Balancing act

 Early September, and the year is in balance. August, dull and wet as it was, has been chased out, and the sun has finally come out.

We had a trip to Brimham Rocks today. As I left high school teaching last year, it's good for me to mark what would previously have been a time of stress, and end to days of freedom, with just the opposite.

It's a strange landscape, up there where the soft Yorkshire Dales meet the bluntness of the moorland. It's other-worldy, and those ancient and precarious rock formations add to the eeriness. 

I can only imagine how wonderfully atmospheric it is on a misty morning, a wintry afternoon, at sunset.

First, we had a walk through the woods. It was a hot, sticky day, so it was good to get out of the sunshine.  

Then we explored the rock formations on top of the hill.

They have a feel of the Wild West about them. It was good to see them when there weren't too many other visitors.

This one is a huge rock balancing rather improbably on a very small one.

We were very happy to discover a well-kept secondhand bookshop in the visitors' centre.

The booksellers obviously have a good sense of humour there! I loved all the small artefacts on the tops of the shelves.

There is a stunning poem called Balancing Act by the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, carved into two stone pillars on the moors.

You can hear it read aloud here.

My favourite lines are these:

"away from the manic circuitry of the world

a person striding this off-grid weather farm

is laundered and reset by buffeting winds

and sudden light"

We moved on from the rocks, to another artwork on the moors nearby, this time at a quarry.

The piece is called The Coldstones Cut, and was created by Andrew Sabin. It's right by an actual working quarry, which is also fascinating to look into.

This is the artwork:

It's a narrow roadway though walls of rock, leading to a viewing platform.

The story of the artwork is here.

On one of the platforms, there's a metal plate around the edge. Into this are carved the names of places from around the world, with the distance to them in kilometres.

Limestone is still quarried here today.

One final fun artwork for the day, also up at The Coldstones Cut. I don't have any information about this one.

It was a hot, but really enjoyable day in the dales.