I’m weeks away from the Scafell Pike Trail Marathon. I’m bored. This new target was supposed to reinvigorate my running, but – while sometimes at weekends I make it out to the hills and moors beyond Bradford – most of the week I’m stuck circling Morley, south Leeds. They are the same roads and tracks I’ve been plodding around for four and a half years now: roads that have been leached, by repetition, of all interest. My internal map of the place is complete and uninspiring.
At least, that’s what I thought. Halfway through a mid-week fartlek session, a half-hidden public footpath sign that I’ve never followed before told me otherwise. The truth is more like this: the map of Morley in my head has enough routes with labels like “7 miles + moderate hills” overlaid on it that I’ve stopped exploring. “Running is too boring for me” is a constant refrain from non-runners and, dead to my surroundings, I feeling that same boredom encroach on my runs. I take an unplanned right. It goes almost nowhere, skirting the edge of a field of cows before throwing me out on to a main road. But, emboldened by the new scrap of topography added to my internal map, I take a lane I’ve never followed before and stumble into something else.
I have a sense that I’m heading towards the quarry that squats between Morley and Batley, though it’s so well concealed behind trees and reclaimed earth that I’ve never actually seen it up close before. I see a path that I do recognise. Someone’s using a trials bike to hump some boulders strewn across its mouth. I take a different left, on to a trail that quickly dissolves into multiple thin veins, threading through low, close, new-growth trees. I’m on a reclaimed portion of the quarry. It’s not local knowledge that tells me this – it’s the feel of the grey mud underfoot and the damp closeness of new woodland, recognised from a childhood spent roaming an old pit village.
I look ahead and see a hare bound away from me, scared by the sight of a lumbering, neon-clad human emerging from the dense, low silver birches. There’s a name that’s emerged for these sorts of places in nature writing – edgelands. You know them, even if you don’t know the term. The ragged edges of our towns and cities, where urban landscapes fray and meet with the countryside. They’re made up of scraps of woodland, dense knots of brambles, scrappy, overgrown meadows, old railways, and factories gone to seed. They’re strands and clumps of wildness (but not wilderness) strewn with abandoned infrastructure, ignored or forgotten by the people who live just out of sight. They are places that haven’t been stamped down by development or cultivated by agriculture. Places you might have roamed as a child.
As I weave, nettle-stung and scratched, further into the undergrowth, I know I’m well removed from any kind of right of way you’d find on a digital or paper map. That’s fine. If whoever owns this land wants us to stick to a rights of way, they should mark them better. Left unattended, people find their own way. While much of what we think of as “nature” in Britain is carefully managed farmland, edgelands grow rough and wild.
This is the space where you might actually see non-human mammals living outside the bounds we’ve set for them, or birds that actually hunt. Rabbits are everywhere, foxes burst from the undergrowth and disappear just as quickly, herons fish untended canals and, if you’re lucky, you might even spot a deer living beyond the confines of a shooting estate. But it’s a human environment, too. Out of nowhere, in the middle of this dense wood, steps appear. Big old stone steps leading down a steep embankment. I hover at the top, wary for a moment of adding yet more miles to what’s supposed to be a mid-distance training run, then clamber down anyway.
At the bottom is a towering arch of stone built into the hillside, sealed off and thoroughly hidden. Morley has a two-mile tunnel running right underneath it, built by the Victorians back when even small Yorkshire towns merited ambitious infrastructure projects. I’ve stumbled across another, abandoned part of that network. How many other people know about this? A handful of dog-walkers, maybe. An underused part of my brain tingles with the thrill of exploration. It keeps tingling, all the way home. I realise I’ve not looked at my GPS watch for several miles. Nor have I let thoughts of the tortilla (middle-class runner’s food) waiting in my fridge nag at me.
Edgelands are spaces we instinctively explore as children. We begin life with an intimate relationship with the wilder shreds of landscape around us, then, as adults, we move away from it. Our lives fall into patterns dictated by developers and lines on maps, then we flee those environments to encounter sanitised “nature” in our countryside. As runners, we all too often plod along the same few concrete-laden routes, week after week, believing that freedom can only be found far from the confines of our urban environments. But runners can be explorers, and there are small outposts of the wild and the unknown all around us if we remember to look.
Mark E Johnson is a runner and a writer. He tweets from @ThatMarkJohnson.
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