1. History Re-enacted: Creswell Crags July 2000

A cold day for heritage but here we come
along the river, marvelling at the crags,
pocked limestone, the tree cover; adjust
our helmets ready for exploration: the guide
puts on her Victorian Ella Boyd Dawkins smile,

with black skirt, Doc Martins, straw hat.
"My father," she says, "is a wonderful man.
Picked and shovelled through ten thousand years,
a hundred thousand years, back to an ice age."
She takes up the huge shin bone, challenges us

to guess at the mammoth, the hyena teeth-
marks. An older woman in anorak says:
"What's a nice Victorian young lady
like you doing here?" The girl smiles,
is not fazed: she carries on with her guide-

book patter, learnt so carefully, shows us
the bone charm round her neck. "My father
will take this for the museum, it's not mine."
We laugh til the years run into each other.

2. The Child is Father of the Man: William Boyd Dawkins 1845

Dark down here with a black smell
and I'm not sure I like it.
Punishment, my father says,
because I interrupted him.

There's a glint of light from the grating.
I know where it is on the pavement,
a circle of black ironwork flowers
and when the coalman comes
he lifts it up, shucks the bag
and a stream of shining pieces
goes chuckling into the depths,
as if they're going back down
to where they came from.

Now as I wait a million years for them
to let me back up, I listen to their footsteps,
hear my father's voice saying prayers
for my obedience. In my hand a small lump of coal.
In the tiny ray of light it seems like something
comes alive on the surface, a leaf from the old forests,
real millions of years ago. My secret find.

3. William Boyd Dawkins finds the horse's head 1876

Carved on this piece of broken rib hidden
in the top layers of robin Hood's Cave.
Twelve thousand years old. I found it.

Think of the man who cut into the bone,
worked with his flint knife, made these
incisions, brown lines on the white base;

outlined the thick-set head, the wide neck,
flared nostril, unblinkered eye. Think how
he knew to show the wind in the mane

blowing forward against the jet-stream,
and the lines across the horse, a flicker-
fence he gallops through, some ancient

Ascot to speed him into the carver's
winning dreams. And into my hands.
Quietly at home with resin and paint

my wife helps to remake the bone, re-carve
the horse. Now in his glass case, he runs non-
stop, carrying us back into the last Ice Age.

4. The Revd. Magens Mello has his say 1877

Robin Hood's Cave, no outlaws
But a quiet place for reverence,
I come here often with my painting stool,
watercolours and paper to paint
the green lushness softening the crags,
where soon the wonders of God's creation
will explpode upon the minds of men.

Today we have come with picks, shovels,
colliers from Creswell, hired labourers
from the Welbeck estate, myself and
archaeologists, Boyd Dawkins and Heath,
to search the layers of the past.

It is God's work we do, just as Sundays
at Brampton Church I see God's words
to find how we are meant to live in love
and grace. It is all one grand design.
Or should have been till Tom the collier
comes across the tooth: great find this tooth
from the Lesser Scimitar Cat. Dawkins'
face is lit with inner light of revelation.

Back at the Rectory, comfortable with
after-dinner port, Heath voices doubts,
says the time-scale's wrong, the cat
has been extinct three hundred thousand
years, this layer's not that old. He smiles,
ready to make his attack: "Maybe Dawkins
placed it there himself! You know, a bid
for fame, before he's really worth it."

I take a sip of port, knowing the ways of men
to be more devious than the ways of God.
"Some of these early hunters," I say,
"they weren't out to make it easy for us.
This tooth, now, maybe was a hunter's charm
found years before he came to the Crags;
wore it as an ornament round his neck.
Imagine him going home, the wife all smiles
till she sees what he has lost."

"The trouble with you men of the cloth,"
says Heath, "you're always so rational."

There are many things to thank God for.

5. Ella in the Isle of Man: July 1888

A windy crossing, mother sea-sick, father bent
over his maps, face furrowed deep as the waves
that beat the ship; the same waters that covered
these islands millions of years ago, built up
the limestone sediments, left their fossil traces.

The hotel is stuffy, too hot. I've a mind to go
walk the shore, while mother shops and father
meets the gentlemen of the survey, plans his
next moves. A small girl with an old woman
digs the sand: she shows me her find -

a tiny piece of bone, cross shaped. I guess
the palate of a fish, perhaps the wrasse.
"Why," she says, "it's a Crosh Bollan,
wear it for luck. Ask my nan."
The old woman pulls her shawl tight.

6. Ella learns about Thor's Hammer: Isle of Man 1888

Tongue bone of a sheep, and the animal
dead in the snow, wait till the crows
have picked the flesh, till the slow thaw
has washed clean the bones of the skull.

On a spring win day, and the grass still
winter brown, search for the little t-shape
bone, unhooked from it's skeleton jaw.
Kept dry in a pocket or tied round your neck.

A drive across the Curraghs, a cold day,
the horses slow, slow for the heavy rain
and the way lost in the puzzling mist.
There is no knowing which road to take.

Reins in one hand, the other pocket-deep
scrabbling against the rubbed cotton,
but no little bone for the fingers to grasp,
no Thor's Hammer to throw and point the way.

7. Creswell and Buxton Souvenirs July 2000

Mostly the kids want ice-cream but ice-cream melts,
leaves only a sticky trace that washes out.
I'd like them to go for something longer-lasting:
a booklet or a crafted model.

On the way home I drive into Creswell village
ready for re-discovery, catch voices of the pupils
I once taught, trapped behind boarded school windows;
look for the pithead wheel silent since the strike;
imagine the darkness below crumbling
the coal-cutter, rotting the unmoving belts;
the acrid smell bottled for good.

Two youngsters on the street corner
kick at the grass emerging between
the paving stones.

Later in the Buxton museum I stare into
Boyd Dawkins' study, a reconstructed space
covered in a layer of brown Victorian gloom.
Tables littered with his collections: books
and bones, rocks, vases, paintings and masks.

I lean on the glass-case barriers, work out
each item named in the key: bits and pieces
waiting to be put together. No sign of Ella.