Rambling can sometimes have a metaphysical dimension. The very word is used to denote stream-of-consciousness discourse; the rambling walk is, in some senses, the free-floating physical equivalent. You can stroll along as though in a trance. This aspect of rambling – the walk with an unconscious impulse – has found echoes in some curious corners of history and culture, from ecclesiastical art to cult television. In the 1979 television drama Quatermass, the eponymous Professor in a dystopian future Britain is attempting to trace his missing teenage granddaughter. It transpires that she has joined The Planet People – a hippyish cult, spread across the world, that is convinced that benevolent aliens are going to transport them to a new planet. As the Planet People process across the English countryside towards the ancient stone circles that they think are the alien launch pads, their leader navigates using not a compass, but a simple plumb-bob. As these young people walk in groups through fields and across bright, summery meadows, they all repeat just one word, hypnotically, ‘Ley, ley, ley …’
Walking and mysticism have always been the most natural companions. In this modern age, a walk with a numinous dimension – either to sites such as Wayland’s Smithy (a Neolithic burial site) in Berkshire, or the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire – is a secular rambler’s guilty pleasure. Why would anyone ever visit the otherwise undramatic countryside that surrounds the Rollright Stones? How much sharper is one’s appreciation of a field, or a copse, if such a place is considered to be steeped in the spooky atmosphere of an ancient, unknowable past? In the 1970s, it was the ramblers’ craze involving ley lines that was picked up – with characteristic satirical energy – by Nigel Kneale, the writer of that Quatermass series. Kneale was responding to a combination of a rise in ecological awareness and the fashionable lure of pre-Christian religious beliefs. According to this fresh branch of mysticism, you could only truly ‘find’ yourself by rejecting science and technology, instead seeking wisdom from the land itself. It was not uncommon to see walkers with dowsing rods; either searching out hidden streams, or following the so called ‘leys’. What exactly were – indeed, are – these supposed to be? Ley lines have come to be defined by enthusiasts as hidden lines of ‘earth energy’, that glow through the ground in distinct geometric patterns across the country. The points at which these lines meet are marked with sacred places, from Salisbury Cathedral to Lindisfarne, from longbarrows to ancient wells, from prominent hills to secluded chapels. Apart from apparently giving visiting UFOs a form of supernatural sat nav (though quite why a floating craft from space, viewing the ground from high up above, would need such navigational aids is unclear), they are also there to guide walkers who are sufficiently tuned in to the telluric currents. Clearly, the entire idea has somehow got completely out of hand. It was all much simpler – and relatively rational – when first proposed and popularised by photographer and amateur topographer Alfred Watkins in 1925 in his book The Old Straight Track.
While Watkins’s conception of ‘ley lines’ connected up sacred sites, they noticeably lacked an inherent mysterious energy. These hypothetical lines, present only in the human eye and imagination, were there for the much more straightforward and practical purpose of guiding Neolithic man on his various journeys on foot. The idea of ley came to Watkins with something of the force of revelation. After years photographing beauty spots across the county of Herefordshire, in that late Victorian efflorescence of the art of photography, he was one day sitting studying a map and suddenly he saw it: various sites – from stone circles to Neolithic earthworks, to prominent churches – appeared to be aligned along straight lines. This was a different thing from established roads like the Ridgeway or the Icknield Way. This was something very much older, and pointed to a past that seemed much more harmonious than the present day. These ancient lines pointed through a land well before the Enclosure Acts; a land without hedges or fences, and across which men could walk with impunity. The lines would not only ease trade, but also ease travel and migration. How did impossibly old longbarrows mesh in along these lines with relatively new churches? The explanation was that those churches had themselves been built on the sites of previous churches; and before those churches, the sites were associated with a religion very much older. The walker could apparently guide himself across the land by following these lines.
It has been noted that the idea found an immediately enthusiastic response from the public because first, around the 1920s, there had been a surge of interest in landscape art. Secondly, ley lines gave a seductive suggestion of what the land had looked like in a simpler, happier age. The book rode a wave of sentimentality about the countryside itself; the reason it was such an underground hit was that it came just at the point when city dwellers began to regard the countryside as being threatened.
In 1925, and in the years beyond, there was a building boom which saw towns and cities encroach ever further into what had once been quiet land. Architect Clough Williams Ellis wrote of urban sprawl in England and the Octopus in 1928. He and his admirers had a particular loathing for speculative suburban property developers, and for the arterial roads which stretched out from the capital, with residential schemes popping up around them. Williams Ellis appealed to the virtues of traditional ruralism.
Another reason for the book’s success is that there was a contemporaneous passion for archaeology, helped by the 1920s British expeditions in Egypt. Ley lines gave the notion of an ancient wisdom embedded in the land, like Saxon treasure or Roman remains. To the middle classes of the 1920s and the 1930s, who were escaping from the cities at the weekend in their new motorcars, and then exploring hitherto remote areas on foot, this opened up an England which they thought must have been lost forever. It echoed with their concomitant discoveries of tucked away villages, and still rustic farmsteads.
We are reminded of a haunting scene in the Kent-set, Powell and Pressburger wartime drama A Canterbury Tale (1945). Landgirl Alison has come walking up the hill outside Chilham to join the old Pilgrim’s Road. She has a deep emotional connection with the place; this is where she and her archaeologist fiancé had shared a perfect caravanning holiday excavating the old road. Now her fiancé – an RAF pilot – is missing, presumed dead. Alison walks along the old Pilgrim’s Road searching for a moment of solace on a perfectly quiet, sunny, summer’s day. Then, from somewhere behind her, there is the sound of a lute, jingling bells, and high spirited laughter. Yet as she whirls around, there is no one there. She is entirely alone. In that moment, we think what she is thinking: that she heard a group of medieval pilgrims, on the final stage of their journey to Canterbury. The old road, with its old purpose, clearly holds the memories of centuries. They are there for anyone who is attuned to the benign atmosphere of the place. There are walkers now who come to places like the Rollright Stones – a circle of seventy-seven small megalithic oolitic limestone standing stones – with at the very least a subconscious wish to hear such echoes. Certainly, you will find many visitors to this field are rather quieter and somehow more respectful than those secular tourists who visit cathedrals.
The superstitious walker is one thing; the religious walker is another. In the Middle Ages, some churches adapted an old Pagan symbol to turn walking into a symbol for the journey of life itself. The labyrinth – that is, the single pathed labyrinth, as opposed to mazes, with all their trick dead ends – is an ancient design that can be found all over the world. Its most familiar incarnation is the maze beneath the Palace of Knossos in which, according to mythology, dwelt the deadly Minotaur. The labyrinth crops up, ploughed into the earth and stony ground, all over Europe, and is attributed to ‘the Celts’, whoever they were.
The medieval Catholic church in some places acquired this design: a unicursal path, weaving and winding through twelve concentric circles, divided in four by a cross – for worshippers to process around. The exasperating turns and reverses, the unexpected changes in direction, were all supposed to mirror one’s mortal progress; the destination was fixed and certain. There is a meditative quality about walking a labyrinth; since it is a single path, there is no need for any conscious decision making about direction, and so one wanders with part of the mind dreamily disengaged. This kind of disengagement makes one more receptive to the symbolism.
The extreme opposite end of this lack of decision making is the hedge maze designed by Greg Bright at Longleat, in Wiltshire – perhaps the ultimate expression of a form that found particular fame with Hampton Court’s eighteenth-century example. Bright’s furiously complex design has paths that stretch to a mile and a half, and which potentially could be wandered for about three times that length. The exercise is explicitly to disorientate the walker, not merely in topographical terms, but also metaphorically. A further diabolical complication of the Bright design is that there are no dead ends – rather, paths that simply loop back on to other paths, in vast swirling vortices, meaning that the walker could conceivably end up going around and around in circles without necessarily even knowing it. Frustration and exasperation grow. There might occasionally be just a flash of irrational panic; how long could one be forced to walk around and around in these recursive patterns?
For Greg Bright – a Glastonbury man – the maze was not just a puzzle for Bank Holiday daytrippers to solve. His mazes, rather, were about throwing the mind, and the body, open to new possibilities. He wrote once of how he had been attracted to the idea of ‘the strangeness of routing’.1 And he had a point: the entire purpose of a maze for the walker is the thrill of getting lost. It is the relinquishing of control.
There is another curious echo here. In 1971, before he found fame, Bright dug out a maze in a field at Pilton, in the West Country. This was like the swirling Longleat version, but this time rendered with deep trenches. Surely the artistic compulsion here sprang from something even more ancient than the maze itself; the cursus.
The cursus was a Neolithic earthwork – essentially, two parallel ditches dug out, and stretching sometimes as far as five miles, in the period 3,600–3,000 BC. There is evidence of such structures near the Thames, punctuated with barrows and longbarrows, and in which have been found fragments of pottery. It is believed by some archaeologists that these trenches were used for the purposes of ritual walks, or processions. We think of these structures, and then we think of the earthwork maze that Bright created, again for the purposes of processing and, in a sense, losing yourself.
In the cases of mazes and labyrinths, it is never difficult to detect a mystical or metaphysical dimension to such a walk. There are some Christians who are extremely distrustful of labyrinths. The sort of revelation and disclosure that they can conjure is not, they think, the type that is good for the soul. In other words, by disengaging to such a degree, by falling into a sort of semi-trance, one is vulnerable to the influence of darker powers, even to the occult. That some Christians voice this is a striking echo particularly of Edmund Spenser: the wild woods that formed his maze in The Faerie Queene were bad for the soul as well as the body.
There will always be pilgrims, making their way to sacred sites. During the seismic upheaval of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the Protestant aim was to rid the English landscape of any signs of idolatry. These included crosses and shrines by the roadside. Even then, there were certain sites – which, themselves, had been adopted by the early Christians centuries beforehand – that proved a little more resilient. People simply continued to walk to them. Such sites included ancient holy wells and healing springs that had themselves been recalibrated from an older faith. There was St Winifriede’s Well in Wales; medieval Catholics went there believing it to have healing qualities. The Reformation in theory should have put paid to such pilgrimages; but in fact, a little later, Protestants started going there too. Indeed, there were sites in rural Wales and northern Scotland right into the twentieth century where such healing wells continued to be visited by those eager for miraculous cures. In Wales, there were ‘rag wells’, springs where strips of clothing would be left tied to hazel trees by those hoping for a cure for skin diseases. Similarly, in the eighteenth century, all those monasteries and abbeys that had been left in ruins by the Reformation became themselves holy places of pilgrimage for Catholics.
We also see a curious parallel between the places that modern walkers are drawn to, and the places our ancestors went. It is not just the stone circles that continue to attract people who otherwise would have no time for anything preternatural. There are the curious shaped hills, like Pendle in Cumbria, with its witchy legends, and Pecked Hill in Wiltshire. Springs, too, still attract visitors. It might now be rare to find occurrences of walkers leaving little strips of clothing; but before we chuckle at the quaintness of such an idea, consider just how many people still throw coins into wells. The impulse – the appeal to some nameless power present in the water itself – is exactly the same. Though according to a weirdly thriving strain of English literature and art, from the medieval period onwards, we ought perhaps to make sure we understand exactly what we are worshipping in the countryside as we make our way through those bosky groves. Some of us might have an attachment to the idea of Gaia theory; the notion that the earth itself is a living organism. Certainly there is a tendency among many of us to personify nature.
Think of all those centuries old churches adorned with Green Men; these grimacing uncanny stone carvings of men who seem to be composed of leaves. It always seems so strikingly strange that this alarming character – precise origin mistily unknown – features within as well as without the churches in question. The old Pagan gods of the British countryside are not always benevolent; quite the reverse. In legends and stories, they are indeed more often malignant, malicious and vengeful to anyone who even unknowingly crosses their paths.
There is the Greek God Pan, who pops up many times. He is benevolent both in Keats’s Endymion, and in The Wind in the Willows. The version of Pan who, at least for our age, seems to have much more abrupt and recognisable resonance is that portrayed in the creepy Saki short story The Music on the Hill. In this, a rather unsympathetic woman bags herself an apparently meek husband; she insists that they move to his estate in the country where she might better mould him, and indeed the lands of his estate. On her first walk out into that country, it seems as though the land will not be quite so yielding as she imagines. She is disturbed by the laughter of an unseen boy – ‘golden and equivocal’ – and subsequently not much impressed by a statue of Pan in a wooded arbour, about which she complains to her husband. It seems to the wife that in these parts, the country folk seem almost to worship Pan. He answers that only a fool would not do so. On another solo walking expedition, the woman transgresses further by taking some grapes that have been left by the statue of Pan. She is almost immediately terrified by the face of a ‘gypsy boy’ grimacing through a hedge at her. Later, her husband calmly assures her that there are no gypsies in this part of the world. The final walk brings the final terrifying confrontation with this sinister, unknowable form of Paganism: a hunted stag, which fatally charges the woman as the air around is filled with the sound of pipes and once more, the noise of a boy’s laughter, ‘golden and equivocal.’2
On one level, this is a nightmare shared (still) by a great many urban dwellers: that the people who live in deep country are in the thrall of gods and beliefs more ancient and more malicious than anyone can know. But the curious thing about the Saki story is that even in the mounting unease, we also perfectly understand the cruel justice of the narrative. The country is there to be taken seriously, frivolous interlopers who seek to impose themselves upon it cannot be allowed to prevail; it is as if they are trying to change the laws of nature. Perhaps the sinister god Pan can relax in the company of modern day walkers. Far from being despoilers, we are almost supernaturally keen, in eco terms, to give something back to the land, and to keep our carbon footprints to a doll-like minimum. Even if there are moments in wooded glades when we find ourselves jumping at a half seen movement, or oddly aware that there is someone else nearby, it is all part of the pleasure of being in a place where man’s influence is more limited.
Fundamentally, what Alfred Watkins was doing with his ley lines back in 1925 – and without quite realising it – was grabbing the land back from centuries of Protestant and Catholic appropriation. By seeing that churches stood on old sacred sites that could be linked, he was essentially uncovering a hidden history. The point is not that the lines are all straight, or form patterns; if there is any such thing as a ley line at all, it is a Neolithic navigation aid, using the most obvious beacons dotted throughout the country. In allowing for some degree of mysticism, Watkins was reminding us that there was religion here long before Christianity arrived.
In the Quatermass serial, the Planet People cannot be stopped in their relentless, hypnotic walk through the leafy English countryside. But the final, horrible irony at the climax is that the guiding alien intelligence bids the young people to return, and to gather in the concrete ugliness of Wembley Stadium. In the end, they have simply been drawn back to the city from which they sought to escape; now they face annihilation. A great many unhappy city dwellers might know the feeling only too well. There are those who, when they escape, catapult themselves as far away from any hint of civilisation as they can. Like the hermits of old, or wise men in the Himalayas, there are those who seek the complete contrast of utter solitude. But pure solitude is not quite as easy to find as one might think.