Moorland

The moor has a dialect
abrupt and guttural,
harsh and impoverished.

It is the sharp tongue of the wind
berating the bracken;
and the yatter of rain.

It is the hawk's cry,
and the hare's scream,
and the low cough of grouse.

Swarthy the moor's complexion;
its skin of peat
pocked with reed colonies,

and heather primed
for autumn's explosion
into purple erysipelas.

It partners the sky.
The two of them cohabit,
blend and intersect.

The morning mist
brings a confinement
of all horizons;

while the wester sun
burns its image
on the moorland pools.

This unhedged margin
is our borderland
and needful wilderness.

May its rough thirst
never be slaked by fertile lime,
or by the dew of pasture.

Dentdale

Each summer to the open field we went
in the deep dale, and pitched our tent
under fells which funnel the road to Dent.

Dent, with the stream that ducks and weaves
under and over its limestone bed;
a water that beckons and deceives.

Dent, with its diagram of hillside farms
held in a net from crest to foot,
impervious to every Pennine storm.

Dent, where the drovers passed with goad and plaid
from Annandale, driving their beasts to sell
in the high market up at Ribblehead,

where over the moors the bold stone viaducts
carry the line the navvies built
from Settle to Carlisle, with hundreds dead.

And in our white pavilion all night long
we'd hear ewes calling for their taken lambs
and the bleat of lambs replying from the fold.

MOORLAND and DENTDALE
Taken from
"Seventy-Seven Poems" by David Morphet
(2002: Notion Books ISBN 0 9541573 1 1)
and were inspired by camping holidays
on a farm at Lea Yeat in the 1970's.

Ley Lines

Dent Town and Horton, Ingleton,
triangulate the high dales
where roots run deep.

The Dee, the Doe, the Ribble,
and their becks and viaducts
draw lines on the mind’s map.

Lea Yeat and Gearstones,
Whernside, Hewthwaite, Rash,
mark out old memories.

At Chapel-le-Dale, St Leonard’s,
squat and robust,
like the first churches of the North,

is holding ground
for Christ and in its element –
stone-hewn, an omphalos.

The Cam Beck tumbles down
past flags of Nether Lodge
into the swirl of Ribble.

The Dee ducks in and out
of thirsty strata, longing
for the Rawthey and the Lune.

This is the country of resilience,
big in its moorland boots,
and on its own two feet.

December 2002

Taken from
"Seventy-Seven Poems" by David Morphet
(2002: Notion Books ISBN 0 9541573 1 1)
and were inspired by camping holidays
on a farm at Lea Yeat in the 1970's.

Taken from
"The Angel and the Fox" by David Morphet
(2003 Notion Books, ISBN 0 9541573 2)

INTRUSION

 Inspired by the Settle-Carlisle Line. 

SWALLOW-HOLES

Our maps define the limestone dale we’re in,
and also show us what’s beneath the skin
of field and fell. Among the contour lines
are pockmark swallow-holes, like ancient mines.

These are the avens plunging to deep veins
in the rock’s fracture; splintered souterrains
spreading across an obscure hinterland.
Unseen, dark rivers flow there; lakes expand.

A world apart, the bowelled aquifers;
the dripping caverns with their long fingers
of lime; the buried waters trickling by
without disturbance; no observing eye

to detect them in their slow processes -
contaminate - pierce their unconsciousness.
Deep below ground, the hidden measures serve
to hold, accumulate, keep in reserve.

And yet the upper landscape answers
to their capacities; the river dries or dances
according to their appetite; it swells
when they are swollen; and when they thirst, it fails.

Explorers I salute; those who descend
and penetrate, and push on to the end,
exhausted, always hoping that beyond a
last dark channel they will find a wonder.

The wonder, though, remains in what’s unseen;
the narrow capillaries; the whole machine
with its elaborate vessels, filters
of mineral, rich with minute particulars.

The wonder lies in courses of a deep
and hidden purity, the constant seep
of waters, and in due time their issuing
into a flight of streams, a sudden spring.
Taken from
"The Angel and the Fox" by David Morphet
(2003 Notion Books, ISBN 0 9541573 2 )
 

Up the gritstone steps of Pen-y-Ghent,
moorland impounded in a maze of walls.
On the horizon stand the other
high places of the Pennine trinity –
uncrowned Whernside; Ingleborough helm -
and down below, a great quarry-scar –
a five-tiered Epidaurus, limestone-grey –
gouged out of Horton hill.

This is my territory. This is where
landscape speaks in an accent that I know
in every clough and thwaite and settlement;
in the high rakes and dry scars of the moor;
in the beck that trickles out of Browgill Cave;
in the dark shafts of the swallow-holes;
in the rough pastures of the valley sides;
in the cold rain siling down on Pen-y-Ghent.

This is a valley which has kept its head -
no special Act of Parliament required;
no monkey business with the fingerposts
or jiggery-pokery with ‘road-up’ signs.

But two stone bridges which a churn could block,
forcing the skewed road through their narrow die.
That’s how the Davids of the dale cut off
Goliath’s head, and ditch the juggernauts.

A Dreamsong for Dent

It could have been a Pennine mini-state;
a moorland Venice with its oligarchs.
Were there not statesmen in the dale?

There would be problems –
currency, for instance, would be sheep
and always being clipped.

There would be vendettas, too,
touching fence and fodder,
but no stiletto in the byre.

Frontiers - never an issue.
North and south and east,
the hills would keep armies out.

All exports would go west;
Dent stockings into the sunset,
with marble argosies.

Pen-y-Ghent

So to the nab of Pen-y-Ghent
where moor’s impounded in a maze of walls
and landscape speaks in accents that I know -
a tongue of scars and rakes and becks
straight from the Norse. A land of spur and knoll,

rough pasture on the valley side,
a cold wind scouring over scarp
from Ribblehead. Here is my own;
my latitude and dialect,
my discourse and parole.

From this bleak Sinai the moors roll out
austere and puritan and fall
in tussock, stone and reed
sodden to the valley floors
down gill and swallow-hole.

If there’s illusion here,
it’s deeply rooted in the bone
and ineradicable.
This is native heath and home,
meridian and pole.

More information from:
 www.notionbooks.co.uk

After the Wars

 ‘After the wars’, fore-elders heard and said,
four brothers came together all the way
down from Scotland, wearing the plaid.

Nothing, though, about which wars, or why.
The micro-legend harks three hundred years
back to the killing times in Galloway,

but that’s a far cry from Dent or Ribblesdale
where farmers milking their lives away
forgot, or lost all interest in the tale.

The mini-anecdote tells nothing of hunters
combing the heather, sent by Claverhouse
to mop up covenanters.

Nothing about conventicles
on the high moors, or martyrdoms.
Nothing about religion, nothing political.

Just the four brothers wearing the plaid
heading for England, seeking a safer billet
in quieter byres, and no doubt better paid.