Walking to Camelot (6 page)

The day is getting on as we finish our inspection of the town's artifacts, but Karl insists on checking up on the Oakham constabulary to ensure that they have picked up Tiffany's clothes from our green lane near Stamford. So we traipse all the way to the police station, only to find that at 5:15
PM
the station is already closed and one must call a special number in case of emergency. Karl and I just stand there dumfounded.

“Bloody hell! Have you ever heard of a police station in a major town that simply closes at 5
PM
, John? What — do they expect all crime to stop for the evening or something?”

“I don't know, Karl. Maybe they don't have enough business to keep the staff engaged, but my hunch is that they are bogged down with both crime and paperwork and don't want to be interrupted by some bloke coming in at night to report a stray dog and such.”

In fact, the “Closed” sign epitomizes the English aversion to the masses having access to shopping, sustenance, or authority outside of severely prescribed hours.

After booking in at a local hotel, Karl and I sample the fare at its upscale restaurant. How about braised lamb shank with a minted pea purée? I was about to say there are no mushy peas offered anymore, but trust the English to sneak in their pea concoction under the guise of gourmet. I settle for grilled figs, pistachio nuts with local honey, and goat's cheese for starters, then move on to wood pigeon breast, foie gras, black pudding, and roasted potatoes, with New York cheesecake for dessert.

Karl fulfills his wish and enjoys wood pigeon as well. The bird has a taste similar to a Cornish game hen, and a texture like liver. Our server advises us that she enjoys roasted wood pigeon on toast. The ingredients, she says, are as follows: two oven-ready wood pigeons; robust herbs such as thyme, sage, and rosemary; four garlic cloves (“bashed not peeled”); olive oil; butter; two thick slices of sourdough bread; and 150 millilitres of red wine. Sounds like heaven on a stick.

Of the pigeon family, only wood pigeons can be legally killed for food. Recently a woman in a London park was arrested for feeding domestic pigeons with seeds, then grabbing them, wringing their necks, and stuffing their bodies into her voluminous handbag. One wonders if she bothers to pick up roadkill.

Don't laugh. Roadkill cuisine has become big in Britain. Waste not, want not. Fergus Drennan has hosted a
BBC
production,
The Roadkill Chef,
instructing viewers on the cooking of casseroles from squashed badgers, pheasant, and rabbits, among other animals. Another
BBC
broadcaster, Miranda Krestovnikoff, recently hosted a dinner party where guests were treated to the following dishes: fried rat served with garlic and soy sauce, the rat having been picked off the
B
3347 in Hampshire; fox sautéed in garlic, found dead on a road near Wimborne, Dorset; and badger
chasseur,
served with tomato sauce after being removed from the
A
354 near Salisbury. Roadkill is touted as being high in vitamins and proteins, with lean meat and little saturated fat, plus the wild dead are free of hormonal drugs and additives. But if you are the driver who runs down that luscious-looking badger, it is illegal for you to eat it. Any other motorist, however, is legally allowed to give it a go. Once dead, the only animals it is illegal to eat in Britain are humans and swans. Only the Queen can consume swan — it is an act of treason for anyone else to kill or eat the stately bird.

Relaxing over his plum brandy, Karl is the picture of contentment.

“Next thing, Karl, you'll be eating Welsh rabbit.”

“I will have you know, John boy, that Welsh Rabbit is now known as ‘rarebit,' and that it is neither Welsh nor rabbit. It is a concoction of melted cheese with butter, milk, and Worcestershire sauce spread over buttered toast.”

“Ugh!” But the word is barely out of my mouth before I realize that the concoction just described by Karl is what was served to me by my grandmother when I was eight years old — and which I positively loved.

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:

Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;

A breath can make them, as a breath had made;

But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,

When once destroyed, can never be supplied.

—OLIVER GOLDSMITH—

The Deserted Village

DIARY:
Oakham is a memorable, tidy little town where one could comfortably settle as a safe harbour. Rutland in fact could have served as inspiration for Tolkien's Shire in
The Lord of the Rings.
The county resembles a Wild Wood in its insularity, seemingly detached from the broader world . . . Ascending a long hill on Oakham's fringe, we pass by a primary school and hear the laughing, frolicking sounds of children at play immediately below us — and yes, there is the ubiquitous soccer ball being kicked about with wild abandon. Oh, to be young again!

From here, our route traverses large swathes of croplands and copses, with small stone villages scattered hither and thither. We will soon leave Rutland, slice through a corner of Leicestershire, and then explore the lonely undulating grasslands of Northamptonshire before reaching the fringe of the Cotswolds.

Karl and I remark upon the constant intersection of other footpaths joining ours, some with clearly marked names, others anonymous. It is like veins of a body radiating in every direction. Many of these veins have existed from neolithic times. Rome added the arteries to the veins when it built the long, straight connecting roads, such as the Fosse Way. Writing in the early 1950s, Geoffrey Grigson opines: “Roads, lanes, paths. We use them without reflecting how they are some of man's oldest inscriptions upon the landscape, how they are evidence of the wedding between men and their environment.”

We cross a stone bridge over the River Gwash. On the outskirts of the tiny village of Brooke lies the twelfth-century parish church of St. Peters, set at an odd angle in a field. The massive oak door creaks; a pigeon flaps in the belfry. Inside is a slanted limestone floor worn smooth by the tread of centuries; rare old box pews denote a well-preserved ancient house of prayer. Outside, we wander the graveyard. Many of the lichen-covered tombs are now bereft of lettering. It's a lonely spot. A Victorian lamp hangs on a crooked post, resembling a gibbet and serving no apparent purpose.

The utter silence is interrupted by the rumble of a rusty brown pickup down the churchyard track. A young, powerfully built man gets out and greets us. He is the groundskeeper — and is straight out of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
. His biceps bulge like sinuous tree roots. He carries a .22 rifle which I assume is for shooting rabbits, for I notice three of his victims lying in the truck bed next to a gas-powered lawnmower. Even his wary aloofness reminds me of the gardener in D.H. Lawrence's novel.

“You must be finding a lot of rabbits around here,” I remark.

He says nothing and fiddles with his tailgate, obviously impatient for us to leave the grounds. Karl mentions that we are walking the Macmillan Way for three hundred miles.

“Thee's walkin' all the way to Dorset and the sea, then?”

“Aye,” Karl says with a smile.

“Can't say's I've travelled much about, but once took the train down to London, I did.”

“Have you lived in the area for long?” I ask.

“'Tis right. Been huntin' and tendin' gardens, field work, whatever a man can find.”

We bid him adieu and leave him to his work.

Walking through Brooke, it is so quiet we whisper, afraid to wake up canines or humans, though it is already midmorning. The appearance of such villages has not changed significantly since the medieval age.

As for the copses, hedges, and flora of the countryside, that is another story. Woodlands have been decimated over the centuries, and the surviving copses are a mere fraction of the size they were in 1850. Hedges too were ruthlessly destroyed after World War
II
.

The primary hedge ingredient is hawthorn. This genus is shrouded in mystical folklore. The English used to call it the “bread and cheese” because young leaves were placed in sandwiches, much like lettuce today. The hawthorn relies on pollination by dung flies and midges, attracted to the scent and to the brown and purple anthers. Evidently, to a carrion fly these colours resemble decaying flesh. The blackthorn bush is related but is not indigenous to England. A Eurasian shrub with white flowers, its small, bluish-black, plum-like fruits are harvested chiefly for flavouring alcoholic beverages such as sloe gin.

All in all, if you ignore the horrible slashes of the motorways and “
A
” roads desecrating the country, both Wordsworth and Constable would be able today to gaze across the rolling countryside and receive inspiration. And much barley is still grown, because since Anglo-Saxon times the populace have consumed beer in copious quantities. Nearby Northampton alone boasted 160 inns and alehouses in the eighteenth century — about one for every thirty inhabitants.

In every village, from medieval times, there were three types of occupational rights: the right of every person to roam the lanes, the footpaths, and the church grounds; communal rights, such as the village green, the common oven, the wells and town pump, the stocks, and the open fields; and strictly private rights — the manor house of the lord and the cottages and crofts of the peasantry. The struggle to keep the paths and tracks open to the public has not always been an easy one. The Enclosure movements of the eighteenth century at first severely disrupted the footpaths. There ensued many stormy battles with big landowners. Legislation was passed in 1815 which allowed any two justices of the peace the power to close a footpath that they believed was no longer “necessary.” In a Hansard record of 1831, it was recorded that this power had been regularly abused by the practice of one magistrate commonly saying to another, “Come and dine with me; I shall expect you an hour earlier as I want to stop up a footpath.”

Jane Austen recognized the propensity of greedy landowners to close public paths, and referred in her novel
Emma
to conscientious nobles doing the right thing by not prejudicing access to the common folk. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote of the hypocrisy of landowners — what we might call the
NIMBY
(“not in my backyard”) syndrome today — in the speech of Mr. Frankland of Lafter Hall in
The Hound of the Baskervilles:
“It is a great day for me, sir . . . I have established a right of way through the centre of old Middleton's park, slap across it, sir, within a hundred yards of his own front door. What do you think of that? We'll teach those magnates that they cannot ride roughshod over the rights of the commoners, confound them! And I've closed the wood where the Fernworthy folk use to picnic. These infernal people seem to think that there are no rights of property.”

There are still problems with farmers ploughing over their fields and failing to demarcate the walking path — which by law they are supposed to do. We are experiencing this problem in some of the rapeseed fields in particular. Thanks to the Ramblers, this issue has been kept in the spotlight. Not that landowners like Madonna and others won't keep trying to fend off walkers. But most owners accept public footpaths running through their estates as an embedded country tradition and an integral part of rural life.

Villagers are confronted today by many newcomers who dream of quiet but sanitized country living. These newcomers complain about everything from the smell of manure to cattle-truck dust to cocks crowing — even the loudness of church bells. One wealthy car dealer, Frank Sytner, recently retired with his wife to the nearby village of Ridlington in search of the quiet life. But the couple did not care for the sheep, the smells, or the mud associated with a farming community. Mr. Sytner sued a neighbouring farmer for in-advertently spilling some mud on a lane leading to Sytner's prize horses. Mrs. Sytner also complained in court of the annoying sound of cows in the field. When the judge pointed out that perhaps the cow ruckus was normal for the countryside, she responded: “Yes, it's unfortunate, isn't it.” The judge threw out the case.

Ian Johnson of the National Farmers Union opines that tolerance between the wave of newcomers to the countryside and the existing hierarchy of farmers and squires is badly needed. Although many townies adapt well, others, like the Sytners, move to the country, asserts Johnson, “but they don't want to be near the nasty niffs and noises . . . They don't want any movement in the country. They want to ossify it, crystallize it, or preserve it in aspic. They want their picture postcard there for immortality.” So put on those designer wellies and get muck on them!

What Canadians would call Red Toryism is described by author Raymond Williams, in his
The Country and the City:
“In Britain, identifiably, there is a persistent rural-intellectual radicalism: genuinely and actively hostile to industrialization and capitalism; opposed to commercialism and the exploitation of environment; attached to country ways and country feelings, the literature and the lore.” Prince Charles epitomizes this mould.

The squires and the radicals with Tory tastes are now at one with socialists who wish to preserve the countryside. Perhaps this unusual political alliance began in the nineteenth century, when the austere Duke of Wellington joined with the poet William Wordsworth in denouncing the carnage wrought by the ubiquitous railway lines upon England's “green and pleasant land.” Wordsworth abhorred the intrusion of the smoky, dirty trains into the countryside and declaimed in a sonnet, “Is there no nook of English ground secure / From rash assault?” The Red Tories and socialists, alas, part company on issues like fox hunting.

A mile beyond Brooke we say hello to an elderly, spry lady sitting on her porch who invites us into her garden for a cup of tea. She says that she walks in North Wales and fights to prevent any new roads or despoliation of her hillside there, where she keeps a caravan for part-time rental plus personal use. Her name is Nora.

We sit and chat about the countryside and village life. Nora's cottage is surrounded by wildflowers, and above our tea table stands a charming Elizabethan-style chocolate and white dovecote with a pigeon perched on a ledge, alert for some tea crumbs.

Nora is a keen observer of village trends: “It's funny how the new people coming into a village to live want to retain village traditions but always want to improve things. Like here, they want a community centre, as if that will keep young people in the village and in line. The young people will still get in their cars and drive to Stamford for partying.”

“That's the way with young people all over the world, Nora,” Karl says with a smile. “Young folk love their cars. Thanks for the tea; and maybe we'll see you one day at your caravan in Wales.”

Refreshed by Nora's tea and talk, we continue down a green lane lined by a hedgerow blanketed with white mayflowers on one side and open farm tracts on the other. My olfactory senses are pervaded by the pungent, distinctive odour of steaming, newly ploughed fields mingled with hedge blossoms, radiant in the sunshine, that takes me back to weekend jaunts to my grandparents' farm in British Columbia's Fraser Valley. Heaven for a ten-year-old city boy was sitting under the horse chestnut tree with Grandfather as he smoked his pipe of Borkum Riff while I sipped Grandma's iced raspberry-vinegar cordial. Surely there is a thread of kinship here among rural areas the world over: that definable odour of spring — perhaps one of the few occasions when Man's agricultural activity blends harmoniously with the richness of Nature's bounty of bursting blooms and the nascent stirring of the land.

The scene before us characterizes much of the landscape each morning: a stile or gate, misty fields of green alternating with cadmium yellow swathes of rape unfolding into the distance. Other than the wood pigeon's occasional
Ooo-oo,
there is utter, ineffable silence. But the rapeseed plants are sopping, and the path which runs diagonally through the centre of the field is often hidden by the five-foot-high stalks that we shove aside with our sticks.

Rapeseed has become a dominant field crop in England. In Canada, it is known as “canola.” The plant name derives from the Latin name for turnip,
rapa
. It is a variety of the Brassica family and the third-largest source of vegetable oil in the world. It was first grown in England in the fourteenth century; in the nineteenth century it became a lubricant for steam engines, and today is grown for vegetable oil, animal feed, and biodiesel. The rapid expansion of rapeseed fields in England is attributable to the European Union's appetite for ever-increasing supplies of biodiesel for both heating systems and motor vehicle engines.

Finches flutter about as we pass through Prior's Coppice Nature Reserve, and then it's onto a bridleway recently churned up by horses. Restored medieval fish ponds flank both sides of the track before we cross the River Chater. Fish ponds formed an important source of the diet of ancient and medieval people in England.

The Way now winds along and over the Eye Brook before ascending a steep hill into Belton-in-Rutland. Cool rain and a slippery track combine to make this a gruelling grind.

We secure lodgings at a stone cottage
B&B
in Belton. The landlady is pleasant but brusque. I dare not ask her for the heat to be turned on early, despite our damp, bedraggled state. I would like some heat before bed; the last uphill climb exhausted me. A sign in my ensuite warns: “Guests may not wash clothes in the basin.” To hell with that! The only way we can keep clean is to wash our socks and underwear each night.

We have decided to take a cab to Uppingham, as the Crown Inn there has been recommended to us by the landlady. Before we set out for dinner, Karl insists that the cab driver be directed to the green lane where we found Tiffany's clothing, just to make sure that the Oakham police have picked up the garments.