Ring the Hill

by Tom Cox

  My landlady got in touch with some important news: Clarence was named Lawrence, not Clarence. I decided this was absurd. He was quite patently a Clarence, so that is what I continued to call him. One day he turned up with a lady friend, and from that point his visits were a little less regular. Studying his perfect feather jacket had made me more aware of pheasants as individuals, suddenly ashamedly aware that previously I had been a pheasant racist of sorts. How had I ever believed that, notwithstanding the obvious distinction between the sexes, pheasants all looked alike? My parents’ regular garden pheasant, for example, had a much cheekier face than Clarence and a wattle that looked prosthetic, very obviously made from felt. When a replacement for Clarence arrived in my garden to take over his shift in March, I noticed he was less robust, nervier, and that the pattern on his underside was more leopardlike. ‘Is that Clarence?’ asked a visiting friend. ‘No, that’s Jeremy,’ I replied. ‘He’s nothing like Clarence at all.’ Many pheasants I spotted on walks now appeared a little undersized or scruffy. I’d never been so critical of the appearance of pheasants in the past but Clarence had raised my standards. He was permanently resplendent: a cosmic chicken in a perennial state of glow up, as if ready not just to go out, but to go what the young people of today call ‘out out’. One day a couple of months earlier, I had tried on a nice new black cape in the living room and had been feeling pretty good about it, until I spotted Clarence strutting about behind me through the window, and became starkly aware of all my sartorial shortcomings. No outfit could make me look as dashing as him.

  I have never purchased a cape but there must be a natural ambience of cape about me, since people keep donating capes to me. ‘I saw this and thought of you straight away,’ they will say, handing me a cape. In a surprising development, I had discovered that the actor Nicolas Cage lived in the neighbouring village to mine, close to the curiously named Teapot Lane (Worms Lane). Neighbours told me he was often seen walking the local footpaths, wearing a cape. From this information, a fantasy had emerged: me walking across a field in one of my capes and bumping into Nicolas Cage in one of his capes and stopping to discuss the various problems we had experienced with footpaths in the area that had been blocked off by farmers, me at all times being careful to steer our dialogue away from any situation where I might be asked for my honest opinion of the remake of The Wicker Man because, although I wouldn’t want to lie to Nicolas Cage, I wouldn’t want to hurt him either. ‘Do you sometimes get your cape snagged on brambles or barbed wire when you cross a little-used stile that has become slightly overgrown?’ I would ask. ‘I do, a lot,’ he would say. ‘Me too!’ I would reply.

  In truth, I had only been walking in a cape once: in 2015, at Burrow Mump, another island in Somerset’s dry sea crowned with a ruined church that looks like Glastonbury Tor’s lonelier nephew. On 1 May the sun rises on a direct line between the two hills and both, it is said, form part of the St Michael ley line, which stretches from Land’s End in Cornwall all the way to Lowestoft, 452 miles away in Suffolk. Burrow Mump – which translates as ‘Hill Hill’ – was used by Alfred as a lookout spot during his wars with the Danes, and it was close to where he incurred the wrath of the peasant woman who had entrusted him with watching her cakes, which were actually not cakes at all but bread. The church on top of the mump was used as a garrison during the Civil War. If you were going to choose one place in Somerset to walk in an emerald-green cape and witchy hat, you probably couldn’t do much better. In the late-afternoon autumn light, I had become increasingly aware of my status as an accidental human mimic of the hill itself, being a high triangle of soft, lush green with a dark, man-made structure at my summit. As I strode down the west side of the mound, my Darth Vader-meets-Vincent Price shadow stretched out before me, engulfing the hillside, and an estate car passed on the road below. The woman perched on the back seat, probably well into her eighties, turned in my direction, her eyes and mouth slowly widening. The middle-aged couple in front of her kept their eyes on the road ahead. I imagined the whispered conversation that would take place later that evening, in a troubled kitchen: the concerns for Jean, with her talk of ghosts, of puritans and the New Republic, her ever-increasing jabber and delusions.

  If, from here, you head a few miles north you hit the Polden Hills, the long ridge that splits the dry sea in two, from where, at the end of a clear day, in the long pauses between the trees, you can watch the sun guillotine ochre and blood-red slits in the entire universe. On the way you’ll pass Somerton, where in a pub in 2016 a stranger introduced herself by lifting up my t-shirt, uninvited, to check if I had ‘a hairy chest’, and, satisfied at answering the question herself, grabbed at it in approval, until her friend remonstrated with her with the words ‘Doreen, you can’t just go around touching young men when you feel like it!’, leaving me with the not quite ambivalent feelings of a person who has been lightly mauled against his wishes and complimented on a state of youth for which there is no statistical support. Carry on in the direction of my house from Somerton and you arrive at Dundon Beacon, with its dark and hidden grass roof, where I found an ash tree throttled by a riot of dead ivy resembling an orgy of serpents. On the eastern slopes I saw a flock of sheep had been set loose on a field of kale. One sheep was on its back, on its way to what appeared to be a kale coma, yet still mustering enough energy to take a last few lazy bites at the stalks it was able to reach without compromising its horizontal position.

  Using my now dog-eared personalised OS map, across the valley in the woods above Butleigh, another site on the St Michael ley line, I finally located Maggoty Paggoty. It was attractive but slightly underwhelming, after all the hype I’d attached to it: just some trees and nascent bluebells, to all initial appearances both maggot-and paggot-free. But that was OK. Of the intriguingly named features of the area, I’d become far more interested in Teapot Lane (Worms Lane). I sensed it had a story to tell. Why had the history of teapots associated with the lane superseded the history of worms associated with the lane? And who had decreed that the worms still got an acknowledgement, rather than being totally consigned to the compost of local history? The lane was very close to where I’d seen the hedge lit up with bioluminescent green dots in September, which suggested that perhaps the worms in question were the glowing kind, rather than the soil-enriching kind. Through my neighbour, Jane, I tracked down an elderly local historian in another nearby village, Allen Cotton, who agreed that my glow-worms theory was a definite possibility, although he had previous believed the name to be derived from the nearby Big Warms Field, and that ‘Warms’ was a possible Somerset mangling of the word ‘worms’. He could, however, clear up the issue of the teapots. Two cottages on the then-Worms Lane, known collectively as Solomon’s Temple, had once been the poorhouses for the village of Baltonsborough, and were occupied by two widows who were known for going into the village to collect used tea leaves. The widows always had a teapot on the hob and, because of this, people began to call the lane Teapot Lane. Early this century, when updating the lane signs in the area, Mendip District Council decided to acknowledge this but consulted Allen, due to his knowledge on the matter, and he insisted ‘Worms’ remain on there too.

  Teapot Lane (Worms Lane) is the point where the Tor asserts its pre-eminence again, after being blocked out by the beefy weightlifter’s shoulder of Pennard Hill. Primroses and dandelions grow more riotously on the verges of Teapot Lane than they do on the lanes in Pennard’s shadow. Pennard is where the cowy smell that pervades the area is most pervasive of all and if you’re cresting it in winter from the direction of Wells, it’s an idea to avoid the time when the Friesians get taken along the road to bed at Hill Farm, as bed is a few hundred yards down the lane and they are not cows who move quickly for anyone. A hundred yards farther up the hill from them is a garden where a giant goose lives. Walking from the direction of my house, a right turn just before the giant goose will take you to the fringe of the festival site, where the Pyramid Stage remains up all year round. Turni
ng left at the giant goose will take you to Withial Combe and Washing Stones Gully, which you descend to find a lonely steel barn, not far from a house with an unseen angry dog with preternaturally good hearing. The dog will hear your footfall from more than half a mile away and whirl itself into a high-pitched rage, as if irked by the slightest shadow idea of your core – or maybe it’s just me. In high winds, a rip in the thick steel wall of the barn twangs repeatedly back on itself, and always reminds me of a flap of skin that hung from my finger after I hacked deep into it while chopping lime with a wandering mind. Horses clop regularly along the road below, in twos and threes, and are one of the ingredients that make these country lanes far more perilous than the much steeper, narrower ones where I lived in Devon, along with endless tractors and dimensions just wide enough to invite risk from the renegades of the highway, including the local taxi drivers, whose penchant for speed almost rivals their penchant for not picking up the phone.

  In 1934, the artist Katharine Maltwood devised the theory that the whole Glastonbury area formed a zodiac, the shapes of the fields and ditches and hills exactly mirroring the patterns in the stars above, and that the features were created in 2700 BC by the people of Southern Mesopotamia, who, it should be noted, already had plenty of experience of draining marshes in their own region. If this theory is to be believed, the area at the foot of Pennard Hill is Sagittarius, the half-horse, half-man creature. My house is in the human bit of him, not the horse bit. Go over the hill, past the giant goose, and you soon reach Capricorn, the horned goat. Poetically, I would have preferred to discover that Capricorn was a few miles farther on in the same direction, at Cheddar Gorge, where on a wind-ripped day in March I met numerous horned goats. The goats were introduced to Cheddar not long after the turn of the millennium to help reduce scrub on the east side of the gorge and their home is officially there but they roam precisely where they like, owing to the fact that they are goats. On the west side of the gorge, where it is technically illegal to be a goat, I watched two pygmy goats bashing horns, a gentle, playful battle that, with time, I suspected was less about any genuine acrimony and more about the satisfying sound their horns made as they clashed. It ignited in me the passing wish that I and some of my closest friends could have horns too. Cheddar cheese is still made at the gorge, as it has been for centuries, although in texture it no longer resembles the rough, pockmarked limestone cliffs of its namesake, as it once did. The biggest cheese made at Cheddar during the nineteenth century was the one that the village presented to Queen Victoria on her wedding day, which was more than nine feet in circumference, two feet high and necessitated the milk of 737 cows.

  I chose a good day to walk the gorge, a Wednesday just after the apex of Storm Gareth, when everything flapped and, in the windy light, from the highest point the lakes of the region looked like magic puddles. Visit on a sunny weekend, though, and being in the valley bottom, close to the village, is like being in a giant service station that sells cheese instead of petrol. It’s a classic example of one of the rules of the twenty-first-century British countryside, which is that 90 per cent of the general public go only where they are loudly instructed to go. Nobody gets loudly instructed to go to Ebbor Gorge, a few miles south-east, so on a similar day it will typically be close to deserted, yet its natural beauty is every bit as staggering, if not more so. ‘Mini Cheddar Gorge’ is the name my closest Somerset friend Michelle – a known snack aficionado – prefers to call it.

  The space between my house and Wells and Ebbor, the last part of the sea before Mendip Country begins, is where my natural map-nerd’s sense of direction goes awry. I think I am going west when I am going east. Two lanes, in opposite directions, somehow lead to the same place, without offering anywhere near enough bends to quantify the enigma. I turned my satnav on in this lost land behind Pennard and it took me somewhere three miles from where I wanted to be. ‘That will be the zodiac,’ a couple of Glastonbury residents told me. Michelle’s best friend Sara is an estate agent who has lived in the area for nearly five decades, and conducted viewings on hundreds of houses, but she still sometimes gets lost in that same space where you sense that, if the sea was real, and not just dry sea, you would vanish forever, without a trace, Bermuda Triangle-style.

  When Sara is not being an estate agent, she also works in a pub and conducts ghost tours in the now defunct prison at Shepton Mallet, an outlier on the zodiac’s borderland. On a bright, almost warm day in late March, which felt like a less hysterical second beginning to spring, she kindly gave Michelle and me a one-on-two personal tour of the prison, which, before its closure in 2013, was the UK’s oldest working jail and is notorious in ghost-hunting circles as a hotbed of paranormal activity. It more than lived up to the preview Sara had given us in the pub a week earlier. We’d been in the building, which originally dates from 1610, less than half an hour when I received the privilege of having my hair touched by Mike. I thought what had touched my hair was some furry dust that had gathered into a kind of dirt stalactite, which you often find hanging from the deep recessed window frames in the prison, but it turned out to be Mike. ‘They are always touching my hair,’ Emma, an employee of the prison for eighteen years – for twelve of which it still contained inmates – would tell me later. By ‘they’ she meant, well, they. When Mike touched my hair, I was having my first half-decent hair day after a run of bad ones, although I have no idea if this influenced Mike’s decision to be bold and make the first move. Michelle and Sara and I were climbing the narrow, dark staircase up to the prison’s gatehouse at the time, a dank, claustrophobic space with a large hole in the floor that probably doesn’t even quite edge into the list of the top ten most atmospheric or terrifying parts of the building. Mike had been making his presence felt in here several times recently, to paranormal experts and Ouija board owners, although nobody knows exactly who he is or when he died. If you make a recording while you’re in the gatehouse you won’t hear him at the time, but you might on playback, if you slow it down. A few weeks previously, Sara had had her hair touched by him too.

  There are a few scattered bits of information and photos gathered by ghost hunters around the prison, plus a few historical recreations in the cells of C Wing – the smartest of the penitentiary’s three sections of cells – but it could be argued that they are superfluous. The building speaks for itself. It’s the kind of place you suspect could be reduced to rubble, its foundations entirely rewilded, and would still radiate its dark history pungently into the air. It was, in its later years, a place for lifers: murderers, rapists, child-killers. It’s a building of quiet alcoves reeking of evil, sudden astonishing drops in temperature, half-revealed secrets. Across the road is a crypt, for which the prison does not have a key. During construction work a few years ago, a sinkhole opened up between B Wing and C Wing, unveiling a horse skeleton. Seven executions by hanging took place at the prison between 1889 and 1926. ‘1926!’ I thought. ‘That was pretty much last week.’ If you are feeling a bit low about living in the era that you do, I’d highly recommend the perspective-enhancing properties of a visit. The summer before last, on a country walk, in a state of mild hiker’s delirium, I’d stolen four corn on the cobs from a field. Had I done that in the 1700s and been caught, I could have easily ended up here, doomed to die of smallpox, picking apart tarry rope for oakum with festering, diseased hands. The one chink of light in my day would have been an hour in the exercise yard with a bag on my head, forced to walk anticlockwise in an attempt to symbolically turn back time and erase the wrongs I had inflicted on society with my clinical and ruthless corn-stealing. For the first 200 years of Shepton’s existence as a prison, the average life expectancy of an inmate was between three and four months.

  When I had first been looking into the possibility of moving to Somerset, Shepton was the town I was most frequently warned away from. As far back as 1912, in his book Highways and Byways in Somerset, Edward Hutton was describing it as ‘a singularly unfortunate town’, ‘very irregularly bu
ilt’, ‘a town gone mad’ and ‘dreadful to live in’. I will concede this, on the side of the naysayers: it’s the hardest place to get a good cheese and onion pasty in the whole of the West Country. The one I finally found, after nearly an hour of searching, tasted of toes. It is a town of efficient tyre-fitting centres, frightening dogs and Babycham, except nobody drinks Babycham any more, so the Babycham has had to adapt and become cider. Shepton is like the civic equivalent of a pair of cargo pants: hugely unfashionable and not very aesthetically pleasing at first glance, but full of unexpected pockets, many of which contain interesting stuff. The architecture around the prison end of town is especially attractive, and I include the facility’s seventy-foot-high walls in that. Before meeting Sara, I did five miles of exploring on foot in and around the town. After passing a vast cider factory which used to be a Babycham factory and telling a man searching for his lost pit bull that I hadn’t seen his lost pit bull, I rounded a corner and discovered spring under a disused railway viaduct in a flurry of sharp blue sky, blackbirds, fresh running water and forsythia.