Autumnal jewels in the Calderdale crown
This ragged landscape, its beating winds, its rough and bumpy terrain, is as much Calderdale as the river and canals.
UP ON Norland Moor these cool, crisp mornings, meadow pipits flit above browning grass.
Late caterpillars curl in frosty pockets of foliage. Cobwebs bangle the grass, brocaded rainbows of silky silver, glistening in crystals of ice-like dew. The hills are purpling with heather, and arrays of lemony gorse, glittering like gold dust in the morning sun. Moorland is widespread across the Calder Valley, and rich in acid soils, hence the heathers, whose growing tips form parts of the diets of various birds. Kestrels, hovering in readiness for prey, swallows, sandmartins, and willow warblers, have all winged their way into my sights upon the Calder Valley’s moorland hills. One summer day on moorland near Lumb Bank, I watched a weasel, weaving in and out of drystone walls; some miles east, this New Year’s Day, a fox strolled by a moorland farm, floating through grasses like a rolling flame. On a cold autumn afternoon eight years ago, I found a stoat, stealing by a gate on the fringes of Norland Moor, where one winter, I noticed the soft shadows of two deer, moving slowly, like velvet silhouettes in morning mist.
The moors in autumn can be bright, inviting places, too. I’ve sat atop piles of stones at Blackstone Edge, watching sun-washed moorgrass swaying in the breeze, like waves of golden sea, sweeping out towards Warland, Calderbrook, or White Holme Reservoir. But autumn moorlands can also be chill, blustery environments, whose inhabitants are accordingly hardy: tough sheep munching tufts of grass, sturdy goats patrolling bald, exposed hills, deceptively soft mosses, hugging rain-soaked ground like sponges, red fungi, disc-shaped edges chewed by insects, looking rubbery, tough, and highly poisonous.
Outside Todmorden, the moors are defined by dune-like dips, chunks of rock and ruined barns. The slopes above Mankinholes are riddled with old bones, skeletons and skulls of sheep sticking out of desolate earth, wind hissing over boulders. For many, these bleak hinterlands spell danger, their altitudes guaranteeing extreme weather. On the moors at Ovenden and Warley, and the heathery miles of Midgley Moor, peaty earth studded with old standing stones, the wind hammers through ramshackle remains of sheepfolds, howling like banshees and thrashing the angry edges of the reservoir. The paths and tracks of these remote spots, criss-crossing through rusty grass, are less trodden, their lumpy hills and jumbles of rocks clambered up and down by hooves, or swooped above by hungry hawks, but rarely traversed by human feet. But this ragged landscape, its beating winds and battered fences, its rough and bumpy terrain, abandoned barns and wary-eyed sheep, is as much Calderdale as the river and canals. With their skeletal trees, bare branches rattling in rain, shy birds and mammals dipping and diving through miles of moss and bog, and their high, panoramic views over neighbouring towns and the distant lights of cities, the moors of our district are fundamental to its character, and at this time of year, ablaze in quilts of heather and gorse, autumnal jewels in the Calderdale crown.