Continuing our old WARTS walk reports, this is one of The Colonel’s from 2018. Her writing skills and vocabulary are much more advanced than my own, and her reports tend to describe the walk itself rather than drifting into personal abuse, as mine tend to do. Though, should you find yourself in her company, as friend or patient, you’ll soon learn she takes no prisoners.
The Colonel once famously told a patient, who was whinging too much, to “look on the bright side, you should be dead already”. Recently, one very pleasant, friendly, older gentleman and fellow WARTS member was showing off his expensive new walking boots. The Colonel’s response was: “They should see you out then.” Bless her, we wouldn’t have it any other way.
One misty November morning …
The conditions didn’t bode well as the usual suspects set off, without one of our number, in the thick mist and damp. A dull November morning, mud on the tracks, soon on our boots, and a slice of wind cutting across the manicured Memorial Park bowling green. A man out walking a dog, head down into the grey, glances at the group, shrugs, before heading back to the car park.
But the tales keep us going, as we top the Blackburn Valley, of dairy farms and suicides, and, past the fragile woods and sudden quarries, we have the company of dogs and owners across a golf course empty of sport. We go down a slope to a mill being nursed into use again, and continue along one side of the beck – footpath blocked – then the other to pass another mill site transformed into a formless factory.
Round here the farms have a functional look, slurry and muck and concrete yards, great slabs of it, and buried deep an older building, unloved and neglected. Jersey cattle, ripening with next spring’s calves, chew silage and raise heavy heads slowly over the rail, asking the question.
The meaning of winter
Then a vast viaduct, a cathedral to steam, and soon we’re away, up and down, to the shy becks running below, the thrum of the motorway, and drift mines hidden in thickets of holly and birch. A hard living to be had here, tales of children barefoot and clemmed, hurriers whose testimony changed the law back before railways, bringing clean water and a chance to live past thirty.
Jagger Green’s a still place now but was once a site of pilgrimage to St Helen’s Well, the source of the name Holywell lower down the valley. Our final switchback takes us down into elaborate lanes lined by huge dry-stone walls that surround a Victorian castle. No looking in for the poor back then, as they shuffled between mill and hovel. Now blank cameras gaze on us as we turn our backs on wealth and head back onto the ridge.
Broster’s farm shop and café is full of older folk, grey birds gathered in pairs, to sit the winter out. They gaze out over Hullen Edge, rain threatening now to steal the last of the view like cataracts. We hunker down, hear of Welsh gold, suitcases of cash being summoned from London in exchange for the chance of a pub, drinking and brawling, then look out again as the landscape melts into the dull light and we understand the meaning of winter and the need for good friends.
The Colonel.
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