Coming Soon: As Autumn Fades, I Stay Among the Hills

 

Each year, when the first chill of October brushes the air, I feel the old pull of the mountains—an unspoken summons to return to the Lakeland fells, and most particularly to the Duddon Valley. There is something ancient and instinctive in that longing, as though I were one of the hefted sheep that belong to these hills by memory older than time itself. 

To be hefted, the shepherds say, is to hold to a place without fences; to remain faithful to the land because one’s mother once taught the shape of it through her own quiet wanderings. The thought moves me deeply. Perhaps we, too, carry such unseen maps within us—regions of belonging that no city can erase.

 

Joseph Campbell once reflected on Thomas Mann’s novel, The Magic Mountain:

“The call to adventure is to a land of no return that is absolutely removed from every law and notion of ‘flatland,’ as Mann called it—the business-land, the newspaper-and-ledger land of the hero’s native city. On the flatland, life is reaction; whereas on the timeless mountaintop, there can be fermentation—spontaneity, action as opposed to reaction.”

 

Those words return to me whenever I think of the Duddon. The valley’s stillness feels like that “land of no return,” a realm untouched by the feverish commerce of ordinary life. 

Down in the flatland, the mind is forever reacting; here among the heights, it begins once more to act, to ferment, to breathe in its own rhythm.

 

Soon I shall return to the Duddon, to the country of my heart’s equilibrium. The light will fall slantwise through the valley, gilding the bracken and birch, and the air will carry its mingled scent of woodsmoke, rain, and old stone. 

There, among the folded hills, I hope to recover something of that inner stillness that civilisation so easily frays—the simple, wordless contentment of belonging once more to the earth, as the hefted sheep belong to their fell.

 

This is the quiet time of year, after the tourist tide has ebbed. The valley feels returned to its rightful owners: retired wanderers, daydreamers, lovers of silence. The country inns glow with their romantic fires, offering refuge to those who seek warmth in both body and spirit. 

I take special pleasure in the leisurely lunches served there: steaming soup, hearty bread, the cheerful murmur of conversation softened by rain tapping at the windows.

This coming journal entry will be my attempt to record that spiritual homecoming—the hush that follows the fading light, the inward peace of solitude, and the enduring hope that the soul, weary of the flatlands, may still remember its path to the hills.

As the last leaves fall and All Hallows’ Eve descends, may peace attend your threshold, and may the ghosts that visit be only those of kindly memory.