Wainman's Pinnacle...

There’s a folly, on a rocky outcrop in Yorkshire, that has sentimental value for me. Each time I pass Wainman’s Pinnacle, my thoughts turn to my dad, a down-to-earth Yorkshire patrician not normally given to flights of fancy. It was he who engendered in me a love of walking and wildlife, even though that came about almost by accident.

As a wee lad I used to grub around in the garden for whatever treasures I could find: stones, snails, worms, dung and the like. Amongst the more salubrious items were birds' feathers. With the optimism of youth, I would present them to my father for identification. Hoping to maintain his facade of all-knowing omnipotence for as long as possible, he would put down the Yorkshire Post at every time of asking and give me his undivided attention. Not bad for a man who, to avoid joining in a conversation at meal-times, would concentrate intently on reading the back of a Worcester Sauce bottle.

Knowing I would label the feathers for my collection, he tried to ascribe a different bird's name to each one. After the roster of sparrows and finches, however, he found it an increasingly difficult task. Which is why my little museum featured feathers that had come from such unlikely species as the Scarlet Ibis and Wandering Albatross. No matter. His feats of inspired guesswork left me with a lifelong interest in birds.

In terms of imparting fatherly wisdom, this was only the beginning. I must have been seven or eight years old when he first took me to see the folly. We stood on the rocks and gazed at the view. “From here”, he announced, portentiously, “you can get to anywhere in the world”. I was stunned: "What? Anywhere, dad?" "Anywhere", he confirmed.

The implications were staggering to a boy whose experience of life extended little further than house, garden and the nearby woods that witnessed so many games and adventures. I wasn't a street-wise child. Even when I decided to run away from home, piqued by a parental telling-off, my progress was halted by the main road that I wasn't allowed to cross. But this view seemed to suggest an infinity of possibilities. The world opened up, like the petals of a flower, as my youthful imagination took flight.

The Lancaster Canal at Garstang...

England’s canal network may be the last technology that everybody could understand... as well as marking the moment in our history when we abandoned the notion of self-reliance and put our faith in ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’ instead. It’s amazing to think of the time, effort and money expended, mostly during the 18th century, to create two thousand miles of man-made waterways. They were the future of bulk transport... for a while.

Canals made commercial sense: a barge, pulled by a single horse and carrying a typical payload of, say, 30 tons, could do the work of a hundred packhorses. By the end of the 18th century, though, the canal-building boom was almost over, and wealthy entrepreneurs were looking to invest in the railways. With few exceptions the canals went into an irreversible decline. Lock gates rotted away; the waterways silted up; when land was needed for building, sections of canal were filled in.

So it’s good to see canals being renovated, and brought back into use... even though it’s only non-urgent cargo that’s carried by barge these days, such as tax refunds and publishers’ royalty cheques. The bargees of old would recognise the canals as they are today, though they’d be nonplussed to discover that what they did to earn a living is now being done for recreation and relaxation. There are more boats on British canals now - nearly all for recreation - than there ever were during the heyday of commercial traffic.

For us the canals represent a benign fantasy: the freedom to enjoy a slower, less hectic pace of life. People buy a narrowboat and talk, in excitable tones, about the pleasures of being able to take off whenever they want. They can cast off, and explore the entire canal system. That’s the theory, anyway. The truth, alas, is more prosaic: they find a mooring, somewhere between the abattoir and the glue factory, and never go anywhere.

Never mind... everybody loves canals. They bring a smile to our faces, in the way that barrel organs and steam trains do, as we negotiate the locks and travel through the landscape at walking pace, before tying up at a waterside pub and dreaming the day away.

Dale End, Duddon Valley...

Will a week without planes make us reconsider our attitudes towards air travel? Probably not. In the space of a few years we’ve come to regard foreign holidays as a right, not a privilege. First it was one holiday each year, then two, then three. We’ll no doubt carry on flying to exotic locations, staying in the air-conditioned luxury of ‘international’ hotels, enjoying a week of sun, sand, sea and sangria. We’ll meet a few locals, of course - carrying our bags, serving us drinks - but mostly we’ll stay by the pool.

The experience of foreign holidays, though relaxing, leaves many people curiously unmoved. I’ve asked friends, on their return: “How was it?”, expecting to hear of adventures in faraway places, or, at the very least, some amusing anecdotes. Most people can only manage a shrug of the shoulders. “The hotel was good”, they’ll admit, while struggling to find anything else to say. They’d jetted off to a place that, until recently, had seemed achingly distant and exotic - more of a mirage than a holiday destination - and returned with little to show for the experience except for a tan acquired rather too quickly for comfort. It was just a holiday...

It must be about five years since I last got my passport stamped. It’s not that I’ve stopped travelling; it’s just that I’ve just been travelling in smaller circles. My ‘patch’ is the North of England. Now, the ‘North of England‘ isn’t an area you’ll find on any map. It’s not a county, or an administrative district, and whole books are written about what it is and what it means, usually accompanied by an attempt to define its boundaries. It’s a pointless exercise. The North of England is not a geographic area, it’s a state of mind. For Londoners it begins somewhere about Watford Gap services on the M1 and might as well be coloured an unrelieved brown on the map, with the legend ‘Here be dragons’. There are Geordies who look down on Yorkshire folk as “soft Southern bed-wetters”, and Yorkshiremen who insist they’re living in ‘God’s own County’.

My ‘North’ is a rather amorphous area; it expands and contracts, like a rubber band stretched between the fingers of both hands. To the north there’s the obvious boundary of Hadrian’s Wall, though I make occasional foreys into the Borders. To the east is the North Sea, to the west, the Irish Sea. To the South it’s more complicated, and my choices more whimsical. I include the Peak National Park, but not Lincolnshire. Cheshire reminds me of footballers‘ wives; it doesn’t say ‘North‘ to me.

Fortunately, none of this matters. My personal map of the North can continue to expand and contract. But what is important is to keep exploring. Yesterday I had a pint in a wonderful little pub I had never visited, in Broughton Mills, which, though sounding like a West Yorkshire textile town, is actually a tiny community of scattered farms in the middle of nowhere (well, the Duddon Valley). Whenever I think I know the North of England quite well, I am gently reminded that I barely know it at all. I will be happy to keep travelling - not outwards but inwards - for the rest of my days.

I have a favourite quote; it’s quite perceptive, which suggests it’s not an original thought of mine. But, having googled it, I can’t find any other attribution. Never mind: if you get to know one area well, your horizons are limitless...

Outhgill Church, in Mallerstang, Cumbria...

From the moment I lifted the latch of the churchyard gate, a sense of peace enveloped me. It was a combination of factors, I suppose. St Mary’s is an old church in an out-of-the-way place, which has occupied its little patch of ground since it was built, in the first years of the 14th century. In 1663, finding the church “ruinous and decayed”, the redoubtable Lady Anne Clifford set about repairing it, as she repaired most of the other properties she inherited. She recorded the fact on a stone plaque above the door.

Also, it felt like the first day of spring... and, after such a long and hard winter, not before time. The grass was greening up, the sun was shining and the fields were full of new-born lambs. Here and there, in the churchyard, were little clumps of daffodils, which a couple of days of sunshine had brought into flower. Before the day was out I’d seen the first swallows, house martins and sand martins of the year, and heard the cadence of the first willow warbler (as well as having a wasp trying to drown itself in my beer). A buzzard wheeled lazily overhead... almost a metaphor for time passing slowly.

By my reckoning (and, yes, you have to wonder about the priorities of a man who bothers to keep a record of such things) the swallows usually return about April 21, so April 10 is very early. Some mechanism compelled the swallows, wintering in sub-Saharan Africa, to begin their long flight north, back to their breeding grounds in rural Cumbria... and to set off ten days early. What do the swallows know that we don’t?

I’m amazed by the mysteries of bird migration. I’m amazed, too, by the strength of faith that built this small, squat church about 700 years ago. And I enjoyed that peaceful feeling as I strolled around the churchyard with the warmth of the sun on my back, looking for camera angles and reading the inscriptions on the gravestones... while taking care not to tread on the daffodils. Even on my own, in a country churchyard, I have the distinct feeling I’m being watched...