Ring the Hill

by Tom Cox

  In mid-afternoon it was barely jumper weather, but once inside the prison I was very glad of the padded high-vis jacket Sara loaned to me. Just how cold was this place in actual winter? Not that the prison’s cold is a cold that can be compared to outdoor cold. It’s a very different cold, that goes straight into your mind, via a steel rod up your spine. The chill was noticeably fiercer in some rooms than others, and all across the bottom level of B Wing, which is haunted by the ghost of a woman wearing a wedding dress who died of a broken heart here after murdering her fiancé. I couldn’t help but note how many of the super-cold rooms corresponded with a gruesome or eerie detail related to us by Sara. In a malignantly chilly cell which was once the quarters of one of 1970s Britain’s most infamous child-murderers, people have often seen an unknown man’s disembodied face in the mirror above the sink. I approached the mirror with my phone and risked a selfie. I didn’t see an extra face on the photo, but I did see my own. It looked terrifying, and not just in that way that most selfies are terrifying. I did not recognise myself. I looked angry. I didn’t feel angry. I had rarely, in fact, felt less angry in my life. The face was me, but it mostly wasn’t, at all. Confused and unsettled, I deleted the face, forever.

  You hear distant echoing sounds as you’re wandering around the vast spaces of the prison: footsteps on sturdy metal stairs, the clang of a door. They might be the sound of other visitors – less than a handful come through the doors in the three and a quarter hours we are there – or one of the two other employees on duty, or they might not. There are three ways to visit: you go on one of Sara’s ghost tours, a guided history tour, or you explore freely in the daytime on your own. Sara is the perfect host for such a tour: an impressive retainer of information who clearly loves her job and is able to pinpoint the deeply fascinating in the ostensibly banal. As a commentator on the supernatural, she’s just the right balance of sceptical and fascinated. Until recently, she drove a car with its own ghost, known to her as Dead Susan, who would enhance her life with small posthumous acts of kindness, such as helping her avoid a speeding ticket. When she and Michelle were last here and listened back to one of the slowed-down recordings Sara had made in one of the cells, they could clearly hear a voice saying ‘Saaaaaaave meeeee.’ When they put it back to normal speed, though, they realised it was just a recording of Michelle inquiring, with reference to the ghosts, ‘I wonder if any of them will say anything.’ Sara said that none of the employees of the prison are ever in any rush to go home. The building has a strange power that locks you to the spot, while you simultaneously yearn to flee its mould-pocked walls, psychotic smells and impossible cold. It was not unknown for inmates here to commit suicide on the verge of their release. The last escape occurred in 1993, when three prisoners used knotted bedsheets to scale the walls. Two were recaptured very quickly near their old homes in Bristol. Another went directly for a pint in the Dusthole, the pub most local to the prison, where – upon drinking a second pint – he was recognised and apprehended by two prison guards who’d gone there for after-work refreshment. Three years later, toilets were finally added to cells, although out of habit many longer term inmates preferred to continue defecating in newspaper, which they then threw into the yard, as tradition dictated.

  By the time we were in C Wing, the final segment of our visit, I was keen to leave, feeling to an extent that I had been serving an actual sentence here and had a fresh appreciation of all of the life I had taken for granted. Strangely, though, I found myself not acting on this impulse. I stood rooted to the cold hard floor, imagining life here in 1940, when the building was repurposed as an American Military Prison. During this period, C Wing remained as English soil, housing various not insignificant historical documents, including the Domesday Book and the Magna Carta, since nobody suspected Shepton would be high on Hitler’s ‘must-bomb’ list. A man called Mr Johnson was tasked with looking after the documents, and his son – now in his eighties – recently revisited the prison. He recalled riding his tricycle around C Wing, as gospel singing floated over from A and B Wings. If that sounds quaint and idyllic, it is worth bearing in mind that sixteen US soldiers were hanged in the prison during the Second World War. Thirteen of the hangings were carried out by the famous Nottinghamshire-born executioner Thomas Pierrepoint, who legally killed a total of 294 people between 1906 and 1946, but was morally opposed to capital punishment and liked to farm in his spare time. The execution chamber and the drop room are not among the coldest places in Shepton prison, but the corridor leading to them definitely is.

  A few months ago, a laminated photo of a young GI had been left in a cell by an anonymous visitor, without explanation: a smiling, brightly toothsome face that could only have been American. You won’t find prisoners’ possessions in the cells, but the aura of recent occupation is palpable, in the mould and dirt and graffiti, in the small sections of coloured tiles that a few prisoners grouted in to make life more bearable. Old smells are still here. The morgue reeks of burning hair. An aroma of perfume not emanating from any of the three of us wafted through the bottom of the gatehouse as we reached it, just after Mike had stroked my hair. In B Wing, three vast paintings, all by the same prisoner, still hang in the corridors. One shows a train puttering through classically English countryside. Another is a fantasy coastal scene: Tolkien and Cornish cliffs rolled into one. The third shows a woodland in spring, full of roe deer and bluebells, with a gypsy camp in the foreground: an unshackled, happy way of life. We studied the paintings more closely. In the fantasy coastal scene, two hanged figures, possibly armless, were visible on a bridge. In front of the bluebell wood, on a table, attended by gamblers, there was a red wine stain that seemed to coagulate, as it hit the floor, into blood. A woman standing behind the gamblers, viewed from a distance, might have been happily watching the game, but on closer inspection she looked thoroughly anguished. Off to the left, a man was approaching, wielding what might have been a machete but was probably more likely a cudgel, and apparently looking for a way to use it.

  Did Shepton’s severe-sounding name make Shepton a severe place? Or did being a severe place nudge Shepton towards its choice of a severe-sounding name? The ‘Mallet’ derives from the Malet family, who settled the area at the beginning of the twelfth century. Before that, the place was just called Sceaptun, which translates from Old English as ‘sheep farm’. In the pub after we’d left the prison, Sara told us that her great-great-granddad had been a sheep farmer. ‘A dead sheep killed him,’ she added. ‘He was loading it onto a trailer, he didn’t push it quite far enough and it fell back on him and broke his neck.’ The unfortunate incident had taken place in rural Surrey, although Sara’s family had been in the Glastonbury area since 1970, when Sara was three. In 1974, she and her sister Marion joined in the Spring Equinox celebrations on the Tor. A gale was stirring up a dust storm and the ceremony’s head druid sheltered them under his huge cloak. The legends surrounding the Tor were a constant background to her childhood. There were endless tunnels and staircases inside the hill. Children, she was told, disappeared in them. Under the opposing Wearyall Hill, beneath where the famous Glastonbury Thorn grew, a vast silver fish lived in the earth. Why shouldn’t it live there? This was the sea, after all. In 1993, Sara’s dad penned a book called The Avalonians, still to this day viewed as a classic of Glastonbury literature, detailing the early-twentieth-century influx to the town of artists and occultists – such as Dion Fortune and Wellesley Tudor Pole – that went a long way towards shaping what is still its current character. That character is a complex one. With its profusion of Victorian red-brick houses, Glastonbury doesn’t look like any other Somerset town, nor does it feel like any other one. In discussions about rural hippie meccas, it’s often mentioned in the same breath as Totnes, in Devon, but, having lived within eleven and a half minutes’ drive of both places, I can report that they are very different, despite being connected by big promises of community and laid-back lifestyle, elements of under-reported penury, a large amount of
politicised yoga and that same purported ley line that stops at Burrow Mump on its way south. Glastonbury is tattier around the edges than Totnes, gaudier in its retail outlook, less affluent and picturesque, its tourist economy driven more by daytrips than long B&B and glamping weekends, less uniform in its dress sense, less foody and foragey, a place where you will find it decidedly easier to locate a straight-forward sandwich. In Totnes, I feel acutely aware of my peasant heritage. In Glastonbury, I don’t. Both towns talk about themselves a lot but Glastonbury does so with more open-eyed wonder.

  During a succession of phenomenal sunsets as March became April, I found the Tor, if not the town, asserting an increasing influence on my life. The change in light, combined with the lack of leaf coverage, made it even more omnipresent, appearing in new spots closer to my house than before. In the evenings, I raced up to it, or to a spot on another island directly across from it, sometimes getting there before the sun had fallen into the sea, sometimes not. Through trial and error, I found the best spot on Pennard Hill to photograph the sunset – the biggest of the errors being when I ended up getting lost on a dirt track, phoneless and dressed in pyjama bottoms, and the biggest of the trials being when I got the back wheel of my car briefly stuck in a ditch as I tried to make a seven-point turn and escape. Pennard surprised me with its largeness and wildness, its loose deer and lonely coombes. The thick grey behind the windows of an abandoned farmhouse on its northern slopes, the forlorn look in the eyes of the dead pheasants draped around the door handles of its cottages, the constant gunshots and the vagueness of the footpaths combined to give it a feral agricultural quality that was a little different to any patch of countryside I’d known. It contrasted with the part of the sea that bled into the more arid ground to the east, which now offered more comfort, with spring’s arrival.

  Under the Tor’s watchful gaze, I walked south down Teapot Lane (Worms Lane), away from Pennard, crossed through Baltonsborough onto Mulcheney Hill – barely a hill at all – and saw a large, freshly dead badger, apparently unblemished, on the verge, upside down, its paws raised in surrender. Land owners, I was aware, often killed badgers then dumped them at the side of the road to give the illusion that they’d been hit by cars. But, to offer them the benefit of the doubt, early spring was prime roadkill season, and I’d been almost run over by the same Porsche Boxster twice in the last week. The speed and dust of major roads insulates us from the reality of roadkill, makes its victims easier to write off as non-animals. Here, on a quiet country lane, under a bluer than blue sky, the badger was astoundingly real. I had not seen Clarence for over a month, not heard the bassy beat of his wings, or his ‘ch-kauwck!’, which I had learned to isolate from the ‘ch-kauwck!’ of different pheasants. I had to accept that the badger’s fate – whichever one of the two possible fates it had been – could very likely have been his too. Spring felt bittersweet today, light and gentle on top, dark underneath: confetti sprinkled on bloody earth. Orchards were coming to life. The mistletoe that had dominated the trees for months, like big organic Christmas baubles someone had forgotten to take down, would soon be hidden again. I walked and walked, taking little detours involving curiously named footpaths and meadows I’d previously missed: Harepits (no hares), Oddway (quite odd), Maggoty Paggoty (still no maggots or paggots). On clear days like this I always felt a little like I was in a shallow pasta dish on the paths south of my house: the front rim being the downland spine of Dorset, the back rim of the dish being the Mendips. In Barton St David, on an unmarked footpath, I asked a young, bald, Eavis-like farmer mending a tractor if the way I was proceeding across his farmyard was correct. He sighed a sigh that sounded like it had been sighed before and said it wasn’t. In the pub in the same village, a few weeks previously, after watching the performance of an Elvis impersonator who didn’t sing any Elvis songs, I’d met a poet called Wes. Wes had recently moved away, to London, but grew up on a farm behind the Tor which had its own modern stone circle. Until a year ago, he had occupied the official post of Bard of Glastonbury: a position gained by winning a competition held annually on St Dunstan’s Day, open to poets, storytellers and song-writers who live within what, with beautiful, carbon-resistant Glastonbury looseness, is defined as ‘a day’s walk of the Tor’. Wes’s Bardic duties included carrying the Silver Branch of Ynys Witrin – also known as ‘The Wiggly Stick’ – wearing a red cape, infusing a fool’s hat with mirth, and supporting pan-Celtic culture, spirituality and creativity within the local community. During periods when Wes has been away from Glastonbury, people have often been adamant that they have seen him around town and will not believe him when he assures them otherwise.

  Wes has climbed the Tor hundreds of times but has only once been alone at the summit. On the weekday evenings I spent up there, the median amount of people at the summit was around twenty: a roughly even mix of tourists and locals, which was unusual for a famous landmark. People meditated and sang. A couple in their early twenties collaborated shyly on a song as the sun set, reading lyrics off the singer’s phone. A humming, beaming woman who was all knitwear asked a man in a football shirt whom she’d just met if she could hug him and he let her. One night, amidst the total acceptance of everyone in the vicinity, a man chanted to himself inside the ruined church, in bellowed Latin. The sound echoed out, far down the hillside. On my descent, I followed a wild-looking, seaweed-haired woman who held three full carrier bags and farted explosively with every other step. The farts also echoed out down the hillside, but not as far. As I walked or drove the higher lanes, the Tor hovered like a distant cake, made for somebody’s first birthday, with just the one candle on top. I had somehow been living in Avalon eight months already. In no time at all our first anniversary would have arrived.

  In addition to the most jaw-dropping sunsets I had seen in my life, from the Tor I saw a couple of the pinkest, fullest moons. One evening in April, in heavy rain, a week before the pinkest, fullest moon of all, I began the climb to St Michael’s church again and met Johanna, who has climbed the Tor almost every day in the eleven years she has lived here, and her partner Steve, who has been doing the same for many, many years longer. ‘It’s our version of the gym,’ Johanna, who is from Holland, told me. Steve set eyes on it for the first time on the summer solstice of 1972 – his first of many solstices spent on the Tor – after driving down from Bristol with a gang of friends. Just three years before, in 1969, the year of the moon landings, a series of inexplicable events had occurred on top of the hill. One of a group of visiting Buddhists was hurled several feet in the air by an elemental force from the ruined tower, and balls of light curved halfway around the dry island’s circumference. Not long after, Glastonbury residents spotted saucer-shaped objects hovering over the town and a fiery red ball appeared, which was not the sun. More people than ever visited during the big days on the pagan calendar. Steve didn’t arrive until gone 11 p.m. on the solstice of 1972, but stayed up there all night, wide awake, with what he described as some pharmaceutical assistance. ‘I decided right then that one day I was going to get a job at the bottom of the hill,’ he told me. Seven years later, he did exactly that, securing work teaching mathematics at Millfield Prep School, situated on Edgarley Road at the Tor’s foot.

  Steve and Johanna first met on the south-west coast path, where they were both walking east towards Lyme Regis. ‘We wild camped, in our separate tents, and talked and talked and talked about everything,’ Johanna told me. ‘We were on the Undercliff, and there were glow-worms everywhere and a meteor shower was happening. Steve told me that if I was ever anywhere near Glastonbury I should pop in for a cup of tea. Being Dutch, I didn’t realise that British people say that kind of thing without meaning it, so a week later, that’s what I did.’ They climbed the Tor. It felt to Johanna like there was light and energy everywhere, brightness coming up through the earth. ‘In all these years, I have never seen it quite like that again,’ she said. The date was 11 August 1988. Johanna talked about her intention to go on a walking pilgri
mage from The Hague to Jerusalem but said she knew it was an unrealistic ambition, with two small children to look after and a full-time job. When she returned to Holland, Steve sent her a chunk of the novel he was working on. Johanna replied with a mixture of critical and positive comments. She received no reply. The months, then the years, scrolled on. She worried she had offended Steve by being too harsh.

  Fourteen years later, Johanna finally walked from The Hague to Jerusalem. It took her eleven months and the stress on her feet meant that forever after she would need to wear orthopaedic shoes. When she returned, Steve was prominent in her mind. She felt a need to get in touch and tell him that she’d finally actually done the walk, all 2,200 miles of it, all on her own. But so much time had passed. Was he even still alive? She wrote to him at his old address and they began to correspond again and, via their letters, fell in love. When they met up, the old chemistry and common interests that had kept them up into the night talking on the coast path, all that time ago, were still there. In the intervening time, Steve had not walked from The Hague to Jerusalem, but he had set himself his own very impressive walking project. After a heart operation in 1999, he decided that, as part of his recovery, he would ascend the Tor sixty times. This, he had worked out, amounted to roughly the height of Mount Everest, with the Tor being 523 feet high and Steve’s house being around twenty feet above sea level. ‘After that, I just kept on walking,’ he told me. One year, he ascended the Tor a total of 525 times, including twelve times in just one day. He estimates that he has walked up it at least 5,000 times in total.

  In time, Steve and Johanna would complete their own joint pilgrim walk: a six-week journey along the whole of the St Michael ley line, from Land’s End to Lowestoft, passing through St Michael’s doorless church along the way. Both retired, they now live together in a flat on the first floor of a red-brick Victorian house a couple of hundred yards west of the Tor, below Chalice Hill, where some claim that the Holy Grail remains buried. Steve told me that, whatever mood he has been in, he has never felt it dip as a result of a walk up the Tor. Johanna said it had an energy you could feel, pushing up through you: ‘All hills do, but especially this one.’ Sometimes she comes up to the top of the Tor or Chalice and sings. ‘You can do exactly what you like up here, be who you want to be, and nobody will say a thing against it,’ she said. ‘People who have come away from organised religion come up here because they want to still feel part of something bigger, because that’s a human need. It’s a strange thing but as humans we need to feel insignificant. It makes us feel better.’ She sees the Tor as having its own force field, which is constantly spinning, spinning stories, many of which are apocryphal, but can become slightly real with enough retelling. She and Steve disagree about some of them: Johanna thinks the story about Arthur and Guin-evere’s bodies being found in the abbey grounds in 1191 could well be true; Steve thinks it was a ruse by the Church to raise money, at a time when pilgrim visits had fallen and they badly needed it.