Kelbrook

Rainy November - a visit to Kelbrook, the village where I lived until I was 3 years old, where my mum and brother were born and where we stayed during school holidays....

Here I am by the beck, from which the village takes its name: 'coele', meaning gulley or ravine, 'broc', meaning brook or stream, in the language of the Angles... and so it's still pronounced, with the soft 'ch' , and 'oo' between 'luck' and 'loch', even though these are the Disputed Territories, annexed by Lancashire, where 'brook' should rhyme with 'fluke'. The Brook in the Ravine, the deep, narrow part of the beck running through Harden Clough, site of one of the ancient settlements from which the village formed. Where we once built a dam of stones across the beck to make a swimming pool, and got our first sunburn.

From the archives of the Craven Herald and Pioneer: a Celtic stone head, found at the Hague, site of another ancient settlement, on the southern outskirts of the village. It is the household god of a family belonging to the Brigante tribe and dates from the time of the Roman occupation of Yorkshire, about 2000 years ago.

Kelbrook's earliest residents, however, lived neither at Harden nor at Hague but on Kelbrook Moor, around 4000 years ago. They were a small group of semi-nomadic farming people, perhaps one family. A few flint tools found on the moor top early last century are all that survives of them. In the City Museum at Leeds I heard the reconstructed music of the Malham Pipe, a little 3-holed bone whistle found on moorland near Malham, dating from the same period.

Yellow Hall: this is the house my grandparents moved to from Merseyside, about 1940, and where my mum was born.

There's a new village hall, shared with neighbouring Sough - it rhymes with 'ruff', not 'sow' ('sogh' meaning 'marsh'), as I think should Gimmerton Sough in 'Wuthering Heights.' The valley was once all marshland, with woods of oak and ash covering the hillsides leading to Kelbrook Moor. In the fields where we played as children clumps of reeds grew up among the buttercups and daisies.

The last time I'd been here was for my Aunty's funeral, about 2 years before. After the service I stood with my brother in the early autumn sunshine, outside the church, by Low Bridge, looking up the main street at all the little places where we'd learned to walk and to call a bird a bird and a stone a stone. People stood on Dotcliffe Lane and stared at us, like we'd come back from another world. ('Dotcliffe', from the Dock leaves which grow profusely there, the leaves that take away the sting of nettles, or sunburn)