Has anybody completed The Dales Walk from Bowness to Ilkey? It takes about seven days and one Canadian travel writer rated it among his top five walks in the world.

North Yorkshire with its Dales has just been voted the Garden of England displacing Kent, who have enjoyed the title since I was a boy. It is quite beutiful just now in Spring but is beautiful everyday really.

The Dales

(i)

I travel into a night that thins to dawn,
into the Pennines’ massive shrug of fells.
Unwinding light behind, the road trails down
between dark crags and shining walls, then falls
into the valley where rivers gather and rise,
mirror the colours of the changing skies.

Smooth white limestone thrusts
as white as winter, white as wind-stripped bones
of sheep are white, white as the tufts
of plucked fleece that whispers over stones.

(ii)

I climb the bottom of an ancient sea and tread
the shells and corals of an antique reef.
Earth’s tale written in every rock and read
in any piece I heft, book of ages, that leaf on leaf
shows life that knew the swell of Tethys’ seas
and the slow-pulsed tides of centuries.

Above, the curlew cries before the threat of rain,
circles the slopes where draggled ewes climb
over the glacial gouge and dark moraine,
pieced in quilts of settlement and hemmed with time.


(iii)
once well inside
down and beyond
that first sudden
d
r
o
p
on twisting r
o
p
e
spun like a spider
over a clattering
welter of spray
t
w
i
n
k
l
i
n
g
down and
away
from you
into the darkness
b
e
l
o
w
and beyond
the entrance and the distant day
long since lost


then

put out the light

feel the mask of dark
utter dark
tighten-over-your-face
closein
on your mouth and nose
like a hand
not yours in the dark
halting breath and sense
your four senses
explore
reach out
into the cave
hear the trickle
in the blackness
the beast-lick of waters
lapping
twisting past
cold
hard aching cold
shaping the cave
around you
in the thick dark
the huge mass of the fells pins
you
punches inwards on your chest
treads underfoot
you trodden
as you slither like a lizard
through the thin mud
taste the grit and ooze of earth
on your lips
coarse sand
crunch in teeth
a pitch
that
will
not
go
a way that pinches
off
narrows
in
womb-tight-womb-night
tomb-dark
your hand no hand
before your face
and wide blind eyes
feels the unseen rock
the ancient life there
that once teemed and turned to light
locked in
the cold the wet and the hardness
pressing
and the throb
of time
be still and know
the suck and pulse
of its dark heart
the loops and whorls
as slow time
mutates all
transposes
unravels
and folds a newness in
hear the bowels of the earth
draining
and replenishing
now turn your face
from the depths
and the dark
towards the lost light and the air
somewhere above
moving over
sweet green dales
fresh and bright with spring flowers
under a broad blue sky



(iv)

The Hill of Winds bulks black, its saurian back
and ridge consumes horizons and the dales below.
Threaded with waters, scarred by seasons’ rack,
flanks bared by the scour of gale and snow,
while over the lip of Ingleborough Hill
the tufts of morning mist in silence spill.

Aproned with scree, low farms and long green,
green as mossed barns and hart’s-tongue fern
are green, as long wet summers are green,
as green as new life springing by the quiet tarn