***

As we grow older, so many aspects of the tick-tock mechanism of our lives require attention. The glorious oiled unison of youth, all the moving parts in harmony – those alliances can no longer be taken for granted. Cannot be left to take care of themselves. From our bodies to entire civilisations, the old certainties we grew up with - they all grow worn and creaky. We are of an age now when attention is required, when maintenance is due.

There are plenty of instruction manuals, of course. When and what to eat. How and how fast to move, how heavy to lift. Sleeping even. A skill we mastered as small children has become elusive, has to be tended and seduced. The list is long. And I am sorry, but I have to add to it.

Our speech, the spoken words that some days flow from us in abundance like the tinkling of a bluebell wood in a back, less trodden dale. That on other days come only singly, as quiet as a grassland orchid on the high fell. Our words are losing their roots, our idioms grow pale and leggy. They will soon wither and die in the summer sun if we do not tend them.

***

Long ago, I went to live in a part of Ireland where the Gaelic1 dialects still wake each morning and sing their unbroken linguistic ancestry, right back to the dreamtime. Where the twisted salt-sculpted hawthorn of Ulster’s Gaelic vernacular still clings to the western seaboard, bent over smooth by the gales of history. You can hear it unabashed in the family-run hardware shops and at the street corner. It hangs over the farm gate mid-morning as if a passing king and queen of the Ulster Cycle had cast aside their exquisitely jewelled cloaks in the rising heat and forgotten to return for them. Village by village, the ancient language of the Gaels ripples along the shore of Donegal from Na Dúnaibh, The Strongholds, westward past the clenched fist of Cnoc Fola, the Hill of Blood, and presses south to An Clochán Liath, The Grey Stepping Stones.2 Each village is a link in the chain and each link is unique. Hand-crafted. Some are rusted and perilously close to giving out. Others are bright and ring true. For now, at least, the line is holding.

So yes, chuaigh mé chuig an tobar,3 I went to the village well in search of the pure spring water of the beautiful old language. It was not initially forthcoming. Other incomers had trodden these paths before me. Some had meant well. Others had been looking to rummage through the old language’s personal belongings for trinkets and souvenirs, memes and sound bites. The language had grown suspicious. Tired of being prodded and poked. Weary of having the dimensions of its skull measured.

I lay low and waited. I prostrated myself out on the turf bogs to soak up some of the blackness of the land’s dark history. I hid all trace of my British-officer English voice under a cairn of weathered schist, far off the beaten track. I rolled in the rotting kelp on the strand line to disguise the foreign smell of me. And I listened, leaning into the strange vowels and the multiple interwoven rhythms of their every sentence. For months, my tongue silently mimicked the sounds it heard. And waited. They have a well-known wisdom saying in Ireland. Listen to the music of the river and you will catch a trout.

Finally, at the chiming checkout of the Gort an Choirce SPAR mini-supermarket and petrol station, I received the hand of blessing. ‘If you really want to hear the language, you should visit old Mr Gallagher. He has beautiful Irish,’ the lady said, almost in a whisper, as if she knew she was taking a risk in revealing such classified information to a stranger.

Beautiful Irish. Gaeilic ghalánta,4 as they would say in the area of north-west Donegal where I lived. Over the following years I heard this phrase used time and again to pay respect to the speech of fishermen, headmistresses, farmers, widows. It was not that these people with beautiful Irish were what we would call in English ‘well-spoken’, nor that they spoke with a rhetorical flourish or with an extensive, esoteric vocabulary. Far from it. It was that they spoke with a tonal subtlety which sang the songs of emotions and visions, both mythical and everyday, using only the simplest of linguistic ingredients. Frills and ruffles were frowned upon.

A language, any language, is an infinite sea of possibilities. I would be a fool if I tried to tell you that I have sailed across the ocean of Gaelic. I have been afloat these last fifteen years but I have only ventured out into the bay and peered longingly around the headlands and the shelter islands towards the horizon. I cannot tell you that Irish has no word for possession, for ‘having something’, as is sometimes asserted in the chatter of social media. Irish has many words and idioms to assert ownership. Of course it does. I cannot tell you that Irish has some single esoteric word which signifies an emotion or value which is inexpressible in any other language. The Celtic languages are not assemblages of memes for the taking. Words, like the organs of the body, only live within the whole. Take them out of their living context and they wither and die.

All I can tell you is that I am forever haunted, ravished, beguiled by the memory of those virtuoso speakers of beautiful Irish. In cosy warm winter cow byres, in tidy front rooms, on the quayside – the language which I had studied in textbooks and classes came to life and winked at me. I can only give you a few glimpses. For the rest, you will have to travel, unannounced and under cover, into the heartlands of Tír Chonaill.

Gaelic is endlessly flexible with regard to word order within a sentence.5 The fishermen fresh from the ocean played tricks with their syntax, like the conjurer who conceals a bead under one of three cups. They shuffled the words of a sentence and let you guess where the meaning really lay. And the meaning became a shrimp, a crab, a lobster.

Gaelic has a tiny sibilant word for ‘is, was, would be’ which sneaks through an utterance as an almost invisible hissing snake. I used to visit an old lady who could charm it, bid it bend the sense of surrounding words until they ate their own tails.

Gaelic is not inclined to coin new words for every trifling eventuality. It prefers to work with what is at hand. To improvise. You will find a newly minted word for ‘refrigerator’ in the modern dictionary. But if you listen closely you may still hear ‘frost box’. The finest speakers I met would rarely feel the need to use any but small handful of infinitely adaptable verbs, which they combined with prepositions and adverbs in endless permutations to achieve their meaning. Because of this, their speech became a sticky web of connotation, waiting for the fly of inspiration to tremble in its grip. So in this respect, and in many others, you could call their everyday speech a stream of poetry. But that might give the impression that it was lofty and rarified. Instead, let’s liken them to great bakers who take just a few, very everyday ingredients and transform them by some unfathomable alchemy into the finest loaf of bread.

I wanted to have the taste of that bread in my mouth, to learn the conjuring tricks of the language until I too might aspire to Gaeilic ghalánta – and never speak my mother tongue again. I wanted to reinvent myself and be free of my past. But for all the influencer’s talk of transforming and manifesting, the gods do not permit us to clean the slate. They protect us from the final folly of cutting off our own roots. People, like trees, are built from the bottom up.

***

And so, here I am. Writing to you now, not in Gaelic but in English. After many years on the road I went back to that pile of schist hidden in the Derryveagh mountains of Donegal and retrieved the package, tattered and mildewed, of my mother tongue. I came home.

Washing up on the coast of Britain, more a piece of worthless flotsam than a king of Ithaca, I set off inland to look for the many forms of expression that I used to forage in the hedgerows as a child. They were not initially forthcoming. Many of the linguistic thickets had been grubbed up to facilitate the efficient monoculture of mass media. The woods, wary of language, would not converse. Red squirrels circled the girth of the great beech tree at the front of the house, slipping in and out of view, refusing to be snared by description. Polecats concealed themselves like snipers in the old oak wood and fired rounds of silence. I lay low and waited. I eavesdropped on the breeze.

On an old stone bridge over a clear river in a northern market town I stopped and pretended to look into the water. Two gentlemen, old acquaintances in worn warm jackets, leant over the parapet. ‘How are things?’ Both men understood the question. ‘There’s been a trickle of small olives6 coming off for the last hour or so.’ And sure enough, underneath the trailing branches of a willow tree below us, a lazy trout kissed the surface once, twice and after some minutes a third time. Each time there was a gentle dimple in the water’s blushing cheek as if the fish were kissing a sleeping child, not wishing to wake them but unable to resist the touch of warm skin.

At a stile on the path to Jinny Wood I came across the lady who lives very quietly in the old cottage up the hill. ‘How are things?’ I asked. She smiled. ‘Wonderful. A woodcock just got up, right at my feet.’

On a morning in late April, the farmer who has the hay meadows up back of the house was stood at the gate to one of his fields watching hares. A quiet man. Generally more for a wave of acknowledgement than for chit-chat about the weather. But that morning, unusually, words burst out of him. ‘I heard the cuckoo.’ He did not say that he had heard a cuckoo. At any one time and in any given place in this valley you can hear two or three birds making their announcement that the year may begin in earnest. In the farmer’s mind, or so I took his meaning, the spirit of cuckoo had once again descended into the valley. Individual birds, yes, but collectively a single theme, a unitary blessing.

I am beginning to understand that these simple turns of phrase, improvised from the simplest ingredients, are embodiments of a love so deep that we can only see its reflection in the hand-crafting of speech. I will keep eavesdropping on the breeze and my tongue will try to form the sounds of its voice.

I don’t suppose for a moment that anyone is hanging on my every word - but just to say thanks to readers who have stayed with me over the last few silent months. I was battling the beast of a PhD viva and ‘minor corrections’ and subsequent committee approvals - all of which quite put me off my stride. But now the PhD is approved and on the library record sits my ‘Socio-historical and linguistic aspects of Achill Irish’. And so now the words are tumbling out of me again. To many words, maybe! This piece is longer than usual but just didn’t seem to want to be divided up. I’ll do better next time.

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Some people go out into the fields and woods to look for harmony. As if it were a mushroom which might simply be found and foraged. Taken home in a basket. The hares and the polecats, meanwhile, know only the hard graft of bringing themselves into being, instant by instant, hour after hour. The world gives them nothing for free. Their senses must fingertip-feel ahead, caressing the timber of time, searching for the knots and warp that will catch them out. That might spoil their beautiful lines. Piece by painstaking piece they joint and dowel the poem that is hare, the song that is polecat. There is a tension in their sinews. It dissipates only in death. True, both polecats and hares may bask in bliss under an afternoon sun. But this is grace, not leisure. Their ears stay cocked.

How do we, in our turn, learn to write the poems of our own existence? My, that’s a big question. I don’t have the answer. I have only glimpsed, once or twice in my life, what it might be to compose such a poem. Back in the day, I knew an old lady in the crofting township up the coast from ours whose taciturn husband had the gift. No, not the second sight or the sixth sense. He neither published nor composed poetry. Rarely sang. But he had the gift of joinery. She arranged for me to shadow him for two dark, near silent days while he patched and made do, spliced and healed the perilous roof of an old cowshed. I swept and fetched, carried and held. He dreamed of winters past and winters yet to come when the hot breath of cattle would nuzzle the rafters while the storm danced on the roof.

Poets and joiners. I get them muddled up. Their conceiving of an object which is not yet there. Measuring and measuring again. Cutting a little, pondering patiently as if waiting for divine inspiration, then cutting once more. Smoothing and matching. Dressing and offering up. The repetition of simple tasks over the months and years of a lifetime. The avoidance of sudden flashes of haste. The respect from dawn to dusk for the raw material. The wood or the words - the smell, the texture. The long decades that are laid down in the grain of a tree’s heartwood and a language’s lexicon.

But the apprentice’s path of unlearning is long and rocky. I have misunderstood so much, right from the outset. The very foundations of my craftsmanship were askew. The taken-for-granted division of months into days, for example. All wrong. I thought that a day was a patch of light with darkness at either end. But the stop and re-start of midnight is a brutal and ill-thought cut along the grain. It does not work with the wood. It leaves the night like two halves of a severed worm. Both writhe and wriggle. Neither is viable. No wonder that the polecats treat me with disdain. A tradesperson who makes such an elementary mistake is not to be taken seriously.

In an attempt to address the deficiencies in my tradecraft, I have recently been attending classes in the University of Mallerstang. This semester I am doing the module on Decay and Mortality. In the prospectus it is described as a foundational module for all life poetry studies. Very ‘hands-on’. Not a literary curriculum by any stretch of the imagination.

The campus is a scattered multitude of old barns and byres abandoned on the hillsides above the upper Eden. Rough-stone walls and some last remains of lime mortar on which maidenhair spleenwort gorges herself. Slit windows and absent doors. If the roof has held, there are dark corners where the barn owls’ pellets pile up like stalagmites or generations of creatures have come to curl and die, predators and prey at last resolving their old disputes in a pile of egalitarian bones. I listen for hours to the lectures of woodlice, comparing and contrasting the intrusion of dry rot and wet. I watch the practical demonstrations of wood-boring beetles and take notes on the patient penetration of moss. I reach out to comprehend the renewal of all things through the decay of old timber. Slowly, as you’d expect from an apprentice, I am unlearning the hegemony of progress.

Through the classroom windows I occasionally catch a glimpse of hares, lolloping about their business. I like to think that they approve of my attempts to start over. Though of course, they’d never say.

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The expiration of my own personal boots involves no such formality. We go through a lot together, my boots and I. Often, they are the only company I have. The shock of a spade unexpectedly hitting rock, doesn’t it rack the boot’s sole and the digger’s ankle at just the same moment? When a woodcock gets up from your feet at the very last second, don’t your boots and your face bask in the very same thrum of eternal glory? These things, surely, are the makings of a friendship. The mother stones of affection.

But boots, like dogs, were not made to last forever. We can deduce, therefore, that the universe was created by a storyteller. To have conjured up the joy of good boots and the perfection of dog but to have allotted them less than a quarter of our three score years and ten – that could not have happened by chance. To pull the strings of love so tight that they cut into your fingertips when you play on them – that is irrefutable evidence of design. Call the storyteller ‘God’ if you must. Personally, I have no need of miracles beyond a collie dog called Nell and a sturdy pair of boots.

So, when the leather of my boots has split like clay soil cracked under summer sun, when the soles begin to separate and we can no longer politely ignore the quiet flip-flap at every step, there comes a day when the boots and I sigh and sit to retell one last time the stories of all the adventures we have had. We understand each other.

For boots, if not for dogs, this creates a dilemma. Boots these days cannot be buried, with or without the honours due to them. Too many artificial materials. But it is simply unthinkable to take them off my feet and put them straight into the bin. What kind of cold-hearted monster could do that? And I fear that I know a thing or two about cold-hearted monsterdom. So I have a special shelf in a dark corner of the shed where my boots go when they retire. We tell each other that there will maybe come a morning and some particularly mucky job that does not warrant the ruination of new boots. The old boots will come out of the reserves and we’ll stride out together again, just like in the old days. Maybe we will. In the meantime, the old boots close their eyes for a bit of a well-earned nap. They gather dust on the bottom shelf until the life finally leaves them. It may be a month or two. Rarely more than a year. Then, and only then, can I bring myself to dispose of the husk of the old boots whose stories have all evaporated into the evening breeze.

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Yes, I’m a wealthy man and, between you and me, weighed down with the guilt of it. The piles of synaptic snapshot visuals - I tried to give those away to charity shops. But apparently there isn’t much call for them these days. And they can only store so much stuff. Have to keep the stock turning over. The longer-term assets, the bonds and futures, the lark song baptising the fell anew each spring, the fishy sweetness of otter spraint – I thought I’d put those into a charitable trust, appoint trustees to oversee their distribution. The powers that be took a dim view. Mustelidae faeces, apparently, do not comply with modern sanitary standards.

In desperation I took to the streets, sat on a double-folded sheet of cardboard in an old jacket fastened with string and tried to give everything away. The passing dogs, eye-to-eye, were all for it. Couldn’t get enough. But their owners tugged on their leads and told them to leave it. The young people, the people we used to call children, came by after school. That was the worst of it. The tell-tale signs of deprivation. The shiny clean shoes. Soft hands. The loss of peripheral vision. A flight of Jackdaws descending onto the remains of a fish supper did not turn a single head.

I said, ‘Cup your hands, as if you were praying, but open them just a little, like a mussel when it is feeding.’ I wanted to pour in a drop of cloud-shadow over the hillside mixed with fox-pad tracks. Some syrup of weasel spiced with the dark disputation of tawny owls.

But they didn’t know how to pray to these old gods. Had not heard of a mussel’s murky mouthing. Besides, their hands were full of a pied piper’s magic and their eyes would not stray far from it. Their fingers danced and twitched and could not have made a seal. A mountain stream’s clear waters would have simply flowed out of their hands onto the pavement.

I slunk off home, my tote bags of joyful memories as full as they ever were. But I have no intention of giving up. This weekend I’m having a garage sale. I’ll put a box of freebies out next to the pavement. A snatch of woodcock roding at dusk. A ripple of snipe as he unzips the sky. A chiding of oystercatchers before daybreak. That’ll bring them in.

Dedicated to - who does a far better job of sharing miracles with young people than I ever will.

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But when did the child go missing? Is the story ancient or modern? After all, in this valley of crumbling castles and fell-shepherd folds you may still blink and slip unawares into the sixteenth century. The Normans are recent arrivals, scorned as newcomers by the old Brittonic blood of the Eden. The echo of pickaxe-and-pony miners up on Mallerstang Edge has not quite died away from the corries. The two elders of Coldside pause and peer into the mist rising from the mugs of tea in their cupped hands. They wander down some unmarked bridleway of history where dates and centuries have fallen into disrepair like the gap-tooth drystone walls up on Downey Scar. And return empty-handed. The story of the lost child is not, it seems, reportage. Conversation moves on to subsidies and rewilding.

By now the light is fading and I am expected elsewhere tonight. A message had been left in the pre-agreed format. A woodpecker’s polka-dot flight feather, lodged in the top of a rotten fence post. The invitation was flickering in the breeze this morning at dawn. RSVP. I accepted with a fleck of heron down. The lost child and I, we converse with feathers. Like a pair of Cold-War spies. Dead-drops and cyphers. We have never actually met.

Up on the knoll above Jaunty Beck, all the local birch saplings have gathered for the dancing. This year they have grown into fine young women, laughing as they share the shock of their own emerging beauty, just this moment unleashed by a fleshing of moonlight on bonny white bark. Their frizzy hair smoulders just beyond the fingertips of colour vision. Memory clothes it in a deep veinous red. Cold fire. I quickly turn my eyes away, lest my looking melt the magic. In daylight they must be either women or trees. Unobserved in the light of the moon they are momentarily both. A younger man might find favour and turn and twirl with them, his arm around a dainty waist, their hair brushing his face. But for me those days have passed. I am old enough now to see the gentle curvature of the path of my life, circling slowly back to the beginning. Old familiar landmarks have begun to appear as I draw nearer to home.

At the edge of Jinny Wood a hint of badger track leads me down, down into the belly of Gullet Gill and its far-below hidden tryst with the river. This is the part of the valley where I have come closest to my lost boy. But still only glimpses and guesses. Once I perched on the top of the rock face above Centurion’s Pool in dead of night and fell asleep. I dreamed that I heard a splash and looking down into the deep black water, not quite awake and not quite asleep, there was a twisting sinew of light just below the surface. A magnificent trout’s pale belly, rolling through a shimmer of minnows? Or a boy’s heel, kicking out as he duck-dived into cover beneath the undercut bank? Another time, a glitter of two eyes blinked out of Crowley’s Copse. Whether that was a young roe buck or a little boy disguised as a yearling deer, or both at once, I cannot be sure. Whichever it was, they left no sign. Last summer, a fragmentary ripple of laughter blew across the path, lofted by the downslope breeze as the dusk soothed the fevered brow of the fell and the woodland below slowly exhaled the basketful of warmth it had gathered during the day. It might have been a jay protesting at the intrusion into its evening roost. Or a talented young mimic of a mimic, laughing like a jay to tease me. No matter. Laughter is infectious, whatever births it.

At the little clearing I know as Woodcock Corner, thick cloud passes over the moon. The uneasy truce between light and dark fractures, leaving pupils to widen until they can widen no more. And garner only guesses. The other senses, waiting patiently in the wings, take to the stage in an ancient mummery of smell and sound, texture and touch. Rich with the spicy sharp of a fox’s love letter to his sometimes wife. Audacious with the creak of restless river-ice. Tender with the slow closure of oak tree bark over rusted barbed wire.

I have come looking for the lost boy but looking and seeing have run their course. So I sit down gently in the leaf litter, with the shiny black beetles and the pale wood lice who are doing the world’s housekeeping. Boundaries blur, edges dissolve. We all spread out and into one another like ink drops on blotting paper. My smell mixes with the dry decay of heartwood. My fingertips connect to the fleshless bones of last year’s leaves, finer than Calais lace. The freezing night air nuzzles my skin. Its rasping cat’s tongue shiver-licks me clean. I surrender my body to its care.

There is no malice in the darkness. Except when we bring it with us, deep down in our coat pockets. The finger-fetish pebbles of rancour which we turn and turn. There is no menace in the night-wood unless we sour it with our bitterness. The dead-stump gargoyles are terrors of our own imagining. The ghosts of fallen trees are tender souls. Listen to the softness of their sighing as they remember the wind in their leaves.

The boy is nearby. Has probably been following me all along. He is in a playful mood and reaches out in the form of a shrew. A restless wriggle wrapped in fur. Dragged along by his nose, an elephant’s trunk with whiskers. He stop-start rummages through the leaves. Crunches what he finds. Eats with his mouth open. Bumps into my hand and steps back amazed. There is a snicker of laughter very close by. So close that the tiny bones in my own ears tremble.

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We valley folk gather, ripe and replete, for harvest festival. The candle light is warm and the hymns are wholesome. But it cannot last. The piles of fruit, fresh from the branch, are concealing the spores of their dissolution. Produce soon succumbs. There is only so much hay in the byre and the animals which are to be kept over winter must be separated and nurtured. The corollary is willfully obscured. Death is wrapped in a black plastic bag and buried out of sight. Its absence turns us into wraiths, forever fleeing from the deepest kisses of life. Its lack makes us half creatures. And I so want to be whole.

Going in search of the other half of me, I take the long path home from church. Over the black treacle midnight waters of the Eden into the forbidden snag and snarl of Jinny wood. A cheek scratched and a clattered knee are a small toll to pay. Blackened bark crumbles in my hands and deadfall branches trip and tease. Then out again so suddenly onto the open fell like a man narrowly saved from drowning, sucking in a rush of air that at last does not reek of rot, which comes clean and untouched off the Solway Firth to bless us with the ramrod of a sudden downpour.

The shock of the shower soon passes. A hush falls on Fawning Fell. But listen. It is not quite silent. There is another festival underway. In the cracks and caves within the drystone walls and in the tenement blocks of gryke and clint there are other ceremonies ongoing. I hear them scrit-scratting in these sacred hours between early and late. The mice are turning the year over, rolling it down the slope of the seasons and celebrating their gods.

By the clock-tick drip of the fresh-fallen rain they measure out the minutes to sunrise. They are the crevice-dwelling crowd, the brotherhood of concealment. They are the little creatures who gnaw and nibble their whiskered world into being, one scrupulous sedge seed at a time. A fallen nut a feast, a blackberry lick the quickening of hope. They are the mousey magicians who seduce the stars to shine. The cosmos will boast over dinner that it was once reflected in their elderberry eyes.

The shrews, as always, are ravenous. Their noses twitch for the blood-bank of earthworms rising, finally, up from the flooded lower decks of the sinking ship. The whole valley lists to starboard as the water floods in from the windward wave of Dowsey Scarp.

The liturgy of the little creatures is already underway in their cathedral of minor miracles. The vaulted limestone chancel, six whole inches from sacramental floor to vaulted ceiling, is alive with the rituals of rodents.

And me, incognito at the back of the congregation. How on earth did I get in here? Massive and brutal as I am, my heel-bones pounding the earth until she cries out for respite. Well, I cheated, of course. I shrank myself down using an old herbal remedy of these parts. I took a sip of Mrs Alderson’s special elderflower cordial. She makes it just so. Slipping the bonds of bigness, my clod-hopper boots fall from my titchy feet as if a dressing-up child were stepping clean out of his father’s wellies. I am made over in miniature. To the world of men and machines I have ceased to be, give or take. It is for the best.

The field mice are just getting to my favourite part of the order of service. They are reciting the creation story of a day, each and every day anew, brought forth out of darkness. Wearing neither cloak nor cassock, these squeaky-whiskered clergy invoke the monumental moment of dawn, the baton-pass of their two gods. The white god of night hands off to the barred god of daylight. The mice’s objects of devotion are well chosen. The barn owl and the kestrel recreate the world in a caress of feathers at sunrise. The sky and the earth are kept from falling in on one another by their merciless attention to the detail, to the flicker in the grass, to the last will and testimony of their true believers.

Lying back grateful in the heather I trace the beloved outlines of Pegasus and the Plough, Cassiopeia and Cygnus. I can taste again the salt lick of death, can abandon myself once more to the urgent kisses of life.

I am sorry that I have been absent without leave. I have written and written these last weeks but nothing came for which it was worth taking a minute of your time. Your time is precious. Some of you know that I am struggling with writing up my thesis at the moment, and that it is a many-legged hydra which has wrapped itself around me these last months and stolen my best words. But it is nearly done now and must be submitted before the end of the year. Then I will be back, every fortnight, to ask for your ear. In the meantime I will try to slip some piece or two past its blockade.

I have put all paid subscriptions on hold. I think I know how that works but it is a little obscure. So please, if you are a monthly subscriber and you wish to cancel, please to do so now before I put payments back in place. If you are an annual subscriber, I believe that the clock of your subscription is currently stopped, but please make sure that you are not about to auto-renew if that isn’t what you want.

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But even for chosen ones such as these, the voice of the world may still fall silent. Months, years, half a lifetime, when they can no longer hear the song of their gods. When the music of everything is taken from them. The land-song which had always been the fabric of their days, the bed of their dreams. Gone. That sweetest of songs, which kept them standing in the storm. Their ears ring at its absence. They are bludgeoned by silence.

Heaven knows, I am no saint. Just a fumbling fool, scrabbling in the dirt for a handful of redemption. But these last weeks I have had no choice but to drink a drop from the tainted saints’ cup. Thursday morning two weeks back, at a quarter past ten, the land ceased singing to me. Mid-melody. I carried on with my work for a moment, fully expecting the robin to take a breath and resume. Or the mewling buzzard to take up the tune and carry it forward. By the time I had finished levelling the new gate to the bottom field the delicate fingertips of anxiety were caressing the back of my neck. I cast around. The plum tree was still there, bent under the burden of a good summer. The river still tarried in the deep pool where it flows under the old Norman bridge. Nothing had changed. Everything had changed.

Had I been struck deaf? There was still the faint hum of the universe’s carrier wave, low and steady. But no transmission. No modulating frequencies to form the message. I worked my jaw to clear the eustachian tubes. That must be it. A change in pressure which I had failed to equalise. My eardrums would surely give that reassuring pop and the world’s voice would come flooding back in.

By the following morning, bright and clear, the emptiness was crushing. Being a man, and a man of a certain age, it was beholden upon me to devise a plan. Big plans are best, of course. The bigger the better. Preferably with a quiver full of quest, a dollop of the sublime. For such a journey a heavy heroic backpack would be de rigueur.

Up, up, up goes this quixotic old man. Up to the roof of the world on Mallerstang Edge. To plug into the mains. To tap into the grid. To re-boot the system. I set my rucksack down by the cairn that guards the head of Polly Moss. Then stash my huff-and-puff body beside it with a sign hung around its neck – POLICE AWARE – and begin to climb the sky’s ladder into the labyrinth of North-Pennine lenticular clouds. The atmosphere’s great phased array antenna of standing waves over the spine of England. If there were a signal to be heard anywhere in the cosmos this colossal tympanum of silent sculpted winds would sift it from the noise.

Close up, the clouds are glamorous, mother-of-pearl, an up-flow torrent of tinnitus ice. But they are not permitted to speak while on duty, these honour guards of the palace of heaven. Not as much as a wink. I grow giddy in the rarefied, esoteric air and, none the wiser, fall the three miles back down into the heather. Land with a wicked thump. Winded, half-frozen, hypoxic. Still deaf.

Repentant of my big schemes, I retreat into the dark corner of the shed where the spiders have their acoustic laboratories. They have the most sensitive listening devices in the world, trembling at a distant midge’s wingbeat, recording the under-arm itch of a woodlouse, the dreams of a woodworm.

She glowers at me. Calculates how much venom and what quantity of silk would be needed to subdue me. Decides against it. Waits for me to make the next move. I shrink myself down as best I can. Judiciously. I would not want to give her the impression that I am that small. Imitating the listening foot which she rests nonchalantly on the guy rope of her web, I eavesdrop across the frequencies of her cat’s whisker set. Silence. The silence of a spider’s unbearable patience.

The first frost of the year came this morning. Beside Birbeck Gill I fall into its arms, abandon ambition and set down the burden of hope. I surrender, leaning back against the mother-stones at the base of the drystone wall that marks the old field boundary. This wall has wriggled in its sleep and fallen out of bed a dozen times since the Norse imagined its line. Each time it falls the rough hands and spirit level eyes of the valley’s old families have picked it up off the floor and tucked it back in. From its caverns and caves emerges a young wren. He cocks his head at this new wonder, this killing cold. It will be his first winter. At a thousand feet above sea level, like as not his last. So he must practise the song of his ancestors and be ready. Faltering at first, losing the line or fluffing the trill. He starts over and starts over, cocking his tail in salute to the song.

Slowly, we rise up through the black waters and begin again. Note by note.

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At a distance he thinks that perhaps I am God. The juvenile male Stonechat, with just the faintest promise of his adult black hood and white collar, has been waiting for God. Nestlings are fed the old stories of how the world became, their beaks gaping for the next instalment. But as I approach, he sees that it is only me. My long shadow, scissoring across the low-sun land, had confused him for a moment. So he keeps his distance. Declines to land on my outstretched hand.

Instead, he flits along beside me as I find my hop-scotch path through the maze of clints and grykes. He and I are almost the entire cast of this one act play. Not a very original conceit, I’ll grant you. A pair of travellers, met upon the road. The dialogue is sparse. A tilt of the head, a flutter of a wing. Pauses of various durations designed to give the appearance of profundity. Once, a word like a clack of two pebbles, which passes for the little bird’s name. Not to be repeated. A grunt as my ankle strains at the limit of elasticity and calls for reinforcements.

All the while, we inspect each other, the Stonechat and I, as if looking into a mirror. A mightily cantankerous sort of a mirror. This mirror shows what was and what will be. What could have been and what might unfold. The Stonechat is young and I am old. His life is ahead and he is in hot pursuit. The clattering hooves and hot leather of my life’s swash and buckle will be upon me soon enough, flee as I might. The bird’s voice is a whisp of promise on the air while my words are set in a leaden typeface. My companion is clean and I am dirty. His is the innocence of survival and mine is the guilt of acquisition. We orbit each other like twin suns, locked together by the gravity of fascination.

So, of course we go there. To the tree of life. Where else would we go? This is an empty stage except for the one lone juniper that somehow sucks up the bitter dregs of summer drought. But she is not in the mood for dispensing wisdom. Not this evening. ‘Try another day’, she suggests. Only, the young stonechat and I do not have another day. This is both the opening night and the end of the run. As the sun wades waist deep in the cleansing waters of the horizon we cast about us for a denouement.

The tree of life laughs. She was only kidding. ‘Look – there they are. Stitching together the blue of the sky and the green of the ground. Theirs is the final word.’

A revelation of harebells stand naked between two onslaughts of limestone, quivering not from fear nor from any breath of wind, but out of some irresistible internal resonance with the whole universe. We do not trouble them with homilies, spare their fragile stems the weight of description. Together we just look and look until the curtain of darkness begins to fall.

In the absence of an audience the Stonechat and I bow to one another. We will not meet again. He and I have shared this moment of gasping bliss and will share it until the end of time. We have kept no secrets from each other.

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With the approach of summer I grow absent-minded. Become confused by the babble of voices. To excuse myself, I claim that the penny-leaf rustle of the giant aspen outside my window has frayed all the seams of sound. True, each year, I manage to mark the day of our redemption, the hour of the first cuckoo call. But the falling silent of cuckoos? Somehow the moment of their silence evades me. At an unmarked turn in the road they have bowed out, discreetly, while I walked purposefully on, eyes on the destination, oblivious. A week later I turn to listen for them, in need of their reassurance on a dark day. But that time has passed.

At the turn of the high tide of summer I make such a shameful spectacle of myself, weeping as I walk the high ridge of Birkett Fell. The helter-skelter of the year’s new growth has peaked and paused and taken a step back to admire itself. We all sense the moment. Even the tottering black-face lamb stops stock and sniffs, amazed. She had thought that time was endlessly slithering forward. Is stunned to see it begin to eat its own tail. The grouse, his young barely on the wing, has hardly time enough. He chides the hour, ‘Go-back, go back.’1 But summer has served him notice. Up on the bare-back tops, the curlews have changed their tune. The long bubbling joy-song of their arrival back on the breeding grounds is clipped now. Just a few short syllables. As the outward migration back to the coast draws near, they ask, ‘Will we?’ … ‘Will we?’ … ‘Will we meet again?’ Through a sheen of tears I whisper, ‘Yes, my loves.’ But more as a prayer than an answer. If these bonny seamstresses of the northern lands should one year fail to stitch the shoreline to the high peaks then we are surely undone. There is no way to re-fashion the long curved darning needles which they use for the task.

Down by the river in late July I am gawky and graceless, drawn in fellowship to the crippled ash tree who holds the bank at Minnows’ Pool. Her first trunk failed, back in her grey-barked dandy days when she was wont to adorn the riverbank promenade, turning heads, twirling her parasol of fashionable ash-tree green. It was such a bitter blow. Woodpeckers drummed her withered leg into a colander. It is a wonder that she regrew, half-twined around the original stem. Today it sounds to me as if she is humming. Not a tune exactly. A harmony of notes I find familiar but cannot place. Then a honey bee lands on my arm and probes for salt or maybe for sweet, finds neither but rests for a while in the warmth. High up in the ash’s flank an old woodpecker nest-hole purrs like a cat giving sacrament.

The bee on my arm will die with all her cohort before autumn. Soon I will be forgotten. The ash tree, long after the bees have left her for a new home, will fall. None of us will follow a straight line over the horizon to immortality. Because the horizon is a circle. And we are already there.

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‘The deep truth is, we were never banished from Eden. Heaven and earth have never been two different places; they are one and the same. There is nowhere more sacred to get to. We are already here, in this place our spirit recognizes; and here are we mended of our ills, for a while.’

I read her words a few mornings ago when I came back up to the house from the river. I had the itchy feeling of knowing there was something I wanted to say. She brought it into focus for me. I am grateful.

This morning is made of alabaster, too soft a stone for the monumental art of cathedrals. Her skin is almost white enough for sanctity, but for a blush of sinful pink when she becomes aware of her own beauty, blossoming under the intricate fingertips of first light. Long shadows shorten, raising the night-flattened dough of the slope below Highfall Scarr into a momentary likeness of a crone’s face, the tracks of her forgotten tears cutting down across the wrinkled terracing of the soil’s slow slump towards wisdom.

At the peeping of the sun over Mallerstang edge we all stand up as one. The hare in the castle field at periscope depth in the long grass, his ears awash. The hazel thicket that hangs out over Striding Pool, teaching fish the secrets of the universe. The polecat in his scurry-back hole. The barn owl in her cloak of invisibility, the cavity where she is perched insisting that there is nothing up its sleeve. Even the sand martins, incapable of stillness, contrive a steep stall turn to pirouette briefly in place. It’s the best they can do. The whole congregation rises quietly to their feet as the dunnock sends out the first high notes from the uncountable unseen organ pipes of creation to announce the day. Prayers in hand, we look intently for salvation. Not skywards. No, not in this church. Our eyes fall to the peat-stained glass of the river, fresh from rain. The whisk of the river’s eddy whips all our reflections into one.

We are gathered here, in the sight of Hangstone Fell, because the single bell for convocation had tolled, up and down the valley, while we dreamed in our beds, or stood dormant in the darkness of Jinny Wood, or foraged by smell in the top hayfield or hunted by ear from the arrow-slit windows of Pendragon Castle – each according to their nature. We were enjoined to bear witness. Here. This morning.

Now, in the doorway of dawn, we hang in the balance. We are waiting. There is a shuffling in the pews. Family hassocks, renewed every second generation, whisper to the flagstones that god is late, again. The dunnock, as any parish organist would, improvises a few extra bars to extend the introit until the service begins, hoping to avert a scandal. But reaching the boundary of harmonic absurdity, the little brown bird falls silent. Time, the church warden, steps into the breach, stretching out his arms wider and wider, until he must surely do himself a mischief. A tawny owl clears his throat as if to begin. All eyes turn. He shrugs and ruffles his dignity back into place. Just a bone, for heaven’s sake. A little bone stuck in his gullet.

The truth is, there is no minister here to lead us into the psalm. And the badger hasn’t got all day. The kestrel has mouths to feed. We are on the point of disassembling, one from the other. Thoughts are beginning to turn towards the grit and grind of the coming day.

Some say they heard it first. Others swear there was silence. A toad still dines out on the story of the blue lightning that flashed upstream, just inches above the river. A cyan spark previously unknown to science. He says that there was a faint smell of ozone. Perhaps there was. For most of us there was a shock as if of static electricity, and an intimation of grace. Only the jackdaws, high in their cawing kingdoms above the river, reported a tiny bird, barely bigger than a robin,1 carrying the original light of the world.

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When a child first pips the eggshell of their small world and emerges into consciousness, what might they see that will stay with them forever? In my waking dreams and in my night travels I see stands of alders1 by my side. I cannot visualise a world without them. The orange blaze of their waterlogged roots, the warp and contort of their twisted limbs, the split-end frizz of their thinning hair. These trees are as familiar as the fingers of my own hands. They were there when I first opened my eyes at the water’s edge, to find my own earnest little face looking back from a stream’s playful mirror.

Before they had a name, before anything had a name, alders watched over me as I clambered careless among their quiet patience. Just as all of them had been before me, I was a sapling water-child, feet wet, my attention drawn to the bottom of a clearwater pool. The old trees of the bankside were my whispering guardians, a cadre of veteran knights, sworn to my protection. Their heads bent in chivalrous prayer over every lowland brook I travelled. Their knotted arms meshed to conceal the secret origins of the forgotten Welsh rivers I met and loved, the young headwaters and I on the joyful snaking path to adulthood and the distant ocean. The fire of the alders’ smouldering-ember roots warmed my cold feet. The winking gargoyle faces in their fissured bark were company enough.

I was the skinny wet heir to a barefoot water palace in the westerlands. You will not find it on any map. It lies beyond the blue remembered hills. Moorhens in full regalia strutted the sandbars, insisting on ceremony and protocol. Herons recited the annals of the mighty pike who once lived under Jinty Bridge. The Monnow and the Troddi, the Mally Brook and the old mill race, all doors were open to me, my socks stuffed into tattered trainers for safe-keeping and left up in the grass. If only someone had stolen them away I might have stayed forever with the gudgeon and the lamprey, unable to return to dry land. But nobody ever came to the crystal-clear corridors and cloisters of this petty kingdom of mine. My shoes were always where I had left them, hours before.

Perhaps it was the frequent immersion which kept the skin-bag of my body permeable for so long. Well past the time when it was supposed to have sealed itself off, closed the castle gates to creatures which are not me. I shared the amniotic fluid of Bellshore Brook with the pin-fry who nibbled my feet. I suppose that makes us siblings.

Legs feel overweight after hours in the partial gravity of buoyancy. Like an astronaut returning from space at the end of a long sunny afternoon. I would grasp a handhold in the labyrinthine bark of an ancient alder to haul myself heavy out of the water, softened fingertips puckered and wrinkled. Was that when some fragment of alder crossed the blood barrier and spliced itself into my story?

There are ancient alders below me as I write. At the bottom of the steep slope of the garden they hold the line against the periodic flash and ferment of the upper Eden, her moods famously volatile. In spring my eyes swoon at a profusion of alder buds and receive the sacrament of their faint lilac aftertaste. We are old now, these trees and I. Nearer to the ocean than the source. In one another’s company we are comfortable with silence. And anyway, they have other charges to look after. Emerging from the hollow trunks and the limb-fallen scars there is a crowd of fledgling jackdaws, clacking and hopping and telling it how it is. The blue-eyed birds and I, we share a fosterage. I suppose that makes us cousins

.

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Never begin a speech or a petition with an apology. That is the iron-clad rule of rhetoric. But needs must. I confess. I confess that I have been giving you only half the story. Barely half. A cauterised stump of the intimate narrative of this valley where we live. There was no malice. No deliberate attempt to deceive. It was just that I was forever looking skywards as I ran the high fells, sporting the latest hydration vest and fancy lightweight running shoes. Racing to catch the younger man I once was, half my age. Him always five steps faster up the rise. A long-stride landslide on the steep descents. I might as well have chased the wind.

It is a barbed melancholy, sweet and stinging hot, to pursue the absence of possibility, up on these ridges where the denuded land, treeless and stripped, offers everything to a glance. Has nothing left for an encore.

All the while I was failing to notice the sound reflecting up into the soles of my feet as they pounded the patient ground. Listen. No, you are not mistaken. The land is hollow. Run with me here on the undercliff of Nab Fell and together our footfall will ring a peal of bells in the belfry of a subterranean cathedral. Cloisters of vaulted limestone - ornate, their rococo pillars crafted meticulously, in situ - will echo the hammering of our hearts.

Here, on this terrace below the Nab’s sheer boulder slopes, the map’s contours break for lunch. Spread themselves out on the tormentil sward, and snooze. A halfway house, neither valley-bottom gossip nor high-fell mute. Invisible from the tracks and byways of daily life below. Unnoticed from the escarpments above, where the eye is seduced by the horizon, attention is ushered discreetly away by the dome of the sky.

It is here at the easing in the valley’s side that hard limestone water, so long underground, breaches the rolling surf of the Nab’s gritstone overburden like a pod of dolphins briefly sunlit in a breaking wave. Only to dive down deep again and surge onwards in secrecy to the far, far away of the sea. Leaving a line of sinkholes and swallows which dimple the heather-flushed cheeks of the level ground at Greystones Wold. From the top of Wild Boar Fell you might look down, see the little sunken circles way below and think of trout, lazily rising to a calm surface, just now and then, for mayflies.

Over the years possibility has deserted the high fells. She despaired at the no-tree sheep-nibbled nothing of the high tops and took her flashing eyes and long grey hair elsewhere. Maybe one day she’ll return. For now she lives nearby, in a luxury apartment of her own devising. At the bottom of Skint Gill Pot. You may not visit. In the great storm of 17121 she rained all hell onto the fellside and boulder-choked the entrance to her cave. Above her, a Ring Ouzel stands guard. His two-stones-chat of a challenge is best heeded. Unless you want your bones to rest by the skull of an old ewe at the bottom of possibility’s pot.

You may be inclined to feel sorry for her, down there in the deep. But don’t be sad. She is not alone. Bats bring the messages.2 Pale dwarf trout, their eyes pinked by generations in the darkness, dart and dance and tickle her feet. A mighty eel of a philosophical bent undermines the fallacy of time with decades of sophistry. Next year he will return to the ocean. Next year. There are spiders front of house, welcoming well-heeled gnats to a dining experience. Rowans and hazel, refugees from the blight and blast of the open fell, reach their roots into her and purr.

They say that sinkholes and swallows are never-to-return gateways to the otherworld. And maybe they are right. But I must run home now, over the ups and downs of this world, lovelorn and naked as she is. So I prefer to dream that possibility is just biding her time, gathering her strength at the bottom of Skint Gill Pot.

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Up on Birkett Common, a short climb above our house, there is one last old juniper tree. Junipers are dioecious. There are male trees, who produce pollen from a profusion of yellowy orange flowers. There are female trees who produce juniper berries, slow to ripen. The deep blue of their maturity is more than a year in the making. The last tree on the common is a male. I sit with him often. We don’t say much. The usual courtesies, conveyed without words. He knows fine well that I want to hear his story. But we are not yet well enough acquainted. So, together we stare in silence, pointedly, intently, across at Mallerstang Edge. As if waiting for an answer. Today, in the gentlest southerly, barely a breeze, a zephyr of warm air lifted from the dust at the base of the tree’s outcrop home and ruffled his branches, brushed past the little ripe flowers. Gathering pace, joined by warmth from gulleys and gills, the column of rising air was adorned by circling buzzards, mewling their spring lovers’ joy. They climbed and climbed until the juniper tree and I lost sight of them, high above the fell-tops. ’There is your story’, the old tree winked. ‘Catch it if you can.’

The vole can hear the oration of bats and the battle-cries of shrews. But is himself a humble man who bears no arms. Wide-whiskered and elderberry-eyed, the vole is god-fearing. He glimpses the wind-hover kestrel, as if she were painted on the vaulted ceiling of the broad chapel that is Mallerstang valley. He may be grateful for the ministrations of the she-hawk one day, when his eyes grow dim and his teeth are worn down.

This is to be his second summer. There will not be another. A vole who has come full circle to the day of their birth is on borrowed time. Already, and a full year behind him, there are young voles who ask him to tell the old stories, who seek the venerable wisdom of his four whole seasons. ‘What is winter?’ they ask. Is it a giant badger whose teeth grind our bones like chaff? Or is it like the smoke of a moorland fire, stinging our eyes and choking our breath? He ponders. A shiver emerges from a memory and rummages in his chest, clutching at his heart. How can he speak the terror? That all grass turns brown and withers, that water turns to rock, that the sun shrinks and shrivels in the sky. Better just to tell them that winter is a great white owl, soft and silent. For now, the month of May is not yet over. The long, joyous, perilous days of summer are ahead. So many of the young ones need never know the truth of winter on the high fells.

He sees the prance and strut of the young roe buck. He feels the pounding of hares’ feet, boxing their way to the throne. But is himself content, lacking the ambition to rule the world. Only, he feels now and then the little itch behind his ears. The little itch that will not be scratched. The tickle of mystery. That biting mite which afflicts a vole of a certain age.

Just once before in his whole life, by folly and accident, has he crossed open ground. A horror, to a vole, like no other. He remembers the vertigo of that open sky as if he had been on a space-walk and his tether had come adrift, leaving him tumbling slowly forever in the glare of the sun. But the itch can no longer be tolerated. And there is no other way to reach the juniper tree, the hermit on his rock, the oldest living creature on Birkett Common. The highest authority of vole lore is surrounded by close-cropped sward on a bare bones ridge of bedrock.

There is a sharp pain in the vole’s heart when at last he reaches the safety of the juniper’s shadow. Too sharp to pass. He had run so hard, head down, through the blazing fire of his agoraphobia. Some little spring inside him has finally broken. His loan is being recalled.

The juniper tree sees that the vole’s ending is near and wants to speak. But it has been so long. And the stammer which gripped him as a seedling has not mellowed over the centuries. He can only sing with a rustling of his sharp green needles. His song is about the juniper berries which were formed on the day of the vole’s birth and are just at that moment on the turn to the deep rich blue of new life.

A year has passed. The bones now lie neat and white by the old tree’s roots. Flesh has long since passed down into rainwater pools deep in the rock, upwards into sap and outwards into juniper flowers. As I sit with the tree and listen to the buzzards’ cry, a vole, on a stream of rising air laden with pollen, begins his long ascension towards the sacred tang and tart of juniper berry. Somewhere far below him, on the limestone pavements of Westmorland, a female juniper is waiting.

I don’t suppose that anyone will notice, not with all the wonderful hustle and bustle of the changing seasons. But just in case - Elvers by Moonlight will skip half a beat now and be back on the 11th of June.

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Spring blue dawn on the back tracks and by-ways of old Westmorland. A mustering of the militia. Hawthorn, hazel and holly, these three stand fast, holding the line of the hedgerows of England. As they have always stood. Side by side. Interwoven. The steady gaze of High Force Top inspects the ranks and contemplates the loss of elm, the imminent demise of ash.1 Oak and alder are held in reserve.

The air is still asleep. The day is rubbing its eyes, waiting for the kettle to boil. The past is just over those low hills, blue-green with the scattering of light through dew-fall.

You can smell it, faintly, in the dandelion bustle of bumble bees, early to rise.

You can hear it murmur in the cathedral cavities of old drystone walls where calloused hands the size of dinner plates set each piece of the puzzle just so. ‘Easy work,’ they’d say, and wink. ‘Just put each egg back in its own proper nest.’

You know it in the midnight lambing-shed face of the upland farmer as he quad-clatters by, smiling like a child let out early from school. The dog on the shelf of this victorious general’s chariot pretends not to see you, has eyes only for him. A stroppy ewe with twins at foot stands and stamps in the open trailer, her job to remind them that their glory is fleeting.

Hawthorn, hazel and holly. The stitches that hold the land, without which we are undone. The holy trinity of the hedgerow. Hawthorn the mother spirit, right enough. But which the father and which the son is still a bone of contention in the snug bar of the Black Bull, where the dark oak benches have been hollowed backside-smooth. If you want food it’ll be served in the lounge.

The narrow lanes and the green roads buzz with the latest scandals of cherry and wild rose, brazen in their petticoat flurry, turning heads. Be sure of it, the gatepost grins, their flirtation will bear fruit this autumn.

Spring has finally climbed the fellside. Robins, dunnocks, wrens, the hard-pressed rearguards of winter, can at last stand down. They have been relieved by warblers. The siege by storm and frost has been lifted by a skylark. The valley is brimming with the cuckoo’s clowning call, to remind us all that spring’s glory is fleeting.

I am a stranger here. Born outside the bounds of propriety that stretch unseen from Appleby to Dent. This kingdom of heaven has no title deeds. But its edges are sharp enough to those who were born to it, whose lowered rolling vowels are a quantum-coded shibboleth, a mason’s handshake at the Monday market in Kirkby Stephen. There is no route I can take to citizenship. Not even in the grave.

When I pass them on the street I can taste their secrets. Some are tannin tart and others earthy sweet. An old piece of code left in the back of their minds counts the cloudy days and calculates to the hour the crab apples’ ripening. At night they dream of little purple plums. The days of trains from Kendal, laden with goodness for the jam factories of Lancaster, are over. But they know a forgotten lane where an old Westmorland damson, leggy and decrepit, still fruits. They will not tell. In April it blossoms discreetly, hiding its brief spasm of beauty in plain sight. Just days. To remind us that the glory of life is fleeting. And all the sweeter for it.

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Smell her. It was an hour ago and in darkness that the fox pissed this luxury silk scent, wicked to the touch. The breathless dawn air has hung it on the line for you alone, a virgin veil of scurrilous sexy stink. Walk through it only once. Once in all eternity. Do not think of turning back. You will not find it again. Feel only the way your throat barks baleful of its own accord. Look hastily around to be sure that nobody sees the hair on the backs of your soft rufous hands.

The ground is crackle-dry. Walk slowly. Pad softly. Stop at random intervals and become a rock, a rotten stump, a fresh-fallen carcass. Go nowhere. The way the air has been of late, listless and nostalgic. Clinging on to smells, fingering them like old photographs in the way that you do when looking is no longer enough. As if touching the image can bring it back, that sunny morning when everything was well, when anything was possible.

The land is long-suffering. With sunup each morning she sends a frog out from the wet reek of its sanctuary to divine the body-language of the sky. Today, again, her messenger crawls lanky-legged back to moisture and reports that the blue remains miserly, hoarding its wealth offshore. The dew’s lips are parched and cracked. She can barely lick them wet.

Now is the time of bones. They poke out of the ground in recompense for spring’s postponement. Strange flowers. The round of a deer’s hip-bone ball is as strokable as a cat’s head. A canine skull, no bigger than your hand, skewers you on the thorn of the moment. The face is as familiar as a glance in the mirror.

Up on the hillside the desiccated skin of Birkett Common is splitting. The ribcage wreckage of a limestone dinosaur is bleaching in the sun.

The land is patient. While she waits for rain there is always the housekeeping. Dry days are best for changing the linen. At the badgers’ sett the old sow’s bones have finally been taken out with the bedding and the tailings of a new tunnel. The great matriarch and her stories had been buried these last twenty years, in the side chamber where she died. Such is the badger’s way. Their dead are not for the ravens. Her offspring slept next door all that time, cosied up with her memory like warm buns in a basket. Letting the slow work of grief and forgetting percolate. They can let her bones go now.

The soil is a sea of possibility. In spring, young moles tickle the tunnels of their birth one last time and set sail for the new world. Rivers and rocks and roads stand in their way. Many founder and sink upwards to drown under the pitiless sky. They wash up at my feet, their paddle hands just too much like my own. I carry them over the tarmac, slow-march solemn, and bury them in their promised land.

Is the land not generous, taking care of our dead when we can no longer bear to carry them? She washes them clean. She launders their clothes so that they can be worn again. And when she sees that the time is right, she gives us back the stories of those we loved, white and shimmering like cotton-grass in the breeze.

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They use a favourite round pebble to stroke the bedrock into a dream of circumference, a slow flirtation with pi, grown skin-smooth salacious with the waiting. The courtship is measured in microns per year.

True, up in Featherfall Gill there is rarely enough water to turn the wheels of industry. But sometimes a storm slaps the face of the fell into a spasm of rage. The gentle trickle of Featherfall's stream opens the horror of its throat and roars. In this brief convulsion of water a lone potter works through the night, seizing the seldom hour. By morning her keel is aground once more, her turbine dry. Only the flattened grass, four foot up the slope, to tell the tale. Never mind the tableware and the Sunday best bowls, she has been at work on her magnum opus, this bold sweep, this monstrous fold of limestone flesh, moulded in the flank of perpetuity. Monumental art. The critics will never have seen anything like it.

How many times has the wheel spun and the potter's soft palm pressed into the rasping clay of the world’s underpinning? We would barely have begun the count before the sun went down. It takes a flash of madness to begin such work. The patience of lichen to pursue it.

Her innovative crescent, half question and half guess, has stood on the floor of her potter's workshop since the days of the old masters. It was to have been her master piece. Her entry to the guild. Perhaps she'll finish it one day, when there are enough mugs and plates and smooth round knick-knacks for the world to fill its dresser. When the daily chores of erosion are done. In the meantime she flows seamlessly around her great work in progress. Long habituation has worn the path to a sheen. She slides past it like a stranger in the street. If their eyes should meet she finds the face familiar but cannot quite place it. Youth and aspiration spring to mind but do not coalesce. After so many years, her high ambition has been ground down, leaving only a grain of eternity's grit forever in her sock, needling her instep.

The potter's latest assistant – there have been so many - is a leggy wild rose, clinging to the river’s edge. She has to sweep around it each evening, this great lump of a sculpture. Sometimes she brushes a little dust underneath, when the potter isn’t looking. After all, it isn’t going anywhere soon. Once, in the early days, her roots barely established, the rose suggested that the potter take the crazy old thing outside. Make room. Breathe a bit. New start. The air between them stayed curdled for days.

Since then, the potter lectures her at intervals on the role of the artist. The need for longevity. The choice of a medium that will stand the heave and subsidence of geological fashion. That will be there to be counted in the final tally. The potter wants to be in at the end.

The rose can see where her tutor is coming from. Really. She tries her best. But when the wind flows over her and her long supple stems bend and sway, she finds herself humming. The notes rise through her, sweet and red. After the summer-pink petals have fallen, the music bursts out in a riot of rosehips. The potter raises her eyebrows. Glossy red and fading fast. She thinks they are chaff on the wind. But the rose has already entrusted her melodies to the mistle thrush. She has given them freely to the russet roe buck who crosses the low-water river to visit her. By now, they are anywhere and everywhere, her rose-hip airs. Listen, from Hell Gill Force to Jinny Wood, the valley is already singing them.

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No? No gills? I see. It was not included in the plan.

Please, then, give me wings like the bonny black birds of the fells. I would go where the ravens rattle the mahogany beads of their voice, wing-tip dipping the ink-pots of the high tarns. We'll scrawl our calligraphy on the velum of the sky. We'll tickle the ribs of the rising air as it plays hide and seek with the scarps and the screes.

Drill into me, just here where the scapulas can best bear the load. Aren't our little wings already half-formed, hiding behind their flimsy alibi of flesh?

I'll gladly pay the excess.

Neither wings nor gills? I understand. Yes, I should have read the contract.

Well, could you still do me a little tune-up? A tweak to the lilt of the larynx. Maybe a bit of a lift on the high notes? As a lonely child I longed to be in harmony with the robin. He always sang the song of my awakening, knowing full well that I was still too young. That time would pass. And now that I am old, I have found the secret places where bloody ochre spills from the iron-pan heart of the earth. When I rub some on my chest the little bird will know that I am serious. That we fly the same banner. We'll stand guard at either end of the vegetable patch and sing a duet.

Clause 14b. 'No shapeshifting procedures.' Yep, I guess that's clear enough.

'Mend and make do,' was all she could prescribe, and sent me on my way. And really, what more could I have asked for, if not this tongue I was born with, if not these lips, forming the words to sing my love to the river, to paint my graffiti on the clouds, to tell the robin's tale?

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Hurry now. The door will soon close. The lock will be turned until morning. Sleep, the nightwatchman, is on his rounds. 'Lights out!' he proclaims, all backside and bluster. Then settles to his crossword. Are we to live half our lives in dreams, then, eyes fluttering like moths behind the drawn shutters of our face? Or do we still sense the candle's flame, and long for it?

Ah, for sure, there'll be time enough to sleep. When the silt of one last great flood finally renders the tug-boat channels of our backwater lives unnavigable. But not tonight. Tonight a toad is waiting on the backdoor step, tapping his fob watch. We are late, apparently. He masticates the silence with a sticky slap of his liverish saliva. Blinks, but rarely. Speaks seldom. He turns away and waistcoat-waddles down the garden path. Leaping is for the frogs. Follow him. Quickly now. Slip into the shadows like an old coat. Who knows what's been left in the pockets.

In a deep-hollow elbow of Tinkling Beck a crayfish is doing stand-up, cracking dirty jokes with the pairs of pliers god gave him. The minnows are aghast. The trout at the ticket agency should have said. They skitter back to their respectable parlours under the alder roots and cover their ears. With carefully cupped hands. Their little bellies billowing with bottled-up laughter. Mayfly nymphs from the cleaning company brush the titters under the carpet.

In the bombazine black beneath the bottom field, a pair of moles are swimming breaststroke in the jealously guarded lanes of a public pool. With the podgy hands of children who have played too long in the snow. As tight in their tunnels as toothpaste. The river-rich loam slips over their non-stick fur like eggs in a pan. They have solved the old conundrum, eating their pink spaghetti worms with neither fork nor spoon. Napkins are as superfluous as socks. Moles never spill the sauce.

Across the two-way mirror of the smutty sky the reflection of a male woodcock beats the bounds. His chat-up lines are as old as moonlight, as fresh as harebell blue. He says he lives in hope. Doesn't like to boast, but there's a glint in his eye.

Stars begin to wriggle. Time is on her break. She pretends to read the paper but daydreams of supernovas. Space is a button accordion which sucks and blows but has forgotten the tune.

Float on the river of the night, face-up. Let an eddy waltz you around, spinning as gently as a feather falls. Somewhere out in the current a twig of immortality is passing you by. Let it pass. The twig is bound for a nameless ocean. We have a date with the dawn.

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But still, the moon rises over Mallerstang Edge and peers down into our little rockpool. The tides still tug at the sleeves of our dreams. As the water of the whole world slowly inhales and exhales, half a day with each breath, it shuggles us gently back and forth on our bed of limestone, kicking up a puff of silt. Our mattress was once the bottom of an ocean. It is made of uncountable shells, unknowable sea creatures.

We stand at the dividing of waters. When I cut my hand and bled there, down in the maiden river Eden's lap, she carried the red dye of my veins with her westward. The rust of my life reached the Solway Firth and was gone with a cry of 'Westward ho!'. It sailed across the Atlantic into the evening sun. But when I set my sinews to the eastern slope of the valley, this morning before dawn, I crossed the watershed while barely awake. There, just over the high scarp, my tears in the bitter wind fell and flowed towards the sunrise, entered the Swale, were bequeathed to the Ure, handed off to the Ouse, were lost in the Humber. I spilled quietly into the North Sea, unannounced.

This valley where we dream always of water. It is a knot in the wood of England. The grain swirls so that east meets west. The gap is closed. Young male Otters come here to make the crossing from coast to coast.

Inland we may be, but in truth, we are just the garnish in a sea sandwich, here at the scrawny neck of Britain. Even in our Pennine fastness, it is maritime gods who vie for our souls. To our west the Irish Sea, gulf-stream warm and glittering. Impulsive. Surging inland but soon forgetting what it came for. To the east, the North Sea. Cold, pastel-shade opaque and patient. It lays its plans.

They would have you know, these ancient rivals, that they each lay claim. In winter the Irish Sea pours itself over the fells, carving its name in the gullies and gills. The North Sea beaches its boats and unloads the siege engines of frost and ice. They meet up there on Mallerstang Edge. We hear them clash in the Helm Wind.

Come spring, they are exhausted. Envoys are despatched. Oystercatchers arrive from the bladderwrack bays of Galloway and shout the odds. Sandpipers follow later and do the diplomatic heavy lifting. Northumberland sends Golden Plovers in smart suits. Woodcock come west, their flight-plans classified, and work behind the scenes. Eventually, the Eden sighs and settles and sculpts her whirlpools. The Swale stands down and whittles away at a waterfall. Mallerstang Edge begins again to count the stars.

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