Featherfall Gill

A love letter to a new home

We are all cartographers. Born to it, you and I both. Our long legs scissor across the land like a navigator's dividers. Our stride measures and plots. Hamstrings quantify the upslope and cruciate ligaments gauge the descent. Piece by piece we learn the fellside and the high tops, comprehend the hollows and nooks of the valley bottom. Only the river evades us, swaying her hips as she passes endlessly by.

Then, in the dark hours, we consult the field notes of our muscles' memory and draw the beloved land on the wide blank sheet of our imagination. The hilltops surge skyward and fly their banners: Swarth Fell, Blackbed Scar, Yoadcomb Hill, Bent Side, Nine Standards. Down below them, on the river's kitchen apron, is a small red arrow next to which is written 'You are Here'.

A little over a year after moving to Mallerstang, in the before-day hours when everything is possible, I spread my first hesitant draft of the map of my new home over the lamplit kitchen table and marvelled at the body of the land. My fingertips rippled over the ribs of barely buried strata. Core muscles snatched at vertigo on the edge of Wild Boar's uncompromising scarp edge. Heaven whispered as it tumbled down an intricacy of waterfalls in Jinny Wood.

The upper Eden, blushing after light summer rain

And yet there was a loneliness. There was a little place which still had no name. You know it. The little place where somehow every walk ends up, however contrived the detour. There is always some excuse to visit. As if excuse were needed. Such a familiar place but don't we still stop and look again, find anew? Where the world stops and looks back. Where minutes pass uncounted. Our heart's own rest-place.

The nameless little place. It lies in a scalpel-cut ravine, a gill in these parts. Where the tiny stream which has done all that heavy work now nestles deep in the grass, more heard than seen. Under the gaze of the obligatory twisted rowan that sentries the southern slope, more lichen than leaf, a single deep pool opens its eye to the sky and winks. In the pool, amongst a babble of rowdy pebbles, lives an old bullhead almost as big as my thumb. I have never seen him. But if ever there were a pool in which an old bullhead would live, it is this pool. And even now, I have faith.

The pool is a jewel more precious than bread. The land has set it appropriately, in an island of flat rich green, as wide as I am tall. A handkerchief of limestone sward. A north-country Shangri-La. There is everything a vole would ever need. A vole-sized paradise.

Peering into the crystal pool of the little place I grow fat and furry. My eyes become drops of the blackest ink. Whiskers tingle. I am wary of the short-eared owls who quarter the sedgelands above, their nestlings tucked up under Grind Fell, from the base of which this constant water flows. The owls are air and fire. I am seed kernel and tap root.

The little place and her magic. She really should have a name. How else can I address her and show my respect? Hint, obliquely, in a very British way, at my gratitude — my affection, even? No. Some words are a step too far. Too forward. Better left unsaid. Stick with respect.

Naming is a serious matter. Best done in person. So I went there one morning last summer, as most mornings, but this time equipped for the job. I took with me bits and pieces of poems, snatches of song, the tools of the trade. Widgets and adaptors. My best words, my favourite interlacing rhythms and chimes.

I stood nervously outside the changing room while the little place tried them on, one by one. Each time the little place re-emerged she blinked at me in sheepish silence. None of them fitted. Not one of them remotely agreed with the colour of her skin. Names, the scold in her eye informed me, are not to be draped on a place nor hung on it like a flag.

The following morning I went empty-handed. Humbled and contrite. All ears. I knelt and I listened, hands cupped, waiting for the benediction. The little place gurgled and trickled her before-noon song. A bumble buzzed and I searched in vain for the hidden code. A wren remonstrated but gave nothing away. The little place blinked and fell quiet. Names, the frown under her heather fringe gave me to understand, are not handed out like coin to a beggar.

The third morning I went neither to give nor to receive. I just lay on my back and looked up to where the little place had been looking all along. An owl swam softly across the shallow sea of the blue sky. Yes. There are miracles still. In the cracks and crannies we have not yet quite filled in. The owl had long since passed out of sight when a single primary feather, worn at the tip, sycamored slowly down through the sunlight and fell at the rowan's roots. The little place winked.

A feather is not a name. But it has the makings of a name. The little place had offered a collaboration. And her name is Featherfall Gill.

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