Footsore, we reached the ruins of Metcalf’s House that, until the beginning of the 19th century, was an inn on an old road between Teesdale and Weardale. On this frosty morning, it’s the perfect spot for a sit-down, hands warmed by mugs of flasky tea. It wasn’t difficult to imagine what a welcome sight this place must have been for weary drovers of packhorses that once carried almost everything across these Pennine hills before the advent of railways, decent roads and the internal combustion engine.
Now, there is no blaze in the hearth, open to the skies, and the apse-shaped oven built into the wall is full of rubble and ferns. In the inn’s heyday, when it had walls, doors and a roof, the air in these rooms must have been a fug of wood smoke, beer, hot beverages and warm bread.
The forest below us, along Ayhope Beck, was partially wreathed in mist. There is probably no one alive who remembers this view before conifer plantations clothed the hillsides, but the birch, hazel, gorse and alder around Metcalf’s House hint at a pre-forested landscape of heathland.
Our route onwards, thankfully all downhill, took us through air scented with the sharp, resinous tang of conifers. In a Scots pine plantation, some wind-thrown trees from past storms had been allowed to slowly subside into the earth: left to their own devices, forests can bury their own casualties under carpets of moss, until fungal decay completes its work and timber rots and crumbles. Winged seeds from cones above sometimes spin down and settle on these mossy seedbeds, elevated above the tangle of brambles, nurturing a new generation of saplings, rooted in decaying remains of fallen giants.
We reached the valley bottom and the sweet, humic aroma of a deciduous woodland of lofty, straight-trunked oaks. They must have been among the first trees planted here, by unemployed shipyard workers and miners who were drafted in and housed in barrack huts, to afforest these windswept hillsides during the Depression years of the 1930s. Their names go unrecorded but they deserve to be remembered for this magnificent legacy.
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