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.