by Hugh Thomson
He still had a business looking after hedges and fences for other farmers, so saw a great deal of the surrounding area and its changes.
‘This used to be a very sleepy farming part of the world. The land didn’t suit big farms. Too hilly. Not like those prairies up in East Anglia. But all the small tenant farmers are going or gone. The estate runs most of the old farms now as one big business.
‘A lot of people in the village have come from elsewhere to retire. Some of them have been here twenty years. They like to think of themselves as Abbotsbury people,’ he laughed kindly, ‘but they’re not. Not like us. We don’t have many second homes. Too far from London or the cities.
‘In some ways I suppose farming has lost its soul a bit. But I can still do a day’s hedging and be proud of it. And I’ve never wanted to live anywhere else. There are times when I come down from the back road on a summer’s evening, and I’ve got a spare five or ten minutes. Then I stop and look around. I get a lot of pleasure from that. As much pleasure as for an art connoisseur at an art gallery. There’s always something different to see, whether it’s the boats over towards Weymouth Bay or what’s changing in the hedgerows.
‘I wouldn’t have had my life any other way.’
*
The butcher’s in Abbotsbury sold me a pie for the day’s walking. I’m a great believer in the power of the pie; in the Lake District I used to try to reach the summit of peaks with a pie still hot in my pocket from the Keswick shop.
I was taken aback, however, when I asked the farmer’s wife running the shop which of the various pies she recommended.
‘Oh, I couldn’t say. I’m a vegetarian.’
How could a vegetarian run a butcher’s shop? It was not a question I liked to ask outright, although I suppose eunuchs were always good at running harems.
If the lost abbey of Abbotsbury had been a geographical and historical landmark of the most familiar sort, given that English schoolchildren were still force-fed ‘Tudors and Stuarts’ like geese for foie gras, then my next destination, at the top of the back road where David had his farming epiphanies, was exactly the kind of place I wanted to investigate. Set back inland from Abbotsbury, and a brisk walk up the coast path, was the Kingston Russell stone circle, a place so off the map that even Aubrey Burl didn’t list it in his authoritative gazetteer, Rings of Stone.
In a corner of a farmer’s field, the stones lay a little forlorn. There were seventeen of them, arranged in a careful, elliptical shape mirrored by other stone circles along the Atlantic coast. They had been there some 5,000 years.
The stones had all fallen over. English Heritage, who nominally administered the site, hadn’t put up so much as a board to inform visitors what they were looking at. While I was there, three couples passed at intervals, heading for the coast path. They would not have noticed the circle if I hadn’t pointed it out.
Yet the stones had a majesty, and much of that came from their position. The slight rise in the land meant that there was a clear sight line to the round hills of Beacon Knap and other similar knolls heading west along the coast. I was accustomed to the prehistoric love of mimicry, the circle reflecting the shape of the hills beyond.
Making a landscape yours, stamping ownership on the land by showing that you too can shape it, is a primal human instinct. The power of the sacred landscape, and in this case of the sea as well, can be refracted by a sense of placement, of concentration. There was a feeling at the stone circle of great deliberation – that this was precisely the right place for these stones.
Only a week or so before I had been in Peru, at one of my favourite sites: the White Rock, Chuquipalta, which lay in the heart of the Vilcabamba and was the title of my book on the Inca heartland. This huge granite boulder lies in a remote valley in the eastern Andes, a place likewise steeped in prehistory.
The rock had been sculpted by the Incas to give a similar concentration of place, of significance. Around it too were scattered other stones, although these were building blocks left by the Spaniards when they destroyed what they thought of as ‘an idolatrous temple’. Many prehistoric sites in Britain had suffered the same fate or neglect – Avebury being a prime example – and not just because of Church disapproval; there has always been a perception, still current today, that British history begins properly only when the Romans lit the touchpaper and that anything prior is dull or inconsequential.
It is as if Peruvian history began only when the Spaniards arrived, for they, like the Romans, were the first to write anything down, the Incas being as illiterate as Iron Age Britons.
To walk along the high escarpment facing the sea, sometimes called the Dorset Ridgeway, was a reminder of the sheer depth of British prehistory. The Kingston Russell stone circle was an emblem of Neolithic Britain and the late Stone Age, with its megaliths and barrows. Further along the Ridgeway, I passed the burial tumuli of the succeeding Bronze Age, which lasted from 2500 BC to 800 BC and was a very different culture, a rich one that we were barely beginning to understand. And ahead of me lay Maiden Castle, the largest Iron Age hill-fort in Europe; an Iron Age that was far more problematic than the arrival of a new technology might suggest, lasting from 800 BC to the arrival of the Romans.
When I travelled in Peru, or Mexico, or the Himalaya, what interested me most was their prehistoric past, their Inca, Aztec or Buddhist inheritance, both because it was so different from the present, but also so formative; moreover new technology was allowing archaeologists to reveal far more about that past.
I wanted to follow the same line of pursuit in England, although there was a significant difference. In those countries, they revered their prehistory; here we patronised our earliest history by homogenising it. The Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages were all very distinct cultures; yet we think of them, if we think of them at all, as if they were one long and bad Ken Russell movie – a bunch of savages in woad, with a few Druids chanting. It always reminded me of the famous New Yorker cover cartoon by Saul Steinberg of the view from Manhattan’s 9th Avenue, in which nearby streets get labelled but everything beyond the city boundaries and the Hudson is ludicrously foreshortened.
It could be said that the history of England – or the formation of England – should end in 1066, rather than beginning then. Everything since has been our present.
I admit to having at times shared this myopia. My problems with early English history were: that the subject was approached with mind-numbing academic boredom, made worse by long quotes in Anglo-Saxon and peer-language archaeology; or conversely that it was co-opted by New Age preachers who used it to sell me ley lines and a crystal through which to peer dimly at the Celtic twilight.
This journey, in good Buddhist spirit, would attempt the middle way. Recent revisionist work by archaeologists and historians showed that early English history was less straightforward and more interesting than popular preconception might suggest. I realised, though, that there was a little work to do to overcome the stumbling blocks that others might share with me.
My youngest son Leo had been appalled when I told him my plan. ‘Exploring England!’ he said. ‘That sounds incredibly dull. We live here anyway. Why can’t you do something like that writer friend of yours you made a film with, the one with the large stomach who lisps slightly – what’s his name?’
‘William Dalrymple.’
‘Yes, like him. Why don’t you do a book about somewhere mysterious, like India?’ He had started to speak louder, as he does when he feels an eleven-year-old sales pitch coming on. ‘You could call it – you could call it Secrets of India. Now that would really sell!’
*
This Dorset coast was Thomas Hardy country – so much so that some of the locals were heartily sick of the man – but while people remember him for his fatalism and the harshness of the countryside life he described, they forget his interest in the prehistoric. Tess of the d’Urbervilles has a memorable scene set at Stonehenge, and Hardy found and erected a sarsen stone at his home, Max Gate.
More remarkably still, he built the whole house within the late Neolithic enclosed circle of Flagstones.
All along the ridge from here to Maiden Castle, tumuli and barrows were scattered like confetti. They were easy to miss as the view out to sea was so fine: the thin strip of Chesil Beach extended out along the headland towards Weymouth, capturing the waters of the Fleet behind its defences; beyond rippled the Atlantic.
‘The number, size and types of monuments in the area around Dorchester is only paralleled by the rich complexes at Stonehenge and Avebury,’ had written Niall Sharples, the most recent investigator of Maiden Castle. There was a reason the ‘archaeological record’ was so good along the Dorset Ridge and had been preserved. Prehistoric man farmed here extensively; the light topsoil lying over the chalk was much easier to work than the heavy clay of the valleys below. But they over-farmed. The thin topsoil was depleted, meaning that some areas, particularly to the east of Dorset, are agricultural wastelands that have still not recovered, and others have reverted to pasture, preserving the barrows and monuments underneath: nothing disturbs the archaeological record more than a plough. There had even been a period in the early Bronze Age when the interior of Maiden Castle was cultivated, although likewise this soon exhausted the topsoil. Over-farming is not a modern invention.
The hill-fort of Maiden Castle is as monumental as an aircraft carrier. Several aircraft carriers, in fact. It lies to the south-west of Dorchester, running over two connecting hilltops. By the time I arrived, the afternoon sun was marking deep ripples of shadow along the banks, bringing out both the shape and texture of the ridges. The houses of Dorchester in the distance looked placid and dull by comparison, like the sheep in the intervening field.
Hardy described it well, as ‘an enormous many limbed organism of an antediluvian time, lying lifeless and covered with a thin green cloth, which hides its substance while revealing its contour’.
It is not the top of Maiden Castle that is remarkable – once you’re up there it feels just like an empty plateau, and a large one of some forty-seven acres – but the giant ramparts and ditches that flow in sinuous folds around the hill for almost exactly a mile.
‘Hill-fort’ is really a misnomer, although academics continue to use it as a convenient term. Archaeologists now think these enclosed places were used for a whole variety of purposes – as settlements, as granary stores, as displays of power, as places of spiritual significance. Local farming communities could have gathered there for a whole variety of reasons, of which defence was only one.
The over-elaborate ditches of Maiden Castle may have been as much for ostentation as military use. I was fascinated by Niall Sharples’ suggestion that limestone had been brought from some distance to face one of the entrances, rather than using more local stone; this was an idea I was familiar with from Peru, a way of deliberately harnessing the power of a different part of the landscape to your own. It is something to which archaeologists have only recently become attuned. When the great mass of man-made Silbury Hill was first excavated, no one thought to question where the infill had come from; it was just assumed to be local. Only now has it been shown that gravel and sarsens were fetched from some considerable distance for no functional reason – but almost certainly a symbolic one.
By the end of the Iron Age, Maiden Castle was the largest hill-fort in England, a reminder of a time when Dorset was the crucial point of entry from the Mediterranean and southern Europe. Wine, precious stones and other goods from as far as Egypt arrived all along the coast here, from Hengistbury Head to Seaton; they might have been exchanged for bracelets made from the polished black Kimmeridge shale, sourced locally at Purbeck, or whetstones and querns from Devon, or slaves.
The Icknield Way serviced the trade by providing a route inland and over to a principal access point from northern Europe, the Norfolk coast. London was bypassed and became important only with the arrival of the Romans; Dorset’s importance fell away and it turned into a relative backwater in the nation’s affairs – one of the few counties, as locals like either to complain or boast, without a motorway. Just a few years after the Roman invasion, even the local coinage was devalued.
It is easy to forget how excited archaeologists were in the 1920s and 1930s when they started to excavate these Iron Age hill-forts. There is a fine photograph of Sir Mortimer Wheeler from the time, wearing his characteristic plus fours and tilted trilby. A small gathering of society observers has formed behind him as he stands proprietorially on his excavated site; a woman wears a flapper hat, with her coat rakishly askew.
Sporadic work on Maiden Castle had been done before, but Wheeler’s excavation between 1934 and 1937 was the first large-scale investigation of the interior of a hill-fort. Such was his dashing appeal that he was able to fund the project with donations from the public, and he set off a veritable ‘iron rush’ among fellow archaeologists. By 1940, some eighty other hill-forts around the country had been excavated.
The tale that Wheeler told captured the popular imagination. His excavations uncovered the bodies of fourteen people who had died violently. There was a layer of charcoal, and signs of Roman occupation. Wheeler put all this together and suggested that Iron Age defenders of the fort had died when the Roman general Vespasian, who later became emperor, defeated the Durotriges tribe; the Romans then burned their fortress.
As archaeological stories go, it was perfect. Heroic British defenders, a historical name that could be attached (the Emperor Vespasian had star value), and a clear conclusion to the story: a burning.
It was also wrong. More recent excavations conducted by Niall Sharples in the 1980s, with the benefit of radiocarbon dating, show that the layer of ash was left from earlier production of iron on the site. Far from burning Maiden Castle, the Romans used it as their own fort for some time. Bodies may have been buried there, but did not necessarily die there.
However, for fifty years Wheeler’s theory was accepted as pioneering and bold archaeology. The novelist John Cowper Powys was living in Dorchester at the time of the excavation. He had already drawn on the interplay between landscape and the history of ideas for A Glastonbury Romance. Wheeler’s excavations unfolding at nearby Maiden Castle were a gift and Powys produced a novel of that name, wanting it to be ‘a rival to The Mayor of Casterbridge’.
No one would pretend that Maiden Castle is an easy read. Critics like George Steiner and Margaret Drabble (‘He is so far outside the canon that he defies the concept of a canon’) have championed Powys as one of the great lost figures of twentieth-century literature. Yet his monolithic Wessex novels – Weymouth Sands along with A Glastonbury Romance and Maiden Castle – now stand like desolate tors, ignored and unvisited.
Perhaps it is because the books are so rooted in place, as the titles suggest. Landscape for Powys had a brooding, psychic force that the modern reader can find oppressive. We like our history to be weightless and free; our towns connected by open roads. The postmodern novel delights in being fictive and elusive; the travel book as a glove-compartment guide that can move the reader at speed between counties, countries and continents. Our writers ‘divide their time’ between New York and Delhi; Hollywood and London; the South of France and Harvard – let alone cyberspace.
Not so Powys. Landscape is held over his characters like a hammer over an anvil. No one seems able to leave. Maiden Castle is a brooding presence in the novel it dominates. As the breathless blurb declared on its cover, ‘even as the characters in Dorchester struggle with the perplexities of love, desire, and faith, it is the looming fortress of Maiden Castle that exerts the otherworldly force that irrevocably determines the course of their lives.’ When Powys died, his ashes were scattered on Chesil Beach.
There was a brief vogue for his books in the 1970s, after his death, when Picador published the novels in paperback and he was part of the post-hippie ‘cult of Avalon’; although Powys would have hated the association and in his earlier and best-known novel, A Glastonbury Romance, lampooned any attemp
t to commodify the Grail legend.
I was then at school. An inspirational teacher, Christopher Dixon, persuaded me to read Powys and not just the Wessex novels. I tried Porius, a late work of such dense historical confusion that even his warmest admirers have hesitated to cut through its hedge of thorns. The book is set in Wales in AD 500 with Druids, giants, Merlin, a Pelagian monk and various characters who have forgotten to go back to Rome with the legionaries. Margaret Drabble commented that ‘the reader may wander for years in this parallel universe, entrapped and bewitched, and never reach its end’. Powys never reread or edited any of the novels. It shows.
But if the plots wander, some of the set pieces and detail within each novel are extraordinary. For Maiden Castle, Powys’s diaries show that he attended a lecture by Mortimer Wheeler in 1935, having toured the site earlier that same day. In the novel’s climactic scene, the hero, Dud No-Man, walks up to the castle with a character called Uryen (Powys had a fondness for baroque names), who, he discovers during the walk, is actually his father.
The shock of this revelation means that he looks at Maiden Castle – or rather, ‘this Titanic erection of the demented mould-warp man’ – with an intensity of response one could only find in a John Cowper Powys novel:
Dud stared in fascinated awe at the great Earth monument.
From this halfway distance it took all sorts of strange forms to his shameless mind. It took the shape of a huge ‘dropping’ of supermammoth dung.
It took the shape of an enormous seaweed-crusted shell, the shell of the fish called Kraken, whom some dim notion of monstrous mate-lust had drawn up from the primeval slime of its seabed.
It took the shape of that vast planetary Tortoise, upon whose curved back, sealed with the convoluted inscriptions of the nameless Tao, rested the pillar of creation.