Sitting in the garden of The Hideaway looking out across National Trust owned Hardcastle Crags, a wooded valley steeped in industrial history, is one of life’s simple, yet hugely cathartic, pleasures. Back in the 1800s Hideaway residents would have found employment at Gibson’s Mill down in the heart of the Crags. This early industrial-revolution mill provided both employment and sustenance for locals.
And today you can still feel its beating heart. Water swhooshing gently down the valley, following a huge arterial complex of valley-side waterfalls and tiny streams, playing in the shadow of a majestic monument to a harsher yet simpler life.
And it is this simplicity, acting like a huge magnet, that keeps pulling me back. Time slips by unnoticed. I’ve lost count of how many hours have gone by when I have just stopped to breathe in this wild, unforgiving, untameable yet beautiful landscape. Easy to see why these valleys inspired poet-laureate Ted Hughes. But I do feel he missed a trick in his lyrical (occasionally ominous) tributes to nature in the Hebden and Calder Valleys. While musing over nature’s dominion, and man’s inescapable yearning to co-exist alongside a frequently inhospitable landscape, the valley’s capacity to heal is conspicuous by its absence from Hughes’s work.
And that’s the point. These valleys have unparalleled restorative powers, verging on the supernatural. Stress, ambiguity, and uncertainty ebb away, like tributaries flowing into Hebden Beck, leaving behind a cleansing combination of renewal and rejuvenation.
An impact that never ceases to amaze.
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