Never lost, but found...
If I'd had but the energy to walk there...
My youngest and I ramble out onto that vast bleak watershed of ochre and umber between our dale and the next, whereon there is little but peat cuttings, old walling, and the tracks of long-dead miners. Stopping for lunch, we sit on a rabbit cropped slope by an old crushing shed and listen to the curlews, before I spot, way over the old green lanes, way over the tracks to the next valley, far beyond the overgrown grouse butts, on the horizon, some vague smudge. My eyesight these days is none so good, so I ask,
"What is this I see?"
"A village, oh parent mine; a village of stone build houses, with smoke in the chimneys."
We consult the map – there is no village, nor ever has been.
01 June 2024