I’ve recently been roaming around Upper Swaledale as often as I can and in a second hand bookshop I was lucky enough to find a battered copy of a book about the dale written by Ella Pontefract in the 1930s, illustrated with lovely wood cuts by Marie Hartley. The book has been guiding my walks in wonderful late August sunshine and took me to the heights of Swinnergill, where I could look down on the River Swale glittering as it flows in bends and bows on the rocky valley bottom between the steep fell slopes on either side.

Just near the edge of Swinnergill, with its abandoned lead mines, are the ruins of a stone farmhouse called Crackpot Hall. The name comes from dialect words for a crow and cave, meaning ‘the cave where the crows live’, and the farmhouse has its own chapter in Ella Pontefract’s book. It wasn’t a ruin in the 1930s but a working farm with a family living there. There is a wonderful description of an encounter with the farm’s children:

“The children at Crackpot Hall are untamed like their home. Until they go to school and lose a little of their naturalness they are spirits of the moors … Once as we sat gazing at the distant view of Keld, there was a sudden rush from behind, our caps and sticks were snatched away … and a tiny figure clambered after them with a mocking chuckling laugh – that was Alice at four years old, Alice with the madness of the moors about her, and all their wariness.”

The passage invokes the character, essence and lifeforce of a child brought up in nature, living in a house where the “tops of the doors and windows are at all angles, and the bedroom floors tilt like the rolling deck of a ship” and with a view “far below in the valley the river curves serpent like”. 

The story didn’t end there however. The children’s writer David Almond found Alice again in later life, aged 88 living in a village near Carlisle, and interviewed her for a BBC radio programme. Alice is as full of laughter in old age as she was as a child and it is delightful to hear her reminisces of the days when Swaledale as described by Ella Pontefract was still “a little country in itself … shrouded in its mystery”.

Do you have childhood memories of times in nature? I’ve found some by digging back and sifting through. Perhaps not as free and wild as Alice, but I found memories of September sunshine, flowers, brambles and apples. Tell us about any you can remember, or anything you’re enjoying about nature at the start of September.

You can listen to David Almond’s radio programme ‘Alice of Crackpot Hall’ here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06nr54x

Rowan on the Moor

A Moodscope member