Walking to Camelot

by John A. Cherrington

  Jane Austen found her cousin’s rectory a grand place, suit-able for the high station that rectors such as Reverend Leigh still enjoyed in the late eighteenth century. The home boasted eight hearths, five maids, a butler, and two liveried manser­vants. From her room in the rectory, Jane looked out upon immaculately kept grounds, including a lovely walled garden. She was a great walker, and traversed paths now part of the Macmillan Way that led to nearby Chastleton House. She also enjoyed a private walk to a lake on the neighbouring Adlestrop Park estate. In her perambulations about the village, Jane would have noted labourers’ cottages with thatched roofs, such as the still surviving Pear Tree Cottage, and the daily congregating of village women round the town pump to draw water and share the local gossip. Jane arrived for visits here from her home in Bath by coach and horses that delivered her directly to the door of the rectory along a road that is now a bridleway.

  Mansfield Park has a scene depicting Adlestrop as a model country village. In rural estates such as Adlestrop House and the grandiose Adlestrop Park, Jane Austen, like George Eliot, found the ideal of country living and a moral society extant within a relatively self-sustaining community. Austen lived at a time when 80 percent of England’s nine million people lived in villages or hamlets. The philosopher Roger Scruton opines that “the country house came to represent an ideal of English civilisation — one in which hierarchy was softened by neighbourliness, and wealth by mutual aid.”

  The walk from Adlestrop to Stow-on-the-Wold combines quiet country lanes with bridleways and pleasant footpaths. The day is sorting itself out and a certain luminescence is appearing in the western sky. We come across an elderly couple hunched over in a field of dandelions. The man’s bearded face is weathered and tanned, as are his big, gnarled hands; his wife is portly and brimming with a robust red-cheeked vitality. I ask them what they are harvesting.

  “Dandelions,” grunts the man.

  “Is that for dandelion wine?”

  He stands up, scratches his thin beard, and then replies, “No, it’s for the guinea pigs.” Then he goes back to work, both he and his wife placing the dandelions in large buckets.

  We decide to back off and move on. “Do you think he was pulling our leg?” laughs Karl.

  “I honestly don’t know, Karl. Maybe they do raise guinea pigs!”

  The bluebells may be fading, but I am in love with them still, plucking a few and holding them up to the sunlight to admire their translucence, which reminds me of the agates and opals I collect from West Coast beaches and Fraser River sandbars. Interspersed with the bluebells are wild garlic plants, which I can’t stop munching like a ravenous rabbit. Karl says I will make myself sick, and that my breath stinks.

  The leaves of the garlic plants are spear-shaped and slender, and release a scent that seduces one to pluck and suck. This wild garlic is a species native to Britain and grows prolifically in ancient woodland. Garlic contains allicin, which is both antifungal and antibacterial. And of course chopped-up garlic adds real zest to salads and soup. After munching my fill I lope awkwardly along the winding path to try to catch up to Karl. I am wracked with momentary guilt, for I have trespassed off the path to enjoy the bounty of this private wood.

  The owner has every right to complain about us walkers. Perhaps Madonna has a point in wanting to maintain her estate unsullied by muddy-booted ramblers. History records that even the most passionate democrats have ranted against public footpaths crossing their land. For instance, E.M. Forster,author of A Passage to India, purchased a little wood in Surrey,not far from London, but was tortured by the fact that it was “intersected, blast it, by a public footpath.” This literary champion of the common man morphed into a strident property owner, on the prowl against anyone who plucked his black­berries, his bluebells, his hazelnuts. Forster derided the prevailing economic system that in his view caused him such conflict in his soul between empathy for the rights of the common man to access woodland and the desire of the owner to protect that land from public despoliation.

  This introspection leads me to realize that the linear walk we have been taking, now well into our second week, is completely different from loop walks; it really is a journey in which one loses oneself to the landscape of history. We have passed through the Narnia wardrobe portal. The modern world is a thousand miles away. Thanks to Karl’s problems with his mobile phone, we are deliciously cut off from the cares of daily life, emails left behind. Though I look forward to talking to my wife every week or so, I do not wish to hear about the mundane issues of family and household which she is facing. Selfish me.

  The Cotswolds are classed as one of the world’s areas of outstanding natural beauty. The name derives from the Saxon cote, a sheepfold, and wold, meaning a bare hill. The Cotswolds defines that range of hills in west central England some twenty-five miles across and ninety miles long, centred in Gloucestershire but including parts of Wiltshire, Somerset, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, and Oxfordshire. Sheep are the economic engine in the history of the Cotswolds. The splendid towns, fine churches, and magnificent honey-hued mansions were all paid for by wool profits from an era when England ruled the world of cloth manufacturing. In Westminster, the lord chancellor still sits on the Woolsack.

  Huge flocks of sheep used to be driven from Wales, and it could take three hours or more for them to pass through towns like Stow and Banbury. By the fourteenth century, Europeans recognized the best wool as being English — and in England, the prime wool was Cotswold. After shearing, Cotswold wool was usually sent to ports like Southampton, from where it was shipped to the Continent. Local merchants grew wealthy and gave some of that wealth to the building of parish churches and other important buildings. A Cotswold epitaph for one such merchant reads:

  I praise God and ever shall

  It is the sheep hath paid for all.

  After the demise of the woollen industry, this region of rolling and folding hills and coombs, of quiet villages and tiny lanes, quickly became a mecca for tourists and the retiring affluent. Horse riding, breeding, and racing are all the rage. The pubs overflow with well-dressed, tweedy locals and weekending Londoners.

  The Cotswolds are home to a star-studded roster — Prince Charles, Prime Minister David Cameron, Arab sheikhs, industrial barons, and film stars such as Kate Winslet, Elizabeth Hurley, and Hugh Grant, to name but a few. Don’t expect them to participate in ferret-racing, cheese-rolling, or nettle-eating contests. But by and large, they respect the long-time country residents and traditions. Of course, appearances in this country are invariably deceiving: the farmer’s wife down the lane might well have a degree in nuclear physics; her unshaven, eccentric neighbour puttering about his greenhouse in mismatched tweeds and smoking the briar pipe — meet the former ambassador to Iran.

  The acerbic A.A. Gill is scathing in his comments about Cotswolds residents, particularly the part-time urbanites. He notes in The Angry Island that the area has become a playground for the rich to indulge their fantasies; it’s all about “paddocks and swimming pools and pheasant shoots.” The price of a small cottage in a quiet village is well beyond the reach of most working people. Gill mocks the Cotswold elite who enjoy the latest in home innovations, such as breakfast bars, Japanese grills, rotisseries, and, above all, the Aga stove — the equivalent of a church altar in the new country home.

  The gentle side of sheep farming hits me on our way up to Stow. We stop to talk to a farm lady who is walking the path carrying a plastic bottle of milk and scanning the field slopes above. She is searching for a little lamb that was evidently so tiny after birth that it needs bottle nourishment to help it through. She asks us if we have seen it. We have not, but shortly after this encounter, I surreptitiously watch Karl stop a distance ahead of me to disentangle a slightly injured large lamb from some brambles by a fence, and he is surprisingly gentle. I don’t say anything to him, but I have seen!

  Imagine quaint country lanes, robins chirping, blossoms overflowing in orchards, and you will see our world
today on the Macmillan Way. Imagine Arcadia — all that’s missing are the Hesperidean nymphs. We pass over the gurgling infant River Evenlode and enter Lower Oddington. It’s time to rest a bit in the churchyard. My eye fixes upon an enormous effigy of an unknown woman with Brobdingnagian feet sticking out from under her dress. Jumbled tombs are spread higgledy-piggledy throughout the rear of the graveyard beneath ancient yew trees.

  “Mile 142, Karl, and just entering the environs of Stow.”

  “You choose the pub, John boy. I am parched.”

  “I can see it in my mind’s eye. Tally ho!”

  The long climb from the northeast up the main Stow road takes us past a vast meadow used by the gypsies for their annual Stow Horse Fairs. On a telephone pole I read a High Court order banning wagons and lorries from this field. Immediately beyond is a sprinkling of antique shops, chic clothing outlets, and towering Cotswold-stone buildings housing retailers at street level with living quarters above. Near the top of the hill is a rabbit warren of narrow alleys, ancient inns, and the town square. Stow has a reputation for severe weather: “Stow-on-the-Wold, where the winds blow cold and the cooks can’t roast their dinners.”

  Stow stands at the convergence of eight ancient roadways. Traders have passed through here for centuries with their wares: salt from Worcestershire, fish from the Severn estuary, iron and charcoal from the Forest of Dean. At Stow they exchanged goods and purchased food, shelter and stabling, pottery, saddles, and harnesses. But in later centuries the wool trade dominated all. At one of two annual fairs, vast flocks of sheep would be driven to the town’s environs and then into the town square down narrow alleyways. Some twenty thousand sheep would be sold on a good day. Foreign goods were sold too, and monastic buyers came from six monasteries within thirty-five miles of the town. The spring fair was one of the largest in the country. When the wool market died, the traditional fair declined and the gypsy Horse Fair became the residual event. Today it remains one of the largest gatherings of its kind in England — popular with artists, photographers, and those appreciating traditions of a raunchy, folksy nature.

  We have decided to stop an extra day here and are booked for two nights at the Old Stocks Hotel, named after the stocks that still rest on the green outside. These are about 150 years old, having replaced the originals that were used to bind minor miscreants and humiliate them in front of their tomato- and egg-throwing fellow townspeople. Today some shop owners would like to use the stocks once again to pelt the gypsies and chavs who occasionally frequent their town.

  We are given a warm welcome by Jason and Helen Allen. At the bar one runs into patrons of all types: a ruddy-faced mason who specializes in laying Cotswold stone; an elderly couple up from Dorset for a weekend; Camera Club seniors from Oxford; even a Roy Orbison look-alike who dresses in black with long sideburns and horn-rimmed glasses. The music is a blend of sixties and seventies classic soft rock — the Beatles, Chad & Jeremy, Leonard Cohen, Orbison, with a bit of Frank Sinatra and Vera Lynn thrown in. Relaxed and mellow.

  The Old Stocks dates to the sixteenth century and has the usual floorboard creaks here and there, but by and large it is all you would expect in a small hotel. It has also been discovered by American travel guru Rick Steves, so one must book well in advance. I ask Jason — a dapper, quick-witted man given to sarcasm with uppity guests — what’s with all the orange traffic cones around town, and, for that matter, all over the roads of England? There are even a couple of orange cones in my field of vision from our bow-window table in the dining room, lying obtrusively next to the rustic old stocks. I go out to examine them and find they are only protecting grass. I ask Jason to remove them, for the cones are detracting from the ambience of the town square — not to mention the myriad tourists who want to be photographed sitting in the stocks.

  Next morning I am sitting enjoying my poached eggs on toast and notice that the orange cones are now even more offensively placed: perched on the very top of the stocks! Jason has undoubtedly done this just to perturb me. So I decide that it is time for some colonial self-help action and trundle outside to determine how to remove the offensive objects. Jason must have seen me, as they subsequently disappeared altogether.

  The streets are quiet at the moment, but I envision what it must have been like on that spring day in 1646, when the Royalist forces of Charles I, commanded by Sir Jacob Astley, were trapped in the square in front of me and slaughtered — thousands of horses and men fighting at close quarters, the heavy clashing of sword against sword, the neighing of the horses, mingled screams. Astley finally ordered 1,600 Royalist troops to put down their weapons, and Roundhead troops then marched them to the church, where they were held overnight. Popular tradition has it that the blood ran so thick that ducks floated in pools down Digbeth Street.

  After breakfast Karl and I stroll over to the church. The north door is flanked by two enormous yew trees standing like sentries. This is the most enchanting church entrance I have ever seen. (Tolkien, it is said, was so transfixed by these gnarled, knobby ancient yews — a primordial vision of tangled roots, trailing moss, and earthy fecundity — that this doorway became his inspiration for the portal to Moria in The Lord of the Rings.) After a visit we duck into the coffeehouse next door for some mocha java. I reflect that the town centre looks much like it would have in the seventeenth century.

  Next door to the Old Stocks is the Royalist Hotel, reputed to be the oldest inn in England, dating from the year 947. An ancient tunnel leads from the bar to the church across the square. In some guest rooms and to the left of the hotel’s massive fireplace, “witch’s marks” are clearly visible. These medieval symbols were intended to ward off spells cast by witches. The obsession with witches reached its climax during the Civil War, when one Matthew Hopkins claimed to be “Witch-Finder General,” ferreting out witches across the country. He was aided by zealous Puritan ministers and oddball fanatics.

  St. Edward’s Hall in the town square must surely be the only town hall built solely from the proceeds of unclaimed deposits at a town bank. Mysterious Fleece Alley dates from sheep-fair days. Swank shops and tourist nooks are the rule — upscale coffeehouses, bookshops, a chemist, stores like Groovy2Shoes, Styles of Stow, Laurie Leigh Antiques, Cotswold Baguettes, and one selling wood-burning stoves — though one would have to own a dukedom to afford wood in this country. Stow is all about Burberry and leather. No Oxfam here, please.

  Stow is perpetually full of tourists — chiefly Japanese, North Americans, and elderly Brits from miles around who come here to stroll the streets, enjoy a cream tea, examine fine linens, and explore the curios, brass, and oak buffets in the cozy antique shops. “Look, Martha, imagine having to use one of those enamel chamber pots!” Of course, the tweedy rich don’t browse; they come to certain shops by special appointment, blowing ten or twenty thousand pounds in an afternoon on such collectibles as a cobalt Ming vase, a Queen Anne glass bookcase, or a nineteenth-century edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

  We are treated this weekend to much activity in the town square, including Morris dancing, which dates back to medieval times and is still very popular in this part of England. Ironically, this quintessentially English dance originated with the Moors in Spain, Morris being a derivative of Moorish. Six men dress in costumes of white shirt and trousers, each with a hat colourfully garnished with flowers and ribbon. They wear gaiters with bells and carry sticks and handkerchiefs which they toss about, all to the accompaniment of a fiddler. Morris dancing had died out in Victorian England, but in reaction to industrialization, the late 1880s saw a revival of many rural customs, including quilting, folk music, and, of course, walking the footpaths. Although Morris dancing is still largely a male endeavour, we see a group of mixed young men and women practising the art. All participants are enjoying themselves immensely, as are the photo-snapping tourists.

  Of course, there is that little problem of customer relations here. Unlike North America, the customer is not God, and
should form a queue and wait patiently in line if there is anyone else near the counter. At the chemist’s to purchase some Pepto-Bismol pills (to replace my bottle so injudiciously discarded en route), I ask the young clerk how things are going. She replies, “Just now, things are fine. But all morning it was simply horrible! Customers just kept coming in!” (One is reminded of the long-running sitcom Are You Being Served?)

  There is still difficulty with servicing large groups of people, such as at restaurants, hotels, and food stores. Paul Theroux notes in The Kingdom by the Sea that the English “were brilliant at running a corner shop, but were failures when they tried their hands at supermarkets . . . The English do small things well and big things badly.”

  The propensity of the English to close things up has even pervaded the churches. In London a notice was recently posted on a church door: “This is the Gate of Heaven. Enter ye all by this Door. This Door kept locked because of the draft. (Please use side door.)” The moral here: If the English can find an excuse to close it, they will. Whatever and whenever the English can squirrel away from the public, they will — their castles, their wares, their thermostats, themselves.

  This is an oversimplification. Our Old Stocks is operated efficiently, and the Tesco supermarkets are big, bright, and generally well run. Though it was a tad perplexing to go shopping at the Stow Tesco at nine-thirty on a Sunday morning and be upbraided at the counter when I brought my apples and water bottles up: