The moors pulse with it. A syrupy silence humming through the landscape. Pouring over nubs of lichen-covered rock, singing through the low-slung, flowering gorse, veering over the bended torsos of hawthorn trees. And then on, to mesh with the ghostly mist that rolls low over hidden valleys. Roaming off, then, to some distant place, only to circle back around again, crooning.
A soothing, fleshy silence. A soggy, murmuring silence. The bracken is full of it. The moss beating on granite boulders is full of it. And then you become full of it too, and it pushes like velvet onto your skin.
You are fixed to this place with a low grumble, which then rises to a searing pitch, and what is real pleaches with a dream. You follow the noise of a sheep in distress to a spot among the clitter, to find no sheep at all. Or you tune into the howling from behind a granite boulder and circle it to the point of madness, or you are slowly conquered by the thickness of it. So you close your eyes and you listen. In a way that you rarely do. And while your muscles become as soft as boiled rhubarb, you listen. As each storied thing screams and whispers across one another, from all directions, and you think finally that it’s a full place, this place, and achingly loud, and trying to tell you many things.
Then you snap open your eyes, and say shall we go?, because it’s getting dark, or you’re too cold, or too hungry, or bored now, and the moors become a simple place again. And as you trudge off through that silence, having listened for really no time at all, you leave it all there, the landscape darning together its undersong.
