Chapter 3: On Alston Moor
Penrith to Hexham
Above a fireplace in 1940s New York hung a map of Alston Moor. The fireplace, and the map, belonged to W.H. Auden. As a child, Auden had thrown pebbles down a disused mineshaft on the moor and hearing the distant subterranean splashes had a poetic awakening. To him, Alston Moor, part of the North Pennines, was full of mystery. It was an alluring contrast of decrepit industry and bleak horizons that sang of the winding passage of time. I was planning on hitching across it, from Penrith to Hexham and the old Roman Wall.
It didn’t take long to catch a ride out of Penrith. A pickup with flashers pulled up and honked its horn. Inside was a tough-looking man, his arms were covered in tattoos and his head was bald and thick. He said in a flat voice he was going to Alston so I climbed in and we drove through the valley of Eden and up onto the desolate moors.
As the trees thinned and the road wound upwards he unveiled his story in a gruff cockney accent. He was a Londoner and had begun work at the age of 14, following his father’s footsteps into the animal slaughtering business.
To begin with he worked a small operation around the back of Smithfield meat market in the City. He’d slaughter one or two animals a day, sending their carcasses on to the market’s butchers. He was a talented slaughterer, deadly accurate with the bolt gun and trained in many methods. At one point he was the youngest kosher slaughterer in Europe.
Sometime in 1999, he made his first trip to Cumbria. He retold the tale with a monotonic frankness. A vet had asked him to come and slaughter 6 pigs which he did without incident but after she told him he couldn’t leave the premises. The young vet told him the pigs were infected with a new disease. So he said, “fuck off you dumb bitch” and left anyway. There was no hint of irony in his voice.
He didn’t get far. Not even a mile down the road he was arrested and taken back. The pigs were the country’s first case of foot and mouth disease.
The disease spread anyway and was soon out of control. The vet called him up and asked if he’d join her again, this time on a nationwide operation to eradicate foot and mouth. Entire herds had to be slaughtered and they needed good people to do it. So he left London and went.
Foot and mouth hit Cumbria properly in 2001. It spread rapidly across Britain and wreaked untold havoc. Public rights of way were closed, tourism was shattered, the general election was postponed by a month and millions of animals were killed.
“I was in the middle of it all,” he snorted. He was called to farm after farm with his team and had to slaughter every animal by hand using a bolt gun. He killed thousands a day, going restlessly across the country.
“At the start,” he recalled, “they didn’t know what could get it so I’d kill every animal on the farm. I was killing sheep, cattle, pigs, chickens, even people’s pets: dogs, cats the lot. At Eden Valley Park I shot 8 ostriches.” His voice was dour and expressionless and he looked blankly at the road.
Eventually, they discovered it only affected cloven-hoofed animals. Infected beasts would come down with a high fever and get blisters in their mouths and on their feet. If they ruptured they’d become lame. The danger was how easily transmissible it was: infected farm equipment, clothing and vehicles all spread it.
After slaughtering the entire herd, his team would pile the bodies on pyres and burn them. Most of the ash mounds are still visible and look like prehistoric burial mounds, monuments to the destruction.
“They’d make a fire out of sleepers and send the whole lot up. The government was throwing cash at it. People were pulling up sleepers and getting 20 quid a pop for them. They were paying the workers £15 an hour back when the minimum wage was £6. It was crazy.”
“Did it all take a toll on you personally?”
“Mostly no,” he grunted, “I was just doing my job. It had to be done. But what got me were the inaccuracies. Some farmers would call in polish butchers to do it. You wouldn’t go to a dentist for a haircut so you wouldn’t get a butcher to do a slaughterer’s job would you?” I wasn’t sure but I agreed I wouldn’t get my haircut at a dentist. “The farmers would call me up and tell me the piles were still moving. You imagine them animals are like their pets, must be shit for them to see that. I’d have to wade in and finish them off. Made my stomach churn.” That was the first shred of emotion he’d shown.
“How many animals do you think you killed?” I asked tentatively.
“I lost count so I don’t know exactly. I lost count at seven hundred and fifty thousand. I think it was around a million.”
“All of them by hand?”
“Yeah, with the rifle. Except the pigs. They’ve got soft skulls so you have to electrocute them and slit their throats.”
He worked closely with the vet he’d met on that fateful day in Cumbria. “She was the most annoying woman I’ve ever met,” he told me. They spent over a year going around the UK and Northern Europe executing their bloody task. He went quiet for a moment before adding gruffly, “Then I married the bitch and now we’ve got two kids.”
I was glad the tale had a happy ending, though it’s hardly Romeo and Juliet.
These days he works doing incident reports, hence the flashing lights on his pickup. It’s long hours but well paid he said, not that he needed much more money. After the massacre, he’d made a killing and bought an estate with his wife, “a literal fuckin’ estate!” He took me into Alston and dropped me by the war memorial - fitting, I thought.
As he drove off I realised I never got his name.
Much of the area is transformed for one week every year when thousands of Gypsies and travellers descend on the Eden Valley town of Appleby for the annual horse fair. It had taken place the week before and I was sad to have missed it. The fair tends to divide local opinion and I’d heard plenty of grumbling about it from the locals but is a spectacle nonetheless. The former slaughterer for one gave me a right earful about the number of incidents he’d had to log: “I seized a 22 plate Range Rover with 1200 miles on the clock, right. It was driving at 60 miles an hour down the Appleby lane. The driver was 10 years old!”
The fair draws a large police presence and as I arrived in Alston I sat in a cafe behind some police officers who, having spent the last week fully occupied by it, were now doing the rounds to make sure everything else was in order. Over their diet cokes, they debated whether they were prejudiced against the fair goers. One admitted he was. I finished my coffee and began walking up the hill out of the village.
Coincidently, as I rounded the bend I saw up ahead a pony pulling an old bow-top cart. It was going no quicker than walking pace so I jogged up the hill to catch it. There were two lads sitting holding the reigns, one was young and round the other older and thin, puffing away like Gandalf on a rolled-up cigarette.
“You’re not going to Hexham by any chance are you?” I panted.
“Ay, we are! But we can’t give you a lift coz Charlie won’t be able to pull us all.” The older nodded at the white and brown pony heaving up the hill, “I better get off myself to be honest.” He hopped off the creaking wagon and walked alongside. “You can put your bag on though,” he offered cheerily. So I did, and the three of us walked up the long hill across Alston Moor together.
John and his nephew Scott were on their way home from Appleby. The rest of their family was in Alston, staying in the caravans for a few days until the cart got a bit further on. It would take them five days to get home in all. John loved it. “Some of the lads get a couple of huuuge horses and they race home from pub to pub like,” he shook his head disbelievingly, “not me though. I love walking it back. Taking it slow and enjoying the scenery and that…An’ smoking! I’ve smoked a lot haven’t I, Scott!” He flashed a smile at his nephew who was hunched casually over the reigns. Scott nodded in agreement.
The scenery was certainly there to be enjoyed. Looking back across the moor you could see the whole of Cumbria far below. In the distance, the fells of the Lake District sat like blue hulks on the horizon.
I asked how the fair was. “Ah it was crazy like,” John shook his head seriously, “The Irish traveller family, the McGuigans were scrappin’ with the Prices. They’re Gypsies from down your way. London I think. It got messy like. Police had riot shields and that. People were charging them with machetes!”
“Someone got clean shot,” Scott added seriously.
“Ay, it’s no good. Ruins it for everyone.”
The three of us plodded on, the wagon rattling along behind Charlie’s steady hooves.
“Who’d a thought,” John announced, “We’d be walkin’ along with a hitcher from Essex ey!” John was just about the most cheerful man I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting and I told him the feeling was mutual.
After a couple of hours I realised it was getting on and we were in the middle of nowhere. We pulled into a lay-by to give Charlie a rest. Scott, being only 15, had never seen a hitchhiker before so urged me to pull something over.
“You’ll get one in no time with this thing here,” he pointed at the colourful wagon. John disagreed.
“Nee, not with the reputation Gypsies and travellers have. They’ll think we’re gunna rob ‘em or something.” He told a story about some young lads being rude to them on the way to the fair. A car approached and I tried to wave it down but it went straight by. John glanced at Scott with a told-you-so look. It was a while before the next car passed but sure enough, it pulled straight over.
“I told you!” Scott shouted as I grabbed my bag.
I bade them both farewell and a safe journey home and ran up to the little red car waiting in the lay-by.
“I’m going to Hexham,” the old fella in the front said, “If you don’t mind getting dirty!” I looked around the car. It was filthy. The whole thing was completely covered in black dirt, as was he. He had it all over his clothes, in his hair, his ears and even up his nose. His fingers were black with it and the passenger seat was no different. I jumped in anyway. His name was Johnny and he was one of the last six coal miners in the north of England.
It’s hard to overstate coal’s importance in Britain’s history. It powered the nation and the industrial revolution. It transformed the landscape, society and eventually the world. In 1920 there were over a million coal miners and well over a thousand mines across Britain.
In the north, once the heartland of coal mining, there are only six miners left. Ayle Colliery is just outside Alston and it’s tiny compared to the mighty mines of days gone by. Its twitter name reads proudly: ‘The Last Pit’. Johnny’s normally a mechanic but Ayle’s so small they all move about regularly. He’d been at the coalface all day.
“The other day, a friend of mine’s boy told his teacher I was a coal-miner,” he spoke with a slow, chuckling voice and a soft Northumbrian accent, “The teacher told him off for lying!” The tale really tickled him and he chortled away for a while.
“Is it safe down there?” I asked thinking of the shocking statistics about the safety of coal mines: on average around 1000 miners died every year that coal was mined in Britain.
“As long as you know it’s not safe, you’ll be perfectly safe!”
We approached Hexham and he pulled over to let me out. He had a long way to go as he was delivering a car load of coal to his friend’s mother an hour further on. She was very old and coal was her only source of heat. He waved goodbye and with a melodic toot of the horn whizzed off. I noticed my backside was black.
Back among the villages of Northumbria the desolate moor and its characters seemed almost like a strange dream. I thought again of Auden and the:
“locality I love,
Those limestone moors that stretch from BROUGH
To HEXHAM and the ROMAN WALL, There is my symbol of us all.”
Perhaps one day when I’ve got a fireplace, I’ll hang a map of Alston Moor above it.
I guess so. Anyway, keep up the good work!
Excellent piece full of interesting characters, do you think the slaughterer was exaggerating at all?