Borderland of the Delves (Full Text)

This short piece of creative non-fiction was included in Landnotes I, a zine of art and writing from across the West Midlands, including an album of music produced by Wayside & Woodland Recordings. It was accompanied by my photography - seen here.

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Ancient parish boundaries were odd things. They often had enclaves and exclaves; detached pieces inserted into the middle of someone else’s land. These sometimes crossed counties, or formed islands of one county within another. The Delves is one of the tamest of unusual parish outgrowths. It was a compressed diamond at the north-east of Wednesbury’s bounds, attached to that parish only by a thin ribbon of land midst the tangle of boundaries where multiple rivers meet near Bescot. It was chiselled into shape by these waters, which formed its border. The coming of the railway physically severed the Delves from the rest of Wednesbury, and one hundred years later it was formally removed and given to Walsall.

Walking such borders is a ritualistic act. Year after year parish boundaries would be navigated and “beaten” along the route, so that each generation knew the line. Today, these lines are perhaps more poignant in that they are forgotten. To follow them now is to trespass, to pass through a veil between worlds, as the rivers and brooks are deposited between what we understand to be the city. Even the ancient entrance site, at the meeting point of the Full Brook and the River Tame, mimics a portal to another realm: a dark tunnel with an emerald path gleaming at the end.

The Full Brook embroiders the edge of the north-western path. If you follow it, it promises itself again and again as a guide, but it is an insincere companion and entices you only to dead ends, deep into nowhere. In the deepest of nowhere, four shopping trollies are tipped on their sides to form stepping stones across the brook, caving uneasily underfoot. The brook sulks in milky stillness; a sheen of scum caught on its surface by the dam formed at the trollies.

This is the place of the Walstad, the dwellers of the upper end of a stream, or a well. They were called the Walstede d’Elves.

The eastern brook is nameless. Through the Brooklands, it cuts silently under the power station back to the River Tame.

The Tame was once a rainbow of industrial spices. It was flavoured with bright copper from James Bridge, leather from Walsall, coaldust from Wednesbury, and a medley of chemicals from Oldbury. It danced in different hues and when each brook bled into it, the colour told of where it came from. It formed the southern border, the uncrossable border.

To follow it now requires a confused embroidery of routes to its edge, doubling back and re-finding it again. It is disturbed by the route of the motorway which rises above on concrete legs, inversions of the deep Dane shafts which are as much part of local myth as they ever were real. The land of the Delves was geologically different, and had ironstone beneath it rather than coal, which may have first been dug from the ground by the Mercian tribes.  

There are not many places in the patchwork of the urban midlands where you are alone enough to feel the dormant wild, but here, lost in the Tameland at the border of the Delves, it lingers.