Icons of England

by Bill Bryson

  There is a diverse range of over six hundred flowering plants, thirty-two species of butterfly, over four hundred species of moth, and nearly thirty species of mammal (the most prolific being the rabbit). The area also contains one of the most significant bat hibernaculums in the county – bats use the heathland as a hunting ground. And it has witnessed the resurgence of the stone curlew which, while not exclusively restricted to heathland, seems to thrive on the Stanford heath – there are currently twenty-one pairs nesting there. On exercise a few years ago, one of my soldiers – a resident of Middlesbrough – turned to me in amazement. ‘Sir, it’s like a game park here!’

  Of course, this beautiful habitat hasn’t always belonged to us. And it hasn’t always been beautiful. In 1942, 40,500 hectares were requisitioned to provide a wartime training facility. After the war, the land was purchased from private investors and the then Forestry Commission. It has remained a training area ever since and now comprises a little over 8,330 hectares of freehold land. Military ownership has not protected it from degradation caused by intensive agricultural development – of the 32,000 hectares of heath in the 1930s, only 7,000 hectares remained in 1980, and two thirds of this was on the training area. In 1987 we decided to bring back some of the lost heathland, and by the year 2000 almost 634 hectares had been recreated and regenerated from clear-fell, arable and from introducing grazing. Almost three-quarters of the estate is now designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

  Stanford remains one of the busiest training areas in the UK, with up to 100,000 soldiers training on the area in any one year. But conservation is never far from our thoughts. A more formal management approach enables us to provide training while safeguarding and enhancing the environment and the interests of our stakeholders. Already we have initiated the clearance of ponds for the great crested newts and made improvements to the nesting plots for the stone curlews. An area that can benefit both those about to deploy on operations and our nation’s wildlife, this is an area that will always be worth protecting.

  BESIDE THE SEASIDE

  Jonathan Dombleby

  on the beach at West Wittering

  I FIRST WENT TO West Wittering more than fifty years ago. I was a small child cramped in the back of a Morris Minor estate (or ‘shooting brake’ as they were then known). We drove past Chichester Cathedral, down an endless leafy Sussex lane, past cows in fields and a scatter of cottages until suddenly we were there, jolting across the turf to park up close to a tamarisk hedge which bordered speargrass and mountainous sand dunes that concealed our view of the sea. But we could smell the brine and hear the hiss of the surf.

  We would race through a gap in the hedge to our beach hut. Sand was always piled up against the door, blown up by the westerlies that drove in across the Solent. Some of the finer grains would have infiltrated the hut itself, depositing a light sprinkling of yellowish dust on the Primus stove, a huddle of worn deckchairs, the black inner tube of a car tyre (the best rubber ring ever), and a detritus of buckets, spades and rubber balls.

  When the tide was in, we braved the breakers and when it was out, we built sandcastles and paddled in the lagoons looking for crabs and sea urchins. Such simple pleasures. At the end of the day we ate sand-flecked jam sandwiches and drank Bovril before piling back into the car, scratching the salt and sand out of our hair and so exhausted that we were invariably asleep long before Chichester Cathedral came into view again from the opposite direction.

  The wonder of West Wittering is that it has hardly changed in half a century. No amusement parks and no stalls selling useless trinkets. There is now a toll booth (five pounds per car), a modest café and a windsurfing club. But the huts are still there, their soft blues and greens and browns faded by salt winds and age. The beach (which still seems to stretch towards eternity in either direction) is busier but not crowded. Children still skip in and out of the water, defying the waves, or construct elaborate castles in the sand. They still play cricket and volleyball. And they still fly kites, though these are now far larger and more elaborate, threatening to lift even big brothers all the way across to the Isle of Wight. Elderly couples still stroll along the water’s edge with overweight Labrador dogs. There is no litter and no music.

  There are differences, of course. Most notably, the wooden breakwaters which used to stride out into the sea, towering over my head, have all but disappeared under the sand. And the dunes where we used to hide are sadly diminished. However, the West Wittering Estate (which bought the 250-hectare estate in 1952 for what today seems to be a peppercorn £21,000, to save it from becoming a leisure centre) is making valiant efforts to stabilize and restore this precious heritage, fencing off and reseeding the most vulnerable areas.

  The view to seaward has changed as well. Half a century ago, when Britain had yet to escape wartime austerity, the Solent was virtually deserted, except for an occasional liner; I once saw the Queen Elizabeth (two funnels to the Queen Mary’s three) steaming out from Southampton. Now this weekend waterway is strewn with expensive yachts and glossy speedboats. But they are merely the backdrop to a very English art form that has yet to perish: a simple afternoon at the seaside.

  A PASSION FOR MEAT

  Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones

  on family butchers

  FOR ME, ONE OF the joys of visiting a rural town is seeking out the local family butcher. You can always tell the good ones, as on Saturday mornings there’s a queue of people snaking out of the door and around the corner. What grieves me is that this sight is increasingly becoming a rarity, yet another casualty of the lure of out-of-town shopping. We now have to work harder to find these tradesmen, but find them we must, and support them by using them. The traditional butcher is an exceptional person. Probably unbeknown to him, it is one such person who opened my eyes to the sheer art of butchery. Philip Warren of Warren’s butchers in Launceston, Cornwall had a huge impact on me when I first met him and he helped me to decide to produce beef cattle, for what he doesn’t know about beef really isn’t worth knowing. From that early meeting I made my decision to farm Ruby Reds, a beautiful and delicious breed indigenous to the West Country. Philip comes up to my farm in person to take a look at the animals and decide which ones are ready for him. He selects his animals for slaughter, following which they go to his shop for hanging to develop the flavour. It is this personal attention to detail that sets the master butcher apart.

  Philip’s passion for meat, like that of every master butcher, is evident in his shop window. Every cut of meat is equal in his eyes and is displayed with pride, whether it’s a prime sirloin steak or rib of beef, or a pig’s trotter. The window makes a feature of the names of the farmers and farms where the animals were reared. It doesn’t come much more traceable than this. A master butcher is to meat what a Master of Wine is to wine. The artistry involved in this profession will be demonstrated most clearly by those working in the rooms at the back of the shop, however. Here you will find the carcasses hanging to mature and an army of butchers hard at work hacking, sawing, boning and preparing cuts of meat that probably only our grandparents would have used on a regular basis. It is local butchers such as these who are keeping these great traditions alive; they are a treasure trove for the interested cook and we should use them for information and guidance and good oldfashioned service. They deserve our support, even if it does mean making an extra journey. The quality of the meat you will buy and the sheer wonderment at visiting such a shop will be reward enough to keep you going back.

  READING THE SIGNS

  Sebastian Faulks

  on pub signs

  THE PUB IN THE village where I was born was called the Three Horse Shoes. The sign hung in a timber frame at the top of a white post, the horseshoes making an inverted equilateral triangle, with the brewer’s name, ushers, in capitals underneath. To a child, everything about this sign was intriguing. We lived in horse country, between Newbury and Lambourn, and I was susceptible to the magic of the lucky shoe and number. The word
‘Ushers’ was also fascinating to me. I pictured men in long black gowns, going about some ancient brewing rite. Then there was the seedy romance of the pub itself. As well as a public and a saloon bar, the Shoes had an off-sales hatch, where an underage errand boy could be sent to fetch back bottles of Courage Light Ale. I couldn’t wait to be old enough to go in, to breathe the forbidden air of beer and cool stone flags.

  Between the ages of twenty and forty, I spent too much time in pubs. I loved the anonymity, the louche but friendly atmosphere. They were boozers then, which seldom had food, let alone a choice of Thai main courses. You went to drink ale and smoke. In the early 1970s Watneys tried to do away with beer and substitute it with pressurized stuff that tasted of weak tea and soda water. I felt compelled to drink ever more real ale to keep the small brewers alive.

  Any journey by car through England for me then was punctuated by the lucky dip of the pub stop. The signs themselves were often a good indicator. Fox and Hounds, Free House, with a jolly hunting scene was worth a look: proper beer and possibly some rudimentary food, such as sausage and mash. Anything with the word Watneys on the sign was out; not just out, in fact, but to be sneered and hooted at. Courage pub signs became uniform, as I remember, and this was disappointing; it gave them a corporate feeling that was the opposite of what individual pubs with their quirky names should exude. Courage was OK, if nothing better was on offer. They had gone the fizzy route with their keg ‘JC’, but had retained proper bitter and a stronger, soupier brew called Directors. Some people asked for lager. This puzzled me. It was like going to buy a shirt, being offered cotton or linen, but insisting on nylon.

  The Marquis of Granby, the Wheatsheaf, the Queen’s Head … these were usually reliable places. At Grantchester, near Cambridge, where I studied pubs with dedication, there was a Red Lion and a Green Man. One was everything a pub should be – open fire, real beer, dim lights; the other was bright, chilly and sold fizz. I can’t remember which way round it was, but the last time I went to the village there was one called the Rupert Brooke. Oh well.

  I expect there is a website somewhere which explains who the Marquis of Granby was and why so many pubs are named after him. Perhaps it also explains why all pub signs seem to be constructed in only one way, as described above: the wooden playing card dangling in a frame or, in town, extended from brickwork on a wrought-iron arm. I think this has an effect on the whole country. Whether you are walking in the Lake District or going home from work in Liverpool or Plymouth, you see this same rectangle, swinging free in wind or rain. The pub sign says: you are still in England. Come in here and – however far from home you are, however outlandish our name – you will find the comforts of your local town or village, the same drinks made by the same people, the same rows of spirits behind the bar, the same salty crisps and, to be honest, much the same conversation.

  Yet there is something daring and romantic about those names. I don’t mean the Hippo and Peignoir, or deliberately silly ones. I mean the Jack of Diamonds or the Hare and Hounds. Perhaps those words, with their evocation of gaming and sports, lured too many good men to their doom. If they had been called the A641 Ring Road Beer House, would anyone have gone there? But who could resist the combination of the exotic and the familiar promised by such places as the Dundas Arms, Mother Black Cap, the Admiral Codrington, the Surprise, the Phoenix, the Rowbarge and the Crooked Billet? They seem to reach down into a folk history that is rich and weird, to something pagan and ritualistic; yet they are as English as the downs from which you first see them swinging in the wind, like hanged men on a gibbet.

  People who think of England as a practical country with little flair for the visual would never have imagined that its lanes and roads would be regularly punctuated by what look like cards from a wooden tarot pack – optical extravagances, creakily offering delight, escape and risk. But it is so; and sometimes we hardly see the strangest things by which we are surrounded.

  ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER PLACE

  Bryan Ferry

  on Penshaw Monument

  PENSHAW MONUMENT IS A half-sized replica of the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens. Built in 1844 at Penshaw, close to Sunderland, it was dedicated to the first Earl of Durham. High on a hill in the middle of an otherwise flat part of the north-east coastal plain, it dominates the surrounding land; and as a young boy growing up in the nearby pit village of Washington, it made a huge impression on me.

  My father was born on the side of the hill and farmed there as a young man. He frequently took me to see the view from the top of the hill, which he thought was the best in the world; and there he told me the stories of his youth.

  For me, the plain but imposing Doric columns of the monument took on heroic proportions, and seemed to represent a grandeur and sophistication of a better time and a better place. They suggested a certain mystery, something that was missing from my life in that bleak industrial environment. Even though it was essentially a folly, a building without purpose, I was lucky to have such a strong image as an iconic focus for my memories of childhood.

  RIDING HIGH

  Dick Francis

  on the Berkshire Downs

  THE MODERN-DAY MOTORIST can travel from Reading to Swindon down the M4 motorway in a little under thirty minutes. The modern-day transatlantic air traveller can sit in his Boeing-made aluminium tube, fresh out of Heathrow, and cover the same journey in a fifth of that time. But both of them will fail to see the full beauty of the land over which they pass.

  To behold and understand the true splendour of the Berkshire Downs, one needs to take the prehistoric M4 the Ridgeway Path – described by some as the oldest road in the world. It runs, as the name suggests, along the edge of the limestone escarpment that crosses the southern British Isles from north-east to south-west. The Ridgeway itself stretches for eighty-seven miles, from Ivinghoe Beacon in the Chiltern Hills to overton Hill near Marlborough in Wiltshire, crossing the river Thames at Goring. And it is the section to the south and west of this crossing with which I am most familiar, having lived in the village of Blewbury, near Didcot, for more than thirty years, until the middle of the 1980s.

  The Berkshire Downs, or the North Wessex Downs as they are sometimes known, are part of the chalk uplands of southern England. Chalk is a sedimentary limestone rock created from the remains of millions upon millions of tiny marine creatures that once lived in a tropical sea during the Cretaceous period, some two hundred million years ago. The now rolling, grass-covered hills of Berkshire once lay deep beneath an ocean, at a time when the European continent of today sat astride the equator.

  It is important to consider the geology of the area to understand why the Downs are so important for horse racing, the greatest love of my life. Just as in the state of Kentucky in the United States, the calcium-rich grasses that flourish on the limestone base produce good strong bones in the horses who eat it. The porous nature of the chalk also means that the rock acts as a reservoir of moisture during dry summers. This allows the grass to continue to grow green and lush, while that on the nearby London clay withers and browns.

  In truth, the reason I adore the Downs so much is not as a result of any love I might have for geology. It was across their smooth undulating contours that I spent the best years of my life riding horses – toning their muscles and preparing them for the racecourse. How I loved the early spring mornings, with mist patches lying on the valley floor like fluffy white blankets. How I enjoyed the sun creeping up over the eastern horizon to bring warmth to the day. The vistas were spectacular, especially when viewed from horseback, through the gap between the ears of a galloping thoroughbred.

  A CONVERSATION WITH SELF

  Trisha Goddard

  on the woods

  SO WHEN DID YOU first fall in love with the woods?

  I think it was when I was a little girl. I was in awe of them. But the woods have always had good PR, haven’t they?

  What do you mean?

  Well, think of all those fairy tales that fea
ture the woods: Babes in the Wood, the Big Bad Wolf stalking Red Riding Hood through the woods, Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail of breadcrumbs through the woods, Snow White hiding out with the dwarves in the woods …

  OK – I get it! So what did the woods mean to you as a child?

  The woods were somewhere I could go to escape. Kneeling on the bright green springy moss, pretending it was a fairy’s lawn. Tiers of fleshy fungi clinging to the sides of knobby logs: a fairy block of flats. Holding my breath as my feet slowly crunched through dried twigs; listening …

  Listening for what?’

  Just listening … I know this sounds weird, but silence in the woods makes you feel small and watched. A scurrying of a squirrel. A burst of birdsong. Rustling. Those first spatters of fat raindrops on the leaves way above your head when you’re safe and dry down here below …

  So, almost fifty years later, here we are … still in the woods. But how come you’re jogging through them, listening to music on your iPod?

  Well, I do this every day. I need to. The music? It’s my woods soundtrack! This song now? See the way the sun’s streaming through the leaves? I can imagine me wearing some long medieval dress. I’m on horseback, ducking thick branches, galloping, yearning … And this song? I can dance to it; hopping over tree roots, kicking up little explosions of dried leaves, singing the chorus up to the bits of blue sky not obliterated by green. This next song? Well, it reminds me of the day they told me I had breast cancer. I came here, to the woods. I didn’t cry then, but now in the safety of my woods, it’s OK if I … you know.