Sally Goldsmith pauses on a wooden bridge spanning the thin stream of Totley Brook to tell the story of this ancient woodland, in spring thick with bluebells and wood anemones, rich now with red haws and rowanberries. Sally, a poet and activist, knows as much as anyone about this rumpled corner of country tucked into the lee of high, forbidding moors. The story she has traced here includes a who’s who of progressive thinkers: John Ruskin, William Morris and Edward Carpenter. Just up the hill lived the Clarion Ramblers stalwart Bert Ward. A few hundred yards downstream on Totley Brook was Bill Keane, last of the Sheffield ramblers on the Kinder Scout mass trespass to leave us.
Some things remain a puzzle, though, even to Sally. She directs our attention to a stone post stuck in the streambed and invites suggestions as to what it’s for. A tenter post, someone suggests, used to support the frame on which woollen cloth was stretched – on tenterhooks. There have been sheep hereabouts since the 13th century, when monks built nearby Beauchief Abbey. Tenter posts were often made of stone in Yorkshire; there are fine examples at Marsden. This one, however, has ironwork fixed in it and Sally offers a more likely explanation. Pairs of them were placed every hundred yards or so and then fixed with wooden battens to slow the stream after heavy rain.
Fine weather has reduced the flow to a lazy crawl, but the young river’s meandering, deep-set course shows that in full flood it has teeth, gouging out the crumbly shale and burrowing among the roots of bankside oaks. Most of the trees in Gillfield were felled during the second world war and then replanted. A few survivors, ancient giants gnarled and twisted from the river’s power, were left behind. Their root systems, half-exposed, grip the friable rock for dear life. The threat of flood remains; for those like me who live downstream, where Totley Brook becomes the River Sheaf, the implications of the climate emergency are only too obvious. There has been talk of gigantic embankments to control flooding, threatening the charm of this gorgeous landscape. Restoring the moors above Gillfield seems the smarter solution: slowing the water nature’s way and leaving our more clumsy efforts to the history books.
• The 11th annual lecture in honour of the late country diarist William Condry will be held at Tabernacle, Machynlleth, on Saturday 5 October. Craig Shuttleworth of Bangor University will be speaking about red squirrels and pine martens in Wales. More information at www.thecondrylecture.co.uk.
