Anglezarke and the Round Loaf

January has dissolved into that pale-sun kind of mildness, and on Sunday afternoon I was tempted out to my old stomping grounds in the West Pennine Moors. I had in mind a stroll up Great Hill from White Coppice, but I wasn’t the only one tempted out by the mild weather, and there was nowhere to leave the car within a couple of miles of the start of the walk, so I cut back over the narrow moorland roads and wound up at Jepson’s Gate for a walk to the Round Loaf instead. The boots are still holding together – a little leaky – but this was home-ground for me and even if they fell apart I was pretty sure I’d be okay.

You can do the Round Loaf and back in a couple of hours, which was just right given the shortness of the days. There’s an uncompromising bleakness about these uplands and sometimes I wonder if their only attraction is that they’re in my blood. One cannot call them dramatic – even though they touch 1200 feet, they’re far too gently rounded and their appearance is more wind-blasted and crouching than proudly soaring.

The Round Loaf, for those of you not familiar with the West Pennines is a Neolithic Cairn, probably a burial, but an unusually big one. These ancient cairns are made of loose stones piled up and overlaid with millenia of vegetation. The stones provide good drainage for root systems so the Round Loaf stands out above the poorly drained peat moorland, a  startling and incongruous green blob on a russet upland plain. Many paths converge upon it and the site seems to appeal to many a varied interest: the sheep seem to like it, walkers certainly do, geocachers too, and also, it has to be said, the local Wiccan’s and maybe some of the darker neo-pagan sects as well.

It’s curious that this place has never been excavated, or vandalised – I suppose its remoteness has spared it both of those indignities.

And speaking of indignities, I returned to the car off-piste so to speak, seeking out the Pike Stones, another ancient monument, another former burial site from the Neolithic period. This one’s only five minutes from the road and consequently has been stripped bare over the generations, dismantled and excavated almost to extinction. All that remains here these days are a couple of tilted slabs of weathered millstone grit. Like the Round Loaf this is another location favoured by the neo-pagans and a while ago one of them decided to embellish this admittedly rather dull monument by chiseling a distinctly “new-age” spiral motif upon it. That was bad enough, but today I noticed someone else had made a half hearted attempt at chiseling the spiral motif off. Either way the site is ruined now and it’ll be centuries before this place ever attracts back the natural magic of the earth – if it ever does. Indeed next time I go up I half expect to see a recreation of the Cerne-Abbas giant dug into the peat.

Forestation began up here in the 1980’s, and the plantations are reaching maturity now. In my humble opinion these forests do little to add to the attractiveness of the area  and I’ve been spending the last 25 years quietly grizzling at them, laid down as they are with a geometric insensitivity that’s about as unnatural as you can imagine and as much of an insult to the plain beauty of the moors as chiseling a spiral on an ancient monument. I suppose they’ll be logging these out soon and then I’ll really have something to grizzle about.

I seem to be peculiar in my belief that open country like this is far more of a blessing than most people seem to realise.  Left entirely to nature it acquires a peculiar energy that has to be felt to be appreciated. Walk through it and it begins to work upon your bones, and upon your brain. You think differently when you return from a walk up here. You’re calmer, brighter, more positive in your outlook and I think there’s more to it than simply the fresh air.  But in walking through it you also leave behind a trail of energy of your own that lingers in your footprints. That’s okay because if you’re careful and respectful the tides will wash away all evidence of your passing and no harm is done. However, if too many people converge upon a place, and especially if their presence carries with it a negative energy, as evidenced by the dropping of litter, the indiscriminate and insensitive planting of commercial forests, or the wanton vandalism of ancient monuments, then the overall quality of the land is diminished or sometimes extinguished altogether. It becomes scrappy, mucky, trashed and void of spirit.

All of this is subjective and I appreciate that much of what I feel about these uplands is entirely imaginary. I wrote my first novel, the Singing Loch, partly in response to these peculiar feelings, in an attempt to give voice to what it was I believed we should value in those few true remaining wildernesses that are left to us in the UK, apart from the handful of filthy money to to be gained from their destruction.

I often think of my ancestral territory as being that patch of moorland bounded to the north by the line of Black Brook, and Great Hill, East by the upland ridge of Spitler’s and Redmond’s edge, and South by the fledgling Yarrow. This is because I was born within sight of it, and grew up gazing out of my bedroom window at it through a pair of binoculars. Looking westwards from just about anywhere in this territory you have a view of the Lancashire Plain, and all the way out to the Irish Sea. When the weather comes in it comes in unchecked and usually very windy, and in my darker dreams now I see wind-generators, and I pray the gritstone foundations lie too deep beneath the squelchy peat for such monstrosities to ever be considered here.

Still, I’m sure someone’s thinking about it.