Walking to Camelot (14 page)

The rules of croquet were formalized right here at Chastleton House in 1866, by Walter Whitmore-Jones. They were then published in
The Field
magazine, as were the rules of lawn tennis, in 1877. The English are the most avid organizers of rules for games in the world, propelled by their manic anger against unfairness. Adam Smith coined the term “level playing field” in his (naïve) vision of capitalism, but it also defines the English sporting view of the world. The English have never reconciled their view of sports as a gentleman's game of amateurs with the cutthroat world of professional sport. The Academy Award–winning film
Chariots of Fire
exemplifies this angst.

Yes. I remember Adlestrop —

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

. . .

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

—EDWARD THOMAS—

“Adlestrop”

A WARM DRIZZLE FALLS
as we leave Chastleton via a pictur-esque meadow of buttercups, irises, and daisies. There is a distinct aroma of mint in the air. “June damp and warm does the farmer no harm” is an English folk saying, apropos this year.

I make for a stile to the left of two tall beech trees. The spire of the Stow-on-the-Wold church is discernible in the distance. My knees and ankles are aching and Karl's pace is not slacking. I reach a paved lane on the outskirts of Adlestrop. This is the village immortalized by the poet Edward Thomas, who was travelling through on the train in 1914.

The first thing I see upon entering the village is Karl standing beside a dross bus shelter sign, peering down at a plaque. On it are etched the famous lines of Thomas's cherished poem “Adlestrop.” Thomas, who was killed in 1917 at Arras, remains a painful reminder that Britain lost the flower of a generation in the mass slaughter of World War
I
.

Thomas walked the footpaths with Robert Frost in Gloucestershire in 1913, inspiring Frost to write his famous poem, “The Road Not Taken”: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, / And sorry I could not travel both . . .” When Frost sent Thomas the draft of this poem, Thomas felt compelled to immediately enlist in the army, as he viewed himself as having prevaricated between Frost's “two roads diverged” — in his mind, the rootedness of the comfy shire versus the road to battle for his country. Thomas has exercised a major influence upon how we view and write about the English countryside. He once wrote, “Much has been written of travel, far less of the road.”

During the dark days of 1943, Peter Scott, son of the famous Scott of Antarctica, spoke on the
BBC
: “For most of us, England means a picture of a certain kind of countryside, the English countryside. If you spend much time at sea, that particular combination of fields and hedges and woods that is so essentially England seems to have a new meaning.” Even though most of the massive destruction wrought by the Luftwaffe in England was over cities, it was, says Scott, “that . . . countryside we were so determined to protect from the invader.”
1

By that time England had already become a largely urban society, but the idyll for most English people was still a cottage in the country. Songs sung by Vera Lynn to lift the spirits of the troops in World War
II
fantasized about the white cliffs of Dover and country lanes:

There'll always be an England

While there's a country lane,

Wherever there's a cottage small

Beside a field of grain.

It's almost as if the urban English always have the countryside at their back, beckoning. It is the refuge, the sacred shire, the Land of Lost Content. Linda Proud writes in
Consider England,
“The idea of a village, romantically dishevelled with tall nettles obscuring rusting tools, with ivy and vines invading walls, with chickens, geese and ducks laying eggs under bushes, with a snuffling pig or two and some feral cats, is the form of a longing buried deep in the English soul. It means home and it means freedom.”

William Blake's famous poem “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time” betrays that same prejudice against urbanity:

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among these dark Satanic mills?

Blake contrasts the mills with England's “green and pleasant land.” To this day, the poem that was transformed into a hymn, “Jerusalem,” is the most popular song in the land, sung at funerals, weddings, clubs, sports events, and innu-merable other functions. Nostalgia overwhelms this country — nostalgia not for power or for empire, but for the ancient green land. Hence the English aphorism “You are closer to God in a garden.”

We find no rail station in Adlestrop, for it was demolished in 1966. The Cotswold Line tracks are still in use in nearby Evenlode Valley, but thousands of miles of rail trackage have been removed as part of an efficiency program that has severely reduced rail service. English country people have never forgiven the government for abandoning five thousand miles of track and closing more than two thousand railway stations following Dr. Beeching's efficiency report of 1965. His name is still vilified. The closing of these lines has left deep scars — long lines of weeds and grass, and stations left as boarded-up wrecks. But as in North America, it has provided a bonus to walkers, with the popular “rails to trails” trend. It is weird, though, stumbling upon abandoned brick and stone bridges mouldering in the woods, covered with ivy, moss, and brambles — and leading nowhere.

“What did Thomas mean by writing that the train ‘drew up there unwontedly'?” Karl asks.

“I don't know. Nobody got on or off, but I suppose it could have expressed Thomas's mood, as if it was frivolous for the train to stop for no reason.”

We potter over to the church, across from which is the gabled rectory, Adlestrop House, where Jane Austen stayed with her cousin, Rev. Thomas Leigh, on several occasions between 1794 and 1806. Another Austen relative owned the manor of Adlestrop Park. On these visits Jane attended this church, but she would not have seen the impressive clock hanging over the gateway, which was erected to celebrate Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, nor the prominent sign warning of a two-penny fine for “use of improper language in the belfry.” Jane would have dusted her shoes off at the church entrance because the roads in the village were then unpaved and consisted of loose, chalky white limestone.

Jane Austen found her cousin's rectory a grand place, suit-able for the high station that rectors such as Reverend Leigh still enjoyed in the late eighteenth century. The home boasted eight hearths, five maids, a butler, and two liveried manser­vants. From her room in the rectory, Jane looked out upon immaculately kept grounds, including a lovely walled garden. She was a great walker, and traversed paths now part of the Macmillan Way that led to nearby Chastleton House. She also enjoyed a private walk to a lake on the neighbouring Adlestrop Park estate. In her perambulations about the village, Jane would have noted labourers' cottages with thatched roofs, such as the still surviving Pear Tree Cottage, and the daily congregating of village women round the town pump to draw water and share the local gossip. Jane arrived for visits here from her home in Bath by coach and horses that delivered her directly to the door of the rectory along a road that is now a bridleway.

Mansfield Park
has a scene depicting Adlestrop as a model country village. In rural estates such as Adlestrop House and the grandiose Adlestrop Park, Jane Austen, like George Eliot, found the ideal of country living and a moral society extant within a relatively self-sustaining community. Austen lived at a time when 80 percent of England's nine million people lived in villages or hamlets. The philosopher Roger Scruton opines that “the country house came to represent an ideal of English civilisation — one in which hierarchy was softened by neighbourliness, and wealth by mutual aid.”

The walk from Adlestrop to Stow-on-the-Wold combines quiet country lanes with bridleways and pleasant footpaths. The day is sorting itself out and a certain luminescence is appearing in the western sky. We come across an elderly couple hunched over in a field of dandelions. The man's bearded face is weathered and tanned, as are his big, gnarled hands; his wife is portly and brimming with a robust red-cheeked vitality. I ask them what they are harvesting.

“Dandelions,” grunts the man.

“Is that for dandelion wine?”

He stands up, scratches his thin beard, and then replies, “No, it's for the guinea pigs.” Then he goes back to work, both he and his wife placing the dandelions in large buckets.

We decide to back off and move on. “Do you think he was pulling our leg?” laughs Karl.

“I honestly don't know, Karl. Maybe they do raise guinea pigs!”

The bluebells may be fading, but I am in love with them still, plucking a few and holding them up to the sunlight to admire their translucence, which reminds me of the agates and opals I collect from West Coast beaches and Fraser River sandbars. Interspersed with the bluebells are wild garlic plants, which I can't stop munching like a ravenous rabbit. Karl says I will make myself sick, and that my breath stinks.

The leaves of the garlic plants are spear-shaped and slender, and release a scent that seduces one to pluck and suck. This wild garlic is a species native to Britain and grows prolifically in ancient woodland. Garlic contains allicin, which is both antifungal and antibacterial. And of course chopped-up garlic adds real zest to salads and soup. After munching my fill I lope awkwardly along the winding path to try to catch up to Karl. I am wracked with momentary guilt, for I have trespassed off the path to enjoy the bounty of this private wood.

The owner has every right to complain about us walkers. Perhaps Madonna has a point in wanting to maintain her estate unsullied by muddy-booted ramblers. History records that even the most passionate democrats have ranted against public footpaths crossing their land. For instance, E.M. Forster,author of
A Passage to India,
purchased a little wood in Surrey,not far from London, but was tortured by the fact that it was “intersected, blast it, by a public footpath.” This literary champion of the common man morphed into a strident property owner, on the prowl against anyone who plucked
his
black­berries,
his
bluebells,
his
hazelnuts. Forster derided the prevailing economic system that in his view caused him such conflict in his soul between empathy for the rights of the common man to access woodland and the desire of the owner to protect that land from public despoliation.

This introspection leads me to realize that the linear walk we have been taking, now well into our second week, is completely different from loop walks; it really is a journey in which one loses oneself to the landscape of history. We have passed through the Narnia wardrobe portal. The modern world is a thousand miles away. Thanks to Karl's problems with his mobile phone, we are deliciously cut off from the cares of daily life, emails left behind. Though I look forward to talking to my wife every week or so, I do not wish to hear about the mundane issues of family and household which she is facing. Selfish me.

The Cotswolds are classed as one of the world's areas of outstanding natural beauty. The name derives from the Saxon
cote,
a sheepfold, and
wold,
meaning a bare hill. The Cotswolds defines that range of hills in west central England some twenty-five miles across and ninety miles long, centred in Gloucestershire but including parts of Wiltshire, Somerset, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, and Oxfordshire. Sheep are the economic engine in the history of the Cotswolds. The splendid towns, fine churches, and magnificent honey-hued mansions were all paid for by wool profits from an era when England ruled the world of cloth manufacturing. In Westminster, the lord chancellor still sits on the Woolsack.

Huge flocks of sheep used to be driven from Wales, and it could take three hours or more for them to pass through towns like Stow and Banbury. By the fourteenth century, Europeans recognized the best wool as being English — and in England, the prime wool was Cotswold. After shearing, Cotswold wool was usually sent to ports like Southampton, from where it was shipped to the Continent. Local merchants grew wealthy and gave some of that wealth to the building of parish churches and other important buildings. A Cotswold epitaph for one such merchant reads:

I praise God and ever shall

It is the sheep hath paid for all.

After the demise of the woollen industry, this region of rolling and folding hills and coombs, of quiet villages and tiny lanes, quickly became a mecca for tourists and the retiring affluent. Horse riding, breeding, and racing are all the rage. The pubs overflow with well-dressed, tweedy locals and weekending Londoners.

The Cotswolds are home to a star-studded roster — Prince Charles, Prime Minister David Cameron, Arab sheikhs, industrial barons, and film stars such as Kate Winslet, Elizabeth Hurley, and Hugh Grant, to name but a few. Don't expect them to participate in ferret-racing, cheese-rolling, or nettle-eating contests. But by and large, they respect the long-time country residents and traditions. Of course, appearances in this country are invariably deceiving: the farmer's wife down the lane might well have a degree in nuclear physics; her unshaven, eccentric neighbour puttering about his greenhouse in mismatched tweeds and smoking the briar pipe — meet the former ambassador to Iran.

The acerbic A.A. Gill is scathing in his comments about Cotswolds residents, particularly the part-time urbanites. He notes in
The Angry Island
that the area has become a playground for the rich to indulge their fantasies; it's all about “paddocks and swimming pools and pheasant shoots.” The price of a small cottage in a quiet village is well beyond the reach of most working people. Gill mocks the Cotswold elite who enjoy the latest in home innovations, such as breakfast bars, Japanese grills, rotisseries, and, above all, the Aga stove — the equivalent of a church altar in the new country home.

The gentle side of sheep farming hits me on our way up to Stow. We stop to talk to a farm lady who is walking the path carrying a plastic bottle of milk and scanning the field slopes above. She is searching for a little lamb that was evidently so tiny after birth that it needs bottle nourishment to help it through. She asks us if we have seen it. We have not, but shortly after this encounter, I surreptitiously watch Karl stop a distance ahead of me to disentangle a slightly injured large lamb from some brambles by a fence, and he is surprisingly gentle. I don't say anything to him, but I have seen!