Garigill to Lintley Halt
We start from Garrigill and pass a ramshackle of buildings. It looks like a place that might be inhabited by an edge-dweller of sorts. A metal chimney comes out of a tin box. There is a tame skinny goat claiming ownership and two red-billed, red-eyed, red-legged oystercatchers on the roof of one of the buildings. There is some overt presence here at least.
The river is rusty brown, we see our first dipper and three roe deer. We walk along a narrow path held in by a stone wall covered in moss and lichen. The division apparent between the farmed and riverside landscapes. On this side there is lungwort, celandine, coltsfoot, wild garlic, wren and robin. Trees with more visible lichen than bark, great areas of shingle and stone where the river has been allowed to meander. Islands of wildflowers, refuge for the grey wagtails.
Images of the river as healer but also a place of forgetting, where you can throw your unwanted stuff and watch it disappear, unconcerned of its destination the next bend or the next. Old trees and branches snagged on the bends, waiting for the next downpour to release them. The river alternates between trapping and releasing.
The river is not trying to get anywhere, which is perhaps why it is so soothing. A place to tell your stories. A place to wash and wash away.
This section to Alston feels like we are going up to go down. Climbing the steep bank side as the river descends into the gorge below. Huge trees cling onto the bankside: enchanted with beings; a dragon with a stone on its nose, a carved face of a man. Magic marks left.
We pass through Alston and the old railway station, past medieval buildings and newly tagged lambs. We stop at Holy Paraclete church, Kirkhaugh, with it’s tall steeple and inscriptions of community folk past and present.
We follow another sliver of land between field and river, then cross the river and railway and our day ends at Lintley halt. We drive back to Alston to stay at the Cumberland Hotel.