Time out – on Clougha Pike

Clougha Pike, Forest of Bowland, Lancashire

I did not intend inspecting the shooting butts. The path just led away from the estate track, and I was tired of that track. As a way up Clougha Pike, it’s convenient, but probably the least interesting, that’s if you don’t count the impressive engineering and humungous cost that must have gone into laying it. The reason for laying it? Fleets of luxury four by fours, carrying unimaginably wealthy, tweeded gentlemen and their guns, from August 12th onwards.

Anyway, the path led off through the heather, and seemed to be going somewhere. But then it petered out among this line of neatly constructed bunkers. I mean, these were the Rolls-Royce of butts, dressed stone, then covered in turfs and heathers for camouflage. They even had attractively coloured gravel on the floor, so the gentlemen wouldn’t get their brogues and plus fours dirty. Believe me, those grouse wouldn’t know what had hit ’em, and with what style!

We’re in the north of Lancashire today, the Forest of Bowland, one of the wildest and most beautiful parts of England, also formerly one of the most forbidden. I grew up on tales of walkers chancing it up here, their scrapes with the keepers, outwitting the dogs sent after them, and avoiding the natives who sought feathers in their caps for grassing them up to the estate managers. It was all a bit – well – feudal. But then the Countryside and Rights of Way act (2000) opened access to certain parts of it, at least for recreation on foot. Clougha Pike’s in the access area, and so long as they’re not shooting, we’re free to roam here. Come after the glorious 12th though, and you could be disappointed.

Cairns approaching Clougha Pike

I’ve seen no one yet, and it’s been well over an hour. There were a few cars down on the little car-park, so I know there are other hikers about, but the moor has swallowed them. It’s my first time in the hills of this northern part of Bowland, so I’m not sure of the lie of the land, and none of the markers make sense yet. There were some elaborate cairns a while back, enticing us away from the track, but I wasn’t sure if they were just for fancy. The plan was to follow the track until the GPS said we were due east of the summit, then just make a bee-line for it. As for wildlife, the moors seem sterile today. No wild birds, nothing with four legs. There were sheep lower down, and all I’ve seen so far up here are grouse, and piles and piles of their droppings in every nook and cranny.

Bowland doesn’t really do tourists, or rather it kettles them into one or two little places, like Dunsop Bridge, and Slaidburn. You can still picnic along the leafy banks of the Langden Brook, but the land itself caters very little for anyone wanting access to the uplands. It’s rough country, and these are big hills. The signs in the valleys proclaim it to be an area of outstanding natural beauty, and they aren’t wrong, but they feature a Hen Harrier as a logo, which, ironically, along with all the other raptors up here, have a very hard time of it.

Clougha Pike Summit, Bowland, Lancashire

Okay, the summit. A short walk across the heather now and,… well. We have a collection of wind-shelters, informally put together from rocks lying about, and the trig-point. And the stunning view: Fylde Coast, Glasson, Lake District, Yorkshire Dales. There’s a path of sorts too. It follows the line of the ridge, looks like it came from as far over as Ward’s Stone. It’ll take us off I think – and looks more interesting than the way we came up.

What drove those walkers to do it? To trespass, I mean. Was it defiance? I suppose that’s one reason, without getting all political and Kinder Scout about it. The guys I knew were working men, unionized, with industrial jobs, but they didn’t wear their socialism on their lapels. Freedom to roam was more the thing. Not all the hills in Bowland have romantic profiles, but some do, and to any walker with the fire in his blood, a hill is there to be experienced, its summit to be gained. Anyone saying you can’t go up there is like a red rag to a bull.

They had the look of dugouts on the Somme, those butts – I mean Hollywood style, ridiculously tidy, where the killing involves no blood, or dismemberment, or evisceration, and where the shooters carry elaborately decorated arms. Upwards of half a million grouse are farmed and killed every year in places like this. When they’re not shooting birds, these gentlemen are out in Africa killing lions. It’s striking, what the really, really rich have in common, is their love of killing.

With that many grouse shot, you’d think it was a national dish or something, but these unfortunate creatures are essentially live “clays” and shot for fun. Rearing so many has a serious impact on the landscape, indeed it shapes the land. The moors as we see them here, wild, desolate, are entirely unnatural, managed specifically for the rearing of this non-native species, at the expense of native creatures, in particular the raptors who barely get a look in and, though protected in law, tend not to thrive in places like this at all – trapped, shot, poisoned.

On Clougha Pike, Bowland, Lancashire

I wonder what the land would be like, if we just gave it back to nature. How long would it take to transform this managed wilderness into something more diverse? What breathtaking diversity of species would return then? Pine Martin? Wild Cat? Merlin? Hell, even a fox or two would be a start! But that’s not going to happen any time soon, of course. It took a hundred years of campaigning against the money and the privilege, just for the privilege of my sitting where I’m sitting now. The sun will have burned out long before we’re anywhere near re-wilding the Forest of Bowland, or anywhere else in England for that matter. And all the clever men – not the money men – are telling us time is running out.

I think we’ll drive home through the Trough. It’s ages since we did that, and I’ve yet to do it in the little blue car – one of the finest drives I know.

Trough of Bowland, Lancashire

Thanks for listening.

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High dynamic range

I took this picture of a buzzard a few weeks ago. It made my day, actually, felt like a good luck charm. They used to be a rare sight in the UK, but are now making a bit of come-back, except for this one, which is now dead. I was out with the camera recently and I met a fellow walker who told me he’d found a buzzard, shot, in that same area. It was alive, but had a broken wing. So he took it to the vet, but the vet couldn’t do anything, so it was put down.

It wasn’t a good start to the day. I’d set out to get some more miles under the belt, and to photograph trees along the way. I was after experimenting with a thing called high dynamic range. It’s a trick in photography that simulates the way the eye sees the world. I like the effect. Other photographers think it’s an abomination. I think the same thing about shooting birds. But we were talking about photography, except we weren’t. We’re talking about vision, and different ways of seeing the world.

When we look at a scene, we see everything – colour, brightness and so on, all of it perfectly rendered, but a camera’s different. Take a good picture of the foreground, and you might find there are no details in the clouds, because the sky has burned out. Take a good picture of the sky, with lots of dreamy texture in the clouds, and you might find the ground is too dark to make out any details.

The trick is to take several pictures of the subject. The bright areas, the dark areas and the middle brightness each have their own photograph. They call it bracketing. Then you overlay them in a piece of software that’s clever enough to compensate for the little bits of movement between shots. Finally, you apply a thing called tone mapping. This makes the colours brighter, more vibrant.

Anyway, I’d hoped to see the buzzard again while I was out, but from what the guy said it seemed unlikely. So I lined up my trees, and took my pictures. And no, I didn’t see the bird, so I’m assuming the worst, and the day was all the poorer for it. Indeed, it lent the landscape an air of doom and threat. The photography wasn’t a success either, other than getting the exercise in. The light was too flat to take advantage of the technique. But most of all I’d messed up with various settings along the way and my shots wouldn’t line up.

Even the best results I got were peculiar, and noisy, a far cry from the images you see by professionals. But one step at a time. We’ll try again on the next walk, different light, different settings. After all, I’m not looking to sell to National Geographic here. I like to stumble upon the occasional shot of my travels that makes me go “wow”! That’s the nature of amateur photography and the limit of my aspirations.

Seeing an egret the other day had perked my spirits up. It had me wondering if we weren’t turning a corner, after the darkness of 2020, and what I interpret as a gravely flawed mindset that’s resulted in over 100,000 dead. But the loss of that buzzard has left a hole. It’s made we wonder if we’re still subject to dark forces oppressing us, even now, with a vaccine being rolled out.

All wild birds are protected in the UK. That said, it’s okay to shoot some of them under licence by calling it “pest control”. Which birds are classed as pests, and why they’re considered pests is very much the subject of debate. On the one side you have the RSPB who don’t like to shoot birds. Then you have the legislators in the middle who make the rules. And on the other side there are the lobby groups like the Countryside Alliance, who represent those who do like to shoot birds. Buzzards can be shot legally under licence – mostly around airports where’s they present a clear danger to life and limb – but the terms are very strict. I’m guessing the majority of birds elsewhere are shot on the sly, either due to ignorance, or more likely moneyed interest.

Personally I’d rather observe, and protect wild birds than look for loopholes so I can shoot them. I’m sure whoever shot that buzzard felt they were justified and could give me a heated dressing down regarding my naivety and ignorance in the ways of the real world and proper country living, which is fair enough, and better for me to think they didn’t just do it for fun.

But this isn’t getting to my point, which appears to be hammering my attempts at photography into a metaphor of sorts. And I think it has to do with degrees of awakening. As I said, not everyone likes the high dynamic range look. Colours can seem over-blown, airy-fairy even a bit trippy. They can take a dull, flat-lit scene and explode it into a Van Gough. But as with light, so with thought. The fact we’ve come up with rules to protect wild birds suggests we’re capable of attaining a much higher dynamic, even though a narrower and near monochromatic attitude persists, and will always find ways and means of undermining the best efforts of those more awakened. It’s a complex argument, and the other lot have guns, but I’d sooner be on my end of the spectrum than theirs. I’d sooner look for ways a creature can avoid being shot than contriving reasons for why it should.

I’d been looking forward to getting more pictures of that buzzard over the summer, getting to know its territory, its favoured vantage points, then I could sneak myself within range of a sharper image. Looks like I’ll be sticking to trees for a while though, trying to make them look Van Gough and trippy. It’s an interest, and it gets me outdoors. And yes, I still like high dynamic range photography, even when it doesn’t quite work.

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Better than a gun

I’m rarely spooked, but the guys discharging firearms on the other side of the hedge took me by surprise. I was on a public footpath. They were on private land – uniformed members of the armed wing of the Tory party. I presume they were blowing the brains out of rabbits. It had been a pleasant morning up till then – a hard frost, a clear winter’s day, crispy meadows and warm in the sun, birds twittering. It was peaceful. Then bang, bang, bang. That’s country life, I suppose. I thought it was against the law to shoot so close to a footpath, even if you’re shooting away from it. But I checked, and it’s okay, as long as you don’t actually shoot anyone in the process. So, that’s all right, then.

The footpath I was on was an attractive one. It threaded its way along emerald pastures. There were ancient oaks, and a sleepy river nearby. It was idyllic, I suppose, but I didn’t feel entirely welcome. At the entrance to the first meadow there was a sign, reminding me of my place. I was on a public footpath crossing “private land”, it said. I was not permitted to picnic, to gather in groups, nor even to venture by the river-bank, it said. Did the little flask of coffee in my pocket count as a picnic? The Derbyshire cops would have said so, at least in so far as the lock-down rules go. Thank goodness this is Lancashire then, and I was walking doorstep to doorstep. But that’s another story.

River banks are monetised, and most of them are a trespass if you’ve not paid your dues. How does one own a river? Who was the first Sir Grabball to claim the river? Who was the first Sir Grabball to claim the meadow? These things are mysteries the Great British public prefer not to enquire too deeply into. They are accepting of their place, and obligingly supine before the interests of perceived class, and money.

Ignore me. I’m sore because those gunmen gave me a fright. But I used to shoot too, a long time ago. Okay, I was just a kid with an air-rifle, so not exactly the same thing. But I had a farmer’s permission, of sorts, to roam a patch of woodland near what was my home back then. I would sit for hours in that wood, waiting for things to point my sights at. But the wood also had a watchman – a noisy old bird called a Jay. He’d always see me coming and send up an alarm. Then all the other creatures knew to keep their heads down, until they saw me leaving. At least that’s the way I interpreted my poor performance as a hunter, as a superior creature in the evolutionary pecking order. Beautiful bird, a Jay. And smart. Smarter than me anyway. As for guns, they can be a dangerous obsession for a young man, and it’s best he grows out of them before they damage his brain.

I was lucky. All it took was cars and girls. And then at some point you realize you don’t need a gun to stalk creatures, nor to feel immersed in nature. Nowadays the pigeons come and sit on my garden fence, brazen as you like. I could feed myself all week off them if I’d mind to, but they know I’m not like that. They also know I’m superstitious about birds. Birds tell me things. One of them is it’s a hard life being a bird, hard enough without being shot at for fun. They take a dim view of it.

There’s this thing at the minute about making trespass a criminal offence. Have you heard that one? So if I’d chosen to ignore that sign, wandered off the path a bit and went and stared all poetically at the river, perhaps sipped brazenly on my coffee while I was at it, that would make me a criminal. How do you feel about that? Would it put you off roaming the English countryside? Is that good for us, do you think? The Ramblers Association is upset about it, and they’re a powerful lobby, but we’ve the wrong lot in at the moment for protecting public access to open spaces, so I fear there’s a good chance it’ll pass.

For the landowners it’s about money I suppose. For the shooter, I understand the appeal, having been there myself. But it was different back then – working men and guns. My parents’ generation grew up with rationing, but if you had a gun and a bit of countryside out your back door, you’d not go hungry. Nowadays, though guns are more about class, or aping it, than supplementing your diet. It’s about rubbing shoulders with the County – or what passes for it now.

I’m still not good with the names of birds – just the common ones – and I saw plenty of them along the way today. They were keeping their heads down, loitering in hedgerows and among the tangle of a tree’s branches. It wasn’t the gunmen they were scared of though. It was something else. I heard it before I saw it.

The cry of a Buzzard is an eerie thing. I’ve been stalking one for ages in other parts of my locale, and didn’t expect one here. That makes three I know of now, and all within a small radius from my doorstep. They’re vulnerable when they stake out a territory that belongs to Sir Grabball. The birds have more natural rights to it, but he has the guns and the traps and the poisoned bait on his side.

Apologies, again. I didn’t mean this to veer into Ewan Maccoll territory. But anyway, for once everything came into place. I had the camera with the right lens on it. I had the shutter set on burst mode, by accident. The sun was lighting the bird beautifully. Now, would it grace me with a flyby, close enough to tell it from a sparrow?

Squeezing off those shots was a thrill. Maybe a man with a gun would understand, even though his endgame would be a dead bird. I took a lot of pictures in that burst, so it was odds on at least one would come out right. I admit, I wandered off the path a bit in my excitement. Yes, I trespassed. So shoot me.

A camera is so much better than a gun.

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The Ego and the Gun

The Ego is our self constructed sense of self. It is a thought-form, so called because it is constituted entirely of our thoughts, thoughts about ourselves, about others, and about the world around us. It is in part, self defensive, assuring us, amid a sea of conflicting opinion and ambiguous social currents, that our way of thinking, our way of living is the correct one. It’s also inherently fragile, having left out all those things we deny we could ever think or allow as part of our identity – things like falling in love with someone of the same sex; feelings of friendship or even just basic respect towards someone of another race or creed; accepting that women are human beings; admitting sometimes we get things wrong; admitting other people’s ideas are as valid as our own.

Throughout all of life’s complexities and ambiguities, we can trust the ego to safeguard our position, and it will raise a storm of emotion when its superiority is threatened, when it fears exposure for the fraud it ultimately is. Then it will insist we take action, defensive or offensive. The ego can lead us astray, it can have us make fools of ourselves, it can cause us to incubate neuroses; it can make us hurt or even kill others.

One of the most powerful symbols for the ego is the gun. Take a look at the entertainment aisle next time you’re in town. Pick the top ten DVD’s and see how many carry a gun on their front cover. There he is, the hero, the “ego,” bearing a weapon in order to assault his enemies. It is the archetypal statement of superiority, that my ego has acquired the power to exterminate yours, that my argument shall ultimately triumph over yours, for no better reason than I am stronger or cleverer or more dangerous.

The young are easily seduced by the gun. They are persuaded by perverted cultural programming that it possesses not only a noble imperative, but also a romance. The young are also least prepared, emotionally, psychologically to have much of an idea about the ego, the ego being itself too strong and too big to be seen, masquerading as it does as the very root of our being. We think it’s who we are, that there can be no “us” without it. When threatened it will turn to weapons, and if no weapons are to be had, then fists will do, and failing even that then some malicious comments posted online will sate its appetite for a while.

And there’s really not much the gun-less can do. Fear of death will have me nodding readily to your tune. I may not be happy about it, I may resent it, and you may rest assured my own ego will ensure the first chance I get, I’ll turn the gun on you. And the hotter the revenge against your insults to me the better, for there is nothing quite so satisfying as the signs of a violent and horrifically painful capitulation on the face of one’s enemies. What? Got no gun? A Samaurai sword, or a knife will do. Plenty of those on the covers of DVD’s as well.

The strength of an argument, of reason, will always be outmatched by proficiency with arms, which makes me wonder how we ever progressed beyond a state of barbarism, to find the time to build cities and invent rich cultural lives as well.

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