Lintley Halt to Lambley
We wake in the hotel owned by Guy and Helen. A warm welcome and a double breakfast; a place familiar from the days of the North Pennines Storytelling Festival
After dropping one car at Lambley, we return to Lintley and encounter the farmer, Willie Lee on his quad bike with a trailer full of dead lambs – It costs £13 to dispose of a dead sheep. You aren’t to bury them because of the potential for pollution. A nod to that underground water connecting places, disrupting the separation of things. Willie is bright eyed with a chuckle adorning his face. He tells us of the table stone, in the river, where he picnicked as a child and how he pulled that stone out of the river before it was covered with silt and put it in his garden, for his son. Now a dry land picnic table full of stories.
There are a pair of pink sandals abandoned under a tree. Another story?
The river meanders between areas of tangled magic, full of new burdock plants and tree roots, meandering with unexpected twists and turns, creating suspense and wonder to banksides filled with stone and caged to stop its natural flow. Areas that are a shock and in turn make us feel imprisoned, for the sake of a few more acres of sheep grazing.
Water and stone, blood and bone.
We pass a park of holiday homes in the trees, cross a metal bridge and enter a wide valley, where one could image an extraordinary wetland if the river was allowed to take its own course. A big toad on the path announces the possibilities.
But there is a new juniper forest on the valley side. We wonder who put it there?
A place of big estates. We encounter a man on the path who shares his stories. Of his journey from Derby to Spain to Eals, of the American laird’s lad in a sports car, too low for the bumpy track. The story of no salmon yet this year.
After the Eals Bridge we make our own little ceremony. Staring into the water, which like a fire constantly moving, stops the mind from constantly moving as it passes through. Sound and movement.
We cross the Lambley viaduct and stop to talk to Craig with his dog who tells us how his grandad used to put him down the viaduct manholes when he was a kid and barely tall enough to get himself out. He used to fish down there. More stories flow, with the river’s presence beneath us. A Heron flies beneath the arches along the river’s course.
We are on more familiar territory beyond the viaduct. We find the car and take our separate journeys home…for now.