Mama, en route by Coco Lone Neal

en route: ‘on the way’ or ‘let’s get going’ in French, ‘route’, a way, a road, a path, from the Latin ‘rupta’, a way opened by force, the past particle of ‘rumpere’, to break, to rupture

‘Why are you going alone, mama?’ Why am I going alone? The answer feels like an empty space expanding in my chest. All I can see are its edges.

‘It’s nice to be alone sometimes,’ I say.

My three-year-old lets go of me, untangles herself from my already waterproofed grasp, ‘You like to be without me,’ she says, and before I can say anything back, ‘I want to be alone too’, and turns away, her small body brimming, little threads sparking between us, her timber eyes, which are my mother’s eyes, turning away.

Her baby sister is sound asleep on the other side of the room. I place my hand on her chest and feel for its rise and fall, at first barely perceptible, then comfortingly regular. ‘Aiwoo,’ I whisper, I love you. On the way out my husband passes me a flask of hot coffee, his fingers gripping a little too tight.

We live on the outskirts of Sheffield, sandwiched between urban sprawl and the Peak District National Park. I look out of the train window and am small again, travelling between my parents’ homes, transfixed by the unravelling horizon.

Edale is a village in the Vale of Edale, named for its watery geography; ‘ēg’ means island and ‘dæl’ means valley, the Island Valley, a land between streams. Just off the main road a dark green sign beckons from a dry-stone wall, ‘The Official Start of the Pennine Way Trail 268 miles/429 km’, England’s oldest National Trail.

The last time I passed this sign was on my own long walk north, seven days into what became a thirty-five-day solo hike following rivers for over 700 km. I haven’t walked alone since, until today, that is.

My dog Bear, who looks nothing like a bear and a lot like a fox met a bat met a magpie, is agitated with my hesitation. ‘One day’, I say out loud to her, ‘one whole day of my own’.

The valley is on the cusp of winter and a fog blankets the hills above. On the horizon looms Jacob’s Ladder. Steep steps cut into the hillside by a Jacob over two hundred years ago, though his is actually the one which veers off to the left. They meet at the top, leading towards Kinder Scout, the highest point in the Peak District.

The national park is divided into two geological zones: the White Peak, characterized by limestone teeming with the microscopic fragments of fossilised marine animals, and the Dark Peak, limestone overlaid by higher, saturated, gritstone moorland. I am moving between worlds, peering into windows offering glimpses of a past as dark and dazzling as a night sky.

At the bottom of the ladder, I cross a gritstone packhorse bridge over the River Noe. River crossings signify moments of change, of metamorphosis. In Genesis the ladder appears to Jacob in a dream, a link between our realm and the other. The fog settles on me as if I am also dreaming, steps disappearing behind me as fast as they reappear ahead.

On a bright day the river would be visible to my right flowing down the clough. I let myself join its course, first circling south around Edale, then on to Hope, which is where I’m heading today for the simple reason I enjoy the idea of walking into Hope.

At the top a sign looms out of the fog, ‘Pennine Way’, pointing north. I linger, teetering on the brink of an old wish, watch another self step forwards and dissolve into the mist.

The path leads over the Kinder Plateau, famous as the site of the Kinder Mass Trespass of 1932. Where local men and women were protesting the lack of access to the countryside. This trespass then became a catalyst for the establishment of the national parks and a legal right-to-roam.

However, most of us still only have access to 8% of the land and 3% of rivers. I find this startlingly sad, as if you have been cast adrift in a body which is no longer your own.

I turn south.

Stone slabs pave the way across endless obsidian streams cutting through dense peat and rust tipped bog grass. My old waterproof coat doesn’t fit my mother-hips anymore and I have borrowed my partner’s. I am walking in a tent, buffeted left to right, grateful rather than embarrassed, giddy even. Rain falls and rises and at my centre a warmth spreads like a match has been struck.

Midday: I take my first break at Lord’s Seat, a flat-topped Bronze Age barrow, more cup than seat. I wonder at the name, Lord’s Seat, what story this tells, how many it obscures, the fact human remains are often presumed to be white cis male, especially in important places. Thankfully this is changing, with advances in DNA analysis gifting us female warriors, male lovers, dark skinned Britons, though their identities will remain unknown.

What was it to live and die here over 4,000 years ago, to stand beside a grave and echo its shape with your cupped palms, to hold them up to the rain and there, the land, you, kin? On a clear day I would be able to see both where I came from and where I’m going, but today the whole world has shrunk to a knife’s edge. Perhaps this, at least, we have in common.

My fingers are wound into Bear’s wet fur, so cold I can’t tell where my body ends and hers begins. She growls at the barrow, at the wind which sounds like a foghorn, like the engine of a great ship. A thin place, I think, time settles on my skin like first frost.

‘Mam Tor’, a little placard says at the bottom of yet more steps. ‘Mam’ is Welsh for mother and ‘tor’ is Gaelic for ‘a steep hill’. Mam Tor, Heights of the Mother or Mother Hill, also known as the Shivering Mountain due to millennia of landslips creating smaller daughter hills.

The remains of a Bronze Age and early Iron Age hillfort is visible, with multiple concentric lines of banks and ditches. One story tells of the Brigantes, a pre-Roman Celtic tribe that once lived here. If it is true they worshipped the goddess Brigantia, cognate with the Irish Brigid, goddess of healing, poetry, wisdom, then the hill might owe her its name.

Another possibility is its breast-like shape though the thought sits askew. I fall into the words as I climb, mam, ‘mother’, mammary, ‘relating to the breasts’, mammal, ‘animals that nourish their young with milk produced by mammary glands’, mama, ‘Latin for breast’, ma-ma, ‘a child’s first syllables’.

The hill is the mother is the breast is milk and if you cannot feed your baby what are you? Stemming tears, my knees begin to ache and a looseness creeps into my hips. I laugh at the irony, here of all places, pregnant with meaning, labouring for what. Bear’s hackles go up and moments later shadows appear in the fog. The hill is swarming with people.

At the summit a man asks me if I want to have my picture taken and I retreat like a wild animal, ‘No thank you,’ please no. I don’t want to be captured, too quickly thrown from my body. Bear is similarly agitated and the wind is suffocating; to think I wanted to commune here, a mother on Mother Hill – instead we flee.

Crows huddle near rocks, flying up into the wind in vain, before plummeting back to the earth. Over and over again. There is so much more than human history here, bison, hyena, bear, reindeer and wolves once roamed these hills.

In the valley below dark and white geology would normally be visible, however today hard lines – stone, skin, story – waver in the fog. We climb Back Tor, then Lose Hill, before the long descent. My knees buckle and grind and lock and I wonder how much my body has changed. A Shivering Mountain indeed.

As the wind stills I find myself in a holloway bordered by bright yellow patches of gorse. The ground is covered in dozens of decaying apples squelching beneath my boots and in the distance Hope comes into view.

The pub is full. I try not to limp inside, the instincts of prey still strong. There is just enough space to stand at the bar and charge my phone. Wrapping a very wet Bear up in a hoodie I pull from my bag, she growls at the only man stood with me.

‘She’s a nervous little thing isn’t she,’ he says, looking straight at her.

‘Yes,’ I respond, ‘she is protective’.

‘Don’t worry about me, I have four of her,’ sheepdogs he means. He is strong, built like the hull of a boat, and Bear won’t let him near me.

‘I am a shepherd, third generation,’ he tells me. We are regularly interrupted by people standing between us to buy drinks, all the locals know him by name. A sort of madness takes hold of me, spurred perhaps by the warmth of this man who spends his days in the cold. I spread my map out on the bar.

‘What do you think,’ I ask him, pointing to Ladybower Reservoir, ‘think I can make it there before dark?’ He prods his thick fingers on the map, one eye on Bear, and draws a line from Hope to the reservoir, crossing Win Hill, the contour lines of which are impossibly close together.

‘Good luck, love,’ he says. I regret my decision before I’m out the door.

Win Hill stands out in an already sculptural landscape, both dome and church spire, a North Star calling you to water. Where there are now reservoirs was once a village, a river, across this river-village-reservoir stands a Bronze Age stone circle whose largest stone is thought to mimic the hill’s distinct shape. The Fairy Stone, as it is known, is weathered gritstone blooming with lichen, a 4,000-year old outline of a 320-million year old hill. I am a baby, a beetle, a blip.

The ascent is as steep as it looks. Every time I pause to catch a breath I am thrumming with pain.

‘Shit,’ I mutter through gasps, ‘shit, shit, shit’.

Focusing on my breathing, on where it hurts the most, I narrow everything down to just sensation. I was in labour for three days with my first and all I remember thinking, repeating, was ‘this will end, this will end’, no matter what, because everything really does.

‘The water will help,’ my partner said, coaxing me into the birthing pool, and when it didn’t, I raged at everyone who ever told me it would. Then I gave up, sank to the earth, eyes shut, imagining myself walking, then water, thoughts stilled and turned to rain. Afterwards the midwives say I didn’t make a sound.

I look to Bear, my now silent companion, drawing on her strength.

The vegetation is typical of the uplands, heather as far as the eye can see, and though Win Hill is not managed for grouse shooting, much of the Dark Peak still is. Neighbouring groundkeepers have gone to extreme lengths, killing badgers, foxes, birds of prey. The more-than-human world is becoming quieter and I am too quiet as well.

A solitary hawthorn watches me with berries welling like blood and I want to be like her, not beautiful but wild, gnarled and shaped by the wind. The fog folds itself back around us.

Ignoring the small path snaking around what I imagine is the summit I clamber up into the boulders, sparks of pain fizzing up my legs. Bear leads us to a little ledge stuffed between two rocks and I lift myself up. The grey of everything stains darker, the sun setting somewhere unseen.

Wind rips at clothes and hair and fur and as Bear howls every bit of me expands to bursting.

‘Aaah!’ a muffled voice finds us from somewhere down below. I spot a jittery man on a little path desperately looking around him. I shout down, ‘Sorry about my dog she’s harmless,’ but he can’t hear and hurries out of sight. The red-eyed hounds of the Wild Hunt on his heels, it is the right time of year after all.

The summit of Win Hill is other worldly, I touch the trig point, a lighthouse in a storm.

When I was eleven years old, for four days my father and I walked and camped, naming the places we passed. One hill was solemnly dubbed ‘teardrop mountain’ because I cried the whole way up. I reached the top transformed into a warrior. On return to school, bruised and covered in cuts, I compared myself to those smooth legged creatures called girls. That evening, over the phone, my father tells me they are the marks of bravery, of adventure, of being alive. I walked back into school the next day head held high. ‘Look,’ I told my friends, slapping my bare legs, ‘this is a map of my walk’.

The rain is needle-like and constant, every part of me is crawling with pain. Ahead the ghosts of trees shimmer in the mist – the woodland on the map – the reservoir must be just beyond it. As I enter the tree line the last of my light is consumed.

Parkin Clough is a near vertical decline, a rock and mud track alongside running water. I try to use the torch on my phone but everything is wet. I grasp for tree roots, slipping on sharp stone, the earth is unstable, everything coming away. At points I have to lift my legs with my hands because I cannot bend my knees and for the first time all day I think this might actually be dangerous.

My eyes are straining, so heavy I could have curled up right there and then in the rain on the rocks in the woods. I stop, sit for a moment, Bear watching the night. Above us tendrils of mist catch in the branches of trees, below wet stone gleams in the dark, beside me water catches what light it can, carrying it down, down, to meet the river just below the great dam. This stream will make it to the sea.

Bear lets out a low growl, nudges my fingers, knees, boots, get up, get up. We walk out of the wood, the night softening all edges. I half run towards the sound of the river. All sensation. In the distance a lamp post lights up a bridge and our ride home.

‘Why are you going alone, mama?’

One day you will step out of the front door and find your own way through the dark.

***

Coco Lone Neal is a mother, rambler and writer. She recently completed an internship with Hachette Publishing and is currently an apprentice associate at the Writers Workshop in Sheffield and studying for an MA in Nature and Travel Writing from Bath Spa University. When she isn’t dragging her children and dog up hills in the rain, Coco is working on a book stitched together with river-blue thread.

Follow her on Instagram

Image courtesy of the author.