Rise of the Rowans
From Grindleford go west. Up and up to the moor where two big old battered rowan trees sit near a convergence of tarmac, track, footpath and bridleway.
There is a line of tumbled and crumbled shooting butts. Here mostly men wore tweed dyed with ling and bilberry and shot birds for fun.
There are still a few wild grouse living up on this moor. Feral ancestral survivors of those bred for shooting live amidst the skylarks and meadow pipets in the heather and bilberry and in the newly encroaching scrub of gorse and bramble.
But now the true new glory is surging up from the peat and pushing through the undergrowth. Hundreds and thousands of rowan trees. Young and vigorous. Newly rampant. Some are six foot tall but slender, only fat finger thick. Witness the rise of the rowans
They appeared first on the edges of the moor but are now moving inward colonising the open ground, reclaiming the land. Why here and why now? Was there a collective awaking? Have the skylarks enchanted them? Sung them up? The rowans yearning upwards towards the unreachable love of the song.
This is the miracle of a sheep free moor. A bird shit, seed, sun, dirt and rain powered normality exerting its primal presence on the land.
And happily it’s not just happening here on Eyam moor. Travel across the Derwent valley to the eastern gritstone edges of Birchen, Gardoms, Froggatt and Burbage and see baby fresh oaks unfurl with greens and browns and yellows. Silver birch colonise eastwards from seeds blown on the prevailing winds. And flowers not seen on these moors for decades yearn towards the sun happily uneaten by the now banished sheep.
Quietly and unannounced this is rewilding as nature intended.
Alex Ekins 2024
On the Edge of the Melting
On the first day I walk up to the La Buvette des Mottets, a small and quiet viewpoint just below Montenviers above the French alpine resort of Chamonix. There is a gap in the trees that once would have allowed visitors to look across to the glacial ice, snow and crevasses of the Mer de Glace. All that ice has now gone. The glacier here has disappeared. I continue down a path that ends at a warning sign and then descend into the void that the glacier has left behind.
It feels like descending into loss. Moving down into terrain that relatively recently would have been deeply filled with ancient ice. In the bottom of the valley is a ground down dust made landscape studded with grey boulders. There is no snow or ice here. The remains are bare. Flayed and skeletal. I feel as if i’m in the bones of the mountain, stood amongst the marrow.
Higher up at Montenvers the loss feels more industrial, the off season landscape is devoid of people and there is construction work with cranes giving it a building site feel.
In 1854 John Ruskin walked up to Montenvers from Chamonix with his assistant John Hobbs. They were carrying an item of cutting edge technology; a daguerreotype camera. The image Ruskin and Dobbs produced that day is one of the world's first mountain photographs and shows a glacier in full vigour; upthrusting ridges and fins of ice filling the valley.
It’s hard to reconcile that 1854 photograph with the contemporary view of France’s largest glacier. What is left of the Mer de Glace looks extraordinarily diminished, grey with glacier dust, sludge and sediment.
What is most disturbing is the speed of loss. The glacier has been retreating for a long time and Ruskin himself wrote in 1874 ‘I was able to cross the dry bed of a glacier, which I had seen flowing, two hundred feet deep, over the same spot, forty years ago.’ This 150 year old observation may give credence to the denialists view that climate change is a natural phenomenon. However the reality of the science undeniably shows that the retreat is speeding up and that the melting is now happening at the previously frozen alpine heights above 3500 metres.
The numbers don’t lie. The surface topography of the Mer de Glace changed very little during the first third of the 20th century, but from 1939 to 2001 the surface of the glacier lowered an average of 30 cm each year. However in 2022 the glacier was losing 10cm a day and it lost 3.5 metres of its thickness during a summer heatwave.
There has been two kilometres of retreat in 100 years but with predictions of increased melt by another 1.2 km by 2040. A third of glacial ice lost. 30 metres of retreat a year. And on and on the melt continues, relentlessly.
And now on my last day I sit here below the Glacier de Blaitiere, I try and find some hope or comfort amid the melting. The view here is stunning with the granite pinnacles penetrating the blue above. Ruskin once said of Chamonix ‘There is no sky like its sky’. The mountain coughs come and feed from my hand and I think back to the first day and the descent into the remains of the Mer de Glace. Into the grey granite dust of a ground up mountain. In the bottom of that desolate valley, young saplings were sprouting. Taking moisture and nutrients from the glacial remains and then growing up towards the same sun that had melted the glacier where they now grow.
Alex Ekins 2023
Enter Burbage
Step through the kissing gate and enter Burbage. The moor is beneath you and ahead of you. The sky high above is moving past with those bright white fluffed up clouds and duck shell blue is showing through the gaps. In between the land and high sky birds are flying, indifferent to your purpose.
You can, if you wish, reach down and touch the earth. Grab some and smell it. Dirty and peaty and rich. In places the soil is puddled and looks like oil; dark and decayed. Dip a finger in and taste it. A strange brew. The soil is beneath your fingernails now and on your tongue. You will carry it with you.
Turn left, go east. Soon the land drops away to your right and small cliffs appear. At the top are small jumbled boulders and loose blocks. The rocks are rough to touch, with flecks of quartz and mica that catch the October evening sun.
Perhaps you’ll ramble on with no care but to accept the day and love the wind. Either way tread carefully now, that cliff drop lengthens and there are holes to trip you amongst the boulders. A weary wanderer distracted by the birds’ business may be tricked into a tumble.
As the sun sinks you feel glad amidst the gloaming but remember you are now far from home.
You reach the top of a higher edge. A little afeared but wondering you look over and down to a jumble of oaks where birds go about their affairs and talk a language you yearn to know.
If you can, turn away from that enchantment and rove upon the moor. There are three lucky heathers here; the purple ling, the pastel shades of the cross leaved heath and some bell heather that rattles like a fairy summons.
The bilberry still has fruit and you might eat some. They are as dark as a Magpie’s eye and the purple juice stains your mouth and fingers.
And here you see a wonderment; some tiny saplings. Count them. Thirteen! Thirteen new born oaks, freshly conjured from that peat rich soil. The leaves are unfurled and move gently in the breeze. Green and brown and tiny. Why are they here? How are they here? Never, ever here before have you seen so many oaks pushing through the heather yearning for the sun, wishing upon the wind.
Maybe a Jay planted them. Acorns taken from those ancient oak woods below; a winter food store pushed down into the earth. Some forgotten or perhaps deliberately left to make a future sacred grove. The Jay’s offsprings’ offspring might one day dance here with Ravens and Crows.
You’ll want to stay and stay and see it all. And watch the saplings grow and grow. And see the oaks twisted by the autumn gales. You want to feel the moss upon those boughs. And wait to watch those Ravens, Crows and Jays dance and kiss and jig beneath the summer sun and winter moon.
Alex Ekins 2024