Lost and found

The alchemists of Mallerstang Edge

Way down below us in the valley there are countless different words. Words for the many things we make out of wood and leather. Words for ideas made of nothing at all. And still more words balancing precariously on other words alone. A giant house of cards that will not stand the storm. We string these words together to make our chains of office and then clank as we walk, like empty buckets. So many words. They have tied us in knots.

But in the beginning there was only one word. That word is with us still, out here on the periphery. It is the lonely-tummock cry of Golden Plovers, calling from the tops of the bare fells, out into the mute blue sky. This early summer morning we might hear it, spoken by the intricately liveried birds who persist up here on the high, naked ridges of the northern Pennines.

The word means many things to the birds who say it. With this meagre lexicon they celebrate beginnings and mourn endings. The word speaks of the pipping of their first strongly mottled brown egg in early May. It keens the precocious hatchling who wandered too far alone and was taken by a crow. All life is comprehended, all paradoxes embraced by this one burst of searing sound. It will stop us dead in our tracks, struggling for breath. Too concentrated. Too vast. Our senses can barely tolerate its onslaught.

The plovers have no need for a multiplicity of words. This place tells no lies. There is no conspiracy. There is rock and there is wind. Between these two tyrants a little black soil and a few transient puddles of water. Both are taxed to the edge of subsistence, their surplus hoarded in the great limestone vaults below. Only the bare minimum is left. A flicker of stunted sedge grass, sucked yellow before its time. An arthritic knuckle of dwarf heather, tortured by the thought of what might have been. In the wet flushes a shock of green sphagnum, water posing as a plant to deceive the inspectors.      

Time was never at home here. An hour is just splitting hairs, a day too easily mislaid. Seasons suffice. Shunned even by sheep, the plovers’ breeding grounds are as patient as the lichens which endure here, waging their hundred-year wars for an inch of a rival’s territory. Only the plovers see riches in this place. They feast on the emptiness, gorge themselves on lack. Their alchemy turns this paltriness into petals of gold, chequering their wings. It is said that they raise their chicks on nothing but the summer breeze and the shadows of scurrying clouds.

On the plateau south of High Pike there is barely room to stand straight without hitting your head on the sky. Up here, you and I may neither settle nor rest. June rain, spiced with hail, is not far away. A few centuries ago, the drystone walls which decorate the valley floor began their assault on these final slopes. They were repulsed and fell back, exhausted. Their day had come and gone, never to return. So there is no shelter for us here. Nothing to conceal us from ourselves. We may pick any direction we like, they are all the same. But we must keep moving. If we were to tarry, the dizziness of dearth would topple us.  

This is not a garrulous bird we seek. They do not speak in haste. Listen for it. Lean into the void. The plovers’ single syllable is lithe and coiled. They have only one vowel, which is annealed to a perfection of glide and rise. But beware. Their lilt is barbed. Once heard, it will never leave you.

There to our right, standing high on his towering six-inch tump of muck and moss, master of his ceremony, his black breast swelling, he sifts the silence for the one and only moment in all eternity. Then, his beak wide open, he inserts the word into the record of history and stands back to appraise it.

Somewhere to our left and a little behind us, unseen, a neighbour mounts his castle keep walls and calls in apposition. Then another, out there ahead of us. With that third entry the key is turned in the lock. We are triangulated by birdsong. Before we even realised quite how lost we were, the plovers have found us.

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