I DRIVE the rattly van to the top of Barningham Moor and it gets stuck in slithery grass while I???m trying to park. I stall the engine and can???t start it again because the starter motor jams. Mist rolls in and thin rain begins to fall. There is no reception on my mobile phone. Eventually, after lots of click-clicking from the solenoid, the engine coughs into life and the van snakes inelegantly onto the road. I park it in mud but on a downward slope just to be safe. I pull on my boots, but it???s a slow process because I strained a muscle in my back a fortnight ago and it???s still painful. Sheep painted in fluorescent colours watch me from behind a wall. The day has a very deep, dark and melancholy feel about it. I decide I???ve unwittingly strayed into a Leonard Cohen song or perhaps an upbeat episode of Emmerdale . . .
The unnerving rattle of machine-guns drifts across the moor, accompanied by the pop-pop of small arms fire and some dramatic bangs. That???s the army training for mission creep. Forgive my cynicism, but eleven years ago I marched through London with a million people in an attempt to prevent an illegal war. It was the biggest expression of raw democracy ever witnessed in this country and it was totally ignored. Now we???re dropping bombs again ??? but very quietly because it???s hardly ever on the news. Let me tell you about fluorescent sheep.
Then coloured sheep dyes became available at about the same time L???Or??al founder Eug??ne Schueller was doing exactly the same thing for women ??? while openly supporting violent fascist organisations in France, may I add. But all that???s history. Now the coloured sheep dyes are fluorescent. The sheep adore them. I saw one doing a Vivienne Westwood impersonation. It was the brightest point of the day.
If you???re not familiar with these names, they can all be found on the hilly but boggy ground to the south of the A66 trans-Pennine road on the border of County Durham and North Yorkshire. The whole area is peppered with antiquities dating from the late-Neolithic to Roman periods. Neolithic and Bronze Age cup and ring carvings and decorated rock panels abound. Mind, they take some finding, but that???s half the attraction.
I trudge along boggy paths to Osmaril Gill where there is a particularly splendid example of a cup and ring carving ??? a chiselled hollow in a slab surrounded by four concentric rings. I also spy lots of boulders with cups ??? either natural or carved ??? in their upper surfaces.
That???s the trouble with traps . . .
FOR the past couple of weeks I???ve been hobbling around the footpaths surrounding the village where I live, full of ibuprofen and little nameless pills my wife gives me. I always take my camera on these occasions, working on the principal that if I don???t then I???ll see something that would have been worth photographing. Here???s a few snaps with explanatory captions.
If you were hoping to park a car or camp for the night and spied these two signs hovering above the grass verge, and you were feeling bolshie and fancied yourself as what people used to call a barrack-room lawyer, you might fancy taking a risk and challenging the authorities. NRCC stands for North Riding County Council, which disappeared in the local government reorganisation of 1974. Further along there???s a sign written in Latin banning chariot racing. Just kidding.
Crossing a field on a public right of way, I notice someone has placed a stone on top of a fence post. Closer inspection reveals the stone to be full of crinoid fossils. I???m not sure, but I think they were the stems of plants which inhabited this part of the world during the Carboniferous era.
The A1 Great North Road is always good for a photograph. We???re right on Scotch Corner here, which along with Viking, Forties, Dogger, Sole, Fitzroy, Bailey, Ambridge and Hotton is famous for being one of those places that everyone has heard of ??? but which has no presence in the physical world.
This looks like it might be an Iron Age earthwork of the type incorporated into the nearby Brigantian fortress at Stanwick, but it???s the spoilheap of a 19th Century copper mine at Low Merrybent Farm. This part of the country is famous for its lead mines, but the copper-mining industry is very much a forgotten chapter.
Diesel pump at Low Merrybent Farm
Just in case you were considering straying from the footpath . . .
This is a section of Dere Street, the Roman road that runs from York to the end of the empire. Hadrian wouldn???t have approved.
These terraces in the fields beneath the village of Middleton Tyas are the remnants of a mediaeval farming system
We are still out in the country, but this wall surrounding a cottage garden has been capped with what appears to be furnace slag. More remnants of the Middleton Tyas and Merrybent copper-mining industry?
And finally. Back to the allotment for a sit-down at the close of another dank and dismal November day . . .
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