DST #4: Stanza Stones: 'Dew'
The cache, a small screw-capped, camo-taped plastic pot, is hidden along the path to The Dew Stones - a huge broken slab of stone on which is inscribed one of Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage's Stanza Stone poems - Dew. To reach the stones - a lovely location with a fine view - simply continue for another 500m to N 53 54.045 W 1 53.351. See Map in Gallery.
On 10 May 2019 Simon was appointed by the Queen as the 21st Poet Laureate - see official announcement and short interview here.
See GC7V827 Stanza Stones Poetry Seat for background info on the Stanza Stones Project (which started at the 2010 Ilkley Literature Festival) and Team, the stones, maps & notes on the Stanza Stones Trail and how to reach each of the 6 stones for which the location is known (a 7th is hidden at a secret location, yet to be discovered!)
To reach the cache location: park on the lay-by towards the top of Banks Lane @ N 53 53.450 W 1 53.554. Walk up to the T-junction and cross Silsden Road some 25m west to the start of the short cut which crosses the field some 200m NW to the corner of the gravel track. Follow this up to the junction at N 53 53.666 W 1 53.719 and take the middle footpath heading across the field and on to the cache location.
Dew
The tense stand-off of summer’s end,
the touchy fuse-wire of parched grass,
tapers of bulrush and reed,
any tree a primed mortar of tinder,
one spark enough to trigger
a march on the moor by ranks of flame.
Dew enters the field under cover of night,
tending the weary and sapped,
lifting its thimble of drink to the lips of a leaf,
to the stoats tongue, trimming a length
of barbed-wire fence with liquid gems, here
where bog-cotton flags its surrender
or carries its torch for the rain.
Then dawn, when sunrise plants its fire-star
in each drop, ignites each trembling eye.
The author has written that he wanted to ' . . . evoke the still and jewelled dawn, when the battles of the previous day and the terrors of the night have been soothed or eased by morning dew.' Listen to him reading the poem here.
The Stones were carved by letter-carver Pip Hall who says this about the Dew Stone:
'A disused gateway in the dry-stone wall was the inspiration for these outsized gateposts which block the gateway – but permit light to pass through. I chose a thick slab of Scoutmoor gritstone at Marshall’s Brighouse Crow's Nest Quarry. The stone was sawn bdown the middle, resulting in two halves which, when opened out, mirrored each other. The holes at the edges were drilled so the stone could be split. This technique, involving hammering wedges into the holes, is known as ‘plug and feather’ and dates back to ancient Egyptian times'.
Colin Neville, a retired university teacher and local author says (in 2012) about the Dew Stones:
'The path to the ‘Dew Stones’ is through a pine wood – as black and silent as anything from a Grimm’s Fairy Tale. 'Dew' - that word evokes the freshness of a summer’s dawn. But the day I made my visit the skies were leaden and the view of Keighley in the river valley below obscured by thick waves of mist.
I found the Dew Stones, high on Rivock Edge, by crossing two fields – both thick with mud – and into and along a commercial pine wood, black and silent, as if the trees, and all its wild life, could sense their eventual fate.
Ten minutes along the path and daylight breaks into the wood through a clearing, and there they stand, either side of a gap in the wall. The rock once whole, has now been riven in two, ground smooth, and stands, limbs akimbo, like the pages of a huge open book.
The stones are separated by a gap revealing the rolling landscape beyond, which falls away into the distance across the River Aire valley. The poem is broken into two stanzas, one on each slab.The marks of the wedges used to split the stone are clearly seen and mirror each other across the gap.
The stones have been in place for nearly two years and already are blending with the dry stone wall on either side. Two Yorkshire winters have scoured away at its freshness; algae and the grey patina of age now mark its surface. It is easy to imagine it slowly changing and merging with the landscape with each passing year.
The poem ‘Dew’ is a memory and evocation of dawn. Simon Armitage, the poet, has written that he sees dew '. . . as a peace-maker or emollient, especially at the end of those old-fashioned summers when the moors seemed ready to erupt into fire at the slightest spark or wrong word' (from his 2013 book ‘In Memory of Water’).
This poem in stone is part of a tradition of Man making its cultural mark on the landscape. There are over 300 examples of Bronze Age rock markings on rocks scattered across the moors near the Dew Stones. The meaning of the Bronze Age markings have been lost in time.
Perhaps a future people in the Fifth Millennium will puzzle over these poems, too. ‘I wonder what the Dew was like’, they might say. Or perhaps even, ‘why did people write poems then?’.