Cracks in the landscape

But for Will this slight indent in the landscape holds a powerful meaning. He sees it as a metaphor of the lives of members of his family – and ultimately his own. Its likely role as a trap into which wolves were driven in the 14th Century illustrates “the perils of a certain kind of romanticism”.

Perhaps oddly, Will’s chief focus is not the pit, but a charming cottage not far away – Bramble Carr Cottage. In 1966, his maternal grandparents, George Brooks, a plant manager at ICI Billingham, and his wife Dorothy, went to live there.

To young Will, who often stayed there, the place was a paradise, where he always felt secure. But for the couple their move to a remote location proved “rash, almost witless”. The close exposure to each other that they now faced caused their relationship, previously buoyed up by a shared interest in the arts, to subside into mutual loathing.

Initially from the husband’s side, conversation dried up. After suffering a stroke, his wife remarked with bitter satisfaction: “Now I’m going to make George suffer.” Will reflects: “There must have been some bad evenings for them both at Bramble Carr. How claustrophobic that setting must have seemed; how much like a trap into which life had driven them.”

Probing as an adult, Will discovered that the couple’s parents had also suffered a miserable marriage. That of Will’s own parents, who married in haste when Will’s future mother, a trainee nurse at Darlington, was swept off her feet by a dashing RAF fighter pilot, was little better. “Contrary to her intentions, she had been caught,” observes Will, whose own marriage in due course broke down. Another family member committed suicide.

When Will learnt that the Wolf Pit was a hollowed-out Bronze Age burial mound, it gained extra significance. It linked the generations whose lives had been played out around it. In near-despair one day he made a drunken drive from London, where he was a theatre director and producer, to Bramble Carr.

He gazed from the moor on to the cottage, from which his grandparents had long gone. “I remembered nothing dark in my grandparents’ household,” he writes. “Just the light of their affection.”

But his hope that “the place that had always seemed so emotionally coherent” would banish the “horrible emotional vacancy” that had overwhelmed him was dashed. Instead, “the romance of the place was mocking”.

Born at Hutton Lowcross, near Guisborough, just over the moors from Danby, Will remains perplexed – and intrigued – by the tangle of human relationships in what he bravely confesses is his “malfunctioning family” – perhaps not too different from many, if not most.

Now a journalist and author, he presents this affecting memoir as “an enquiring love letter to my grandparents, my family and (the suicide victim) my uncle Robert”.

It’s more. For despite one of two wonky bits of history (the Lion Inn on Blakey Ridge was never a coaching inn; the moorland hermit George Baxter lived in Rosedale, not Westerdale), it is virtually also a love letter to the North York Moors.

ONE perceptive observation is of how a sheet of melting snow can appear “like a thinly-stretched pallid membrane,” about to “split and immediately give birth to summer”. The clatter of a cattle grid “delineates the passage from one world to another, from the green to the brown...” Fryupdale has rarely been better evoked – “a singular isolation, a green silence...full of secret space...” Though now living in Lincolnshire, Will is at one with the spirit of the moors The community of Danby in the period of his boyhood is richly celebrated. A farmer pursuing a runaway tractor, shouted “Whoa! Whoa!” Family doctor Bob Robinson was sometimes accused by his patients of being “more interested in the history of their farms than their ailments”. If he was needed while out walking on the moors, his wife Ruth summoned him by spreading a white sheet on a roof. On busy evenings at the surgery she “prowled the waiting room”, sending home those whom she considered could come back tomorrow.

But Ruth and Bob perhaps also fit Will’s main theme. He writes: “Life with Ruth could be pretty insufferable at times, so it was as well that Bob Robinson had another love on the go in his enduring fascination with Danby.”

Less incongruous than it might seem – remember who his grandfather worked for – even the demise of ICI is brought into the picture: “All that power had come and gone in 80 years, leaving behind rows of spectral factories on Teesside,” notes Will.

Returning to the moors, he recalls their long history of transient human endeavour: pagan settlement, the monastic age, the industrial epics of jet and ironstone. “You are never far from the remains of someone’s dream,” he observes – the mirror, once again, to the broken dream of Bramble Carr.

To square the circle of the dream with the reality, he suggests: “Surviving entails forgiving and finding a way to admire the view of the past, no matter what desolation it contains.” Readers of this book will easily be drawn along what its author calls its “thread of inconclusive anecdote.” For those who know Bramble Carr and its overlooking moor, this peaceful corner of the North York Moors might well now be defined by the trapped lives symbolised by the Wolf Pit.