Ring the Hill

by Tom Cox

  When the feeder was full, it meant more robins, dunnocks, blackbirds and blue tits dropping seeds on the grass for Clarence to vacuum up, along with the flakes of last night’s poppadum I’d left out for him. He had become quite bold, for a creature who had been bred to exist in a constant state of terror. Sometimes he’d see me through the picture window in my living room and, so long as I avoided sudden movements, carry on pecking about, maybe let out a triumphant ‘ch-kauwck!’ and fluff out his feathers a bit. I told myself I was providing a refuge from the people who wanted to kill him but all I was really doing was making sure he had a constant supply of food and taking care not to be boisterous in his vicinity. As I was leaving the house late one day, I noticed he was in the back field, and, fearing for his safety, shouted ‘Clllaaarrrrence!’, but then remembered he had no idea he was named Clarence, and was a pheasant. He did a little run, in the way he did, which as with all pheasants looked like he was saying ‘Shit shit shit!’ His ‘ch-kauwck!’ joined the undersong of the day. Other ingredients in the undersong included the clop of three horses farther along the lane and a succession of gunshots two or three fields away. The undersmell, meanwhile, was cow. In truth, it was more of an oversmell – fairly constant since my arrival. There had been plenty of cattle close to the two Devon houses where I’d lived, but their aroma never pervaded the air in the way it did here in the reclaimed sea.

  Beside the A303 – the road into the west, the ancient road, a big road that is something of a big-road anomaly in that it often acts like a secretary to landscape rather than like landscape’s pissy, inconsiderate boss – men in green semi-camouflage attire were shooting Clarence’s contemporaries in the fields. There might have been women too, I can’t say for sure. I only saw men. Presumably the camouflage gear was in case they encountered an unusually pecky and violent pheasant who crept up on them from behind and tried to fuck them up. They would no doubt argue that what they were doing was traditional and historical as opposed to, say, a grand act of cowardice taken out on a defenceless animal bred purely to indulge their bloodthirsty twattery. I suspect it is unlikely that these men, so in thrall to tradition and history, would practise the even more historical art of dressing only in a loin cloth, starving themselves for a while, then attempting to bring down an animal five times their size while unarmed.

  Not far past the turning for Warminster, I noticed a dead hare on the verge: soggy and half-black and sinewy. A few miles on from here, as you head east, the land turns sinewy too. I am interested in this terrain but, unlike Bruton’s, it’s not one I could imagine offering me a hug when I needed it. Strangely, for a county best known for Stonehenge, a landmark so closely associated with summer solstice, Wiltshire always feels like winter to me. Maybe that is partly because winter is when I have most frequently walked in it. But each time I go, I look in vain for the places where summer might happen. I love soaking up the Neolithic ambience on the Wiltshire Downs but I can’t shake a stronger feeling that I’m walking around a film set: a balder, one-colour, parallel Britain, underpeopled, overthatched. The book I had just finished reading – also set in Wiltshire – was not about winter, but it was overwhelmingly wintry. A book well-known at the time of its publication but now a little bit overlooked, by a dead writer, in which nearly everyone either dies or seems to be in some kind of bucolic yet austere antechamber for death. Perhaps more of an antegreenhouse for death. Greenhouses crop up in the book a lot.

  I plan some of my walks in advance but an increasing number get scheduled on the day they happen, in a burst of scattershot inspiration, like the walk is a verse I’d been waiting to write but couldn’t, until inspiration struck. Were I a session musician, I’d probably be a nightmare to collaborate with on a group project. ‘Where is Tom?’ ‘Oh. He’s at another recording studio, sixty miles away. He decided at the last minute that he wasn’t in the mood for country rock today and that he would record with another band instead. They play funk.’ Today, for example, I was meant to be doing something completely different, but I found myself driving to Wiltshire, propelled spontaneously eastwards by the vivid pictures created by the book by the dead writer, which was called The Enigma of Arrival. It had been written during the mid-eighties, by the former Booker Prize winner V. S. Naipaul. Naipaul describes Wiltshire almost as you expect an alien might and to an extent that is what he is, as someone who spent the first two decades of his life in Trinidad, even though he’d already lived in the UK for several years before he relocated to Wilsford cum Lake, near Stonehenge. He disguises the location to an extent, but it’s not hard to work it out, just as it’s not hard to work out that his reclusive neighbour and landlord was Stephen Tennant, former cherubic Bright Young Person of the Bloomsbury Set and inspiration for Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Even though it’s at the commercial end of the county, you can see why it was a good place to escape, both for Tennant, whom Naipaul never spoke to and only saw twice in the whole of his decade of living there, and for Naipaul himself, who was in a quiet period of ‘withdrawal’ during his time there. It seems impossible that the tourist bustle of Stonehenge is only a couple of miles away. As I climbed out of the village, I got a decent view of the landmark from a ridge at the highest point of a farm track. It looked like a little green birthday cake in the distance topped with grey candles. Another part of the film set.

  Being here felt like walking onto a film set in a different way, too. There are days when you choose your place and time well as a walker and it can take you so vividly and swiftly inside a legend, or a piece of history, that it feels a little illegal, like someone ought to come along any moment to check you have the appropriate wristband. To finish a book I’d been mesmerised by – albeit in a slow-motion, almost banal way – from start to finish, then drive an hour from my house and be deep inside its setting, alone and free to explore, all for the price of quarter of a tank of petrol, left me giddy, which was an incongruous sensation on a route frequently redolent of death. I’m not sure where the death ambience came from most: the barren vegetation, or the realisation that every major character in the book – the gardeners Naipaul befriended, Tennant, Tennant’s housekeepers, the local farmworkers and electricians, the neighbour whose husband murdered her, Naipaul himself – was now dead. But this aura of death, of the emptiness that death leaves, also made the universe that Naipaul described more present. I saw just one other walker on my seven-mile route: a Barbour-jacketed, Labrador-walking man of about seventy, who looked more like a Barbour-jacketed, Labrador-walking man of seventy might have done in 1985. When I drove out of the village, two small children in identical pink bathrobes, very 1980s bathrobes, rose from behind a hedge to wave to my car, like children in 1980s villages used to wave at cars before they had more exciting pursuits to occupy their attention. Did they read my lips as I shouted ‘Fucking hell!’ and almost careened across a water meadow into a cob wall in fright?

  The walking route criss-crossed the River Avon several times, a shallow-banked but full river whose tributaries were often clogged with dead trees, the kind of river you feel might whisper about you behind your back, and I thought of what Naipaul had written about Tennant’s love for ivy, and how he refused to allow it to be cut off the trees behind Wilsford Manor, causing the little inlets nearby to get congested. Unlike Tennant’s biographer, Philip Hoare, who was permitted to wander around the manor as a stranger, not long before Tennant’s death, and heard Tennant talking and laughing to himself in his room, I could not get a proper glimpse of the grounds. Close to the border, I was chased by a bitter but ineffectual poodle, who was soon gathered up by a youth in wellies with an aristocratic, cherubic, not un-Tennant-like face. I walked past the pub which Naipaul’s gardening neighbour Jack had soldiered to for a last drink, the night before his death. It was closed but I got the impression it wouldn’t have looked a great deal livelier if it had been open. On the quietest paths, farther from the villages, in the final part of the walk, a soft sunset briefly threatene
d to warm the earth, but didn’t. The big skies were brasher characters than Somerset’s, unkeen to listen to anyone’s nonsense. Spindly clouds appeared to reflect the bare branches of the trees, not unlike the way the Avon did. Naipaul learned to identify tree types while living here and described it as ‘learning a language, after living amongst its sounds’. The cow undersmell of home was replaced by a sweet, horsey one, which was apt, as all the horses I met on the walk came across as very sweet. One added self-grown loon pants to a nice jacket and scarf to complete his look. It was the most fetching horse outfit I’d seen out and about since the matching checked jackets two horses had shown off for me on my way to see a much bigger horse: the prehistoric Uffington one, above Compton Beauchamp in Oxfordshire, which might in fact be not a horse at all, but a dragon, depending whose theory you believe.

  Every year, the Uffington Horse is spruced up by National Trust volunteers equipped with hammers and tubs of chalk. Its chalk gleams much more impressively than the Cerne Abbas Giant, Britain’s most pornographic hill figure, whose erect thirty-five-foot member has looked in need of some TLC on both the recent times I have visited it. The giant’s penis – bigger than it once was, since incorporating what was originally the giant’s navel – is well-known for imbuing those who spend time on it with magic fertility. It is fenced off nowadays, but I once met a shaman on Dartmoor whose fifty-something friend had just slept on the giant’s penis, unaccompanied, and enjoyed what she described as ‘the most erotic night of her life’. When I walked there for the first time it was April, the earth was frisky and I was with my friend Lucy, who is in possession of what must surely be one of the planet’s three or four sexiest voices. In the Giant Inn in Cerne Abbas village at the foot of the hill, a party of a dozen or so women of varying ages crashed through the door, breaking the sleepy midday atmosphere of the place, apparently still drunk from the night before, which, from all we could gather, had involved some form of hedonistic pilgrimage to the hillside. I remember thinking how the treadmarks of the footpath leading past the figure resembled the footprints of an actual giant, feeling the wind turning my face and hair wild on the way up, and spotting an unidentifiable creature marching industriously through a cornfield at the summit, badger-shaped but fox-coloured.

  Wiltshire’s most famous hill figure, the white horse above the village of Bratton, near Westbury, famously depicted in watercolour in the 1930s by Eric Ravilious, lacks the wild pagan nature of the figures at Uffington and Cerne Abbas. But the Bratton horse might well have once been more feral, if you believe the theories of either Richard Gough (1772) or T. C. Lethbridge (1957) about the original shadow horse pre-dating it. Gough’s drawing shows a smaller, jollier-looking horse, potentially of a clumsy nature, whose slightly exposed penis and solitary eye fail to add any threat to its character; Lethbridge’s, meanwhile, is downright terrifying: a war-ready beast with tusks instead of a face, also Cyclopean, but in a much more ominous way. A slight anticlimax upon getting up close to the Bratton horse comes from the realisation that it’s largely made of concrete, not chalk. This gives it the appearance of a modest yet extreme skatepark. The vantage point from the horse is more commanding than from above the Cerne Abbas Giant, however. Above it, with the weather the way it was, I had the luxury of seeing for entire yards.

  As I explored this still slightly unfamiliar part of the West Country, the almost cold, drab dishwater days continued: mornings that never really started, afternoons where you thought it was getting dark then realised you were just looking at the colour of the day. I’m not a winter person and, while I am fine with the concept of Christmas as an approximately forty-eight-hour period concomitant with a generally agreeable set of warm family feelings and the natural world turning over, December steadfastly maintains its status as my least favourite month. I missed Devon, but I checked myself, as I knew my judgement could traditionally become impaired on such matters around now. I often get a strong sensation of missing stuff at this time of year – people, places – but I know a large amount of it is often an illusion and what I’m really missing is colourful petals and birdsong and days that aren’t like living inside a cup of tea you left to brew five hours ago and forgot about. December is like no other month when it comes to realising how many people and cars and butchered animals and bad songs there are in the world and if you find this, combined with the lack of natural light, all a bit much, some of the lesser-known footpaths in Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire aren’t bad places to retreat to.

  A six-mile circle of Ilminster took me into the peculiar quiet spots you find only next to a big, important road: neglected, sluicey edgeplaces, part industrial, part arable – not hiking country. Gates on the north side of town were stiff, suggesting I was one of, say, nine people to have used them since June. The trig point above town was half-hidden and shy, as if it knew there were more famous and cocksure hills nearby whose summits it had missed out on. A riverside path took me past ribbed, oxidised iron posts and an open but deserted warehouse full of machinery with purposes I was oblivious to but wanted to learn, then past rusty barrels full of miscellaneous everything, ready for burning. I poked my head into the warehouse, unable to resist a lungful of oil. Over the course of a decade this had become something of a Christmas tradition. Others went carol singing or drunkenly snogged someone from their office; I walked along the banks of small, slightly polluted rivers, sniffing fumes and admiring arcane rusty ironwork. I remembered I had almost zero food in the fridge and that I needed to get to a supermarket then made a hypothesis regarding the chances of being asked if I was all ready for The Big Day and remembered I did still have some crisps and a banana and one can of tonic water at home and drove directly there instead. My timing was all out anyway: I wasn’t hungry and, as anybody who has accrued any life wisdom knows, you should never go to a supermarket when you’re either very hungry or not hungry at all. Super-markets are to be negotiated only when experiencing a medium level of hunger.

  Pheasants were ubiquitous, particularly on the walks I embarked on farther east, in Wiltshire and north Dorset. Why wouldn’t they be? English shooting estates now rear 20 million of them per year, meaning the weight of pheasants in England is now greater than the total weight of wild birds in England. In the fields around the Dorset–Wiltshire border the only thing I saw more of than pheasants were flints: big ones, like old chipped bones once belonging to knees, feet and hips. Damp weather had brought the softer chalk to the surface too, mushed it up attractively. I could imagine popping up a hillside with a spade and pickaxe and sketching a quick figure. A protest image: The Long Pheasant Of The A303. Historians in the twenty-fifth century would puzzle and theorise over its meaning. Except they wouldn’t, because, the way everything was going, it would all be long over by then. The evidence was all here, in your face, despite the denials of those in power: the statistics on the vastly reduced numbers of birds and insects, just in the space of my lifetime; the way the seasons were starting to blend together. I’d seen blossom in Bristol in early December and lambs in the dry sea before the year was out. A hornet flew into my living room in January, excitable and confused. A week after heavy snow, February decided it was May and soared to nineteen degrees. There was a sense that nature was rubbing its eyes and waking up but in the way that you might wake up with the first daylight, only to realise it’s not daylight at all but a new streetlamp that has been installed needlessly by the council on the pavement outside your bedroom window. Under a sky of thick blue, slightly redolent of chemicals, I walked from Ham Hill to Montacute, quickly stripping down to a t-shirt, and saw buff-tailed bumblebees, a cockchafer beetle and dozens of red admiral butterflies. It was blissful, but slightly wrong, tinged with guilt. In the woods on Ham Hill a tiny female child walked past me, alone, pulling a plastic crate on some rope, full of fluffy toys, talking to herself. It was only later that it occurred to me she could have been a ghost, blown in on the breeze of fake spring. I walked on through the golden soil of Hamdon, above stone the same
colour, which stonemasons say is as easy to cut as cheese. At the foot of the valley the houses of the village of Montacute are made of the same stuff: perfect little cheese homes. A cat in the churchyard rolled on tombs, headbutted me passionately, begged me to take him home, using every bargaining technique in his arsenal, which was vast. Whoever lived with this cat was lucky, but also must have been constantly worried about his potential infidelity. I decided he was the best cat ever, but aren’t they all?

  Montacute is the perfect name for Montacute: a village somehow both sweet and haughty. The name in fact comes from the abrupt conical hill above it – ‘mount acute’ – which is crowned with an eighteenth-century tower. The tower was deserted when I reached it. I climbed its spiral stairs, which were covered in broken glass, to a prison-like space entirely covered in the graffiti of the youth population of Greater Yeovil. The graffiti created a pleasing wallpaper whose aesthetic appeal was entirely democratic, nothing to do with the quality of any individual art. Pretty much all of Somerset was below, to the north, hypnotic in the thinning blue haze at the cusp of dusk, enhanced by the fact that from this distance you couldn’t pick out the badger, pheasant and fox carcasses currently lining the A37 at sixteen-yard intervals. Nobody appeared to have informed the sky that it was Monday. My back was finally better and I felt I could have continued walking indefinitely. I noted that only a mile to the south was Odcombe, birthplace of Thomas Coryat, known as the Odcombe Leg-Stretcher and often thought of as the patron saint of hikers, who set out to explore Europe on foot in 1608 and walked all the way from Venice to Somerset in the same pair of shoes. Upon his return, inspired by Italian dining culture, Coryat popularised the table fork in the UK, and donated the shoes to the village church, where they were displayed for many years until they rotted away and were replaced with replicas that remain there to this day.