by Bill Bryson
A REAL CLIFFHANGER
Tristram Hunt
on the north Devon cliffs
FAR REMOVED FROM THE deep England of the South Downs landscape or Chiltern Hundreds hamlets, stand the high cliffs of the north Devon coastline. Very different from the louche resorts and yachting inlets of the South Devon Riviera, this craggy coastline – which stretches from Woolacombe beach around to Minehead in Somerset – is an uncomfortable, nonconformist, dogged, bleak and utterly exhilarating part of England. Admittedly, there are few stately homes or well-tended gardens here, but there’s certainly a sense of the island spirit.
Along much of this seascape meanders the excellent National Trust Neptune Pathway. But this is no Peak or Lake District thoroughfare with hundreds of people jostling from pub to B&B along well-worn paths. The steep, narrow routes and pummelling winds tend to reserve these walks for the hardiest souls. My favourite section runs from the elongated village of Combe Martin – once a noted mining, smuggling and strawberry-growing centre – to the elegant parades of Lynton and Lynmouth, Devon’s so-called ‘Little Switzerland’, where Shelley, Wordsworth and Coleridge all found inspiration.
Along this edge of England, the cliffs rise up hundreds of feet tall, peaking with the arching sandstone of Great Hangman at just over 1,000 feet above sea level. Standing atop here, you can look one way across the Bristol Channel, another way to the bogs of Exmoor, and yet another to the western coastline. That is, if you can see anything at all. For most of the year, the mists and rain roll along this coastline in an unforgiving procession.
It is so damp that, in 1952, the inundated barrows began the terrible flow of water which led to the deadly Lynmouth flood. So this is a sodden scene of heath moorland, gorse and then, in the steep-sided valleys or combes which intercut the coastline, great beds of ferns and mosses among the small forests of oak.
But when the drizzle clears, what a sight it is! The crashing waves at Heddon’s Mouth; the vertiginous cliff edges hurtling down to untouched beaches; the hillsides of bracken; and then the mysterious granite outcrop of Lundy Island shimmering in the distance. The animal life is also rich: between the sheep, the Exmoor ponies and the famous (or infamous) garden-eating Lynmouth goats, there are colonies of razorbill, guillemot and kittiwake, as well as black-billed gulls. And, if you are very lucky, you might see an adder sunning itself on the rocks, seals playing in the coastal swell and even the odd basking shark.
Above all, what the North Devon cliffs offer is a welcome sense of isolation and loneliness. Of course, man has made his mark here, stretching back to the Roman hill fort at Martinhoe on through the Victorian lime kilns to the mock-Tudor Edwardian lodging houses. But, today, bar the odd RAF flyby and spirited hiking party, the modern human footprint is enchantingly light. For the most part, it is you and the elements, you and the unforgiving sea – timeless geological formations, rushing streams, isolated coves and a sense of your own remarkable insignificance. It is, as I say, a rather different England.
CATHEDRALS OF SEWAGE
Maxwell Hutchinson
on London’s sewers
DOWN ABBEY LANE IN East London there sits a building that will never rank among the city’s main attractions. Nobody notices its striking Byzantine-style elaborate flourishes or cruciform plan. Nobody misses its original two Moorish-style chimneys – they were demolished during the Second World War, condemned as a landmark for German bombers on raids over the city docks. But it is such a stunning building that its designers created two – its twin is situated at Crossness in south-east London. And because it’s related to London’s sewerage system, you’d hardly know it was there.
Even with this magnificent pumping station, otherwise known as a ‘Cathedral of Sewage’, the city’s sewerage system is all but invisible – a secret underworld beneath London’s bustling streets. But when you think that every sanitary appliance in the metropolis is connected to these secret brick tunnels, it is, in fact, far more intriguing and engaging than a life above ground. If you could only see this underground maze – as I have been privileged to do on several occasions – you would understand why it means so much to me. And why, in turn, it should mean so much to you. By removing waterborne disease, it is helping to keep us alive.
When the system was completed in 1875, London – along with most of the civilized world – had never seen anything like it. The city had grown exponentially following the Industrial Revolution, and the health, social and economic problems this brought meant that diseases such as cholera were threatening the population. The first outbreak occurred in 1831. It was generally believed that the disease was airborne, carried in a mysterious vapour known as miasma. Indeed, Florence Nightingale took this belief to her grave. The all-pervading fear of the miasma led the Victorians to drape their windows with heavy curtains in a vain attempt to keep the cholera at bay. The majority, however, drank the filthy water from the Thames, which was polluted with human sewage – most of the 369 sewers emptied into the river.
The problem was twofold: the quality of drinking water and the means by which sewage from the growing metropolis could be safely removed. In 1849, Dr John Snow, a physician from Soho who had carried out a survey of the health of those living within the catchment area of his practice, published the pamphlet, The Mode of Communication of Cholera. He had discovered that his patients who drank fresh well water from the pump in Broad Street, Soho, now Broadwick Street, didn’t catch cholera. Those who drank from the local conduit, however, contracted the disease.
In parallel with Dr Snow’s work, Sir Joseph Bazalgette convinced Parliament in 1858 to initiate the building of a gigantic network of underground sewers that would carry human effluent to the mouth of the Thames on the north and south banks. The effect of this massive endeavour on the health of Londoners was dramatic. Cholera epidemics were over for good.
The Bazalgette sewerage system was emulated throughout the civilized world. It was pioneering in every respect and remains as effective today as it was 130 years ago. So when I look at the wonderful Abbey Mills ‘Cathedral of Sewage’, I don’t mourn the loss of its chimneys. I remember the people who made this innovative idea possible – and beautiful in the process.
THE WAY AHEAD
Kurt Jackson
on milestones
AT DUSK, ON THE way to the pub for an early evening pint, I hesitate and linger at a familiar spot in the valley near my home. For at the junction that connects No Go By Hill, Nancherrow Hill and the Kenidjack Valley, there is a milestone. If you look closely, this triangular piece of granite suggests that Morvah is four miles away, and Botallack just one. But unless you know where to look, you’d hardly know it was there.
Marginalized and squeezed out by a widened and surfaced lane, and now repeatedly slapped by the road run-off, car splash and gritting machines, this milestone has seen better days. The back of the stone is against a wall with hanging ivy, valerian and robin song (above, a robin is seducing me with her evening chorus) that supports a contemporary chevron. Bold, black and white, and unreservedly brash, it overshadows the older marker. The milestone seems almost invisible, especially now the kerbstone has been built up to meet it. Its granite faces seem to resist almost anything, with just the odd chip betraying its age. But, collecting litter and autumn leaves around its base, it looks as if it’s lost its way.
There is something artistic about a milestone, but I am still unsure about its practical value. A coat of whitewash was once applied, and the pointing hands, letters and numbers that were carved into the surface have been filled with black pigment. It’s all charmingly wonky, with almost childlike writing wrapped around the stone, as if the writer was running out of space. On other local examples where there wasn’t enough room, the carver simply abbreviated the village names to become almost incomprehensible – other times they’re misspelled or written out phonetically. How many strangers would have stumbled across them in their prime, and of what use would they have been with incorrect names? And why w
ould locals who know directions and distances need a hand? I do think, however, it’s a style particular to our parish. You only have to go a few miles away and the lettering and design changes – capitals replace that immature font, the hand vanishes and the stones are shaped differently.
This simple stone is almost forgotten and definitely ignored by most passers-by, a leftover from a time when travel was slow. Now the drivers are too fast and the pedestrians too familiar with it to pay any attention to its sharp edges or local detail. And even I must move on without its guidance. The robin has stopped singing, I’m getting cold, and I’m going to catch that pint. For the pub I’ll take the unsigned way opposite, up Nancherrow Hill.
TO THE MANOR BORN
Simon Jenkins
on English country houses
A FEW YEARS AGO, I travelled around England with one purpose: to write about its country houses. England has a greater number of houses with their contents intact and on public display than any other country in the world. Designed by a roll call of eminent architects – Inigo Jones, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Christopher Wren – they reflect the aesthetic styles of their time, from the peles, keeps and heraldic halls of medieval England, to the eaves and cupolas of the Jacobean tradition, and the splendour of the Classical revival.
I walked Vanbrugh’s Long Library at Blenheim Palace, the marble pavements of Castle Howard and the exquisite cube rooms of Wilton. I looked out over Beaulieu’s river through windows cusped with tracery, examined the murals and scrollwork of Knole’s great staircase and explored the green damask dressing rooms of Holkham Hall.
My research also led me to houses that are less grand. East to Charles Dickens’s so-called Bleak House in Kent, where the sea winds blow and gulls occasionally fall down the chimneys by mistake; south to Thomas Hardy’s villa in Dorchester, where his second wife typed out his love poems to her predecessor; and north to the slopes of Skiddaw, where in the bee garden of Mirehouse Manor, Tennyson found refuge after the death of a friend.
I paid no less attention to the grounds of country houses; peaceful places with their graceful lawns, pollarded lime walks and meadows of wild flowers. The gardens of Levens Hall in Cumbria are sculpted with yew and box topiary, while those at Mapperton House in Dorset billow down the hillside, intersected by arbours and Ham stone walls.
All English houses, grand or otherwise, are in essence homes – refuges from the world, where people loved, lived and died. They are places of solace as well as of function; a conversation between utility and beauty. The Englishman sees the whole of life embodied in his house. Here he finds his happiness and his real spiritual comfort, as observed by the German architect Hermann Muthesius.
Today, while many English country houses allow us an insight into the artistry of previous eras, their utility also prevails. Tregothnan Estate in Cornwall is an official safe site for the protection of endangered trees from all over the world, while Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire contains one of England’s finest composite collections of art and antiques, and Chatsworth has one of the largest private libraries. At Christ’s College, Cambridge, I found the perfect embodiment of utility and beauty: a mulberry tree, planted at the time of James I to help the English silk trade, still in flower.
Old houses offer us communion with the roots of England, a collective narrative of its history. But they must continue to breathe, and not be preserved as museums or mausoleums. William Morris, who cherished Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire with a passion, believed that we are only the trustees for those who come after us. As such, we must ensure that we never allow the spirit of English country houses to suffocate under dust sheets or die in the gloom of a shuttered room. They are exquisite tributes to their time, our portals to the past.
VIEW OVER LONDON
Terry Jones
on Hampstead Heath
IT ISN’T REALLY A heath, only half of it lies in Hampstead and East Heath is actually on the West, but so what? Hampstead Heath is still, to my mind, the ultimate evocation of perfect English countryside.
It helps that it almost exactly matches the imaginary countryside of my childhood, as depicted by Alfred Bestall in the Rupert books, with its gentle, grass-clad hills dotted with occasional trees and tangles of woodland. The idyllic rustic playground – just as nature intended. But, of course, Hampstead Heath – like Rupert’s Nutwood – is an invention.
In medieval times the Heath was a true heath, made up of easily dried-out, sandy soil supporting scrubby vegetation. Its summit was the sandy ridge linking Hampstead and Highgate villages. It still retained the character of moorland when John Constable painted it between 1819 and 1837. Constable depicts fewer trees than there are now, interspersed with patches of heather and gorse, and the distant views of London are uninterrupted by hedge or thicket. But Constable also paints another aspect of Hampstead Heath that is perhaps more surprising.
He shows it as a place of industry, with men hard at work excavating the fine sand which, at one time, covered the entire surface of the Heath up to a depth of ten inches. The level of excavations on the Heath was such that, in 1806, there were complaints that the resulting pits were dangerous and ‘the whole face of the heath is become so mutilated that the prospect of beauty is nearly destroyed’.
This disfigurement of the Heath reached its zenith in the 1860s. The much-reviled Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson had spent thirty fruitless years attempting to assert what he considered his right to build on his own land and to lease building land on the Heath, which he controlled as Lord of the Manor of Hampstead. Finally, when the Midland Railway extended its line to St Pancras and needed huge quantities of gravel and sand, he seized his chance to turn the land to profit. To supply the railway company, Sir Thomas devastated the Heath on both sides of Spaniards Road, digging pits as deep as twenty-five feet. He destroyed the heather, gorse, broom and trees to such an extent that the area to the west of Spaniards Road has never recovered.
What’s more, in his desperation to turn his estate to profit, he leased a large section of it (from the viaduct down to the valley of the Hampstead Ponds) as a brickfield. Sir Thomas’s character was such that I imagine he derived a grim pleasure from the thought that, since he wasn’t allowed to build on the Heath, he wouldn’t allow it to be the place of beauty that his opponents claimed it to be.
But then the truth is that the Heath had always been valued more for its natural resources than for its beauty. Gravel and loam were extracted for many years, and it was also used for turf-cutting and the grazing of animals. There were sheep grazing on the Heath as late as 1952.
The Heath was also famous for its many springs, and Hampstead and Highgate brooks were two of the main tributaries of the Fleet river, but there were no actual ponds on Hampstead Heath until 1692, when the HampsteadWater Company created the first two as reservoirs to supply water to London.
So even the famous Hampstead and Highgate Ponds are not natural, and the appearance of the Heath today is as much a man-made artefact as Blenheim Palace or Kew Gardens.
But then the Heath doesn’t have to be a work of nature. To tell the truth, I think it’s an improvement on nature: an ideal countryside that you only find in dreams or in children’s stories.
OLDER THAN ENGLAND
Paul Kingsnorth
on the Green Man
I HAVE SEEN HIS face everywhere, for longer than I can remember. High up on the stone roofs of great cathedrals. On the bench-ends of ancient pews. Carved into the lintels of churches from the last millennium. In the pages of books and on websites and sometimes, it seems, in the trees themselves at night in high summer. He is older than the trees; older, probably, than England itself. But he is still out there.
He is the Green Man, and his face can be seen carved into churches all over England, in a thousand variants. At his most basic he is a human face surrounded by woodland foliage. In his more pagan, florid guise, his mouth, eyes and nose sprout leaves, shoots and branches. Sometimes he is sinister. Sometimes he is comical o
r beguiling.
Who is he? We don’t know. What we do know is that this symbolic melding of Man and Nature is very ancient indeed. Some have speculated that he is the remnant of some ancient fertility cult; others that he is a devil or a god. Some believe he is a Christian symbol; others claim him for the Druids, the Anglo-Saxons, the builders of prehistoric monuments.
Why is he here? Again, we don’t know. Green Men are not a specifically English phenomenon: they can be found, in various guises, all over Europe and as far afield as Nepal, Mesopotamia and Borneo. But why is he most commonly found in England, in old churches? Is he a representation of the Devil – the Church playing its old trick of coopting pagan gods to represent its own version of evil? Is he a snook being cocked at Christianity by pagan-minded stone workers? Is he even – my favourite theory – a symbol of political resistance? Green Men occur most notably in Norman churches, and it has been suggested that they were representations in stone of English resistance to the Norman Conquest of 1066. For a decade after that date, English rebels were at large in the forests, fighting a guerrilla war against their new masters. The Normans called them silvatici – men of the woods. Did stonemasons who supported the rebels carve their faces into the new Norman buildings in solidarity?
Perhaps. But in the end the Green Man is an archetype, as old as the downs and the dales. He is all of us, and he reminds us of our place in the landscape and its place within us. In an age of environmental crisis he still watches over us; chides us, perhaps, for what we have become and what we are doing. He takes us back to basics: back to the green wood where all life is born and to where it will all, eventually, return.