Dream Landscapes of England
On out-of-place places
Usually, it goes like this. I’m walking or cycling through familiar, unremarkable countryside – lanes and villages that I’ve learned to thread with barely a conscious thought – when I find myself on a new road. I must have taken that left turn – the one I’d always wondered about but never got round to trying. Until, it seems, now. The road swerves and narrows, mounts to a sudden rise, and all at once there is an extraordinary, impossible, utterly surprising vista. How could I not know this was here?
Sometimes it’s a great fast-flowing river, something like the Swale or the Ure, but with a milky tinge to show that we are only a few miles down from the glacier. Sometimes it’s a secret valley, where the farms turn their backs to the world and the locals adhere stubbornly to the Julian Calendar (as well as some other Old Customs nobody likes to mention). Mostly, it’s a wall of mountains, flaring bright against the sunset, high and awful as the walls of Eden.
A dream, of course – but one thing about England is that there really are places like this: landscapes so incongruous that you have to pinch yourself and scratch your head and pause. It’s all down to our crazy, jigsaw geology, that puts hills and humps and hollows where they don’t belong; but knowing that doesn’t allay the oddness. Let me introduce you to four dream landscapes of England – places so queer that you half expect to meet Julianne Moore in a Viking hat, Saddam Hussein handing out the bowling shoes . . .
None of this belongs here, in rural Leicestershire, where the contours should be as soft and crumbly as a good Stilton. It’s as if some genie had taken a chunk of Bodmin Moor and dropped it on the outskirts of Loughborough.
Drive a few miles north of Leicester and you’ll find yourself in the weirdly out-of-place landscape of Charnwood Forest; all blasted heath and twisted trees and outcrops of strangely shaped igneous rocks (by some accounts, the very oldest in Britain). If it looks a bit odd from the M1, turn off into these high, bracken-clad hills with their extrusions of jagged granite and you may indeed think you have strayed into a dream. None of this belongs here, in rural Leicestershire, where the contours should be as soft and crumbly as a good Stilton. It’s as if some genie had taken a chunk of Bodmin Moor or far Penwith and dropped it on the outskirts of Loughborough.
Given the strangeness of this place, it’s no surprise that it should have given rise to every sort of tale – ghosts, fairies, UFOs, the whole kettle of spooks. In particular, the ruined priory of Grace Dieu can claim to be one of the most haunted sites in the Midlands, with endless reports of apparitions and strange, gliding lights. The veteran ley-hunter Paul Devereux put it down to the area’s queer geology and associated electromagnetics (the Forest stands over the celebrated Thringstone Fault). Whether you buy that or not, the idea is given a powerful twist in Graham Joyce’s novel of Charnwood Some Kind of Fairy Tale (2012) – a modern take on the old tales of fairy abduction. The Forest is here a portal to the otherworld:
In the deepest heart of England there is a place where everything is at fault. That is to say that the land rests upon a fault; and there, ancient rocks are sent hurtling from the deep to the surface of the earth with such force that they break free like . . . monstrous sea-creatures coming up for air. Some say that the land has still to settle and that it continues to roil and breathe fumes, and that out of these fumes pour stories . . . The land is a mysterious freak, where the air is charged with an eerie electrical quality, alternately disturbing and relaxing. The earth echoes underfoot.
If this is a very pagan landscape, however, it is also visibly Catholic. Take a walk on the northern edge of the Forest and you might suppose you had slipped out of England altogether. The woods are dotted with wayside shrines and statues and, out towards Coalville, a vast Breton-style Calvary looms above the abbey of Mount St Bernard (a very French-looking affair). This Trappist foundation – the only one in the country – was dreamed into being by one Ambrose Lisle March Philipps de Lisle, a particularly fervent and high-profile convert to Rome in the 1830s. Having inherited the ruins of Grace Dieu, Philipps devoted his life to the revival of English monasticism, not least because he supposed this would kick-start the Second Coming.
The monks started out in a sort of cottage but soon moved into grand buildings designed by Pugin – the country’s first purpose-built monastery since the Reformation. As such, Mount St Bernard drew crowds of wondering and often hostile sightseers, who gawped at the silent, robed monks performing rituals that had not been seen in England for 300 years. Among them was the 70-year-old William Wordsworth, who confessed ‘The whole appearance had in my eyes something of the nature of a dream . . . it has often haunted me since.’ A final disorientating thing about Charnwood is that this is indeed Wordsworth Country; the poet lived here for nine important months (1806-07) and came back regularly till the end of his life.
There’s a bit in London Orbital, his epic account of a walk around the M25, where Iain Sinclair talks about the strange experience of hiking in suburban Enfield or Barnet, where for a few miles at a time London gives way to vistas of deep country:
Out of nowhere . . . you suddenly find yourself on a long, straight stretch of country road. It’s dreamlike: telegraph poles, hedges, a red farmhouse tucked under a line of low hills. You’re still carrying the weight of the city, the density of talk and noise and interference, quick-twitch nerves . . . but you let it go . . . Soft warm air. Birdsong.
The same dislocation can be felt on the edge of many English cities – but nowhere more than on the south side of Birmingham, where a turn in the road can feel like a trip through the wardrobe door. Very suddenly, the urban and suburban clutter gives way to the heights of the Clent Hills – a little piece of Welsh Border Country that has somehow fetched up in the gap between Halesowen and Longbridge. By southern English standards these hills are big – topping the thousand-foot mark at Walton Hill – and yet something about the lie of the land means that you hardly sense them until you are in them. One minute you are among solid post-war housing, chain pubs and Premier Inns, motorway traffic fretting at the lights – and the next you are up in the wind, with pony-trekkers saddle-deep in bracken and long views into Shropshire and Wales.
The dream feeling is enhanced by a weird collection of 18th-century follies: the usual Greek and Roman things, a lovely sham-Gothic castle, and most potently the Four Stones – a mock-Neolithic circle with an aura that beats that of most genuine remains. The Stones provide one focus for the New Age and neopagan types who seem drawn to the hills, although more serious practitioners are said to prefer the yew groves on Wychbury Hill, an altogether more secluded spot.
One minute you are among solid post-war housing, chain pubs and Premier Inns – and the next you are up in the wind, with pony-trekkers saddle-deep in bracken and long views into Shropshire and Wales.
The witchy sort of vibe that hangs over the Clents must also owe something to their darkest legend – the very strange story of Bella in the Wych Elm. In 1943 four boys poaching in Hagley Woods were terrified to discover a human skeleton wedged upright in the hollow of a tree: police later found the victim’s right hand buried separately some yards away. While it was soon established that the victim was female and had been pushed into the tree shortly before or after death, no progress was made in tracing her identity. Someone, however, seems to have known something. Within months, graffiti began to appear across Birmingham and the Black Country, all putting variants of the same question: Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?
With no answer in sight, speculation about ‘Bella’ and her fate has taken on a morbid life of its own. According to one theory, Bella was the victim of a Satanist cult, her hand cut off to create a so-called ‘hand of glory’. Another has it that she was an executed spy, perhaps a double agent (the munitions factories of Birmingham being a prime target for wartime bombing). A third, only slightly less lurid, suggests that Bella may have died as a result of a practical joke gone wrong. Years later, it is said, a man confessed that he and a friend had picked up a drunken woman and driven her into the hills. When they found that she had passed out, and couldn’t be roused, they decided that it would be very funny to . . .
The old taunt still turns up on walls and gates in the Clents, baffling those who don’t know the story and chilling those who do: Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?
For some minutes Alice stood without speaking, looking out in all directions over the country – and a most curious country it was. There were a number of tiny little brooks running straight across it from side to side, and the ground between was divided up into squares by a number of little green hedges, that reached from brook to brook. ‘I declare it’s marked out just like a large chessboard!’ Alice said at last.
The living chessboard of Through the Looking Glass must be one of the great dream landscapes of literature. All the more astonishing, then, to find that you can travel a few miles north of Oxford and see it for yourself. Mount any of the little hills around Beckley or Islip and you will find yourself looking down on the weird, fen-like expanse of Otmoor – a small piece of Norfolk or Suffolk set down insanely in central Oxon. Lewis Carroll certainly came this way and most scholars believe that it was this wholly surprising landscape – flat as a board and divided into squares by drainage ditches and straggling hedges – that gave him an idea.
If Carroll saw something dream-like in Otmoor, many others have felt the same way. Even today, visitors find themselves reaching for words like ‘bewitched’, ‘ghostly’, and ‘haunted’. Although ringed by quiet villages, the moor itself is perfectly empty, and crossed only by the track of a Roman road. A walker who ventures beyond the tarmac enters a miniature wilderness – some 400 acres of wet grassland and dense reed beds, part RSPB reserve and part MoD firing range. The mists come suddenly and at sunset the skies are dark with the wings of massed wheeling starlings.
Although Otmoor remains largely uncelebrated, a number of writers and artists have found themselves drawn to its wastes. John Buchan lived for many years at Elsfield, on the edge of the moor, and was clearly intrigued by the wildness lingering in this odd corner of England:
In a wet winter it is one vast lagoon; in summer it is a waste of lush grass, and its few mud tracks are pitted and ribbed like the seracs of a glacier . . . at night and in wild weather it recovers its loneliness. To ride or walk there in an autumn twilight is to find oneself in a place as remote from man as Barra or Knoydart.
The same out-of-the-world quality makes ‘the Moor’ an inspired setting for The Power of Three, one of Diana Wynne Jones’s most haunting fantasy novels:
The Moor was never quite free of mist. Even at bright noon . . . there was a smokiness to the trees and the very corn, so that it could have been a green landscape reflected in one of its own sluggish, peaty dykes.
And it also features heavily in Susan Hill’s memoir The Magic Apple Tree, where ‘the Fen’ is a place of unappeased ghosts and stifling winter fogs. Most curiously of all, perhaps, Otmoor is the main location for Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins (2010), a cult movie that blends psychogeography with agitprop. Altogether not bad for a few damp acres in Oxfordshire.
The living chessboard of Through the Looking Glass must be one of the great dream landscapes of literature. All the more astonishing, then, to find that you can travel a few miles north of Oxford and see it for yourself.
While most visitors to the moor have relished its peace, others have sensed something morbid in its very tranquillity. Among these was the psychic researcher Arthur Guirdham, who crossed Otmoor one hot summer day in 1933 and was overcome by the sense of ‘an old evil’ in the ‘grey-green silence of the heavy vegetation.’ On reaching his inn at Beckley, he collapsed with a nervous illness that prostrated him for days.
I made my own crossing of the moor some forty years back, on a heavy, hazy day much like the one described by Guirdham; there were no ill effects, but the experience was not ordinary. I still have a memory of water smells, of hedges smothered in wild roses, of wading slowly through long grass in a silence that felt more and more perturbed. It was in those strange, exhausted days after Finals, when you don’t know whether your life is ending or beginning.
The last of my out-of-place places is easily the best known – although in some ways barely known at all. To anyone travelling across the Levels of central Somerset, the Mendip Hills present a quite startling appearance; a sudden scarp rising wall-like out of the plain and sliced open by the deep gorge at Cheddar (which, for all the crowds, has a queer, dream-like quality still – a Roger Dean album cover come to life).
Go higher into the hills – as most do not – and the strangeness alters subtly. You have here a bleak plateau, five or six miles across, which seems more like the central Pennines than anyone’s idea of Somerset: there are drystone walls; dour, huddled villages; and mile after mile of rough grassland broken up by dry valleys, scattered screes, and patches of limestone pavement. It’s as if a hard wedge of Yorkshire had been driven into the mild country south of Bath and Bristol. Here and there a sink or swallet leads to the still more incredible underworld of Mendip; galleries of linked caves and the most extensive underground river system in Britain. To add to this sense of being a place apart, the hills have a microclimate with attitude; sudden, drenching rainstorms that come from nowhere and vanish as swiftly; snow in March or April, when there is not a flake to be seen on the Levels (real snow, lying for a week or a fortnight, forming waist-high drifts).
Just to the north you’ll find a different sort of oddness, if you care to look for it: the last relics of the Somerset coalfield, hidden away in the deep valleys round Midsomer Norton and Radstock. Yes, that’s right – coal-mining in Somerset: some 80 pits employing 6,000 men and producing well over a million tons per annum in the years before World War I. Although the industry declined steadily thereafter, it remained active well into my lifetime, with the pits at Kilmersden and Writhlington still open in the 1970s. Today there is little enough to be seen; the mirage of a giant spoil heap glimpsed once through a gap in the hedge; tramways and sidings running mysteriously into woodland; pit chimneys lost among fields.
It’s always worth stopping here for the view, which extends for miles across the watery flatlands, but today there was something else, something impossible – a vista of distant, sun-drenched mountains where I knew for a fact there were none.
I’ve had the dream so often that I suppose it must mean something – the one where you turn from the known road, into a landscape at once utterly strange and insinuatingly familiar. Probably, it’s related to that other dream, the one we’ve all had, where you find a hidden room in your house or perhaps a whole floor that you had somehow mislaid. No doubt it can all be parlayed into stuff about hidden talents and new goals and perspectives; but I don’t think I’m in the mood.
The thing itself happened to me just once, on a clear spring morning when I was still preposterously young. A lazy bike ride through Somerset, on roads I knew too well, had brought me to the crest of the Polden Hills, a tiny ridge that rises sheer from the Levels. It’s always worth stopping here for the view, which extends for miles across the watery flatlands, but today there was something else, something impossible – a vista of distant, sun-drenched mountains where I knew for a fact there were none. The cocks were still crowing when I saw the golden hills, as plainly as if I had dreamt them. Later, I puzzled it out with a map and saw that I must have been looking straight across the Channel into Wales; on that long lost morning some trick of light and perspective had shown me the hills above Pontypool, while hiding the grey waters in between.
Years ago, in Somerset. A thing not known again.
If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in my ebook The Whartons of Winchendon —a short study of one of the strangest families in English history, featuring incest, treason, deep-sea diving, fairies, and the self-proclaimed Solar King of the World.
This was such a great pre-dawn read for me this morning. Thank you for sending a bit of magic my way