At Abney Manor, a dozen goldfinches burst into the air, light catching their red faces and the broad yellow bar on their wings. I stopped to watch, and then looked down into Bretton Clough.
Tibetan lamas speak of beyul, sacred hidden valleys that offer spiritual refuge. If such a place exists in north Derbyshire then this is it. Its watershed divides Eyam and Shatton moors, a narrow, steeply sided valley, thick with trees, that feels remote and convoluted in clear weather, but today seemed full of secrets and surprises.
While the moors on either side were bathed in sunshine, fog slopped around the valley like milk in a bowl. Only the tops of the highest trees half-emerged from the mist, like drowning spectres. Plunging down through the fog to the bridge at Stoke Flat, I passed beeches still holding their bronze leaves and a huge, venerable sycamore stripped bare. Walking up valley, trees gave way to gorse trimmed with spiders’ webs beaded with dew, and leafless hawthorns thick with fruit, a flock of redwings wheeling off them as I approached.
The valley is narrow here, and the sense of concealment strong. When Bonnie Prince Charlie came south in 1745 with his army, this is where farmers over the hill at Eyam brought their cattle to hide them, or so the legend goes. There were farms here then, their ruins looming out of the mist as I walked past. Beyond their broken walls, the hillside had sagged in places into a maze of grassy hummocks.
Climbing steeply back up the hill, the heavy mist thinned and the angle eased. I crossed empty pasture to Cockey Farm, where I stopped to watch a muscular ram, shoulders bulging out of his tight harness, grunting softly as he surveyed a field of ewes, half of them with yellow dye on their backs. It was a comforting thought, on a day of autumn mists, that the seeds of spring were already half sown.
