The Ned Wood Archive

Yeah, somebody said to me,

you know that I could fall in love

with just anyone

and I will be alone again tonight

Love

After I’d gone up to Derbyshire to do my mapping, that vision of Annie dancing round the fire stayed with me.  After the party had died down on the Sunday afternoon and the tired youth of town had at last slumped down to rest for the summer.  After I’d put Annie on the train up to Scotland and waved goodbye from the deserted platform.  And after I’d made that short, but lonely journey up to Buxton to start my 40 days in the wilderness.  After all that, Annie stayed with me, moving calmly and gently as if she was floating on the moonlight.

I’d thumbed up quickly, needing three rides to do it, but getting them easily from a couple of local farmers at first, then finally from a truck carrying roadstone which left me two or three miles from Buxton.  I walked into town past the hospital, but managed to miss the youth hostel, which is where I should have stayed and ended up finding a bed and breakfast near the football ground.

The old dear who ran the place treated me well enough.  Cooked me up a good meal that night of sausage and chips.  But we didn’t talk much – I was thinking too much about the job ahead to concentrate on what she was telling me.  But the next morning she got her next-door neighbour to drive me into my mapping area just to the east, so I could make a nice early start.

I don’t suppose you’ve ever spent a summer mapping?  It’s one of those rights of passage things that every profession has.  Sorts the men from the boys, all that jazz.  See, what you are supposed to do is choose 10 square kilometres and make a map of it.  A geological map, which means finding out what rocks are sitting underneath your 10 square kilometres.  It’s an art form.  You get to colour it in.  If you have orange for sandstone, red for granite, green for schist, purple for basalt, and pink for gneiss you could make yourself a pretty good map.  

Some wise guy decided that as I was so brilliant, I could have 10 square kilometres of Derbyshire.  Derbyshire is all limestone.  Look at a map and it’s all blue.  Sky blue for limestone.  I could borrow Dave’s Coventry City scarf, hand it in, and get a first.  Dave was on Match of the Day once.  Coventry won a game 3 or 4 nil and they showed it on TV.  After the last goal I nearly jumped out of me seat because there he was, running across the pitch.  I asked him at school on the Monday why he’d done it and he just said he’d got too excited and couldn’t control himself.  I’m not surprised.  How often do you see Coventry score four?  Anyway, I hadn’t seen Dave since I’d left school – I think he moved away or got himself locked up for running on pitches – so I couldn’t put his scarf in my report.  But, anyway, it should be easy, I thought, just to map 10 square kilometres of limestone.  And I’d stocked up on light blue crayon.

So I started at the top right hand corner of my map, on the road to Tideswell where I’d been dropped off by my landlady’s neighbour.  About 20 yards down back the way we’d come there was this massive lump of rock about 40 foot high, standing next to the road, as impassive and immovable as Shilts between the sticks.  Like massive 40 foot buddha. A grey tower of the kind they build for local government offices in places like Basingstoke and Milton Keynes.

I sat down on the short stone wall across the road from it and stared.  Behind me, the ground fell away quickly toward the river where it was lost in a forest of trees.  In front of me the giant rock buddha mocked.  How the hell do I map that?  I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do.  There had to be something I was missing.

It was like trying to write an essay and hunting for the first words.  I opened the notebook I’d brought with me to record all the wonders of Derbyshire in and managed to put down “July 5^th.  Site 1.”  But twenty, thirty minutes later I hadn’t written anything more.  Three, four, five cars passed by, but none cared to stop and help.

Eventually, after much concentrated thought, I managed to break the spell.  “July 5^th.  Site 1.  Limestone” I wrote.  Excellent.  Thank you rock buddha. That was enough for the morning.  I’d proved my powers of observation.  I got up and walked down the hill a free man, deliberately ignoring all of the other lumps of rock jostling for attention along the road.

The pubs I’d noticed on the way out were still closed.  The guy who’d brought me from Buxton had pointed out the two in the village of Miller’s Dale before he dropped me off, recommending the one by the river.  I’d still got an hour or two to kill before I could have lunch, so I walked along the river until I found a sunny slope I could lie on.  All that thinking had worn me out.

When I started to feel hungry, I strolled back to the Traveller’s Rest for lunch – that was the better pub – and had a nice long pint of beer with my sandwiches.  I carried me beer and sarnies out to sit by the river and just sat watching the water rush past.  The bank opposite was wild with yellow foxgloves, tantalisingly out of reach.  I must have sat for an hour or more just listening to the river, gazing at the river banks, and imagining all manner of creatures running in and out of the foliage watching me.  Then the guy that had given me the lift that morning drove by and spotted me.  He came over and woke me out of my reverie, offering me a ride back into Buxton, which I was too lazy to refuse.

I spent the afternoon wandering round the park in the town, watching the ducks on the pond.  There’s a glasshouse there called the Winter Gardens or something.  I spent quite a bit of time in it just being with the plants.  Places like that always cheer me up.  There’s something about being indoors with greenery, especially when it’s slightly exotic, that warms you up.  So I was feeling much better when I got back to my digs and had my sausage and chips.  The old dear joked with me and told me all these stories about folk coming up to look for gold in the hills, but only finding lead.  I was starting to warm to her, but, around nine o’clock, she made a quick phone call and said: 

“You’ll be staying at the Traveller’s now, duck.  It’ll be better for you.”  

The other thing she said before I left was.

“Don’t spend all of your time hitting rocks with that ruddy hammer.  Get out and see the country.  Enjoy yourself.”

It was a shock to think I was being turfed out, but she was right.  It was the best thing to do.  I got ferried out by her neighbour the following morning with all my stuff and, when we got to Miller’s Dale, I was shown into an unused attic room above the pub where I was expected to spend the next couple of months.  It seemed like everything was being organised for me, so I decided to get out and see the country.  Like the old dear had said, I left me hammer in that attic room and walked.

I crossed the river using the footbridge opposite the pub and walked up the other bank, over the old railway line, and on up through the ash and the elm, stepping round all sorts of beautifully delicate pink flowers as well as red and white campions and the deep dark yellow, nettle-like archangel, and listening to the cries of the warblers playing in the trees, until I came to a gigantic old disused quarry, strewn with blocks of limestone, cut from walls which enclosed me like I was a lion in a Roman amphitheatre.  The sides of the dale were steep, but the trees I’d just been walking through were now beneath me blocking out most of the slope from view, so that it seemed as if the habitation below didn’t exist.  Just like when you look at of an aeroplane window and imagine the clouds are a carpet, so it seemed with the thick mass of leaves stretching beneath me.  Opposite, beyond the tree filled valley, I could see the scar that was Monk’s Dale, cut into the chessboard of fields.  I picked my way through the grey rocks lying amid the grass on the quarry floor.  As if to compensate for the dull uniformity of the limestone blocks, strong yellow violets, deep purple and yellow pansies, and dark red helleborine sprang up in this isolated garden.  I bent down to look closely at a spotted orchid and noticed a mass of what appeared to be dark grey veins growing out of a lump of rock.  Looking even more closely I saw it was a coral, in fact now I saw that the whole quarry was alive with fossil corals.

For a moment, I thought I’d better get on with my mapping as I hadn’t opened my logbook since the previous morning.  But looking around, I soon decided to put off work for a while so I could continue exploring my new home.

I crossed to the far side and found a route up round the quarry walls.  I sat on a ledge at the quarry face and looked back at my secret garden and noticed the scent of thyme hanging in the air.  Climbing up even higher, to the top of the quarry, and looking out over Miller’s Dale, I could make out the whole of my new world.  Field upon field, each a different shape, each bordered by grey stone walls.  Lonely farms here or there.  Maybe, even, a farmer astride a tractor in the distance, moving slowly from field to field like a lazy bee in a summer garden haphazardly collecting honey.

Turning round and walking on, away from the quarry’s edge, the land spread gently out away from me to the south, almost a mirror of the farmland I had just been staring at.  Within a few yards, though, the atmosphere was different.  Instead of the sparkling breeze coming up from the dale, the air was now hot and dry.  Insects buzzed about me as the grass sizzled in the fields.  Up above, lapwings and pipits swooped, their songs less melodic than those of the warblers down in the valley.  It seemed they were angry at my disturbing their tranquillity, but in the fields either side of the track I was following, the cattle chose to ignore both them and me.     

I walked on into Priestcliffe along a narrow lane hemmed in between stone walls.  Once, a small wheatear started out from between two of the limestone blocks in the wall, but was too shy to talk and turned back on seeing me.  I walked through the small farms of Priestcliffe and then cut back on myself, skirting along under a strange kink in the valley side above Blackwell Dale.  Cattle wandered the rock-strewn fields on the other side of the road, not caring whether I was there or not.  Looping back on myself and walking north again now, I crossed over where the road twisted and dived and found myself heading down towards the swift running river whose valley I’d admired from the quarry.  When I reached the shade of the tall trees escorting the river, the temperature cooled sharply.  The air was filled with the soothing sound of rushing water.  Every few steps, the dappling of the trees in the faint wind would send a shimmer of light down onto my path before the leaves closed ranks once more.

And then I was out into a beautiful meadow full of flowers: rock rose and birdsfoot trefoil, its yellow unopened flowers looking like teeth.  A collection of stepping-stones led me across the river and I felt as if I was the only person that had ever seen this spot.  I walked on a few hundred yards further upstream and the valley sides closed in to form the breathtaking majesty of Chee Tor, a huge limestone cathedral that climbed up above the river. Another great buddha to help with my enlightenment.

On I walked, up into Wormhill, past the wells and farms, through woods of ash and sycamore, rowan and elm, across meadows filled with bright yellow globeflower and deep red cranesbill, accompanied on my journey by tipsy blue and orange tipped butterflies, over into Monk’s Dale with its own unique flora, and finally back to the pub, marvelling with every step at the beauty and variety of my new home.

I wish Annie had been with me.  She’d have loved this.