Dent by Myna Trustram

One summer we camped by a swollen river in Dentdale.

The famous railway line from Settle to Carlisle contours around the eastern end of the dale, just above the village of Cowgill. In 1869, when construction began on the Rise Hill Tunnel, hundreds of navvies and their families moved to the area and lived in camps up in the hills. Seventy-two children, women and men who died from accidents or disease during the construction are buried in unmarked graves in the yard of the Church of St John the Evangelist in Cowgill. The ground over the burials is bumpy, the grass unmown. They were recorded in the church burial register which is perhaps the only official record of these people. In 2017 a memorial stone to the dead was erected in the graveyard, and a plaque placed inside the church that names and dates each one.

These are the names of the thirty-five children who died:

James Morgan (1870, 8 days)

James Braggs (1870, 4 months)

Ruth Elizabeth Philips (1871, 1 year)

William Williamson (1871, 10 days)

Elizabeth Ann Salt (1871, 7 years)

James Stephenson (1871, 5 years)

Clara Jones (1874, 1 week)

William Henry Morgan (1872, 5 weeks)

Hannah Ellen Salt (1872, 2 years)

Hannah Jameson (1872, 10 years)

Annie Elizabeth Jessop (1872, 5 years)

Charles Hatch Davies (1872, 5 years)

James Thompson (1872, 10 years)

Emily Boycott (1872, 10 months)

Phoebe Askew (1872, 1 month)

Isabella Walker (1872, 17 days)

George Jackson (1872, 19 months)

Samuel John Morgan (1873, 5 weeks)

Margaret Richardson (1873, 2 years)

Albert Henry Thompson (1873, 6 weeks)

Henry Homer (1873, 6 months)

Alexander Collins (1873, 10 months)

William Henry David (1873, 2 years)

Eliza Richardson (1873, 6 years

Charles Henry Rushton (1873, 3 weeks)

William Osbourne (1873, 6 weeks)

William Reuben Gregory (1874, 9 months)

William Webb (1874, 2 days)

Edward William Williams (1874, 3 months)

Hannah Reeves (1874, 7 months)

Marcelline Jones (1874, 16 years)

Margery Turnbull (1874, 14 weeks)

Elizabeth Ann Morgan (1874, 7 months)

Thomas Wright (1874, 6 years)

William Ferris (1875, 2 days)

Unpick a tragedy and you are left with a list.

The navigator men, women and children lived and died in the dry fields of summer and the mud of winter. After a wet pandemic summer in the city, we wanted to be in the bright green valley, bare apart from woodland along the river and a scrubby plantation of flowers and trees that emanated a radical kind of hope that the hills might just recover from centuries of clearances. Not so long ago the valley was full of labourers and engineers, scaffolding and mining, women and children, squalid workcamps, goods sheds, cattle docks, trains running back and forth on the highest public railway in England. The building of the railway was for some a drawn-out tragedy. Today the line is celebrated as a survivor of the great days of Victorian railway building.

We had retreated for a while from the pandemic city. There were three of us and we each arrived separately in a car and erected a little single tent. A bottle of sanitiser was tied to an old post at the entrance to the camping field. All pubs, cafes, shops in the valley were closed. This was no hardship, we got off lightly compared to many. We had left our soft beds and sought out easy hardship for reasons known only to our secret selves. A try for redemption perhaps. We sought out the bumpy ground of others’ long-ago deaths, to what end we did not know.

Along the valley bottom, lichen spatters hawthorn branches like paint on a studio floor. It appears to be the same lichen I saw in a churchyard on the Swedish island of Fårö and that also grows on gooseberry bushes in my garden.

Come away, Oh human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping, than you

 can understand.

Early in the morning before the others were awake, Yeats’s poem The Stolen Child (1889) came into my mind. I have long been alert to every imaginable danger a child could face, and the injuries I might knowingly or unknowingly inflict. Until that morning I had heard the poem as a call to come away from danger, away from the waters and the wild. In fact, the child is called towards the danger, she is invited to leave the weeping world for the wilder world of troublesome dreams.

A few years ago, my Irish Aunty Eva slid along the pew as we waited for an uncle’s funeral to begin and whispered, you are a very brave wee girl. She alone had the temerity on that occasion to refer to our daughter’s death. I have an Irish passport now, having grown up in England it feels fraudulent, claiming experience that lies far beyond me. Then again, at times my Irish mother’s experiences, moods and fears seem lodged deep inside me.

While the world is full of troubles

            And is anxious in its sleep.

During our childhoods in the 1960s and 70s, our mother lived alongside us children in England. ‘Alongside us’ rather than with us because at times she was clenched and distraught at her warring, troubled countrymen and women, most likely she was ashamed. I watched her, a silent frightened English child, my red hair refusing to hang in a straight sixties style. I was waiting to be seen, to be picked out from the family’s inner and silent turmoil. We were mother and daughter, sister and sister, sister and brother, father and daughter, father and son all locked into a silent, unfought battle for understanding. Play loud The Waterboys’ setting of the poem to music with recitation by Tomás Mac Eoin and I am in the heartland of grief. The weeping that has never been wept.

A heron flew low over the river. Elderberries were green and hard, wild roses bore red glossy hips and the not so drowsy water rats stole into my tent to eat grapes. I heard that water voles might lose their special status as a protected species which affords protection to their habitat as well as the animal. Like an infant, the water vole can’t prosper outside of its habitat, though these did scuttle and creep into my tent.

A week or two after her death, I dreamt that she, our daughter, was gone away, not with faeries but with other young, garlanded girls. She said she had to go, called and waved goodbye. Her name was taped on the camping equipment that I was using – socks, torch, rucksack, insect repellent, sleeping bag and mat.

Early one morning I watched a mother and daughter walk across the dew-dropped grass to their tent.

The benign act of belated memorial to the navigators and their families, took place within the valley’s changing landscape, where navigators cut through the rock and built high into the air. Where sheep continue to eat the hillsides bare; moneyed incomers transform farmhouses and barns, make neat flower beds while their glossy dogs pad around garden furniture; farmyards are slung about with rural poverty, defunct tyres and machinery.

Whenever a train passed above us, we looked up like delighted children – a train! – and watched it trundle along the viaduct, then disappear northwards to Garsdale, Kirkby Stephen, Appleby, Langwathby, Lazonby, Armathwaite, Carlisle.

We slept by the roar of the river Dee. I thought of the artist Richard Long walking with a river’s roar in the Himalayas and a walk a group of us once did along a bouldered Himalayan river to Har Ki Doon. We camped by streams; when morning came after a frozen night, we broke the iced-up streams to wash our faces. To reach the starting point of the trek, we snaked in a minibus up a barely surfaced mountain road with a precipitous drop. I saw us all tumbling down the mountainside and my daughter left motherless. This would surely happen if we carried on at such a speed; the others didn’t seem to worry. Until then I was little aware of the depths of anxiety locked up inside me. It was a foreboding, but eventually it wasn’t me who died on a foreign road. We who are left alive are the ghosts. We haunt ourselves, roam riverbanks and hillsides alive in diminished selves, the dead inside us.

Up above Dent station, two children cycle at speed around Great Knoutberry Fell. They nod at me as they spin past, delighted with their ride. Watch out! One pebble in the road and you are off, your slight limbs searing across the tarmac into an oncoming car.

I had come to Dentdale once before, not long after she died. The train rumbled along the viaduct, and I walked down alone from the station to a farmhouse where a man showed me the bedroom and bathroom and next morning laid breakfast in the empty dining room. Our bed and breakfast transaction did not hide the oddness of our situation: a stranger sleeping in their house, a woman hovering in a back room. The next day, I followed the river along the valley, heaved my injured leg over styles and afterwards lay in a bath of deep brown water. My injury remained inside. It was impossible to speak of anything at all.

***

Myna Trustram has worked as a historian, curator and researcher, mostly in Manchester at the People’s History Museum, the City Art Gallery and the Metropolitan University. She now devotes her time to writing essays which combine academic and theoretical interests with literary and experimental forms. Her themes are childhood, the material world and loss.

Notes: For the story of the unmarked graves in Cowgill churchyard, see the booklet by Peter Boyles, 1869, (Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority and Friends of the Settle-Carlisle Railway, ND). ‘unpick a tragedy …’ I have developed from ‘unpick a map and you are left with a list’, from Richard Wentworth’s Thinking Aloud. With an essay by Nick Groom, Hayward Gallery Publishing, 1998. For an account of how The Waterboys worked with Tomás Mac Eoin read here, while Richard Long’s short piece, ‘Walking with the River’s Roar’ can be read here.

The photograph at the head of this essay is of the graveyard at the church of St John the Evangelist, Cowgill, Dentdale, photo credit ITV Border.