Christmastime Escapades
Driving in hostile territory atop a moor
Christmas Eve
Families walk together through the Yorkshire village to the pretty church on the hill in Thornton le Dale.
A festive service is gathering in its Christmas congregation, the flock stronger, no doubt, at this time of year.
The sentimentality of Christmastime, a collective yearning, bringing the folk together.
We are on the move, in search of a tap to refill our jerry cans with drinking water. A quick stop at the church to scour the graveyard: you can often find an outside tap on church land, hidden away in a corner behind a gate, the water from which is used to tend to the graveside flowers.
No luck this time though. There is a tap, but it’s been disconnected, presumably to prevent the pipes from bursting during a winter freeze.
While we’re alongside the churchgoers, something in Tara’s soul is awakened by the heartwarming scene of a traditional community coming together at Christmas. She suggests that we stop and attend the service.
Her suggestion appeals to me, and I’m sure they would make us welcome, but being wayfarers, people who pass through, I urge our family caravan onward. Somewhere out there waiting for us in the dusk there is a place to shelter but it’s not here in the house of god.
We drive on.
It’s very windy now. An all-out Ayurvedic vata squall. Wild wind whipping up leaves and rocking the van, shifting it off its central driving line.
The orange sun descends, a single point of stillness, revealing a beautiful sunset sky.
Polar stratospheric clouds, usually only seen in Scandinavia, radiate a rainbow of colour through the atmosphere. The sunlight diffracts around the tiny ice crystals contained within.
We leave the benign shelter of the village, recklessly we reflect later, and drive straight into a Met Office Yellow wind warning in hostile territory atop the moor. Angry gusts hit us broadside.
A Christmas Eve chaos begins to unfold.
The wind gets in and flips the skylight open, dislodging it from its fixings while we’re on the move. Tara reacts fast and reaches up to hold it in place while I drive on trying to get clear of the exposed high lands. This goes very badly as the road climbs higher and the moor opens up all around us, handing us over to the merciless weather to do with as it pleases.
I sense high anxiety and the rising tension of a panic attack in the back, which intensifies each time the wind rips open the roof.
I stop in the thick of it, hazard lights blinking, and clamber into the back to take over while Tara slides into the front to drive.
It is damned hard work holding everything down but eventually we crest the peak of the moor and the road winds down.
Tara stops in a dip, a sheltered lay-by shrouded in darkness, which turns out to be our sleep spot, although in this flustered and frenzied moment, we don’t recognise it as such.
Taking advantage of the temporary refuge I manage to reconnect the skylight to its fixings and secure it in place. I get out of the van with my head torch on and look around. In the rushing air and moving shadows I can make out a grassy hollow with trees and a stream at the bottom meandering under a humpback bridge.
This looks like the place for us, I think to myself, but I can’t access my belly-mind properly so my head takes over and insists we keep going. I foolishly accede to its demand.
This sets in motion another detour further down the road where we find a small hamlet called Goathland, suffering its own battering in the wind.
This is Goda’s land, the good land, where Isaac the T’Awd Man, a local sword dancer with the Plough Stots, will put a furrow straight through your lawn if you fail to pay your dues.
There’s no sign of Isaac and nowhere to park the van so we turn around and head back to the hollow.
Before we get there my anxious ego interferes yet again and stops me to investigate a level looking verge on my side. From inside the cab it looks pretty good but I don’t realise we are dangerously exposed to the weather.
When I get out this lack of comprehension catches up with me fast as the wind rips the door out of my grasp and flings the full weight of it hard against its hinges in the wrong direction.
Even in the howling noise and darkness I can see its been damaged and when I finally wrestle the door out of the grip of the gale and slam it home it protests with an unhappy misaligned crunch. Thankfully it’s still functioning as a door.
Anger and regret wash over me. These are the wages of ego; the consequences of not trusting gut instinct.
Back by the brook, ego-mind chastened and in hiding, engine switched off, bedraggled but sheltered from the storm, we all exhale.
Light the fire in the log burner. This is our home for Christmas night. We have arrived.
Later, while Tara makes a delicious dinner I go across the road and up the slope to the moor beyond. The wind welcomes me back as its plaything and I stumble along submitting my body to its bullying. Powerful gusts relentlessly buffet me.
Stone blocks jut out, bigger the further I go, the earth getting craggier as I climb higher.
At the top a bright white moon, behind scudding fast moving clouds. It’s a few days off full and Jupiter is in close proximity.
Ferns, grasses and heather abounds; purple moor grass, cross-leaved heath, dwarf shrubs and bog-mosses. The bright green stars of Polytrichum commune moss.
I slide a closed hand along a small frond and collect the seeds before releasing them to the wind, watching them fly.
After dinner I take Tara with me on a return trip to the summit to stand and face the strength of the wind, while Thor, Oak, Red and North work together to get ready for bed, tidy up the van, then hang and fill everybody’s Christmas stockings.
This year we have appropriated the Icelandic tradition of giving books on Christmas Eve. Jólabókaflóð or Christmas Book Flood revolves around giving and receiving new books and reading them together while enjoying chocolate treats and drinks.
We picked them all up a few days ago after having them delivered to The Whitby Bookshop.
When we return from the brow of the moor, the children have laid the books out and we explore this new tradition together, reading around the table and cramming chocolate into our mouths before bed.
Unfortunately I don’t get to read my own book because North, our youngest, wants me to help him with his.
Christmas Day
In the morning there is almost no wind.
Our little dale, beside Eller Beck, is a refuge, a sanctuary.
Waking before all of us, a local sheep farmer. We hear him approach on an all terrain vehicle rounding up the flock on Christmas morning.
Here! Hey! He shouts, over and over again. The sheep come to him.
The children empty the contents of their stockings, which we have whittled down to bars of chocolate and bags of sweets only. There is absolutely no cheap-shit-from-China, which is either a miracle, or the result of about five years of me and Tara steadily reshaping Christmas, or both.
Chocolate for breakfast, plentiful rounds of coffee and tea, all toasty in pyjamas next to the log burner.
We open the door to take in the view.
The lay-by, then pasture, rolling down in three small terraces to the Eller Beck. Trees line the waterway.
Tufts of grass and molehills are spread liberally across the landscape, as is the sheep-shit, the smell of which is a sweet taint in the nostrils.
A proud silver birch reaches out limbs expansively in its own space with velvet-soft moss, decaying orange mushrooms and blue-grey foliose lichen adorning its feet.
Orange iron-brown submerged stones lurk beneath the surface of the clear-black water.
On the river bank, the grass is more mossy. There are primroses amongst the green stars.
Sparrows fly over together. A solitary robin watches. Alone.
Smaller rivulets have cut though the wet earth to make their way to the brook, exposing stone and wet brown soil.
Across the river the landscape changes, rising more steeply. A fence or two running along its length. Dry stone walls. Bracken and ferns. Browns and greens.
Sunlight stippling and shadows, a mottled effect. The blue sky sharply defined at the horizon. The canopy of a tree pushes past it.
It’s almost completely still, with just the barest breeze to wrap the cold air around you and remind you of winter’s touch.
A birch wood behind me, leading to Birchwood Farm.
A rope swing hanging over Eller Beck beckons to the children and they throw on coats and hats before running down to the water’s edge.
The log burner is radiating heat. The stovetop espresso maker steams in readiness.
I reach for my new book, which until now has remained unopened, and begin to read.
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