After the rains the river is vigorous, churning over rapids, frothing like a cappuccino against rocks, full of vim and energy. The Allen is broad here at Allen Banks, just a few miles downstream from where its east and west arms conjoin.
This is a place I return to often, a place where layers of memory overlap. My children skimming stones at the gravelly bend; my grandchildren playing at the exact same spot. Slow summer walks with friends, brisk walks on cold days. Knowing where to find orchids and mountain pansies or the lone spindleberry. Winter’s spectacular hair ice bursting from rotting wood.
The deep gorge is covered in ancient semi-natural woodland, paths threading up and down its steep sides. It’s a landscape that was moulded and enhanced in the 19th century by Susan Davidson, who owned nearby Ridley Hall. She spent 30 years revealing its dramatic beauty, making a Victorian wilderness garden of rustic bridges and summerhouses, viewpoints, avenues of beech trees and a boating tarn.
One path runs along the top lip of the gorge where a shingle-roofed Cedar Hut has been recreated by the National Trust. Further along, high above the river, is the ghost of another summerhouse. Semi-circular nobbles of bone, pitted and ash-grey, punch up through yellow-green mosses. They are sheep’s knucklebones, rammed into the earth, ebbing out in concentric rings to make a patterned floor.
The Knucklebone Floor is a collection of poems by Linda France imagining the 19th-century widow who intervened in the landscape. A part of Linda’s creative practice-led PhD titled “Women on the Edge of Landscape”, it won last year’s Laurel prize, the international accolade for nature and environmental poetry. She writes, “We almost don’t find what’s left of the knucklebone floor from her vanished moss house.” You have to look carefully among beech mast and leaves.
This January day feels between seasons, with tight nascent catkins on the hazels and glossy-leaved hollies still blazing with berries. Goldcrests skip through a lattice of silver birch twigs; a coal tit calls. A dipper slips into the turbulence to feed, unfazed by the high water, and a rusty-backed kestrel dashes ahead of me. It’s a good start to a new year.
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