by Hugh Thomson
In the following centuries the West Saxons were forced south out of Oxfordshire by their neighbours to their north: first the Mercians and later the Vikings. This has always been a martial frontier, as evidenced by the much earlier Grim’s Dyke near by, which marked a similar divide of the Iron Age. The hills that bisect the county are a natural border point. The centre of Wessex headed south, towards the coast. After Birinius, the bishops moved their see from Dorchester to Winchester – and the Chilterns and Berkshire Downs became savage and disputed frontier lands. They were the scene of many battles, one of the most important being the battle of Ashdown, not far from here, which Alfred the Great fought against the Vikings in 871, a battle that deserves to be remembered as much as Agincourt, Waterloo or El Alamein.
It was Grim’s Dyke that I joined just a little further to the north where the Icknield Way crossed it, a high embankment with a defensive ditch which once ran west and east from the Thames for hundreds of miles. This was one of the best-preserved stretches of the Dyke, as it entered the Chilterns.
The bluebells in the beech woods that surrounded and disguised the embankment came as a shock. I had forgotten that they would be there, a soft purple rather than blue, as I came in from the bright sunshine of the fields and saw waves and islands of them spreading below the trees, not so much lighting up the forest as glowing within it: purple shadows.
They spread across the ridge. A heavy-seeded plant, bluebells travel slowly across the ground: it had taken many, many generations for them to cover such distance. The carpet of blue flowers managed to be a celebration both of the transience of spring and of the permanence of the English landscape.
Along the top of the Dyke, I followed a path that was covered with beechmast and threaded through with white wood anemones. Looking down through the trees at the wheat fields to either side, with the young wheat still tight in bud, the stalks shimmered blue under the green of their tops, so that when viewed from certain angles they looked like water, an effect exaggerated when the wind blew across the fronds and sent a ripple of green-yellow across the underlying blue.
The Dyke took me back to an older heritage than the Saxon world; it was built by the Celts of the Iron Age in about 300 BC, for reasons that, if archaeologists are honest, remain mysterious – to the point that there has been some argument as to whether it was for southerners to keep northerners out, or vice versa. To my lay eyes, it seemed probable that it was designed to keep the north out, with the ditch on that side of the embankment; but more crucial for me was the acceptance of a mystery. I was used in Latin America to ancient earthworks whose purpose or meaning remained resolutely obscure, and I liked that. Keats’s idea of ‘negative capability’, that we should be humble in the face of what we do not understand, does not always sit well in the world of archaeology, where forcibly expressed hypotheses and the denigration of rival theories are the norm.
Perhaps because we understand so little about it, you never hear Grim’s Dyke mentioned in the same breath as Offa’s Dyke on the Welsh border. Yet it was also a substantial achievement and wherever traces of it remain, as they do on the high horse country below Wantage and even around Watford and suburban London, it is a reminder of how insistently north and south were divided in this country, a fatal fault line that ultimately allowed the Normans to conquer the Anglo-Saxon world.
It was along Grim’s Dyke as it rose from Mongewell by the Thames over to Nettlebed (named at a time when nettles were much appreciated as a resource) that the bluebells were at their finest. I walked here in ‘courting days’ when I was eighteen, too shy to kiss the girl I was with and so kept talking of music instead, a male displacement activity long before Nick Hornby identified it; and I walked here more recently thirty years later when I had fallen in love again after a difficult divorce (aren’t all divorces difficult?) and was trying to rebuild.
I found the bluebells in the woods had a mesmeric quality, one of darkness as well as of light, along this old earthwork trackway whose purpose was still not clear, that collated different impulses together for me: the mystery of the path; the mystery of love that after thirty years I had still not understood; and the bluebells spreading underneath the beeches in purple shadows that would last just a few weeks but had taken centuries to establish.
*
There is nothing like taking a walk to make up your mind. Or for making you accept an obvious solution, however challenging it might be.
I knew that I could base myself at home and launch excursions to various different trackways and drovers’ paths around the country; cherry-pick them, so to speak.
But how much better to make a journey from coast to coast? To be bold. To begin at the Atlantic and end at the North Sea. To travel from Dorset to Norfolk. To follow the Icknield Way not just for a few, familiar miles, but for its entire length right through rural England: the ancient, prehistoric way to cross the country, along its spine and following the hills.
There was a geographical appropriateness to the plan. Locals were fond of saying that we lived in the area that was furthest from the sea. I suspected that this was debatable and a contested national title – like the accolade of being the wettest place, for which I’ve seen many candidates – but it was undoubtedly very landlocked; it was also almost exactly at the midpoint of the Icknield Way. By travelling from coast to coast, I would be connecting the place I knew so well with the country’s furthest edges.
That same night, I looked out some maps and gathered the things I needed for such a journey. Truth to tell, as I had not unpacked, this was hardly difficult. My down jacket, tent and boots stood ready to go from my travels in Peru. The teabags and blister-kit were still in the backpack.
The cure for a hangover was to keep drinking. The cure for jet lag was to keep travelling.
I was on the train to Dorset next morning.
*
Can there be a finer place in all England to start a journey?
I’m at St Catherine’s Chapel on the Dorset coast. A square-cut Norman chapel with immensely thick four-foot walls, it stands isolated on a hilltop, with magnificent views sweeping down the Atlantic along Chesil Beach to Portland Bill. Behind me are the folds of Dorset, undulating away with their coombs and copses and small English lanes, made more drunken than usual by a toponymy that even locals find confusing.
The chapel was built in the fourteenth century by the monks of the nearby Abbey. They constructed it in stone throughout, including the roof, because of the fear of fire from both lightning and the French invaders who made regular incursions along the coast.
The chapel was abandoned for centuries. It has now been restored to its bare essentials and the walls repaired, but there is nothing inside – no pews, no altarpiece, no stained glass. Once a year at Christmas there is a small service held by candlelight for a few devoted souls.
As an emblem of both continuity and neglect, it could not serve me better. St Catherine was perceived as the Athena of the early Christian world: calm, dispassionate, intellectual and courageous; dying as a martyr to a cruel Roman emperor, tied to the wheel that still bears her name and is lit up every Guy Fawkes Day. Her story made for an alluring myth – and myth it properly was. She was removed from the list of official saints by the Vatican in 1968 because ‘she probably never existed’.
The last chapel to St Catherine I visited was in the Sinai desert. This chapel has an equally wild beauty. Thomas Hardy described it as being ‘in a fearfully exposed position’. The chapel seems to be dedicated not to the church but to the sea.
I won’t see the sea again for another 400 miles or so, when I emerge on the Norfolk coast. I will be following as near as I can the old road of the Icknield Way, which has some claim to be the most ancient route in England. It linked the world of the Mediterranean, whose traders landed along the coast from here to Cornwall, with the world of those northern Europeans who came to East Anglia – a prehistoric highway between these two points of entry to England, slicing diagonally across the
country from Dorset to Norfolk, with lay-bys at all the great prehistoric sites: Maiden Castle, Stonehenge, Avebury, a string of hill-forts and finally, on the Norfolk coast, Seahenge.
London and the South-East were completely avoided; only later, with the Roman invasion, did all roads start there and Dover become such a principal port. But that suits me fine. I want to take the temperature of England as a country not a city, and to slice across it from the South-West to East Anglia is the perfect way to do so. London can stay off my map.
Perhaps because of the later Roman reorientation of English roads out of London, far more traces of the Icknield Way survive than one might expect: it has not simply been built over and tarmacked. Nor was the route taken by prehistoric man one that now favours the motor car. The old path often follows the hilltops, not the valleys; it is more concerned with natural ford points of rivers, with keeping above the flood plain and with following the grain of the landscape.
Dorset has always been a good launching-off point into England; so much so that Walter Raleigh concentrated on Weymouth for his defences against the Armada, as he suspected that, if Philip of Spain had any tactical sense, that was where he would land. In the event, Philip had no tactical abilities whatsoever and south-westerly winds blew the Spanish fleet into the Channel.
Directly below St Catherine’s Chapel, on the semi-saline waters of the Fleet Lagoon, protected from the Atlantic by the thin strip of Chesil Beach, I can see the old Swannery, established by the same Benedictine monks who built the chapel. It is one of the last surviving swanneries in the country, testament to the medieval appetite for roast swan (preferably with another bird stuffed inside), although now benignly managed to preserve, rather than eat, the birds. Daniel Defoe was much taken with it when he came this way in the eighteenth century: ‘The famous swannery, or nursery of swans, the like of which I believe is not in Europe’.
When I descend there from the chapel, one of the women workers tells me they have just completed the biannual count of mute swans. Seven hundred and forty were tagged as their own, as opposed to any ‘freeloading royal swans’ belonging to the Queen that might come as visitors. She showed me some arresting photographs of the local villagers of Abbotsbury wading into the waters of the Fleet to help hold and tag the swans, as they have always done.
What is it about the incongruence of humans holding swans? Many of the pictures of Leda and the Swan gain their power from the sheer anatomical disjointedness of the species. It certainly puts a new spin on the idea of ‘necking’.
In the photos, the villagers are putting on a brave face. The English countryman or woman is expected to deal with most things with aplomb: holding a live ferret, dealing with a dead sheep, breaking down in their 4×4 on the middle of Dartmoor. But holding a live swan, with a neck like an articulated python and a wing powerful enough to break a man’s arm, is a whole different order of magnitude.
My path leads inland from the old Swannery. It’s a good way to start getting into my stride: an old ropewalk, with a stream bubbling beside it, hart’s tongue ferns in the banks, and roses in the cottage gardens I pass.
But any sentimentality is banished in Abbotsbury – as it should have been by the ropewalk, which was a brutal industry, a medieval sweatshop in which the endless tying of material into rope along a straight path would lose any charm if actually witnessed.
Abbotsbury is a testimony to destruction. Where the abbey once stood is a gaping void, with just the odd gatepost left. All that remains of what must have been a quite wonderful medieval building is the outpost of St Catherine’s Chapel behind me on its hill, spared by Henry VIII at the Reformation only as a useful landmark for the navy of which he was so proud.
England’s green and pleasant veneer – nowhere more seductive than in Dorset – has always hidden its capacity for sudden and brutal change. The winding roads that so picturesquely lead inland were the ones that killed T E Lawrence on his motorbike.
*
My teenage children get embarrassed because, when walking, I have the most un-English habit of buttonholing complete strangers and asking them the time of day and what moves in their neck of the woods. While my children pretend that I am some stray father who has got attached and is just tagging along, the accosted stranger, after the surprise of being addressed by someone who hasn’t known them for at least five years and is saying more than hello, will do that other very English thing: launch into a long tale. For it is a national characteristic that we have the boldness of the very shy. We keep ourselves zipped up but given the opportunity – the licence – and it will all pour out.
A few words to a farmer in Abbotsbury and I find myself hearing a story that needs a longer sit-down and a cup of tea, in a farmhouse with a horse yard and chickens that has managed to stay in the centre of the village without being redeveloped.
David Young was born in 1937. A shrewd and gentle man, he had lived his whole life in Abbotsbury. He practised mixed farming until the late 1960s, but then concentrated on dairy farming until 1998 when he retired, although he told me he wasn’t sure ‘whether he gave up dairying or dairying gave up on him’.
The whole village has always had one landlord: the Ilchester estate, which also owns the Swannery. Apart from some new shared-equity accommodation, put up by the Salisbury Trust, the Ilchester estate has completely controlled the village for as long as he could remember.
The old Lord Illchester had a paternalistic interest in keeping the village uniform. ‘Anyone painted their door a different colour, he would put them right.’ He died in 1964, but both his sons had already been killed: one in a shooting accident when still a schoolboy; the other on active service with the army in Cyprus. The title then passed to a fourth cousin, which is about as distant as it gets in the peerage. The most recent holder had been called Maurice Vivian de Touffreville Fox-Strangways to his friends, Lord Ilchester to the neighbours.
When David was a boy, he and the other children in the village were always conscious of the power of the Ilchester estate.
‘It was like a pistol pointing at your foot. No one would step out of line. As kids, all of us in the village would make dens, like kids do, but we never dared go into the woods, even though they were all around us. That would have been sacrilege, disturbing the pheasants.’
They had to be careful where they went anyway. The same reasons that might have made this Dorset coast attractive to Philip and his Armada applied equally in the Second World War. The beach and surrounding area were heavily mined. I had seen the remains of pillboxes and barbed wire scattered along Chesil Beach, together with what the locals called ‘dragons’ teeth’, large concrete blocks put up as tank traps.
David remembered that when they were children, the local gamekeeper had been blown up when he stepped on a mine.
‘The estate had to bring an older keeper out of retirement. We weren’t exactly scared of him, mind, but he was what you would call authoritative. No one wanted to get on the wrong side of him. Of course, in those days we respected people who had authority.’
This didn’t stop David going out with his father to poach the odd pheasant for the family Sunday pot, particularly during the long years of rationing.
‘We took a sponge and a bamboo and some ammonia. Put the soaked sponge under a roosting pheasant in a tree – and plop, there was Sunday lunch. No shots, no weapons. I was only a lad tagging along with Dad when he did it. Some of the locals used a different technique: they would pierce a dried pea with a needle, right through, and tie it to a stick. If any pheasant took the bait, they couldn’t get loose. A bit cruel, that was. I never did it.’
David won a place to the grammar school in Dorchester. In those days there was still a train line from Abbotsbury. Now there are just a few intermittent buses.
‘I used to get the last train back from Weymouth. Often I was the only passenger. I got to know the driver and he would let me drive the train. Think of that! You wouldn’t get away with a boy being allowed to drive a t
rain these days.’
David’s father had been a reluctant farmer.
‘His heart was never in it, not really. He should have been a carpenter. He was good with his hands. But that was like a lot of people around here. They’d have a small dairy herd, say thirty cows – enough to earn a living and have a drink in the pub. Everyone around here was a farmer when I was growing up. Then my friends started to do different things. One went off and joined the fishing boats in Weymouth.’
David was more enthusiastic about staying. He took over his father’s farm, and built up the dairy herd. That was in the days of the Milk Marketing Board, whose passing he, like many farmers, regretted.
‘The Milk Marketing Board was a monopoly. That’s why they had to get rid of it later. But it protected the farmers. They had the power to dictate prices to the big supermarkets. Soon as that went, the big five supermarkets could turn round and dictate prices to individual dairies.’
‘When the milk quota came in around ’84, it almost did for me. I had just started expanding the herd. Then I had to cut back again, so as not to go over the quota. I was taking milk up the back of the fields and dumping it so that I didn’t get fined for overproduction. That was heartbreaking.’
‘They have a much better system on the continent, where the quota system goes with the cow, not the land. But here we had the House of Lords controlling the bill as it went through Parliament. Vested interests. So of course they tied the quota to the land, to the owner. That meant that if they kicked a tenant farmer off, they could still keep his quota.’
David had now retired from running the farm, which had gone ‘back-in-hand’ to the estate. The yard at the back of the house was still busy with horses, chickens and ducks. His wife and daughters were active horsewomen. Just the week before, the family had suffered a bad burglary. Someone had broken into the tack room: ‘While we were watching telly, they jemmied the door off and wheelbarrowed away nine thousand quid’s worth of saddles and gear.’