Hellsborough Exposed — dark-peak-geography

Beeley wood is not its real name. Before it was Beeley it was Billa's Hag, and a hag is not an old woman but a woodland worked for winter fodder, the soft spikeless upper leaves of holly cut down to keep wooltard and demonspawn through the cold months. Ecclesfield Priory's monks are credited with the first written mention of the place in the 1160s, which is a nonsense; I have seen it named in milting semagrams that predate those monks by a considerable margin. Walking it now you find the holly all but gone, a roasting spit that stood there last time vanished though the fire remnants and the woodsmoke still hang about, and a dead Gruizer under the leaf fall looking very sorry for itself. Somebody is always watching in there. I have never settled whether it is the beauty of Dunlockslyn taking an interest or something a good deal more insipid, and lately I have stopped assuming it has to be one or the other.

Van told me of the Sunderlands, and I have not shaken the telling since. Beyond the Ripperthroat mountains, past a fissure in smooth black basalt, lies the great northern expanse — endless ice fields that run on, the Woad swear, forever, and beyond them nothing at all. They name it the bleakness: where our Bleak is a season, theirs is every day of the year, the very end of the world. On the neutral strip between the ice and the mountains huddle the villages of lost souls — pilgrims who turned off the Dun and could not scale the canyon walls, escaped milting slaves, the stranded who can go nowhere and will never leave. Neither woad nor milting trouble to recapture them, for there is nothing out there worth wanting, and the lost souls fight only amongst themselves, harming no one but each other.

Out past Ugg Hill, the Edgefield Obelisk stands alone where the Loxley runs lonely — a majestic monolith emerging from the murk like a needle of vengeance. They raised it in 1832 over a roadside spring, in memory of a child who drowned in the water that still runs beneath it. I've never decided whether it marks the grief or feeds it.

Somewhere above Stannington, at the head of the Rivelin Valley, stands the Head Stone - also known as Stump John, the Priestley Stone, or the Cock Crowing Stone - a solitary megalith that local lore maintains moves its position depending on the migration of curlbeak. I have found it in two different locations on two separate visits and have no satisfying explanation.

Every river in The Dark Peak flows eventually to the Ripperthroat mountains — the Dun, the Loxley, the Rivelin, all three tails of dunlockslyn, converging at the one place from which, according to both custom and theology, no resident of Hellsborough ever returns. Van has been there. He mentions it with the particular casualness he reserves for things he ought not to have survived.

Bradfield is drifting north. Ray Hobson has been measuring the boundary posts for long enough that his clipboard has its own character arc, and the data is consistent: fourteen metres of contested field, moving north at a rate he refuses to estimate in case estimating makes it faster.

Dale Road after murkfall: do not walk the centre line, the centre line walks you.