EYES peeled, we clambered over "the most romantic of Swaledale bridges", and climbed the dark, wooded bank to the hamlet of Ivelet. We were aware that we might not be alone. Water dripped down the roadside cliff like saliva dripping from a hungry dog's bared teeth.
Out of the trees, we walked across the broad meadows and through the squeezy stonewall stiles, the first dews of autumn wetting the toes of our shoes and washing our fears away.
wholesale colthingThe children climbed happily on the massively mis-shapen trees which had been pollarded more than 200 years ago. The gnarly trunks now run horizontal and are only fit for jumping off. Once, though, they were cut to create hedges, and to encourage straight saplings to grow for use as "prods" which held the heather thatch onto roofs. Spare cuttings were burned for charcoal; spare leaves were fed to sheep to make their meat tastier.
We reached Calvert Houses, a remote hillside huddle without even a real road. A vehicle radio broke the countryside quiet. In these days when the Royal Mail is in retreat, when the mobile shop ceased calling decades ago, when the village shop closed last century and when the rural pub is ripe for conversion, it is amazing how the Tesco home delivery lorry still gets through. Even to the top of the dale.
Always at a profit.
We left the on-line shoppers and plunged down the ancient landscape. In front of us, the houses of Muker - from the Norse "mjoraker" for narrow acre - were higgledy-piggledy at the bottom of the valley like old potatoes at the bottom of a string sack.We turned towards Gunnerside, once the home of a warlike Norseman called Gunnar, and followed the river. Its upper section - all waterfalls and forces - careers down the steepest gradient of anymajor river in England and so our distant ancestors called it the Swale - "the wild one".
We were returning to Ivelet, a collection of Norse words which describe its spot: "yew, stream, slope". And the foreboding returned.
replica breitlingWe were on the Corpse Way, a 16-mile path along which bodies were carried for burial in the dale's only consecrated ground at Grinton. We imagined their progress, the pallbearers with the wicker coffin on their shoulders, faces grimly set into the weather, wailing women and children in their wake.
This last journey lasted two days, the night spent at the Punchbowl Inn at Feetham, the corpse safely stored in the nearby 16ft by 16ft Dead House. Another break was at Ivelet Bridge. On its north side is a human-sized slab - the Coffin Stone - where the heavy wicker load was rested.
Ivelet Bridge, a single arch built in 1687 with a hump so high it might snap a Mondeo in two, is, according to historian Nikolaus Pevsner, the dale's most romantic crossing.
embroidered patches
"The bridge is in the trees in a place where a splashing beck meets the Swale, " he wrote.
Clearly, he did not know that the bridge is stalked by the ghost of a headless dog, a harbinger of terrible tragedy?
Yet we weren't worried by the dog of doom.
We weren't concerned by the Corpse Way.We rather liked standing on the Coffin Stone.
What made us apprehensive was the dirty great dayglo green police poster nailed brutally to a bridgeside tree.
"Motorists beware, " it screamed, breaking the countryside quiet like a Tesco delivery lorry. "Thieves
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