Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History

by Adam Nicolson

  Wood to Sissinghurst is like sea to an island. Everything in the Weald, in the end, comes back to the wood. Sissinghurst’s parish church, at least until the nineteenth century, was at Cranbrook, about two and a half miles away, a short bike ride. It became an intensely puritan place in the sixteenth century, and the feeling in the church still reflects that: big clear windows, a spreading light, the clarity of revelation. But in the church, miraculously preserved, are the remains of an earlier and darker phase. On the inner, east wall of the tower are four ‘bosses’ – large, carved wooden knobs, originally made to decorate the intersections of beams in the roof high above the church floor. These are from a late-fourteenth-century chancel roof which was replaced in 1868. They are some of Cranbrook’s greatest treasures. Each is cut from a single fat dark disc of oak, a yard across and a foot deep, sliced from the body of a timber tree. The carving takes up the full depth of the disc so that there is nothing shallow or decorative about the form. Most of the oak has been chiselled away, leaving only the vibrant, mysterious forms. These faces are the trees speaking. The trees have been felled but here they grow again.

  Each of the four bosses has a different atmosphere, a different reflection of the nature of the wood, and of the human relationship to it.

  Man at ease in nature

  There is a conventional, if smiling human face, a young man, wearing a padded hat and a headcloth, surrounded by a mass of curling leaves, a wide border to the face, with no interpenetration between figure and tree. It is, perhaps, an image of reconciliation, of an easiness with the facts of nature, a civilised man (or perhaps a woman?) settled in his bed of vegetation, like half an egg resting on its salad.

  Man troubled by nature

  The second, which is aged, bearded and broken, as if the boss had fallen from the chancel roof on to the stone floor of the church, was clearly similar, a face with leaves, but more troubled, an arch of anxiety across the bearded man’s brow, a feeling that in the luxuriance of his beard there is some osmosis across the human–natural barrier. Already here, the civilised man is sinking into (or is it emerging from?) the vegetation that threatens to smother him.

  The other two come from somewhere still deeper, wild and savage things from a world that seems scarcely connected to Christian orthodoxy, let alone to the neatness of modern Cranbrook going about its shopping outside the door. These are the wood spirits that have emerged from the primitive Weald itself:

  Nature as threat

  The first is a huge, near-animal mask, at least twice the size of a human face, with goggle eyes and an open mouth, a face of threat and terror. Between its lips, roughly hewn, uneven peg teeth grip the fat, snaky stems of a plant, which is clearly growing from this creature’s gut and from there spewing out into the world. Its chiselled tendrils engulf the head, branching around it, gripping it and almost drowning it, as though the figure were not the source of the wood power but its victim. The whole disc looks like a hellish subversion of a sun god: not a source of emanating life and light but a sink of power, dark and shadowed where the sun disc gleams.

  The fourth of the Cranbrook bosses is the most intriguing. The same net of leaves, which are perhaps the leaves of a plant that hovers between an acanthus and a hawthorn, crawls all over the surface of the boss, but without regularity, a chaotic and naturalistic maze of leaf and hollow, mimicking the unregulated experience of a wood itself, highlight and shadow, reenacting the obstruction and givingness of trees. Within this vivid maze of life, there is something else, a body, winged apparently, with a giant claw that grasps a stem, and beyond that the full round breast of a bird. There is a head here, perhaps of a dragon, curled round to the top and difficult to make out, a presence, neither slight nor evanescent, both solid and unknowable, the wood bird/dragon, which does not even give as much as the green man, with his terror-explicit face and strangeness-explicit eyes.

  Nature as the maze of life

  These four great Cranbrook bosses were almost certainly paid for by the de Berhams, the family living at Sissinghurst at the end of the fourteenth century, when Cranbrook church was embellished, and whose coat of arms was carved on the west face of the church tower. In their bosses, there is a buried and schematic sermon on our relationship to the natural world. The set of four presents four different visions in a sort of matrix, two human, two natural, two good and two bad: a sense of ease among the froth of vegetation (human good); anxiety at its power (human bad); the bird/dragon half seen in the obscuring leaves (natural good); and the peg-toothed wood god grinning in the dark (natural bad). There seems to be no ranking here. Each is equal with the others. Together they are a description of how we are with the natural world (delighted or threatened), and how it is with us (mysterious and beneficent or obvious and cruel). Nothing I have ever seen has made the wood speak quite like this.

  Of all the trees that this part of the world was in love with, none was more constant than the oak. In the great rebuilding of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, oak played a constant part. The hundreds of big Wealden houses on the farms around here are always crammed with as many oak studs in their façades as they could manage.

  At what remains of Sissinghurst itself, which is a brick house, consciously set apart from the yeoman timber-framed tradition around it, the timber still shapes the interiors. All my life, lying in bed in the morning or last thing at night, I have stared up at the oak joists and tie beams of its ceilings. In the five hundred years since they were put up there, the oak has lost the orange-brown tang that it has when new and paled to a kind of dun suede, dry and hard, with a sort of suavity to it. There is no way you could bang a nail into this oak now, but it makes no display of its strength. It lies above you as you lie in bed, the grain visible along with an occasional knot, the edges as clean and sharp as the day they were cut. I have slept in every bedroom in the house at different times, and each has its different quirks and wrinkles. In some you can see where the sawyers using a doubled-handled saw made their successive cuts. A man stood at each end of the saw, one above, on the timber itself, the other, the underdog, in the pit beneath him. Each downward swoop was followed by an upward cut, and each cut moved the saw a quarter or a third of an inch along the joist. Each of those cuts is visible now in little ridges, not quite aligned, some almost on the vertical, some more on the diagonal, where one or other of the sawyers ripped an extra bit of energy into his stroke. The timbers look like a roughened bar-code, an account of two men at work one Elizabethan morning.

  Oak sack hoist, trusses and rafters of the Elizabethan barn

  Until recently, it was thought that the original wildwood, the wood of England before man began to change it, was a huge and continuous cover of trees, the crown of each tree meeting those of its neighbours for hundreds of miles so that a squirrel could run from Dover to Ludlow or Penzance to Alnwick without once needing to touch the ground. Universal and mysterious gloom prevailed in this ancient picture. Occasionally a giant tree would crash to the ground, it was thought, and light would come down to the forest floor, but for the most part life was said to crawl about in a romantic vision of everlasting shadow.

  All of that, it now seems, may be wrong. In the last few years new thinking, particularly by the brilliant Dutch forest ecologist Frans Vera, has begun to challenge this idea of the ubiquitous, closed forest of the ancient world. According to Vera’s ideas, the ancient Weald, the sort of landscape that people would first have found when they came to Sissinghurst, may not, strangely enough, have looked very different from the Weald as it now is. If I walk out from Sissinghurst, across the Park, into the wood and out again into the pasture fields beyond it, where the oaks grow spreadingly in the light, I may well be walking through a place whose condition is rather like it was five thousand years ago.

  If you take your bike and ride north from Sissinghurst, about seven miles across the clay flatlands of the Low Weald, past a succession of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century oak farmhouses, you come beyond Headcorn to the
first rise of the Greensand Hills. Farmhouses, farm walls, barns and piggeries all start to turn here into the pale grey ragstone of the hills themselves. Just north of Headcorn, where the old road is cut deeply into the slope, you climb to the village of Ulcombe. From here you can look back at Sissinghurst from a place on its own skyline. The Weald lies blue and glossy in front of you. Beyond the ground at your feet, there is nothing but trees. I scanned the whole horizon. In the binoculars – it must have been five miles away – I saw what I hadn’t spotted with the naked eye: a kestrel hanging and fluttering in the summer air. Its body was quivering in the eyeglass from the rising heat, a black dot buried in the distance, making its own survey of the land. Beyond the kestrel’s body, I could make out the ridges of the Weald, one layer of wood after another, but scarcely a field and no buildings, except, very occasionally, a church tower. There was no hint of modernity, nor from this height even the sound of traffic. Only, far to the south-east and grey with distance, like islands seen from out at sea, the huge blocks of the Dungeness power stations on the Channel coast, and the necklaced pylons strung towards them like toys. Otherwise only the heat, the dot of the kestrel and the blue of the wood. Even with the binoculars, I couldn’t make out the Tower at Sissinghurst, but the avenue of poplars going down from the herb garden to the lake, planted by Vita and Harold in November 1932, stood out clearly enough, almost the only verticals in the continuous rounded swells of the oaks.

  The view from Ulcombe is a vision of the great wood of England. All the hedgerow oaks in the Low Weald come together to give an impression of uninvaded woodland. It is a view that might have confirmed the old theories of the solid, unbroken canopy of the Weald. Now, though, intriguingly for the later history of Sissinghurst, it seems that this picture of the dark, continuous ‘closed’ forest of folklore may not be the whole story. The critical factor, for Frans Vera and those who follow him, is the large herds of grazing animals. What effect would they have had on the ability of trees to reproduce themselves? Would they not have nibbled the seedlings even as they emerged? Added to that is the strange anomaly of the large amounts of oak and hazel pollen that have been found trapped within ancient muds at the bottom of lakes and ponds. Neither oak nor hazel can reproduce itself in shade. They need plenty of light to establish themselves as trees. If the forest remained dense and dark, with the canopy closed, how come there were so many of these shade-intolerant trees?

  Vera’s answer combines an understanding of the nibbling mouths with all the defence strategies the trees employ to resist or evade them. The Vera forest is a mosaic of thorny patches in which young saplings are growing; open, park-like savannah in which spreading, many-branched trees stand over well-grazed pastures; fringes of nettle, garlic, sorrel and goosefoot; and in the centre of the spreading woods places where the trees have aged and died and grassland has re-established itself, with its butterflies and all the birds of the woodland edge. It is not unlike the Park at Sissinghurst now, fringing on to the wet alder and oak wood, with thorny patches here and there (which we call hedges) in which the young oaks spring up, protected by the thorns and looking for the light. If Sissinghurst’s well-managed parklands were abandoned, and the grazing mouths withdrawn (by a wolf, say, or lynx), then blackthorn, hawthorn, guelder rose, wild apple, pear and cherry, together with lots of hazel, would all emerge, to make buttons of young, scrubby wood. The whole place would be in slow and gradual flux under its ancient tension of grazing mouth and germinating tree: not a constant and continuous place, but somewhere in movement, a shifting of high woodland from one place to another, an opening of grassland, a recolonising of it by scrub.

  Seen from a time-lapse camera, suspended over it in a balloon, the country flickers and shifts. The herds come and go, the patches of woodland emerge as thorny thickets and spinneys, become high, leafy canopied oak wood and collapse in time, the animals moving in again, the grassland emerging, the buttercups flowering in the flush of summer. There were beavers here then, and when beavers build dams in streams and small rivers, the roots of the trees rot and the forest collapses. If the beavers then leave, their dams break and the pools empty. In place of the drained pool, a grassy meadow develops and elk and deer come in to graze it. When Western colonists first went to Ontario they often found beaver meadows up to a hundred acres across and used them to make hay for their own cattle. So perhaps this too was happening down in the valley of the Hammer Brook, beaver dams and beaver meadows, the opening of wonderful damp, grassy glades where the herds of deer would come to graze.

  I know that for others, certainly for people who have come to work at Sissinghurst and to make their lives here, its beauty lies in its fixity, in its resistance apparently to modernity, and as a place that was reassuringly still and even perfect. Why did I not share in that?

  Perhaps, I came to realise, because it allowed us a place here too, because a focus on vitality and change, which may look like a rejection of the past, is, if set in this other framework, in fact a continuation of it. It might re-establish at Sissinghurst a sense that this was not a shrine or a mausoleum, but a long-living entity, far older than any one ingredient in it, of which self-renewal was part of its essence.

  The Weald has never been the best or richest of lands. Throughout human history, the part of Kent that has seen the greatest development, the most people, money, roads, cities and grandeur, has been the strip of land in the north of the county, between the North Downs and the marshes that run along the south shore of the Thames estuary. Even at the very beginning, that would have been the prime land. It was easy to reach from the sea. Endless little creeks run up into it from the estuary shore. Travelling there, on lighter soils, would have been far easier than in the Weald. The soils were good there. It is one of the deep structures of Sissinghurst’s history that it is a long way in from that coastline and set apart from that richness.

  Even so, at the very beginning, the wild animals of the great wood would have been a draw, and the first signs that people came to Sissinghurst are now in Cranbrook Museum. Gathered in a glass case are the earliest human artefacts from this part of the Weald, flint hand axes and knives found now and then by chance in ditches and postholes, or turned up by the plough. A cluster of them appeared when Cranbrook School made its playing fields. A mile to the south of here, in a field at Golford Corner, a large Mesolithic flake was found which could have been a pick, perhaps belonging to a group of hunters pursuing the deer five or six thousand years ago. Some of the flints had yet to be made into useful tools or weapons; spare parts, elements of a repair kit. One or two had been chipped into blunt ‘scrapers’, used for separating flesh from skins. I have handled these stones at the museum, and one arrowhead in particular is a perfect thing, made of flint that the huntsman had brought here from the chalk downland to the north and then dropped or abandoned, who knows why. Its edge, scalloped to sharpness, each chipping like part of a little fingernail dished out of the flint, can still cut a slice in a piece of paper. There is nothing primitive or crude about it. It remains as honed as the day it was made.

  Even so, these stones are at best fragmentary memories, half-whispers from the distant past, but they do at least articulate one thing: people were here. And they brought something with them. They were here for a purpose, and the fact they were here must mean there were animals in the Sissinghurst woods worth pursuing. How had they come? How did their life relate to this geography?

  If you look at a map of the lowland that lies to the north-east of Sissinghurst, the 25,000 acres taken in by the view across the farmland of the Low Weald from the Tower, what you are looking at is the section of country that connects Sissinghurst to Canterbury and all the riches of the light, good soils in north-east Kent. Remove the villages and the farms, the railway and the Victorian toll road, and look for a moment only at the arrangement of the lanes. A pattern emerges. Quite consistently, over a front about seven miles wide, the country to the north-east of Sissinghurst is aligned around a set of long, sinuous
but almost parallel lanes which snake across the Low Weald, each separated by about three-quarters of a mile from its neighbours. Sometimes the lanes visit the villages, but more often ignore them and slip onwards, across the clay lowlands. Farms are usually latched on to the lanes, but not always, and quite often little side routes diverge to a settlement, while the main drive moves on as if it had another motive beyond visiting the local and the immediate.

  In the Dark Ages, 1,500 years ago, these lanes undoubtedly became the drove roads of early English Kent, the routes by which settlements in the Weald were connected to the more established manors in the rich lands around Canterbury to the north-east, but there can be little doubt that they are far older than that. If you bicycle along them or even drive along them in the car, the sensation is quite different from driving along most lanes in England. They have an air of seamless continuity. There are no blind corners. You swerve across the miles with an extraordinary, liquid authority, gliding through Kent as if Kent were laid out for your pleasure. There are no obstructions. The lanes flow onwards, river roads, like the threads of a wide, braided stream making its way from north-east Kent to the woods of the High Weald. One French landscape historian, describing the lanes and paths of the Limousin, called them ‘les lignes maîtresses du terroir’. It is a phrase I have always loved, the mistress lines of the country, and that is what these subtle, unnoticed and slippery lanes of the Low Weald are like. They govern what they cross and predate the places they join. They are the matrix to which everything else in the end submits. Sometimes the old lane has not been taken up by the modern tarmac network but continues as a footpath across the fields or as a track used only by a farmer, and then, on foot, away from any traffic, you can feel as close to the beginnings of this place as in any other experience of the landscape.