“I never felt magic crazy as this”
Twice a week over this past year I have driven from Sheffield to Hathersage in the Derbyshire Peak District and then back again on the ‘high’ Ringinglow Road.
Over the decades I must have driven this road thousands of times and walked across the moors that it traverses hundreds of times. It is a mere five miles or so from my house in central Sheffield.
The road starts in the Sheffield suburb of Bents Green and then takes a steadily rising but undulating straight path on a ridge overlooking the River Porter valley. Past the farm with its field of free range ducks which grow towards their sudden disappearance in mid November, towards the hamlet of Ringinglow, with its old octagonal toll house and the Norfolk Arms pub.
It then enters The Peak District National Park sliding past Lady Canning’s plantation and the sculptural Ox Stones before the Derbyshire border is traversed and the road surface deteriorates.
The top of Burbage valley and its brook passes by before the road tops out close by Higger Tor. Then a choice is offered of either The Dale, or Fiddlers Elbow roads to take you down into the Derwent Valley and Hathersage.
I go down The Dale and return up Fiddlers Elbow. It’s a habit I have made this journey in all seasons with the common dominator, apart from when enveloped in cloud or fog, being the sky.
I go down The Dale and return up Fiddlers Elbow. It’s a habit I have made this journey in all seasons with the common dominator, apart from when enveloped in cloud or fog, being the sky.
It is huge.
On a clear day it stretches for miles to distant Kinder Scout and Bleaklow Hill, even to the Staffordshire moorlands. Coming back towards Sheffield on a sharp, clear winter’s morning the stanchions of the Humber Bridge are faintly visible on the horizon of a vast panorama of sky. And then there is Sheffield clustered in the valley below you.
Driving on these mornings is often accompanied by the radio, Nick Grimshaw or Maconie & Radcliffe on BBCRadio 6, but the song that most encapsulates the love and familiarity I have for this journey is Nick Drake’s ‘Northern Sky’.
Nick Drake is music’s Van Gogh, an artist who only graced the world for twenty six years and by the time of his suicide in 1974 had made only three albums of material, all of them barely making a ripple at the time of their release. From 1969 (Five Leaves Left) to 1972 (Pink Moon).
Driving on these mornings is often accompanied by the radio, Nick Grimshaw or Maconie & Radcliffe on BBCRadio 6, but the song that most encapsulates the love and familiarity I have for this journey is Nick Drake’s ‘Northern Sky’.
Nick Drake is music’s Van Gogh, an artist who only graced the world for twenty six years and by the time of his suicide in 1974 had made only three albums of material, all of them barely making a ripple at the time of their release. From 1969 (Five Leaves Left) to 1972 (Pink Moon).
Today I think it is fair to say that Drake is acknowledged as one of the greatest British singer-song writers of his generation perhaps of any generation, and that his album Bryter Layter (1971) is his masterpiece on a par as a piece of art with any of the great works of Van Gogh and with Northern Sky a song that is a shimmering pinnacle of plaintive love, for a person? For a feeling? For a place? It can still reduce me to tears.
Nick Drake: Northern Sky
The Ringinglow Road is my northern sky close to the people and places I love. It can also be a place of wild climatic hostility. Several decades ago I stuck my car in a ditch climbing The Dale in mounting snow as a blizzard raged. I reminded myself as I was towed out and home that normally it was a place of bucolic
serenity especially when the heather and cotton grass paint a canvas in August with a soundtrack of skylarks to serenade you. You get the picture I am sure.
In fact I have the picture. It is an early piece by John Holmes Laver (see image below), a Sheffield artist (1880-1950), said to be in ‘grinder school’ of artists (it was a thing back then, but feel free to insert your own joke here) those, like himself, who worked as grinders, or polishers, or silversmiths: the famous "little mesters" of Sheffield but at the weekend walked up Ringinglow Road and into the Peak District to paint the local landscape.
A John Holmes Laver original - image copyright Carl Lee
Laver is a little-known Sheffield-born artist the son of a police constable. He attended Sheffield School of Art where he studied under Austin Winterbottom. He achieved some level of acknowledgement for his art during his life, getting to exhibit a painting at the Royal Academy in 1938, but generally speaking his artistic path was not dissimilar to that of Nick Drake’s apart from the fact that unlike Drake, and Van Gogh, he didn’t become a revered and globally influential artist after his death.
The unnamed but signed painting by Laver that hangs in my hall way is of a view that you take in every time you drive out on the Ringinglow Road. It is about 50 meters into Derbyshire, approaching the bend before the cattle grid. If you have ever driven this road you will know the exact point. I do indeed.
In the distance, across seemingly featureless moorland is Millstones at the southern end of Stanage Edge, and above, a brooding sky that speaks of incoming rain. That is my northern sky come rain or shine. I like to imagine that Laver would have seen, or rather heard, the beauty in Drake’s 'Northern Sky' and hope that he had someone that he could project Drake’s poetic evocations of love, life and, yes place, onto.
As the Irish band Fontaines DC, who have magnificently covered Nick Drake’s ‘Cello Song’, recently enquired on their most recent album ‘Romance’, “maybe romance is a place?”
If romance is a place, for me the Ringinglow Road and its huge skies stretching out over Yorkshire and Derbyshire have a forever place in my heart.
“Would you love me through the winter?
Would you love me ‘til I’m dead”.
“Would you love me through the winter?
Would you love me ‘til I’m dead”.
Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.
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