I want to fold myself into Kinder.
Not the plateau proper, obviously, but its cloughs. Lie down in them – head up top, feet in Edale – and pull the covers around me like a burrito. Soft and round and gentle, I could sleep there all day.
Kinder itself is sleeping. Sprawled and enormous, one day it will rise and wend its way off. There’s no one word for how Kinder walks. Less showy than a stride, more purposeful than a plod: the steady pace of long awaited migration. Ring Ouzels fly off to Morocco, I wonder where Kinder will settle?
I pop by often. Those soft irresistible cloughs, they draw you in and up to the hunched gargoyles above. Wardens wrinkled, grey and squatting. I pick my way through carefully. I’m not sure why, they are no more than sediments – Sandmen.
Regardless I flee craggy coast and set sail across an ocean of sticky, pungent peat; bow crashing through grough and hag. Back in the cloughs there’s trickling and drip dripping; here there’s squelching and suckering: schllllluup schllluupp. Tunnels gape, well eyes, water slides. I would like to know where they go, I would like to slide down into the rich chocolate centre of Kinder. I would be surrounded by lost boots, walking sticks and shipwrecked aeroplanes. Warm, enveloped, oppressed.
Company here is in the past: footsteps abandonned in the mud. I leave mine with them to comfort companions of the future. The horizon is nothing but Kinder. Kinder Kinder Kinder. Waves lapping. Lost at sea.
Hati Whiteley 