Dream River

Salvador Dali's 'Sleep' (1937) reproduced on www.wikigallery.org

The subconscious is a strange and wonderful thing. I have been interested in dreams and what they tell us since reading the work of Carl Jung many years ago. While many dreams are routine reconfigurations of our hopes, fears, and experiences, some have particular significance and may tell us something about what lies beneath in our subconscious or sometimes even what lies ahead in the future.

Shortly after we moved from Knaresborough to the Pennines in February last year, I had a dream about going on a train journey. My destination was clearly written in large letters in the dream scenario: DEARNE. When I woke up, I felt instantly that the dream had been one of those significant ones. I didn’t know where Dearne was, and to my embarrassment discovered that it was the name of a river in Yorkshire, the county where I have lived for forty years.

I was embarrassed that I didn't know because rivers have become a bit of a thing for me, as my wife will tell you! I think it started while visiting mountainous areas of France, where the rivers can be quite spectacular, with gorges and waterfalls, winding through beautiful scenery. And of course in Knaresborough, my home for twenty-six years, I lived in sight of the River Nidd, which was as spectacular through that town as some of the French river gorges. I like to say that, if you know the rivers in a region, you can navigate the towns and villages more easily. Once you know the location of the rivers, everything else follows, as rivers do not criss-cross like roads do.

But I hadn’t heard of the Dearne. My knowledge of Yorkshire rivers was mainly focused on the main Dales rivers which come together in the Ouse before flowing out through the Humber into the North Sea: the Swale, Ure, Nidd, Wharfe, Aire, and Calder. I had also come across the Don, which flows through Sheffield, Rotherham, and Doncaster. And around Huddersfield, near to where we live, I knew about the Colne and Holme. But the Dearne, no.

The confluence of rivers Dearne and Don (from the River Dearne Facebook page)

In actual fact it flows into the Don somewhere near Mexborough. I traced it back upstream to Barnsley, where on Google Maps it seemed at first sight to disappear. So I left it there, uncertain as to why I had dreamed about it. Was it because of the town ‘Wombwell’, which sits upon the Dearne? This seems to be a very evocative name for those interested in Freudian interpretation!

For some reason, about a year later I remembered the dream and decided to see if I could find some traces of the Dearne above Barnsley. Google Maps can be a bit messy at times, but I managed to find a new section of the river higher up its course, going upstream past the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where it feeds the lakes. It is quite easy to lose track of it because it dips underground from time to time. Then I got a surprise!

Bridge across the Dearne in Bretton Country Park (wikimedia, by Steve F on www.geograph.org.uk)

When we moved from Knaresborough into the Pennines, we had to make the journey several times because of the complexities of finding a new home and moving, and we have followed that same route several times since, when visiting Knaresborough, York, or Leeds. After leaving the M1 and driving along the A636 away from the Calder valley, you encounter a string of small towns that became very familiar to us, winding up into the hills: Clayton West, Scissett, Kitchenroyd, Denby Dale (the largest of these towns, which we visit regularly), and finally, at the top, Cumberworth.

And the route of the Dearne? You guessed it. The narrow, trickling upper Dearne passes through or by each of those towns, and despite being river obsessed, I hadn’t even noticed it. Its source lies at the top of the hill half way down which we now live in Shepley, the same hill on whose lower slopes we lived temporarily in New Mill before finding our permanent home. The source of the Dearne is less than two miles away from each of the two homes we have had in this area over the last sixteen months.

The dream journey to Dearne reflected our move from Knaresborough to New Mill and Shepley. It was an important move, which was life-changing and stressful, and we are not over a little homesickness yet. We didn’t come by train, but dreams have poetic licences! (Shepley is on the railway and you could travel there by rail from Knaresborough if you wanted to.) We left behind the Nidd and discovered the Holme, which flows through nearby Holmfirth and into Huddersfield. Yet the Dearne didn’t want to get left out of my atlas of rivers, especially given that it is so close, and so it forced its way into my dream. My subconscious picked it up somehow, I still don’t know how. The website ancientworlds.net claims that, ‘The River Dearne in Yorkshire derived from the Old English word dierne which means hidden.’ There you are then.

The Dearne Valley path (on the left of the river) (wikimedia, by John Fielding on www.geograph.org.uk, 'The River Dearne', licence CC BY-SA 2.0 )

I have discovered that there is a Dearne Valley path, a walking route, which looks very enticing in the on-line photos as you would expect from a Pennine valley walk. I look forward to taking Bea, when she is a little older, along parts of it. In actual fact, it is quite feasible to walk up the hill from our house to the upper Dearne valley without using the car at all. So I am very happy that the Dearne announced itself to me through my dreams, and encouraged me to find out about it.