by Hugh Thomson
*
There is a kestrel over the skyline, hovering just a fraction above the horizon so that its wings are parallel with it. And then we rise higher up the hill and it is lost against the grasses.
I’m climbing Wittenham Clumps with my old friend Robin Buxton. As we get higher, I begin to feel like a kestrel myself. The view is breathtaking. From these two hills beside the Thames, one can see back towards the Uffington White Horse in one direction and on up the Icknield Way towards the ridge line of the Chilterns the other. Directly below, the Thames winds from Wallingford around the old West Saxon centre of Dorchester, with its barrows and abbey.
No surprise that one of the twin hills that make up Wittenham Clumps should have been another Iron Age hill-fort, the latest in the line that I’ve been tracing from the west, now meeting its natural barrier at the Thames. In the eighteenth century the hilltops were wooded over, for picturesque effect: an effect that was still admired in the early twentieth century, when Paul Nash returned here frequently for a series of landscape portraits. The two prominent hills above the river are a landmark for miles, along with Didcot Power Station. From some angles in Oxfordshire, the sites seem to mimic each other; the cooling towers of Didcot are likewise grouped into two sectors. Looking down from the Clumps, the power station seems so close you could roll a pebble down the slopes and hit the concrete walls.
The last time Robin and I climbed anything together it was Mount Kilimanjaro, some 20,000 feet rather than 500. Robin came with me on a filming expedition to investigate the endemic flora – the giant senecio and lobelia – isolated on the ‘island in the sky’ with its shrinking glaciers. We were given permission by the authorities to spend two punishing nights on the summit; normally you have to descend immediately and cannot put up a camp.
Under the best of circumstances, this would have been a challenge. But for Robin it was additionally hard. As a small child in the 1950s, he was brought up within sight of Kilimanjaro, on the Kenyan plains. The family was hit by a local polio epidemic. His father died and Robin was left polio-disabled. He walks with a stick. To climb the Western Breach, the hardest route up the mountain, was a challenge he had set himself because the wildlife of Kilimanjaro had always fascinated him and, like many with a disability, he was determined not to let it impede him.
With us, we had Kenton Cool as a guide, one of the finest mountaineers of his generation, and a mixed British and Tanzanian crew. Ironically, given that part of our research was to show how the glaciers had diminished, our ascent up the Western Breach was badly hampered by snow. This meant that Robin was unable to make the last 3,000 feet to the very top, to his considerable sadness; he asked his younger Tanzanian colleague, Michael Ngatoluwa, to take the measurements he wanted.
I had been impressed then by Robin’s courage and determination and by the way he could share his knowledge of natural history with the ease of someone who had a total command of his subject. Now he was equally quick to explain the delicate ecosystem of Wittenham Clumps; for many years he had helped run the Trust that administered the nature reserve.
They had been trying to reseed the meadows below the Clumps with wildflowers for some time, without success. As anyone who’s ever tried to do the same on their lawn knows, ‘You can’t buy a meadow in a seedbag,’ as Robin put it. Grass is much more resilient than most wildflowers, particularly if the soil is rich, so they won’t take.
The breakthrough on Robin’s meadows came with the introduction of yellow rattle in the wildflower mix, which weakened the grass to allow other wildflowers through – typically long-headed daisies, but also goat’s beard and Loddon lilies, which are like snowdrops on steroids. Now there were fifty hectares of wildflower meadow around the Clumps, and Hereford beef cattle to graze them.
Earth Trust, the nature conservancy charity established by Robin’s family, took over the Clumps in 1984. Since then, they had used no fertiliser, planted 10,000 oaks and converted an old barn as an ecology centre for the community. This was true stewardship of the land. An intriguing division was used by the Ministry of Agriculture to allocate set-aside grants: there were ‘entry-level stewards’, farmers who might maintain hedgerows and do a certain amount of ecological management; and there were ‘high-level stewards’, like Robin’s Earth Trust, who dedicated themselves to such land management for the ecology rather than profit.
I had heard plenty of anecdotal evidence in local pubs, from farmworkers talking out of turn and into their drinks, that farmers had welcomed the ‘entry-level stewardship’, pocketed the subsidy, and then planted out meadows and maintained copses in a way that uniquely benefited – pheasants. ‘Funny that,’ one farmworker added with a smile. ‘Nothing to do with renting out their land for shooting. Of course.’ (Pause for reflective sip of Brakspeer.) ‘The thing about estate managers is that the bastards will always get the right angle on every scheme going. And pot the red in the pocket.’
The view we had enjoyed from Mount Kilimanjaro, at almost 20,000 feet, was both extraordinary and celebrated: nearby Mount Meru, the plains stretching away, the glaciers in the foreground. The view from Wittenham Clumps, at less than 1,000 feet, could hardly compare. But scale is everything. I remember George Band, the youngest member of the 1953 Everest team, telling me that when they left Snowdonia after practising for the Himalaya, some were sorry to leave. The British Lake District is a pocket handkerchief compared to the Patagonian lakes, yet I would rather be walking down from Helvellyn than Bariloche.
One thing Kilimanjaro has in common with Wittenham Clumps – a sense of origin. It is difficult to be anywhere near the plains of East Africa or the Rift Valley without reflecting on how Homo sapiens fanned out from there across Africa, and north to the Middle East and beyond.
To look down at the placid plain around Dorchester is to see where the West Saxons first established themselves, before spreading further west to create the heartland for what later became England. You can see the appeal for the Anglo-Saxons: the river close by, the fertile soil and the sense of previous occupation. Just as later at Avebury, they were drawn to sites that had a sense of history, perhaps to mark their own ownership of the land, like many colonising tribes. One can see it from their place names, many of which incorporate references to ancient monuments.
Looking south towards Wallingford, I remembered a charming comment by the Irish naturalist and bohemian Robert Gibbings when he came here, that many woodpeckers nested in the trees, but none faced due south: ‘like many other birds, the woodpeckers do not care for the sun in their eyes when nesting.’
Robert Gibbings’ Sweet Thames Run Softly is a forgotten classic. In 1939, the fifty-year-old Gibbings decided to build a small punt and float lazily down the Thames, looking at the wildlife through a glass-bottomed box that he held over the side. He examined dragonflies, moths and the long-held belief that pike will always attack other fish ‘broadside-on’, seizing them by the flank. He slept on his boat by covering it with a tarpaulin.
The opening attacks the reader broadside-on:
Having travelled more than 50,000 miles over salt water, and having visited the five continents of the world, it occurred to me that it might be fun to explore the River Thames, in whose valley I had lived for 15 years. It seemed to me that it would be a neat and compact little journey within clearly defined limits. It would be restful, too, for I plan to float downstream at the river’s own pace, and to look for nothing but what I might see as I moved along, consigning all guidebooks to the devil, and offering the same hospitality to insistent and obtuse advisers.
The book is an escapist retreat from the approaching war. It is also funny, with an Irish eye for a story in a bar and a pretty girl, of whom Gibbings seems to meet a disproportionate amount, many of them swimming nymph-like in the Thames: ‘I wonder why it is that girls in the water seem so much more attractive than they do on the land … It may be some strange harking back to the primitive. Have not our ancestors all emerged from the sea?’
&nbs
p; At one point he lifts his tarpaulin cover in a dawn shower to see the naked form of the local bargirl slipping along the bank and into the river when the weather has kept everyone else away, ‘a naiad shining all over with the rain’; he solicitously invites her aboard for an innocent cup of tea.
Despite years of canoeing up and down the same stretch of river, I’ve yet to meet a naked bargirl, but many of the other delights that Gibbings describes are still there: the way a kingfisher blends in so finely with the willows that only the keenest eye can pick them out – some children in particular have the knack; the long ducking of the moorhen below the water so that their reappearance seems both improbable and a surprise; the shimmer of huge, dark-blue dragonflies, a reminder of their Pleistocene ancestor whose wingspan measured twenty-seven inches.
I have at least seen far more of the great crested grebe than he ever did, as they have now colonised the upper Thames. He failed to find a single one despite searching them out for their exotic courtship dance: the birds approach each other, raise their necks and exotic crested ruffs until they are face to face and then shake their heads violently from side to side, before settling into a slow motion: ‘the beak and head of each bird were swung slowly from side to side as if the bird was searching the horizon for it knew not what.’
After leaving Wittenham Clumps, Robin and I paddle downriver towards Dorchester in his old Canadian canoe. I feel for an odd moment as if I’m on the Amazon, not the Thames, perhaps because that was the last place I floated along a river with a naturalist – but also because the river from here to Oxford feels remarkably empty for an area not so far from London. The stretch beside Dorchester is covered with thick trees on both banks. I have biked here with my boys and then swum out from under the overhanging trees into the sun-filled centre channel, a wonderful moment like swimming out of a tunnel. As evening falls on us, there are hardly any boats or traffic, and not a house to be seen. Instead, the only movement is from the clouds of turquoise dragonflies that hang close to Robin and me on the water.
There are two remarkable long barrows we can see over the riverbank known as the Dyke Hills, constructed in Neolithic times and later used as burial grounds by the Saxons (and then for that pillbox in the Second World War). The tombs of a fifth-century man and woman have been excavated from the Dyke Hills; their grave goods can be seen at the Ashmolean in Oxford. Saxon remains from such an early period are rare and have prompted much academic debate on the intermingling of Romano-British and Saxon culture after the Romans left. There are belts, buckles, bracelets and an early cruciform brooch. However, what caught my attention was an object that has prompted no academic interest whatsoever – a key that was buried with the woman. To take anything to the grave implies a secret, but a key is a double secret.
The key is also a provocation. What is it that had been locked? A door, a casket, a chest?
One of the saddest exhibits I have seen in recent years was a collection of first-century keys that Jewish refugees from the Roman occupation of Galilee had taken with them to the caves of the holy land, keys of the houses to which they would never return; just as Palestinian refugees still hold the keys to their old houses in Israel today.
This key is chunky, the equivalent of a mortise lock. It is the key to something that mattered; something that, like so much else about the early Anglo-Saxons, we do not know.
To visit Dorchester is to remember both how little we know about our past and how badly we have treated its monuments. But the very neglect has a potency. Jerome K Jerome broke off from his usual charming round of light riverside anecdotes when he passed: ‘Dorchester is very old, and it was very strong and great once. Now it sits aside from the stirring world, and nods and dreams.’ (Three Men in a Boat.)
*
There’s something mesmeric about the way a bird of prey alights on your arm. It’s to do with both the tremendous speed of approach and the stalling when it lands, an almost filmic effect of fast and slow motion. It is also, for the first couple of times, alarming. You are being jumped on by the straining talons of a predator.
To understand the Anglo-Saxons I needed to understand their obsessions. Studying village settlement patterns is all very well, but how much would you know of twenty-first-century man from council tax registers? Better to spend five minutes playing an Xbox.
The Anglo-Saxons were obsessed with hawking. As one academic put it, ‘In modern sociological terms falconry was an almost perfect example of conspicuous consumption: it was expensive, time-consuming, and useless.’ No wonder that by the eleventh century and the end of the Anglo-Saxon occupation, it had become an essential part of any noble’s education.
At the battle of Maldon in 991, great play is made of the fact that a follower of the Anglo-Saxon leader Earl Byrhtnoth lets his beloved hawk fly from his hand to the wood before facing the Viking hordes:
Loosed he from his hands his darling to fly,
His hawk to the wood, and to the battle strode.
From that one could tell that the chieftain would never Weaken in the warfare.
(The Battle of Maldon, translated by Wilfrid Berridge)
Earl Byrhtnoth has already asked his warriors to send their horses far off from the battle; the equivalent of Cortes’s later actions in Mexico when he broke up the boats in which the conquistadores had landed. But a horse is easily reclaimed. Not so a hawk. To free your hawk was a symbol of total commitment to both your cause and most likely death, the fate that awaited Earl Byrhtnoth himself.
As a romantic and desperate gesture, it could not have come at a more significant battle. For Maldon signalled the beginning of the end for the Anglo-Saxons. By 991, there had been no Viking raids for well-nigh a century, since the time of Alfred the Great. The young Ethelred the Unready was on the throne. Earl Byrhtnoth was his most senior noble, a tall man in his sixties who commanded respect. So when a large Viking fleet appeared off the coast of Suffolk in the summer of that year, and sacked Ipswich, he was the man sent to confront them when they reached Essex, his own dominions. He stood on the shoreline and told the arrogant Viking messenger who was demanding payment that ‘This was Ethelred’s land.’ Or, to use a phrase that was only just becoming current, ‘Englalond’.
The Battle of Maldon, the poem that commemorates the battle – or what is left of it, as the manuscript was partially burned – is as moving an English war poem as any written before the First World War, and an elegy for the turning of tides and of a civilisation. In the poem, ravens circle overhead waiting for the carrion corpses to present themselves. The young chieftain will never reclaim his hawk.
The raids that followed on for the half-century after Maldon created the turmoil that led to the Norman invasion of 1066. At Maldon, the Anglo-Saxon ‘shield-wall’ collapsed against the Vikings, just as it was later to collapse at the battle of Hastings to those Viking cousins, the Normans.
There were Anglo-Saxon hunting lodges all over Oxfordshire: a large one at Blenheim, just north of Oxford; and another in the Chiltern woods at the old settlement of Swyncombe. And there were still some active falconers.
I track down one called David Hughes, who lives just a mile or so from my barn. David is about forty-seven (‘I think,’ he says engagingly) and a countryman of the most reassuring sort. He wears a Viyella shirt, green breeches and yellow shooting socks. During the course of the day he lets slip a beguiling and unexpected past: his first job came about because he saw a vacancy for ‘Assistant Lion Trainer’ in Yorkshire, where he grew up. He spent eight years as a lion-tamer for Gandey’s Circus, where he met his wife Tracy, who was looking after the horses. Some years later, they moved south to rural Oxfordshire. David turned to falconry. His experience with lions and other animals (the job at the circus had expanded to include both bears and elephants) was an ideal preparation for creatures that if anything are even less biddable.
And there is a considerable element of showmanship of the most enjoyable sort to what David does now. To teach me, he uses dea
d chicks as bait, so that the birds fly between us and I can be eyeballed up close by each raptor. Having a hunter’s eye staring at you out of a feral ball of fluff just a foot away from your own vulnerable face is unnerving: it feels like a game of dare where you are not allowed to blink.
During a brief training session before we set off, he reminds me to keep my gauntleted forearm held high and pointing upwards, as the bird will land on the highest available part of any ‘perch’, in this case your body. If your arm is down, this will be your exposed shoulder, and painful.
A great deal of the charm of the day I spend with David lies in his conversation. Keeping a bird to the right ‘hunting weight’ is an obsession of his, and for good reason: the bird needs to be kept healthy but with enough appetite to return to be fed. Otherwise no amount of imprinting or bonding with its social peer group will stop it from just taking off and away, ‘and that can be thousands of pounds flying over the horizon’. While the hawks (and David’s ferrets) are tagged with radio receivers for retrieval, a lot of time can be spent trying to get them back, particularly as they are no respecter of natural boundaries like rivers or fences. There is an old, unwritten convention that a falconer can enter someone else’s land to retrieve a bird, although not any prey it might have illegally killed.
Over his cup of tea and morning cigarillo, David talks about the changes he has seen in the countryside. He thinks it’s too easy to make the usual assumptions about how ‘it’s all commuters now and the heart has gone out of the villages’. That needs to be qualified by ‘some villages’, as I’ve noticed myself.
‘You get places where the church is now open only one day a month, the pub has to be run by agency management, if it’s open at all, and despite a perfectly good primary in the village, the locals send their children to private schools outside.’