by Hugh Thomson
They had considerable difficulty getting the elephants’ van up onto the Downs for the circus. Hughes mentions, with disapproval, an earlier fair at which a female smoking marathon was held; a gallon of gin was awarded to the woman who smoked the most tobacco in an hour.
The scourings continued, if not quite at regular seven-year intervals, in a more English way whenever the White Horse fell into such a state of decay that there was a public outcry. Although in a good condition in 1940, the horse had to be turfed over for concealment from the German bombers, as they used it as a landmark. Since then it has been cleaned and cared for by English Heritage and the National Trust.
Far more interesting than its preservation over the last few centuries is its preservation over 3,000 years. It stands as a remarkable emblem of continuity: a Bronze Age horse that was scoured later by Celts, the Romano-British and the Saxons, let alone Normans, Tudors and Stuarts.
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For a long time, until the arrival of Optical Stimulated Luminescence as an archaeological technique, it was thought the White Horse commemorated Alfred the Great’s defeat of the Vikings, an idea that was particularly strong in the nineteenth century. The Victorians liked to aggrandise Alfred wherever possible. He was the spitting image of their own Prince Albert: studious, energetic, pious and of Germanic origin. The statues they put up to Alfred in Wantage and Winchester show him as a solid, bearded Victorian sage, albeit one who has dressed up with a sword and shield for a pageant. Contemporary Anglo-Saxon coinage shows that Alfred was actually clean-shaven and gaunt, as you might expect from a man who suffered from constant pains in the abdomen.
Alfred’s place as the only king to be afforded the piquant soubriquet ‘the Great’ was assured by his own efforts. As Churchill said, ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.’ Alfred’s court cleric, Bishop Asser, assigned the duty of writing ‘the authorised biography’ while the king was still alive, kept to the brief. While just shy of hagiography, Alfred is a prodigy who aged four already outshines his older brothers; later, he battles with both Danes and illness courageously, and single-handedly founds the English navy and legal system. In vain have later historians pointed out that the foundations of a Saxon legal system were already well in place and that Sutton Hoo is but one reminder of how earlier Saxon kings had built many longboats, not least to arrive in England in the first place. Asser’s ‘official version’ has sunk deep into the national psyche.
That the White Horse was thought to commemorate a victory by Alfred is revealing, as is the way an Iron Age hill-fort near by has become known as ‘Alfred’s Castle’. He fought many of his key battles against the Vikings along the same ridge of Iron Age hill-forts that I had passed along my journey; just as many other key battles of the first millennium had also taken place along this line of the Berkshire and Wiltshire Downs: the Romano-British defeat of the Saxons at Mount Badon, either at Liddington or just further south at Baydon, and the Saxon defeat of the British below Barbury Castle.
The reason is simple and strategic. Once an invading army, be they Romans, Saxons, or Vikings, had landed in the South-East, at some stage they would try to push up the Thames and head west, passing through the narrow Goring Gap where the river cuts between the hills.
The strategy for any ‘home guard’ was to lure them away from the Thames and then attack from the commanding heights of the Berkshire Downs – from forts like Uffington, Liddington, Barbury, defensive positions all connected by the Icknield Way. The Downs were the fortified centre of southern England; take them and you commanded Wessex. Far from being just ‘Iron Age forts’, the hill-forts may have been established far earlier, in the Bronze Age, to resist the Celtic invaders who brought the Iron Age to Britain; then fortified yet further by those Celts to resist the Romans, whose descendants the Romano-British were likewise to resist the Saxons, who in turn fought their battles with the Vikings along the same heights. A lot of blood had been spilled along the Vale of the White Horse. On the slopes near by, the remains of hastily buried men have been found, some with Saxon, some with Romano-British artefacts.
If England had a heart to defend, it was this. No wonder that as late as the Second World War, a row of concrete pillboxes was built along the River Thames as it cuts through the Goring Gap. Some can still be seen today, mouldering at the bottom of river lawns and used as latrines by hikers along the Thames Path.
The Home Guard built the pillboxes to defend the envisaged Nazi advance out of London, in case the German 9th Army planned to take the same route – the Goering Gap? – as had all previous invaders if they wanted to dominate southern England after ‘Operation Sea Lion’. British military command envisaged a scenario where Nazi troop-boats rolled up the Thames, navigating locks with German efficiency; although surely the likelihood was that their tanks would have used the nearby roads?
At Dorchester-on-Thames, one abandoned Second World War pillbox sits directly at the end of the Dyke Hills, the twin long barrows that formed the impressive centre of an Iron Age and later Saxon settlement. Any Home Guard soldier manning the pillbox would have faced his attackers down this row of prehistoric barrows.
Perhaps some deep historical memory had been triggered, and the British High Command had contingency plans to retreat in the face of the German advance to the Berkshire Downs as a last line of defence; to look down from those hills that even a Panzer division couldn’t climb, with their military base set back towards the Marlborough Downs at the rear and with their camps on Salisbury Plain? Would the forts of Banbury, Liddington and Uffington have been used for one last time?
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I passed several gallops after leaving the White Horse and crossing the high country heading east towards the River Thames. It was curious how rarely anyone made the obvious point that the White Horse was galloping across some of the firmest going in the country for racecourse training. The map is speckled with places associated with the racing world: Lambourn Downs, East Ilsey and Lockinge.
We have always been a nation of riders. When Caesar arrived, he was impressed by the dexterity of our horsemen as they wheeled their chariots on the shore. That this was ‘the land of the horse’ can be seen by Bronze Age coins, which used the same galloping iconography as at Uffington.
Yet sometimes it can appear that we have forgotten our equine past: that riding has become a minority pursuit for those rich enough to pursue it, attended by a complicated rite of passage from gymkhana to showjumping, constricted in a formal dress of jodhpurs and black leather, with a compulsory riding hat.
As a boy, I never learned to ride in England. It didn’t seem like a world I wanted to join: riding schools where you had to parade around in tight circles and be shouted at by bossy, brisk women.
I only learned later, when I went to Latin America: first in Mexico at a cattle ranch; then leading expeditions into the Andes in Peru, where the muleteers usually had a few horses to go with the mules. This was riding of a more satisfying sort. Just get on a horse and go. No concerns about deportment, tack or wearing a hat, and where you could ride with a loose rein, western-style.
Only weeks before beginning this walk across England, I had been to a small village in the Andes called Huancacalle. It was a place I had visited many times over the previous thirty years. The locals used horses to carry goods over the mountain passes and down towards the Amazon, which lay beyond. They were natural and superb horsemen.
A fiesta was taking place for their patron saint and to celebrate, the locals had organised a race up the village street. This was horse racing at its most primal. The village street was unpaved and no wider than a country lane, running alongside houses and shops. The riders went bareback, careering down the street against each other and past the villagers, who whooped them on. Being an Andean festival, most of the revellers had already drunk a great deal; some of the riders also looked far from sober. The technique was to ride your opponent off the track, using your outstretched hands if necessary to impede his horse.
That spirit of pure horsemanship can still sometimes be found in England, but you have to look for it. The point-to-point held each Easter at Lockinge, not far from here on the Icknield Way, was a fine example. The jockeys might not be allowed to ride each other off the course – nor were they riding bareback – but there was a fine spirit of amateur competition, helped by the geography of the place: the spectators massed on a hill, with the racecourse spread out below them and rolling around the fields with a natural gait. In the Easter sunshine, with the jockeys in their colours, and the women in theirs, it was a splendid sight. I enjoyed it even more because it was the only place in England where I regularly won my bets.
I remembered Cobbett’s enthusiasm for horses, not just as a way of getting about the country for his Rural Rides, but because he considered that when it came to horses, ‘the English so far surpass all the rest of the world that there is no room for comparison’. The sound he most liked when travelling was the hammering of horses’ hooves on a flint road.
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Before descending from the Downs to the River Thames, I came to a place of almost mesmeric attraction. It is the site of one of the most momentous battles in British history. But what also intrigued me was that I must have passed or driven by it hundreds of times before without ever so much as giving the place a glance. The site lies just off a particularly bad junction, where four roads meet at the rise of a hill, and there is a blind dip before they do so.
Kingstanding Hill must be one of the most neglected battlegrounds in England, the setting for a historic victory over the Vikings: a victory that prefigured their eventual expulsion from Wessex. It was where Alfred the Great made his name and arguably proved his right to be king.
I dropped down onto it along the ancient Fair Mile track, wide enough for prehistoric man to have herded cattle down to the various fords over the Thames below. Kingstanding Hill made immediate sense as a defensive position. It guarded the flanks of the Downs, where they turned the corner, heading north from Reading and then west into Wessex.
So it was not surprising that King Ethelred and his younger brother Alfred, yet to become either ‘ Great’ or king, chose this position to mount a crucial defence of Wessex. Their Viking opponents were led by the savage Lothbrok brothers, sons of the legendary Ragnar Lothbrok. The brothers had come to avenge their father’s earlier death in England.
By 871, Viking raids had turned from being an occasional catastrophe – like the sack of Lindisfarne in 793 – to a sustained assault by the Danes. Their ‘Great Army’ had conquered the other large Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England, Mercia and Northumbria. They had also just conquered East Anglia – killing King Edmund of the East Angles in the process – and then marched on Reading, coming down the Icknield Way from Thetford in Suffolk.
Only Wessex was left. The Vikings took and held Reading, emerging from its fort like ‘savage wolves’, according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, to beat back Ethelred and Alfred, killing their most loyal henchman, ealdorman Æthelwulf, in the process.
The Saxon brothers had managed to regroup – but if they were not able to hold Kingstanding Hill, then the Vikings would swing around into Wessex and the stronghold of the Downs, using both the Thames and the undefended Icknield Way for access; worse still, they had reinforcements on the way.
One glance at the land was enough to show how cleverly the Saxons had chosen their defensive position. There were two parallel spurs running out from the Downs towards the Thames: Kingstanding Hill and Moulsford Common. These were divided by a deep valley, which now contained the inappropriately named Starveall Farm, a prosperous-looking place of paddocks and pheasant shooting; but there was no disguising the steepness of the gorge between the two opposing hills. The Saxons occupied Kingstanding Hill, inviting the Vikings to occupy the other.
Alfred was still in his early twenties, the youngest by some way of five brothers (he seems to have been a late afterthought, when his mother was in her forties); even given Saxon mortality rates, no one expected him to be king. But the other brothers died early, whether from battle wounds or the attrition of defending the now last Saxon kingdom left in England. Alfred, trained more to be a clerical scholar than a warrior, had to buckle on his shield.
His loyal biographer Asser stresses, with revealing overemphasis, that Alfred was the ‘heir apparent’ and even that he could have been king already, so popular was he; but his older brother King Ethelred had two sons, the rightful heirs – and Alfred had yet to show any military prowess.
The battle of Ashdown that now ensued was to make his name. In a curious incident, King Ethelred was late in coming to the battlefield because he insisted on going to mass; it is unclear from Asser’s account, never reliable, whether he regards this as piety or cowardice. Whatever the reason, Alfred had to lead the charge ‘like a wild boar’, according to Asser, drawing the flank of the Vikings where the hill dipped towards the river. Once the Norsemen had broken formation, Ethelred, arriving late on the scene, made a more frontal charge across the valley. Between the brothers, they scattered the Viking army. Asser reports with relish that two of the Norsemen kings and four earls were killed, along with ‘thousands’ of their men.
As I arrived, two red kites were searching ponderously over the field, the first I had seen on my journey. It was a scorching summer’s day, so clear that I could see a woman feeding the horses down in Starveall Farm below in the valley, and the sheep dotted on the far hillside.
But the battle of Ashdown was fought in the depths of winter, on 8 January 871. The Vikings liked to attack the Saxons around the feasts of Christmas – some years later, in 878, they would almost defeat and capture Alfred, now King Alfred, at Chippenham when they attacked on Twelfth Night – both because they could exploit the Christian festivities and were accustomed to fighting in the cold; England in winter must have been a spring dip for those used to the Baltic.
Therein lies much of the reason for Ethelred’s and Alfred’s success. To get from Reading to Kingstanding Hill would have taken the Vikings the best part of four hours’ hard marching. They would have arrived to find a rested and prepared English army. And the defeated Vikings then had to return to Reading in the dark of a short winter’s day, while harassed by their Saxon opponents.
So Ethelred and Alfred had successfully lured the Vikings too far from their base. Overconfident, the Vikings had taken the bait, perhaps scornful of Saxon fighting ability. If so, the worm turned.
The battle was not decisive – the Vikings regrouped with reinforcements from King Guthrum, who was to prove Alfred’s most long-lasting Viking opponent, and Alfred was to endure many vicissitudes before finally defeating Guthrum at Eddington in 878. But Ashdown was a turning point psychologically. It showed the Vikings – and the Saxons themselves – that the invaders could be defeated.
When Ethelred died not long afterwards, worn out by the ceaseless incursions of the Vikings, Alfred was a shoo-in for the succession, despite not being the natural ‘heir apparent’.
Of the images we have inherited of Alfred – the wise full-bearded sage of Victorian legend, the henpecked minder of the ‘cakes’ – I far preferred the image I now had of him at Ashdown: the headstrong young prince, charging over a frosted field towards the Viking host who had shown the temerity to invade Wessex and kill his most trusted ealdorman – of Alfred as a wild boar.
Of course there was nothing here now to show any of this: a little smoke moving across the valley bottom; the scavenger red kites hovering; and a few off-road bikes gunning up along the Ridgeway.
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Many will tell you that the Icknield Way (or Ridgeway as it is known locally for this section) descended towards the river at Goring on Thames. Walkers are funnelled in that direction for the ‘convenient amenities’. But that was not the route I wanted to take.
There were several reasons for this. Goring is a plush resort, popular in Edwardian boating days, with large hotels and substantial pubs. The default drink is gin and t
onic. Oscar Wilde rented a large house there for a season with Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas; it was Bosie’s demand that this be an expensive riverside house that pushed Oscar into a financial crisis and the spiral of disastrous events that led to his downfall. Both George Michael and Geri Halliwell have houses near by. The Indian restaurant does baked sea bass.
Instead I wanted to cross the Thames a few miles further north, from Cholsey to Little Stoke. There were good historical reasons for choosing this ford. Scholars agree that the Icknield Way diverges here into a number of crossings of the river; which one prehistoric man chose might have depended on how many cattle he needed to take across. The fields on either side of the ancient ford at Little Stoke are littered with Iron Age artefacts. It is rare not to see the metal detectors out at a weekend. And this is where Edward Thomas chose to cross for his book on the Icknield Way a century ago.
It was Edward Thomas’s book that had partly inspired me to do this journey in the first place. I had been reading it carefully as I travelled; with some frustration, as he took the journey in reverse, from Norfolk towards Dorset, and so I was having to read his account backwards; and with some surprise, as it was not quite the book I had imagined it might be.
One might expect The Icknield Way, which he published in 1913, to be Thomas at his most poetic, even though at this stage of his life he was still writing prose. He turned to poetry only shortly afterwards for his last few years, at Robert Frost’s suggestion, before being killed in the First World War on Easter Monday, 1917. And yes, there are wildflowers in the hedgerows and the mystic sense of the road as ‘a shining serpent in the wet’. But there is also an underlying darkness, a gloom, that leads him off in other directions.