There is a place on the moors, where the track crosses the beck and where, more often than not, this crossing is a dry bed of stones. This is because, just upstream, Beldon Beck goes underground. Where it had been travelling across the moor, gurgling and trickling, tumbling and sometimes silently caressing the water - worn stones and pebbles, it suddenly makes its descent. There is a place where, without close inspection, Beldon Beck just disappears, leaving a dry bed, waiting, expectant, but usually disappointed. Nothing to mark its passing except a lone skylark, rising up, fitfully, on warm currents of air, singing of the descent of this vibrant moorland beck. The bird flutters directly above, where, if you crouch down and bend an ear to the stones, you can hear the water falling, down into the dark limestone to become or to join with, an underground stream. What makes such a force of nature go? Leaving a pale scar where it should run and nothing to mourn its passing but a skylark. A crack, a fissure in the rock draws all the power of the flow into itself, luring it down into the cold, dark depths. Unable to resist, drawn to the easiest route, the water rushes down and falls into the fissure and is gone.

  When the beck is in spate it has enough power, enough water, for this loss to go unnoticed but it is when it is at its lowest ebb that this dark force pulls its victim down. When the summer dries the beck to not much more than a trickle and little rain falls, then it goes under.

 

There was only one place for her to go. Under. She followed the stream which ran into the cavern, underground. Lost to those above. Safe in the cave, it is quiet, it is calm.

 

They don’t look for me here. I am not afraid of this darkness. The cave takes my words and gives them back, I sing to the walls and they sing back. The walls welcome my voice allowing it to roam around, and return. I am free but it is cold and lonely here.

I heard words, echoing down, murmors in my watery world.

 “What do you want?”

 

 

She no longer knows.

 

She stayed alive in the cave but barely, licking the stones, humming to herself, wandering out onto the moor at dusk learning no more than the songs of the birds and hearing no more comfort than the moaning of the wind. Clothing herself in rabbit pelts and scraps of wool she gathered from the moor, she learned the ways of the wild, she was away from care, too scattered to know any other way, abandoned. She was a feral soul. Leaving behind, somewhere, a hollow girl she missed, but who was only a feather on the breeze in her memory.

 

There will always be a scar, where two have been divided but the water, the water falls down into the cool depths of a limestone cavern, safe from the sun. It is being preserved. This force is saving the water. This force, saved the water releasing it further down the hill to run out into the cooler, lush fields below. The water has chosen the route and the bird is celebrating, not mourning.

Deb R