Sunset is a great time for a quiet stroll in Ribblesdale. The light plays tricks. Limestone changes colour in the sun’s weak rays. Erratic rocks like this one take on unlikely silhouettes. I watch a hare dance alone around a freshly cut field. Sheep take no notice, grazing monotonously as they’d been doing all day long. No birdsong. No traffic. No telephone ringing. No tiresome beep from the computer announcing the arrival of yet another tedious email. Just pleasurable peace in the pastoral perfection of the Dales. Ahhh.
Several middle-aged badly dressed portly gentlemen with cameras shuffled hurriedly past my house this morning. Fitting the description perfectly myself, I thought I’d join them to see what all the fuss was about. The village railway station is but a few giant steps away from my house and has a large car park but that was full and the small northbound platform was packed with tourists and trainspotters. For two reasons I always hesitate before asking someone pointing a camera at an empty space on the railway line what’s happening. Firstly, they might think I’m a keen trainspottter and strike up some lengthy over-detailed conversation about trains; or secondly they might think I’m not a keen trainspotter and strike up some lengthy over-detailed conversation about trains. So instead I listened in to a lengthy over-detailed conversation about trains between two trainspotters. Anyway, before I’d got to the point where I felt like chucking myself off the bridge, controlled excitement broke out and into the station chugged the above. It’s the Fellsman 45231 – I know because it says it on the engine bit at the front.
Driving through Swaledale this morning I doubted there was a better place I could possibly be. I travelled up Ribblesdale, in amongst the Three Peaks, before heading over Buttertubs Pass and negotiating my way around sheep that had serious suicidal tendencies (they were sunbathing in the middle of the road). Almost got run over myself while taking some photos of the meadows near Gunnerside (shame the Kings pub has now closed). Then, in sharp contrast to the neatly walled enclosures of the dale, it was over the wild open heather moorland to Redmire in Wensleydale and back home via Bolton Castle and Hawes. Yorkshire writer Alfred J Brown (1894-1969) once wrote: ‘One of the charms of the Yorkshire Dales is that they are all characteristically different, like lovely sisters of the same family.’ Nicely put.
The thought of ripping up thousands of miles of beautiful countryside, blighting properties, wrecking wildlife habitat and ancient woodland just to create a high-speed rail link to London (HS2) leaves this normally placid chap seething. That’s before I even mention the cost. As far as I can see the only benefit will be that you’ll be able to get far away from the capital a little bit quicker. If the hypothetical figures about creating thousands of jobs and how the North and Midlands will be so much better off actually comes off I’ll eat my flat cap. I’m not saying I don’t believe in railways, I just think we should be making better use of what we’ve got, improving stock, bringing back more local lines and increasing the number of people working on the railways.
I thought of this while I was struggling up a hill outside Horton-in-Ribblesdale last week. I made the excuse to stop to watch this train working down the Settle-Carlisle line beaneath Penyghent. The line is underused by the quarry owners who prefer to send huge clanking trucks through the villages. And there’s a perfectly good line from Lancashire that joins up with the Settle-Carlisle line at Hellifield… but there’s no passenger timetable for it. Tourists bringing business and prosperity to this to this part of the Dales have to take an hour or more detour.
I assume the locals and landowners were up in arms when the Victorians decided to rip up this bit of the countryside to build the Settle-Carlisle railway but now it’s here – thanks mainly to volunteers – we should be making the most of it instead of pandering to some political pipe-dream.
