by Bill Bryson
I followed a paved path to the front of the palace and over Vanbrugh’s grand bridge to the mighty, absurdly egocentric column that the first Duke of Marlborough erected at the top of a hill overlooking the palace and lake. It really is the most extraordinary edifice, not only because it is lofty and impressive, but because it dominates the view from at least a hundred palace windows. What kind of person, I wondered, would erect a 100-foot-high column to himself in his own grounds? How striking was the contrast with the simple grave of dear old Winnie.
Maybe I’m a bit simple, but it has always seemed to me that the scale of Blenheim Palace and the scale of Marlborough’s achievement are curiously disproportionate. I can understand how in a moment of mad rejoicing a grateful nation might have awarded turn, say, a two-week timeshare for life in the Canaries and maybe a set of cutlery or a Teasmade, but I can’t for the life of me comprehend how a scattering of triumphs in obscure places like Oudenard and Malplaquet could be deemed to have entitled the conniving old fart to one of the great houses of Europe and a dukedom. More extraordinary still to my mind is the thought that nearly 300 years later the duke’s heirs can litter the grounds with miniature trains and bouncing castles, charge admission and enjoy unearned positions of rank and privilege simply because a distant grandsire happened to have a passing talent for winning battles. It seems a most eccentric arrangement to me.
I remember once reading that the tenth Duke of Marlborough, on a visit to one of his daughter’s homes, announced in consternation from the top of the stairs that his toothbrush wasn’t foaming properly. It turned out that his valet had always put toothpaste on his brush for him, and as a consequence the duke was unaware that dental implements didn’t foam up spontaneously. I rest my case.
As I was standing there taking in the view and reflecting on the curious practice of primogeniture, some well-groomed young woman on a bay horse bounded past very near to where I was standing. I’ve no idea who she was, but she looked rich and privileged. I gave her a little smile, such as one habitually gives strangers in an open place, and she stared flatly back at me as if I was not important enough to smile at. So I shot her. Then I returned to the car and drove on.
I spent two days driving through the Cotswolds and didn’t like it at all - not because the Cotswolds were unlovely but because the car was. You are so sealed off from the world in a moving vehicle, and the pace is all wrong. I had grown used to moving about at walking speed or at least at British Rail speed, which is often, of course, much the same thing. So it was with relief, after a day spent dashing about through various Chippings and Slaughters and Tweeness-upon-the-Waters, that I abandoned the car in a car park in Broadway and took to my feet.
The last time I had seen Broadway, on an August afternoon some years before, it had been a nightmare of sclerotic traffic and flocks of shuffling daytrippers, but now, out of season, it seemed quiet and forgotten, its High Street nearly empty. It’s an almost absurdly pretty place with its steeply pitched roofs, mullioned windows, prolific gables and trim little gardens. There is something about that golden Cotswold stone, the way it absorbs sunlight and then feeds it back so that even on the dullest days villages like Broadway seem to be basking in a perennial glow. This day, in fact, was sunny and gorgeous, with just a tang of autumn crispness in the air which gave the world a marvellous clean, fresh-laundered feel. Halfway along the High Street I found a signpost for the Cotswold Way and plunged off down a track between old buildings. I followed the path across a sunny meadow and up the long slope towards Broadway Tower, an outsized folly high above the village. The view from the top over the broad Vale of Evesham was, as always from such points, sensational - gently undulating trapezoids of farmland rolling off to a haze of distant wooded hills. Britain still has more landscape that looks like an illustration from a children’s story book than any other country I know - a remarkable achievement in such a densely crowded and industrially minded little island. And yet I couldn’t help feeling that the view may have been more bucolic and rewarding ten or perhaps twenty years ago.
It is easy to forget, in a landscape so timeless and fetching, so companionably rooted to an ancient past, how easily it is lost. The panorama before me incorporated electricity pylons, scattered housing estates and the distant sunny glints of cash and carry warehouses. Far worse, the dense, carefully knitted network of hedgerows was showing distinct signs of becoming frayed and disjointed, like the pattern on a candlewick bedspread that has been picked off by idle fingers. Here and there fragments of overgrown hedge stood stranded and forlorn in the midst of otherwise featureless fields.
Did you know that between 1945 and 1985 England lost 96,000 miles of hedgerows - enough to girdle the earth four times? So muddled has been government policy towards the countryside that for a period of twenty-four years farmers could actually get one grant to plant hedgerows and another to grub them up. Between 1984 and 1990, despite the withdrawal of government money to plough up hedgerows, a further 53,000 miles were lost. You often hear it said (and I know because I once spent three days at a
symposium on hedgerows; the things I do to keep my children in Reeboks) that hedgerows are, in fact, a transitory feature of the landscape, a relic of the enclosure movements, and that trying to save them merely thwarts the natural evolution of the countryside. Indeed, increasingly you hear the view that conservation of all types is fussy, retrograde and an impediment to progress. I have before me as I write a quote from Lord Palumbo arguing that the whole vague notion of heritage ‘carries the baggage of nostalgia for a nonexistent golden age which, had it existed, might well have been the death of invention’, which is so fatuous it breaks my heart.
Quite apart from the consideration that if you followed that argument to its logical conclusion you would tear down Stonehenge and the Tower of London, in point of fact many hedgerows have been there for a very, very long time. In Cambridgeshire, I know of a particularly lovely hedge, called Judith’s Hedge, that is older than Salisbury Cathedral, older than York Minster, older indeed than all but a handful of buildings in Britain, and yet no statute stands between it and its destruction. If the road needed widening or the owners decided they preferred the properly to be bounded by fence-posts and barbed wire, it would be the work of but a couple of hours to bulldoze away 900 years of living history. That’s insane. At least half the hedgerows in Britain predate the enclosure movements and perhaps as many as a fifth date back to Anglo-Saxon times. Anyway, the reason for saving them isn’t because they have been there for ever and ever, but because they clearly and unequivocally enhance the landscape. They are a central part of what makes England England. Without them, it would just be Indiana with steeples.
It gets me a little wild sometimes. You have in this country the most comely, the most parklike, the most flawlessly composed countryside the world has ever known, a product of centuries of tireless, instinctive improvement, and you are half a generation from destroying most of it for ever. We’re not talking here about ‘nostalgia for a non-existent golden age’. We’re talking about something that is green and living and incomparably beautiful. So if one more person says to me, ‘Hedgerows aren’t really an ancient feature of the landscape, you know,’ I shall very likely punch him in the hooter. I’m a great believer in Voltaire’s famous maxim, ‘Sir, I may not agree with what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to be a complete asshole,’ but there comes a time when a line must be drawn.I struck off down a wooded back lane to Snowshill, three miles away. The leaves were golden and rustly and the sky vast and blue and empty but for an occasional slow-moving wedge of migrating birds. It was a wonderful day to be abroad - the kind of day that has you puffing your chest and singing ‘Zippity Doo Dah’ in the voice of Paul Robeson. Snowshill drowsed in the sunshine, a cluster of stone cottages gathered round a sloping green. I bought an entrance ticket to Snowshill Manor, now in the hands of the National Trust but from 1919 to 1956 the home of an eccentric character named Charles Wade, who devoted his
life to accumulating a vast and unfocused assortment of stuff, some of it very good, some of it little more than junk - clavichords, microscopes, Flemish tapestries, snuff and tobacco boxes, maps and sextants, samurai armour, penny-farthing bicycles, you name it - until he had filled his house so full that there was no room left for him. He spent his last years living happily in an outbuilding, which, like the house, has been preserved as it was on the day he died. I enjoyed it very much, and afterwards, as the sun sank in the west and the world filled with long shadows and a vague, entrancing smell of woodsmoke, I hiked back to my car a happy man.
I spent the night in Cirencester and the next day, after a pleasant look around the little Corinium Museum with its outstanding but curiously little-known collection of Roman mosaics, coins and other artefacts, drove on to Winchcombe to see the real thing in situ. On a hill above Winchcombe, you see, there is a little-visited site so singular and wonderful that I hesitate even to mention it. Most of the relatively few visitors who intrude upon this tranquil corner of the Cotswolds generally content themselves with a look around Sudeley Castle or a hike to the remote hump of the famous Belas Knap long barrow. But I headed straight for a grassy hillside path called the Salt Way, so named because in medieval times salt was conveyed along it. It was an enchanting walk through open countryside, with long views across sharply defined valleys that seemed never to have seen a car or heard the sound of a chainsaw.
At a place called Cole’s Hill the path plunged abruptly into a seriously overgrown wood, dark and primeval in feel and all but impenetrable with brambles. Somewhere in here, I knew, was my goal - a site listed on the map as ‘Roman villa (remains of)’. For perhaps half an hour, I hacked through the growth with my stick before I came upon the foundations of an old wall. It looked like nothing much - the remains of an old pigsty perhaps - but a few feet further on, all but obscured by wild ivy, were more low walls, a whole series of them, on both sides of the path. The path itself was paved with flagstones underneath a carpet of wet leaves, and I knew that I was in the villa. In one of the relict chambers, the floor had been carefully covered with plastic fertilizer bags weighted with stones at each corner. This is what I had come to see. I had been told about this by a friend but had never really believed it. For underneath those bags was a virtually complete Roman mosaic, about five feet square, exquisitely patterned and flawlessly preserved but for a tiny bit of fracturing around the edges.
I cannot tell you how odd it felt to be standing in a forgotten wood in what had once been, in an inconceivably distant past, the home of a Roman family, looking at a mosaic laid at least 1,600 years ago when this was an open sunny space, long before this ancient wood grew up around it. It is one thing to see these things in museums, quite another to come upon one on the spot where it was laid. I have no idea why it hadn’t been gathered up and taken away to some place like the Corinium Museum. I presume it is a terrible oversight, but I am so grateful to have had the chance to see it. I sat for a long time on a stone, riveted with wonder and admiration. I don’t know what seized me more, the thought that people in togas had once stood on this floor chatting in vernacular Latin or that it was still here, flawless and undisturbed, amid this tangle of growth.
This may sound awfully stupid, but for the first time it dawned on me in a kind of profound way that all those Roman antiquities I had gazed at over the years weren’t created with a view to ending up one day in museums. Because the mosaic was still in its original setting, because it hadn’t been roped off and placed inside a modern building, it was still clearly and radiantly a floor and not merely some diverting artefact. This was something meant to be walked on and used, something that had unquestionably felt the shuffle of Roman sandals. It had a strange kind of spell about it that left me quietly agog.
After a long time, I got up and carefully put back all the fertilizer bags and reweighted them with stones. I picked up my stick, surveyed my work to make sure all was in order, then turned and began the long process of hacking my way back to that strange and careless place that is the twentieth century.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I WENT TO MILTON KEYNES, FEELING THAT I OUGHT TO AT LEAST HAVE a look at a new. town. Milton Keynes takes some getting to from Oxford, which is a little odd because it’s only just up the road. I selected it as my destination on the basis of a quick look at a road map, assuming that I would, at worst, have to take a train to Bicester or some such place and then another from there. In fact, I had to go all the way back to London, catch an Underground train to Euston and then finally a train to Milton Keynes - an overall journey of perhaps 120 miles in order to travel between two towns about thirty miles apart.
It was costly and time-consuming and left me feeling a tiny bit fractious, not least because the train from Euston was crowded and I ended up sitting facing a bleating woman and her ten-year-old son, who kept knocking my shins with his dangling legs and irritating me by staring at me with piggy eyes while picking his nose and eating the bogies. He appeared to regard his nose as a kind of mid-faced snack dispenser. I tried to absorb myself in a book, but I found my gaze repeatedly rising against my wishes to find him staring at me with a smug look and a busy finger. It was quite repellent and I was very pleased, when the train finally pulled into Milton Keynes, to get my rucksack down from the overhead rack and drag it across his head as I departed.
I didn’t hate Milton Keynes immediately, which I suppose is as much as you could hope for the place. You step out of the station and into a big open square lined on three sides with buildings of reflective glass, and have an instant sense of spaciousness such as you almost never get in English towns. The town itself stood on the slope of a small hill a good half-mile away beyond a network of pedestrian tunnels and over a large open space shared by car parks and those strange new-town trees that never seem to grow. I had the distinct feeling that the next time I passed this expanse of grass and asphalt it would be covered with brick office buildings with coppery windows.
Though I have spent much time wandering through new towns trying to imagine what their creators could possibly have been thinking, I had never been to Milton Keynes. In many ways, it was much superior to any new town I had seen before. The underpasses were faced with polished granite and were largely free of graffiti and the permanent murky puddles that seem to be a design feature of Basingstoke and Bracknell.
The town itself was a strange amalgam of styles. The grassless, shady strips along the centres of the main boulevards gave them a vaguely French air. The landscaped light industrial parks around the fringes looked German. The grid plan and numbered street names recalled America. The buildings were of the featureless sort you find around any international airport. In short, it looked anything but English.
The oddest thing was that there were no shops and no-one about. I walked for some distance through the central core of the town, up one avenue and down another and through the shadowy streets that connected them. Every car park was full and there were signs of life behind the gaping office windows, but almost no passing traffic and never more than one or two other pedestrians along the endless vistas of road. I knew there was a vast shopping mall in the town somewhere because I had read about it in Mark Lawson’s The Battle for Room Service, but I couldn’t for the life of me find it, and I couldn’t even find anyone to ask. The annoying thing was that nearly all the buildings looked like they might be shopping malls. I kept spotting likely looking contenders and going up to investigate only to discover that it was the headquarters for an insurance company or something.
I ended up wandering some distance out into a residential area -a kind of endless Bovisville of neat yellow-brick homes, winding streets, and pedestrian walkways lined with never-grow trees - but there was still no-one about. From a hilltop I spied a sprawl of blue roofs about three-quarters of a mile off and thought that might be the shopping mall and headed off for it. The pedestrian walkways,which had seemed rather agreeable to me at first, began to become irritating. They wa
ndered lazily through submerged cuttings, nicely landscaped but with a feeling of being in no hurry to get you anywhere. Clearly they had been laid out by people who had thought of it as a two-dimensional exercise. They followed circuitous, seemingly purposeless routes that must have looked pleasing on paper, but gave no consideration to the idea that people, faced with a long walk between houses and shops, would mostly like to get there in a reasonably direct way. Worse still was the sense of being lost in a semi-subterranean world cut off from visible landmarks. I found myself frequently scrambling up banks just to see where I was, only to discover that it was nowhere near where I wanted to be.
Eventually, at the end of one of these muttered scrambles, I found that I was beside a busy dual carriageway exactly opposite the blue-roofed sprawl I had begun searching for an hour earlier. I could see signs for Texas Homecare and a McDonald’s and other such places. But when I returned to the footway I couldn’t begin to work out how to get over there. The .paths forked off in a variety of directions, disappearing round landscaped bends, none of which proved remotely rewarding when looked into. In the end I followed one sloping path back up to street level, where at least I could see where I was, and walked along it all the way back to the train station, which now seemed so absurdly remote from the residential areas that clearly only a total idiot could possibly have thought that Milton Keynes would be a paradise for walkers. It was no wonder that I hadn’t passed a single pedestrian all morning.
I reached the station far more tired than the distance walked would warrant and gasping for a cup of coffee. Outside the station there was a map of the town, which I hadn’t noticed on the way in, and I studied it now, dying to know where the shopping mall was. It turned out that I had been about a hundred feet from it on my initial reconnoitre of the town centre, but had failed to recognize it.
