The effect of the road, the A3 and its Cobham junction (with spiral-shaped cochlea and semicircular canals, a diagram of the inner ear), is to deafen pedestrians. The underpass sucks out country sounds and replaces them with traffic-stream percussion; blimps and creaks and soft bombs. Then, hitting sunlight, there is no sound. We’re in it, in the band – adjusting to speed, torn air, sticking fingers in our ears; we march, single file, through an unresolved, town-edge landscape. Development is on hold. We feel the volume displacement of power drills and JCBs, even when they’re not operative. Avenues of red cones, red-and-white detour boards, make walking difficult.
SAINSBURY’S THIS WAY.
The others aren’t convinced but I have a notion that you can eat in these places. We follow the arrow down a white fence that is just tall enough to mask the new estate (sand-coloured housing units with red tile roofs). Naked trees. CCTV masts. The superstore, demographics run through the computer, anticipates the coming, off-road expansion. The map is decorated with heaths and commons that aren’t common: pony-exercising paths, discretion suitable for American Community Schools. You walk these areas under sufferance, under observation.
Our breakfast is excellent and modestly priced, on a par with a transport caff. This is what Sainsbury’s has become: a place to which you can drive, to which you must drive. A warehouse in which to bulk buy (card-and-carry) foodstuffs that haven’t quite gone off. In Surrey, the picture-window superstore is also an all-day breakfast facility. They give you a numbered flag to place on your table, so that the eating area, when it’s busy, looks like a pitch-and-putt course. Nobody else has walked here, or come just for the breakfast. Fast food is a loss leader. Hugging the A3, this branch of Salisbury’s could outperform the Little Chef; a motorway pit stop attached to a larger than average impulse-shop. If you aren’t shopping, if you don’t have to do the consumerist assault course, the Cobham Sainsbury’s is an oasis of quiet conversation, unemphatic service, managed light. English hash-jocks have never been able to work the corporate grin of retail fundamentalism. ‘Have a nice day’, in their shipwrecked mouths, sounds like a threat. Employment, with its funny uniforms and patronising name badges, is a form of probation; a way of demonstrating that another small town, another strip of countryside, has been captured.
If you have the model town of Sainsbury’s, with its busy avenues, young mothers, kids, arguing couples, flirting singles, cruisers, slow-moving oldies (walking frames on awkward wheels), you don’t need Cobham. Sainsbury’s is universal (like America). In supermarket heaven, you’re at home everywhere. The name sounds like Salisbury. You might bump into Edward Heath, V.S. Naipaul, Cecil Beaton. Or find John Constable sketching meadows of lettuce. The retail landscape supplies all the ingredients for a day out: butcher, baker, fishmonger, deli, confectioner, video store, florist. The acoustic environment keeps trippers in a trance state. Lulled by the scent of lilies, tulips, carnations, weary excursionists rest on the bars of their trolleys. Dazzled by cosmetic colours, the eye-damage of too-red strawberries, tomatoes, peppers as green as the deep Atlantic, sleepwalkers call up mildly erotic reveries. Their hands keep moving, making guided choices, filling the basket. Supermarkets are the last pleasure gardens, brothels of the senses.
Do we take the time to visit Painshill Landscape Garden (aka Painshill Park)? We don’t know anything about the place, but here it is – and, on this rather dim section of the walk, we’re ready to access the unexpected. The A3 runs down the west side of the extensive grounds and the M25 carves around to the south: Painshill (supported by the National Heritage Memorial Fund, English Heritage, the Countryside Commission and Surrey County Council) is overendowed real estate. Like so much else that we’ve encountered, it is dedicated to customising the past as a way of making us feel good about ourselves: we come from somewhere, we have a lineage. That which is worth preserving has been preserved. We meditate, by walking specified and guided routes, on the lessons that history can teach us. The M25 is ringed with National Trust properties, mansions, estates, hills, towers. Runnymede through Hatch-lands Park to Box Hill. Brochures tell you what you should notice: ‘mammals such as the dormouse, plus a nationally important bat population’. Box Hill is doubly blessed: by ‘spectacular views towards the West Sussex Downs’ and by its association with the Jane Austen movie franchise. Surrey is divided between the bits where Merchant/Ivory exercise their Forster options (watch out for a naked Simon Callow plunging into a woodland pool) and hillocks where one of Austen’s headstrong young ladies can be beastly to her elders. For location caterers, it’s west to Hardy country (Polanski, Schlesinger) or east to India (David Lean).
The ascent of Box Hill, formerly a Cockney outing (deplored by mandarin essayists like Sir Sidney Colvin), is now pictured in the National Trust brochure as a procession of mountain bikes. ‘On the summit there is a visitor centre, shop with plant sales, servery and a fort (partly open to the public).’
My feeling is that anywhere with a ‘servery’, anywhere that is ‘partly open’, is to be avoided. Why let someone else nominate sites that are worth visiting? If you want a shop, you should find a shop. Sainsbury’s (Cobham) has a better servery than Box Hill. The space underneath Runnymede Bridge is more exciting than the National Trust recommended Runnymede Meadows (with ‘popular tea-room’). Don’t take my word for it, don’t bother with my list of alternative attractions – Junction 21 of the M25, the Siebel building in Egham, Hawksmoor’s gravestone in Shenley; discover your own. In the finding is the experience.
Painshill, unrecommended, unknown to us, was irresistible. Acquired, designed, planted by the Honourable Charles Hamilton (1704 – 86), the estate consists of several hundred acres of barren heathland converted into a gallery of views, framed landscapes, to rival Stourhead or Stowe. Hamilton almost bankrupted himself in the process. An enterprise undertaken to satisfy his vanity, and to astonish his friends, is now – after two hundred years of ‘seclusion’ – offered to the public, as a venue for ‘events’. Days are given over to Teddy Bear Trails, Santa in the Grotto and demonstrations of water wheels. The park, with its Augustan conceits, its Gothic fantasies, has been thoroughly democratised.
We’re conscious, from the start of our tour, from the moment we pick up the Painshill Park Trust leaflet (and map), that we are processing through an elaborately staged masque; graded effects. The aristocrat Hamilton, youngest son of the Earl of Abercorn, travelled widely. He was influenced by ‘poetic and literary sources’. Alexander Pope’s Grotto at Twickenham. The fashion for chinoiserie. The lake, created above the circumfluent River Mole, looks like a faded transfer on a willow pattern plate. The South Bank bridge has the spindly quality of something borrowed from an oriental romance: a landscape in quotation marks. Dank English reality shaped to provoke memories of unread books, almost-familiar illustrations. Catherine the Great commissioned a dinner service from Josiah Wedgwood, decorated with scenes from Painshill Park. If we followed the route suggested by the official guide, pausing to appreciate the Gothic Temple, the Ruined Abbey, the Temple of Bacchus, the Turkish Tent, we would be tramping through a vista of smashed crockery. A Julian Schnabel replay of William Gilpin’s watercolours, the generic views of Prosser and Wollett. Between the artifice of the Augustans and the passion of the Romantics, we were lost: day trippers in quest of easy revelations, shock effects, anything that could be satirised in a couple of sentences.
But Painshill outmanoeuvred us. There is a triangulation between the paradise gardens of Enfield Chase, Painshill (and Wisley) on the south-west corner, and Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham (the Valley of Vision). A recrudescence of the pastoral in the teeth of all contrary indications. A triangle within the circle of the motorway: flashing like a hazard sign. Heaven and hell. Early visitors to Painshill referred to it as Elysium or Eden. A place to be enjoyed after death. Or through the myth of origin. A sanctuary in an unpeopled world. A doomed experiment by some remote and paternalistic deity. The Painshill leaflet stresses this theme: ‘Paradise, once lost, cannot be regained in a single day… We are recreating an inheritance – the magic and mystery of Hamilton’s garden.’
Seduced from the road, let into this estate, our duty is to record the eighteenth-century theme park experience. The decahedral temple is too white, wood as stone; the recreation of a fraud, the missing turret of a Disneyland castle. A cardboard crown from a touring production of Richard III. The temple is anti-Gothic, lacking creepers, dirt, dust, spiders, any trace of the North European spirit. The temple should have been located much closer to the M25, peeping out of a thicket of salt-resistant grass. It’s a hut, open on all sides, arched windows acting as doors. The design of the floor points inwards to a jagged circle made from hexagonal tiles. The white orbit contains a brown centre which contains the outline of a square. The floor, as we contemplate it, becomes a theoretical dome.
Hamilton’s architectural conceits, stressed by tame artists hired to make promotional sketches, demonstrate the proposition that there are always two viewpoints. The distant prospect of an exquisitely sited folly. And the view out, from that privileged position. Prosser, in his 1828 drawing (made at the Gothic Temple), highlights the lake, the Chinese bridge, two figures at the water’s edge. Further attractions – Turkish tent, Temple of Bacchus, Gothic tower – are distant features. The drawing teaches you how and where to look. Where to walk.
Contemplating the lake, we find ourselves alongside it. No digressions, no psychogeographic detours. Each view leads, directly, to the next feature. The ‘ruined abbey’ is insufficiently distressed, the fake of a fake. This sort of thing was, until very recently, known as ‘postmodern irony’, but architecturally contrived ruins don’t seem so ironic after the newsreel footage of 11 September at ‘ground zero’, New York; or photographs of collapsed tower blocks in Mexico City, crumpled flyovers, devastated cheap hotels. Hamilton’s abbey, incompletely complete, is cheesy and nibbled. The lakeside setting is picturesque; a potential swamp waiting on winter rain.
This homage to Monk Lewis and Horace Walpole was an afterthought, built in 1772. Brick plastered over to simulate stone. Atkins is interested in brick. The jagged finish, with rodent toothmarks, reminds him of abandoned jobs of his youth, when contractors went bust or upwardly mobile Brummies ran out of readies. Contemporary excavations explain the choice of location for this one-room abbey: vaults and ducting were found beneath the floor. The abbey was built to conceal Hamilton’s brick kilns. Within the illusionist scheme of Pains-hill, evidence of mechanical and mundane things had to be suppressed or disguised. Figures in recorded views of the estate are schematic, at ease, caught in reverie. No record of manual labour was left for posterity. Fakes faked themselves into oblivion.
The game is movement. Walkers undergo a form of aesthetic analysis as they travel from folly to folly, a strict examination of their responses to the freakish sets with which they are confronted. The interval between wonders is nicely calculated; just enough time to compose a poem of celebration. Here, on English heathland, is an eruption of weathered limestone, the aftermath of a volcanic catastrophe. The grotto is shaped from outcrops of tufa, razor-sharp stone you might find on a barren Mediterranean island. Tufa needs heat, sunlight. The sea.
The grotto, after Pope, was the ultimate challenge for the landscape conceptualist: a retreat, a back reference, a geologically impossible shrine to the Muse. But it’s done as a gesture, a performance. You don’t mean it. Hamilton doesn’t really want to hide here. He isn’t soliciting trance or fugue. He invites his guests to admire the artifice. He wants their astonishment. He plays with the laws of physics. He constructs a fantasy cave with stalactites and crystals: in order to deliver an authentically metaphysical experience. By strolling out of sunlight into a dark place, where reflected crystals glitter beneath water, the excursionist is agreeably stunned, disorientated. Amazed.
Jennifer Potter (in her 1998 book, Secret Gardens) commends Painshill Park for featuring her favourite grotto:
The first part is easy: a chink of natural light ahead makes the tunnel seem longer than it is. The wall to your left opens into a shimmering view of the bridge; an oeil-de-boeuf admits light from above, heightening the tension between earth and air, black slag below, crystals above. The gardener, meanwhile, has galloped round the outside to switch on the taps so that when you finally stumble into the main chamber, blinded by sunbeams, you see the water gushing down the walls and the lake opens up to view beyond spangly stalactites.
Pulling away from the too rapid succession of Hamilton’s conceits, we zigzag through the plantation at the western extremity of the estate. Conifer avenues remind me of South Wales, the densely planted darkness of pit prop forests good for nothing except rally driving and hunting foxes with shotguns. Painshill has been invaded with pylons. One of them has the impertinence to place itself directly in front of the red brick Gothic tower.
From the woods, as we climb towards it, the four-storey stump is a Romantic allusion, a nod to Samuel Palmer’s etching The Lonely Tower. Palmer, by the time he completed this work in 1879, was living in Furze Hill House, Reigate. His property stood 400 feet above sea level. The Palmer scholar Raymond Lister said that the South Downs and Kentish hills could be seen in the distance and, ‘on a clear day’, Chanctonbury Ring. Hamilton’s tower, seven or so miles from Furze Hill House, was well within range. Palmer had the habit of jotting lines of verse on to labels which he pasted to the frames of his canvases. Two years after The Lonely Tower, at a period when he blended remembered elements of Shoreham (foreground) with Italian hills (background), he quoted Milton’s ‘L’ Allegro’ as a form of dedication for his watercolour The Prospect.
Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures
Whilst the landscape round it measures…
Towers and battlements it sees
Bosom’d high on tufted trees.
The memory of stars and owls and lounging shepherds dissolves into a busy road. The A3, hurtling towards Junction 10 of the M25, is the graphic margin in our western view, a rude invader. The democracy of speed, pod culture, ensures that Hamilton’s hillside prospect is ignored. Motorists are trained to read signs, watch for hidden cameras, to ready themselves for disaster: the jam, the shunt, the swerve into a service station. They ignore landscape. It happens, but it is as featureless as television; no better, no worse. Narcoleptic resignation, postponed pleasure.
By a fortunate chance, we’re given access to the tower. It’s not the right day, but an official happens to be around and says that, if we’re quick, we can climb the circular stairs to the roof. From the castellated summit we gaze out over three counties – and, better yet, two motorways. The riptide where the roads merge.
Looking down on the pylon, the path between close-packed trees, we understand why Hamilton’s paid hermit felt the need to escape. The hermitage, on the escarpment, was a rustic hut with a thatched roof. I was reminded of Jack Kerouac, fire-watching on Desolation Peak. Too much transcendence gluts the soul. Grand views, elevating prospects, shrivel the human spirit. Kerouac was reduced to writing haikus about winter flies in a medicine cabinet. Hamilton’s salaried loner lasted a fortnight, his existence a spectacle, before he took off to town in search of ale.
The gate in the tree line, indicated on the map, was a chimera. Traffic on the A3 flashed between gaps in the forest screen. The road was a torrent to which we could find no access. From the battlements of the high tower, the motorway was a steel rule in an expanse of woodland, broken by a few small red patches of settlement. Shrubs and new plantings on the gradient of the roadside verge, the soft estate, struggled to disguise a sliproad. We were forced to trek back the way we had come, revisiting every highlight in Hamilton’s portfolio.
Beyond the Ice House, blind children were being led down the long avenue by sighted companions. They worked in pairs. An educational game. Supervisors with clipboards lurked, benevolently attentive, checking the blindfolds. This condition of blindness was temporary, induced. There must be no cheating. Tiny guides, in sports clothes and baseball caps, grinned. Both hands cupped around the leading hand of their unsighted friend. They leant forward, tugging – as if they had a sheep on a lead. The blind ones stretched back, arms flung wide, to ward off obstacles. Progress was slow. Between them, explainer and unseeing audience, they came to understand the ambivalence of Painshill Park.
There’s no help for it, we have to endure a section of road walking; Indian file, facing the oncoming traffic, pressing our body-prints into spiky hedges. A three-mile plod down the A245, through Cobham Tilt and Stoke D’Abernon (like routed Diggers). Vernacular architecture, Surrey brick (headers, stretchers, English Rose, Contra Dutch) proselytised by Marc, are quietly extinguished as we advance on the motorway.
The M25 is an old friend, a vagrant travelling with a special visa, under instruction to keep moving, keep its eyes to itself. The earth-sculpting and planting of the soft estates around Leatherhead Common and Junction 9 is majestic; Tony Sangwine of the Highways Agency can be proud of this one. Leaning on a five-bar gate, among golden fields of corn, to view the low hills and darkening sky, we wouldn’t know the motorway was there – if it wasn’t for the gently humped bridge, the hum of traffic. The road is a painless intervention in a complacent landscape.
We’re in a twilight mood. Emerging from the final clump of settlement, another deserted common planted with lines of dwarf trees, we recognise the sign – ELDERLY PEOPLE– as an appropriate message. There aren’t any on the street. They must have taken the warning to heart and stayed indoors. If there were humans in this part of Surrey, they would certainly be elderly. The road is elderly. Its energies have diminished to the point where it can do nothing but trickle into the brash sweep of the M25, spin on to Chartwell, Tunbridge Wells and the coast, or risk an outing to the Bluewater shopping experience.
There’s a three-mile stretch, pretty straight, between Great Bookham Common and the Leatherhead Junction; a chance to go for it, pedal to the floor. Tony Sangwine’s modulated landscape planting doesn’t register with these high-speed dolts. What do they care about interestingly crinkled trees chosen for their ability to peep over fences? They’ll never see, as we do, the hidden spaces, the rampant ecology, weeds, wild flowers; hawthorn, dogwood, hedge-parsley, willowherb, tormentil.
A detour into Leatherhead is debated; briefly. Epsom is still the target, but there’s a church I want to visit. Renchi is always up for a church, any church. He’s soon bounding across roads, confronting citizens, women with bags of shopping. The Catholic Church of Our Lady and St Peter? There is a reason for my interest. The church has a series of panels carved by Eric Gill, the fourteen Stations of the Cross. Gill features in a novel I’m trying to write, as the paterfamilias of the small community at Capel-y-ffin in the Ewyas Valley on the Welsh borders.
As we draw towards the end of the day’s business, Marc’s mobile starts to trill; friends and potential commissioners activate his signature tune. ‘I’m out on the M25, somewhere in Surrey. Don’t know when we’ll finish.’ Sounds implausible but, this time, it’s true.
A slightly disgruntled priest – Father Paddy – gives us a key. He’s pissed off with a sale sign outside the presbytery. There should be enough elderly people to keep the church afloat, even in Leatherhead – but, in a period of economic instability, realisable assets have to be cashed in.
The church was built in 1923. Father Redway, ‘remembered principally as a man of holiness and poverty’, secured the patronage of Sir Edward Hulton, the Leatherhead-domiciled newspaper magnate. Hulton agreed to guarantee the costs of the church’s construction. He also, having viewed the Stations of the Cross at Westminster Cathedral, commissioned the Gill panels.
Gill was responsible for more stations than British Rail. They came off a production line: Westminster Cathedral, St Alban’s (Oxford), St Cuthbert’s (Bradford), the Church of Our Lady and St Peter (Leatherhead). The panels for Leatherhead were cut in Gill’s Ditchling studio and fixed in groups of two or three. The last panel was finished in April 1925. Hulton died a month later. The car, taking his body to London for burial, paused at the church gates for a blessing.
None of us, tracking around the Stations of the Cross, is inspired by them. Maybe that’s the point: Gill didn’t want the church to be a gallery showcasing his genius. The panels were there to do a job, provide illustration, mark out the route for a series of devotional exercises. These low reliefs, produced in the Twenties, long after Cubism, Vorticism, Suprematism, seem perverse in their customised antiquity. Innocence of vision is hard to fake. Primitivism, smoothed and stroked, looks coy. It’s an art for believers – many of whom, astonished by the eccentricity of the stone carver, didn’t want it. More accurately, it was an art for patrons. In paying for a work that demonstrated their taste, their selfless generosity, they bought a short-term immortality.
It worked. We had come here for Gill’s panels: to see how an orbital journey could be mapped as an album of stone cartoons. The Passion of Christ as a graphic novel, a storyboard. Gill modelled (in the tenth panel at Westminster Cathedral) for the figure of Christ – by standing naked in front of a mirror. In the submissive curves of these low reliefs, the thrusts of staves and crosses, is a masochistic eroticism; in the gilded detail, a tinsel coarseness. The antiquarianism hasn’t lasted. It doesn’t offend, it’s all of a piece with Paul Woodroffe’s stained glass windows, his version of Holman Hunt’s Light of the World.
The Gill project doesn’t help Renchi to decide how he’ll put together his own panels, a record of our journey which has to be both documentary and mythic. He sits in a pew, studying his Ordnance Survey map, plotting the best way out of here. As I click the camera, Marc (the Catholic boy) lifts his left forefinger in a parodic blessing, a mirror image of the Holman Hunt window.
Around Junction 9 the M25 is in spate. Heading north, over the motorway bridge, for our late-afternoon walk to Epsom, we pause to admire the eight lanes of moving traffic. There is no congestion, white vans and light-load heavy goods vehicles (returning to base) are snowflakes dissolving in a fast, grey stream. The central reservation is paved, without impact barriers or any form of planting; a few brave weeds push between the cracks. When the Highways Agency photograph a scene like this (for the brochure, Towards a Balance with Nature), they make sure that motor traffic is an out-of-focus blur; roadside flowers and grassy banks are pin sharp. Roads, the promoters suggest, are not about cars. Roads are landscape improvements, an architecture of ‘managed’ space. My snapshots, freezing the action, tell a different tale; a fast shutter pins each vehicle to the board. Safe distances are observed. Travellers, gunning for Gatwick, have no hold-ups to panic them, no jackknifed articulated lorries. The Leatherhead stretch, on this July evening, is leisured, a mini-autobahn, a military highway of the kind Margaret Thatcher fantasised when she cut the ribbon. The principal difference, so far as I can see, between the Thatcherite Vision of the Eighties and National Socialism in the Germany of the Thirties is that Thatcher couldn’t make the trains run on time. The M25 never was an invasion route down which the master race could roll, just a three-hour fairground ride with dull views.
But here, at Junction 9, the M25 almost succeeds in living up to its statement of intent; Box Hill directly to the south, the genteel Clacket Lane Service Station (the best on the road) up ahead; swathes of unoptioned greenery, a literal green belt, downs and commons and broadleaf woods. At Dorking there is a gap in the ring of hills which protect always-timorous London. We discuss that gap, recall fantasies of future war. George T. Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871) is generally acknowledged to have launched the genre: landscape paranoia (with an undertow of viral sex horror, the Home Counties ravished by cruel Huns). The Germans (Russians, Kosovans, Martians) were coming to Surrey. ‘The line of the great chalk-range was to be defended,’ wrote Chesney – who looked, resolutely, back to the future. Let the suburbs spread and before you know it brutish Prussians will be advancing on Epsom, occupying Thames Ditton.
The streets reached down to Croydon and Wimbledon, which my father could remember quite country places; and people used to say that Kingston and Reigate would soon be joined to London. We thought we could go on building and multiplying for ever.
Sir George Tomkyns Chesney was a military man, a lieutenant colonel, founder of the Royal Indian Civil Engineering College at Staines. Suburban complacency brought the risk, so Chesney thought, of a weakening in moral fibre. We were unprepared for the coming hordes: tunnel-rushing aliens. Premature Euro-scepticism was a popular fictional brand. Iain Duncan Smith ghosted by H.G. Wells.
When I look at my country as it is now – its trade gone, its factories silent, its harbours empty, a prey to pauperism and decay – when I see all this, and think what Great Britain was in my youth, I ask myself whether I have really a heart or any sense of patriotism that I should have witnessed such degradation and still care to live!
Box Hill was England. The recollection of childhood, picnics, walks. Literature. John Keats, at the Burford Bridge Inn, finishing ‘the last five hundred lines’ of Endymion. George Meredith at Flint Cottage, a solitary walker, visited by Robert Louis Stevenson – and later by Leslie Stephen and his ‘Sunday Tramps’. Meredith pronounced: ‘I am neither German nor French, nor, unless the nation is attacked, English. I am European and Cosmopolitan – for humanity.’
But ‘one of the most beautiful scenes in England’ (as Chesney called it) was also one of the most vulnerable.
The shoulder of this ridge overlooking the gap is called Box Hill, from the shrubbery with which it was covered… The weak point was the gap; the ground at the junction of the railways and the roads immediately at the entrance of the gap formed a little valley, dotted, as I said, with buildings and gardens.
Geological trauma: the break in the ‘great chalk-range which extends from beyond Aldershot in the east to the Medway’. We found in the course of our orbital circuit that the fear of invasion was still an active concern; horticulturalists were employed to screen numerous MOD properties. The M25 was London’s perimeter fence. The outer suburbs were infested with bunkers, deep-shelters, airfields, tunnels, tank traps, concrete pillboxes, radar beacons, telecommunications dishes. The architecture of paranoia mushroomed around London. Private researchers, hearing about my walk, deluged me with local evidence: maps, photos, sketches, copies of letters. The main defensive rings – established in the 1890s – started about fifteen miles out from Charing Cross. I visited the once secret Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey and one of the government’s nuclear bunkers (disguised as a farmhouse) at Kelvedon Hatch, Essex. How many more ‘conversions’ were there? How much more unmapped territory?
Junction 9 and its complimentary system of baffle-boards, pedestrian overpasses, had its own architectural style: pastoral/schizo. Our old green path was back (not quite wide enough for two men to pass without touching), but it ran between high fences. If Renchi stood on Marc’s shoulders, he still wouldn’t see over the top. On one side, the road (audible behind clean timber boards); on the other, impenetrable chain-link. Scrubby, sandy soil. No detours, no way out. Graffito with literary pretensions: YOUR SHAPE, MY EYES, THE FAN TASTICAL, PHASES – MY HEART IS A TOOL, A DEVICE, A TOOL/A SAVIOUR.
Walking this narrow path is like patrolling forbidden ground: we don’t know what we’re guarding. We’ve lost all sense of direction. Sound is doctored. We trudge on towards a distant circle of light, the end of the green tunnel. Noise is managed. Noise is subject to ‘reduction technology’. Tyres kiss sympathetic surfaces. Curtains of aspen swallow engine shrieks. Acoustic ‘footsteps’ are plotted by Highways Agency snoops; spectral footfalls in country lanes; posthumous whispers down secret paths that shadow the motorway.
At Ashtead we cross the railway line. Two young lads (one Arsenal, one Spurs) are the only human figures in the landscape. They’re tugging a bright red trolley which contains a yellow plastic sack. Newspapers, GUARDIAN. Are all the inhabitants of Ashtead liberal-leftists? And why do they get their papers at night? The news a day ahead of itself.
Renchi has information, somewhere at the bottom of his rucksack, on the well at Epsom. We can’t go home until we’ve found it. The railway bridge, unlike the user-friendly span over the M25, is from another era; it bristles with spikes – if you’re determined to throw yourself off, you are going to be punctured on the way.
Ashtead Common (‘Camp: Remains Of’) has an excess of paths, decisions to be made. We tack, north/south, east/west, until our enthusiasm flags. It’s been a long day. Marc and I would be happy to hold the well over for the start of the next walk. But Renchi is hot on wells (friend of Glastonbury). Magnesium sulphate constipation remedies (taken in pints from a stone beaker) I can leave alone. I did ten years in Cheltenham. I have something of an allergy to spa towns (twinned, as in Cheltenham’s case, with post-colonial residues and Secret State listening posts, high frequency huts).
Even here, deep in the woods, Renchi locates someone to interrogate, a ranger in a green jeep. We’re realigned. We head off towards the snail-shell spiral of ‘The Wells’, sited on what’s left of Epsom Common. On the map, this is a maze: take the wrong road and you’ll circle aimlessly for hours. The area has ambitions to be suburban-sprawl. ‘The Crescent’, boasts a streetsign. ‘The Greenway’.
The well on the Common was Epsom’s original, the beginning of England’s fashion for spas. Salts and sediments were plentiful (hence the brand name, the universal white tin, Epsom Salts) – but the water supply was mean. At the height of Epsom’s popularity (end of the sixteenth century, beginning of the seventeenth), rumours of sharp practice abounded: the well drunk dry by mid-morning was surreptitiously topped up with buckets from elsewhere.
Everybody sampled the waters, once; Pepys, Defoe, John Aubrey. Thomas Shadwell had a hit with his theatrical romp, Epsom Wells. The combination of bodily purging with amorous adventure, gaming houses, gluttony, was perfectly suited to the English love of ‘Carry On’ humour. Farts, gropes, excursions.
Many of the earliest visitors walked from London. Successful men set themselves up with country estates. John Aubrey, who wrote the first known history of Surrey in the 1670s (published 1718), carried out experiments to analyse Epsom Water. His property, Woodcote Park, was visited by Pepys in 1667. Voluntary rustification was all very well, Pepys thought, but a day trip was as much country living as he could tolerate. His diary account of an excursion to Epsom is still a model for M25 Man: arrive early, try the waters, gossip about Lord Buckhurst and Nell Gwynn, pub lunch, siesta, buy souvenir bottles, back to the pub for dinner, home. Better to invest in a coach than a burdensome house, miles from the City. Provincial novelty is all very well, but the journey is the best of it.
In 1662 a Dutch artist, William Schellinks, walked from Kingston to Epsom Common with the son of a shipping magnate he was shepherding around England. The drawing of the Old Wells that Schellinks made on 5 June reveals the true nature of the scam: a turf-roofed hut of the kind you usually encounter at the edge of Indian territory in an Anthony Mann western, a blasted heath. Coin paid, visitors were encouraged to swallow ten or fifteen pints of murky water; after which, segregated by sex, they trotted up and down until their bowels loosened. The canny employed youths to reserve a bush, warn off intruders. The tumbleweed of the Common shook with bad wind, episodes of projectile vomiting.
None of this dubious history deters Renchi. It’s obvious from the Ordnance Survey map of 1866 that the well, on Oldwells Farm, is at the heart of a cosmic maze, a slice of brain coral. Well Way, if we hit it, will carry us directly to the sacred spot. And so, plodding through what seems like a translation of the less exciting areas of Hampstead Garden Suburb, it proves.
The ‘new’ Old Well, designed by pupils from Epsom High School, dedicated in June 1989, has a touch of the fishing leprechaun about it. Brick steps leading to a circular well – which is topped with a glass light-globe supported by four metal pillars. A grille prevents you getting at the doubtful water. Lepers and tremblers, the spleen-sick, need no longer apply. The Old Well is lost heritage. Aubrey boiled gallons of the stuff to provide himself with a tobacco-box of grey sediment that nobody wanted. We twist through painful contortions, floor to wall, trying to contrive a reasonable visual record of this place. Then we leg it for the station.