Ever/Moor

Here, in my pack, is a map. Old and creased and folded with my anorak. A noise. 

Good morning, Mr Magpie. How’s your wife and daughters?

I tip my hat.

A white fronted beak dipping bow and a caw, caw, cawing that could mean anything, really. An eye darts towards my ring finger then he flies away, and I check my wallet, to be safe. 

Are you walking far, with me, today?

All the way. 

You like the moor?

I love the moor. My cottage is on the edge, in a village called Bowithick. It means Budic’s house.

The wild sow’s house.

The house in the woody place. 

The marsh pushes into the edges of the garden and, in spring, tempts away the lilies with the promise of freedom. The wall is broken, and I’ll not stop them if they go.

And now you follow.

The cottage is called ‘Elowek’, the stumps of the elm grove it takes its name from still ring it. Sticking up like ill-extracted teeth. It is low and dark and empty of everything but me. I’m pleased with it. It’s a relic.

There is a beast. This moor has a beast.

Hush.

It sits on clumps of marsh grass. Its claws are briar. Its coat the fleece of sheep lost to blackthorn. 

I walk out onto the lane, then double back onto the moor. Past crows picking at lamb’s tails left from last year’s spring. Past the ruined foundations of second world war POW camps. Of first world war huts. Nothing now but shin high walls on a flood plain. Built to house the men brought here to mine that manganese needed for shells. 

Bombs born of peat bogs. 

There is an apple tree growing at the centre, shouldering apart the blackthorn to tempt with a better offer. 

A boozy, bitter fruit.

This moor is mine, this time of year. There’s nowhere like it. 

Nowhere like it.

Nowhere.

The branches of the trees are empty of leaves but heavy with lichen, it cascades from the wood in petrified waterfalls. A robin picks at frost ripe sloes that fall along the brookside. There is ice on the ground and the brook runs slowly. The water sluggish with cold. There is movement though, frenzied and whirling. A flock of goldfinch. Their noun is undeserved there is nothing charming about them. Always fighting, nitpicking, tumbling in acrobatic fisticuffs. Not a charm they are a brawl.

A brutality of goldfinch. 

I lay my bet, on the smallest bird, and turn back to the brook. Follow it upstream, through old eighteenth century mine works. Tin. Copper. 

Silver, gold. 

A hill full of dust and shining powder. I pass an adit, access to a forgotten mine. Bend to climb inside then stand. A chamber held by ancient wood. Garlanded with sleeping bats. The copper has seeped from the lodes. The wood is blue, the stone is blue the bats are leather black. 

Wander deeper in. 

Only ponies tend these workings now. Knee deep in black water tearing tufts of marsh grass free with teeth crowned with ground in tin. The banks are studded with flowers. 

Eyebright, tormentil, stitchwort, vetch. 

Redstart and wheatear digging into the tapestry earth with embroidery-hook beaks pulling tufts of coloured thread through the weave. Above a lark spirals out in song.

That’s it, eyes up, don’t look down.

I’ve walked to unsafe ground. Grass rolling beneath me like a turf sheeted waterbed. Quaking mires. There is a horse skull resting further out.

The rest of that skeleton deep inside the mud. A rider on its back, arm up and a finger length from freedom.

I won’t sink yet.

A swift retreat. A weasel watching from sturdier ground laughing the length of its body and shaking its ermine tail. It turns and runs. I walk by the water looking in and then…

The broken ridge of granite, the ripple of an otter. 

Strong and lithe and gone with the current.

The sound of clacking rocks. A stonechat unafraid to live up to its name is perched on a boulder that rocks in the wind. Underneath I find a shoulder blade, the scapula of a sheep, the sort once used for scrying. I turn it over, count the marks, the dents, the holes but I can’t see a future in it. 

Make no bones about it. Climb.

The tor rises from the moorland, a giant beneath a blanket of grass. It’s top encased in mist. Buttern Hill. 

Its name means fire. 

It has a burial mound burnt out in gothic font on the Ordnance Survey. The hill wears its past like faded tattoos. Like old wounds scabbed over. Scar tissue contour lines and rings of standing stones. Lines of granite that point the way to my destination. There are several humps along the ridgeline. They emerge one by one by the mist, then are eaten once again by it. As though the hill is sending knotted rope out, to see how fast it’s going. 

All graves. 

This whole hill a cemetery, for people so long dead their bones are moorland now. Black peat. Do they miss the light? 

They reach each dawn for it. 

Herdwick sheep traverse the stacks, longhorn and highland cattle too. I disturb a hare, snug in its form and it dashes itself against the horizon.

What does a moor beast feast on?

Wheatear

Ouzel

Lapwing

Lark

The sky is heavy with the names of birds until the wind blows them away and I am in the mist. A moment ago, I could see the sea and now I can’t find my feet. It blows in drifts. I don’t need fairies to be pisky led, the sheep bleat me astray. I hear their baa’ing echoes and the distant beat of wings. 

A tomb. 

It sits in a ring of stone and earth, two meters across. A box. 

A kist. 

A place to lay the dead, to sleep. 

A place to clean their bones. 

Who knows? 

An eternity of prehistory, nothing but a guess. Its lid is tipped back, the lacuna beneath strewn with ragged wool and compacted soil. AA batteries and a bouquet of wind dried gorse wrapped in

Bright.

Tin.

Foil. 

The stone, granite, is weather worn and tired. A cosy spot to freeze in.

Climb inside.

When I wake it is late, the sky almost gone, and I think for a second it is night. My muscles cold, my bones cold, my mind a burning ember. I hear the birds. Starlings. Thousands. Pulsing in the sky like ink in water. Like the head of a jellyfish. Their wings have polished the dull grey sky to shining constellations.

Birds land in drifts around the tor top and blacken the grass. Buttern Tor is burning.

Has burnt.

Is ripe for burning.

I can taste the earth. The stone and grit in the mud. The bitterness of reed grass. 

The sweetness of clover. 

The sweetness of clover. The whole moor turns on a flower head. 

You’ve found your place.

In a granite box?

A canker on the cheek of a giant.

Happy, now, to wait it out. 

Forever.

And ever.

And ever.