HIGH FORCE
The air on the path down is thick with ghost-water, with the atomised breath of the Tees. It is an afternoon in late October and the world is dissolving. Mist clings to the sessile oaks and the birches, muting the last of their autumn fire to a dull, damp gold. The sound is what guides you forwards, a low-frequency thrum that travels not through the air but through the soles of your boots, a tremor that speaks of immense weight and velocity. This is the voice of High Force in full autumnal spate, a river swollen with the rains that have scoured the moors of Upper Teesdale.
To get to the plunge pool’s edge is to become a creature of the slick-stone and the root-grip. The path gives way to a scramble down rocks scrawled with the neon-green of moss and the grey cartography of lichen. Each handhold is a test of faith, each footstep a negotiation with the greasy surface. It is a necessary clamber, this descent. It tunes the body to the landscape’s pitch, a physical prelude to the spectacle below. You arrive at the riverbank breathing hard, your senses already heightened by the effort and the cold.
And then, you see it. High Force is not merely falling; it is a solid thing, a liquid rampart collapsing in on itself. The river, stained the colour of peat and old pennies, funnels through a constriction in the rock and explodes downwards. It shears seventy feet over the black, brutalist cliff of the Whin Sill, that great intrusion of dolerite that muscles its way across the north. The harder rock of the sill forms the precipice, holding fast while the water excavates the softer sandstone and limestone beneath it, a process of geology so slow it is almost static, yet the cause of this ceaseless, violent motion.
The roar is a physical pressure. It scours thought clean away. Spray billows up, drenching everything in a fine, cold rain that smells of stone and fern. To stand here is to feel your own scale diminished, to be a fleeting witness to a power that operates on a timescale far beyond the human. The water that crashes into the churning cauldron below began its journey in the high fells, in the quiet seep and trickle of the peat bogs. Here, all that gathered water is given its singular, magnificent voice. You stand soaked and shivering on the shore, watching the river thunderously unmake itself, only to be reborn in the white-water rapids downstream.