If the Peak District is a mounted painting, the nearby cities are situated like hastily placed drawing pins at the edges of the mount. Because of the foot traffic, the path along the Dove – the first river I ever swam in – is rarely totally quiet in daytime, even in thick end-of-winter rain like today’s. Complaints about the Peak District becoming besmirched by crowds are nothing new. In J. B. Firth’s Highways and Byways in Derbyshire of 1905 he laments the vulgarisation of the Derwent Valley: its litter and its transformation into a ‘tripper’s Paradise’ populated by hordes of ‘callous rowdies’ from the conurbations that distantly surround it. Devon is a place much more synonymous with holidaymakers, but its central walking country remains emptier than this, even in high season. That’s because it only has drawing pins in one direction from the edge of its mount. If you tried to attach a drawing pin in any other direction the drawing pin would be swept away by some large waves. But in this rainy, high-altitude terrain I rediscovered much to remind me of my current home. As we pushed towards Milldale, skirting the Staffordshire border, and the rain soup cleared to mere consommé, the scenery looked like Devon in a different jacket. It was hard to conceive that there was no coastline just over the horizon, let alone within sixty miles. I understood why Derbyshire had been nagging at my subconscious lately: this bleak, craggy, up-and-down terrain and damp climate was a deep, ingrained part of me. By moving to south Devon I’d finally made myself aware of it. The top of Lustleigh Cleave on Dartmoor was my Froggatt Edge, the Teign and Dart were my Dove and Derwent (the original meaning of both ‘Dart’ and ‘Derwent’ is roughly ‘river valley thick with oaks’). Devon was not just somewhere I’d moved to because of two love affairs – one, destined not to last, with a woman and one, still burgeoning, with a landscape. It also kept me connected to Ted. And maybe during his lifetime Derbyshire had kept Ted – whose mum had grown up on Dartmoor – connected to Devon, whether he knew it or not.
We arrived at Milldale, whose stone footbridge and matching surrounding cottages my dad had painted in intricate detail when I was young and we were living in the first of our Almost Derbyshire houses. I recall moaning on walks around here as a nine- or ten-year-old, but my mum remembers a weird stamina I had a few years prior to that: an ability to keep going on ambitious routes around Chatsworth and Eyam and Padley and Wirksworth that belied my age and tiny legs and which, if she was honest, she found just a bit unsettling. My parents were tired now, on the bridge at Milldale, and I realised with a pang that the ten-mile-plus walks in which I now liked to indulge at least once a week were never going to be within their reach again. The final stretch of the walk, up the hill towards the George pub at Alstonefield, was hard going. While they caught their breath I stopped to say hello to a farmer rebuilding a stone wall, for a few minutes admiring his craftsmanship and the slow satisfaction of mending. A miracle structure made from local material that withstood the elements purely due to weight distribution, ventilation and mortarless adhesion, being repaired with care and unhurried love. I barely suppressed the urge to join in. About half an hour earlier a slow, tentative sun had finally called off the rain. As its light fell through the branches and we passed along the Dove where the river nips below the high bank of Lode Lane my dad had pointed to a spot where, for many years, an abandoned Wolseley had hung suspended in the foliage: a car like Ted’s that had been driven too hastily or faced a problematic obstacle in its path, or perhaps both, then, unclaimed, had seemed more of an embedded natural part of the landscape with each passing season until one day it was gone.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
21st-Century Yokel is the result of my stubborn conviction that something that a lot of people told me for many years wouldn’t be ‘marketable’ enough to work would be a much better book than the marketable stuff they recommended that I did instead, but it also only exists because, as it began to take form, a few other people did believe in it: in particular, my editor Simon Spanton and my agent Ed Wilson, who have offered support of the kind you hope you will get from editors and agents in optimistic, childlike dreams but rarely would be so bold as to hope for in realistic wakefulness. I am very lucky to have you both on my side. I’d also like to thank the rest of the Unbound team for giving me the springboard to launch this book in a non-conventional way and my astoundingly loyal and lovely readers for helping to get the project off the ground in a manner that would not have been possible in the publishing industry climate of six or seven years ago. The Bear’s Army: you rock, as
