Walking to Camelot

by John A. Cherrington

  It is a pleasant but mucky walk through Hailey Wood. The Guide warns us, however, to keep away from the fenced edge near the end of the wood — it is dangerous, as an open shaft remains intact, formerly used to extract debris from the tunnel below for the building of the nearby Thames and Severn Canal. We emerge intact at the Tunnel House Inn, which the Guide informs us “was built to house, feed, and especially water, the navvies who dug the canal tunnel and the thirsty boatmen who used it when completed.”

  The tunnel was completed in 1789, and allowed boats to cross the Cotswolds from the head of the navigable Thames at Lechlade to the Severn, and thence to the eastern coast. This was the longest tunnel in Britain at the time, and was such an engineering feat that even King George III came to watch its construction. Reports indicate that the Mad King was in fine fettle, freshly released from Dr. Willis’s sanatorium, which we encountered up in Greatford, Lincolnshire.

  Bargemen propelled their boat through the inky blackness of the canal tunnel by means of “legging” along the sidewalls. This had to be the toughest, most eccentric way to ever move a watercraft. Two men had to lie on a plank, each placing his feet against sidewalls of the tunnel, and then crabfoot along to gain forward momentum. Sapperton Tunnel was abandoned in 1927.

  The Tunnel House Inn was Poet Laureate John Betjeman’s favourite watering hole. Outside hang some old, weather-beaten signs: “Craven A Will Not Affect Your Throat” and “Corston’s Aerated Beverages — First for Thirst.” We sample the local brew; Karl quaffs a pint of Hooky Bitter and I try the Uley Bitter. The traditional workman’s fare is served, including burgers, steaks, and Gloucester Old Spot sausages — a true bangers-and-mash establishment. But one can also devour monkfish tails, goat’s cheese brioche, and pig’s ear. We both settle for a ploughman’s lunch.

  In the course of devouring our victuals, Karl overhears the term “red biddy” in conversation at another table and asks the barkeeper about it.

  “You don’t want any red biddy, mate,” says the tall moustached barkeeper. “It might kill you.”

  “Why?” asks Karl. “Is it some kind of local gut rot?”

  “Well, mate, it’s like cheap red wine mixed with spirits — methylated spirits.”

  “I guess I will pass on that,” Karl says with a smile.

  The barkeeper winks at the two blokes next to our table, who continue to quaff their glasses of suspected red biddy.

  The solicitous barkeeper does not know that Karl’s stomach is so tough that he could drink paint thinner and suffer no ill effects.

  * * *

  2 On the subject of odd place-names: One year I stayed at a delightful thatched-cottage B&B in the village of Knockdown, Wiltshire. At breakfast I gingerly broached the subject of village name origin with the proprietor — an intelligent, red-haired company executive. “You know,” he replied, “I’ve lived here some twelve years now and really haven’t given a thought as to why the village is known as Knockdown. Please pass the salt.”

  3 Atkyns’s dream of the House of Lords losing its judicial role was not to be fully realized until 2009, when the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom became the highest appellate court in the land.

  8

  Ghosts, Brothels, and Raging Bulls

  Green lanes that shut out burning skies

  And old crooked stiles to rest upon;

  Above them hangs the maple tree,

  Below grass swells a velvet hill,

  And little footpaths sweet to see

  Go seeking sweeter places still.

  —JOHN CLARE—

  “The Flitting”

  CHERINGTON VILLAGE still has charm. A quaint communal pump sits on the green, with the inscription: “Let him that is athirst come.” The pump is really a fountain that was fed by water drawn from an underground stream. It never ran dry, and until well into the twentieth century, most cottagers in the village drew their water from it. Now the fountain trough has become a flower bed stuffed with blue and red pansies.

  The stone cottages clustered near the green are largely nineteenth century, and hence are considered modern. The shops and pub have long since shut down. My ancestors lived here as far back as the Domesday Book, compiled in 1086. In the fifteenth century, a couple of forebears migrated ten miles north to Leckhampton village, now part of Cheltenham. It was in this period of English history that the common people began to acquire surnames — chiefly by virtue of their occupation, their father’s first name, or the village from which they had migrated. Hence, William moving from here to Leckhampton came to be known as William of Cherington, and eventually just William Cherington.

  Karl and I amble lazily through the village on a dewy June morning. A weathered sign affixed to a cottage reads “Telephone: Telegrams may be telegraphed.” At the thirteenth-century church, I gingerly open the heavy oak door and enter. It’s a rather spiritual moment. As I gaze down the aisle toward the chancel, touch the ancient baptismal tub font, admire the stained glass windows, I wonder about my forebears who worshipped here so many centuries ago. What were they like? What were their hopes, their aspirations, their dreams? I deposit a few coins in a donation box. It seems so long ago that this church was built, but in the history of the Earth, it is just a millisecond.

  The Way drops downhill from Cherington village to the Avening Stream, which flows into Cherington Pond. The pond is really a small lake, dug out of a marshy section of the stream in the mid-eighteenth century to facilitate boating and fishing. Today, the pond is a protected wetlands area. Here are found rare species of butterflies, dragonflies, and wild irises. At the pond’s edge flourish reeds, bulrushes, and marsh marigolds. Carpets of emerald moss flourish among the trees on the upper banks.

  At the far end of the pond we encounter two swans coaxing their six cygnets over a weir into the outlet stream. It was not always so peaceful in this dreamy glen. On Sunday afternoons in the 1930s, young people would congregate at the pond and play music from a record player and mobile amplifier, much as future-generation teens would brandish boom boxes and Sony Walkmans. Ice cream was sold from a motorcycle with a sidecar. Pious villagers complained that raucous sounds of revelry from the pond could be heard by them all the way up at the church during Sunday Evensong.

  Just beyond Cherington Pond is the hamlet of Nag’s Head. I decide to use the phone booth that I spot beside some bushes in order to line up a B&B for the following night. When I open the door, I run into cobwebs. A plastic sign that had formed part of the window clatters to the floor. Oddly, the phone actually works. I place my notebook on the counter; after I finish my call and pick it up, I find a snail securely stuck to the cover. I am so busy disengaging the slimy creature as it oozes its life juices onto my notebook that I almost step on a snake that has wriggled into the phone booth under the door — the wriggly, shiny thing actually hisses at me. I navigate past it, thrust open the door, and in my haste literally topple out into a thicket of blackberry bushes and stinging nettles — in khaki shorts. I actually yelp.

  Karl is laughing so hard he doubles over.

  “Having a good time, John?”

  Karl says that the snake was harmless, but I am convinced that it was an adder, Britain’s only poisonous snake.

  I apply both hydrogen peroxide and Ozonol from my first aid kit to my nettle and bramble wounds. Life is a bitch sometimes!

  We continue our jaunt toward Avening village. The stinging-nettle pain abates. My head is in a whirl after walking through the village of my ancestors. I try to remember the threads of a tale my grandfather told me under his horse chestnut tree when I was a child — about the Leckhampton Hill riots, which were precipitated by efforts of a landowner to close down the hill’s popular walking trails just after 1900. My grandfather was born in Leckhampton in 1887 and grew up gazing at the famous Devil’s Chimney, a weird limestone formation towering above the village on Leckhampton Hill.

  The hill had been used for eons by villagers as their recreational playground — for picn
ics, walking, celebrations, and children’s woods games. Myriad paths crisscrossed in every direction. The paths even guided children from outlying farms to and from school in the village. Leckhampton Hill, in other words, was for centuries a vital part of the warp and woof of their very lives.

  Then, in 1894, Henry Dale acquired most of Leckhampton Hill. His intent was to extract gravel and limestone from the hill for commercial purposes. But Dale failed to recognize the importance of the hill in village life; he immediately began barricading trails and refused to recognize any public rights-of-way. He annoyed just about everybody — and not just the poor villagers, but even the local magistrate and chair of the district council, one G.B. Witts. In 1897, Dale built Tramway Cottage for his quarry foreman in an open space that had always been used by the villagers. Now the foreman’s house occupied this common ground, and also blocked the main footpath to the hill. In 1899, Dale fenced off a twenty-six-acre parcel, as part of his Leckhampton Quarries Co. operations. Finally, in 1901, he obstructed many additional footpaths.

  Leckhamptonites had had enough. In March of 1902, a gathering of villagers tore down fences beside the offensive Tramway Cottage. Four of the men involved were charged with obstruction, and promptly acquitted. On July 15, a mammoth crowd of some two thousand villagers — including my grandfather, a lad of fourteen—marched to the foot of the hill. Oddly enough, my grandfather recalled this as a festive occasion: just a couple of thousand Britons asserting their rights. Women dressed in colourful summer frocks, and men wore suits and white straw boater hats. Author David Bick writes in Old Leckhampton, “Roused to still greater excitement, the mob was led up the hill, the next stopping place being Cratchley’s cottage. The occupants were ejected and fled to Dale’s home. In a short time the furniture was pulled out and set alight together with the house which was afterwards razed to the ground without a stone left standing.” Accounts of the events record that the police were powerless to act “where such a large and determined mob were concerned.” And none were prosecuted.

  My grandfather left England forever three years later at age seventeen, alone, with two shillings in his pocket. He wanted to farm, but there was little future for poor tenant farmers in England at the turn of the twentieth century, so he emigrated to Canada. But he was aware of the denouement of the Leckhampton Hill riot story. For the public regained their rights-of-way and enjoyment of the hill. Sometimes all it takes is a determined group of residents making a firm stand to protect their rights. Today, another cottage stands on the spot where Dale built his foreman’s home, but instead of guarding the hill against the populace, it is there to protect the place for use and enjoyment by the community, as custodian.

  THE LANE FROM Nag’s Head is tree-lined and resembles a long driveway to a manor house. At lane’s end, however, we find ourselves in Avening village, which is chiefly noted for the unusual history of its church.

  The Church of the Holy Cross is built upon the site of an earlier Saxon church. Ancient tombs with porthole windows were uncovered near here in 1809; they have since been dated to 3000 BC. This is the only church in England ever specifically erected at the command of a queen. And it is all because of a woman scorned.

  Prior to marrying William the Conqueror, Matilda of Flanders met Brittric, a young Avening noble who was Edward the Confessor’s envoy to Flanders. Princess Matilda fell madly in love with the golden-haired Brittric, but he did not reciprocate her affections, returning instead to England and resuming his residence at Avening.

  Matilda then married William the Conqueror, who, upon defeating King Harold in 1066 and subjugating England, was utterly ruthless with the country’s Anglo-Saxon landowners. Still smarting from Brittric’s rejection years before, Matilda caused William to dispossess Brittric of all his estates and throw the young man into prison, where he died. But in her later years she suffered such remorse that she ordered the Avening church built so that masses could be said for Brittric’s soul. Matilda and William stayed at Brittric’s residence (which of course they had appropriated) to supervise the construction. In 1080, on the day the church was consecrated, the queen gave a feast of boar’s head to the workmen. Today “Pig Face Day” is celebrated on September 14 every year. A torchlight procession of villagers clad in medieval dress walks from the church with pigs’ heads carried on platters. Entertainment ensues, provided by jesters, jugglers, and musicians. Then the entire village tucks into a feast of hog roast.

  It is fitting that this remarkable church commissioned by a queen should have been placed in the charge of Reverend Celia Carter in 1994, when she became one of the first ordained women priests in the Church of England. One can imagine Matilda smiling with pleasure.

  The climb uphill from Avening is strenuous. But we are rewarded with sweeping views of Gatcombe Park, Princess Anne’s estate. Princess Anne embodies the equestrian spirit of the Cotswolds, playing host annually at Gatcombe to the Festival of British Eventing, which combines the national open, novice, and intermediate horse championships.

  Down the hill and through a hedge gap, the path diverges, with a minor road that takes us to Chavenage House, an Elizabethan manor with stories to tell. There has been a manor house here since the ninth century, when an ancient Saxon Hundred Court held session on site. The estate was the location for the popular TV series Lark Rise to Candleford, based on Flora Thompson’s nostalgic look at the English countryside at the turn of the twentieth century.

  Chavenage House is considered to be one of the most haunted places in the country. Producers of horror movies such as Dracula and The Ghost of Greville Lodge film here regularly. The hauntings all stem from a visit by Oliver Cromwell’s emissary Henry Ireton at Christmas in 1648. Cromwell sought to obtain the signature of Chavenage House’s owner, Colonel Nathaniel Stephens, to the death warrant of King Charles I.Stephens was a key figure in the Civil War, and his support for regicide was considered important. Following an entire night of argument, Stephens reluctantly agreed and signed his consent. A few days later, his strong-minded daughter Abigail returned home from a trip and flew into a rage upon learning that Stephens had joined the regicides. She loudly and publicly cursed her father and all of his descendants. Shortly thereafter, Colonel Stephens died at home of an illness — but some say it was from his daughter’s curse.

  Upon the colonel’s death, his body was wrapped in a shroud, at which point a fine coach drawn by four black horses silently appeared at the house entrance; the colonel’s ghost rose up and glided down to the coach, which then clattered down the long driveway, ostensibly with a headless driver. When the coach reached the estate gates, it burst into flames and disappeared. Apparently, the deceased King Charles had come to collect the body of the rebel colonel who had broken his oath to serve and protect his sovereign. Every owner of Chavenage House since is said to have been collected in this manner upon his death. The current owner, David Lowsley-Williams, swears that he will make a more conventional exit from life.

  Our tour of this magnificent manor house is impressive. The Great Hall is stunning, with a high ceiling, numerous pieces of artwork, and intricate wood panelling. There are over forty rooms here, all of them maintained, and several of them available for overnight guests. However, guests should not sleep in one particular room: Cromwell’s bedroom, which is dark and forbidding, adorned with coarsely woven wall tapestries. A copy of the Lord Protector’s portrait, entitled Warts and All, hangs beside the bed he slept in. Also in the room is a chilling reminder of Cromwell’s legacy as a regicide — a copy of Charles I’s death warrant, together with a lock of the king’s hair.

  Over the years, dozens of people who have slept in the Cromwell Room have complained of waking up in a cold sweat, spending a sleepless night, or worse. The current owner’s grandmother felt compelled to have the bedroom exorcised, and summoned two priests — one Church of England, the other Roman Catholic — to say a blessing. This seemed to calm things down for a time. But during movie filming in the 1990s, more than one emp
loyee on the set fled the premises in terror.

  Just past the estate we slog down an overgrown bridleway known as Chavenage Lane. Swallows are swooping and diving like Typhoon fighter jets. We climb a stile into a field, where a small herd of cows graze. Gingerly we make a wide berth around a mother and two calves. Just as we reach the far stile, we hear the roar of an engine, and a mud-spattered Land Rover comes barrelling across the field to stop abruptly beside us. The driver is a wrinkled, rosy-cheeked farm woman who greets us amiably.

  “Saw you comin’ into the field and I’m glad you stepped ’round those calves,” she says, “because in the next field over last spring, one of our local farmers was killed by a cow protecting her calf when he went walking there. A darned shame, but you have to be real careful when calves are present.”

  She looks us over again. “If you ever need a place to stay, I do B&B back in the village, so look me up” — and she hands me a soiled card from her glove compartment. We thank her and she speeds off, clods of mud and sod spewing from her churning wheels.

  Close to Tetbury, we become hopelessly lost and ultimately emerge from the woods on Cirencester Road. Almost immediately a long white building comes into view: the Trouble House Inn. The pub’s signage displays a bloody hand and corpse hanging between a Cavalier and a Roundhead soldier, neither of whom is showing much love toward the other. We enter the strange building and are straightaway made welcome by the friendly publican, who studiously ignores our muddy boots. The dining alcoves are full of locals, most of them tweedily clad, several wearing their wellies. A few elderly gentlemen sit by themselves with newspapers, nursing pints. One bewhiskered Edwardian sits poring over an ancient-looking piece of vellum. The atmosphere is more London club than country pub.

  I ask for a sandwich menu and the barkeeper replies, “We do gourmet only; we are really a gastropub.” Karl and I both order a Guinness and look around. The Trouble House has a tumultuous history dating back to the Civil War. Despite its ancient vintage, its current name derives from trouble caused by farm labourers who rioted in protest over the mechanization of agriculture in 1830. The inn is also famous for being the site of Trouble House Halt, the only train station in England ever built solely for the purpose of servicing a pub. The publican supplied an empty beer crate to assist passengers to step up into the coaches. The rail line to the station was built in 1959 but closed only five years later. That same year Trouble House Halt was immortalized in the Flanders and Swann song “Slow Train.”