*
I’m staying with Catherine and John in Kirk Yetholm. Or is it Town Yetholm? Or perhaps even Thirlestane? In the twilight, through the car window, one place seems to bleed seamlessly into the next, but as every villager knows, at the local level these kinds of distinction are fundamental. To the Town Yetholmer, Kirk Yetholm may as well be Timbuktu, an elsewhere, a place unlike their own, where they do things differently. A cork comes out of a bottle of wine and Catherine takes an order for my breakfast and packed lunch. A conversation gets under way around the kitchen table on the relative merits of the treasure-trove system, John’s land having recently yielded up some historic artefact. I tell them a story I heard on the news, about a man with a metal detector who unearthed an exquisite Anglo-Saxon torc. He knew he had to hand it in to the authorities, but just for one night he gave the golden necklace to his wife, and she wore it for dinner. I embroider the tale, so she enters the candlelit kitchen in a flowing white gown and satin slippers, and he carves and serves the specially prepared dish of a wren inside a quail inside a guinea fowl inside a turkey inside a swan. Then they toast their good fortune with a goblet of mead, royalty for a day, king and queen of their own little world.
In the guest bedroom there’s no signal to call home, not even if I stand on a chair or lean out of the window. I get under the sheets, drift off dreaming about buried treasure and hoards of gold, then wake up realising I haven’t counted the takings from the reading. With the rest of the house asleep, I empty the sock onto the bed as quietly as I can. It’s a scene I wouldn’t want to explain, the awakened householder bursting in with his gun and his dog to discover the avaricious and perverted northerner standing there in his underpants and T-shirt above an eiderdown glittering with money. I count the coins into piles. There are notes as well, some bearing the face of Sir Walter Scott. In my notebook I write, ‘Abbotsford: Attendance, 72. Takings, £167.77.’ Then with the money scooped back into a Tesco’s carrier bag I go back to sleep, and wake up five hours later when the alarm goes off, not sure where I am and with a two-pence piece stuck to my bare thigh.
Kirk Yetholm to Uswayford
15 MILES
OS Explorer OL16 East Sheet
Thursday 8 July
The threshold of the Border Hotel, standing at one side of Kirk Yetholm’s village green, is thought of by many as the finishing line of the Pennine Way, with the hotel bar as a sort of winners’ enclosure. Some of the guide books and Pennine Way publications are a little bit snotty about Kirk Yetholm itself, but this is largely to caution the exhausted though euphoric walker who rolls up expecting to be met with congratulations and praise. Because there will be no open-armed welcome, no ticker-tape strewn from bedroom windows, no fly-past by the Red Arrows, and outside stern and vigorously applied Scottish licensing hours, not even a drink. So despite the fact that the Pennine Way is its biggest claim to fame, it’s best to assume that Kirk Yetholm won’t give a flying toss about yet another bedraggled hiker staggering into town after an epic walk. No matter how long it has taken or how painful the journey, the Pennine Way is an individual accomplishment, a form of private satisfaction, and any sense of triumph should be limited to a strictly personal level.
There is, however, a book to be signed, some sort of ledger or roll of honour, but the hotel is closed and the curtains are drawn. I knock several times, until I hear bolts sliding and the sound of a big key in an old lock. A woman in a dressing gown and with sleep in her eyes squints at me through the half-opened door.
‘I’m setting off on the Pennine Way and I’d like to sign the book,’ I say.
‘You sign it when you finish,’ she says, then closes the door.
*
There are ten of us and a dog setting off this morning. Most of them are still laughing at my rejection as we huddle for a group photograph next to the Pennine Way signpost, then next to the Pennine Way illustrated notice board, the dotted red line of the route meandering between etchings of curlews and waterfalls, with two idealised ramblers in shorts and basin cuts consulting a map. Rendered in that style and reduced to that scale, it looks like child’s play. An afternoon stroll. A walk in the park.
There’s a gentle climb along a metalled road for a mile or so, then the Way splits, a ‘High Level Route’ continuing east, and a ‘Low Level Route’ forking south. Taking ‘low’ as a measure not only of altitude but also of experience and confidence, we head south. Outside a farmstead, a lorry container emblazoned with the red, white and gold of Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer Biscuits is being utilised as a stable, and an angelic, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked boy radiates his enthusiasm and appetite for the Tons of Taste in a Tunnock’s. The cart track along the valley bottom eventually becomes a worn strip of grass as it leaves the last cattle-grid and farmyard and heads into the hills. But before it does, a car pulls up and the poet Katrina Porteous gets out. She’s brought cakes, and a great many of them. I’m only a couple of miles in and I’m stuffing myself with gingerbread and Victoria sponge. ‘A cakewalk,’ I tell everyone, rather pleased with the pun. Everything feels good. It’s a clear day, my boots are comfortable, and a couple of horses are nodding agreeably by an electric fence. Four of the party say their goodbyes and turn back. We pass a dilapidated farmhouse on the right, where a stoat hops about on a cracked lintel, unperturbed by our presence. In my part of the world, a walk in the hills is nearly always a painstaking trudge over ankle-breaking tussock-grass or through saturated peat bogs, but these Borders foothills are smooth and firm underfoot, appearing from a distance to be lawned and mown, like the emerald baize pastures of Romantic paintings. It won’t last, but for now it’s a green and pleasant land that our feet walk upon.
Katrina hasn’t just brought cakes, she has brought a memory. A number of years ago she came here with a man, and walked up through the tumbledown settlements of Old Halterburnhead and Piper’s Faulds, and stopped at a gate, between the peaks of Black Hag to the left and the Curr to the right. They sat down on the grass together – there was no one else around. Like all good poets, she knows that silence and empty space are just as important as the words. Then the man asked her a question. She doesn’t say what it was; an invitation or proposal of some kind I imagine, life-changing, dramatic, exhilarating, impossible. Her heart said yes, but her mouth said no. To which the man replied, ‘You have said NO to the universe,’ carved the word NO into the gatepost, then took up a stone and cast it away into the valley. As we pass by the gate, she hangs back, hearing the question again maybe, maybe looking for the carved word, perhaps this time saying yes. A couple of years before he died, Ted Hughes suggested I read a book by Thomas Charles Lethbridge, the Cambridge-educated archaeologist and keeper of the Anglo-Saxon antiquities at Cambridge’s Archaeological Museum, a man whose scholarly reputation wavered as his interest in ‘alternative realities’ grew. Lethbridge became a scientific experimenter, investigating aspects of the occult such as psychokinesis, divination and even ghosts. The Power of the Pendulum puts forward a theory of dowsing by means of a pendulum. In its practical application it becomes a kind of magical metal detector, the pendulum responding to metal buried in the ground, the length of the pendulum relating directly to the type of metal. He also suggested that recollections can inhabit or cling to places, and that objects can become infused with the sentiment of an experience. So we shouldn’t be surprised when we feel the atmosphere of a battlefield or graveyard, or sense the emotional charge of a chair or a knife. Or a gateway, such as the one Katrina stands at, in the distance now, triggering memories by touching the wall or ruffling the grass with her boot, or just disturbing the air with her presence.
Tim and Claire are also lagging behind, either because they’re birdwatchers or because they’re newlyweds. They catch up at the border. Not just any border, but the border of Scotland and England, and it’s somewhat disappointing that the dividing line between the two nations, across which so much blood has been spilt and so much animosity exchanged, should be little more than a woode
n ladder. We all take photographs and I try to summon up the gravitas of the occasion by standing with a foot on each side. But T. C. Lethbridge would have been disappointed, because I feel nothing except for an inflated sense of progress, i.e. it’s only day one and already I’ve walked into my own country. The dry-stone wall running south-south-east makes a semi-dignified effort as a national boundary, the air-blasted, lichen-covered grey stones holding out against the weather and the gradient. Just. But eventually the wall downgrades to an apologetic post-and-wire fence, through which anything and anyone might pass. We scramble up to the top of the Schil and find shelter from the wind behind a rocky outcrop. There’s more cake, which Claire cuts with her pocket knife.
‘It’s not going to be full of toenail clippings, is it?’ I ask, when she passes me a slice.
‘No, this is the blade I use for dissecting birds,’ she says, with a mouthful of crumbs.
Through the binoculars we watch the skies, but focus eventually on the more disturbing sight of police vehicles, sniffer dogs and armed marksmen at the bottom end of College Valley. Five days ago, Raoul Moat, recently released from Durham Prison, went on the rampage with a gun, wounding his ex-girlfriend, killing her new partner, and blinding a police officer by firing at him twice from just a few feet away, sparking what is being described as ‘Britain’s biggest ever manhunt’. Moat was last spotted near the pretty Northumberland town of Rothbury, the ‘Capital of Coquetdale’, usually a picture postcard of tea shops and hanging baskets, but today a hotbed of police activity and a media circus. There isn’t a room to be had in the town, apparently, nor a stottie left in the bakery. Even the Met have been called in, though it’s hard to imagine anywhere less metropolitan than these environs; park rangers and big-game hunters would have been a more useful conscription. Moat is said to be armed and dangerous, not to be approached under any circumstances. It seems unlikely to me that as a fugitive he would choose a well-worn section of a national trail during the summer holidays, but who am I to second-guess the moods and actions of a wanted man. Some grisly, tragic outcome feels inevitable. The binoculars go back in their case and we move on.
It tries to rain but it can’t. Cows lumber freely across the lower slopes and through high bracken, like big slow balloons, with no obvious sign of ownership or restriction. The view in every direction is delicious: a solar system of summits, majestic but benign hills overlaid with lush grass and the odd rectangle of planted conifer. And somewhat incongruously, in the far distance to the east, the sea. The higher ground, usually a morass of liquefied peat and standing water, is bone dry, courtesy of an unusually rain-free spring and hot early summer, meaning a stubbed toe is more likely than a wet sock. We make good time, springing and bouncing over the dehydrated turf, marching across the stone slabs, promenading along the two or three wooden boardwalks. Like long, low pontoon bridges spanning vanished watercourses, the planks on these boarded sections have turned bright silver through years of bleaching by stinging rain, penetrating frost, scalding wind, and, this year, relentless sunlight. In the Mountain Range Hut we have our second lunch and say hello to three men with chapped lips and sunburnt faces who are walking the other way and are almost home and dry. One writes operas. The second is retired. The third man, Nick, says, ‘Are you Simon Armitage?’ He’s read about my walk in the Huddersfield Examiner, compounding my suspicion that wherever you travel in the universe, someone from the Huddersfield diaspora will have got there first. Either we are born to travel, or we can’t bear to stop at home. Once, on a beach in Spain, I inadvertently tuned a shortwave radio to the commentary on a Huddersfield Town semi-final play-off, and ten minutes later there were eight Town fans standing around me, four of them in replica shirts. One of my party, Steve Westwood, then confirms my theory by admitting that he lives at the bottom of my road. As National Trail Officer, Steve has to walk the Pennine Way several times a year, so is acting as guide today. On his advice we don’t detour up the highest point in the Cheviots, the unimaginatively named and apparently unrewarding Cheviot, which is more of a swelling than a peak, but stick to the path as it dog-legs to the south-west, and a few hours later we’re standing at the top of Clennell Street, an ancient drove road or ‘escape route’. Many walkers, especially those on the last leg, take a deep breath and complete the twenty-seven miles from Byrness to Kirk Yetholm in one day. Less intrepid souls, like myself, need to break the journey in half, and Clennell Street is the only realistic option for getting off the hills for the night. The rest of the group say goodbye and go north to rendezvous with a Land Rover parked at Cocklawfoot, and I go south with Mel from Northumberland National Park. The forestry track drops down to Uswayford, pronounced Oozyford, which appears to be not much more than a house and a wooden chalet, no longer offering B&B. The plan is to keep walking until someone called Gareth meets us in his car. But I’m knackered, and the cinder path is hard on the feet. So I suggest we sit down at the top of Murder Cleugh (where IN 1610 ROBERT LUMSDEN KILLED ISABELLA SUDDEN according to a commemorative stone), and enjoy the view, which is at its most agreeable when a powerful estate car comes haring up the valley, rattling over the cattle-grids and kicking up dust.
Gareth is the landlord of the Rose and Thistle Inn in Alwinton, my lodgings for the night and venue for the reading, being the nearest alternative to pitching a tent and reciting poetry to a few sheep. He offers me a pint, but until I’ve broken the back of this walk I’m on the wagon. Al has kindly delivered my suitcase, which has already acquired the nickname of the Tombstone. Gareth tried to porter it earlier in the day, then quite rightly decided to leave it for me to carry upstairs to the room. It’s not easy, packing for three weeks of walking in unpredictable weather and three weeks of poetry readings to unpredictable audiences, but even so, the case is absurdly heavy, the kind of inert and uncooperative weight I associate in my mind with a dead body. I eat all the individually wrapped shortbread biscuits in the wicker basket by the mini-kettle, then go for a stroll around Alwinton. It doesn’t take long. A dozen or so houses, if that. A bridge. A river with picnic tables on the bank. Pinned on the inside of the wooden bus shelter between adverts for a barn dance in Hepple, quiz night at the Star Inn in Harbottle and details for Margaret’s Yoga Class, there’s a poster for a poetry reading. Under my mug-shot are the words, ‘Free – no need to book.’ The phone box next to the bus shelter doesn’t take actual money, only credit cards. I don’t think I’ve used a payphone since calling Dial-a-Disc in 1979. When I eventually get through to home, having followed half a dozen voice-prompts and entered several hundred numbers, it’s the answering machine.
I read in the lounge bar. Gareth has turned the jukebox off but can’t silence the fruit machine, the intermittent hum of beer coolers, the clack of pool balls or the chatter of locals in the snug. Poetry has this effect on background noise – start reading, and everything else becomes amplified. In the presence of the spoken word, the scrape of knife against plate or the opening of a packet of salted peanuts are nuclear explosions. At one point, a crying child in a Cinderella dress wanders across my line of sight. Raoul Moat’s face keeps flashing up on the muted TV screen. Two waitresses sashay between the stools and tables with dirty plates and vinegar bottles, oblivious to any element of performance, although when the younger one does finally realise what I’m doing she ‘ducks’ beneath the poem as she passes in front of me with a Cumberland sausage. Eventually, a kind of quietness settles over the proceedings. It never reaches that level of concentration where even the trees outside seem to come to the window to listen, but enough to hope that a few words or even sentences have hit home. Afterwards, a man at the bar, who insisted on sitting behind my back in the furthest corner of the pub, says, ‘You were all right but you need to speak up.’ I spread the map out on the pool table, and study tomorrow’s route with Sarah from South Shields, who has offered to sherpa the Tombstone to Byrness in the morning. Rather than driving home tonight, she is sleeping in a tent outside, just a few miles upstream from w
here an armed killer is said to be lurking. In the room I tip out the sock and make a note of the numbers. ‘Attendance: 22 [about ten of which had probably just come out for a quiet meal], takings: £31.55.’ Down at the toe end of the sock I feel the encouraging rustle of paper. But it’s something far less crude than money. It’s a poem by Katrina, called, ‘The Answer.’
I go to the phone box again but there’s no light bulb inside and outside it’s pitch black. It’s only ten o’clock but there’s nothing to do so I turn in. It’s a twin room. I take the bed next to the wall, and the Tombstone takes the one by the door.
Uswayford to Byrness
12 MILES
OS Explorer OL16 East Sheet/West
Friday 9 July
A softly spoken ranger in an impressively equipped Land Rover drives me back up to the trail. He talks with what is probably some finely nuanced accent peculiar to just a few square miles of rural Northumberland, but to me he sounds pure Geordie. Because there’s a killer on the loose his team have been advised to work in pairs, and he tells me to take care before swinging the vehicle around then accelerating back down the forestry track, stone chippings spitting and popping under the chunky tyres. Fugitive gunmen aside, I’ve been looking forward to today, to walking on my own. It’s blowy and fresh, clear and bright, and the slabbed causeway forms a very obvious and inviting path, a yellow brick road of sorts, stretching from cairn to cairn, from one peak to the next, in pretty much a straight line. An hour later, I’m lost.
Walking Home: A Poet's Journey Page 3