Minor Moorlands Roads – Part Two

During the summer of 2022, Emily Oldfield set out walking the minor roads pushing into the moors around the town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire – many of them traversing and toying with the county boundary into Lancashire. Emily has long-been interested in edgeland spaces, and these roads in particular as routes of intimacy and abandonment simultaneously; built with great intent by former generations, now rarely-used – places that are neither footpath nor main road, where the pedestrian could then be seen as another aspect of the ‘edge’.  When feeling ‘on the edge’, to choose these routes can be paradoxically a place of solace, possibilities, even power.

The walks – published here on Elsewhere in a three-part series – are an exploration of intimate abandon, loss and yet the courses that connect us – chiefly, love.

Stones Lane

We step into them every day – human remains. From the pavement underfoot to the paths we take, all are a past push… not a mere trace or fragment, but a site of sheer force and cold sweat. 

It is easy to package ‘the past’ as something abstract; an echo in what we say about a place, a sort of ether that runs between the fingers of a hand gesture. Over there. But man-moved stone serves up the past somehow even closer to the present, as presence, an almost-paradox that pulls us further towards it. 

This morning I take the lanes heading towards Stones, a scattering of farmsteads situated high on the hills above Todmorden, close to the dark clutch of Dobroyd Castle; a site of Victorian extravagance now scarred-black and haunted by its own intended splendour. So much moved stone still stirs here – from the weathered warp of the buildings I mention, to the lie of the lane. I scatter pebbles as I walk, dust dredging peat-pickled boots as I look at the dark hump of the hills towards Bacup. I wonder whose tread pressed form to fragments before me, who first laid the course, rolled the rock that now is the route. 

My musing is interrupted by the fourth tallest standing stone in Yorkshire. A looming bolt of blackened by time, it spears the edge of a farmer’s field –around 12-feet tall and bolstered at the base by a rough ring of hewn rocks. Blasted by factory fumes and the bitter bite of persistent Pennine winds, its dark edges give it the demeanour of a far-flung weathervane. A lightning rod. A question mark with no stop. 

But I stop. Perhaps there is an absence in us –an inherited ancestral ache –that angles us to the stance of certain standing stones, how the solo walker finds their body flexing slightly to match its bearing. Falling into those before us. For how many bodies bore this great rib of rock upright?

And when? Surprisingly little information arises about this stone, with no agreed date on when it was set up. Records exist of it being present by 1921, but no known reference before then. Not even a name. 

It is a tongue in the mouth of a time we have no words for. It may well have still been standing in previous centuries, erected as a monument  to the Great War, even the Battle of Waterloo. 

Or older.

Yet the implications of modernity could be seen to stain. Why is that? This stone waits, straddling the border between monument and monolith, track and field, logged and lost. Wavering.

And how when we waver, we reach for rock. The craving to stand in stone seems a human one, time-over: monoliths, buildings, byways, graves. Monuments not only of memory, but for memory. We all become it. I lean against the layers of touch, the sun-soaked rain-rinsed hours of finger-cracking contact, baked into the bulk of the drystone wall. I lean and lean, feel its unknown weight pushing my tissues closer to bone. And still I can’t reach the stone. No human armspan could from here. 

Perhaps it is this ungraspable intention, the tactile unknown, that draws us in particular to menhirs; standing stones. 

So we keep reaching.

And I keep walking. 

Doghouse Lane 

Steep slopes draw abandon to the surface. I think about it as I take on the tarmac of Doghouse Lane, a track arching up out of Todmorden and unspooling over the moors to Cornholme. The initial incline is unrelenting, the course quickly gaining ascent as it pushes above the town, as desperate as an outstretched arm. Get out.

Breath builds behind each footfall, arms loosen, and I feel the familiar angst under my ribs dissipate into something else. Each inhalation echoes through the body. I am drawn to walking these minor moorland roads – typically unfashionable and unpublicised routes, often overlooked as the territory of the occasional land-rover, nearby farmer and the lost. Here the walker encounters the road –a craft of human hardship and hiccup in the land simultaneously – alongside the pummelled patchwork of South Pennine moorland. We become the borders, occupy an edge.

Abandon. Mind and body orientate to the undulations of terrain, thoughts fuse. I quickly pass the florid green of cultivated trees above Centre Vale Park and push on amidst the unfolding brushwork of burgundy, brown and off-yellow moorland. Wind hits every exposed angle of my face. I find myself simultaneously an onlooker and an accomplice as the landscape loosens like a shaken sheet, moving with my grasping stare and eager tread.

A few scattered farms fleck the opening aspect of landscape, and the occasional large car passes – somehow cold and impersonal. I keep walking, the interlocking valleys of the Cliviger Gorge on one side and Walsden on the other opening up, spangled by interlocking sunlight and low-lying cloud. Inherited abandon. The very road beneath my feet is a flex of it, forged in a past where it meant more than just an occasional, isolated track. Its name darts between possibilities; Doghouse becoming Parkin Lane, then Flower Scar Road, then Tower Causeway, ending as Carr Road. Furrowed edges tell of agricultural attempts ages  back, now wandering half-shorn sheep occupy. They drift into the single-file road in the absence of any fence or wire.

I drift too, body buffeted by wind and warm coils of temperamental sunshine. In these moorlands, the breeze breathes through industrial remains as much as it rolls the cry of the curlew, the pheasants trembling trill. On my left, the hills bordering the East Lancashire town of Bacup push up, their blown-brown backs intersected by turbines, pylons and brooding pine plantations. 

And then I stumble into Sourhall. An old row of terraced cottages marks the site of something so much bigger. A public information board tells me of this later on the route, far-flung and stark like the most melancholy of memorials. Out of place. For the cottages, and a rather uncanny estate of half-finished new-builds behind them, tell  little themselves of a former factory (Peel Mill), later to become a Smallpox Isolation Hospital in 1874. Industry becomes illness. Exposure becomes isolation.

Inherited abandon. The surge within myself I meet in walking the weave of these moorland roads. And when I wonder of how the ill would have watched the thrashing, flexing moor arch around them, I pull my coat closer and keep the route. 

***

Emily Oldfield is a writer especially drawn to exploring landscape, the feel of place and relationships to it within her work. Born in Burnley in 1995 and growing up in the East Lancashire town of Bacup, her first poetry pamphlet Grit (published by Poetry Salzburg, March 2020) explores the history and folklore of the Rossendale Valley of her childhood. Her second poetry pamphlet (also with Poetry Salzburg) is titled Calder and due in 2022, largely exploring the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire - especially around the town of Todmorden, where she currently lives. Emily is now working on a book and probably wandering somewhere in the West Yorkshire/East Lancashire edgelands.

Minor Moorlands Roads – Part One

During the summer of 2022, Emily Oldfield set out walking the minor roads pushing into the moors around the town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire – many of them traversing and toying with the county boundary into Lancashire. Emily has long-been interested in edgeland spaces, and these roads in particular as routes of intimacy and abandonment simultaneously; built with great intent by former generations, now rarely-used – places that are neither footpath nor main road, where the pedestrian could then be seen as another aspect of the ‘edge’.  When feeling ‘on the edge’, to choose these routes can be paradoxically a place of solace, possibilities, even power.

The walks – published here on Elsewhere in a three-part series – are an exploration of intimate abandon, loss and yet the courses that connect us – chiefly, love.

Todmorden Old Road

It starts out as reach into the hills, around the back of a housing estate in Bacup. Known in my childhood as ‘Back Lane’ or ‘Dark Lane’, idioms abound suggesting a push to the edges. Todmorden Old Road rises as a single-file flex of rough tarmac, initially bordered by brambles on one side, a stretch of wall weathered into various states of moss-strewn disrepair on the other. There is the perpetual tang of wet bark and wood rot, exploded open through summer and into autumn by the florid fizz of somehow never-quite-healthy blackberries and a density of dandelions. 

Follow the road up far out of Bacup enough and a walker can reach the crest at Sharneyford where Lancashire slumps down on one side whilst West Yorkshire arches up on the other. I stand at that intersection now, the personal points of childhood and adulthood split by a glistening grey belt of hills and the ripped-up course of the road. This is a route rarely travelled by vehicles now  – other than the occasional shuddering tractor and red shock of the mail van – and yet once was a key link between two counties; though the county boundary itself a contentious blur of argument, artifice and echo. I imagine it hovering and drifting like a buzzard buoyed by the muffled prospect of prey, now fought over by public propaganda and irregular footfall. 

These minor moorland highways are alive with prospect and past potential. On Todmorden Old Road, I’m walking through what could have been, as someone now. There’s that wrench in the chest, a burn that the books of both childhood and adulthood would have a word for. A whole genre. A human heave I can feel at the edge of my eyes, in the skittering beat behind ribs and the roll of cold sweat between fabric and skin as I walk. 

Yet part of me doesn’t want to write about walking these roads at all. For in the aftermath of personal pain, why don’t I push off through wild upland and well beyond the mundane, the mechanical? Reflect on fumbling away from the footpaths and meeting the bite of bogland between my toes? Because I’m ashamed. Ashamed of my own assumption that the landscape equates to escape. Ashamed of my tendency to want to fall into the revered narrative of walker meets wildness. Ashamed too, of the hurt I have caused and the ways I have reacted, acted, reacted.

And I’m coming to terms with, as readily as I will wander over hill and dale… most of all, I am drawn to these minor moorland roads; a place where the pedestrian seems seldom, their hard and their hold. 

Here, language lies in the cut and thrust of the route, how it writhes through stone and sediment in a surge of gradient that can be felt under foot. A force that seems to take on the lie of the land with a trodden truth.  

So much still does. Close by,  bumping the edge of my vision on the left is Tooter Hill – a site of ancient field systems, a possible ring cairn burial and traces thought to date as far back as the Neolithic. Touch upon touch upon touch. Now mine pits and pock-marked mounds stubble the escarpment, the bulge of earth enmeshed in yellow-green grass, the picked-out course of a footpath and the marks of a search. 

Searching for a hold.

In discussions of loss and heartbreak, John Bowlby posits the concept of ‘searching for the lost object’ as the state of angst and upset the individual goes through, sifting through fragments of the departed, fumbling over a promised future.

 Walking these roads has become my way of stepping into that promise, feeing it shift and crack as I tread. Here a sense  of place comes through a throb – a heart, a hurt, the human intent that still hums in the course of the route. The lost object forever lies in these roads. And to step out is to hold on in the only way I can. 

Allescholes Road

I step into a former thoroughfare, a channel of change and industry, blown by time to a track. The dialectical drawl of ‘the back of beyond’ is a mere breath away – and indeed, this a place now behind the routes we recognise, yet still reaching for something, fumbling further into a time we can’t quite fathom. 

Allescholes Road pushes into the Western hills above Walsden, and I stumble onto it as I make my way down from the moorland, having joined a friend for the first leg of the Todmorden Boundary Way. The area where the minor road intersects the sogged strip of footpath is still ripe with the reek of bogland. It is a particular Pennine flavour – peaty loam pummelled through with weeks-old water and sheep shit split open with rain. 

Beaten-grey clouds hang low and clot across the land, any hope of horizon blunted by swirling bouts of mist. Moisture moves over my face like a shroud and my chest heaves. The surrounding steep benchwork of hills throw their shadows through the fray; though what initially seems like a landscape drained of its colour, is punctured by the occasional stark shout of a foxglove. Swollen cyan trumpets laugh their colour in a wind that offers no regularity, captures breath with no answer. These plants point to our deficiencies, stirring as a reminder that all personal projections in this place are the past. The present is coarse and hard and rips off any romanticised attachment with the wrench of the wind. It catches in my throat with foam, phlegm and a click. 

I crave to locate to Todmorden somewhere to my left, Littleborough to the right, but direction drains away and my body, still hungering for traces, fixes on finding the road from the path. One hand still clutches a found clot of moss like wet hair. Absence arises as an angular feeling under the skin and I snort, sending more water skittering over my face. 

Then my foot meets the rubble of the roadway with a shudder. Semi-solidity after miles of ambiguous, uncompromising moor comes as a shock. And yet there is almost an urgency as to how the road – Allescholes Road–  takes on the topography of the valley, arching and unfurling with tactile intent. For how many people took to build this, whose hands, and when? I wonder– almost crouching in the body’s coil of relief – over what love and hate, what impatience and angst, what boredom and bitterness and sheer brute force did human hands drive this stone into place? Questions are quashed as the sound of each sogged footfall rises as a shh, shh, shhh. 

I drag my feet against saturated stone and look at how the route pushes parallel to the valley bottom, merging into Reddishore Scout. This was once the well-worn packhorse trail linking Walsden with Calderbrook (then towards Summit and Littleborough), and beyond, a linkage forged with prospect and promise, steering clear of the swampy valley base. It was only when the turnpike road was cut through the bottom in the early nineteenth century, that Allescholes Road became optional, then occasional… and now, touched with an air of abandon. 

I feel it too. I watch the straggle of settlements below me busy with human hum and bustle, and the raw roll under my ribs rises to meet them. Falls. Rises. Falls. On these minor moorland roads we find the hurt of ourselves in the hills, we trace back to feelings buried and impulses dashed. It is here I walk with a heart soaked open, and as the horizon hazes into the hill – I stop, reach out and watch the wave of my hand become a blur. 

***

Emily Oldfield is a writer especially drawn to exploring landscape, the feel of place and relationships to it within her work. Born in Burnley in 1995 and growing up in the East Lancashire town of Bacup, her first poetry pamphlet Grit (published by Poetry Salzburg, March 2020) explores the history and folklore of the Rossendale Valley of her childhood. Her second poetry pamphlet (also with Poetry Salzburg) is titled Calder and due in 2022, largely exploring the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire - especially around the town of Todmorden, where she currently lives. Emily is now working on a book and probably wandering somewhere in the West Yorkshire/East Lancashire edgelands.

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. 

Dawn

By Emily Oldfield: 

My relationship with the dawn. For a long time I have sought the quiet spaces, the unannounced areas, the moments ripe with the tension of possibility. That is the dawn, to me – a place uneasy with potential, strange and malleable edges, inviting experimentation before the day declares itself… and the usual routines and cycles with it.  

I have risen early for as long as I can remember, at least always early enough to still catch the last imprint of dawn like thumbmarks on the morning. But to be in dawn itself is a place altogether; perhaps the inevitable edgeland, twisted in its temporality - a map of furrowed brows in restless beds, the taste of dread deep in the palette, the futile attempts to re-enter dreams in the dead hour before the alarm. The time some wish they could sleep forever. 

When, aged 18, I lived in St Andrews on the Scottish East coast, I would enter dawn each morning with two trainer-strapped feet, an oversized hoodie and leggings. 18: the same  number of degrees the sun is below the horizon at astronomical dawn. At 5.30am, the sea was a sensation, not yet separate from the sky, the air stirred thick with the sting of salt. Light diffused as a kind of colour seepage against the thick black bulk of the sky, the tide all the time turning its rhythms like endless wands of chalk worked down a blackboard. Shhht, shhht, shhht.

I set myself to that rhythm – the surge of the sea and my own ticking compulsion to push… push onwards, beyond. The cold flex of the air flashed through my lungs as I lurched out of Albany Park – the pebble-dashed plot of university accommodation in a peculiar crater by East Sands – and along the shorefront. The blanket of blackness was a comfort, billowing at its edges into a yellowing, almost coppery bruise as the first spools of sunlight fought through. This marked nautical dawn. Here the sun sits at 12 degrees below the horizon, melting like a layer between land and water…and two different bodies are born. 

It is an addictive feeling, running at the edges. Dawn on one side, my own body at the other; underfed and overstretched, burning at the chords of muscle like a candle wick collapsing into itself, light leaching out into the battered bronze of a new day. 

Within five minutes of the run I would come to East Sands harbour, making a note to hold my balance across the wooden footbridge, its slats alternately swollen and withered through the warp of the water, like teeth time-swilled with soda. The stench of gutted fish and engine oil. 

I ran very much as routine and each morning the view would typically be the same on reaching the harbour. On the end of a block of dwellings closest to the water, three men would be hunched in a paraffin-lamp lit garage, looking out to sea… to the red smears settling on water, lights of caution, of warning. Bearded and booted, they regarded my bluster past them with apparent contempt at first, which settled uneasily into a kind of acknowledgement. Outside the garage, various blue-edged ropes spooled across stone like cut-off, dried-out plaits… the hair of some washed-up marine creature, now hard and lashed under salt crust.

Approaching civil dawn – the time when most objects start to become clear, the sun at just 6 degrees below the horizon - sometimes I would have to dodge the lobster pots, their pink-orange cages and little hinged doors turning them into a sparkling series of grottoes. Seaweed was scattered everywhere in its ragged carpeting, pustules of black and grey-green bladderwrack leaking into standing water. The occasional galled cry of a gull would puncture the air. 

I enjoyed the unspoken intimacy of seeing the fishermen each morning, the suspended questions of our occupation, assumptions hanging between us, but also a kind of confirmation; you proceed with your task, I proceed with mine. Rather than uncertainty, it fused a kind of communion - solid and salt webbed and somehow reassuring. I would pass them and then make my way up the side of the ruined cathedral, suspended high on the coast edge like a shell on a spit. The pathway would be peppered with the petroleum-sheen of standing lighting, the cathedral itself once one of the largest buildings in Scotland – consecrated in 1318. Another 18. There was the cartilage of the gable walls and a section of South Transept, the bulk and body of the place flayed away over time into sea foam. It was ransacked in 1559, abandoned by 1561. 

The rasp and slap of the sea simmered to kind of snore as I stumbled up steps, ran past the cathedral and angled towards the town of St Andrews itself, starting at the bottom end of Market Street, the cut of the cobbles blunt on the bottom of my feet.

I ran over West Sands, past the many-starred hotel by the golf links where I worked a couple of shifts as a waitress. Strangers gazes grasping at my ill-fitting uniform, my movements clumsy and awkward. Men with their flourishing gestures and uninvited hands, the view polished and mowed, even the beach opening up in an extended flank of white sand. I staggered with a tray of gourmet desserts… and ran from that. 

I ran to the public swimming baths for a hurried shower when the shared one broke. I ran into other students, their faces closed. I ran even when a childhood friend visited in the middle of winter. After seven hours on an overcrowded coach from Accrington, she shared my single bed whilst we watched Trainspotting on the smeared screen of an old laptop, the type that permanently needs to charge. I felt a little like that as I ran, leaving my friend in bed, picking up friction from the street in a kind of necessary energy. Repeated. 

I ran when the Northern Lights swirled through the sky, a mottled green like that of buds pulsing on the edge of blossom, plucky against the dark.

When people refer to running and places – it is typically in terms of the trajectory of a beginning and end, a start and destination, to and from. For me, running became an attempt of touch; to push myself, not only forwards, but into. The thickening thud of foot through stones, then sand, then surf. I craved to feel the absolution of everything, the timelessness of land-lock. 

I was even preparing my body for it, skimming down to the quick, coaxing the bone’s proximity to skin - and then to surrounds. A closeness created through how strongly limbs felt every lurch and lift, the wind chiselling cheeks and shoulders. As the weather grew colder, I pushed – in childhood shorts and a t-shirt – to take higher and higher routes. This, after all, seemed a place of straight lines, people knew their allegiances: onwards. I could feel my legs filing down precise points, the compass needle caught in the mind’s eye and fixed on N. Nada. Nothing. None.

Running was a place during those months, just as the dawn was - their combined woozy mixture of experimentation, intimacy, release. In lectures, my legs fizzed with friction, my tailbone scoring against the skin of my lower back until it bled beneath carefully-chosen clothes. I felt everything all over. 

It was all over as I aimed for one of the rockiest routes along the east coast path, a tide-bolstered breeze buffeting my knees, dawn still dappling the pelt of the sky approaching 6.30am. It was January and spangles of orange-edged sunlight were starting to cast themselves outwards, catching gorse on one side, sheer cliffs on the other.

Brown fur suddenly stood out against gritty, salt-studded textures. Stretched a little ahead on the rock-scrambled pathway was a young rabbit, laid on its side, back legs coiled like a comma, twitching. Coming closer, its eyes were swollen bulbous in its head like two live insects glistening, fizzing beneath partially open lids. An amber matter pooled beneath, sticky and strange. 

Myxomatosis; the words wondrous and warped on my tongue as I took in the moment, my face then turning back towards the direction of the town in a kind of helplessness. Dawn-darkness still pervading, but so too the dashes of light, the red pinpoints of potential warning – or reassurance – an assemblage at the end of docks, at the tops of buildings. A reminder; here. My tears smeared the light into a lingering red gleam, the gleam of something else against the skyline. 

Red lights remind us of our capacity to go too far. How we struggle to face up to the land beneath … and yet need to. 

It is now five years since those dawn runs in St Andrews, and I have written this, the words somehow leeching out during the Covid-19 lockdown, lines unfolding in a room of a shared house in Hulme. Inner city Manchester stirs. 

Here I sit and stare out of the window, facing the news that I need to stop running again, the old ghost at the edge of my mind with its grey fingers. The buildings burr with construction, expansion, bulk. 

And at the tops of the cranes there are red lights. 

***

Emily Oldfield is a writer especially drawn to exploring landscape, the feel of place and relationships to it within her work. She is 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.