Will North

by Water, Stone, Heart (v5)

  “Yeah, ar-chi-tec. Means he builds stuff, he said. Like walls, I guess.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Is that a good thing?” Lee asked.

  “Well, let's just say it makes him interesting. Maybe he understands something about beauty.”

  “He thinks you're beautiful.”

  “You're making that up.”

  “Uh-uh! Said so yesterday.”

  “When?”

  “Coming back from the Cobweb. Mum and Daddy drove, but we walked back, up Dunn and Fore streets.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “’Bout what?”

  “About me!”

  “Just that you're pretty, which is pretty obvious, if you ask me. And difficult.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “I dunno. Just something he said. I told him you were a witch.”

  “You what?”

  “Well you are, right? You work at the museum.”

  Nicola hung her head in her hands: “I don't believe this …”

  The fact was, Nicola had indeed become intrigued by witchcraft, at least the gentle form of it that had been a part of Cornish culture for centuries, even eons. Nicola wasn't sure when it was, exactly, that she'd fallen away from the Catholicism she'd been raised in. Maybe it was in Italy, when she struggled to rationalize the obscene opulence of the Roman church with the poverty of Jesus and the noble simplicity of Mary. Maybe it was when the vows she'd spoken during her marriage ceremony turned to bitter blood the first time her husband had hit her. Maybe the rot had set in long before any of that, when despite her white-dress confirmation, despite going to mass every Sunday, despite going to confession, bad things kept happening to her in Boston when she was a girl scarcely older than Lee.

  But somewhere along the way of volunteering at the witchcraft museum, collecting the entry fees from the tourists, listening to the stories of pilgrims who'd come to look at the artifacts and relics in the collection, and being in the company of other volunteers who quietly confessed they were believers, Nicola had begun to embrace the earthy honesty of Cornwall's benign history of witchcraft. Cornwall's remoteness and its Celtic heritage had kept ancient traditions and practices alive long after religious zealots had stamped them out elsewhere in England. Well into the last century, the Cornish routinely sought the help of “cunning folk,” “wise women,” or “pellars”—people who repelled evil spirits. They provided charms to break spells, cures to heal ills, and magic to address more common needs such as identifying thieves, telling fortunes, finding water, or finding love. Witches, like doctors, were guided by a simple rule: Do what you will, but do no harm.

  Modern witchcraft, she'd learned, was simply a religion that reveres nature. God is represented in both the form of the Mother Goddess and the Horned God, her consort. The fertile goddess is believed to rule during the growing season, from spring till autumn, while her consort rules during late autumn and winter. It was a system of beliefs and practices she found deeply comforting. It didn't promise salvation or threaten damnation; it simply offered a way of fitting oneself into the complex web of the universe. And here, in a landscape littered with prehistoric stone circles, enigmatic standing stones, hilltop burial quoits, sacred wells, and remote hermit's cells, a place so steeped in prehistory, witchcraft just seemed, well, natural.

  “So what did he say when you told him I was a witch?”

  “Not much.”

  “What's that mean?”

  “He said you had a funny way of casting spells, but I didn't understand.”

  But Nicola did. She'd done what she always did: flirted and fled, leaving behind little but the sting of her barbed tongue.

  * * *

  They had driven through the market town of Camelford and were climbing east out of the valley of the River Camel when Jamie Boden said to Andrew, “Notice anything different?”

  “It's getting steeper?”

  “True enough, and that's part of the answer. Let me ask you this: When you look at buildings and walls in Boscastle, what do you see?”

  “A lot of black slate, at least where it hasn't been painted over.”

  “Right. Now look around again.”

  “Granite!”

  “Good lad.”

  “I hadn't even noticed the change.”

  “That's the thing about this country; the underlying geology is so complex that it seems like it changes every dozen miles or so. That's why neighboring villages can look so different sometimes. They're built of whatever material was close at hand. Granite up here on Bodmin Moor; slate down in Boscastle. Mind you, the granite's fairly new, geologically speaking. It's the result of volcanic activity only three hundred million years ago. Slate's much older.”

  “Only three hundred million years. I like that.”

  “Around here, you get used to thinking about time differently. Show you what I mean in a moment.”

  They turned from a narrow, winding road hemmed by hedgerows to a rutted dirt track. Ahead on the horizon, the moorland was barren, virtually treeless, almost otherworldly. The summits of the hills were stacks of wind-carved granite, fractured and layered like giant wedding cakes. The slopes were littered with scree broken off by frost. Jamie's van lurched to a stop beside a rocky field. That's what it looked like to Andrew, but he would soon learn he was wrong. The other two cars pulled up behind them and everyone got out and followed Jamie across the springy turf.

  “The fields hereabout are all part of my land, but I feel more like a museum curator than a landowner,” Jamie commented. They stood on the edge of what Andrew now realized was a wide, circular stone wall, the remnants of a rampart of some sort. And within the circumference of the circle, which had a diameter of perhaps fifty yards, there were eight or ten smaller circles.

  “This was a settlement,” Newsome said quietly.

  “Right you are. Round about four, maybe five thousand years ago.”

  Andrew tried to get his mind wrapped around such antiquity. “And it's still here” was all he could say.

  “That's the thing I want you lot to understand,” Jamie said. “Stone is the nearest thing we have to eternity. Building with stone is the nearest we get to immortality. When you build a stone hedge—drystone, mind, no concrete—you're building for all time.”

  “What's wrong with concrete?” Case, the mason, asked. He sounded defensive.

  “Just that it won't last. It weathers fast. How often you reckon you have to repoint a chimney?”

  Case hesitated, looked at the hut circles. “Often enough,” he said.

  “Stone hedge?” Andrew asked.

  “Aye, lad. You're in Cornwall now, and in Cornwall we call 'em hedges. Doesn't matter if it's all stone, or all earth and turf, or a Cornish hedge, which is a bit of both. They're all hedges here, not walls.”

  “So those hedges we've been driving by that are all shrubbery,” Andrew said. “What are they called?”

  Andrew heard a rumble of laughter from behind him. It was Burt. “Best check avore yew lam in't wan!”

  Jamie chuckled and translated. “Burt's warning you not to expect a soft landing if you run your motorcar into a leafy hedge. There's stone behind that foliage, at least here in the southwest. Up-country, the hedges are more likely to be thickets of hawthorn, beech, and hazel, but not here. You'll understand soon.

  “Right, then. To the classroom!” Jamie hoisted himself into the van, Andrew followed, and they roared off, the others following more carefully up the potholed track.

  Another hundred yards or so later, they pulled up in a cleared parking area and walked through a gate in an old stone hedge that led to Jamie's house, an ancient—medieval, Andrew guessed—gable-ended, two-story, slate-roof granite cottage with multiple ells and dormers and two massive chimneys. A sturdy stone barn stood some distance from, and perpendicular to, the house. The complex of buildings, hunched into the landscape, looked to Andrew as if they'd emerged spontaneously from the surrounding rock, witho
ut benefit of the hand of man.

  “Thirteenth-century, some of it,” Jamie replied to their unspoken question. “With various later bits. Come in and I'll put on some tea. Then we'll get to it.”

  The students milled about the ground-floor rooms. Burt, who was easily six-foot-four, had to duck beneath the beams, and everyone but Case hunched as they went through doors. Case himself prowled around scrutinizing the stonework, clearly impressed. From time to time, he would make small huh sounds of mason's admiration. Ralph Newsome played contentedly with a ghost-white cat that materialized from nowhere. And Becky, to Andrew's surprise, slipped into the kitchen to help Boden with the tea making. Andrew stood at the bookshelf beside one of the two massive hearths on the ground floor and thumbed through one volume after another on wall- and hedge-building styles and techniques. He'd had no idea the subject was so diverse, and it pleased him in a way that architectural theory never had. It had a rich vernacular history. It was form and function inseparable. It was real in the most elemental sense. It was stone made into art, art given timeless utility. He felt his heart expanding outward, into the immortality of it, as Jamie had said so simply and elegantly.

  They took their mugs of tea outside to the front yard, which was rimmed with stone hedges. Andrew glanced around and realized the hedges varied in style every few yards; it was a display area for the craft of hedge building.

  “There's something like thirty thousand miles of hedges here in Cornwall,” Jamie said. “Some of them are even older than that settlement I showed you. Back in the Neolithic, maybe six or seven thousand years ago, you could say stone was the first harvest of the people creating fields here. Farmers have been clearing fields ever since.”

  Andrew looked at the bleak landscape around him and said, “It's a wonder they were able to raise anything but stone.”

  “Ah, well; 'twas warmer here then, y'see. We know that now from pollen studies and such,” Jamie explained.

  “How the devil did they move them?” Newsome asked.

  “Not bloody easily, I promise you. Remember, we're talking about people scraping dirt away with antler picks and shovels fashioned from some dead animal's shoulder blade, levering the rock from the ground, rolling it on sections of log maybe, or end over end. When you figure there's roughly a ton of stone in every cubic meter of hedge, the scale of their accomplishment is staggering. And they didn't just pile the stones in rows. Even then, long before the Romans ever arrived, they had the skill to fashion hedges that'd last.

  “Since then, as you can see with these demonstration hedges here, different styles evolved, driven mostly by what rock was available and, later, what tools could be used to shape the stone.”

  Andrew looked around. There were hedges built of raw fieldstone; hedges with regular, alternating courses of shaped granite; hedges with horizontal layers of slate and shale that looked almost like the sedimentary beds they had been wrestled from. There were slate hedges with herringbone patterns, hedges with steps built in so you could cross from one side to the other, and hedges that incorporated slots and holes that allowed small animals and wildlife through, but not cows or sheep. There were hedges with stones on end at the top—coping stones, Jamie called them—and hedges with luxurious, flower-dappled turf tops.

  “Normally, we'd stay right here and I'd teach you how to build a proper Cornish hedge on-site, but we've got a real job to do, or at least to get started, down in Boscastle. I thought we'd get the fundamentals over with here, though. I've got a hedge half built from a previous class.”

  The group walked around the back of the big stone barn to a sort of outdoor workroom. Jamie took them to the unfinished end of a new stone hedge.

  “So, what do you notice?”

  “No mortar,” Case said with mock disgust, and everyone laughed.

  “It's tapered and curves inward from the base,” Becky commented.

  “Right. That centralizes the weight and pushes the hedge into the ground.”

  “It's hollow in between the two sides,” Andrew noted. “Well, not hollow, but filled with dirt.”

  “That's part of the traditional Cornish hedge design. Other hedges could be all stone. But that's not dirt. I call it ‘neutral earth.’ Dirt is part organic, and over time it breaks down and sinks, creating weakness. Soon enough, the stone faces will collapse inward. Neutral earth's inorganic. Around here, for example, there's a lot of rotted granite that breaks down to something like sand. We call it ‘growan.’ When I'm building a granite hedge, I look for a deposit of that stuff to fill the center—which is called the ‘heart,’ by the way. Down Boscastle way there's usually a layer of shillet—broken-up bits of slate—just below the turf. We'll be using that, plus quarry chips, I expect.

  “Speaking of which, we'd best be getting back down there. Time to get to work. Oh, by the way, a couple of reminders. Burt, when you come tomorrow, no rubber wellies. Heavy boots is what you want. Don't want those dainty toes of yours crushed. And Becky—no shorts. Proper trousers.”

  “Right you are, gov'nor,” she said. Burt nodded his big head slowly.

  When their little caravan got back to the Visitor Centre car park they drove to the far end. The county council had hauled in several loads of stone, all slate but in an earthy array of colors, from sandy brown through charcoal to blue-black. They'd left a small Bobcat front loader as well. The crew had lunch, and then Jamie gave them the bad news.

  “First job's the nastiest, by my lights. We need to excavate a bed for the grounders.”

  “Grounders?” Newsome asked.

  “The stones that make up the footin',” Case said. “They need to be set into the ground, which means diggin' a trench.”

  “Not bad, for a mortar man,” Jamie teased. “Come on, then; tools in the van.”

  Jamie had an impressive array of shovels, spades, picks, and something that looked like a combination pick and spade, called a mattock. He passed them out, and then ran two twenty-foot parallel lines of twine between stakes at the edge of the macadam, each about five feet apart.

  “Why so wide?” Newsome asked. “We're not trying to stop tanks!”

  Jamie laughed and gathered the crew by the two parallel guide lines.

  “The gentleman wishes to know why I'm having you dig such a wide trench. Contrary to rumor, it isn't because I'm sadistic. There are rules of proportion in hedge laying. The first is that the base must be as wide as the hedge is to be tall. The standard height of a hedge is five feet, including the turf, or cope, on top. Also, the width of the top should be roughly half the width of the base. It's not that we're ‘trying to stop tanks,’ in Mr. Newsome's words; it's that we're trying to stop gravity from pulling the hedge down once it's laid.”

  The five students set to work while Jamie wandered among the piles of stone the council had left. Case took his shovel and began to cut a line in the turf along the boundary Jamie had set. Becky watched him for a few moments, then grabbed a mattock and asked him to step aside.

  “That'll take forever,” she said. She swung the mattock above her head, then, her strong shoulders arching, brought the broad blade down and, in one smooth stroke, peeled back a one-inch-thick strip of sod as wide as the mattock blade. She moved her feet slightly to one side and repeated the movement. Working like a machine, she'd stripped the five-foot-wide trench surface to a length of ten feet in a matter of a few minutes. She stopped, drenched with sweat, stepped aside, smiled, and said, “All yours now, gents.”

  Andrew shook his head. “Wow, Becky.”

  “We do a lot of footpath maintenance at the trust; I'm well acquainted with this fellow,” she said, hefting the heavy mattock.

  Even silent Burt was moved to observe, with characteristic opacity, “Lass doaes a fitty job, she doaes.”

  Case said nothing.

  They set the sod aside to be used eventually on the top of the hedge, and the men began digging. It wasn't long before they ran into trouble. After shoveling up and setting aside the layer of shil
let, which, as Jamie had predicted, lay just beneath the turf, they found only a scrim of subsoil and, beneath that, solid shelves of slate. They called Jamie over.

  “Figured as much,” he said. “We want the hedge growing out of the ground from its footing, not perched on top of it, but we work with what we've got. One bright spot: You won't have to dig so much. Let's dig where we can and clear the ledges smooth where we find them.”

  They continued like this, Becky peeling sod and the rest of them clearing subsoil, while Jamie, working alone, maneuvered the biggest stones into the bucket of the Bobcat and dumped them along the edge of the car park, a couple of yards from the new trench. It soon became clear that Andrew and Ralph Newsome were in nothing like the shape Burt and the wiry Case were. They huffed and puffed while the other two shoveled and slung gravel and dirt without apparent strain. Becky, sweating just as much as the men in the muggy August heat, kept swinging her mattock, several yards ahead of them. They only stopped for water, which Jamie provided from a big blue insulated plastic barrel with a spigot.

  By midafternoon, they'd begun laying the grounders. Jamie explained that the big footing stones had to tilt downward so that gravity would pull the higher levels of the hedge inward to the center.

  “How much tilt?” Case asked him.

  Jamie took a long-handled shovel and laid it on the ground with the blade facedown, the pointed tip facing toward the center of the trench. “Same angle as that blade.”

  “Fair enough,” Case said. “But what about where we're laying directly on bedrock?”

  “Then you'll have to find grounders that have a wedge shape that does the same thing.”

  “Why can't we just shim them up to that angle?” Becky asked.

  “Might have to in a few places,” Jamie answered. “But as much as possible, we want the grounders in contact with the ground. More stable that way.”

  And so they began, using pry bars and planks to move the big stones to the edge of the trench.

  “If you can move a stone a quarter inch, you can move it anywhere,” Jamie explained. “It's all in the leverage. We can roll a big stone end-to-end along its edge, or walk' it, once we've got it up high enough that we're at the center of its gravity.”