Our path winds toward Kates Bridge, an ancient settlement that demarcates the end of the Fens. No, it is not named after some village maiden, but rather a Danish god called Kat or Catta. We stop to admire a cluster of willow trees beneath the bridge. This was at one time the head of navigation on the River Glen. The thriving community declined in the nineteenth century, when railways became the favoured means of transport. Now the hamlet consists of a petrol station, a tractor dealership, five houses, and one farm.
The loose limestone fields are gradually becoming higher and dryer as we approach Baston. This village is thought to be the site of the first major battle between King Arthur’s Romano-Britons and the invading Anglo-Saxons, in the late fifth century. Many Saxon graves have been unearthed here.
DIARY: Images of today’s walk — the heavy, burdensome pack (I must dump some clothes, but not any of my books); two Perrier bottles wedged upright into a hollowed-out fence post; the dank smell of the marsh; endless grasses and rushes, with swallows swooping and thrushes singing; stiles and waymarks to which the green Macmillan sticker is affixed; brick cottages; the ubiquitous red telephone booths, inside one of which Karl tried to call home but the line was dead — the first of many broken-down phone booths we would encounter along Macmillan. British Telephone says the phones and booths are too costly to maintain in this day of mobiles. So one by one they fall into disrepair and will soon become anachronistic relics of the countryside.
We stay the night at Baston’s Baskervilles Inn, where each room is named after a character in the Arthur Conan Doyle novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. Ours is Mrs. Oldthorpe, while next door is Sherlock Holmes. Karl and I had not planned on having to share rooms like this, but in rural England, you take what you can get. Until the twentieth century, a traveller at a crowded inn was expected to share not only a room with a perfect stranger, but also the same bed.
We start a regular nightly ritual of washing out our undergarments and socks with detergent in the soap basin. Most B&Bs don’t do laundry: you have to plead for heat to be turned on so you can dry off your clothes on the wall register. Karl tells me that one must vigorously rub the socks together after laying them immersed in water for at least an hour. The proprietress allows us only two hours of heat this evening, so I worry whether the clothes will be dry in the morning. A bigger concern is Karl’s snoring, for I am rather noise sensi-tive. I pinch his big toe after half an hour of his walrus out-bursts, and he rolls over. Mission accomplished. (My snoring is even worse, but fortunately, Karl is a deep sleeper and half deaf.)
On the trail next morning by the River Glen, we encounter an elderly fisherman in tweed hat and waders with whom we stop to chat. He says he has lived in the area all his life and has watched the demise of the native red squirrel — decimated, he says, by the introduction of the American grey squirrel. But the red squirrel is finally making a comeback. Government and nature groups are targeting key areas where red squirrels are still found, and trapping squirrels — killing the grey ones and releasing the red ones unharmed. (Personally, I think the grey squirrels are just as cute and someone should stand up for their rights too.) Then he complains about the American mink wreaking havoc with the aquatic life in the rivers. Mink are eating the fish and killing off ferrets, water rats, and small otters. We commiserate, then leave him to his fly casting.
“Karl,” I muse, “the very first book ever read to me by my mother was Chatterer the Red Squirrel, by Thornton Burgess, and I have gone through life believing that Shadow the sly weasel was the Darth Vader threat from which Chatterer was always running. Now I find that it’s just a bunch of grey squirrels that have decimated Chatterer and his mates.”
“Don’t lose any sleep over it. They’re all pests and varmints as far as I am concerned, and they do a hell of a lot of damage if they get into your cellar or attic.”
The scene as we wend our way along the stream is reminiscent of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, with badger setts, willows overhanging the brook, and abundant bracken, marsh, and hedgerow to house myriad wildlife. Here indeed lies a quiet little microcosm of rural Lincolnshire, a world unto itself. Our fisherman friend is well entitled to be protective of this natural habitat.
Near the entrance to a copse of beeches, we discover a dead badger on the side of the path. The creature is much larger than I imagined. Its sharp, angular teeth and long, non-retractable claws are truly fearsome. This animal can do a lot of damage. Badgers are almost never seen in daylight; Grahame notes in his classic that “Badger hates society, and invitations, and dinner, and all that sort of thing.” However, badgers have a reputation for wisdom. In T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, the young King Arthur is turned into a badger by Merlin as part of his education. Arthur meets an old badger who tells him, “I can only teach you two things — to dig, and love your home.” The badger is also the house symbol for Hufflepuff in the Harry Potter book series.
Ratty in The Wind in the Willows is in fact a water vole, a semi-aquatic rodent which has a rounder nose than a rat, a chubby face, and, unlike the rat, hair covering its tail, ears, and paws. There are believed to be some 220,000 surviving voles in the United Kingdom, and the old fisherman was right — they have been fast declining due to the American mink, a predator. In the comic novel and movie Cold Comfort Farm, one of the main characters, Urk, refers to his unrequited love, Elfine Starkadder, as his “little water vole.” In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, his hero declaims, “Feather-footed through the plashy fens passes the questing vole.” And British archaeologist David Miles opines that the vole existed in Britain some 500,000 years ago. In fact, the vole may be the longest surviving original Briton. Such adorable little creatures are therefore much maligned with the “rat” appellation.
The English really are in love with animals. There are countless stories of macho fathers condoning the beating of their sons at boarding school yet breaking down and crying at the sight of an injured sparrow. As Sarah Lyall writes in The Anglo Files, “Every British animal has its cheerleaders.” And the epitome of evil in English society is someone who mistreats an innocent beast. Near London’s Hyde Park this year the government will unveil, at a cost of one million pounds, the Animals in War Memorial, to celebrate the animals who aided the nation in numerous wars. The massive stone sculpture will portray in bas-relief pigeons, dogs, monkeys, horses, donkeys, even glow-worms. Chiselled into the stone is the chilling proclamation “They had no choice.”
A mudflat we pass is covered with tracks — the etchings and scratchings of little creatures that resemble a Trafalgar Square–like meeting place. As we leave the brook and follow the path through the copper beech grove into a copse, a furry white creature suddenly rushes out of the bracken and does a merry dance around Karl, at one point even crawling partway up his boot.
“It’s just a ferret, and I think he’s blind,” Karl laughs. “I have read that they are often born blind.”
The ferret, however, is known for its ferocious bite, being a member of the weasel family, and I suggest that Karl steer the animal away from us. He takes his walking stick and gently flicks the creature to the side of the path, where it sits pondering the situation.
“Now,” I say, “all we need is Mr. Toad, Mole, and Ratty to trundle by, Karl. I can see where Kenneth Grahame received his inspiration.”
There is a North American connection here. Sales of The Wind in the Willows did not take off until President Theodore Roosevelt publicly wrote to Grahame in 1909 to tell him that he had “read it and reread it, and [had] come to accept the characters as old friends.” So popular is the anthropomorphic genre in England — and the world — that British author William Horwood has written two entrancing sequels to the Kenneth Grahame classic, which continue to captivate children and adults alike. And with his multi-volume Duncton Wood series, Horwood has brought tears to the eyes of millions of readers over the life and plight of English moles. Indeed, I will never kill a mole again — let them have my lawn, they
deserve their tunnels and homes. Oh, crikey!
We divert slightly off trail to visit Bowthorpe Park Farm in Manthorpe, where stands the largest living English oak tree by girth, the Bowthorpe Oak. This tree boasts a circumference of some forty feet. Now, next to North America’s giant firs and sequoias, you might think this rather short, stubby tree would appear dwarfish. But it has a majesty of its own, and its veined, textured bole and gnarled gnome-like branches remind one of a scene from Mirkwood in The Hobbit. The tree is estimated to be over one thousand years old and has made it into the Guinness Book of Records. The trunk is hollow; a former farm tenant built a roof and door — the tree held within it thirty-nine people standing or thirteen people tucking into high tea.
There are older trees in Britain, since the estimable yew outlives all other species. The record so far belongs to the Fortingall Yew in Perthshire, estimated to be between three and five thousand years old. Other notable specimens are the Gog and Magog oaks at Glastonbury and the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Tree in Dorset, a sycamore beneath which six poor farm labourers formed the first trade union in Britain, in 1834.
“Not much challenge to a logger, though, Karl.”
“Log it, burn it, and pave it, John.” But Karl has a twinkle in his eye.
We amble back to the main path. Our next destination is Wilsthorpe. The inhabitants must all be asleep here, together with their dogs. Not a soul stirs. We search for a landmark Roman villa ruin, but it eludes us. The word village is derived from the Roman villa, as many settlements grew up around the several thousand homesteads built by Roman merchants and soldiers who remained in Britain after Caesar’s conquest.
There are so many similar-sounding names in this country that it all makes for great confusion. For example, a few miles to the west lies the village of Woolsthorpe, where you can stop and visit the house where Isaac Newton lived, and even sit on a bench under the apple tree — actually, its progeny — where the great man observed the proverbial apple drop.
Speaking of Isaac Newton, the National Trust has recently begun a program called “Making the Countryside Real,” intended to teach city children about rural life, and Woolsthorpe Manor, Newton’s home, is the scene for the first field trip — a neat way to combine history with the flavour of the countryside. Polls indicate that urban schoolchildren harbour fears of rural areas.
We stop to catch our breath in the charming stone village of Greatford. It is here that, in 1788, Dr. Francis Willis temporarily “cured” King George III of his madness, in a private asylum he operated at Greatford Hall. Today we might call the king’s ailment a severe psychiatric disorder, whereas George just told Dr. Willis, “I am nervous; I am not ill, but I am nervous.”
The king was required to undergo the same regimen of fresh air and physical labour assigned to other patients, and so he toiled in the fields, anonymous but set apart from other patients. Upon being cured, the king rewarded Dr. Willis with a pension of one thousand pounds a year for twenty-one years. In 1801, the king suffered a relapse and returned to Greatford for further treatment. After a third and final relapse in 1810, he remained completely mad until his death in 1820.
None of which stopped Dr. Willis from becoming so well known as a psychiatrist that many other wealthy aristocrats travelled to Greatford Hall for treatment. Villagers were amused by the curious sight of these patients working in the fields clad in black coats and wearing powdered wigs, for Dr. Willis believed hard physical labour was vital to the treatment process. Little did they know that one of these labourers was their sovereign.
“It’s too bad the good doctor was about thirteen years too late with the cure,” I muse. “Then perhaps the American Revolution would have been averted.”
“If I had just lost the American colonies to a bunch of backwoodsmen, I think I would have developed a chronic nervous condition too, John.”
We trudge through fields laced with shoulder-high rapeseed plants, immersing ourselves in sopping yellow stalks that coat our hair and clothes with yellow, sticky powder. A light rain adds to the clammy experience. The path through the fields has turned into gumbo.
“Not exactly Field of Dreams today, Karl.”
“Come on, John, it would look just grand on a sunny day.”
We finally exit the field, climb over a stile, hit a brief section of tarmac, and abruptly leave the road to enter a lovely green lane about six miles north of the market town of Stamford. Green lanes are ancient drover roads that farmers used for centuries to drive cattle and sheep from Scotland and northern England to the pasturage of the Midlands and then on to London for consumption. The remnants of these roads make for some of the loveliest walking in Britain.
This lane runs along the Lincolnshire–Rutland border. It is dark, with lush growth and high hedgerows — and holds a morbid surprise. About a hundred yards along, I spot a bright object lying in the verge, and stop to investigate. To my shock, I find a pair of red high-heeled shoes beside a heap of fancy clothes — in fact, a complete female wardrobe: a new and expensive-looking pink silk blouse, black skirt, pantyhose, bra, the works. But where’s the body? Nobody just randomly dumps a complete set of designer clothes in a dark lane. Gingerly, I reach out with my walking stick and raise the label on the blouse.
Etched in ink on the underside of the label is a phone number, and then this:
Raped me in back of cab
Help! Tiffany.
Karl and I stand stunned.
“My God!” Karl exclaims.
“We have to report this right away to the police, Karl. Stamford is the closest town.”
Karl nods and we set out, but we also carefully examine the east side of the lane near the heap of clothes, just to ensure we haven’t overlooked a body. I shudder. Stamford is a long six miles from here.
Close to two hours later we push ourselves up a steep hill before the plunge down to Stamford. Scattered rain falls, the drops dribbling like a leaky faucet, just enough to wet the Gore-Tex and turn bridleways into gooey mire. The summit of the hill overlooking Stamford brings us to Cobbs Nook Farm. Below us, silvery steeples poke up through the swirling mist like beacons for the lonely wayfarer.
On the outskirts of Stamford a passerby informs us that the police station is at the far end of town at the top of another hill. This is testing our endurance — mine, at least. I am just an out-of-shape solicitor, but my seventy-four-year-old companion surges ahead, mouth rigidly set, walking stick propelling him along this last half mile. We don’t stop to admire the fine Georgian buildings along the main street.
It’s a gruelling grind up the final hill. Pedestrians turn aside on the steep sidewalk to avoid us, scared of these two bedraggled apparitions pounding upward. We arrive out of breath at a nondescript building on the hilltop, to be greeted inside by a burly young cop who has had a bad day. We are sodden; rain drips from our clothes onto the grey tile floor. I show him the location of Tiffany’s clothes on my Macmillan Way Guide map page, which he promptly photocopies.
“On which side of the lane did you find the clothes, sir?” he asks.
“East side.”
“Then I am afraid it is outside of our jurisdiction, sir, because that’s the Rutland County side, and I will have to fax this over to the Oakham police and ask them to send out a patrol car to investigate.” He sounds almost relieved.
“You will do this right away?”
“Yes, don’t worry, but you have to understand — over a hundred thousand teenagers a year run away from home in Britain, and this could be just another poor girl who’s ended up victimized by getting involved with unsavoury people, perhaps living the partying nightlife. Half the time the missing teenager is never even reported to the police. Give me the address or phone number we can reach you at this evening in case the Rutland constabulary need to talk with you further.”
We advise him of our local B&B, to which we trudge next, passing a shop sign that reads: “Good stabling and loose barrels.” Our landlady greets us on the seventh ri
ng of the bell. She is rosy-cheeked, amiable, and all business. She introduces herself as Mabel Trance, but we are to call her Mabel.
“You all right, then?”
She is looking at our dripping clothes and rumpled hair. No, I almost say, we are not all right — we are cold, hungry, and tired, and I feel like Ratty after a wet day in the Wild Wood.
“Yes, er, Mabel, quite all right. Just need to dry out and go for a bite to eat.”
But when I advise her that the police may be calling for us that evening, she lets out a squeal. I calm her. “And please, Mabel, I don’t want a cooked English breakfast in the morn-ing, but would love some porridge.”
That night we dine at an Elizabethan pub close to our B&B. The steak is great; the chips, dry; the wine, superb. Everyone is so polite. Of course, there is that small matter of poor service. I feel like a lout for repeatedly hailing the waitress for condiments like ketchup and vinegar.
Alas, it had been a long and trying day, and surely it is time to have some fun. It so happens that whereas in Britain this is a bank holiday weekend, in Canada it is Victoria Day, in honour of our then longest-reigning queen. (Some Canadians call it the May Two-Four, referring to both the date it traditionally falls upon and Canadian slang for a case of twenty-four beers, copious amounts of which are drunk on this celebratory weekend.) So after downing our first bottle of Shiraz, we commence work on the second bottle and I cause Karl to stand with me, clink glasses, and in loud nasal voices declaim together: “To the Queen!” Whereupon the pub’s gibberings cease entirely and all eyes turn upon us disdainfully, as if we are lunatics.
Walking to Camelot Page 3