Cold Fell Flow
It began as rain on Cold Fell.
A rumour, a darkening on its western edge, a thickening of cloud above the ridge, a sudden silence among the curlews. Then the sky breaks open.
Yet this is not destruction. It is the start of something that will flow to a renewal.
The Fell drinks deeply before releasing water slowly into the land. The gift carried eastward remembers a harder age. It once hurried past lead mines, limekilns and quarry workings, carrying the dust of human labour through narrow valleys where the land was wrestled into usefulness by hand, horse and explosive.
The scars of that industry may be hidden beneath heather and grass, but the healing is still to be completed.
Yet when the same water reaches Newcastle, it’s met by another industrial scene. Glass structures, backlit by blue skies, stare at their own reflections. Digital networks pulse invisibly beneath streets. Bridges and tunnels straddle the river. Laboratories and universities fashion wealth not from stone and ore but from knowledge, data and ideas. It is a new landscape, made by ambition and imagination.
Arriving at Tynemouth, Cold Fell’s water tastes salt in the air for the first time before entering the restless North Sea. Here it experiences something unique – it feels lost.
But Cold Fell’s water has not disappeared. Instead, it’s part of something immeasurably larger than itself, something that has within it the memory of the becks, brooks and burns, the storms, the glaciers and the clouds.
No, the fell’s raindrops are not lost. Now they’re part of a vast and ancient conversation – the first word in a story that had grown too large for a single landscape to contain.
Lower Steenbergs Yard on the Ouseburn, opposite Northern Rye - a gorgeous little cafe and bakery :)
Cold Fell Flow was a collaboration between a painter (Kathy Kemp), a poet (David Bamford) and a photographer (me) from Brampton/Hallbankgate in North Cumbria plus a sound artist latterly of Brampton but now back home in Australia (Will Rodgers). We followed the flow of water from Cold Fell (just 4km from where I live these days) until it reached the North Sea. Read more here. I hadn’t touched my camera in years - I hope it won’t be too long before I pick it up again!.
