The Devil’s Edge

24

It was amazing how different the landscape on the edge was from the White Peak country below it. Down there were green fields carved by limestone walls, wooded valleys with clear streams, a distinct sense of a place formed by human activity. None of that was present on the moors. Almost all signs of human occupation had been wiped out. Big Moor had reverted to a wild place.

Cooper unfolded his Ordnance Survey map of the White Peak. Previous generations of inhabitants had certainly used their imaginations. All along these edges, rock formations had been given evocative names. Many of them spoke of the dark imaginings of people who had been obliged to find their way across these moors in fog and snow, and maybe at night too. A traveller crossing Big Moor on the way from Sheffield would have to identify a specific rock from a distance if he was going to navigate his way safely through the bogs. It would have been an essential skill for the preservation of life and limb, not to mention the ability to arrive at the right spot for a steep descent into the valley.

How would you pass on instructions for a crossing like that? Only by describing the shape of a rock in terms someone else would recognise. The Eagle Stone, the Toad’s Mouth, the Three Men. A traveller would have watched for the moment when a shape became recognisable, like a sailor scanning the coast for the glimpse of a lighthouse. He would be waiting for a giant black toad to open its mouth, for a monstrous bird to spread its wings on the horizon.

No wonder, in those superstitious times, that stories of monsters and demons had thrived. A packhorse lost in a bog could have been swallowed by a serpent. A man falling to his death from the edge would have been led astray from the path by an evil spirit. It wasn’t so difficult to believe when you could see those monstrous shapes in the desolate landscape. Things that were moving, changing. Practically breathing.

‘There are still traces of the old packhorse routes somewhere on these moors,’ said Cooper. ‘Tracks and hollow ways. It’s funny to think how localised people were back in those days. They knew nothing about the geography of neighbouring valleys. And that was because of the moorlands that separated them. They were pretty inhospitable places.’

‘I know villages around here where you’re still considered a foreigner if you’re from the next valley,’ said Villiers.

Cooper smiled. ‘A foreigner? Practically an alien.’

He was tending to forget that Carol Villiers was local too. He’d become used to having to explain these things to outsiders who knew nothing about the area. But Carol understood.

‘All that travellers had to guide them at one time were the natural rock formations.’

‘The Salt Cellar. That was always my favourite.’

He nodded. ‘That’s further north, on Derwent Edge.’

It was true that some of the rocks on the eastern edges had less sinister, more domestic names. The Wheel Stones, the Cakes of Bread, the Salt Cellar. A few of the meanings were too far lost in time to be explained. Take the Glory Stones, or the Reform Stone. What glory did they refer to? What long-forgotten reforms? You could write a book about these stones, and unravel an entire layer of Derbyshire history just from their names. For all he knew, someone might have written that book already.

In the Middle Ages, the only exceptions a traveller might stumble over were the crosses set up by monastic landowners. These weren’t just an aid to travel; they marked the boundaries of property and reminded everyone of the power of the Catholic Church. Monasteries had felt it important to mark out their territory, even out here on the moors. An ancient cross base and the stump of a shaft were all that remained of the Lady Cross on Big Moor.

But guide stoops had been erected following the dissolution of the monasteries and the Civil War, to help all the extra trade generated by an improving economy. Derbyshire was slow to follow orders from central government – which was pretty much in character, he supposed. And in the end its guide stoops had been erected in a hurry, early in the eighteenth century.

Cooper knew he’d seen some of these stoops. He’d passed them when he was out walking, had stopped to look at them out of curiosity, and had their history explained to him. They were inscribed with the names of the nearest market towns in each direction, to help guide those travellers venturing into the wilds of Derbyshire.

He looked at the symbol on the message again, and the scrawled inscription, Sheffeild Rode. A guide stoop, then. But which one?

The path from the car park above Riddings passed the first guide stoop within a few yards. It was positioned just above the road, over the first stile – a tall, rectangular block of stone, well embedded in the ground. Carved from the local gritstone, it stood about five and a half feet high, and was a foot wide on each of its four faces.

‘This is a guide stoop?’ said Villiers, running her hand over the rough surface.

‘One of them.’

This stone was in too exposed a location, though, and had suffered badly from the weather over the last three hundred years. There must have been lettering cut into each of the faces, but the stone surfaces were totally eroded and the inscriptions illegible. All Cooper could make out was a ‘V’ sign on one face.

He pointed at the OS map.

‘We need to follow this track to the next one,’ he said.

Sheep sheltered under a hawthorn tree, the ground beneath it worn bare by their hooves. In places, the bracken came up to Cooper’s shoulders. But the masses of heather were coming into flower, turning the more distant hills into a purple haze.

They crossed a muddy stream on a bridge made of planks covered in wire mesh. A steep climb past the old walled enclosures brought them to a modern signpost at the top, pointing the way to White Edge and Birchen Edge.

Looking back, Cooper could see thirty or forty beehives sheltered in the lee of a wall in one of the enclosures. When he stood still, he became aware of the buzzing all around him. Thousands of honey bees were humming through the heather.

In the middle of the moor, there were no extraneous sounds, only the closest thing you could ever get to silence. The stillness made him more aware of the life stirring under his feet as he walked. Birds and rabbits scuttled away from his approach. The sweet scent of the heather blossom rose into the air with every step.

There were many boggart holes in the bare earth. Some of them looked deep, dug by animals into the shallow peat. Reddish-brown soil had been kicked out of the larger holes. You could put your arm right down into them, if you weren’t too worried about what you might touch. This was adder country, after all.

‘This place is full of legends, you know,’ he said.

‘Nice things, legends. I like ’em.’

‘You know about hobs, Carol?’

‘I know you have to show them respect, or they cause mischief in the house.’

‘You got that from your grandmother?’

‘Of course.’

Not too long ago, a bowl of cream would have been left on many Derbyshire hearths to ensure that the hobs did good for the household. Of course, many people believed that a hob’s real home was out here, in the wild landscape. There was a Hob Hurst’s House in Deep Dale, and another on Beeley Moor, just to the south of here.

Over there was an area called Leash Fen, said to have been a community the size of a small market town. There was nothing to be seen now. According to the stories, the town had sunk into the bog, and vanished without a trace. It sounded unlikely, until you went up there. In the winter, with your feet sinking deep into the ground, your trousers wet up to the knee, it was possible to imagine the fate of Leash Fen. If you had the imagination, you could even picture the ruins of the stone houses lying mouldering under the ground as the bog deepened over the centuries. In fact, there were probably other things under there too. Animals that had strayed off the track, a crashed Second World War German bomber, and maybe the odd hiker who had never returned home. Cooper wondered if global warming would dry out the bog one day, revealing all the buried secrets of Leash Fen.

They walked across the moor, following a faint track through the heather, until they came to another guide stoop. This one was smaller, less than three feet tall, possibly only the top half of a broken stone.

Cooper recalled that there was supposed to be one that had been damaged by gunfire when the military were training on the moor during the war. He felt that was further on, though – in Deadshaw Sick, near Barbrook Reservoir. This one had just fallen or been broken accidentally. It was probably a common fate for moorland stones. Yet the inscriptions were clear on each face. Chasterfield Road, Hoope Road, Dronfeld Road. The way the names of the towns were spelled must have reflected the accent of the stonemason, he supposed. None of the men who chiselled the letters on these guide stoops in the eighteenth century would have been entirely literate. Yet each of them had their own ideas about spelling. This one knew how to spell ‘road’, at least.

‘Not this one,’ he said.

‘How many more are there?’ asked Villiers.

‘I’m not sure. A lot of them will have disappeared over the decades. But at one time they would have been all over these moors. They were the only means the packhorse men had of navigating their way across, especially when there was snow on the ground to cover the trails.’

Cooper imagined the immense task it must have been to get these guide stoops into position. A full-sized stone had to weigh around four hundred kilos. Once they had been shaped and inscribed by the stonemason, they had to be transported from the mason’s yard, brought as far as possible by horse and cart, then probably dragged by wooden sledge and manpower to their final position.

‘In that case, we could spend all day out here.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Cooper.

He turned his body through three hundred and sixty degrees, trying to orientate himself. He could picture the old packhorse men doing this, too, taking their position from the sun or stars, or from a distant landmark.

Over that way, if you took a route directly across the moor, you would enter South Yorkshire and emerge in woods near the hamlet of Unthank. But in the other direction, you were in Derbyshire, the Derwent Valley – in the villages below the edges.

‘This way,’ he said. ‘It shouldn’t be too far.’

After five more minutes of walking, Villiers stopped and pointed across the moor.

‘Is that one over there?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

They could soon see a full-sized stone, standing straight and upright. For Cooper, it was as welcome a sight as it might have been for many weary travellers crossing this moor. When they reached it, Villiers rubbed a patch of lichen off the inscription.

‘It’s a bit eroded, but…’

‘What does it say?’

‘ Sheffeild Rode. This is it, Ben.’

She looked flushed and excited, like a child who’d just won a treasure hunt, or discovered a hidden Easter egg.

They walked round it, exploring the wonderful tactile surface of the rough gritstone, tracing the letters on each of the four faces. Bakwell Rode, Tidswall Rode, Hatharsich Rode. And most carefully of all, they studied the symbol chiselled into the stone below Sheffeild . The horizontal line and arrow. The surveyor’s benchmark. The mason’s spelling had been eccentric, but the ‘Rode’ was consistent. And the inscription on that face was exactly as it had been reproduced on the message sent to the Eden Valley Times.

‘Brilliant,’ said Villiers. ‘I’m so glad we found it.’

But Cooper was shaking his head.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘It’s the wrong way round,’ he said.

‘What?’

Cooper had orientated himself at the last stone, and had retained his sense of direction as he covered the last few hundreds yards across the moor. He knew which way was which.

‘The route to Sheffield would be that way, to the east,’ he said. ‘This guide stoop needs turning ninety degrees to be pointing in the right direction. I suppose it must have fallen over and been replaced at some time. And whoever repositioned it didn’t worry too much about getting the direction right.’

‘Well, they don’t exactly serve a useful purpose any more, do they? I mean, nobody is likely to follow their directions.’

‘No, they’re just history, I suppose,’ said Cooper. ‘Another part of our useless heritage.’

Villiers ran a hand over the eroded stone. ‘So the Sheffield road

…?’

‘Isn’t the Sheffield road at all. The hand is pointing south instead.’ Cooper turned round to face the other way. ‘It points downhill, look. Directly towards Riddings.’

He gazed down the slope. Nothing looked quite so dead as dead heather. Though it was probably only last year’s growth, the stems of the dead plants already looked fossilised, dry and skeletal, their brittle stems crumbling under his boots. They were petrified, as if they were already on their way to becoming the next layer of peat.

‘And I think that could be the packhorse way,’ he said.

From the guide stoop, there was a clear route winding its way down the hillside. Overgrown with bracken and reeds, it looked hardly more than a rabbit track. But for the route to have remained distinct even during the summer, there must at least be well-compacted earth, or more likely stone slabs laid on the ground to make it passable in wet weather. Otherwise the undergrowth would have covered it completely in time.

With his back to the guide stoop, Cooper let his eye follow the line of the track downhill. It curved between the scattered rocks, taking a circuitous route that avoided the steepest parts of the slope.

‘Is that what you’d call a road?’ said Villiers, when he pointed it out.

‘Some people would. If they used tracks and old pathways to get around this area. That looks almost like a three-lane highway.’

She shrugged. ‘I suppose we should follow it, then?’

Towards the end of the track, just before they reached the outskirts of the village, they stumbled across an area enclosed by half-tumbled stone walls and fractured lengths of barbed-wire fencing.

‘Wait,’ said Cooper.

Through the undergrowth he’d glimpsed the remains of an ancient building with a corrugated-iron roof and no windows. Moss grew on the stone walls, and a crooked door was half covered in peeling green paint. The weeds in front of it were dense and impenetrable, and a bird had built its nest on a broken downspout. He was looking at an old farm building, a lot older than most of the properties in Riddings. It was Barry Gamble’s artistic statement about decay and abandonment.

And now Cooper could see why the composition of Mr Gamble’s photograph had been all wrong. There was a reason why the angle of his shot had been awkward, with the building off-centre. The photographer had been unable to move those ten yards to the right and take a few steps closer to his subject. He had been prevented by the barbed-wire enclosure.

Inside the enclosure, Cooper saw a pair of brick slurry pits, which must have lain disused for decades. They were overgrown with willowherb and full of a dark, oily sludge, choked with old tyres and covered with green scum. He dreaded to think how foul that sludge would smell, once you broke through the crust on the surface. Matt would never have let any part of his land get like this.

Cooper leaned over and looked into the nearest pit. There was one clear patch on the surface, where something had dropped through the scum and vanished into the murky depths. A small cloud of mosquitoes hovered over it.

For a moment, he stood quite still, oblivious to anything else around him. The moor seemed to recede as if it was no more than a landscape in a dream. For a second he’d slipped back into the real world, the one inhabited by all those people down there in Riddings.

He looked towards the village, and saw the distinctive roof of one of the houses very close to the bottom of the track. His mind filled rapidly with images. The body of Zoe Barron, her blood staining the tiles. The fragments of gravel scattered across the Barrons’ lawn. The white handprints on their back wall. Gardeners, a grey woollen fleece, and a gust of wind blowing canvas over a face-painting tent.

Then he shook himself. He felt as though he’d just woken up and found the nightmare was real. He took a step backwards, and almost bumped-into Villiers.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘Ben? What is it?’

Cooper could barely answer her. After everything that had happened this week, it was as if his mind had suddenly cleared. The fog had lifted, the mist had finally been burned away by the sun. He still didn’t have the proof, of course. But like those white chalk marks on the rock faces of the edge, he realised that there were one person’s prints all over this case.

‘We need to get some equipment up here, and empty out these slurry pits,’ he said.

‘Oh my God, Ben. Are you serious? You are going to be really popular.’

‘I know. Trust me, I know.’