The potter and her protégé

Limestone and rose hips in Featherfall Gill

Late at night when the Eden is in spate, ranting and roaring down the trembling valley, we cower in our beds and listen to her voices. I swear that you can just make out, through the bedlam and the bluster, the sound of a hundred little axles turning. The potters are hard at it. As their swirl-pool water-wheels spin they are forming the bowls and cups where summer blackbirds bathe and a wren takes tea.

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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