subject: Ekwall Scraef [print this page] According to DrAccording to Dr. Ekwall scraef is a den or ravine, so from this secret place the village got its name. The larger river in the dale has a name with a meaning identical the word Cover is from two Welsh words which combined denote a stream in a hollow. And everywhere in the dale are suitably streams in hollows. How June evenings hold one out of doors. Penhill had taken on the, bloom of grapes before we sought the dale bottom along a delicious and dim path. The Cover was merging in the twilight when we came to the place we soughts a sweet solitude at the river's brink.
Centuries ago, a story says, a hermit good lived in the wood praying for travellers who used the ford hard by his cell. The ford was Simon's Wath, the chapel there St. Simon's, a popular saint in Coverdale (Was he the saint who shares October 28th with St. Jude?), with a whole day's feasting in his honour. We found the ruined fragments of the chapel, and a holy silence and a rapt stillness as if the whole world knelt at prayer I One bird sang his vespers where one holy man prayed to God. The trees cut out the last light- a canopy of green boughs, the steep banks of the dell walled us in. We found a stepped path; there seemed to be hundreds of fairy steps, climbing upwards until the hollow, was cleared and the lamplit windows of Melmerby winked across the fields. Carlton was not far away and a pretty daughter of the family Binks waiting with candles to light us to bed.
They told us down in the village we would not find the track over Penhill to West Burton. Tanks have broken it up. It has been obliterated like the path over Melmerby Moors. There used to be a most pleasant path through the heather from Carlton to the MelmerbyWest Witton moor road, one I have walked and dreamed about, but returned during the war to find a desolation like a battlefield, a desert of mud and bogs scored by countless tracks of tanks and armoured cars. In spite of them all we found the way. It began from a Carlton cottage with a distinctive date tablet over its front door: 1751 and a wreath of flowers picked out prettily in red and green paint. At first the path was clear enough, but before we had reached the shooting lodge the tanks had done their worst. Following a peatbrown beck trickling between fern and heather clumps we reached the skyline.
And here we are now, lying on warm turf, gazing into a taut blue sky. The sun blazes down on us, heaven's most glorious eye. Before long I will wish it modestly veiled. Jeune, who has been meditating, face down, for a while, looks up. What is that delicious perfume? It is borne on the breeze, it comes from the earth, it is in every breath of air we breathe. The grass we lie on gives forth warm fragrance, the green rushes smell sweet and so does the young bracken now uncurling in green croziers over the fellside. Is the scent just the breath of June?
