Back of Beyond by David Yeadon

Author:David Yeadon [Yeadon, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Retail, Travel
ISBN: 9780061976612
Google: L4Bn-fTVItYC
Amazon: B002R2OFHI
Barnesnoble: B002R2OFHI
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

Turning north from the remnants of Housesteads Fort, I could see little else but angular blocks of Sitka spruce massed along the ridges like legions. I had reached the southern tip of the vast three hundred-square-mile Border Forests. The Forestry Commission has often been lambasted for blanketing popular tourist landscapes with its “pole factories” of spruce and pine plantations and chose these hills and heaths for their remoteness and inaccessibility to car-borne travelers. Walkers however must contend with muddy tracks through dark crypts of conifers, shadowly regimented.

Silence reigns here; sounds sink into thick blankets of pine needles. All that can be heard are the soft sighings of breezes in the highest branches, like ocean lappings on a lonely seashore. Mosses and fungi flourish and the most delicate of mushrooms with stems as thin and straight as horsehair. Warty toadstools ooze a deadly looking black fluid, and puffballs wait to explode under piles of pine cones. In the gloom, nothing moves, and it all smells of a slow rotting death. I was glad to be out on the open moor again.

Down in cozy Bellingham the menu at the Cheviot Kitchen restaurant read like a poacher’s priority list—venison, hare, wild duck, grouse, teal, partridge, woodcock, pheasant, and pigeon. I ate every nuance of a very gamey grouse in front of a roaring fire and wandered off over the bridge to enjoy an hour at Jubson’s traveling fair, newly arrived in town. But something had gone wrong. Poor Luke Jubson stood by his motionless dodgems gazing at the empty shooting galleries and unclaimed Teddy bear prizes.

“If I could just get the men’s wages I’d be satisfied. My father did this most of his life. Started just after the great war when it used to be really good, but this is just plain daft.” Luke’s displeasure was shared by the three other families who traveled with him around the small villages of “Geordie-land” (Northumberland). They agreed it was the evening dance that had eradicated trade although in their hearts they knew times were changing and little fairs were not so popular nowadays. So I went to the dance and pranced the floor with the village lovelies until my blisters burst for the second time.

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