the village and the church, with the Cumbrian mountains in the background. You can see the mouth of the Duddon estuary from up here and further on the sea. There is wisteria festooned with lilac blooms growing up the side of the building, but as with Broughton House, there is no plaque to mark Branwell’s stay. The town seems rather blasé about its Brontë connection, or even indifferent.

  I walk to the crossroads and past the huge wooden cross mounted to the left, with High Cross Inn to my right. Next, I head down the hill towards the River Duddon. A footpath cuts through some farm fields and goes towards Duddon Bridge. The first is full of mad cows with their calves that don’t seem to take very kindly to Wolfie. They charge at us with all the speed they can muster. It’s that time of year when maternal instincts turn previously docile bovines into rural killers. We try and find an alternative route, climbing over a fence into the adjacent field with sheep and lambs that seem less perturbed by our presence. Some lambs gambol while others bleat for the teat. I walk along the banks of the River Duddon, as Branwell did, with a copy of Wordsworth’s sonnets in my pocket. We know he did this from the letters he wrote to his friend Joseph Leyland. The Duddon is a shallow, wide river. The water is crystal clear. I see a farmer approach. I’m trying to avoid a confrontation with him, so as he gets closer I get in there first, going on a charm offensive: ‘Hello, I’m sorry. I know I’m trespassing, but your cows wouldn’t let me past.’

  ‘You didn’t have to climb over the fence. You could have used the gate.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry.’

  In the end, he is perfectly reasonable and shows me an alternative way.

  As Branwell walked along these banks, was he looking at the scene with his painterly eye, wondering how he could capture all this beauty on a stretched canvas frame? In the distance, the dark brow of Black Combe looms over the estuary and village. It’s pronounced ‘Black Koom’. And it was the subject first of Wordsworth’s pen and then, in imitation, Branwell’s. Wordsworth wrote two poems celebrating the Combe: ‘Written with a Slate Pencil on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of Black Combe’ and ‘View from the Top of Black Comb [sic]’. Branwell’s poem is called ‘On Black Combe’. The mountain from any view is barren and austere – a threat or a dare. I want to walk up it, but I need to psych myself up. There is something sinister about its foreboding bulk.

  I head towards Foxfield, a hamlet by the mouth of the estuary. I cross the rail tracks and walk along the silted banks, treading carefully on the soft sands. The wind ripples the water and the sun silvers the tips of the waves. There are black-headed gulls bobbing on the surface – they look like buoys – and further on waders: snipe, shank and sanderling. I head along the Cumbrian coastal path, past Well Head and Coal Gate. I bear left taking a
path that crosses fields to a golf course. The path circumnavigates the course anticlockwise. Despite blue skies and mild weather, there are no signs of golfers. Over the years, I’ve seen these spaces diminish in popularity. It seems like the sport has had its day. Golf courses are often sizeable areas of land in good spots. What I’d like is for them to rewild and reforest, perhaps flooding the lower areas to create lakes and marshes.

  I drop back down into Broughton, past tennis courts and slate-roofed houses clad with solar panels. I’ve been walking for more than three hours now, and I stop at the Manor Arms for a rest. I get talking to some drinkers, who it turns out are all ‘offcomers’, the local term for out of towners. No one has heard of Branwell Brontë. ‘Not seen him drinking in here. What time does he usually come in?’ one of them jokes.

  I wonder where to go next. I’ve got most of the afternoon left. I could do Black Combe, but I still don’t feel ready for it. I’m going to save it for the morning. I know that nearby there is a stone circle, and I decide instead to head out to see it.

  I walk through a wood full of flowering wild garlic, with white petals like dancing stars. I climb up a steep clough until I emerge out of the woods into a rugged spot where the remains of a stone circle can be found. But there’s not much left. Just two standing stones. This isn’t the circle I’ve come to see, though, that’s further on, a couple of miles to the east. I watch Wolfie give chase to a hare, but it outruns him easily. Unlike rabbits, hares don’t burrow, instead relying on their speed, agility and cunning to escape their pursuers. It’s a strategy that doesn’t always work. I find a half-eaten hare corpse by the side of the path. Its skeleton is much bigger than a rabbit’s. The skull looks to be twice the size of a rabbit skull. It is still attached to the body by a collar of wet fur.

  When I get there, I am struck by the location of the circle, cradled as it is between the rounded slopes of Swinside Fell and Knott Hill, with the majestic Coniston Fells providing a dramatic backdrop. There’s nothing in the near vicinity of the stones, and it feels like they are in conversation with the natural geology around us. This is Sunkenkirk Stone Circle, one of the three most important stone circles in Cumbria. It is an almost perfect circle with a diameter of ninety-three feet, and fifty-five of the original sixty stones remain. There is something mystical about its symmetry. The inner ground is perfectly level, like a bowling green. The stones are what the locals call ‘grey cobbles’. It isn’t as grand as Castlerigg, which is sited just outside of Keswick, but it is just as graceful. The tallest stone is only seven feet six inches, and it stands in a spot marking true north. The circle wasn’t recorded until 1794, and it wasn’t fully excavated until 1901. So, when Branwell was here, there wouldn’t have been much to see. It is interesting to wonder, though, what he would have thought of stone circles. Would he have been as underwhelmed by them as Coleridge was when he visited Castlerigg with Wordsworth in 1799?

  It’s nearly six in the evening when I get here, and with the exception of a few sheep, I have the place to myself. It is still, peaceful. Perhaps stone circles would have been more Emily’s thing. The first man-made structures to worship the gods, built to imitate natural forms and pointing up to the stars. The stones function like a church spire. They connect the earth to the heavens.

  The next morning, I get up early. I drive over to Whicham at the base of the Combe. I put the kettle on and fry myself a breakfast. As I sit eating mushrooms on toast and drinking tea, I stare up at its vastness. Even from this distance, the path that snakes up its back is visible. Wainwright said that you could walk it in carpet slippers. But I wouldn’t like to try.

  I take out and read Branwell’s poem ‘On Black Combe’:

  Far off, and half revealed, ’mid shade and light,

  Black Combe half smiles, half frowns; his mighty form

  Scarce bending into Peace – more formed to fight

  A thousand years of struggles with a storm

  Than bask one hour, subdued by sunshine warm,

  To bright and breezeless rest; yet even his height

  Towers not o’er this world’s sympathies – he smiles –

  While many a human heart to pleasure’s wiles

  Can bear to bend, and still forget to rise –

  As though he, huge and heath-clad in our sight,

  Again rejoices in his stormy skies.

  Man loses vigour in unstable joys.

  Thus tempests find Black Combe invincible,

  While we one lost, who should know life so well!

  The sun is rising over the sea, and the one cloud in the sky casts a shadow over the mountain’s shoulder as I think about Branwell’s line ‘half smiles, half frowns’. It’s a good line. Not just because it describes how often it is half in sunlight and half in shadow, but also the shape of it – the bowed arch of its back and the crenelated crags that furrow vertically. I think it could be one of the best lines he wrote, because it is also addresses me, the walker, who is equally awed and vexed by it.

  As I set off, I’m thinking about Wordsworth, and how, when Branwell climbed this mountain, he may have been thinking about Wordsworth too. He was walking in his wake. As I am now walking in Branwell’s. Did he blush as he recalled the letter he had written to Wordsworth three years before?

  Sir– I most earnestly entreat you to read and pass your judgement upon what I have sent you, because from the day of my birth to this nineteenth year of my life I have lived among secluded hills, where I could neither know what I was or what I could do … But a change has taken place now, sir; I am arrived at an age wherein I must do something for myself … Do pardon me, sir, that I have ventured to come before one whose works I have most loved in our literature, and who most has been with me a divinity of the mind … Surely, in this day, when there is not a writing poet worth a sixpence, the field must be open, if a better man can step forward … Now, to send you the whole of this would be a mock upon your patience; what you see does not pretend to be more than the description of an imaginative child. But read it, sir; and as you value your own kind-heartedness – return me an answer if but one word, telling me whether I should write on, or write no more. Forgive undue warmth, because my feeling in this matter cannot be cool; and believe me, sir, with deep respect.

  He never received a reply to his letter, which was a curious combination of the lickspittle (‘a divinity of mind’) and the foolhardy (‘there is not a writing poet worth a sixpence’). Certainly, he doesn’t appear to have written to him again.

  Back in 2017, when the parsonage was celebrating Branwell’s bicentenary, they commissioned Simon Armitage to write a series of poems in response to Branwell’s artefacts. In one, he chose the letter Branwell had written to Wordsworth, and his response was an imagined reply. The poem was called ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’. Armitage is a fan of the Manchester music scene of the eighties, and the title of his poem is clearly a reference to The Smiths and their song of the same name. In his poem, he captures that feeling between intention and reception: ‘What glittered like charmed finches over Haworth Church, drifts as rain across Scafell Pike’.

  Rereading the letter, I cannot help but feel a great sadness. I also reflect on my own efforts to reach great writers in my late teens and early twenties. Again, without reply. Perhaps it is something that all aspiring writers do, although not something that they would confess to.

  As he climbed the mountain, was Branwell still angry that Wordsworth hadn’t bothered to reply? While living in Broughton, he wrote first to Thomas de Quincy (who was living in Wordsworth’s old house, Dove Cottage) and then to Hartley Coleridge, son of Samuel Taylor. The tone in his letter to Hartley was more consistent. And it must have felt like a breakthrough when Hartley wrote back, inviting him to his home, nearby, at Nab Cottage.

  The path cuts diagonally through a field full of sheep and lambs, and, nervous of my dog, the flock parts like biblical waves. I watch the lambs buried deep into their mothers’ teats. It always amuses me to see t
hem wag their tails, the way dogs do, to show their excitement. Mammalian milk contains casomorphin, an opioid. No one really knows why it’s there, but one possible answer is to make the infant young dependent on their mother. So, when we see lambs sucking hard at the teat, or indeed any infant mammal, we are really watching addicts.

  Although the sky was clear twenty minutes ago when I started out, there are now dark clouds around the head of the Combe. The climb to the top is an unrelenting slog, but Wainwright was right about carpet slippers. The ground is soft and steady. Grassed on the whole but even where there is exposed soil, it feels easy underfoot. At six hundred metres above sea level, it is a small mountain in comparison to Scafell Pike or Great Gable, but it’s a punishing climb. I’m thinking about how the Romantic writers changed our perception of these great peaks. From something to be feared to that which we revere. What was once thought as rough and ugly, lacking classic symmetry, seems to us now naturally beautiful, effortlessly elegant, combining awe with magnitude, grace with power. We appreciate a mountain’s great scale but also the minutiae of its ecosystem.

  Black Combe, its form and shape and size, dominates the Duddon valley. It’s not hard to see why first Wordsworth and then Branwell would want to ascend its heights and view the world from the vantage point of its peak. As I walk the ravine between Seaness and Moor Gill, there is a shelf of rock to my left that looms over me like a black scythe. To my right, a stream trickles as water oozes from the tops. It’s May Day weekend, but I am on my own on this mountain. I imagine that the rest of the Lakes will be teeming with walkers and tourists today. The path is fringed with infant bilberry bushes, fern stalks and heather patches. I can hear but not see the noisy rising song of the skylark. As I mount the first brow of the Combe, the sun cuts through the thick cloud and everything is suddenly illuminated. Now the frowning brow of Black Combe is smiling. Everything is verdant green and gold. The fronds of the bilberry are bronzed, and the sand beneath my feet is polished copper. The grey shingle glows pink and blue. But the view in front is the black furrow of the Combe head. It has its own dark cloud situated above it like a fedora hat.