Ghostland

by Edward Parnell

  ††† Spoonbills so often seem to be sleeping when you see them, concealing their weird spatula-shaped beaks as if they don’t want you to believe that such an instrument could have possibly ever evolved.

  Chapter 12

  ANCIENT SORCERIES

  Two skylarks perform their songflight somewhere above me. In the harsh glare of the late morning sun I can’t pick them out, and it’s no easier when the scene’s temporarily thrown into eclipse by a fast-moving cloud. The breeze is forceful, shaking the foot-high grass and masking the faint radio-interference sounds of the larks.

  Badbury Rings in Dorset, an Iron Age hill fort consisting of three concentric circles of chalk banks and ditches. A herd of brown and black cows graze contentedly alongside the earthworks. One of them coughs as I pass, the sound a little like the persistent throat-clearing my brother couldn’t stop himself from doing when we were last here. I don’t know the exact date because I made no note of it and there are no corroborating pictures on my phone; that summer of 2014 I took few photos because I didn’t want to document what was unfolding. But on that similarly sun-stoked day we watched – briefly, because they never stayed still – dark green fritillary and marbled-white butterflies. So I can date our visit to around the end of June, because that’s the period those two species are on the wing.

  You see, my brother was dying.

  He had, within a few months, become frail and thin: a prematurely aged 46-year-old perched on his maroon electric mobility scooter, which he manoeuvred with gusto around the paths of this ancient fortification. He drove it with no self-consciousness – with little grumbling about the rapidity of his physical deterioration, his hacking dry cough, and his complete lack of appetite. I admired him for how he managed to keep it together, because he seemed so much mentally stronger and more dignified than I could ever imagine myself to be in that situation. But then he always was the stoic, sensible one, always just got on with things while I went flitting from job to job, off on travels to look for obscure rare birds, or half-heartedly tried to write books that never came.

  Several weeks before – around the beginning of May – the doctors had finally determined what was causing Chris’s breathing to become laboured, his heart to stop functioning correctly. He’d been admitted to hospital two years previously with related symptoms, which were eventually attributed to long-term cardiac damage caused by the corrosive therapy carried out to treat his Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After that initial scare, following a spell of recuperation, he was back at work, back to becoming himself again. Yes, if we happened to be walking up a slope I would notice that he’d get breathless and have to pause for rests, but I was hopeful that with ongoing medication nothing much would substantively change. But as the spring of 2014 got under way he collapsed at home and was readmitted to hospital once more. This time they found the underlying cause: it wasn’t only his heart that had been damaged by the earlier treatments – insidious cancer cells were concealed within his lungs, another little-known consequence of the chemicals, or the radiation, that had before kept his disease at bay.

  Chris went home and every opportunity I got I came down to his house on the outskirts of Wimborne Minster – only a few miles from Badbury Rings – to help out in the small way I could, dropping my nieces off at school or at their dancing lessons (they were nine and twelve then), and to enjoy being with my brother: our expectations were finite, though we hoped he had a year or more left. Knowing his stubbornness, he’ll hold on far longer, I thought, when I dared to wonder about that empty future at all.

  When I reach the outer circle I head clockwise around the periphery of the Rings, just as the two of us did before. Here, higher up the hill, the wind is stronger and a swift is quartering uncharacteristically low over the grass and wild flowers. A swift once more – like the pioneering April bird that had sailed above the Southampton General car park; I follow its twisting flight through Chris’s binoculars, which I have borrowed.

  Later, I will see numerous common-spotted and pyramidal orchids, but none of the mimicking bee orchids that Chris and I did manage to locate that day. An elderly but sprightly Dutchman – from Friesland, in the north of the country, he tells me – asks what I’m looking at.

  ‘Orchids,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know what they’re called in English, but in Holland they grow taller,’ he replies, then explains how he has been coming here for fifty years, as his late wife was from nearby Blandford. I sense his sadness – you are on a pilgrimage of sorts like me, I think. We move on to a safer topic of conversation for two strangers: the weather.

  ‘We should be okay,’ I say, glancing up at the fast-changing sky.

  ‘Let’s hope. I’m on the campsite, so need it to be good.’

  He carries on, away into the woodland at the heart of the hill. I sit down next to the Ordnance Survey triangulation station that juts up from the bank – a modern monolith – and listen to the scratchy song of a nearby whitethroat. Few butterflies are on the wing – perhaps it’s too windy? Just a handful of meadow browns, but none of the marbled whites or fritillaries I saw before. A stoat lollops past through the long grass, too fast for my camera, but I can make out its black tail tip, so am certain of its identity. I smirk to myself, like I always do when I encounter one of these agile little killers. Because my mother couldn’t help but crack her joke: how do you tell a weasel from a stoat?

  Weasels are weasily recognised and stoats are stotally different, of course.

  I get to my feet. It’s time to walk in the wood. When Chris and I were last here I was concerned that the foot-worn path up through the centre of the Rings to the apex of the hill was too muddy and his scooter wouldn’t make it, but he didn’t seem concerned. ‘I’m not bloody carrying you,’ I joked. And we were fine. Beyond the concrete plinth showing neighbouring landmarks, we watched a spotted flycatcher perform dashing sorties among the Scots pines, the first example of that declining migrant I’d seen that summer. They used to nest behind our house when I was at school – the newly fledged youngsters usually appearing at some stage on our washing line – but now I encounter them only sporadically (the species’ British population has declined massively over the past fifty years). I wonder whether I might find one here again, whether even the same individual could show itself to me through my Chris’s binoculars. The thought puts me in mind of M. R. James’s ‘A View from a Hill’, in which Fanshawe is visiting his friend Richards on a sunny June day like today.* Fanshawe takes the loan of a strangely heavy, archaic pair of field glasses from his host and, from a nearby vantage point, can see people milling about on so-called Gallows Hill across the way.

  ‘And now – by Jove, it does look like something hanging on the gibbet.’

  The squire, when he tries them, sees nothing.

  It transpires that the maker of the optics, a local antiquary named Baxter, has been boiling down the bones of hanged men and incorporating the grim fluid into the instrument’s lenses, in order that he can see through their dead eyes into a previous age. Predictably, events do not end well for him.

  Through my rather less heavy borrowed Leica binoculars no flycatchers present themselves, no past visions or snatched glimpses through my departed brother’s eyes – though would I even know the difference, I wonder, as so much of what we enjoyed looking at was so similar.

  So many things about us the same.

  From out of nowhere a shower has started, so I make for shelter beneath a holly bush among the oaks, the sound soporific as the rain drops onto the leaves above my head; if I stay here for too long I might never want to leave. The place possesses a peacefulness – a sort of magic, I suppose. It’s a sense described in reverential terms by the artist Paul Nash, who also captured the languorous undulations of the age-old hillside in an illustration included in his 1935 Dorset Shell Guide – an early title in the series of petroleum-sponsored guidebooks for the new breed of pioneering motorist tha
t, under the editorship of John Betjeman, he compiled:

  I have read of enchanted places, and at rare times come upon them, but I remember nothing so beautifully haunted as the wood in Badbury Rings. Long afterwards I read of the tradition that King Arthur’s soul inhabited a raven’s body which nested there – indeed it is one of the last nesting-places of the wild raven in England – but I needed no artificial stimulus to be impressed.

  I’ve not heard the croak of any ravens today, but driving around the local lanes that summer with Chris, we often saw their distinctive wedge-tailed silhouettes sailing above us and picked out their gruff croaks, and he told me how they’d been getting far more common in the county over the past few years.† The Arthurian raven legends at Badbury are a comparatively recent phenomenon, stemming from a late-Victorian, Cambridge antiquarian scholar, Edwin Guest, who hypothesised that Badbury was the location of Mount Badon, where the historical Arthur was said to have defeated the Saxons (though several other sites make a similar claim). This speculation seems to have become intertwined with the notable presence of breeding ravens – the last to nest in Wessex, some have claimed. From those two snippets of purported fact, it was not such a leap to have Arthur’s spirit transferring into one of the shaggy-throated corvids, a species which had been popularised by Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem and Dickens’s novel Barnaby Rudge; the tradition of keeping ravens at the Tower of London and the associated legend also first arose in the Victorian age. Yet other local folklore grew up too, involving the great king’s midnight appearances at the Rings with his ghostly cohort of knights, superseding earlier stories of a golden coffin buried somewhere between the ancient fort and the neighbouring village.

  The shower stops and I start down the hill. I try to think back to where else Chris and I went during those end days: we looked, unsuccessfully, for otters on the river in Blandford Forum; to Knowlton, not far from Badbury, where the ruins of a Norman church sit within an even older circular earthwork in the chalk – a perfect example of the links between the pagan past and Christianity; to Corfe Castle, where we ate a cream tea (or at least I did, Chris having little appetite by this point) in the shadow of the now romantic ruin that was blown apart during the Civil War; and to Maiden Castle, a bare-hilled Iron Age fort overlooking Dorchester, whose size dwarfs all others in the country. John Cowper Powys’s 1936 novel Maiden Castle was inspired by the impressive site, though it’s a book I struggle to have much affinity with. Thomas Hardy wrote about it too – his short story ‘A Tryst in an Ancient Earthwork’ describes the place beautifully: ‘At one’s every step forward it rises higher against the south sky, with an obtrusive personality that compels the senses to regard it and consider.’ This was another location Paul Nash painted and photographed, writing powerfully of the skeletal remains – lifeless objects in the landscape – that he’d recently witnessed being uncovered there (during the 1930s) by the archaeologist Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler:

  The sun beat down on the glinting white bones which were disposed in elegant clusters and sprays of blanched sprigs and branches. Or some seemed to be the nests of giant birds; the gleaming skulls like clutches of monstrous eggs. It was a place, with these scattered groups of fantastic nests and long raised ledges on the open hills, resembling a bird sanctuary. A sanctuary for moas.

  Chris and I only got as far as the parking area that day, hoping to see a corn bunting, a rattle-songed, streaky-brown farmland species that we came across often in our Lincolnshire youth, but has since been decimated by the onslaught of pesticides and changes in agricultural practices. We didn’t find any, but today, almost as soon as I leave the car, I hear one. And there it is, perched on a low fence post. Another, more distant male is on a telegraph wire, attempting to demonstrate the superiority of its own voice. Nash was right, I think: this is a sanctuary, only the birds it shelters have not quite yet gone the way of the flightless, extinct New Zealand moa.

  From Maiden Castle I detour into Dorchester: Thomas Hardy’s Casterbridge. The Dorset county town is where Hardy lived – in Max Gate, a house he designed himself – for almost half of his eighty-seven years. It’s also the setting for the culmination of one of the few uncanny stories he wrote, ‘The Withered Arm’ – a Wessex tale Hardy himself described as being ‘of rather a weird nature’.‡ Its main protagonists are the milkmaid Rhoda Brook and her illegitimate son, a boy of twelve or thirteen fathered by Lodge, a local farmer. The story begins with talk of the imminent arrival of the farmer’s recently acquired wife. Rhoda, understandably, is bitter about this turn of events and the way she’s been cast aside. She sends out her son on a spying mission, though his reports back of the girl’s loveliness are not what the older woman wants to hear. Two or three weeks later, as she lies in bed, Rhoda experiences an unsettling night terror: ‘the young wife, in the pale silk dress and white bonnet, but with features shockingly distorted, and wrinkled as by age, was sitting upon her chest as she lay.’ Feeling herself suffocated, she struggles and grabs ‘the incubus’ by its left arm, flinging the figure away from her onto the floor of her room.

  It transpires that the picture the milkmaid has built up about the woman she views as a callous usurper is unfair. Gertrude Lodge has a pleasant, kindly nature: she brings new boots to the boy because she feels sorry for the state of his footwear, and strikes up an unlikely friendship with Rhoda. She confides in the older woman that she’s recently been troubled by a strange mark – ‘as if produced by a rough grasp’ – on her left arm, which is beginning to cause her increasing discomfort. It appeared at the same time Rhoda cast off the creature in her night terror. As the summer draws on, Gertrude’s odd condition deteriorates further, and she confesses that she believes her husband already loves her less due to her newly acquired disfigurement: ‘Men think so much of personal appearance.’ Rhoda has begun to feel responsible, wondering whether her own anger and jealousy have combined to ‘exercise a malignant power over people against my own will’.

  The arm begins to shrink and wither, and Gertrude persuades Rhoda to take her to a noted wise man said to be gifted with healing abilities. Conjuror Trendle is a grey-bearded local who lives in a remote cottage on the wild Egdon Heath, a place in Hardy’s work of eeriness, magic, and the superstitions of a bygone age. Trendle makes a living selling furze (gorse, traditionally used for fuel), turf and sand that he harvests from the heath, yet also helps those who come to him regarding more esoteric matters. He tells Gertrude that ‘an enemy’ has caused the affliction, showing her the likeness of the person in a glass filled with the albumen of an egg. Although what she sees is not described to us, her later reaction to Rhoda confirms the identity of the glimpsed figure.

  Over the course of that winter the farmer’s new wife gradually loses the use of her left arm. Local gossip puts it down to her being ‘overlooked’ by Rhoda Brook – an old term for the Evil Eye.§ Rhoda and her son leave the neighbourhood, nobody knowing what has become of them. Six years later Gertrude Lodge, by this point firmly trapped in a loveless and childless marriage, goes again to see Conjuror Trendle on the heath. One possible last cure remains: to touch the limb against the neck of a recently hanged man. ‘It will turn the blood and change the constitution,’ he tells her, so Gertrude makes a secret plan to visit Casterbridge on the occasion of a forthcoming public execution.

  This being Hardy, of course, things do not conclude brightly.

  Egdon is a location vividly rendered in this story, which also plays a greater role at the heart of Hardy’s novel The Return of the Native. In the geography of his imagined ‘partly real, partly dream-country’ of Wessex it’s a wild expanse, stretching much further than the actual heathland areas, known as Black Heath and Duddle Heath, that were within easy walking distance of the cottage in which he was raised in the hamlet of Higher Bockhampton, three miles east of Dorchester.

  By the time I arrive, the rain clouds that tracked me at Badbury have blown over and the heather-covered hillsides are gatheri
ng the afternoon warmth. I like to think I’m following in the very steps the young Hardy himself took, past Rushy Pond, a shallow ‘heath-hemmed’ watering hole where I watch a pony silently emerge through the scrub to drink. I follow the old Roman road to Puddletown, walled in on my left by a monotonous stand of Scots pines whose bone-like roots crisscross the surface, causing me more than once to stumble. Heat reflects back at me from the foot-worn chalk of the path and, at one point, I nearly tread upon the blackness of a red admiral butterfly that basks there open-winged; from the nearby furze two yellowhammers sing out to me about the paucity of bread and cheese. This ancient thoroughfare inspired a poem by Hardy, ‘The Roman Road’, in which the memory of his long-departed mother, who brought him here as an infant, is remembered and contrasted with those earlier, unseen legionaries.

  The heath itself, though it doesn’t cover a large acreage, is still easy to get lost in – like Sebald’s mesmeric Dunwich – particularly as I try to locate the tumulus that’s the setting for the evocative Guy Fawkes’ Night bonfire at the beginning of The Return of the Native. The real-life location, known as Rainbarrows, consists of three now overgrown cavities – inside which, in 1887, urns containing the cremated remains of the dead were unearthed – rather than the more conspicuous singular ‘Rainbarrow’ whose ‘blurred contour’ obstructs the sky of the novel. This viewpoint is also, so the leaflet I picked up in the Hardy’s Birthplace Visitor Centre tells me, the spot from where the author once witnessed a public execution – a hanging – down in the dip of Dorchester. Before that, as a young boy, he’d been haunted by a story his father told him, a story that provided the inspiration for the devastating ending of ‘The Withered Arm’: during the 1830s his father watched four men, including a starving lad of eighteen, put to the noose, for being mere bystanders when a haystack was torched.