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| Sunset over Goat Pond, Sharpitor |
It’s a
cold, frosty morning at the end of January.
The river is steaming slightly.
Above its wrinkled gun-metal surface, on a granite stepping stone in the
middle of the river, sits a dipper. He’s
almost comically puffed up against the cold.
A series of bright notes clinks through the rush of the water like gems
inside a washing machine. He’s singing.
He sits
like an outsize Christmas card robin whose colours have been tinted by a
confectioner. Dark cocoa brown above,
grading to a slightly warmer gingerbread tinge around the belly and the lower
edge of the sugar-white bib. The
whiteness stands out against the smoky greyish light of the icy valley.
As he
sings, his fine thrush-like beak works open just slightly – enough to see a
glimpse of bright water between the mandibles.
He looks like he’s trying to lever something open. He spills forth a jumble of harsh yet sweet
chatterings, like a compressed song thrush whose repetitions have been filtered
out by countless generations of river sounds.
This is a song perfectly suited to the slip, rush and suck of the well-aerated
water that the dipper spends its entire life in or alongside.
The dipper’s
whitish nictitating membrane closes sleepily every few seconds. It’s this film that slides across the eye
when the bird is underwater, protecting it from debris and enabling it to locate
fish eggs, fry and insect larvae. These
are what the bird forages for on the river bed, rootling and paddling like a
truncated penguin, then popping out of the water like it’s just hatched down
there among the grains of sand and quartz.
Several times recently a dipper has materialised with a slight splash out
of the water just in front of me and whirred off downstream.
This one is
singing on a cuboid slab of granite that has been worked by human hand. On the side facing me are the characteristic parallel
grooves where the ‘tare’, an iron spike, was driven in between the twin tapered
lengths of iron known as ‘feathers’ to force them apart and split the rock. It strikes me as apt that a bird with such a
ringing, metallic song, evolved over millennia to include luminous shard-like
notes that carry above the rushing sound of the water, is now singing on a rock
that would have rung with similar notes when iron hammer struck iron spike.
I have
heard that the local stonemasons could tell when the block of granite being
worked was about to split. After hours
of precise force, first with an iron rod called a ‘jumper’ to initiate a hole,
then striking the tare with a greater and greater sense of anticipation, the granite would start to ‘sing’ as the vibrations
reached a certain frequency. Just as it
reached that sweet pitch, the mason would stand back, not quite smiling.
An ancient
coalescence of rock, quartz, feldspar and mica, formed by the slow cooling of a
prehistoric batholith, fell in two at his feet, cloven by his opening bill of
metal. What would that man, working on a
tawny Dartmoor hillside, have made of this small bird ringing out its fluid
anvil song, perched on his handiwork long after his death?
Yet
something’s not quite right in this picture.
The facts don’t quite match my reverie.
Looking more closely at the hemicylindrical grooves in the granite, it’s
clear that they were not made by hand.
They’re too deep and their diameter is too great.
This is an
ancient fording place that has seen stepping stones across the river for
centuries. The old stones were replaced
some time in the late 20th Century, and the new ones brought in
using tractors and diggers. They were
drilled by a pneumatic machine that superseded the old armies of skilled
labourers (masons, rabbit warreners, tin miners) that had made this landscape a
busier, more populated, noisier one than it is now. The sounds that would have accompanied this
cleaving of the rock would have been far different to those of old William the
mason, he of grizzled face and singing hands.
Does that make the purling spiel of this dipper any less meaningful?
