Simon English
England Revisited

On an oil drum placed on moor of Walden Beck Valley. 4 miles from West Burton. Near local sinks.

On a broken fence post that I pushed into a big tussock of reed on a grass and sedge enclosure up the Walden Valley.

This reed tussock oddly stands alone in this place, not that tussocks are rare up here but in this exact place it is noticeable. When I hitch-hiked and walked up here in 1971, looking at the map I could see that there would be no feature on which to fix the flag. So I picked up a discarded 5 gallon agricultural can on which to tie it when I reached the calculated grid reference.

In 2010 I did not know what to look for so I had to use the little information there was in the black and white photographs. All I had to go on was a depression in the ground, with a bit of wall and fence beyond against a view of the head of the valley two or three miles to the south.

I wandered about the moorland, in and out of sinkholes and deep rills until I located a shoulder of ground between a rill and the junction of two others beyond which was a section of dry stone wall that continued with a fence running downhill parralel to watercourse. This would be the exact grid co-ordinate.

At this point stood the big lone reed tussock. It was almost as if the rusting drum of 1971 had protected or encoraged the growth of the reeds. The photographic match was exact.I was amazed at my younger self's ability to navigate where I might have got lost or compromised my destination.

All is quiet up here except for the distant bleating of sheep and the cry of the curlews in the wind. The road up the valley is a dead end so there is only local traffic. The field patterns with drystone walls and a scattering of field edge hawthorne seems the same as it was after all these years.

To the north down the valley a plantation of conifer has just been clear felled. These must have been small trees when I was last here.

The flat rich narrow fields by the river in the bottom of the valley have lush well grazed grass. The tumbled walls allow sheep to pass between one old enclosure to another. No hay is stored in the little barns but hay or haylage must still be cut as a mole eradication program of pasture can be seen by the bridge. Here is a gibbet of a couple of dozen corpses, the fur jeweled with brown fly pupae and the emerging greenbottle flies warming themselves in the sunshine on the fence rails.
Points 16 & 17