The Wild Places (Penguin Original) (24 page)

11

Holloway

For months after the Cumbrian night walk, I was unable to travel, kept in Cambridge by work and my young daughter. I watched spring come and go in the city - crocuses bursting on the Backs, white cherries blossoming on the avenues, blackcaps singing their hearts out - frustrated not to be getting away, up to the Ribble and the Lune. I walked or ran up to the beechwood several times, and climbed my tree. Then one day in early June, Roger rang. I was pleased to hear from him, because I had been having some difficulty getting through to him at Walnut Tree Farm. Squirrels, he said. Squirrels had been the problem. His phone line had first gone crackly, then dead, and he had called in the engineers. The engineers had found that squirrels had been nibbling the phone line. Apparently, Roger explained, this was becoming quite a common occurrence. Squirrels are highly intelligent, agile enough to tightrope-walk along telephone wires, and poor conductors of electricity. Somehow they have realised that by biting through to the bare wires and short-circuiting the fifty volts that run through them into their own bodies, they can heat themselves up. In this way, said Roger, each squirrel becomes a sort of low-voltage electric blanket - and will sit up on the wires with a stoned smile for hours.

But the point of Roger’s call, it eventually transpired, was to propose an expedition down to Dorset, in order to explore the holloway network of that county.

Holloway: from the Anglo-Saxon
hola weg
, meaning a ‘harrowed path’, a ‘sunken road’. A route that centuries of use has eroded down into the bedrock, so that it is recessed beneath the level of the surrounding landscape. Most will have started out as drove roads, paths to market. Some as Saxon or pre-Saxon boundary ditches. And some, like the holloways near Bury St Edmunds, as pilgrim paths.

The oldest holloways date back to the early Iron Age. None is younger than 300 years old. Over the course of centuries, the passage of cartwheels, hooves and feet wore away at the floor of these roads, grooving ruts into the exposed stone. As the roads deepened, they became natural waterways. Rain drained into and down them, storms turned them into temporary rivers, sluicing away the loose rock debris and cutting the roads still further below the meadows and the fields.

Holloways do not exist on the unyielding rock regions of the archipelago, where the roads and paths stay high, riding the hard surface of the ground. But in the soft-stone counties of southern England - in the chalk of Kent, Wiltshire and East Anglia, in the yellow sandstone of Dorset and Somerset, in the greensand of Surrey and in the malmstone of Hampshire and Sussex - many holloways are to be found, some of them twenty feet deep: more ravine than road. They go by different names in different regions - bostels, grundles, shutes - but they are most usually known as holloways.

These holloways are humbling, for they are landmarks that speak of habit rather than suddenness. Trodden by innumerable feet, cut by innumerable wheels, they are the records of journeys to market, to worship, to sea. Like creases in the hand, or the wear on the stone sill of a doorstep or stair, they are the consequence of tradition, of repeated action. Like old trees - the details of whose spiralling and kinked branches indicate the wind history of a region, and whose growth rings record each year’s richness or poverty of sun - they archive the past customs of a place. Their age chastens without crushing.

Gilbert White, in his
Natural History of Selborne
(1788), made a typically attentive study of the holloways in his Hampshire parish. ‘Two rocky hollow lanes’, he recorded, ran through the parish, ‘the one to Alton, and the other to the forest’.

To enter these holloways, White said, was to access a world of deep history; an unexpectedly wild world, buried amid the familiar and close-at-hand. He visited his holloways in different weathers, to see how their moods altered with the changing climate. During the fiercely cold January of 1768, when the temperature in Selborne dropped to -34°C, and the leaves of laurel bushes were scorched brown by the cold, and when the snow fell thickly enough to fill the holloways, White observed how it there became sculpted by the wind into shapes ‘so striking to the imagination so as not to be seen without wonder and pleasure’. When the sun shone that winter, reflected sunlight from the snow was bright enough to dazzle animals and birds. Poultry sat in their roosts all day long, stupefied into inaction by the land’s lustre.

Few holloways are in use now: they are too narrow and too slow to suit modern travel. But they are also too deep to be filled in and farmed over. So it is that, set about by some of the most intensively farmed countryside in the world, the holloways have come to constitute a sunken labyrinth of wildness in the heart of arable England. Most have thrown up their own defences, becoming so overgrown by nettles and briars that they are unwalkable, and have gone unexplored for decades. On their steep damp sides ferns and trailing plants flourish: bright bursts of cranesbill, or hart’s tongue, spilling out of and over the exposed network of tree roots that supports the walls.

I think of these holloways as being familial with cliffs and slopes and edges throughout Britain and Ireland - with the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare, or the inland prow of Sron Ulladale on the Isle of Harris, or the sides of Cheddar Gorge or Avon Gorge, where peregrines nest. Conventional plan-view maps are poor at registering and representing land that exists on the vertical plane. Cliffs, riverbanks, holloways: these aspects of the country go unnoticed in most cartographies, for the axis upon which they exist is all but invisible to the conventional mapping eye. Unseen by maps, untenanted by the human, undeveloped because of their steepness, these vertical worlds add thousands of square miles to the area of Britain and Ireland - and many of them are its wildest miles.

Dorset is rich in holloways: they seam the landscape cardinally, leaving the coast and moving northwards, uphill and inland, cutting into the Jurassic lias, the Permian sandstones and mudstones, the oolites and the chalks of the region. Along these routes dray horses, carts and carriages would have moved to and from the harbours and bays, supplying and evacuating the incoming ships. Roger had been tipped off by a friend of a Dorset friend about an especially deep and forgotten holloway, in which he thought we could begin our exploration: it was near the village of North Chideock, which lies in a small lush valley, cupped by a half-moon of low green rabbit-cropped hills, the horns of which rest upon the sea.

So on a hot July day, we set off for Dorset to see if we could find wildness amid the dairy farms.

We drove down in Roger’s dark-green Audi, and as we left the outskirts of Cambridge I felt a lift of excitement at having escaped the city and at being on an adventure. The Audi had moss growing in its foot-wells, and in the grykes between the seats. ‘Three different sorts,’ he said proudly, when I pointed this out. In the glove-box were a variety of knives. The boot held, as it always did, a bivouac bag, a trenching tool of some sort, and a towel and trunks, in case he passed somewhere interesting to sleep, dig or swim.

We got lost several times on the way. When he was unsure of the correct exit to take on a roundabout, which was nearly always, Roger tended to slow almost to a halt, and squint up at the exit signs, while I assumed the crash position in the passenger seat.

We reached Chideock - a one-song drive west of Bridport - in the early afternoon, left the car, and began walking up along the village’s main road, keeping where we could to the shade cast by the big green-gold laurel bushes which lapped at the road. The sun roared soundlessly in a blue sky. Hot light glared off every leaf and surface. Dust puffed up from the road wherever we stepped. There was the smell of charred stone.

Where the road ran to its end, we found an emblem for our adventure. Just to the east of the road, set back amid oak trees and laurel bushes, was a small Catholic chapel, built of pale sandstone in a Romanesque style. We pushed open a wooden gate, and walked down a leaf-strewn path to the chapel’s porch. Its door was huge, of ridged oak, studded with black square-headed bolts. It opened with an ease that belied its weight, its bottom edge gliding above the flagstones of the porch, which were dipped by the passage of many feet.

The air inside the church was cool, and the sandstone of its walls and pillars was chilly to the touch. There was a faint odour of must, and everywhere the glint of gilt: saints in their niches, a golden altar rail, a gleaming candlestick at either end of the mensa. Striking through the air at angles were needles and poles of sunlight, sieved by the windows, in which dust motes rose and fell slowly, like gold leaf in warm water.

The Chideock Valley has a recusant past. After the Act of Supremacy in 1558, when Catholic priests were banned from Britain, missionaries began to re-infiltrate England in order to keep the faith alive. Chideock had long been a Catholic enclave, and several priests came to the area to offer clandestine ministry. A high-stakes game of hide-and-seek began. The priests went fugitive in the landscape, taking asylum in the woods, caves, copses and holloways of the area. Soldiers combed the countryside for them and their supplicants. Mass was held in secret in a hayloft in one of the Chideock farmhouses. Over the course of fifty years of this recusancy, at least three laymen and two priests were caught, tortured and executed. The chapel had been built in the nineteenth century as a memorial to these ‘Chideock Martyrs’.

One of the priests, John Cornelius, had returned in secret to Chideock from Rome in order to act as chaplain to Lady Arundell, the lady of the manor. He was arrested at Chideock Castle on 24 April 1594, being dragged out bareheaded. A relative of the Arundell family, Thomas Bosgrave, was outside the castle that day, and in a spontaneous gesture of solidarity he offered Cornelius his hat. Bosgrave himself was immediately arrested, as were two of the castle servants, John Carey and Patrick Salmon, who were rightly suspected of having assisted Cornelius. Cornelius was taken to London, and tortured, before being transported back to Dorset. And on 4 July he, Bosgrave, Salmon and Carey were hanged in Dorchester. Carey was the first to ascend the scaffold, and before he died he kissed the rope, praising it as a ‘precious collar’. Bosgrave delivered a brief and passionate address concerning the rectitude of his faith. Cornelius kissed the gallows, and uttered the words of St Andrew: ‘O Cross, long desired’, before praying for his executioners and for the queen. After hanging, the body of each man was quartered, and Cornelius’s head was nailed to the gibbet.

We left the church’s golden cool and set off up into the heat of the hills, to find and follow the holloways. Knowledge of the valley’s violent past, of the priests who had gone to ground here for their faith, and the laymen who had died for it, had altered my sense of the landscape and of our adventure.

This was another unexpected change of atmosphere for my journeys: the cold exigent Protestant north had given way, via Ireland, to a sinuous southern Catholicism. In one sense, I thought, all of recusant Britain could be conceived of as a kind of holloway labyrinth: sunk down, almost unnoticeably, into the cultural landscape. In Lancashire, Aberdeenshire, parts of Dorset and Devon, and the other recusant heartlands, existed an alternative culture that was intensely British, but which possessed different strata of custom, language and history. That history was at once real, but also an
utinam
, an ‘if only’ history, and so it had to keep itself hidden, wild. Even London had its recusant holloways, of which vestiges remained: Tyburn, the shrine of Thomas More off Kingsway, the Bavarian Embassy chapel behind Piccadilly . . . many other recusant routes could still be traced through the city. I thought of a secret map of which I had been told, made by Jesuits around 1590, that showed the Catholic safe-houses in Scotland, and of which one leaf was in an archive in Rome, the second in Salamanca. There were also the Sheldon Tapestries, huge woven hanging maps of Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire, into which red threads had been discreetly insinuated to mark many known recusant hide-outs.

The path that Roger and I followed up into the hills was itself the beginnings of a holloway, cut down ten feet or more into the caramel sandstone of the area. Though no traffic other than walkers now passed this way, the road was still being deepened by water. Heavy rain had fallen the previous week, and the holloway floor bore evidence of the water rush that must have flooded it. Leaf and branch jetsam was tangled around tree roots, and here and there patches of smooth surface stone had been rinsed clean and exposed to the air, so that they lay glowing in their first sunlight for nearly 200 million years.