I look out across the fell as I smooth my scrunched clothing back into a respectable position and pick up the empty cider bottle, squeezing out the air and replacing the lid, making it easier to carry. My bum is damp from sitting in the mossy grass. We’re on a stretch of the Pennine Way close to my house on one of Alston’s two small council estates. Below us the South Tyne twists its lazy route toward Newcastle, our little town just another passing place on the journey. To the Gortex-clad tourists this is maybe an insignificant place. It’s a part of Cumbria that few know about, close to the borders with Durham and Northumberland, over a thousand feet above sea-level, well away from the picturesque lakes.
Over fifty years ago, a restless young couple travelled from London to this remote place, looking for a new life away from the grey city stench, and they made it home. They brought me with them. I was two. So, this remote Cumbrian secret, this stretch of the Pennine Way that doesn’t quite measure up to the chocolate-box ideal of the lake district, and was bypassed by Wainwright, has become part of me.
The river
The May blossom has died back on the blackthorn bushes that line Natrass gill and I know that in a few months I’ll head back down here to pick the sloes to flavour gin, cheap Christmas presents for family and friends. It’ll likely be as white with snow in November as it was with spring bloom a few short weeks ago. We get a lot of snow here in the winter, but today is glorious. Once off the bridge we sneak our way through the bushes down to the river. The Pennine Way itself runs along the top path, but we know the track along the river is the sunnier trail, so we push through the blackthorn and emerge on the bank of the South Tyne as it snakes its way along without a care in the world. There are bits of bank at this point that have disappeared altogether, during winter months when this slow-moving waterway is angrier than it is today, battering everything it touches until soil and trees and fences just give up and throw themselves into the force of the torrent, to rest eventually somewhere between here and Hexham when the wrath subsides. Today there is no ire, the river gurgles with the contentment of a baby. Still, we pick our way with care and scramble past the precarious overhang of the bank to the more solid ground beyond. An oystercatcher screeches at us, guarding the nest that I know must be hidden, invisible somewhere in the smooth pebble streak in the middle of the river. It’s wide here, but shallow, and there is an oxbow as it splits into two. We duck to avoid the low hanging branches of the goat willow and alder that line the bank on this side
An unseen woodpecker is drilling into a tree somewhere nearby, we hear it, but we can’t see it. After a minute we press on, I feel privileged to be a part of this and silently thank him as we move away.
The islands
We come out into the islands, a stretch of land where the river has, over the years, cut a few slender streams through the earth around it. This is where I played as a child, lighting fires, climbing trees, and picking harebells and scabious in the summer. Building igloos and looking out for the heron’s nest in the winter when the trees have no leaves, and a curious child can see through the bare boughs to spy on an unsuspecting bird. There are Scots pines and Sitka spruce all around these scattered land patches, I can smell the musty fly agaric and other wild fungi I don’t know the name of growing on and under them, and I get that familiar feeling of knowing that we’re nearly home. Just a few hundred yards to go, up through the Firs Wood, a steep bank of mainly beeches that was donated to the townsfolk by a generous landowner in the distant past and now frequented by local children, hikers, and dog-walkers.
As we push through the gate to the cemetery, the shortcut home, I think of old Wainwright and his love of the lake district and the Cumbrian fells. He once spent the night in Alston with a friendly family called Richardson, possibly the ancestors of my friends who bear the same name, but his path took him in from Haltwhistle, and back over Hartside to Gamblesby. I can’t help but think, as I breathe in the taste of home, that he missed the best bit.
