by David Yeadon
“Clouds are comin’ down. It’ll mist up, sithee,” said one of the group. With a knowing scowl and a warning of, “Think on na’,” he left, taking my compass by mistake. I didn’t miss it until an hour later when his prediction proved all too accurate and the mist came down, thick and chill.
Following other people’s tracks was useless. The Pennine Way name suggests a clarity of route that rarely manifests itself on the ground. It is invariably tenuous and, in a mist, invisible. I was quickly lost, wandering in bad-tempered circles with all sense of orientation gone. There was nothing to do but sit it out in a sheltered spot, munching on such legendary hiker’s energy snacks as Kendal Mint Cake and other sugary delights, bought more for effect than use the previous day.
It darkened and the mist thickened, swirling wraithlike around hags of worn peat in the gloom. I experienced a gray surge of blind, unreasoning fear and felt enormously alone. Things seemed to be moving out there, and strange gurgling sounds came from the bogs. I gave up all hope of leaving the moor that night, cocooned myself in an enormous plastic survival bag (a joke gift from my sister), thought of Caribbean beaches and Christmas dinners, and half slept through a fitful frosty night.
By dawn the mist had lifted into ponderous low cloud and I felt to be the only survivor in a dead world. Then two silly sheep popped up suddenly from a grough and looked so startled to see me that I bellowed with laughter, and the day became promising again except for a head cold, souvenir of my carelessness.
At the A62, another trans-Pennine route, walkers find “Rambler’s Relief” in the form of five pubs, all within two miles of the crossing. A couple relegate hikers to rather spartan rooms well away from the red velvet plush and horse brass decor. Further down the Colne valley at Linthwaite I discovered a haven for beer connoisseurs at the Sair Inn where Ron Crabtree, an ex-schoolteacher, is one of a handful of British landlords to brew his own ale. Five Linfit beers range from a gentle dark mild all the way up to Enoch’s Hammer, a rich barley wine named after the hammers made by a local blacksmith. These were used in 1812 by Luddite gangs of cloth croppers who resisted the installation of automated shearing frames in the wool mills by smashing them.
“Wool from the hill sheep was the whole way of life on this Yorkshire side of the Pennines, just like cotton on the other side,” Ron told me as we sipped pints of Old Eli (named after his pet spaniel). “Machines meant less jobs and there was no dole in those days. So it was like a real revolution. Government was fighting Napoleon and America at the same time, and they got really nervous about troubles at home. So—they hanged all the ringleaders in York.”
Two young men sitting near the fire overheard the conversation. “Should ’appen be some Luddites round here nowadays. There’s seventy-six of us got laid off last week for’t same reason—automation. Same bloody story all over again.”
Not far from the pub came an unexpected surprise.
A stubby-spired church rose up from a clustering of houses set in fields against a backdrop of stumpy hills and a sky filled with topsy-turvy clouds. Next to the church was a well-dressed field, a level rectangle of velvety grass on which white figures pranced in summer sunlight. Ah!—a cricket pitch—with a Sunday afternoon cricket match in progress. Just the kind of diversion my aching bones needed.
“Owzatsir!”
The umpire in white coat and flat cap standing behind the stumps (three twenty-eight-inch-high sticks topped by two “bails”) agreed that the batsman had indeed been “bowled out” and raised his finger in solemn day-of-judgment fashion. The crestfallen cricketer tucked his beechwood bat under his arm, adjusted his cap, and walked, tall but despondent, to the wooden pavilion. A polite sprinkling of doughy-handed applause greeted him; he’d scored twenty-seven runs in just over half an hour. “Not bad for a young ’un” “Tha’s Tommy Thwaite’s son tha’ knows” “He were daft—he should’ve seen that one comin’” “In’t he t’one as got Sally Atherton into trouble?”…
A young freckle-faced girl in a pretty pink dress ran up to him before he reached the pavilion steps. “Lovely game, darling. Honestly. You were super.” The warrior-batsman smiled wearily…
I love cricket! (Don’t worry, I’m not going to explain it. That’s far too mighty a task for this writer.) I just enjoy the moods of this odd summer institution whose nuances have shaped the great leaders of Britain’s institutions and Empire. That old chestnut “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton” gives a clue to the importance of the sport in shaping and strengthening the British character.
“It’s not so much a game,” I was once informed by a bristling colonel type at Lords (England’s mecca of cricket in London). “It’s more a way of life, y’might say. It teaches you patience, courage, a little gamesmanship—not too much of that though—fair play, gentlemanly conduct, with a touch of real aggression now and then to assure a win.”
We were watching the fourth day on an interminable five-day “Test Match” between England and Australia. “Patience is perhaps the most important,” he mumbled petulantly as England lost another “wicket” for no additional score.
Back at my own cricket pitch a new batsman emerges to another sprinkling of polite applause from spectators and team (even the opposing side applauds) and the crowd settles down to watch the game again in canvas deck chairs and on old backside-polished benches. It’s a typical village setting—pub, church, pond with random ducks, a cluster of hoary oaks for shade, the clink of teacups in saucers, straw hats, and kids playing tag in the weeds at the edge of the mowed “oval” (I can smell the just-cut grass). A setting untouched by time; a place for manly games and rituals in the warm Sunday afternoon doldrums.
The men in white—white sweaters, shirts, trousers, boots, leg pads—even invisible white groin “boxes” for protection—are trying to bowl, stump, catch, run-out, or otherwise decimate the eleven members of the opposing team for as few “runs” as possible before the end of this one-day match (from 2:00 to 7:00 P.M. which, by happy coincidence, are precisely the hours during which pubs traditionally close on Sundays!).
It’s a typical country game. Long pauses, then the fast run up by the bowler (balls can exceed ninety mph), the quick click of red ball on blonde bat, the flurry of white flannels as the batsmen scamper to opposite ends of the pitch and score a “single.”
“Good show!” says the vicar, clapping vigorously.
“Nice one that,” says the village bobby, resting on his bike.
“Better start the kettle,” says the vicar’s wife. “Did we get the Eccles cakes from Mrs. Harris? She promised.”
“Go on, Charlie—show ’em, lad,” from the old men in the shade.
The game has hardly begun, following lunch, but the village ladies are already fussing around the table inside the pavilion preparing a gargantuan tea of sandwiches, pork pies, sausage rolls, Scotch eggs, hot crumpets, and cakes with pink icing, all for the men in white.
The casual commentaries from the spectators are a fascinating sublanguage. “Should shift his silly mid-on” “That were a real googlie-ball” “Leg-before-wicket—he’s out!” “Worst third man I’ve ever seen—send him t’long stop” “Move your bloody gully, Charlie!”…
And the game goes on—a duel of enduring dullness with moments of deft marksmanship and cries of “Oh, well played sir!” Spectators doze in the sun. The players all break for tea and then return. One batsman is hit on the shoulder by a high-speed bouncer, and there’s great concern shown by both teams. “C’mon now, lads, play the game right,” mumbles the vicar, upset by such ungentlemanly bowling. Looks like a draw is in the offing; there’s no way the opposing team will be annihilated by 7:00 P.M.. Plus there’s rain coming. The wind is up and a brief sprinkle dampens the pitch. The umpires agree to “play on,” but a sodden downpour wipes out the match entirely.
“Nice playing lads,” says the vicar, wondering how he could use the vagaries of this afternoon’s game as a telling metaphor in his evening ser
mon.
“Some pork pies left, love,” offers one of the tea ladies.
“Same time next week then,” says the umpire.
After the storm, I climbed back up the hill out of the tiny village in the middle of nowhere. The path was muddy, my boots were caked in the stuff, and I was hoping for a warm place to stay in that desolate country. It was a shame the match ended so soon, I was just getting into the rhythm of it, dozing, then cheering with the crowd, then dozing again…all in all not a bad way to spend a warm Sunday afternoon in England’s wild heartland.
On the wide open fells you own the earth. In all directions are rolling waves of purple heather cut by chittering streams, belly-high thickets of bracken in the hollows, bubbly little springheads where waters bounce out of the ground, sparkling like ice-cold champagne.
At Blackstone Edge more thin streams slipped through the grasses and over rocks in the shadows. Peewits whirled overhead like thrown confetti, and a haze of heather flowers floated over the moors. I peered out over the county of Lancashire where Manchester and its satellite cities sprawled across the plain far below.
To the north the somber bulk of Pendle Hill huddled on the horizon.
I’ve always been curious about Pendle. It’s a strange, little-explored part of northern England, full of tales of witches and pagan worship. Now was a chance for a slight diversion—a short ride on a local bus, a walk across tiny fields bound by dry stone walls, and what looked like a relatively steep but easy climb.
Mists smothered the high moor and the sleeves of my anorak were sheened with moisture. The sweet smell of heather hung about me as I groped up the rocky path to the high flat summit.
“Tha’ll happen have a bit of weather.” I should have listened to the warning of the shepherd in Newchurch. The village was a tiny place, a peppering of thick stone cottages along a steep dip in the road below the bulk of Pendle. I almost missed the church, hidden behind hedges. On the west wall of the bell tower was the “eye of God,” an oval protruding stone with a distinct pupil peering out over the surrounding moors. “Tha’s for witches.” The shepherd’s face imploded with wrinkles and he laughed. “Tha’s what they says, anyroad. They says it were a charm again them witches.” He nodded his head toward the isolated farms and cottages straggled around the base of the hill as if the infamous Pendle witches were still in residence.
As a young boy I had heard the stories. For generations Lancashire children trembled in early beds, fearful that their errant mischievousness would bring parental dispatch “to’t Pendle folk” and terrible torment on those misty moors. Today many of the local legends are regarded with disdain, dismissed as the feudings of miscreant families whose hysterical accusations and counteraccusations resulted in their mutual destruction. But that was not the way the superstitious country folk around Pendle interpreted the gory incidents in 1612.
Old Chattox (“a very old withered spent and decrepit creature”), one of her contemporaries, Mother Demdike (“the rankest hag that ever troubled daylight”), and her wild and “fearsome ugly” daughter, Bessie, had long been regarded with trepidation by the residents of these lonely hills. In March 1612, Mother Demdike’s granddaughter, Alizon, was refused a handful of pins by the peddler John Law and, being a creature of high passion, hurled a violent curse at the terrified man, which instantaneously caused him a stroke. He survived the ordeal, “with his head drawne awrie, his eyes and face deformed, his legges starcke lame,” long enough to testify at her trial in Lancaster.
His tale and the indictments of a local magistrate, Roger Nowell, led to the imprisonment not only of Alizon Demdike but of eighteen other local witches accused of such scurrilous crimes as communing with imps and the Devil himself (Bessie Demdike was said to possess a third nipple for suckling the Lord of the Underworld), desecrations of graves, at least sixteen murders, and even a plan to destroy Lancaster castle by incantation (witches were wonderful suspects for unsolved crimes). Panic gripped the region. One of Nowell’s assistants wrote in his journal, “Is every person a witch in these hills? I have a list in excess of a hundred. Every day I receive more names. Where will these things end?”
No one was safe. Alice Nutter, a gentlewoman of fine reputation, whose large house still stands at nearby Roughlee, was somehow assembled with the accused and hanged with eight of the others in August 1612. Mother Demdike escaped by dying of “natural causes” in her cell (a most inauspicious demise for a witch).
“Most of it’s jus’ plain rot,” the Newchurch shepherd had told me. He was not at all impressed by all the pen scratching inspired by Pendle. “It’s just a gert bloody hill. My dad wouldn’t have none of it. Folk were daft, he said, and he were right. They’d lie brooms across doorways to stop witches gettin’ in and throw salt in t’fire when they felt scared. They carved them special witch-posts. And my grandma, when she were making her own butter, she’d shove a great poker, red hot, int t’ cream to burn t’devil out and stop butter being ‘bynged.’ I thought it were a bit daft then but I didn’t say nowt. She’d clout me.” His face crinkled again. “She’d have scared all of them witches off, given arf a chance. She were a terror.”
But up here in this silver world of moist mists and silence, the sceptical shepherd’s humor was less reassuring. I remembered a phrase in Harrison Ainsworth’s book The Lancashire Witches: “Pendle Forest swarms with witches. They burrow into the hillsides like rabbits in a warren.” Before leaving Newchurch I’d browsed through the village shop brimming with witch lore. A life-size tableau of cauldron-scraping cackling hags was accompanied by a corny taped commentary, which no longer seemed quite so corny. “On wild and stormy nights when the clouds are scurrying across the moon you may hear their fiendish laughter…”
I was lucky. The mist cleared as quickly as it had descended and sun filled the hill, the browning bracken, and the purple deeps of the heather. Damp stalks gleamed. A curlew whirled against the clouds, hurling its hollow cry at a world invaded by me and a flock of soggy wandering sheep, Roman noses sniffing warily at the sudden brightness. The wind rattled the sharp-bladed nardus grass and brought the smell of cut hay scooping up the flanks of the hill and across the high summit. I could see the fields below Sabden and Barley bound by a spiderweb of lanes and paths. The chimney-crusted skylines of Nelson and Burnley stretched along the Calder. Invisible from the foothill villages, they seemed overclose from up here. To the north stretched the domed loneliness of Bowland, the empty gray hills of Lee Fell, Calder Fell, Mallowdale Fell, and Burn Moor, receding into a hazy nothingness.
I walked on to the “Big End” of Pendle near the gurgling spring where the first Quaker, an impoverished shoemaker, George Fox, refreshed himself in 1652, after his momentous vision of a new faith. As he wrote in his journal, “We came near a very great and high hill, called Pendle Hill—I was moved of the Lord to go up to the top of it. I saw the sea bordering upon Lancashire; and from the top of this hill the Lord let me see in what places He had a great people to be gathered.” His ideas were greeted with interest in the nonconformist hill country, but the authorities were distressed and imprisoned him at Lancaster Castle in 1664.
Pendle is the kind of place where one expects to have great thoughts. It was also a place for lighting bonfires either as warning beacons against regular raids from the ancient Viking stronghold on the Isle of Man or as celebrations of coronations and great victories. In a less dramatic context it provided an ideal base for the farmer-sponsored “flagman” to wave his large black flag during the harvest season at the first sign of inclement weather from the west or noisy little “chipping-duster” storms from the north. Also, according to a farmer friend, the hill and the loneliness of the surrounding countryside have created a froth of odd customs and eccentricities. Particularly bizarre are the activities of the Nick o’ Thungs, an all-male club whose activities include annual meetings on the first Sunday of each May in a secluded clough between Barley and Rimington and the regular recitation of such doggerels as: “Thim
bering Thistelthwaite thievishly thought to thrive through thick and thin by throwing his thimbles about, but he was thwarted and thwacked, thumped and thrashed by thirty thousand thistles and thorns for thievishly thinking to thrive through thick and thin by throwing his thimbles about.” Well, I suppose they have to pass the time some way or another in this lonely region.
Reluctantly leaving my mountain eyrie for the softer foothills and woods of the Ribble valley, I set off walking the wriggling roads to Slaidburn, a village of great charm with its cobbled courts, tight twisting streets, riverside meadows, and the Hark to Bounty Inn, where one of the rooms is preserved as an ancient “forest court.” The church was usually quiet. A sign on the door read: “Visitors may photograph any aspect of this ancient church they desire.” A welcome change—and subjects abounded, including a pillared Jacobean chancel screen and squire’s pew, a collection of dog whips for the farmers’ unruly hounds (the locals liked to bring their dogs to church), and a splendid three-decker pulpit with canopy.
“Excuse me.”
I was admiring the fine screen carving and failed to notice a small, elderly lady in a long green coat standing by my side.
“Would you wish a dog?” She stared at me very intently as I tried to make sense of the question.
“Do you mean do I want a dog?” I asked.
She continued to study me. “He’s only little but he barks too much.”
I made some joking reference to the dog whips, which left her totally unamused.
“Would you wish a dog?” she repeated.
I hardly thought my faithful feline companion Fred would welcome a canine intruder back at home but was curious and asked her where the creature was. She gave me a puzzled look and pointed over my shoulder to a spot halfway up the nave. “He’s only little but he’s harmless.”