A WALK TO BLAWEARIE

We park the car by the farm, and start to walk up the snow covered track, past the cottages where Jane Grigson watched her grandmother bake ‘Singing Hinnies’. The snow is thick, and the way up the hill is a ribbon of ice, more a frozen stream than a path. We pass through the gate and climb upwards, with the steep, tree-topped ramparts of the Iron Age fort on our right. We pass out of the valley and out onto the flattened tops of the moorland. The snow is deep here, and the path hard to follow. Ahead of us we can see the ruins of the steading, the roofless house and barn standing in its grove of trees at the foot of the rock outcrop.

Two miles later, we are close to the Bronze Age burial cists, and she says we should make a detour to look at the ring of stones standing in the snow. It’s cold, and we hurry back to the main path. I try a short cut, but misjudge my way and sink to my waist in a deep drift. Her laughter rings out over the moor.

‘You always fall into something’ she says, remembering the midnight descent when we’d come up here to watch the stars and took the wrong way down. Somehow, I find myself back on my feet on firm snow and heading on towards the steading.

We pass the point on the track where in late spring, the young adder slithered across our path, too quick to catch on camera. We pass the stream that runs down into the valley, we can’t see it, but we hear it gurgling under the snow. Now, we have reached the steading, and enter the flat platform of land that used to be the farmyard. To our left are the ruined buildings and as we walk on over the bank where in younger days on a late summer’s evening we once made plans for a future far from Bolton, we pass the ancient plum tree whose fruit we gathered in Autumn. Ahead lies the wall of rocks that encircle the secret garden, hewn out for a Victorian farmwife all those years before, the initials of long departed farmers carved into the stones. Ahead is the flight of steps that will take us up the wall and down into the garden, and on to the alder shrouded pool beyond.

The great beech tree that, all the years we have come here, stood guardian over the entrance lies fallen in front of us. It lies half covered in snow, like the body of a slaughtered giant at Ragnarok.

It fell in the early spring gales. The winds that give this place its name finally triumphed over it, and brought it down. We found it on this year’s first visit. Her painting is its memorial.

It is a winter’s land indeed, and no sign of a spring to come. Bleak and cold like these snowy, eternally windswept hills, the future stretches before me.

She calls to me from the top of the steps to take a photograph of her, in her green coat, face pink with cold and the happiness she always feels in this place.

We move through the abandoned garden, and through the snow covered bracken towards the pool below. A perfect circle, ringed with alder saplings, it is an eerie, magical place, conjuring notions of myth and moonlight meetings. Today the pool is frozen, and she is entranced by the patterns of ice crystals forming on the reeds.

The winter days are short, the dark is falling, and we turn our steps back down the hill, back to the waiting car, and the journey back to the coast. It is New Year’s Eve

From 'A Walk to Blawearie' by David Jackson (2011)