by Tom Cox
Long before that mast could help you send a text to your cousin to tell them Sunday’s barbecue had been put back an hour or Snapchat a stranger a photo of your naked body, I came here, only semi-knowing where I was in any historical sense, and listened to some live music in some fields four miles up the road. I’d just turned nineteen and it was my first Glastonbury Festival. When it was all over, my girlfriend and I walked through the gate and along a small country lane, passing hundreds of queuing cars, down a hill, until – at the bottom of the steep part of the hill, just where the ground began to flatten out and a smattering of cottages appeared – we reached the car containing my dad, who kindly drove us home to Nottinghamshire. Remembering this, standing on the Tor, I found two aspects of it remarkable. First: how illustrative it was of the faith people had in the times and vague meeting points they’d arranged, in the days before mobile phones. Second: the fact that the point where we found my dad’s car in the long queue was quite possibly directly outside the house where I now lived. I looked out from the island across the cow pastures and rhines and sham footpaths I’d negotiated to get to the Tor, back towards the house, and noticed smoke billowing from its roof. The smoke reached for the sky, then danced north on the breeze, diminished slightly by the drappy rain, in the direction of Worthy Farm, where the festival’s organiser, Michael Eavis, would already be making plans for next summer’s event, for which tickets would cost almost precisely five times what my girlfriend and I paid for ours in 1994, and which, unlike 1994’s festival, would not feature a succession of drug dealers crawling through holes in the fence then waking you up to try to sell you Benzedrine.
It didn’t look like the fire brigade had arrived yet but no doubt they would soon. Someone in the village would have raised the alarm. Maybe Eavis would assist in getting the blaze extinguished. In 1963, when the fourteenth-century tithe barn at Pilton, three miles away, was struck by lightning and caught fire, Eavis – then just twenty-seven and not yet in possession of his world-famous music festival – was one of the first to raise the alarm. But it was presumptuous to rely solely on Eavis. He was far busier now, I expected, than he had been then. I’d heard he liked to turn up in pubs around here and, uninvited, sing ‘My Way’, and it was getting on for seven. There was not much I could do. I didn’t yet have a number for my next-door neighbours. I could call my landlady but she was in Spain. Less than a month earlier, in a pub in Bristol, somebody had stolen my rucksack, which contained my wallet, my journal, my phone, a Lush bath bar and my car keys. The following morning, using some cash that a friend had kindly loaned me, I’d caught an early train back to Devon. I had felt anxious, since I could not remember for sure if my spare car keys were at home or in a jacket in my locked car parked near the pub in Bristol, but also very freed, having been materially reduced to nothing more than the clothes on my back, a return train ticket and £31.30. It was as if many of the complexities of my life had floated away, and I was realising my essential core being for the first time, which was just a transient collection of experiences and opinions and hopes, blundering along to the next destin-ation, maybe picking up a few more along the way.
You could say there were similarities in my current predicament. Certainly, I liked my books, my records, my plants and my furniture, but undertaking the next house move without them would be much easier. My main worry was my two cats, but I knew them well and felt confident that they would have fled well clear of the house as soon as the fire began and, when the smoke had gone, would return – although I would surely find them cowering in a field long before that anyway. From here I could just pick out, across the dry sea in the gathering gloom, the field I suspected they were most likely to retreat to, but it looked different to the way I remembered. The wood abutting it was gone and I couldn’t see the farm on the slope where the hill begins to get steep, in the direction of Washing Stones Gully. Had it burned down too? Precisely how much damage were I and my fire responsible for? I swung my vision gradually thirty degrees anticlockwise where, a mile north, I re-orientated myself and found the spot containing my actual house, which appeared to be smoke-free. I set off down the slope, reburdened by the clutter of material life, but genuinely relieved about the cats, who would been ill-suited to a life solely on the road.
All day, HGVs bump and bang along the road below the Tor, staining dark cottages darker with their exhaust fumes. Signs in the cottage windows offer cartomancy readings and beg for the road to be diverted. PLEASE SLOW DOWN. SACRED SITES AHEAD, asked a notice tied to the leg of a pavement mannequin, as I reached the foot of the Tor. She looked quite smart, with her flower headband, blue anorak, fluorescent tabard, long hippie skirt and wellies, but in a couple of weeks’ time, in a period of high winds, I would drive past and notice her upside-down legs sticking out from a hedge; an incident from which she would partially recover before vanishing forever six months later during Storm Gareth. I decided to pop into her local, The Rifleman’s Arms. A lady with a busy sleeve of tattoos was telling a friend about another friend who had fallen out with her because the friend claimed she ‘didn’t text regularly enough’. The lady with the busy sleeve of tattoos said she had done nothing wrong apart from not wanting to be on her phone all day. ‘Exactly!’ I thought, already over-involved. My intention was to have a quick drink, without getting carried away and becoming what the Somerset drinkers of the nineteenth-century called ‘overtookt’, then call a taxi. I’ve only taken the taxi option once during a walk, and, even when circumstances made it the only option, it felt like the lamest kind of chickening out. This, however, wasn’t to be a sequel: of the six local taxi companies I called, only one came close to agreeing to pick me up. ‘I’m having my tea but I could do it after, maybe,’ said the driver. I asked him how long his tea would take him to eat. ‘A couple of hours or so,’ he said. I imagined him on a high dining chair with a mesh of wooden beads beneath him, looking regal and entitled as a doting wife brought out each successive course, each one a little larger than the last: prawn cocktail, jellied eels, sturgeon, beef bourguignon, trifle, a really massive apple.
If you make your way back to my house from the Tor via the lanes, avoiding the main roads and unreliable truncated footpaths, you take the lowest ground: the deepest part of the reclaimed sea, threaded with the rhines the monks of the Middle Ages dug to drain it. Arguably nobody enjoys a better view of the Tor than the travellers who have constructed their own small, easily dismantleable neighbourhood along here. I passed about two dozen of their caravans in total. A couple were empty, their innards appearing recently ransacked, their doors gone or hanging by a single hinge. The occupied ones glowed with light, music and the aroma of weed, and maximised the luxury potential of their rhine-side locations. One announced itself with an appropriated AREA UNDER SURVEILLANCE sign. Another had constructed a hammock by wedging a mattress into the crook of a willow overhanging the water. A couple of hundred yards away, on the River Brue, whose surface solemnly reflected dark silver sky, a plank had been nailed into a board submerged in the bank, for diving. Crooked tents and parasols and tarpaulins had been shoved together outside caravans, haphazardly: Frankenstein’s awnings. I startled a couple of herons and they made their escape on big hushed wings the same colour as the river, charting a path between realities.
On the skyline to the north, Whiting’s death church and the glowing red telephone mast, symbols of the old and new religions, continued their debate, until night gradually snuffed out the former. Looking towards the long, blurring wall of the Mendips, taking in the commanding hills and flatlands, it struck me that I had in my haphazard way ended up living in a landscape that was a composite of the two very different places on opposite margins of the country that I had loved most deeply and chosen to spend most of my adult life in: Norfolk and Devon. It was not twee or manicured but it was definitely not rugged, either. It was anti-rugged. In this light, from this perspective, it was like looking at a scene concocted by an imagination obsessed with a time that will never be
. Not much could be added, atmospherically speaking, besides perhaps an eel crying through the dark. Maybe it was because I was tired and emotional and still five miles from a place where I could rest my aching back but I couldn’t stop thinking about the poor eels, the image of them sleeping innocently in their peat hideaways and waking to the horror of being pronged. I’d once met a man who used to catch and sell them for a living in Cornwall. He’d even briefly had a pet one, which lodged alternately in a large tank in his house and the leat that flowed beside it. The eel went missing from the tank at a particularly lively party he and his wife held and was found over twenty-four hours later under a sofa cushion, caked in fluff and, miraculously, alive. It went to live outdoors permanently after that. The former eel catcher, who confessed he’d never been very good at catching eels, told me about the noise the eels would make as he stalked the Cornish rivers, searching for them: a bark-moan that seemed to come from the most unfathomable well of loss and despair. It was a noise, he said, that still haunted him now in his less robust moments, over a decade after he’d quit his job as an eel catcher.
I did not hear the noise of an eel as I negotiated the dark, early autumn lanes beside the rhines here, in the dry sea, but I did stumble across something no less outlandish or liminal. A mile from my house, I rounded a corner beside a large orchard – a sleepy, houseless stretch of lane – and realised that I was being flanked by fairy lights, dozens of tiny bioluminescent spots of green. After mentally replaying my time in the pub – with an awareness of Glastonbury’s reputation – and assuring myself that at no point had my drink been left unattended, I realised that I was staring directly at a vast colony of glow-worms, the first I’d ever seen, and active here in the hedges, a place where I’d never expected to see them, two months after what I’d been assured was glow-worm time. Had I not had all the problems with the footpaths earlier and arrived at the Tor so much later than expected and failed to find a taxi, I would not have been here to witness them. It was indicative of a lesson I had learned about walking: that a mistake or a wrong turn was something to be embraced, an experience not always synonymous with only failure and frustration. I can think of no stronger example of this than a walk I’d done two summers previously on the fringes of the Stourhead estate, twenty miles east of here, where Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire intersect. A moment of lackadaisical navigation had led me into thick woodland past a shag rug of foxgloves and, in trying to find my way back to the correct path, which would lead me to my destination, King Alfred’s Tower, I’d become hopelessly disorientated in a series of wildflower-heavy clearings. It was not so much that I had lost my natural compass, more that the entire concept of compasses had evaporated, and I became under the impression this would now be my habitat forever more: a psychedelic space walled in by trees on all sides. It was early June, the exact time, maybe even the exact hour, when everything had reached the apex of its growth for the year, and I stumbled and tripped over tussocks and difficult boggy ground, warmed by a beating sun, with poppies and foxgloves and ox-eye daisies all around, until I felt like I was spinning in a dream, and flopped onto the ground, exhausted, contentedly defeated. A cloud of holly blue butterflies gathered above me and instinct told me that the right thing to do was wait. I let myself slip into the delight of a half-nap, until a potential way out suggested itself in the wood fifty yards down the hill directly below my left big toe. I walked back to my car along lanes where large flocks of unseen sheep could be heard shouting together at the tops of their voices, a noise that from an individual sheep can seem to smack of the most terrible depression but in chorus sounded totally joyous, as if rows and rows of hearty pensioners were behind the hedges all saying ‘Yeah!’ over and over again. I never found the tower.
A few weeks after my experience with the glow-worms, I retraced the Stourhead walk, and could not see how I had got it so drastically wrong on my first attempt. Horse chestnuts were scattered on the quieter lanes through the woods, sealed and spiky. If goblins had a game of bowls, then abandoned it in a hurry, it would look like this. In drappy rain, I followed the route I’d planned on my OS map, took a few simple twists and turns, climbed past fresh log piles to the top of Kingsettle Hill, turned left onto a wide grassy path and watched the sun crash through the clouds as Alfred’s Tower materialised ahead of me. The entry fee for the tower is cash-only, and all I had in my wallet was seven pence, a bank card and an old Gnasher the Dog Beano fan-club button badge missing its pin, but I managed to sweet talk Chas on the door to let me up for what I described as research purposes. I was not telling an untruth: everything is research, if you want it to be.
County borders are rarely denoted by very sudden marked changes in terrain but, from the top of the 160-foot folly, the different characters of farmy, verdant Somerset (west and north-west), bald, yellow Wiltshire (east and north-east) and furry, ridgey Dorset (south, south-east and south-west) were very discernible, especially with the clarifyingly abrupt sunlight. The tower was built by the banker Henry Hoare in 1772 as a showy commemoration of King Alfred’s victory over the Danes in 879, which Alfred purportedly initiated from this spot after hiding out on the Somerset Levels in the house of a peasant woman and burning her cakes. The word ‘folly’ refers to a building with no purposes other than to demonstrate the indulgent eccentricity of the person who decided to build it, but people seem strangely reluctant to use the term for big buildings. Few people I have spoken to about Alfred’s Tower have called it a folly, whereas the dovecote above Bruton, four miles to the west, is often called a folly, even though it’s not one. For over two centuries the dovecote, which also once belonged to the Hoare family, has been specifically used to house pigeons and doves, which, if you climb through the hole in the wall like I did, can still be witnessed above you, cooing from various slots in the brickwork, like furry singing packages in a pre-Reformation Royal Mail sorting office.
In the days of late autumn, as the last of the gold disappeared from the treetops and hedges, the starker aspects of living in the sea became more apparent, and I found myself frequently popping over to the Bruton area and asking it for a little hug, which it always offered unconditionally. It had the same spellbinding mists and long sunsets as Avalon but its hills were not such loners, and were struck through with rumpled coombes and wooded holloways that gave me a small, gentle fix of the Devon walks I missed, without any accompanying belief that I was settling for Devon lite. The Brue, such a minimalist, geometric river from the coast to Glastonbury, underwent an almost total character change here, becoming paintable and cuddly. John Steinbeck and his wife Elaine lived in a cottage on the edge of Bruton in the spring and summer of 1959. Nine years later, when Steinbeck was dying, they both stated independently that their period here was the happiest of their lives. I wonder if they were able to suppress a chuckle at Sexey’s Hospital, in the centre of town – or, for that matter, Sexey’s School, located on a lane called Lusty Gardens – unlike literally every other person I took to Bruton. (‘Which hospital are you going to? I’m going to the sexy hospital.’) Like ordering a pint of Butcombe ale, if you can talk about it without giggling it probably means you’re properly entrenched as a Somerset resident.
Bruton is all art and secret backways and artisan baking and well-spoken children and – a mark of its past as a wool town – stone ram carvings. Many speak of the increasing house prices, the ‘down from London’ aspect of the population, but if you listen to Pentangle’s brilliant interpretation of the old murder ballad ‘The Bramble Briar’, renamed ‘Bruton Town’, you might conclude it has never been a place where the peasantry have blossomed. In the song, which prior to my first visit had been the source of pretty much all my information on Bruton, one of the two sons of a wealthy farmer finds out his sister is indulging in relations with the family’s serving boy. The brothers take the lad on a spurious hunting trip, kill him and hurl his body in a thicket, all of which their dad seems to have no problem with. When their sister finds out, she sits with her love
r’s blood-soaked body for three days and three nights, until finally she gets hungry, heads home, and life resumes. The name of the farm is not specified in the song but something tells me it’s not the one on top of Creech Hill, which is notable for its silage lake, in which the wrecks of boats and vehicles rot away, half submerged. From here, near the site of a former Roman temple, the town looks so tiny and perfectly placed in the valley bottom that its buildings might have been painted on fine cardboard then carefully placed by the hands of surgeons or nineteenth-century draughtsmen. I recommend the view this spot offers not only of Bruton but of the head and shoulders of Alfred’s Tower, poking up above the woods at the top of the horizon. I also recommend the unusually furry, eerily silent German shepherd who crept up on me from behind as I gazed across the valley, and slowly, calmly stared at me: a rare farm dog more interested in mind games than bluster or violence. Nearby was a large barn, where cows were listening to thumping 1990s R&B on what I at first thought was a radio but on further evidence could only have been a mix CD or Spotify playlist devoted specifically to the genre. The last bee of the year followed me a few yards down the valley, back in the direction of town.
In my garden, the leaves on the back hedge fell away, revealing that my neighbour was a horse. A strikingly handsome cock pheasant began to pay me visits, twice daily and more; an isolated flash of colour on an increasingly grey scene. The crisp, misty punctual days had ended, replaced by graceless dishwater ones that didn’t fully happen, if they did happen at all, until gone 11 a.m., by which point at this time of the year, let’s face it, it was essentially evening, and you were already wondering about what to have for tea and what book to read and whether that bit of damp kindling you’d found was going to be enough to get the woodburner going. In an attempt to add some sparkle to a December morning I filled my bird feeders to overflowing and sat back to watch the action. The pheasant, I realised, was the one my landlady had told me about, whom she called Clarence. She talked about what a mystery his singleness was, especially in view of his appearance, and when I saw him I puzzled over the matter too, but then I realised this made me one of those people who assume that everyone who is single is desperately looking for love, without taking into account that some enjoy their own company, are very content in a single state and don’t view it as a position of intrinsic sadness.