Walking to Camelot (30 page)
Read Walking to Camelot Online
Authors: John A. Cherrington
In Evershot, as elsewhere along our journey, the footpaths tend to converge at the church because people came from so many directions on a Sunday to attend services â which were compulsory until the modern era. Flora Thompson writes of this in
Lark Rise to Candleford:
“Ding-dong, ding-dong, went the bells of the village church in Lark Rise, and when they heard them, the hamlet churchgoers hurried across fields and over stiles, for the Parish Clerk was always threatening to lock the church door when the bells stopped.”
It is hard for us today to understand how pervasive the church was in the life of the common folk in centuries past. On one hand was the lord, succeeded later by the more benign squire; to the former one paid tribute in the form of labour or tax, while to the latter one gave deference. The church represented the other half of the equation, demanding its tithes â and enforcing morality by means of the ecclesiastical court, commonly known as the “Bawdy Court.” Although the church's power to impose penalties was legally questionable, few ever challenged its authority since most penalties were in the nature of humiliation of the miscreant, who was publicly called to account. Church offences ranged from poor service attendance, failing to pay tithes, and swearing in church to more serious moral offences such as prostitution, fornication, and fathering a child out of wedlock. The line between the jurisdiction of the civil and religious courts was frequently blurry until statute law clarified matters in the nineteenth century.
The interior of Anglican churches underwent a change in appearance during Thomas Hardy's lifetime. Box pews disappeared and were replaced by rows of bench pews, facing an altar with a decorative cloth rather than a plain table covered with linen. Tiles replaced stone flags underfoot, which made the interior more colourful. But perhaps the two biggest changes to church interiors were the replacement of plain with stained glass windows and the introduction of the organ.
Village orchestras usually comprised performers who, as described in Thomas Hardy's “A Few Crusted Characters,” could play a jig better than a hymn and frequently became drunk during church service. It was embarrassing to the vicar when the orchestra broke out into a dance tune. The organ lent a new air of respectability to proceedings.
Yet it was too late to rescue Anglicanism from its lackadaisical, class-driven ways. The proliferation of Baptist and Methodist chapels throughout the country attested to the increasing democratization of society. The squire, his family, tenant farmers, and some of the very poor still patronized the parish church, but the dissenting parson attracted other tenants, shopkeepers, tradesmen, and independent labourers. The parson was typically less educated or wealthy than his Anglican counterpart, but the villagers tended to think of him as “one of us.” Of course, an ever-increasing segment of the population failed to attend church at all.
Evershot reeks of Hardy's influence. In 1893, Hardy was still practising his hand as an architect, designing a wing of the village mansion known as Dower House that year. This was the last project he took on before turning to writing full-time. One imagines him traipsing through Dorset to gain inspiration. He was a keen observer of the countryside. “Every village,” he wrote, “has its idiosyncrasy, its constitution.”
Hardy's famous home lies some ten miles from Evershot in Upper Bockhampton. The Hardy Cottage is visited by thousands of tourists each year. It still holds its charm, boasting an expansive front garden brimming with flowers. The structure is of cob and thatch construction. A clump of walking sticks hewn from local limbs sits in the entrance hall, as if waiting for the master's touch.
Opinion is still divided on Hardy's significance in English literature. There is no doubting his descriptive powers, yet his constant themes of romantic but unrequited love, the tragic endings to his characters' liaisons, and his vivid drawing of assertive female personalities have caused many literary commentators to assert that he was a misogynist, while others maintain he was ahead of his time and was advancing the cause of women's rights.
Hardy more than any other nineteenth-century novelist reflected the influence of landscape and setting in the human condition â that sense of place. He was passionate about Dorset, using features of many towns and villages of the shire in his novels. The tithe barn in Cerne Abbas is the model for the great barn in
Far from the Madding Crowd,
the novel in which Troy spends the night on the parish church porch in Puddletown â the real name of which used to be Piddletown, but this offended Victorian sensibilities, so was legally changed; think “spotted dick.”
Hardy was raised as a boy in Puddletown. Perhaps the rough-and-tumble ways of fellow villagers affected his attitude toward religion and society in later years. An old ditty from his town was sung by residents during his era:
Into church
Out of Church,
Into Cat,
Out of Cat,
Into Piddle.
The “Cat” was the Old Catt Inn, and the Piddle was the river into which the slops from that inn were delivered. Hardy understood the hypocrisy of his fellow Victorians who paid the utmost attention to the proprieties of outward appearances â such as attending church â before they decamped to the local inn.
Thomas Hardy represents the pastoral life with deft realism, much like other prominent English authors, such as Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot. Even if one cannot live the country life, there is always the imagination. And this is where
Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, Peter Rabbit, Watership Down, The Chronicles of Narnia, Alice in Wonderland,
King Arthur, and Robin Hood continue to capture the collective English consciousness. Nostalgia rules. The most endearing parts of
The Lord of the Rings
on the screen for English viewers are the scenes of the Shire.
The philosopher Roger Scruton maintains that the English still search for their lost childhood, which always lies in the enchanted countryside. The Englishman never truly grows up. He plasters his walls with hunting and fishing scenes. He wants to play horsey with his children; to imagine that he can walk at any time into a labyrinthine Arcadia of rabbit holes and streams, downs and wolds, perhaps shoot a couple of colourful pheasants, and visit a quaint pub that has sat in unspoiled countryside for five hundred years, where he can quaff the local ciders and ales. Walking along the Macmillan Way, one can almost believe that this rural idyll is the true reality and the
M
1 is just an aberration.
The Dorset Gian
t
, Maiden Newto
n
,
and
Chesil Beach
The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.
âJ.R.R. TOLKIENâ
The Lord of the Rings
THE WEATHER CONTINUES
balmy. Lazy herringbone cirrus formations gild a diaphanous sky. The path winds downhill from our lofty Evershot perch atop of Dorset as we head steadily southward toward the Channel. We encounter an electric fence running through a stile; the cover has torn, exposing the bare wire. Karl nimbly pops over the stile â sprained ankle and all â while I wrestle with my pack and finally jump over, landing heavily on my side. I have always had a fear of electric shocks. Just ahead, we enter a wet spinney.
We emerge from the spinney into the remote hamlet of Chantmarle. The word is Norman French for “blackbird's song.” The one impressive set of buildings is Chantmarle Manor, an imposing stone edifice which housed the Dorset Police Training College from 1951 until 1995. Local lore has it that for many years at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a ghost was heard in the Great Hall shouting out the words, “Search for Wat Perkins!” This occurred on the same night every year. Later, workmen digging in a ditch on the property discovered a headless skeleton. An investigation ensued, and a widow named Kit Whistle, who lived at a nearby cottage, confessed to murdering a Scottish peddler twenty-two years earlier. She had placed the man's head beneath her cottage hearthstone and buried the rest of the corpse in said ditch. After her arrest, the ghost was never heard from again.
Dorset is a treasure chest of superstitions, folklore, and wild tales. Western society has yet to come to grips with the extent to which magic and sorcery played a role in daily life even after countries such as England became officially Christian. For instance, every Dorset village had its own “conjurer,” who, much like a shaman, was a fellow of good re-putation thought to possess some limited supernatural power that he exercised for the common good. He was also reputed to be able to cure certain illnesses. Thomas Hardy refers to such a Wessex character in his story “The Withered Arm.”
WE AMBLE DOWN
green lanes to the rustle of hedge life and birdsong. The path eventually veers left through a silage area to enter the village of Cattistock.
I stop to peruse a village bulletin board, where a letter is posted from the lieutenant commander of a Royal Navy frigate, who promises to update villagers on
NATO
naval exercises. He plans to berth his vessel at Weymouth soon so that villagers have the opportunity of getting reacquainted with the ship. The ship's name is
HMS
Cattistock
. We recall Pat up in Ford and Angela in Beckington, both of whose husbands served with the Royal Navy.
Like other villages in Dorset, Cattistock was at the heart of the World War
II
D-Day effort. The village also served as an important detention area for prisoners of war. First an Italian and then a German prisoner-of-war camp were established here, both providing agricultural labourers for local farms that were desperate for field workers. Over 150 Germans were billeted at the farms where they laboured.
Cattistock is home to yet another local tradition involving food and sporting competition, this one known as “knob throwing.” The Dorset knob is a hard, dry savoury biscuit made only in the west of the county, at Bridport, baked three times over from bread dough containing extra sugar and butter. It is named after local knob buttons. Dorset knobs were a favourite delight of Thomas Hardy, who ate them for dessert with Stilton cheese. Locals claim it is Dorset's most famous export.
The Telegraph
describes the knob as “the most obscure edible object produced in Britain today.”
The Knob Festival occurs on the first Sunday in May, and the main event involves competitors trying to throw a knob the farthest distance. The rules provide that the contestant must keep both feet on terra firma and throw the knob toward a marked area. The longest distance a knob has been thrown is 26.1 metres. Additional fun events include knob painting, a knob and spoon race, guessing the weight of the Big Knob, knob darts, and a knob pyramid.
We leave Cattistock to its knob-throwing delights. The Way now follows the River Frome. Mallards, teals, and white swans are all teeming on this stretch of the stream. Our path takes us through a large copse full of willow, beech, ash, hazel, and alder, from which we emerge to walk under an old railway arch, eventually stepping into a large field recently cut for barley.
Karl is dragging his doubly sprained ankle, but I still find it difficult to keep stride with him. He eagerly anticipates reaching our destination at Abbotsbury and dipping his ravaged feet into the English Channel. When I finally catch up with him around noon, I find to my surprise that he has snagged a couple of new walking companions: Marcia and Wynn, two Rambler ladies at least his age or older. Both women walk in shorts. Marcia is tall and gangly, with short white hair and calves of muscled knots resembling contoured road maps. Wynn is petite, well tanned, and toned; she carries the Ordnance Survey map in a plastic case dangling from her neck.
The three of them are wetting their whistles from water bottles beneath a clump of oak trees at the side of the path. Marcia explains that they walk British footpaths in Rambler outings and on their own, and together they have trekked all of the Pennine Way, much of the South West Coast Path, and the North Downs Way. They are currently planning a major walking trip in Luxembourg. When I refer to the footpaths as “trails,” Wynn grimaces and chastises me, objecting that the word “trail” is an Americanism creeping into Britain; she insists that I call “a path a path.” She turns to Karl and produces from her knapsack some ointment, which she proceeds to spread on his sprained ankle. She then wraps his foot in athletic tape. Finally, she applies a small brace.
“You absolutely must take care of this, Karl.”
Karl just smiles wistfully and basks in the attention.
After a few more pleasantries, Marcia and Wynn wish us cheerio and lope off down the path. A couple of hours later we turn into a friendly inn for refreshment. I know these two ladies are in residence for the night because I recognize their freshly washed wet socks waving in the breeze, hanging from a second-floor window ledge, drying in the pallid sun.
“Energetic gals,” smiles Karl.
“They certainly took a shine to you.”
“They are Good Samaritans. Most walkers are decent sorts.”
“Did you see Marcia's thigh muscles?”
“They're pros, John. They could keep pace even with our friend Colin from Derbyshire.”
We are nearing Maiden Newton, where we have booked two nights' accommodation at the Chalk & Cheese pub.
DIARY:
The Chalk & Cheese is run by a macho, tattooed ex-naval man and his wife, and caters to young smokers and drinkers. Karl was assigned the dog's room. It seems that the owner's Dalmatian is somewhat upset that Karl has taken over his quarters, for we hear barking and whimpering from somewhere within the nether regions of the inn. The bottom half of Karl's door is so scratched and tattered that only a thin layer remains in place â presumably from the Dalmatian trying to regain his room from guests over the years.