The last field in England

"Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorled ear
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear."
The Habit of Perfection, Gerard Manley Hopkins 

Today I walked across the last field in England. A field that I had first wondered about as I viewed it from the high walls of Chepstow Castle, over on the western bank of the river Wye. This quiet pasture, Edward Thomas' archetypal "acre of land between shore and the hills", occupies a sloping promontory around which the tidal section of the river curves as it cuts through oolitic limestone before feeding the water hungry Severn estuary. Two miles to the south-east a still extant section of bank and ditch marks the southerly starting point of the eighth century Offa's Dyke, commencing its monumental 150 mile peregrination of the Welsh Marches to the banks of the Dee estuary in the north. The dyke formed an intermittent constructed boundary, a physical marking of territorial desire, between Anglo-Saxon Mercia and the Welsh kingdoms to the west. It can be traced again, on the map and ground, just north of the field. In parts of the southern Marches the Wye forms a proxy boundary, a more powerful line of division than any human construct. Perhaps the meander traversing the field of interest here fulfilled this role; or maybe the meadow's landward boundary is a ghost memory of a stretch of the dyke long levelled, marooning the field itself as a mini no-mans-land, neither Saxon nor Welsh? Today the middle of the Wye (more properly Gwy in Welsh) is decorated with alternate black dashes and spots on the Ordnance Survey map, marking the coming together of Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire, of England and Wales.

There is something both inviting and slightly daunting in the thought of studying the micro-landscape of a single field. A small matter for a master such as Richard Jefferies who can devote a whole chapter to dwelling on the minutiae of the topography, flora and fauna of the 'homefield' in Wild Life in a Southern County, but more of a challenge to most of us, lacking the innate knowledge of the Victorian country-dwelling naturalist. Nevertheless, it is an approach that retains its appeal, witness Tim Dee's recent Four Fields, an expansive study of the geography, history, literature and ecology of varying, and admittedly atypical, areas of fields in the Fenland of Cambridgeshire, Zambia, Ukraine and Montana, USA; or The Plot by Madeleine Bunting, "a biography of an English acre", rooting a story of family history in a very particular place. A personal favourite is At The Water's Edge, John Lister-Kaye's journal of his observations on a daily circular walk to a modest Scottish hill loch; in the author's words, "turning its pages and dipping in, I realise it has taken me over thirty years to cover little more than a mile".

My intention here is less ambitious than the above tracts, but I do hope to give a voice to the overlooked places that are all around us: an on-going theme of this blog, but one that I feel has plenty more territory to explore. It is the limitless anonymous rural places that often seem absent from today's landscape discourse; lacking the profile of landmark and touristic countrysides, urban edgelands or even maligned agri-business prairie lands. John Clare knew and spoke for these unheralded places, for instance in his poem Stray Walks: "How pleasant are the fields to roam and think, whole sabbaths through unnoticed and alone". Such terrain forms the background montage for a thousand views, taken for granted; the landscape equivalent of the Jones-Bonham dependable rhythm section underpinning Page-Plant's front of stage howls and riffs. And therein lies the magic, far from the one-dimensional vision conjured by landscape platitudes: green and pleasant land, outstanding natural beauty, national treasures. Its the thrill of a spatial portal to new ways of seeing past, present and possible futures, in plain sight but obscured by ordinariness; an open invitation to new adventures in topography, accidentally esoteric: providing the opportunity to, in Phil Legard's words, take "a small step into the realms of psychegeographic reverie". Dozens of examples exist on any Ordnance Survey sheet or Google Earth view, waiting to be discovered, mapped but unknown: hedges, walls, fences, quarries, pits, fords, bridges, tracks, barns, streams, springs, wells, weirs, ditches, ponds, copses, brakes, lynchets, pylons, sewage plants, tumuli, windmills, dovecots, and on, and on.

Its through such a portal, a hedge, that the protagonists of Ben Wheatley's A Field In England enter the titular field in which the narrative of the whole film is set, seemingly entering a parallel universe a world away from the Civil War skirmish taking place on the other side of the bushes. There they seek arcane and possibly diabolical knowledge or treasure, we do not find out what. Magic mushrooms - psilocybin - abound in the host field, and help to fuel a psychedelic trip into madness and beyond; an original perspective on the upheavals of the English Civil War.

The historical setting here is Monmouthshire (which, administatively at least, had an ambiguous status at this time as to whether it was within England or Wales), on the western bank of the Wye. My field lies on the eastern side of the river in Gloucestershire, but mirrors something of the atmosphere of the film. It does not take much of a leap of the imagination to picture a rag-tag group of Civil War renegades passing through in search of an inn, a passage home or maybe some natural psychedelics to temporarily banish the horrors of the conflict.      

And so into the field, which frustratingly has to remain nameless until such time as I can pore over tithe or estate maps at the Gloucester Records Office (although my initial guess is that some variation on 'Chapelhouse' or 'Chapel field' may be a contender).

The field annotated in green on the modern Ordnance Survey map; extract from Digimap. 

Historically this promontory was within the bounds of Tidenham, a large royal manor occupying the land immediately south of the Forest of Dean between the Severn and the Wye. The manor was recorded in a tenth century charter, became part of the Marcher lordship of Striguil (Chepstow) and was turned into a hunting chase, separate from the Royal Forest of Dean, in the thirteenth century.

Ordnance Survey map extract, from Digimap.

The earliest Ordnance Survey 1880's map (above) shows the modern day single eight hectare field divided into five enclosures, with a brickyard where the residential road now runs and a small pond and heath occupying the site of today's larger pond in the south-western corner. From the gateway in the south-east corner a raised track follows the field boundary to a collection of brick buildings, concrete clad, corrugated iron roofed and now part overtaken by ivy and hawthorn; a fire-place and cattle stalls bearing witness to their original mid-twentieth century agricultural utility. The map evidence suggests that the topographical footprint achieved its current configuration during the 1960's. 

The line of the old boundary along the middle of the field mirrors the curve of the river and follows what, on the ground, is the visible edge of a natural river terrace. This morphological symmetry with the river is shared by a ditch along the western edge of the field, running into the pond and encased by a thick hawthorn hedge. Crossing the field I am naturally drawn to a single oak standard holding centre stage, its trunk surrounded by large limestone blocks and pieces of brickwork; what structure they have come from is not immediately obvious. Below the river terrace three ducks enjoy the last mud of winter flooding, the grass and clover of the water meadow providing rich grazing for the cattle occupying the field. The murky morning stillness is studded by the scat singing of great tits, and the echoing calls of seagulls and rooks. Perambulating the boggy perimeter and surveying the rising ground of the field I muse on the people who have toiled in these acres over centuries: what thoughts did they share on the Norman uber-hooligans who established the castle on the cliff opposite? Did they consider themselves to be Welsh, English or something in between? The Forest of Dean borderlands with Wales, in contrast to the Welsh Marches further north, are characterised by a marked absence of 'Welshness' in terms of surnames, place and field names, but this has always been a land apart from the more generally accepted norms of nationality.     

Eventually I reach the northern end of the field, with the muddy Wye beyond and the steeply wooded opposite bank just starting to come into leaf, vivid greens permeating the dull greys and browns of retreating winter austerity. Here is great potential for some landscape archaeology prospecting. For somewhere in this corner of the field lie the buried remains of the chapel of St David's, a few metres north of its boundary is the postulated river crossing of the Roman military road from Caerleon to Gloucester and a short way into the adjacent Chapelhouse Wood the bank and ditch fragment of Offa's Dyke. When, last summer, I originally noticed this large field from the castle and lodged a vague mental note to have a closer look sometime I had no knowledge of this archaeological treasury; another example of the extraordinary wealth of historical interest and local stories connecting with wider narratives seemingly to be found within any randomly selected part of the British landscape.

Map courtesy of Natural England, based on Ordnance Survey ST59SW map Crown Copyright

Prior to the visit I was aware that the line of the Roman road was in this vicinity, but had not appreciated that the accepted site for the crossing of the Wye (via a wooden bridge, the footings of which have been found at low tide and were observed by the nineteenth century antiquarian George Ormerod: "paralled lines of black remains of stakes are clearly seen at low tides crossing the bed of the river") was so close to the field (see photo above). The road ascended Alcove Wood (following the line of the Chepstow/ St. Arvans parish boundary) on the opposite side of the river and then ran uphill to Tutshill to join the present A48, which still follows the line of its Roman ancestor. The section from the river to the modern road is not visible on the ground, but appears as a track as recently as the 1920's Ordnance Survey map. This map also indicates Striguil Bridge (remains of) at the above location and site of St David's Chapel in the adjacent corner of the set of fields on the promontory.

The fantastically named Archaeologicia or Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity (Vol 29) published by the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1842 notes a thirteenth century reference to the chantry chapel of St David's "juxta potem de Strugell", which later became a possession of Striguil (Chepstow) Priory, and also that the remains of the ruined chapel were visible in 1814. The same book also seems to suggest that the antique wooden bridge was still extant, though ruinous, as mentioned in Leland's Itinerary of 1535-43 and quotes a later sixteenth century source for the bridge being "clean carried away"; although these references may be to an earlier bridge on the site of the current iron road bridge just downstream. A cursory examination of this section of the field yielded no visible 'humps and bumps' earthworks indicating the location of the chapel, and the whereabouts of Chapelhouse Farm, mentioned in some sources is not verified by any of the historical OS maps. 

However, the nearby Roman bridge site and surviving dyke were all the excuse I needed to duck through the barbed wire fence bounding the field and enter the briar and bramble of the liminal terrain beyond. Scrambling along the shoreline a rocky promontory looked a likely abutment for a bridge, the thick mud below perhaps hiding further evidence of Roman engineering below. The steep wooded river bank here was at once archetypal of the British Isles - carpeted by bluebell and anemone, ivy clad yews - but simultaneously, looking across the wide, brown river, a vision of riverine Amazonia; a place to inspire Fitzcarraldo dreaming. An informal path snaking through this rain forest facsimile is a reminder that such places are beyond the allegedly definitive truth of the Ordnance Survey map and the supposedly all seeing eye of Google Earth.

Having found the remnant bank of the Dyke, darkly entombed by towering and toppled larch, an excursion upriver was now in motion, following an old fisherman's path through a nature reserve at the foot of gigantic limestone cliffs. The scene here further evocative of South American sublime grandeur, particularly when crossing a rock fall, the black boulders stretching upwards into Andean infinity. The limestone from these now silent cliffs has in the past been heavily exploited for use as building material, the Wye providing a convenient route for transporting the heavy loads by boat to the Severn Estuary and beyond. A vernacular design of craft particular to the river was the flat-bottomed trow, many of which plied their trade between the Wye and Bristol; a historical memory kept alive through the name of a well-known Bristolian pub dating from 1664, the Llandoger Trow.   

Just around the next bend in the river lies the peninsula of Lancaut (from the Welsh, Llan Cewydd), a pulse of land cut-off by Offa's Dyke as it heads north with no time for diversion. The small parish of Lancaut within the manor of Tidenham was a settlement of some size by the fourteenth century, but progressively shrunk to its current single farmstead in the subsequent centuries to become one of countless examples of the deserted medieval village. Here was established an early British monastic settlement, named for St Cewydd (first reference c625). A ruined church named St James', its fabric dated to late 12th century, now stands on the site and may have served time as a leper colony for Chepstow Castle. In fact, this remote church seems to have had something of an itinerant and varied history of ownership, use and status and was ruinous by 1885.     

The church and its location are almost impossibly picturesque and atmospheric, though on a damp and misty April day a sense of Gothic melancholy is at large. In fact the roofless relic brings to mind the scenes set in ruined churches in The Wicker Man and the lesser known 'folk horror' offering Blood On Satan's Claw. Although a solitary visitor today, I am accompanied by the celluloid ghosts of Sergeant Howie and Angel Blake. If the recently revived Hammer Films are on the look out for suitable locations then here they have one that would admirably meet their needs. 

Still from The Wicker Man (from www.diaboliquemagazine.com)

Still from Blood On Satan's Claw (from www.hickeysonic.wordpress.com)

   

"The clifftop situation, the stern fortification of the earliest parts and the sumptuous enrichment of later ones, combined with the exceptional completeness of so much, make Chepstow Castle one of the most exhilarating and instructive castles in the whole of Britain" (The Buildings of Wales: Gwent/ Monmouthshire, Newman).

Back to the field: although it is the river that in many ways defines its topography, history and character, the dramatic backdrop of Chepstow Castle, a rock-bound menhir looming across the water, dominates the view from within its bounds. Chepstow and Monmouthshire, like Berwick on the English-Scottish border, have had a forced history of national schizophrenia, mostly Welsh in character and population but administratively a more unclear status. The castle has remained a constant, dominating the town since its foundation by the Norman lord William FitzOsbern in 1067 at the southern end of the chain of fortifications bestriding the Welsh Marches. 

The "steep and lofty cliffs" of the Wye that "connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky" made a lasting impression on Wordsworth during his visit in 1793, as recorded in Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey from Lyrical Ballads. At the same time the Wye was gaining popularity as part of the nascent touristic itinerary, with artists also drawn to its natural and historic wonders. The picturesque ruins of Chepstow castle high up on their limestone cliff particularly attracted the painterly gaze.

The field's position on the opposite bank of the river, with a clear view of the length of the castle's fortifications strung out along the cliff top, is an obvious vantage point for an artist to take up position. Below are a number of paintings of the castle that may have been painted from the field, or include it as part of the scene.

Chepstow Castle, 1905, Philip Wilson Steer (from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/steer-chepstow-castle-n02473)

River Wye ('Chepstow Castle'), c1806-07, Joseph Mallord William Turner (from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/steer-chepstow-castle-n02473)

View of Chepstow, c1750, artist unknown (from http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/view-of-chepstow-159348)

Chepstow Castle belonging to his Grace the Duke of Beauford. (Monmuthshire), Joannes Kipp (from http://publicpleasuregarden.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/american-reaction-to-18th-century-grand.html)

Reflecting on the experiences of the day, my mind is taken back to the field of my childhood. We knew this place as the ‘Echo Meadows’, whether this was our made up name, local lore or a genuine field name I do not remember. Here the meadow abutted the massive sandstone outer walls of a Norman-medieval castle, and was bounded by the curve of a stream. Hours, days and weeks were spent roaming and lolling around this field, mapping on foot and on paper its everyday features, imbuing them with significance: ‘bully bridge’, the ruined sheep dip, the overgrown holloway – a hidden space for watching, like an apprentice rogue male. This is a place much like 'The Field', an area of old parkland adjacent to the 1950's Metroland suburban home that Richard Mabey describes in his extended essay, A Good Portion of English Soil; a wild playground for the local children in which "'Nature' was something we all took for granted, like an extra layer of skin".

But it is not just children who can enjoy playgrounds. We should all remember that the landscape is waiting for us to learn from it, to adventure into it. Go and find your field.   

References

Hammond, J (Ed.), 1965. Red Guide: The Wye Valley. Ward Lock.

Hart, C, 2000. Between Severn (Saefern) and Wye (Waege) in the Year 1000. Sutton.

Hill, D & Worthington, M, 2003. Offa's Dyke: History and Guide. Tempus.

Hopkins, G, 1966. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Vista.

Legard, P, 2011. Psychogeographia Ruralis: Observations concerning landscape and the imagination. The Larkfall Press.

Lister-Kaye, J, 2011. At the Water's Edge: A Walk in the Wild. Canongate.

Mabey, R, 2013. A Good Parcel of English Soil. Penguin.

Newman, J, 2000. The Buildings of Wales: Gwent/ Monmouthshire. Yale University Press.

Walters, B, 1992. The Archaeology and History of Ancient Dean and the Wye Valley. Thornhill.

Wordsworth, W and Coleridge, S, 1924. Lyrical Ballads, 1798. Oxford University Press.

Archaeologicia or Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity (Vol 29)

Gatehouse Gazetteer

Victoria County History: A History of the County of Gloucester

Landscape in Particular: The Uffington White Horse and Wayland's Smithy

"I write with very cold hands, the White Horse twenty to thirty yards below me to my right ... and the sun breaks through suddenly and warms my aching soul. Long shadows across the man-made fortifications below - long shadows and a Blakean arc of rays cuts the cold and draws me into its eternal glow ... Earthworks abound and I cannot help but scan the horizon ... The shadows lengthen and more peace ... White chalk routes cut these hills and stalk out this endless greenery. Greenery. Ha, ha! A delirious man awake and awash in a sea of green."

So reads Julian Cope's entry for Uffington White Horse in his survey of the sites of Megalithic Britain, The Modern Antiquarian; and I share Cope's cold hands and sense of awakeness as I view the same scene on a day of equally long shadows and arcing sunlight. My time would be spent on the wild downland overlooking the Vale of the White Horse, encompassing the historic boundaries between Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Wiltshire and presenting a curious mix of the pastoral and the functional in the form of the sprawl of Swindon, the mainline railway from London to Wales and the West Country, and the RAF air bases of Fairford and Brize Norton. The 'thud, thud, thud' of Sea King helicopters from the latter would regularly punctuate the day's soundscape; with the title track from PJ Harvey's 2007 album, White Chalk, providing the more appealing counterpoint pulsing through my thoughts.

XTC - English Settlement album cover
en.wikipedia.com

"High on a hilltop wind-swept site: the pagan horse in chalk scratched white." Opening line from a framed poem in All Saint's Church, Woolstone.

The Uffington White Horse is a well known and highly stylised landscape symbol, its singularity undimmed by familiarity (and now seemingly reproduced in Mexico). Although widely acknowledged as probably the most ancient of the numerous hill-figures across the high ground of Wessex, there are various theories about its origins. From folklore we have the story that the horse was carved to celebrate King Alfred's victory over the Danes at the Battle of Ashdown in 871, believed to have taken place locally. However, excavated silt analysed in the 1990s was dated to the first millennium BC. This evidence would support the view that the figure is in fact a tribal emblem carved during the Iron Age as a territorial indicator, probably by the Dobunni tribe of this region. More fanciful theories have positioned the horse as a fertility symbol or star marker, designed to be viewed from the heavens rather than from below. Commanding the heights above the chalk-cut horse, and adjacent to the passing Ridgeway path, is Uffington Castle, an Iron Age hillfort dating from the 7th century BC. A carnival and fair was traditionally held within its bounds during the scouring undertaken every seven years to renew the chalk.    

Close-up the lines of the iconic chalk figure take on the strangely mundane appearance of golf course bunkers. Treading the curving white paths of the horse I made my way down slope and then up to Dragon Hill, a natural chalk outlier of the main ridge artificially levelled to give a distinctive flat-topped appearance. The hill is named for the local legend that St George here slew the dragon. It is said that nothing has ever grown on a bare patch on the summit where the dragon's blood was spilt. A fascinating fiction.

The Manger is the name given to the steep-sided natural amphitheatre that forms the head of the dry valley below White Horse hill. In many ways this is the most intriguing element of the area's topography. Dropping into its depths, one is shadowed not only from the brightness of the low winter sun but also the surrounding ambient noise on this thin-aired day. Looking back up to the horse figure and hillfort this would seem the most dramatic way up to the monuments, and its easy to imagine this as a processional route designed to maximise climactic impact. Its also noticeable that here the natural morphology of one side of the valley gives it a distinctive whale-backed pattern, like a row of prehistoric long barrows. This use of natural features in the landscape to frame or influence prehistoric practices and monumental architecture, even to provide design inspiration, is fascinatingly investigated in Richard Bradley's An Archaeology of Natural Places.     

Looking up from within The Manger the horse is visible just below the ridge line, but a discussion with a National Trust Warden fixing fence posts reveals that it may have had an even more striking appearance from this vantage point. It is thought that the figure was considerably larger in the past and faint lines in the slope just below the current position may indicate that the legs were once much longer. Whether this is true or not, it seems much more plausible that the figure was designed to be seen by the human-eye from below, and from miles around, rather than a monument to be viewed from the air by the gods. The Warden also confirmed that the scouring to keep the figure white and clear of overgrowth is still regularly undertaken, though now using volunteers from far and wide rather than local villagers (who it seems were anyway somewhat press-ganged into the work by the Craven Estate, the big local landowner and employer).

After lunch - perhaps inevitably at The White Horse pub in nearby Woolstone (the village an amalgam of thatch, yew tree, woodsmoke and tasteful Farrow & Ball paint) - I made my way back up to the ridge via a sunken green lane. On the way passing Handwell Camp, another hillfort, its immense banks and ditches hidden in woodland and intriguingly cut into the scarp slope rather than occupying the top of the ridge as is more common. Having walked past the body of a dead roe fawn, my ascent was accompanied by something of a surge in wildlife, as I passed a number of deer scrapes and badger sets and observed a large flock of wood pigeons and several red kite, patrolling the thermals.  

The Vale of the White Horse (1939) by
Eric Rivilious www.tate.org.uk

Cresting a ridge always provides the excitement of entering a new realm, steep slopes forming a liminal border that millennia of human activity cannot alter. At this time of year the seemingly endless undulating high country of the North Wessex Downs that now come into view to the south is a sea of brown, russet, orange and fading green; bringing to mind the chalkland landscapes of Eric Ravilious. Encouraged to linger in my gaze by the day's sharp light I ruminate on the fact that the current topographical scene is largely a construct of the enclosure and agricultural improvement of the last two centuries or so. The monuments that pepper theses uplands would have been born into surroundings dominated by open grassland, no doubt with patches of woodland much less orderly than the angular shelter-beds, breaks and copses seen today. The question of what is an authentic landscape is however a futile and unnecessary one. In any case, much of what we see is mere surface dressing, covering the unchanging - at least in timescales that we can comprehend - natural morphology. The lines of the land catch your eye whatever transient topographical cloak they are currently wearing.

My final stopping point of the day is Wayland's Smithy, a Neolithic long barrow a few metres from the Ridgeway and a mile and a half west of the Uffington monuments. Six huge sarsen slabs formed the facade of the mound (now partially reconstructed), which then tapers out over its length of 55 metres. A cruciform chamber at the entrance can still be entered. When the interior was excavated in 1919 the remains of at least eight people were found. Later archaeological investigation revealed more human remains and that the barrow was built on top of an even earlier structure. The name given to the barrow is an example of the awe in which later waves of civilisations held such monuments, to them the work surely of gods or giants. In this case the Anglo-Saxon god Wayland or Weland. Local legend has it that an invisible smith lived in the chamber, known as The Cave, and if a horse were left at the entrance with a penny it would be shod when the owner returned. This may be a case of folkloric confusion - perhaps linking the monument with the nearby white horse - as Weland was a swordsmith and armourer in English and Norse mythology (the maker of Beowulf's chain mail) not a blacksmith. 

The barrow is encased by an oval of beech, bristling in the wind. Although a relatively new addition to the scene - such high-status burial mounds were designed to be clearly visible - the trees somehow seem to frame the monument in a fitting way. This is now a place for tranquil contemplation rather than supernatural blacksmithery.

The return to my starting point followed the Ridgeway; the miles on view in each direction, aptly described by R. Hippisley Cox in The Green Roads of England as "a spreading view of middle England", dramatically lit as the day prepared for dusk. This now modest track is the Ur-superhighway of southern England, traversing the high ground of the Wiltshire and Berkshire Downs and the Chilterns for nearly 100 miles. The hillforts, barrows and other prehistoric structures along its route speaking not only of its antiquity but also the huge span of time during which it remained as an important communication route, before the network of roads we use today emerged during the medieval period to render it a backwater byway. 

On reaching the summit of White Horse Hill once more, a celestial vision met my gaze: Didcot Power Station bathed in a shaft of winter sunshine, like a frame from Patrick Keiller's (Oxfordshire set) Robinson in Ruins. A fitting end to a day of, in the words of Swindonian Andy Patridge, senses working overtime.

This is the latest in a regular-occasional series of posts on specific landscapes and places that are particularly meaningful to me, for whatever reason; after all, interest in the topographical is nothing without a feeling for sense of place: genius loci.

Previous 'Landscape in particular' posts:

Harburton: Devon and Tierra del Fuego
Hergest Ridge

Worth Valley

 Cold Ashton

Kenilworth Castle

Bolton Abbey

References

Bradley, R, 2000. An Archaeology of Natural Places. Routledge.

Conduit, B, 1997. Somerset, Wiltshire and the Mendips Walks. Jarrold.

Cope, J, 1998. The Modern Antiquarian: A Pre-Millennial Odyssey through Megalithic Britain. Thorsons.

Darvill, T, Stamper, P & Timby, J, 2002. England: An Archaeological Guide. Oxford University Press.

Hippisley Cox, R, 1973. The Green Roads of England. Garnstone.

Muir, R, 2004. Landscape Encyclopaedia: A Reference Guide to the Historic Landscape. Windgather.

Vale of the White Horse blog http://valewhitehorse.blogspot.co.uk/

Westwood, J, 1987. Albion: A Guide to Legendary Britain. Paladin.

We had eyes for phantoms then

As the dying light of summer drifts through the snap of autumn, and life and the land are readied for the murk of winter, a sense of gloom begins to pervade, or so received wisdom dictates. But darkness and melancholia are a powerful combination, life-enhancing even. An existence without cold nights, foggy dawnings and cloudscapes with the promise of snow would be one sadly diminished. In William Blake’s words: “In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy”; and the lead-in to the midwinter solstice crackles with hearty and joyful arcane ceremony and ritual that has wintered throughout the centuries and still pulses strongly, though the times when gods, spirits and magic underpinned daily life are long behind us. The old ways were receding fast even in Thomas Hardy's time, as essayed in his elegiac poem Yuletide in a Younger World: 
"We had eyes for phantoms then,
And at bridge or stile
On Christmas Eve
Clear behind those countless ones who had crossed it
Cross again in file
Such has ceased longwhile!" 

What remains - the family and community conventions, and commercial set-pieces - of Halloween, Guy Fawkes Night, Christmas and New Year have become so ingrained that it is hard to look beyond their familiar glare. However, these are but the over-boiled remains of the framework of rites, feasts and gatherings that stitched together this glowering season for our ancestors; helping them through the months of thrift and want, life lived in a fallow landscape. Halloween, of course, derives from All Hallow’s Eve, a Christianised festival of all saints and the dead to mark the end of summer, with its pagan roots clear and strong. The fading light of dusk and the long dark nights of howling wind and rain, hostile to all but the cawing crow, provided, and still provide, a fitting backdrop not just to merry-making but also to storytelling; the subject matter often meeting a seemingly universal and antediluvian human desire to scare ourselves into safety. Samuel Johnson’s adage that “All argument is against it (the existence of ghosts); but all belief is for it” explaining the enduring popularity of tales of phantoms and the supernatural. 

Landscape, sense of place – the natural or human setting – is a key element of the folklore tales, songs and ghost stories that have always been at the heart of winter custom, underscored by the elements and the weather; such narratives for dark nights maintain their hold on our collective imagination exactly because they play out in a familiar environment that can easily shape-shift into something altogether more spectral, a phenomenonological shadowland: "Precisely because locales and their landscapes are drawn on in the day-to-day lives and encounters of individuals they possess powers. The spirit of a place may be held to reside in a landscape" (Christopher Tilley). So, like a gnarled character actor, the landscape helps to give its central storyline depth and authenticity. It is this preternatural terrain that will be navigated here. 

Voices from the well

The Church of Merthyr Issui at Patricio (now Partrishow) inhabits its location high up on the western slope of the Grwyne Fawr valley in the Black Mountains as only an ancient country church can do; nestled stone, standing in calm defiance of time. Seeking shade on a day of broiling heat, the dank emptiness inside was a welcome pause from the summer uniformity of the past few weeks. Looking up and around, the glory of the archaic architecture and iconography met my gaze; a spiritual, though - for this heathen - not a religious, leap back into the Middle Ages.

The church has occupied this site since at least the eleventh century and is named for a Christian hermit, Issui, who lived in a cell in the dingle below, next to the fast flow of Nant Mair ('St Mary's stream') and a Holy Well that probably predates the church as a place of worship and pilgrimage. Springs and wells have a deep topographical relationship with places of worship: as Richard Morris points out, 'the basic meaning of the Old English wylla is spring. More than any other type of feature waeterwyllas span the transition from pagan to Christian geography'. Issui was murdered by a passing traveller who had taken rest in his cell (hence Merythr, 'martyr') and this ungrateful act led to the foundation of a church in his name; in the more florid words of P. Thoresby Jones in his 1938 Batsford guide '...to commemorate an unwholesome and officious hermit who rashly rebuked some lusty pagan prince'. 

For once my interest was focused on the interior of the building rather than the landscape setting. Likely due to its remote location, the church did not suffer the same state-sanctioned vandalism as most during the Reformation and therefore retains much of its late medieval features and ambiance (P Thoresby Jones again: 'the Puritan iconoclasts failed to find it'). From my last visit I had remembered the 'doom' mural on the west wall of the Nave: the figure of 'Time' represented by a skeleton holding a scythe, hourglass and spade; presumably a subtle reminder to the parishioners as they left the service that this earthly life, and therefore time to repent for their sins, is limited. As shafts of sunlight streamed through the window above, the outstretched arms of the looming figure seemed to widen; rib bones and skull standing out in sharp relief to the white washed wall.

The church also retains a rare surviving rood loft, or gallery, and screen; its intricately crafted carvings, including a dragon - representing evil - consuming a vine - representing good, a common motif in the Welsh Marches. As is so often the case, the name of the highly skilled artisan who has left us this everyday masterpiece will never be known; was it the work of a local craftsman or imported skilled labour from Italy or Flanders?

I will choose less sultry weather for my next visit and explore the wider landscape surrounding the church further: the aforementioned Holy Well in the dell below, decorated with niches which once held sacred images and relics; the nearby stone bearing an incised Maltese Cross used as a waymarker for pilgrims; and the ancient bridge across the river Grwyne known as Pont Esgob (the 'Bishop's Bridge'), over which Archbishop Baldwin is said to have travelled on his way to preach at the church in 1188, on a tour of Wales to gather support for the Third Crusade (as recorded in Giraldus Cambrensis' famous Journey Through Wales).

Edward Thomas, an Anglo-Welsh son of such a landscape, captures the elegaic sense of a place seemingly now left adrift from its history in his poem The Mountain Chapel:

'Chapel and gravestone old and few
Are shrounded by a mountain fold
From sound and view
Of life. The loss of the brook's voice
Falls like a shadow. All they hear is the eternal noise
Of wind whistling in grass more shrill...
...Under the sun. When gods were young
This wind was old.'

So much to learn from the temporal repository of compelling lives and deeds behind the decoy of sleepy backwaterness; 'voices from the well'.

References

Baker, Kenneth (Ed.), 2000. The Faber Book of Landscape Poetry. London: Faber.

Gerald of Wales (trans. Thorpe, Lewis), 1978. The Journey Through Wales/ The Description of Wales. London: Penguin.

Mason, Edmund, 1975. Portrait of the Brecon Beacons. London: Robert Hale.

Morris, Richard, 1989. Churches in the Landscape. London: Dent.

Reed, Canon Arthur, 2010 .The Church of Merthyr Issui at Patricio. Leaflet.

Thoresby Jones, P, 1938. Welsh Border Country. London: Batsford.