Clints

I was singing a Yorkshire folk song, On Ilkley Moor Baht ‘At, and thought of this piece. (Though technically, Ilkley Moor is mainly sandstone and gritstone.)
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I am indigenous to Yorkshire, England. A hilly, wild place where the limestone bones of the earth form ridges on the land, the ribs of the world. You can see these ribs and feel the earth below them breathing; they’re placed at the surface so you can wonder at the immensity of it all. How similar the limestone peaks and stony cracked clints are to our own bones and how full they are of the bonified remains of alien creatures a billion years before our time – the crinoids and the seashells and crushed sea floors raised up to hikers’ heights.

The earth bones reflect our bones. Our bones are who we are, how we are created from the ground, the dust of the earth. Archaeologists can divine the native land of buried autochthons by grinding their skeletons and dissolving them, running them through their machines. If a man was born in Anatolia and walked the earth to dwell in Germany, the trace elements in his teeth and bones, the trace radioactivity of his bony remains, each give out a clear signal of his origin and travels. We are made from the land. We carry our bones within us (as the shelled creatures carry their bones without) and yet we are made of the bones in the ground where we were born, glossed with where we grew our wheat and corn. In turn, our bones ultimately return to the ground to create the possibilities of new bones, of new life. New corn springs from the ribs of the world, and we consume it, making it part of us, unknowingly or knowingly, with prayer.

We invite the earth’s bones inside us with rhythm Music comes from our bones and our bones come from the ground. We make drumsticks with our bones, and our flutes are made of bones. The bone bridges of guitars a link to the bone age origin of our music. Every beat and tone is created from the native bones, the outer sound resonating the bones within us. Our tiny earbones ring with beats that swell below and among us. The rhythm translated into our hasty mortal speed, the rugose and crenellated stones of Yorkshire limestone, its peaks and lakes the creations of deep time, millions of years in the making, the rising and the sinking of the earth’s very bones, speak to us and call for our attention. Many times I’ve looked for music that speaks to these bones, and found Neo Folk, the songs of the land.

The limestone scars around me are called Feizor, and Moughton, Pen-y-ghent and Ingleborough. Crummackdale, Askrigg, Clapdale and Malham. The Ribble runs between them, trout-frequented and glacially cold even in the Anthropocene. In the center, like a lesion of the skin eating down to the bone, Arcow Quarry has blasted an impressive abyss into the world, carting off the tortured crushed stones to make road surfaces. In the depths of the quarry a cerulean blue lake has formed, gorgeous and poisonous. A thousand feet above the dynamite holes where the rock is forced down into the grinders, curlews sing and rabbits run in the heather between the limestone clints.

(Originally written for my writing group, March 2020)