Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  A bare-armed boy in a black singlet, herding calves by a haystack: his red-gold hair, white skin—the white is strange.

  Now heading towards Hungerford and Bristol among brown and yellow plowlands paling into chalk streaks. Oaks and beeches, alone or in rows and groves.

  A silvery quality to the green of this country, in this season.

  Now off the artery onto the quieter Hungerford road; and through poor Hungerford haunted by the specters of the mass murder here last summer—the honest, familiar, curving street of shops where people want to buy cheese and letter paper and shoelaces, not to be slaughtered.

  Into Wiltshire on the high road past Prosperous. Past pretty Shalbourne in its vale, shepherded by its small, square, grey church. Our road follows a ridgetop, steep swaling off to the left and up again to another long ridge. And now we’re on an even smaller road, down between hedgerows—up onto the open downs—a sheep biting its ankle. Great, long, pale Wiltshire distances.

  Down now into little thatch-browed, whitewashed, bright-gardened Collingbourne Ducis. Weeds sprouting from a long grey thatch. We discuss Barbara’s friend Edmund’s list of eligible wives, which did not include Barbara, she having crossed herself off before being asked, which annoyed Edmund considerably. We discuss the ugly way so many people dress themselves in London.

  Red poppies, and black fighter planes, and white chalk.

  We pass Stonehenge now, driving on the Amesbury Road, which I walked with my brother Karl in 1951. We had never been in England before, everything was new; we were twenty-four and twenty-one. We took the bus from Salisbury to Amesbury village so that we could come to Stonehenge on foot, because it seemed the right way to come to Stonehenge, and it was. We walked and walked, talking Housman and Borrow and Hardy, for we were very literary brats, and we kept seeing this little thing way off on a great downside, like a flock of sheep maybe, or stumps of trees, or more like stumps of teeth, really, giant’s teeth, a ring … Is that it? Is that them? And so I first came walking among them, among those great presences, in the bright morning.

  And then again, with Charles, in ’54, the year we married. And other times, always walking out from Amesbury so that we could see the sheep become the teeth become the stones, so that we could walk back over the millennia. In ’69 we walked it with the kids; the youngest was only four years old and never did approve of long hikes. He was bribed all the way out with the promise of a new Matchbox car, a red one; he got it, and played with it on the Altar stone, vrrrooom, vrrooommmm …

  And then when we stayed with Barbara in ’75, that Christmas, she took us over to Stonehenge on the evening of the winter solstice. If the druids had been there, they were gone. Everyone was gone. There was a long, golden, winter light on the stones, a light frost, a great and ancient silence on the high downs. Barbara took photographs of that honey light, which seemed to shine out of the stones themselves.

  A couple of years after that, they put a steel fence around Stonehenge because too many people came and camped and trampled and chipped and trashed the stones. We said then we wouldn’t go back. You learn to say goodbye to places: to keep them in your heart and go on, as we do now.

  Down and up again … a big, hard-bitten farm on the Warminster road, a man in the field throwing lumps of fire to spread the field-burning blaze. A Tank Crossing sign; helicopters yammering. This is all military country.

  Down down down between high gold slopes where they’re making hay and into Chitterne village in its vale and up up up again to sheep against the sky. And the land is growing lumpy—a long barrow, then a round barrow on a chalky ridge—the old bones showing through.

  Warminster, a grey stone and brick town, rather linear and grim.

  We have stopped for lunch and are sitting in a field in a tiny village/farm just this side of Somerset. We sit on Barbara’s mac and munch cheese, and a lonesome horse watches us from up the hill. We all pee in the hedgerow.

  On again, into Frome of the many-splendored gardens, where a sign says Fish and Chips and Chinese Food. Out of Frome, and ridge-running across the long green land that drops to either side, intersected with dark hedgerows, dark trees. The green is vivid now, wet green.

  Heavy Plant Crossing. I imagine giant artichokes lumbering across the road …

  Beer Garden and Children’s Play Area, in Shepton Mallet, and then Cannard’s Grave Inn—a place for serious drinking.

  A sheep under a round green hill scratches its stomach with a hind hoof thoughtfully.

  And now we’re at our bed-and-breakfast for tonight, West Holme Farm in North Wootton, having been greeted by kids, cats, dogs, and made welcome. Barbara’s room is a long way down the hall from ours, a shining-floored, narrow hall, with windows, and steps up, and steps down, and little angle-turns. The farmhouse was built in fits and starts from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries; turn a corner and you’re Elizabethan … Our room has two low-set, deep-set square windows, one looking out on rough red-tile roofs, green-mossed, and a rainy green ridge beyond them; the other on young Friesians (Holsteins to Charles and me), some of the hundred head of cattle this farm runs, black and glossy white, grazing for windfalls among the apple trees of Avalon.

  For this is the Vale of Apples, this is Arthurian country, legendary land. When we first talked with Barbara about coming here, back a dozen years ago, we had been reading up on King Arthur, who and when he might have been in history, and where he might have gone in the old West Country. By now we’ve all forgotten all the facts we read, but not the legends. They’re not forgettable, and Malory, Tennyson, and White are with us here.

  Barbara finds her way from the Victorian Era to the Elizabethan Age to tell us that it’s stopping raining and we can be off to Glastonbury. On the way we get our first glimpse of Glastonbury Tor, bare, abrupt, dark, topped with a broken tower, rising like an island over the rainy fields. An island it was; for all these farmlands were bog, marsh, and lake. The Iron Age town of Glastonbury was wealthy and famous, protected by water on all sides, an island within the greater island, England. So to the rich Glastonbury of Roman times St. Joseph of Arimathea came, so goes the tale, and climbed that other hill just above the town, Weary-All Hill, and planted a hawthorn by the church he founded. The church grew, building and rebuilding itself over the centuries (like West Holme Farm) till its fall and ruin when Henry VIII broke the power of the monks; but the descendant of St. Joseph’s tree still flourishes, and bears its tiny roses in the dead of winter, at Christmastime—a faithful miracle, a not uncommon genetic oddity in hawthorns.

  So we walked the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey all the afternoon, wandering in sky-ceilinged chapels, through apple orchards, past the pond, seeking that holy thorn the whole time, and finally finding it right back where we started from: a venerable little patriarch of a tree, crouching by the wall near the entrance gate.

  Out to the farm then, to wash and change, and back to the Methodist chapel turned house and workshop where the potters Liz Raeburn and Rod Lawrence live, and entertain us with their beautiful three-year-old son Haydon, whisky, dinner, good talk, and good pots. We discussed the Rajneeshees, a far cry from eastern Oregon. Drove back to the farm in the country night, and slept in pure silence, until the wind came up again and wuthered in a baritone organ tone around the house, and the rain came in great soft gusts.

  Saturday, September 5. I am sitting now on the curve of the staircase up to the Chapter House of Wells Cathedral, the second most beautiful staircase in the world, surely, after the one in the Laurentian Library in Florence. The choir is practicing; music rings along the high spaces defined by stone. The smell of stone, grey stone with a hint of rose-beige. Little stone faces high and low look down out of the old centuries.

  We got very rained-on eating sandwiches at a deli across from the west face of Wells Cathedral, and hurried to find Pac-A-Macs in town. Mine is baby-green, Charles’s baby-blue, Women’s XL Size, Made in China; keep English rain off very well. Then back through the tors-and-val
es once-was-swamp to Pilton, and to the Old Vicarage, our new B&B. Our large room looks down upon the vicar’s church, the spire on one corner of the square church tower about level with the window. We walked the deep lanes of the village to high fields above it, before dinner; it is a steep town, with a deep stream. There are some good monsters on the south church wall. A silky bear-colored cat came in to visit and slept on my shirts in my suitcase, and fowls and a rabbit and two children wander and hop about the big back garden. But it is a vicar’s cold house, compared with last night’s sweet, buttery, cidery farm.

  An enormous dinner at the Apple Tree on the Glastonbury road.

  Sunday, September 6. Barbara’s back, which has moods, was in a good mood, and we all wanted to be outside. So we went back to Glastonbury and walked up the tor, starting from Chilkwell Street, where we left the car. A lovely windy walk. At the top it came on to rain and blow, and dark rain-mist ate up all the west and south of the immense countryside of green strip fields and dark green hedgerows and ridges and levels and red roofs and round tor-sides. It stopped raining as we went down the other side, and we went to the Holy Well, or Chalice Well, which is only holy as all springs are: a lovely red iron-water running into wading pools, healing pools, in delightful small gardens cut into the side of the tor, under the high skyline.

  Lunch with Dora Raeburn, Liz’s mother and Barbara’s old friend, and her friend Anita, and Liz, Rod, and Haydon, in the house semi-attached to the chapel house. “Cholls! Cholls!” Haydon cries, imperious; he likes Charles. He sits on Charles’s lap, sucking his thumb, and dreamily fingers Charles’s dewlap; when he sits on his grandmother’s lap, he uses her earlobe the same way.

  In all these places vast cats are to be seen, cats the size of small pumas.

  Monday, September 7. We set off from hilly Pilton in the mild, rainy late morning along winding byways to Pylle. I am writing in the back seat of the car. Past Evercreech and onto the Fosseway, long and Roman-straight, which takes us down onto the Somerset Levels, the lowlands low. Left past cows to Hornblotton among apples. Go in square zigs around every farm’s flat fields across Cary Moor to North Barrow, and then up and down and round about, Charles guiding us by the half-inch map, to North Cadbury, South Cadbury and its great Iron Age fort, past Pauncefoot, Sutton Montis, Queen Camel … We stop to see St. Thomas à Becket Church, which seems to be frequented mostly by sheep, and then on, out of Somerset into Dorset, at last!

  Over a beacon hill, down big, deep hills past dark woods, to Sherborne. A busy town with a confusing car park and a fine, steep High Street; everyone looks somewhat as if they had voted for Margaret Thatcher and were pleased at the result; many Volvos. A pleasant woman popped out of an office to set us on the right way to Sherborne Abbey. We fortified ourselves with egg and cress sandwiches at a tea shop and then did the abbey, which I found handsome but not endearing. Visited Barbara’s publisher friend at Alpha Books, once we found it, then blundered around Robin Hood’s barn back to the elusive car park. Round about again to find the Dorchester Road, and finally found it.

  Please Take Your Litter Home. Is this addressed to the vast cats?

  Cyril Tite, Car Breaker. For young cars that need a firm hand on the reins, I guess?

  In deep country, through thick beech and oak woods, over a hilltop, all twisty stone walls, to Up Cerne—which consists of a Great House and its properties. A man in tweeds came stalking along the road with his stick and snubbed us as we stood looking at the view, which he referred to as “My View.” (Later we found that the place is owned by a bunch of Austrian businessmen who come there only to shoot grouse or something, and he was a complete fake, which is nice.) Then we drove on down, past Giant Hill, where we got a fine afternoon view of the giant, to Cerne Abbas. Our B&B is the Sound o’ Water—named from a William Barnes poem—on Duck Street, by the little quiet-running Cerne, in this bright, quiet hill village. Flint, brick, and stone in courses; half-timbering. The small church, mostly tower, has striped courses, and strange faces peer from corners all over it. A cool, bright evening. We found dinner, good plaice and good beer, at the Red Lion. Going to sleep, an owl crying, wailing, in the big woods of beech and oak that stand all round the streets.

  Tuesday, September 8. Waking in the morning to “Tak’ two coos, Taffy … Tak’ two coos, Taffy … Tak’—” What do our western mourning doves say? It’s not quite the same sentence, but I can’t recall it, hearing this.

  I was up at seven to bathe in the radiantly clean, moss-green and violet bathroom in the sunny, clear, cool September morning. A good English breakfast and then back to the little church to photograph the stone faces in better light. On to St. Austin’s Well, a spring in old stone basins under huge lime trees, behind the church, below the graveyard. Then we followed the path up onto Giant Hill, misled at first by sheep trails; up by the fence, for the Giant has to be fenced in, like Stonehenge, because “we are too many.” Wonderful combes and hillsides enlarging as we climb. On along the hilltop past the fence through thistly bits to where you can walk freely about the tumuli and small earthworks of a village and field system of the Iron Age or earlier, and see all about the beautiful hills: Wancombe Hill and Rowdon Hill and down into strange-shaped Yetcombe Bottom. (Kiddle’s Bottom, the map shows, is farther south.) Then we come on back down the other side of the Giant, and can see him a little, the chalk lines along the hill slopes. Back below him, through the beech and sycamore woods, into town.

  We bought crackers and tomatoes and cheese and Rybena and picnicked on Black Hill in a green field under a blue sky.

  On to Dorchester, to Maiden Castle, that great work of hands. We circumambulated it first by car—unintentionally, trying to find the way to it—then on foot, deliberately. Sun and wind and the immense earthworks. Four thousand years. Sheep have been replaced by archaeologists, not an improvement. But you can still be quite alone, watching the hawk hunting.

  Back via the valley of the Piddle. We stopped for the church in Piddlehinton; we passed the Piddle Valley Microwave store in Piddletrenthide; and came on across Kiddle’s Bottom right up onto a high chalk ridge that took us straight to Cerne Abbas, which now feels very much like home to the leg-weary who have walked so far back today in time.

  Wednesday, September 9. I woke this morning to a rather thin, middle-aged male voice in my mind saying the following poem:

  The Earthworks of Mai-Dun

  Men hurry to hurt and kill.

  Great nations fall.

  Still the hawk hangs still

  On the wind above the wall.

  It sounds very like Thomas Hardy, but not in top form.

  At breakfast, when we told Mr. Simmonds, our kind host, where we were planning to go, he said, “An upalong downalong day,” and so it is as I ride in the back of the car—to Toller Fratrum. This is a magical place, no more than a farm, a big farm not even a village, but the farm has a chapel with a font carved in the Dark Ages, and the barn was where the brothers ate, the refectory; the beautiful farmhouse is early seventeenth century. The hills rise up all around in sun and silence.

  And on to Toller Porcorum, wonderfully named, with its staunch Dorset church standing, as the guide booklet points out, on seven feet of buried villagers—the mound that raises church and churchyard above the village lanes. More excellent openmouthed “gurgoils” staring down from the grey walls. Inside the church, numerous crewelwork pigs.

  And on upalong downalong to wild, lonesome, hilly Powerstock under a Stone Age fort past and through dark oak forests, acorns for the Toller Porcorum pigs—wild boars for kings to hunt. Through a tunnel cut in sandstone and roofed with tree branches and vines, smelling earthy, rocky, dark, and then out and up onto the big hills again, past Pymore and past Dottery, to the sea. Thalassa, Thalassa! cries Barbara.

  We lunched on the beach of Chideock Sea Town, all ruddy tawny flints and agates—and oddly some obsidian—and Barbara did Tai Chi down at the waves’ edge. Then we made the ascent of Golden Cap, the high head that dom
inates that coast; Barbara had climbed it last in 1937, so it was a golden anniversary. We could see east past Eype, pronounced Eep, to Portland Bill curving out grandly, and west past Lyme Regis to the far blue coasts.

  We went back up to Moore’s Dorset Bakery, where Barbara used to buy Dorset knobs in 1912 or so, but the silly people “only bake knobs in the winter now”; so we settled for some butter cookies, cursing. Then back in the car past Swyre and Puncknowle, through Littlebredy, red thatched house in deep gloomy vale, huge stone H-shaped barn with a high slate roof and a stone-walled yard crammed jammed full of lowing black and white cattle. Up again. The rivers run clear, clear, a clear stream runs through Sydling St. Nicholas. They are field-burning, the air dims.

  Home to Sound o’ Water and a good whisky and a long wait for dinner at the Red Lion. The owls called again in the night, two and then three of them, a pure, quavering, falling cry and reply.

  Thursday, September 10. At breakfast, Doug Simmonds sang for us his beautiful song of the old man that lived on Chesil Beach under a boat. He showed us his garden, lovely, half encircled by the little clear Cerne. Charles and I had been up at seven to walk up to see the Giant from the road once more, and back round by the Cerne to endearing Cerne Abbas church.

  By eleven, I am writing in the car, in the green tunnel of trees that leads you out of Cerne Abbas up past Yetcombe Bottom—and now the last long view right down Yetcombe to the village and the square tower of the church and the rooks wheeling and playing in the high air.

  On along up ridge and down dale, through Duntish, past Map-powder and Lydden Ho. Many farm trucks, lorries, I mean, very strong-smelling of sweet muck. A village called King’s Stag among oaks, and a deer park, the spotted deer grazing easy among big, wide-spaced oaks and horse chestnuts. Past Lydlinch on the River Lydden, and we have never yet found out what a linch is. Sturminster Newton, a fine market town on a hill. The streams and sky all look like Constable today—a streak of silver aspens brightens the wind. Level green pastures for a while. Now we climb and climb steep slopes up to steep-streeted Shaftesbury, and so back into Wiltshire. Dorset, fare thee well.