All week the sun has been as fierce as it gets in the Yorkshire Dales. It forms rising ripples in the air that act as a distorting mirror to the landscape. The lower flanks of the far hills, Wild Boar and Baugh Fell, appear to have moveable bases, as if set in jelly. Tractors passing over meadows wobble under this climatic illusion. Despite the good weather the peat soils are water filled and wobble with each step, adding to the sense of a landscape on the move.
I walk to where the River Ure spills out of two slit-crevices in the limestone rocks, this has always been my place, somewhere I sit and watch life pour out of the geology. The river shifts its length here, above me an ephemeral stream, shrinking and surging with the weather, provides the adjustable start of the Ure. Below me the water skates the boundary of Yorkshire and Cumbria before turning into the long valley towards the Moorcock Inn, where Wensleydale really begins.
I’m resting on rank vegetation, purple and blue moor grass, fescues and the wild thyme that seeps into the air, the scent of the Dales. The top plateau leads over towards Cotterdale, on good days buzzards, peregrine and even merlin break the sky. I once watched one of these swift-fast flacons hunt a skylark here, they both flew in what appeared to be a choreographed aerial dance, but it was life and death for both, with the skylark losing. All around me are pipits, stonechats and wheatears, their name appropriately derived from the Norse for white arse. The birds skip between the tops of grasses or between lichen-covered boulders.
I spent five seasons surveying the trout populations of this river. I was in wonder at their ability to turn from calcite grey to chocolate brown. I would hold them in white and dark buckets ready for counting them. On letting them go I would quickly transfer them from the dark to the white bucket and watch them turn. Their chameleon ability astounded me, and offered the trout protection in streams that can turn from crystal clear to peat brown with the first flush of a downpour.
Down at Blades Farm one drought-cast summer I discovered over twenty native white-clawed crayfish resting the day in scour holes below the little waterfall. Back then I had a license to survey these animals so took measurements of their carapace and recorded sex and lengths. There were two large males amongst them, bigger than I’d seen before. Their grasping cheliped pincers snapped at me but I had them held before releasing them back into the water.
The non-native signal crayfish, introduced from America for food but now run-rampant across the rivers and streams of England, may have got a hold of me, their cheliped limbs are near double jointed. You have to be sure of the grip you have on these larger animals. I was always proud that the system I worked on was free of the signals that elsewhere destroyed populations of the native form. Signal crayfish carry the crayfish plague that the indigenous white-claws have no immunity to. But the signals are only forty short miles downstream of here and so it’s only a matter of time before they reach these headwater streams.
I watch the occasional train go by on the Settle-Carlisle run and a little downstream of me farmers are working hard on bringing in the haylage from the best fields, which are poor in comparison to the meadows of lower Wensleydale. Then I take a slow walk to Hell Gill Force, a little step over the watershed into the Eden River system of Cumbria. Hell Gill Beck pours through narrow gorges before surging over a cauldron waterfall.
This short step over the watershed spills the rains into a vast drainage basin of the North-Western hills before edging into the sea at the Solway Firth. At the falls I watch the water drift with the breeze into the large plunge pool. There are no fences to stop you falling but this offers better views of the small stream that soon becomes one of the best Atlantic salmon rivers in the north.
I clamber down the grassy flanks that have become terraced from sheep trails and soil creep. At the stream bed I clamber over moss-wet rocks and algae-laden boulders that are barely able to sustain a foothold, till I reach the foot of the waterfall. I find a place to sit and simply watch the water run downstream and away from me.
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