Over The Moor

I walk out of town. Through Freehold and Golgotha, past the old insane asylum, and up the hill-path to the moor, at the very fringe of human life. These restless edgelands skirt many towns and cities; they are not the pastoral paradises we expect of rural areas, not the Tory Party wet dream of the English countryside, but harsh, gloomy places where civilisation has made a scarce impact, and nature - both environmental and human - displays its true face. I am always uneasy in these places.

Following the road, I stop to look back down at my point of origin, and capture this image. It reminds me of a line from a Tom Waits murder ballad - the trees are bending over, the cows are lyin' still - and sure enough, just out of frame a herd of cows watch me coldly. They refuse to take their eyes from me until I've passed by, and even as I turn the next corner, I can still feel their gaze drilling into my back.

The rainclouds overhead cast a pall over this ground that is already in shadow, dwarfed by the outline of pikes and fells. Land that is rich with stories, not least that of the lad who went missing here nearly ten years ago. I remember only vague details; the tearful television appeals, newspaper reports, the same smiling photograph endlessly reproduced. The mammoth police search, an exhaustive manhunt that took two months to discover the body lying frozen in a field.

To the west, the old asylum stands black against the horizon, its Gothic towers decaying steadily. It was built in 1816, designed to remove the mentally ill entirely from the boundaries of the town, placing them out of the way. On the fringe. Somewhere they could not be seen, but only heard, their hollow howls sweeping the desolate slopes of the moor for over a century. I quicken my pace along the road. To my right, someone has daubed a swastika on a post in red, its points facing counter-clockwise. Further ahead sits a dilapidated caravan. It looks like a permanent landmark. I glance at the windows as I pass. A curtain twitches. Twitches again.

And I'm running. Off down the lane, as fast as my unfit body can manage, back to the familiar fumes of the city, back to human habitation, far from the fringe. From the restless edgelands. This place where nature shows its true face.