Ben Myers - The Gallows Pole: Once upon a time in the West Riding

The arresting cover of Ben Myers' sixth novel is a statement of intent for the work inside: historical fiction with danger and harshness and radicalism foregrounded; a bit punk rock, a bit psychedelic, not too knowingly retro. Frankly, I'd have bought it for the cover artwork alone. Thankfully, this is an author with form and the story itself does not disappoint; it cracks along at pace, based on a little-known episode in history tailor-made for the strain of gritty rural-noir which Myers, Paul Kingsnorth, Cynan Jones, Ross Raisin and others have rendered in recent years. The unearthed source material merits such a telling. It's the 1760s and the wild West Riding of Yorkshire is on the cusp of transformation, careless of the coming pandemonium to be wrought by industrialised manufacturing. Amidst the self-reliant weaving communities of the Calder Valley - for William Atkins (The Moor) 'a ditch made dim by its narrowness', a place of fugitives - emerge the Cragg Vale Coiners. Led by the brutally charismatic 'King' David Hartley, their outlaw business is the clipping of coins to produce counterfeit money; local currency for local people, recycled coin outwith the control of not only the crown, government and taxation but also the new capitalists ready to harness and exploit the power of land and labour. Thus, a dangerous business and (literally) a capital offence.    

The book's stylistic and narrative similarities with Kingsnorth's The Wake are striking. Both have central characters - David Hartley and Buccmaster - who are deluded, self-mythologising and ruthless yet also cast with a certain 'Man With no Name' dark allure. Like mythical cowboys of the northern past, these doomed men raging against the dying of the light are also possessed of pagan visions of stagmen and the old gods. Both authors utilise blunt vernacular speech to give voice to their protagonists, albeit in Kingsnorth's case a 'shadow tongue' version of Old English is utilised for the whole narration.

In the opening chapters, we see how up and over from the surrounding valleys men come to King David's call, 'like crows to the first pickings of carrion after the snow melt'; a repetitive roll-call of locally entrenched surnames: Dewhurst, Clayton, Sutcliffe, Bolton, Hepworth, Eastwood, Bentley, Hoyle, Pickles, Sykes, Greenwood, Feather and Proctor. These everyday monikers later counter-pointed by the tally of Yorkshire nobility called from across the ridings to address the threat to their wealth and power presented by the coiners activity. We dig repetition, as Mark E Smith would have it, and so does Ben Myers. It's a technique used deliberately and effectively throughout, toughening the narrative: 'the moors are ours and the woods are ours he said. And the marshes are ours and the sky is ours and the fire is ours and the forge is ours. The might is ours and the means are ours and the moulds are ours and the metal is ours and the coins are ours and the crags are ours and this grand life in the dark wet world is ours.'

Hartley's lair is high amongst 'the hill's hanging silence', to use Ted Hughes' description of this haunted terrain of his youth, where bosky slope gives way to moorland waste. A hint of Cormac McCarthy pervades the depicted harsh beauty of this landscape. When Hartley's nemesis, excise-man William Deighton - a walker of the moors and valleys in pursuit of those who would evade the (real) king's tax - returns to Halifax in the gloaming, the town's lights flicker 'as if the sky had fallen in defeat, and draped itself across the rise and fall of the bloodless, smothering land.' To my mind what elevates Myers prose above much similar place-bound company is the clear rootedness of the writing in the Calderdale-based author's embodied knowledge - based on walking and observing - of the landscape in which the actors operate, buttressed by an authentic portrayal of the life-rhythms of those working the land. This is an author unafraid to leaven the drama of the story with the small detail of rural life: for instance, a couple of pages describing a scything team working their field at pace 'as they raced against the season and the coming of the harvest moon.'

A certain poetic mysticism is also scattered amidst the thrifty speech of Hartley and the Coiners, somewhat at odds with their rough ways: 'rope or rain or a day threshing grain ... I take each as it comes'; 'the moor is the moor and the wind always blows.' Thugs ain't what they used to be, perhaps. Silver-tongued maybe, but there are frequent brutish scenes of rising and implied violence, recalling prime-Scorsese or, closer to home, Shane Meadow's Derbyshire-set Dead Man's Shoes in their cinematic menace and liberal deployment of the harshest word in the English language, not quaint. The shocking end of loud-mouth drunk Abraham Ingham thrust head-first into an open fire, 'left smoldering, a spent match in human form' as his killers return to their tap-room pints, is particularly wince-inducing. As is the defilement of the traitor James Broadbent in York gaol. A gruesome end seems to be a possibility for just about everyone involved.

This violence, combined with the radical social commentary of the story and pervasive sense of movement through the landscape, bestow filmic qualities which the author acknowledges as he describes an eclectic playlist put together whilst writing the book. It's not hard to hear this music soundtracking a film adaptation of the book, which might look a little like a mash-up between Ben Wheatley's A Field in England, Ken Loach's Black Jack and Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lydon.

As the place-names in the narrative came thick and fast - reminiscent of a seventeenth-century survey of manorial bounds - I pulled out my battered Ordnance Survey map of the South Pennines, weathered by time, held together by yellowing sellotape. Family connections bond me to the country immediately north of Calderdale, Keighley and the Worth Valley over Cock Hill and Nab Hill, and I have previously posted about this landscape, my younger self's introduction to hill walking, now embedded in memory. The names on the map speak of place as, above all, morphology and topography. Northern - mostly Anglo-Saxon or Norse - descriptors of the lie of the land. Clough, slack, holme, delf, edge, nook, wham, carr, hey, hole, head, nab, bank, dyke, shaw, royd, shelf, stones. A lexicon used by Myers to rivet the narrative to its locale; to particularise the valleys and streams and rocky places and moors and woods in which the story unfolds. Many of these toponyms have been appropriated as local surnames, fixing a symbiosis between people and place; the bearers literally a product of their landscape. And there, above the river Ryburn feeding into the main Calder Valley, a crow's fly over Crow Hill from the Hartley homestead in Cragg Vale, spreads Gallows Pole Hill. Presumably, part-inspiration for the book's title (alongside the traditional song, The Maid Freed From the Gallis Pole)?

One minor place-naming misstep is the use of Calderdale and West Yorkshire, modern-day administrative units which would not be used as descriptors of the local area by eighteenth-century folk. Not sure either about the use of the archaic 'Yorvikshire' in Hartley's vernacular, but artistic license at play here so fair enough. Of course, it is the storyteller's prerogative to extrapolate the partial facts that are fed down through history but this reader also wonders whether King David really was as locally revered and acclaimed as suggested. How many really were thankful to Hartley for clothing and feeding them, and giving them hope? Did thousands really line the old streets of York to view his procession to the gallows?

Not in dispute are the economic changes which circle around and loom over the actions of the Coiners (the 'progress' of proto-capitalism, industrial development, a hardening of the rule of law and land ownership), prefiguring the enormous rupture in the way of life of the independent dwellers of these previously left-alone valleys that the Industrial Revolution would bring. Earlier in the eighteenth-century Daniel Defoe had commented approvingly on the lack of dependence on and subservience to the gentry amongst the self-sufficient and egalitarian populations of the farmsteads and hamlets of these hilly districts of the West Riding. As the century draws to a close the characters here are lamenting not only that 'the machines and mills are coming' but also 'they do not give a fuck about us hill-dwellers'; 'the land is being sold off. They say there are mills the size of cathedrals in Lancashire.' The self-made prosperity of the cottage industry of small-holdings and hand-looms is coming to an end. A few decades later Halifax and the Calder Valley would be central to a more famous popular uprising, the revolt of the Luddites; a conflict which Robert Reid in Land of Lost Content described as threatening 'the stability of the nation from within as it had never been threatened since.'

In the end, and in the face of this maelstrom, we leave Hartley dreaming of his moor and woods, and the Stagman: 'still he waches now and so too will be there when im drug up to that gallis pole that awaytes us Heel be thur I no it Waytin a me.' In reality, as the epilogue hammers home, 'the stone cathedrals of mass production' were to win out and King David would be forgotten. Mills and new rows of terraced houses, and turnpike roads, canals and railways, would remorselessly fill the valleys, transforming not only the population's economic and social lives but also the very landscape. The Coiners and their descendents would ultimately bend to the will of the new puritans of capital, commerce and mass-production.

The Dig: a bleak midwinter read

No end of year list this. Just a short recommendation of a short, stark and arresting novel: a bleak midwinter read.

The Dig is Cynan Jones' fourth book, but the first that I have found. It is the story of two men who's lives are ingrained in the cold, sodden fields of the hill country of mid Wales; one a recently bereaved sheep farmer, the other a single-minded badger-baiter. The language and tone of the narrative is sparse and bleak and matter of fact, reflecting the landscape in which the two protagonists edge towards their, seemingly inexorable, fated confluence.

It is clear where most reader's sympathies will lie: with Daniel, the farmer bringing new life at lambing time, sleep-walking through the long hours occupied by memories of his dead wife, rather than the un-named big man with his dogs and his barbarous occupation. But this is an unsentimental picture of rural life and both men are of the land; making a living through their knowledge and understanding of the animals they share their days with. Indeed they are both in some way trapped in their existence in the fields. Of the big man we are told: "He was too much of an instrument to change what he did".

The writing of Cynan Jones has been compared to the visceral narrations of landscape, of nature that characterise the work of Ted Hughes and Cormac McCarthy. I was also reminded of God's Own Country by Ross Raisin, rooted in the North York Moors and the words of its upland anti-hero narrator. The cadence of the writing, seemingly awkward at first, draws the reader into the landscape, pulls you away from the passive gaze of an outsider. 

Reading the book reminded me of two of my own observations from earlier in the year; brief glimpsings that unsettled, and have stayed with me. The first was on a local walk, during a cold and glowering late winter morning. Resting at a field gate affording a fine wide-screen view, I was drawn to the sound of dogs and men closer to hand. Down-slope at the fields edge (the field in these photographs) I surveyed a pick-up truck, its occupants digging in the bank running along the boundary, accompanied by insistent barks. I did not linger, was not seen. But I had seen them and wondered what their labours were in this lonely spot. Perhaps renewing a fence or clearing scrub? This was not the view I came away with though. There was something malevolent in the air. Had I happened across badger-baiters? was the question that nagged for the rest of the day.

A contrasting day and location in the summer: waiting at a rural level crossing in the Aire Valley, North Yorkshire and the only people disembarking into the sunshine from the two carriage diesel unit are a rag tag band of teenage boys; track-suited hyperactivity - lads from the estates of Keighley or Bingley or Bradford, maybe Leeds I surmised. As we waited on opposite sides of the crossing gates their exuberance was a striking counterpoint to the reticent village halt that had just accepted them. Equally frantic dogs accompanied the boys, one of whom carried a wooden box in which his ferrets lurked. As the gates lifted the gang unhesitatingly and knowingly climbed the nearest four bar and raced across the large field adjacent to the station, their released dogs filling its space. Space that minutes earlier had been the benevolent preserve of their prey, gambolling rabbits. I carried on my way as a passing local resident dialled the number of the field's owner.

The Dig gives voice to such encounters at the sharp end of rural life. The story dissects our cosy view of the countryside to reveal the unbidden and often unspoken darkness that lurks at every gate post, in every copse, atop every hill. A reminder that harsh, hard lives and deeds bleed into the landscape still.

Landscape and poetry: 'an anthology open in the sun'

I seem to be increasingly immersing myself in sounds and words that my younger, more culturally timid self, would have eschewed. It strikes me that getting older allows you to choose, perhaps unconsciously, between one of two paths: either slowly turning full circle and elegaically retreading old familiar ways (music collection mummified in yer 20s; a narrowing of the ways, living a life of incrementally reduced wonder) or striking out for new ground, ascending unfamiliar heights to see whats over the horizon, giddy and expectant. No contest I would have thought. And following the latter trail is liberating, shedding the constraints of earlier years and conservative youth (perhaps those who strike out on a more bohemian course too early end up having nowhere to go but right-wards; the opposite direction of travel, from left field free-thinkers to Boden-wearing Telegraph supplement readers). 

One manifestation of this period of enlightenment is tuning on to Radio 3 and classical music in general (OK, maybe not exactly the cutting edge, which was long ago blunted anyway, but more radical territory than the re-formers, landfill indie or safe singer-songwriter fodder that targets my demographic, like a stultifying smog); on surveying a rack of second hand records (for there is no magic or mystery in the grim and colourless efficiency of iTunes, Spotify et al) I'm now as likely to go for Bach as Black Sabbath, the Byrds or Burial. But the more unexpected meander has been into the world of poetry, previously subconsciously dismissed as the pretentious stuff of studied dilettantism. More specifically, and less surprisingly, I have been drawn to the carefully hewn and richly crafted words of poets who use landscape, place, nature and the elements - however tangentially - as their theme or motif.

    

As with classical music, my starting point for poetry has been an almost laughable level of ignorance; but this year zero baseline of knowledge and exposure has meant that the last few years have been a joyous drift into new territory. Yes, I was lazily aware of Burns, Ted Hughes and Wordsworth, but only hazily familiar with John Clare and Edward Thomas, the two titans of poetry that is rooted in a sense of place (but in no way safely and sentimentally so). As with music, discovery of one artist leads on to another and before long a labyrinth has been entered, with a lifetime of exploration exposed. So, I gorge on the Oxfam bookshop's selections of archaic texts, classics and the works of pioneers: Beowulf  (the sadly recently deceased Seamus Heaney's excellent 1999 translation), Sir Garwain and the Green Knight, Piers the Ploughman, Dante, Poly-Olbion, Milton, Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Housman's A Shropshire Lad and on and on. 

Treasures all, but there is also a vibrant contemporary strain of poetry - perhaps echoing the outpouring of prose writing on themes of place, the natural world and our relationship to it in recent years. Much of this output feels radical and non-conformist, in the best traditions of the poetry of the past that has weathered well. For instance, new poetry figures large in EarthLines magazine, the journal Terrain and the Dark Mountain network of 'writers, artists and thinkers in search of new stories for troubled times'. The web and new media have also opened up opportunities for poets to share their work more easily. Collectives such as Longbarrow Press ('poetry from the edgelands') utilise on-line audio channels like SoundCloud  to give voice to their output; neat symmetry with the oral traditions of poetry, which is generally best appreciated aloud.

Now that I have belatedly 'found' John Clare and Edward Thomas, their work is a touchstone that I keep going back to; recently given further depth by the excellent Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas by Matthew Hollis, which documents how Thomas, through the seasons leading up to his death at Arras on the Western Front in 1917, realised the latent poetry that had been in his prose writing all along.

There are many works that I have found thought-provoking or just a joy to read but here are extracts from a few that have particularly seared themselves into my imagination; all, in some way, topographical or concerned with the interplay between humanity and environment. 

Cock-Crows, Ted Hughes 

I stood on a dark summit, amongst dark summits -

Tidal dawn was splitting heaven from earth.

The oyster

Opening to taste gold.

And I heard the cock-crows kindling in the valley

Under the mist - 

They were sleepy,

Bubbling deep in the valley cauldron...

Dart, Alice Oswald

...Dartmeet - a mob of waters

where East Dart smashes into West Dart

two wills gnarling and recoiling

and finally knuckling into balance...

Kidland, Paul Kingsnorth

He came when the summer was high

to the dark false forest of the Kidland

where light does not go and people do not go

and trees are without branches because it suits us

that they should go naked...

Solnhofen, W.G. Sebald

...Overtaken by ruin

a Wilhelmine artisan mill

reflects the breadlessness

of the passing trains

Deposited between layers

lie the winged

vertebrates

of prehistory.

Speak of the North, Charlotte Bronte
Speak of the North! A lonely moor
Silent and dark and trackless swells,
The waves of some wild streamlet pour
Hurriedly through its ferny dells...

The Combe, Edward Thomas

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.

Its mouth is stopped with bramble, thorn and briar;

And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk

By beech and yew and perishing juniper...

The Land of Dreams, William Blake
...Oh what Land is the Land of Dreams?
What are its Mountains and what are its Streams?

...Father, oh father! what do we here
In this Land of unbelief & fear?
The Land of Dreams is better far,
Above the light of the Morning Star.

The Mores, John Clare

...Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene

Nor fence of ownership crept inbetween

To hide the prospect of the following eye

Its only bondage was the circling sky

One mighty flat undwarfed by bush and tree

Spread its faint shadow of immensity

And lost itself, which seemed to eke its bounds

In the blue mist the horizon's edge surrounds...

The Reader Looks Up, Arthur Freeman
See now how the English landscape lies
like an anthology open in the sun - 
a rock-bound book, of even leaves
thumbed and unthumbed, of parts begun

and left undone, uncut, unread...

The Ruin, Anonymous

Wondrous is the stone-wall, wrecked by fate;

the city-buildings crumble, the works of the giants decay.

Roofs have caved in, towers collapsed,

barred gates are broken, hoar frost clings to mortar,

houses are gaping, tottering and fallen,

undermined by age. The earth's embrace,

its fierce grip, holds the mighty craftsmen;

they are perished and gone...

V, Tony Harrison

...This graveyard on the brink of Beeston Hill's

the place I may well rest if there's a spot

under the rose roots and the daffodils

by which dad dignified the family plot.

If buried ashes saw then I'd survey

the places I learned Latin, and learned Greek,

and left, the ground where Leeds United play

but disappoint their fans week after week...

Welsh Landscape, R.S. Thomas

To live in Wales is to be conscious

At dusk of the spilled blood

That went to the making of the wild sky.

Dyeing the immaculate rivers

In all their courses,

It is to be aware,

Above the noisy tractor

And hum of the machine

Of strife in the strung woods,

Vibrant with sprung arrows.

You cannot live in the present,

At least not in Wales.

You can't keep an inveterate list-maker down, and there is a wider selection of the poems and collections that I have journeyed through as, in the words of Edward Thomas, 'I passed the horizon ridge to a new country' (Over the Hills) in the Reading the Landscape pages of this blog. 

As a footnote, it is not just the poetry of landscape that I find fascinating, but also the landscape of poetry; the morphology of the word-hoard itself. The subject matter and imagery may well be the starting point to draw in your interest but, in a way that prose cannot match, a poem makes you consider every word and often uses words, phrases and syntax in surprising and unusual ways. There is something about the sparse and elastic structure of poetry that encourages the reader to linger and reflect, to allow the type on the page to take flight. Even the lexicon of terms to describe the form and structure of poetry has a lyrical quality: cadence, coda, metre, stanza, timbre etc; though the technical terminology can still baffle me somewhat: blank verse (verse that does not employ a rhyme scheme, though not the same as free verse); iambic pentameter (a line of poetry comprising of five metrical 'feet', with an end stressed two syllable foot?); and I'm still not entirely sure what characterises a Haiku (the aim, apparently, is to create something greater than the sum of the parts).

Landscape in particular 4: Worth Valley

View of Oldfield in the Worth Valley

This is the latest in a regular-occasional series of posts on specific landscapes that mean a lot to me, or are new discoveries; after all, interest in the topographical is nothing without a feeling for sense of place: genius loci.

 

Previous 'Landscape in particular' posts:
Cold Ashton

Kenilworth Castle
Bolton Abbey

The Worth is much like any of the other green valleys that snake through the Millstone Grit uplands of the South Pennines, a transition zone between the more venerated and celebrated landscapes of the Peak District to the south and the Yorkshire Dales to the north: here is a heady mix of 'dark satanic mills', non-conformity, rugged beauty and often harsh weather; the topography seeming to embody the very essence of the cussed independent spirit that Yorkshire folk (because that is how we must refer to them) are so stubbornly proud of. Its a landscape in which dispersed farmsteads, miles of dry stone walling and pack-horse tracks across the high heather moors share space and time with woollen mill towns and villages battered by the elements and economic decline, and narrow valley floors often crowded with two centuries of communications networks: canal, railway and road. In his classic study of the region, Millstone Grit, Glynn Hughes captures the essence of the place thus: 

"Those towns whose lights at night dance in little cups and hollows between peninsulas of the moors, from which they look like safe little harbours." 

The Worth valley is, though, different because embedded on its slopes is the small town of Haworth, once home to the Brontë sisters, Anne, Charlotte and Emily, and its fields, farmsteads and moors were the inspiration for their brief but astonishingly creative burst of Gothic Victorian writing. It is by no means the only locality in the area that has significant literal or artistic associations: Ted Hughes hailed from nearby Mytholmroyd and much of his poetry was rooted in the hills and towns he grew up in ("The valleys went out, the moorland broke loose" Heptonstall Old Church); Simon Armitage's contemporary poetry is similarly influenced by his Marsden base, a little to the south; David Hockney and JB Priestley are sons of nearby Bradford; and the town of Hebden Bridge is awash with galleries, artists and generic northern bohemia. However, the Brontë's are on a different plane of international recognition and canonisation, up there with Jane Austin and Charles Dickens.