Sounds of ringing picks and hammers, clattering rockfalls, squealing railway wagon wheels on iron tracks: a cacophony that, a century in the past, carried on the wind into the centre of the city, a mile downhill. Then, Ashes quarry employed 200 males who despatched 136,000 tonnes of limestone yearly to the Consett iron and steelworks, 10 miles distant throughout bleak Pennine moorland. This morning, silence, damaged solely by metallic tchak-tchak calls of jackdaws, echoing from the vertical rock face. Nature has reclaimed this chasm within the fellside, reworking it right into a shallow lake.
Standing on a spoil heap close to the water’s edge, sheltered by a towering cliff from an icy north-westerly wind, I can scent peaty perfume from sun-warmed moss, wild thyme crushed underfoot and a lacustrine aroma of final autumn’s decaying reedmace leaves. On the water margin, its brown, felty, cylindrical seedheads – seemingly out of synchrony with spring’s new development – are disintegrating, dispersing wisps of plumed seeds throughout the water. A blue tit arrives and begins pecking one aside. Trying to find bugs or amassing materials for a snug nest lining? The latter, it appears; it carries a beak-load away to a nest gap within the cliff, whereupon a mysterious darkish form – blunt-headed and broad-winged – detaches from a ledge, glides away and disappears amongst deep shadows alongside the rock wall.
Following is troublesome: an excessive amount of haste over this jagged, slippery rock invitations a damaged ankle. Stepping fastidiously, trying down for footholds, risking temporary upward glances, I believed I knew the place it went, however can see no signal, so I stand, wait and watch. Nothing, no motion, no sound.
Simply as I’m about to go away, by means of the branches of a tree rising from a fissure within the cliff comes the revelation that I’m being watched by the unblinking gaze of a tawny owl, eyes like polished jet. It’s perched inside a small cave created by fallen rock, lit by the rising solar. Disdainful of the clumsy animal down beneath, it decides that I’m no menace, and its heavy-lidded eyes shut. We inhabit separate worlds: the snoozing owl belongs to the moon and stars; my day, with in a single day frost nonetheless melting on the grass, is simply starting.
