Common Ground (15 page)

They used to say that water drawn on the Easter Day was holy and healing. They weren't lying. I was at one with everything; my head swam with old voices, the deeper music of the stars and the dreams of ages. I was the swift hare running through Eden, hearing the universal harmony that comes in the union of soul, spirit and earth. The divine. And she was there at dawn the next day, Eostre, standing fair, golden-maned, fully formed, alive, gentle, fragrant as honeysuckle, randy, multi-scented, multi-coloured, many-voiced, bright and bold, her warm breath as pure as a baby's. The soft hair on her skin was the waving grass; her face was the perfect pear blossom blessing the bushes. And it was me that summoned her.

I released the spring.

I move around a lot now following the sun. It's necessary also since an arrest warrant for theft and criminal damage was issued in my absence at Harrogate County Court four years ago. I travel on foot, always alone, up and down this country, from village to village, on the back roads and down the lanes, over the fields, bedding down in the spinneys and copses. You've probably passed me someplace at some time, glimpsed a familiar shape in the hedge, a form in the wheat. I'm there at the Summer Solstice at Stonehenge and Winter Solstice on Windmill Hill, overlooking Glastonbury Tor as the glowing orb rolls along its ridge. Sometimes, when the weather gets too much for these old bones, I'm forced to warm up or dry out in the public libraries where, up against a radiator, I'll read with a mix of hope and horror about climate conferences or the UN's embracing of progressive energy agendas, then inevitably, a few pages on, the issuing of fracking licences to multinational corporations. On the occasions I can beg the change and bear the hypocrisy of my actions, I'll take a corner seat in a coffee shop and spend an hour and a half over a sugary Americano. Ah, it's heavenly, but nothing compares to the waters of that Bilton spring and the vigour of bringing life and hope back to this dark world. That's why I defy the law, returning here at the same time every year. I
have
to, you see. Nature's order must be revealed. It's our only hope. I prepare myself by watching the run of the hares over the fields and then, when the moon is right, I replay the ritual and release the spring again. After I've drunk my fill, I set up camp down by the weir, rolling out my sleeping bag and sparking a cooking fire, just like I used to. I can sleep then, safe in the knowledge that tomorrow the light will return.

I leave him there curled up in the earth by the weir in his grubby brown sleeping bag, a union of land and landless. I scramble up the wood to emerge fairly soil-covered myself into a shock of daylight. While my back was turned, the blackthorn has blossomed. Its flowers are heaped over at the meadow's hedges like snow, bright enough to burn your retinas. They're a Tate & Lyle white, the white of wedding dresses and meringues, bleached against the contrast of their black, leafless branches. A crow is suspended for a second in the sky above, held as if on wires. From that height the sloe flowers in rows must resemble chalk on a football pitch, parcelling up the fields, splicing the meadows, woods, road verges and houses. Segmenting them further are the shadows, the shifting lines of the high sun. More divisions, more borders. Today all these lines make me feel sombre and shut out. I'm sure it's
his
influence, Old John snoring away down in the trees, but perhaps all his talk resonates because he has a point. I trudge around the fields, keeping a lookout for farmers and hares, but seeing neither. Sloshing the clay off my boots in Bilton Beck releases dun-brown clouds of liquid earth, washing away downstream. My thoughts turn to the land and its ever-changing states. The truth is that a spectre hovers over all England, a ghost from a time when people were rinsed from fields as easily as mud from a heel. I've been aware of it since I first came to the edge-land, ignored it perhaps, but it still casts its shadow – over the town, the country and this space between. Time I searched out its relics; time I traced its source and looked full into its face. And now I know where to start.

Finding the spring proves harder than I thought. There is little mention of it in the definitive Victorian study of the area, William Grainge's
History and Topography of Harrogate and the Forest of Knaresborough
, and it's a similar story in more recent regional histories – a predominant concern with the town's famous wells, the springs that sprung the spa resort. I find tantalisingly vague references claiming the purest natural waters are to be found at the outlying ‘Bilton spring' or, more grandly, a ‘Bilton Well', but no indication of its position aside from references to it being on private land and (with the verbal equivalent of a waft of the hand) an assertion that it lies ‘somewhere near Bilton Hall'. As geo-location goes, it's not exactly pinpoint.

So I approach Bilton Hall on foot down a gravelled driveway edged with daffodils and I stumble across my first butterflies of the year. Two tortoiseshells flit between the edges of the docks and dandelion flowers on the lawns. Above me, rows of trees touch twigs to create a thin canopy filled with singing finches. A passing car kicks up the chippings; the driver nods and raises a finger in greeting. He is wearing the recognisable tunic uniform of a medical professional; the hall is now a private nursing home and an expensive one at that, the sort where you might expect doctors mustering at the press of a button. Its landscaped grounds and handsome Jacobean-style brick and stone exterior are well preserved, beautiful even, retaining that dreamy, mournful tranquillity you find with old manor houses. Enclosed by empty fields to the south and east, and farms, woods, river and the edge-land to the west and north, it has the air of luxurious seclusion. Less than half a mile from its door are the shuttling A-roads and petrol stations, rubbish dumps and back gardens, the houses, churches, hospital buildings, garages, salons, supermarkets, bathroom stores and autoparts retailers that now conjoin eastern Harrogate, Starbeck and Knaresborough into one continuous colony. Yet from here all that feels like a war being fought in foreign climes. The hall has a different, slower speed, like a record on the wrong setting. As you approach you're enveloped by a sense of isolated history, an accumulated repository of dormant and dying memories being relived over and over again. It's there in the expression of the residents who, at just gone 10 a.m., are now caught between breakfast and morning tea and sit dozing in wingbacks or stare out the mullioned windows at the flowering magnolia and rhododendron. It's there too in the fabric of a building sited in this same position in one form or another for nearly seven centuries.

‘This is my blank face,' says Elaine, the sister on reception, as a loud buzzer parps somewhere down a corridor. ‘I've never heard of a spring here. You mean a water spring, right?' Another parp. ‘Becky?' she shouts over her shoulder. ‘Springs?'

Becky pokes her head around from the back office chewing a pen, sticks out her bottom lip and shakes her head. ‘Not that I know of. I'm pretty sure this whole area used to be a deer park, though, back before this place was even built. There's a map on the wall over there might help.'

Round the corner in a tatty frame hangs the faded, sepia plan of the hall taken from an old set of particulars. It is of little use, but Becky was right about one thing: go back far enough and hall, grounds, woods, river, all of this was part of something bigger, the huge 20,000 ‘Forest Acres' (roughly equivalent to 30,000 acres as we now define them) of landscape that constituted the Royal Forest of Knaresborough. The precise date of this enormous sovereign land grab is lost, but it was probably around the time of William the Conqueror's parcelling out of English lands among his followers. By the end of Henry I's reign in 1135, the forest was regarded as a highly valuable asset with boundaries that extended from close to Knaresborough Castle westward over 160 square miles. The word ‘Forest' can be misleading, for although cloaked in dense woods, in places it wasn't solely tree cover, rather a mix of woodland, clearings, rivers, open moors and heath given over to the proliferation and protection of ‘venison', a broad term that included all game – wild boar, wolves, grouse and hares. Primarily, though, it was red and roe deer that served as the ‘noble' quarry for the Norman and, later, Plantagenet bloodlust. In the Forest of Knaresborough two specific areas were fenced off especially for their concentration using a system of sharpened palings that allowed game entry but limited exit. These corrals or ‘parks' were therefore prime spots for the hunt, carefully maintained and policed by ‘Foresters', the local workers who lived on and around the land. These men enforced William's brutal forest law over the rest of the community, which, as the
Anglo Saxon Chronicle
tells us, ‘set up great protection for deer and legislated to that intent, that whosoever should slay hart or hind should be blinded'. One of these condensing areas, Haverah Park, lay to the west of the village of Beckwithshaw, three miles south of what is now modern Harrogate. The other covered the verdant woods south and west of the River Nidd, including all of what is now the edge-land. Its heart was the ground I'm standing on. This was Bilton Park.

In 1380 John of Gaunt, son of Edward III and then Lord of Knaresborough, ordered the construction of a new hunting lodge. It was this building that mutated and morphed over centuries into Bilton Hall. Despite the thrill of the hunt falling out of favour among successive royal dynasties, The Crown retained possession until it was sold by Charles I in 1628 to help finance his disastrous foreign policies and ongoing war with the French. But even prior to its sale, the noble and wealthy Slingsby family had been leasing this estate. Theirs was a name that would become synonymous with springs around Harrogate following Sir William Slingsby's ‘discovery' of the town's first mineral water source. Returning from a Grand Tour of Europe, he realised that the iron-rich water around the Tewit Well, located in the marshy meadows a few miles away to the south, had the same properties as those he'd enjoyed in the Belgian town of Spa. It was a revelation that would birth not just Harrogate's reputation for restorative waters but also the word ‘spa' in the English language. (At least, that's the story Harrogate's local historians stick to; similar claims can be found in most spa towns in Britain.) Whether Slingsby knew of the existence of an even more efficacious sulphur well in the woods by his home is unrecorded. In any case, his family's days as residents at the hall were numbered. In 1615 charges were levied against his son, Henry, then keeper and ‘herbager' of Bilton Park, for allowing it to fall into a dilapidated state. He was accused of felling trees and killing deer, aristocratic misdemeanours serious enough to warrant a heavy fine and the family's swift removal. Ironically, three years after Charles I sold the estate, it was bought by Thomas Stockdale, a staunch parliamentarian and fiercely bitter political rival of Henry Slingsby. Bitter enough that he perhaps even bought it to spite him. In the tradition of primogeniture, ownership passed down the Stockdale line until an heir, another Thomas, mortgaged the hall and land in 1720, investing the thousand pounds raised in the ill-fated South Sea Company. When that bubble burst he lost everything and despite desperate remortgages and loans, the Stockdales were ruined too. They would suffer the same fate as the Slingsbys before them: the family was unceremoniously evicted and, searching for some kind of renewal, emigrated to the New World.

A cacophony of buzzers sound, snapping me from my thoughts. Urgent calls for attention from residents' bedrooms upstairs. Harsh, robotic yells, like ship alarms; reminders that enforced removals to new worlds are ongoing at Bilton Hall. Rushing off to answer them, Becky and Elaine suggest I talk to the maintenance staff outside. ‘If there's a spring anywhere around here, that lot'll probably know about it,' says Becky, throwing me a wave. ‘Happy hunting.'

Alone, I loop around the manicured hedges and wooden sun-recliners. Visions encroach on the neat lawns and apple trees of tweed-suited hunting parties meeting for morning sharpeners, long pre-war summers where the white-dressed daughters of the hall pick flowers to brighten the cut-glass table decorations. Behind a plastic shed, I find a group of Polish groundsmen sweating as they load wheelbarrows with turf and compost. I'm met with more blank faces at the mention of a spring, but when the boss arrives he shows half an interest. With a shrug, he grants me the freedom to roam. ‘Knock yourself out,' he says in a thick Scottish accent. ‘But let me know if you find anything. I could do with making my fortune.'

Stepping over flowerbeds blooming with primroses and down through the overgrown margins, I cross into a line of holly bushes and oaks. From my jacket I pull an illegal photocopy of an old map rooted out from the bottom of a drawer in Harrogate Library. It marks a patch of the sloping woodland north of Bilton Hall's grounds and leading all the way down to the Nidd as ‘Spring Wood'. It's a stab in the dark, but it's the best I have. Blundering on through the scrub, leaf litter and rhododendron, I stray further into trees that have clearly been left to their own devices for decades, maybe centuries. Private and unused, the wood is a deserted place strewn with lines of collapsed fences and the sudden shrieks of pheasants. The air seems to descend slowly, like the ground, sinking away from the hall and the world behind. There are young silver birch and hazel, the progenies interspersed with the rotten hulks of their fallen brethren. Oaks flushed with youth give off the warm aura of innumerable new leaves. Behind, beeches grab at the sky with furry, green limbs, like mould-covered bones. A wood-pecker drills away. Soon trying to marry the map's markings with such deep cover becomes futile. I'm surrounded and short-sighted by similarity.

Branching left, I reach a high, unkempt grassy field. I can't tell if I'm still on the estate grounds or have wandered into some other private plot. The boundaries are disorienting; more fragments of low walls, wired-off muddy-brown patches and enclosed clumps of reed and cotton grass. I climb a sturdy wooden fence, this one blond and splintery, recently sawn and nailed together with shiny barbed wire stapled along its top, and come to a fold in the land. The rumbling drone of big machinery roars and clangs down the slope. At its top a digger is tearing down the wall of an old bungalow. Workmen in orange high-vis jackets and hard hats are mixing concrete nearby, leaning on spades, waiting to pour the foundations into a wedge-shaped cleft in the ground. Not one of them cares that I'm here.
Smash
. Another stud wall and steel-framed window crumples and disintegrates. I stroll off west, climbing another fence before cutting back into the trees.