The Source and Garigill
We leave the car as far up the road as you can drive, towards the source of the South Tyne. It’s a gloomy scene: abandoned diggers, piles of manure, derelict buildings, sheep shielding from the wind. In a moment of levity, several hundred fieldfares pierce the grey and are gone again. Not a fanfare of welcome or a place of romance. A barnful of cows wading in their own poo, old barrels stuffed in doorways.
The river is there, running cold, as it has always done. Providing definition to the land in this desolate place. Water and rock slowly shaping one another in an ancient dance of shimmering light and bubbles. No dippers, no wagtails, no wheatears, no chats, just a single pipit, a lone buzzard and the ubiquitous sheep. And beside Josh’s Hush a hillside of plastic tubes containing saplings blown sideways.
It is a place shaped by lead miners: a hard life in a hard place. Now deserted, only the ruined buildings, old mine shafts, the old pipes are testament to what has gone before.
The source is there, or so we are told marked by a sculpture, a dribble coming from a mossy cleft in a rock, that you can see through the sculpture’s hole. But how you can call this the ‘source’ when there is water flowing everywhere down from boggy fells – sike, burn, hush and river different names for the flow and even these constrained by blocks of stone and a surprising tarmac road alongside which a rivulet runs. Where are you river Tyne? Husssssssh…
Look over there, not so far in the valley beyond another source: The Tees.
At least here we have a beginning of sorts in this damp issue – a unique creation story. A flow stained brown from the darkness of its peaty birthplace. A birthplace full of underground treasure – the lead, that was gouged from the earth and stains it again, but invisibly this time. Poisoned, so there is no place for the stone-fly or fish.
We look up and there are huge white clouds drifting down a mizzle of rain drops and ask again, who is this birth mother, where do you really start, River Tyne?
And despite this dereliction, we like this place – this beginning, a reminder of the darkness that accompanies the shimmering light. It is full of memories – George Edward Dawson walked from here when he was 90 years old.
Tracing our steps back down, we pass the ruined cottage with the protection of a rowan tree and wonder what exactly it protects now. This tree, which is itself a river of water pumping skywards.
The river is all glitter and reflection, swirls and bubbles soft but sharp enough to cut this valley, where the sheep now graze on the banksides where the river has now taken its shape. Its all rocks and water.
Archie is oblivious to us as we talk – engrossed in searching for tadpoles. We ask what it is apart from the fish that draws them here. “Well it’s like the sea. It’s just the water isn’t it”. That kind of sums it up for us. We continue to Fourstones and find our car where we left it. Somehow that is a surprise. Like how after all we’ve just seen has it just been here, just like that?