Wide enough for a cart, this now grassy track was once well used. It curves down, gate-posted by alders, to a stone bridge, also greened by turf over time. Through a well-worn field gate, the way thins to a foot-trammelled path that snakes through decaying meadowsweet, dog’s mercury and stands of wild raspberry.
I walk alongside the East Allen, churning and noisy after two days of rain and the colour of strong tea. The river spits foam up into the wild wind. It’s my second time here in a month – first to see the fish migrating up stream, but today to thrill at the river in spate.
At Holmes Linn, the river forms itself into muscled waves before curving over the lip of the falls and plummeting down. Water vapour is tossed backwards by the wind.
The linn, a Northumbrian word for waterfall, pounds into a steep sided bowl created by the river. At a near vertical nine feet, it’s a testing obstacle for the sea trout that risk the battering of its narrow ledges to spawn in upland gravel beds. Today, it’s a mass of jumping spray and flying spume, a thunderous, gleaming, light-catching force.
A narrow bridge below the linn gives a different view, framed by a leaning larch whose thick roots have burrowed into the rockface. Abandoned mine buildings stand near the opposite bank; a wheel pit with an elegantly arched portal, a mine shop where the miners slept, and the remains of a power house. A fenced-in shaft drops 70 metres to the Blackett Level which was dug to exploit and drain the valley mines.
A photograph, possibly taken in the 1870s, shows buildings in pale new stone and an unusual campanile-like accumulator tower, where water was stored for operating machinery. Today, just a masonry platform remains. Birches and sycamores have grown among the tumble of stones surrounding the wheel pit, and even at midday, their shadows lie long across the field.
With engine, winding gear and water wheel long gone, the only sounds in this beautiful wooded ravine are from the waterfall and the surging river.
- This article was amended on 14 December 2015 to correct the credit for the photograph
