I was in Rookhope on Monday, went up Bolt's
Law and then met a Rookhope resident on Wednesday. It made me think that
I should share this. There follows my Rookhope entry (matched illustrations
here) from my part completed
An A-Y of Auden's Pennine Landscapes: “The valley of the Rookhope Burn, a northwestern tributary
joining the River
Wear at Eastgate, is the site
of the earliest reference to metal mining in the
Pennines in medieval records. In 1153 an
iron mine and
a lead mine in ‘Rykhup’
were granted by King Stephen to his nephew the Palatine Bishop Hugh de Pusiet
of
Durham...............I first became
acquainted with Rookhope mining in 1929.................In addition to the big
water-wheel another feature of the industrial archaeology was still intact at
the time. This was the smelt mill, beyond the west end of the village. The
hearth was still intact and an arch carried the great stone-built flue over the
road and up the valley side for over a mile. This mill had been in use until
1919, the last of the traditional mills to operate”
.
Those are not the words of W. H. Auden though one feels that they easily could
be. He, however, would only have needed to substitute 1919 for 1929 and so
indicate that at his arrival the great smelt mill and its matching railway
system with its incline ascending
Bolt’s Law
from the village was just about operational.
The quotation is by Sir Kingsley Dunham F.R.S.
.
It is profoundly ironic and fascinating that two of the great intellects of the
20th century both found the experience of inter-war Rookhope seminal for their
lives. Rookhope is not on the tourist trail, it is not the subject of a large
popular literature. The vast majority of Auden’s readers have probably either
not known of its location or still worse but quite plausibly, assumed that it
is an imaginery location. In the 1930s, a view gained currency, which is still
repeated today, that Auden’s play
Paid On Both Sides was set in the mill communities
of Northern England. Nothing could be further from the truth (by about 100
miles). It is explicitly said to be set in Rookhope. The mill of
Paid On Both Sides
is not a Yorkshire textile mill but the wholly
different structure of Rookhope smelt mill located beside the still surviving
Lintzgarth house, itself named in
Paid on Both Sides.
Sadly, neither Sir Kingsley nor Wystan ever met. Wystan
possibly never even knew of Sir Kingsley whose recognition really followed
after Wystan had left England.
Sir Kingsley was a
Durham undergraduate studying
geology when he first came to Rookhope in 1929. Essentially Sir Kingsley and
Wystan were of the same generation. Rookhope’s mineralogical fame brought Sir
Kingsley and both Wystan and John Auden (the Boltsburn Flats had a reputation
for great riches amongst miners and were being worked between the wars). Sir
Kingsley went onto post graduate study into the origin of the lead, zinc and
fluorspar deposits of the North Pennines. As
such he became a mining apprentice with the Weardale Lead Company in Rookhope
in 1930 and the proud owner of a secondhand Morris Cowley. His studies
eventually took him to almost every hole in the ground in the
Pennines north of the Craven fault
(Auden’s
Craven Ladies in
Age of Anxiety).
Sir Kingsley’s first published work on Rookhope appeared a
few years after Wystan’s. His literary debut was in 1934. From 1939, Sir
Kingsley was back in the area, this time on urgent war work assessing the
contribution the mines could make. This led in 1949 to the first edition of his
magnum opus the Geology of the Norhern
Pennine Orefield, a work which was thoroughly revised and re-issued in two
volumes in 1990. In the meantime Sir Kingsley had become Professor of Geology
at Durham
in 1950 and then Director of the British Geological Survey between 1966 and
1975. In 1961 Sir Kingsley’s most famous research project came to fruition when
the Rookhope Borehole reached granite. Throughout these years Sir Kingsley
retained close connections with the companies working Rookhope, a connection he
retained into the 1990s.
He saw in the millennium in retirement in Durham, Sir Kingsley’s recollections of the North Pennines were then as vivid as ever. A few days
before I first wrote this Sir Kingsley came with friends from Durham to what
was probably the first ever reading of Auden’s Pennine
poetry in the North Pennines, at Allendale Library. When the Auden’s Pennine Landscapes exhibition opened at Nenthead Mines in 1999, Sir Kingsley was one of the
guest speakers and represented Wystan’s generation.
It might seem odd to be devoting so much of this account to
a summary of someone else’s career but a key point follows. Sir Kingsley’s
career might have been Wystan’s or with just a tiny change in fortune John
Auden’s -Wystan’s brother whose life was spent with the Indian Geological
Survey. Rookhope was a place of great intellectual potential. Sir Kingsley’s
career shows that. Here you have two men for whom the physical accidents of
location (its bleak, apparently unpromising and unfashionable nature) became
trivial compared with its real potential. Both men explored Rookhope in depth,
both had started with the same agenda, an interest in geology. One fulfilled
that agenda, another took the same bedrock and turned it into a poetic
landscape, one capable of articulating the deepest concerns and dilemmas of the
human condition. Each offering is a quite stunning achievement.
Yet there is a hint of sadness in this relationship, one
that speaks of the separateness and division in human affairs that so drove
Wystan. Poetry and geology are not often conjoined. Sir Kingsley could lead
almost all his life unaware of Wystan’s interest. When late in life, he learnt
of Rookhope’s poetic importance, he was taken aback. That is the point, it is a
measure of the failure by English learned society to interpret the correct
location and significance of Rookhope that Sir Kingsley knew nothing of the
matter.
I too have to add my own ignorance. For in 1978-83, I was
exploring the industrial archaeology of Rookhope with passion. I was also
studying theology at Durham University
with a supervisor ensuring that I bought my first Auden. I never made the
connection then; no one at Durham (despite the award of
Auden’s D.Litt. and the accompanying oration in 1962), whether in the
University or in the County, was making anything of the Pennine Auden. Had I bought Carpenter’s biography published in
1981, the penny would have dropped. That treat had to wait until 1987 and it is
to Carpenter’s credit that the Pennine Auden
spoke loud in his biography. Carpenter speaks clearly of the importance of Nenthead, Alston Moor,
and the Pennines
to Auden. Specifically Carpenter gave some prominence to the quotation of the In Rookhope I was first aware of Self and Not-Self, Death
and Dread:..... segment of New Year Letter. At that point, I began to realise
that Auden’s relationship to the Pennines
was out of the ordinary. How on earth had he got there? That was an issue not
well addressed by Carpenter and it remains an issue full of mystery.
Before working through the Rookhope material in the Auden
canon, it is worthwhile providing a simple list. In chronological order it is
((N) indicates that Rookhope is named):
The Old Lead Mine 1924
The Old Mine 1924
Rookhope (Weardale, Summer 1922) 1924 (N)
The Letter 1927
Paid on Both Sides 1928 (N)
New Year Letter 1940 (N)
England Six Unexpected Days
1954 (N)
Amor Loci 1965.
The chronology of this material does not directly unlock the
datelines. Indeed it is necessary to turn to the final poem to answer the
leading question: when did Auden first visit Rookhope?
Amor Loci or Love of Place describes
Rookhope but not by name and it speaks to the seminal importance of the place
to Auden’s vision. Three reasons allow us to conclude that its subject is
Rookhope. Edward Mendelson in New
York confirms that Auden’s pocket diary of the time
refers to
Amor Loci
as the Rookhope poem. Granted this fact, the key line becomes
not (as perhaps at twelve I thought it) of Eden. Next in the
jigsaw are the memories of Auden’s hosts at his
Newcastle
Reading in 1972 as narrated by Alan Myers
.
The key conversation took place between Auden and the author Sid Chaplin.
Chaplin who knew Rookhope asked Auden when he had first been there. Chaplin
noted the answer as 12. This ties in exactly to
Amor Loci and leads to the
conclusion that Auden’s first North Pennine
visit took place in 1919. And then only in 2014 did I find myself listening to Wystan recorded reading
Amor Loci and he says directly to the audience "the place is Rookhope"!
The complications of chronology certainly do not end there.
From Auden’s own material, the only other dateline that we might add comes from
the title of the poem
Rookhope (Weardale, Summer 1922). Additionally the
two well known visits to nearby
Allenheads
(September 1926) and
Blanchland (Easter 1930)
almost certainly account for other visits. This suggests that Auden was in
Rookhope on at least four occasions, but probably more often, before World War
Two. None of this really accounts for how Auden got there. Carpenter simply
said “At some time during his schooldays, probably when staying with friends,
he began to visit a stretch of country in the north-western part of the Pennine
range.....”
Since the
first visit to the Keswick area appears to be in 1921 (see Wescoe), we are left with having to explain how a
twelve year old child from Birmingham
reached Rookhope in 1919, an apparently unlikely event. Several people have
tried to unearth more by speaking to Rookhope residents without any real
success. I have been told that Auden stayed “at the doctor’s house in Rookhope”
but presently have nothing more than a local oral tradition.
Other sources suggest Rookhope had no resident doctor. Any link that there may
be to a possible friend of Auden’s father deserves examination. Doctors were
amongst the earliest groups of people in Britain to obtain cars and such a
linkage may help explain how Auden became so familiar with such an inaccessible
area far from home.
Granted that
he got there in 1919, what did he find? “The Little Nut” (illustrate) might
have made an impression. This was a 2’ gauge saddle tank locomotive which
worked around the Boltsburn Mine in the centre of the village. Boltsburn was
the hub of activity and remained at work until 1940. Its closure was far from
the end of the story. Grove Rake, Frazer’s Hush, Stotfield Burn and Redburn Mines were all
functioning in Rookhope at various time since 1945. Physically dominating the
village was the Bolt’s Law incline. This was
Rookhope’s (freight only) rail link to the outside world. It had opened in
about 1846 and would work until 1923 and thence lie derelict for many years.
Most traffic had to be hauled up the incline’s 2,000 yards of 1 in 12 track. At
the top and 1650’ a.s.l. was a huge steam worked winding engine, a chimney on
the skyline, engine sheds and a small railway community.
I turned and travelled quickly down the track
Which grass will cover by and by
Down the lonely valley; once I looked back
And saw a waste of stones against an angry sky.
That is
Auden description’s in The Old Lead-mine (with a variant in The Old Mine).
It comes after the stanza that describes the initial stone down the shaft
incident which develops through Rookhope (Weardale, Summer 1922) to its climax in New Year Letter’s
In Rookhope I first knew self..... Within New Year Letter
I shall argue that the incident took place at Sikehead Shafts. The present
point is that is congruent with a return to the village along the old trackbeds
which linked the two locations. This makes perfect sense of track which grass will cover by and by. The railway
was newly derelict. Thence he is walking down the incline, which is certainly Down the lonely valley. It is precise description
that turning around on this descent a waste of
stones against an angry sky would be seen. That is still the case where
the ruins of the railway buildings at Bolt’s Law incline head and a rock
cutting come together on the skyline.
Back in the
village and railway tracks led south in which direction lay further mine and
limekiln remains at Brandon Walls. West of the
village the tracks led past the old smelter at Lintzgarth
(both names are in Paid on Both Sides) and on up to the most remote
of the mines towards Allenheads at Wolfcleugh,
Grove Rake and Frazer’s Hush.
These
details and timelines are important in order to substantiate the argument that The Letter
represents Rookhope and thus the Wear element of
the 1979 Selected Poems’ opening
triology that seem to describe the North Pennine
landscape. For his American audience in 1954 Auden described Rookhope , the most wonderfully desolate of all the dales in
England Six
Unexpected Days. That desolation had become for Auden the sacrament
within this landscape that was able to reveal agape, the vital conclusion to Amor Loci.
Few Americans are likely to have followed Auden’s 1954
itinerary. Until very recently few Auden enthusiasts have made the journey to
Rookhope (some have, in 1988 his literary executor Edward Mendelson and
Katherine Bucknell the editor of Juvenilia
made the trip). However unless the reader of Auden hurries, it will be too late
to see a working mine. Perhaps to the surprise of many, the Grove Rake mine was
still functioning in 1999 (but closed in 2001). As Sir Kingsley has suggested,
there is still likely to be plenty of minerals beneath the dale, the point is
that the foreign competition Auden noted
in The Chase
has, in all likelihood, finally extinguished the industry.
Grove Rake in 1999 looked straight out of Auden’s poetry.
True, there was no waterwheel or steam engines, but there was rusting machinery
by the ton, gaunt headgear and hoppers, cages poised in rust above their
shafts, numbers of battery locos in varying stages of decay. The one engine
that was working was posed on track in front of a windowless stone building
from the old days, beside it in fading red on yellow paintwork a truck was
marked “Explosives”, behind which there was a backdrop of sheep and cattle
grazing the fell. It seemed poignant that the final workings accessed the mine
by an inclined adit (not present in Auden’s time) which rejoiced in the
thoroughly apt name of the Firestone Incline. Named as a consequence of
geological fact but capable of revelatory allegory and symbolism, it is an
effective summary of what Auden had found in Rookhope".
