Though normally a fast-flowing river, the East Allen has shrunk from its banks. Its voice, through trees, is like a bath filling up behind a closed door. Reaching it through wild garlic, I walk to the centre of the river where the boulders are pale and dry. The water is clear to the stony bottom, not clouded with silt and energy. The river, so low that its still surface reflects the sky, feels different.
A path curves alongside the river to Allendale Town, clambering over thick roots and stones. Shaded by alders, beech and sycamore, it’s a cool walk on a hot day, scented by honeysuckle and the currant smell of wild raspberry leaves. A young song thrush hops along in front of me, stopping every now and then to tug at something unseen among the flowering verges of deep pink campion, starry stitchwort, the vintage lace and froth of sweet cicely.
Birdsong is amplified in the cutting that the river has made. This sunken wooded cleft is loud with the demanding peeps of fledglings just out of the nest. I walk through a melee of baby wrens. Higher up in the alder branches there’s a bunch of coal tits begging to be fed. A spotted flycatcher arcs across the river snatching insects from the heavy air, while goldcrests tinkle in Scots pines. The alarm call of a redstart is insistent and repetitive, but the shrillest sound comes from a sandpiper preening on a fallen alder log. Perfectly camouflaged among the bleached rocks, it is only its voice that gives it away.
A small burn joins the main river and into it tumbles the sharp, clear water from a tunnel entrance. Behind an iron grille set in a horseshoe arch, it’s an adit, begun in 1854 to drain the valley’s mines and to search for ore, but the lead industry collapsed before it reached its intended destination of Allenheads. Four and a half miles long, this once busy tunnel is a dark hole set into the hillside below the town.
Now the glade is quiet, light flickering among leaves, as the church bell tolls half past the hour and the smell of mown grass drifts from the nearby cricket ground.
