England's Last Wilderness

From the high cliffs near the ruins of Staward Pele where local freebooter Dickie of Kingswood once made his camp you look out northwards across the steep cut of Northumberland's Allen valley. Oak and ash forest fills the whole of your field of vision. In summer there are bluebells, wild violets and pansies, ramblers and picnicers, the yells of children paddling in the river, but on a midweek morning in winter it is a place of calm, austere and eldritch beauty that no middle-aged man can look upon without a tinge of regret. For the seasons march on and so much of our life is wasted that could have been spent perfecting a Johnny Weismuller yell.

Cold aside, Tarzan you feel would have been at home here, and not only because Greystoke is a short elephant ride across the hills to the west. Staward Pele lies on the northern fringe of an area naturalist David Bellamy has dubbed "England's Last Wilderness". Since that title is also claimed by Exmoor The National Parks Department have opted for a less divisive more prosaic name, The North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Whatever you call it, the region that gives birth to the North East's three great rivers, the Tees, the Wear and one half of the Tyne is as close as England comes to untrammelled territory. If not quite virgin country - man has left his mark here - this is at least chaste.

One Monday morning we follow the yellow mobile library van up the East Allen valley to the occasional fanfare of honking geese and the warning growl of quad-bikes. The sky is as blue as a baby's eyes and as clear as his conscience. Floral sheets snap on washing lines outside the low rows of Northumbrian miners cottages and wood smoke hovers in the chill air.

This was once the richest source of lead in Britain. Though long since gone there is evidence of the trade everywhere, in the old workings that cut the hillsides, the tall brick flues (up which, so local legend has, it small boys were sent annually to crack the silver that had adhered to the sides), the isolated clumps of trees still stunted by the run-off and in the Non-Conformist chapels that line the road.

Wherever there was mineral extraction there was Methodism. Now the mining has stopped and Methodism is suffering a reversal in fortunes too. The Temperance Hotels that were once a presence in many of the North Pennine villages have all shut down and many of the chapels have been sold as houses, the current occupants battling with the problems not of drink and the devil but of how best to curtain arched windows. Anyone who feels filled with nostalgia can still experience what it was like to be a lead miner - albeit without the poverty, danger and poisoning (In the Allen valleys during the peak lead mining years of the 18th Century average male life expectancy dropped below thirty) - by popping down the shaft at Killhope, now a museum.

Allendale Town used to claim to be at the exact centre of Britain (taking into account the Channel Islands and Orkney) but after a prolonged battle that title - along with the associated EC grant money - was recently wrestled away from it by nearby Haltwhistle.

On Monday morning the village is quiet. It is not always like this. On New Years Eve as midnight approaches the market square is filled with people from all over the world, American tourists jostling with TV crews from Japan and Brazilian journalists for a site of the Baal procession. A couple of dozen local men - known as Guisers - dressed in an odd assortment of Viking helmets, Victorian miner's gear, pink tutus and fishnet tights march up the town's main street with flaming tar barrels balanced precariously on their heads as a brass band plays The Keel Row. As the year turns they toss the tar onto a massive bonfire outside the King's head hotel and the flames and sparks erupt into the glowering sky. It's an ancient pagan ceremony that symbolizes the burning off of the old so that the new can grow, but in Allendale it owes less to the Brigantes or the Norsemen than to Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, which was when it was first held. "The Northumbrian peasant is as a rule simple and abstemious in his habits," the splendidly snooty Peter Anderson Graham noted in his 1920 work "The Highways And Byways of Northumberland, "but he used to let himself go in the dark days of Yule".

Beyond Allendale Town the valley narrows to a point where a hoarse man could shout from one side to the other. Sheep huddle in the lee of dry stone walls and at the gates of a farm a snowman made from two vast bales of hay wrapped in white polythene, leans over a wall from amongst a stand of fir trees looking more sinister than festive.

At the top of the valley stands Allenheads, once the most productive lead mine in the country. 1,400 feet above sea level it boasts of being England's highest village. There's a café, a pub, a post office. Icicles hang from the spongy moss and there's little talk of global warming though the nearby ski-lift has not seen much use in recent years.

From Allenheads you pass over the top of the valley and into Weardale. The walls of the hill farms give way to the wire fences of grouse moors. The Al Maktoums of Dubai own a huge tranche of them. They have an immaculate lodge just outside Blanchland, a pretty village on the banks of the Derwent that has appeared in more Catherine Cookson mini-series than even Robson Greene and doubled as Dorset for the film of Jude the Obscure. Blanchland too is a lead mining village, but its history owes much to a monastery, the former guesthouse of which is now a rather splendid hotel, the Lord Crewe Arms. The village once belonged to the Forster family, but like many locals - including the vicar of Allendale -they mistakenly pledged their colours to the Jacobite cause and lost the lot during the '15 rebellion.

At St John's Chapel in Weardale a colour parade of garden gnomes stand outside Buttercup Farm. My mother came here during the war to stay with an aunt. She remembers pigs, the smell of clover honey wafting through the house and an elderly female relative who sat by the fire all day smoking a clay pipe.

Near Langdon Beck you cross over into Teesdale. There's snow on Melmerby Fell, Cross Fell and Great Dun Fell, but High Cup Nick has escaped with a platinum dusting of frost. From a distant peak the white ball of a listening station monitors the world, but the locals still can't get Channel Five and when you ask about the chances of a digital signal the man from Boxclever just laughs.

A friend remembers school holiday visits to relatives in high Teesdale who had a small holding near here in the 1960s - oil lamps, an earth closet and the sour taste of butter made from sheep's milk. The smallholding is abandoned now, the roof timbers gone and the walls buckled by ice and frost. "You could make a living from the land back then," he says gravely, "but not anymore". Maybe that is right, though I can't help thinking its demise is as much to do with the kind of living people want nowadays than the ravages of a globalised economy and the CAP. Like most of my neighbours I have liquid propane gas, solid fuel heating and a septic tank, but I draw the line at windmills and generators.

Near Garrigill there are signs advertising llama treks and a local business initiative welcomes visitors to The Hills of the North. One man who does not rejoice is the bloke that drives my daughter's school minibus. He worked as a miner up here for over a decade, bussed 30 miles to work each day to extract obscure minerals - fluorspar and feldspar - from fractured seams. "And I tell you something for nowt, "he says gruffly, "you won't catch me up there between New Years and Easter ever again".

In the high country spring comes in like a celebration, a clarion of birdsong, wildflowers speckling the high meadows like confetti, but in December spring is a muttered promise. The pastures are dulled and muddy, the fells hunkered down under a plaid of auburn, ginger and bronze; the blond bent grass shivers forlornly. The only birds are silent crows picking road kill rabbit off the tarmac and then reluctantly lifting off at a car's approach and tumbling away in the westerly wind like shredded bin-liners. Yet the bleakness, at least from a sheltered spot with a thermos of coffee steaming nearby, tends only to add to the epic scale of the landscape. To look out from Killhope Law on a clear frosty day is to see England in Cinemascope.

Alston, population 2,000, is the area's largest town. The cobbled square slopes so steeply that as a Geordie once remarked to my partner, "When you get out of the car you fall over". When we stumble out it is noon and the sun is shining yet the cold is still so intense it seems to buzz around your head like a mosquito swarm.

Alston is a lovely place, filled with tall, jumbled Georgian houses that look as if the builders made them up as they went along. The back streets are like illustrations by Gustave Dore. When we first came here we watched an old man in a gabardine trenchcoat with a belt of baler twine walk up to the front door of a beautiful 17th Century house in the main street, remove his shoes and hang his socks on a nail outside the front door before going inside. Now the house has smart new wooden shutters and the shop that once had a window display of a collection of Tenant's super lager cans featuring girls in bikinis is an interior designers. Economically as well as physically Alston appears to be on the up.

In the estimable Blueberry's Tea Room we eat minced beef and leak pudding, apple crumble and custard. The Christmas Ball is a sell out and there's an argument raging over whether the town has Britain's highest golf course. A town in the Peak District disputes the claim because the Alston's does not run to a full 18 holes.

On the road up out of Nenthead there are more llamas and a man lowered over the drop handlebars of an aquamarine Italian racing bike flashes past in a blur of lycra and shiny plastic. This is popular cycling country and the vertiginous roads stretch nerve as well as sinew. At the Cupola Bridge just outside Whitfield in the West Allen Valley there's a memorial to an Edwardian cyclist whose bicycle ran out of control on the hairpin bends of the Grindstone Elbow, plunging him to his death.

It was near Whitfield too that the infamous Allendale Wolf first appeared one winter's night in 1904 and set about the local sheep flocks. Up in the high dales even today it's possible to believe that the wolf was wild, a lonesome descendant of the packs Daniel Defoe heard howling when he spent the night, thirty or so miles away at Bewcastle towards the end of the 17th Century. In fact the adolescent male, five feet in length, had escaped from a private zoological garden just outside Consett. A price was put on the poor beast's head and hundreds of hunters turned up, guns at the ready, to track it down. None succeeded though. The Allendale Wolf strayed onto the railway near Carlisle and was hit by a train. Even in England's Last Wilderness the dangers of civilization are never far away.