Not just a pretty face?

As you may now be sick of reading, Brassington is a beautiful Derbyshire village in a lovely setting. It sits with its back to the north, facing south and west. Most of the houses and walls are limestone and there are plenty of gardens and trees as well as the green hills to soften the edges. But it's not just pretty and it hasn't always been so clean and calm. The landscape around is littered with the signs of a very different kind of life and work. The last lead miners worked here right into the 19th century and there is evidence of continuous mining here from long before the Romans. The spoil heaps and stopped-up mine shafts - now mellowed by a grassy skin - are all over the fields and hillsides but beneath these soft green mounds the earth is honeycombed with climbing shafts, turns and galleries.  So, it's an unusual and fascinating landscape but beautiful today. Walking over it I try to imagine what it might have looked  like when the mining was in its heyday: the dangerous ground littered with hazards, waste everywhere, fires burning, smoke, lead polluting the land and water, men having to make a living from hard, dangerous work. Not beautiful at all.

The other 'non-pretty' aspect is that there are a number of quarries and factories close by, out of sight of our house and the village but still a crucial part of the area and its economy. When you move to the country from the city there's a natural tendency to want everything to be non-citified - but that's obviously a false division. After all, the country is full of city stuff - industrial products: cars, electricity, washing machines, computers, mobile phones (even if they don't work here!). And the city is full of 'country' stuff - milk, vegetables, wood, wheat, oats, etc (even if most come into the city in huge lorries, and some farming processes are as close to industrialised as dammit.) Most of us these days know this, we're sophisticated modern folk after all with few illusions, but still the dream of escape from one and into the other persists - either into the pastoral rural idyll - or into the sophisticated city full of art, culture and entertainment. Of course much of the escaping is one-way: from country to city.  Brassington village and the area around it had a much bigger population in the past served by shops and services, most of which no longer exist - in those days people worked in the area they lived. And many of the people who live here now are not 'natives' but incomers, either people who came here to work, retired people, or commuters to nearby towns. I was at a village social event and a local man said to me rather grumpily that there were lots of 'incomers' now and that everything had changed since his childhood. I had a pang of guilt for a moment - until I thought about Chorlton, full of incoming people, many of them from country places all over the world - probably plenty of Derbyshire escapees among them! And Chorlton, Manchester, most places in fact, have changed enormously since my childhood too. Modernity powers on. Is this a good or bad thing? Answers on postcard please. Whatever, it's probably unstoppable. Fair swap mate, I felt like saying to the grumpy bloke at the party, but didn't. Incomers better keep their mouths shut, for a time at least. 

There's another aspect to the industrial remains near Brassington, pointed out to me by a visiting artist friend, who opened my eyes to the richness and strange beauty to be seen if you just look properly.  Some of the objects left by older processes have the quality of monuments or sculptures. These four towers are just off the High Peak Trail and very close to us. The trail was once a railway and the structures may once have supported an aerial conveyor carrying quarried or mined materials. This convergence of colour, rock, stone, history, field and light is both lovely and poignant. 

Also next to the trail is a factory which processes and manufactures quarrying products and which is still in operation. This photograph shows the same short-lived light on  the side of the factory building. When my friend pointed it out I saw for the first time a complex beauty in these silver and gold corrugations overlaid by patterns of shadow.

Thinking about it now, maybe these images offer a hint to me of what I might need to learn, how I might learn to see  - beyond crude city/country oppositions - to make a life that can include both. 

Ageing Fast and Slow

I don't like the word retirement. It has connotations of quietness and  conclusion - things slowly coming to an end, a vague peacefulness descending, like soft snow settling onto a quiet landscape. It's a word that goes with slippers and firesides, with teapots and scones, a woman sitting beside a hearth, a book in her lap, thinking over her life - all the things she did, all she might have done.

It's an image of post-work and ageing that many of my generation understandably, often vehemently, reject. Many of the people I know, in their 50s and 60s, including Him Outdoors, are still running over mountains, cycling up Everest, trekking to the South Pole in bare feet as well as growing businesses, travelling the world, solar system, universe, while juggling grandchildren and finding the Higgs-Boson particle. ( I  exaggerate - but only a little.)



Of course it is good to refuse to lie down, to try out new things, to keep the body fit and set new challenges, but there's also be a hint of denial in all this speed and busyness. If yer keep dodging, the bullet won't git yer. And although I can't compete with that exhausting lot, I'm also trying to dodge my own bullet - blogging, studying on an Open University course, writing, moving from one of the flattest cities in the country to a hilly house in a hilly village in Derbyshire just at the age when some people think you should be pricing stair lifts.  Do not go gentle into the slipper-y slope of retirement, I tell myself . . . rage rage against the dying of the knee joints.


My main physical activity is walking - I go out lots of days either on my own or with him outdoors. It's supposed to be fast, aerobic- type walking, but recently it's slowed down a lot. This is mainly because of  the Open University course I'm doing - Neighbourhood Nature - which helps you to learn about aspects of the natural world in your neighbourhood - the clue's in the title. I also take photographs. So now the walks involve a lot of stopping, looking around, click clicking, starting again and then stopping again. Which is fine when I'm alone but when my nearest and dearest speed freak is with me, it causes some agitation. Last time we went out he was heard muttering to himself:  Is this a walk or a picnic? And if it's a picnic where's the bloody food?  

But this slowness has yielded up treasures - abundance, diversity, colour. I've added a small gallery here.

 
Who would have thought that these cold months could produce so many colours, and that stone walls, half dead trees, fields and skies could produce such rich abundance in winter light?

Yet nature isn't only slow. Earth, sun and moon, stars, comets, race around each other, the whole universe explodes, expands in all directions. These words and pictures have been almost instantly transformed into electronic signals. Light moves at 186,282 miles per second.

Still the body ages - fast and slow! So keep on running, trucking and trekking. But keep looking as well. 

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See more about the OU Neighbourhood Nature

See  Carl Honore speaking In praise of Slow 

And if you fancy a fast way to slow down try the One Minute Meditation   (Oh the irony!)