by Rob Cowen
My name then, if I had one at all, was ‘madman’, ‘tramp’, ‘good-for-nothing’, ‘blight’. I was chased and spat at, but that was nothing compared to the savage beating inflicted by a group of drunk football fans enraged at England’s semi-final exit from Euro ’96. Disoriented and half-dead, I crawled with my meagre belongings to the only place I knew no one would follow, where I could shelter and recover unmolested: the woods and meadows beyond the new urban limits of Bilton. Here, in the remnants of the realm that had once been my playground, I fell back on the deep-rooted knowledge accrued through my father’s botanical obsession and my own historical studies, tending my injuries with the herbal remedies of the Romans. I used sphagnum moss to clean the wounds and then stuffed them with foul-smelling hedge woundwort – Stachys sylvatica – a legionnaire’s cure-all I discovered to be incomparable in its efficacy. The bleeding stopped and my skin healed without infection. The fever that followed subsided quickly and a tea brewed from its purple flowers restored me to level spirits. It’s true that I’ll always carry a limp but at least I was able to walk again. Then, as my strength returned, I haunted the same spots I had as a boy, surviving on food I could forage, steal from supermarkets (on point of principle) and blag from the North Outfall allotmenters who tilled the soil between my old school and the sewage works. Each evening I lit a cooking fire on the bank above the old weir and watched the flickering shadows of Daubenton’s bats hunting insects over the Nidd.
Readmitted to the societies of the wood and field, I fell into the rituals of earlier times. I prayed to the gods of Celt, Saxon, Angle and Jute and communed with the insects, animals and plants seeking to learn the secrets of their microbial, cellular majesty. I dabbled with mind-altering concoctions of liberty cap – Psilocybe semilanceata – and pine needles, stripping away my pain and loneliness. All those hours of research at UCL proved invaluable in this homecoming and I dredged my memory for ancient practices to enact among the trees. The ebb and flow of birdsong, the rise and fall of the sun, such things became my world. The slow spinning of the earth, the circadian rhythms of the solar day, the life and death of the flowers and the fruits, these whirred the mechanisms of my mended biological clock. I moved barefoot with the wax and wane of the moon, synchronising with the lunar month, realigning my entirety to the rotation of the planet in the universe.
In the middle of the wood is a small clearing that becomes a crucible of sunlight in summer. It is a celestial spot but hidden to all that don’t know it, so it was a shock one day to find a man standing there as I returned from washing. Wearing a cardigan and tie, he was picking about my sleeping bag with a stick, oblivious to the glorious light and occasionally looking about himself like he’d lost something. It took a while before I realised it was my eldest brother, George.
‘What the hell are you doing down here?’ he asked. ‘We’re all worried. Joy says she saw you shoplifting in Asda last week. For Christ’s sake, John, look at the bloody state of you.’
I told him everything, hoping he’d understand. I laid out my thoughts on carbon societies and greenhouse gases, and why the myth of unending growth could only result in destruction. I explained the danger of indifferent, short-term political economies and revealed my insight into the micro-ecosystems of the hedges and woods. I thought he’d been listening, but evidently he’d been growing angrier. Spittle flew from his mouth as he told me he was a prospective councillor for the Harrogate Bilton and Nidd Gorge division in coming local elections. He said my living there could ruin his chances if word got out.
‘You better not eff this up for me,’ he yelled. ‘I’ve worked too hard for it. I sweated blood in the office while you were gallivanting around London high as a kite.’
The coup de grâce was his assertion that my presence there was illegal, that, by law, I could be, should be, removed. We argued for a while and I accused him of colluding in the widespread exploitation and destruction of this world. He said I had sustained a serious head injury and that I needed proper care. Round-the-clock care. The sort of care where they lock you away. ‘You’re ill, John,’ he said. ‘Time to stop with these daft ideas and speak to someone.’ At these words, I asked him to leave, which he did after throwing a crumpled twenty-pound note on the ground and calling me a damn fool. Off he stamped through the trees, swearing. I watched him go and realised that I was speaking those passages from Luke out loud, just as I had on Harvest Festival all those decades before.
The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ Do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. Life is more than food; the body more than clothes.
The winter that year was a particularly long and bitter one with deathly nights and short sunless days of rain, frost and sleet. It showed no sign of letting up, and by the last days of March I was ready to go further and consign my form entirely to the divinity of the radiant dawn, Eostre, if only her up-springing light would come again to warm us beleaguered survivors. Pledging to do her will and become a living spectacle of her joy and blessing, I built a bonfire at sunrise on Easter Sunday, 2007. As the smoke filled the canopy of the wood, I heard St John’s Church ringing out the good news of the resurrection over the town, over my parents’ greening bones. I thought of my father sitting in his garden and smiled. It had been a long time since anyone called me Sir Hare, but I felt myself again. I knew who I was. What I was.
That evening hares flocked in the fields. A drove of them, maybe thirty or forty, were gathering in the gloaming. I rushed from the trees to join them, tearing over the soil in giant leaps. We ran together east of here along the edge of dense hazel thickets, up sloping fields and through hedges until I could run no more and collapsed panting on my back. It was there that I chanced upon a strange relic lurking in the undergrowth, a dome of gritstone buried by brambles, wood anemone and bluebell leaves. I only noticed it at all because of the marshy ground and stench of rotten eggs. Brushing aside the foliage I revealed a capstone covering a spring, potent with the smell of sulphur. On the stone were carved the initials ‘JW’ and the numerals ‘1778’, a date that had been chiselled just as deeply into my memory by Mr Wallbank back at Bilton Endowed School. It was the year the Enclosure Acts were passed in Harrogate. The enormity of that discovery dawned on me, sending me reeling backwards into a carpet of greater stitchwort. As I stared at it, the simple stone testament of ownership became the embodiment of dispossession. With such markers they had broken up, divided and enclosed our beautiful world, turning fields, springs, trees and beasts into commodities for mankind to claim, buy, sell and kill for. Global enclosure, exploitation, industrialisation, climate change, I saw all of it radiating out from that capstone, leaching out its poisonous darkness over the land. Eostre had clearly led me there for a purpose and I wasn’t about to disappoint her.
Sending up a prayer of strength to Tiw, god of war, I set upon the stone, heaving and hauling away until I wrestled it sideways into the foliage. From beneath, water bubbled and gushed through black mud. I bent down and scooped a hollow, then drank thirstily, handful after handful, raising my wet face to the moon and shouting my joy and thanks.
They used to say that water drawn on the Easter Day was holy and healing. They weren’t lying. I was at one with everything; my head swam with old voices, the deeper music of the stars and the dreams of ages. I was the swift hare running through Eden, hearing the universal harmony that comes in the union of soul, spirit and earth. The divine. And she was there at dawn the next day, Eostre, standing fair, golden-maned, fully formed, aliv
e, gentle, fragrant as honeysuckle, randy, multi-scented, multi-coloured, many-voiced, bright and bold, her warm breath as pure as a baby’s. The soft hair on her skin was the waving grass; her face was the perfect pear blossom blessing the bushes. And it was me that summoned her.
I released the spring.
I move around a lot now following the sun. It’s necessary also since an arrest warrant for theft and criminal damage was issued in my absence at Harrogate County Court four years ago. I travel on foot, always alone, up and down this country, from village to village, on the back roads and down the lanes, over the fields, bedding down in the spinneys and copses. You’ve probably passed me someplace at some time, glimpsed a familiar shape in the hedge, a form in the wheat. I’m there at the Summer Solstice at Stonehenge and Winter Solstice on Windmill Hill, overlooking Glastonbury Tor as the glowing orb rolls along its ridge. Sometimes, when the weather gets too much for these old bones, I’m forced to warm up or dry out in the public libraries where, up against a radiator, I’ll read with a mix of hope and horror about climate conferences or the UN’s embracing of progressive energy agendas, then inevitably, a few pages on, the issuing of fracking licences to multinational corporations. On the occasions I can beg the change and bear the hypocrisy of my actions, I’ll take a corner seat in a coffee shop and spend an hour and a half over a sugary Americano. Ah, it’s heavenly, but nothing compares to the waters of that Bilton spring and the vigour of bringing life and hope back to this dark world. That’s why I defy the law, returning here at the same time every year. I have to, you see. Nature’s order must be revealed. It’s our only hope. I prepare myself by watching the run of the hares over the fields and then, when the moon is right, I replay the ritual and release the spring again. After I’ve drunk my fill, I set up camp down by the weir, rolling out my sleeping bag and sparking a cooking fire, just like I used to. I can sleep then, safe in the knowledge that tomorrow the light will return.
III
I leave him there curled up in the earth by the weir in his grubby brown sleeping bag, a union of land and landless. I scramble up the wood to emerge fairly soil-covered myself into a shock of daylight. While my back was turned, the blackthorn has blossomed. Its flowers are heaped over at the meadow’s hedges like snow, bright enough to burn your retinas. They’re a Tate & Lyle white, the white of wedding dresses and meringues, bleached against the contrast of their black, leafless branches. A crow is suspended for a second in the sky above, held as if on wires. From that height the sloe flowers in rows must resemble chalk on a football pitch, parcelling up the fields, splicing the meadows, woods, road verges and houses. Segmenting them further are the shadows, the shifting lines of the high sun. More divisions, more borders. Today all these lines make me feel sombre and shut out. I’m sure it’s his influence, Old John snoring away down in the trees, but perhaps all his talk resonates because he has a point. I trudge around the fields, keeping a lookout for farmers and hares, but seeing neither. Sloshing the clay off my boots in Bilton Beck releases dun-brown clouds of liquid earth, washing away downstream. My thoughts turn to the land and its ever-changing states. The truth is that a spectre hovers over all England, a ghost from a time when people were rinsed from fields as easily as mud from a heel. I’ve been aware of it since I first came to the edge-land, ignored it perhaps, but it still casts its shadow – over the town, the country and this space between. Time I searched out its relics; time I traced its source and looked full into its face. And now I know where to start.
Finding the spring proves harder than I thought. There is little mention of it in the definitive Victorian study of the area, William Grainge’s History and Topography of Harrogate and the Forest of Knaresborough, and it’s a similar story in more recent regional histories – a predominant concern with the town’s famous wells, the springs that sprung the spa resort. I find tantalisingly vague references claiming the purest natural waters are to be found at the outlying ‘Bilton spring’ or, more grandly, a ‘Bilton Well’, but no indication of its position aside from references to it being on private land and (with the verbal equivalent of a waft of the hand) an assertion that it lies ‘somewhere near Bilton Hall’. As geo-location goes, it’s not exactly pinpoint.
So I approach Bilton Hall on foot down a gravelled driveway edged with daffodils and I stumble across my first butterflies of the year. Two tortoiseshells flit between the edges of the docks and dandelion flowers on the lawns. Above me, rows of trees touch twigs to create a thin canopy filled with singing finches. A passing car kicks up the chippings; the driver nods and raises a finger in greeting. He is wearing the recognisable tunic uniform of a medical professional; the hall is now a private nursing home and an expensive one at that, the sort where you might expect doctors mustering at the press of a button. Its landscaped grounds and handsome Jacobean-style brick and stone exterior are well preserved, beautiful even, retaining that dreamy, mournful tranquillity you find with old manor houses. Enclosed by empty fields to the south and east, and farms, woods, river and the edge-land to the west and north, it has the air of luxurious seclusion. Less than half a mile from its door are the shuttling A-roads and petrol stations, rubbish dumps and back gardens, the houses, churches, hospital buildings, garages, salons, supermarkets, bathroom stores and autoparts retailers that now conjoin eastern Harrogate, Starbeck and Knaresborough into one continuous colony. Yet from here all that feels like a war being fought in foreign climes. The hall has a different, slower speed, like a record on the wrong setting. As you approach you’re enveloped by a sense of isolated history, an accumulated repository of dormant and dying memories being relived over and over again. It’s there in the expression of the residents who, at just gone 10 a.m., are now caught between breakfast and morning tea and sit dozing in wingbacks or stare out the mullioned windows at the flowering magnolia and rhododendron. It’s there too in the fabric of a building sited in this same position in one form or another for nearly seven centuries.
‘This is my blank face,’ says Elaine, the sister on reception, as a loud buzzer parps somewhere down a corridor. ‘I’ve never heard of a spring here. You mean a water spring, right?’ Another parp. ‘Becky?’ she shouts over her shoulder. ‘Springs?’
Becky pokes her head around from the back office chewing a pen, sticks out her bottom lip and shakes her head. ‘Not that I know of. I’m pretty sure this whole area used to be a deer park, though, back before this place was even built. There’s a map on the wall over there might help.’
Round the corner in a tatty frame hangs the faded, sepia plan of the hall taken from an old set of particulars. It is of little use, but Becky was right about one thing: go back far enough and hall, grounds, woods, river, all of this was part of something bigger, the huge 20,000 ‘Forest Acres’ (roughly equivalent to 30,000 acres as we now define them) of landscape that constituted the Royal Forest of Knaresborough. The precise date of this enormous sovereign land grab is lost, but it was probably around the time of William the Conqueror’s parcelling out of English lands among his followers. By the end of Henry I’s reign in 1135, the forest was regarded as a highly valuable asset with boundaries that extended from close to Knaresborough Castle westward over 160 square miles. The word ‘Forest’ can be misleading, for although cloaked in dense woods, in places it wasn’t solely tree cover, rather a mix of woodland, clearings, rivers, open moors and heath given over to the proliferation and protection of ‘venison’, a broad term that included all game – wild boar, wolves, grouse and hares. Primarily, though, it was red and roe deer that served as the ‘noble’ quarry for the Norman and, later, Plantagenet bloodlust. In the Forest of Knaresborough two specific areas were fenced off especially for their concentration using a system of sharpened palings that allowed game entry but limited exit. These corrals or ‘parks’ were therefore prime spots for the hunt, carefully maintained and policed by ‘Foresters’, the local workers who lived on and around the land. These men enforced William’s brutal forest law over the rest of the comm
unity, which, as the Anglo Saxon Chronicle tells us, ‘set up great protection for deer and legislated to that intent, that whosoever should slay hart or hind should be blinded’. One of these condensing areas, Haverah Park, lay to the west of the village of Beckwithshaw, three miles south of what is now modern Harrogate. The other covered the verdant woods south and west of the River Nidd, including all of what is now the edge-land. Its heart was the ground I’m standing on. This was Bilton Park.
In 1380 John of Gaunt, son of Edward III and then Lord of Knaresborough, ordered the construction of a new hunting lodge. It was this building that mutated and morphed over centuries into Bilton Hall. Despite the thrill of the hunt falling out of favour among successive royal dynasties, The Crown retained possession until it was sold by Charles I in 1628 to help finance his disastrous foreign policies and ongoing war with the French. But even prior to its sale, the noble and wealthy Slingsby family had been leasing this estate. Theirs was a name that would become synonymous with springs around Harrogate following Sir William Slingsby’s ‘discovery’ of the town’s first mineral water source. Returning from a Grand Tour of Europe, he realised that the iron-rich water around the Tewit Well, located in the marshy meadows a few miles away to the south, had the same properties as those he’d enjoyed in the Belgian town of Spa. It was a revelation that would birth not just Harrogate’s reputation for restorative waters but also the word ‘spa’ in the English language. (At least, that’s the story Harrogate’s local historians stick to; similar claims can be found in most spa towns in Britain.) Whether Slingsby knew of the existence of an even more efficacious sulphur well in the woods by his home is unrecorded. In any case, his family’s days as residents at the hall were numbered. In 1615 charges were levied against his son, Henry, then keeper and ‘herbager’ of Bilton Park, for allowing it to fall into a dilapidated state. He was accused of felling trees and killing deer, aristocratic misdemeanours serious enough to warrant a heavy fine and the family’s swift removal. Ironically, three years after Charles I sold the estate, it was bought by Thomas Stockdale, a staunch parliamentarian and fiercely bitter political rival of Henry Slingsby. Bitter enough that he perhaps even bought it to spite him. In the tradition of primogeniture, ownership passed down the Stockdale line until an heir, another Thomas, mortgaged the hall and land in 1720, investing the thousand pounds raised in the ill-fated South Sea Company. When that bubble burst he lost everything and despite desperate remortgages and loans, the Stockdales were ruined too. They would suffer the same fate as the Slingsbys before them: the family was unceremoniously evicted and, searching for some kind of renewal, emigrated to the New World.