Moonshine Gap: what does that name say? When I saw it on the map it said something probably over-romantic, definitely nefarious, the sort of feature found in literature of the Kentucky backwoods. Or older, when the transit of and sightlines to stellar objects were watched, noted and sometimes immortalised. Seemed a stretch for this place.
Gap is like col or pass, a place where the ground gives to allow a way between this place and that. All are mountain words, so a strange find in this flat place. This “gap” marks a straddle between Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire, so maybe that’s why. It’s not new: there it is on the 1889 map, attached to a wedge of wood amid crackle-glaze fields.
Where these meet the sky there is the slightest of rolls, enough to quell the disquiet of the absolute flat experienced further east. Isolated spinneys, trees and larger woodlands stand separate along the horizon. They’re thick with summer, and watch like dark forts on rising fields of crop.
I stop at the gap and walk into the field on the Cambridgeshire side. The air itches, the silence thick with heat. Crisp details: the purr of an investigating bee, the static-fizz of the pea crop, the twitch of things moving within it. Near the field’s edge I watch a bird climb the inside of a hedge in silhouette, listen to its dainty movements, then walk over the gap into Northamptonshire, into the wood.
Here humans have been. No moonshine (of course) but more modern rural mischief. A sign by the footpath asks no vehicles, please, and has been burnt for it. The path beyond: underfoot tyre track, hoof-hit and foot-fall mingle in a mess. Walking, I find deep trenches left by wheels, then dead tyres in the trenches, then foetid, buggy water in the holes where the dead tyres have been exhumed. Behind me on the remote, arch-cornered road I hear the sound of a fast car being driven too fast. And find stupid, strange litter: rugs, buckets, barrels.
I try to enjoy it. A pheasant’s bark; something heavy making a run to my left. And so many butterflies, meadow browns, everywhere. No mountains, no moonshine. But a gap between here and there.
