eric robson's alston...

W.H. Auden
Mining Engineer

There should have been if Auden's boyhood dreams had come true. He called the landscapes around Alston his ‘great good place'. His spiritual home was that part of the Pennines bounded in the south by Swaledale, in the north by the Roman Wall and to the west by the Eden Valley. He was inspired by the bleak moors and the pinched valleys that insinuate themselves between and he wrote about them for most of his life. If you don't believe me about poetry being second choice just take note of these lines from his Letter to Lord Byron.

And from my sixth until my sixteenth year
I thought myself a mining engineer.
The mine I always pictured was for lead,
Though copper mines might, faute de mieux, be sound.
Today I like a weight upon my bed;
I always travel by the underground.

And you can follow in Auden's footsteps. All you need is his complete works and the Ordnance Survey map, both of which you study in a café in Alston before heading into the wild, high country. The skeletons of the mining industry are still there to be discovered. The engine sheds and flue chimneys stark against a cold horizon. The long wait for the sound of a dropped stone finding water at the bottom of an abandoned mineshaft. Washing floors and spoil heaps and crumbling chimneys at places like Rookhope and Garrigill and in the wastes of Nenthead's industrial hinterland. Auden spoke at their funeral.

The shafts are filled with water; the mosses grope over the washing floor.
I look through the broken arms of waterwheels: I see lambs feeding.
Trucks lie overturned; an old rail patches a gap in the wall.
Rain falls through the gaping roof of sheds; it falls on the obsolete inventions
and structures...

It's still all there to find just as Auden found it. But remember to wrap up well because The Moor can be as cold as the lead that made it famous.