by Hugh Thomson
*
The last stretch lay ahead of me, to the coast and the sea.
I was excited by the revelations about the Bronze Age. I also felt tired. Walking long distances may make you fit – and that’s questionable, because it makes you fit for nothing other than walking – but there comes a time when a hot bath and a cold pint are the only things luring you ahead.
By chance, I had brought some coca tea back from my last trip to Peru. Strictly speaking, this was not something that the US Food and Drug Administration endorse – indeed they arrest people for it at airports – as coca leaves are the raw ingredient for cocaine. I hadn’t thought it sensible to ask what the policy was at Heathrow, if they had one. But the tea was herbal and gave a sustaining energy that helped Andean Indians through long nights on the mountains; I had taken it for years, particularly when walking long distances. This was a good moment to brew up with my thermos.
I sat on the side of the track, sipping at the acrid coca tea, looking out over the endless plain of Norfolk and thinking about everything I had seen on my 400-mile journey.
Some things in England had improved immeasurably. Pubs, pies and Premiership football for a start. Perhaps because Norfolk reminded me so much of Russia, which I had recently travelled across, I was struck by one contrast in attitudes: in Russia, the whole idea of ‘relationship issues’ had been considered for so long a bourgeois decadence under the Soviets that there was now widespread family dysfunction, with alcoholism and divorce rife; England was by no means perfect – and it was easy to poke fun at the ‘touchy-feely culture’ in which prime ministers kept apologising and everyone was ‘finding themselves’ before ‘moving on’ – but there seemed to be a far greater concern for other people’s feelings than in other countries I had travelled through.
Underneath the brash and flash of tabloid Britain that had reached parts of the countryside – I had a mental image of Jordan driving a black Range Rover as she went to ride her horses on the North Downs – there was still a residual modesty, a kindness that was there if not always spoken. That said, while being increasingly connected by the distorting prisms of cyberspace, we were disconnected on the ground: we don’t walk and talk enough.
England was also a phenomenally beautiful country. How often had I come back to Heathrow from abroad and marvelled at the sudden green of the fields as I drove home. We are complacent about its beauty, which we assume to be natural, but is highly managed by our farmer custodians, in whom we show little interest. You need to walk large stretches of England to appreciate its subtle gradations; changes that can be missed when speeding past on motorways or A roads.
My walk had taken me within the baleful orbit of London, a reminder that there were two countrysides: the one close enough to London or a big city for house prices to have risen steeply and villages to be empty during the week, when the inhabitants were sucked into commuter trains; and the older countryside, like Dorset or Norfolk, too far out, where the problem was often the reverse – a lack of public transport meant no one could leave during the day at all. Many of the East Anglian villages I passed had been left with bus services so reduced they had just one daily departure and arrival, if that.
It was also less secure living in the countryside than one might think: more gun crime than in the cities, according to statistics; more divorces; too many car crashes on small country lanes (more dangerous than motorways or urban traffic, and with a ridiculously high speed limit of sixty miles an hour, as I knew from my Speed Awareness Course); and, towards King’s Lynn and north Norfolk, one of the highest rates of suicide in the country.
I was sure this last, unexpected, statistic had something to do with everything being so flat. I’ve always needed hills. They don’t have to be the Lake District, Alps, Andes or the Himalaya – although some of my happiest journeys have been made in those mountains – but some slight rise in the landscape doesn’t half lift the spirits. All the way from the coast, I had been travelling along the spine of the country, with its gentle undulations of down and valley; by comparison, Norfolk was flat-chested. Sorry, Brian Eno.
I rarely listened to my iPod when walking. It was better for dozing off to if I slept out in the open. But crossing Norfolk was so dull that I saw no alternative. I should have been listening to Mozart or Vashti Bunyan, or for that matter Eno’s ambient musings – something calm and reflective. But instead I was listening to Ryan Adams’s guitar-driven Rock N Roll at full volume, the only way to relieve the tedium of the East Anglian steppes.
The pretty village of Ringstead came as a welcome relief. There was the faint flush of a hill – the Ringstead Downs off to one side, with their beech trees and chalk grasslands, a very last whimpering sigh of the Chilterns; the Gin Trap, a seventeenth-century coaching inn, which served an excellent bangers and mash; and some farm buildings reassuringly in the centre of the village.
It was just a few miles to Hunstanton, a curious Victorian resort that had been built up by the L’Estrange family, the local landowners since the Norman conquest (their hereditary title of ‘Lord High Admiral of the Wash’ sounded straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan).
Hunstanton had much that was bad and much that was good about England. The bad was more obvious. A grim set of plastic amusement barns had been put up along the seafront, with slot machines; there was an ‘Ancient Mariner Inn’, with the sort of restaurant that sandwiches go to when they die, and another pub that had proudly put up a sign to say there was ‘a real log fire’. You expected everything to be fake. It had none of Blackpool or Weymouth’s exuberance or charm. There were bossy notices from the L’Estrange Estate telling you not to do any of the things you might normally want to do at the seaside.
But beyond, on the beach, I found some huts that Maisie Taylor had told me about, spread out below the cliff. These were not the polite little beach huts that change hands for over £100,000 at the front on Southwold, but more ragged, bleached affairs, scattered across the dunes and sometimes, I was told by locals, overwhelmed by them. On a bad year whole huts got submerged by the drifting sand. One was called Sea Holly, in turquoise; another, Ocean Drive, looked like it had been a wooden caravan that had got to the beach and just stopped. Both were the sort of places to write a book in and look out to sea, as the winds shored the dunes up against you.
I’m a sucker for bleached wood, whether on a beach hut or the driftwood that was scattered over the sand. And across the wide beach, flecked with flint, kite surfers were racing at a fabulous speed, matched only by those who were out on the water.
A little down the coast too were the remains of St Edmund’s Chapel, built in 1272 in memory of the martyr king, who was thought to have landed on Hunstanton beach in AD 855 ‘to claim his Kingdom of East Anglia’, some fourteen years before his death at the hands of the Vikings.
If he did land here – and the historical jury is still out on the case – he would have found that it all looked very familiar. It reminded me strongly of the wide Jutland and Danish beaches from which the Angles had come.
But what I had always known would be the end of my journey lay just a mile ahead along the shore, at Holme-next-the-Sea, the north-eastern edge of the Wash, and a departure point since prehistoric times to cross both that water and the North Sea to Europe.
*
In the spring of 1998, a special-needs teacher called John Lorimer found a Bronze Age axe on the beach at Holme. Not that he knew what it was at first; the crescent-shaped blade required identification by the county archaeologists. While they were looking at it in Norwich, John returned regularly to the same spot on the beach to look for more artefacts. He noticed a strange piece of wood in the peat beds that the incoming sea was slowly eroding – strange because of its weirdly contorted branches. Then on later visits he realised that a neat circle of posts around the tree were becoming exposed – at which point it was clear the structure was man-made.
John called in the experts, who by this time had dated his axe. It was when they
realised that the ‘branches’ were strange because they were in fact the inverted roots of an oak tree buried upside down that the world stood up and took notice. Or, in Francis Pryor’s words, ‘picked it up, ran with it, tossed it around in the air and devoured it’.
The wood had been preserved by the same peat that had kept Flag Fen causeway and the boats at nearby Must Farm quarry in such good condition. Wood can be accurately dated, unlike a stone circle. The date the experts came back with was 2049 BC, in the early Bronze Age.
The papers needed a catchy name. ‘Seahenge’ was obvious but misleading – for when it was constructed, it was not on the beach, but inland, and was not strictly speaking a henge. But no matter. The growth of the coastline had, over four millennia, brought the sea to the site. That it had exposed the circle now rather than at any other time over the past few thousand years – when it might well have been ignored or missed – was sheer luck. It was also an indicator that there might well have been many more such sites which have not survived.
One reason the press loved it was that the Druid and New Age community didn’t. As could have been foreseen, they objected strongly to the timbers from Seahenge being removed; for English Heritage decided the only way to save the circle from the incoming sea was to take it away for preservation.
Rollo Maughfling, the self-styled ‘Archdruid of Stonehenge and Glastonbury’, was just one of many who protested. He has described the first time he saw the circle, as the tide retreated over the wooden posts and they began to emerge from the waves with, at their centre, ‘the magnificent upturned central tree formation, seawater pouring off it and lapping around it. A shiver ran down my spine.’
Many of the archaeologists were affected as well. Francis Pryor described what it was like to enter the circle when Channel 4’s Time Team built a full reconstruction:
I can only say it was profoundly moving and peaceful. Somehow the thick timbers excluded nearly all sound from outside. I was also strongly affected by the strong smell of freshly split oakwood. You could almost cut the tannin in the air. The cleft-oak interior harmonised with the de-barked tree trunk in an extraordinary way. It was as if this special enclosed space had truly been cleansed and purified …
Some protesters tried to stop the archaeologists’ work by throwing away their sandbags; the police were called. A legal challenge in the courts to halt the removal of the circle, which the protesters argued should be allowed to stay in its natural and spiritual site, failed when it was clear English Heritage carried too much establishment and academic backing to be beaten.
The circle and the central oak were finally removed. After restoration at the specialist tanks in Flag Fen, they are now on display at the Regional Museum in King’s Lynn. The central inverted oak, in particular, retains all its power, even behind glass.
The press controversy surrounding its removal, with photos of Druids bearing staffs confronting bulldozers and archaeologists, overshadowed the fact that Seahenge was such an extraordinary creative achievement.
For me, entering the mindset of those who made the circle was in some ways as challenging as anything contemporary art could offer. Here was a tree that had been stripped of its bark – a cumbersome operation which Francis has described as ‘completely senseless and pointless’ – and then, even more oddly, planted upside down, an idea that was beyond the irrational. Around it had been positioned a dense circle of fifty-five oak posts, forming a palisade: these too had their bark stripped, but only on the inward-facing side. The bark had been left on the exterior, so that to an observer the original monument would have looked like an enormously wide tree trunk, which one could then step inside to find the inverted oak tree at its centre.
The only entrance was through one of the posts that had split, so offering a narrow V between which to slip; as a child, climbing in the oak tree-house that we built in a wood in Suffolk, I remember the feeling of getting stuck between such forking branches; and of the subsequent entrance to a special place.
Because the bark had been stripped from the inside of the posts, the interior, once gained, would feel worked and cleansed. And inside this giant artificial tree, what would we have found? The trunk of another oak tree, but inverted so that its one-tonne mass disappeared into the ground and its truncated roots waved in the air. The world turned upside down.
We think of the oak as an image of our national stability. Our steadiness under fire. Hearts of oak. The French have their long lines of high, thin poplars, the Spanish their cork trees, the Italians their olive groves, the Russians wide forests of silver birch: all trees of great practical use, of value.
We like our oaks for their steadfastness, their age and the way they spread about themselves with a wayward sense of ownership; that they also provide acorn-feed for pigs and our beloved pork is collateral benefit.
I find it intriguing that what archaeologists call ‘the Great Central Stump’ of an oak tree should have been used with such lightness, such finesse, although those seem to have been the trademarks of the Bronze Age.
The one-tonne trunk was lowered upside down into the ground using woven honeysuckle rope: not a natural choice of material. We know, because some of the abandoned honeysuckle rope was found wrapped around and under the oak, preserved by the peat, the first such prehistoric rope ever to have been found. Maisie Taylor, Francis Pryor’s wife, had helped make the identification, and I had talked to her about it at their farm.
To give honeysuckle that tensile strength, it would need to be soaked first, and then woven with great skill. There are other naturally occurring materials that would lend themselves much more easily to making a rope. So the choice of honeysuckle was a symbolic one, just as was the oak, which might possibly have been brought some distance to the circle to transfer a sense of place, like the Stonehenge bluestones brought from Wales.
In 2049 BC, at the time the oak was lowered into the ground, the transition to a deforested Britain was beginning. The trees were starting to be felled. Bronze axes and tools could work the wood in a way impossible in previous Neolithic times. On just this one upturned trunk of oak, the marks from some fifty different axe-heads have been distinguished.
Francis had suggested one possible explanation for the site, and one that made sense to me intuitively: that it was a mortuary ring. The tree, a symbol of life, had been turned upside down to show death; the body of the deceased was then placed on the upturned roots of the tree so that scavenger birds could descend to strip away its flesh – excarnation, as had happened to the skeletons of those found near the Iron Age hill-forts I had visited; the outer palisade created a private and hidden space within which this could happen. In his view, ‘The tree could have provided a superb excarnation platform, but I cannot prove it.’
Whatever the explanation, to see the great blackened trunk of the upturned oak tree at the nearby King’s Lynn Museum is a primal experience. As with Damien Hirst’s shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, the glass case the trunk is kept in only adds to the feeling that this is an emotion we once knew but have since anaesthetised.
*
And now I had come to the beach where it had been found. There was of course no sign of ‘what I’d come to see’, or rather respect the memory of. I knew exactly where Seahenge had stood only because Francis and Maisie had given me accurate directions. Black waves swirled over the spot.
The beach was completely empty, aside from a few distant dog walkers. Beyond the bar of shingle at Gore Point, oystercatchers, one of my favourite birds, were wheeling with their bold, confident cries. Grey plovers were walking on the shingle. The marram grass had woven the sand together to form dunes along the beach tough enough to withstand the North Sea winds and tide, for the while at least; a duck-boarded path led across them to allow birdwatchers access to the shore.
I liked the view of local historian and archaeologist Matthew Champion, who, while sympathetic to the reasons for the removal of Seahenge, had commented tha
t ‘perhaps we should have let the cold waters of the North Sea finally take it away once and for all. The circle was after all a place of boundaries, a symbolic structure on the cusp between sea and land, life and death, the land of the living and the land of those who gone before. Perhaps it would be no bad thing if we had simply let it slip over the boundary for one last time.’
This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England …
John of Gaunt’s speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II is a familiar way of framing our island story, a Churchillian way. The sea as our defence, our moat, that protects us from invaders and gives us our strength.
But there is a different way of looking at it. The sea makes us open to other influences. As a nation, we are one gigantic port, absorbing the language, cultures and rhythms of the world. We have always done so from the earliest of prehistoric times. That is our strength. We are not landlocked, immobile.
Empire didn’t suit us. It brought out the bossy, inflexible, hierarchical side of our national character. But being more on the edge of things again, that will suit us fine – a fluid, swirling mix of energy, like the sea around us, which can absorb people and ideas from across Europe, whether music, food, architecture or technology, and transform them with mercantile energy.
