High above Allendale on this frost-sparkling January day, two stone chimneys reach up into a clear blue sky. Built in the 19th century, they exhaled fumes from horizontal flues that ran from a lead smelter more than two miles below on the valley floor. The flue lines can still be seen, bulging like veins across the fields. In places they have collapsed, revealing arched interiors where lead and silver would condense to be intermittently scraped off and recovered.
The Allen valley is far less populated now than it was in the busy lead mining days. From this high point on Dryburn Moor I look out across a quiet dale parcelled up by drystone walls, farmhouses sheltered by Scots pine woods and a drove road that curves over the hillside. There’s a far horizon of uplands and ridges and, in the distance, beyond the long trough of the Tyne Valley, is the white-crested wave of Cheviot. Snow lies on Cold Fell to the west and bleaches the level summit of Cross Fell in Cumbria. It’s an exhilarating near-360-degree view.
One slender chimney stands on the flank of the hill. The one on the fell-top is fatter and chunkier. I remember they were in a fragile state until the lower one collapsed during a storm in 1994. Both were rebuilt by the North Pennines Heritage Trust the following year. Now a single polypody fern has latched itself between the stones.
On the surrounding peatland, rich colours show through the sprinkling of gritty snow: mosses, olive-green and emerald, heather stalks tinged purple-red, ochre rocks littering the path, and creamy lozenges on frozen puddles. The spent tops of the ling have been doubled in size by spiky frost crystals. The moorland grasses have faded to a pale straw.
When I walk here in summer the air scintillates with the trilling of skylarks, the sad sweet cries of golden plover and lapwing. Today there’s no wind and it’s unusually silent, but for our footsteps on the crunchy snow grains, a dog barking miles away down in the valley and the red grouse chuckling and churring.
