My friend Nick is a smoker, has been ever since I’ve known him. He never leaves the house without his battered tin of Golden Virginia  and a lighter stowed in a coat pocket. It’s clear he’s an addict, but I’m not clear on what he’s addicted to. Knowing when Nick smokes, how and where, it seems to me that he doesn’t so much like or crave smoking for its own sake, more that it seems to him a logical response to particular situations and spaces.

Take for example our walk out to and along the lip of Barden Moor.

(The road less travelled. Photo: RBC)

Nick likes to puff on the move, blowing smoke out over his shoulder. He smoked his first of the day at around 9am, when we set out, and his second after lunch and a pint of Theakston’s Old Peculiar upon leaving a village pub. Two cigarettes in about five hours, one marking the start, the other half-way. When they’re spent Nick stubs and stows the butts away in a crisp packet he’s keeping in his back pocket. He’s seen David Lynch’s Public Service Announcement: Don’t Litter in NYC (or anywhere else).  

I’m waiting to see when the next smoke will be. We scramble down into a mini-gorge at the moor-edge and pause to watch the water run down to the falls; skirt a drystone wall, gummed together with softs of sphagnum moss, and pause to peer into the inky darkness of ground-level pine plantation; step out from crags of limestone, ascending to the moor’s zenith, disturbing camouflaged flocks of Grouse as we go.

At the highest point we find an OS point, a white obelisk, marking a panoramic view of the lowlands broken up by great palls of shadow and sunlight. There are stones to sit, exposed by scouring winds. This is the place.

(OS Point S5781. Photo: RBC)

Nick perches on a limestone promontory and prepares: Out comes the tin, the tobacco pouch, the lighter. The tin is opened, a filter popped from its packaging, placed between lips, a paper slipped from its letter box. 

Now, with all the parts assembled, the putting together: A pinch of tobacco, strands of black, brown and yellow leaf, heaped onto the paper, spread, bunged by the filter, a dextrous shimmy and one edge of the paper is slipped under the other. The whole thing is gummed into a white cylinder with a letter-lick of saliva. 

Then comes the smoke: Filter back between lips, hand-cupped to a wind guard, lighter lifted, sparked; a red burn, sizzle, and the first wreaths of smoke peal away from into nothingness.  

The process takes two-minutes or less, but has a mesmerising quality that makes it seem far longer. I can’t speak for Nick, of course, but even watching from the outside the succession of events draws my mind into a space of concentration and rootedness. When I look up the already stunning view out over the lowlands appears wider, more vivid. I feel my senses have been sharpened, my noticing power enhanced.

(Sun-break over dark moor from Barden. Photo: RBC)

It is the nature of ritual practices to induce states of heightened awareness, and rolling and smoking a cigarette is nothing if not ritualistic. Smoking, as practiced by Nick, means engaging in a deliberate, oft repeated process that induces a contemplative mindset. This practice subsequently creates temporal space, the time in which the cigarette is smoked, that enables one to stop and engage with the world from that contemplative space, to look more deeply and, perhaps, see with greater clarity for a short while.

As Nick puffs away on his perch, he has a certain beatific look about him. Like he knows something I don’t. It could be the smoking, but then again it could be the great bushy beard.

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Moor.

The word conjures others- bleak, desolate, barren- and visions of shelterless wastelands smudged out of grey.

These established mental shapes have become complicit in our interpreting moors as a kind of terra nullius (non-place or empty land). This leaves these landscapes vulnerable to misapprehension. Unexplored and unappreciated they become blank canvases for the imposition of widely-held prejudices and pseudo-moral judgement in our culture.

In the popular imagination, moors have become the sensationally immoral back drop for evil doings. They are bed clothes for bodies violently dispatched; hiding places for villains, caked in mud and malice; hunting grounds for the great flame-eyed beasts of victorian fable.

The idea that a place can be in and of itself be bad, or good, does not stand up to any kind of examination. But even if we allowed ourselves, as we do, to equate that which is barren with ‘bad’ and that which is abundant with ‘good’, we would be wrong to equate moors with the bad on account of their being places of grim nothingness.

As Robert MacFarlane points out in Landmarks, his most recent book, our prejudices against moorlands are born out of ignorance, not knowledge. In doing so he highlights a central paradox of the ‘information age’: As institutions and professionals proclaim greater knowledge of ecology, gained and shared through virtual means, our ecological literacy as peoples, acquired through our lived-experience of nature over time, is in free-fall. Into the gaps left by our lost experience, delusions like those about moorlands as empty ‘non-places’, can rush in, fatally colouring our perceptions.

In 2014 a pro-fracking advocate said Britons needn’t worry about the controversial energy technology as it would only be operationalised in ‘the desolate north’ of the country, where moors adorn the country’s throat. As has happened elsewhere, here the myth of terra nullius is operationalised as a precursor to expropriation and destruction. The disappearance of moor-knowledge, and with it an appreciation of this landscape’s own special abundance, thus poses a real existential threat to these special places.

In Landmarks MacFarlane stays and speaks with friends who still work with and rely upon moors for their subsistence, earnings and enchantment. Gathering a ‘word-hoard’ of ultra-specific terms and toponyms related to moorland, he demonstrates the connection of labour, love and lived-experience between these people and the moors. This relationship of intense engagement makes visible an unexpected diversity of flora, fauna, mood, movement and magic.

teine biorach   flame or will-o’-the-wisp that runs on top of the heather when the moor is burnt in summertime. Gaelic

slunk  a muddy or marshy place, a miry hollow. Scots

rionnach maoim   shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day. Gaelic

eit    the practice of setting quartz stones in moorland streams so that they sparkle in moonlight and attract salmon to them in late-summer. Isle of Lewis

Having read the passages in Macfarlane’s book devoted to moors, bogs and other maligned spaces, I walked the peaks and troughs of Barden Moor with a keener eye than usual. Alert to diversity rather than lazily observing desolation, I found the moor to be overflowing with unexpected rewards.

If I were a botanist I am sure my jotted list of plant species would be more impressive, but the presence of crow berry, whortle berry, harebells and Devil’s-bit scabious to go with the ubiquitous heather and bracken is enough to immediately disperse stereotypes of barren scrubland. The gwirring, camouflaged leks of grouse and partridge, the hover of the kestrel above and tsee-ing flocks of meadow pippits in between provide yet more evidence of abundance.

No list of names can conjure the full sensory joy of walking on the moor, however, and I can’t write it adequately. It is an intense place. The wind pulls fresh air into lungs, the ground sucks at the feet in boggy bits whilst heather bounces the step in others, vein-like drystone walls embroider the landscape, and from a hawk-like vantage the sunburst over the lowlands takes on a mythic aspect. Everything is simply as it is, insistently itself. Moor-ish.

If I were able to walk the moor daily, rather than for a few hours on one day in a week belonging to month that lies within a single season, who knows what other enchantments it would offer up to the senses. It is a tantalising thought, its own reason for our returning.

(Right to Malham Cove, North Yorkshire. Photo: RBC)

From the jackdaws that nested in the chimney of my childhood home, to the buzzards that mythologically embrace British skies, I never tire of watching birds. No matter how common they are said to be, each species, each bird, is feathered in its own enchanting mysteries.

That said, there is something particularly special about first encountering a bird that, up until the point of direct experience, has existed only in the clumsy, broad descriptions held in the pages of the this-or-that Handbook of British Birds.

So it is with Dippers (Cinclus cinclus).

Before my recent visit to the North Yorkshire moors with my good friend and staunch Yorkshireman, Nick, I had encountered a Dipper just once before. Then, I had been walking in Slovenija’s Vintgar Gorge, immersed in the coolness of the water-hollowed valley on a scorching midsummer’s day. Perched dip-dipping on the edge of the glacial river the white-bibbed bird had caught my eye. The rocks seemed to yield its busy little life like a golden fleck of mica; a key to the depths of the gorge’s secretive beauty.

(Vintgar Gorge, Slovenija. Photo: RBC)

In uncannily similar circumstances, it took no more than five minutes walking from Malham village for the Dipper and I to be reacquainted. Taking the narrow footpath from the road down past the dry-stone of Anglo-Saxon rigs, we followed the gin-clear waters of Malham Beck along the valley floor. Beneath an Ash, ploughing a furrow through the swift silver of the stream, head under, blue back appearing almost scaled, was the Dipper.

Hopping out onto a rock the little bird cast about over the water with an angler’s poise, providing a dazzling focal point, a whetstone for wonder. As it had in Vintgar, the attention demanded by the enigmatic Dipper helped us make the subtle transition from looking to seeing. Offering an enchanted ‘in’, it brought the landscape to life in its finest details and broadest brushstrokes.

Rooks dived and cackled, a kestrel quivered pale-winged overhead, water, wind and leaves combined their dialects to something approaching a praise-song of constant, quivering melodies.

Ahead of us, along the stream and above the grove of yellow-leaved ashes, the sheer limestone walls of Malham Cove towered. The bare-faced bole of an iceage waterfall over one-hundred feet high, the Cove possesses a sudden, austere beauty with the power to stretch mind and language out of shape.

Our human tendency when confronted by such natural wonders is to become adjectival. We describe them as majestic, magnificent, wonderful. Gesturing at their multidimensional vastness we stretch for some symbolisation, for a way to capture what we see and draw it into the comfort of intellect and comprehension; bringing it under our spell, not vice-versa.

But the truth is that no term, no word or sentence, can wrap itself around such landscapes and our disconcerting experience of them. These places are too much themselves, embodying incomprehensible stretches of time and incident. Their affect, as particular as the pattern on a Dipper’s flight feathers, holds us rapt.

Poetry and perhaps the visual arts can throw bridge-like shapes towards describing these landscapes, but still they fall short. At best they accentuate one particularity or aspect beautifully enough to give us a flash of being in place, but their true value is in evoking the presence of what is not and cannot be known or expressed, and that is mysterious.

(Malham Cove by Arthur Streeton circa 1911.)

Stories of creation and origin kindled in the collective imagination of peoples often seek to evoke a landscape, or explain its features, or extoll the way it rises up in and affects us.

Here the giant fell teeth-first and bit a great half-moon from the land. Hare made his first great burrow open to the sky in the shape of his own back in the days before man. Where the water falls from the sky we were formed from the growing stones.

Minds and tongues mould stories from the bodily features of the land. All story is first an unspoken expression of Earth and what we make is imperfect.

I don’t know of any such creation stories associated with Malham. Any that existed are by now likely extinct or hopelessly eroded compared those that flowed from the tongues of our ancestors who first trod here some 10,000 years ago to fish in the dark Tarn above the cove, hunt deer and wildfowl.

Parts of Malham Cove’s story are, however, written in rock and root for those who can read it, a gift the studies of geology, paleontology and archaeology have refined. They give us a fresh insight into the scale of the temporal drama that has unfolded here.

350 million years ago, the limestone walls and pavements that make up the Cove’s body today were living, breathing denizens of a great shallow sea. Tropical species of fish and coral- Brachiopods, Crinoids, Goniatites- swam, clung or drifted over what we now call Yorkshire. Slowly their foundational deaths built up the geology of the landscape we know now, concentrating and hardening into strata of stone under the pressure of millennia.

Millions of years later, that landscape was colonised by the blue-white glaciers of successive ice ages, inching inexorably down from the North. The slow process of their freezing and melting exposed and gouged the limestone, creating the cracks or ‘grykes’ in the pavements and the vast falls of Malham Cove; a Niagara of roaring spray circa 14,000 BC.

(Grykes in the limestone ‘pavement’ above the cove wall. Photo: RBC)

Our ancestors won’t have witnessed the most dramatic of those melts, the cold and ice kept them back. But we know they followed the receding ice north, leaving trails of bone needles, flaked flint, chert and song-lines before arriving in the mesolithic as transient hunter-fishers roaming between the sea and the hinterland. Evidence of their liths and camps adds yet another layer to the strata of dramas that constitute this extraordinary inland cove.

The bright dart of a particular Dipper seering over Malham Beck today is just the latest act in the Cove’s unending dance, but, like a great poem, it evokes the mystery of the whole. Our ability to be overwhelmed and enchanted by the the land’s invitation, to let it draw us in, is our most precious ability as a species.

As my brother traverses northern India by train, I set out for a long weekend rambling in the North Yorkshire moors with a friend to soothe my own wanderlust. As always, walking the wilds of these beautiful isles restored in me a keen awareness of the wonder to be found right on our doorsteps here in the UK. 

Adventure is in the eye of the beholder. 

Kit-list for North Yorks

Wearing:
Socks, thick woollen  
Polperro gansey 
Coventry Eight cap
Waterproof mac
Trail trousers, herring bone barely worn
T-shirt
Sensible shoes

Seeing:
Binoculars
Landmarks, by Robert MacFarlane
        books = other people’s eyes
Pipe, Buiz Choquin
Matches, 24 left 2 already burnt,
       bought from a flea market in Ljublijana
Tobacco, rough cut
        smoking = sitting still, taking notice

Recording:
Notebook
      black leather, ¾ full
Stationary roll
Pockets
      to brim with feathers, heathers, treasures

Other essentials:
Water canteen
Chocolate
Money
Rucksack.