The trackside is fringed by flowering redcurrant, its sharp tang medicinal and earthy, bees feeding from pendulous pink clusters. Wooden sleepers exude a thick tarry smell, and a neat little train, the Green Dragon, puffs out kettles of steam as it gears up for a morning’s work. We walk past the engine sheds of the South Tynedale Railway, chatting as we go to cheerful volunteers on this bright morning.
This narrow-gauge heritage railway runs from Alston in Cumbria to Slaggyford in Northumberland, crossing the county boundary by a painted metal sign on a bridge over the Gilderdale Burn. The wide, level footpath alongside it is a great place for striding out, but today our pace is slowed by a heady enjoyment of spring.
Primroses and dog violets sprinkle the banks and a white-tailed bumblebee queen cruises along the ground looking for a nest site: a hole in the ground or an abandoned mouse burrow. New lambs shelter in the nook of a wall or lie snug against the flanks of ewes. Puffy clouds bank up against a cornflower blue sky, canary yellow dandelions open to the sun. The newly painted shelter at Kirkhaugh Halt looks like a doll’s house with its little red brick chimney.
There’s the rich fluting of a blackbird down by the West Allen river, the descending notes of a chaffinch, and a song thrush sings lustily from the top of an ash tree. Wilder sounds come from the higher fields, where curlews glide and lapwings swoop and call over the terraced Roman fort of Epiacum.
The verges of the railway are a linear refuge for flowers. We spot the first tentative apricot bells of water avens, the felted leaves of melancholy thistle sprouting all down the trackside. Marsh marigolds luxuriate in a narrow ditch, feet in water, golden cups held up to the light. Prehistoric horsetails thrust through rubble, rufous seedheads show last year’s St John’s wort. There are nettles for soup and hawthorn leaves to nibble on.
Overriding everything in this feast for the senses is the mimosa fragrance of sallow flowers loud with bumblebees. It’s honeyed and exotic, Mediterranean in its intensity, the culmination of an immersion in scent and sound.
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