Expanses of icy blue, trailing grey skirts of rain, and billowing towers of gilt-edged cumulonimbus vie with each other for control of the sky above Wharfedale. It feels distinctly wintry, but the gathering momentum of spring is unmistakable.
As well as new life bursting from earth and branches, the seasonal migrants are returning. As I walk up Hebden Gill, dozens of lapwing barrel above, fighting headlong into the biting wind. They are followed a few minutes later by a flock of about 30 curlew, their watery calls all mingling together, creating a sound that shimmers and morphs like quicksilver. One of the first times I have heard these strangely bittersweet noises this year, it releases a flood of emotion and memory.
The gill gives way to Grassington Moor and the hard-bitten lead-mining relics of Yarnbury, a sprawling assortment of spoil heaps, mine shafts and derelict infrastructure, largely abandoned to the elements after cheaper imports killed the industry in the late 19th century. Despite the trail of information boards, these ruins resist romance or nostalgia; they are bleak and un-picturesque, the carcass of a dead past being slowly picked at by wind and weather, and there is no mistaking the risk and squalor that a life working these seams must have entailed. Whole families, young children included, took part in the effort, and the average miner’s lifespan was about 45 years.
The ruins are barren and despondent, but the moor around them is full of urgency and life, with the calls of curlew and lapwing continuously haunting the air, and formations of golden plover sweeping above. I come across the 90-metre-deep Beever’s Engine Shaft, and think of WH Auden’s memory of exploring abandoned mine shafts in the North Pennines: “There I dropped pebbles, listened, heard / The reservoir of darkness stirred.”
As a child, unburdened by adult knowledge, I found the Yarnbury ruins mysteriously exciting. I find an unlucky stone and drop it through the metal safety grating into the inscrutable blackness, listening for a clatter or a splash. But there is nothing; just the wind in my ears and the call of a curlew nearby, bubbling up from somewhere deeper still.
