youlgrave & the pommie panter
LIKE THE WIND WERE KIND ENOUGH TO PRINT THIS MADNESS IN THEIR 42ND ISSUE. YOU CAN BUY A REAL COPY HERE, COMPLETE WITH MY ARTWORK.
You Won’t Get The Pommie Panter Out Of Your Head
I know this because, early on a Saturday morning, me and my two friends are running up a steep hill at the start of the Pommie Panter fell race route and one of them, Jawad, sighs “I love this area but I can’t get “Pommie Panter” out of my head. It keeps repeating again and again and I hate it”. And its true: the name came easily then and it comes easily now, over a year after the first ever race on a bright Sunday in May and 11 months after when this piece is set – when we ran the route for fun on a summer morning. Jawad, Tony and me are not racing, we’re running because we’re friends and because the route is a good route – a beautiful route in fact – and also because they’ve never done it before and there’s a river to swim in at the end.
We’re in Youlgreave in the White Peak in the Peak District. It feels lighter and looks more like classic English countryside than the Dark Peak, which feels bleaker and richer, with its sublime aspects coming more easily and quickly. The wide valleys, the black gritstones perched high on their sides and the heather-covered moorland between them combine into a kind of echo of the Scottish Highlands, a program of purple and brown advice that caromed down the Pennines, rang on Castleton and redounded in a ring only nature could shape, quiet near Dove Dale and silent by Ashbourne. An island rising from the ring’s middle, the White Peak has sublime aspects too but they tend to be hidden and their appearance is often a surprise tucked away in easy-looking, picturesque hills or obscured by the angle you’re gazing from. Despite the sheep-serving arcadia of the surface, in the White Peak there are deep gorges that yawn from nowhere and limestone outcrops with odd names, shaped like the wind and that point to the sky.
I ran the first ever Panter, and I ran it with my friend Ed and his buddy Chris. This time however, I’m running it with Jawad and Tony and we’re deeper into the summer, but its somehow much colder than last time. Halfway up the hill, the memory of racing up it and passing a few people overlays the morning and inserts itself between the fields, hills and trees for a few minutes. As inclines go, its laborious but the surroundings are pleasant and green. We chat easily as usual, about running, where we’re going, about the landscape, occasionally about ideas and often about injuries. The pace is steady and the day seems good already, unfolding quietly under skies that are grey and heavy.
The name, “Pommie Panter” is an easy name to repeat and to remember. Whoever named it managed to put some music in it, and its the same music that’s in names like Lost Lad, Lover’s Leap, the Chelmorton Hob, Jenny Greenteeth and Magpie Mine. Sound and wording like this is easy on the mind and easy on the tongue; saying such things out loud is a pleasure, and not just because they are often made up of two words with the same letter at the beginning. There’s something in the meter, the scansion and the auditory qualities that make them pleasurable for the brain to test, select, and perform. The sky is dark, grim and grey but the fields are alive and green, rolling away into the distance and after a hard start, the left turn at the top is a happy one. From the crest, we tip down winding trails, criss-crossed with shade from trees and into a valley where the woodland is much darker than the woodland we’ve run through so far. There’s a brief tangle of trods and roads and then we’re onto grasslands; flatter but bumpy with hummocks and hidden waterways and bogs.
Jawad, while running along a lane, tells me with a laugh that “its great countryside but I still can’t get that f*cking name out of my head” and that makes me think that maybe the music in the words is something that shaped the British countryside. A-pleasure-to-say-and-easy-to-remember names and phrases can flourish in towns and villages, given life in stories and songs, picked up easily in conversations and transmitted into far away places by anyone who is receptive to them. Jawad’s brain was doing what the musicality in the name encouraged it to do: to repeat it and pass it on, until it became a part of the day and a way of understanding and talking about what was around us. It behaved in a way similar to an internet meme, but stored in a mind rather than a computer.
Thinking of the countryside being made like this is a way of looking into a very old world, where the spoken word was more important than the written, when remembering names, stories and places was easier to do with sounds than it was with writing. Even today, spellings of certain places still vary, while the spoken version sounds the same. The English science fiction writer M. John Harrison is from Youlgreave and his fiction features a character called Yulgrave. When you see the village name written down, its sometimes spelled Youlgrave without the ‘e’. Yulgrave, Youlgreave and Youlgrave all sound the same when you hear them said out loud.
Inside the pleasant-to-hear-and-say plashes and plosives, there’s a steely practicality in the titles and names from an oral tradition. “Panter” refers to physical exertion and “Pommie” to the place that the race is set; and colloquially, a Pommie is someone from Yulgrave.
The lanes take us near a river and there are yellow, undulating fields filled with black-wrapped plastic bales of hay, set at irregular intervals across the hillsides. The plastic feels slightly difficult to be near, but the overall effect is arresting. Black against yellow is a warning colour combination and the regularity of the bales suggests a machine, which feels out of place on grass.
This section is classic White Peak cross country. It doesn’t look too high or the inclines too steep and its bucolic, wild and alive, but when you try to run through it quickly, progress becomes slow and arduous. For a mile or two, its like the ground is in the shape of waveforms of varying frequencies that converge and mix in the field in front of us. Tony has things to say about broken ground and broken ankles and I think he’s right to bring it up.
There are some navigational errors around here. I have an electronic map of the way – one that I can access and that was created while I was racing – but the route comes from memory. There are a few wrong turns – to my mind, this is true of everything – but in the main, the correct paths slipped into consciousness without my really noticing how they came to be there.
A red kite glides through the air to our right, so close it looks too big to be real. It isn’t scared and moves smoothly above telegraph wires to hover almost above our heads until its chased away by a band of crows. There’s a slight uphill and we find a steady pace and proceed over the fields, toward more farmland, cattle and blue-black skies.
Our running group is a running group with its own oral traditions and I’m guessing that its the same for all running groups. As we’re moving, we’re talking and discussing where we are and agreeing on what we can see. I have recollections of talking about bird silhouettes and wondering why the river in the valley was the River Bradford and not the River Lathkill, but the rest is gone from my memory and the main impression I’m left with is that talking creates the things around us. The Word Of God is perhaps the most famous reality created by speech, but a judge pronouncing a sentence is maybe the most interesting to think about, simply because “pronouncing a sentence” is a description of what the judge does and a way of making the law real. Races are started by speech (or a gun that fires blanks if you’re lucky) but not writing.
Llamas peer from behind a tree and watch us run past. We reach more grassland and the small hills that enclose these pastures make it feel like its secret and removed from the rest of the Peak District’s thoroughfares. We’re running on meadows full of waving grass, past wildflowers and limestone outcrops, the rock clearly visible like exposed bone and far away there are tunnels of yellow sunshine on the tops and black thunderheads are gathering themselves up into teetering black mountains.
We almost go back on ourselves but then hit a steady rhythm for one of the last uphill sections. By the time we arrive at the crest, we’re glad of the respite. The valley opens out below us, the view spilling out into the horizon at the same time. Its warm and the drizzle is constant. My memories don’t really match up with what I can see because I’m tired, but it doesn’t matter. We seem to be going the right way anyway, despite it all feeling new. In fact, my main memory from the race of this last section is of overtaking a man on a hill who gasped “good f*ckin’ runnin’ yer c*nt, ‘ow you get up them ‘ills like yer do is beyond me” and then at the end we shook hands and talked about the mud and how it compared to other types at different times of the year.
As our group tumbles into the valley, we decide to follow the River Bradford down one side and then loop back up the other when we get to Alport. We complete the loop and the trail there runs across the top of the valley sides, where we can hear the squeak and scream of hunting birds and rabbits run quickly between hedge and patches of brush.
A bias toward the spoken word doesn’t mean that the written word disappears. Dostoevsky dictated his novels to a transcriber who wrote out what he said and that careening, dreamlike quality that he captures sometimes is a result of that I think. The wildness of sound and the composed peace of a well-written page are hard to reconcile and its difficult to know if mixing the two together will create sparks or produce nothing.
By now, we’re nearly back to the village and we head down into the river, climbing carefully into the cold water and the ripples spreading out from us toward the reeds and the edges. Its quiet and there’s nobody there.
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