An Ode to the Moors

Though I wish I could say I grew up on the Moors, I didn’t. The truth is that I grew up with my feet in the sand on a beach in Dubai, or playing beneath the lemon tree in our garden in the suburbs of Melbourne. I’ve never found it easy to identify any one place as home; but if anything could be, it is seeing the Moors appear in the distance as I’m coming back to Yorkshire.

Those wild plains of yellow, weaving in and out of the horizon. A deep shade of violet in the summertime as the heather reigns over the valley. A crisp white in the winter when the rolling hills sleep beneath a blanket of white.

There are those golden days when the moors are framed by a baby blue sky and lit up by warm sun rays. But mostly they are wild. Shadowed by a sea of clouds, shaken by a rough wind, drowning in a rainstorm.

I love them most on their wild days because, to me, that is when they are most alive.

Uncontrollably inconsolably terrifyingly free.

Rugged and untamed.

That is is the true essence of the valley, my valley, a little piece of my soul I carry with me wherever I go.

“It’s–it’s not the sea, is it?” said Mary, looking round at her companion.

“No, not it,” answered Mrs. Medlock. “Nor it isn’t fields nor mountains, it’s just miles and miles and miles of wild land that nothing grows on but heather and gorse and broom, and nothing lives on but wild ponies and sheep.”

“I feel as if it might be the sea, if there were water on it,” said Mary. “It sounds like the sea just now.”

(From The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson)