Snow paints another world over the top of the one that we normally see. When it falls from the sky, it brings with it unclear pictures of Christmas, undercurrents of American culture and children. However when its settled and laid across everything we can see, covering the fields, the houses, the valleys and the cities, there’s a different sense of something older and more peaceful; something almost pagan that reaches North from where you are and up towards where the nights are longer and deeper and the sun shares the sky with the moon.
You can tell its arrived when the skies glow a watercolour pink and blue and the air shakes a little with the cold. Cars and vehicles park where they like and people walk on the road. Time gets thicker and thoughts like “of all of the engines that drive reality, weather is one of the most important and least understood as one” come to you and fade again, like the daylight at 4.00.
I don’t know how to put it into words to be honest. I just know that its peace-inducing to run as steadily as you can over a brand new landscape made of ice, water and a new topography that sits on top of the one that you’re used to. When the snow is deep, it replaces the land underneath completely. Sometimes, you break through when you tread too heavily and you’re reminded of the heather, the stones and the earth underneath, rippling away in a shape that should be more familiar than the smooth snow and ice shapes in front of you, but which isn’t more familiar at all. In fact, its gone completely from your mind and the snow is the new real. Its like having two worlds on top of each other, both with their own myths and both with their own hills, fields, peaks and valleys.
Its cold this morning and Tony and me have set out early. It was dark when I left the house and there are pools of blackness everywhere. Its dark in the frozen car, down the sides of the houses, at the bottom of the street and all over the road. Everything is covered and glittering with rimes and ice crystals and I wonder whether some is black ice and decide to drive slower than usual. There are chunks of snow and ice on the outside of most things. The dawn is here and it lays an orange, a blue and starfield of light on top of the ice and snow that coat our world.
The drive is dark. Its not far to Tony’s but there are plenty of hills and I don’t trust them. There’s no black ice on them – everything is either well-used or well-gritted – and I arrive a little late but safe. We drive out along the Snake as the blue in the sky gets deeper and the sunrise bursts slowly overhead.
We park at Cutthroat Bridge and get out into the freezing air. The Snake wasn’t too dangerous and no-one was driving too impatiently. We set off running slowly in the half-dark, running past one or two other cars and another runner, a woman who passes us, says hello and is gone into the snow-covered distance in minutes. We crunch and wend up towards Derwent Edge and watch a tangerine glow bathe the snowfields a mile or two in front of us, leaving us in the hill’s shadow.
My breath feels like its close to my ears and there’s a muffled sensation that comes with running in the freezing snow and ice. Each crunching footstep feels like it only makes it as far as our ears and no further and we’re the only people for miles around. There are tracks though and its easy to see the path we need to take to get up high and into the sun’s bright wash.
Vapour piles up where ever it can. The clouds cluster at the horizon like uncertain paint strokes and our breath billows wildly like shower steam. Further up the ascent and away in the distance I can see the expulsion from a power station’s steam turbine, shaped like a flamethrower jet and flat as a pancake on top, presumably because the jet has hit a cold block of air and can go no further. It looks strange and its as memorable as the plants encased in finger-thick ice, tiny rime crystals in the shape of grass or cilia pointing in the direction of the wind where grass would normally be, the twirling shapes of frozen water with the old world inside them and the vision-killing tip of sunlight breaking over the sharp horizons and hilltops.
For some reason, when we look at the something small, we see echoes of what’s big, but we don’t see echoes of what’s small in what’s big. When I look at the ice crystals and the rimes of frost on the ground and wrapped around plants and trees, I can see little cities and mountains, tiny versions of what I’m stood on now. But when I venture into a city somewhere, I don’t see tiny plants blown up to the size of sky scrapers or houses that look like boulders. I don’t know why this is and as I’m wondering and running, I see that I’m wrong. There’s a rocky outcrop that looks like horse-shite from here. We get closer and it looks like its a pile of UFOs and so do the low lying clouds. As we get closer still, it towers over us and it begins to look like its made from the human-organ shapes in an H R Geiger painting. Its been made by the wind and the rain.
At night, the cat snores at the foot of the bed and it makes me feel comfortable and connected to the universe somehow. These rocky outcrops make me feel a similar way, but through shape rather than sound. The next rocky outcrop is called the The Cakes Of Bread and it looks like someone is camping there. There’s over a mile of bright, white snowfield between us; the hard-to-define ice world on top of the old, earthen one.
Now we’re on the Edge proper, we get a steady rhythm going. Its been hard to do that until now, mainly because the snow is deep and frozen and it has its own topography, covering what’s normally there and because its easy to break through the snow, drop two feet and find yourself stood on the hard earth below. I cut my shin doing this and its more painful than I would have thought it would be. The red from the blood is brighter than any man-made item of clothing ever could be and I find myself comparing it to the red that’s spilling over the hilltops with the sunshine, but its nothing like it. The temperature is about -4 and it stays that way until we get back to the car, some 3 hours later.
Up around the Cakes, we get to the man who’s camped there overnight. He looks peaceful and he nods quickly as we pass. Everyone can see and feel how beautiful the sun on the snow is and it seems a shame to distract anyone for too long from it. Its so cold that the edges of everything seem blurred and taking your gloves off even for a minute is sure to make your fingertips hurt with the temperature drop. The blues that come from the cold are a special kind of blue that I never see anywhere else. Maybe its because they often fade into a mauve or a pink that they seem so flinty. They’re intense, fascinating and gargantuan and Tony and me take lots of photographs.
There are more runners than I expected. Its quiet where we are, but fell-runners obviously know to come here for the sunrise when its been snowing. Tony falls a few times, a victim of the snow’s idiot-savant redesign of the land, his feet plunging through the smooth frozen mini-hills of snow into the dark depths beneath them. We stop for a moment near some plants that are so caked in ice that they look like crystal cauliflowers.
The sun rises and we stop briefly at each rock outcrop. Derwent Edge has been overwritten with snow fields and ice runs and the closer we get to Lostlad, the less footprints there are. There are a few more runners and a couple with some dogs. The dogs are embodiment of joy in the snow, no matter how deep it is for them. Everyone we pass seems happy.
We turn around at Lostlad. My shin AND ankle are bleeding now and the cold makes it hurt more for some reason. Tony has injured his ankle – the muscles not the surface – and we’re glad that on the return leg, we’ll be going very slightly downhill. This section is the same as a portion of the Nine Edges, but its unrecognisable. Kinder is visible, white as we are and below us Howden is black and ringed with pine forest, dark and smudged in the cold.
The sun is high and bright, like an interrogation lamp, and its still too cold to be out here for much longer. We run down into the valley and the temperature drops even further, mist rising around us and ice becoming more common. Tony reminds me that valley floors are often colder than the top of their sides.
We get back to the car and the car park is full. A man from Nottingham wants our space and waits patiently and chats while we shiver, remove our steaming socks and shoes and scramble into the car to drink some ice-cold water and put the heater on. Twenty five minutes later, I’m home.
Want to read more fell-running escapades? Head back to the Unpublished Writing page.