The Village News

by Tom Fort

  The place is called Pitton. It is at the northern end of a crescent of similar sized settlements east of Salisbury, with Adderbury at its southern tip. It is not at all remarkable and never was: a village on the boundary between the downland and the great expanse of ancient woodland known as Clarendon Forest, owing its existence and character to both. People settled there in Anglo-Saxon times and for more than a thousand years went about the business of taking a living from the woods and fields. Within my lifetime that way of life came abruptly to an end, and now Pitton is something else entirely.

  But even fifty years ago the arrangement of the village had not changed that much. The old farmhouses – Parsonage Farm, Taylors Farm, Coldharbour Farm, Webbs Farm, Whitehill Farm and some others – were spread out along the Whiteway and the lanes off it with barns and yards and paddocks between. Then a resourceful local with ambitions to be a builder rather than a farmer got down to filling some of those gaps with new housing, and discreetly edging the village outwards. The new dwellings – for instance the bungalows along Beeches Close on the west side – were of their time, uniformly uninspiring in design and owing nothing to local building traditions or materials. They did nothing to enhance the charm of Pitton, nor did they make their developer a popular man, although he was doubtless consoled by the profits.

  However, the village did at least retain its nucleated form and the integrity of its setting in the landscape. To the north and east the downs – chalk with a thin covering of soil – rise and roll away. To the south and west extend the remnants of the great forest of Clarendon, much reduced but still considerable, also rising and falling with the undulating landscape. A couple of miles south-west of Pitton are the ruins of Clarendon Palace, which began as a mere royal hunting lodge but grew in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to be a very splendid complex of apartments and halls and kitchens and ancillary buildings, surrounded by terraced gardens; all of it left to crumble and be reclaimed by the forest as the tastes of kings and queens changed with the times.

  Pitton and its fields in the mid-1960s

  To the villagers of Pitton the forest was an opportunity for poaching when the backs of the gamekeepers were turned. But they also enjoyed legitimate, time-honoured rights in the less-favoured expanses of woodland. They took their faggots of firewood, and cut hazel rods to make their wattle fencing and hurdles. They took the spars for pegging the thatch roofs of their cottages, and larger poles to make the frames of the cob walls. They shaped the handles of their scythes and other tools and made gates and ladders and whatever else they needed.

  So some Pitton men worked in the woods, and their sons and grandsons after them. And others took their living from the open land, which for centuries meant sheep above anything else.

  Sheep meant wool and wool meant shearing. The downland shearers were a special breed. They worked in gangs, moving from farm to farm in customary sequence around an area in a twenty-mile radius from the village. They were away from home from Monday to Friday, sleeping in barns, up at first light to fit in four hours of clipping before breakfast. Often the barns were far from any farmhouse, so there was no access to a kitchen. Someone would light the fire and put the kettle on, and when it was singing they broke off from their work and squatted down in front of the heat and held out rashers of fat bacon on wooden skewers until the grease dropped and sizzled. They ate and drank strong sweet tea among the bleating sheep. Then they went back to the work through the day, until the flock was done, when they would wash from a barrel of water filled by the farmer. Then they would eat again: bread and cheese and sliced onions, maybe boiled eggs if they were offered, or spoonfuls of cocoa powder mixed with condensed milk. With the light now gone, they rolled over in the straw and slept.

  One of the Pitton shearers remembered the scene at breakfast thus: ‘The bearded men with ragged coats held by binder-twine at the waist, squatting close together on the dewy grass, the dancing flames casting glows and shadows on their gaunt faces . . . in the east the climbing sun is just beginning to shed a little warmth, and all the myriad dewdrops sparkle in a final blaze of glory before evaporating into oblivion. Freer than the villagers, freer than the Gypsies, we shearers were more to be compared with the downland curlews and larks as we feasted.’

  If the language sounds improbably, even suspiciously, flowery for a humble sheep-shearer, there is an explanation. The speaker, in old age, was Edwin Whitlock, a Pitton farmer born in 1874, one in a line of Whitlocks going back to 1655 – when the first page of the first parish register has one recorded – and beyond. The writer of the words was Edwin’s son, Ralph Whitlock, who was born to be a farmer like his father, but had a gift rare among those of that calling. Ralph Whitlock found that writing came as naturally to him as song to the curlews nesting in the meadows. While still in his teens he began contributing a column about country matters to the Western Gazette, and continued with it for more than fifty years. For many years he wrote a similar column for the Guardian, an arrangement ended only by his death in 1995. He was farming correspondent for The Field for the best part of thirty years, wrote and presented Cowleaze Farm, which ran weekly as part of Children’s Hour on the BBC’s Home Service, and produced an astonishing number of books – more than 100 of them – on every conceivable aspect of natural history and rural life, from water dowsing to the life cycle of the pig.

  Whitlock was a phenomenon of productivity. The problem with such a vast output of words is the separation of wheat from chaff. All his flood of journalism has gone the way of such work, into oblivion, and almost all of his books are out of print. It is not easy to envisage much of a demand for a reissue of his volumes about penguins or ducks or even eels. But the three books he wrote about Pitton and the Whitlock connection with it – A Family and a Village, The Lost Village and A Victorian Village – together constitute a uniquely informed and authentic picture of agricultural life in the last age before the revolution that changed the face of the countryside for good. It is focussed entirely on one small settlement, but that is its strength. Ralph Whitlock knew the place and the life of that place from the inside, and he made it his business to make a record of it, to give it its due after it was gone.

  His father and mother had Whitehill Farm, on a track called Coldharbour which led south-west from the village towards Clarendon Palace. Pitton had ten farms altogether and ten farming families – some related to others, none of them conspicuously better off than any other. They lived in houses with thick cob walls – there was no natural stone available in the vicinity – and thatched roofs. In addition to the farmhouses there were fifty or so cottages, giving the village a total population of around 300. Since 1850 Pitton had had a school; the agricultural labourers paid a penny a week for each child, the smallholders two pence, the better class of farmer three.

  The farms were of fifty to a hundred acres each, with two or three labourers to a farm. The other able-bodied villagers worked in the woods, or travelled elsewhere. The dairy fields were mostly along Bottom Way, north-west of the village. In the afternoon the herds of cows would be led along the flinty track to the milking parlours at a leisurely pace, allowing time for them to munch at the grass along the fringes. Sheep were grazed on the downs, and some of the land was suitable for wheat which was cut by gangs of mowers with scythes, after which the sheep and pigs would be turned out to graze the stubble.

  There had been two great events in Pitton’s recent history. The first was a fire in 1861 which gutted a number of houses and cottages on the north-west side of the village; they were replaced by new dwellings near the lime kilns under White Hill. The second, in 1912, was known simply as The Sale, when the Earl of Ilchester, the ancestral owner of Pitton and the neighbouring village of Farley, decided to get rid of both. As he lived in distant Dorset and had nothing to do with them, the people of Pitton did not miss him. But those who were able to scrape together the means were able to buy their farms, which at the time was – or seemed – an extraordinary opportunity for be
tterment. Almost overnight Pitton’s farmers became men of property.

  After the 1914–18 War the village acquired a reading room in the shape of an ex-Army wooden hut with a galvanised iron roof. There was a stage at one end for theatrical and musical performances, a piano, a dartboard, table tennis, a collection of books and old magazines. The village had its church, St Peter’s, which was next to the pond, but many Pittonians, including the Whitlocks, were Methodist. According to Ralph Whitlock, the books commonly found in people’s homes were the Bible, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a volume of Wesley’s Sermons and perhaps Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Unusually there was no pub and had never been one, until the Silver Plough opened its doors in the 1930s.

  The main diversion, which grew out of the field and forest work, was killing birds and animals. Whitlock recalled that when he and his father took on 230 acres of downland for sheep in 1934, they shot more than 2000 rabbits in the first year and paid the rent with them. As a boy he and his chums had delighted in shooting blackbirds with their air rifles and netting the hedges for sparrows. There was no stream through the village so no fishing, but otherwise every living creature that could be sold or eaten was fair game.

  Reviewing the Pitton of his boyhood in A Family and a Village, Ralph Whitlock listed the comforts and amenities they did without: no radio, no newspapers, no running water, no electricity, no car, no indoor lavatory, no bath, no telephone, no gas, no fridge, no doctor or nurse, no shop apart from the basic village store; and very little money. But they provided for themselves: chickens, eggs, pig meat, lamb and mutton, fruit and veg, home-baked bread. Everyone helped everyone else and labour was cheap. On Saturdays they went to shoot rabbits, on Sundays they went to church. They organised concerts, fetes, dances – everything dictated by and revolving around the farming calendar. ‘Would I go back to it?’ Whitlock asked himself. ‘That is hard to answer. But we were vastly content.’

  That, of course, is him speaking for himself, the view filtered through hindsight. His father, also looking back as an old man, identified his golden age as his carefree days as a sheep-shearer. Their perspectives on the past bring to mind Raymond Williams’ metaphor of the backward escalator, offering the memory the opportunity to jump off at its time of perfect contentment. Did Ralph Whitlock mean his ‘vast contentment’ to include the whole village? Or just himself and his carefree schoolfellows? His own father was fifty years of age when Ralph was ten, and must – given the economic climate of agriculture – have had a multitude of worries about how to make the farm pay. Would he have thought himself vastly content? Or would he have thought himself overworked and weighed down by burdens of anxiety?

  Certainly the 1930s brought acute difficulties for the Whitlocks in common with other small-scale farmers in Wiltshire. Sheep-farming could not be made to pay and was in headlong retreat. Edwin and Ralph Whitlock got rid of the flock, diversified into vegetables and flowers, sold butter and chickens. All the money Ralph earned from his writing went into the farm, but the overdraft grew. They went into dairy and expanded the acreage, but the struggle was unending. Whitlock recorded bleakly that when his father died in 1963 at the age of eighty-nine, he left nothing.

  By his own account and that of others, Ralph Whitlock was a far from successful farmer. But it was in his blood and he kept at it a long time, combining it with his prodigious output of words. In 1967 he was accused of bad husbandry on land rented to him by the county council; he contested the charge, but after a bitter court battle he lost the fields, which were divided up between neighbouring farms. A little later he finally gave up, and spent the next five years travelling on behalf of the Methodist Missionary Society in India, Africa and the West Indies, giving advice on farming methods. On his return to England Whitlock devoted himself wholly to writing, including the second and third volumes about Pitton.

  In The Lost Village – published in 1988 – he seems less sure than before about the balance between profit and loss: ‘Is the village better or worse than it used to be? Immeasurably better, from the standard of life . . . Each generation adapts to its environment and local atmosphere and develops its character accordingly. What can be said is that the village of 1919 to 1939 has been irretrievably lost in the mists creeping up from the horizon.’

  *

  At first glance the landscape and the place of the village in it do not seem so different. The fields that Edwin and Ralph Whitlock and their forbears and fellow Pitton farmers worked are still worked today. It’s mainly arable now – wheat, barley, rape – although there are some cattle and even a speckling of sheep on a few meadows. A great swathe of woodland still sweeps up and over the ridge where the ruins of Clarendon Palace are hidden. The woods to the east – Hound Wood and beyond that Bentley Wood – survive intact. On a hot June day, with the rise and fall of the downland pale green with ripening wheat and splashed with the brilliant yellow of rape against the richer green of the pastures and the deeper green of the woods, it would be quite easy to conclude that nothing had changed too drastically.

  Then look a little closer, and scratch at the surface. Blocks of conifer dominate Clarendon Forest. The fields are empty of men and machines. The conversion of the downland landscape from sheep-grazing to arable – made possible by the ever-more sophisticated application of herbicides, insecticides and chemical fertilisers – has brought about an extraordinary ecological degradation. Hardly more than half a century ago Ralph Whitlock and his aged father were noting the disappearance of wheatears, stonechats, stone curlews and corncrakes. Twenty years later the son was lamenting the vanishing of the wildflowers – tormentil, viper’s bugloss, eyebright, sheep’s bit scabious and the rest – and the precipitous decline in the abundance and variety of butterflies and moths: Adonis blues, fritillaries, skippers, green hairstreaks and burnet moths.

  Two generations ago a drive across Salisbury Plain at dusk or during the night in summertime would have left the margins of the car windscreen thick with the corpses of insects. The air was filled with them and the birds thrived on eating them. But today anyone who fishes for trout on the famous Wiltshire chalk streams – the Avon, the Wylye, the Nadder and others – will testify that the hatches of standard insect invertebrates are a shadow of what they once were. The silence along the riverbanks is matched by the silence of the downs, which were once alive with the songs of the birds.

  Pitton itself has clearly secured a new and viable function for itself. There are twice as many houses as there were in Whitlock’s youth, and if it is a tenth as picturesque as it was then, does that matter so much if it works as a place to live? The agricultural labourer has gone the same way as the stone curlew; Pitton is now populated by an overwhelmingly middle class and prosperous mix of retirees and families in which the breadwinner drives off to Salisbury or further afield to work.

  The school is apparently thriving, even if a significant majority of the pupils are from outside the village. The church is well supported. The number of weekend cottages is very small, so Pitton is not afflicted by the seasonal flux that devitalises so many prettier villages. As a result it is able to support a decent, basic village shop which – crucially – retains its Post Office counter. The pub, the Silver Plough, is distinctly gastro rather than village boozer, but none the worse for that. The old wood and iron reading room was replaced by a proper village hall in the 1970s, which is well used. The whole village turns out every July for the Pitton Carnival. Although there is no cricket or football club, there is a slightly eccentric enthusiasm for pétanque, and part of the little recreation field behind the village hall has been levelled for a ‘terrain’ on which league matches are played.

  On the face of it, Pitton is a quiet, decent, friendly place to live – if you can afford it. The absence of low-cost ‘social housing’ at one end of the scale, and of substantial gentrified mansions at the other, has given it a social cohesiveness which fosters a distinctly contemporary brand of community spirit – one based not on the need to work together
to survive but on a shared economic (and, one suspects, political) outlook. The flavour of this spirit is aptly displayed in the Parish Plan, which also covers the next village, Farley, and was produced in 2007.

  This document concentrates largely on a familiar cocktail of middle-class concerns: excessive road traffic and speeding, the risk of flooding, noxious weeds, street lighting, inappropriately timed cutting of hedges, litter, the maintenance of play areas and so forth. The sections on the economy and housing are revealing, bearing in mind that for almost all its long history Pitton was a working, working-class village. Current economic activity is minimal and the villagers clearly want it to stay that way; the Plan states that any new business should be small-scale, inconspicuous and silent, which rules out most options.

  On housing the Plan virtuously declares theoretical support for ‘planning applications that provide lower-priced housing for locals and families on appropriate sites whilst protecting open village spaces.’ A cursory look at the way Pitton is laid out reveals that – apart from the recreation field – there is only one sizeable area within its present form that has not been built on. Known as Coldharbour Field, this is an area roughly square in shape between the gardens along The Green and The Street, the two side roads off White Hill. Some years ago it was placed on a list of notional sites for housing across the Salisbury District Council area, thereby setting off a considerable village rumpus. The owners of the land found themselves under fierce attack spilling over into personal abuse, which ended only when the field was excluded as a potential housing site under the Salisbury District Plan.

  *

  Just one of the old farming families listed by Ralph Whitlock still has a presence in Pitton: two brothers whose father followed his father on the farm, but who themselves plumped for careers in teaching in preference to lives of toil in the fields. But the impulse is not that easily shaken off. The brother I met has held on to sixty acres on the western downslope of White Hill; having spent a small fortune fencing it off, he is farming some sheep there – not for the profit, he hastened to assure me, because there isn’t any profit, but because it’s in the blood.