by Hugh Thomson
I looked back at the sun myself, as it was fast setting behind the distant towers of Didcot Power Station. The towers emerging out of the orange haze looked like the lost towers of Avalon. Either that or a cooling station had gone critical.
There was very little time left to get up a tent. I headed on down the slope behind the Cross and then even further, to get away from the golf course (I didn’t quite have the nerve to bed down in a bunker); but as I came over the brow of Pulpit Hill, I found what I had been looking for – Chequers Knap, a perfectly formed prehistoric barrow, just off to the side of a hollow-way lane. By now even the dog walkers had gone home, so I could set up the small tent I had first used thirty years ago in the Andes and was still serviceable: a Vango Expedition A-frame that was about as old-fashioned as it was possible to get, with the virtues of simplicity and strength. I had seen too many fancy igloo or bender tents get blown off hills to trust them.
Did the stars look brighter if seen when sleeping on a prehistoric barrow? Unlikely but true.
*
There’s nothing quite like waking up under a tree to make you appreciate them. Along the ridge line of the Chilterns ahead of me ran the still surprisingly deep forests of beech.
The forests of England. Not the phrase you’re supposed to use, as strictly speaking ‘forest’ applies only to a royal hunting ground. But the one we all do. Before consulting the archaeological research, my preconception – widely shared, I suspect – was that England was largely wooded until the arrival of the Romans. Prehistoric Britons might have made a few inroads into the densely wooded valleys, but preferred the wide-open expanses of Salisbury Plain or other high, treeless places like Dartmoor or the Berkshire Downs; the Romans cleared some lowland areas for their settlements and built connecting roads; with the arrival and gradual domination of the Anglo-Saxons during the Dark Ages, more woodland was slowly lost and a pattern of villages emerged, ready for the Domesday book to record after the Norman conquest.
This has now been shown to be wholly inaccurate. Much of England had been cleared as early as 1000 BC, some two millennia beforehand. The Bronze Age saw intensive farming on a scale that we are only just beginning to appreciate. As one academic expert put it (Oliver Rackham in The History of the Countryside):
It can no longer be maintained, as used to be supposed even twenty years ago, that Roman Britain was a frontier province, with boundless wild woods surrounding occasional precarious clearings on the best land. On the contrary, even in supposedly backward counties such as Essex, villa abutted on villa for mile after mile, and most of the gaps were filled by small towns and the lands of British farmsteads.
Rackham describes the immense clearance that had been undertaken during the Bronze Age and makes the bold claim that ‘to convert millions of acres of wildwood into farmland was unquestionably the greatest achievement of any of our ancestors’. He goes on to remind us how difficult it was to clear the woodland, as most British species are difficult to kill: they will not burn and they grow again after felling. Moreover, in his dry phrase, ‘a log of more than ten inches in diameter is almost fireproof and is a most uncooperative object’. The one exception was pine, which burns well and perhaps as a consequence disappeared almost completely from southern Britain, the presumption being that prehistoric man could easily burn the trees where they stood: the image of pine trees burning like beacons across the countryside is a strong one. It took the Forestry Commission in the twentieth century to reintroduce large amounts of conifers, an unwelcome decision.
Some Bronze Age woodland was naturally kept and managed for what it could provide: timber for building materials, smaller wood and shrubs for fuel, acorns for pigs (which were often turned loose in the woods in autumn), hazel and other trees suitable for coppicing. But this was small scale. When the Domesday book recorded a relatively low level of English woodland – a much lower proportion than modern France, say, enjoys today – this was not a recent development, but the way it had been for millennia.
The idea that England 3,000 years ago was already as suburban as the outskirts of Basildon has not been absorbed into the popular consciousness. Nor will it ever be readily, for we suffer from what might be called Sherwood Syndrome: the need to believe that much of England – that most of England – was both wild and wooded until modern history ‘began’ in 1066, or indeed stayed so until much later; and that these ancient forests were the repository of ‘a spirit of England’, the Green Man, that could be summoned at times when we needed to be reminded of our national identity; where Robin Hoods of all subsequent generations could escape, where the Druids gathered their mistletoe from the trees, where the oak that built our battleships came from.
It is a further irony that the most heavily wooded county of England is now Surrey, thought of as the most suburban. One farmer there told me that it was the county that had the most trees and the most divorces.
There is another popular assumption that follows on from the first – that the Icknield Way I had taken so far across the high ground of Dorset, of Salisbury Plain and of the Wiltshire and Berkshire Downs had kept high because this was naturally treeless land, while many of the valleys the ancient trackway looked down onto would have been wooded and more difficult to cross. Not so. The ridgeway route kept high because it was dry all year round, a good winter road. For many sections of my walk, there had also been a ‘Lower Icknield Way’ that wound around the hills below in the valley, but would have been practical for livestock only in dry summers.
The landscape that Bronze Age travellers surveyed in 1000 BC, around the time the White Horse of Uffington was carved, would of course have been different: no Swindon, Didcot Power Station or M4 motorway for a start; nor, from where I now looked out, Aylesbury in the Vale that bears its name. But a cultivated system of fields and pastureland would already have been there, albeit in a different formation.
What the work of archaeologists over the last few decades does suggest is that we possessed the land very early – that England was shaped long before the arrival of the Romans, whose occupation can be seen as a brief, anomalous interlude that interrupted the continuity of British history.
The idea of England as a wild and wooded land until the arrival of the Romans is a powerful one. But like so many of the most persistent myths that survive about our country, it is as illusory as the lake from which the Lady’s hand emerges to grasp the sword.
There is another surprise that I find peculiarly exciting. There may have been much less forest than we might imagine, but what did exist was of a spectacular quality. The predominant tree in southern England was not any of the ones we might expect – alder, birch, hornbeam, let alone those national favourites, the oak, or the beech that now lines the Chilterns. It was the linden, sometimes called the small-leaved lime or Tilia cordata, not to be confused with the large, common lime trees that are used in cities for their ability to absorb pollution and have such sticky leaves, the Tilia vulgaris.
The linden was the elven tree of the Bronze Age. The lovely fresh green, heart-shaped leaves created handsome rounded domes in summer. In July, it sent forth fragrant ivory-white flowers. So many insects cluster around these flowers that today, if you stand under one, it often sounds as if the whole tree is humming. Easily coppiced, the resulting offshoots could be harvested, either for burning or for carving the fine-grained wood into pots and bowls. It had a fibrous layer of under-bark called ‘bast’, which could be made into rope. Even the leaves of the linden were used for animal fodder, the small round fruits eaten (tasting, apparently, like cocoa) and the blossom used to make a mildly sedative tea: a tree for Titania and all her troupe.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, these wonderful trees declined as more and more invasive species of elm, birch and alder arrived – let alone the beech trees that came much later. There are only isolated pockets of small-leaved limes now in our most ancient woodlands. Many people would find them hard to recognise. They are better known in Germany, whose p
oets from medieval times have celebrated the experience of being ‘Unter der Linden’, ‘Under the Linden Trees’, where lovers can crush the fragrant white flowers beneath them: Goethe’s Werther is buried under one, Hermann Hesse wrote of them and Berlin’s famous Unter den Linden avenue of limes is a national symbol.
A movement to replant them in England is slowly beginning, as we reassess our attitudes to woodland and move towards more broadleaf and traditional species.
But for prehistoric man travelling along the Icknield Way, as the green road entered the woods it would have become even greener: the colour of sunlight filtering through the translucent leaves of the lime trees would have been of a transcendental intensity.
*
As it was a Saturday, my children could take time off from school to join me, despite their manifold reservations about the potential enjoyment of walking a prehistoric route. They had refused to meet me at Stonehenge earlier: ‘What is the point of a pile of stones?’ as Daisy had put it.
But Cymbeline’s Castle on the slopes of Beacon Hill can claim to be the finest small hill walk in England – and it is very small, only some 800 feet above the plain. Climbing up from the old church below at Ellesborough, it does everything right. It remains steadily in view, isolated, as the summit to climb. It is steep enough to think about zigzagging up the cattle tracks. There is a fine view from the top. And as the name suggests, it is saturated in either history or myth, depending on your persuasion.
Cymbeline – or Cunobelinus – reigned as king of the Catuvellauni from AD 9 to shortly before the Roman invasion of AD 43. The Catuvellauni were the dominant tribe in late Iron Age politics. They had led the earlier resistance to Julius Caesar, who struggled to contain them.
But during the interregnum between Caesar’s invasion of 54 BC and Claudius’ more successful and permanent occupation a century later, the Catuvellauni enjoyed a quasi-Roman lifestyle without having to subject themselves to Roman political control. Roman goods like wine, olive oil and tableware were imported, in substantial quantities. Roman-style coinage was issued.
Cymbeline’s long reign created considerable strength. Likewise, his death in about AD 40 caused the destabilisation that allowed Claudius to invade. The subjection of the neighbouring Atrebates, continued after Cymbeline’s death by his son Caractacus, was the spark, or at least the pretext, for the Roman invasion; the Atrebatan rulers fled to Rome and asked for the Emperor Claudius’ protection.
If people know about Cymbeline at all, it is because of Shakespeare’s play (although Hawkwind also celebrated him in a song with the terrible rhyming couplet, ‘And it’s high time /Cymbeline’). Critics suggest that Shakespeare made up the events in Cymbeline from a few scraps in old chronicles like Holinshed, much as he did with King Lear. But one historical aspect Shakespeare captures well is the indeterminate nature of the British court, which was not yet controlled by Rome; the characters are lured alternately by the splendours of the Roman court and the wild places of Britain: ‘Let a Roman and a British Ensign wave / friendly together.’ It is a curious play, a hodgepodge of different genres and cultures that cannot quite make up its mind, like the Players in Hamlet, whether it is tragedy, comedy, history or pastoral: a play about confusion and confused national identity.
As you walk up to it, Cymbeline’s Castle stands proud in every sense from the Chilterns, jutting out from the ridge ‘just like a Forwards Operation Base, an FOB’, observed my older son Owen, the most military-minded of the children. ‘If England was invaded, this is the sort of hill that SAS men would hide up on and launch a guerrilla operation.’
It was a perfect position for the Iron Age hill-fort that stood there and which Cunobelinus is said to have inherited. ‘Said’, because the odd archaeologist has waved a tar-brush of doubt over the association with Cymbeline, despite the local village also being called Kimble, the antiquity of the name, the discovery of many coins near by and the way in which the hill dominates the Catuvellauni territory.
At the rear of Castle Hill was an ugly black observation camera on a metal pole. The hill backed onto Chequers, the prime minister’s weekend getaway, a brown slab of a country house that enjoys only a slightly less commanding position than Cymbeline’s Castle, and is set off to one side in the woods. In recent years, walkers have been dissuaded from making use of open access legislation, if it means getting close to Chequers; not in my backyard, or estate in this case. There were signs up trying to dissuade walkers from roaming too freely over the hillside.
Just along from Cymbeline’s Castle, and within sight of it, stood Coombe Hill, a Celtic word that had somehow breasted the Anglo-Saxon invasion, just as the hill stands proud along the escarpment. At 850 feet, it is one of the highest points, which goes to show how low the Chilterns are to start with.
A perfect viewpoint had been ruined by a monument Mussolini would have been proud of: a tower grotesquely out of proportion, that reared above the hill with an ice-cream cone pinnacle covered in gilt.
My children, not usually concerned with architectural appreciation, were appalled.
‘It looks so naff. Like one of those Disney theme-park things to show you’re in the ancient world.’
The tower had been erected to commemorate the dead of the Boer War, who deserved a better tribute. This was a politician’s speech of a monument, smooth-faced, inane and glib. Even its stability was suspect; there had been worries in recent years that it might fall down.
The children cheered up at the thought that we were so close to Chequers, indeed had a sniper’s view of its back entrances.
‘So do you think David Cameron might come up here with his family? Could I ask him for his autograph? Would he give me money?’
I explained that modern prime ministers no longer have purses from which they dispensed coins to any lucky subjects they encountered. And that no, I would not be wanting his autograph, nor that of any other recent prime ministers.
We were not far from the Getty estate where the red kites were originally reintroduced back in the 1980s, and there were some circling over Chequers below us, so that we could see their red upper wings, usually hidden. As they swooped over the hills with their unnatural, keening cry, I couldn’t help thinking of what an unfair but apt metaphor it was: the scavengers released here over the last thirty years, the free-market vultures unleashed by an all-party consensus.
We retreated away from the vainglorious monument and back into the woods where we found a bowl of beech trees where someone had set up a perfect swing on a very high rope, so that first Leo and then all of us could swing out high above the trees before circling back.
The best things in life were still free.
*
I’m writing this tucked into the nook of a convenient lone tree on the leeward side of Ivinghoe Beacon. Convenient because the Beacon protrudes north from this central block of the Chilterns, and so the wind funnels around the hill with ferocity as it sweeps across from the plains of Cambridgeshire that lie ahead. But in the protected hollow of my lone pine below the hilltop, with the setting sun falling on me from the west, even the ugly Coombe Hill monument behind me now looks atmospheric.
My children have taken the train back to Bristol, catching it with perhaps thirty seconds to spare, so I’m alone again.
I’ve come some 250 miles; 150 lie ahead. Edward Thomas passed drovers here taking their plump Dorset and Devon sheep on to Dunstable and East Anglia. I’m impressed again by the speed with which Thomas covered the ground: around thirty miles a day. But then poets have always been good walkers.
Much has been written describing the epic walks Coleridge and Wordsworth undertook together in the Lake District; little on why they did so. The assumption is that it was to experience the sublimity of nature at first hand – but they did not need to spend days and nights restlessly journeying for that. The poets escaped to the hills for a simpler truth: however arduous the walk, it was always easier than the alternative – having to write.
&nb
sp; The physical labour of writing is much underestimated. When the walks ran out, and there was no escape from the desk, these fit young men in their twenties, who thought nothing of covering 100 miles in a couple of days, were laid prostrate: Wordsworth got heartburn from writing too much, together with ‘an uneasiness at my stomach and side’; Coleridge, who found it even harder, needed recourse to laudanum.
And oft, when in my heart was heard
thy timely mandate, I deferred
the task, in smoother walks to stray.
(William Wordsworth, ‘Ode to Duty’)
Writing has always been physically exhausting – or writing at that level. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge envied, yet also deplored, the facility with which Southey could produce his epics. They were right to do so. Who reads Southey now?
The Lake Poets were not alone. Keats and John Clare drove themselves in punishing walks: Keats covered hundreds of miles in Scotland, as well as his daily commute from London up to Hampstead; the vision of John Clare tramping endlessly across the fields of Northamptonshire in search of work or sanity is one of the saddest in all English literature, but also one of the most productive.
Writing for the sternest critic – yourself – produces a bilious mix of dissatisfaction and insecurity that eats away at the stoutest constitutions. No wonder that Wordsworth got heartburn. Or that Montaigne advised potential writers to become physically fit before attempting any work of value.
There is another reason for poets in particular to walk. By setting up an unwavering rhythm in their stride, they can allow any words in their head to deviate from that rhythm and then return to it. The pleasure and power of any metre depends both on adherence to a pattern but also on breaking it. A strictly metrical poem would soon become mechanical and dull. By walking, the Romantics had a constant metronome against which to compose and to rebel. The poetic feet in a line are not called that for nothing.