by Hugh Thomson
Elizabethan England was a minority power, running before the heavy galleons of Spain and the Habsburg Empire in Europe. We are better as the world’s pirates than as its policemen. We are a liminal country, on the edge of things. Which is a great place to be.
I looked down at the wide sands of Holme, with their black pools, the low tide sucking across the beach. Seahenge was a reminder of the changing line of the coast and our country’s mutability; of the many secrets that still lay buried waiting to be discovered, which, if archaeological techniques continue to improve so exponentially, will surely happen; of how many other such wooden mortuary rings might have been scattered across Bronze Age England, and the miraculous survival of this one.
Above all it was a reminder of flux, of change. Nothing about England is solid: its people, its culture, its language, its coastline. All are constantly changing, and have been from our earliest prehistory.
Rather than trying to hold onto some outmoded notion of national identity, like a piece of the driftwood out in the ocean, we should just let go and have the waves take us where they will.
I looked out to sea. In the far distance there was the faintest white line of wind turbines on the distant horizon, like the white foam of waves breaking. A flock of plovers rose up to join the oystercatchers wheeling above me. A huge and empty sky was lit to the west by the descending sun.
The end of one journey inevitably meant that soon I would embark on a new one. I didn’t know where I would next be travelling. There was talk of taking a boat around Cape Horn and the lower coastline of South America.
Whatever happened, I felt I was ready to go abroad again; although I was not sure I would find anywhere quite as strange and foreign as England.
Timeline
All prehistoric dates are approximate and subject to constant revision. Those given for monuments refer to their construction, not their period of use.
Disclaimers and Acknowledgements
THIS IS EMPHATICALLY not a guidebook. If it intrigues people into making journeys of their own along the older paths of the country, then those making decisions over stiles and hills and bridleways should consult the many gazetteers that set out routes.
By far the best and most inspirational for the Icknield Way are Ancient Trackways of Wessex, by H W Timperley and Edith Brill (1965) and The Icknield Way by Anthony Bulfield (1972), although both are old enough to need supplementary maps; or the useful booklet publication by Ray Quinlan and the Cicerone Press, The Greater Ridgeway, which is small enough to fit in a pocket.
Julian Cope’s wonderful and eccentric The Modern Antiquarian (he uses his rock-star girlfriend in the pictures of megaliths to give scale) is too big to fit most coffee tables, let alone pockets, but details many prehistoric sites, as does Aubrey Burl’s Rings of Stone, illustrated by Edward Piper.
The word ‘Celt’ has occasionally been used. This is the archaeological equivalent of smoking in a restaurant and I should make the disclaimer that I am well aware that it is a loaded and tendentious term – but there are times when no other word will quite do and the reader can add their own judicious pinch of salt. The alternative is to say ‘Brythonic’, but that sounds as if you’re lisping.
Nor have I bothered to put Iron Age ‘hill-forts’ in inverted commas the whole time. Their use may well not have been exclusively or even partially military, but that is the common name we know them by, and archaeological pedants can add their own ironic quotation marks.
Barry Cunliffe has studied hill-forts extensively and produced many excellent publications on the Iron Age, just as Mike Pitts has on the Neolithic in Hengeworld and other works. I am also grateful to John Blair for his Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire and to John Peddie for Alfred: the Good Soldier.
Eminent writers like John Steinbeck and Peter Ackroyd have attempted modern versions of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, but nothing can match the cadence of the original text in Vinaver’s edition of the Winchester manuscript: Malory: Complete Works, edited by Eugène Vinaver (Oxford University Press).
There are fine biographies of Malory, William Cobbett, Kenneth Grahame and Richard Jefferies by Christina Hardyment, Richard Ingrams, Peter Green and Edward Thomas respectively, and an equally fine biography of Edward Thomas himself by Matthew Hollis. Despite many biographies of Orwell, the best source about his life remains his own writing: Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (four volumes, Secker & Warburg).
*
My thanks to those who offered hospitality or guidance along the way: Jeremy and Paula Lawford, Richard and Clare Staughton, Kevin and Rachel Billington, Tim Copestake, Chris and Jane Somerville, Peter and Eleanor Buxton, William and Aliya Heath, the Rainbow Circle, Roger and Maha Thomson, Andy and Heather Martin, Adrian Poole, Maisie Taylor, Matthew Champion, Laurie Gwen Shapiro, Nicola Keane, Benedict Taylor, Barry Isaacson, Bob Colenutt, Mick Conefrey and numerous pub landlords.
Simon Keynes for advice on the Anglo-Saxon period, Francis Pryor for similar advice on the Bronze Age, and Oliver Rackham on prehistoric woodland, with the usual disclaimer that nothing I have included is in any way their responsibility.
My agent Georgina Capel, my editor Trevor Dolby at Preface and all those at Random House who helped with the production of the book, along with Adam Burton for the illustrations and John Gilkes for the maps.
Irena and my children for sharing some of the walking and all of my life.
Appendix
‘Thunderer’ article for The Times on Stonehenge.
Stonehenge is vital to the nation. It should be spared the cuts
Stonehenge was given to the nation in 1918. So far, almost a century later, the nation has done a remarkably bad job at looking after it.
The situation at the site is currently, as its custodians English Heritage put it, ‘severely compromised’ and as others like leading archaeologist Mike Pitts would say, ‘an embarrassing, abominable, inexcusable mess’. For decades, plans have been put forward to improve the site and then postponed.
Two main roads not only thunder past but divide the circle of stones from the Avenue that should lead to it. The findings from Stonehenge are scattered piecemeal between some sixteen different museums and private holdings around the country. For the almost one million annual visitors drawn there, it can be a dispiriting experience, with the stones themselves fenced off and the current ‘visitor centre’ resembling a British Rail station built in the 1970s. Overall, it can be a bit like having a picnic in a car park.
Just last week the Government announced that it would no longer help finance the proposed new landscaping and visitor centre which Labour had announced last October.
On the face of it, this might seem perfectly reasonable. A saving of £10 million would result. We all know that cuts have to be made; the Government claims that Labour committed to projects that were never affordable.
What no one has pointed out is that they have left in place a whole raft of other projects that Labour committed to at the same time: £50 million towards the extension of Tate Modern, £22.5 million towards the creation of the British Museum’s World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre, and £33 million to secure the future of the British Library’s newspaper archive in new premises in Yorkshire.
While all these projects may be worthwhile, they are certainly more expensive and show a strange sense of priorities. Stonehenge is a quite unique prehistoric monument that has Unesco World Heritage status. We are supposed to be conserving it not just for the nation but the planet, and at present are failing dismally.
You don’t have to be a paid-up pagan or druid to appreciate that this circle of megalithic stones represent an extraordinary imaginative and creative effort of our prehistoric fathers that compares well with our own Millennium Dome of 5,000 years later – and how much better it would have been to divert some small change from that grandiose project to Salisbury Plain.
Surely it behoves us to spend what little money we have left in the public purse on preserving one of our greatest monumen
ts before embarking on far more expensive new projects? Or, as a Conservative Party obsessed with home-owners might put it, perhaps we should fix the roof before we build an extension?
Hugh Thomson
*
Letters to the Editor of The Times
Stonehenge
Sir, Hugh Thomson [yesterday in The Times] rightly questions the wisdom of the coalition Government’s decision to cut its support for improving the setting and building of a new visitor centre at Stonehenge, an icon of our national heritage and the centre-piece of the ‘cultural offer’ pitched to the International Olympics Committee for 2012. The casual saving of £10 million places Stonehenge under threat as a World Heritage Site of outstanding universal value.
The news is felt all the more painfully since this is now the third time the project has been cancelled and it is estimated that £45 million to £55 million has already been spent abortively in developing these proposals. More than £25 million has been promised from other sources including the Heritage Lottery Fund. Added to this, the visitor centre has already received planning permission. So to make a saving of £10 million at this advanced stage makes no sense, either financially or strategically. It would be cheaper to finish the job now, rather than cancel and have to start again.
We invite the Government to seek an effective solution to the problem.
Professor Maurice Howard
Professor Geoffrey Wainwright
Professor Colin Renfrew
Professor Timothy Darvill
From: John Pettifew Clark
To: Crowmarsh, Eustace
Subject: Hugh Thomson
Dear Eustace
Thank you for sending me the MS of Hugh Thomson’s The Green Road into the Trees.
I will post you the copy-edited manuscript by surface mail. I have followed normal UK publishing practice and Random House house style in my editing and instructions to the typesetter.
Meanwhile, in addition to the usual solecisms and stylistic quirks that I see all too often from writers who have not had a classical education, I did want to raise a few concerns.
You should be aware that along the way, on what is ostensibly a walking book across England, Thomson manages to alienate a great many of his potential readers.
To be specific, and listing them in order of occurrence, he insults or makes gratuitous reference to: vegetarians, William Dalrymple (who is the favourite writer of most aunts in England), Paul McCartney, the Prince of Wales, publicans with beards, model aeroplane groups, the custodians of Stonehenge, all three of the major political parties (comparing the Liberal Democrats at one point to Pagans), rentier farming landlords, the Church of England, the neo-pagan group ‘Dragon Order’, gastropubs, bird-watchers, the army on Salisbury Plain, aristocrats, archaeologists, minicab drivers, hunters of wood pigeons, the Vikings (who, we should remember, have living descendants), postmodern architects, Amazon and Katie Price (also known, I believe, as ‘Jordan’); along with numerous others.
It is possible that there is some overlap between these groups (vegetarians, for instance, may be Paul McCartney fans, given his association with Linda; many aunts who read William Dalrymple are likely to be members of the Church of England), but it still seems a high-risk marketing strategy, and risks offending many.
Moreover, just to ensure that he makes a clean sweep of the majority of the population, he takes a sideswipe at married Englishwomen – and their husbands as well.
Nor has he taken his own advice and travelled with an animal (a dog, or perhaps like Stevenson, a donkey), which would have ensured commercial success; the British public like to read about animals, and they are less liable to involve contentious issues of class or history.
I would suggest that in future it might be safer to commission him to write a book about a less populated part of the world, or at least one that has fewer special interest groups, or readers. I see from the author biography that he has travelled to Afghanistan. Why not send him there? Or even better, the Empty Quarter of Arabia. It worked for Thesiger.
Best wishes – and thank you again for that excellent lunch at the Garrick.
Yours
John
John Pettifew Clark
PS I will enclose a hard copy of this with the manuscript. Remember to take it out!
Index
The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.
Abbo of Fleury 237
Abbotsbury 17–22
Adams, Douglas 71
Adonis Blue butterfly and sexual habits 36
Æthelwulf 122
After London (Jefferies) 109
agriculture, intensive, beginnings of 263
Alcock, Leslie 42, 43
Alfred the Great 9, 49–51, 116–17, 121–4, 238
Alfred’s Castle 117
Alfred’s Tower 48, 49–51
Alice, Duchess of Suffolk 173–4, 175–6, 177
see also de la Pole family
Amesbury Archer 230
Amis, Martin 250
Ancient Trackways of Wessex (Timperley, Brill) 54
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, The 122, 237
Anglo-Saxons, see Saxons
Animal Farm (Orwell) 232
Archaeologists, See minicab drivers
Arthurian legend 42–8, 51, 54–6, 57, 242
Ashdown, battle of 9, 123–4, 238
see also Kingstanding Hill
Asser, Bishop 116, 123
Atkinson, Richard 66, 136
Aubrey, John 80
Auden, W H 126
Avebury 16, 24, 70, 84–96, 99–100
and ley lines 136
museum at 86
Rainbow Circle at 87–90, 94–6, 99–100
surviving stones at 86
Baker, Revd A 199–200
Baldock 228
Balquhain 188
Banbury Fair 36
Barbury 101–2, 111, 117
Barnes, Simon 218
Barrie, J M 143
barrows 26, 53, 68, 85, 112–13, 118, 152–3, 201, 242
Baskerville, Thomas 115
Battle of Maldon, The 155, 237, 238–9
Beacon Hill 206
Beacon Knap 23
Beale, Simon Russell 252
‘Beanfield, battle of the’ 98
Beatles 178
Bell, Rachel 187, 258
Bennett, Arnold 139
Benson 8
Berins Hill 8–9, 169
Berkshire Downs 9, 59, 117, 201
Betjeman, John 184
Betjeman, Penelope 170
Bevis: The Story of a Boy (Jefferies) 110, 139
Bible (King James) 226
Bingham, Hiram 245
Birinius 8, 9
Black Horse pub 182
Black Sabbath 257
Blair (née O’Shaughnessy), Eileen 232–3
Blair, Eric, see Orwell, George
Bledlow 199
Blenheim 156
bluebells 10, 11
‘Bluestonehenge’ 67
see also Stonehenge
Book of St Albans 158
Boswell, Henry, ‘King of the Gypsies’ 225–6
Boudica 242
Bowie, David 241
Bracewell, Michael 250
Brandt, George 184
Brill, Edith 54
British Association for Shooting and Conservation 219
Broadsheet (Cambridge Magazine) 252
Bronze Age:
axe from 277–8
barrows of, see barrows
boats from 269–73
coins of, horses represented on 114, 119
cross-dykes built during 35
delicacy of art and artefacts from 266
demographic explosion coincides with start of 263
field systems of 265
hill-forts of, see hill-forts
intensive
farming during 202
lesser visibility of 263
period of activity precipitated by 264
revolutionary nature of 267
tumuli of 24
woodland from 203
Buckland, Julie 193–5
Buckland, Nathan 193–5
Bulfield, Anthony 102
Bultmann, Rudolf 226, 228
Bunyan, John 213–14
Burl, Aubrey 23, 188
Bury St Edmunds 239
Bushnell, Geoffrey 268
Butterworth, Jez 191
Buxton, Peter 77–8
Buxton, Robin 147–9, 152
Byrhtnoth, Earl 154–5, 238–9
Cadbury Castle 42–3
Caesar, Julius 119, 206, 214, 215–16, 265
Cambridge Antiquarian Society 243
Cambridge University 247–56
Anthropological Faculty 255
English Faculty 251, 254–5
as home of intellectual freedom 256
library 251
Museum of Archaeology 242–3
Camlann, battle of 54
Caractacus 206
Casterley Camp 80
Castle Hill 57, 207
Cathy Come Home 97
Cathy Where Are You Now? 97
Catsbrain Hill 169
Celts, arrival of 265
Cerne Abbas 199
chalk crosses 198–200
chalk hill carvings (leucippotomy) 81–2, 113–16, 117, 119, 199, 204, 243
Champion, Matthew 283
Charles I 199
Charles II 193
Charles, Prince of Wales 33, 34–5
Chatwin, Bruce 169, 170, 172, 229
Chatwin, Elizabeth 169–72
Checkendon 169, 182
Chequers 206
Chequers Knap 201
Cherry, John 221–2, 223
Chesil Beach 17, 19–20, 26
Powys’s ashes scattered on 30
Chiltern woods 156
Chilterns 7, 161, 164, 169
beech forests on 201
as disputed frontier land 9
Thomas’s description of 191
Chinnor 197
Christianity 7, 160, 226–8
Christmas Common 182
Chuquipalta 23–4
Church of England 226–8