The Green Road Into the Trees

by Hugh Thomson

  But above all as he surveyed that dark-green bulk rising at the end of the long, narrow road, he was compelled to think of the mysterious nest of some gigantic Jurassic-age bird-dragon, such as, in this May sunshine, he could imagine even now hatching its portentous egg.

  Looking at it in equally strong spring sunshine, I felt my own imagination distinctly underpowered by comparison. If anything, I reacted against the tendency of writers and artists to regard Maiden Castle as a strange, inexplicable phenomenon, or Wheeler’s similar attempt to give it a human narrative. For me, the hill-fort was remarkable enough for a far simpler reason: that an Iron Age tribe should have invested so many patient man-hours in building such elaborate earthworks, and that they had the considerable resources needed to do so. It was a statement of confidence.

  There was something else that struck me. Maiden Castle is remarkable for the complexity of its entrance: the ditches weave backwards and forwards, almost like a maze, before you can gain access. It may not have exclusively been a fort, but the Iron Age when it was built, the first millennium BC, was certainly a time of conflict. The Celtic influence that had come to Britain from the continent with the new technology of iron created far more pressure for existing resources and, almost certainly, divisions and territorial claims. Maiden Castle was a Celtic status symbol, to which you could only gain access if you were allowed.

  The idea of the Celts is at best a complicated construct, hedged round by all sorts of romantic and nationalistic longing. They are sometimes thought of as the indigenous people who were pushed out to the margins by waves of later invaders – Romans, then Anglo-Saxons, then Vikings – but kept the flame of true Britishness burning in Cornwall, in Wales and in the Gaelic lands. This ignores the fact that they were themselves Iron Age invaders who partially disrupted what appears to have been a peaceable Bronze Age society – and also ignores the process of gradual assimilation rather than invasion that at times took place. We have always been a polyglot society. And the idea of ‘the original Britons’, the Celts, is as dangerous and delusive a myth as any.

  *

  The walk from Maiden Castle to Dorchester was odd. You left the ramparts of a prehistoric fort to cross the modern equivalent, a town’s ring-road.

  As I reached the centre of town, I was struck by the tawdriness of what had once been Hardy’s Casterbridge, with its South Street a pedestrian mess of ugly fascias and badly fitting pavements. At least a street market brought a flicker of energy. Stalls were selling bric-a-brac from around the world – cheap scarves, leather hats, earrings, ‘charms’, glass beads, silver chains, hematite, lockets, amethyst, lapis and above all silver – not so different from traders who had landed on the Dorset coast with their Egyptian faience beads or prestige Beaker pots.

  An Iron Age traveller would have enjoyed – and needed – the nearby Body Shop with its unguents, lotions and aloe vera deodorant. The busker outside, with a lurcher dog and a flute, was playing Paul McCartney’s ‘Mull of Kintyre’. I gave him some change, on the condition that he chose another song.

  But worse lay ahead. My route lay through Poundbury, the Prince of Wales’s controversial new model urban estate on the edge of Dorchester. I had hoped that this might prove counter-intuitive; that despite or because of the outcry from all those modernist architects whose noses the Prince had put out of joint – ‘carbuncled’ – this might be a defiantly different experience. A place that ran to its own, more organic rhythm.

  The reality was very different. It looked like the village in Shrek. The open loggia of the Town Hall with its mock medieval wooden gate was bad enough – but just opposite was a house with a ludicrous Chippendale front. Giant urns had been placed on the roofs of buildings as if they were empty mantelpieces that needed filling. The townhouses ressembled ornamental carriage clocks. In the square that was supposed to be at the heart of this new, more human town planning stood a fountain, topped by a mermaid wearing fishscale stockings that looked suspiciously as if they might have come from the Ann Summers shop. Across the empty square from the fountain was an empty café.

  The tragedy was not just that of a wasted opportunity – and chance to jolt complacent modernist architects out of their normal glass-and-buttress conformity. The tumulus of Poundbury’s own Iron Age fort had been obscured in the process.

  Poundbury Hill-Fort lies north of Maiden Castle and is substantial in its own right. John Cowper Powys described a memorable scene here in his diary when he attended a jubilee bonfire in the 1930s:

  We did enjoy the fireworks and the enormous bonfire. It became a personality – this great fire – as it whirled and swept and curved up … And the fireworks were striking but the best thing was to see the crowds silhouetted against the sky. They might have been the old Neolithics under the crescent moon.

  It was ironic that the Prince of Wales, who had so often and rightly lamented the hemming in of St Paul’s Cathedral by the horrors of Paternoster Square, should have ignored the Iron Age monument on his doorstep when designing Poundbury.

  *

  The passing of so many cattle and men over the years has hollowed out the lane to a remarkable degree. It looks like a bobsleigh run as it shoots away from me down the hill, its banks covered with hart’s tongue ferns, sloes, brambles and a wet greenness that glows in the shadows.

  I’ve reached one of Dorset’s wildest and empty stretches – the Dorsetshire Gap, where a number of old drovers’ roads meet in a valley that allows access through from the north of the county to the south and the sea. The only nearby house at Folly was once an old drovers’ pub, the Fox, although it is now in private hands.

  It seems an empty stretch of countryside, but look closely and it glows with the tracings of the time when this was a thoroughfare. There is an old Roman fort up above on a plateau called Nettlecombe Tout, although no footpath leads there and it has never been excavated. The drovers’ road drops down from the Dorsetshire Gap to the ghost medieval village of Higher Melcombe, whose buildings can be traced as faint outlines on the farmland. At the farmhouse there is an old chapel which is disused but still has its stained-glass windows in place. Beyond lie the ruins of the Benedictine abbey at Milton Abbas.

  Close as well to the Gap, there are many Bronze Age cross-dykes built to divide the land into plots – particularly around Lyscombe Bottom, a valley or coomb scooped out of the ground so that the surrounding ridge encircles it, a place that must have been pleasingly obvious as a settlement centre for prehistoric man as the valley was naturally protected.

  The land is still protected, but now as a wildlife reserve and well-managed farm. On this spring morning the meadows are covered in early gentians and fragrant orchids, although it is too early for the Adonis Blue, which has always fascinated me because of the unusual courtship ritual that gives this chalkland butterfly its name. The silvery male of the species flies coquettishly along; the drab brown female gives chase and tries to catch it.

  When Daniel Defoe made his tour of England, he was much taken by the quality of the local Dorset pasture and the sheep it fed; so much so that he returned several times in his narrative to the ‘fine carpet ground, soft as velvet, and the herbage, sweet as garden herbs, which makes their sheep be the best in England, if not in the world, and their wool fine to an extream’.

  It was the same pastureland that drew prehistoric man to the area, and right through to the twentieth century, Dorset sheep, together with cattle, were taken along the Icknield Way to distribution points like Banbury Fair in Oxfordshire, where, Defoe reported, the sheep had such a reputation that butchers came from all over the country to source them.

  This is grass that has been fine-cropped by sheep for millennia, which is why it is such a beautiful green sward now. Well-managed sheep farming can create a hillside like a lawn as those sharp teeth nibble neatly down.

  Another traveller this way, the naturalist W H Hudson, noted how the local plants had adapted by growing as low as possible to avoid the attentions of the sheep.
I was a great admirer of Hudson and had visited the house where he was born in Argentina, overshadowed by an enormous ombu tree: a strange tree which is more like a giant shrub and needs to have its branches supported on crutches across the ground, so that it resembles a giant spider. He brought to his studies of England, in particular A Shepherd’s Life about these Dorset and Wiltshire Downs, a sense that England was just as strange and exotic as the pampas; also a sense of how short rural memories are. He told an odd story of how a farmer puzzled over finding a disused well full of sheep heads with horns, when none of the local breeds were horned; and how Hudson had to tell him about the old Wiltshire breed of sheep, with horns, which had died out only a generation or so before.

  I see not a single walker through this stretch of Dorset, even though parts of it are waymarked ‘the Dorset Ridgeway’. There are so many long-distance paths now across the country that they have become devalued. The only way of knowing that others have passed this way is a thoughtful tin that someone has left at the crossing point of the Dorsetshire Gap; inside is a notebook wrapped in a bag, in which passers-by have left comments over the years. These tend to the inconsequential, ‘a charming place’, or the paradoxical, ‘just sorry that we are disturbing the stillness and solitude by being here ourselves’; but there is an attraction in this slow accumulation of comment, like a cairn to which every traveller has added a stone.

  We think of southern England as being overpopulated. In the fine photos NASA has taken of the Earth from space at night, we are one of the brightest spots on the planet as we burn our office and home candles at both ends. Yet there are still wonderful lacunae of emptiness such as this. A lesson I learned long ago in South America is that however much people think of an area as being known and explored, they are invariably talking about the principal points of a map – the rivers, mountaintops, settlements. There are always ‘the places in between’, as Rory Stewart called his study of rural Afghanistan, that we rarely visit.

  *

  At this point the more curious reader might ask where I’m spending the night. It would be good to report that I unrolled the mat from my knapsack and stretched out under the Dorset stars. I do have a mat and tent with me – and there will be times when I do just that, or face an additional ten-mile walk to some overpriced bed-and-breakfast with doilies on the washstand.

  But by great good fortune I have friends living near by who can put me up. Even better, they are believers in the good life and have a well-stocked cellar and a hot tub they’ve built on the garden hilltop above the house so they can take in the sunset while sipping a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and wondering which red wine to drink over dinner.

  There are times when it is wonderful and austere and bracing to sleep under the stars. That time will come. For now, a pleasant bed, good wine and the prospect of a cooked breakfast send me to sleep very happily.

  But not before a confession. I’ve taken many expeditions to the Andes, sometimes with people I didn’t know that well beforehand, if at all. There may come a moment when, after a few days, you find yourself alone together at the campfire or by the roadside, and they turn with a ‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’

  In a relationship, those words would be the blue screen of death. From someone you’ve known for a couple of days, it’s just something they are nervous about hitting you with on Day One. That they are insulin-dependent, bad at altitude, a recovering alcoholic, or once voted for Richard Nixon.

  There’s a moment that is just right for such an admission – some days into a journey, but before you’ve gone too far and it’s absurd that you didn’t know earlier. So at this point I need to look the reader in the eye and draw a little closer. You see, there is a reason we’re doing this whole journey on foot, and not necessarily the one you thought it was. It’s not just the lyrical intensity of a walking experience, although I can have my own occasional epiphanies. It’s because I have to. Not to put too fine a point on it (and here I would lean a little closer, and perhaps touch your arm), the thing is, Reader, I have just lost my driving licence.

  This may not come as a complete surprise to those who sat with me in the passenger seat through Tequila Oil: Getting Lost in Mexico. But it certainly came as a surprise to me. One moment I had a spotless driving record of twenty-five years without a single point. The next they were coming at me like Space Invaders.

  I was not alone. Speed cameras at the entrances to villages were tripping up the most sober and upright of countryside citizens. I knew of at least three worthies – a county councillor, a captain of industry and the owner of a large local estate – whose Range Rovers were on nine points and hanging over the cliff edge, like The Italian Job. Some people had got wives or penniless students to take their points for them; or hired expensive solicitors to get them off on technicalities.

  I faced up to the magistrates, feeling a little like Toad when he was sentenced to jail for motor offences and the Clerk ‘rounded up the sentence’ to twenty years to make it neater.

  ‘To my mind,’ observed the Chairman of the Bench of Magistrates cheerfully, ‘the ONLY difficulty that presents itself in this otherwise very clear case is, how we can possibly make it sufficiently hot for the incorrigible rogue and hardened ruffian whom we see cowering in the dock before us.’

  (The Wind in the Willows)

  Although in my case it was a Chairwoman of the Bench, with one of those low, soft voices (‘Mr Thomson, would you mind telling us how you came to be travelling at 34 mph in a 30-mile zone’) that meant trouble. Her two male colleagues looked as if they had just lunched at the Rotary or golf club, and were contemplating a post-prandial liqueur to celebrate the sentence they were about to dish out. The courtroom could have been designed by Terry Gilliam, with a vast height and expanse rearing up above the dock to the magistrates sitting in the gods above and looking down. They may all have come on from a session of housebreaking and were in hanging-judge mood. Between them, they tried to give me a suspension of one year. ‘One year’ echoed out above my head like a voice of doom. The Clerk had to remind the court that: my points were all for small ‘trip-wire’ offences; the maximum suspension was six months anyway.

  Even with this reprieve, my car was languishing at home.

  Although the need to walk everywhere had proved salutary: it had been a reminder of how shoddy public transport services were in the country, where buses ran to some villages only when there was an ‘r’ in the month; and like slow cooking, there was nothing like being on foot for getting the true taste of a journey.

  *

  ‘You work all day and half the night and where does it get you?’

  Mike had sharp blue-grey eyes and a farmer’s way of holding your gaze while he spoke. I met him when I passed a sign for eggs at the end of a lane, and fancied boiling some up for the journey; at the other end of the lane were Mike and his open-sided barn, where he kept a dozen or so young calves and a few chickens. It was not so much a farm as a smallholding and Mike lived in nearby Sherborne now but, as he tells me, once he had far more.

  It was a sad story, although it started off well. Mike had been born in the country to a family of modest means. He left school at sixteen and married young. For many years he made ends meet through a variety of jobs, from working on the dustcarts to helping a farmer in the local village, Poyntington.

  The farmer was elderly and came to depend on his younger labourer for help. He had no children himself. When he died, he left Mike the farm, much to the anger of the farmer’s nephew and family, who were cut out of the will. They tried to sue Mike, but he survived this. Slowly, he built up the stock of cattle to some 100 head.

  Very few farm labourers ever end up owning a farm. Social mobility is still painfully slow, and land prices high; banks will rarely lend substantial amounts to a labourer.

  Mike’s particular skill was bringing on young cattle. He would buy them at just a few weeks old, for only £30–£40, then grow the calves on and sell them at five time
s the amount when they reached six months.

  For more than ten years he worked ‘all the hours God gave me’ to build up his herd. But then came disaster. His marriage of thirty-seven years collapsed. As part of the divorce settlement he had to sell the farm. At fifty-six, all he was left with now was six acres of land and a few cattle; he needed to lay hedges for other farmers to earn a living.

  I asked him if he felt at all bitter.

  ‘If I’d lost the lot, then I really would be sick. But at least I’ve still got this bit of land.’

  When he hears that I’m walking from Dorset to Norfolk, he insists on giving me half a dozen eggs for free. As in South America, the people who are most generous to travellers are always those who have the least to give.

  *

  That afternoon saw me reaching the windswept ridge of Corton Hill. Looking behind me I could see the passes around the Dorsetshire Gap leading back to Dorset and the coast. When I reached the end of the ridge, I looked ahead and there, as if arising like an island from the plain, was Cadbury Castle, the closest we have to Camelot, the centre of Arthurian legend and tradition. Even respected archaeologists like Leslie Alcock had endorsed Cadbury Castle as Arthurian.

  I had been well set up to this moment with a Bloody Mary of savage and potent force from the Queens Arms in Corton Denham, the village just before this hill. The barman made it for me with chilli vodka, grated raw horseradish and an additional kick of sherry. One advantage of losing your driving licence was that there were no longer any worries about drinking at lunchtime. Together with their excellent home-made pork pie, I now felt I could fly over the valley to Cadbury Castle, or at the very least imagine a knight leading his horse, damsel and page across in a troupe.

  But I should at once declare my position on all matters Arthurian. I would be bitterly disappointed if it was ever proved – which looks unlikely – that there was a historical Arthur. One of the great triumphs of the English literary imagination is that the cathedral of prose which is the Arthurian cycle was built up over centuries on empty ground.