“Not often that we get lost,” offers Karl.
“We’re not lost! As Tolkien once said, ‘All who wander are not lost.’ ”
“John . . . face it, we are lost, and you damn well know it!”
I know better than to argue with Karl, so I just stand there and pick a few burdock burrs off his back. Then he laughs.
Our male egos bruised more than our bodies, we walk across a field immersed in purple thistles and by good luck stumble upon a path that leads us back to the Macmillan. Half an hour later we straggle into Buckland Dinham.
At about this point I reflect on our situation: that despite all of the manifold delights of our adventure, one must also consider the hazards and travail — ravaged feet; inclement weather; wading through field after field of wet, thigh-high rapeseed; avoiding charging bulls and other bovines; boggy bridleways; dangerous horse encounters; near-death experiences on busy roads, not to mention pony carts and tractors; scratched and punctured skin from brambles and nettles; crime scenes; ploughed-up, muddy fields; attacks by canines and geese; getting lost in driving rain; and encountering the odd dodgy character. So, please, do not take a long-distance walk in England lightly. Still, I love it.
I find burdock burrs still clinging to my shorts. These prickly, sticky balls are found worldwide. In England, dandelion mixed with burdock constitutes a soft drink associated with the hedgerow mead that was consumed during medieval times. The burdock root has even been used as a bittering agent in beer. Its greatest usefulness, however, was as inspiration for a Swiss inventor named George de Mestral. George was walking his dog one day in the 1940s when he became curious about the burrs that clung to his pet’s fur. He studied them with his microscope and realized that a synthetic approach could mimic Nature’s method of causing seeds to disperse through “stickiness.” The result after ten years of effort was Velcro, the “zipperless zipper.”
The village bulletin board advertises a weekly yoga class. The local inn is hosting a charity curry night. A chalk sign proclaims “Ladies Film Night,” which sounds a tad racy. Are only ladies allowed? Do they look at male strippers? Chick flicks? This village is a far cry from Flora Thompson’s Candleford.
Near Great Elm, Karl and I decide to take a Guide-recommended diversion to Mells, where there is reputed to be great refreshment at the Talbot Inn. Not far along we reach a crossroads called Mary’s Grave, the origin of which name is based upon one of four alleged scenarios:
a young woman in 1850 murdered by a jealous wife from Great Elm is buried here;
a gypsy caravan containing a gypsy queen was cremated here;
a suicide named Mary is buried here; or
a highwayman who disguised himself as a woman, was tried by Judge Jeffreys, and was hanged at the Old White Horse Inn is buried here. (This is my personal favourite.)
There used to be a stone etched with a cross at the presumed site of Mary’s grave, but this vanished in 1998 when a new road was built. It must have been a wild, violent place around here, as there is a Murder Combe and a Dead Woman Bottom en route as well.
Mells is well worth the visit. This unspoiled village tucked away from main roads has three notable features: a tall, withered palm tree; a fascinating graveyard; and a fifteenth-century coaching inn — The Talbot Inn free house. I marvel at the great hall of the Talbot, whose matching oak doors lead to a cobbled courtyard cluttered with beer barrels where village fete events are staged in the summer. There is even a “tithe barn sitting room” with a Sunday cinema. The inn proper is a labyrinth of obscure passageways. We take a pint and a sandwich in the Coach House Grill Room, where the food is still grilled over a charcoal and wood fire as in medieval times.
Upscale inns like the Talbot cater to everyone from country rectors to the Rolling Stones. Coaching inns were specially equipped for stabling the teams of horses used for stagecoaches. Their heyday ran from 1650 to 1850, after which time they were converted to country pubs or inns with limited accommodation. The courtyard cobbles of the Talbot conjure up visions of steaming, stamping horses.
In The English Inn, Thomas Burke quotes one seasoned nineteenth-century traveller’s impressions of coaching inns:
Inns of good dimension and repute . . . where portly sirloins, huge rounds of beef, hams of inviting complexion, fowls, supportable even after those of dainty London, spitch-cocked eels, and compotes of wine-sours, were evermore forthcoming on demand.
What home-brewed — what home-baked — what cream cheese — what snow-white linen — what airy chambers — and what a jolly-faced old gentleman, and comely old gentlewoman, to bid you welcome. It was a pleasure to arrive — a pain to depart.
A glowing tribute, but I just don’t know about those spitch-cocked eels.
Mells Manor was owned by the Horner family for centuries, and is associated with the nursery rhyme “Little Jack Horner.” The story involves the Abbot of Glastonbury, Richard Whiting, who held title deeds to twelve manorial estates and who, in resisting King Henry VIII’s order to destroy all the monasteries, decided to bribe the king by handing over the deeds to those other estates — in return for the king sparing Glastonbury Abbey. Whiting’s steward was Thomas Horner, who set about the bribery mission by secreting the twelve title deeds in a large Christmas pie so as to avoid being robbed of same while travelling to Westminster.
Horner double-crossed the abbot, so the king learned in advance of the plot to save the abbey. In a strange twist of fate, Horner then sat on a jury that found his own abbot guilty of treason. Whiting was hanged, drawn, and quartered on Glastonbury Tor, and Horner was rewarded with the title to Mells Manor, the “plum” of the twelve estates. (The king obtained title to the remaining properties.) Hence the nursery rhyme:
Little Jack Horner Sat in the corner,
Eating a Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said, “What a good boy am I!”
Subsequent generations of the Horner family have protested that the manor was properly purchased by Thomas Horner, but the rhyme has been used by satirists over the centuries to ridicule politicians and sycophants who get fat on the public purse.
Before leaving Mells, we visit the churchyard and discover the gravestone of Siegfried Sassoon, the famous poet. The simple headstone is surrounded by miniature crosses stuck into the grass. Sassoon was one of the first prominent anti-war activists in modern history. He served in the trenches on the Western Front and experienced their horrors. In time he became a thorn in the side of the Establishment, using satire in his poems to attack the “patriotic pretensions” of those who believed in war being necessary and honourable. Even before World War I Sassoon is said to have written, “France was a lady, Russia was a bear, and performing in the county cricket team was much more important than either of them.” Yet he enlisted and was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry in rescuing countless soldiers from death. He later threw his Military Cross into a river.
“And he was damned right,” muses Karl as we slowly walk away from the grave.
“I thought you were a fan of Attila the Hun, Karl.”
“Not on your life. Oh, I would have gladly fought in World War II — I just missed it — and my brother was badly injured and captured at Arnhem by the Jerries, but that Great War was pure genocide. Certain generals on both sides should have been hanged for ordering such senseless slaughter.”
We retrace our steps back to the main Macmillan path. We enjoy the peace of a deeply wooded coomb, then slog wet pastures in the rain, inch through a kissing gate, and find a tree-lined driveway. The lovely Nunney Brook now runs beside us, and we follow it to the next village.
Nunney is dominated in its centre by a castle that is modelled on the Bastille. It was erected in 1373 as a fortified residence, not a military stronghold. During the English Civil War, it was defended for the Crown, but a few Roundhead cannon blasts breached one wall. The castle fell, and its interior was gutted by Cromwell’s soldie
rs.
The castle lay in shambles until the 1900s, when the rubble was removed and the structure partly restored. It was auctioned off in 1950 for six hundred pounds to one Rob Walker, of the Johnnie Walker whisky dynasty. We wander about the castle ruins; there is no one about but the pigeons that mass on the towers. The place is well maintained, surrounded by manicured clipped grass and a quiet brook.
At the George Inn, one can always enjoy a pint of refreshment and a pound of local gossip. The beam holding up the sign at the entrance was used in the seventeenth century to hang the condemned. At that time the inn doubled as a courthouse for judges travelling the circuit. Occasionally, says the barkeeper, one can hear the sound of taut ropes and creaking from outside, as the bodies of the criminals sway in the wind from the beam — which beam, by the way, is actually “listed” as a legally protected heritage structure.
A local ghost story concerns the lane between Nunney and Frome, which is haunted by a phantom hitchhiker. The ghost wears a sports jacket and trousers and takes great pleasure in fetching lifts from motorists, then vanishing before their eyes. Several motorists over the years have filed reports with the local police. Karl just shakes his head in disbelief.
“I think the whole country is haunted,” he says with a smile.
I reflect that despite Karl always charging ahead of me on the trail, we are getting along just fine — both of us stubborn and blunt in our own ways. In her book The Cruel Way, Ella Maillart discusses the trials and tensions of travelling with a companion in terms of a vie à deux, but our drama consists more of a good-natured joshing from time to time — and no argument between us can maintain ill humour in the face of a good steak and ale pie, a bottle of red wine, and a sticky toffee pudding at the end of the day.
In fact, I have never seen Karl so mellow. I know his sprained ankle is bothering him, but he shrugs it off, and now walks with a kind of half-smile. At first I thought it was by way of cynical reaction to untoward events, but not so. He seems genuinely amused by everything, taking it all in stride. Thich Nhat Hanh writes that the Buddha always walked with a half-smile: “The half-smile is the fruit of your awareness that you are here, alive, walking. At the same time, it nurtures more peace and joy within you.” I never thought that I would be thinking of Karl and the Buddha at the same time!
“So, John, how many days until we get to the coast at Abbotsbury?”
“At least another five, or six if we stay an extra night at Cadbury.”
“That long?”
“Emerson once said that life is about the journey, not the destination. Don’t tell me you just can’t wait to get back to the rat race?”
“I’m torn, John. This has been great fun, and in some ways I wish it could go on and on. But I need to get back to the business and see the family.”
But his mind has drifted off and now he is thinking again about poor Tiffany. “Do you think it’s too early for us to call the Oakham police again?” he says.
“Yes, I do, Karl. And don’t expect a whole lot. After all, there was no immediate report of a missing person. I‘d be surprised if they were to conduct DNA tests on the clothing unless they had cause to believe it might match that of a reported missing person.”
After refreshment, we wander the Nunney streets, where ducks waddle about freely. The path from here ascends a steep ridge toward the great woodlands of eastern Somerset, culminating in King Alfred’s Tower. We plod up the escarpment. Near the tower we enter dense woods. Round a bend, however, our lovely path suddenly turns into an ugly-looking commercial gravel road, with a sign posted: “Logging in Progress; No Public Access.”
“Bloody hell, no public access!” sputters Karl as he marches onward. His mellow half-smile has vanished.
Just then a walrus-moustached walker dressed in a faded tweed coat approaches us from the opposite direction and stops to say that the Forestry Commission is doing some clear-cutting ahead of us and it is they who have placed the signs on the path, one of which he has just torn down. He is a calm, unflappable fellow in his seventies, who gesticulates toward the hillside with his black cherry walking stick, quite rightly pointing out that Macmillan Way “is open to the public and that is that.”
“That’s the spirit,” cries Karl with his familiar panache. “Tally ho, then!”
When we round the next bend in the trail we immediately spot the rectangular Forestry Commission sign the tweedy gentleman has torn down, lying to the side of the path — and with alacrity add our own boot prints to it. A chainsaw wails loud and shrill as we pass through a coppice and encounter two forestry workers standing by a yarder. They must have seen the blood in Karl’s eye, for they just smile and make no attempt to stop us.
“Another blow struck for freedom to walk, Karl.”
“Bloody bastards,” he growls. “I’ve managed lumber camps all my life and have never tried to bar access to a public trail. Course, it’s not those workers’ fault — it’s their bloody bureaucratic masters who think they are so high and mighty they can close off a public right-of-way.”
Eleanor Farjeon, biographer of Edward Thomas, recalls how she used to walk with Thomas on the footpaths and one day accompanied a group of walkers from Thomas’s cottage on a mission to tear down and burn a private sign warning off walkers from a traditional path. “May the fumes suffocate Squire Trevor-Battye, arch-enemy of ancient Rights of Way,” she wrote exultantly after the fiery deed was done. The experience inspired her to write a children’s story, Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep, about how a new lord of the manor closed footpaths where generations of children had always skipped at the new moon. The English take their walking rights seriously, with the same enthusiasm with which Americans defend their rights to own guns. NRA — meet the Ramblers!
Suddenly the tall finger of Alfred’s Tower projects on a hillside above us. It is now very muggy and we are sweating like pigs. We finally arrive at the base of the tower, parched and out of breath. The folly was erected in 1772 as a dual memorial: to commemorate the conclusion of the Seven Years War, just finished, and to celebrate the Battle of Ethandun, Alfred’s decisive victory over the Vikings in 878, in which the Danish army under Guthrum was vanquished. As a result, the West of England, or Wessex, was left to be governed by the Anglo-Saxons, and the eastern portions of the country became the Danelaw. The tower stands near Egbert’s Stone, where Alfred rallied his Saxons to battle.
We pay the entrance fee at the kiosk and purchase a couple of bottled waters.
The tower is 161 feet high, and there are 205 steps up a tiny, winding dark stone staircase, at the top of which sits a platform on a crenellated parapet. We are rewarded with incredible views across Somerset. I can discern in the distance Glastonbury Tor and the ancient town of Glastonbury. On our way down we note a point where the tile becomes darker, demarcating rebuilding that occurred in 1986 to repair the damage caused when an American warplane accidentally crashed into the tower in 1944, killing all aboard.
A recommended diversion of two miles to Stourhead Garden is well worth the effort. One follows open wood-lands down to a lake and then into the village of Stourton. The Garden was opened in 1740 and comprises 2,650 acres. The setting is dominated by Grecian follies — little temples, romantic grottoes, and, the pièce de résistance, a reproduction of the Parthenon. The ninety-minute walk round the lake is a memorable experience and should not be rushed. It is so quiet and peaceful here that I find myself holding my breath, wanting to take in every bird’s twitter, every leaf’s movement in the breeze that gently whispers across the lake.
We trudge the two miles back to Macmillan. I am de-hydrated and hot. At the tower I purchase another bottle of water and drink deeply. The trail is wide and pleasant south of here. This was a major trackway in the Middle Ages, used by drovers herding cattle to London markets.
Soon I am peering through the gateway to Redlynch Park. This was the seat of Charles Fox, leader in Parliament of the Whigs, who opposed King George III’s going to war against
the American colonies. Fox was an enlightened reformer who persuaded Parliament to pledge itself to ending the slave trade. It would have amused him to learn that his estate was used in World War II to house the 3rd Armored Division of the U.S. Army preparatory to the D-Day invasion. Remnants of the command bunker are still visible at the park entrance, where hangs a plaque from the Americans thanking the local Brits for their hospitality. And so the wheel of history turns.
Redlynch was also the home of John and Elaine Steinbeck for nine months in 1959, when the noted author rented Discove Cottage. The cottage was crude. Steinbeck had the landlord furnish a refrigerator, which he named “His Majesty’s Voice,” stating “It must be his late majesty because it stutters.” He chopped wood, grew veggies in a garden, and whittled wood carvings from old oak. On March 30, 1959, he wrote, “The peace I have dreamed about is here, a real thing, thick as a stone and feelable and something for your hands . . . Meanwhile I can’t describe the joy. In the mornings I get up early to have a time to listen to the birds. It’s a busy time for them. Sometimes for over an hour I do nothing but look and listen and out of this comes a luxury of rest and peace and something I can only describe as in-ness.”
Steinbeck used his time in and around Redlynch and neigh-bouring Bruton to familiarize himself with the Arthurian landscape of Somerset. He yearned to produce a modern version of the Arthurian story based upon Malory’s fifteenth-century Le Morte d’Arthur. Steinbeck became a familiar sight on the streets of Bruton, where he frequented the pubs and the post office. He engaged a local typist, to whom he dictated the beginning of his manuscript.
John Steinbeck was completely overwhelmed by the land-scape. He writes, “The other night I discovered that fifty feet from our house, you can see St. Michael’s Tor at Glastonbury. Elaine didn’t believe it until I showed her and she is so delighted. It makes the house so much richer to have the Tor in sight. Am I in any way getting over to you the sense of wonder, the almost breathless thing? There is no question that there is magic and all kinds of magic.”
Walking to Camelot Page 21
