Wharncliffe Edge

Dragon’s well and Devil’s Cave

haunted by name and lore

Where sun-soothed gritstone winks

Inviting, as a winter coat

warmed beside a fire

Rift rocky shapes

conjure past people

Who foraged and wrought

at the raw edge of life

Before verse essayed tempest,

before our breath painted ancient rock

The view commands the mind

to join the invocation

of spirits that shoulder us off-balance

with firm, ruffling gusts

Below, troll-rolled rocks

stagger to the rattling pebble games of the Don,

slaking beyond a mask of trees - 

fresh cold, tea-stained,

from beyond the bracken ruin

and sheep-shorn hills

Behind the edge, under charcoal washed air

chunking pollards scoop fistfuls of sweet loam

Disappearing, serpentine, their coarse bark

speaking volumes louder

than grafitied gabble

before they emerge, a few brown sheaved leaves away

singing beechmast songs

of emerging dragons

Notes: written early 2020s if not sooner. For some reason this area really speaks to me. I'd driven through with my parents whilst very young. We parked to look at the view in the opposite direction. yet it left a familiarity of that road - Woodhead Road - in my mind. It feels like a vestige of a once beautiful 1950s' countryside.

Rediscovering it on the motorcyle in later years, Ali and I began walking here. There is a tree with poetry cut into it, another with song lyrics - and other graffiti. Mildly amusing - what is more engaging is how pollarding or 100 years ago has left a woodlandscape that is perhaps, Tolkeinesque. As for looking out over the rocky edge, with it's volcan/seismic beginings and ice-age refurbishments - imprinted with the long ago and folded as only hot rock might, you half expect to meet a fur-clad neanderthal....