Old Trigs

I saw the trig though the stainless steel fence almost immediately and broke into a small grin of triumph.  Maybe ten feet inside the perimeter, its brown, pebbly concrete was splashed with pale lichens.  Framing it from behind were massive stacked ranks of metal beer barrels.  Leaf litter from the close-by birch trees was scattered round its base and, further back, a dip in the grass was filled with a large puddle.  Human detritus was also tangled up amongst the fallen twigs – plastic bags, polystyrene cups, food wrappers – disfiguring the little corner of wildness in the centre of the business park.  Someone had found their way to the trig at some time and placed a rather worn and weather-beaten golf ball on the top, towards the end of one of the sight-lines.  It seemed a casual act of desecration, a sign of lack of respect.  Who would have done it?  Not one of the trig nerds seeking it out; a bored employee, for some reason in possession of a golf ball?  A trespasser who had found a way round the site’s security?  It emphasised the forlorn scene.  This monument to mankind’s impulse to map and control the world, hemmed in by commerce’s bland structures, a neglected megalith, the views it was meant to command from its bend in the river Tame now hidden.  I know they’re neither as ancient nor as significant, in terms of human development, as stone circles and the like, but I feel their violation the way anyone would that of a prehistoric site.  It’s a pity to see, and I feel the sadness and the sorrow for their eventual and inevitable disappearance, these hidden-away markers of the high land.  I want them somehow to exert a chthonic power, to gather the strength of the land somehow, to show us humans that you don’t mess with the old gods with impunity.

Wilderness Bones

On top of the moors, an area the map simply marks as ‘wilderness’, the dry heather, which crunches under our boots, sending ash-like cluster of petals in to the wind, is interspersed by ovoid patches of chocolate-brown peat, like bare, untended flowerbeds.  Some of these spread out over the area of, perhaps, a tennis court; some are fringed with pebbles of gritstone, whose quartzite content twinkles in the sun.  One of these rain-ploughed mud-plots is scattered with the bleached, ancient remains of trees; dry, white, twisted limbs of wood.  The paleness of the wood against the darkness of the earth makes them look like bones, the strange bones of long-lost dinosaurs, up there on the hills.  A multi-forked stump looks like a vertebra; a fragment of a branch is a rib.  They sit on the surface, or are slightly buried in the mud.  Industrial rain has stripped the fibre out of the layers of peat and left these totems of forgotten forests exposed once more to the air.  How strange to think of these high moors covered in trees.  These places, so familiar as bleak wastes of emptiness and bog, were once thick with greenery and full of life.  It’s a vanished landscape, whether it was caused or abetted by man’s actions, or whether it was just a part of nature’s ceaseless change, but those bones of trees are there for now, reminding us of what has passed.