Pond

The August Bank Holiday re-enactment weekend is always sad in a way as it is the last of the season and means that another Summer is coming to an end. Spring is always lovely at Murton, with the hedges foaming with blossom and wild flowers tucked away on the banks of the streams, not to mention the lambs and chicks, but for me, the park is at its best in late Summer, with the trees in their fullest foliage, the hawthorn berries turning red, the elderberries green still but plumping up to deep purple weighing down the slender branches like dangling earings on a Turkish belly dancer. The paths around the fort are bordered with shoulder high grass and nettles, briars spill ripening blackberries like shining jewels over onto the narrow packed earth tracks. The Celtic village is overgrown and mysterious with the ruins of the roundhouses which were burned down by vandals a few years ago. The twisted hawthorn bedecked with ribbons guards the remaining sod house, mossed green and cool as a water nymph's boudoir. Along the walkway to the apiary the apples plop prematurely on the path, and in the garden of the Tudor house, they blush red above the rioting herbs.

A few years ago a huge English oak on the path to the Celtic village was blown down in a gale. Its shattered and splintered trunk screamed, the trunk and overweight branches spread across the pond and beyond, a giant broken and dying. Over a period the leaves ceased to unfurl on borrowed sap in Spring. The branches were sawn up and used for firewood, so that now the remaining fallen trunk rests across the pond and has become a part of its organic ecostructure, the jagged base smoothed and painted by time is hollowed out and is home to various flora, fauna, insects and magnificent fungi. The nettles and willowherb, wild garlic and tall grasses had been cut back exposing the rushes and water edge plants and allowing the sunlight to play on the deep viridian waters, picking out the vaguely sinister emerald weeds below the surface that hide goodness alone knows what.

Today the sun shines passionately down as if making up for lost time. The woven hazel hurdles that warn the unwary visitor or stray sheep or goat of the pond's existence are warm and supple to the touch. The grass is vibrant with grasshoppers playing the fiddle and the creatures that busy on the banks of still water. The pond is rich cerulean in places where it reflects the sky, and a pair of dragonflies swoop and dodge and skim in an arial ballet, their wings whirring, whizzing, blurring , sharply changing direction to defy my camera lens. If I stare hard enough I can see poor mad Ophelia, flowers in her flowing hair, floating in the murky depths.

Despite the mad activity of the wildlife, the plips and ripples of the surface skimmers, skittering waterboatmen, the opportunist minnows and the wisps of thistledown, it is still and peaceful. It is peaceful enough to allow the imagination to slip beyond time and place to the pages of Thomas Hardy or Mark Twain, or to feel as if one is inside of a Romantic Movement painting or poem, formed in the dots of pointillistic impressionism.

Sitting by the pond, on a day like this, time stands still.

The Jacobite Steam Train and Dogs.

Trains of Thought.


I don’t know what made me walk that way last Thursday evening. I generally avoid groups of people hanging around on the footbridge over the railway, or groups of youths hanging around anywhere on the dog walking route. They tend to have Bill Sykes type bull terriers on one side or other of the Dangerous Dogs Law. In some areas a gun, either replica or otherwise is the must -have fashion accessory, around the area I walk through to get out into the woods and fields they favour the staffie or the pit bull as a necessary part of their well ‘ard image. Dangerous Dog Law is a joke. The owners are probably the danger , not the hapless hounds, but even so, we have been attacked by them on more than one occasion. My border collie assumes a sit and wait posture and if the dogs go for him, he tends to run. As I am always on the other end of the lead, and he runs rather faster than I do, the effect does not do much for my dignity. I hate people who insist on having their dogs off th leash and who cannot or will not keep their dogs under control. Dogs apart, I go on adrenalin code red if I see a group of people, and specifically a group of teenage males with an attitude and aspect intended to intimidate. However, it has always been my practice to walk right through the middle of them, ensuring I do not make eye contact. It usually works, taking the current dog fashion out of the equation. They part to let me through and don’t take much notice.

So, last Thursday evening when I decided to turn right and walk the bridle path at the back of the school the opposite way to which I usually take, and go over the footbridge, it was too late to change direction and avoid the crowd of about twenty people milling around on it by the time I saw them. As I approached, I saw that the crowd consisted of elderly people, children and a couple of people-who-looked-responsible. You know the type of person, you can tell them as soon as you see them; teachers, carers, some (not all ) parents, most grandparents out with the grandkids have it, that air of authority, that tilt to the face and set of the mouth. I soon realised that these people must be carers as a few of the others started to paw at me and smile and ask me questions that people who have inhibitions just do not ask strangers. In fact, people rarely say anything to other people, unless it is two dog walkers with the same sort of dog and dressed the same way, between whom the radar twitches and tests the signal with a jaunty ‘lovely evening isn’t it’ type of comment as you draw level. These people were Downs syndrome people, smiling broadly and clutching my arm, asking if the dog was friendly. (He is. Too friendly).

I smiled , to my shame, a little embarrassed, and spotting some kind of spaniel -cross -Heinz57 bounding towards us through the coarse grass, wild oats, golden rod, rose bay willow herb that grew wild and dry and scratchy in the no mans land between the path and the fence of the embankment, pulled my collie in close and rushed through , nodding and painting a stretched- mouth clenched- teeth grin on my face to them all like some puppet tweaked by a drunk with St Vitus dance, the spaniel attempting to shag my leg, my collie attempting to shag the spaniel. Bobby always prefers to make love not war.

The cycleway asphalted path that runs parallel to the railway line here forks off the streets that once were part of the landscaped gardens of the big Victorian gothic house with the crenulated tower that breathed wealth and propriety, owned by the Foxes last century and now a Rest Home for Antediluvian Buffaloes. Once on this path from here, there is no exit until about a mile beyond where I would normally have taken my circular route home , thus taking me on a longer detour, past where I need to be so I would have to double back through the town streets. I decided what the hell, I would walk along it tonight.

There were two men standing on the path. They both had cameras cocked. They looked approachable so I asked them if there was a special train coming down the track, thinking maybe it was the Royal train or something, thinking vaguely I had not seen any police ,to say there were all these people loitering around. One of the blokes replied that it was a steam train and due any minute now.

Of course, I love steam trains, spend a fair bit of my time on and around them, what with all the WW2 railway events we attend. The dog and I stopped and fixed our eyes upon the arch of the road bridge by the Buffaloes Mansion.

At the museum there is a mile or so of restored track from the Derwent Valley railway, and we ride the lovingly restored trains as part of the scenarios when we do frontier or Indian Wars and WW2 , Spanish Civil War re-enactments there. The train enthusiasts are a fantastic bunch of talented engineers, with boiler suits , smutty faces, black hands and enthusiasm that would out-shine a beatified evangelist.

In August 2003 , the 100th anniversary of the original railway opening in 1913, there was a reconstruction of that day, down to the local brass band playing (badly) and out of time with each other, CL-W loafed around with his old school tie holding up his trousers, being very foppish, PH dressed as a gamekeeper in his plus-twos and Norfolk jacket, a couple of the girls wandering about with Votes for Women placards and rosettes, others chained to railings, genteel cups of tea in fine bone china in the marquee , croquet on the lawn, farmers, ag labs, gentry all milled around, everyone all dressed for an Edwardian summers day and the scene was for all the world a replica of 100 years back. I remember, I looked across the yellow and green fields dozing under the bluest of Vale of York skies, thinking how all these people (because for me now the scene had time slipped for real, they were no longer my friends and colleagues, they were people on the edge of the world) had no idea that their peace would be completely shattered within the year. in a few months time, the golden Edwardian Summer would have turned into the mud and blood and slaughter of the trenches of the Great War and nothing would ever be the same again. Most of these young men , cheeks puffed out honking their tubas and parping their trumpets would be dead, or if they survived, armless, legless, mindless or if they avoided that, with the joy sucked out of them. I started to cry. I am starting to cry now.

I burst into tears when the engine shrieked under the bridge, pristine brass work, glossy maroon paintwork, with a roar and a hiss . It was a long train, people leaning out of the windows. Involuntarily, I waved at them. With all my heart I waved at them, tears dripping off my nose So embarrassing. That will teach me to run out of emotional memory blockers. For once in my life I had no camera with me, so I looked with my eyes and with that part of me that seems to be attached to atavistic memory; I had to look with a roaring in my ears, and wave, wave frantically at all the people waving out at me and the dog standing in the rays of the sinking sun, there on the path along the embankment. No camera shot, just emotion memory to write from.

Full of wonder, the dog and I climbed up the steep slope to the Antidiluvian Buffalo's Road Bridge and clambered over the fence and the wall onto the main road sidewalk for a quicker run home to find out about the train.

It was the Jacobite that runs from York to Scarborough on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays in July and August. I shall be there next Tuesday waiting for it bringing its passengers home after a day at the seaside.









Settle to Carlisle Railway Poem.


Sleepy Settle wakes on a market Tuesday,
Farmers’ wives from Clitheroe,
Hellifield, Long Preston,
Gisburn and Horrocksford,
Not to mention Nappa ,
Have your tickets ready please.
Travellers on the platform
Don’t forget to mind the gap,
Standback while the gypsum wagons rumble past;
Look up to Ingleborough, Whernside and Pen y Ghent
All aboard for Langcliff and the Carlisle metropolis
Don’t lean out the window when the guard’s whistle blows.

On through Taitland’s tunnel
And the Sheriff Brow viaduct
First of many striding ‘cross the rivers and vales;
Helwith Bridge, Crag Hill, Horton in Ribblesdale
Where they carry off the Yorkshire Dales in tip- up trucks.

Steam from the engine trails back from famous Batty Moss,
A pall on the graves of the navvies who died
From gunpowder accidents, hard work and smallpox
Burrowing Bleamoor tunnel like an army of moles.
Arten Gill is where the firemen take a breather
Before they stoke the boilers for the highest of climbs

They’re knitting in Dent, they’re knitting in Dent,
Their needles are flying , those mad knitters of Dent.

In Garsdale the waterfalls tumble down the hillside,
form speleologists’ cathedrals far underground;
Dandry Mires marshes were hard to negotiate,
The engineers spanned it with granite cut from Pen y Ghent.


Over Lunds and Grisedale, Moorcock, Birkett , Shotlock,
Tunnels and bridges built by force of will;
Time for a thermos to drink to nature’s ruggedness,
Watch sparrowhawks swoop over Mallerstang Moor.

Mallerstang Moor, Mallerstang Moor,
Mallerstang, Mallerstang, Mallerstang Moor

Stop at Kirkby Stephen
Pick up passengers for Appleby,
Decked out in their finery for the annual fair;
Horses and gypsies, gypsies and horses;
‘Retain your loyalty
preserve your rights’
Appleby ,Appleby, pride of the dales.

Ribbons twist round Langwathby's maypole,
Time for a cuppa at the Brief Encounter café,
Count the stone dancers in Long Meg’s circle,
Past Little Salkeld to Lazonby Halt.
See the pele tower that guards the River Eden;
Stained glass windows in the church
By Edward Burne-Jones.
Last stop
Tired little Armathwaite
then chug into Carlisle
with a triumphant toot.

(by DeBracey)

For the Love of Steam Trains


Freight wagons shake bottle green buffet windows
globe electroliers swing umbrellas of ochre light
over vaguely antagonistic travellers
reading ripping yarns in waiting rooms.

Manic sweating fire-dwarves stoke
rake and shovel locomotive coal
smoke blinds our eyes
our ears ring with the clank of iron wheels
and the shrill whistle that rends the night
like a knife shredding silk.

The guard's arms flash his flags
in scissor-action semaphore
Betjeman crams his Great Western Railway
Company egg-and-cress sandwich
into his cut glass vowels
and we board the 19.42 for Wantage.


Library photo of The Jacobite Steam Train

Slideshow by me- photos of Bolton Abbey- Embsay Railway 1940s events

Poems by me.