7.

more
The North York Moors

Mick spoke about the desert fondly. For their twenty-fifth

wedding anniversary he and his wife had gone to the
birding. 'I like it. I'd been in t'desert when I were in forces,
and I seem to like it.' His foot was prone to infection and he'd
taken recently to wearing desert boots, for their breathability.
No, they weren't waterproof: '\Vhat would you need water-
proof for, in t'desert?'
He hadn't warned his wife he'd be bringing someone back.
'Excuse the mess,' she said, as he led me into the back room
that might once have been a dining room. 'This :is :Mick's
domain.'
He had the silhouette and carriage of one who has gone on
being active despite failing health the broadened waist, the
limp, the hand pressed to the lower back when he stood; and
yet a litheness and alertness in his movements, and lean legs,
and a bright, sun-burnished face under the pale grey beard.
The stick a simple birch with a crook head - went every-
where with him. You could tell, as he settled into his chair,
that sitting was a relief; but he didn't slump.
I'd met Mick that morning at a lay-by near the Fylingdales
radar base. From his neck, still, hung the Zeiss compact
'bins', his ID lanyard, and sunglasses whose lenses had the
translucency and colour of peat water. Pegged into his shirt
pocket were a couple of insulin pens. Before him on his table
- the table the family had once sat at was a straight pint
glass full of orange juice and, on top of stacks of papers and
books and newspaper cuttings, a book entitled The Birds of

209
 THE MOOR

Durham, published by Durham Bird Club, a hardback with

the heft of an old family Bible. An object with which a bur-
glar might be incapacitated. A white envelope was being used
as a bookmark. It had my name lettered on it, a reminder.
Pill jars (more brown glass) were stationed about the room
- on the table and the shelf-ledges and the sideboard; and two
canisters of insect repellent. The bookcase screwed to the
chimney breast behind his chair was lined with more mono-
graphs: Thrushes, Nightjars, Gulls, Stonechats, Peregrine Fal-
cons, Birds of the Middle East, Grouse.
Mick's operation was set for the end of the month. It was
his one chance, he said. 'Being a diabetic now don't help. Now
it's sort of set in at the back of my legs. But!' he said. 'There
are ways round it!' He was still getting used to the automatic
clutch, but the new motor would get him most places.
After he was invalided out of the RAF Regiment, Mick
had gone back to working on farms, as he had as a boy, but
his injury had intervened. Since then (the late seventies) he'd
received war disablement pension. up to the moors
every day. The hen harrier was his bird. Of the keepers, he
said: 'lVIost of them are what we call piss and wind. He shouts
at me, I shout at him.' He spent whole days up on the high
ground, watching the moors, waiting for harriers, watching
the keepers.
A graph of hen harrier numbers over the past century
would also chart the intensification of grouse-moor manage-
ment. It is a bird of fen, marsh, heath, bog and moor, and
until the late nineteenth century was found throughout Eng-
land. In Devonshire it was called the blue furze hawk, on ac-
count of its association with gorse-lands; in vVales the blue
kite; in Northumberland the dove-coloured falcon; in John
Clare's list of Northamptonshire birds it is the ash-coloured
falcon. It is the male's pale blue-grey pigmentation that ac-

210
 Blackamore

counts for its regional namings (the brown female was once
thought to be a separate species). Those who describe the
hen harrier are invariably struck by its bluish pallor - appear-
ing starker still against a dark backdrop of heather or blanket
bog. Myself I'd seen them only in pictures and on TV.
On the fen close to his home in Peterborough, Clare ob-
served in 1823 a male hen harrier 'almost as big as a goose'
that flew 'in a swopping manner not much unlike the fl.ye of a
heron'. In the mid I Soos, William MacGillivray observed 'the
gentle flaps of their expanded wings, floating, as it were, on
the air'. A French ornithologist, Lafond, described how the
bird patiently, vigilantly quartered the moor, sometimes dou-
bling back to rescan promising ground - comme s'il cherchait
un objet perdu, 'as if searching for something lost'. The male's
display flight is prized by birders - the steep climb topped by
a somersault, followed by the steep dive checked just above
the ground, and this repeated again, and again, across the sky.
Keepers have always held it in special contempt - and who
knows the moor and its inhabitants better than the keepers
and their fathers and their fathers' fathers? Not only is the
hen harrier a butcher, they say; in merely passing low over
a moor it will flush the grouse from the heather, disrupting
shoot days. It is capable of humiliating a keeper. Its ghostli-
ness, its stealth, its tendency to leave slaughtered grouse un-
eaten, its association with places of mire and fog - all have
contributed to the bird's reputation as somehow unsporting,
unseemly.
As the efficiency of the grouse shooters increased, so they
and their hosts expected to be presented with sufficient
quarry. Whatever posed a threat to grouse on the moor -
weasel, fox, crow and every variety of bird of prey - was to
be eliminated. It had been straightforward, in the early days:
trap, poison, shoot; stamp on the eggs, stamp on the chicks

211
 THE MOOR

(harriers nest on the ground amid the heather).

of the twentieth century the bird was extinct in England.
I ts numbers only recovered when the keepers and their men
abandoned the moors to fight in the Second \Vorld War. In
the 1970s there were an estimated five hundred pairs in Eng~
land. In 2012, when the unlicensed killing of raptors had
been illegal for more than fifty years, only a single nesting
pair was known of. Again there was the threat of national
extinction.
:Mick was a deterrent - 'My worth is that I am about, and
the keepers know I am about. I was coming down the road,'
he said of an occasion the previous year, 'and there was some
dead ground, and I saw the hen harrier go across. I watched
it for a bit. And I drove further down, and in the dead ground
coming after the harrier was [he named °the keeper] in his
four-wheel-drive vehicle, so all I could do, I just stopped in
the road, and I just stood there so he could do nothing but
see me.'
The keeper broke his gun and went on his way.
When a nest is found, concealed, as they tend to be, in a
stand of tall heather, the first thing Mick does is seek out the
keeper whose beat it lies on. Let him know he knows it's there.
'It's gradually changed. Since grouse became big money.
You know, these numpties from the city are willing to pay
so many thousands. And then they can go back and brag
amongst their mates. And the pressure has been put upon
the moorland. It's been sanitised. There's no balance left. In
tooth and claw. Up there it's like a mini Serengeti, you know;
there's everything. They want to turn it into a monoculture.
There's a place for shooting, it's part of our heritage but
there's a place for the harrier, the buzzard .. .'
It was the 'bean counters' he reserved his deeper contempt
for, the invisible, biblical entity. 'The bean counters control

212
 Blackamore

world!' Shaking his stick in his as if it were a pike,

ready for the fight: 'Shrouds don't have pockets!'
·we'd go looking for hen harriers tomorrow, though he
didn't hold out much hope of our seeing one.
From the comer desk a tawny owl was blanking us. 'Bloke
said he'd found one at the roadside, did anyone want it. I said,
''I'll get it stuffed."' He took a long drink of his orange juice.

2
Two days earlier, on Danby Beacon, I'd stood beneath a five-
metre post crowned with a fire-basket formed of tarnished
steel flames. It was a beacon, put up to mark the jubilee. A
flurry of pings pulsed into my pocket reception returning
as I gained the high ground. Here, a mile from the nearest
dwelling, home to grouse and curlew and lapwing and plover,
was an old place of human communication. Four hundred
years ago the beacon that stood here (only a crude iron basket
to hold the fuel) was to be lit on invasion by the French. Dur-
ing and after the Second ·world War a radar station occupied
the moor-top, part of the early warning network known as
Chain Home, a precursor to the modern facility across the
moors. Eight aerials had stood here, visible from across the
East Riding. Dozens of servicemen and servicewomen lived
here, on the moor. All that remains, amidst the rust-coloured
sheep's sorrel, are the crumbling footings of the dismantled
aerials, a gun mount, an anchor point for a mast cable, a
workstation's doorstep, a few shards of corrugated asbestos,
and the old track that runs east along the moorside from the
beacon to Lealholm Rigg. The gun emplacements of the old
radar station have been superseded by new lines of shooting
butts.

213
 THE MOOR

The bell heather was starting to flower. Along the shel-

tered gullies and east-facing track sides; in sun-spots and
dells. There was something tentative about its blooming, as
if those four or five royal purple flowers that were slung from
each stem-head, fulsome as teats or water skins, might be re-
tracted. This was the darker, lower, sparser ~nd more regal of
the two common species. (The lighter, pinker sort that cov-
ers the high moors - called ling, the 'true heather' - would
flower later, in August, when the Guns came.) The moor was
not yet colourful, but its tone was shifting, and even from a
distance the dark moor-top heather had a tint of mauve. The
heather had always carried the colour within it within its
green, within its black and its grey and its brown. Even the
burnt patches, even the cinders, seemed to hold a remnant
purple. The moor was tipping towards summer.
As the mature heather came into flower, new growth was
emerging from the rootstock, through the reindeer moss that
grew amidst the grey litter of last year's burn. It was this new
growth that the young grouse preferred it grew about an
inch a year, and was its most nutritious when three years old.
And this too (it came to me as a sort of revelation), this too
would, in time, flower, and grow to perhaps a foot in height
over the course of say ten years, and then the keepers would
burn it to the ground, and in its place fresh growth would
come. The flowering of the heather was an excitement I
had been waiting for all year, and now here it was, gradually
changing the face of the moor, not by brushstrokes but by
stippling.
The moor behind me had been sluiced by water that had
run off the track, exposing the reddish shale that underlay
the peat. It was close to this field of shards, where the runoff
had collected in a shallow trench, that the cotton-grass was
flourishing. This was hare's-tail, the bolder of the two British

214
 Blackamore

species, its fluffy white fruit-heads plusher than those of the

other sort ('common'). Each stalk clutched its own tuft to the
wind. The patch of white hung on the moor as if it had been
floating across its surface and had got snagged. And once I no-
ticed this first expanse of cotton-grass, I noticed other white
patches, scattered across the moor - a shimmering white so
pure that it was not dulled by distance.
Above Clitherbeck Farm, a Land Rover was parked by
the old Pannierman's Causeway. A line of eight mounds
measured off the distance between here and the brow of a
tumulus, half a mile north. The tumulus - 'howe' was the
regional word - was unnamed; it had been constructed as a
burial place, had once contained the cinerary urn of some
Bronze Age chieftain. The open hills were where those hu-
mans placed their dead - far from the ongoing world, but
visible to it. Down in the dales, where they lived, not a single
tumulus has been fo{md. Once, the moor was clothed - ha-
zel, birch, willow - but the presence of these burial mounds,
surely intended to be visible from afar, suggests that the hills
had already been stripped by the time they were constructed.
'Inviolate', 'pristine', 'wilderness': the writer-words clung
to these hills, words that made us aliens here, but these moors
- all of the English moors - were as manmade as cornfields,
or battlefields. It was not just 'wilderness' that brought those
lone hikers to the causey paving, not even a mistaken or de-
luded notion of 'wilderness'; it was something darker, the
same impulse that summoned those hundreds to the site
of the crashed bomber on Saddleworth Moor - a desire to
experience ruination and expose oneself to the aftermath of
catastrophe.
'England's Last Wilderness' was the slogan used to pro-
mote the North Pennines. The moors could be wild, but wil-
derness? It was no more than an idea. When the ice withdrew,

215
 THE MOOR

ten thousand years ago, the forest came - not the 'wildwood'
of myth, the unbroken baize that stretched from coast to
storied coast, but a kind of scattered wood and scrub that was
to be found on all but the highest peaks: preserved in the peat
on the scoured edge of Cross Fell, at 893 metres above sea
level, birch pollen has been found.
This was the 'moor', then, after the ice age: woodland on
the slopes, scrub and scattered stands of trees higher up,
heather or bare rock on the summits.
Man came. For the Mesolithic tribes there was not the line
that can be seen today, where wooded or cultivated lowland
gives way, abruptly, as a wall is crossed, to treeless upland:
there was no 'waste', only the small drop in temperature felt
as you climbed from the valley bottom; the breeze louder in
the trees, wetness in the air.
If you noticed that the deer, the aurochs, the boar, fed
at those places in the forest made open by senescence or
windthrow, then it was there that you would wait with your
»11
bow. And it was wise to maintain those places where hunt-
I"'
"'
Ht!
ing was easiest, even to make those areas more desirable to
your prey - you might snap off the succulent branches from
spring birch, to entice the deer, or encourage more growth of
111: the grasses that the aurochs favoured. You might even learn
111
11))
to make further clearings. Scrub could be harrowed up, or set
fire to. Your tools were no match for full-grown trees, but if
you pared a ring of bark from a tree's waist, no matter how
great that tree might be, it would, in time, die.
In the high wet places, where new tree growth had been
prevented, waterlogging occurred, and peat began to form.
And as the peat deepened so the land became more acid, less
fertile - where once trees had grown, now the roots of saplings
could not reach sustenance. The moor emerged piecemeal, as
a scattering of clearings that finally coalesced. Five thousand

216
 Blackamore

years before Christ, wheat was being grown in some of these

clearings; oak and elm were being felled for cattle fodder. You
realised that by felling more trees - by now, your axe was up
to it - you were able to provide more and better food for your
people. It was possible to domesticate cattle and corral them
in the clearings you had made. You learned that each crop of
wheat (and later barley and oats) took something from the
land, and that your cattle's dung might, when scattered there,
allow the land to be sown again. You cleared more land.
The uplands became bare of all but scattered stands of
birch and alder. Little else would grow on this cold and wet
and windy ground, apart from shrubs and mosses and grass-
es. Hardly anything above waist height. During the first mil-
lennium, the climate deteriorated. The temperature dropped
by two degrees, the growing season was shortened. As the
winters lengthened, the peatland expanded, and the uplands
- now exposed - became hostile: migration to lower land oc-
curred, as if by gravity. And as man dropped, he felled the
trees at the moor's margin, so that the moor followed him
down the valley slopes.
By the time the Romans left, the moors were much as they
are today: a harsh place for summer grazing, cultivated for
crops only by the extravagant, stubborn or desperate. It was
man, then - man, with the climate, but not 'nature' alone -
that made the moors. And it was man who continued to shape
them: sheep grazing under the abbeys discouraged the resur-
gence of all but the least palatable vegetation: mat-grass, pur-
ple moor-grass, cotton-grass. In the nineteenth century, as the
cities grew, streams were dammed and reservoirs excavated;
in the twentieth, forestry was planted - the deforested moors
wooded once again, albeit with plantations of conifers rather
than the broadleaves that had grown there five thousand years
before. Heather was made to dominate the northern moors, as

217
 THE MOOR

the tracks were metalled, and railway sleepers laid down, and
the gentlemen came up with their guns.

On top of the mound nearest to me was a man with a shovel

- dressed in green, with knee-length camouflage gaiters. Not
an archaeologist. Nor were the mounds themselves subsid-
iary tumuli, as I'd thought (in my ignorance), but derelict
grouse butts - an old line disused for years.
The traditional grouse butt is a circular bastion, five feet
across, chest high, its stone walls coped with heather turf. He
was renovating this line, ahead of the summer's shoot.
A few weeks earlier I had spent an afternoon on the moors
north of Ilkley, looking for the site of Turner's painting
Grouse Shooting on Beamsley Beacon (executed ten years be-
fore his painting of Buckfast Abbey). It rained; the fog came
down, hiding the famous views. Paintings of the moors are
scarce, and those that exist invariably depict 'sporting' sub-
jects - the fox hunt, the deer hunt, the otter hunt, the shoot.
One of Turner's other works in this series shows the Guns
settling down for lunch among a circle of marquees: a cart
II"' piled with provender, a spit waiting for the birds, a beer bar-
i::::
::m
rel ready to be tapped - like the encampment of a victori-
111::
ous mediaeval army. The moor alone, however, was neither
:111
IJl!I
sufficiently picturesque as a subject nor sufficiently dramatic
- too desolate for the school of Claude, too flat for that of
Salvator Rosa. It was no fitter for the artist's attention than a
starless night sky or a boatless and becalmed sea.
Comme s'il cherchait un objet perdu. The only sign I saw of
the keepers was a larsen trap - a chicken-wire cage contain-
ing a rabbit's haunch and a 'call bird', a sodden crow meant
to entrap others of its species. It was impossible to pinpoint
the spot where Turner had stood. In any case his painting
was a fiction, for one of its subjects was Turner himself (sec-

218
 Blackamore

ond right, big nose). In the painting, he and his companions,

including his patron and host Walter Fawkes, are walking over
the moor, accompanied by loaders and packhorses and point-
ers. What is curious about the painting is its colours: perhaps
they have faded, but Beamsley Beacon, on the first day of the
grouse season in I 8 I 6, is not purple but brown and khaki;
heather, in other words, is not dominant. This was in the
days when grouse were still 'walked up' - that is to say, shot
at as you walked across the moor. A good day's bag was a
dozen birds; more than twenty was outstanding. Even in I 8 57,
during James Platt MP's fatal afternoon on the 'well-stocked'
moors above Saddleworth, ten shooters had, by lunchtime,
bagged only 'about four brace of birds, having then had
two or three drives'. (There had always been an element of
danger associated with the shoot, and Turner's painting was
also a sort of memorial: on 13 August, the day after he made I
his sketches, his host's younger brother, Richard Hawkes-
worth Fawkes, was accidentally shot and killed.)
It was technology that transformed grouse shooting; first I
the expansion of the railway network, which allowed the
moneyed city man to board the Friday-night sleeper and be
on the moor after breakfast, and then the development in
I
I
I
France of the breech-loading shotgun, in the 1840s, which
facilitated quicker reloading. The old muzzle-loaders had re-
quired a wait between each shot while the breech was packed,
I,,
and the smoke they generated meant a further delay while
the air cleared. When smokeless powder was introduced in
the 1870s, there was nothing to prevent the crack shot from
dispatching as many birds as daylight, energy, wealth - and
numbers - allowed.
The demand for quarry led to intensive moor manage-
ment - draining of the moors, predator control and, most
important, the cyclical burning of the heather. At the same

219
 THE MOOR

time, walked-up grouse shooting gave way to a preference for

'driven' shooting - that is, shooting from butts, as the birds
are driven from the heather by a line of beaters. Whereas once
one might have had to trudge across the sodden moor all day
in order to dispatch birds sufficient for one's own dinner, now
one could simply saunter the short way from drive to drive,
and stand in one's butt, and wait for the coveys to be driven
into range. On a single day in 1872 Lord Walsingham took
842 grouse on Blubberhouses Moor; in the same year, Sir
Frederick Millbank killed 190 in twenty-three minutes, ac-
counting for 18,231 birds in the season. In 1888 Walsingham
exceeded his own record, shooting r ,070 birds in fourteen
hours. The bags of fifty years before had become unthink-
able. On the first day of shooting in 1915, as Gallipoli raged,
Jllil

:::;, 2,929 grouse were bagged on the Littledale and Abbeystead

,1111
I"''
i:::: moors. A new record.
1""
The butts are either built above ground or else sunk into
nil
I

!!!! the peat. Often it seems as if they are meant to shield as well
,,.,
'"'
as conceal. You'll see wooden butts; sometimes just a brack-
eted fence panel, redolent with creosote and painted with a
number. On the moors above Haworth I'd seen Freddie's
ml
:a1
'flat-pack' butts, dropped into a wedge cut from the moor.
I"' But the finest, and all the old ones, are stone-built, with grav-
Ill:
111:
elled or turfed floors, the butt's number carved into a slate
tablet, and a bright steel eyelet screwed into a nearby rock for
your dog's leash.
The butt where the man was shovelling was sunken and
canted; it looked like it had been shelled. The top line of stones
and turf had collapsed inward. Most of its depth was filled
with sheep-trodden spoil. The man was ankle deep in it, cut-
ting it with his spade-edge and carrying each shovelful away.
He was to exhume the butt's old shape, to expose the carefully
placed stones, and to replace those stones where necessary. He

220
 Blackamore

had cut a narrow drainage trench from the entrance. It was

filling with a dark water. All he knew, he said, was that the butt
_ the whole line - needed to be ready by August. He was tired,
sweating even in the rain; the peak of his cap was dirty where
he'd tugged it down. He'd be here all day. Back tomorrow. As
long as it took - and then on to the next one.

The heather, the cotton-grass, the broad view down the dale,
the cry of the curlew. And then an incursion from another
world - Typhoon, Tornado, Hawk. Whatever its name, the
jet topped the skyline like a cat mounting a fence, and closed
in, black and eloquent, sailing over the moor, corkscrewing
into the low cloud, then returning to its base, beyond the
horizon. The noise was not intolerable, only an urgent, showy
roar - and this sound chased the craft like a shadow, and
eventually, each time the jet returned, it was the noise I found
myself tracking across the sky, just behind the jet itself. It
came three times, tipping its wings as it passed, and it seemed
to me that there was some indulgence in this wing-tipping,
some joyfulness in its quick spiralling or banking. The villa-
ges, the farms, the bridges, the railways, the electricity pylons
- every human thing in the valley was, for the purposes of the
pilots, just a stand-in target, and the moors only contours to
be negotiated. The dale was a replica for hostile terrain. The
jets - or jet, I never saw more than one at a time - came and
went all day, and I didn't begin to grow accustomed to them.
When I spoke to the villagers, in a shop and a pub and a B & B,
they said they heard every sortie. You didn't get used to it.
The valley lanes took me back to Danby, twining the river
Esk, first to the village of Danby itself, then across the railway
line and up through the higher settlement of Ainthorpe and
over the wet fields. The rain had been going on all month: the
cows were moody, the milk yield was down, fluke-worm was

221
 THE MOOR

a constant worry for the farmers. Wherever the cattle went

they mashed up the ground and left the grass inedible. The
Esk was opaque with silt; not clear gold as the southwest's
rivers had been: push a finger through its surface and its tip
was obscured; take a handful and your palm was left gritty. At
the farm where I was staying I had a hot bath in spring water
tinted by the moor's off-wash: it was the hoppy colour of a
moor tarn, and grew darker - stewed tea - as the bath filled.
Well, the Victorians thought peat baths therapeutic. In cer-
tain spas it had been possible to experience something called
a 'peat enema'. I was offered bottled water to drink, but I
preferred the brown stuff.
The rain went on into the night, and the moors filled up.
It was the wettest June on record, and for some the coming
months would be ruinous.

Danby's church, with its square Norman tower, stood bun-

kered deep in the green dale, far from the nearest homestead,
UII'"" dating to a time before the railway, when 'Danby' was only a
1ii:::::i
... ,:::1'1'1 parish of cottages scattered down the valley, like seeds in a
~1111

,,111:::1 furrow, and passers-through were rare. It was low and ringed
:::in::
'1111111::
by yews that were almost black - pretty on a sunny morning,
but built and rebuilt, it seemed, by people who were accus-
tomed to having to cower from the weather. Pinned to the
porch notice board was a poem written by the church cat,
whose name was Toffee. It went: 'I meet so many people,
who come here to pray/ so I'm really busy, day after day'.
Canon John Christopher Atkinson, vicar of Danby from
1850 to 1900, was a walker - seventy thousand miles 'in the

prosecution of his clerical duty', but the same again in lei-

sure. Round the world five times. 'Far the larger proportion

222
---
Blackamore

of those miles walked alone.' The extent of his wandering was

matched only by Danby's postman, who reckoned his daily
rounds amounted, over the years, to a quarter of a million
miles. I was reminded of Thomas De Quincey's claim that
Wordsworth had, in the course of his life, walked I 80,000
English miles, and that it was to this 'mode of exertion' that
'he has been indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and
we for much of what is most excellent in his writings'.
Atkinson was seventy-seven when Forty Years in a Moor-
land Parish was published, in I 89 I. It was not his first book,
but he was an ambivalent author. In his Introduction he con-
cedes that the volume 'may be of little or no interest to any
besides myself'. The second edition includes a photograph
of the author in his study at the parsonage - on his desk are an
in-tray and a black upright typewriter; in the background is
a shelf of leather-bound books. The canon himself is letter-
writing or correcting proofs, his spectacles so dainty as to be
almost invisible. It was taken around the time of the book's
first publication. He is white-haired and white-bearded, though
his hair is as thick and brilliantined as it must have been
when he first arrived as a young man. He has the physical
stability and uprightness of those who continue to walk every
day (aged eighty he was still enjoying fifteen-mile rambles),
and the look of painless concentration of one for whom study
is a comfort.
A scholar- clergyman of the old variety, a kind rare even
then, he put in his book, which was subtitled 'Reminiscences
and Researches', everything he had learned about his parish
- it was compendium, companion, miscellany, florilegium,
bestiary, yearbook, gazetteer - derived, as he put it, from 'my
"stores, things new and old'".
Responding, before the book was published, to the editorial
suggestions of Macmillan's reader, he replied: 'Frankly, I

223
 THE MOOR

should be at a loss how to set about "gathering the material

into a story".' Thus, some of his chapter titles: 'The Witch
not Always or Necessarily an Imposter', 'The Wise Man',
'Barrow Digging', 'Bee Customs and Notions', 'An Old Oak
Chest and Some of its Disclosures', 'Calf Burying', 'Holy
Wells', 'Black Land', 'The Dog Whipper', 'Geological Con-
siderations', 'Lost on the Moor' ... In it goes, in it goes. And
where a subject finds no easy place within the body of the
book: 'Appendix'.
Atkinson had first come here in 1847. 'Before me, looking
westward, was moor, so that I could see nothing else ... It
was a solitude, and a singularly lonely solitude ... and yet not
dreary, nor could one feel altogether alone.' And this was the
moor experience; it was what I had known on the Chains and
the wide bogs above Top \Vithens - this aloneness that was
not fully aloneness; a solitude that was never whole. 'There
was perpetually so distinct a personality in the matters which
passed in succession through the mind, that the effect was
rather one of conversation than that of solitary reflection.'
Atkinson was of a scientific bent, but not immune to visions.
1111""" Having one morning taken the train from York to Grosmont,
1111""'1'
: ~mi~ returning to his parish for the Sunday service after 'a press-
::111::::1
ing call from home', he climbed, in his horse-drawn trap, up
::111:::
"11Jlt]i,
the moorside to Egton. 'When we reached the heights from
which we could see well into Eskdale, it was - so far as the
testimony of actual vision went - full of water as far as the
eye could see.' The valley was flooded to within a hundred
feet of the moor-tops. Like a man in a film, he rubbed his
eyes; the vision persisted. 'Eskdale and all its tributary dales
were inundated, drowned, submerged.' He went on, higher
still, towards Danby Beacon, and saw 'a great sheet of water
with deep, narrow, far-reaching gulfs or inlets, and only the
moorland heights standing out of it'.

224
 Blackamore

Gradually, as the sun rose and intensified, he saw 'threads

and streaks of the dissembling surface detach themselves',
until finally the mist (for that is what it was) evaporated to
present the bright morning dale, familiar once again.
Atkinson was a southerner, an Essex man, although his
previous appointment had been in Scarborough, thirty miles
away from Danby. When he arrived in Danby, at the invita-
tion of the parish patron, Viscount Downe, he found the liv-
ing not godless, exactly, but neglected. Seeking his way to the
village from Danby Beacon, he came upon a signpost, 'but
the arms which had once borne the names of the places the
various tracks led to were gone.'
Danby's then minister was 'an old and infirm man, and
did not care to face the elements in bad or stormy weather'.
(A distinction may be drawn between 'stormy' weather and
'bad'.) It was a fine day, therefore, when Atkinson was brought
to see his church. 'It must suffice to say that my conductor,
the "minister", entered without removing his hat.'
The altar table was covered in crumbs (the Sunday-school
teachers ate their lunch at it); a 'dirty shabby' surplice was
hung over the broken altar railing; the pulpit: 'reeking with
accumulated dust and scraps of torn paper'; the font: 'a pal-
try slop-basin'. One effect of the persecution of hawks in the
district, he noted, was that their prey thrived, especially mice,
which had done several hundred pounds' worth of damage to
the church's American organ. 'They have actually eaten some
of the wooden stop-couplers quite through.'
Prior to his departure, a friend had told him: 'Why, Danby
was not found out when they sent Bonaparte to St Helena;
or else they never would have taken the trouble to send him
all the way there.' 'However,' wrote Atkinson, 'I had my own
reasons.' According to an obituarist, 'the only personal regret
he had was a certain solitude, not the solitude of the great

225
 THE MOOR

moors, but solitude in his problems and researches.' It was

the plight of the rural scholar-priest.
In the spring of 1895, five years before his death, he
wrote to his friend and publisher George Macmillan about a
local man ('an artist in many parts of his idiosyncrasy') who,
while walking on the moor, had undergone something like
an epiphany: 'he had never known- himself experience the
presence of Divinity so powerfully before ... I don't think I
am ever on the moor without something in me that answers
to that. What we mean by Heaven must be nearer sometimes
than at other some. Don't you think so?'
Merely a hard walk up the dale-side, and through the
gorse-line; a heaven graced by larks.

The Nelson Room in Middlesbrough's Dorman Museum

contains the collection of eggs and mounted birds bequeathed
to the museum in 1914 by Thomas Hudson Nelson, ten years
after it was founded. Among the hundreds of blown eggs are
II"""' those of the hen harrier ( coloured the palest of peach, and
11uu.,,
1::::m:
""Ill''
the size of a goose's), and its prey, the red grouse (apricot-
iii:::::: sized, and white-grey stippled with black). Also present are
1111::::
ll)JJ::;:
a wretched-looking peregrine, its brow still furrowed with
contempt, and three red grouse in a glass vitrine, each look-
ing in a different direction with the far-off, cocked gazes of
catalogue models.
Among the many people who have worked at the museum
since 1944 are those who say they have seen a ghostly fig-
ure, thin, pale, bespectacled, and always wrapped in a grey
cardigan, Frank Elgee, the museum's late assistant curator,
was a sickly child: scarlet fever left him partially deaf. Sick-
ly, till the age of fourteen - when he developed pneumonia.

226
 Blackamore

It was 896 when, unable to sit for a scholarship to grade

I

school on account of his poor health, he became an office boy

at William Jacks the ironmonger's. He lasted two years - an
empyema, untreated since his pneumonia, led to 'a complete
breakdown'. He was eighteen. His parents - despairing- took
him away, Middlesbrough being no place for the boy to die.
In the village of Ingleby Greenhow, ten miles south, on the
western edge of the moors, young Frank was pushed about,
each day, in his bath chair. He knew the village well - for sev-
eral years the family had spent their summer holidays there.
It was nearby, under U rra Moor, that Frank first began to
know the changing land that lay between here and the sea.
'My mother used to wheel me down to the stream, and ...
I would sit for hours watching the birds, wagtails, dippers, red-
starts and swallows. I also used to sit in the garden facing the
Cleveland Hills, watching the rosy light of the sun flash on
their craggy summits.' He was an avid lepidopterist: spotting
a passing peacock from his chair, he would hand his sister the
butterfly net and send her after it. At dusk, he and his father
would paint the railings outside the cottage with jargonelle-
pear essence, and, in the morning, carefully pick off the
moths trapped there, and drop them into the killing jar.
He was a spectacle, this studious man-child from the town,
gazing up from his chair, as if returned from war. The boys
ran to watch him pass. So pale! His nickname was 'Daddy
Whitehead'. He didn't mind.
Three months later, Frank was still not dead. The family
returned to Middlesbrough, where he was able to look out of
his bedroom window on a clear morning and see the moor-
tops change, as summers passed, from purple to brown to
purple to brown.
He spent his days reading Scott and Byron, and the Sher-
lock Holmes mysteries, and improving his Latin, French and

227
 THE MOOR

German, and studying entomology, botany, geology, conchol-

ogy, and being wheeled by his mother around Albert Park,
where he became familiar to those others who spent their
days there. On his bedroom wall he hung an engraving of
the Dauphin of France, imprisoned in the Temple; he would
look at it and - 'Oh, poor boy!' he would cry.
In I 904 - rid of the confounded chair - he was appointed
as assistant curator at the Dorman Museum. Finally his life
began. Of these 'youthful days', he wrote, looking back, 'nei-
ther girls, nor a lung and a half, nor hot weather nor cheap
lodgings could hold me from the moors. They commanded
and I had to obey.' He was, for that short period between
his partial recovery and his marriage, a 'lover' of the natural
world, because, in the words Henry Williamson had applied
to his own youth in Devon, there was 'nothing else'.
'It would have been natural to have been in love,' Elgee
wrote. 'I was: with a cold stony waste of hills and dales.'
While walking on the moors during the summer of 1906,
'trying to convince myself that I was as strong as I ought
to have been', he slipped 'down the almost-vertical side of
"'"lll
a deep griff or ravine'. The incident is recollected in diaries
::::1:::
:an:::
written years later, and the reader begins to wonder if some
1:::a11
111::::1
kind of allegory is being offered, when he emphasises the
111::;::
heat of the day and tells us that the bottom of the griff was
'bone dry' ...
'Had I been wiser in moor lore,' he writes, 'as soon as
I quitted that griff I should have borne away to higher
ground.' Instead he marches on, following his compass, and
finds himself 'in the depths of another waterless griff . . .
number two seemed worse than number one ... the climb
out made me speechless.' Having escaped, the slight young
man with his lung and a half, who only a few years before was
being wheeled around in a bath chair, stumbles into another

228
 BLackamore

griff, and another; 'I must have crossed six at least.' And yet
onward he trudges, and on (heather-walking is tiring even on
a cool day, even for those with two lungs), over the scorching
moor - until 'suddenly, without warning, the earth opened in
front of me'. Not another griff, but the Hole of Horcum, the
vast scoop-shaped valley close to the Whitby-Pickering road.
The exhausted invalid is euphoric: fourteen years later he
would write that the experience made the land 'as much mine
as if I held the title-deeds ... it has been a source of fertile
thoughts; and often, at the most unexpected moments, its
image emerges from the background of my consciousness as
though demanding my attention.'
It was the following year when his mother died, she who
had pushed him up so many hills. It was during this year, too,
that Frank Elgee can be said to have begun his great project.
From then on he continued to holiday on the moors with his
father - his father who had bought him Canon Atkinson's
British Birds' Eggs and Nests, and who had tutored him in
French and German. Unable to find a description of the
moors in his own tongue, Frank first turned to accounts in
other languages, of other moors - to Schroter and Fruh's Die
Moore der Schweiz and Graebner's Die Heide Norddeutsch-
lands - and then, to himself.
It would be his modest reply to Gilbert White's Natural
History of Selborne. The fact that the domain he planned to
examine - in every aspect from its vegetation to its geology to
its birdlife to its archaeology - was far larger (and its terrain
more physically demanding) than White's Hampshire parish
did not discourage him. He would not allow his tribute to
be incomplete. He called the area - the moors of northeast
Yorkshire - 'Blackamore', the term the topographer William
Camden had used in 1607 ('that is the black moorish land').
In August r 9 r 1, he and his father took a holiday - an hour's

229
 THE MOOR

ride on the train, to Danby. It was there - in his boarding

house - that he met her, Miss Harriet Wragg, headmistress.
'Your interest in me I cannot thoroughly understand,' he
wrote to her in December, 'owing to the utter lack of such in-
terest from others during my dark and dismal past. Like you,
I used to think myself immeasurably below other people in
every way, and when anyone expresses a deeper interest than
usual I feel strange.'
The moor would be his accomplice in wooing her.
If the wild, Wagnerian music of the mountain were to lull you to
sleep, lo!, a vision would enter your dreams - the Man of the Moors,
cleansed of all imperfections, perfect in soul, mind and body, hand-
some and strong! And he would touch your brow, and at that touch
the vigour and exhilaration of all the moorland breezes would flow
through your veins and lighten your weariness of spirit.

She, reflecting later, would write of Frank's relation to the

moors, 'I shall never forget once watching him, diminutive,
frail as a plant, standing at the base of a hard, rocky cliff, his
white hand resting on its face as it might rest caressingly on
the face of his wife, and I knowing that he loved four hundred
square miles of moorland with the same reverent intimacy.'
Frank was not blind to the scale of what he had taken on;
nor was it hubris. 'Those who have explored the district will
1::::11
,,,,,
l'""I
understand how arduous a task it is to examine thorough-
ly an area nearly as large as an average English county,' he
wrote, in his introduction to The Moorlands of North-Eastern
Yorkshire. It was finally published in 1912, the year after he
met his wife-to-be ('To Miss Wragg, B.A., of Shirley, War-
wickshire, I must here express my best thanks for many sug-
gestions'). He had worked at it for two years, but it was the
happy culmination of a lifetime's sombre thought.
From the moors he would write Harriet long letters, his
passion for her entwined with his passion for the moor, and

230
 Blackamore

glistening with pretty details: 'I must not forget to tell you', he
wrote in August 1912, a year after they met, 'that I found two
rare beetles on a dwarf sallow growing in the bog. They were
a bright coppery colour with a green head and thorax ... '
I
They married soon after. His transformation was complete:
no longer the half-deaf, wizened cripple, squinting feebly at
the hills. He had become 'the Man of the Moors'. But whereas
the title Beatrice Chase of Dartmoor assumed, 'Lady of the
Moor', represented a kind of self-coronation, Frank wished
only to be possessed by the moors he knew.
Elgee's ambition was to answer a question, he said: simply
'What causes the moors?' He realised that to understand a
landscape was to understand its words, and that moor-words
were precious. He knew that the burning of the moor was
'swiddening', and that a burnt strip of moor was, naturally, a
'swidden'; just as he knew that the burnt heather stalks were
'gouldens', and those patches of white cotton-grass I saw
above Danby were not 'patches', nor 'swathes' nor 'tracts',
but 'hassocks'; and that the phenomenon I witnessed on the
moors above the Calder Valley - the moor steaming as the
sun came hot after rainfall - had two names: 'summer geese'
or 'summer colts'. 'See,' he quoted a moor-man, 'see how the
summer colt rides.'
Before he could explain the 'cause' of the moors, Frank
had first to explain what they were, and for this he again drew
on his aptitude for languages. Moorland, after all, was not
purely a British phenomenon.

The word is in all essentials identical with the old Norse mor, sig-
nifying peat, turf, heath or Ling, and if we look at its meaning in
the Gothic languages we shall find that it is everywhere the same,
though with some elasticity in its application. In Suio-Gothic, mor
is a marshy place, also the undergrowth in a wood; Danish and
Swedish mor, a tract of fenny land; Danish dialect, moor or mor,

231
 THE MOOR

land where turves may be cut; Anglo-Saxon mor, waste land, a

moor, heath; Dutch moer, and German moor.

(From the Anglo-Saxon came the application of the word

'moor' to lowland areas of fen and marsh and other 'waste':
Sawston Moor in Cambridgeshire, Otmoor near Oxford, Som-
erset's Sedgemoor- and, of course, those Moors I'd known as
a boy.)
Elgee's ambition was to elucidate his moors' multipli-
city. They were not barren. He didn't deny that they could
be 'dreary', but he understood, as Emily Bronte understood,
that dreariness was only one of their moods. It was their vari-
ety he loved, and reading his book you do not doubt that love
is the right word. He describes the face of the moor with the
tenderness and stifled excitement of one describing the face
of a new lover. With an eye for colour, he recalls a sward on
the northern side of Stockdale, with its 'beautiful clumps of
bright green Hair Moss ... of a brighter green even than the
turf itself; here were the bristly leaves of the Heath Rush,
there tufts of greyish Mat Grass with occasional bosses of
purple Ling.' He was not so much describing the moor for
others as adoring it by close attention.
Even where the moor appeared to be uniform, it was not;
11::::111
1n:::;:
even within a single square mile the varieties of moor might
be classified and ranked. In his taxonomical system there
were the Fat Moors, with their deep wet peat; then the Thin
Moors, with their shallower, freer-draining, drier peat; there
were the Mosses, or bogs, some of them thirty feet deep;
there were the Slacks and Gills and Moorland Slopes - and
each such moor type, naturally, was connected by 'insens-
ible gradients'. And then again, within each moor were var-
ious further designations: the Fat Moors alone contained
'Pure Heather Moor' and 'Heather and Bilberry Moor' and

232
 Blackamore

'Heather, Flying Bent, Cotton Grass and Common Rush

Moor' and 'Heather, Flying Bent, Common Rush and Sweet
Gale Moor' ...
I
He had systematised the moor, and named it, but he had
not shaken its mystery from it. Frank was partial to quoting
Goethe (in the original):

Die unbegreifiich hohen Werke

Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.

Thy works, unfathomed and unending,

Retain the first day's splendour still.

5
In the morning, after another brownish bath, I filled my bot-
tle with brownish water and set off. The new bracken was
pushing through the bed of dead stalks as I climbed up to
the moor. Its green was vivid against the pale beige, as the
leaves of bilberry were vivid against the unreflecting brown
of the heather. In an abandoned quarry the sheep were ab-
sorbed in their grazing, and scarcely moved when I passed
by. Where a half-acre of heather had been recently burnt the
land's texture was revealed, deep trenches advancing to the
horizon. Grips was the word. Drainage ditches, like those I'd
seen on Exmoor - cut after the last war, under a grant sys-
tem that had since been reversed, to make productive pasture
or arable land or forestry of the moor; or by the old keep-
ers, in the belief that heather favoured drier ground, or that
draining discouraged grouse disease. But pasture soon turned
back (bad land is bad land), and a dried-out grouse moor, it
became clear, was grouse moor no longer - their insect food
declined; their drinking water was depleted; the chicks fell
into the grips in winter and were swept away.

233
 THE MOOR

Where the path had been worn deep, a measure could be

taken of the land's layers: a foot of surface peat, its top few
inches riddled with heather roots; then the peat-stained yel-
low sand; followed by a band two inches thick of what Elgee
describes as 'a hard brown substance' - the 'pan', composed
of iron, silica and organic matter leached down by rain from
the soil above, and virtually impermeable. It is this - the pan
- that keeps the Fat Moors from draining, discouraging the
growth of anything but grasses and dwarf vegetation, such as
heather and bilberry, and preventing all but the hardiest trees
from growing. Even those that do take root, such as birch,
will not survive on land grazed by sheep or burnt for grouse.
And everywhere were grey sandstone boulders, clustered
in field-clearance cairns, scattered among the burnt heather,
edging the path, or standing alone in a burnt swathe - 'swid-
den'. The locals, Elgee wrote, had a term for these solitary
outcrops, too: Crow Stones. Like 'Black Hill' and 'Red
Marsh', it is a common naming on the moor maps.
The North York Moors are hard to configure in the mind's
eye: on a map they have none of the easy coherence of the
southern moors, or even those of the Pennine ridge. The
moor edges are bitten into by the dales, and to go from one
moorland spur to another means a long round trip on heath-
er, skirting the dale's edge, or else a deep descent- three hun-
dred feet; more - into the dale and up the other side. I met
a retired keeper, who raised his hand to explain the dales to
me. These moorland spurs were fingers, the dales their inter-
stices; the high moor itself was a palm - a palm-full of peat.
From this brown flat silent land, down. Down, into the
green dale, forested, noisy with combine harvesters and cat-
tle. As I slipped down Crossley Side into Little Fryup Dale
the heather stopped suddenly and was replaced first by a band
of gorse, then one of bracken, then a steep patchy grassland,

234
 Blackamore

before the green valley floor was reached. Then once more
up - over the narrow moorland spine of Glaisdale Rigg, and
down into Glaisdale itself, and climbing again to the uplands
- to Traverse Moor, onto the heathered palm of Egton High
Moor.
I saw the tree first; then the pyramid. The tree was three
miles away; the pyramid - truncated, black against the sky
- ten miles. It lorded over the moor, even at this distance.
Its ugliness seemed to exist as a radiance. When an ordinary
Egyptian, a shopkeeper or farmer, saw a pyramid he was not
awed; he wasn't inspired - what he felt was dread.
The heather was unrelenting, dense and even as a lawn,
and not a flower anywhere. 'Wandering over the moors at all
seasons of the year,' Frank Elgee had written, 'the naturalist
cannot but be impressed by the paucity of bird and animal
life.' And that was how it seemed - these moors weren't the
Serengeti; what defined them was their very lack of diversity,
biological or otherwise.
But there were always, always the grouse. Grouse grouse
grouse grouse grouse. From beside the path a frumpy brin-
dled hen spun up. The alarm call is traditionally transliter-
ated as 'Go back! Go back!' It spoke for the bird as menacing,
hectoring, and inauspicious; it spoke, too, for the moor it-
self - 'Go back!' - a kind of ventriloquism. It was one of the
grouse shooters' articles of faith that the red grouse, Lagopus
lagopus scotica, was Britain's only native bird species. But the
bird books will refer you to the willow ptarmigan, of which
the red grouse is merely a local race, along with its voice:
"'ke-u, ke-kerrrrr-ke-kerrehe ehe ehe", slowing down at the
end and often followed (or preceded) by a few "kowah".'
Jeering, rooting, triumphal, aghast. Yes: go back.
I'd thought this specimen was on her own, but she was fol-
lowed over the moor by first two, then five fledglings - and

235
 THE MOOR

when they'd gone, and crash-landed in a d istant patch of tall-

er heather, and when I myself had settled, the heather they'd
fled from shuddered, and I saw three further chicks, flight-
less, eyeing me with something that was not yet fear. Come
August, these birds would be ready for the gun.
Through the heather was cut a maze of narrow paths - too
narrow to have been made by walkers. The ways of grouse
and stock. I left the grouse chicks and followed these tracks,
ignoring my map, only keeping the lone tree between me and
the pyramid. These tracks, these cuttings in the heather, were
puddled and black, and carried along their edges numerous
tags of pale white fluff. Just as earlier, on Danby High Moor,
I had seen the cotton-grass's fruit and taken it for wool or
feathers, I saw this material, now, and assumed it was a trim-
" 111111111

::11r.:::
ming of cotton-grass - but there was no cotton-grass here.
1''""""
:0,, .. , There was hardly anything but heather, and the white that
. ::;;::::
:;1::::1Jl edged the paths was wool - combings snagged on the wiry
ui""'"
rnrnrn: heather as the sheep filed through.
'''''!""
The Wintergill forestry plantation, on the edge of Egton
High Moor, was dark and abandoned-seeming, as these plan-
tations always were. A block of utter silence on the quiet
:ii:::iii moor. Alongside it, a wide firebreak had been shaved into the
11::1111
t:11111,
heather - 'swiped', using a mowing device dragged behind
::::!!!
11,,lt
a tractor - to prevent flames from threatening the timber
when the moor was burnt. The tree ahead, still about a mile
off, was a spruce, an outlier of this plantation. It was tilted
on the prevailing wind. No telling, from this far, how tall it
had grown: ten foot; twenty. Between the plantation and this
solitary tree (which was so conspicuous that its absence from
my map seemed like an oversight) were High Birchwath Peat
Bog, Duckponds Peat Bog and Pike Hill Moss.
'Those who are unacquainted with the moors', wrote Elgee,
'frequently confuse "fl.aughts" and "peats", two entirely dif-
 Blackamore

fe rent products', the former being a sod of turf, the latter 'ob-
tained from a peat-hole'. (In my mind's eye he is often sat at a
pub bar, after a day on the moors, holding an engraved pewter
tankard .) Turbary and other 'common' rights - the right to
take quantities of stone, ling and turf, as well as grazing rights
_ were vested in the older moorland houses, and included in
farm leases. Even the deadest-seeming land has its harvest.
The peat face - called the breast - might be eight feet high .
In front of your toes would be matter two thousand years
old. The spade comprised a short T-shaped handle fixed to
one end of a narrow tray eighteen inches long, with a winged
steel fore -blade. This blade was to be pressed and jemmied
into the peat breast, to the tray's full extent, then eased out
with the fresh block in place. Keep your peat spade sharper
than your razor. As the block was tipped onto the barrow, the
outer surface was to be 'sliped' - smoothed by the action of
the blade as it was withdrawn, so that the peat edge, when
stacked to dry, would resist the permeation of water.
Among the many photos in Frank Elgee's beautiful book
- photos that he and his father took 'using a heavy half-plate
camera - is one of the Pike Hill Moss peat holes. It shows a
black quarry. The exposed face, from which the peat has been
cut, looms darkly over two pale moor-urchins, a boy perched
on a ladder, and his older sister, a white shawl wrapped
around her.
A well -stropped blade and a strong shoulder might cut two
thousand in a day. T he peats would be taken to the 'ligging
ground' nearby to dry, five peats leaning against a central
block, with the sliped surface outermost to repel the rain. In
the spring, the pits here would have been busy with the peo-
ple of Danby, Glaisdale, Fryup and Egton, the stacks multi-
plying hour by hou r, the peat face being slowly pushed back
across th e moor.

237
 THE MOOR

Good black peat burns hot as coal, but is smoky, and in

time coal was got more cheaply. The bogs are no longer cut
for peat; the old cuttings have been allowed to become ponds.
The peat fires, some which had, it was said, not been quenched
for a hundred years (you heard this in every moorland pub),
have been allowed to go out - coal is the fuel, now; or else
your hearth is only an ornament, filled with dried flowers and
dishes of potpourri. The heat comes from gas or oil, or from
electricity; the peat, with its stored carbon, is legally protect-
ed. And it is precious - has become precious - and not only
to the water companies who want to prevent downstream dis-
coloration (peat-stained water is harmless, but householders
won't tolerate it). If five per cent of its peat were to be lost,
Britain's carbon dioxide emissions would double. Already,
it is estimated, damaged peatlands are releasing 3.7 million
tonnes of carbon dioxide each year - equal to the combined
emissions of Leeds, Edinburgh and Cardiff.
The wind that had been blowing since I left Danby had
stopped, and the surface of the moor was still. When the first
western explorers to enter the terra nullius of Australia came
'••1111:::::
"'""''"' to its southern limestone desert in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, it was the treelessness that undid them - a horizontal
sublime of a kind that would have been inconceivable to Ed-
mund Burke. Imagine encountering a race of people without
faces. 'A Climax of Desolation - no trees, no shrubs, all bleak,
barren, undulating sand. Miserable! Horrible!' They named
it fittingly: Nullarbor.
I veered off the path to stand beside the tree I'd been
watching for the last three miles. The sole vertical in a land
of horizontals, it had drawn me to it like a light. It had grown
for perhaps twenty years, or thirty, and had got to about fif-
teen feet. Of the sycamores at Top Withens, Ted Hughes
wrote:
 Blackamore
The girth and spread of valley twenty-year-olds,
They were probably ninety.

To live, a seedling must either derive its sustenance from the

sparse moorland soil, or else force its roots through a foot of
dense pan; and then it must be spared the attention of sheep
or the keepers' fires. In Turner's Grouse Shooting on Beam-
sley Beacon six blobs can be made out atop a hazy knoll: a
moorland spinney of a kind rare on modern grouse moors.
In order for the vast areas of moorland forestry planted
following the Second World War to thrive, the pan had to be
cut deep, and the ground heavily fertilised. And then there
was the wind, the winter wind that came strong enough to
blow you over, and did not relent for hours. It was hardy, this
specimen. Not only twigs, but its limbs lay scattered about
its trunk, torn off by winds, and recently. I stepped back and
saw that virtually all of the branches from its windward side
had gone, and it was this that had made it seem, from a dis-
tance, as if it were leaning, when in fact its trunk was quite
vertical. This was its existence. To stand here and be torn
apart every year, to have its branches flung across the moor,
and its cones dropped impotently into the peat. It might sur-
vive for another century in this unburned patch. In the sappy
socket where a limb had broken off, a cone was lodged.
From the sentinel tree I looked down across Randy Mere
Reservoir, across Coombs Wood and the village of Goath-
land, and followed a line of butts that pimpled the far slope,
butts that would soon be occupied by eager chaps with fresh-
ly oiled guns. I counted five down from the hilltop - and then
my eye settled on the pyramid.

239
 THE MOOR

By AD 71 the Romans had established their fortress at York.

Dotting the coastline, from Filey to Hunt Cliff, were the
ruins of their lookout posts and signal stations. The follow-
ing morning I climbed from Goathland over Howl Moor, to
stand on the Roman road that can be traced from the camp
at Cawthorne, north to Lease Rigg: in the rain the road was
a pontoon of ranked stones, floating on the moor surface. It
was strange that the moor had not, over the centuries, folded
these stones into itself. I had seen, two days ago, up on Danby
High Moor, a tractor tyre - no more than twenty years old,
surely, and five feet across - that had been absorbed by the
peat right down to the last half-foot, so that only a cracked,
cleated arch showed above the surface. On the lower moors
you often came across discarded ploughs or harrows, half
consumed by the soil. And yet this road - two thousand years
old - was still here, on top of the moor, unsheltered from
the rain. Perhaps it was its continued use that had preserved
it - the constant course of footsteps (and not only human)
preventing the moor from overwhelming it. Country lanes
that carry few vehicles will soon grow a hackle of grass and
moss along their central ridge. I ts continued use - but also
its position, here on the high moor, where its stones had not
been taken for field walls and barns and dwellings, as they
had been along its lowland stretches.
The road from Goathland to the AI 69 was a stopping-off
point for those travelling across the moor between Whitby
and Pickering. Salt traders (and salt smugglers) from the
coast had come this way in former times. As I approached
the Eller Beck bridge, the radar structure's components and
textures were disclosed: it was not black, as it had appeared to
be from the moors above Danby. I ts base was dark grey, while

240
 Blackamore

its visible face was an off-white square bearing a dark-grey

circle within it. As I closed in, the off-white became a proper
grey, not merely a white that had faded in the elements, and
the square panels that made up the array surface could be
made out, with their thousands of stubby antennae, regularly
spaced. It was hard to gain an idea of its size - beyond the
chain-link fence, and the higher electric fence, beyond the
expanse of no-man's land and the additional barbed-wire
fences, there was nothing of human scale. I had been told
that it was nine storeys high; it might have been forty.
RAF Fylingdales was an American operation, British-built
and run. By 1960, three years after Sputnik I was launched
by the Russians, the US ballistic missile early warning system
had been established. 'BMEWS' was the acronym. It was said
'Bee-muse'. There were to be three sites: the others were at
Thule in Greenland, and Clear, Alaska. Between them, they
would cast a radar net three thousand miles into the USSR.
A missile once detected would be tracked, and its trajectory,
target and strike time calculated. Twenty minutes' warning
would be afforded to the US; to Britain, four. The warheads
would come, the cities would be destroyed - the system would
allow the RAF's V-bombers to scramble and reply.
The radomes had been replaced in I 994, but I knew them
from pictures. I had seen, too, from the top of Ilkley Moor,
the cluster that stood today at the Americans' listening sta-
tion at Menwith Hill, a dozen or more of these white spheres.
Each of the three Fylingdales radomes had measured forty
metres in diameter, with the bottom eight metres sunk into
a cuboid control building. They had stood in a line across
the moor, just under the brow of the hill. Very quickly they
became known, by the people of the base and more widely,
as 'the golf balls'. They were not perfect spheres, in fact, but
geodesic domes composed of hexagonal panels ( this faceting

241
 THE MOOR

echoed the regular dimpling in a golf ball's surface). Nor were

the domes white, but pale blue, in order that they would - so
it was imagined - be less of a blight on the skyline of the na-
tional park. (I wondered what Frank Elgee would have made
of their appearance on his adored Fat Moor.) They came to
be regarded with affection by the people of the moors. Post-
cards of them sold well in Goathland's tourist shops.
The radomes had had no radar function; they were only
to protect the delicate dishes within from the moor's high
winds, from rain and snow. But it was easy to see why it was
assumed, by those who had opposed the site's existence, that
they were meant to conceal, too - to hide the dishes' move-
ments. And then they had been replaced with the 'pyramid'
I saw today, the 'solid-state phased array radar', which they
called SSPAR (the military, where acronyms outnumber
proper nouns), and which was in fact a truncated tetrahe-
dron. The threat had changed - from Russia, to Iran and
North Korea; from a fixed threat to the shifting, invisible
threat of submarines - and the technology must change with
it. The system's reach had been extended. The radar looked
into space, too: at the International Space Station; at the sat-
ellites in their orbiting hundreds, friendly and hostile, com-
mercial and state-owned, and the thousands of fragments of
debris, circling the Earth.
The War Office had requisitioned this stretch of North
Yorkshire for training, during the First World War. Thus
when a site was required - unpopulated, high, with an unin-
terrupted east-facing outlook - Fylingdales Moor presented
itself. But the original site, close to the coast, was felt to be
vulnerable to seaborne rocket attack. The name Fylingdales
they would keep. ('Clear, Alaska'; 'Thule, Greenland' - they
couldn't, it was felt, call this vital instrument of western sec-
urity 'Snod Hill'.)

242
 Blackamore

Snod Hill had first to be cleared of ordnance left by years

of army training. UXB teams scoured the moor to a depth of
a metre, deeper: dozens of grenades and shells were found.
On Fylingdales Moor itself, some miles away, you could see
the concrete hardstandings from which the tanks fired, the
adjoining ground poisoned by propellant gases still bare.
The labour camp went up first - room for a thousand,
in wooden huts with sixteen beds in each and a couple of
fuming oil heaters. There was the canteen, the post office,
the bookies, the bar. Where once there had been only sheep,
there developed quickly a township - the bar stayed open till
3 a.m.; the bookies thrived. There was some lawlessness: lar-
ceny, fistfights. Felons from Whitby and York hid out among
the unregistered men.
The first tracks they laid, from the salt road into the high
moor, were soon absorbed by the peat; rubble was put down,
tons of it, but this too was taken in by the ground. A bulldozer
sank to its roof. A Land Rover went under. Every day, vehi-
cles had to be tugged from the morass. Perforated steel plank-
ing of the kind that had been used for runways and roads in
Europe during the war was put down; it sank. Supply trucks
went astray - if you were to ask a local where 'Fylingdales'
was they'd direct you to the village of that name, five miles
east, not this unpeopled rise of grouse-land beside the
Whitby-Pickering road. It took the rest of the year to ready
the ground - to strip the heather and roll the peat back to the
bedrock. Three hundred thousand cubic metres of moor were
bulldozed and blasted; 150,000 tonnes of hardcore were put
down. The Eller Beck was dammed and a waterworks built;
sewerage was put in; a powerhouse was installed (the site was
to run not on the standard British mains cycle of 60 Hz, but
the American 50 Hz). In November 1961 the radar sections
arrived at Liverpool Docks and were edged along the salt road.

243
 THE MOOR

It was the isolation of Snod Hill that was its chief appeal
to those American 'defense' strategists, as they considered
Sputnik II, and what it meant. The designers, the strate-
gists, knew that the era was one of flux; the requirement was
only immediate. But the threat had remained; only the en-
emy had renewed itself. The radomes had come down, the
golf balls, but the facility persisted. It had become a site of
national heritage. The truncated pyramid - the SSPAR - had
acquired its own nickname. It hadn't taken long: it was called
'the Toblerone'.

It was beside the Eller Beck that I met Mick, my hen har-
rier friend, chatting to a couple of the police officers who
spend their days patrolling the perimeter. One of them was
1~:::'""•:::u a keen birder himself. In the I 990s, when the three radomes
::::::::111:::::11
were being demolished, Mick was contacted by the base com-
mander. Kestrels were nesting in the RSJs. The birds were
:::1i::::~ 1·::
i: i:imrrrn::~ rehoused in boxes on poles at the site's perimeter. Since then
' .'.:::,,11..,1 he had advised the managers on ecological matters. Where
,;;;;:::111::::u
,, , 111:::u,,,, the radomes had stood, on a rise of imported clay, he had ar-
ranged for ponds to be dug, and these ponds now contained
great crested newts. His position meant he was allowed on the
MOD land and the Forestry Commission land that abutted
the base, and he had keys for the gates and barriers. The men
at the base - those armed police at the security barrier and
patrolling the surrounding roads - recognised his car as we
approached.
We were here to meet Mr Westhead. He'd come to RAF
Fylingdales as a young man in the 1960s, from Manchester,
where he'd been working on the Bloodhound guided missile
system. 'I was concerned with the algorithms in the software
and ensuring that they were performing optimally and look-
ing into any anomalies that occurred.'

244
 Blackamore

We were sitting in the officers' mess: deep leather sofas, a

broad dark coffee table. A shaded hush. When Mr Westhead
had first come here, a year after the base became operational,
the place had been little more than a scattering of Nissen huts
surrounding the three gleaming radomes. Mick held onto his
stick and drank his coffee in silence.
Mr Westhead's beard was a fine dense white, meticulously
trimmed. Over a dark blue shirt he wore a white blazer with
a cream stripe, with whiter linen trousers. In one hand he
held a straw boater with a broad black band. He spoke with
measured intensity; he was diligent in his vocabulary, careful
with his facts and their implications. He had done important
work - more important, I sensed, than he was permitted to
let on. He had been at the centre of things. The worst had not
happened, and for that some of the credit was his.
'I believe the word "moor" comes from the French mer- as
in "sea",' he said. And it struck me that the work of building
these establishments on the soft moor, miles from the normal
places of human habitation, was like building something at
sea - an oil rig or drilling platform.
RAF Fylingdales is a product of expediencies. The four-
minute warning that BMEWS afforded the UK had value
only in so far as it would allow the bombers to leave the
ground before the incoming missiles struck. When Polaris,
the new submarine-based 'deterrent', emerged in 1969, there
was a danger that Fylingdales would be deemed obsolete. If
retaliatory missiles could be launched by the navy from any-
where in the open seas, then Fylingdales' four-minute warn-
ing only served to prime the populace for the coming hell.
What was more, the system's efficacy would only be proven
when the country was already an irradiated slagheap. As one
RAF officer observed in 1967, 'If the missiles are on their
way (which means deterrence has failed) it is not very clear

245
 THE MOOR

what advantage we get from knowing this four minutes in

advance of the actual strike. We shall know when we are hit
anyway.'
Since the V-bombers' retirement, therefore, it was the
base's ability to track space-based objects - satellites, debris,
the International Space Station - and to demonstrate this
ability, that recommended its continued existence. Mr West-
head admired the Americans, and felt that they alone, as a
people, were capable of such ingenuity and audacity. RAF
Fylingdales had been a British project, British-built, but the
impetus, the demand, had been American. 'It was brilliant
and most impressive that the Americans could do it. Just go
in there and get it done and do it.' N ow there was only a single
American officer based here, when previously there had been
,c;::"'"':::i dozens, and a handful of US civilians operating the 'sat-com'
·:""'111""' '11
:~1111,, ,,.. .,"
'll""«,"'11 - the technology that allowed communication between these
111""' 1l :::: il
::~~im!~I'~ moors and the base concealed inside a mountain in Colorado,
"'
,:\illii11Hl,'I
.. ,,,,,,.llkM1 7,400 kilometres away.
lq'"""'''""'
,:""lj'""j The white suit, the white hat, the smart beard, the hard
,::::::111::::•."
~11111 1.,., ~

J 11:::u,,, and frank gaze - Mr Westhead was a handsome gentleman

IU""'""""' who had lived a life of significance and had stories to tell and
b ::: m· secrets he shared with very few. There was patience there,
=~11::1111
il~::111,,,
:m;:i11 and also a knowledge of his stories' value. The white suit,
•1Q:::~:·
the white hair, the white hat - they were of a part, somehow,
with those obliterated white radomes, and I wondered if the
outfit had come about at the same time as his retirement, or
whether the white suit and the open-necked shirt and the hat
had been his daily attire for much longer. It was hard to pic-
ture him in anything else.
North of the MOD boundary were the game-lands of
Widow Howe Moor. The strip -burnt surface of the hillside
- ten hectares or so - was entirely regular; it was orderly and
intricately patterned, yet it was baffling to look at, as if the
 Blackamore

orderliness had no system, no purpose - part sports pitch,

part crop-land. It had been burnt over and over, in stripes
and patches that were at once a jigsaw and a record of the
moor's recent history, of the recent history of grouse-moor
management. Any visiting beings, observing this place from
overhead (UFOs were occasionally reported in the area),
would see the outlying terrain and believe that it was associ-
ated with the military installation, and that the runic display
of the moor - one could easily read letters into its surface, an
E here, an L there - was as integral to its operations as the
radar building itself. In Forty Years in a Moorland Parish,
Canon Atkinson writes about wading through heather thigh
deep. On Widow Howe Moor there was scarcely a sprig that
rose above the knee. Merlins no longer nested there.
Across the valley of the Eller Beck, where otters had been
seen, a brown hill rose, scattered with low trees. There was
heather, but not the uniform growth of the adjacent moor; it
had not been patterned by burning or swiping. This was the
radiation-hazard area - the 'rad-haz area'.
'You could walk all the way round it,' Mr Westhead said.
'It's closed off to human activity. It's a sort of - an unspoilt
area. There are no sheep. It was quite fascinating, over the
years, watching trees sprouting up. We had a meal break in
the middle of the day. It was possible, with an hour in the
summertime, to go out into the RHA and just wander round
and explore it. The radiation levels were actually very low.'
When he went for his lunchtime walks around the rad-haz
area, taking a break from his mysterious work in the admin-
istration of the apocalypse, Mr Westhead would stop at the
ponds that were scattered across the surface. They were shell
craters, from the artillery exercises that had been held on the
moor during the Second World War. 'In the summer they
were full of reptiles, frogspawn, tadpoles, newts.' Somebody

247
 THE MOOR

in the programmers' office brought in a fish tank, and filled

it with tadpoles, and each day the programmers would watch
the tadpoles grow. One day a few sticklebacks were added. In
the morning the tadpoles were gone.
Wired to the boundary fence were bright hazard signs, the
symbol for non-ionising radiation: a yellow triangle contain-
ing a black pillar topped with a black disc, flanked by what
resembled nested brackets: (((i))). There was no significant
danger, I was told (the radar beam is directed three degrees
above the horizontal); and yet there had been a reason for
siting the facility here, away from habitation, with only a
few miles of moorland and farms between the radar and the
sea. And this expanse of moorland had been deemed out of
bounds for fifty years, since the radomes had first been acti-
vated. There had been a rash of cancer cases around a similar
site in America. The radiation was strong enough to fraz-
zle an aircraft's instrumentation. When, as often happened,
the Whitby air ambulance was called to attend a crash on the
A169, the radar's output was, at the press of a button, tem-
porarily redirected.
It was a rare expanse of northern moorland that had not
been cycle-burnt or grazed or afforested. The heather grew
to a certain height (say three or four feet in thirty years),
then it died and collapsed, and new growth came. There was
young hawthorn, and birch. Grouse bred there, but not in
the numbers that occupied the managed moor; wilder grouse
- prey to fox and crow and peregrine and disease, susceptible
to wildfires, but spared the shoot and the dogs, the managed
burn, the swiping, the keepers' constant ministrations. If
man was to be eradicated, here was what would happen.
 Blackamore

7
The moor belonged to the hawks, Henry Williamson wrote -
'pitiless despoilers of rooted and blooded things, which man
has collected and set apart for himself; so they are killed'.
Mick wore two coats, and carried two Thermoses. His stick
he holstered between the seats. It was unlikely that we'd see
anything: England ought to be supporting at least 320 breeding
pairs of hen harriers, but in the whole country, last summer,
there was a single known nest. Individuals were occasionally
seen, passing through. Recently a bird that had been ringed
and fitted with a tracking device (it had been nicknamed Bow-
land Betty) was located on the Yorkshire Dales; lead shot was
found in one of its legs. It was clear that its death had not
been quick. The birders I met were happier to display their
anger than the keepers; the keepers' anger was of the watch-
ful, contained sort: shaken heads, compressed lips, soft snorts.
Perhaps a hissed 'jokers ... ' The birders, on the other hand,
were happy to call the keepers bastards, and condemn the ar-
rogance of the landowners and the duplicity of their spokes-
men. There was no regret about their contempt, and little of
the willingness to compromise espoused by the keepers and
owners. If you wanted to know why there were no hen harri-
ers, ask those individuals on their quad bikes, they said, with
their long-range rifles and secret caches of pesticides.
Mick had just got back from a birding trip to Oman; he'd
gone alone, despite the limp. 'The desert', he said, 'is not to be
afraid of.' As we drove through Hutton-le-Hole and up onto
Spaunton Moor, he told me about a Bedouin fisherman who'd
towed his car from the sand. 'I said, "Look, I'll have to give
you something, do you want something for t'mosque, family,
anything?" "No, no," he said: "inshallah." And I thought, that's
beautiful, is that.'

249
 THE MOOR

He'd been to the Negev five times, volunteered at the In-

ternational Birding and Ringing Centre in Eilat, gone with
friends to occupied Syria. He'd used the stick for twenty
years, his mobility having deteriorated since he left the RAF
Regiment. He'd been involved in airfield defence, in Aden,
Bahrain, Cyprus, Belize, Northern Ireland. After the acci-
dent and the end of his military career, there had been 'one or
two bits of depression', he said - hit the bottle. 'Even today,
these lads coming back from Afghanistan, covered in their
mates' blood, get no support, no nothing ... But I've come
out the other side.'
Birding had been an interest since he was a boy, growing up
near Skipton, when he'd walk on the moors with his father,
or cycle over to Stocks Reservoir to watch the black-headed
gull colony. He'd seen the moors change around him, seen the
harriers decline and the grouse proliferate, seen a new sort of
moor owner emerge and the pressure on the keepers increase
- which meant more burning, and more killing of the crea-
tures that predated the grouse. 'If they could put the bloody
grouse in poultry arks in the middle of the moor, and just let
'/W"'"'"""' them go out onto the little shoots of heather, they'd do it.'
The view of the keepers was that, if they were not to
kill them, they should at least be allowed to cage-trap the
birds that predated the grouse, and release them where they
couldn't damage people's livelihoods. 'A natural thing breeds,'
Mick said. 'No way can you play God with God's creatures.
Why do you want to remove it from its habitat and its eco-
system? It's totally wrong, it's just wrong, morally wrong.
If grouse shooting can't exist as a business without going to
radical means, it shouldn't exist.'
He relished the enmity; enjoyed the notoriety he believed he
had achieved among the keepers. He had no time for arguments
founded on the shoots' supposed economic benefits to strug-

250
 Blackamore

gling upland communities - annually £5 .25 million in keepers'

salaries, 37,000 days' casual labour, 6,500 nights spent by the
Guns in local hotels, according to the Moorland Association.
'Red grouse', he said, and I detected some mischief in his
voice, 'were put on this earth to feed hen harriers.'
Mick parked up at Rosedale Head, and poured a cup of tea
from one of his flasks as I scanned the horizon with his spare
binoculars.
In Avium Praecipuarum of 1544, William Turner tried to
identify the bird species named by Pliny and Aristotle: 'The
Rubetarius, I think to be that Hawk which English people
name the Hen Harroer. Further it gets its name among our
countrymen from butchering their fowls.' In British Birds'
Eggs and Nests, Canon Atkinson noted that the hen harrier
'appears often to consider "a chicken might suit me too", and
acts accordingly'. There is little recorded evidence of such
behaviour, but distrust of the bird runs deep, and existed well
before the advent of organised grouse shooting.
In 1808, the Marquess of Bute required keepers on his es-
tate to take an oath that included an undertaking to 'use my
best endeavour to destroy all birds of prey with their nests,
so help me God'. An article in the Quarterly Review of 1845
stated that 'the worst of the [hawk] family, and the most dif-
ficult to be destroyed, is the hen harrier'. By r 89 r, numbers
had been so depleted that Atkinson could write 'I have not
seen a harrier or a buzzard these thirty years', although, when
he first came to Danby, he had seen a buzzard (he was fairly
sure) and a pair of hen harriers. He'd also seen a white-tailed
eagle, flying with a rabbit trap hanging from its leg. The name
'hawk', he added, 'was as fatal to the poor birds that bore it as
the proverbial "bad name" to a dog'.
Mick had his pre-op in a few days' time. 'I believe you've
got to keep going,' he said, as I looked out at the cold moor,

251
 THE MOOR

searching for life. 'I have an injection into my spine every six
months. It keeps me going. I want to be out here amongst it.
To me that's the ultimate reason for bloody living, now.'
I got out of the car, and noticed behind us, beside the road
to Castleton, three steplike oblongs of sandstone, one atop
the other. It was the memorial to Frank Elgee (1880-1944),
put there by his friends shortly after his death. On its top-
most stone was a small offering of medicated grouse grit.
In Elgee's notes towards an unwritten autobiography, kept
in the Dorman Museum's archive, I'd several times come
across the same quotation, taken from John Donne's ser-
mons; Elgee had wanted it as an epigraph -

... put all the miseries that man is subject to together, sickness is
more than all ... In poverty I lack but other things; in banishment I
lack but other men; but in sickness I lack my self.

In 1930, he published his second book, Early Man in North-

east Yorkshire, and began work on his third and last. 'My
husband broke down completely in health in 1932,' wrote
Harriet, 'and the latter part of his Archaeology of Yorkshire
was written at his bedside, whenever he felt able to deal with
it. I often wondered whether he would live to see it complet-
ed ... but he would not relinquish the task.'
In 1933 Frank was forced to resign from the museum on
account of his failing health, and five years later he and Har-
riet moved south - once more on doctor's orders - to Alton.
What took them to this particular mild Hampshire town is
not recorded, but five miles south is a place Frank knew in-
timately, albeit, up to then, only from the pages of a book -
that written by his childhood hero, Gilbert White: the village
of Selborne.
On the moors we spotted only two crows. Though they
were busy in the dales, they had learned not to venture up

252
 Blackamore

here. A rough-legged buzzard showed itself briefly; a lone

curlew drove its long bill eastwards, as if gouging a groove
across the sky; a pair of kestrels braved an intake field -
and, distantly, two miles off, in the light mist that hung over
Rosedale, we glimpsed the slender wings and casual flap-and-
glide of what might, Mick said, adjusting his bins - and he'd
be drawn no further - might have been a female hen harrier.

8
Five months later, I sat on a roadside bank above Hutton-
le-Hole, emptying tiny purple flowers from my boots. My
trousers were powdered and tacky with pollen to the thigh.
It was dusk and I was exhausted and burnt. I'd spent all day
with the shoot, and it had been a reminder that the moor was
unsheltered from the sun as well as from wind and rain.
'If, unacquainted with the moors,' wrote Frank Elgee, in
The Moorlands of North-Eastern Yorkshire, 'we were told by
travellers of extensive regions overgrown with dwarf, shrub-
by plants, possessing myriads of purple flowers, giving a defi-
nite colour to many square miles of the earth's surface, we
should express our surprise at the discovery.' In my photos,
the heather, newly bloomed, is intensely purple. But at the
time, it had been a disappointment to me. The purple was
hard to consolidate; it was irregular and uneven: it allowed
only an impression of purple. It was as if I had come at the
end of the flowering season, when the flowers were going
over. But I knew that - late-blooming this year, on account of
the wet - it was at its height. Look carefully, and the purple
separated into uncountable tones, many of which had noth-
ing to do with purple: the new blooms were silverish specks;
there were pale grey, beige and mint green. I picked a sprig,
but the moor-purple visible from a distance was not a colour

253
 THE MOOR

you could take home. That would be like hoping to capture a

sea's blue in a dunked glass.
The gathering had begun shortly before 9 a.m., in a field
north of Hutton-le-Hole, beside the old lodge. I'd arrived ear-
ly and watched the field fill, the beaters pulling on motley gai-
ters, hissing at the dogs, gorgeous animals that were beloved
and treated as wilful children. I watched the stubbled recruits
in camouflage, laconic as they waited, garrulous and watchful
in their turn - this one with a mustard-yellow baseball cap and
a roll-up living at the corner of his mouth. 'Watch the seaves,'
he said, with some pleasure. 'You'll break a leg.' 'Seaves' I had
heard as 'sieves', which I had taken to mean the sinkholes or
griffs screened - 'sieved' - by heather. But it is a local word for
the rush, Juncus effusus, that thrives along the streams.
Keith was the only loader today; there was just one new-
comer among the Guns - he was used to pheasants, but would
need some watching. The trouble with new Guns is not that
they're trigger-happy; on the contrary, they need to be en-
couraged to take the shot. Keith's beard was mythic. The
moment he emerged from his car, George the head keeper
called over, 'Father Christmas is here!'
'If I were Father Christmas,' Keith muttered, 'you'd be
getting no presents,' as he leaned into the back seat to gather
his things: binoculars, cartridges, flask, lunch; each in its own
bespoke leather satchel. He'd also be carrying his Gun's kit-
shooting stick, shotgun in its canvas case. These are still the
materials of the shoot leaders and the pickers-up, leather and
tweed; but the beaters, whose work is more energetic, wear
T-shirts, and jeans under their gaiters.
Keith and I went with the other, younger George, the
moor owner, to the hotel where the Guns were staying, leav-
ing George the gamekeeper to brief his men. To distinguish
him, George Thompson the keeper was called 'Tommo', but

254
 Blackamore

not in his presence. I'd introduced myself to him: 'Stay out

the way and don't ask questions,' he'd told me. He was spo-
ken of with a wary smirk. From a few feet away his face was
a satyric red; close up the red was composed of a network of
inflamed veins centred on the plateau of his brow, as if they
sprang from that point. 'You get a better class of bollocking
with me,' George the owner said, as we rumbled over a cattle
grid and made our way to the hotel.
In the passenger seat, Keith, twenty years his senior, made
a noise that was not quite a laugh. This man, George, was
the overseer: it was his moor, his business. It was not exactly
authority that he possessed; there was something about him
of the junior officer who has yet to face a gun. But again he
wasn't disliked; he commanded a kind of deference that was
unfamiliar to me.
It was an old scene in the hotel car park. The men were
overjoyed. They'd eaten well and were warm and took pleas-
ure in being in their regalia once again, in feeling the weight
of the gun in its canvas or leather slipcase, and anticipating
the satisfactions of the day to come. I imagined the early
start to get kitted out, their dressing overseen by their wives.
They'd be here for two or three days. The weather was fine,
and it was likely to stay fine. They knew one another and stood
about like schoolboys before an outing. The men seemed
dazed with excitement, and their women - slender and glad
and sexual, with a birdlike daintiness, and dressed from rural
stores - were at once accomplices and servants and, above all,
witnesses. Birdlike like egrets. I introduced myself to these
women (the men were spellbound by one another) and gave
my name, and they cried 'Yes!' and did not offer their names
in return.
The men wore oversized waxed jackets, well used, and
wool socks instead of gaiters, held up with tasselled garters,

255
 THE MOOR

into which their loose plaid plus fours were tucked. They
wore thick red ties, and they all wore tweed caps; they all
held wooden sticks. But there was variation in their dress -
an informality that permitted character to be displayed, or
perhaps it was a kind of hierarchy: bright yellow socks, say,
or a bright blue satchel-strap, a stick whose head was shaped
like a grouse's. One of them wore a glinting cartridge belt
under his paunch. The youngest - a tanned Swede whom I
took (wrongly) to be the newcomer -wore city brogues, and a
white plaid shirt, and white slacks that, at the end of the day,
were still white. He stood with his feet eighteen inches apart.
His spine was straight and strong as a mast.
The wives perched on the 4 x 4s' open tailgates, arms
around their dogs' necks, and laughed at their husbands, as
George gave the men their briefing. It was hard not to like
them, the wives. They were here to supervise their husbands'
pleasure. Mostly they would hunker down at the butt edge,
eyes half-closed, fingers in ears, or coddling their dogs.
'My view is that pickers-up who are in range are also in
season!' The men liked this. They'd listened to such brief-
ings before, and welcomed the irreverence; it was a necessary
health-and-safety provision, but also a part of the building
excitement, a part of the ritual that would conclude, later,
with the counting of the 'bag' over a cup of tea. When the
whistle went, said George, it meant the beaters, having har-
ried the birds across the moor to the Guns, were in range and
forward shooting was to cease. Frames were to be used - two
poles planted in the butt-tops to prevent the Guns from turn-
ing too far left or right and peppering the men in the butts ei-
ther side. It was a reminder, said George. 'Mother-in-law got
peppered on the Pennines recently; in fact, two mothers-in-
law, and a Gun.' There'd been a peppering, too, on the Dales
the week before. On a moor in Scotland, the chief auctioneer
 Blackamore

of Sotheby's had got fifty pellets in the face. His protective

glasses saved his sight. These accidents are rare enough to be
regional news among the keepers, and national news if the
victim is a public figure (Guns often are).
'Pigeons, rabbits and crows you're welcome to shoot,' said
George. 'Ducks and pheasants are out of season.' There'd be
three drives this morning, and two after lunch; from Sledge
Shoe Butts, south to Sheriff Butts and Peter Butts. 'We're
not expecting saboteurs, but anything can happen. Your pri-
mary responsibility is the security of your weapon and am-
munition. If they do happen to turn up, I advise you to keep
out of spitting range.' The men drew straws from George's
fist to allocate their starting butts.
Afterwards, as we set off again, the Guns lined behind
in their black vehicles, George said, 'That was rather long.
Perhaps I went on a bit.' There was a pause and Keith said,
'Happens all the time.' It was a try at gentle ribbing. George
said quickly, 'Pardon?' but I supposed he'd heard. Keith
didn't reply.
'They're all right,' is what the beaters said about the Guns,
although as they walked out to the butts and back it was not
thought proper that the two groups should talk. The Guns
were called 'sir', even by these day workers who might come
here to beat only once or twice a year. Like the Guns, the
beaters too - some of them - took pleasure in the enactment,
and relished their part in it. Without them, they knew, the
shoot wouldn't happen, the spectacle would be diminished.
And yet there was also, among the beaters I spoke to, an ac-
ceptance of the shoot's 'barbarity'. It was as if, even for these
people of the moors, that barbarity was regrettable, as if even
the shoot itself was a sombre duty, a necessity. It was the
message I often heard; the ungainsayable defence: without
the shoot the moors would not exist. The ling would grow

257
 THE MOOR

uncontrolled, wildfire would be rife, scrub would take over,

predators would thrive and ground-nesting birds would de-
cline. And the iconic 'purple moors' that drew the tourists
would be no more. There was no stridency in these declara-
tions. For them they were accepted truths. But grouse shoot-
ing is not an ancient activity- it is not sheep grazing; it barely
pre-dates the reservoirs, or the railways, or the ramblers' cau-
sey paving. And before the Guns, before the cosseted grouse
and the curated heather - consider the Fylingdales rad-haz
zone, consider Turner's 1816 painting of Beamsley Beacon -
the moors existed.
Up the Blakey Road, past Farndale, onto Blakey Ridge,
and then the dismantled railway bed that now serves as a
track for walkers and mountain bikers, but which once deliv-
ered iron from the works whose huge kilns - a rank of arches
in the hillside - were still visible.
George the keeper - Tommo - and his young new under-
keeper, Ant, were already there with the dozens of pickers-up
and beaters, and the game wagon where the birds would be
sorted and stored, and the tarpaulined trailer in which the
beaters would be taken from drive to drive. Almost everyone
clutched a short white pole - furled flags used to flush the
grouse from the heather, made of a long stick with, stapled to
it, a rectangle of white plastic cut from a grain-bag. Tommo,
standing by his Land Rover, was brash with tension; as the
day went on it would ease. He was the other George's em-
ployee, but it was his day and he was in charge: if George
who owned the land commanded deference, George the
keeper commanded something like fear. He had a power to
embarrass that his employer lacked. And yet, again, he wasn't
disliked. He'd earned that power and was respected for it, as
well as feared. And he required the power, of course. He had
a temper; he was the kind of man of whom some people say,
 Blackamore

with awe, 'He doesn't suffer fools gladly,' and whom some
would disparage, given the right company. He had no cap-
acity for squeamishness.
It was the underkeeper Ant's first day of shooting on this
moor; he was perhaps nineteen, tall and lean, livid with ex-
pectation. Already he was well respected; he was Tommo's
man, and one day would wield Tommo's authority. One day,
too, if he stuck with it, if keepering continued and there was
a future, he too would have those marks of a life spent out-
doors. His skin was a boy's; it would weather. His manner
was young also - his gentility. He squeezed his walkie-talkie,
and it was as if the squeezing drew sound from it - the voice
of George the keeper, his boss and mentor, or of the flankers
whose job it was to keep the grouse from veering and to re-
port the numbers and patterns when Tommo asked.
I'd assumed each Gun was known to the others, but later,
as one of them came to a butt recently given up by another, he
intoned to his wife: 'That one hasn't cleared up after himself,'
and I saw that the other man - it was the newcomer, who'd
moved on to a further butt - had left a clutch of black shell-
cases in a corner of the butt's gravelled floor. There was a
hidden seriousness to the men's day out- not only a belief that
there was a proper way to do this, but that one was on display,
being assessed by the other Guns, friends or otherwise, and
that it was important not to shame oneself, or one's wife. It
mattered that easy birds were not missed (though they would
be). It would go unmentioned, but not unnoticed. Something
vital was being upheld, and failure would be present over dinner.
The first line of butts, at Sledge Shoe, started below us at
the foot of Middle Ridge and crossed the old railway onto the
flat moor above. The Guns who had drawn the shorter straws
were located down the hill, where the going was trickier. One
of these was called James. He and two other men with their

259
 THE MOOR

wives edged off the track and, crooks in hand, down the tus-
socked slope; James's wife was standing on the track edge and
looking down at him and the other men. 'Will I be able to
make it?' James was installing himself in his butt - a newly
dug sunken pit, its edges not yet covered with new growth -
like a bomb crater. He was laying his sheathed weapon on the
butt wall, installing the shooting frame, positioning his satch-
els and shells. 'James?' she called. She was frail. Undergoing
some treatment.
She began to edge down the incline to join her husband.
'Will you stay up there?' he called to her. 'Can't you ..
can't you go with one of the others?'
She put her weight on her stick and stood for a while. She
turned and followed one of the other wives onto the flat high
moor and took her elbow as they crossed the ditch that ran
alongside the track.
The birds were flying low and sparsely. I stood in the
bracken and tall heather at the bottom of the ridge, in a deep
dell, and waited until a distant line of men and women thrash-
ing white flags appeared over the horizon, flushing the grouse
ahead of them. I'd encountered these butts for months, sunk-
en butts like these, with their stone walls and turfed floors,
and their neat upholstering of young heather or crowberry
around the rim. And here they were, after a year's disuse (but
careful maintenance), occupied by the men for whom they
had been built and maintained. Look at them out of season
and in ignorance and you'd be hard set to guess what use they
might have other than a military one. The weeded turf or
gravel floor, the solidity of their walls, the viewpoint, those
neat stone steps leading down into each one. To stand there
was to feel that you were important; to stand in one with a
Gun and attended by dozens of men and women, while the
quarry came flashing into sight - that was an experience of

260
 Blackamore

another order. They paid by the brace (two grouse, which

rnight cost£ I 50 ), but what brought them was not just the op-
portunity to outdo last year's bag, or even to better the other
Guns, but to stand here, amidst the noise and attention of
the day, and know that this - here, among the bright heather,
with a gun in one's hand and one's wife at one's side - this
was one of the world's centres.
There was only the sound of the gun-dogs panting, and the
voices of Swaledale sheep filing along the ridge-top. George's
dogs - three black Labradors, glossy as cormorants, grand-
mother, mother, daughter - were restless in their eagerness
to please him, brimming with it. There was the occasional
dull shot to be heard from the line: the man called James
winged one, sending it tumbling into the heather a hundred
yards behind him; another he took almost point-blank. There
was a burst of feathers and it dropped to the ground ten feet
in front of his butt. The whistle blew; the men in the butts
tipped their muzzles skywards as they had been instructed.
The drive hadn't lasted long; only five or six birds had come
over, and fewer still had been shot. 'Just odds and sods,' came
a voice from a distant walkie-talkie.
Then came the search for the killed or injured birds.
'Where-is-he,' said the pickers-up to their dogs. 'Get on. Get
on then. Get on. Get on then,' and the animals crawled over
the heather and under the bracken and came up with the limp
bodies of the dead or shook the life quickly from the injured,
and held the birds with enormous, sombre tenderness, as a
mother cat holds her young, and placed the bodies at their
owners' feet. For ten minutes the dogs scoured the ground
for the bird James had clipped, 'Get on, get on then, where-
is-he, get on,' until it was found, not by a dog but by George
himself, who took his flagpole and clapped the dazed bird on
the head, before we clambered back up the ridge to join the

261
 THE MOOR

others for the second drive. James was very pleased with his
performance; could not help grinning when congratulated. It
was a good start to his day.
One of the wives - the wives! - in ankle-length trench coat
and suede chaps and a wide-brimmed waxed hat - pressed
my shoulder as I walked ahead of her and another wife, and
held out to me a dead grouse. 'I wonder. I wonder if you
might find a use for that.' She thought I was a beater or a
picker-up. I smiled and took the heather-bird and swung it by
the neck between two hooked fingers, as I'd seen the pickers-
up do. Its lightness was a surprise, as an empty case lifted in
the hand is a surprise when you expect it to be full.
The beaters had used the word 'barbaric', a word like 'un-
fortunate'. But I'd seen no barbarism. It was as if the killing
had been bloodless. The barbarism was inconspicuous. You
pointed your gun at the incoming bird and pulled the trigger
and turned it into something else, something that no longer
flew, but might be eaten. I removed the protective yellow
glasses I had been given and, for some seconds, as my eyes
adjusted, the sky, like the moor, was lit with violet.

Beating is waiting. The sun was warming the moor. South of

here was Lastingham; to our right Lastingham Ridge. Hold
the line, hold the line. It is waiting, and listening: this after-
noon, just the noise of bees, and Ant's walkie-talkie, and
the breeze, and underfoot the crackle of dead heather. The
ground where I stood was not purple or black but white -
scattered with white stalks burnt last year. To my right was
the rise of the ridge, with the silhouette of a beater at its top;
to my left, half a mile off, the road from Hutton-le-Hole to
Rosedale Abbey. For twenty minutes we stood in a line, half
a mile long, from end to end, waiting for George's command.
It came, and the line was made to push forward.
 Blackamore

The line must be kept, its course to the Guns carefully

measured and monitored, which, for the keeper control-
ling the line (Ant), means knowing the moor and holding
its shape in his head, its knolls and inclines and becks. The
line had also to be shaped - it was not the beaters' job simply
to harry the grouse from the heather, but, with the flankers,
to enclose the flushed birds in such a way that they were
shepherded to the butts. As the line homes in, therefore, its
curve must intensify, so that each member remains an equal
distance from the line of butts as it is approached. For Ant
(his first day!) this meant knowing the terrain, knowing the
route from the starting point to the Guns, and commanding
his line - 'Slow down!' 'Hold the line!' 'Keep up!' - when,
with perhaps fifty metres between each member, only those
on his immediate left and right were able to hear him. A
beater did not require skill, exactly, but you needed to be fit
in order to maintain your course through knee-high heather
and knee-deep becks.
The Guns were in sight and within earshot. The whis-
tle went. The white flags were raised and the guns ceased.
Smoke and feathers hung on the air. You could feel the Guns'
excitement settling; it was wet-lipped, pitiless. The dogs were
panting in the heather.
At the roadside the drive's kill was sorted into crates ac-
cording to age - a pile of perhaps a hundred, young and old -
which were slid into the game wagon. One had been dropped
on the dusty track and I carried it over to the wagon and was
again struck by its lightness, and its human warmth - the
warmth a child gives off when sleeping. I ts eyes were shut,
its beak slightly ajar, its neck between my fingers so soft as to
be barely tangible. It was not 'red', any more than the moor
was purple; rather a brindled motley of reddish brown and
orange-brown and black and greys and white. It seemed that
 THE MOOR

you'd need to eat a dozen to satisfy the appetite generated by

a day's shooting.
It was exquisite. I held it to my nose and the smell con-
tained in the remaining warmth was the smell of the flower-
ing heather.
James's wife was slowly walking ahead of me to her ve-
hicle, a walking stick in each hand - it had been a long, hot
day; ten metres ahead of her was James. He called to another
Gun: 'I expended a certain amount of ammunition futilely!'
- jovially, self-mocking, enjoying those eight words' reserve
and irony, but also addressing himself. He said it again: 'I ex-
pended a certain amount of ammunition futilely!'
It was easy to imagine him and his friends - or their fathers
or grandfathers - hunting in the preserves of, say, British East
Africa, the plus fours replaced by Jaeger flannels, tweed caps
by khaki helmets, elephant guns in place of shotguns. And to
picture those men of an earlier generation exclaiming one to
the other: 'I expended a certain amount of ammunition fu-
tilely!' - and treating their gunbearers and porters kindly and
with good cheer: an extravagant tip, a clapped shoulder, the
sharing of a water flask; and to imagine those African men
and boys in turn thinking fondly of the visitors and looking
forward to their return, when they boarded the homebound
steamer stowed with ivory and pelts.
Before I left, George the keeper - Tommo - came up to
me, a grouse in one hand, its eyebrows nipple pink. He was
relaxed now - the day had gone well, the season would be
respectable. He could afford to be genial. 'This is what we
do,' he said, lifting a hand to my face and swiping a blooded
thumb across my cheek. Later, before the convoy of black
4 x 4s snaked silently away from the moor, I looked in one of
the vehicles' wing mirrors. There was nothing on my cheek,
there had been no blood.
 THE MOOR
A Journey into the English Wilderness

WILLIAM ATKINS

FABER & FABER

 First published in 2014
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74-77 Great Russell Street
London WCIB JDA
This paperback edition published in 2015

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All rights reserved

© William Atkins, 2014
The right of William Atkins to be identified as author
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of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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8 IO 9