Walking to Camelot (13 page)

Incredibly lonely and miserable, Alastair Grahame committed suicide at age nineteen by strolling down to the Thames near Oxford — home of Ratty, Toad, and Mole — where he lay down on a railway track and was decapitated by a train. How ironic that a novel borne out of a father's inability to handle a relationship with a son should have provided such incredible enjoyment and solace to millions of children around the world for over a hundred years — and brought Theodore Roosevelt to tears.

We beat uphill from Roman Row to the edge of Whichford Wood, where the last of the withering but still beautiful bluebells form an azure carpet in the open spaces of the forest, intermingled with white stitchwort and a few late-blooming wood anemones. The scene is one of natural harmony, with ferns, flowers, and leaves making a natural florist's bouquet.

Emily Brontë immortalized England's favourite flower in her poem “The Bluebell”:

The Bluebell is the sweetest flower

That waves in summer air:

Its blossoms have the mightiest power

To soothe my spirit's care.

Our path is taking us through farmyards that reveal varying animal husbandry methods, including a few mucky eyesore operations. The typical farm buildings are a mixture of brick, stone, and wood. In this northern fringe of the Cotswolds, tidiness is not the priority, partly because these are working farms, not the playgrounds for the wealthy equestrian set we will encounter farther south.

Last night, after returning to our farmhouse
B&B
after dinner, we heard a great commotion in the barnyard. The farmer told us over tea in the kitchen that the noise was from the pigs. The taciturn chap tapped his pipe and casually advised us that pigs occasionally indulge in cannibalism and bite each other's tails off. He says it's not uncommon for him to find two or three pigs in the morning running about with blood all over them, and he has seen a mature pig take three good chomps to bite off the tail of a baby pig — apparently out of boredom. Mind you, he's proud of his pigs, which are Gloucester Old Spots, a large, black-and-white breed that has been prized for its exceptional quality meat for over three hundred years: prime pork.

“Do any other animals bite each other's tails off?” I ask.

“Not usually.”

“That's ironic,” I ponder, “because geneticists tell us that of all living creatures, humans most resemble the pig.”

The farmer smiles. “Old Churchill had it right when he said he was fond of pigs. ‘Dogs look up to us; cats look down on us; but pigs treat us as equals,' the grand old man said.
”

For the rural English, the family pig was akin to the family cow in North America. After Enclosure, villagers no longer had any grazing space. Keeping a cow required negotiation with some big landowner, but a pig could forage about the lanes by itself and find enough scraps to keep alive. The family fed its pig on food waste such as peelings, and watched it fatten. Once a year they slaughtered their animal, providing ham, sausages, bacon, and lard for many months. Writer Flora Thompson was typical of Victorian children, going to bed crying after the pig was killed, scalded, and butchered, since it had served as a family pet for the months preceding its demise. William Cobbett wrote in
Cottage Economy
that “a couple of flitches of bacon are worth fifty thousand Methodist sermons and religious tracts.”

Another source of food for poor village families was the autumn harvest gleanings from the crop fields. Country custom allowed women and children from the village to enter the fields to collect the grain that harvesters had missed. Such gleanings provided wheat for flour and barley to feed the cottage pig. The gleaning tradition helped reduce the cruel impact of Enclosure and could make the difference between starvation and subsistence to a poor village family.

The gleaning tradition is still followed in parts of rural Canada. I have a dear friend who drives a field truck alongside a harvester machine every September in New Brunswick's St. John River Valley to bring in the potato crop. After the fields are worked, he takes his pickup full of burlap sacks and gleans the potatoes that the harvester has missed, filling the sacks and then delivering them around local villages to elderly folk, struggling single parents, and the food banks.

The village of Long Compton sits astride the busy
A
3400 road to Oxford — and totally ignores it. The golden Cotswold-stone cottages bask in late-afternoon sun, and villagers walk about with their dogs and wheelbarrows. At Wyatts Farm Shop we enjoy homemade ice cream that is sheer decadence.

We check into our working farm
B&B
, which the landlady, Eileen, operates with a quiet efficiency. Her aged husband, Robert, runs the farm. It would be easy to write Robert off as some eighty-year-old down-at-heel codger in the early stages of dementia, but he seems more like a spry, amiable eccentric enjoying every moment of life. He thumps about his farmyard, his trusty thirteen-year-old border collie at his side, inspecting the poultry, the pigs, and his barns. He also smells of wine.

“When the old gal here gives out,” he says, patting the collie's stomach, “I'll likely go with her. I want us buried together. Now, Eileen here — that's my wife — she wants to be buried more proper in the churchyard, but I've told her that my dog goes with me, and if they won't take my dog in the old churchyard, well then, they won't get me. Reverend Sassers in the village says I should reconsider, as there's only a few spots where dogs can be buried, and it's not right I be separated from Eileen, like — but to me it's a matter of principle.”

When not tending to his farm animals, Robert can be found in his greenhouse. He shows us his winemaking operation. There are innumerable gallon glasses with bubbles of
CO
2
going “pop-pop-pop” at ten-second intervals. Robert sits with his collie, a broad smile on his wrinkled face. He explains that he has batches of blackcurrant and elderberry wine on the go, and that he makes precisely five gallons per season.

We order dinner at the Grey Fox. Our palates are well prepared for a repast of the highly recommended breast of duck, washed down nicely with elderflower wine. Upon returning to the farmhouse, we stop in again on Robert in his greenhouse close by. We find him peacefully smoking a briar pipe as he sits mesmerized by the “pop-pop-pop.” It appears that he hasn't moved an inch since we left him for dinner.

“Save a glass for us for next year,” smiles Karl.

“My dear fellow, it never lasts that long. I always run short by January.”

“Then why not make more than five gallons?”

“Say, now there's a good idea!” he laughs.

By this time, Eileen is standing in her apron in the farmhouse doorway, arms crossed, shaking her head and smiling.

I decide to change the conversation. “Robert, I understand your farm here goes back to Anglo-Saxon times. Have you ever found any old artifacts on the place?”

He pauses, watching the bottles. “Oh, now, I suppose a few coins over the years — from the plough, you know. The rocks, of course, keep pushing up, and new stuff comes to the surface.”

The collie stirs and looks up at us as if to signal that our audience with his master is over. So we hobble over to the cottage, where Eileen offers us some cheese and apple slices before retiring.

It has been an enervating day. We have walked some long miles and are now finally into the magnificent Cotswolds, a magical honeycomb of hidden valleys, softly rounded hills, and quiet, refined villages.

Eileen has overheard our conversation with Robert about being buried with his dog, something she obviously has heard before, and seems fine about. “As long as it is what he wants,” she says. “Bentley means a lot to him. At least it's better than becoming too attached to a fish.”

“Fish?” I query.

“Yes, over in Blockley, just a couple of miles from here, lies Fish Cottage. Back in the nineteenth century, the owner of the house, William Keyte, trained a trout to rise to the surface of his pond like a dolphin whenever he approached. Keyte became very affectionate with this fish. When the fish died at age twenty in 1855, his son inscribed a memorial stone in memory of the ‘Old Fish.' It can still be seen today: ‘Under the soil the old fish to lie. Twenty years he lived, and then did die. He was so tame, you understand, He would come and eat out of our hand.' ”

Perhaps, I reflect, the English anthropomorphize animals out of empathy for their plight. To humanize is not to demonize, according to David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher who had an enormous impact on the evolution of moral philosophy. As well as great classics like
The Wind in the Willows, Winnie the Pooh,
and
Watership Down,
there are the traditional folk tales of badgers' funerals, rooks' parliaments, magpies' weddings, and hedgehogs milking cows. Badgers, toads, voles, moles, bears, and rabbits all become vested with human characteristics and, hence, empathy.

Then there is the incredible influence of bird protection activists, who number in the millions. How do they feel about the serving of wood pigeons to delight our wretched human palates? Robins are protected by legislation, and it's a heinous offence to intentionally kill or injure any wild bird without special dispensation. The writer John Betjeman is said to have once asked, “Who runs the country? The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Their members are behind every hedge.” And in this day's
Telegraph
I read of a ruckus in Thornbury, Gloucestershire, where three robins were “assassinated” by a squad of pest control officials at the Wyevale Garden Centre. The birds allegedly posed a public health risk by flying around the centre's cafeteria. The
SWAT
team action has been condemned by animal welfare charities and is now being investigated by government. Now we know who killed Cock Robin — it's a pest control company with the progressive name of Ecolab.

I fall asleep dreaming of witches' brew with Robert sitting in his shed smoking his briar pipe; I hear the pop-pop-pop of the
CO
2
as Karl and I sit drinking elderberry wine.

NEXT MORNING,
we encounter another mystery with links to witchcraft. Immediately after breakfast we hike up to the Rollright Stones, a circle of megaliths that stand high on a hill above the Macmillan Way. At the brow of the hill, we pass through a copse, on the other side of which stand these strange prehistoric monuments.

As with Stonehenge, tremendous effort went into hauling these boulders up here, and we really know nothing of their significance. The stones date from 3000
BC
. The main group, known as the King's Men, is a circle of seventy-seven stones covered with mosses and lichens. A solitary stone stands across the lane, larger than the others. It resembles a seal balancing a ball on its nose. This upright, the King Stone, shows signs of vandalism, with many chip marks. During the Civil War, soldiers would break a piece off and put it in their pockets as a good-luck charm for pending battle. In the 1930s, the King Stone had to be fenced in to stop local troops from chipping it down to nothing.

The Rollrights have been a venue for witches to meet since at least Tudor times. This is considered hallowed ground by Wiccans, practitioners of modern-day witchcraft. The site is also supposed to enhance fertility. Young women were known to come here to touch the King Stone at night with their breasts. The archaeologist William Stukeley related in 1743 that young men and maidens gathered at the Rollrights on a specific day each year “to make merry with cakes and ale.”

The presence of the stones has in legend been attributable to a local witch who cast a fatal spell upon a warrior leader and his retainers. The witch, Mother Shipton, taunted the would-be king by challenging him to approach the escarpment and look for Long Compton below. When he failed the test, the witch cackled:

“As Long Compton thou canst not see, King of England thou shalt not be! Rise up stick and stand still stone, for King of England thou shalt be none; thou and thy men hoar stones shall be. And I myself an elder tree!”

And with that, the king and all his men were turned to stone.

On our way down the hill we pass two black-cloaked, hooded figures whose faces are hidden. Karl nods a greeting, but they look away. A couple of Druids?

The main footpath now takes us past a quarry and through a gate over a cattle grid beside Grey Goose Farm. A short hop and we are sauntering up to the gates of Chastleton House, a Stuart mansion managed by the National Trust. The house was built in 1612 for a wealthy wool merchant. The Long Gallery is amazing, seventy-two feet long with a high, vaulted ceiling. On the grounds, we view an amazing array of box trees, carved as topiary into toys and chessmen clustered around a sundial.

The big attractions for me, however, are the two croquet fields laid out adjacent to the mansion, where a group of spirited fanatics are playing their guts out. Much of British sporting culture has of course permeated North America. Golf has been adopted by Americans even more fervently than by the British, yet the one golf course in the world still revered by all golfers is St. Andrews in Scotland, and in tennis, Wimbledon is still the über-event. Lawn bowling, which dates to the thirteenth century, is still immensely popular in England. The invention of the lawnmower, patented in 1830, led to a surge in popularity of many such sports, including lawn bowling, cricket, croquet, soccer, and lawn tennis. Prior to this invention, sheep were the chief means by which to create a smooth, level playing pitch.

Croquet has long been a pastime of English and North American families. The sport came to England from Ireland in 1852. It quickly became popular as a family and party activity because it could be played virtually anywhere on a well-clipped lawn, and the configuration might vary with the terrain. It was also the first outdoor sport that could be played by men and women as equals.