The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
Tennyson was writing of the discoveries of his era – how ancient the earth is, how it seems solid and permanent but has changed over millennia and will continue to change. To contemporary readers this may have felt like blasphemy. Now, however, it is a common place idea which might hardly seem relevant. We were not there as the continents shifted and we will not see the next seismic change. If the world is not objectively immutable, it may as well be, for we cannot detect its change in our brief lifespan. I begin to feel the falsity of that view. The hills don’t seem to me to be shadows or mist, but instead a living being that shifts and moves. The land under our feet is not constant. Not only does it move, to our shock, to our horror, to our detriment, but it also changes in response to us.
Looking at the church in Alnmouth, we were thinking how the stone does not look as old as that in some of the cottages in the village, and that the design of the church seems relatively modern. Researching it a little, we discovered that the church was indeed fairly modern (1876) and is the third of the churches in that village. The first, however, apparently on the site where St Cuthbert agreed to be bishop of Hexham in 684, was built in the 12th century. The storm of 1806 changed the course of the river Aln and cut off the building from the rest of the town. (The second was a granary used temporarily from 1859 until the new and current one was built). Not only was the church destroyed but, from that moment, Alnmouth ceased being an important port.
https://co-curate.ncl.ac.uk/alnmouth/
As we drove back down the coast from Alnmouth, I recalled my father saying that the river Coquet had also changed its course at Amble. Instead of coming out into the sea beside Warkworth, after a storm in 1764 the river cut through some sandbanks and came out at Amble instead, transforming this village into the port it is today. In my father’s time, the meander of the river where the water used to flow was called the ‘old waters’.
These musings on the fickleness of the land and how we have responded to it, brought me to reflect on how we have changed the land to suit our own needs, especially here in the North East of England, where we have mined for coal, resculpting the very ground under our feet. Suddenly, the image of the earth as shifting and mutable no longer seems so remote, but instead is concrete, is tangible. No longer insentient clay, but part of us, living, breathing and long-suffering.
Northumberland – this is my land. I tried to run away, but once I was elsewhere I felt its pull and knew I would return. A homing pigeon, always destined to come back. At a university reunion recently, I was jokingly commenting that my husband has been trapped into a life in the North East of England. My friend replied that he would always have known that would be his future. She had known that about me, even then, as I thought I was trying to escape my past. Life is not certain, and no path taken is inevitable, but living elsewhere, I always felt myself to be a foreigner. Returning, it was as though I could breathe out, knowing I was grounded and rooted in my own land.
Recently, though, circumstances have pushed and pulled me until nothing seems solid. The past I saw as frozen, squirms and twists as I look at it. The pillars on which my life is built are crumbling. But yesterday, on a drive around Northumberland, I felt the land enclose me, like a blanket, like a mother caring for her beleaguered child. Those hills are curvaceous, like a sleeping woman. The sinuous winding of the narrow hedge-bound roads border patchwork fields of barley, wheat, rape and grasses, now ready to be harvested. Fields stood pale and still, bound by green trees and hedges.
I’ve always thought that England, unlike countries like Australia and the United States, has had time to get used to its inhabitants. Of course, there have been people living on all these lands for thousands of years, but modern towns in Australia or the United States look like they have been placed down on top of it. Here, I feel, the towns nestle in the country’s folds, kneading the land, reshaping it. This land bends and moulds itself to its inhabitants. We change it; it changes us.
Yesterday, as we drove through Northumberland, my father pointed out hills created by slag heaps, which now, gently undulating, seem as natural as any part of the landscape. Lanes, now shaded by trees, were once railway lines running from coal mines to the port of Amble. Long and straight in this curving unevenness, only this marked them out as created by man. The noise and soot are long gone. Not even the metal rails remain. But the land is scored with man’s straight lines, disguised now as rustic country paths.
As we drove through Radcliffe, my father said, as he always does, “When I was a lad, this was all houses!” in gentle, mocking reference to the changing of the world around us. Radcliffe was a village of pit rows where my Great Uncle Jack and his wife Nelly had a pub, The Radcliffe Arms. By the time I knew them they were living in sheltered housing in Amble, as was my grandma. The village disappeared entirely, the open cast mining ripping up all of these fields, roads and houses, remaking them. Now, where the village was, there are more quiet, still fields, teeming with animal life.
As a child, on the way to visit my grandparents in Warkworth, we would travel the tranquil roads through Acklington coming into Warkworth by Morwick Road, the street on which my mother was born. Sometimes it was a change from the usual coastal route through Amble, and then it was made necessary by the opencast which tore up the whole countryside and made the other route impassable. My brother and I would plead to go on ‘the bumpy road’ and would shout with glee when my dad drove quickly over each little hill and round each tight bend. Yesterday, my dad shouted ‘wheee!’ as I drove him round those tight bends and over those little hills, bringing us full circle.
I used to imagine that life was a path, curving and twisting off into the distance. Now I feel it is a circle, bringing us back to our beginnings. Or perhaps, we travel the same circular route, passing again and again the familiar landmarks, each time different, each time the same. Each time bringing ideas, experiences, knowledge to each turn, bringing, in each circuit, more and more of the world.
My land and I, we travel together. It changes me. And it is changed. It offers me a perspective on the past. A past that is painful and sweet – the innocence and every-day-ness of my past life without the consciousness maturity brings. The pain lies in the unreachable chasm between now and then, in the damage that past was inflicting, and in the loss of people and a way of life that seemed to me to be the whole world.
My roots spread across this region; they merge and twist, fray, decay, renew and grow. The people, linked together by blood, by history, thin out to single breakable threads. Only my parents, hanging onto this land as it spins into the future, link me to this past, at once more industrial and more rural. My children fly from here, less tethered than I ever was, all other family dwindled and diminished to memories and names written in copper plate on the back of faded black and white photographs. But the land remains. Each part of our shared history is scored and chiselled on each hill, each lane, each street.
The future fans out before me, paths still to be trod, connections still to be formed, friends to be made. Events not yet conceived, full of joy, full of sorrow, lie ahead on the bosom of this patient land. Moulded and damaged by us, to mould and damage us in our turn, we and the land are inextricably linked. I see our future as though it were bright sunlight on the dancing waves glimpsed from the seashore. It suggests comfort in the changing familiarity of my home. Thinking of this past, mine and that of the land, I look out from this shore and see hope, like an island floating between the sea and sky. My feet on your shore, Northumberland, I lift my eyes. I see that island, never reachable, always present, at the end of the land which enfolds me.
Thank you to Co-Curate, and to the following websites for their invaluable information and the use of their images. (Accessed July 2022)
https://www.amblenorthumberland.co.uk/heritage%20&%20development.htm
Enjoy English 