Blackwater Graveyard
by Frank Broughton
A low green picket fence defines a rocky knoll, otherwise lost in a waste of stunted heather, dun sedge, blanched blades of moor-grass. Clustered within the fence, a score of headstones cast from concrete, the same concrete used for the great dam that the bodies beneath these stones once helped to build: the dam that killed them.
On the stones, the sparsest of detail, name and date of death. No ages recorded, no sentiments of any kind. These are the graves of outcasts, itinerants, the ones nobody minded, who had no-one to ask that their remains be carried the long miles down to the kirkyard in Kinlochleven. Would they have been welcome there among the respectable dead?
One stone belongs to the only woman here, a Mrs Riley, who died at the dam it’s not recorded how. Unlike those who lie beside her, she does not have the dignity of a Christian name. Presumably no-one knew it, just as no-one knew even the surname of whoever rests beneath a stone that simply bears a date, 26/6/08 and the inscription Not Known.
Half a mile above the graves stands the massive wall of the Blackwater Dam. The dam holds back an eight-mile-long reservoir, water supply for the turbines that powered the Kinlochleven aluminium smelter. The smelter closed down twenty years ago: most of it has been demolished.
Frank Broughton was born in Lancashire but has since lived in London, East Anglia and currently in North Yorkshire. Before retirement he managed a team of ecologists and countryside management advisers promoting and delivering the Government’s “green” schemes to farmers. Since finishing paid work, he has volunteered with a number of environmental organisations including the Rivers Trust and Yorkshire Dales National Park. He is a long-time member of York Poetry Group and had also written a number of novels.