There's a new road that cuts through the upper reaches of Northumberland, a cold black stripe that cuts across the rolling hills of yellowing grasses and rough gorse, usually pressed bellow sticky grey clouds that cling to the tips of the peaks, and from it, if you are paying attention, you can just about see the top of the stack. Newcomers to this land might be forgiven for thinking it is part of a factory, hidden below the dip of the hill, or even the large funnel of a stately home's ostentatious kitchen, hidden behind the dry stone wall. But if you find the old dirt road, the only way to access the stack besides cutting across wet fields and thick hedges, you will soon see that the stack stands alone. A monumental circle of red bricks, arranged like a massive chimney, leading from nowhere, to nowhere.
When people first see it, it strikes them in different ways. Some flinch back, as if shocked to see it standing there, right in the middle of the dirt road. Some back away, as if it is going to come towards them. I grabbed my brother's arm, when I first saw it, and left him with bruised fingerprints across his skin. Being a local, having lived my whole life in close proximity to the stack, I've had a long time to mull over the cause of this reliable reaction. What is it about the stack that induces such fear in everyone who sees it? It's just a big chimney after all. Or appears to be.
I think it's the sense of displacement. Here you are, at the edges of the wilderness, where the nearest living things are hares and sparrows and foxes, and yet here it is, an appendage of industry, built for purpose, yet seemingly without one. It connects to nothing, that we can see, and is miles from the nearest village, let alone the nearest industrial area. If you scout about, like many have, you won't find any traces of any other buildings, or anything buried underneath. There's a mouth that opens on one side, which, over the years, has become blackened by the fires set by generations of daring children. The inside is likewise scarred. But no bricked pit has been built to house a forge or generator. And, if you approach adulthood and find yourself in the local libraries and town halls, you won't find any evidence of anything having ever been constructed in the surrounding area besides some old farmhouses and a long forgotten chapel. It's always been an inbetween place, a space between fields and old roads, and before that it was just forest.
Once the initial shock fades, there's a lingering unease that gets overshadowed by young bravado. No one wants to be the last kid to go near the stack. Some groups, mine included, back in the day, would hang out around there after school. Make the half-hour walk to it from the village just to loiter in its shadows. Parents would warn them away, and be inevitably ignored, citing that it was dangerous. A brick might fall. There might be broken glass. I think those were the least of their concerns. I think those dangers were the most they were willing to warn us of. I tried asking my mum, years later, why she forbade us going near the stack. At first she said she wasn't sure what I was talking about. Then, when pressed, she shrugged and mumbled something about asbestos.
I actually live closer to the stack now. My farm sits on the edge of a dam and the across the main road from my drive is the access to the old road and the stack. I moved here because the price was a steal and the land is pretty good for cattle. But sometimes I wonder if it was an unconsious decision to be closer to the stack. I've never told my wife about it. She grew up down south and I can't imagine has ever heard of it. Never saw a reason to bring it up.
There is one element to the stack's identity that I think that I, and I alone, have access to. Very rarely, about three in the morning, you can hear a train rumble through. A deep thrum, that rattles the dishes in the kitchen and the glass in the windows. Night trains aren't unusual in themselves. But this one is, because the nearest train track is about fifty miles away.
I've never seen any lights. Never dared to look. Never seen any evidence of it in the surrounding fields. My wife has never heard it, nor have any of my neighbors, not that I've asked. But surely they would have mentioned it by now?
And I am sure, sure as the sea is wet, that the sound of the train passes below the stack, deep inside the darkness of the earth.
And I won't be thinking of it any longer. Because I get the sense that if I let its claws of curiosity hook into me, the stack will take me to places from which I will not return.
The one question I can't shake: if the stack holds no fire, then what does it funnel into that hungry sky?
Paddy Dobson
16th September 2020