Ring the Hill

by Tom Cox

  The M5 wasn’t here prior to 1962 but an indication of its topographical dominance is that when I first read about the fifth-century giants and their missiles, I imagined the vast rocks flying over six lanes of traffic, while police blocked the road and the drivers of important Sports Utility Vehicles paced the hard shoulder ranting into their phones, until the giants tired of their rock throwing and fell into lengthy giant sleeps that made all of the West gently vibrate. I bought a very beautiful 1930s guidebook to Somerset published by the Great Western Railway company, and it was only while reading this that the force with which the M5 slices the county in two properly hit me – or, rather, I’d already known it sliced the county in two, and it had already made me mentally divide Somerset into its more rugged west and softer east, but what properly hit me was the fact that it hadn’t always been that way. Once, as you tootled through it in your Morris Minor, not getting anywhere quickly, Somerset was much more of a cohesive whole. I found myself returning again and again to a photo in the book of a craggy hollow near Wellington, a lost, fairy-tale place. Did it even still exist? How many others of its kind had been destroyed during the motorway’s construction? The M5 is now the hollow. It’s the West’s great unnatural valley, and as such has become the king of all hill-watching roads. While I’m on it, my excitable hill surveillance goes on long past Somerset’s northern border, past the Tyndale Monument at North Nibley in Gloucestershire, to the Malvern Hills and the mountain ranges of Wales.

  Having been repeatedly beckoned by the dark high shapes on the skyline to the west while taking the motorway from Devon to visit friends and family in the Midlands, I caved in to pressure, cancelled some practical stuff I should have been doing to earn a living and booked into a B&B in Hay-on-Wye, on the Herefordshire– Wales Border. I had an ulterior motive: Hay is full of books. More books per square yard, perhaps, than any other town on the planet. Before the first of my walks, I shopped for a few, showing great restraint by stopping at a total of seven. The purchase I was most pleased with was a first edition of Coming Down the Wye, the 1942 memoir by the naturalist engraver Robert Gibbings. The pages had some foxing, but I didn’t mind. That’s one of the many things I love about buying old books: even the negative jargon sounds attractive. Who wouldn’t want a nice bit of foxing?

  In the early 1940s Gibbings set out from his home on Plynlimon, the Cambrian mountain where the Wye’s source is found, and travelled down the river, past Hay, all the way to its mouth, near Chepstow, gathering folklore, creating a vivid picture of farming communities and trout-tickling fishermen in wartime, making a before-its-time plea for ethical meat consumption, and recording conversations with locals in pubs, sometimes in a fashion pleasingly divergent from the main narrative. At one point he goes totally rogue, telling us, apropos of apparently nothing, about an attractive young lady who – he claims – gives him the eye on a train. This is perhaps a telling insight into Gibbings’ state of mind at the time of writing, when you learn that he subsequently got off with his wife’s sister, who was his typist for the manuscript.

  There are two eerie stories about hares in the book. The first concerns Gibbings’ neighbour Bill who, with his friend Evan, tries in vain to catch one at night, but it keeps darting through the arms and legs of the men, until Evan decides that the hare is in fact an apparition. The second is of a hare in the valley that cannot be shot, until a wise man recommends that a hunter uses a sixpenny bit instead of a cartridge. The hare, wounded on its flank, retreats in the direction of a cottage, where, upon entering, the hunter finds an old woman on the floor with a broken leg. I’ve found versions of this story in numerous books of folklore: a hare that is ‘not right’ being shot with silver or herbs and transmuting back into a witch. Another version is told in ‘The Hare and the Harbourer’, an old Herefordshire story collected by the folklorist Ruth Tongue in 1962 from a Welsh WI member: here, the hare – giant and with glowing eyes – is attacked in the throat by a dog and screams out in pain in the voice of a human female.

  On my Herefordshire walks, I got the sense of being in a forgotten dragon-green space, much bigger than it appeared on the map. It’s worth remembering that, until 1969, Herefordshire wasn’t even on the National Grid. My most abiding memory of the county was a childhood holiday in an isolated riverside cottage without electricity, where water came from an outdoor pump. It was the spring of 1985, but it felt, to a nine-year-old used to hot baths and nightly viewing of Blue Peter, like the winter of 1885. As soon as we blew the candles out each night, we heard mice scampering around us on the flagstones. The guest book, largely filled with the eloquent observations of fishermen, stretched back to the 1920s, and my dad took it to bed to read each night as a person might read a work of literary fiction. Mayflies abounded above the small adjacent tributary to the Wye: a paradise for trout and their oppressors. My mum chose to clean the toilet, since apparently nobody else had bothered since the end of the Jazz Age, and in doing so had to make a super-human effort not to throw up. In the local pub, I was offered hare for the first time in my life, and declined, unable to conceal my horror. In the living room there was a copy of Masquerade by Kit Williams. There always seemed to be, in living rooms, in 1985. I stared and stared at the illustrations, feeling pleased with myself when I found the hares Williams had hidden in them, and getting whisked away to the rolling, greener than green English countryside of their setting, which – not totally unlike the place we were staying – appeared to be in a permanent state of spring and had a touch of the pagan and the grotesque about it.

  I drove south from my plusher and less interesting twenty-first-century guest accommodation in Hay to the Black Hill and saw a hat-trick of pleasing village names: Cockyard, Vowchurch, Turnastone. Local lore says the latter two were named after two sisters who built competing churches. One sister vowed she would complete hers before her sibling had chance to turn a stone of hers, then went ahead and completed the task. Not far on, the Black Mountains loomed and the road ended, in a way that suggested it could signal the end of everything, not just the road, or England. I paused midway through lacing up my walking boots, mesmerised by the shadow of the clouds tracing across the mountain on the opposite side of the valley; a giant ghost curtain being drawn, again and again, for all of eternity. Another book had brought me here: the 1982 novel On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin, whose descriptions of eight harsh decades in the life of two farming brothers on the border had frozen themselves inside me. The reality was no let-down. According to the forecast, the weather wasn’t doing anything particularly unpleasant to anyone anywhere in the UK, but I still got the sense that anything could happen here, that it was slightly outside the rules.

  As I climbed to the Cat’s Back, the long, aptly named ridge at the hill’s summit, I saw bits of sheep everywhere: sometimes just their wool, sometimes other bits of them, rotting. It was a dominating theme of all of my Herefordshire walks: sheep here seemed to leave more traces of themselves than sheep elsewhere, as if they were constantly walking into trees and bushes, drunk. Later, on the climb up to Arthur’s Stone, a Neolithic chambered tomb above Dorstone between the Golden and Wye Valleys, I saw a whole tree entirely festooned with sheep’s hair, as if, not satisfied with merely bumping into it, the inebriated sheep had tried to climb it too. Jim Capaldi of the band Traffic once lived in a farmhouse in the Black Mountains, until he left and the place was turned into a wreck by squatters. On the cover of his poorly titled but mostly excellent 1974 solo album Whale Meat Again he posed with a local sheep-farming family. The harder you look at the expressions on faces of the sheep-farming family, the more vividly you can imagine the conversation that led to the photo shoot.

  Farming family: ‘Us? Why?’

  Jim: ‘Come on. It will be cool. You can pretend to be me band.’

  Farming family: ‘OK, if you say so. But how long will it take? There’s a ewe gone lame in the back field.’

  I could quite easily imagine leaving bits of myself up here, like a sheep. A
t the top, after I’d crossed Offa’s Dyke into Wales and scaled the easternmost Black Mountains, January took place, undaunted by the fact that it was legally still six months away. Hail and rain drove into me until I leaned like the wooden prop of a washing line. Through the deluge I saw tall piles of stones, a trig point and another ewe carcass. All three looked like signs of some abstruse future mountain religion. Something about you might change, dramatically, noticeably, up here, if you lingered too long. ‘What happened to that guy in that place?’ they might say of you, down where normal people hang out, when you returned. On the descent, a looped monster bramble, unquestionably possessing full of awareness of what it was doing, closed its long arms around my neck. I ripped myself free, drawing blood, gaining a deeper understanding of what the sheep around here were going through on a daily basis and feeling bad for insinuating that they were wreckheads. The ghost-cloud curtain closed on the mountainside, then closed again, then again. When I got back to the Wye, it was July again. If I’d told the river what I’d just seen, it probably would have said it didn’t believe me. But the water knew, because it had been up somewhere similarly lofty, earlier in the day. It was a trickster of a river, always telling you one thing when it meant another. People often compared it to a snake but what it reminded me of most, with all its loops and feints and zigzags, was the movement of a hare across a field.

  I missed watching that unique dash, living in the west. It had now been nearly three years since I’d seen a live one: an unthinkable gap, back when I lived in Norfolk and came to view the sighting of hares as a standard part of my week. In spring, I’d peeked over hedges and seen pairs of them boxing. It was like looking behind a curtain where animals who thought they weren’t being watched stood vertical and played out various human activities. But hares could do all sorts of stuff humans couldn’t, such as run at speeds of over forty miles per hour and get pregnant when they were already pregnant. Later in the year, hurrying the finale of walks where I’d overstretched my daylight allowance, I’d disturbed them in their furrows, watching them scatter and zigzag ahead of me. I’d had high hopes that Herefordshire would break the recent dry spell, but when I returned from my four days there I remained hare-less. Even a stop in Gloucestershire on the way home to explore Painswick Beacon and Nailsworth – the homeland of Kit Williams, which had directly inspired Masquerade – yielded no results. But that is the nature of hares: they’re liminal, edge dwellers, mercurial, non-conformist, always in the corner of the picture of the British countryside, or more likely just outside it. That was the idea Williams had explored in Masquerade, both with the hares hidden in his illustrations, and with the riddle he embedded in the story which would lead to the location of a golden one he had buried in the actual countryside, in Bedfordshire.

  I’d been lucky enough to meet Williams in 2015, through a friend who’d modelled for him. It had been a time when I had been just starting to become more hare-like myself, less imprisoned and predictable in the way I spent my time, more free, more me. When newspaper editors got in touch and asked me to write a piece reacting to something that I didn’t have a reaction to, I said no, and went out and circled a hill on foot instead. People told me the sensible steps I should take for the benefit of my career and my profile, and I did the opposite. I know Williams would have approved. I had rarely met a more hare-like man, sinewy, long-looking without being tall, with piercing eyes full of occult knowledge, and mostly covered in a thick layer of hare-coloured fur. The way he had behaved after Masquerade’s success, and the publication of its follow-up, The Bee Book, was the way a hare would probably have behaved if a hare had ever created books that sold millions of copies, suddenly found itself discussing them on primetime TV with Terry Wogan and received thousands of fan letters a week. When his publisher asked him to write another ‘puzzle’ book that he didn’t in his heart want to write, he vanished from public life, continuing to live at the base of a hill in rural Gloucestershire and make the art he had always been compelled to make. But in truth Williams had always been hare-like, and the high-profile period around Masquerade’s publication was the aberration. The publisher Tom Maschler had first discussed the idea for the book – or one not unlike it – with Williams in the mid-seventies, to not a massive amount of enthusiasm on the part of Williams, and the project had, in Maschler’s mind, been forgotten, so he was more than surprised when Williams got in touch three years later to say Masquerade was complete, then turned up with a trunk containing the illustrations, all painted on wood, sewn into individual blankets for protection and insured for £100,000. This, you feel, is exactly what a hare would do if it wrote a book. You probably wouldn’t have even met the hare beforehand. ‘Hi,’ the hare would say, arriving at your office. ‘The book is complete.’ ‘Who are you? What book?’ you would ask the hare. ‘I am a hare, and this is the book I have written. Also, I have some big news for you: I am pregnant. Also, I have some more big news for you: I am pregnant again, even though I am already pregnant.’

  The scene from the top of Painswick Beacon was much like a scene in Masquerade, a book where all the landscapes were rolling and soft. The Severn Estuary sparkled to the west, an upturned full-length mirror rested flat on the ground. I peered at it. Was the hidden hare in the water? Or was it in the trees below, or the clouds, or on a Stroud rooftop? Earlier in the day I’d been reading about Phyllis Barron, the early twentieth-century Painswick-based textile designer, who made indigo dye using urine and used to hold what she called ‘piddle parties’ to obtain it. I could see her, too, in the distorted Williams version of the scene in my head: a lady in a 1940s dress, taller than any tree, sitting at the foot of the hill holding a giant bucket, preparing for her latest piddle party, surrounded by patchwork fields.

  The Beacon allowed me to track the corridor of the M5, the hill road, from a new angle. It offered a fresh appreciation on the shape of the country, the closeness of everything, the true size of the quilt we live on. There is nothing like climbing hills for perspective. Only a face full of sea rivals it. Perhaps this is why I climb so many hills: to make up for thirteen years of living in inland Norfolk and having no perspective. I’d had hares, but I’d not had perspective. Perhaps that was the choice you had to make in life: hares or perspective. You could never have everything. I’d loved Norfolk, and I loved here, but no place is without drawbacks.

  I think there is another reason for my hill obsession that goes beyond just the perspective they offer and the intoxi-cating thrill of reaching the top of them: I am afraid of heights. But my fear of heights is weirdly selective and goes hand in hand with my unending fascination with heights. I’m the person who watches planes coming into Heathrow with his mouth open in uncomprehending wonder, yet who, for the last seventeen years, has done everything in his power to avoid getting on one. I still dream about the plane I was on that was struck by lightning over the Channel in 1998, but sometimes I sense the dreams are less PTSD and more a Netflix of the mind. I was a satchel of nerves by the time I’d got scarcely more than halfway up the Eiffel Tower but I will dangle my feet off the edge of the Golden Cap, the highest point on the country’s south coast, as casually as a child on a swing. On visits to Bristol, I go to great lengths to incorp-orate the Clifton Suspension Bridge into my day, because of the beauty of the Avon Gorge, but also because I don’t fully believe the bridge exists and have decided the matter needs properly investigating. When I see it lit up in the mist, I am perfectly prepared for it to vanish. How does it meet in the middle, and stay up? It all seems very fishy. I have visited the small museum just beyond its western extremity – the M5 side of it – numerous times, looking for evidence of black magic. I have not found the black magic, but I now know a fair bit about the bridge, whose architect Isambard Kingdom Brunel died five years before its completion and only narrowly escaped death much earlier in its construction, in 1843, when he had to have a tracheotomy to remove a coin he’d swallowed while performing a magic trick for a child. When the bridge was final
ly complete, the first person to cross it was twenty-one-year-old Mary Griffiths, an impressively hare-like runner who – after paying the one penny toll, and lifting up her skirts – raced and beat an unnamed young man to the other side, by several yards. The toll is now a pound and you don’t have to pay it if you are not a car. Weirdly, considering that it’s 331 feet above the river and man-made, the bridge doesn’t frighten me, apart from when there’s a very high wind, and it starts to shake. In his 2017 BBC documentary about wind, the writer and producer Tim Dee tells a very moving story of the time in his youth, while doing his paper round, that he saw a man commit suicide off the bridge, and believed he had flown away on the wind. According to my parents, when I was a toddler I asked their Irish friend George why we can’t see wind. I think it is still a very valid question, especially when I am on the suspension bridge in a minor gale.

  My attitude to heights could be viewed as the ultimate manifestation of a trust in nature and mistrust of man: the same outlook that means I am far more at ease with the idea of being eaten by a tiger than being put to death by lethal injection. But it’s about more than that. Heights, even those that would be viewed as non-spectacular by any daredevil mountain climber or skydiver, are a drug for me, and like all drugs, a dependency on them can cut in and have a detrimental effect on the rest of your life. You put it ahead of responsibilities – to work, to the people you care about. I have climbed a lot of hills when I should have been filling my time more sensibly. I suppose this is my completist side coming out. I’ve never been a puritanical completist, though. I don’t need to own the inferior albums a great musician made, just because I like the great musician’s great albums. But hills are always good. Hills don’t make bad albums. Put a hill on a song on your album, and the album will almost certainly be better for it. ‘The Hills of Greenmore’, on the first Steeleye Span album, is already fundamentally great because it’s about a hare, but is further enhanced by featuring not one but several hills. Where were these hill hares that folk bands sang about, and why wasn’t I seeing any of them? It isn’t as if hares are exclusive to flatlands. One of the sixty-nine ancient monikers for the hare, mentioned in The Names of the Hare, the poem written on the Welsh border in the late thirteenth century, is Ring the Hill, and presumably that doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s one of my favourite hare nicknames, along with Old Fat Bum, Dewflirt, Stag of the Stubble, Woodcat and The One Who Does Not Go Straight Home. The last is presumably a reference to that indirect, mazing run hares are prone to, but it’s suggestive of something else too, a secret after-dark activity. The hare’s extra business, which it will never stoop to reveal to us.