York Gate stretched upwards, pitilessly straight, as befits a road with possible Roman origins. Today, getting up it felt like trying to run in a dream, energy sapped by each buffeting blast of wind. Rowdy gusts sent sheep skittering sideways, and gulls swung restlessly around in the sky like children’s kites. I earned odd looks from passing drivers, visibly bemused at the sight of a jogger slogging up this bleak bit of road, teeth gritted against wind and sleet.
The shelter of a wood offered a brief respite, the wind muffled and the ground cushioned with beechnut husks. Gritstone boulders were indelibly marked with climbers’ chalk, and frayed remains of blue polypropylene rope swings did a macabre impression of nooses.
I emerged on to the open heathland topping the Chevin, the escarpment overlooking Wharfedale and my hometown of Otley. This beauty spot can often be busy, but today I ran past only a few hunched, hooded figures, making the briefest possible forays from their cars.
Joseph Turner, visiting nearby Farnley, was reputedly inspired to paint Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps by a storm he witnessed over the Chevin, imagining an army of elephants helpless under a terrible vortex of black cloud. On a day like this it almost feels apt, though it still might seem odd that this modest ridge of beech woodland and bilberry bushes could inspire such a tempestuous vision.
But for me, the Chevin has greater significance than its size; it is a frontier, or a faultline, between the two dueling personalities of northern England.
From the top, one horizon is filled by Leeds and Bradford, the start of the great conurbation created by the forges, mills and mines of industrial Yorkshire, stretching more or less to Sheffield. The other horizon swells with the whalebacked tops of the Yorkshire Dales; if you walked roughly north-west, following the spine of the island, you wouldn’t reach a major settlement for 200 miles, until central Scotland.
The Alps might have been formed by two continents crashing together, but here you can watch worlds collide.
