Last week I went to Swaledale, drove to the top end of the dale and parked at Muker in the little car park by the bridge. From there I walked through the famous flower meadows, doubled back to cross the river, and followed the old lead miner’s path upwards.

It was too early for the meadow flowers. The meadows are still being grazed and it is at least another month before the livestock will be taken off. After that they will be allowed to grow ready for hay harvesting. Nonetheless, despite being early in the season, there were clusters of botanists sitting in groups in the meadows with flower guides and hand lenses. Perhaps they were doing a survey; or it might have been a university student field trip. I didn’t stop to ask because I was headed for one of my old childhood haunts.

My aunt used to have a farm near Reeth in Swaledale. She moved there from the farm with the ‘howe’ that I wrote about in my Christmas Eve blog. Staying there as a young teenager during the long summer holidays I used to roam around Swaledale once my farm chores were done.

Children explore places in a way that adults do not. An adult will have a map and follow waymarked paths. They will measure distances and times to ensure that they are on schedule so that obligations and responsibilities can be fulfilled. In those long distant days without mobile ‘phones, and that were made up of endless warm summer afternoons that stretched long into evening, I could take a rucksack with some sandwiches, hop on my bike and disappear up the dale.

I was retracing one of those childhood explorations as I walked along the river Swale and then cut upwards into Swinner’s Gill, up the steep track to the long-abandoned lead mine. High above the valley, just before the tumbled down stone mine buildings, there is a gully full of boulders that make for treacherous and uneven walking. This leads to a waterfall, and underneath the waterfall there is a cave. This is Swinner’s Gill Kirk where dissenters used to meet in secret for religious services in the 17th century just after the English Civil War.

The cave is a long tube that was hollowed out by thousands and thousands of years of water flow through the limestone. The remarkable thing though is that these natural processes of erosion created bench-like ledges along either side of the tunnel where the dissenters could be seated during the services. Secrecy was paramount. Discovery would have resulted in imprisonment or worse. The cave is still not easy to find, you need to know where it is, there is no path.

Those summers were carefree and wild. It is true that the farm work was hard, mending dry stone walls, pulling thistles, carrying hay bales; but dale explorations are etched into my memory. I can still find the same hidden paths even now, decades later. At night, when I have trouble sleeping and am wide awake in the dark witching hours, I can delve into my imagination and even walk those sun-drenched paths through the meadows and up to the hidden cave until the memories turn to dreams and sleep.

Do you have some special places that you return to either in person or in memory?

Rowan on the Moor

A Moodscope member