by Adams, Max;
Much of the museum is, perhaps unsurprisingly, dedicated to T. E. Lawrence whose cottage at Clouds Hill lies just a few miles west—a place of pilgrimage for historians and followers of his modest cult. Pam told me that there is a settle in one of the local pubs which was a favourite perch of the warrior hero; that she once had the privilege of sitting astride a Brough Superior SS100 motorcycle (the model Lawrence rode when he was killed), and would have kick-started it and taken it for a spin had she not been prevented by a spoilsport at the Bovington tank museum. It is a salutary thought that this motorcycle, whose top speed was about the same as my modern Japanese hi-tech slickster (roughly 125mph), was being ridden about the lanes of Dorset by a semi-crazed adventurer with no helmet eighty years ago. The one that killed him is a priceless treasure in the Imperial War Museum in London.
I had rather hoped to walk along that iconic stretch of road towards the cottage; but the pedestrian takes his life in his hands negotiating these roads in high summer so, leaving Wareham behind, I followed instead the shallow valley of the Piddle. I was kept from the riverbank by a scout camp, a Highways Agency maintenance depot, a grassy meadow defended resolutely by two jet-black African oxen who looked as though they had liberated themselves from the philosophy of vegetarianism and might eat me; by a quarry and a golf club; by private roads and dense woodland of chestnut and hazel. I was afforded brief excerpts of Dorset’s heathland, all bracken and spiky gorse. Not until I came out onto the Bere Regis road did I cross the Piddle, no more than a foot deep and running perfectly clear over a bed of gravel and chalk.
My second campsite of the trip was a mile short of Bere Regis (it has nothing to do with bears; the name means something like ‘the king’s pig-grazing wood’). I found a friendly welcome, a discreet field and a soft pitch; made my camp, showered and read a few pages of my old, thumb-worn copy of Leslie Alcock’s classic archaeological survey of the Dark Ages, Arthur’s Britain. I read it as an undergraduate at York in the early 1980s; I have reread it since: soon, for the first time, I would be visiting the site of Alcock’s famous excavations at South Cadbury, a view of whose ramparts provides the cover image for the book. Hunger soon distracted me from this professional comfort food. From the back of the campsite a suitably time-worn hollow way, cut through the chalk and lined with coppiced hazels bearing their acid-green fruit, led to Bere Regis. It’s a small, neat village with a couple of pubs, a Post Office and shop. The church has a remarkable decorated hammer-beam roof adorned with distinctly earthy figures; otherwise, the village is famous as the ancestral home of the Turberville family, immortalised in Thomas Hardy’s Tess. She is no less a heroic figure than Arthur, or Lawrence: wronged, raped, shunned and two-timed, her death by suicide is Shakespearean tragedy confined in Dorset’s dark lanes and torpid, poverty-ridden hamlets.
Dorset emerges into history as a shire during the ninth century; its name derives ultimately from that which the Romans recorded for its Iron Age tribe, the Durotriges, whose lands also embraced the southern parts of Somerset and Wiltshire. Its physical and cultural landscape evolves slowly, not impervious to change but cautious, conservative. To find out what its native peoples were doing and where they lived over the last two millennia, you need to look beneath the farms and hamlets that survive in the present landscape and excavate there. Mostly, what you would find would be farms and hamlets much as we see them today, minus the veneer of technology and with many, many more people thrown in. For clues to its Early Medieval character you might as well look in the pages of Thomas Hardy as try to peer through the eyes of Bede or the Chroniclers.
For some reason I did not feel like eating in a pub that night. I bought a couple of pork pies, some tomatoes and a wedge of cheese, and took them back to my den via Bere Regis’s near neighbour, the tiny but picturesque hamlet of Shitterton. People used to come and steal its village sign until, in 2010, the villagers had a new one carved into a ton-and-a-half block of creamy grey Purbeck stone. Shitterton is one of the very few properly attested scatological place names in England: it means, in Anglo-Saxon, the settlement of the open sewer—scite being the Old English word for, well, shit.
My second full day on the trail was hot enough without getting lost, first thing, in a maze of green lanes and sunken paths as I tried to effect a shortcut back to the Piddle. Dorset’s myriad footpaths tend to keep to the valleys and combs instead of breaking out onto the breezy, open spaces of the downs. So many trails criss-cross each other that it’s hard to navigate: landmarks are invisible from these green tunnels, and it’s as if I have stumbled on a Wessex version of the Ho Chi Minh trail, thoroughly invisible from above during the summer months. In truth the paths are so old that they have been worn into hollows by time, water and the hooves and feet of drovers and their charges. The effect, after a while, is slightly sinister, as if Dorset has something to hide. I began to harbour Rogue Male fantasies.
I more or less stumbled out into the open at the tiny hamlet of Turner’s Puddle: a more Hardy-esque, ramshackle, dozy Victorian estate farm it is hard to imagine. The orange-tiled brick barns and courtyards could easily be old Melbury’s place in The Woodlanders. I was all wide-eyed at this rural shabby-chic and had my cameras out, until a woman, passing me at little more than walking pace in a Volvo estate, gave me a look that suggested I was off-piste and intruding on her privacy. I have been getting used to the idea that a tall, middle-aged man walking on his own with a rucksack and cameras might seem threatening. It wouldn’t be like that if I was young (impoverished gap-year student: harmless) or in company. I am not sure if they think I will steal their daughters, or their televisions; rather, I think they are threatened by my apparent poverty: for a middle-aged man, alone (and therefore single), must be a misfit, unable to hold down a job (he is evidently NOT at work) or purchase an automobile. In another age I might be a refugee from some great conflict, or from Dust Bowl America. The only thing I can do to assuage their fears, should I choose to, is smile, wave, chat and tell them what I am about. Or act the fool. It always worked for Lord Peter Wimsey. It is a pity that I don’t look quite so harmless.
When opportunity arises, in cafés and campsite receptions, the response is universally kind and interested. But when I walk along lines of white caravans and motorhomes I can feel the fear behind the twitching of polyester curtains. Some people don’t give one a chance. Cars depersonalise in a way that not even brick walls and closed doors do. There is also the sad fact that on all these journeys so far I had not yet met a single other walker, except those being towed by their dogs. Ambulists have become an unusual sight, almost as rare as hitchhikers. The English are forgetting their walking rights and privileges, neglecting to keep their paths open. Like muscles, they atrophy through lack of use: choked with brambles and nettles and eventually reclaimed by nature, rights of way will become artefacts to be studied, not defended and enjoyed. Like the Post Office and the rural bus service, the public footpath, and the chance encounter on the trail, is in danger of becoming a casualty of the age of transport.
I came to Tolpuddle in the middle of a very warm morning. It was the most impeccably kept village I have ever seen: every house in its Sunday best with perfectly pointed brickwork and neat thatch or tile, fresh paint on woodwork, windows clean, lawns manicured and pavements swept, hanging baskets in their mating plumage, the full glory of high-summer blossom—as if, perhaps, royalty were expected. As it happened, I came here the day before the Tolpuddle Festival, which annually celebrates its nineteenth-century trades-union martyrs; and so a degree of polish was not surprising. Even so, I got the impression that it’s always like this in Tolpuddle. It gave me a slightly uneasy feeling, like Switzerland does.
I stopped, sweaty and thirsty, before the Methodist chapel where memorials to the six men imprisoned and transported in 1834 are mounted either side of the entrance. It is still salutary and depressing to think that, at the time of the Great Reform Bill debate, when Combination Acts banning trades unions had been repealed and when
liberty and representation for the people were matters of supreme public interest, small groups of rural workers, their jobs threatened by low wages and the infiltration of agricultural machinery, were still being oppressed by government in a case which belongs more to the world of the 1790s, of Jacobin paranoia, treason trials and French regicide than to the dawn of the modern age. On the marble gateway to the church is an inscription which records the defence of George Loveless, their leader.
We have injured no man’s reputation, character, person or property, we were uniting together to preserve ourselves, our wives and our children from utter degradation and starvation.
After the first great public campaign of its kind in England galvanised opinion against the transportation of the six men, all but one were released in 1836. I was sorry to miss the festival: there is something compelling about watching large crowds of people drawn to a place—a village becomes a temporary town; old friends meet; new friendships are forged. Tolpuddle might have been an important meeting place long before the martyrs—a Roman road crossed the river here and it is a natural focal point in the landscape for farmers and travellers; another site for a caravanserai, perhaps.
A mile further west, my horizon now confined by a maize crop whose plants dwarfed me at well over six foot tall, I walked along the south bank of the river, sorely tempted to strip off and jump in, except that I would only have got my calves wet. Here I passed the confluence of the Piddle with the Devil’s Brook which runs directly north into the chalk downlands through the old villages of Dewlish and Hilton.
The Devil’s Brook bears an intriguing name—there are several like it in England, and they all seem to derive from an early form Divelis (as does Dewlish). This is an English corruption of a Brythonic river name, Dhuglas, or Douglas, meaning ‘blue-black’. In the Historia Brittonum the name occurs (Latin Dubglas) as the site of four battles fought by the British general Arthur in the region of Linnuis (unknown, but sometimes identified with Lindsey or Lincolnshire). Across the Tyne from Corbridge is a river called Devil’s Water, also probably derived from a Dhuglas original, where Oswald slew Cadwallon in 634 to reconquer Bernicia.
As it happens, no river bearing the name Douglas or its several derivatives is to be found in Lincolnshire. Another candidate for the place-name root of Linnuis is Lindum on the north side of the Clyde estuary; a third, slightly corrupted, is Lininuis which, Leslie Alcock argued in his survey of the evidence, can be identified with a section of the Durotriges tribe of British Wessex around Ilchester (Roman Lindinis). And there are four rivers in West Wessex which bear the name Douglas in one form or another. So the would-be Arthurian geographer might justifiably be excited by the possibility of identifying a battle zone between Briton and Saxon in just the area and at the time—that is to say, late fifth-century western Britain—when we suppose tensions to have been at their greatest, and Arthur to have been militarily active.
By the time I reached Puddletown in the middle of a sweltering day, I was sorely in need of refreshment. I bought lunch from the village grocery store, downed a can of ginger beer in one and paused to sit on a wall to consult the map. It was time to leave the low ground and its limited-visibility frustrations. Dorset was acting like a teenager, monosyllabic, distant and impenetrable. I wanted to head for the hills. My first long-distance walk, in 2001, was the West Highland Way, from Milngavie on the edge of Glasgow to Fort William, all camaraderie, laughs, beer and mountain vistas. At the time it seemed epic. In 2007, with my friend Paul McGowan whom I had met on the West Highland Way, I tackled Corsica’s notorious GR20 route along the island’s alpine spine. It was hard: seriously hard. Three walkers had died on it the previous week in a freak blizzard; we passed the remains of their belongings on the trail. To spend two weeks in the mountains is to redefine walking—and life. These lowland trails are fascinating in the palimpsest detail of the topography, its intimacy, its crammed-in richness: a filo pastry landscape. But the experiences seemed to pile up, as if I was being buried under a sensory and cultural tumulus. I began to resent having to write so much, take so many pictures, read so many books. I longed for the open downs, their big air, their sightlines and an opportunity to think less. Thinking can be hard work; and walking is for hard physical effort, not for brain-ache.
The afternoon, leaving Puddletown, did not start well: the path that circumvented a crossing of the busy A35 was choked with briar and nettle; one needs a machete for this sort of jungle. After what seemed like a couple of miles (actually, just over half a mile), I emerged, cut, scratched and sweaty, onto a back lane, took a right, and at Druce Farm left the Piddle to follow the line of a small stream that would take me up onto the downs. The heat was like a lead weight slipped into the pack while I wasn’t looking. The smell was a composite musk of straw dust and baked earth. The dead rasp of stubble against trail shoes, and ahead of me the growl of a tractor ploughing it into the crisp, dark reddy-brown earth, were welcome noises in that still air. I was reminded, for reasons I can’t quite pin down, of Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, with its evocation of the dry intensity of the Cossack landscape and the crushing, infinite labour of the Russian peasant. The contemporary British landscape is largely devoid of peasants or labourers: it is a modern, industrial space. But its past is written in the lines of its boundaries and lanes, paths and monuments, and to be able to read them is the privilege of speaking a native language. The peasant experience was, I suspect, universally similar.
On either side now, on the rounded crests of these convex hills, pimples of tumuli perched on the horizon reminded me that Dorset is primarily a prehistoric landscape of Bronze Age pastoralists, who cleared the wolds of their forests and buried granny on their summer pastures under a pile of stones and a mound to remind their children and their neighbours that this was their grazing land; that it had always been their grazing land. Thousands of barrows on the downs of Dorset echo a time before the construction of the great Iron Age hill forts—Maiden Castle, Hambledon Hill, Badbury Rings—that mark a feverish tribalisation of these rich lands in the three or four centuries before Caesar planted his untimely hobnail sandals on the shores of Kent.
Higher, then; and higher still, as the trail, surely an ancient route between sheltered winter quarters and summer grazing lands, followed the lazy incline of the valley sides. And then out, out onto Whitcombe Hill at over four hundred feet (not exactly Buachaille Etive Mor in Glen Coe; nor Monte Cinto in Corsica; but still). At last a vista, an uncoiled horizon. Grasshoppers chirped in the long grass; flies buzzed, the faint wind a gentle caressing murmur. Wiping the sweat from my eyes and dropping the pack for a few moments, I enjoyed what little breeze there was, stood beneath the boughs of a lone sycamore for its shade, and looked around. Puddletown lay to the south, now hidden in its valley; the Purbeck hills lost in blue haze beyond; the line of the downs sprawling east, back towards Bere Regis. Higher land spread to the north, land parcelled out three thousand years ago by cross dykes and join-the-dots barrows and interconnected by the even older Ridgeway, so ancient a route that it qualifies as a geological certainty almost as much as an artefact of longdistance prehistoric travel; or a Wall.
I had to point myself west; so I must descend once more into the valley and to the village of Piddletrenthide, where I found a pint glass of lemonade in a pub (shades of Lawrence again, after Aqaba and the Sinai crossing; that marvellous Officer’s Mess scene in David Lean’s film. ‘We. Want. Two. Large. Glasses. Of lemonade.’ And later, General Allenby to orderly: ‘What do you think of what Major Lawrence has done, Perkins?’ Perkins: ‘Bloody marvellous, Sir!’).
Up the other side, then, and I found a very welcome campsite perched at six hundred feet on the hills above Cerne Abbas. After pitching the tent, showering and enjoying a snack, I made a late-afternoon excursion to visit the celebrated phallic Giant. What to make of him—seventeenth-century folly or prehistoric message to the ancestors? He is Hercules or a native British totem, not Woden, but whether a Romano-Britis
h fertility plea to the gods or a Civil War parody of Oliver Cromwell none can say unless definitive archaeological evidence emerges one day to prove his antiquity. Cerne Abbas, reached by a steep descent off the chalk ridge, through a field of rape (that sweet, rancid smell again), a track carpeted with pineapple weed (the abiding odour of the day) and down sheep-worn paths has other pleasures—half-timbered houses, a tranquil spring and shady burial ground inside the high walls of the former abbey; good food and beer. The abbey was not founded until the reform movement of the tenth century; but the sweet water of St Augustine’s well might conceivably link it with a visit by the first Archbishop of Canterbury on his way, perhaps, to that fateful meeting with the British bishops in 602/3.
That evening, heavy clouds gathered; the air became very close and dusk coincided with rumbles of thunder—Thor making his presence felt. During the night a terrific gusty wind came dashing across the ridge and with it a fistful of short, sharp rain showers, but they passed; and at first light there was nothing to see or hear but a grey, enveloping veil of swirling hill fog. Dorset was invisible again, and silent; sulking. More green lanes funnelled me through field and wood, across small streams. As I came down onto farmland, through the hamlet of Hermitage with its Lady’s Well and small neat flint church, the fog lifted. I crossed a meadow whose hedges hosted great, ancient oaks and I saw, as my feet swiped the damp grass, thousands of tiny oak saplings, all delicate green, the fruits of the labours of dopey, forgetful jays and a bumper mast year. I reflected that, should this meadow lie neglected, uncut or ungrazed for just a few years, it would revert to oakwood. This mannered human landscape of field and hedge, wall and fence, is a very temporary borrowing from nature, whose colonising forces sit poised, leashed in like hounds and ready for deployment. Just a decade away from woodland regeneration that might look, to my future self, like the onset of a Dark Age of abandonment. Sure, it’s a comforting thought.