From some angles the viaduct seemed dwarfed by the trees surrounding it, but it was usually possible to see it from any point in the valley. A series of spans reaching across the higher ground. The arches built at intervals, impossibly high and frail from a distance, creating a sense of emptiness in the land below. It was the viaduct that framed the valley; its high sombre arches elevated into distance seemed to define and to dominate the landscape as much as the unchanging shape of the hillside and the landmarks of the town. The viaduct was always there.

When she left the town, it was this view she would think of. She dreams she is living beside it, in a house high on the hillside, the bridge hanging across the valley. Even though it was the biggest structure for miles around, it had a hidden feeling, sometimes melting into the trees. She always knew there was a mystery to those arches, fading in and out of view.

She couldn’t stop thinking about the viaduct, and so she did some basic research. The viaduct stretches to 435 metres. It has 32 arches each with a span of 9 metres. At its highest point the viaduct is 41 metres high. But this didn’t seem to solve the problem or bring her any closer to the question in her mind. It fuelled the obsession and left an empty feeling. She searched for maps of the area, and plans of its construction; surrounded herself with photographs of the viaduct, like a scene in a police drama. As if she might find clues from these different angles and perspectives. As if these pictures could tell a story, one that she could piece together across time.

The valley below, sparse fields, a few trees, and a road disappearing into the distance, bending around the hillside, as the viaduct cuts through, continuing its route. A line of houses built along the ridge of the hill, terraces joined together, their windows, roofs and chimneys standing out distinctly. A view of the bridge which stretches through the middle of the frame in lines of dark and shade, the measured lengths of its arches diminishing in height and blending into the hillside. One end of the viaduct visible at the edge of the picture.

In another photograph, apart from the viaduct itself which dominates the picture, there is a steam train crossing the bridge with thick plumes of smoke emerging from it, threatening to cover the hill that it passes. There are the rows of houses and the old mill buildings that stand high in the distance and occupy the hillside just above the bridge, or within its shadow. These rows of houses that wait for trains to cross the valley. She wonders how submerged in smoke these valleys and hills would have been at times, how it might cover the sky.

The next is a strangely flat picture, as though drawn by hand and simplified. The clean lines of the hilltop and horizon. Further down there is a line of settlements spanning the hillside, and here terraces and mills and chimneys are visible. The viaduct looks frailer, from distance, and suggests the possibility that its lines could be erased from the drawing, that she could cover that part of the picture, to find an empty space, the valley continuing in a timeless spell.

It is years later that she begins to imagine the setting for a story. A house high above the valley, set in the shadow of the viaduct, perhaps an old signalman’s house. A sleepless night, and the hyperreal vision of a figure glimpsed from the window, in the dense woodland at the edges of trees, peering over the parapet that crosses the valley. Did the house really exist, or did she imagine it … looking up towards the lights she would see suspended over the valley. Somewhere high up, where the viaduct began, was where she imagined the house to be, as though reaching the end of some bizarre rainbow.

She used to think these high places were somewhere to go when you needed to think, for clarity and the perspective of a wide-ranging view. In this town, there was always somewhere higher to go, somewhere further to climb when you thought you had reached the highest point. Sometimes the roads seemed to vanish, an impossible ascent to unseen places.

It was as if she had never been so high, like trying to imagine the peak of a mountain when you have never been there. What it would be like to live so high up, with such a view across the valley? She has started to feel there is a loneliness to the higher places, and the dark mystery of the valleys beneath. That once you have reached them, the view would be lost and obscured down below.

It was possible to walk to the end of the viaduct, in dense woodland, at the bottom end of the park near where she grew up. Along the road that skirted the edges of the park, she would crane to see passing glimpses from the window as the car passed by. Just before the steep descent into the valley, when her mind was on other things. Her memory began to fail her as to its exact location. More and more it seemed less likely to be how she remembered.

Sometimes she forgot that the train still travelled the route across the viaduct. She must have travelled across it many times before, but she couldn’t remember. She longed for the perspective that would come from taking that journey. She pictured herself walking to the train station and buying a ticket, waiting on the platform. Climbing onto the train, a figure in a film, each moment constructed until the inevitable blank space of departure. The valley opening out below, the movement of the train scaling heights and distance, the view of the valley passing by in glimpses, framed by the window of the train for a moment in time.

Sometimes it was better to be close to the viaduct, to see the stone close up, to imagine it fixed in the ground, under the soil, like the roots of some tall tree. To stand near to its arches and escape the shifting sense of multiple perspectives. Then it was easier to remember the unnamed workers who placed these stones, who passed through these valleys. Each measure and span of distance and travel, each piece of stone, cut and shaped, transported, fitted together.

Sometimes she caught herself drifting to other times before the canals and the railways crossed the land, rapid change, and transportation. Perhaps some distant time when the viaduct no longer had a purpose and had been reduced to rubble. A structure that seemed solid and imposing but that one day could be demolished, its stone removed from this place and taken to another, like so many other industrial buildings that had dominated the valley. Each day they were there, falling slowly into decline, that seemed to leave a desolation. The lines of houses lying at the bottom of the valley, stuck together in rows, had a temporary feel when you looked up towards the high arches.

She used to think about the valley before the viaduct was built, about what it would be like if it disappeared from view. As the chimneys and the ghosts of the mills were gradually removed from the landscape or repurposed. But questions remained. If it was possible to conceive of the landscape as a blank space … would it bring a sense of lightness, or would it leave the valley hollow and emptied out, mourning a loss … what would come in their place … how quickly would they be forgotten, these scars in a pristine landscape … would the hills recover or always bear a trace … could places formed by these shadows be anything else? She began to feel that it was possible to go back in time, to imagine the valley without the viaduct, even now.