A Sunday ritual in my grandparents’ house was that while the roast was cooking all leather footwear in the house – whether it belonged to Ted, Joyce or a visitor – was buffed by Ted to a high, mirror-like sheen. Before walks in the Peak District it was mandatory for walking boots to be thoroughly cleaned and dubbined. I don’t clean my own walking boots since my staunch belief is that they’ll only get dirty again very soon afterwards. As for dubbining, I have never even entertained the idea. Also, I live in south Devon, where there is invariably a puddle or creek somewhere nearby if you get desperate. I did feel a bit bad in March 2015 when my parents and I visited Wolfscotedale, where Joyce and Ted’s ashes are scattered, and I looked down at all the dry cakey West Country mud I’d carried up there with me. It was one day when I perhaps should have made more effort.
Before that afternoon it had been many years since I’d visited the Peak District, and seeing the curtain in the land that marks the entrance to it from the south knocked me for six. As I passed towards Ambergate along the A610, Crich Stand, the lone ring at the top of the curtain, rose out of the mist ahead, and a concomitant geyser of memories rose out of some mist inside me. My dad racing home further down the valley to get me back in time to see that night’s episode of The Incredible Hulk, overtaking, unthinkably, a Ford Capri, and me realising properly for the first time that overtaking was something a person could legally do and becoming excited by the future personal implications of that. The spectre of the ruined Wingfield Manor, one of the venues on the ghost of Mary Queen of Scots’ haunting tour of the UK, appearing in fading foggy light in the valley below our Morris Marina’s headlights then staying in the corner of my mind’s vision for days afterwards. Getting the cable car up the Heights of Abraham to see my cousin Fay working at the cafe at the top: the ambience of roller disco created by the decor and staff uniform. A raft race at Matlock Bath, Ted wrapped up against the cold in layer after layer, looking even more teddy bearish than ever. Our old, deceased weekend life. This curtain in the land is much more significant than the actual Nottinghamshire–Derbyshire border a few miles behind you. The change is negligible as you travel from Eastwood, the last town in Nottinghamshire, to the spoil-heap-shadowed Langley Mill, where I once saw an empty shop with the heartbreaking handwritten sign which read, ‘Rob me if you like: I’ve been burgled so many times I’ve got nothing left’ in its window, or Ripley, where I contracted food poisoning from a transport cafe ham sandwich in 1987, or Codnor, from whose Codnor Pets and Aquatics my parents purchased my first goldfish. I noted as I waited at the traffic lights beside the latter establishment that it now sold air rifles, pistols, crossbows and knives as well as aquatics. I found it hard to imagine anyone wanting to buy a gun and a goldfish at the same time. If they sold barrels too it might have made a bit more sense.
The change, by contrast, as you continue west to Ambergate with Crich Stand looking down its nose at you and turn right towards Whatstandwell, is like the change that occurs when you meet a venerable witch at the edge of a wasteland who takes you by the hand and says, ‘It’s OK. I know where the good place is with the enchanted stone and the wise sheep who speak,’ and leads you directly to it. It is not the fault of Ripley and Langley Mill and Alfreton and Codnor that they got the tyre stacks, chippies and bleak-looking pubs. Tyre stacks, chippies and bleak-looking pubs have to go somewhere, and not even the most rampant environmental charlatan would want to scatter them over the other side of the Crich divide: it would be like fly-tipping in Middle Earth.
For a year, maybe more, before I drove through the Peak District to Wolfscote Dale, in my dreams I’d been seeing a tower looming over a giant rock face not quite a cliff but very reminiscent of one. It always felt like a calming place, but where was it? I couldn’t work it out. It seemed like it should be in Devon, somewhere near the sea, but it didn’t match up to anywhere in Devon I had so far visited. It reminded me a little bit of the Daymark, an octagonal nineteenth-century shipping tower on the south Devon coast near Kingswear that I had often walked to, sometimes in atmospheric fog, but that wasn’t it; the Daymark is a little too brutalist, sci-fi in a starker way. As soon as I saw Crich Stand – built in 1923, the year of Ted’s birth, on the site of at least two apparently more gloomy and ominous previous towers, in remembrance of the members of the Sherwood Foresters regiment who had died in the First World War – loom up ahead, I knew immediately that that was what I had been dreaming about.
The Stand continued to watch me for several miles as I made my way in the direction of Matlock, parallel to the Derwent, and I had to tell myself to stop looking at it after veering into roadside gravel not far from the turning to Wirksworth. ‘Kimberley Ales’, announced big painted letters on the side of a pub. A benevolent gesture: an area as magnificent as this, stooping to import ales from the less magnificent area where I
