Walking to Camelot

Home > Other > Walking to Camelot > Page 30
Walking to Camelot Page 30

by John A. Cherrington


  “It is a great day for me, sir . . . I have established a right of way”: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (London, 1902).

  “but they don’t want to be near the nasty niffs and noises”: Ian Johnson, quoted in Audrey Gillan, “You don’t get country folk moving to London and demanding that they stop the buses,” The Telegraph (July 19, 1998), reprinted in The Hedgerows Heaped with May.

  “In Britain, identifiably, there is a persistent rural-intellectual radicalism”: Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973).

  “Is there no nook of English ground secure”: William Wordsworth, “On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway” (1844).

  “unfreedom of the villein or serf was never a generalized condition”: Frances and Joseph Gies, Life in a Medieval Village (New York, 1989).

  “One spot shall prove beloved over all”: Rudyard Kipling, “Sussex” (1902).

  “Laws for themselves and not for me”: A.E. Housman, “The Laws of God, the Laws of Man,” in A Shropshire Lad (Oxford, 1896).

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”: Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (London, 1865).

  “stock exchange, his reading-room, his club”: Richard Jefferies, “The labourer’s daily life,” Fraser’s Magazine (November 1874).

  “nurseries of naughtiness”: James Moore and Paul Nero, Ye Olde Good Inn Guide: A Tudor Traveller’s Guide to the Nation’s Finest Taverns (Stroud, 2013).

  The writer A.A. Gill decries the Trust: A.A. Gill, The Angry Island Hunting the English (London, 2005).

  “That in the beginning of June, 1741, he observed a Man”: Bill of 1744 to Dissolve a Marriage, Journals of the House of Lords, Vol. 26.

  “where a footpath diverged from the highroad”: E.M. Forster, A Room with a View (London, 1908).

  “Woods, where we hid from the wet”: Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Marriage Morning,” in The Window (London, 1871).

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “rides on his foot, slung over his knee”: Mary Gladstone (Mrs. Drew): Her Diaries and Letters, edited by L. Masterman (London, 1930).

  “Blisters? Simply make a lather of soap suds inside your socks and break a raw egg”: Francis Galton, The Art of Travel (London, 1872).

  “continuous zeal”: in A History of the County of Oxford, Volume 10, Banbury Hundred, edited by Alan Crossley ([London], 1972).

  “They are the only people in the world who think of jam and currants as thrilling”: Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (London, 1993).

  “He halted again and bought from the old applewoman two Banbury cakes”: James Joyce, Ulysses (Paris, 1922).

  “The moodiness makes for lovely landscape painting”: Lyall, The Anglo Files.

  “He to whom the present is the only thing that is present”: Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” in Intentions (London, 1891).

  “You must come down for the weekend”: Dreaming of Toad Hall, produced by Emily Williams, presented by John O’Farrell (BBC Radio 4, 2008).

  “The Bluebell is the sweetest flower”: Emily Brontë, “The Bluebell,” in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846).

  “A couple of flitches of bacon are worth fifty thousand Methodist sermons”: William Cobbett, Cottage Economy (1823).

  “Under the soil the old fish to lie. Twenty years he lived, and then did die”: John Timpson, Timpson’s England: A Look beyond the Obvious (London, 1994).

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”: Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken,” in Mountain Interval (New York, 1916).

  “Much has been written of travel”: Edward Thomas, The Icknield Way (London, 1913).

  “The idea of a village, romantically dishevelled”: Linda Proud, Consider England (London, 1994).

  “And was Jerusalem builded here”: William Blake, “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time,” in preface to Milton a Poem (London, 1811).

  “the country house came to represent an ideal of English civilization”: Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (London, 2000).

  “intersected, blast it, by a public footpath”: E.M. Forster, “My Wood” (first published, 1926; reprinted in Abinger Harvest, London, 1936).

  “paddocks and swimming pools and pheasant shoots”: Gill, The Angry Island.

  “brilliant at running a corner shop”: Paul Theroux, The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey around the Coast of Great Britain (London, 1983).

  “The picture of the rural life of England must be wholly defective”: William Howitt, The Rural Life of England (1838).

  “We see death coming into our midst like black smoke”: Jeuan Gethin, quoted in David Miles, The Tribes of Britain (London, 2005).

  “Even when the sun is obscured and the light is cold”: J.B. Priestley, English Journey (London, 1934).

  “a huddle of warm-looking Jurassic stone houses, clustered amicably”: Simon Winchester, The Map That Changed the World: The Tale of William Smith and the Birth of a Science (London, 2001).

  “one of these enchanted little valleys, these misty cups of verdure and grey walls”: Priestley, English Journey.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “compleatly fitted up and accomodated for the Entertainment of Gentlemen”: in “History of the Bear Inn,” www.hares-antiques.com.

  “bitter Mohammedan gruel”: Matthew Green, The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse (London, 2013), also at publicdomainreview.org/2013/08/07/the-lost-world-of-the-london-coffeehouse/.

  “I am with Lord Bathurst, at my bower”: Alexander Pope, letter to Martha Blount (October 1716); Pope, letter to Martha and Teresa Blount (October 1718); and Pope, letter to Robert Digby (1722), in The Works of Alexander Pope: Correspondence (London, 1886).

  “Within a limited radius one encounters some remarkable diversion”: Bill Bryson, The English Landscape (London, 2000).

  “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky”: John Masefield, “Sea-Fever,” in Salt-Water Ballads (London, 1902).

  “It is the place where you eat, drink, commiserate, flirt, laugh”: Jeremy Paxman, The English (London, 1998).

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Roused to still greater excitement, the mob was led up the hill”: David Bick, Old Leckhampton (Cheltenham, 1994).

  “biologically sustainable farming linked to conservation”: The Prince’s Highgrove garden is a mélange of organic utilitarianism and aesthetical delight. In his recently published Highgrove: A Garden Celebrated (London, 2014, with Bunny Guinness), the future king reflects that each part of his garden is a “separate painting and the result of ceaseless walking, ruminating and observing those moments of magic when the light becomes almost dreamlike in its illuminating intensity.”

  “Life is a game of two halves”: Chris Hastings and Elizabeth Day, “Churches heed the prayers of football fans,” The Telegraph (June 13, 2004).

  “We are not helpless young ladies in these parts, nor yet timorous”: Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, Vol. 1 (London, 1867).

  “A hole into which drunken and bleeding men were thrust”: Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty, serialized in Master Humphrey’s Clock (1841).

  “One need not be a mystic to accept that certain old paths are linear”: Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways (London, 2012).

  CHAPTER NINE

  “It kind of feels like losing a loved one”: in Michael Powell, “Royal Navy’s old workhorse makes her final voyage,” The News (Portsmouth) (August 3, 2012).

  “Inns of good dimension and repute”: Albany Poyntz, quoted in Thomas Burke, The English Inn (London, 1930).

  “France was a lady, Russia was a bear”: Siegfried Sassoon, quoted in Frank Chapman, “War poet was tasty with bat,” Kent and Sussex Courier (December 10, 2010).

  “The half-smile is the fruit of your awareness that you are here”: Thich Nhat Hanh, The Long Road Turns to Joy: A Guide to Walking Meditation (Berkeley, Calif., 1996).

&
nbsp; “May the fumes suffocate Squire Trevor-Battye”: Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas, the Last Four Years (London, 1958).

  “The peace I have dreamed about is here, a real thing”: John Steinbeck, to Ero (March 30, 1959), in Steinbeck, A Life in Letters, edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten (London, 1976).

  “The other night I discovered”: Steinbeck, to Elizabeth Otis (June 17, 1959), in Jackson J. Benson, John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography (New York, 1984).

  “I read Prayers this morning at C. Cary Church”: James Woodforde, The Diary of a Country Parson, 1758–1802 (Oxford, 1935, reprinted Norwich, 1999).

  “Miss Mary Donne is a very genteel, pretty young Lady”: Ibid.

  “We had for Dinner to day one Fowl boiled and Piggs face”: Ibid.

  “Whilst I was preaching”: Ibid.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “myth, legend, and the land of faeries”: Susan Toth, My Love Affair with England: A Traveler’s Memoir (New York, 1992).

  “beyond them a far green country”: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (London, 1955).

  “To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars”: Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses,” in Poems (London, 1842).

  “I turned flat west by a little chapelle”: John Leland, The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543 (London, 1907).

  “At the very south ende of the chirch of South-Cadbyri”: Ibid.

  “Camelot is a noted place; it is a noble fortification of the Romans”: William Stukeley, Itinerarium Curiosum (1776), quoted in Leslie Alcock, By South Cadbury Is That Camelot: Excavations at Cadbury Castle 1966–70 (London, 1975).

  “Cadbury Castle has few equals among British hillforts”: Alcock, By South Cadbury.

  “was the principal building — the feasting hall, in fact”: Ibid.

  “The figure of Arthur remains, as it always will, a symbol of British history”: Michael Wood, In Search of England (London, 1999).

  “Yesterday something wonderful. It was a golden day”: John Steinbeck, letter to Ero and Chase Horton, May 1, 1959, in Appendix, John Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (London, 1976).

  “And did those feet in ancient time”: Blake, in preface to Milton a Poem.

  “It may seem peculiar but if I am wearing my farming cap I would certainly not like our badgers culled”: John Kerton, Letter to the Editor, This Is Dorset (December 17, 2010).

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “little lines / Of sportive wood run wild”: William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798,” in Lyrical Ballads (London, 1798).

  “We could never have loved the earth as well”: George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (London, 1860).

  “stocked with thyme and parsley and sage”: Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (Oxford, 1939–43).

  “as in a graven image”: Edward Thomas, The South Country (London, 1906).

  “hobbit of the garden; the sprite of the window box”: Gill, The Angry Island.

  “if the town were a woman”: in Sunday Mercury, “Buzzing boutique hotel in Dorset is becoming a must-visit for foodies,” Birmingham Mail (October 20, 2012).

  “riotous expenses and unlawful games”: S.H. Burton, A West Country Anthology (London, 1975).

  “journeymen out for a holiday, a stray soldier or two”: Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (London, 1886).

  “If all the world and love were young”: Sir Walter Raleigh, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” (first published 1600).

  “she battered a pheasant to death recently”: in David Harrison, “RSPCA militants want to drop Queen over her support for hunting,” The Telegraph (June 13, 2004).

  “When the war times came we had Americans in Melbury Park”: Diana Mitchell, “My Childhood Memories,” The Francis Frith Collection, www.francisfrith.com.

  “One of the benefits of colder weather is that it encourages men to cover up”: in “Bad togs and Englishmen,” The Telegraph (May 23, 2004).

  “not at the Sow and Acorn, for she avoided inns”: Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (London, 1891)

  “Ding-dong, ding-dong, went the bells of the village church”: Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford.

  “Every village has its idiosyncrasy”: Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Thomas Hardy refers to such a Wessex character: Thomas Hardy, “The Withered Arm,” in Wessex Tales (London, 1888).

  “the most obscure edible object produced in Britain today”: Adam Edwards, “Le knob est arrivé,” The Telegraph (February 23, 2002).

  “Beyond the Wild Wood is the wild world”: Grahame, The Wind in the Willows.

  “Neil Shepherd, 41, a crossword compiler”: Richard Savill, “Gipsies victims of race crime,” The Telegraph (June 12, 2004).

  “It is normal practice in England not to answer anything directly”: Idries Shah, Adventures, Facts and Fantasy in Darkest England (London, 1987).

  AFTERWORD

  “If we want the Golden Country to exist outside the imagination”: Kim Taplin, The English Path (Woodbridge, UK, 1984).

  “wisest philosopher or the most egregious of donkey”: Robert Louis Stevenson, “Walking Tours,” in Cornhill Magazine, 1876.

  “Bilbo used to say there was only one Road”: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (London, 1954).

  Copyright © 2016 by John A. Cherrington

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

  ISBN 978-1-927958-62-9 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-927958-63-6 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-927958-64-3 (pdf)

  Editing by Scott Steedman

  Copy editing by Stephanie Fysh

  Map by Eric Leinburger

  Design by Natalie Olsen

  Ebook by Brightwing Books

  Cover images © giftgruen, johny schorle, morningside, pencake, sure / photocase.com

  Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West

  Figure 1 Publishing Inc.

  Vancouver BC Canada

  www.figure1pub.com

 

 

 


‹ Prev