Ring the Hill

by Tom Cox

  In the opening illustration of Masquerade, field mice build their nest in a tangle of weeds at the perimeter of a field under the light of a full moon. On the horizon, you can make out just a sliver of sea. There’s a farmhouse whose foundations lean with the slope it’s built on to the extent that, if you laid out a meal on a table in its kitchen, every last plate of food would no doubt slide off it onto the floor. Behind the farmhouse, obscuring the rest of the sea, is a hill that looks like a buttock, which, when you look more closely, turns out to be the answer to the illustration’s puzzle: the hare, its ears pinned back in alertness, its eyes focused on something unseeable in the stubble pasture ahead of it. A hare hill. Old Fat Bum. To me it is the most Dorset scene in the book: it’s the combination of the particular kind of green, the angle of that farmhouse, the precise depth and shallowness of spaces between the hills, and the shape of that buttock mound. It’s a hill that’s patently an individual and has just a touch of the man-made and prehistoric about it. If you got a bit closer, the grass at the top would appear tightly stretched across the chalky topsoil, as it does on many Dorset hills. It reminds me of Colmer’s Hill, just outside Bridport, another lone Dorset mound, although Colmer’s is a little too tall to be a buttock, and boasts a rockabilly quiff of trees, allegedly to assist the ships of centuries gone by with navigation. When I climbed it in late 2018, on Remembrance Sunday, a bright red carpet of artificial poppies had been laid over its eastern slope, which seemed entirely fitting of its VIP status in the landscape.

  I was at the beginning of a phase of being seduced by Dorset’s hills in much the same way as I’d been seduced by the ones that provided the walls for the M5’s corridor. Growing brave, I forged farther along the Jurassic Coast, into the east of the county, throwing aside my preconception that everything over there was essentially an outer suburb of London. On one of several coastal walks on the Isle of Purbeck in the first half of 2019, I spotted another hare, my third live one in total since moving to the West Country. It was just a brief sighting on a ridge above Kimmeridge Bay, where for an amazing half an hour before sundown I felt like I’d stumbled on the exact spot where all of Purbeck’s wildlife congregated. Before I’d seen the hare, I’d turned a corner to find myself ten yards away from a fawn who’d looked me directly in the eye before hurdling a fence and bouncing away across the field ahead in the most cartoonish, fluffy-tailed way. I realised I was grinning. It was early April and the lambs were tiny and just as cartoonish and for many yards in every direction southern England had the deceptive appearance of having recently been born. I’d not even embarked on this walk specifically for the wildlife; the day’s mission had been to see Tyneham, a village a few miles west along the coast, last inhabited in 1943. Tyneham’s 225 residents left their homes during the Second World War when it was repurposed as a military firing range. The villagers expected to be allowed to return but the military decided to hold on to the land. The houses are now ruins, largely roofless, but there is something untarnished about them, which adds to the feeling that you are tumbling through time. The spaces hold you and tell you their story, which is one where the twentieth century made only the lightest of marks. In 1940, the farm here was still tractor-less, with no running water or electricity. Milk churns were kept in water overnight as a rudimentary form of refrigeration and the lorry driver who collected them would dip his head in the churn to test the freshness.

  The general public aren’t permitted to walk through Tyneham and along this part of the Jurassic Coast except on certain dates, and you need to check the firing range timetable before you try to do so. In Nuts in May, Mike Leigh’s 1976 TV play about a Dorset camping holiday, the holidaymakers Keith and Candice-Marie fall foul of the in-use firing ranges. Nuts in May is still, for my money, the greatest thing Leigh has ever done, even more subtle and clever than his better-known Abigail’s Party from the following year. Alison Steadman stars as Candice-Marie in Nuts in May and as the patronising party host Beverly in Abigail’s Party. The dizzying, impossible fact that these brilliant and entirely different performances could emerge from the mind and body of one human was what, when I was in my early teens, first made me aware that acting was an art form. As Candice-Marie and Keith drive around Dorset, Keith mansplains rural England to her, lectures her about how crucial it is to chew your food seventy-two times, tells her off for picking stones off the beach because ‘if everyone did that there wouldn’t be any pebbles left’ and reminds her of the importance of his ‘schedule’. Down from Croydon, on hiatus from their respective jobs in social services and a toy shop, Keith and Candice-Marie make up naive folk songs together, clash with noisy yobs on bikes and stick to a health-conscious vegetarian diet. Their treat, when they feel like they’ve earned it and really want to kick back and let go, is raw mushrooms. At the time, Nuts in May was part of a growing tide of anti-hippie piss-taking that helped invent the 1980s, but now Candice-Marie and Keith come across as a little ahead of their time with their eco-awareness and simple, sustainable lifestyle, and Candice-Marie’s inventive, knitwear-heavy, jumble-sale wardrobe seems less goofy, more stylish. A subplot of the play is Candice-Marie’s rebellion against Keith’s despotic governance of their relationship. This could have been conveyed in a much more heavy-handed way, with Candice-Marie yearning to leave Keith for a Hell’s Angel and drop litter in bluebell woodland, but the central genius of the story is that the rebellion is a subtle one: Candice-Marie loves the planet, loves birds and trees and mushrooms and history, but she’d prefer to get away from Keith’s schedule, and not have to worry about getting mud on the floor of their Morris Minor. In the final scene, on a new campsite, Keith heads off into the woods with a toilet roll in his hand and we see her alone with her guitar, singing the play’s one non-twee song: a dark eco-ballad about what humans have done to ruin the earth. A vision emerges of her shaking off some of her rabbit-like aspects, discovering her inner hare, and breaking away from Keith to forge a successful song-writing career as a politicised songwriter: Wessex’s answer to Joan Baez.

  Purbeck remains spotted with Nuts in May-style campsites, barely pimped up farmland with not a hint of glamping, whose barbecue smells drifted over as I walked. On a bridleway through one, a sartorially flawless female camper emerged from a gate. Her wide-brimmed hat and floral dress seemed straight out of a 1969 fashion-magazine photo shoot, and I felt no less transported than I had in Tyneham, earlier in the day. Behind her in a field, a man juggled with oranges beside a campfire, an activity suggestive of a life without a spreadsheet. I headed farther east and ordered a post-walk pint from the Square and Compass, a pub with a serving hatch for a bar and which doubles as a fossil museum, in the village of Worth Matravers. No county in Britain names its villages more inventively, and less predictably, than Dorset. I see Worth Matravers as a reclusive billionaire, a William Randolph Hearst figure, who, after making his fortune in the US, came to the south-west of the UK to stare at the sea, grow his fingernails long and collect books on the golden age of sailing. His half-brother, Langton Matravers, who always mimicked his business methods and tailored suits but with less success, now continues to live in his shadow just a few miles farther along the coast. Head inland and a little west from here, and you soon reach Wool, where I can picture Candice-Marie settling after breaking away from Keith. Farther inland you soon reach the tightest concentration of villages in the world to have been named after pools of potentially tainted liquid: Puddletown, Piddlehinton, Briantspuddle, Affpuddle, Tolpuddle, Piddletrenthide. It won’t be long until you also find a Caundle – Purse, Bishop’s or Stourton, probably – which is an old Dorset word meaning ‘conical hill’.

  I’d been reading about a caundle I particularly wanted to visit: Round Knoll, above the village of West Milton, near Bridport. When I did, it was just as commanding as I’d been led to believe: another, more pert, buttock, crowned with a lichen-splashed storytelling tree. Margaret Morgan-Grenville, who owns the converted mill at the foot of the knoll, told me that everyon
e always thought the tree was an oak but it was an ash. Margaret had kindly invited me over for lunch, after I’d written to her and told her I was interested in the mill’s former owner, the writer Kenneth Allsop. During the fifties and sixties Allsop was best known as a TV presenter, but he was also a restlessly eclectic author and, during the early seventies, when he moved to West Milton, became west Dorset’s most prominent and active eco-campaigner. In his 1972 book In the Country – originally a collection of columns published in the unlikely context of the Daily Mail – he railed against agribusiness and its pesticides, and created a vivid picture of the tranquil and hidden triangle of land between West Milton, Powerstock Common and Eggardon Hill, an area he called ‘The Last Place’. With the help of his new neighbour, Brian Jackman – a fellow nature writer, several years his junior – he drummed up local support and prevented the Common, an atmos-pheric ancient woodland teeming with wildflowers and marsh fritillary butterflies, being turned into a deadened conifer plantation. Jackman and his wife Annabel, who still live next door and own donkeys called Punda and Toto, joined Margaret and me for lunch at the mill. Jackman recalled his first meeting with Allsop, which came about after Jackman spotted a hen harrier above Eggardon Hill and called Allsop to tell him, after looking up his number in the phone book.

  At the time of writing, there are only two clips of Allsop available to watch online: an interview with John Lennon and an episode of Points of View where Allsop’s Soho hairdresser is interviewed, in response to a viewer’s letter criticising the presenter’s ‘flash’ new haircut. Few people under the age of sixty-five know of Allsop now but in the 1960s he was a famous man who enjoyed a very glamorous lifestyle. A few weeks after my lunch with Margaret, Brian and Annabel, I met Allsop’s son Tristan in The Three Horseshoes in Powerstock, and he remembered how Ken would walk along city streets, very focused, and erect invisible walls at the sides of his face, so ready was he to be recognised and stopped by members of the general public. At their house in rural Hertfordshire, where the family lived before moving to West Milton, they threw parties attended by the likes of Dudley Moore, Cleo Laine, Johnny Dankworth and other celebrities of the day. ‘Robin Day broke my pogo stick at one,’ remembered Tristan. ‘But he paid for a new one.’ Lennon, another of Ken’s friends, would later cite a conversation with Ken in the green room before a TV performance as a major catalyst for his decision to leave The Beatles. Tristan had once met Lennon and recalled how he had introduced his sister, Amanda, to the singer, ‘This is my sister.’ ‘Well, I didn’t think it was yer brother,’ Lennon had replied.

  Ken had whipped along the tiny lanes around West Milton in an E-Type Jaguar, which might seem at odds with his environmentalist beliefs, until you remember that the early 1970s were not the late 2010s. ‘He was very concerned about pollution, pesticides, oil,’ said Tristan. ‘But he had no knowledge of global warming. Nobody did, back then. I suspect if he was alive now he’d feel very guilty about it.’ Tiny West Milton, which many decades before had been in possession of the comically large number of three hostelries, was pub-less by the time the Allsops moved there, so The Three Horseshoes had been Ken’s local. As I’d sat in the bar waiting for Tristan, I’d known by all logic that I was meeting a man born in the middle of the previous century, but because I’d been reading In the Country and the posthumous collection of Allsop’s letters to his daughter, Amanda, my head was in 1973, and I was half-expecting a fresh-faced university graduate to walk through the door, not the smiling, dignified, silvery man who did. Tristan Allsop was sharp and eloquent, with a crushing handshake and his dad’s excellent hair and clothes.

  Some of the fans of Allsop’s TV work might have known of his simultaneous existence as an ornithologist and nature writer – his debut novel Adventure Lit Their Star, took the breeding of the ringed plover as its subject and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1950 – but almost none would have been aware of the chronic pain he lived with every day. Allsop only had one leg, as a result of an injury sustained on a battle training course during his time in the RAF in the 1940s. He took medication for the pain of his phantom limb, walked with a limp – ‘More of a kick than a limp, really,’ recalled Tristan – and while on screen was almost never filmed below the waist. Despite his disability, he walked miles with his binoculars, observing Dorset’s birdlife. In the spring of 1973, he’d recently been fitted with a new suction prosthesis, which had been giving him even more trouble, and had fallen off while he was walking through King’s Cross. He was also having various troubles with his employers, and envied his neighbour Jackman’s carefree life, away from the pressures of celebrity.

  Jackman thinks it wasn’t one overriding factor that prompted Allsop to take his own life via an overdose of barbiturates on 23 May 1973. That month in Dorset it rained, almost constantly. The mill is a beautiful building and the day was clear when I visited, but its rooms do not let in a large amount of light and, in the middle of a sequence of unrelentingly dingy days, I could see how the darkness might get to a person. Allsop’s suicide note, addressed to his wife Betty, was exceedingly well-written, right up to the moment where his pen visibly trails off the page, as he loses consciousness. ‘He was a consummate professional, right to the last,’ said Jackman. Margaret says two of her guests have seen his ghost wandering around the mill, although she has never seen the ghost herself, and feels it’s a benevolent building that’s always been good to her.

  Before Margaret and I walked through the valley to Powerstock church to visit Allsop’s grave, she and Jackman and I wandered around the back of the mill, beneath the shadow of Round Knoll, to a wild pond. Jackman found some otter scat and identified frog bones in it. Margaret tuned in to the call of a kingfisher down on the river below, but Jackman said his hearing could no longer pick it up. It was the same with a lot of birdsong. It was, he said, one of his least favourite aspects of getting old. He was now three decades older than Ken had been when he died. I asked him whether he thought Ken would have been pleasantly surprised or saddened by the state of Britain’s wildlife today. Jackman said he thought it would be a mixture of the two, that – and this was echoed by Tristan – he’d be deeply saddened by the diminishment of birdlife, but he probably wouldn’t have expected to see the resurgence of otters in places like this, or the peregrines who’d defied the odds to come back and nest on virtually every cathedral in the UK. Just before his death, Ken had seen a peregrine while on holiday in Wales and been convinced it was the last he or anyone he knew would ever witness.

  A week later, I walked from Powerstock, through the Common to Eggardon Hill, and was surprised to find it still much the way Allsop had described it: ‘The Last Place’ remained a fitting description. I explored the old railway line, a late survivor of Beeching’s axe, among the branch lines, where trains had still been running at the end of Allsop’s life. Back then, cows would step out onto the line from time to time as the trains went to and from New Malden and the driver would stop the train, getting out to shoo them away. Now the disused cutting was made almost solely of primroses and atmosphere. The Common, just beyond it, felt like a mindbendingly old place. Under Eggardon, farmhouses nestled on the lower slopes, like the one in the Masquerade illustration, albeit probably with kitchen tables that did not slant quite so severely. The hill itself, over 800 feet high, was wide and weird and stark with spiky totemic-looking trees and a sky that made me feel dispensable. Cars were known to cut out along its dome, for no scientifically explainable reason: three at the same time, on one occasion. The mud as you descended was wet and hot, as if underneath the surface layer upon layer of matter was fermenting.

  *

  I continued to tick off the hills, failing to stick to the schedule, often not going straight home, getting mud on the floor of my car, treating myself to the occasional raw mushroom when I decided I’d earned it. Hambledon and Hod, with the nightingales, jumpy cows and chalky Neolithic causeways. Ashmore, the highest village in Dorset, where I watched the annual festiva
l, The Filly Loo, in which villagers danced in slow motion wearing antlers to elegiac flutes playing the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance beside the village pond, which is said to be inhabited by Gubbigamies who gibber in the night. The only mention I can find anywhere of Gubbigamies is by Michael Pitt-Rivers in his 1935 book Dorset: A Shell Guide and I still am in the dark as to precisely what they are. Pitt-Rivers, grandson of the legendary archaeologist Augustus Pitt Rivers, also reports that, beside the pond, ‘a Mr Hare failed to win Miss Rabbits, so he married instead Miss Bunny’ but doesn’t expand on the matter. Were these actual animals, people with amusingly coincidental surnames, or liminal creatures of the crepuscular hours? In Ashmore, on a summer evening, with the sun slipping behind the old hunting forest of Cranborne Chase, all explanations seemed possible. I chased another spectacular sun into the sea behind the Golden Cap, not quite making it in time. In the pub below, I got talking to an Australian man, who asked me what music I liked. He said his name was Michael and he had been in the industry but was now retired. His wife had recently passed away and he’d felt the need to escape, because back home his friends were doing something he described as ‘killing me with kindness’. He had a bittersweet air about him that suggested an intersection of sadness and freedom. He was staying very flexible for the remainder of his trip, he said, and asked me for West Country hill recommendations. He was obviously not somebody who stuck to the schedule and I liked him instantly.