Far-off turbines are shawled in silvery mist
Coned, like some mediaeval witches hat, the dark spire of the pike rises against purpling cloud.
BUFFETED BY winter winds, I clump through cloughs and soggy, swamp-like moors, up to my ankles in mud.
It’s late February outside Todmorden, and on this biting afternoon the far-off turbines are shawled in ribbons of silvery mist. A pale sun drools icy light across the choppy waters of the reservoir.
No rain falls, but a week’s worth of downpours has left the soils up here a mushy mat of bog-like quagmire. The desire paths tramped into the steep hills around Lumbutts are slippery, and slicked in slimy moss.
It’s a few years since I was here, and I feel semilost amid this rough-hewn desert, half craggy labyrinth of disintegrating paths, half weather-beaten slough, where every footstep seems to land in deeper water. I run into a jogger, much more sensibly kitted out in his waterproofs than I am in drenched denim a torn cagoul. After he has given me directions, I watch his sleek frame sink into cloudcapped distance, chugging purposefully on until he has become a speck of blue lycra, bouncing along the distant ridges like some tiny, brilliant bird.
To my south, the sodden moors roll into Greater Manchester. The small, former mill towns of east Lancashire lie West, while
East are Cragg Vale, haunt of 18th Century counterfeiters, and the tough, blackened terrain of moorlands leading into Soyland, Ripponden
and Rishworth. Up ahead to the immediate North is the 120 ft tower of Stoodley Pike monument – at the summit of the hill of the same name.
Looking in this light like a stark column of black brick, the monument
replaced an earlier structure erected to celebrate victory against Napoleon, and was completed in 1865, at the end of the Crimean War. The monument’s history assumes an ironic poignancy against contemporary events, and it’s hard, trudging these rockstrewn, uphill miles, not to think of those on similar inhospitable treks, not through choice but in fear for their lives.
Below, half of Calderdale is laid in a lego-land of houses, and fields sliced up by dry stone walls. Todmorden is a grey, background smudge; behind rises a slab of mountainous dark hills. Above this basin, a rumpled wall of cloud is blotted by the dot of sun, whose yolky soak seeps through like an expanding stain. Few birds fly up here, but from time to time there is the sulky chuckle of a grouse, their beetling black forms whisking from one cover of bushes to another.
Coned, like some mediaeval witches hat, the dark spire of the pike rises against purpling cloud. In its shadow, clumps of walkers and lone cyclists are Lilliputian stick men.
The brown, dead heather dwindles as I approach, giving way to a thin mat of grass, which its self is superseded by a chequerboard of large, uneven stones – jagged slabs and diamond shaped, cobbly rocks.
To ascend the monument is to enter total darkness, hear the scraping of your shoe against brick steps, wind your way up a spiral of pitch black, before emerging on a windbattered balcony, amazingly only half way up. Here, the wind is so remorseless I have to literally hold on to my hat. It whistles and bashes against cold, fat bricks, scrawled in scribbles of moss and yellow lichen. It’s sunset, the horizon bleached by streaks of peachy pink. Giving way to a tumbling plunge, 1,300 ft towards Todmorden, and beyond.