Cragg Vale

Photo: Helen Oldfield

By Emily Oldfield:

The Cragg Vale Incline has become the site of excited spatterings of conversation, speculation… Climbing 968 feet over 5 and a half miles, it is said to be the longest continuous road ascent in England. An endurance. But what about the descent? 

Descent. A word weighted with downhill draw – the airflow of the ‘d’ angling the tongue against top teeth, the breath cast outwards, the body downwards. When we walk downhill, extrinsic muscles stretch, and the dorsum of the foot flexes open. Suspension into a kind of surrender? Descent – a word working back into our origins: where do you come from? What did you leave to be here? 

Hence, we descend. We drop down through Cragg Vale largely at the roadside, having climbed out of the valley bottom – a fertile slit of land lashed in Silver Birch, Beech and Sycamore. The black mud of Withens Clough still slicks our boots, the souvenir of  a walk over the moors from Walsden; at some point brushing between postcodes, the angry acronyms of OL and HX. Here on the West Yorkshire-Lancashire border, a bristling blend of wood-rush and cotton grass seem caught in the stupor of a wind that can settle on no one direction for more than a few minutes.

Distinct snapshots of the journey jolt through the mind like its chill - skin under a cold wind. The startled shrill of a pheasant tucked under a tumbledown wall, the farmhouse picked to ruins around her. I imagine her eggs, still intact, olive-coloured; their secret yellow only the bounty of stoppered life. 

Here, there isn’t so much a ripening as a weathering, enduring. So much potential colour we never see. Plenty is on the edge – birth, bloom, kingdom. The bluebells wait close to the water, their buds weighted with the prospect of purple, like youth hangs at the edge of adulthood in a tender, tremulous body. Coveted, craved. 

There are other edges. Stream surging on the edge of river. The steep valley side as we descend the road. A dip where mills once worked cotton and coyed young, agile bodies into early graves. Bound in their beauty. Perhaps like the chicks, still egg-wet and ordered in their thousands from the valley’s hatchery at the turn of the 20th century. The semi-ripeness of youth becomes an industry. Or fashion. Or art. 

Today the air seems tempered with a semi-stickiness, a temperate sheen over skin. The sun’s light is beginning to warm. It works its curious fingers through the open beaks of young daffodils, their flowers mouth-like and hungry as they shuffle in series at the side of the road. A confetti for the coming season. Then suddenly, to the left, a field that seems suspended before the valley; a glut of manicured green against a shock of white geese. 

It is the field of geese that stops us. Perhaps it is something about the manicured enclosure being rendered futile by their presence, their capacity to fly. And yet, they seem to busy themselves within the field; sure-footed, coral-coloured steps only interrupted by their own unpredictable shadows; the sashaying groundsheet of reflection rendered by swivelling necks and flexing wings. 

Geese take so many of us back to youth; even an angry hiss at the river or canal-side enough to evoke that hot flush of muted panic often at its ripest in childhood. The child-like fear and fascination at ‘the other’. I think back to the tales of Old Mother Goose, The Golden Goose: birds basted in expectation, fattened by projected hope of fortune and learning. Now I look at the geese in the field and feel a kind of resignation – the body muted and limited by its enclosures. 

Human enclosures. We see them as we pass by road signs, door fronts; names twisting through Turvin, Elphin Brook, Castle, Paper, Cragg. A geography lesson gone wild.

Wild too, somehow, is the impulse that arises – and opens those extrinsic muscles of the foot outwards, downwards. We find ourselves taking a sharp turn away from the waymarked road and down towards the valley bottom, encouraged by the occasional flash of brook like a wet cobweb caught in light. Cool wind tussles with spools of sun, our tread is tentative, not sure of our destination, yet committed. 

This is a valley where concealment is part of the course… transgression touching its growth. I notice it in the tongues of wild garlic that lash many a thicket-floor, fragrancing the air with their bulb-heavy, bursting perfume. Although we have been on roadside and track for a good half an hour, I still feel the allium heat from an earlier stretch of woodland. The same heat that would have once stifled the raw rot of mill water, human sweat, hacked stone, bird shit, broken hands. Where industry clawed at contours, chewed terminology up to the point that Elphin, Cragg, Turvin – all became an interchangeable word for the water. A trickling childspeak. 

Water. I feel it in the currents of your hand – skin itself a simmering breathing tide that sheds its cells not just with season-shift, but endlessly. Now we choose our own deviation from the incline, toes feeling the tip of anticipation as we head downwards and over a bridge. 

And then, the sudden combination of stream-rush and a slight sulphur hits me. Brings to mind the air of an egg brought to boiling point: perhaps the goose egg we wrapped in tissue paper and had carried home just weeks earlier, as excited as children. 

We have reached Cragg Spa – a site celebrated for centuries – its underbridge pool offering not only its own shimmering yolk of sky, but stirring that reflection with a drapework of greenery surging over the stone arch. The determination of young growth, despite the odds. It is here after all where eager opening hands would have snatched for Spanish water – what I remember my own grandmother calling sugarelly – a liquorice-smothered liquid weighted with sweetshop smell and the rumour of health. Here Spaw Sunday saw not just the youth, but bursts of locals and visitors alike visiting the Spa, some steeping the nearby well-water with liquorice to mask the eggwash. Others took to its waters, its spill over skin the same surge that brought life and death to this valley, woodlands and waterwheels, radicals and riches, youth and age. 

And as we watch the pool, its patina of bluegreen like the gloss of a pupil or the pattern of eggshell – I think then, of an egg, its precarious potential for life, its closeness to death – and how to clasp it, tip to tip, yields a strength that never ceases to take us by surprise. 

***

Emily Oldfield is a writer especially drawn to exploring landscape, the feel of place and relationships to it within her work. She was the Editor of Haunt Manchester at Manchester Metropolitan University, explored Winter Hill for the Edgelandia project, and now is probably wandering somewhere in the South Pennines. Grit is her first poetry pamphlet - published by Poetry Salzburg (March 2020) - delving into histories of the Rossendale Valley and The River Irwell, which has continued its thread throughout her life.