Back of Beyond (24 page)

On the wide open fells you own the earth. In all directions are rolling waves of purple heather cut by chittering streams, belly-high thickets of bracken in the hollows, bubbly little springheads where waters bounce out of the ground, sparkling like ice-cold champagne.

At Blackstone Edge more thin streams slipped through the grasses and over rocks in the shadows. Peewits whirled overhead like thrown confetti, and a haze of heather flowers floated over the moors. I peered out over the county of Lancashire where Manchester and its satellite cities sprawled across the plain far below.

To the north the somber bulk of Pendle Hill huddled on the horizon.

I’ve always been curious about Pendle. It’s a strange, little-explored part of northern England, full of tales of witches and pagan worship. Now was a chance for a slight diversion—a short ride on a local bus, a walk across tiny fields bound by dry stone walls, and what looked like a relatively steep but easy climb.

Mists smothered the high moor and the sleeves of my anorak were sheened with moisture. The sweet smell of heather hung about me as I groped up the rocky path to the high flat summit.

“Tha’ll happen have a bit of weather.” I should have listened to the warning of the shepherd in Newchurch. The village was a tiny place, a peppering of thick stone cottages along a steep dip in the road below the bulk of Pendle. I almost missed the church, hidden behind hedges. On the west wall of the bell tower was the “eye of God,” an oval protruding stone with a distinct pupil peering out over the surrounding moors. “Tha’s for witches.” The shepherd’s face imploded with wrinkles and he laughed. “Tha’s what they says, anyroad. They says it were a charm again them witches.” He nodded his head toward the isolated farms and cottages straggled around the base of the hill as if the infamous Pendle witches were still in residence.

As a young boy I had heard the stories. For generations Lancashire children trembled in early beds, fearful that their errant mischievousness would bring parental dispatch “to’t Pendle folk” and terrible torment on those misty moors. Today many of the local legends are regarded with disdain, dismissed as the feudings of miscreant families whose hysterical accusations and counteraccusations resulted in their mutual destruction. But that was not the way the superstitious country folk around Pendle interpreted the gory incidents in 1612.

Old Chattox (“a very old withered spent and decrepit creature”), one of her contemporaries, Mother Demdike (“the rankest hag that ever troubled daylight”), and her wild and “fearsome ugly” daughter, Bessie, had long been regarded with trepidation by the residents of these lonely hills. In March 1612, Mother Demdike’s granddaughter, Alizon, was refused a handful of pins by the peddler John Law and, being a creature of high passion, hurled a violent curse at the terrified man, which instantaneously caused him a stroke. He survived the ordeal, “with his head drawne awrie, his eyes and face deformed, his legges starcke lame,” long enough to testify at her trial in Lancaster.

His tale and the indictments of a local magistrate, Roger Nowell, led to the imprisonment not only of Alizon Demdike but of eighteen other local witches accused of such scurrilous crimes as communing with imps and the Devil himself (Bessie Demdike was said to possess a third nipple for suckling the Lord of the Underworld), desecrations of graves, at least sixteen murders, and even a plan to destroy Lancaster castle by incantation (witches were wonderful suspects for unsolved crimes). Panic gripped the region. One of Nowell’s assistants wrote in his journal, “Is every person a witch in these hills? I have a list in excess of a hundred. Every day I receive more names. Where will these things end?”

No one was safe. Alice Nutter, a gentlewoman of fine reputation, whose large house still stands at nearby Roughlee, was somehow assembled with the accused and hanged with eight of the others in August 1612. Mother Demdike escaped by dying of “natural causes” in her cell (a most inauspicious demise for a witch).

“Most of it’s jus’ plain rot,” the Newchurch shepherd had told me. He was not at all impressed by all the pen scratching inspired by Pendle. “It’s just a gert bloody hill. My dad wouldn’t have none of it. Folk were daft, he said, and he were right. They’d lie brooms across doorways to stop witches gettin’ in and throw salt in t’fire when they felt scared. They carved them special witch-posts. And my grandma, when she were making her own butter, she’d shove a great poker, red hot, int t’ cream to burn t’devil out and stop butter being ‘bynged.’ I thought it were a bit daft then but I didn’t say nowt. She’d clout me.” His face crinkled again. “She’d have scared all of them witches off, given arf a chance. She were a terror.”

But up here in this silver world of moist mists and silence, the sceptical shepherd’s humor was less reassuring. I remembered a phrase in Harrison Ainsworth’s book
The Lancashire Witches:
“Pendle Forest swarms with witches. They burrow into the hillsides like rabbits in a warren.” Before leaving Newchurch I’d browsed through the village shop brimming with witch lore. A life-size tableau of cauldron-scraping cackling hags was accompanied by a corny taped commentary, which no longer seemed quite so corny. “On wild and stormy nights when the clouds are scurrying across the moon you may hear their fiendish laughter…”

I was lucky. The mist cleared as quickly as it had descended and sun filled the hill, the browning bracken, and the purple deeps of the heather. Damp stalks gleamed. A curlew whirled against the clouds, hurling its hollow cry at a world invaded by me and a flock of soggy wandering sheep, Roman noses sniffing warily at the sudden brightness. The wind rattled the sharp-bladed nardus grass and brought the smell of cut hay scooping up the flanks of the hill and across the high summit. I could see the fields below Sabden and Barley bound by a spiderweb of lanes and paths. The chimney-crusted skylines of Nelson and Burnley stretched along the Calder. Invisible from the foothill villages, they seemed overclose from up here. To the north stretched the domed loneliness of Bowland, the empty gray hills of Lee Fell, Calder Fell, Mallowdale Fell, and Burn Moor, receding into a hazy nothingness.

I walked on to the “Big End” of Pendle near the gurgling spring where the first Quaker, an impoverished shoemaker, George Fox, refreshed himself in 1652, after his momentous vision of a new faith. As he wrote in his journal, “We came near a very great and high hill, called Pendle Hill—I was moved of the Lord to go up to the top of it. I saw the sea bordering upon Lancashire; and from the top of this hill the Lord let me see in what places He had a great people to be gathered.” His ideas were greeted with interest in the nonconformist hill country, but the authorities were distressed and imprisoned him at Lancaster Castle in 1664.

Pendle is the kind of place where one expects to have great thoughts. It was also a place for lighting bonfires either as warning beacons against regular raids from the ancient Viking stronghold on the Isle of Man or as celebrations of coronations and great victories. In a less dramatic context it provided an ideal base for the farmer-sponsored “flagman” to wave his large black flag during the harvest season at the first sign of inclement weather from the west or noisy little “chipping-duster” storms from the north. Also, according to a farmer friend, the hill and the loneliness of the surrounding countryside have created a froth of odd customs and eccentricities. Particularly bizarre are the activities of the Nick o’ Thungs, an all-male club whose activities include annual meetings on the first Sunday of each May in a secluded clough between Barley and Rimington and the regular recitation of such doggerels as: “Thimbering Thistelthwaite thievishly thought to thrive through thick and thin by throwing his thimbles about, but he was thwarted and thwacked, thumped and thrashed by thirty thousand thistles and thorns for thievishly thinking to thrive through thick and thin by throwing his thimbles about.” Well, I suppose they have to pass the time some way or another in this lonely region.

Reluctantly leaving my mountain eyrie for the softer foothills and woods of the Ribble valley, I set off walking the wriggling roads to Slaidburn, a village of great charm with its cobbled courts, tight twisting streets, riverside meadows, and the Hark to Bounty Inn, where one of the rooms is preserved as an ancient “forest court.” The church was usually quiet. A sign on the door read: “Visitors may photograph any aspect of this ancient church they desire.” A welcome change—and subjects abounded, including a pillared Jacobean chancel screen and squire’s pew, a collection of dog whips for the farmers’ unruly hounds (the locals liked to bring their dogs to church), and a splendid three-decker pulpit with canopy.

“Excuse me.”

I was admiring the fine screen carving and failed to notice a small, elderly lady in a long green coat standing by my side.

“Would you wish a dog?” She stared at me very intently as I tried to make sense of the question.

“Do you mean do I want a dog?” I asked.

She continued to study me. “He’s only little but he barks too much.”

I made some joking reference to the dog whips, which left her totally unamused.

“Would you wish a dog?” she repeated.

I hardly thought my faithful feline companion Fred would welcome a canine intruder back at home but was curious and asked her where the creature was. She gave me a puzzled look and pointed over my shoulder to a spot halfway up the nave. “He’s only little but he’s harmless.”

I turned and I saw nothing. I thought maybe he’d vanished into one of the pews. The little lady was under no such illusion. “He always sits there,” she said, quietly, looking at the empty floor.

I mumbled some excuse and moved rather hastily toward the door.

“It’s a shame about his ear, isn’t it?” she called after me.

When I was half out of the door I heard what sounded like one very shrill bark and stepped back inside. The lady was smiling at the still empty floor. It must have been the door hinges. An odd place, this Pendle country.

A couple of days later I was back on the Pennine Way again and crossed over the remnants of a stone-paved “packhorse” trail, thought to be of Roman origin. It was such routes as these that carried the trains of tough packhorses from town to town and formed the trans-Pennine trade networks before the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution roared into these quiet valleys, leeching the people from the land and cramming them into the new mill towns.

On the long descent into the Calder cleft near Hebden Bridge, the whole profile of that rapid transformation can be seen in a single glance. High on the fells are the ancient Norse-styled farms, long low meldings of house and barn, sunk heavily into hillsides and almost windowless. Then the dry stone walls begin, wriggling down past black stone weavers’ cottages with long sets of upper-story windows, which once let in the daylight for the weavers of Pennine wool.

“Everything was nice and orderly until the early 1800s,” said Roland Wright, who, with his wife, Jean, runs Sutcliffe’s Inn on the moors high above the Calder valley. “Then it all happened—new spinning and weaving machinery, coal-fired steam power, turnpikes, canals, railroads. These tranquil valleys became long strips of mill towns feeding down into the rapidly expanding cities on either side of the Pennines. And all in less than fifty years!”

For almost a century the valley economies flourished on worldwide monopolies in the cotton and wool trade. Then at the end of World War II the economic doldrums came, characterized by empty mills, unused canals, and a dwindling population. Only recently has pride returned to the valleys. The powerful beauty of the setting coupled with low rents and property values attracted artists, writers, and craftspeople. Row houses were gutted, refurbished, and the blackened stone washed back to its original golden color.

In a flurry of fresh enthusiasm, small museums of valley life were opened and people like Bill Breakell and his Pennine Heritage organization began restoring abandoned mills for craft workshops and small businesses. Old valley customs and festivals were revived with a vigor that astounded many of the locals.

John Taylor, secretary of the Calder Valley Driving Club, a newly formed society for lovers of horse-and-trap travel, is amazed by all the recent activity: “It’s come back fast in the last ten years. There’s so much going on now—the pigeon racers, mice fanciers, clog makers, and clog morris dancers, the Bradshaw Mummers, dock-pudding competitions in Mytholmroyd, faith healers, the medieval Pace Egg Play, and the Rushbearing festival—they even brought back the old game of “knur and spell”—sort of a poor man’s golf. And there’s that group, Mikron, traveling the canals in a ‘narrowboat,’ giving theatrical histories at pubs all round here.”

According to Susan Booth, who recently opened her Wheat Croft whole-food store in the Holme Valley, the South Pennines has become “one of Britain’s most unlikely tourist areas.”

I arrived just in time for the late August procession of the Sowerby Bridge Rushbearing, a recently revived seventeenth-century festival celebrating the distribution of fresh rushes for the earth floors of churches. The fourteen-foot-high thatched “ark” containing the rushes was pulled by forty men in morris dance costume, led by women in gold-and-brown dresses carrying hoops of flowers. A nervous “queen” sat on top of the ark clutching at anything secure as it wobbled along narrow country lanes, pausing at pubs and churches for dancing and “largesse, beer, and spirits.”

Ron Pickles, sweating profusely, removed a huge cow skull and black cloak from his head. “I’m supposed to be a kind of fertility symbol or something. There’s a horn in here for blowin’ but it’s all bunged up and the eyes are supposed to light up an’ all but battery’s gone flat!”

When the weary caravan finally eased into the town of Ripponden at the end of the journey, the local junior brass band played, the morris men danced again, the people gorged themselves on pork pies and ice cream, and festivities frolicked on into the evening. The dance at the local village hall was attended by the young girls from the band, who had exchanged formal caps and uniforms for frilly dresses, setting the young men blushing at so much loveliness in that lively night.