The Green Road Into the Trees

by Hugh Thomson

  Past Ogbourne St George and on one of my small digressions from the main Icknield Way as it ran along the Downs, I stumbled on a small cottage in a valley that fell away to the north. It reminded me instantly of the gamekeeper’s home that Richard Jefferies once described in his book of the same name – a little down at heel (for the valleys facing Swindon did not have the upmarket value of the Cotswolds or the Marlborough Downs), a little battered and worn at the sides, like Jefferies’ gamekeeper’s jacket where he continually rested his gun. Although this, admittedly, did not have the vermin hanging from the rafters that also caught Jefferies’ attention.

  Richard Jefferies was born near here in 1848 and made the Wiltshire countryside his own. As a boy he would roam over these same Iron Age forts, particularly the one at Liddington Hill which I was approaching. He too had noticed the rooks that haunt these hills, without sentimentality: the gamekeeper he describes in his first and most memorable book, The Gamekeeper at Home, organised rook shoots in the spring at which a ‘rook-shooting party from the grand house’ were invited to take pot-shots at them with rifles and even crossbows.

  As a writer, he has the rare patience to wait, and observe, and record the details that a more casual visitor to the countryside might miss. He knows precisely how the poacher sets a trap for a hare – the exact height and shape of the loop for a snare, the difference a few inches can make to capture or escape; and has sympathy for the poor hare, whose foot is often stripped of flesh but held, subjecting the animal to a slow and painful death. He knows how the gamekeeper strips down his gun; how a ferret seeks the warmth of its owner’s pocket, ‘nuzzling down with a little hay’; how a jay patrolling a hedge pretends ‘an utter indifference’ to the small birds it is intent on eating.

  Like the best natural history writing, his simple observational prose seems to come to him as naturally as the water down one of his rills. But it didn’t. Despite having lived and breathed the Wiltshire countryside on a small struggling farm, for many years he tried to write something completely different – romantic novels of high society that never took off because, in the view of one of his later editors, they were unnatural: ‘What he knew of men and women was largely confined to his acquaintanceship with farmers and their wives.’ It took him years to accept that he was best at writing about what he knew and to abandon his novel-writing ambitions. The stream of fifteen books that he then, ‘like an unleashed whippet’, produced in the last illness-plagued decade of his life were proof of how fluent his talent was.

  His sheer prolixity means that if he is now read today, it is in edited selections – which is a shame, as the original slim books are just the size to slip into a poacher’s pocket. My copy of The Gamekeeper at Home with its dove-grey and ochre sleeve, from the uniform edition produced in 1948 for the centenary of Jefferies’ birth, has been one of my favourite books ever since I first read it thirty years ago.

  In the past, Jefferies has been patronised for the plainness of his style (that same earlier editor again: ‘He is lacking as a grammarian and as a stylist he is by no means in the first rank’) but it is precisely that unadorned, natural approach that I like. There are no purple patches of prose waiting like a swamp to sink the unwary reader. He affects the directness of his first hero, the gamekeeper, whose thoughts are ‘not always flattering or very delicately expressed; and his view is not forgotten’.

  My own experience of gamekeepers has been less rosy. On one occasion not far from here, I was walking with a dog along a public footpath through the woods when a keeper bounded up and threatened to throw me off the land. With luck, as I was a little way from home, I had an Ordnance Survey map in my pocket which showed the footpath. Moreover, the dog was on a lead. ‘Well,’ blasted the keeper, a raw-boned, tall man, ‘it’s only a public footpath when the pheasants are not being reared.’ I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or unleash the dog on him.

  Jefferies was not just interested in gamekeepers for their obviously close contact with the land. As the son of a struggling farmer, he was always aware of the small divisions of rank and status in the countryside. The gamekeeper had an interestingly ambivalent status, in the confidence of his master and respected by him – indeed depended on by him – for the provision of shooting and country knowledge. One of Jefferies’ cleverest passages is where he describes how a gamekeeper can subtly, or unscrupulously, influence a landowner’s opinion of his tenant farmers:

  Passing across the turnips, the landlord, who perhaps never sees his farms save when thus crossing them with a gun, remarks that they look clean and free from weeds; whereupon the keeper, walking respectfully a little in the rear, replies that so-and-so, the tenant, is a capital farmer, a preserver of foxes and game, but has suffered from the floods – a reply that leads to enquiries, and perhaps a welcome reduction of rents. On the other hand, the owner’s attention is thus often called to abuses.

  There is no sentimentality. One object Jefferies describes beside his gamekeeper’s cottage is an old, disused mantrap: ‘The jaws of this iron wolf are horrible to contemplate – rows of serrated projections, which fit into each other when closed, alternating with spikes a couple of inches long, like tusks … They seem to snap together with a vicious energy, powerful enough to break the bone of the leg; and assuredly no man ever got free whose foot was once caught by these terrible teeth.’ Jefferies tells the story of one old man, a mole catcher, who had been caught in the trap when a young boy and had gone lame in one foot as a consequence. It is the last detail he adds that has always stayed with me: ‘The trap could be chained to its place if desired; but, as a matter of fact, the chain was unnecessary, for no man could possibly drag this torturing clog along.’

  Jefferies was constantly aware of how the countryside was changing. Within his lifetime, from 1848 to 1887, Swindon was transformed from a small market town to a railway metropolis, and the building of the railways brought labourers and itinerants to the nearby woodlands. Jefferies used the neologism ‘tramps’ in quotation marks to show how recent the term was. When not actually poaching, these newcomers caused plenty of irritation for the gamekeeper, whether cutting down young saplings to sell as walking sticks (those with a spiral groove curving up from the growth of a honeysuckle vine were the most valuable), gathering hazelnuts and pulling off branches in the process, or, worst of all, lighting fires in the hollow of trees ‘just for the sport’.

  In some ways, Jefferies shares much in common with D H Lawrence – and not just an interest in gamekeepers. Both had a view of nature that was driven by loss and by the illness that was consuming them, and so made every moment wrested from life more precious. Jefferies was tubercular. For the last ten years of life, when he was writing the countryside books, he was forced to leave the Wiltshire he loved for London, to seek a scrappy literary living. He and his young family were desperately poor. His father’s farm had gone bankrupt.

  The almost hallucinatory tone of his extraordinary autobiography, The Story of My Heart, in which he imagines himself on Liddington Hill dissolving into time, is testament to a man who wanted to lose, not find himself, in nature: ‘Listening to the sighing of the grass I felt immortality.’ Lying close to the man who he imagines has been buried for 2,000 years in a tumulus a few feet away, his thoughts ‘slip back the twenty centuries in a moment to the forest-days when he hurled the spear, or shot with the bow, hunting the deer, and could return again swiftly to this moment, so his spirit could endure from then till now, and the time was nothing’.

  Jefferies’ last years were not happy ones. He wrote about the countryside that was most accessible from London, around the fringes of Surrey. His novel After London (1885) was a post-apocalyptic view of what would happen if that city was overwhelmed, submerged, returned to nature: a vision he relished. Despite increasing illness, he managed still to summon up vistas of the old countryside: a lane where clematis grew below Worthing, and memories of the Icknield Way, which for him had always remained a talismanic route to the sea and freedom
over the Downs, even as his own horizons darkened:

  A broad green track runs for many a long, long mile across the Downs, now following the ridges, now winding past at the foot of a grassy slope, then stretching away through cornfield and fallow.

  Plough and harrow press hard on the ancient track, and yet dare not encroach upon it. With varying width, from twenty to fifty yards, it runs like a green riband through the sea of corn – a width that allows a flock of sheep to travel easily side by side, spread abroad, and snatch a bite as they pass.

  The track winds away yet further, over hill after hill; but a summer’s day is not long enough to trace it to the end.

  Jefferies died impoverished in 1887, just thirty-eight years old. I thought of him as I biked up to Liddington. From the ramparts of the Iron Age hill-fort, I looked down to see Coate Farm, where he was born, and its nearby reservoir, now almost completely subsumed by Swindon: the fastest-growing city in the country with its hospital and car plant and high-tech matchbox factories lining the railroad and the M4. He wrote about the lake and waterbanks in Bevis: The Story of a Boy, a book that was later to influence Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.

  Jefferies came up here endlessly as a boy, and not just to empathise with the bodies below the turf. From here he could survey his kingdom, both Swindon below and more importantly the Downs stretching away to either side:

  There is a hill to which I used to resort … The labour of walking three miles to it, all the while gradually ascending, seemed to clear my blood of the heaviness accumulated at home. On a warm summer day the slow continued rise required continual effort, which carried away the sense of oppression. The familiar everyday scene was soon out of sight; I came to other trees, meadows, and fields; I began to breathe a new air and to have a fresher aspiration … Moving up the sweet short turf, at every step my heart seemed to obtain a wider horizon of feeling; with every inhalation of rich pure air, a deeper desire. The very light of the sun was whiter and more brilliant here. By the time I had reached the summit I had entirely forgotten the petty circumstances and the annoyances of existence. I felt myself, myself.

  As soon as I arrived, I could hear skylarks everywhere. The point about a skylark’s song is not its sheer beauty, although considerable: it is the way that the acoustic is constantly changing as the skylark is on the move, the music first seeming to come out of the earth and the grass, then rocketing upwards in a cascade of notes and still spluttering high up in the sky, like the end of a firework, when it seems impossible that one should still hear it. Like Jefferies’ voice. I remember suddenly his phrase, ‘the lark’s song is like a waterfall in the sky’.

  Liddington camp is a place of dreams. It lies a little off the main track – there is no footpath across to it, so some satisfying trespassing is involved – which makes it a more private place than the other Iron Age forts.

  One can almost believe the old story that King Arthur fought the momentous battle of Mount Badon here, which halted the advancing Saxons in the early sixth century and kept Britain Celtic for another half-century. One can believe but without a huge amount of evidence: we know that ‘a battle of Mount Badon’ was successfully won by the Romano-British around AD 500; we don’t know where that was and we don’t know with any certainty who led them. But in the absence of fact, Arthur, if he existed, makes a fine symbolic victor. And given that Barbury Castle is still visible behind me in the distance, where the Britons were later decisively beaten themselves by Cynric and the West Saxons in AD 556, Liddington Hill makes a fine place to have held back the inevitable.

  *

  And I’m away. Leaving Jefferies behind and coming out of the Wiltshire hills as I swoop down towards the M4. The map marks an enticing pub just across the motorway and before the ascent up Fox Hill into the Berkshire Downs beyond. The thought gives me wings as I hit a brief stretch of tarmac road and get the speedometer up to thirty miles an hour, which is nothing in a car but feels good on a mountain bike. I swoop over the M4 on a high bridge that leaves me feeling like the angel of the West, as I stretch out my arms from the handlebars and look down on the stream of traffic below. The metal of the car roofs glints in the sun and looks glorious.

  Who needs a caravanserai carrying jet from Yorkshire, amber from the Baltic and blue faience beads from Egypt, as they had in the Bronze Age along the Icknield Way, when you can have the turquoise, silver and red of the modern car streaming past in an endless display of wealth and speed? No amount of walking will stop me from loving the sound and sight of a motor car. Like Mr Toad, the far-off poop-pooping of a vehicle coming down a country lane excites in me more admiration than condemnation. I would rather be buried in an Alfa Romeo, like an Anglo-Saxon king in his longboat, than with my boots and walking stick, however many miles across the Andes, Himalaya and now England they might have taken me.

  The wind is spilled out of my sails when I reach the promised pub. It has been turned into an Indian restaurant, like so many in the villages of southern England. I enjoy a curry as much as the next man, but not when I’ve got a hill to climb.

  Maybe it’s the lack of liquid intake or the fact that I’ve been on the move for some time, but I feel a little hypoxic when I reach Wayland’s Smithy, with its long barrow tomb. My legs are shaking as I leave the bike by the stile and wander down from the Icknield Way towards the Smithy. It is a place I’ve been to before, but many, many years ago – enough decades for me to remember only the approach into the trees, but not the actual tomb.

  Three things take me aback: the scale of the barrow – it is almost 200 feet long; the incredible antiquity – at around 3500 BC, it is even older than Stonehenge and Avebury; and the glade of encircling beech trees around it, which remind me of the Rainbow Circle camp back near Overton Hill.

  I also remember when I last came here before, thirty years ago. I had not long moved from London to the country and like many a neophyte was far more enthusiastic for its pleasures than most of the other teenage residents, who were desperate to get to the bright lights of Oxford and Reading.

  My family came for a picnic along this stretch of the Icknield Way, a walk that had to adapt to the slower pace of my grandmother and younger sisters, so did not extend very far. But it did reach the Smithy. There is an old photo of us having a picnic, with my brother Ben and his recently acquired girlfriend, Kari, an exotic foreign girl whom he had picked up on a train to the general surprise and admiration of the rest of the family. And there is another photo of me walking the path wearing an old tweed jacket, an act of deliberate and absurd affectation given that I would not have been seen dead in one in London. I started to read The Countryman, a pocket-book-sized magazine like The Reader’s Digest, with articles on burning rural issues of the day like the controversial introduction of oilseed rape. If able to get away with it, I would have smoked a pipe.

  Just a mile or two further on from Wayland’s Smithy was a far better-known landmark, the White Horse of Uffington. The best way to see it has always been from the train travelling westward between London and Bristol, a route I must have taken hundreds of times. Glance up at the right moment, somewhere between the dreariness of Didcot and Swindon, and there is the White Horse running across its hill, a memory of a wild time, but in your same direction of travel.

  There are other white horses scattered across the Downs: at Marlborough, at Pewsey, at Hackpen Hill and the one I had stopped at on Old Adam Hill; some nine in all. But these others are later imitations, all cut into the turf since the eighteenth century.

  The horse at Uffington is the progenitor, and an ancient one. Optical Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating shows it to have been made in the Bronze Age around 1000 BC; SO confirming the aesthetic dating first made by a local vicar back in 1740, writing under the wonderful name ‘Philalethes Rusticus’, who pointed out the similarity between Uffington and the representation of horses on Bronze Age coins.

  It is the delicacy of the White Horse that you notice when walking close to it. Th
e startled eye. The gapped legs. The fluidity that has made some mistake it for a greyhound. It is hard to think of more delicate tracery on the landscape, as it lies askance the slope, with the mound of Dragon Hill below. The later white horses are all chunkier, more obvious affairs, though many have great charm; but they are shire horses to Uffington’s sleek racing breed.

  I find it remarkable to think how long the horse has been preserved; without regular scouring of the chalk, the grass would grow over it again, although its position on a steep slope may inhibit the speed of that growth. As Thomas Baskerville put it in 1677, ‘some that dwell hereabouts have an obligation upon their hands to repair and cleanse this landmark, or else in time it may turn green like the rest of the hill, and be forgotten.’

  The likely reason for its survival is that the scouring of the horse provided a good excuse for a party. In 1738, the Revd Francis Wise, an Oxford don who did much to publicise the White Horse and other chalk figures, described how people came from all the villages around every seven years to do the cleaning, with an accompanying two-day fair that had a reputation for disorder and debauchery. It was paid for by the local Lord of the Manor as one of the conditions on which he held his land. There is nothing an Englishman likes so much as a free drink, particularly if it’s paid for by his boss, and the fair became a popular tradition.

  Thomas Hughes, of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, gave a full description of a later fair in his 1857 novel The Scouring of the White Horse. It was held within the banks of the Uffington Iron Age fort and was

  decked out with nuts and apples and gingerbread, and all sorts of sucks and food, and children’s toys, and cheap ribbons, knives, braces, straps and all manner of gaudy looking articles … an acrobat was swinging backwards and forwards on the slack rope, and turning head over heels at the end of each swing … The whole space was filled with all sorts of people, from ladies looking as if they had just come from Kensington Gardens, down to the ragged little gypsy children.