A thousand feet of fluted concrete

“The North, where the M1 does its emergency stop, and away over the back of the hill is the M62, gouged into the moorland and completely out of its element. At one point the carriageways separate to pass each side of a farm, and a farmer brings his cows for milking at dusk, through a subway, into his central reservation. Thousands of tons of steel pass any given point every minute of the day, but when the winter brings the motorway to a frozen standstill, convoys are snuffed out by the snow in less than an hour, and vehicles are excavated weeks later like woolly mammoths out of the tundra… From the observation suite of Emley Moor Mast, not much short of a thousand feet of fluted concrete, with a hypodermic aerial on top, just south of Huddersfield, you can see both coasts. Or you could if you were allowed up it, and the weather was clear, which you aren’t, and even if you were, it wouldn’t be.”

If I’d read my Simon Armitage more closely then I’d have been better prepared for the shock, today, of seeing Emley Moor Mast on the horizon. In this tumbling land central Leeds has many tall buildings of note, but as Chris confidently (and correctly) pointed out as we stood (backs to the passing M62) at a high opening in the grounds of Oakwell Hall, nothing in Britain compares in scale with Emley Moor Mast. It’s the tallest freestanding structure on the British Isles at a height of 330.4 metres (1084 feet). If it had the nerve to stand next to it, that southern softy Canary Wharf would have to blink a long way upwards to the top of Emley Moor Mast.

The present Emley Moor Mast seems even more impressive when you hear that this is the third tower to stand on top of the bleak moor, the second one having collapsed in March 1969, brought down by strong winds and the weight of ice on the structure. Nearly forty years and still standing – that’s some achievement up there.

Anyway, I thought I’d left the big human-made M62 landscape icons behind at Ferrybridge, but clearly here’s another one which will shadow me for a couple more weeks at least, until I’ve made the Pennine crossing and dropped down below Rochdale. Conversation with Chris revealed the strength of positive feeling that local people have for this majestic construction. Its near-anonymity outside of West Yorkshire makes it another example of that ‘if it was in the South-East it would always be in the news’ scenario. It’s only in the news when it falls down, Emley Moor Mast. The rest of the time (effectively, all the time) it just gets on with the job of ensuring that the news reaches us.