by Ian Crofton
In order to avoid undue fatigue, and indeed to render walking in this particular part of the country anything approaching a pleasurable experience, it is advisable to find a sheep-track and keep to it as far as possible . . . otherwise after a short time even those accustomed to hill-climbing will become exhausted . . . To those who intend to explore this stretch (which should be undertaken only by those stout of limb) the practice is to be commended of finding these tracks and keeping one’s eyes usually on the ground, though now and then ahead for varying distances.
The theory was fine. However, my particular sheep path soon turned into a drainage ditch.
At last I came to the point where the Border makes a sudden and arbitrary right-angled turn and heads briefly southeastward, back into the Kielder Forest. This was my highest point that day, somewhere around 1,500 feet.
I turned round to look back at the way I’d come. Far to the southwest, beyond the moor and the forest, glinting pale gold, lay the Solway Firth. It had taken me two and a half days’ hard walking to get from there to here. To the south and southeast lay a vast area of forest, and, beyond that, the rolling hills and farmland of Northumberland. There was a great sense of space, of freedom, up there on the Larriston Fells. Even with the wall and the fence by my side I felt I’d made a transition from the bounded to the unbounded. I was unrestrained by roads, or tracks, or even paths. I was far removed from the comforts and limits of civilization. It was just me and the unordered, arbitrary surface of the earth itself, a harsh landscape that offered an infinity of choices – all of them hard.
Somewhere round where the Border abruptly changes direction once stood the ‘Grey Lads’. Various such lads are found across Cumbria. They are not, as you might have expected, prehistoric standing stones – like Long Meg and Her Daughters near Penrith or the Nine Ladies near Bakewell. These ‘lads’ are neither young men nor monoliths but piles of stones. The word derives from Anglo-Saxon hlaed or Old Norse hlad, both meaning ‘heap’.
I found no heaps, only the finely crafted drystone dike that here marks the Border. Perhaps the Grey Lads had undergone a metamorphosis, dismantled and then reordered into a wall – just one more step in the story of these blocks of pale grey sandstone. They’d once been sand, deposited by ancient rivers more than 300 million years ago and then pressed and pressed by the weight of the sediments above into the hard rock we know today. The sand that had been compressed into the stone had once itself been solid rock, but over time the rock had been cracked and weathered and washed into tiny fragments. Over eons to come, the blocks that make up – for now – this Border wall will be ground down once more into tiny particles, until the whole cycle starts again. By then, humans and their walls and their boundaries will long have crumbled to dust.
The map marks a path alongside this wall. I tried both sides, but both sides were pathless, and the rough going continued. Further down the slope, though, I thought I could see what looked like a proper path. It looked recent, well maintained, shaped into pleasing curves. I presumed it had been built for mountain-bikers. I couldn’t wait to get on it.
When I reached the trail I felt like a sailor who’s become so used to the motion of the waves that when he steps onto dry land he can’t find his feet. I soon adjusted, and strode out downhill. The trail ran parallel to the Border. I hoped it continued to do so, because the alternative was more tussocky horror. After a while the path left the open hillside and plunged under the forest canopy. It was peaceful in the dappled shade, with the wind now only a whisper in the tops of the trees. On either side there were deep ditches dripping with ruby, emerald and purple mosses, lush and treacherous.
I checked my compass. The trail was heading east, the same direction as the Border. I was encouraged, but told myself not to raise my hopes. They’d just be dashed.
A little further on the trail was intersected by a track. I looked at my map. Nothing seemed to match. In Forestry Commission land the tracks marked on the map are not always there on the ground. And often on the ground there are tracks that aren’t marked on the map, and they rarely go where you want them to go.
At the intersection there was a flurry of signage. Suddenly I was back in the world of direction and advice, back into the territory of the bounded.
One sign gave emergency information, in case you and your mountain bike should inadvertently part company. The nearest public phone was ‘15 km’ away, the sign advised, and the nearest place to get a mobile phone signal was a kilometre beyond that. And you’d have to go all the way to Hexham to find an A&E willing to put you back together. Another sign told bikers they were about to embark on the Bloody Bush Mountain Bike Trail. It is graded Red, and the sign asks, ‘Is This For You?’ My answer was ‘No’. I was heading in the opposite direction. Another sign told me the trail I wanted was called Borderline. The significance of the name took a while to sink in. It follows the Border . . . and it’s so hard that it’s borderline. Ah yes.
Maybe my brain was slow from dehydration. I’d just finished the last of my two litres of water, and I didn’t fancy the stuff in the drainage ditches beside the trail. The water was stagnant and covered with an oily sheen. Not even my chlorine dioxide tablets could cope with that.
I checked the map, looking for places where I might refill my bottles. A bit further down the Border there was Birkey Sike, and then the Duke’s Well, and Bell’s Burn. I’d soon be able to quench my thirst.
After a while the trail mounted a winding wooden causeway. Apparently bikers call this ‘north shore’. As it was made for bikes, the slats were wide apart and I had to keep my eyes on my feet to avoid a trip. I checked my compass again. The north shore was taking me a bit more to the southeast than I would have liked. There was such thick forest on all sides that I wasn’t quite sure where the Border line was any more. Then the north shore turned a bit more northward, which was more like the direction I wanted to be going in. I trudged on as the trail meandered through the densest forest I’d so far travelled through.
After a while it became clear that the net direction of the north shore was in fact southward, in diametrically the opposite direction to the Border. A sign had advised me that ‘This north shore allows access across some of the deepest peats in Kielder Water and Forest Park.’ So there I was, in the midst of the deepest peats and the densest forest, stuck on the wrong route. I told myself I would be mad to abandon the north shore and attempt a beeline for the Border. It would be like trying to negotiate the barbed wire and mud-filled craters of Passchendaele (although without the machine-gun fire and the gas). I just hoped that the trail wasn’t going to take me too far out of my way – to Kielder Village, for example. Though there is a pub there, I comforted myself.
I also told myself that this whole area was still marked as ‘Disputed Ground’ in James Duncan’s 1837 map, so a bit of deviationism might not be too inappropriate from a historical point of view. The Border as now marked along this section is some way from the watershed, and doesn’t follow any natural boundary. Logan Mack describes it as ‘an extraordinary detour’. The obvious line is further west, from Larriston Fells down past Currick, Green Craig, Rampy Sikes and Foulmire Heights. The ground under my feet now offered a damn sight better going than the horror that had been Hobbs’ Flow, and the horror that would have no doubt awaited me on Foulmire Heights, if the name was any clue. In such a fashion I justified my divergence from the path of righteousness.
It was to turn into an afternoon of self-deception.
The errors of my ways became only too apparent when I came to an extensive clearing of virgin heather moor. This, I established from the map, was Purdom Pikes, a third of a mile east of the Border. And I was on the far side of the clearing, even further from where I should have been. Far beneath me in the distance I could see the blue expanse of Kielder Water, dotted with a few white sails. I imagined myself out there on the water, trimming my sail to the wind, following whichever course took my fancy. Instead, I told myself, you’re stuck up he
re with this daft project which is all going belly-up cos you’ve tried to match the cartography to your convenience.
Then I heard a cuckoo calling.
Excited, I got out my Dictaphone. The previous evening, just as I was nodding off, I’d heard a cuckoo, but had been too sleepy to record it. Now the cuckoo of Kielder was coming over loud and clear.
It called again. And again.
Then an icicle of doubt slid down my back. Wasn’t it just perhaps a little too loud and clear and regular, this cuckoo?
Cuckoo, it said. Cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo.
Here I was in the wilderness, with no soul seen since Bloody Bush, and some joker was pretending to be a cuckoo. Cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo. Maybe deep in the forest on the far side of Purdom Pikes a biker had a bike with a bell that went cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo?
As if in answer to my question, I heard once more the cry, cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo.
So not only had I been lured away from the Border by the duplicitous north shore. Now I was being mocked by a Mock Cuckoo.
The trail swung this way and that, very gradually making its way downhill but in no very determinate direction. There were some fine swoops and dips. They would have been especially fine if I’d been on a bike. Indeed, I made this point to the only person I met that afternoon. He was from the Reivers Mountain Bike Club, based in Morpeth, and he’d had a hand in designing these Kielder trails, he told me. The idea, he said, was to pack as much biking as possible into the limited ground available. I said I thought it would make a fantastic ride. But I had only my feet between me and the ground, and my agenda was to get from here to there as directly as I could. So it was all proving rather tiresome. We both laughed, then he jumped on his bike and sped effortlessly downhill.
And I still had found no water.
Straight ahead, across the valley in which the village of Kielder nestles, I could see Deadwater Fell with its clusters of antennae. It’s an MoD radar installation controlling the local airspace, and on weekdays these hills shake with the sound of low-flying NATO jets. Beyond Deadwater Fell lay the flat top of Peel Fell. My plan for the day had been to continue over Peel Fell and make camp by the Kielder Stone, in a dip on the far side of the summit. It was only twenty past four. I was still telling myself I could make it. But it looked a long way away. Especially if the trail was going to go on zigzagging in this languorous fashion.
It did. At one point I found myself heading for something signposted as ‘Purdom’s Plunge’. I didn’t like the sound of that at all. Plunging was not part of my game plan for the day. So I was relieved when I encountered another sign that said ‘Escape to Kielder’.
I was even more relieved when I found a trickle of water coming out of a culvert. It took five minutes to fill up a litre bottle, and another ten for the chlorine dioxide to do its work. But the water was worth the wait. As I lay back in the dappled sunlight of the late afternoon and quenched my thirst, I examined my options. I concluded that the Kielder Stone was not a realistic objective for the evening. Instead, I found on the map a little patch of deciduous woodland on Deadwater Rigg, bang on the Border and two or three hours closer than the Kielder Stone. There were springs marked nearby. It would be a good place to spend the night, I decided. And, having made that decision, I felt a further burst of relief.
Perversely, the trail – ostensibly an escape to Kielder Village – started to go uphill. My feelings of exasperation returned.
After a time I found myself approaching a strange-looking building. It stood on a rocky knoll called Cat Cairn. The structure was round and roofless, with drystone walls capped by white concrete. It reminded me of a broch, one of those ancient Iron Age towers that dot Scotland’s northern seaboard. Or perhaps a Mycenaean citadel louring over the plains of the Peloponnese. But I knew exactly what it was, and hadn’t expected to encounter it. It was the Kielder Skyspace. If I’d stuck to the Border, I would have missed it.
I entered through a white circular tunnel. Inside, every small sound reverberated. The centre of the floor was a circle of grey gravel, and round the walls ran a continuous white bench. Through the large circular hole in the ceiling a splash of light was projected onto the side wall in the shape of an ellipse.
Then you look up and see, through the circle of space in the roof, the sky.
It was like looking at our Earth, or perhaps another planet – Neptune, Uranus – from a high orbit. All you could see was a circle of blue, with flickers of white curling round it.
The Skyspace takes you into a different place. The world is not the same from inside it, and neither are you. It would be the place to come if you were troubled.
But I had more miles to cover before I slept, so I abandoned my meditations and took to the trail once more. As I headed down into the darkening forest I was mindful that this area had once been a sanctuary for ‘wulcats’. I hoped no wildcat was going to spring onto my neck as I passed through the dense firs. I recalled with a shiver the lines of the Renaissance makar Gilbert Hay:
Thare wyld cattis ar grete as wolffis ar
With ougly ene and tuskis fer scherpare . . .
The forest floor was lightened here and there with the delicate white flowers of wood sorrel. But the only animals I spotted were scores of black slugs making their sluglike way along the trail. Who knows what business they were intent on. Perhaps they were after a chomp on the sorrel’s tangy trefoils.
I came at last to tarmac road, and the whiff of burnt petrol. The road took me in a few minutes to Kielder. The village is still a remote place, but not as utterly out of the way as it was in the middle of the eighteenth century when the then Duke of Northumberland described the inhabitants as ‘all quite wild’. His Grace continued:
The women had no other dress than a bedgown and petticoat. The men were savage and could hardly be brought to rise from the heath, either from sullenness or fear. They sung a wild tune the burden of which was ‘Ourina, Ourina, Ourina’. The females sang, the men danced round and at a certain part of the tune they drew their dirks which they always wore.
Today Kielder is more hospitable. I contemplated the many temptations the village has to offer: the hostel at Butteryhaugh, the campsite at Catcleugh, the Anglers Arms with its ‘traditional freshly cooked British fayre’.
But what I needed above all was water. I tried the petrol station. There was a man filling his four-by-four. I asked him whether there was a tap. He said there wasn’t. We fell to chatting. Although he was originally from Derbyshire, he’d discovered this place while living in Newcastle and decided to settle here, a few miles north of the village, just short of the Scottish Border. ‘That is the beauty of it,’ he said. ‘People get to Kielder then turn round, don’t explore further.’ He told me his name was Jonathan.
I asked Jonathan if he could give me a lift up the road to Deadwater. He said of course. As I’d put in a lot of extra unintended miles during the course of the day, I didn’t feel I was cheating. I was merely being restored by four-by-four to my proper place on the Border.
I told Jonathan I was thinking about camping on Deadwater Rigg. ‘I had a chap calling by,’ he told me, ‘wanting to wild camp, but wasn’t sure if he could. I said you can walk and camp anywhere you like on the Scottish side. But he wasn’t sure on it. Don’t know what he ended up doing.’
Jonathan dropped me off at Deadwater Farm. ‘If you go to the farmhouse, Tony the farmer’s up there, and he’ll sort you out with some water. Ask him where the source of the Tyne is as well. Tell him Jonathan says.’
It turned out that there’d been some experts from Newcastle University had recently decided that the true source of the North Tyne lay somewhere on the flanks of Peel Fell above Deadwater Farm. There was some talk of erecting a monolith to mark the spot. They’d need a helicopter to put it in place.
Sheila, the farmer’s wife, was taken aback to find a vagabond on her doorstep. But when I explained I was just after some water and would be on my way, she smiled, and took my bottles to fill them. The
family were eating round the table, so I didn’t want to linger. Their Jack Russell ran round my ankles, barking. Sheila laughed, said the dog was confused by my big blue rucksack. Apparently I wasn’t quite human, and therefore needed a good barking at. I let myself be seen off. I never did get to discuss the source of the Tyne. But I’d got my water.
I walked a few hundred yards back down the road towards Kielder, looking for the right-of-way marked on the map. It should have taken me straight up to Deadwater Rigg. But where the path should have been, it wasn’t. I followed its theoretical line up the edge of the Deadwater Plantation, squelching through bog, squeezing under low branches, ducking my head down to avoid putting an eye out. It was hopeless. So I made a break for the open hillside to the west, because whatever path there may once have been was now completely overgrown. The only sign of human passing was an old camping chair lying on its side, covered in mildew. It didn’t explain what it was doing there.
Straddling two barbed-wire fences, I escaped from the forest, and then crossed the ditch of the Deadwater Burn.
I don’t quite know why ‘Deadwater’. In The Romance of Northumberland (1908), A.G. Bradley tells us that in a ‘wild hollow’ under the English slope of Peel Fell ‘the North Tyne springs from peat mosses, and on its way down lingers silently for a time in a rushy flat known to the borderers as Deadwater, a name now embalmed in the timetables of the North British Railway’. The implication here is that ‘Deadwater’ refers to the marshy floor of the valley (called ‘Ye Red Mosse’ in a survey of 1604), where the various streams that come down from the fells merge and mingle and lose their identity in the general wetness, before dribbling out the southeastern end of the moss as the River North Tyne. It’s not long before it too becomes lost in Kielder Water, the largest artificial lake in Britain. The marshes of Deadwater, and in particular the burns called Rashy Sike and Dead Sike, also form the source of the Liddel. The latter flows west towards the Solway, while the Tyne goes east to the North Sea. So at Deadwater I was at the middle of the Border, at least in watershed terms.