Winter On The High Frontier

To the Red City to see my accountant and, being overcome with inspissate gloom thereafter, decided to take the afternoon off rather than return to work. So I drove up to Birdoswald on a warm January day and explored part of the High Frontier. Birdoswald Fort's now thoroughly heritagised, but on winter days you still get a feeling of the bleakness, exposure and sheer extremity of a place that once was the uttermost utter. Depending on which semi-superseded scholars you choose to believe, Birdoswald's name used to be Camboglanna, the Crooked Glen, which goes to Camlann, a name with meanings well outside the consensus of history. So the High Frontier's a place with echoes of myth and legend as well as secret histories and contentious heritage. I walked along the wall and looked over the horizon towards Spadeadam, site of Britain's independent ICBM building in the Cold War. The moors to the north are quite desolate, a beautiful, empty quarter of Britain, open country and deep forest miles from any road. Paradoxically, yesterday this unmanned desolation lifted my spirits and I returned to West Cumbria restored.