Well. It didn’t work out quite as I’d planned. I was meant to be walking Lady Anne’s Way from Skipton to Hawes in Wensleydale. Only I couldn’t get the logistics to stack up. Three days of walking could have got me there; but no further, as I’d miss the connections to get me home in time. Or I could have driven to Hawes and walked South, abandoning my car. And then the B&Bs were in the wrong places. And I’d agreed to take the boys and to Brimham Rocks. We had a great time, but I lost a day’s walking. It just wasn’t working out.
Still, I’d arranged to be on retreat. So on retreat I would be. I rang up Parcevall Hall, the diocesan Retreat house: I’d been many times, it was very familiar. Too familiar? Perhaps that was why I hadn’t thought of them. They were so helpful. I drove up later that day.
Today I went walking. There and back. 11 miles of there and back. Grassington to Kettlewell. (And back.) I have really enjoyed walking there, where there leads on to another there, and the countryside changes imperceptibly and inexorably and I look back at how far I have come simply by placing one foot after another. There is real purpose in this kind of walking. It helps me get over my initial inertia and reluctance: if I don’t walk I will have nowhere to sleep that night. There and back is different. It is undoing the hard graft of getting there, it is unstitching the tapestry. It is a different discipline and a different learning. But it is still walking in the deep countryside, it is still blowing the dust and cobwebs from my soul, still reminding my body that it needs this kind of exercise every now and again. So I accept its challenge, buy a couple of walking sticks, and stride out on the Dales Way, OS map in hand.
The Yorkshire Dales is a desert. It’s beautiful: an austere landscape of green fields intersected by a maze of grey limestone walls. The land mirrors the immense clouds hurtling across the heavens, with shadows or drizzle. But it is a desert nonetheless. Immense forces of ice may have carved out these dales in the last ice age, but the biggest impact upon the land we now see is much more subtle. It’s going on all around us. Sheep eating grass. 800 years of ovine munchers has destroyed the ancient woodlands that would have once covered these bald hills. And we barely perceive it. Sheep have become a natural and intrinsic part of The Yorkshire Dales. They are embedded in the landscape. When the sheep were slaughtered during the dreadful Foot and Mouth epidemic here over ten years ago the eeriest sound was the absence of bleating. We have shaped the land here. For good or ill humankind creates the world we all live in by a myriad of personal choices. Like grazing sheep upon the fells.
When I reached Kettlewell I headed off in search of a Tea Room. It was crowded with children and their parents on half-term holiday, and cyclists. Clad in brightly coloured cycling lycra, old and young alike exuding health and wellbeing, all tucking into their cream scones. The Tour de France has done much for tourism in the Dales. But it’s the interplay of humanity that really strikes me. A young couple discuss their cycling strategy and perhaps their relationship. He says he was shielding her from the wind, she tells him she’s a faster cyclist than he is and doesn’t like working as a team. On another table a little child is the focus of her parent’s attention. A group of older women are discussing weddings. One table is silent. Whilst round the corner children play noisily, and a mother tries to keep them engaged. And the service is slow, very very slow.
I head back out into the wind, and retrace my steps.
May 28th 2015
pilgrimvicar 