On this darkening evening, the sky above Wharfedale is wild and oceanic, and the river Wharfe is its turbulent likeness, swollen with rain and surging urgently eastwards. An excoriating wind, the kind that makes you grimace, whips brass, bronze, and copper foliage into the water for the current to swallow, hastening winter’s approach with every gust.
The sound and fury is suddenly muffled as I enter the centuries-brewed silence of Ilkley’s All Saints church. In the church’s collection of Anglo-Saxon crosses is an altar stone on which a figure is carved out of rough millstone grit. She wears a pleated robe and holds what appear to be two snakes in her hands. Her oversized eyes may have looked out on the world for almost two millennia.
The adjacent description associates her with Demeter, a Greek goddess, but others believe her origins are more indigenous. This church sits on the site of a Roman fort, the historical nucleus of Ilkley, which was manned by soldiers recruited from the Lingones, a Romanised Celtic tribe originally from the area around the Seine headwaters.
Another altar stone found in the town is inscribed with the words “VERBEIAE SACRVM CLODIVS FRONTO PRAEF COH II LINGON” (To holy Verbeia, Clodius Fronto, prefect of the second cohort of Lingones).
Some have argued that Verbeia was a deification of the Wharfe itself and that the altar stone in All Saints church is a depiction of her. The evidence may be a little speculative, but it is imaginatively tempting to see both the outward beauty and lethal potential of the river in her ambivalent gaze.
It is also intoxicating to think of the water of the Wharfe as a current linking me to the foreign countries under my feet, the pasts of my home landscape. As a child, I spent hours by the sinuous limestone cataracts of Appletreewick or Grassington, and in dreams I have swum down the river’s whole length like a salmon smolt.
People who lived in unrecognisably different worlds may have felt the same sense of kinship as I do looking into that ever constant, ever changing, water.
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