Fisherman's Friends on Ilkley Moor

As you'll know from my post of a couple of weeks ago, I went to Yorkshire, land of (some of) my youth. Well, it was marvellous, despite me experiencing it through a thick cold. For old times sake I went specially to Ilkley to buy some Fisherman's Friends - my scent of choice as an unhealthy student.

Fortified by my FFs I staggered from the cafe car park up onto the moor behind the Cow and Calf rocks and slumped on a bench to admire the view. I'd forgotten how the wind never stops up on the moors - even on a day when the sun is beating down the grasses and heathers whisper constantly.

While I caught my breath I watched a great many plump people puff up the slope - it's clearly the hill of choice for overweight locals, no doubt for the same reason as me in my breathless state - you can drive half way up it, and buy a bun on the way down.

I resisted the buns (actually, I needed a loo and there wasn't one) and headed off to find my B&B, up the Wharfe valley beyond Bolton Abbey. With every bend of the road my grin grew bigger - I'd a trace memory of how much I'd loved being up here almost thirty years ago, but I'd forgotten just why. Steep valleys, drystone walls, glimpses of rushing water, barebacked purple moors above everything - and all in incredible glorious sunshine, which is something you definitely don't take for granted in Yorkshire in late September.

I won't go on about my B&B, except to say that I'd feared polyester floral coverlets on the bed, and a bustling landlady who'd want to talk to me all the time, and my fears were utterly unfounded. Here's what I could see from the bench outside my door:

That evening I walked down to the valley and along the river to the New Inn at Appletreewick for pie night, and a pint of Black Sheep bitter.

The next day, I drove over Barden Moor to Skipton. If you're ever in Skipton, there's excellent coffee in the Italian cafe by the castle, and a splendidly idiosyncratic museum - dinosaur remains, lots of pictures of an unfeasibly large cow, miners' lamps, complaints from 19th century commercial travellers about the local rowdy youth - and a Shakespeare First Folio. I love local museums.

Suitably fortified with yet more nuggets of probably useless knowledge, I returned to Wharfedale and set off on foot from Skyreholme (a tiny village with an invisible large house, now a religious retreat) up through Trollers Gill (a limestone ravine), onto Nussey Green (open country) and back to Skyreholme's teashop via Black Hill Road.



What struck me, as I walked through a landscape almost entirely empty of people, and where the only houses were in the far distance, was that this had once been a place thronging with people. On my way up from the village to the gill, I passed great grassy earthen walls, which once held back reservoirs of water for the mills in Skyreholme, all now gone. And just beyond the gill, a ruined hut sits beside the still sound-looking entrance to a lead mine. Very small, it is- you'd have to crouch to make your way in there.

And above it all, Black Hill Road, now a half-made track, but clearly at one time a much-used route from the mills across to Patley Bridge.

This is a place of emptiness, not wilderness. There once were people all over these hills, and now there are sheep and rare flurries of brightly clad walkers on their way back to their cars and home.

When I got home I ordered the new chapbooks from Nightjar Press (www.nightjarpress.wordpress.com) - and yesterday they came. I read one straight away - GA Pickin's Remains - and it was the perfect echo from my final day in Yorkshire, set high on the moors, in an abandoned landscape, the wind singing in the heather as darkness falls. It's printed in a limited edition of 200, so if you want a copy, you'd better be quick. It's brilliant.