Chapter 1

The Stranger’s Welcome

Hamlet: ‘But this is wondrous strange.’

Horatio: ‘And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.’

I STUMBLED INTO the English spring sunshine after a deep sleep. An unnatural sleep, a jet-lagged sleep. I had spent the months before travelling around South America and the long flight back across the Atlantic from west to east, against the sun, had wound my body up and then down. Now I was emerging after what seemed like a hibernation. The river meadows were flooded with purple bugle and fringed with white hawthorn blossom. My neighbour’s apple orchard was also gleaming with blossom, underplanted with daffodils; it led down to the river which still ran fast with the old rains of winter. Back inland, towards the Chilterns, a flush of yellow was spreading across the year’s first crop of oilseed rape.

Mole at the start of The Wind in the Willows realises that spring has arrived without his noticing. I felt the same way. When I had left for South America, it had been bitter February weather, with snow on the ground and the only colour coming from a woodpecker or robin.

Needing a strong coffee and with no food in the house, I cycled to the local market town. The sound of Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ being pumped out by a brass band could be heard for some way before I arrived. A celebration was in full swing. Red and white bunting hung from the church, matched by the small flags the children were waving and by the icing on the teacakes sold in the market place; near by was a puppet stall where Punch was setting about Judy with ferocity. The children watching had their faces painted to look like lions or tigers.

Tattoos snaked out of the busts and jeans of the farmers’ wives queuing at the ice-cream van, which had been painted in neon orange with a ‘chill-out’ logo, and was dispensing Skyrockets, Mr Magics, Daddy Cools and Blackcurrant Peep-Ups. A quiff-haired teenager ostentatiously did a wheelie right across the Market Square on his bicycle pimped up with double shocks and chunky chrome spokes. Oblivious to the fairground stalls and the noise, an elegantly overdressed older lady with sunglasses, light wool coat and malacca cane was stooping against the spring breeze, leaning into it.

The band had finished ‘Dancing Queen’ and were now playing a more stately jig. I noticed not so much the music as their hats: a pink stetson playing the guitar, a bowler manning the cello, a Pete Doherty-style pork-pie perched on the lead guitarist and there, on the drummer’s head, an unmistakable panama, just as I had seen and bought at a small market on the Ecuadorian coast only weeks before.

England has become a complicated and intriguing country. In truth it’s always been one, but perhaps I’m just noticing it more now. The familiar is looking very strange. It may be the jet lag, or the sudden immersion in all this noise, colour and confusion after a deep sleep, but I am seized with a sudden desire to explore England. The few other times I’ve ever had really bad jet lag – the sort where you walk in a trance, as if under water and sedation – have been when I’ve travelled abroad, not travelled home. The only cure then has been total immersion in the new culture.

So I feel like plunging in – and to do so by the darker, underground ways, again like a mole, tracking the older paths into the country.

My usual pattern is to travel abroad to an exotic location, then rest up at home to write about it and try to cultivate my tomato plants in the insipid English sun. And then repeat the process.

Suddenly I like the idea of doing it all in reverse.

*

I was on my third cup of coffee, when a dog caught my eye before I noticed its owner. Not to disparage the owner, who was large and wearing shorts and a brightly coloured pair of Crocs. But it was the dog that drew my attention: it had the wiry, attractive qualities of a natural rat catcher, a smooth-haired fox terrier with unusual markings, its face black and white in an exactly symmetrical way, black on one side, white on the other, as if wearing a harlequin’s mask. And as such, a natural conversation opened with its owner, not that Simon, said owner, needed much excuse.

Even South Americans don’t introduce themselves so fast. Within ten minutes, Simon had told me his entire medical, matrimonial and financial history, which could be summarised as ‘crocked, divorced and bust’. Not that he was letting this get him down.

He made his living by being an artist and a poacher; the two seemed complementary. I was more interested in the poaching, having read Richard Jefferies’ books on the subtle arts and skills, and occasionally brutal encounters, of the poaching world.

Simon supplemented his portrait painting by foraging for truffles and mushrooms that his dog found for him in the woods, and the odd larger bird or fish tickled out from under a gamekeeper’s nose. At forty-nine, he was almost exactly my age, with a touch of the overgrown schoolboy, exacerbated by his shorts. He was large with a hint of vulnerability; he certainly had plenty to be vulnerable about. A car crash (or rather a car crashing into him when he was parked) had broken his neck and left him with back pain, which he took morphine for, along with other pain-killers. As he talked, he apologised for occasionally repeating himself: ‘It’s all these drugs I keep having to take.’

I asked him more about the poaching. I couldn’t help noticing the badge on his jacket lapel: it was for the Countryside Alliance.

‘I like to call it “supplying wild produce”. Rabbits, pheasants, squirrels, deer, mushrooms, truffles, crayfish. It’s all in these woods. And a lot of the time if I didn’t have it, it would just go to waste.’

He got out a catapult to show me, keeping his hands well below the café table. It was a beautifully crafted piece from birch, that he had made himself, with a thick industrial rubber band and a supply of lead musket balls that he kept in a pouch.

‘Incredibly fast, incredibly accurate. Totally legal. And the best thing is that I can get it out quickly. Sometimes I’ll get to a field and it’s in those first few minutes that the best game presents itself, before I can get out a gun. With this little beauty I can pop off a rabbit straightaway.’

Simon ate a lot of rabbit and provided it for his son who lived with him. ‘Skinning a rabbit is easy. Make one incision and you just unzip the thing. Get the guts out and you’re away. Although like they say, there’s plenty of ways to skin a rabbit. Not like a squirrel. Squirrel has a pelt so thick it’s unbelievable. I look down the barrel of a gun sometimes when shooting a rabbit and you see the pellet pass straight through the skin, the flesh, the skin and out the other side. But with a squirrel the pellet never gets out again. Skinning a squirrel is a bastard.’

‘Is squirrel good to eat?’ I wondered, mindful of the old adage that they were just rats with tails, and conscious too that with the jet lag I was not at my sharpest.

‘Squirrel? Very tasty,’ said Simon loyally. ‘But what I really like is deer. Plenty of muntjac around. To the extent that it’s a pest. Beautiful deer, of course. I love the way they move. You know the best way to skin a deer?’

This was purely rhetorical.

‘Wrap some rubber bands around the handle of a golf club. Work the golf club down the spine of the deer when it’s suspended from a tree and tied to the ground. Then attach a lead from the golf club to the tow bar of your pick-up truck. Reverse very, very slowly.’ (Simon stressed this, as if concerned that I might rush the job.) ‘And the skin will peel off like a baby’s nappy. But the deer has to be fresh.’

I nodded.

‘Not so much any more, but there was a time when I was supplying a lot. Local hotels, restaurants, places up in London. They loved it. All my stuff was organic, free range – and local. That’s probably what they put on the menu. “Local free-range venison.” You bet it was free!

‘I had a good run with crayfish. They’re not on this year. Something wrong with the river. I tried the usual beats. A couple of years ago they were jumping into my hands. The other day though, I found a lovely stretch for eel. They’re coming back. I was going down in the boat and we passed plenty of perch. But what I liked the look of were the eel. Good, thick ones. Eel only put on a pound a year, so they’re slow-growing. Some of the butchers over in Henley and Maidenhead, towards London, have started to sell a lot of smoked eel.’

Simon ordered another cappuccino.

‘I live on air really. Painting doesn’t pay much. My life is about survival.’ This complaint – which sounded well rehearsed – was undermined when he showed me copies of his paintings on an expensive iPad he drew from a capacious pocket. The paintings were excellent. Some were of horses, commissioned by their owners. Some were large oils of patterns cast on water. ‘I did these from looking out over the river so much, for fish. You get fascinated by the way the light plays on the water. There’s always a patch beyond the trees where the light is slightly different.’

After a brief silence, he changed tack abruptly.

‘I learned one thing from that car crash. All you have in this life is time. All that matters is time, and how you use it. Nothing else matters. Possessions don’t matter. I lost everything after the crash. And I realised that nothing else is real. Your clothes, that magazine you’re reading, that sandwich you’re eating. Your marriage. None of it. None of it is real. All that matters is your time and what you do with it. I’ve wasted a lot of my life.’

Simon had gone from being very talkative to subdued. He explained that he had these sudden mood swings. ‘It’s the medication.’

*

It was easy to live in the countryside, as I did, and not know what was stirring beneath its surface. Most rural dwellers in England are blithely unaware what the farmers around them are doing, let alone the poachers. If I made a journey, as well as being an investigation of the deepest past, I wanted to explore what was happening now – how the countryside was changing.

The question was which journey to make. There were many old trackways threading their way around England. Not far from me ran one of the oldest and most intriguing, the Icknield Way.

Unlike many of the older paths, this had not been commodified into a long-distance trail with accompanying guidebooks, signposts and people to hold your hand. For much of the Icknield Way’s long route from the south coast near Dorset diagonally across the country to Norfolk, it was still half covered by bramble and tunnelled by elder, beech and oak, forgotten and ignored. This prehistoric track dissected England in a way no modern major road did, since most ran arterially out of London. A century ago, one of the poets I most admired, Edward Thomas, had tried to follow its traces.

That same afternoon, I went over to an escarpment near by. Across the fields of oilseed rape, the clearest of paths showed the Way continuing up to the hills beyond.

It was a path I knew well: I had cycled, ridden and walked it many times, with dogs, friends and neighbours. From where I stood, the path led up into the Chilterns, one of the largest forested areas in England when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, as it still is. Before the Saxons came, this had been part of Roman Britain, but more lightly colonised because of the rougher terrain: south of Romanised Dorchester, the River Thames makes a great horseshoe sweep down from the crossing at Wallingford and around below Whitchurch and Mapledurham to reach Henley. The Chilterns sprawl out from the centre of this horseshoe in a mess of wooded valleys.

It was the West Saxons, the Gewisse, who colonised this area, a group less civilised than the East Saxons of Kent, resisting Christianity until much later. Their original name, the Gewisse, is thought to mean ‘the trusties’ – or as we might put it, ‘the heavies’; one historian described them as ‘a strong-arm gang controlling weaker neighbours by brute force’. Only later have they been labelled more sedately as ‘the West Saxons’. The eponymous kingdom they founded of Wessex is often associated with the south-west coast and Thomas Hardy’s novels, but it was first centred here in Oxfordshire and the upper Thames.

Under the veneer of commuter respectability – for Henley in particular lies within striking distance of London and is much prized by Jaguar owners for its regatta and gentility – you do not need to go far into the woods to find traces of a less polite past.

Entering the Chilterns along the Icknield Way I came to Berins Hill, at the start of what locals called ‘the Ipsden triangle’, a dense patch of woodland in which both motorists and walkers were forever getting lost; it also had no mobile phone signal, which I found satisfying.

Berins Hill was named after the Italian bishop, Birinius, who in AD 631 came on a missionary expedition to convert those Saxons like the Gewisse who had not succumbed to the earlier charms of St Augustine. Birinius was successful and baptised the king of the Gewisse at nearby Benson.

Benson had now been taken over by the RAF, who performed helicopter manoeuvres over the fields. It was a place of security compounds, breeze-block buildings and shaved heads.

But Berins Hill was still wild. I came in from the fields and entered its wooded flanks. Because the beech trees were climbing up the side of the hill, they had to grow even higher to reach the sunlight. The effect was spectacular, the tall beeches disappearing for nigh on a hundred feet up into the canopy, the great height of the tree trunks accentuated by the delicacy and smallness of the beech leaves floating like maidenhair. With the large ferns guarding the entrance to the wood, the effect was Amazonian; not for the first time, I reflected on how exotic we would find a horse chestnut in flower, or beech forest in spring, if we came across them in Brazil rather than Buckinghamshire.

As I got higher onto the hill, the ground thickened with holly and there were pockets of dense wildwood. And then to my surprise I came across something I had never noticed in all the years of passing, perhaps because, in the old maxim, you only ever find what you are looking for: off to one side, on the north, close to a small road but invisible from it, a broad, deep ditch had been dug, wide enough to be a substantial moat, a hollow way that did not feature on any map. And why was this called Berins Hill? Was it because from here the bishop could survey the broad sweep of the West Saxon heartland, both the farms in the valley and the woods up above?

Certainly St Birinius, as he later became, made a judicious if odd decision when it came to dividing up the parishes. Rather than doing so in the usual compact shape, he created long, thin strips that ran down from the hills to the river, so that each parish should enjoy access to the woods at one end and the River Thames at the other. The fact that they all look like Chile on the map has confused both priests and parishioners ever since: my own church lies many miles inland from the river villages it serves.

In the following centuries the West Saxons were forced south out of Oxfordshire by their neighbours to their north: first the Mercians and later the Vikings. This has always been a martial frontier, as evidenced by the much earlier Grim’s Dyke near by, which marked a similar divide of the Iron Age. The hills that bisect the county are a natural border point. The centre of Wessex headed south, towards the coast. After Birinius, the bishops moved their see from Dorchester to Winchester – and the Chilterns and Berkshire Downs became savage and disputed frontier lands. They were the scene of many battles, one of the most important being the battle of Ashdown, not far from here, which Alfred the Great fought against the Vikings in 871, a battle that deserves to be remembered as much as Agincourt, Waterloo or El Alamein.

It was Grim’s Dyke that I joined just a little further to the north where the Icknield Way crossed it, a high embankment with a defensive ditch which once ran west and east from the Thames for hundreds of miles. This was one of the best-preserved stretches of the Dyke, as it entered the Chilterns.

The bluebells in the beech woods that surrounded and disguised the embankment came as a shock. I had forgotten that they would be there, a soft purple rather than blue, as I came in from the bright sunshine of the fields and saw waves and islands of them spreading below the trees, not so much lighting up the forest as glowing within it: purple shadows.

They spread across the ridge. A heavy-seeded plant, bluebells travel slowly across the ground: it had taken many, many generations for them to cover such distance. The carpet of blue flowers managed to be a celebration both of the transience of spring and of the permanence of the English landscape.

Along the top of the Dyke, I followed a path that was covered with beechmast and threaded through with white wood anemones. Looking down through the trees at the wheat fields to either side, with the young wheat still tight in bud, the stalks shimmered blue under the green of their tops, so that when viewed from certain angles they looked like water, an effect exaggerated when the wind blew across the fronds and sent a ripple of green-yellow across the underlying blue.

The Dyke took me back to an older heritage than the Saxon world; it was built by the Celts of the Iron Age in about 300 BC, for reasons that, if archaeologists are honest, remain mysterious – to the point that there has been some argument as to whether it was for southerners to keep northerners out, or vice versa. To my lay eyes, it seemed probable that it was designed to keep the north out, with the ditch on that side of the embankment; but more crucial for me was the acceptance of a mystery. I was used in Latin America to ancient earthworks whose purpose or meaning remained resolutely obscure, and I liked that. Keats’s idea of ‘negative capability’, that we should be humble in the face of what we do not understand, does not always sit well in the world of archaeology, where forcibly expressed hypotheses and the denigration of rival theories are the norm.

Perhaps because we understand so little about it, you never hear Grim’s Dyke mentioned in the same breath as Offa’s Dyke on the Welsh border. Yet it was also a substantial achievement and wherever traces of it remain, as they do on the high horse country below Wantage and even around Watford and suburban London, it is a reminder of how insistently north and south were divided in this country, a fatal fault line that ultimately allowed the Normans to conquer the Anglo-Saxon world.

It was along Grim’s Dyke as it rose from Mongewell by the Thames over to Nettlebed (named at a time when nettles were much appreciated as a resource) that the bluebells were at their finest. I walked here in ‘courting days’ when I was eighteen, too shy to kiss the girl I was with and so kept talking of music instead, a male displacement activity long before Nick Hornby identified it; and I walked here more recently thirty years later when I had fallen in love again after a difficult divorce (aren’t all divorces difficult?) and was trying to rebuild.

I found the bluebells in the woods had a mesmeric quality, one of darkness as well as of light, along this old earthwork trackway whose purpose was still not clear, that collated different impulses together for me: the mystery of the path; the mystery of love that after thirty years I had still not understood; and the bluebells spreading underneath the beeches in purple shadows that would last just a few weeks but had taken centuries to establish.

*

There is nothing like taking a walk to make up your mind. Or for making you accept an obvious solution, however challenging it might be.

I knew that I could base myself at home and launch excursions to various different trackways and drovers’ paths around the country; cherry-pick them, so to speak.

But how much better to make a journey from coast to coast? To be bold. To begin at the Atlantic and end at the North Sea. To travel from Dorset to Norfolk. To follow the Icknield Way not just for a few, familiar miles, but for its entire length right through rural England: the ancient, prehistoric way to cross the country, along its spine and following the hills.

There was a geographical appropriateness to the plan. Locals were fond of saying that we lived in the area that was furthest from the sea. I suspected that this was debatable and a contested national title – like the accolade of being the wettest place, for which I’ve seen many candidates – but it was undoubtedly very landlocked; it was also almost exactly at the midpoint of the Icknield Way. By travelling from coast to coast, I would be connecting the place I knew so well with the country’s furthest edges.

That same night, I looked out some maps and gathered the things I needed for such a journey. Truth to tell, as I had not unpacked, this was hardly difficult. My down jacket, tent and boots stood ready to go from my travels in Peru. The teabags and blister-kit were still in the backpack.

The cure for a hangover was to keep drinking. The cure for jet lag was to keep travelling.

I was on the train to Dorset next morning.

*

Can there be a finer place in all England to start a journey?

I’m at St Catherine’s Chapel on the Dorset coast. A square-cut Norman chapel with immensely thick four-foot walls, it stands isolated on a hilltop, with magnificent views sweeping down the Atlantic along Chesil Beach to Portland Bill. Behind me are the folds of Dorset, undulating away with their coombs and copses and small English lanes, made more drunken than usual by a toponymy that even locals find confusing.

The chapel was built in the fourteenth century by the monks of the nearby Abbey. They constructed it in stone throughout, including the roof, because of the fear of fire from both lightning and the French invaders who made regular incursions along the coast.

The chapel was abandoned for centuries. It has now been restored to its bare essentials and the walls repaired, but there is nothing inside – no pews, no altarpiece, no stained glass. Once a year at Christmas there is a small service held by candlelight for a few devoted souls.

As an emblem of both continuity and neglect, it could not serve me better. St Catherine was perceived as the Athena of the early Christian world: calm, dispassionate, intellectual and courageous; dying as a martyr to a cruel Roman emperor, tied to the wheel that still bears her name and is lit up every Guy Fawkes Day. Her story made for an alluring myth – and myth it properly was. She was removed from the list of official saints by the Vatican in 1968 because ‘she probably never existed’.

The last chapel to St Catherine I visited was in the Sinai desert. This chapel has an equally wild beauty. Thomas Hardy described it as being ‘in a fearfully exposed position’. The chapel seems to be dedicated not to the church but to the sea.

I won’t see the sea again for another 400 miles or so, when I emerge on the Norfolk coast. I will be following as near as I can the old road of the Icknield Way, which has some claim to be the most ancient route in England. It linked the world of the Mediterranean, whose traders landed along the coast from here to Cornwall, with the world of those northern Europeans who came to East Anglia – a prehistoric highway between these two points of entry to England, slicing diagonally across the country from Dorset to Norfolk, with lay-bys at all the great prehistoric sites: Maiden Castle, Stonehenge, Avebury, a string of hill-forts and finally, on the Norfolk coast, Seahenge.

London and the South-East were completely avoided; only later, with the Roman invasion, did all roads start there and Dover become such a principal port. But that suits me fine. I want to take the temperature of England as a country not a city, and to slice across it from the South-West to East Anglia is the perfect way to do so. London can stay off my map.

Perhaps because of the later Roman reorientation of English roads out of London, far more traces of the Icknield Way survive than one might expect: it has not simply been built over and tarmacked. Nor was the route taken by prehistoric man one that now favours the motor car. The old path often follows the hilltops, not the valleys; it is more concerned with natural ford points of rivers, with keeping above the flood plain and with following the grain of the landscape.

Dorset has always been a good launching-off point into England; so much so that Walter Raleigh concentrated on Weymouth for his defences against the Armada, as he suspected that, if Philip of Spain had any tactical sense, that was where he would land. In the event, Philip had no tactical abilities whatsoever and south-westerly winds blew the Spanish fleet into the Channel.

Directly below St Catherine’s Chapel, on the semi-saline waters of the Fleet Lagoon, protected from the Atlantic by the thin strip of Chesil Beach, I can see the old Swannery, established by the same Benedictine monks who built the chapel. It is one of the last surviving swanneries in the country, testament to the medieval appetite for roast swan (preferably with another bird stuffed inside), although now benignly managed to preserve, rather than eat, the birds. Daniel Defoe was much taken with it when he came this way in the eighteenth century: ‘The famous swannery, or nursery of swans, the like of which I believe is not in Europe’.

When I descend there from the chapel, one of the women workers tells me they have just completed the biannual count of mute swans. Seven hundred and forty were tagged as their own, as opposed to any ‘freeloading royal swans’ belonging to the Queen that might come as visitors. She showed me some arresting photographs of the local villagers of Abbotsbury wading into the waters of the Fleet to help hold and tag the swans, as they have always done.

What is it about the incongruence of humans holding swans? Many of the pictures of Leda and the Swan gain their power from the sheer anatomical disjointedness of the species. It certainly puts a new spin on the idea of ‘necking’.

In the photos, the villagers are putting on a brave face. The English countryman or woman is expected to deal with most things with aplomb: holding a live ferret, dealing with a dead sheep, breaking down in their 4×4 on the middle of Dartmoor. But holding a live swan, with a neck like an articulated python and a wing powerful enough to break a man’s arm, is a whole different order of magnitude.

My path leads inland from the old Swannery. It’s a good way to start getting into my stride: an old ropewalk, with a stream bubbling beside it, hart’s tongue ferns in the banks, and roses in the cottage gardens I pass.

But any sentimentality is banished in Abbotsbury – as it should have been by the ropewalk, which was a brutal industry, a medieval sweatshop in which the endless tying of material into rope along a straight path would lose any charm if actually witnessed.

Abbotsbury is a testimony to destruction. Where the abbey once stood is a gaping void, with just the odd gatepost left. All that remains of what must have been a quite wonderful medieval building is the outpost of St Catherine’s Chapel behind me on its hill, spared by Henry VIII at the Reformation only as a useful landmark for the navy of which he was so proud.

England’s green and pleasant veneer – nowhere more seductive than in Dorset – has always hidden its capacity for sudden and brutal change. The winding roads that so picturesquely lead inland were the ones that killed T E Lawrence on his motorbike.

*

My teenage children get embarrassed because, when walking, I have the most un-English habit of buttonholing complete strangers and asking them the time of day and what moves in their neck of the woods. While my children pretend that I am some stray father who has got attached and is just tagging along, the accosted stranger, after the surprise of being addressed by someone who hasn’t known them for at least five years and is saying more than hello, will do that other very English thing: launch into a long tale. For it is a national characteristic that we have the boldness of the very shy. We keep ourselves zipped up but given the opportunity – the licence – and it will all pour out.

A few words to a farmer in Abbotsbury and I find myself hearing a story that needs a longer sit-down and a cup of tea, in a farmhouse with a horse yard and chickens that has managed to stay in the centre of the village without being redeveloped.

David Young was born in 1937. A shrewd and gentle man, he had lived his whole life in Abbotsbury. He practised mixed farming until the late 1960s, but then concentrated on dairy farming until 1998 when he retired, although he told me he wasn’t sure ‘whether he gave up dairying or dairying gave up on him’.

The whole village has always had one landlord: the Ilchester estate, which also owns the Swannery. Apart from some new shared-equity accommodation, put up by the Salisbury Trust, the Ilchester estate has completely controlled the village for as long as he could remember.

The old Lord Illchester had a paternalistic interest in keeping the village uniform. ‘Anyone painted their door a different colour, he would put them right.’ He died in 1964, but both his sons had already been killed: one in a shooting accident when still a schoolboy; the other on active service with the army in Cyprus. The title then passed to a fourth cousin, which is about as distant as it gets in the peerage. The most recent holder had been called Maurice Vivian de Touffreville Fox-Strangways to his friends, Lord Ilchester to the neighbours.

When David was a boy, he and the other children in the village were always conscious of the power of the Ilchester estate.

‘It was like a pistol pointing at your foot. No one would step out of line. As kids, all of us in the village would make dens, like kids do, but we never dared go into the woods, even though they were all around us. That would have been sacrilege, disturbing the pheasants.’

They had to be careful where they went anyway. The same reasons that might have made this Dorset coast attractive to Philip and his Armada applied equally in the Second World War. The beach and surrounding area were heavily mined. I had seen the remains of pillboxes and barbed wire scattered along Chesil Beach, together with what the locals called ‘dragons’ teeth’, large concrete blocks put up as tank traps.

David remembered that when they were children, the local gamekeeper had been blown up when he stepped on a mine.

‘The estate had to bring an older keeper out of retirement. We weren’t exactly scared of him, mind, but he was what you would call authoritative. No one wanted to get on the wrong side of him. Of course, in those days we respected people who had authority.’

This didn’t stop David going out with his father to poach the odd pheasant for the family Sunday pot, particularly during the long years of rationing.

‘We took a sponge and a bamboo and some ammonia. Put the soaked sponge under a roosting pheasant in a tree – and plop, there was Sunday lunch. No shots, no weapons. I was only a lad tagging along with Dad when he did it. Some of the locals used a different technique: they would pierce a dried pea with a needle, right through, and tie it to a stick. If any pheasant took the bait, they couldn’t get loose. A bit cruel, that was. I never did it.’

David won a place to the grammar school in Dorchester. In those days there was still a train line from Abbotsbury. Now there are just a few intermittent buses.

‘I used to get the last train back from Weymouth. Often I was the only passenger. I got to know the driver and he would let me drive the train. Think of that! You wouldn’t get away with a boy being allowed to drive a train these days.’

David’s father had been a reluctant farmer.

‘His heart was never in it, not really. He should have been a carpenter. He was good with his hands. But that was like a lot of people around here. They’d have a small dairy herd, say thirty cows – enough to earn a living and have a drink in the pub. Everyone around here was a farmer when I was growing up. Then my friends started to do different things. One went off and joined the fishing boats in Weymouth.’

David was more enthusiastic about staying. He took over his father’s farm, and built up the dairy herd. That was in the days of the Milk Marketing Board, whose passing he, like many farmers, regretted.

‘The Milk Marketing Board was a monopoly. That’s why they had to get rid of it later. But it protected the farmers. They had the power to dictate prices to the big supermarkets. Soon as that went, the big five supermarkets could turn round and dictate prices to individual dairies.’

‘When the milk quota came in around ’84, it almost did for me. I had just started expanding the herd. Then I had to cut back again, so as not to go over the quota. I was taking milk up the back of the fields and dumping it so that I didn’t get fined for overproduction. That was heartbreaking.’

‘They have a much better system on the continent, where the quota system goes with the cow, not the land. But here we had the House of Lords controlling the bill as it went through Parliament. Vested interests. So of course they tied the quota to the land, to the owner. That meant that if they kicked a tenant farmer off, they could still keep his quota.’

David had now retired from running the farm, which had gone ‘back-in-hand’ to the estate. The yard at the back of the house was still busy with horses, chickens and ducks. His wife and daughters were active horsewomen. Just the week before, the family had suffered a bad burglary. Someone had broken into the tack room: ‘While we were watching telly, they jemmied the door off and wheelbarrowed away nine thousand quid’s worth of saddles and gear.’

He still had a business looking after hedges and fences for other farmers, so saw a great deal of the surrounding area and its changes.

‘This used to be a very sleepy farming part of the world. The land didn’t suit big farms. Too hilly. Not like those prairies up in East Anglia. But all the small tenant farmers are going or gone. The estate runs most of the old farms now as one big business.

‘A lot of people in the village have come from elsewhere to retire. Some of them have been here twenty years. They like to think of themselves as Abbotsbury people,’ he laughed kindly, ‘but they’re not. Not like us. We don’t have many second homes. Too far from London or the cities.

‘In some ways I suppose farming has lost its soul a bit. But I can still do a day’s hedging and be proud of it. And I’ve never wanted to live anywhere else. There are times when I come down from the back road on a summer’s evening, and I’ve got a spare five or ten minutes. Then I stop and look around. I get a lot of pleasure from that. As much pleasure as for an art connoisseur at an art gallery. There’s always something different to see, whether it’s the boats over towards Weymouth Bay or what’s changing in the hedgerows.

‘I wouldn’t have had my life any other way.’

*

The butcher’s in Abbotsbury sold me a pie for the day’s walking. I’m a great believer in the power of the pie; in the Lake District I used to try to reach the summit of peaks with a pie still hot in my pocket from the Keswick shop.

I was taken aback, however, when I asked the farmer’s wife running the shop which of the various pies she recommended.

‘Oh, I couldn’t say. I’m a vegetarian.’

How could a vegetarian run a butcher’s shop? It was not a question I liked to ask outright, although I suppose eunuchs were always good at running harems.

If the lost abbey of Abbotsbury had been a geographical and historical landmark of the most familiar sort, given that English schoolchildren were still force-fed ‘Tudors and Stuarts’ like geese for foie gras, then my next destination, at the top of the back road where David had his farming epiphanies, was exactly the kind of place I wanted to investigate. Set back inland from Abbotsbury, and a brisk walk up the coast path, was the Kingston Russell stone circle, a place so off the map that even Aubrey Burl didn’t list it in his authoritative gazetteer, Rings of Stone.

In a corner of a farmer’s field, the stones lay a little forlorn. There were seventeen of them, arranged in a careful, elliptical shape mirrored by other stone circles along the Atlantic coast. They had been there some 5,000 years.

The stones had all fallen over. English Heritage, who nominally administered the site, hadn’t put up so much as a board to inform visitors what they were looking at. While I was there, three couples passed at intervals, heading for the coast path. They would not have noticed the circle if I hadn’t pointed it out.

Yet the stones had a majesty, and much of that came from their position. The slight rise in the land meant that there was a clear sight line to the round hills of Beacon Knap and other similar knolls heading west along the coast. I was accustomed to the prehistoric love of mimicry, the circle reflecting the shape of the hills beyond.

Making a landscape yours, stamping ownership on the land by showing that you too can shape it, is a primal human instinct. The power of the sacred landscape, and in this case of the sea as well, can be refracted by a sense of placement, of concentration. There was a feeling at the stone circle of great deliberation – that this was precisely the right place for these stones.

Only a week or so before I had been in Peru, at one of my favourite sites: the White Rock, Chuquipalta, which lay in the heart of the Vilcabamba and was the title of my book on the Inca heartland. This huge granite boulder lies in a remote valley in the eastern Andes, a place likewise steeped in prehistory.

The rock had been sculpted by the Incas to give a similar concentration of place, of significance. Around it too were scattered other stones, although these were building blocks left by the Spaniards when they destroyed what they thought of as ‘an idolatrous temple’. Many prehistoric sites in Britain had suffered the same fate or neglect – Avebury being a prime example – and not just because of Church disapproval; there has always been a perception, still current today, that British history begins properly only when the Romans lit the touchpaper and that anything prior is dull or inconsequential.

It is as if Peruvian history began only when the Spaniards arrived, for they, like the Romans, were the first to write anything down, the Incas being as illiterate as Iron Age Britons.

To walk along the high escarpment facing the sea, sometimes called the Dorset Ridgeway, was a reminder of the sheer depth of British prehistory. The Kingston Russell stone circle was an emblem of Neolithic Britain and the late Stone Age, with its megaliths and barrows. Further along the Ridgeway, I passed the burial tumuli of the succeeding Bronze Age, which lasted from 2500 BC to 800 BC and was a very different culture, a rich one that we were barely beginning to understand. And ahead of me lay Maiden Castle, the largest Iron Age hill-fort in Europe; an Iron Age that was far more problematic than the arrival of a new technology might suggest, lasting from 800 BC to the arrival of the Romans.

When I travelled in Peru, or Mexico, or the Himalaya, what interested me most was their prehistoric past, their Inca, Aztec or Buddhist inheritance, both because it was so different from the present, but also so formative; moreover new technology was allowing archaeologists to reveal far more about that past.

I wanted to follow the same line of pursuit in England, although there was a significant difference. In those countries, they revered their prehistory; here we patronised our earliest history by homogenising it. The Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages were all very distinct cultures; yet we think of them, if we think of them at all, as if they were one long and bad Ken Russell movie – a bunch of savages in woad, with a few Druids chanting. It always reminded me of the famous New Yorker cover cartoon by Saul Steinberg of the view from Manhattan’s 9th Avenue, in which nearby streets get labelled but everything beyond the city boundaries and the Hudson is ludicrously foreshortened.

It could be said that the history of England – or the formation of England – should end in 1066, rather than beginning then. Everything since has been our present.

I admit to having at times shared this myopia. My problems with early English history were: that the subject was approached with mind-numbing academic boredom, made worse by long quotes in Anglo-Saxon and peer-language archaeology; or conversely that it was co-opted by New Age preachers who used it to sell me ley lines and a crystal through which to peer dimly at the Celtic twilight.

This journey, in good Buddhist spirit, would attempt the middle way. Recent revisionist work by archaeologists and historians showed that early English history was less straightforward and more interesting than popular preconception might suggest. I realised, though, that there was a little work to do to overcome the stumbling blocks that others might share with me.

My youngest son Leo had been appalled when I told him my plan. ‘Exploring England!’ he said. ‘That sounds incredibly dull. We live here anyway. Why can’t you do something like that writer friend of yours you made a film with, the one with the large stomach who lisps slightly – what’s his name?’

‘William Dalrymple.’

‘Yes, like him. Why don’t you do a book about somewhere mysterious, like India?’ He had started to speak louder, as he does when he feels an eleven-year-old sales pitch coming on. ‘You could call it – you could call it Secrets of India. Now that would really sell!’

*

This Dorset coast was Thomas Hardy country – so much so that some of the locals were heartily sick of the man – but while people remember him for his fatalism and the harshness of the countryside life he described, they forget his interest in the prehistoric. Tess of the d’Urbervilles has a memorable scene set at Stonehenge, and Hardy found and erected a sarsen stone at his home, Max Gate. More remarkably still, he built the whole house within the late Neolithic enclosed circle of Flagstones.

All along the ridge from here to Maiden Castle, tumuli and barrows were scattered like confetti. They were easy to miss as the view out to sea was so fine: the thin strip of Chesil Beach extended out along the headland towards Weymouth, capturing the waters of the Fleet behind its defences; beyond rippled the Atlantic.

‘The number, size and types of monuments in the area around Dorchester is only paralleled by the rich complexes at Stonehenge and Avebury,’ had written Niall Sharples, the most recent investigator of Maiden Castle. There was a reason the ‘archaeological record’ was so good along the Dorset Ridge and had been preserved. Prehistoric man farmed here extensively; the light topsoil lying over the chalk was much easier to work than the heavy clay of the valleys below. But they over-farmed. The thin topsoil was depleted, meaning that some areas, particularly to the east of Dorset, are agricultural wastelands that have still not recovered, and others have reverted to pasture, preserving the barrows and monuments underneath: nothing disturbs the archaeological record more than a plough. There had even been a period in the early Bronze Age when the interior of Maiden Castle was cultivated, although likewise this soon exhausted the topsoil. Over-farming is not a modern invention.

The hill-fort of Maiden Castle is as monumental as an aircraft carrier. Several aircraft carriers, in fact. It lies to the south-west of Dorchester, running over two connecting hilltops. By the time I arrived, the afternoon sun was marking deep ripples of shadow along the banks, bringing out both the shape and texture of the ridges. The houses of Dorchester in the distance looked placid and dull by comparison, like the sheep in the intervening field.

Hardy described it well, as ‘an enormous many limbed organism of an antediluvian time, lying lifeless and covered with a thin green cloth, which hides its substance while revealing its contour’.

It is not the top of Maiden Castle that is remarkable – once you’re up there it feels just like an empty plateau, and a large one of some forty-seven acres – but the giant ramparts and ditches that flow in sinuous folds around the hill for almost exactly a mile.

‘Hill-fort’ is really a misnomer, although academics continue to use it as a convenient term. Archaeologists now think these enclosed places were used for a whole variety of purposes – as settlements, as granary stores, as displays of power, as places of spiritual significance. Local farming communities could have gathered there for a whole variety of reasons, of which defence was only one.

The over-elaborate ditches of Maiden Castle may have been as much for ostentation as military use. I was fascinated by Niall Sharples’ suggestion that limestone had been brought from some distance to face one of the entrances, rather than using more local stone; this was an idea I was familiar with from Peru, a way of deliberately harnessing the power of a different part of the landscape to your own. It is something to which archaeologists have only recently become attuned. When the great mass of man-made Silbury Hill was first excavated, no one thought to question where the infill had come from; it was just assumed to be local. Only now has it been shown that gravel and sarsens were fetched from some considerable distance for no functional reason – but almost certainly a symbolic one.

By the end of the Iron Age, Maiden Castle was the largest hill-fort in England, a reminder of a time when Dorset was the crucial point of entry from the Mediterranean and southern Europe. Wine, precious stones and other goods from as far as Egypt arrived all along the coast here, from Hengistbury Head to Seaton; they might have been exchanged for bracelets made from the polished black Kimmeridge shale, sourced locally at Purbeck, or whetstones and querns from Devon, or slaves.

The Icknield Way serviced the trade by providing a route inland and over to a principal access point from northern Europe, the Norfolk coast. London was bypassed and became important only with the arrival of the Romans; Dorset’s importance fell away and it turned into a relative backwater in the nation’s affairs – one of the few counties, as locals like either to complain or boast, without a motorway. Just a few years after the Roman invasion, even the local coinage was devalued.

It is easy to forget how excited archaeologists were in the 1920s and 1930s when they started to excavate these Iron Age hill-forts. There is a fine photograph of Sir Mortimer Wheeler from the time, wearing his characteristic plus fours and tilted trilby. A small gathering of society observers has formed behind him as he stands proprietorially on his excavated site; a woman wears a flapper hat, with her coat rakishly askew.

Sporadic work on Maiden Castle had been done before, but Wheeler’s excavation between 1934 and 1937 was the first large-scale investigation of the interior of a hill-fort. Such was his dashing appeal that he was able to fund the project with donations from the public, and he set off a veritable ‘iron rush’ among fellow archaeologists. By 1940, some eighty other hill-forts around the country had been excavated.

The tale that Wheeler told captured the popular imagination. His excavations uncovered the bodies of fourteen people who had died violently. There was a layer of charcoal, and signs of Roman occupation. Wheeler put all this together and suggested that Iron Age defenders of the fort had died when the Roman general Vespasian, who later became emperor, defeated the Durotriges tribe; the Romans then burned their fortress.

As archaeological stories go, it was perfect. Heroic British defenders, a historical name that could be attached (the Emperor Vespasian had star value), and a clear conclusion to the story: a burning.

It was also wrong. More recent excavations conducted by Niall Sharples in the 1980s, with the benefit of radiocarbon dating, show that the layer of ash was left from earlier production of iron on the site. Far from burning Maiden Castle, the Romans used it as their own fort for some time. Bodies may have been buried there, but did not necessarily die there.

However, for fifty years Wheeler’s theory was accepted as pioneering and bold archaeology. The novelist John Cowper Powys was living in Dorchester at the time of the excavation. He had already drawn on the interplay between landscape and the history of ideas for A Glastonbury Romance. Wheeler’s excavations unfolding at nearby Maiden Castle were a gift and Powys produced a novel of that name, wanting it to be ‘a rival to The Mayor of Casterbridge’.

No one would pretend that Maiden Castle is an easy read. Critics like George Steiner and Margaret Drabble (‘He is so far outside the canon that he defies the concept of a canon’) have championed Powys as one of the great lost figures of twentieth-century literature. Yet his monolithic Wessex novels – Weymouth Sands along with A Glastonbury Romance and Maiden Castle – now stand like desolate tors, ignored and unvisited.

Perhaps it is because the books are so rooted in place, as the titles suggest. Landscape for Powys had a brooding, psychic force that the modern reader can find oppressive. We like our history to be weightless and free; our towns connected by open roads. The postmodern novel delights in being fictive and elusive; the travel book as a glove-compartment guide that can move the reader at speed between counties, countries and continents. Our writers ‘divide their time’ between New York and Delhi; Hollywood and London; the South of France and Harvard – let alone cyberspace.

Not so Powys. Landscape is held over his characters like a hammer over an anvil. No one seems able to leave. Maiden Castle is a brooding presence in the novel it dominates. As the breathless blurb declared on its cover, ‘even as the characters in Dorchester struggle with the perplexities of love, desire, and faith, it is the looming fortress of Maiden Castle that exerts the otherworldly force that irrevocably determines the course of their lives.’ When Powys died, his ashes were scattered on Chesil Beach.

There was a brief vogue for his books in the 1970s, after his death, when Picador published the novels in paperback and he was part of the post-hippie ‘cult of Avalon’; although Powys would have hated the association and in his earlier and best-known novel, A Glastonbury Romance, lampooned any attempt to commodify the Grail legend.

I was then at school. An inspirational teacher, Christopher Dixon, persuaded me to read Powys and not just the Wessex novels. I tried Porius, a late work of such dense historical confusion that even his warmest admirers have hesitated to cut through its hedge of thorns. The book is set in Wales in AD 500 with Druids, giants, Merlin, a Pelagian monk and various characters who have forgotten to go back to Rome with the legionaries. Margaret Drabble commented that ‘the reader may wander for years in this parallel universe, entrapped and bewitched, and never reach its end’. Powys never reread or edited any of the novels. It shows.

But if the plots wander, some of the set pieces and detail within each novel are extraordinary. For Maiden Castle, Powys’s diaries show that he attended a lecture by Mortimer Wheeler in 1935, having toured the site earlier that same day. In the novel’s climactic scene, the hero, Dud No-Man, walks up to the castle with a character called Uryen (Powys had a fondness for baroque names), who, he discovers during the walk, is actually his father.

The shock of this revelation means that he looks at Maiden Castle – or rather, ‘this Titanic erection of the demented mould-warp man’ – with an intensity of response one could only find in a John Cowper Powys novel:

Dud stared in fascinated awe at the great Earth monument.

From this halfway distance it took all sorts of strange forms to his shameless mind. It took the shape of a huge ‘dropping’ of supermammoth dung.

It took the shape of an enormous seaweed-crusted shell, the shell of the fish called Kraken, whom some dim notion of monstrous mate-lust had drawn up from the primeval slime of its seabed.

It took the shape of that vast planetary Tortoise, upon whose curved back, sealed with the convoluted inscriptions of the nameless Tao, rested the pillar of creation.

But above all as he surveyed that dark-green bulk rising at the end of the long, narrow road, he was compelled to think of the mysterious nest of some gigantic Jurassic-age bird-dragon, such as, in this May sunshine, he could imagine even now hatching its portentous egg.

Looking at it in equally strong spring sunshine, I felt my own imagination distinctly underpowered by comparison. If anything, I reacted against the tendency of writers and artists to regard Maiden Castle as a strange, inexplicable phenomenon, or Wheeler’s similar attempt to give it a human narrative. For me, the hill-fort was remarkable enough for a far simpler reason: that an Iron Age tribe should have invested so many patient man-hours in building such elaborate earthworks, and that they had the considerable resources needed to do so. It was a statement of confidence.

There was something else that struck me. Maiden Castle is remarkable for the complexity of its entrance: the ditches weave backwards and forwards, almost like a maze, before you can gain access. It may not have exclusively been a fort, but the Iron Age when it was built, the first millennium BC, was certainly a time of conflict. The Celtic influence that had come to Britain from the continent with the new technology of iron created far more pressure for existing resources and, almost certainly, divisions and territorial claims. Maiden Castle was a Celtic status symbol, to which you could only gain access if you were allowed.

The idea of the Celts is at best a complicated construct, hedged round by all sorts of romantic and nationalistic longing. They are sometimes thought of as the indigenous people who were pushed out to the margins by waves of later invaders – Romans, then Anglo-Saxons, then Vikings – but kept the flame of true Britishness burning in Cornwall, in Wales and in the Gaelic lands. This ignores the fact that they were themselves Iron Age invaders who partially disrupted what appears to have been a peaceable Bronze Age society – and also ignores the process of gradual assimilation rather than invasion that at times took place. We have always been a polyglot society. And the idea of ‘the original Britons’, the Celts, is as dangerous and delusive a myth as any.

*

The walk from Maiden Castle to Dorchester was odd. You left the ramparts of a prehistoric fort to cross the modern equivalent, a town’s ring-road.

As I reached the centre of town, I was struck by the tawdriness of what had once been Hardy’s Casterbridge, with its South Street a pedestrian mess of ugly fascias and badly fitting pavements. At least a street market brought a flicker of energy. Stalls were selling bric-a-brac from around the world – cheap scarves, leather hats, earrings, ‘charms’, glass beads, silver chains, hematite, lockets, amethyst, lapis and above all silver – not so different from traders who had landed on the Dorset coast with their Egyptian faience beads or prestige Beaker pots.

An Iron Age traveller would have enjoyed – and needed – the nearby Body Shop with its unguents, lotions and aloe vera deodorant. The busker outside, with a lurcher dog and a flute, was playing Paul McCartney’s ‘Mull of Kintyre’. I gave him some change, on the condition that he chose another song.

But worse lay ahead. My route lay through Poundbury, the Prince of Wales’s controversial new model urban estate on the edge of Dorchester. I had hoped that this might prove counter-intuitive; that despite or because of the outcry from all those modernist architects whose noses the Prince had put out of joint – ‘carbuncled’ – this might be a defiantly different experience. A place that ran to its own, more organic rhythm.

The reality was very different. It looked like the village in Shrek. The open loggia of the Town Hall with its mock medieval wooden gate was bad enough – but just opposite was a house with a ludicrous Chippendale front. Giant urns had been placed on the roofs of buildings as if they were empty mantelpieces that needed filling. The townhouses ressembled ornamental carriage clocks. In the square that was supposed to be at the heart of this new, more human town planning stood a fountain, topped by a mermaid wearing fishscale stockings that looked suspiciously as if they might have come from the Ann Summers shop. Across the empty square from the fountain was an empty café.

The tragedy was not just that of a wasted opportunity – and chance to jolt complacent modernist architects out of their normal glass-and-buttress conformity. The tumulus of Poundbury’s own Iron Age fort had been obscured in the process.

Poundbury Hill-Fort lies north of Maiden Castle and is substantial in its own right. John Cowper Powys described a memorable scene here in his diary when he attended a jubilee bonfire in the 1930s:

We did enjoy the fireworks and the enormous bonfire. It became a personality – this great fire – as it whirled and swept and curved up … And the fireworks were striking but the best thing was to see the crowds silhouetted against the sky. They might have been the old Neolithics under the crescent moon.

It was ironic that the Prince of Wales, who had so often and rightly lamented the hemming in of St Paul’s Cathedral by the horrors of Paternoster Square, should have ignored the Iron Age monument on his doorstep when designing Poundbury.

*

The passing of so many cattle and men over the years has hollowed out the lane to a remarkable degree. It looks like a bobsleigh run as it shoots away from me down the hill, its banks covered with hart’s tongue ferns, sloes, brambles and a wet greenness that glows in the shadows.

I’ve reached one of Dorset’s wildest and empty stretches – the Dorsetshire Gap, where a number of old drovers’ roads meet in a valley that allows access through from the north of the county to the south and the sea. The only nearby house at Folly was once an old drovers’ pub, the Fox, although it is now in private hands.

It seems an empty stretch of countryside, but look closely and it glows with the tracings of the time when this was a thoroughfare. There is an old Roman fort up above on a plateau called Nettlecombe Tout, although no footpath leads there and it has never been excavated. The drovers’ road drops down from the Dorsetshire Gap to the ghost medieval village of Higher Melcombe, whose buildings can be traced as faint outlines on the farmland. At the farmhouse there is an old chapel which is disused but still has its stained-glass windows in place. Beyond lie the ruins of the Benedictine abbey at Milton Abbas.

Close as well to the Gap, there are many Bronze Age cross-dykes built to divide the land into plots – particularly around Lyscombe Bottom, a valley or coomb scooped out of the ground so that the surrounding ridge encircles it, a place that must have been pleasingly obvious as a settlement centre for prehistoric man as the valley was naturally protected.

The land is still protected, but now as a wildlife reserve and well-managed farm. On this spring morning the meadows are covered in early gentians and fragrant orchids, although it is too early for the Adonis Blue, which has always fascinated me because of the unusual courtship ritual that gives this chalkland butterfly its name. The silvery male of the species flies coquettishly along; the drab brown female gives chase and tries to catch it.

When Daniel Defoe made his tour of England, he was much taken by the quality of the local Dorset pasture and the sheep it fed; so much so that he returned several times in his narrative to the ‘fine carpet ground, soft as velvet, and the herbage, sweet as garden herbs, which makes their sheep be the best in England, if not in the world, and their wool fine to an extream’.

It was the same pastureland that drew prehistoric man to the area, and right through to the twentieth century, Dorset sheep, together with cattle, were taken along the Icknield Way to distribution points like Banbury Fair in Oxfordshire, where, Defoe reported, the sheep had such a reputation that butchers came from all over the country to source them.

This is grass that has been fine-cropped by sheep for millennia, which is why it is such a beautiful green sward now. Well-managed sheep farming can create a hillside like a lawn as those sharp teeth nibble neatly down.

Another traveller this way, the naturalist W H Hudson, noted how the local plants had adapted by growing as low as possible to avoid the attentions of the sheep. I was a great admirer of Hudson and had visited the house where he was born in Argentina, overshadowed by an enormous ombu tree: a strange tree which is more like a giant shrub and needs to have its branches supported on crutches across the ground, so that it resembles a giant spider. He brought to his studies of England, in particular A Shepherd’s Life about these Dorset and Wiltshire Downs, a sense that England was just as strange and exotic as the pampas; also a sense of how short rural memories are. He told an odd story of how a farmer puzzled over finding a disused well full of sheep heads with horns, when none of the local breeds were horned; and how Hudson had to tell him about the old Wiltshire breed of sheep, with horns, which had died out only a generation or so before.

I see not a single walker through this stretch of Dorset, even though parts of it are waymarked ‘the Dorset Ridgeway’. There are so many long-distance paths now across the country that they have become devalued. The only way of knowing that others have passed this way is a thoughtful tin that someone has left at the crossing point of the Dorsetshire Gap; inside is a notebook wrapped in a bag, in which passers-by have left comments over the years. These tend to the inconsequential, ‘a charming place’, or the paradoxical, ‘just sorry that we are disturbing the stillness and solitude by being here ourselves’; but there is an attraction in this slow accumulation of comment, like a cairn to which every traveller has added a stone.

We think of southern England as being overpopulated. In the fine photos NASA has taken of the Earth from space at night, we are one of the brightest spots on the planet as we burn our office and home candles at both ends. Yet there are still wonderful lacunae of emptiness such as this. A lesson I learned long ago in South America is that however much people think of an area as being known and explored, they are invariably talking about the principal points of a map – the rivers, mountaintops, settlements. There are always ‘the places in between’, as Rory Stewart called his study of rural Afghanistan, that we rarely visit.

*

At this point the more curious reader might ask where I’m spending the night. It would be good to report that I unrolled the mat from my knapsack and stretched out under the Dorset stars. I do have a mat and tent with me – and there will be times when I do just that, or face an additional ten-mile walk to some overpriced bed-and-breakfast with doilies on the washstand.

But by great good fortune I have friends living near by who can put me up. Even better, they are believers in the good life and have a well-stocked cellar and a hot tub they’ve built on the garden hilltop above the house so they can take in the sunset while sipping a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and wondering which red wine to drink over dinner.

There are times when it is wonderful and austere and bracing to sleep under the stars. That time will come. For now, a pleasant bed, good wine and the prospect of a cooked breakfast send me to sleep very happily.

But not before a confession. I’ve taken many expeditions to the Andes, sometimes with people I didn’t know that well beforehand, if at all. There may come a moment when, after a few days, you find yourself alone together at the campfire or by the roadside, and they turn with a ‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’

In a relationship, those words would be the blue screen of death. From someone you’ve known for a couple of days, it’s just something they are nervous about hitting you with on Day One. That they are insulin-dependent, bad at altitude, a recovering alcoholic, or once voted for Richard Nixon.

There’s a moment that is just right for such an admission – some days into a journey, but before you’ve gone too far and it’s absurd that you didn’t know earlier. So at this point I need to look the reader in the eye and draw a little closer. You see, there is a reason we’re doing this whole journey on foot, and not necessarily the one you thought it was. It’s not just the lyrical intensity of a walking experience, although I can have my own occasional epiphanies. It’s because I have to. Not to put too fine a point on it (and here I would lean a little closer, and perhaps touch your arm), the thing is, Reader, I have just lost my driving licence.

This may not come as a complete surprise to those who sat with me in the passenger seat through Tequila Oil: Getting Lost in Mexico. But it certainly came as a surprise to me. One moment I had a spotless driving record of twenty-five years without a single point. The next they were coming at me like Space Invaders.

I was not alone. Speed cameras at the entrances to villages were tripping up the most sober and upright of countryside citizens. I knew of at least three worthies – a county councillor, a captain of industry and the owner of a large local estate – whose Range Rovers were on nine points and hanging over the cliff edge, like The Italian Job. Some people had got wives or penniless students to take their points for them; or hired expensive solicitors to get them off on technicalities.

I faced up to the magistrates, feeling a little like Toad when he was sentenced to jail for motor offences and the Clerk ‘rounded up the sentence’ to twenty years to make it neater.

‘To my mind,’ observed the Chairman of the Bench of Magistrates cheerfully, ‘the ONLY difficulty that presents itself in this otherwise very clear case is, how we can possibly make it sufficiently hot for the incorrigible rogue and hardened ruffian whom we see cowering in the dock before us.’

(The Wind in the Willows)

Although in my case it was a Chairwoman of the Bench, with one of those low, soft voices (‘Mr Thomson, would you mind telling us how you came to be travelling at 34 mph in a 30-mile zone’) that meant trouble. Her two male colleagues looked as if they had just lunched at the Rotary or golf club, and were contemplating a post-prandial liqueur to celebrate the sentence they were about to dish out. The courtroom could have been designed by Terry Gilliam, with a vast height and expanse rearing up above the dock to the magistrates sitting in the gods above and looking down. They may all have come on from a session of housebreaking and were in hanging-judge mood. Between them, they tried to give me a suspension of one year. ‘One year’ echoed out above my head like a voice of doom. The Clerk had to remind the court that: my points were all for small ‘trip-wire’ offences; the maximum suspension was six months anyway.

Even with this reprieve, my car was languishing at home.

Although the need to walk everywhere had proved salutary: it had been a reminder of how shoddy public transport services were in the country, where buses ran to some villages only when there was an ‘r’ in the month; and like slow cooking, there was nothing like being on foot for getting the true taste of a journey.

*

‘You work all day and half the night and where does it get you?’

Mike had sharp blue-grey eyes and a farmer’s way of holding your gaze while he spoke. I met him when I passed a sign for eggs at the end of a lane, and fancied boiling some up for the journey; at the other end of the lane were Mike and his open-sided barn, where he kept a dozen or so young calves and a few chickens. It was not so much a farm as a smallholding and Mike lived in nearby Sherborne now but, as he tells me, once he had far more.

It was a sad story, although it started off well. Mike had been born in the country to a family of modest means. He left school at sixteen and married young. For many years he made ends meet through a variety of jobs, from working on the dustcarts to helping a farmer in the local village, Poyntington.

The farmer was elderly and came to depend on his younger labourer for help. He had no children himself. When he died, he left Mike the farm, much to the anger of the farmer’s nephew and family, who were cut out of the will. They tried to sue Mike, but he survived this. Slowly, he built up the stock of cattle to some 100 head.

Very few farm labourers ever end up owning a farm. Social mobility is still painfully slow, and land prices high; banks will rarely lend substantial amounts to a labourer.

Mike’s particular skill was bringing on young cattle. He would buy them at just a few weeks old, for only £30–£40, then grow the calves on and sell them at five times the amount when they reached six months.

For more than ten years he worked ‘all the hours God gave me’ to build up his herd. But then came disaster. His marriage of thirty-seven years collapsed. As part of the divorce settlement he had to sell the farm. At fifty-six, all he was left with now was six acres of land and a few cattle; he needed to lay hedges for other farmers to earn a living.

I asked him if he felt at all bitter.

‘If I’d lost the lot, then I really would be sick. But at least I’ve still got this bit of land.’

When he hears that I’m walking from Dorset to Norfolk, he insists on giving me half a dozen eggs for free. As in South America, the people who are most generous to travellers are always those who have the least to give.

*

That afternoon saw me reaching the windswept ridge of Corton Hill. Looking behind me I could see the passes around the Dorsetshire Gap leading back to Dorset and the coast. When I reached the end of the ridge, I looked ahead and there, as if arising like an island from the plain, was Cadbury Castle, the closest we have to Camelot, the centre of Arthurian legend and tradition. Even respected archaeologists like Leslie Alcock had endorsed Cadbury Castle as Arthurian.

I had been well set up to this moment with a Bloody Mary of savage and potent force from the Queens Arms in Corton Denham, the village just before this hill. The barman made it for me with chilli vodka, grated raw horseradish and an additional kick of sherry. One advantage of losing your driving licence was that there were no longer any worries about drinking at lunchtime. Together with their excellent home-made pork pie, I now felt I could fly over the valley to Cadbury Castle, or at the very least imagine a knight leading his horse, damsel and page across in a troupe.

But I should at once declare my position on all matters Arthurian. I would be bitterly disappointed if it was ever proved – which looks unlikely – that there was a historical Arthur. One of the great triumphs of the English literary imagination is that the cathedral of prose which is the Arthurian cycle was built up over centuries on empty ground.

Even so, on arriving at Cadbury Castle I could see why such sober heads as Leslie Alcock, who had excavated here in the 1960s, should have succumbed to its charm: the ring of trees around the banked hill; the approach up through them along a hollow way; the emergence onto a plateau commanding views across to the Somerset Levels and Glastonbury. Moreover it was close to the River Cam, and had the villages of West Camel and Queen Camel just to the west, so encouraging the identification with ‘Camelot’.

When Alcock excavated here, he established that the hill-fort was built in the Bronze Age, with later Iron Age usage, and that it was substantially enlarged and occupied just after the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the fifth century – much more so than other comparable hill-forts. The fifth century was precisely when Arthur was supposed to have emerged to lead the British against the Anglo-Saxons.

With great good luck, Alcock discovered a ‘Great Hall’ from this period, measuring some sixty-five feet long; good luck, in that his team of archaeologists allowed themselves only a relatively small part of the plateau to excavate, so to find anything was providential. Perhaps it was this that tipped Alcock over the edge into making the identification with King Arthur, which brought Cadbury Castle to worldwide attention at a time, the late 1960s, when a generation were searching for a lost and future king. It cost him a great deal of respect from his peers, who questioned the historicity of Arthur. There are no contemporary accounts of his reign and the first chronicle describing his deeds dates from 600 years later – but then, argued Alcock, there are hardly any fifth-century contemporary accounts of anything in the first place.

The power of the Arthurian myth is intense, and I can see how archaeologists could succumb to that sheer power, like those who open burial chambers with toxic fumes.

After Geoffrey of Monmouth created the story in the twelth century (although he may have used sources that have since been lost), the tale grew in the telling over the following centuries as it was passed between the English and the French. With their perennial fascination for adultery, the French elaborated the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, and stressed the romance of the tales; the British built up the patriotic and nation-building elements – ‘the Matter of Britain’, as the epic became known.

As with Star Wars, in order to expand the cycle new writers had to keep creating prequels. The finale to the story – the death of Arthur at the hands of Mordred, and the disintegration of the Round Table – was one of the first elements in its telling. Only by going further back could they create new material, spinning out fresh adventures for different knights, embroidering the Grail Quest and delving earlier into Arthur’s boyhood – a process that has continued right up to the present, with T H White’s influential The Sword in the Stone. In the BBC’s recent Merlin series, even the wizard is imagined as a young boy, which really does put the story into reverse. Next we can expect Merlin’s Mother.

But over the thousand years in which the story has been retold and expanded, one account stands out with diamond clarity. Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur combines a journalistic matter-of-factness in his retelling of events – one lecturer of mine at Cambridge observed that you can read the accounts of jousts like cricket fixtures and see certain knights advancing slowly up the ‘prowess-ranking’ – with an underlying elegy for the passing of an age.

Malory had notoriously seen the rougher side of life. He was imprisoned numerous times, on charges that included theft, rape and attempted murder. Attempts have been made to rehabilitate his reputation and show that many of these charges may have been politically motivated – that, for instance, it was a jealous husband who accused Malory of rape when Malory absconded with his wife; but the authorial tone is not that of someone who has led a cloistered existence. When his knights fight, it has all the gritty exhaustion and confusion of a bar brawl that starts up all over again just when everyone thinks the protagonists have calmed down.

He wrote it during the Wars of the Roses, in which he played a part. Those self-destructive and brutal wars circle under Malory’s disintegrating Round Table. The age of the lance and halberd was giving way to that of gunpowder and the arquebus. Edward IV could give a chivalrous speech and then massacre his Lancastrian opponents sheltering inside Tewkesbury Abbey.

Malory divided his original manuscript for Le Morte d’Arthur into eight books, most of which are very familiar to us: the tales of Arthur and Merlin, of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Tristan (which he tells at Wagnerian length) and of the Holy Grail. His great achievement was to take this disparate set of stories and unify them into one overarching narrative, adding link passages, which are called ‘explicits’.

The book that I’ve always liked most is the least familiar – that of ‘Sir Gareth of Orkney’. It is the sole book for which there is no obvious source. Critics have suggested the source is lost, but I like to think that this was the one part of the story Malory made up.

The plainness of the tale is characteristic of him. He is not drawn to the flowery romance of Lancelot and Guinevere – he underplays their adultery as much as possible – or the more abstract theological points of the Grail legend. What Malory likes is grittiness of character and, in characteristic English style, a good story about class difference. ‘Gareth of Orkney’ could be a Mike Leigh film. He is the only one of Arthur’s knights whose name you can still find in a playground today: calling a child Galahad, Percival, Lancelot or Gawain would mark them for life.

Gareth arrives at King Arthur’s court incognito, a big, raw-boned lad of great strength; ‘large and longe and brode in the shoulders’. For reasons that are unclear, he does not announce himself as a prince of royal blood; but he is in truth the son of King Lot of the Orkneys and the much younger brother of Sir Gawain, who has been away from home so long chasing damsels and dragons that he fails to recognise his own brother.

Gareth asks that King Arthur grant him a boon. Arthur, who always falls for such open-ended requests, agrees, but is disappointed when all that Gareth asks is that he be given food and drink for a year. The disagreeable High Steward Kay points out that Gareth could have asked for horse and armour and become a knight, and that this proves he’s a ‘vylane born’, just a peasant. Kay nicknames Gareth ‘Beaumains’ (‘Fair Hands’) – more malicious for being in French – because he looks as if he’s never done any manual labour, and sends him to the kitchen as a galley boy.

After a year in which Gareth is fattened up ‘like a porke hog’, a damsel arrives with the customary tale of woe and need. Lancelot, who can spot a prince dressed as a frog, knights Gareth and he is sent off to help the damsel – who is none too pleased. She had expected a more upmarket, Premiership knight. The names of Tristan, Gawain and Lancelot himself are mentioned.

The damsel’s name is Lynette and she would undoubtedly be played by Alison Steadman. As Gareth makes his way across country to help rescue her besieged sister, Lynette gives a non-stop commentary on how Gareth ‘smells like a kitchen boy’ and is ‘nothing but a ladle-washer’. Even the various knights Gareth defeats she describes as easy pickings: ‘That first knight you killed – his horse just stumbled; and as for the second knight, you came up behind him!’

The effect is to make Gareth fight even harder. With the true masochism of an Englishman, it is her scolding that drives him: the chivalric code forbids talking back to a lady, so he can only become yet more violent in his fighting.

Although Malory is likewise gentlemanly about this, it’s clear that bossy Lynette is not much of a looker; but her sister Lyonesse, who needs rescuing, turns out to be a stunner when she unwimples her visage – or, as Gareth puts it, ‘the fayryst lady that ever I lokyd upon’.

Gareth launches a frenzied assault upon her captor, the Red Knight, that lasts an entire day.

At first light the opponents joust, but both fall to the ground, stunned. They engage again on foot, buffeting each other around the head with their swords, leaving pieces of shield and harness strewn around them. This goes on for some hours, until they are winded and stand there swaying, ‘stagerynge, pantynge, blowynge and bledying’. Gareth and the Red Knight run at each other again like boars, clashing heads and ‘grovelynge’ to the earth. They are so stupefied by the struggle that, Malory reports, they pick up each other’s swords by accident. Come the evening and most of their armour has fallen away, leaving them half naked.

And then occurs one of those moments of genius that Malory’s deceptively simple prose style allows him to slip into his narrative. The two men agree to rest and find two molehills to sit on ‘besydes the fyghtynge place’. They unlace each other’s helmets and literally have a breather. They ‘take the cold wynde’.

The armistice pause is broken when Gareth glimpses Lyonesse at the window and remembers what he’s there for. Egged on by sister Lynette – ‘Where’s your courage, man!’ – Gareth rips off his adversary’s helmet, about to kill him, when the Red Knight manages a long, exculpatory monologue. He explains that he is avenging some damsel whose brother was killed by Lancelot or Gawain, although he’s not sure which. It’s a lame story; nevertheless, given that a woman is behind it all, Gareth feels he has to stay his hand.

So Gareth gets the girl. Even here, Malory can’t resist throwing in some bedroom farce. The young lovers arrange to meet at night ‘to abate their lustys secretly’. Because they are young and inexperienced in such matters, notes the older and wiser Malory, the plan doesn’t stay secret. When Lyonesse arrives at Gareth’s bed wearing nothing but a coat lined with ermine – about as hot an image as the fifteenth century could manage – her jealous sister Lynette sends a knight with an axe to stop them.

Although the bold Gareth sounds more like a Monty Python character at times, Malory weaves him into the fabric of the tale so that his death unpicks the whole great tapestry. When Lancelot accidentally kills Gareth later, Gawain’s revenge for his brother’s death precipitates the collapse of the Round Table. Gareth is the very human and English keystone that Malory adds to his great narrative arch.

As I left Cadbury Castle and made my way across to the landmark of Alfred’s Tower at Stourhead, which marked the ascent of the Icknield Way to Salisbury Plain, it was hard not to think of this Somerset country as a castellated plain. Many of the hills were surmounted by an Iron Age fort or earthworks – or in the case of the most dramatic of all, Glastonbury Tor, which I could see behind me, by a tower rearing up foursquare.

Unlike Leslie Alcock and the historians, I had no need to worry about the truth of Arthur’s existence; but I had an absolute belief in the truth of the Arthurian story as story – that it satisfied a very English need for stoicism in the face of adversity, for a lost Golden Age, and illustrated a perennial truth: that rather than face a damsel with a sharp tongue, most Englishmen would fight an army, or a dragon, or go on a quest to the other side of the world.

*

From Cadbury Castle I was following the old drovers’ road east, directly towards the rising sun on Salisbury Plain. There were times when the old lane had been superseded by modern roads; but a surprising amount of the Icknield Way, or this loop of it, was still traceable. It gave me pleasure to rejoin a grassy lane, the sort that one would hardly notice out of the corner of an eye if driving, yet once resurrected as part of a greater road had real resonance. The Long Lane, as it is sometimes called in this part of Somerset, glowed green for me: ‘the Long Lane’ because it led on to the North Sea.

It was impossible anyway to get too lost over the next ten miles as ahead lay the landmark of Alfred’s Tower on Kingsettle Hill. This three-sided folly rose up like a giant triangulation point. It was erected as a supremely self-confident monument by the eighteenth-century banker, Henry Hoare, for his Stourhead estate. The tower commemorated the historical likelihood that here in 878 King Alfred raised his banner to summon his troops for one last stand against the Vikings, who had penetrated this far into Wessex.

The tower stands 160 feet in height and dominates the surrounding landscape; it ‘commands Somersetshire nearly as far as the curvature of the earth allows’, wrote Edward Thomas. Much of its triumphalism can be understood if one remembers that the tower was built when George III had just ascended the throne – a king with a background as equally Germanic as Saxon Alfred – and that Britain had recently defeated those other Scandinavians, the Swedish, in the Seven Years War.

The myths about Alfred were as complex as the ones about Arthur and the bold statement over the Tower’s entrance was one I would untangle as I journeyed further into the Berkshire Downs ahead:

Alfred the Great

AD 879, on this summit

Erected his Standard

Against Danish Invaders.

To him we owe the origin of Juries;

The establishment of a Militia;

The creation of a Naval Force: –

Alfred, the light of a benighted age,

was a philosopher and a Christian;

the Father of his people,

The Founder of the English

Monarchy and Liberty.

Certainly Alfred managed to rally the English for a final push back against the Vikings, and having walked here, I could see why this was a supremely good place for him to have done so. His subjects in the burghs to the west of Salisbury Plain would all have known how to reach this spot along those same drovers’ paths I had followed. There would, too, have been a sense that the Vikings had reached the inner keep of Wessex; if the Saxons could not hold the drawbridge into Somerset, where, in the celebrated story, Alfred had hidden when on the run as a failed baker, then it was all over. They would get no support from Celtic Cornwall.

Some have suggested that if this was indeed Arthurian country – or already associated with him – then there could have been no more symbolic place for Alfred to raise his standard. But they forget that Arthur was a symbol of the Romano-British who had originally resisted the Saxons, so may not have been the best role model for Alfred. Come to that, Arthur may not yet have been invented.

The tower was not quite as monumental and unchanged as it looked. An American plane – ironically, a de Havilland Norseman – had flown into one of the tower’s turrets in 1944, killing all the crew, when low fog had crept up from the Somerset marshes and hidden the tower. It had taken forty years to repair the damage.

But my thoughts on climbing the 200 steps of the tower were not of Alfred, nor of plane crashes. Because I had come here before, with my wife and children, when I was still married.

It had been for a picnic, on a convenient day’s excursion from Bristol. What concerned me, as I climbed the steps again, with a diamond lattice of light illuminating each sweep of the spiral staircase as it passed a narrow window, was that I could remember almost nothing about that first visit. This had been some five or six years earlier – I could not be certain exactly – but not that long ago. And yet other than the bald fact that we had all climbed the tower, the experience had been wiped clean from my memory.

You can sometimes get that same feeling looking at an old photo album. Why am I smiling in the picture when I can’t even remember the day, the hour, the occasion? In this case exacerbated by a subsequent separation and divorce.

It wasn’t that the last time I climbed the tower I had been with three children running around me; it was that I couldn’t remember what they had done. What we had all done. Was someone told off for going too close to the edge at the top? Undoubtedly. Or for running back down again?

This had, admittedly, been part of a larger outing. We had visited the main Stourhead estate as well. But it gave a certain melancholy to the view as I gazed back at Glastonbury Tor and Cadbury Castle in the distance. How the past can get wiped so clean. And an empty tower with a spiral staircase was a powerful receptacle for the loss of memory.

*

The next day, I was cheered by the discovery that there was a pub directly on my route up onto Salisbury Plain, despite the isolated country. The Red Lion was an old drovers’ inn. The name was a giveaway: it indicates a pub of great antiquity; the red lion was an emblem on John of Gaunt’s fourteenth-century coat of arms. I was to pass many more Red Lions in my journey along the Icknield Way.

Even better, there was a quite superb stretch of the Long Lane leading there, grassed over and hedged by hazelnut.

‘Yes, it’s Roman,’ the pub landlord told me. ‘There’s more Roman stuff up on the hills above.’ I didn’t like to tell him that both the road and the remains on White Sheet Hill were thousands of years older than the Romans; I was used to the assumption that anything old must be Roman.

And there were more important matters to discuss: no less than five pies to choose from, heaven for a pie fancier. I asked the landlord for his thoughts. ‘They’re all good, but the lamb and leek smells the best,’ he told me. It was an eccentric recommendation and all the better for it.

The landlord had a beard, the sure sign of a fanatic of some sort. Most publicans with beards I’ve encountered over the years have been obsessed by CAMRA, or a particular football team, or kept unfeasibly large dogs on the premises. But this one was subtler and more unconventional. He darted around the tables as his customers ate their assorted pies, more like a maître d’ at a good restaurant, checking that his charges were enjoying themselves.

Sometimes his small talk ran a little off-key. With one couple, he complimented the woman on the very short skirt that she was wearing. A conversation ensued as to whether the skirt would or would not be suitable for work. When the woman got embarrassed and the conversation dried, the landlord quickly added, ‘But of course I really like your top as well.’

Fortified by my pie, I set off up White Sheet Hill, my entrance to the heights of Cranborne Chase and Salisbury Plain. At the bottom of the hill was a curious set of artificial mounds which the Normans had constructed to encourage rabbits, a good cash crop. Weaving its way around them, the chalk path took me onto the hill. A south-westerly wind had got up and White Sheet Hill was not a hospitable place, but I saw a lone figure standing on top of what even at a distance was clearly a Bronze Age barrow. He had various boxes of kit open.

For a moment I wondered whether I’d stumbled on that rare thing, an archaeological dig, but the man turned out to be a member of the local model aeroplane flying club.

I admired his model aeroplanes, which were all in the boxes. He told me he came to the same spot every day, whatever the weather.

‘The barrow must be a convenient place to fly them from,’ I suggested.

‘What barrow?’

Almost completely forgotten today, for 4,000 years White Sheet Hill was a convenient beacon for first Neolithic, then Bronze Age and finally Celtic travellers, all of whom left their mark on the hilltop. There was a Neolithic causeway, various other Bronze Age barrows and one large Iron Age hill-fort in close proximity to one another. The local water board had sympathetically built a small reservoir almost on top of the Iron Age fort – which seemed gratuitous when they had an entire open hillside near by to choose from.

It was as I headed on from the hill over Cranborne Chase that the magic took hold. I had a book in my knapsack, which I had referred to frequently since the coast. Ever since I had managed to find an old copy of Ancient Trackways of Wessex, written in 1965 by the husband-and-wife team of H W Timperley and Edith Brill, I had wanted to follow some of the old drovers’ ways they laboriously tracked. It was only with their help that I had negotiated a route through the complexities of the Dorset valleys, as the Icknield Way has many variants.

Most of the time they kept to a dedicated route-finder approach, for which the reader needed an OS map beside them at all times. But when it came to this stretch, which they described as ‘the Harrow Way’, a loop of the Icknield, they allowed themselves a rare moment of lyricism:

This is the most splendid and – in feeling if not in actual number of feet – the highest stretch of the Harrow Way, and one of the loneliest downland walks in Wiltshire.

The wind was buffeting around my head as I advanced down the old lane into the wide-open expanses. I could see for miles and there was not a single person. For Cranborne Chase as it leads into Salisbury Plain is the vortex of England, the great emptiness at its heart, sucking it in.

This was where Arthur and his knights finally disintegrated: the setting for the battle of Camlann where Mordred and Arthur killed each other. Malory tells it all with a bleak beauty: how it was resolved that the two armies ‘should meet upon a down beside Salisbury, and not far from the seaside’.

Throughout the Morte d’Arthur, Malory shows a keen sense of geography, going out of his way to give the epic a scope ranging right across the British Isles, from the Orkneys to Kent. At one point Lancelot offers to make a bare-shirted journey on foot from Sandwich to Carlisle as penance for having unwittingly killed Gareth. It is after this accidental killing that Gareth’s brother Gawain swears vengeance on Lancelot and will not allow Arthur to make peace, however much the king would like to; Arthur has a glorious aside to the effect that ‘I can always get another queen, but not such a brotherhood of knights.’

For the final battle on Salisbury Plain, Malory must surely have drawn on his own experience of civil war of the most vicious sort during the Wars of the Roses. He is careful to show that the conflict was not an inevitable outcome of opposing views, but came rather from a series of very human failings and misunderstandings. What other writer would allow his king to faint with the knowledge of the carnage that lay ahead? There are more manly tears in the last book of Le Morte d’Arthur than a Mills and Boon novel: Malory’s knights are in touch with their feminine side. But they are also capable of creating violent mayhem.

I thought of Yeats’s poem ‘Meditation in Time of Civil War’ in which, while recounting violence similar, the poet notices with most intensity the honeybees building their nest outside his window. Malory likewise tells us that the conflict begins in spring, when every heart should ‘flourysheth and burgoneth’. Instead a ‘grete angur’ has been born. As Yeats wrote of his own time, suddenly there was ‘more substance in our enmities than in our love’.

Whereas Malory’s main source for his account of the battle, the earlier French thirteenth-century Le Mort le Roi Artu, makes much of the fact that Merlin had once foretold that the kingdom of Logres would end in a cataclysmic battle on Salisbury Plain, Malory omits this prophecy completely; as he does much of the lengthy heraldic list of kings and their exploits in the battle chronicled by the anonymous French writer.

He keeps his description terse, like a foreign correspondent, but makes sure that the figure of 100,000 dead stands out, a number that was not inconceivable by the European standards of his own time.

What he does introduce is a human detail of startling simplicity. The two armies have originally agreed to meet in truce on the Plain but, as each distrusts the other, they are equally ready to draw their swords in defence if the other side should raise theirs. An adder comes out of the bushes and bites a knight on the ankle, who not unnaturally responds by killing it, and ‘thoghte none othir harme’. Cue trumpets, horns and bloodshed.

Malory describes the chaos of such a battle. ‘There was but rushynge and rydynge, foynynge [thrusting] and strykynge.’ When the dust clears, the survivors can hardly see each other for the bodies. Arthur kills Mordred, but in a Mexican stand-off the usurper manages a last, mortal blow at the same time, and the king falls to the cold earth.

As night arrives, the grievously wounded Sir Lucan sees looters and robbers creep out by moonlight to strip dead knights of their rings and jewels, and kill any who are injured for their horse harnesses and riches. A time of darkness has come.

I spent many hours walking on the Plain, which is not as flat as it sounds. W H Hudson once compared it to an open hand, ‘with Salisbury in the hollow of the palm, placed nearest the wrist, and the five valleys which cut through it as the five spread fingers’.

After crossing over one of these valley ridges, I came to an old beech copse, with a holly tree at its entrance and more brush-holly underpinning the trees. Called ‘Hanging Langford Camp’, the ancient woodland settlement dated from the late Iron Age and the Arthurian Romano-British period. Brooches from that time had been found under the trees, particularly when any had been uprooted by the wind. From there, the old lane swept down out of the copse towards the bottom of the Wylye Valley along one of the hardest of flint roads I had yet walked on, a penitential track.

What I liked about following this old road across England was not just the necklace of prehistoric sites that accompanied it, but the way they could be so hidden unless you knew where to look. Brush away what appeared to be a normal bit of British countryside, as here, and to my right, hidden under the beaches of Castle Hill, was a tumulus; I had just left a Roman camp and road on the ridge behind me, along with the earthworks of Grim’s Dyke. And now I came over the brow of West Hill, again with its early earthworks, I could see the Langford Lakes laid out before me, next to the medieval village of Steeple Langford.

The lakes were protected as a bird reserve and the terns were circling overhead with their swept-back wings. The odd shaft of light through the dark clouds was picked up by the surface of the water. Coarse fisherman had set up day camps along the reed banks.

Malory never identifies the lake to which Arthur returns his sword when he is dying. The king asks Sir Bedivere, one of his stewards and one of the few survivors of the battle, to take Excalibur and throw it in the lake. Twice Sir Bedivere takes the jewel-encrusted sword but cannot bring himself to waste it in the water. Only on the third time of asking does he not deny Arthur, and throws the sword in, ‘after wrapping the belt about the hilt’, Malory adds, with his usual concern for detail. He sees it grasped by the Lady of the Lake’s hand as it rises up out of the water. Again, Malory keeps a telling detail from one of his sources: the hand shakes the sword three times and ‘brandishes’ it, before withdrawing below the surface.

As an ending that leaves the reader wanting more, it has few rivals. The sword is never explained. Arthur’s body is borne off to ‘the vale of Avalon’ on a barge crewed by black-hooded queens.

When Lancelot learns that Guinevere too is dead, ‘he wepte not greteleye, but syghed’. Malory, sitting in his prison tower as he wrote, waiting for a reprieve that never came from Edward IV for his part in the Wars of the Roses, wanted to achieve a sense of elegy and of loss, of an England that had wasted a golden age through the quarrelsomeness of human nature.

I had been sitting by the banks of the Langford Lakes for no more than a minute when a kingfisher landed on a bare branch just a few feet away from me. I had often waited for hours to see them along stretches of the Thames. This was a gift. It gave its characteristic sweet, bitten-off cry. A slash of turquoise ran down its back, a slash that is difficult to see in flight or unless it is close. The violently red stalks of dogwood along the banks made it stand out even more.

I looked out over the water. In Greek legend, the kingfisher is the bird that harbingers the ‘halcyon days’, those days of calm before a storm. With the wildfowl circling and the strange reflections of both sun and dark clouds on the surface, it was easy to imagine the Arthurian end sequence as having taken place here.

Before I could get too carried away by the moment, one of the fishermen disabused me: ‘They’re old gravel pits. Only been filled with water for the last fifty years, if that.’

*

William Cobbett had spent parts of his childhood here in Steeple Langford, so when it came to doing his Rural Rides, it was natural that he should return. He was disappointed:

When I got to Steeple Langford, I found no public-house, and I found it a much more miserable place than I had remembered it. The Steeple, to which it owed its distinctive appellation, was gone; and the place altogether seemed to me to be very much altered for the worse.

Cobbett, like many a distinguished British traveller – Smollett and Johnson come to mind – loved a good disappointment. The Rural Rides are full of them. He managed to find the Berkshire Downs, which lay ahead of me and in some ways were the treasure trove of Wessex, bleak and equally unsatisfactory. What he liked was a good valley, like that of the Wiltshire Avon.

But his trenchant approach to poor working conditions was admirable. I particularly liked his rant when he visited the nearby village of Milton Lilbourne about how capitalist writers like Adam Smith and his followers – ‘The Scotch feelosofers’, as he called them – could do with a spot of manual labour to appreciate why the working man might occasionally need a holiday:

The Scotch feelosofers, who seem all to have been, by nature, formed for negro-drivers, have an insuperable objection to all those establishments and customs which occasion holidays. They call them a great hindrance, a great bar to industry, a great drawback from ‘national wealth’. I wish each of these unfeeling fellows had a spade put into his hand for ten days, only ten days, and that he were compelled to dig only just as much as one of the common labourers at Fulham. The metaphysical gentleman would, I believe, soon discover the use of holidays!

But why should men, why should any men, work hard? Why, I ask, should they work incessantly, if working part of the days of the week be sufficient? Why should the people at Milton, for instance, work incessantly, when they now raise food and clothing and fuel and every necessary to maintain well five times their number? Why should they not have some holidays? And, pray, say, thou conceited Scotch feelosofer, how the ‘national wealth’ can be increased by making these people work incessantly, that they may raise food and clothing, to go to feed and clothe people who do not work at all?

Cobbett set off on his rural rides not long after he had been living in the United States, effectively exiled there for his political views, and saw England with fresh eyes on his return at the end of 1819, just after the Peterloo massacre had given fresh impetus to the need for reform, and the new Corn Laws were making landowners rich at the expense of their workers.

He made a point of talking to as many farmers as possible, often staying with them, and was interested in new farming methods, like the revolutionary seed drill that Jethro Tull had suggested (Cobbett republished Tull’s book, Horse Hoeing Husbandry); he inveighed against the potato, seeing it as a dangerous fad which the Tory government of the time was trying to promote; and above all he sympathised with the poor lot of the farm labourer, disliking the ‘new rich’, like the Baring family who had made their money from banking and had now ‘bought into the country side’ without understanding it.

God knows what Cobbett would have made of much of southern England now: chips sold in every pub and a banker in every large estate; a patrician ruling Tory Party; a venal House of Commons whose members had just been exposed to public condemnation for their abuse of expenses, and were driven by the dictates of lobbyists; and a victory for free-market capitalism across all the political parties that would have made ‘the Scotch feelosofers’ ecstatic.

It would be wonderful to have his campaigning and humane journalism lance the boils and excesses of the current age, just as he did those of the early nineteenth century.