Walking to Camelot

by John A. Cherrington

  Squalls lash us, so we stop for a bite at the Mitre Inn. Unfortunately, our ploughman’s repast is spoiled by the inane chatter of a henpecked husband being berated by his wife over his refusal to purchase a new bed — I feel like opening my wallet to help the poor bloke just to terminate the tiresome conversation. Then at the bar a disgruntled stonemason complains to the proprietor that his work that week has not been properly appreciated by the homeowner — “Not at all, sir,” the stocky lad moans, “not at all.” The publican commiserates in gentle, cooing tones. The lad gratefully accepts another cider.

  On the road again, the capricious clouds part and we are treated to a cerulean blue sky, but with a stiff breeze. Just past the pub we stop to chat with a thatching crew who are refurbishing a stone cottage.

  “I love thatched cottages, Karl.”

  “They may look quaint,” Karl says gruffly, “but they are dirty and impossible to maintain.”

  We have had this argument before.

  The use of thatch for roofs dates to the Bronze Age in England. The materials used vary from sedge, flax, and broom to mere grass and straw. Neolithic hut-circles were often roofed with reeds spread over brushwood laid between the poles. The roofers here are using wheat straw. It is estimated that some 250 roofs in England today still have base layers of thatch that were placed over 500 years ago.

  Victorians moved away from thatch in favour of tile roofs. Thatch was a symbol of poverty and was condemned as a fire hazard. But today there is a real revival of the “old ways,” and the swank businessman and his wife from the city demand that their West Country cottage be thatch-roofed. It is now considered chic.

  At the south end of the village we encounter a lady in her garden cheerfully digging turf with an undersized spade. Overhead, her parrot sits in a dovecote-style cage, rudely talking back to her. She looks up at us, wipes her brow, and all three of us suddenly laugh. Then the parrot laughs. I admire her sea of electric blue cornflowers, clumps of hollyhocks, peonies, and lavender. We chat for several minutes and she offers us tea. We demur, thank her, and cross over a stile to enter a hidden coomb.

  I relax and catch my breath in a hollow before the final ascent of the hill, enjoying a scene reminiscent of Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. Below me a shepherd walks through a narrow valley, herding sheep with the help of his collie. He is dressed in a tattered old wool coat, patched pants, and wellies. Surely I am in another century? I finally climb and crawl my way up the draw, through a spinney. I am looking for Karl’s back but instead come face to face with two ruddy-cheeked golfers who are hunting in the brush for a ball. Below me to the south sprawls the historic market town of Sherborne. I was oblivious to the approach of urbanity; the golfers in turn are oblivious to the scene of the shepherd and his flock just below in the valley to the north. Parallel universes.

  The sunken roads, enclosed gardens, and high hedgerows give England a three-dimensional look. It is unreal how a country smaller than Oregon appears so gargantuan when sliced up into so many little compartments. Indeed, landscape gardeners have long employed the tactic of creating mini-arboretums, nooks, and bowers so as to enhance the perception of size. Another clever device is the insertion of a “ha-ha” — a low hedge or fence unseen from the home — which gives the illusion of one’s property extending to vast fields beyond. Add to this the English propensity to build mazes, and you have a fascinating rural landscape.

  Karl is waiting for me in front of the clubhouse. Just beyond this point we enter narrow lanes with recently clipped hedgerows. From time to time on this section of the route from Cadbury into Dorset we encounter hedgerow trimmers, who are pruning the vines, yews, and hawthorn to promote denser growth. The laying of a new hedge must be done in late fall or winter. Branches are intertwined, and it is considered an ancient art to do it properly. The most popular trees for hedge-laying are hawthorn, blackthorn, and hazel. A top binding must be laid to keep it all together, and for this layer willow and hazel are favoured.

  In Slavonic languages, zhivy plod means “living fence,” that is, a hedge. The word hedge comes from the Old English hecke, or “enclosure.” Indeed, the Enclosure movement resulted in thousands of miles of hedges being constructed in order to fence in animals and eliminate the common areas previously available to the peasantry. William Wordsworth lovingly referred to thick hedgerows as “little lines / Of sportive wood run wild.” George Eliot viewed the hedge as indissolubly tied to the personality of the countryside. In The Mill on the Floss she wrote, “We could never have loved the earth as well if we had had no childhood in it . . . These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows — such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination.”

  As woodland areas decreased, the hedgerows became increasingly vital to sustain insects, birds, and small animals. The hawthorn, for example, attracts a variety of insects, including beetles and caterpillars, which most songbirds rely on in turn as a food supply. Hawthorn leaves were used for centuries by the peasantry for tea, and the flowers, like the elderberry, were used for making wine. Elderberry leaves are still used by some folk for lotions and ointments.

  Hedges help with erosion and block wind far more efficiently than walls or fences. It is estimated that in southern England, as many as one fifth of all surviving hedgerows date from Saxon times. The hedgerow is, like the church and the castle ruins, an ancient yet living monument of the past. Together, hedgerows and cottage gardens represent England’s greatest green resource.

  The movement toward corporate-style agriculture began at the end of the nineteenth century and continued until very recently. The enormous enlargement of fields has led to a huge loss of hedgerows. There remain some 236,000 miles of hedges in England and Wales — a huge extent, but still less than half the total in 1945. Now hedgerows are being planted throughout the land to replenish green corridors. The 500,000 acres of hedges estimated to be extant in Britain in 1968 represent twice the area of all the country’s nature reserves.

  On the outskirts of Sherborne we tool around a corner and come to a halt beside what I can only describe as “trailer-park gardens” — all these ticky-tacky aluminum trailers sitting in a row, nestled into a wooded hill, surrounded by a flowing landscape of Japanese maples, honeysuckle, peonies, St. John’s wort, irises, wild roses, poppies, cornflowers, sunflowers, lavender, and yellow celandines which so overwhelms the humble appearance of the abodes that for a moment I want to live in this paradise. What a rich panoply of colour and scents! Bees are humming, butterflies flitting. I see a small, bent-over, grizzled figure clad in a plaid shirt tending with love a little herb garden he has planted to the side of his trailer. A calico cat sits calmly beside him.

  “More garden than I saw in half of northern France,” Karl says with a smile. “Of course, the Dutch wouldn’t allow such random growth. Have you ever seen their rows of tulips?”

  “Yes, and I find them far too regimented, though you probably love the neatness.”

  “How far away did you say our next drink was?”

  “Not far — the George Inn of Sherborne coming right up.”

  “Why are there so many George Inns in this country?”

  “That would have something to do with there having been six English kings named George.”

  “Better get the move on, John — there’s dirty weather approaching again.”

  But I still stand transfixed gazing at the trailer-park gardens. For I realize that across the road is another feature of this unique spot: the huge abandoned rock quarry that at one time supplied much of the stone for Sherborne’s buildings. The trailer park, I now see, was also part of the former quarry, and this otherwise ugly bowl, surrounded on both sides by towering rock scarps, has been reclaimed as a park — with paths, benches, and flowering trees. Instead of becoming a rundown, grungy trailer park, it has been transformed into a
n environment of living beauty and joy. It reminds me of a mini version of Butchart Gardens, near Victoria in British Columbia, one of the most popular attractions of western Canada, which is an arboretum established out of the hollows and detritus of a vast gravel pit.

  The love of the English for gardening is well known, but how far back in time villagers enjoyed gardens is not known. The landed gentry have always boasted arboretums, orangeries, and well-manicured landscapes. After common fields were eliminated by Enclosure, villagers lobbied for yards and gardens of their own, abutting their cottages. Victorian legislators eventually agreed, believing that gardening would keep men away from the pubs. An eighth of an acre was considered adequate, enabling the villager to keep some chickens and a pig, plus grow potatoes and other vegetables and herbs used as medicines. If room could not be found in the village, then allotments were created in a spare field — and indeed there is a revival of allotments today, as we have seen en route.

  A side effect of the Enclosure Acts, therefore, was the eventual sprouting of gardens everywhere, many of them walled. The cottagers, in a way, were mimicking the landed gentry, whose vast gardens had evolved into status symbols. A walled cottage garden became the Englishman’s place of quietude, no matter how humble his dwelling. The first such gardens were purely utilitarian, catering to cultivation of veggies, herbs, and fruits.

  Flora Thompson has written of the herb patch in the cottage garden, “stocked with thyme and parsley and sage for cooking, rosemary to flavour the homemade lard, lavender to scent the best clothes, and peppermint, camomile, tansy, balm and rue for physic.” The rural English love their herbs and readily identify with the lyrics of the ballad “Scarborough Fair,” a song memorably covered by Simon & Garfunkel but which derives from the medieval period.

  The idea of flower beds originated with monasteries. William of Orange later brought to the throne of England a passion for flowers. This added impetus to the idea of an “aesthetical garden,” especially when he imported bulbs from Holland and thereby created a trend. The garden also became a palliative for the annihilation of the ancient forests. Edward Thomas noted that the English sought to recreate their ideal country of the past in their gardens “as in a graven image.” The Green Man, that Celtic guardian of the woods and its mysteries, has been replaced, notes A.A. Gill, by the fictional Puck: “hobbit of the garden; the sprite of the window box and the hanging basket.”

  The 1911 children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden, centres upon the magical, therapeutic qualities of the walled garden attached to the home of Colin, a little lame boy who secretly spends part of every day there, getting stronger and stronger until eventually he gets up from his wheelchair and walks — to the utter astonishment of his overbearing father, who has written him off as a cripple. The hallmark English imagery of hidden doors leading to magical places is present when Mary finds a key that turns the lock of a door, and suddenly finds herself standing inside Colin’s secret Eden. This imagery is key to understanding the secret world of the countryside in English literature. The wardrobe closet of C.S. Lewis in The Chronicles of Narnia is another portal to that idyllic “other world.” In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien also refers to the journey of adventure along the road “out from the door where it began.”

  The last half mile, plunging down rain-soaked lanes with cars streaming past our eyeballs, is unpleasant, as the rain is driving at us now in droplets the size of paintball pellets. Fortunately, the George Inn lies on the upper outskirts of town. We stamp our wet boots and enter to a hubbub of men standing and mingling at the bar. One chatty bloke greets us cheerily.

  “Rather dickie out, yes?”

  “Indeed,” I respond. I try to slither a tad closer to the huge fireplace that’s roaring and crackling its flaming warmth like an angry lion. We find a table next to eight English bankers on a walking trip. They explain that they like to go from pub to pub quaffing the local brew; all are in their twenties or thirties. Each year they walk a different part of England, at about eight or nine miles a day. We chat it up and they become a little subdued upon learning that seventy-four-year-old Karl has just walked over three hundred miles.

  I replenish Karl’s Guinness with a half pint and order another lager. The talk at the bar turns to the hot topic of the day — the great Gold Hill brothel scandal. Sherborne has a virtual twin in Shaftesbury, which lies a few miles to the east; both are ancient market towns that sit perched on hills bordering Thomas Hardy’s Blackmore Vale. Gold Hill is a steep lane leading down from the edge of Shaftesbury to the Vale, adorned by picturesque, multi-hued cottages. It is a favourite photo stop for tourists, a scene rendered familiar to Brits by the now classic TV commercial for Hovis bread that features a delivery boy pushing a bike with a basketful of baked goods up the cobbled street.

  But alas, it seems that Gold Hill these days is appealing to more than just tourists snapping their photos. The press reports that a retired army major set up his wife as a hooker on the internet. Police became interested in a website that offered the “cultured, gentle and sensuous services of Jilly, a woman who loves to be borrowed and shared.” When police burst into the major’s picturesque cottage on Gold Hill to arrest Jilly and her hubby, their timing could not have been better, for she was halfway through a rather sensual massage. As the Hooker on the Hill, Jilly may be a joke right now, but in this quiet, conservative corner of rural England, the community is not so forgiving. The press report quotes local resident Janet Bardy, sipping coffee at the Café Rose, her shaggy dog Max at her feet, asking, “What did she do for 500 pounds a night?”

  Karl shakes his head in amusement at all this.

  “So maybe, John boy, our Liberty House experience was no isolated phenomenon. Besides, wasn’t that Thomas Hardy a bit of a horny bastard?”

  “It’s all about being discreet, Karl. Marnie up in Bradford flies under the radar. This part of Dorset is a conservative, stricter part of rural England — you just can’t sell yourself blatantly as some online English Rosie, sensuous and wicked, because here you stick out like a sore thumb. Besides, town officials no doubt think it’s bad for tourism. Thomas Hardy country is supposed to be quaint, not racy.”

  That said, British society has moved toward the European model of a liberal approach toward sex and morality, closer to the libertarian approach of the eighteenth century than to Victorian prudishness. When someone handed me a mainstream British newspaper the first time I travelled here, I thought I had been given pornography, but it was just The Sun with its topless Page 3 girls. And I have hastily skipped through breast-filled sections of other English papers in embarrassed, furtive fashion at coffeehouses — only to glance over my shoulder to see a wispy, white-haired old dear in a lavender and cream jacquard dress sipping tea, unabashedly enjoying both the stories and the skin show.

  We rise to leave, our backpacks now reasonably dry. It is hard to disengage from this noisy yet convivial chatter and the warmth of the fire to face the fierce rain outside. Before we reach the door, a man and woman, both in full riding costume, sweep through the entrance with a retinue of wet equestrian types behind them, much like royalty. This must be the local squire and his wife, because the publican and his assistant both rush out from the bar to bob, bow, and curtsey.

  Sherborne is a mad jumble of narrow, twisting streets. Cheap Street careens downhill and is lined with lichen-dappled, ochre stone shops full of Dorset knobs, fresh-baked scones, creamy blue vinney cheeses, sticky honeys, and succulent hams. The shops cater to all wallets, from a Diva accessory store associated with Castro clothing to an Oxfam bookstore full of earthy intellectuals. I count eleven coffeehouses, including Caffe Baglioni, Kafe Fontana, and Costa Coffee. One guidebook advises that “if the town were a woman she would be a popular socialite who relished the envy she generates in everyone else. She has an impressive aristocratic pedigree spanning hundreds of years, and exudes a refined sense of style.”

  The town attained affluence from the wo
ol industry, later becoming a manufacturing hub for lace, gloves, and buttons. Famous residents have included Sir Walter Raleigh, John Le Carré, Cecil Day-Lewis, Alan Turing, and Sophie Kinsella. Hardy often frequented the town, and he references Sherborne Abbey and the town’s marketplace in his novel The Woodlanders.

  Dominating the town is Sherborne Abbey, which has been a Saxon cathedral, a Benedictine abbey, and a parish church throughout its chequered history. Henry VIII would have demolished it at the Dissolution if the townspeople hadn’t clamoured to make it their parish church. I note the expansive Perpendicular Gothic windows, ornate pinnacles above the gargoyles, and decorated flying buttresses. The abbey’s bells hold the distinction of possessing the heaviest peal of eight bells in the world.

  Light penetrates the abbey interior through enormous clerestories, illuminating the decorous vaulted ceilings. Crested heraldic symbols and painted flowers line the walls, and stained glass windows everywhere overwhelm the senses — a fabulous display that must be credited to those busy beavers, the Victorians. Both Henry VIII and Cromwell’s Puritans viewed colour as being idolatrous, and their minions destroyed a large percentage of the stained glass windows in England. But the Victorians believed in restoration, and built and fitted some eighty thousand stained glass windows into churches across the land during the nineteenth century.

  Two of King Alfred’s brothers, both of whom became kings — Æthelbald and Æthelbert — are buried in the abbey. Sir Walter and Lady Raleigh attended services in the Leweston Chapel when Raleigh was not abroad or imprisoned in the Tower of London. Lady Raleigh introduced to Sherborne Castle, the Raleigh home, a flower known as clove pink, which still grows on the castle grounds and is known as Lady Betty’s Pink. Clove pink flowers are still cut on special occasions and placed in Leweston Chapel as a reminder of the good old days of the First Elizabethan Age when chivalry abounded, adventure lurked, and poetry ruled.