The Ned Wood Archive

Think about the places perhaps, where a young man could be

Jim and Rick have to test out the coring equipment. And because I’m the new boy, they tell me I have to go along to find out how it’s done. Turns out we’re going to Loch Arthur, so I’m up for it! Big Jim and Twelvestring Rick are the lab technicians. The folk who do all the work at the department. At least Jim does all the work. Rick does all the talking. You ask Jim for something and he’ll tell you to ask Rick. You ask Rick for something and he’ll say “Yes, I can do that.” and then get Big Jim to do it. If you ask Rick for something new or something unusual, he’ll still tell you he can do it and he’ll still get Jim to do it, but then he’ll say “That’s another string to my bow” which is why folk call him Twelvestring Rick. At least, that’s what I call him. Whatever, Jim still does the work. Jim is smaller than I am, but everyone calls him Big Jim. No exceptions.

Anyway, today we’re testing the coring equipment. One of the things the department does is research lake sediments. It’s the prof’s current favourite hobby: legging it down to southern France for the summer and splashing about on Lake Annecy or Lac du Bourget or even Lake Geneva. We get money for researching the sediments in these lakes. We can tell or, should I say, the prof and his research students can tell what the climate was back in the day, what the Earth’s magnetic field was doing back then, that sort of stuff. What you need to do is collect the mud from the bottom of the lake, take it back to Auld Reekie, and stick it in a measuring machine. In fact, the research students do all the work. The prof does all the talking.

Jim and Rick have the first job, viz collecting the mud from the bottom of the lake. They’ve got this barrel-like contraption with some sort of pneumatic attachment which they take out over the lake in a dinghy and drop to the bottom. It’s got a tough vertical tube on it which sinks into the mud to snaffle the sediments. I never paid much attention to the mechanics, not being much of an engineer, so I never knew exactly how it worked. I’m guessing the contraption sank under its own weight and then surfaced when they pumped the air out of the barrel, but I may be wrong. You have to sink fairly deep into the mud at the bottom of the lake in order to get sediments that are strong enough to hold up when you measure them. Firm like clay not semi-liquid like cement mix.

Anyway, that’s what they did in the summer and it had to work right. And being proper craftsmen, they made sure they checked their tools over and fixed them up as soon as they got back at the end of their summer trips. And that’s why they took them out and retested them in the autumn, even though the lakes up here are much colder than the south of France in summer. So we’re off to Loch Arthur, near Dumfries, for the day. There’s not much to see. It’s a fairly uneventful lake separated from the road by a thin line of trees. Guess that’s why they chose to play with the sampling tool there.

After we’ve played around on the loch, messing with the dinghy, trying out the barrel and the corer, getting a bit cold and a bit wet, drying ourselves off, cleaning everything up, and stowing it away, we drive further down the road a little and park up near some woods. Rick kicks us out for a Jimmy Riddle – “last chance before home”. There are some crags beyond the trees and loads of boulders on the ground dotted round the woods. I pick one up to find out what it is. I recognize it like an old friend. Granite. Criffel Granite. It’s what they build that part of Dumfries out of. Not that pink stuff from Shap or that stuff you get in posh kitchens. This is just black and white.

We went to Shap back when I was in sixth form and did geology. JJ took us. On the way to or back from a field trip to Ingleton. He took us everywhere. Whenever he had half a chance. Even when we weren’t on a geology field trip, he managed to get some geology in. I was also in the running team as well as doing geology A level. JJ – Mr Jones – Jim Jones – the geology master – was also in charge of cross country and athletics and had us train over at Cannock AC some evenings. He’d drive us over in the school minibus, same as he took us to our cross country meetings at the weekend. Oh, those cross country trips were boring. John Horton used to sit at the back of the minibus playing the same dreadful Led Zep tape on his tape machine all the way there and all the way back. Nothing but Black Dog and Rock and Roll.

So, one evening Jones drove us back through Cannock Chase rather than the quicker way through Chase Terrace and Burntwood. It’s his idea of a quick geology field trip, even though I’m the only one on the athletics team doing geology. We pull off just past the German war memorial so he can test me on the composition of Glacial Boulder. You know Glacial Boulder – that monument that they’ve put up to the ice age in the middle of Cannock Chase. A great big glacial erratic on a pedestal. Better than putting a soldier on a pedestal, I guess. Or a politician. Or a king. We should have more monuments to rocks, I say. Anyway, this Glacial Boulder is a salt and pepper granite: black biotite and hornblende, white plagioclase feldspar, and colourless quartz. Not pinky granite like you get for your posh kitchen counters, although there’s a bit of a pink streak vein across part of the boulder like someone’s smudged lipstick across it. And this salt and pepper stuff that’s all over these woods round Loch Arthur is the same as that Glacial Boulder back home.

And how do I know that this granite at Loch Arthur really is the same as Glacial Boulder on Cannock Chase back home? It’s the same granite because Glacial Boulder was untimely plucked from the Dumfries hillside and transported by ice down to deepest darkest Staffordshire. I know that, not because I’m the world’s expert on all the world’s different granites. It’s just that JJ planted this meme in my brain and it’ll never go away. He did this test for us in geology. He’d test us by giving us rocks to identify. He had a piece of Shap which he lobbed at the class clown, Al Scott, who is sitting right at the front, in the middle. Now as we all went somewhere near Shap on a field trip to Ingleton, everyone of us recognises Shap. It was a full toss for Scotty and he smashed it away for four. Then JJ lobbed a piece of this other granite to Doug Humphreys. A bit of a yorker. Humphreys was pretty good, so he identified the rock, but couldn’t tell JJ where it was from. So JJ said “It’s from Dumfries Humphreys” which we all thought was hilarious cos that’s what we called him: Dhumphreys, cos that’s what his name was. (Well, strictly speaking, his name was Humphreys, D, but you know what I mean.) So that’s how I remember. We all remember that lesson and that line. We always will. The more I thought about it, the more I understood that JJ asked that question deliberately. He didn’t stumble over the joke by accident, he’d picked up on our nickname for Doug and planned it. And it worked. We none of us ever forgot what the granite at Glacial Boulder on Cannock Chase looked like. The granite from that pluton near Dumfries.

Guess what. Doug Humphries took a degree in Forestry and Conservation at Bangor and ended up working for the Forestry Commission on Cannock Chase. Just so he could spend all of his time over near Glacial Boulder.

Glacial Boulder, Cannock Chase. These are the magic words, the secret password, the “Open Sesame” command that gets me into a hidden library of stories, an Aladdin’s cave of treasures, a massive chamber of secrets.

Here we are back at Glacial Boulder, a bright Tilly lamp shining through the dusk from atop the trig point. Nearby, perched on a camping table, is a calor gas stove boiling up a big dixie of soup. I’m yomping with Chopper Trueman across the heath, part of some Friday night scout wide game or hike or sommat over the Chase and we can see the finish line and the rewarding mug of soup. And, now, here’s Chopper sprinting ahead and leaping up onto the trig point and being king of the castle as per usual. However, there isn’t much more of Chopper here in this Aladdin’s cave: just this evening hike and maybe a couple more hikes from town through the villages to camp up at the Chase. The roads aren’t here nor the villages, just the names: Chorley, Farewell, Gentleshaw.

Here we are at Castle Ring, past the waterworks. Castle Ring – that old Ancient Brit fort from years and years BC, now just a couple of circular embankments since the Romans cleared out the Cornovii. Here’s the Castle Ring trig point that we all climb up to get the best views across all of creation. Chopper’s gone now, off to do some serious outward bound stuff in the army. It’s me, our kid, maybe Alex, perhaps Phil Marley or Mark Sheldon too. But, I’m the first to reach the trig point this time. And now, I’m trying to cook a tin of beans on a primus stove next to that trig point. Taking ages. The billy not getting hot enough. Too exposed? Not enough parrafin?

We often come up and camp on the Chase. Sometimes driving up with the old dears to this place Dad knows outside Rugeley where his Mam used to live. Sometimes on our own. We have parties there as kids, build dens, climb trees. Here we are camping, just me, our kid, Alex, Phil Marley, Mark Sheldon. Sitting round the campfire all night doing nothing, just chatting, trying to stay up til dawn. Here’s that old bottle dump, bits of green bottles, some not even broken, that everybody starts to collect and then gives up cos they’re all just the same. Here’s our kid walking back from the village shop in Slitting Mill with a bottle of cider under his arm being stopped by a couple of cops in a Panda. It’s only cider so they let him off. He’s 12 or so. We don’t let him hear the end of it.

There’s a right mix of places here, some clear and bright, some shrouded in mist, some hidden by shadows. Fresh green curled fern fronds slowly stretching out in spring like a young lass waking up from a good night’s kip. Here’s the brown broken bracken in autumn, harsh and scratchy on your legs like a Chopper Truman tackle. Rows of conifers in boring lines like communist armies on parade. Silver birches with white paper bark that we unwrap from the tree trunks like the wrapping from Quality Street toffees. Underneath all the vegetation just poor soil, nothing but pebbles.

Old, half-forgotten names. Wandon, Slitting Mill, Marquis’ Drive, Stile Cop, Shooting Butts. The night we walked across the Chase and built bivvies to sleep out in near Wandon. Here’s Sheldon on that trip. Mark Sheldon, the first of the gang to get the Ziggy Stardust album, trying to lead us all through the songs. Here we are spending that whole night trying to sing all of the lyrics and always going back to “Cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest”.

Here we are camping in a hut at Beau with Phil Marley, him teaching us all the rugby songs he knew. Here we are later at Beau winning the county scouts cooking competition, although it’s all down to Marley who is a brilliant cook as well as a foul mouthed troubadour.

Wow – here’s Maggie Gainsborough. I haven’t seen her since … way back! We’re walking up from Seven Springs through plantation after plantation of pines, the snow on the ground, the trees tall and silent. Now I remember. This is Christmas Day 1975, pretty much the last time I saw her. We’d been to the rugby club disco together the week before so she invited me over to have Christmas with the family. Here’s her Mom, her Dad, and her big brother. We’re having a walk to get some fresh air after what was a fairly grim but fortunately brief Christmas lunch. They know this part of the Chase well. I’ve only ever been here this once. That time with her and her family. She was part of the Rod Stewart/Rolling Stone tendency at home. All her gang were. Her year at the girls’ school. I’d given her the Faces Overtures and Beginners for Christmas. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s possibly the worst live album ever. No wonder she dumped me.

“Oh, hi Maggie. How you doing?”

“I’m OK. You?”

“Not too bad, thanks.”

I leave them and walk off back to the camp fire. There are too many musty cobwebs, ghosts, and demons in the dark corners around where she is. Back at the campfire it’s a warm summer night. I’m slumped back watching the dying embers with our kid and Alex. We’re warm. Too warm to move. We’re quiet. We’ve said everything we wanted to. We’re just watching the glow of the fire, snoozing.

“Shall we drop you off?”

It’s Rick. We’re back in Edinburgh. I’ve been asleep in the van. They take me back to Marchmont and let me off just outside the flat.