by Roger Deakin
The sun had come out, and glinted in the Cowside Beck, clearly audible three or four hundred feet below. About two miles further on up the high ridge path I came to a declivity diving towards the increasingly distant bottom of the gorge. There was no path, and the descent was so precipitous that it was impossible to see more than a few yards ahead at a time, but I decided to take the plunge, more or less literally, towards the beck. It was hard to know, even with the help of the map, whether I was heading down towards Yew Cogar Scar, the spectacular cliffs that walled parts of the gorge. They live up to their name with a perpendicular forest of gnarled yews that somehow clings to the rock face. The escarpment I hoped I was going down was Cowside. The descent was so dizzy it was hardly even grazed, so there were tussocks full of ankle-sized potholes. A stiff breeze funnelled up the gorge threatening to shake off the gaudy yellow-and-black-striped humbug snails that clung to harebells and yellow bedstraw. I felt for them, hanging on for dear life too, and creeping blindly down. The really amazing thing was that there were trees. Bent old rowan, ash and hawthorn grew from the most daring rocky outcrops, probably the only places where a sapling would have escaped being grazed. Fortunately, I had brought a climbing rope which I looped round a trunk wherever I could, and so slithered my way in stages to the bottom.
By now I was feeling the thrill of the chase, glancing eagerly about in search of hidden pools. I had landed in the canyon bottom just upstream from the cliffs of yew. The first thing I saw was a black rabbit disappearing into a stone wall, then another. Was there a whole colony of them marooned in here? Looking up at the imposing rocks, I could have been in California. I had no idea how I was going to climb out again. I followed the beck upstream, rounding each bend and contour with the warm glow of anticipated pleasure.
At length I came upon a small spinney of ash by the banks, and the promising sound of a waterfall. And there, just below, was the elusive tufa pool and the sparkle of animated water chasing its tail around in it. It was very nearly circular, and rimmed with moss. At one side, natural steps led into its perfectly clear depths, which ran to eight or ten feet by the fall. I stripped and dived in. It was so cold, I might have flung myself into a bed of nettles. Then came the heady rush of the endorphins, or ‘endolphins’ as a friend once called them, the natural opiates with which the body anaesthetises itself against the cold, and the adrenaline. As the Oxford Textbook of Medicine cautiously says, the mood changes they induce ‘are difficult to validate scientifically, although feelings of well-being seem to occur’. For swimmers, my friend’s inspired malapropism goes straight to the point: you come up feeling like a dolphin. The Cowside Beck dashed towards me like a wind under the trees, and spouted smoothly between two rocks to hurtle into the pool, which I now explored, feeling beneath the bubbling surface with hands and feet, diving under, and swimming against the current to hover in the middle. Immediately uphill, a tributary stream cascaded down a series of waterfalls and saucered pools over mounds of tufa accumulated through the centuries. If it weren’t so natural and ancient, it would be easy to mistake tufa for the kind of artificial rocks you see at the Chelsea Flower Show. It is really petrified water that has built up, like the fur in a kettle, from the lime that is carried in the streams. It is voluptuous and spongy and loves to dress itself in fine mosses and algae.
I flopped out on to a rock, up the grassy side, and clambered, dripping, to bathe in a second pool some thirty yards upstream. The boisterous water took my breath away all over again and I returned to the circular pool, where I swam down once more to the bottom under the waterfall and surfaced inside it, coming out with head, hands and feet frozen, feeling wonderful. I thawed them in the gentle, dished, tufa pool, like a warm bath after the frigid beck, its water slipping over the sunlit stone.
I wondered how many walkers must have slid into these tempting waters, remote and hidden though they are. Sunlight reflected back off the rounded white rocks on the bottom, and soft cushions of fine, tight grass and thyme were scattered languidly around the margin, as though for some nocturnal gathering of the nymphs. J. B. Priestley, when he was travelling about these parts in 1933, met a woman who lived in one of the remote Dales farmhouses, ‘a solid West Riding country-woman and not one of your fanciful arts-and-crafts misses’, who swore that she saw faeries dancing on the hillside. There are still some places left in England that have unquestioned magic about them. This pool had me enchanted; I could have stayed there quite happily all day and night with the attendant naiads. But a man must take care never to kiss a water sprite. As the English folk-song ‘George Collins’ relates, it will lead to certain death, and that of any woman he subsequently kisses. The old pagan deities may have fled much of our land, but they have not yet forsaken all their haunts.
Made ravenous by the cold water, I demolished a prosaic sandwich lunch reclining on a cushion of thyme, with my head resting on a clump of moss the size and texture of a British Railways antimacassar, then decided to climb up alongside the tributary gill, through a scree of scattered rock, past the occasional modest waterfall, towards some caves at the top of Cowside. Sleepy dor-beetles crept about in the grass, and Yorkshire rabbits darted out everywhere, more agile than their lazy Suffolk cousins, bouncing between the rocks like bagatelle balls. The head of the steep cleft was a mass of springs spouting extravagantly over a giant sponge of tufa, decked out in mosses, ferns, liverworts and algae. I sat in the cave and ate another cheese sandwich, spiced with sorrel leaves I had gathered on the way up, grateful for the generous hint that sent me to this wild and beautiful spa.
In the morning, I drove over to Malham and walked out of the village in bright sunshine towards the headwater of the River Aire above the spectacular Gordale Scar waterfall. Some of the grazing meadows here contained great pastel blue pools of meadow crane’s-bill, and it lined the roadside verges, with here and there a patch of the striking magenta bloody crane’s-bill. The warm weather, and the previous day’s rain, had brought on an abundance of grasshopper song and swelled the streams. Ascending the mass of tufa beside the waterfall, I reached the edge of the limestone pavements that stretch away above it to the north, and to the source of the Gordale Beck at the remote Middle House Farm near Malham Tarn. By the time it reaches Malham, the beck has gathered enough water to be worth calling a river, the Aire, that will flow on through Skipton and Leeds and into the brown expanse of the Humber at Goole, above Hull.
The path levelled out along a ridge, and I dropped down the stepped rock walls to the beck, half-hidden in a steep cleft as it approaches the waterfall. Here there were pools, dished from the yielding limestone and built up like coil pots out of tufa. It was sheltered, sunny, and warmed by great natural solar panels of white rock. I took advantage of the utter solitude for a delicious limestone plunge. I chose my bath with care, and soon settled on the right one, upholstered in moss and deep enough for an icy wallow in the hot sun. Rolling out, I contrived to lie reading on the rustic poolside with my toes in the exquisite coolness.
It wasn’t long before I was joined by a leech, exploring my pool with great thoroughness and the most elegant swimming. It is hard to say how big it was because it kept changing shape, looping and stretching out its black stocking of a body as women do when they’re trying tights for quality in Marks & Spencer. It varied between an inch-and-a-half and three-and-a-half inches, and it was the most graceful aquatic creature I have ever seen. Like pigs, leeches suffer in our language from the abuse of their name. There was a self-contained air about it as it inspected the rim of the pool, as well there might be, since leeches are hermaphrodites, like their relatives the earthworms. It seemed in no hurry; the leech family are an easy-going lot who put off breeding until they are six or seven, and can live to the age of fifteen. Of our eleven native species, only four actually suck blood. The rest prey on molluscs and small aquatic creatures and swallow them whole. A single meal will apparently keep a leech going for six months, a fact that causes Theodore H. Savory to recommend them as p
ets in The World of Small Animals. I was lucky enough to be taught zoology by Savory, who kept leeches in his laboratory at school, a magic land full of books, belljars and butterfly nets, peopled by Latin-labelled living spiders (his first love) peering at us bi-peds from mahogany-framed glass pens. I had felt instantly at home in his classroom, recognising the comforting aroma of my suburban bedroom, crammed as it was with semi-derelict vivariums full of my scaled and creeping familiars: lizards, newts, slow-worms, stick insects, tree frogs and white mice.
My leech could well have been a medicinal leech, although it hadn’t shown much interest in my toes, or my arm when I put it into the water, and I imagine we must have been in there bathing together. Medicinal leeches seem to have become rare by 1802, when Wordsworth wrote ‘Resolution and Independence’, in which he meets an ancient leech-gatherer by a pond who tells him:
Once I could meet with them on every side;
But they have dwindled long by slow decay;
Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may.
However, they now seem to be relatively abundant in places. And they can still save lives: there is even a successful leech-farming business in Wales supplying hospitals all over the world. There are fish leeches, too, and the duck leech, which feeds inside the noses of birds. In order to spread to new habitats, a leech with wanderlust needs animals to come to its pond or stream and drink. Once attached, it can be carried to the next watering-hole by the unwitting host. Here in Gordale, leeches could well be carried by sheep.
An emperor dragonfly soared out over the waterfalls into the infinite blue air of the ravine beyond, and my leech continued its graceful undulating swim round the pool, then disappeared into a miniature cave in the tufa. There were tadpoles in there too, quite undeveloped, water shrimps and caddis larvae, and a drowned black beetle. Having tasted, and bathed in, the sweetness of the innocent Gordale Beck, it seemed extraordinary that its journey through a hundred miles of our land would turn it so quickly into the polluted tide of Humber. W. H. Auden’s line: ‘A culture is no better than its woods’ holds true for rivers too.
20
SWIMMING WITH ANGELS
North Yorkshire, 16 August
SATURDAY DAWNED MAGNIFICENTLY blue, and the banks of the Wharfe at Bolton Abbey presented an almost biblical scene. On a bend in the river below the abbey ruins, there is a wide sandy beach and I fully expected to see John the Baptist rise up amongst the bathers and bless them all for having the sense and self-reliance to go swimming in the wild. It was still only eleven o’clock, and half Harrogate, Bradford and Leeds were already in the river. The scene was a hybrid of an L. S. Lowry beach picture, and Stanley Spencer’s Christ Preaching in the Thames at Cookham. The thermometer was rising steadily towards the eighties, and Yorkshire was at play.
No one was making any money out of all this enjoyment on the river – least of all the Duke of Devonshire, to whom the land belongs – unless you count the busy restaurant and café on the banks. By bathing here for years, the Yorkshire people have established a kind of right, which, very sensibly, the Duke appears to recognise. I began swimming at once, from a point upriver where the water is forced into an exhilarating dash between massive rocks, then eases into a saunter through some of the deeper pools. Swimming and wading by turns as the capricious river bed allowed, I arrived at length at the populous beach below the abbey, dried off in the sun, and walked back for an ice cream at the café. It was like an inland Blackpool; men in deckchairs listening to the cricket, little football games everywhere, lilos and rubber boats. Here was a linear natural lido of spectacular beauty; proof that river-bathing and people in large numbers need do no damage to a river.
On the road past Skipton, on the way north-west towards Ribblesdale, Settle and Ingleton, I found myself at one of the most northerly points on the English canal-system: Gargrave on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. It was two o’clock, and by now really warm, and I had been thinking about a swim in a canal for some time. Somehow, though, I had kept putting it off. I had heard rumours of a beach on the Venetian system of canals in Birmingham, somewhere near Spaghetti Junction, but no one seemed to know exactly where it was. I had contemplated the oily waters of the Caledonian Basin on the Grand Union Canal from the deck of a narrowboat, and I had even got as far as dipping a toe in the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal near Talybont-on-Usk. Something was inhibiting me, I didn’t know what, but I was going to have to cure myself. After all, according to John Betjeman in ‘A Shropshire Lad’, the ghost of Captain Webb, the original Channel swimmer, swam in the canal in his native Dawley, near Ironbridge:
When Captain Webb the Dawley man,
Captain Webb from Dawley,
Came swimming along in the old canal
That carried the bricks to Lawley.
I was never going to find a canal in better weather conditions than this, so I stopped the car, crossed a field to a lock, and went up the towpath to a quiet spot, wondering about old bicycles, prams and supermarket trolleys on the canal bed. I didn’t dive. I went into the chocolate water feet-first off the stone parapet, expecting deep water. To my amazement, it was only knee-deep at the edge, shelving to a mud bottom I hardly dared touch, four feet six inches down in the middle. I reflected that barges are shallow-draught boats and don’t need any greater depth, except in locks. The thought of the locks scared me. The idea of being sucked under the ponderous wooden gates was not appealing. But the immediate danger, I knew, was more from swallowing than being swallowed.
It was a good wide canal, with fine elevated views across the countryside north of Skipton. When the first narrowboat passed there was plenty of room for both of us, and the only danger came from the wash, which threatened a taste of the dubious-looking water, or a mouthful of gudgeon. I kept my mouth firmly shut and swam a token mile of the hundreds that thread this country, to just short of the next lock, and the Anchor Inn. The water was comfortably warm, and, slightly to my disappointment, there were no supermarket trolleys or prams. Not even a bicycle frame. I passed the Gargrave cricket match on my way, and could have continued swimming in the same direction all the way to Burnley, Blackburn, Manchester, Liverpool, Stoke-on-Trent, Birmingham and London. Or back the other way to Leeds and Sheffield. Instead, I climbed out (not always such an easy thing in a canal) and began to stroll back in my trunks.
It was by now such a hot day that I attracted little attention amongst the walkers on the towpath or the bargees. I was glad to have swum in a canal, and to sense the years of working traffic in the worn towpath flagstones and the churned water. I have friends who claim to have swum in the Kingsland and the Paddington Basins on the Grand Union in London and lived. Some of the canals in Yorkshire, whose names evoke the industrial past (the Huddersfield Narrow, the Aire & Calder), pass through impossible-looking gradients on their way across the Pennines. Between Hebden Bridge and Todmorden, the Rochdale Canal has thirteen locks in six and a half miles, and the annual sum of human labour involved in opening and shutting lock gates on the Calder and Hebble canal between Halifax and Wakefield must be enormous.
It was over tea at Bernie’s Caving Café in Ingleton, after a swim in the village pool the miners built, that I heard of Hell Gill. Gavin Edwards, an Aysgarth potholer, described a hidden canyon, a deep gash in the limestone filled with white water dropping steeply for two hundred feet, on the remote moors near Garsdale Head, just beyond the top of Wensleydale. Not many people knew of it, he said, but it was possible, given the right conditions, to descend the gorge through the water. The way Gavin described the place immediately seized my imagination and I resolved to go and find it. I didn’t realise at the time quite how much the experience would take over my dreams in the weeks to come.
I was sharing a table with a group of potholers, all regulars, tucking into big plates of chip butties and sausages. Considering that in potholing your life can depend on the ability to squeeze through a letterbox crack or a hosepipe cave, I was mildly shocked. It was interesting how
many were first-generation descendants of miners. They agreed that the instinct to go underground was probably in their blood; it didn’t seem so frightening to them because they had grown up amongst miners. The café was the HQ of the local caving mafia, full of equipment for sale and decorated with posters and photographs of the insides of immense caverns festooned with stalactites, or cavers hanging upside-down over raging underground torrents. There were ropes, harnesses, helmets, lamps, and big maps on the wall showing the astonishing labyrinth of interconnecting caves and potholes that surround Ingleton, like the London tube map. You could plan your route for the day, setting off down the Wormway, perhaps, to Bloody Thigh Rift, through Monster Cavern to the Wurlitzer via the Keel Hauler, nip down Ramsden’s Crawl, change at Sausage Junction and resurface through Ratbag Inlet. The place had something of the atmosphere of the warren, with dozens of tough, skinny, burrowing people busy exchanging notes and tall stories of the Underground. Potholing discoveries are earnestly discussed and christened like new strategies in chess: The Doctor’s Dilemma, The Squeeze Box. The need to communicate detailed directions in this twilight world has sparked off the inventive patois you always find in sub-cultures. The ‘New Routes’ book hangs on the wall full of improbable instructions for climbing rocks or navigating potholes:
SWINDALE: THE CAT’S KNACKERS 6a (easy). Wall right of Castration Crack. Start right of above – pull through roof easily on left to small ledges, place wires in Castration Crack (yes, I am a coward) and step right immediately above the roof into the centre of the wall and climb delicately up to the faint crack of First Cut – up this and Right to finish.