by Rob Cowen
I started carrying a notebook with me everywhere, filling its pages with my experiences. Some days I’d drop off in the grass and dream of changing shape. It wasn’t madness, it was a growing awareness born of watching and it brought with it relief and a flood of understanding: if I could dissolve myself from the human shackles of logic and reason, I thought, I might achieve an immersion, perhaps a written expression in common that goes beyond the sterility of the field guide, the dry social history or the overblown romantic eulogy, something drawn from observation, heightened awareness and sensitivity; something akin to a truer shape of the place I’d found.
Some years ago, by an arc of stone and another river, I stood outside the sealed entrance to the Chauvet cave, halfway up a cliff face in the Ardèche Gorges. Lost for millennia but rediscovered in the 1960s, it was found to contain over 400 representations dating from between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago. The mind can struggle to take in that reach of time, especially when you consider the pyramids are ‘only’ 5,000 years old. The handprints and multiple forms painted, scratched and worked within show the land outside the walls as it once was. Life, as it once was. To enter it now you need written permission from the French interior minister but its secrets can be seen and studied in the masses of high-definition photographs, film footage, interactive websites, even a full-scale, life-size and painstakingly accurate reproduction of large sections of the cave being built in a hangar nearby. Beasts massing to cross the river are represented on a section where the buttery flank of wall narrows, giving the same sense of compressing, jostling and funnelling you see with animals congregating at a water’s edge. Astoundingly beautifully rendered aurochs and rhinoceros dissolve into one another; lifelike horse heads merge perspectives. Owls, bears and panthers emerge and change shape in what is a dark, frightening and fascinating world. There are strange human forms too, all of which seem at a point of transformation. On one piece of rock is a half-human, half-animal couple: the man has the right leg and arm of a human and a buffalo head. The woman ends as lioness. They embody a now inconceivable engagement between animal, land and human, a sort of becoming-animal.1
In a similar way, it didn’t feel strange to cross between narratives in what I was writing. I felt myself moving with a sort of Chauvet cave-like focus and freedom through the creatures, characters and stories I encountered over the passage of that year. What I didn’t realise until later is that in seeking to unlock, discover and make sense of a place, I was invariably doing the same to myself. The portrait was also of me.
Once upon a time the edges were the places we knew best. They were our common ground. Times were hard and spare but the margins around homesteads, villages and towns sustained us. People grazed livestock and collected deadfall for fuel. Access and usage became enshrined as rights and recognised in law. Pigs trotted through trees during ‘pannage’ – the acorn season from Michaelmas to Martinmas – certain types of game were hunted for the table and heather and fern were cut for bedding. Mushrooms, fruits and berries would be foraged and dried for winter; honey taken from wild beehives; chestnuts hoarded, ground and stored as flour. The fringes provided playgrounds for kids and illicit bedrooms for lovers. Whether consciously or not, these spaces kept us in time and rooted to the rhythms of land and nature. Feet cloyed with clay, we oriented ourselves by rain and sun, day and night, seasons, the slow spinning of stars.
Humans are creatures of habit: we all still go to edges to get perspective, to be sustained and reborn. Recreation is still re-creation after a fashion, only now it occurs in largely virtual worlds. Clouds, hyper-real TV shows, 3D films, multiplayer games, online stores and social media networks – these are today’s areas of common ground, the terrains where people meet, work, hunt, play, learn, fall in love even. Ours is a world growing yet shrinking, connected yet isolated, all-knowing but without knowledge. It is one of breadth, shallowness and the endless swimming through cyberspace. All is speed and surface. Digging down deeper into an overlooked patch of ground, one that (in a global sense, at least) few people will ever know about and even fewer visit, felt like the antithesis to all of this. And it felt vitally important. You see, I still believe in the importance of edges. Lying just beyond our doors and fences, the enmeshed borders where human and nature collide are microcosms of our world at large, an extraordinary, exquisite world that is growing closer to the edge every day. These spaces reassert a vital truth: nature isn’t just some remote mountain or protected park. It is all around us. It is in us. It is us.
CROSSING POINT
I am dreaming of the edge-land again. It has begun to colonise my sleeping mind. Dreams take place in the midst of Scots pines and down among the cold, scrub-scattered banks. I am following a fox, a copper coat floating through the trees. He pauses. A backward glance. Incredible eyes – coronal black holes over exploding suns, that intense face; mouth curled at its edges in the white, greasepaint smile of The Joker. Another step. Am I to follow? He pads up to the lip of a rise and disappears. Suddenly I can’t move. I wake. The weak glow of a street light forms an exclamation mark on the ceiling. I dress quietly, shivering in the dark, pick up my notebook and walk out.
Modern life is such that it can be hard to see beyond the present. You think you know somewhere, but really you only know a layer, a moment. Most people don’t even notice such things, but just look around you. The moss-swollen pavement crack, the rosette of a dandelion defying a driveway or a gutter-growing sow thistle, these are glimpses of what lies beneath and beyond. The deep past and the far future.
A map drawn by Ely Hargrove in 1798 in his History of the Castle, Town and Forest of Knaresborough: with Harrogate, and Its Medicinal Waters shows the town I call home as little more than two rows of cottages. Harrogate, as the world now knows it, doesn’t yet exist. This hilly stack of roads, traffic lights and pristine flowerbeds, of imperialistic hotels, antique shops, churches and promenades, is still open land. Its cottage gardens, fields and marsh-meadows await delineation, diversion, draining and deed. The ‘medicinal’ wells that will soon lure legions of the aspiring middle classes to holiday here or, should they strike it lucky in the mills and mines, build vast villas on the woody escarpments to the south-west, are little more than mud-edged watering holes. Pigeons pick at salt accretions forming at their rims; only the informed aristocracy and gentry shoo them away to take the waters. The arches, domes and sweeping curves of Regency and Victorian architecture that will soon form the grand structures of ‘the English Spa’ lie dormant, locked in the gritstone cliffs and subterranean clay of the surrounding countryside.
Hindsight imbues the map with the feeling of land on the cusp. It has the death-stare of ground destined to be choked with high-density housing, tower blocks, supermarkets, shopping centres, warehouses and car dealerships. In a matter of decades the two little rows of cottages will bloom into an urban mass that consumes the surrounding land and villages. Eventually it will reach an ancient settlement a mile and a half to the north marked on Hargrove’s map with a green blob – a legacy of its past life as part of a royal hunting forest. Between the 1950s and 1990s, the sprawl will swallow Bilton almost entirely, appropriating its Celtic name – farmstead of ‘Bilain’ – for the suburb thrown up around the scattering of old homesteads and farms. But it will be a last meal. For now at least, Harrogate will reach no further in this direction. Bilton will become edge-land. There will be no protests, no public outcries or petitions, no organised lines of conservationists standing in front of diggers or activists hauled down from centuries-old oak trees. The ground won’t resist sublimation. After all, it has always been a place of transience and transformation. It has known innumerable beginnings and endings.
In contrast to the raw, jump-in-head-first shock I’d felt on the night of its discovery, my preliminary forays into this new-found land were to take more methodical lines. Confronted with this unknown world stripped bare by winter, I planned to navigate via its most obvious physical structures and landmarks in an effo
rt to map and taxonomise it. I felt I needed to gain a sense of its definable perimeters and the logical starting point was its western edge.
In the 1840s, Britain’s burgeoning railway network reached Harrogate. Or, more accurately, it reached its outskirts. A decree had been passed to prevent the town’s reputation for restorative waters, clean air and new regal façades from being besmirched by steam-spewing engines and dirty tracks. Instead, it was decided that the first rail link should end a mile to the east, down a hill at a cluster of old houses named after the little stream that flowed past them. Starbeck station birthed a thriving community. Rows of terraces, pubs and hotels sprang up around the marshalling yards and engine sheds. Horse-drawn coaches more aesthetically acceptable than coal-fired trains carried the great and the good up the hill to the unsoiled spa resort. Meanwhile, financiers and speculators gripped by the frenzy of nineteenth-century Railway Mania had already turned their eyes to the land beyond, prospecting its gullies and ridges for potentially lucrative routes that would lead further north.
The intention of the hastily formed Leeds and Thirsk Railway Company was clear from its name: to connect the thrusting might of an industrialised Leeds with the outlying city of Ripon and the market towns of Thirsk and Northallerton. Starbeck soon changed from terminus to thoroughfare. Track was hammered at startling speed along a contour heading north-north-west, skirting Harrogate in a sweeping curve, colluding with natural features where possible and running over earth-stacked sidings where it wasn’t. Lying on its path like a body on the tracks was Bilton.
Seated in an ornate Leeds office, no doubt with a ticking clock and glowing dog grate in the corner, a suited and bespectacled planning clerk drew a line in pencil. That was all it took. The course of the railway sliced scalpel-like through the community, straight over Bilton Lane, an old drovers’ road that had already seen 400 years of foot- and hoof-fall. The bisection created an ‘X’ of road and rail, necessitating a level crossing. Probably no more than two white-painted wooden gates with lamps on top, it was a crossing nonetheless. X marked the spot and it still does, for today this is the edge-land’s point of origin, its moment of departure from the housing estates, cul-de-sacs and crescents; it is where town becomes something else.
I’m sure such coincidences must occur frequently in the buffers between urban and rural worlds. Over time, people and landscape leave unintentional impressions on each other. Things assume significance impossible to predict or design in the moment they are conceived. Though the planning clerk is dead and the railway gone, the crossing point remains.
It was an afternoon in January and I had finished work early and returned to follow that pale seam of rubble and mud, heading north-west from where it jutted off at ninety degrees away from the divisions of tarmac, B&Q plank fencing and houses at the end of Bilton Lane. The dismantled railway line was much as I imagined it would be with rail, sleeper and shingle removed: its edges grew unchecked with bramble, dog rose and willowherb. Overshadowing it were the interwoven tangles of blackthorn, hawthorn, willow, hazel, elder and ash that become indecipherable when denuded by winter and silhouetted by a low sun. Light torched the cascades of dead grass and birds flapped between branches in shrill fly-pasts, needling the air. Everything else was still. Poised.
A long, rectangular block of masonry and concrete, green with algae, was almost entirely consumed by bare vegetation. I would find out later that this was an old raised platform constructed in the 1880s to unload the coal that supplied Harrogate’s new gas works built to the west of Bilton at New Park. Its by-products, vats of ammonia and bitumen, were ferried back here and loaded onto trains heading for Middlesbrough and the shipbuilding yards of the north-east. It’s an exchange commemorated in the bulbous liquorice residues that still dribble down the platform’s face – great black drips hanging frozen in perpetual movement.
A few steps on and the ground gave way on either side, giving the impression of being on an elevated causeway. To my left, through the bare shrubbery, the siding became a sea wall holding back waves of housing. Tidy terracotta boxes with grey roofs rolled with the landscape’s contours like a swelling ocean, its peaks and troughs awash with the debris of suburbia: wires, cars, caravans and, cresting the waves, the square tower of a church, a tree or two and a dull defiance of offices. To the north the land assumed the form of a sloping field, dipping down to a farmhouse and beck, then quickly gaining height and thickening with tawny wood. Before long both sides rose again to rejoin the old railway. The land flattened out ahead, disappearing into that curious imperceptibility of distance.
Neat staves of high-tension cables ran perpendicular overhead, east to west, carried underarm by pylons. The nearest one stamped down the brush beside the track with four barbed-wire-rimmed feet and wore a thin shawl of starlings around its shoulders. The fence of power line skirted the bulbous edge of Bilton, disappearing westward and corralling the town as it fell away downhill towards a sewage works and the old hamlet of Knox. To my left as I walked, houses petered out into a sward of common land, a grassy plateau fringed with willow wood and birch copse that accompanied the old railway onwards. A hay cropping meadow that in summer would be sewn with bird’s-foot trefoil, orchids, Welsh poppies and alive with the rhythms of crickets, it was scarred with the marks of the urban: wonky white goalposts rusting in damp air, shrubs and gorse bushes fruiting the odd multicoloured membranous bag of dog shit.
Mirroring it on my right, through a thin belt of vegetation, I recognised the meadow I had stumbled back over in darkness on New Year’s Eve. The trace of a path cut across its dead grass and disappeared into a dark intensity of trees running parallel to the old railway, 300 yards east. Seeing it from the opposite direction elicited a similar feeling as when I’d first come here; it was like there was something undisclosed in the grass, brush and branches, something alternative. But I didn’t change course. Materialising through the mist ahead was what I’d come to find – the conclusion to this western border. Amid the blur of alder and beech was a huge metal gate prickling with railings and razor wire. The old railway plunged headlong into these reinforced shutters. Walking to the side, I craned my neck, expecting to watch the track’s crumbling demise down the wooded gorge into the river. Instead, an unbroken viaduct spanned the deep, narrow valley.
In 1846, having progressed north-west half a mile from the crossing point at Bilton, the Leeds and Thirsk Railway Company faced a major obstacle. The River Nidd’s meandering course rises on the mountain flanks of Great Whernside in the Yorkshire Dales, flowing on to the River Ouse near York before winding a further fifty miles east to the Humber Estuary and, eventually, the North Sea. This immovable, looping line was also proving a problem for men working a few miles east laying track for the East & West Yorkshire Junction Railway trying to connect York to Starbeck. Simultaneously, both companies began the gargantuan task of bridging the river, one at Bilton, the other at Knaresborough. Teams of men quarried enormous gritstone slabs straight from the sides of the Nidd gorge at an impressive rate. Then disaster struck. Nearing its completion in 1848, Knaresborough’s viaduct dramatically collapsed, sending thousands of tonnes of stone, crenellated towers and carved abutments thundering into the water. Rebuilding took another three years. Today it is an iconic sight, ranked among the county’s ‘best views’, immortalised in local TV news credits and preserved in the digital repositories of countless visitors. Upstream, Bilton Viaduct suffered a different fate. Opening without incident in 1847, it towered 104 feet in height with seven arches that dutifully carried freight and people over the water for well over a century. The railway’s closure in 1964 heralded an unglamorous downfall. Unneeded, unnoticed, I found it shut-off, shackled and destitute, left to the plumes of dead Oxford ragwort and buddleia that bristled from its cracks.
Mostly we have no idea what surrounds us. We don’t care. But to me the viaduct’s scale and size seemed extraordinary, so too the sense of rectitude, the way the abandoned arches reflected nobly, silen
tly in the river. Pines and bare larch furred the far bank; wide black water flowed beneath. An irony, I suppose, but this once great crossing point was now a definitive end, closing the western border of the edge-land with steel and wire and by virtue of its sheer height above the river. There was no plaque or information board, just words scrawled over the metal shutters and mesh: ‘Kurt has Hep C’ in crude, white letters. The font was difficult to age, having an almost 1970s punkish, sectarian quality, like a Belfast wall, and yet the name and disease suggested a more modern story. In the dusk-darkening trees, this combination of viaduct and graffiti felt like a worn memorial to vanished narratives, fragments of time, lost lives. Here was an arbitrary bridge between the solid and the sensory. I thought of the men who built the viaduct clambering over its sides on ropes and wooden platforms, and of the water below sliding over slabs of rock that will outlive me. I thought of Kurt, his disgruntled lover and the randomness of what is lost and what is passed on. Of time passed and time passing.
Stupid, dangerous, but I wanted to get closer.
Manoeuvring gingerly around the railings, I shimmied up and onto the top of the three-metre-high shutters, smashing my feet against them with a loud bang, balancing precariously, a leg on either side. As the drop to the river below dizzied my vision I felt a moment of vertigo but pushed through it to tip my body over, dropping heavily onto the viaduct, heart pounding. There, from that lofty position above the slow, sliding river, I could see the shape of the edge-land from the other side. The breadth and depth of the landscape, past, present and future, era stacked on top of era. There lay the northern border, the ancient serpentine Nidd, twisting east on its course through flak-like explosions of trees. Westward, where the horizon vanished, hundreds of rooks and jackdaws were swarming rookeries, rattling, squeaking and murmuring in the furthest sepia crowns, jostling for position, bickering, fluttering up and settling again. They turned the bare branches black. I thought how each must be the offspring of the victorious or the lucky, a culmination of a bloodline dating back incalculable years. Out where the river gorge slumped into fields, the white and yellow orbs of street lights demarked the western rim of Harrogate. The sewage works was an abandoned city turning and whistling to itself. Bare sycamores towered over illuminated suburban avenues, stark against the ashen sky. Closer were beeches whose forms resembled milky streams of hearth smoke rising from cottages. A light, strong and gold, burned by the river’s edge in a clearing. In the descending gloom it passed for a great bonfire.