Bog Myrtle & Peat

Leaves are turning in the Tyne at Chollerford. At the weir, the salmon are thrusting themselves to the current like javelins; rills of water flare about them. Only a few big fish have broken the surface in the time I’ve been watching. Instead of jumping, most prefer to wriggle in the fizz and walk on their bellies so all you can see are fins and tails and the occasional disc of a widened, vatic eye.

The nearest ones are most explicit. I can almost hear them panting like run-down calves in the water; their kypes are backbent and battered by nuts and October’s litter of twigs washed into the water. Then all of a moment, they’re clear of the weir and back to black riverlands again, heading home beneath the bridge in the direction of Wark with all the grim steadiness of pilgrims.

Then redwings rise in approaching dusk. Acorns rain on the ruins of a roman bathhouse. I walk East above the town, and a wooden cross bars the path, breakingh the skyline like a window without a frame. Beyond it lies St Oswald’s church at Heavenfield, and distant rain rolls in towards me like a sloe-blue bolt of cloth. Knowing they will soon be wet, sheep are pooling in the lee of the dyke nearby. But one of them is dying; it lies apart from the others and she doesn’t bother to move. Sycamore leaves slap against her like the palms of children, and each one cackles away to lie in schools by the roadside ditch. When a car passes and lights them up, they freeze. It’s the kind of night when you notice the first woodcock of the year, with the rib-revealing trees in their winding sheets unwinding.

In architectural terms, there’s nothing to love at St Oswald’s at Heavenfield. It doesn’t meet any criteria for beauty or charm. It simply is, and the building stands in the shelter of trees and a too-tall yew amongst the slack-toothed gravemarkers like a parachute in its final, urgent moment of failure. This is only the most recent of several churches which have been built on the site of an ancient battle between the Christian King Oswald and the Pagan Cadwallon ap Cadfan which spoiled the soil in 634AD.

Battlefields are ephemeral places, like the point where lightning strikes. Big storms can gather for weeks at sea before they ever find soil to sign, and history’s made by a thousand currents which are pounded together long before that single moment lashes into luminescent brightness. There’s nothing at Heavenfield to mark that fight; no shell holes or burnt-out tanks, and you’re silly to think there will be. Too much time has passed, but turn around and look at Hadrian’s Wall behind you. Those stones were ancient long before children called Oswald and Cadwallon played at their mothers’ knees.

Feeling for a match in the church which stands against the darkness, I light a candle and find the dusk abruptly rebuffed at the window. I walk down the aisle through interior spaces, blind to the world beyond my own momentary warmth. A framed inscription looms into view, asking me to pray for “The People of Northumbria”. Sheep wail outdoors in the darkness, and as I’m reading those words, I spot my own crow-foot, low-lit eyes in the picture’s glass before me. That’s when rain comes at last, so loudly to the windows.

And every bare-faced experience I’ve set down here contains the power to kill or cure me forever; each listed thing is both an elevation and the crush of an endless weight. I walk between the hazards, feeling safe from destructions of pleasure or pain because neither comes too much at once, and counterweights are always rescue-ready. I could tell you that I am clever to navigate the vast advancing night, but in truth I survive these times by simple fluke. They say I’m lucky; I duck the darkness and dive into light by random acts of serendipity. But I’ll surely fail someday, and one extreme or another will strip me down to the bone at last. That’s when I’ll go, and you’ll recall me like the sound of rain which fell as night rose but was dry by the dawn.

Picture: A view NW from Heavenfield, Northumberland – 6.10.22