Walking to Camelot
Page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Map
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
1. Lincolnshire Lanes
2. Horseshoes, Wood Pigeons, and Paris
3. Hare Pies and Bottle Kicking
4. Princess Diana and Elderberry Wine
5. Rollright Stones, Witches, and Banbury Buns
6. Heart of the Cotswolds
7. Roman Villas, Racehorses, and Cirencester
8. Ghosts, Brothels, and Raging Bulls
9. Alfred’s Tower and Steinbeck’s Quixotic Quest
10. Cadbury Camelot
11. Raleigh Passion and Hardy Haunts
12. The Dorset Giant, Maiden Newton, and Chesil Beach
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Chapter Notes
Copyright
To my wife, Dee.
Walking is a subversive detour, the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences.
—REBECCA SOLNIT—
Wanderlust: A History of Walking
In the days of her childhood the footpath over the meadow had been a hard, well-defined track, much used by men going to their fieldwork, by children going blackberrying . . . and, on Sunday evenings, by pairs of sweethearts who preferred the seclusion of the fields and copses beyond to the more public pathways. The footpath had led to a farmhouse and a couple of cottages, and, to the dwellers in these, it had been not only the way to church and school and market, but also the first stage in every journey. It had led to London, to Queensland and Canada, to the Army depot and the troopship. Wedding and christening parties had footed it merrily, and at least one funeral had passed that way.
—FLORA THOMPSON—
Still Glides the Stream
Karl, John, and Colin resting at their farm B&B.
The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.
—J.R.R. TOLKIEN—
The Lord of the Rings
Introduction
FISHING BOATS CRAM the muddy-banked sliver of salt water known as The Haven. An old-fashioned windmill looms in the misty distance. Battered carnival caravans greet us on the town’s outskirts, where a few modern-day gypsies tinker in the dusk with gaily painted circus equipment. Pungent aromas of fish, tar, hemp, and cotton candy waft through the air. The pubs are smoke-filled and raucous.
Karl and I are surprised to see groups of leather-jacketed young men and women just hanging about, smoking and drinking, as we trudge by Market Square with our heavy back-packs. We pass a plethora of shops and eateries — including The Russian Restaurant, Baltic Foods, and a few Chinese takeaways. We stop in one doorway and watch as industrious waiters and well-dressed patrons speak in various Eastern European languages. Town centre lies in the shadow of St. Botolph’s Church, the city’s best-known landmark, known to locals as Boston Stump.
We arrived in Boston, Lincolnshire, by train after a mad dash from Heathrow and with the jet lag that always brings on my flu symptoms but never affects Karl and his cast-iron stomach. We had taken short walks together in the English countryside the year before and been smitten with the walking bug. Now we had come to Boston to walk the Macmillan Way, a 290-mile route running from this ancient port on the North Sea halfway to Scotland all the way through the heart of England to the English Channel.
Karl is lean, short, muscular, half deaf, and tough as nails. He is also seventy-four years old and a proud Canadian of mixed Irish and Dutch ancestry. When he’s in one of his lighter moods — usually after a couple of pints — he’ll quote poetry and be self-deprecating, with his “wooden shoes, wooden head, and wouldn’t listen.” At other times, he’s a bullheaded, pugnacious former logging camp manager and bantamweight boxer who is afraid of nothing. When visit-ing Palm Springs recently, he and his wife were attacked at night by a knife-wielding assailant who demanded the keys to their car. Karl walked backwards to a vacant condo, smashed the window with his bare hands, pulled out a shard of broken glass, and chased the young assailant away. You get the picture. The cops were so impressed they even paid for the broken window.
Karl also can keep walking pace with most Olympic athletes. He is a man of intensity, endurance, and integrity. So I made him promise that on this trip he would let me pause now and then to look at historic buildings and take photographs instead of always charging ahead to the next village and getting himself lost or into mischief.
Nowhere else in the world can one walk in literally any direction on footpaths over private land throughout the entire country. Britain has over 140,000 miles of footpaths, green lanes, bridleways, and other public rights-of-way, many of which date from medieval times or earlier. Unlike in North America, roads and paths traditionally travelled by the populace remained in the public domain long after new asphalt routes jammed with motorized transport came to dominate the landscape.
Karl was seeking adventure and wanted to prove to himself that he was still tough enough to complete a long-distance walk. At fifty-four, I was twenty years younger but not in shape, having led a sedentary life as a solicitor in the village of Fort Langley, near Vancouver, British Columbia. I had visited England in past years on driving trips, even taken short walks, but this would be a new challenge. The guidebook promised varying landscapes — beginning in Lincolnshire with fenlands, then on through the rolling hills of Northamptonshire and the enchanting, honey-coloured Cotswolds, then Somerset, with its legendary Castle Camelot in Cadbury, and finally, on into Dorset’s rolling hills to emerge at Chesil Beach on the English Channel.
The Macmillan Way was established as a memorial to Douglas Macmillan, who founded the Society for the Prevention and Relief of Cancer in 1911. The charity, now known as Macmillan Cancer Support, helps people cope with cancer and ensures that within the vast labyrinth of Britain’s health system, patients receive the best possible care. More than two thousand nurses and three hundred doctors work with the Macmillan charity around the country, making it one of the foremost charities in the nation. Many people walk the Way to raise funds for Macmillan Cancer Support and to raise awareness for both cancer and fitness.
Most long-distance paths in England run east–west or follow the coastline. Macmillan trends in a steady southwest direction. The route passes through few park areas. It is truly a test of private land walking rights. I was intrigued by the challenge of “giving it a go,” as the English say — combining my love of history with my passion for rural landscapes. You cannot walk two miles in England without experiencing some cultural or historical artifact, landmark, or memorial. Rolling hills are interspersed with coombs, fens, and meadows. To walk the Way in springtime would be divine, the verdant English countryside alive with hawthorn and honeysuckle blooming down green lanes, with the singing and swooping of swallows, thrushes, larks, and wood pigeons coursing through the fields and woods. And it would be challenging to do it with just a backpack, booking ahead at bed and breakfasts en route. Alas, blisters, bulls, and English rain are also part of the joie de vivre of long-distance walking.
Imagine my surprise when I learned while planning the trip that Macmillan Way also passed through the ancient village of Cherington, where my forebears lived as early as the Domesday Book of 1086. I began to envision this walk as a link to the past, a pilgrimage to places that have played an important part in shaping the life of my ancestor
s and hence my own. My mother had recently passed away, so it was time for a spell of reflection. Then too, there was Cadbury Camelot, reputed site of King Arthur’s legendary hill fort, conveniently en route.
It has always struck me as bizarre that academics and journalists cavalierly separate the world into neat divisions based on economic status, such as “third world” versus “industrialized world.” In many ways a villager in Canada has more in common with a villager in the UK, Spain, or even Japan than she does with an urban dweller in Toronto, London, or Madrid. Those who reside in small towns or villages have not severed their connection with the land.
Villages have played a vital role in human history. They represent the first stage in our civilization, when people began to settle down on the land and engage in agriculture. Up to the Industrial Revolution, production in most countries flourished chiefly in a home milieu. That there may be a role for the village today seems manifest, as millions of people around the globe are returning to the cottage-industry concept of working from home — not with a loom or a blacksmith’s anvil, but with computers.
The importance of the village was touched on by the travel writer H.V. Morton, who in his In Search of England had this to say in 1927: “That village, so often near a Roman road, is sometimes clearly a Saxon hamlet with its great house, its church, and its cottages. There is no question of its death; it is, in fact, a lesson in survival, and a streak of ancient wisdom warns us . . . to keep an eye on the old thatch because we may have to go back there some day, if not for the sake of our bodies, perhaps for the sake of our souls.”
Joanna Trollope opines: “For all the drawbacks of rural life and its tough and uncompromising history, the English continue to feel a determined union with the countryside. It is a sense of both belonging and finding salvation there, in a community — preferably consisting of church, pub, farms, cottages, a small school and a Big House. We have, we English, a national village cult; we cherish the myth that out there, among fields and woods, there still survives a timeless natural innocence and lack of corruption.”
In a very real sense, villages represent the underlay, the basic fabric of British culture. It is the common footpath, bridleway, and green lane that draw the threads of this fabric together, like some vast spiderweb stretching outward around the country.
The signposts, stiles, lanes, and paths of England have become iconic, and survive within a swirling milieu of fast-paced asphalt and metal modernity. Yet they form an indissoluble link with England’s past. Nathaniel Hawthorne once observed: “These by-paths . . . admit the wayfarer into the very heart of rural life, and yet do not burden him with a sense of intrusiveness. He has a right to go whithersoever they lead him; for, with all their shaded privacy, they are as much the property of the public as the dusty high-road itself, and even by an older tenure . . . An American farmer would plough across any such path . . . but here it is pro-tected by law, and still more by the sacredness that inevitably springs up, in this soil, along the well-defined footprints of the centuries.”
Walking is the most popular outdoor recreational pursuit in Britain. People can trek on any one of several dozen long-distance footpaths, defined as any route over 31 miles. Some are loop walks, which allow one to park at the village church, walk several hours, devour a ploughman’s lunch at a pub en route, and be back at one’s car without retracing one’s steps. That said, not enough Brits get out and do this, and only a small percentage emerge at all from their stuffy cocoons in the cities. The rich Londoner might buy a quaint cottage in some country village to which he scoots in his Porsche for the weekend, but most urban dwellers prefer to holiday on the Continent, with cheap flight vacations to Spain, Portugal, and other hot spots around the Mediterranean.
Legally speaking, both the common law and the Countryside and Rights of Way Act of 2000 protect the right to walk. What is unique about this vast network of British paths is that most routes pass over private land. There are also “permissive paths,” where there is no public right but the owner has agreed to a temporary right of passage; and finally, there is the “right to roam” that is mandated under the 2000 statute, whereby walkers have a conditional right to roam over some portions of uncultivated private land. This right to roam is a partial redress of the elimination of such rights by the Enclosure statutes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which removed millions of acres of common land from the public domain.
The Ramblers is the largest walkers’ rights association in Britain, and indeed the world. It is an activist group that boasts some 123,000 active members and played a vital role in the passage of the 2000 statute. The Ramblers do not hesitate to launch court action to save a path from being closed by a landowner or the highway department, and its credo is that public paths form an invaluable part of the national heritage. There exist some 485 Rambler groups in the country, with 350 affiliated bodies, such as the Footpath Societies.
This book is a celebration of walking — specifically, walking a long-distance path through the heart of the English countryside. Along the way we will examine the topography, flora and fauna, and rural customs of the English heartland, plus meet a fascinating array of historical and contemporary personalities. The perspective is that of a North American, probing the English landscape, history, and character.
The journey awaits us. In the tradition of William Wordsworth, W.H. Hudson, Edward Thomas, and Robert Louis Stevenson, cross-country walking is an escape into another world. One enters Narnia via C.S. Lewis’s wardrobe door, the portal to that other dimension. A single stile will suffice as our own portal to escape the present, discover the past, and rediscover the self.
BOSTON IS AN ancient port situated on the Wash, a North Sea bay on England’s east coast one hundred miles north of London. It was a wool-exporting town for the Hanseatic League in the thirteenth century and diversified to salt and woven fabrics over succeeding centuries. The port has a strong tradition of religious dissent, as it is here that John Cotton became vicar of St. Botolph’s in 1612. His fiery preaching energized church attendance, but his Nonconformist beliefs enraged the Church of England so much that he was soon encouraging parishioners to join the Massachusetts Bay Company and emigrate to America, where he himself fled in 1633, helping to establish Boston’s namesake — a true Pilgrim father.
We are too fagged with jet lag to walk much of the town this evening. We find our B&B, which turns out to be a rather sleazy little hotel off the main drag, and crash. I am dimly aware of sounds of revelry from the streets, and wonder if the gypsy carnival runs at night.
Before nodding off, I lie there in a dingy, cramped single bed thinking about the adventure before us. In the news this spring of 2004, Madonna is battling it out at hearings before the Countryside Agency over the planned opening of walking paths on her vast country estate near the Wiltshire–Dorset border — threatening in good old American West style to shoot any trespassers on her land. Another wealthy landowner, Nicholas van Hoogstraten, has been fighting the Ramblers for thirteen years; after numerous court battles, the High Court ordered him to reopen a footpath on his East Sussex estate to the public. He calls the Ramblers “the scum of the earth.”
In English literary history, the footpath and stile form a common backdrop in the works of many writers, including Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, Wordsworth, D.H. Lawrence, and George Eliot. Often the footpath is a haven for lovers to meet for an evening rendezvous at a chosen stile. It is cherished by others as a convenient connecting point to another village. Many landowners, however, view the common footpath as the domain of vagabonds, gypsies, and rogues. In Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Mr. Tulliver blames his lawyer for losing his lawsuit against a “right of . . . thoroughfare on his land for every vagabond who preferred an opportunity of damaging private property to walking like an honest man along the high-road.” So van Hoogstraten and Madonna are in a long tradition of landowners wishing to close off their leafy acreages to the public.
I fall asleep and dr
eam of gypsies, trains, and Pilgrims — and, oh yes, of Madonna, standing with a shotgun at a wooden gate, clad only in her wellington boots, guarding her estate.
1
Lincolnshire Lanes
“Beyond the Wild Wood comes the wild world,” said the Rat.“And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or to me.I’ve never been there, and I’m never going; Nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all.”
—KENNETH GRAHAME—
The Wind in the Willows
I AWAKE DAZED WITH JET LAG, then smell the gammon sizzling in the breakfast room. I quickly dress and stumble to the appointed table, where Karl sits with his coffee. I am bleary-eyed, stomach still rumbling. Harold, the greasy-haired, middle-aged proprietor, who resembles a wrencher, curtly offers us a full English breakfast: fried tomatoes, mushrooms, eggs, gammon, and the option of sardines. I decline the sardines but am foolish enough to order the main concoction, which is duly presented — only a tad less greasy than the proprietor’s hair. All the while, the radio blares loudly, the strident DJ interspersing rap music with bits of an imaginary conversation between Britney Spears and a bimbo hotel receptionist, occasionally throwing in a crude joke and burping loudly.
Harold the Wrencher asks if we’ve noticed the East Europeans in town. I say we had, and that I understood they came here looking for jobs under relaxed EU labour laws and were helping harvest the vegetable crops of the Lincolnshire lowlands.
“Aha,” he says, “that’s true, mate, that’s true; but we locals are upset because they work for lower wages than our English lads. But time will tell, won’t it? At least they’re better than the gypsies.”
Karl’s breakfast consists of half of a cup of coffee. He will snack on trail mix and quaff a pint of Guinness midday if the opportunity arises, but otherwise his only real meal of the day is dinner. He shakes his head reprovingly as I struggle to finish the soggy repast awash on my chipped plate.