by Hugh Thomson
Edward Thomas’s and his friend Robert Frost’s fondness for walking could be seen to come out of the same kitbag. Many of Thomas’s poems are pieces of prose that have got up and walked out of the door.
That said, I had felt the urge to write, or even think, only occasionally when walking – otherwise I would have finished my own version of The Prelude from the Dorset coast to here. Most of the time the average walker goes through the usual cycle of thoughts: route-finding, the weather, clothing and wider issues of love, sex, money and the annoying tune you heard on the radio and now can’t quite get out of your head. The process is a bit like meditation. The initial five miles of each day’s walk just serve to clear the noise from your mind. Then random flashes of insight can start to emerge.
Kenneth Grahame, who paced many miles of these Oxfordshire trackways while composing The Wind in the Willows, wrote that
Nature’s particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking – a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree – is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe – certainly creative and suprasensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as if it were talking to you while you are talking back to it. Then everything gradually seems to join in, sun and the wind, the white road and the dusty hedges, the spirit of the season, whichever that may be, the friendly old earth that is pushing life forth of every sort under your feet or spellbound in a death-like winter trance, till you walk in the midst of a blessed company, immersed in a dream-talk far transcending any possible human conversation.
(Kenneth Grahame, ‘The Fellow that Goes Alone’, 1913)
Walking on your own can set up an interior monologue of peculiar power. However, it is also necessary at times to be jolted out of your own internal rhythms.
A few summers before, I had taken the children to Switzerland for a holiday. I wanted to show them some of the wilder, more open stretches that still lay in the less frequented valleys.
Early one morning we left the ramblers’ hostel on a hilltop and set off to a beautiful side valley that curled around to Mount Tounot, at only 10,000 feet a very achievable peak for young teenagers. We were alone in the valley. The air had that harsh silence you sometimes get in Switzerland, when the early sun has flash-dried the atmosphere, and the snow on the mountaintops seems to have sucked in all the moisture.
Owen put the Kaiser Chiefs playing ‘Ruby’ at full volume on his speakerphone. I felt like the museum guard who sees a visitor put a moustache on the Mona Lisa.
‘Owen! The whole point of coming here is to get some peace and quiet. They can probably hear that on the Matterhorn.’
‘Why not? There’s no one else around. And it’s boring walking in silence.’
‘Yeah Dad,’ the other two chorused.
We spent the next few minutes singing along to the chorus of ‘Ruby, Ruby, Ruby!’ I enjoyed it. Didn’t Marcel Duchamp put a moustache on the Mona Lisa anyway?
*
Just beyond Luton I came across some fields that had lungwort, or ‘poor man’s hosta’, growing freely on their edges. It was a common fancy in medieval times that the leaves were spotted from drops of the Virgin’s milk or tears, and the plant was known as ‘Jerusalem cowslip’. Further on, there were more exotic creatures like the burnt tip orchid, moon carrot and the startling Pasque flower in the nature reserves which here as elsewhere had shot up along the Chilterns.
This was the part of the world John Bunyan had walked in, the landscape of his Pilgrim’s Progress; he described the low hills I was walking across as ‘The Delectable Mountains’, a place where his pilgrims could rest: ‘a most pleasant Mountainous Country, beautified with Woods, Vineyards, Fruits of all sorts; Flowers also, with Springs and Fountains, very delectable to behold’. Bunyan lived in nearby Bedford, but travelled widely as a tinker, and later as a preacher. Like Malory, he wrote much of his book in jail, imprisoned in Bedford for his non-conformist views.
I had always liked Bunyan, and the simplicity and power of his parables. It was hard not to draw a comparison with England today, when most people were more concerned about the state of their haircuts than of their souls. The notion of grace, redemption, forbearance, patience – these were alien or at best hidden, much like the old medieval names of our familiar flowers in the hedgerows.
The virtues most trumpeted now were self-reliance and self-fulfilment, with much heavier stress on the importance of one’s immediate family than of the wider community or country.
Looking back from Warden Hill, I could see the lights of Luton. An orange EasyJet plane was flying in low from the south, while the neon flicker of Sainsbury’s caught my eye in the centre of the city. Below me, the banks of the prehistoric Drays Ditches gave way to a golf course, some of whose bunkers seemed to mimic and extend the earthworks.
Not for the first time, I was reminded of what a complicated country England was, of how many seams and layers it had.
I have been to empty countries, parts of Patagonia or the peninsula east of Murmansk, where you can travel in a helicopter for hours and not see a sign of human habitation. They have a wild beauty. But I prefer a landscape that has been given meaning by humans, like the Inca heartland of the Andes or the headwaters of the Ganges in the Himalaya, with their Hindu temples. The hills east of Luton, some of England’s least celebrated countryside, were clearly less dramatic than the Patagonian mountains or the Kola Peninsula. But the ribbon of the Icknield Way curved beautifully over the last outlying Chilterns, past medieval villages, nature reserves and one great surprise.
Ravensburgh Castle is one of the most important and significant of all the Iron Age hill-forts, the largest in eastern England. Moreover, it’s thought to be where the British mounted a heroic resistance to Caesar when he invaded.
Just to get an idea of the scale of the place: the perimeter wall is a kilometre long; it encloses eight hectares; when partially excavated in the 1960s, a thousand postholes were found, along with a rich haul of late Iron Age jewellery, like La Tène brooches.
You would have thought that it would be a national monument, lovingly tended and signposted from afar. But Ravensburgh, far from being treasured, is not even accessible to the public, let alone cared for. It lies on private land, just to the north of the Icknield Way, covered in scrubby woodland and used as a pheasant shoot.
Unless you’re prepared to trespass. Which of course I was. One of my prime problems with the open access ‘right to roam’ legislation (which does not apply to woodland) was that it lessened the opportunity for a good trespass. But this was private woodland with a vengeance, with enough ‘keep out’ signs to make an American rancher proud.
It seemed prudent to go after nightfall. Luckily there was a full moon. Striking across from the fields, I entered the woods cautiously. To me, pheasants meant one thing and it was not food: they meant gamekeeper. I could imagine one coming up behind me with a lot of attitude and a ‘You’re not from around here, are you?’ If not a baseball bat.
The wood was neglected: the white trunks of uprooted oaks that had toppled over gleamed in the moonlight, their undersides coated in the local chalk. In the past, when some of these trees had fallen, Iron Age artefacts had been found entangled in the roots.
I advanced with caution around the fort, at one point almost voiding myself when I stepped close to a pheasant in the dark and it shot up. The site was enormous. The only virtue of its complete neglect was that it was easier in the thicket of moonlit trees and shrubs to conjure up the ghosts of the Iron Age tribe who had lived here than if it had all been cleared.
James Dyer, the archaeologist who led the partial excavations in the 1960s and 1970s, made the plausible suggestion, from the scale of the fortifications and the artefacts found, that it was the base from which the Catuvellauni led the British resistance against Julius Caesar’s invasion. If so, it was well chosen. Even covered by trees and at night, I could see how precipitous the slope was on t
he southern side, and how the fort dominated the approaches to the north and west.
Julius Caesar, writing in his customary third person, left a description that fitted well:
The oppidum of Casivellaunus, which was protected by woods and marshes, was not far off, and a considerable number of men and of cattle had assembled in it. The Britons apply the name of oppidum to any woodland spot, difficult of access and fortified with a rampart and trench, to which they are in the habit of resorting in order to escape a hostile raid. Caesar marched to the spot indicated with his legions, and found the place had a great natural strength and well fortified: nevertheless he proceeded to assault it on two sides. The enemy stood their ground a short time, but could not sustain the onset of our infantry and fled precipitately from another part of the oppidum.
(Caesar, Commentari de Bello Gallico)
Earlier that day, like Caesar, I had sized up the location and points of access while there was still some light, and also the points of departure in case I too had to ‘flee precipitately’. The fort’s position commanded the valley. James Dyer had commented on ‘the great natural strength of the hill-fort which cannot be matched by any other in the Chilterns’. If cleared and properly maintained – let alone excavated, as Dyer could only scratch the wooded surface – it would be a fine landmark for nearby Hexton and this part of Hertfordshire between Luton and Hitchin, which was often ignored or forgotten.
After my evening venture into the wood, I felt I deserved a drink and a meal at the pub in Hexton, not least because it was called the Raven, so had some loose anthropological connection with Ravensburgh Castle.
However, there was a potential fly in my beer. As a conscientious girlfriend, Irena had informed me that walking used up only some 100 calories an hour and that if I kept eating nothing but pies as I crossed England, I would soon look like William Dalrymple. So I had promised to have more salads.
This went against the grain. A salad, as P G Wodehouse once remarked, rarely feeds the inner man. Particularly one who’s been walking all day, or trespassing in woods.
I approached the bar with trepidation. The barmaid had a mass of frizzy blonde hair and was comfortably upholstered. She looked sympathetic and I need not have worried. Prominent on the menu was a ‘black pudding and bacon salad’. Honour could be satisfied.
It was not a time to beat about the bush. I asked the barmaid – there was no way of putting this delicately – if the salad was ‘substantial’.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Very.’
*
As I climbed up towards Deacon Hill the next day, the path entered a delightful woodland glade. This was hardly unusual on my walk; much of the charm of the Icknield track I was following lay in how it entered and left woods right across England; in the retreat and advance of shadow and dappled light playing across beechmast before opening out again to the track across the hills.
But sometimes you arrive in a wood at precisely the right moment. The sunlight on the fields outside. Old man’s beard climbing headlong among the outlying trees, searching for the sun from its shady roots. And for me, one of the greatest pleasures England can provide: the soft murmur of wood pigeons.
I’ve been in love with that brooding, liquid call ever since I first heard it as a boy in Suffolk where we spent summer holidays in a caravan in a wood. I would wake to hear them playing call and response from the trees above. It is too variable a sound and call to pin down that precisely – though I like Simon Barnes’s attempt at a Welsh wood pigeon, ‘Steal twoooo cows, Taffy.’ It is too conversational to be a song, yet too melodic to be conversational. There are chromatic shifts within it that no other bird can quite manage. An oboe in the orchestra.
It came as a wonderful shock to hear it again in Peru, many years after Suffolk, when we were approaching a 12,000-foot pass that led to the Inca ruins of Choquequirao, which then still lay covered in jungle. After climbing up through an area of grassland, we arrived at a hangar of wood that guarded the pass. Wood pigeons shot out, at first startled, and then settled to give their plump, contented fluting as we made our way through the little-visited trees. One of our muleteers told me that they were called ‘cucula’ locally, a wonderfully onomatopoeic word.
They were much less common there than in England; here they are seldom valued or celebrated. If wood pigeons were as rare as nightingales, or such occasional visitors, we would make pilgrimages to hear them as well. Because they are a sedentary, year-round population (unlike in Europe, where they migrate) and because we have so many of them – an estimated 20 million, easily one per household – we take them for granted.
They are also a magnificent size, the largest of all adult pigeons, weighing some half a kilogram of contented plumpness. There is that coat of grey, with just a hint of pink and mauve at the breast, like a bridegroom in his tails and waistcoat. They have a wingspan of over two feet and can fly at fifty miles an hour, with some complicated acrobatics along the way.
It may come as a shock to many city dwellers, who assume that country shooting is mainly of pheasants, to learn how many wood pigeons are added to the bag. The British Association for Shooting and Conservation (patron: the Duke of Edinburgh) estimates that a third of all wood pigeons born each year are shot – a staggering amount. That same ability to fly at speed, twisting and turning, apparently makes them a challenge for those who like to call themselves ‘sportsmen’, although in my book sport involves a little more energy and ethics than lifting a shotgun to your shoulder and blasting at a wood pigeon. The BASC recommends that a gun which is ‘12-bore, double barrelled (28” barrels are good), choked improved and ½ firing 1 ounce (28 grams) of No 6 shot will drop pigeons stone dead at between 25–35 yards all day long’.
Why do I get annoyed at the idea of wood pigeons being shot when I’m quite happy for pheasants to grace both my pot and my table, and know perfectly well how they got there? Pheasants are bred to be shot. Wood pigeons aren’t. I realise the distinction is illogical. But I still could no more kill the owner of this magnificent liquid cry than shoot a soprano on stage at Covent Garden.
Today there is another reason why I have stopped in the trees for a while to listen to the pigeons glissade above me. Because even more than associating that sound with Suffolk when I was a boy, or Peru when a young man, it’s the sound I have been waking up to in my barn at Little Stoke for the last few years, and at my family house near by for nigh on thirty.
It’s a reminder of having left the place for good. ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura’; ‘In the middle of my life’s journey I found myself in a dark forest.’
*
I had already found that most country districts had a certain unanimity when it came to ‘who to go to’ for local knowledge on farming, in the same way as it was always obvious who the village shaman was in the Amazon. Asking people around this part of rural Hertfordshire, I was quickly directed to the same person, Peter Roberts, a farmer who had over forty years of experience before recently retiring.
He had now moved out of the farmhouse to make way for his son, and lived in a cottage by the old watercress beds near Whitwell. A thoughtful, white-haired man, he was convalescing from an illness when I saw him.
‘These cottages were all lived in by labourers before. Now it’s just me who’s had anything to do with farming.
‘It’s tricky soil. We’re on the edge of the Chilterns in Hertfordshire. Chalk, London clay, flint, we get it all. There’s a farmer I know near here has a sixty-acre field on a hill. He’s always said that you could plough the bottom of the hill with one horse, but you would need two for the middle and by the time you got to the top, it would be pure clay and three horses.’
The main change he had seen had been the loss of livestock. ‘There used to be eight dairy herds in this parish alone. Not any more. Not a single one. All gone over to cereals. No sheep either, apart from a few “hobby sheep”. Cereals pay better, and oilseed rape. Even then, we’re
not really in the right part of the country. Time was when it helped being close to London. Not now. Better to be close to Felixstowe or another port. Most of the wheat goes for export so you want to keep transport costs down.’
‘Also it’s a heck of a job, milking. Work first thing in the morning and last thing at night. There just isn’t enough money to keep people interested.
‘On the farm estate I was managing, when I started we had 250 cows and 13 people working. Now there are no cows and just two or three people working, with a fair amount of casual labour.’
Peter was worried about his son, who had taken over the family farm. Not as to whether he could manage – he had diversified into light industrial units and a livery service for two dozen horses – but because ‘farming now is a pretty lonely business. At least they’ve got mobiles so they can keep in touch more than we could when I started.’ As if on cue, his son rings up. I had a vision of farmers all over the country trundling along in their tractors and using a hands-free.
‘It’s been a godsend, mobiles. Really helped farmers. Used to be that the only time they talked with anybody else other than their sheep was once a week in the pub, when they all got hammered together.’
Over the years Peter had become so concerned about the pressure on farmers, and their solitude, that he worked with Farming in Crisis to help those who had reached the end of their tether.
As in so many parts of the country, pheasant shooting was a big part of the local economy. ‘By the time you pay for the gamekeepers, there’s not a lot of profit, but it keeps them in work and gives value to the woodland cover. I’m always surprised, though, that the anti-hunting lobby don’t do more against shooting. They run around complaining about a few foxes when there are hundreds of thousands of birds being blasted out of the sky all over the country.’
I went over to see another farmer close by, John Cherry, who still worked a large 2,500-acre farm based around his old family home. John was just a few years older than me and had been farming for thirty years – or, as he put it, had spent ‘thirty years trying to batter the soil into submission’. An amiable, lanky man, with a mop of dishevelled hair, he hadn’t let the various trials and tribulations of farming spoil his sense of humour. If anything, he had begun to take a Zen approach.