Midsummer 2022 - In a Wild World, West Yorkshire

There is a wild wind here on my Thoughtful Walk, but not the sort that heralds a storm or threatens a change. It’s a constant, steady wind, the sort that shapes trees over years, bending them into fluid shapes, the sort that races into your lungs with every breath you take, and makes the grasses with their filigree seed heads ripple like the marks left in the sand of a gentle shoreline. I’m in love with the moor.

It’s been raining most of the day, which has been just right. I was thinking a moment ago that this place would not be right in the sun, it’s so gloriously alive in the rain and mist. But then the sun came out, and it was like a new world had been lowered down for a moment and swallowed this one in one gulp, then it was gone again. The sunlight is resting on a distant hilltop for a instant, racing now across the land, here for a fleeting breath, then off again. The cloud's shadows whisk the light along, but never for more than a moment or two, it always returns.

And the peace which I always found in the silence and emptiness of the moors filled me utterly.

 - James Herriot

One or two fireweed torches (Chamaenerion angustifolium) are just beginning to bloom, fields of them are in bud. Between those blooms and the heather (Calluna vulgaris), I imagine these moors will be a sea of pinks and purples in a month. Birds whose names I do not know squabble among the ripening wild blueberries, and the wind-sculpted hawthorn trees (Crataegus monogyna) are covered in green berries. The clouds are low, or perhaps the land is high and closer to them, yet they do not settle as dreamy mists in the hollows and dells as I would have expected.  These clouds alternately float and race just over my head, like an ever-changing roof of painted greys.

... A lonely moor / silent and dark and tractless swells,
The waves of some wild streamlet pour / hurriedly through its ferny dells.

 - Charlotte Brontë

Stone walls and old stone homes are etched into this land, not built upon it. They cut, in beautiful disorder, through the coarse, sponge-like grass, through the sturdy heather, through the deepest imaginable moss, all the way down to the sandy soil beneath. It looks as though these stone structures have grown out of that soil.

So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air;/And, deepening still the dream-like charm,
Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere. /That was the scene, I knew it well;
I knew the turfy pathway's sweep,/That, winding o'er each billowy swell,
Marked out the tracks of wandering sheep.

 - Charlotte Brontë

This is a place of contradictions, or perhaps of an odd balance. The vastness and the wind gives a sense of wildness, yet somehow the clouds and the little hollows make it feel sheltered, and homely. The land looks untamed, yet sheep graze it placidly. Tufts of wool are caught in the grasses, self heal (Prunella vulgaris) dots its bright purple face among great swaths of nettles (Urtica dioica). The horizon seems limitless, and strangely reachable.