Love Songs

For what is loved and what is lost: a writing prompt BY CLARE SHAW

The North Yorks Moors are burning.

They have been burning for 20 days. The A171 Whitby to Scarborough is closed, there is heavy smoke. There is moss and the heather, lichen and gorse. There is curlew and dragonfly, lizard and hare. The peat is six thousand years deep; six thousand years of carbon is stored there.

The fire began close to the military base at Fylingdales. 18 bombs have exploded; soft moss and sundew, bilberry, cowberry, lapwing and adder. Where a fire burns, the soil is sterilised and seeds grow slowly. The ground is dry and hard, rain gushes fast from the high ground, hard into the valleys, taking the dry soil with it; hawthorn and rowan, the ancient oak. 12 fire crews are fighting the blaze over 25 km of fire, many of them voluntary. The fire chief thanks the public for their donations of drinks and cake - “We are at saturation point”, he says, and asks us to stop.

The fire broke out on the 11th. On 14th, we watched the smoke in the distance from Blakey Ridge, in the low pink evening. We walked from Grosmont to Robin Hood’s Bay and it felt like my heart was breaking. It’s been a very tough two weeks, for reasons more complex than I can describe in this blog. But I will find the words. That’s what poetry is for, and music, and my own good time.

On Thursday 4th September I’ll be reading at “A Love Song to Peat” at Ponden Mill, on the edge of the threatened Walshaw Moor; there will be music and films and words, there will be miles of moors, the craft of walls, ruins holding their stories. “The wild mountain thyme / Grows around the bloomin' heather/ Will ye go, lassie, go?”

We write love songs because the landscape inside us is so huge and we are so small. We write love songs because love is all of the oceans and we cannot hold them. Sometimes we are a curlew and we sing for our mate and our chicks, we sing for our land. Sometimes we are quietly on fire and a thousand years burn inside us. Sometimes the flames reach high and we sing so that the fire crews will come, and the people will bring them cake. Look at my flames, we sing, look at my ashes.

Look at the ashes. Peat grows at a rate of 1mm per year. It will take centuries to repair. On September 4th, we’ll be raising awareness of the campaign to save Walshaw Moor, site of Wuthering Heights, and proposed location of the Calderdale Energy Park. The project is backed by a Saudi-owned multinational corporation; despite its claims, wind turbines located on deep peat are not “clean” nor “green”. Across the world, we are fighting to save peat, knowing that a healthy peatland can store up to 30 times more carbon per hectare than a healthy tropical rainforest. The proposed destruction of the Haworth Moors is driven by a hunger for money and for votes; if it goes ahead, it will be an act of immense and irreparable ecological destruction and cultural vandalism.

We are singing a Love Song to Peat, because like all good love songs - Jolene, Into my Arms, Wild Mountain Thyme, Nothing Compares 2 U - we are facing the loss of what we love - and it is good sometimes to share the pain, and the heather, and all of the birds. You can join us at the historic Ponden Mill, close to Haworth, on 4th September at 6.30-9pm - tickets are free, but you must book here.

If you can’t get to West Yorkshire, then you can still be part of this artistic conversation. Share your favourite love songs below - in poetry or art, film or music. Or write your own love poem to a plant, or a person, an animal or a place, following the simple abcb rhyme scheme of the ballad. Whether you are inspired by the lyrical and comedic contrasts of Dorothy Parker’s Love Song, or the melancholy ache of Robert Burns’ Red Red Rose, make sure that your song holds pain alongside pleasure, loss alongside love. Write your flames and your curlew; write your cake and your ashes.