track.
"Hey, sunshine, what's your hurry? We've not got there yet."
He looked back to see that Dalziel was still heading uphill where the track emerged from the trees and began to wind across the open fellside.
"But why ...? I thought you were just ... Oh, sod it!" said Pascoe, and followed.
In fact the track meandered fairly gently up the fellside, worn there over centuries by the heavy feet of all those sad processions--and also, he reassured himself as the melancholy vision threatened to overwhelm him, by their presumably much lighter feet, tripping merrily back to Dendale after the wake.
At least, being the eastern flank of the Neb, it was out of reach of the declining sun, though he managed to produce sweat enough by the time he labored up to the sunlit ridge.
"Forty-five minutes," said Dalziel, sitting at his ease against a boulder. "I'd have thought a fit young shag like you 'ud have done it in half an hour."
Pascoe sagged to the ground beside him, trying not to pant too audibly.
"Gi's the sack, then," said the Fat Man.
Pascoe wriggled it off his shoulders and handed it over.
Then he turned his attention to Dendale.
It was only now, looking down, that he realized how much of a real frontier the Neb must have seemed to the old dalesmen. The fell on this side was much steeper and the sinuous curves of the Corpse Road on the Danby side turned into sharp zigzags beneath him. Also, while Danby had one foot and half its soul in the great fertile agricultural plain of Mid-Yorkshire, the narrow glaciated valley of Dendale belonged completely to the county's wild moorlands.
It was, he supposed, this wildness and steep enclosure which had made the dale so attractive to the gray suits in search of a reservoir site. He knew nothing of their search and final selection but guessed it contained much that was unedifying, with references to the greater good of the greater number and the difficulties of making omelettes without breaking eggs flowing like hot lava, destroying all lives and homes that lay in its path.
Doubtless there'd been an Inquiry. There always was. Some linguistic archaeologist of the next age, putting together a lexicon of late-twentieth-century usage, would probably conclude that the space between choosing a site and starting work on it was for some arcane reason called "The Public Inquiry."
So the inevitable had happened and the valley had changed. Beyond recognition? Possibly. Beyond redemption? Probably. In one sense it was wilder now than before, because human beings no longer lived and worked here.
But the stamp of man's presence was visible beyond disguise in the shape of the long curve of the dam wall.
Nature, though, is a tough cookie. Through his art man tried to perfect her, and through his science to control her. But always she will shrug her shoulders and be herself again.
So here it was, the famous reservoir, built out of public money for the public weal in the days when privatization of public utilities was still a lurid gleam in a pair of demon eyes. Now, of course, it was a key feature in the master plan by which Mid-Yorkshire Water, PLC, hoped to keep its consumers (sorry; customers) wet and its shareholders wealthy for the next hundred years.
And Nature, simply by opening her great red eye in the sky for a couple of months, had set all the plans at nowt.
Around the dark waters of the reservoir ran a broad pale fillet of washed rock and baked mud, across which ran the lines of ancient walls and on which stood piles of shaped and faced stone showing where bits of the drowned village had come gasping up for air again.
"You want this beer or not?" said Dalziel.
Pascoe turned to find the Fat Man was proffering a can of bitter.
"Well, I carried it up," said Pascoe. "I might as well carry it down."
He took a long, satisfying pull. Dalziel meanwhile had put down his own can and extracted from the knapsack a pair of binoculars with which he was scanning the valley.
What else did I
"Hey, sunshine, what's your hurry? We've not got there yet."
He looked back to see that Dalziel was still heading uphill where the track emerged from the trees and began to wind across the open fellside.
"But why ...? I thought you were just ... Oh, sod it!" said Pascoe, and followed.
In fact the track meandered fairly gently up the fellside, worn there over centuries by the heavy feet of all those sad processions--and also, he reassured himself as the melancholy vision threatened to overwhelm him, by their presumably much lighter feet, tripping merrily back to Dendale after the wake.
At least, being the eastern flank of the Neb, it was out of reach of the declining sun, though he managed to produce sweat enough by the time he labored up to the sunlit ridge.
"Forty-five minutes," said Dalziel, sitting at his ease against a boulder. "I'd have thought a fit young shag like you 'ud have done it in half an hour."
Pascoe sagged to the ground beside him, trying not to pant too audibly.
"Gi's the sack, then," said the Fat Man.
Pascoe wriggled it off his shoulders and handed it over.
Then he turned his attention to Dendale.
It was only now, looking down, that he realized how much of a real frontier the Neb must have seemed to the old dalesmen. The fell on this side was much steeper and the sinuous curves of the Corpse Road on the Danby side turned into sharp zigzags beneath him. Also, while Danby had one foot and half its soul in the great fertile agricultural plain of Mid-Yorkshire, the narrow glaciated valley of Dendale belonged completely to the county's wild moorlands.
It was, he supposed, this wildness and steep enclosure which had made the dale so attractive to the gray suits in search of a reservoir site. He knew nothing of their search and final selection but guessed it contained much that was unedifying, with references to the greater good of the greater number and the difficulties of making omelettes without breaking eggs flowing like hot lava, destroying all lives and homes that lay in its path.
Doubtless there'd been an Inquiry. There always was. Some linguistic archaeologist of the next age, putting together a lexicon of late-twentieth-century usage, would probably conclude that the space between choosing a site and starting work on it was for some arcane reason called "The Public Inquiry."
So the inevitable had happened and the valley had changed. Beyond recognition? Possibly. Beyond redemption? Probably. In one sense it was wilder now than before, because human beings no longer lived and worked here.
But the stamp of man's presence was visible beyond disguise in the shape of the long curve of the dam wall.
Nature, though, is a tough cookie. Through his art man tried to perfect her, and through his science to control her. But always she will shrug her shoulders and be herself again.
So here it was, the famous reservoir, built out of public money for the public weal in the days when privatization of public utilities was still a lurid gleam in a pair of demon eyes. Now, of course, it was a key feature in the master plan by which Mid-Yorkshire Water, PLC, hoped to keep its consumers (sorry; customers) wet and its shareholders wealthy for the next hundred years.
And Nature, simply by opening her great red eye in the sky for a couple of months, had set all the plans at nowt.
Around the dark waters of the reservoir ran a broad pale fillet of washed rock and baked mud, across which ran the lines of ancient walls and on which stood piles of shaped and faced stone showing where bits of the drowned village had come gasping up for air again.
"You want this beer or not?" said Dalziel.
Pascoe turned to find the Fat Man was proffering a can of bitter.
"Well, I carried it up," said Pascoe. "I might as well carry it down."
He took a long, satisfying pull. Dalziel meanwhile had put down his own can and extracted from the knapsack a pair of binoculars with which he was scanning the valley.
What else did I
Similar Books
