The Echoing Green
At 7.45am on a sunny Saturday morning in May, with an almond pastry for breakfast, I get a 30 minute bus from Parliament Street, Nottingham to Derby bus station. It's another 30 minutes to get to Ashbourne, where I'll hire a bike and explore the southern part of the Peak District.
I arrive in Ashbourne at 8.45am. The bike-hire store doesn't open until 9.30am so I wander down the narrow pavements, feeling good about being up this early. Walking into a small side-street café I sit down and order a coffee. When my coffee arrives I sip it and consider what, exactly it is I'm doing aiming to do here in a tiny Derbyshire town, 1 hour from Uni.
I moved to Nottingham 3 years ago as a student and visited the Peaks for a solo hike in the summer of 2021. I planned a route but it turned out to be very long and boring. I found myself traversing a lot of main roads and was dehydrated, exhausted and upset when I got to my first campsite. This time I'll be riding a bike, taking a shorter route and travelling over lovely White Peak landscapes, so I hopefully will enjoy myself more on this occasion.
I guess that, in short, I'm trying a bit to be like Jack Kerouac, who wrote books about travelling America in the 50s. Since I read 3 of his books in a row when I was about 18 I've tried to be like him every so often (although I've never done quite so much benzedrine in 1 go). Like they did for him, for me creativity and travel work in tandem by making me feel like myself on occasions when I'm struggling to. Visiting places alone to walk, cycle and meet people while writing or taking photos of what I find, hits different if I do it right. Sometimes, I'll get quite stressed but other times will come away from the trip enriched.
My goal then will be to document what interests me through photographs, making a poem or sort of artefact about history and myth in the Peak District. 3 years ago I was an English student after all, writing about stuff written from the 10th century to now. In remembering that rough hiking trip 3 years ago I guess I might as well put myself in the same headspace.
Thinking about the Peak District, I can't help but consider how English Literature is everywhere here. 100 years ago DH Lawrence lived 20 minutes drive from this coffee shop and wrote a story about a peacock in the snow. 40 minutes up the road there's a place called Lud's Church which people think is immortalised in the medieval poem: Gawain and the Green Knight, as the chapel where Sir Gawain goes to get his head cut off by a completely green guy with an axe. I sadly can't visit either of these places myself but who knows? Maybe I'll find some green men of my own.
St Oswald's Church
The Green Man
I finish my coffee and decide to visit St Oswald's Church, which is just down the road. I walk inside and find this guy, a lot sooner than I thought that I would. Green Men carvings can be found everywhere in England but there are particularly a lot of them in churches around Derbyshire. Most people believe that he is a pagan deity representing Spring and renewal. Why does he usually in churches? The consensus is that the Catholics of England wanted pagan people to feel at ease during Christianity's early medieval stages so they put a face in churches that people would recognise from the murky, mythic past. Why would people have recognised him? Nobody knows. I however like to think that it's something to do with stories that inspired Gawain and The Green Knight.
Sir John Cokayne
Below the Green Man face was a monument commemorating this guy. In the 1300s he was Ashbourne's Lord of the Manor and served under the Lancastrians, mainly John of Gaunt: the royal who spent most of his life trying to take over France. John Cokayne didn't have the most notable life. From what I know he was accused of murder for little discernible reason but was later cleared. He also paid for a chantry in St Oswald's Church. The flower arrangements surrounding the monument are very pretty; they make me think of springtime. Even in this dark and gloomy church, nature still permeates.
Not all those who wander are lost
The Tissington Trail
I cycle away from Ashbourne and down the Tissington Trail, passing and being overtaken by many other cyclists and walkers. The trail follows alongside a railway line disused since 1967, which runs between Ashbourne to Buxton.
Tissington is a cute village surrounding 2 or 3 ponds. Cycling off the trail and to the village green, I park my bike next to a cyclist's café and rest for a moment.
(maybe I subconsciously wish that I was in a car and not soon to kill myself pedalling uphill towards Milldale)
The Fitzherbert baronetcy have owned Tissington Hall since 1465. It's no longer the place where the 'lord of the manor' lives, so-to-speak; you can now hire it out for weddings and other private functions. Has much changed? Not really.
I cycle back to the trail, but notice a mysterious green door and stop for a moment to look at it. Before I can decide on whether or not to open it, 4 old gents walk by and save me the trouble, glancing inside and saying "Ah that's where the board games and things are kept."
They walk away down the road. I look past the door and oddly don't see any board games. There are however lots of magazines and books, tucked away on shelves as if they're top secret and confidential.
A leaflet on a table at the cyclists' café says that 'well dressing': ornately decorating village wells every summer, is a big thing in Tissington. The practice signifies gratitude for fresh water in Derbyshire tradition. I like that idea. It's good to be grateful for the simple things.
Doesn't look that private to me
I lift my bike over a fence, lock it up, hide it in a hedge and climb a steep hill
I'm eating my lunch (chicken noodles I made yesterday) on top of Shining Tor: a rocky outcrop overlooking the Wolfscote Dale Path. There is a beautiful view of the green hills rolling into the distance. There are a herd fat and fluffy sheep nearby. My bike is about 40 feet below. I wonder if I'm sitting on a burial mound? There's no placard around saying that I am. Nevertheless, my aim for today is to visit to Thor's Cave, near the village of Wetton: a famous neolithic burial site. No matter what happens I'll leave the Peak District having seen one of the famous Derbyshire burials.
There are lots of stories in the Peak District about strange things happening in locations where dead people are buried. They're often to do with goblin-like creatures: the hobs and boggarts that live there. These beings are benevolent but sometimes a little hostile if you do something to upset them. 2 'hobs' live at Monsal Dale and Beeley Moor, or did in medieval times, looking after sheep and threshing corn in return for porridge or cream from locals. Other times these stories are about young women doing things that they aren't supposed to do. At a burial mound near Birchover there are four stones which used to be 4 women out dancing on a Sunday, which the Church didn't like. They were turned to stone somehow, when they saw a giant taking a piss up the hill on Robin Hood's stride.
There's no shortage of ghost stories in-an-around the peaks either. Derby itself is 'the most haunted city in the UK' while at Haddon Hall, near Bakewell, King Henry VIII's older brother saw a ghost that said his fiancée, Catherine of Aragon, was going to be a widow, before he died days later.
Why were medieval and early modern people near Derby so fixated on the past and the dead? I guess that when you live near ancient and natural expanses you can't help but think about the things that have come before; the secrets and memories that the trees, rocks and hills might hold.
“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long dead relative, like an old dream..."
- Jack Kerouac
Not that you asked, but the reason that I like Gawain and the Green Knight so much is because it's an enigmatic poem; we don't know who wrote it and we know very little about why. All the same, the poem is clearly a 'rejection' of certain things that came before it. It's a romance about King Arthur (pictured here, on the original manuscript) but still turns romances about King Arthur on their head. It's written in Middle-English, like Chaucer's poems, but in an odder and more indecipherable way; most people think that's because it was written in a Midlands, not a London dialect.
The Green Knight arrives at King Arthur's court and challenges a knight to cut his head off. Gawain does so and 1 year later is compelled to visit the Green Knight's church to have the same thing done to him.
I like to think that the anonymous poet was walking the same roads that I'm cycling down and suddenly thought of a story idea, imagining the knight Gawain wandering through the Peak District to confront the representation of nature, or destiny, or whatever you want to call it.
2
From Thor's Cave to Ilam
I pass through Stanthorpe, a tiny hamlet where several guys are building a peculiar structure.
I ask what they're up to and they say that they're putting on a music festival called 'Lost in the Hills' next week.
Thor's Cave
I climb a steep hill out of Stanthorpe and ride into the village of Wetton at 2.30pm.
I stop at the busy village pub for a pint. Thor's Cave is no more than 15 minutes away. I can't however take my bike there.
The cave itself is inside a massive limestone crag overlooking the Manifold Valley. It attracts many visitors each year. The name could either be a link to the eponymous Norse God or a corruption of the word 'Tor'.
The cave can be seen from the entrance to a footpath. Nearby there is a meadow sweeping down into the valley. A very tired couple and their young kid are walking up it. They recommend that I take the footpath instead of walking down into the meadow, so that's what I do. I lock my bike to a tree and set on towards the limestone crag in the distance ready to commune with the Norse God of Thunder or something.
Thor's Cave could have the strangest history of all the Peak District's burial sites because a Bronze Age person decided to bring a dolphin here. Nobody really knows why.
It was the sternum, scapula and vertebra of a Dolphin that were found among these smooth limestone nooks and crannies. Was it for magical purposes? Well, there's certainly something magical about this strange, dark and gaping mouth in right in the middle of the Peak District's verdant skyline.
The road to Ilam Hall...
...is pretty long and tiring. I'm nowhere near as stressed as I was walking to Bakewell 3 years ago but I can feel the early onset of those emotions. I feel slightly lonely as I'm prone to do most days. Maybe the cave that made me aware of the darkness of nature and the human soul. Maybe I'm just a little hot and tired.
ILAM hall
I arrive at Ilam Hall, my home for the night, at 5pm. The girl at the front desk is one of the friendliest people that I've ever encountered; she gives me a key for the bike-shed and an entrance card for my dormitory. When I was 18 I inter-railed around France with a friend and encountered some relatively ropey youth hostels. I haven't stayed in one since so I'm pleasantly surprised to find that my dormitory at Illam is one of the cosiest rooms that I've ever stayed in, cosier than many hotels. Across the room an older gentlemen is sitting on his bed, checking his phone. I speak to him for a second and he says that his English is not good because he is French although to my ears he sounds Coventry.
Illam Hall is a national trust property repurposed as a YHA youth hostel since the 1930s. The main purpose of it has always been to provide a space for kids from the city to experience the countryside with their peers, at low financial cost. Suitably, I'm staying here on the same night as a 50 strong party of school-kids. I order a burger in the dining hall at 7pm, I'm advised that the kids will arrive in 30 minutes. It's of no bother to me because I'm hungry enough to finish my food within 10.
After dinner I sit in the lounge with a beer, trying and generally failing out of laziness to do some writing. A couple and their 2 kids are here at the same time. We talk and I tell them that I'm a journalist in training. The lady says that her brother works in Hong Kong translating British newspapers. It makes me wonder where my career will take me.
I go to bed at 10, the earliest time I've turned in for a while. It's a cliche but I truly feel at this point that I've stepped away from my daily life into a totally different landscape; a different world even. In 2 days, I'll be back at university but I feel as if it will be 2 months. Time moves slower in the Manifold Valley I guess.
In the central part of Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain stays the night at the house of rich noble called Bertilak.
While Gawain's there, Bertilak's wife keeps trying to convince him to sleep with her while her husband is out hunting. He mostly resists which shows that he's not one to give up his knightly honour and strength of will.
Journeys are processes of hardship and rest. You can't give up your grand purpose for rest.
The road back to Ashbourne...
...isn't always easy; on 5 separate occasions I somehow manage to go in the wrong direction. I therefore get back to Ashbourne later than I would have liked: about 12.30pm.
Eating Sainsbury's sandwich in Ashbourne town centre, waiting 40 minutes more than I would have liked for my bus to Derby, I feel like the outdoors has enriched me but still I'm anxious, I guess about the many things that I will have to do during the coming week.
The journey itself put a spark in my bones. I need to travel more often and do the things that it necessarily involves (being aimless, going down paths, learning about strange, niche things in history, feeling the nature around me, moving through hardship and rest, moving my body and moving my mind, listening to the echoes of days gone by). I guess it's matter of doing those things until they become my whole life
Travel Music
The songs which make me think of moving onwards
