Chapter 4

Homeleaving

‘You think you’re so clever and classless and free but you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.’

John Lennon, ‘Working Class Hero’

I PACKED MY sleeping bag and kit, and finally headed on up the Icknield Way and towards the Chilterns.

Did the colours look fresher, the green after the rain more succulent, the dark lanes into the beech trees more inviting, now that I was leaving my home not just for a journey but for good? Thirty years before, I had motorbiked through these lanes at dawn, on my way to college, the steam rising from the tarmac filtering and softening even further the colours of the leaves.

The names on the signposts as I headed inland from the river were like a roll-call from different eras of my life: South Stoke where one of my sisters had got married; Checkendon where my other sister had; Catsbrain Hill; Stoke Row; the road up Berins Hill past an old eccentric zoo that was kept at Wellplace Farm, now long closed, and up into Ipsden and the heart of the woods.

I went to see Elizabeth Chatwin, who had continued living at her house at Homer End since her husband, the writer Bruce Chatwin, died in 1989. Elizabeth had been kind to me since I moved back to Oxfordshire after my separation; she had invited me, among other things, to several Thanksgiving meals, which, as an expatriate American, she celebrated with due pomp, ceremony and cranberry sauce.

As I came up the drive to her house, I surprised a muntjac deer, which bolted away into the woods; muntjac had proliferated over the past few years, helped by their fertility cycle. They can breed all year, unlike other animals restricted to set seasons. Some landowners disliked them as pests; I enjoyed the beauty of their startled, exaggerated high kicks, like cheerleaders.

Elizabeth had a direct countrywoman’s approach, which I valued. She was a good person to see when you needed cheering up. It was clear why she had always been such a good traveller – to Afghanistan, with Bruce and Peter Levi, and to India with Penelope Betjeman: her resilience was infectious. Now in her late seventies and suffering from arthritis, she still undertook arduous journeys.

There were some dead pheasants outside the door waiting to be plucked. On one of my first visits, a neighbour had dropped by with some rabbits which she had asked me to help skin – if not quite as a test, then certainly as a rite of passage.

But the animals that Elizabeth most favoured were sheep. On coming to Homer End in 1981, she had brought ten of them from the Chatwins’ previous house near Stow on the Wold. Growing up in America, Elizabeth had been surrounded by animals and she had once wanted to be a vet. In the Cotswolds, she had helped neighbours with their flocks, and they had presented her with a few ewes in return. Over the years at Homer End, she had grown the herd to some thirty ewes, and borrowed a ram from a neighbour each year to produce more.

While the sheep ‘rooted her’, as she put it, and gave her purpose, she complained that the new rules concerning abattoirs made it hard for sheep farmers. Once, local butchers used local abattoirs. Now the five local butchers in the nearby market town had closed, and the supermarkets’ domination of the business had centralised abattoirs at just a few locations in the country, meaning that livestock had to travel an inhumane – and uneconomic – distance to be slaughtered.

For a while, Elizabeth had employed a licensed slaughterer to come to her own premises.

‘Then that was stopped for health and safety reasons. Worse still, when I used one abattoir, I wasn’t sure if the shrink-wrapped cuts I got back at the end were from my own sheep. The whole point is that you want to sell – and eat – your own animals.’

Hygiene regulations now prevented sheep farmers from being present when their sheep were slaughtered. The layman might think this a blessing, but as farmers point out, if you’ve brought sheep into the world, you want to see with your own eyes that they have been despatched as humanely as possible.

Sheep were one of the few subjects on which I had ever heard Elizabeth get emotional. She had stuck with the black Welsh mountain breed that she had started with in Stow, although it was clear her fancy had sometimes strayed elsewhere. ‘I fell in love with Gotland ewes in Scotland. Cloud grey with glossy curly wool, for sheepskin coats. So polite and aristocratic – compared to my grumpy black Welsh sheep who growl and grind their teeth.’ She demonstrated.

I told her that she sounded like one of those men who could have any girl they wanted, but settled for the plain one rather than the gorgeous blonde. ‘Well, it is a bit like that.’

The sheep had been a solitary passion. Bruce had often been away travelling and was anyway not much interested. ‘He didn’t like to touch the sheep. But he would let himself be used as a post. So he stood stock-still in a field and let the sheep be herded round him.’

‘Michael Ignatieff used to come and stay, and I made him help as well. So that once he complained that all he ever did when he saw us was “sheep business”.’

Ignatieff gave a live and impromptu elegy for Chatwin on the day of his death in the cold January of 1989, on The Late Show. It was a bravura and moving bit of television, not now accessible on YouTube or the Internet, but I remember it vividly at the time of transmission. He described how he had visited the Chatwins several times in Bruce’s last months, when he was dying from AIDS and being nursed by Elizabeth. How Chatwin had lain down outside on the grass wearing a pair of Vuarnet glacier sunglasses with side pieces to stop reflected glare, and the sky and clouds had been mirrored in them. It was an image I had always remembered, and thought of whenever I came back to the house and garden.

Ignatieff had also written perceptively about his friend. His claim, in The New York Review of Books, that ‘his own character was one of his greatest inventions’, is often repeated. Less well known is how he ended that same sentence: that he was ‘at the same time the most restlessly cosmopolitan English writer of his generation’.

Chatwin died in 1989 just when the world was changing: the Iron Curtain coming down; the Internet beginning. He wrote when there were still secrets to be found in libraries – when knowledge could be more compartmentalised, hidden, like the rare artefacts he collected; Elizabeth had showed me the Peruvian pre-Columbian cloak of hummingbird feathers they had always kept above their bed.

Knowledge had now become more democratic. It was all ‘out there’, somewhere, on a server. The more arcane settings of Utz in communist Prague, or the isolation of Patagonia, let alone of the Black Hill on the Welsh borders, had passed. We were all connected now. But perhaps, as a result, we had lost his furious urge to talk.

*

‘Aewelm’ means ‘the spring or well source’ in Anglo-Saxon. Ewelme lay just off the Icknield Way a few miles on from Elizabeth, a perfectly formed small village in a dip between the Thames and the Chilterns that had retained much of its ancient Saxon and medieval shape. The chalk stream that flowed through it – and attracted the Saxons, who loved clear water rising – once made the village prosperous from trout and watercress. The watercress beds had been recently restored, although much to local frustration the perfectly good cress could not be sold, due to EU regulations.

The village was small and out of the way, protected in its dip; perhaps the reason that Cromwell’s men failed to rip apart the church in the way they did the rest of royalist Oxfordshire. It was the extraordinarily well preserved flint and stone church I had come back to see, as I had many times in the past.

I am not a great churchgoer or indeed church visitor. But there was something about Ewelme church that would lure in even a devout apostate like Philip Larkin. It sits by a medieval almshouse and the oldest occupied school in the country, a medieval complex made homely by the wood and the scale. Even so, the richness of the interior belies the plain front. In the fifteenth century the church enjoyed aristocratic patronage by the powerful Dukes of Suffolk, the de la Poles, one of whom married Chaucer’s granddaughter, Alice.

Her tomb is quite remarkable. On top, the marble effigy lies in repose, clothed in the habit of a vowess (a widow who has taken a vow not to remarry), a ring on the third finger of her right hand, her hands clasped in prayer in a conventional way. Less commonly, she has the order of the Garter tied around her left arm; Alice was an influential woman for her time, thrice married (so her final vow wasn’t that hard to make), owner of the estates of those three dead husbands and deeply enmeshed in the Wars of the Roses.

Around the tomb’s canopy and on the ceiling of the chapel to the side are multiple angels: some of the earliest wooden carvings in the country and similar in style to those in Suffolk churches like Blythburgh, as you would expect for the Duchess of Suffolk. Attendant angels hold heraldic shields along the side of the tomb. More sinuous angels, like lizards, cling to the marble pillow on which Alice lies, their wings folded back to meet its curves.

But it is what lies beneath her tomb that always draws me back. Bend down to the floor, look through the marble grille and there is a second effigy, directly parallel to the one above. Again it is the Duchess. But this time Alice has been carved in the rictus of death, naked in a winding sheet, in direct parallel to the calm poise of the statue above. Her back is bent up, arched in pain, her teeth bared, her ribs protruding. It is a shocking image.

Moreover, it is an image commissioned by her son, John, the next Duke of Suffolk. What strange mixture of filial piety and horror at his mother’s death prompted him? He had experienced a disturbed childhood. The de la Poles were regarded as upstarts by the nobility, merchant stock who were derided for adding the Norman affectation of ‘de la’ to the plebeian name of Pole. His father William, Alice’s third husband, had been on the wrong side in the Wars of the Roses, supporting Henry VI and alienating the Yorkist clique who arranged for him to be exiled. When he boarded a ship to escape, he was seized, beheaded and left as a corpse on the beach at Dover. Before he died, William was just able to write a moving letter to his son hoping that he would ‘pass all the great tempests and troubles of this wretched world’. Yet on reaching his majority, John himself became a strong supporter of those rival Yorkists and Richard III – and then of Henry VII when he triumphed over the House of York at Bosworth; no wonder that John was known as ‘the trimmer Duke’. His mother Alice had similarly twisted and turned between factions in the Wars of the Roses.

Such ‘cadaver tombs’ were not unknown across Europe in the fifteenth century when John had this one of his mother carved after her death in 1475. Similar tombs had been erected for Henry II of France by his wife Catherine de Medici, and for various clerics in England. Masaccio had illustrated one in Florence in his celebrated Trinity of 1428, the first painting that many visitors see when they arrive at the city, as it stands in Santa Maria Novella just opposite the railway station. Beneath the fresco of the Trinity lies a painted corpse with a stark message: ‘I once was what now you are and what I am, you shall yet be.’

But this tomb for Alice, Duchess of Suffolk, is unusual and far more than just a memento mori. For a start, it is one of the very few known of a single woman; her son John could hardly have carved a tomb to his father as well, given that he had married into the assassins’ family. The sculpted skeleton too is brutally lifelike: the toes curling up, the ribs pressing through the skin, the arms emaciated as one would expect in an old woman of seventy.

There are few other places in England that bring home so well the psychotic disturbance of the Wars of the Roses, a period that has always fascinated me: perhaps Tewkesbury Abbey, where the Yorkists barricaded in the last of the Lancastrians before butchering them; Towton, where 28,000 people died on the battle-field, more casualties in a single day than in any other battle fought on British soil; or the walls of York where the heads of Richard Plantagenet and his son Edmund were skewered.

But Alice’s tomb has a peculiar horror all of its own. It is the Munch Scream of the fifteenth century. It belies the placid face of England as smooth in repose as the marble effigy on top of the tomb; underneath, buried by the weight of centuries, is a twisting and turning effigy that will not rest.

*

I carried on up the outlying hills of the Chilterns. As many as nine red kites were wheeling overhead and searching the skies – or rather searching from the sky, as they peered down for dead prey. It was near here on the Getty estate, in 1989, that the species were reintroduced to England after their extinction. At first welcomed as a triumph, locals were now murmuring that the release programme had been all too successful. Both the local countryside and towns were patrolled by fleets of the birds, their distinctive pronged tail and slightly heavy flight making them instantly identifiable even by the worst birdwatcher.

Kites are primarily scavengers, although if I had a fiver for every countryman or woman like Sarah Phipps who had told me they had lost livestock to them, I could stand a round of drinks at a farmers’ market. I wasn’t too worried about the tales of guinea pigs snatched from village gardens, or chicks for that matter – but I did find their cry oppressive: a thin shriek that died away on the wind. With the nine circling above me as I climbed the hill – and with a certain amount of the weight of the world on my shoulders after my eviction – I felt for a moment like Frodo in Lord of the Rings, with the Nazgul circling in for the kill, an idea so laughable that I instantly felt better.

The kites would have been a familiar sight back in Ewelme during the Wars of the Roses. Medieval towns encouraged them as unpaid street cleaners, although they were not much loved, any more than vultures in India: Shakespeare was still using ‘you kite’ as an insult, or the more satisfying nickname for them, ‘you puttock’. Hollinshed includes them as ‘fowls which we repute unclean’ along with ravens, crows and choughs.

Perhaps their unpopularity was as much to do with the battlefield. Kites would have competed with crows to strip the flesh from the dead after the battles of the Wars of the Roses.

I thought of Malory again and his attempt to create a lost Arthurian world to put against what must have seemed the complete anarchy of that time. A recent biography suggests that he visited Ewelme and Alice, Duchess of Suffolk. She was precisely the sort of powerful yet pious woman who figures in his chronicle.

Malory’s work has stayed so centrally in the English imagination because it tells of loss. There is an undercurrent of regret running through our history. What could have been. The unicorn disappearing into the trees. The loss of Roman Britain. The loss of Albion. The loss of Empire. We are forever constructing narratives in which a golden sunlit time – the Pax Romana, the Elizabethan golden age, that Edwardian summer before the First World War, a brief moment in the mid-sixties with the Beatles – prefigure anarchy and decay.

I remembered how as a teenager in the 1970s, there was a sense of disappointment: that this was a failed decade, the hangover after the sixties dream. The Beatles had split up. Altamont had driven a nail into the idea of free festivals and peace ’n love. Terrorism was rife from the Munich Olympics to Northern Ireland. Industrial dispute had led to bitter winters of strikes and discontent. England was a tribal place of factions and class with divisions hammered out as surely as the wall put up between the Falls and Shankill roads in Belfast. I wished then that I had been born ten years earlier.

In retrospect, the seventies were a fabulous decade that produced far better music, film and attitude than the sixties ever had. Punk was an ethos of self-invention and do-it-yourself, and openness to the unexpected, that has always stayed with me. But I’m not sure I realised that at the time.

Are we bad at living in the present? Always yearning for a past peace that is more perceived than real, wanting to turn the clock back as well as forward. Or is it because the future is always so uncertain? The pace of change in England has often been so ferocious that we cling on to the past, like shipwrecked sailors to a plank of wood.

*

The light is coming low through the trees when I turn the corner and see Danny sitting up ahead beside his caravan. He is tall, with shaved hair, heavily tattooed, maybe in his thirties. His four large shire horses are grazing along the verges of the Icknield Way, and in the field beyond the fence. Danny is on a mobile phone (a gift, it occurs to me, to travellers), while the most beautiful wooden caravan stands on the path, a saucepan of coffee still smoking on a fire near by.

We ease into conversation – it’s too beautiful a caravan to pass without saying something – and it emerges that Danny built it with his wife in Norfolk a few years back and is now very slowly winding his way towards the west, perhaps branching up to Herefordshire – so, rather like Edward Thomas, is doing the same journey that I am, but in reverse. It may take him years rather than months to complete, as he tries to get work as he goes.

I ask him if everyone is friendly when he meets them; he is cautious in his reply. ‘Well, only some. When we were travelling through Suffolk, which was hard, we found that they liked us to stay for one night only, on the village green, because it looks good with the caravan. Any more and they’re not interested. They start getting worried. And if you’re going to work, you need to stay for more than a night.’

He’s been travelling since he was a teenager, but does not come from a travelling family. He was adopted in Newbury (‘by a kind couple who are now dead’), and brought up there but felt he had failed at school and left at sixteen for the open road – ‘and I haven’t looked back’. He too had known Jeremy Sandford, and had read his book about the horse fairs of Yorkshire.

The caravan is a throwback, a conscious and artificial homage to a previous travelling age. In many places the old drovers’ tracks no longer serve their original function – they can be too rutted to travel along or, worse, some local councils have put up bollards, more to stop four-wheel-drive vehicles than caravans, although few councils welcome travellers of any sort.

This is borne out later that evening when a farmer in the local pub overhears me talking about Danny’s caravan on the Ridgeway.

‘Fucking pikeys,’ he says. ‘I hate them. That guy’s horses have been eating my grass. They’ll take anything if it isn’t nailed down, and then some.’

‘Tractors are the worst. They’ll take them in the middle of the night, drive them up onto a container vehicle and be in Felixstowe by dawn before you know anything has happened. Then ship them to Poland. There are a lot of shiny new British tractors in Poland.’

His face darkens. He is already well tanned after what transpires has been a fortnight’s skiing in Courchevel. He is in his fifties, lean and saturnine.

Someone else asks him what he’d do if he caught any thieves or poachers. ‘Ram the vehicle,’ he says unhesitatingly. ‘And if any pikeys were trying to get out at the time, so much the better. The police won’t do a thing against them. Particularly if there’s any colour involved. Just don’t want to go there. A lot of those pikey camps are “no-go zones”,’ he snorts. ‘No-fucking-go zones. What’s that about?’

It doesn’t seem the right time to mention my appreciation of Danny’s hand-tooled wooden caravan, or his magnificent shire horses.

‘I’m getting some concrete blocks put on the drovers’ road. That’ll stop the bastards.’

And sure enough, concrete posts appear shortly afterwards on the Watlington stretch of the Icknield Way. I remember when bollards started appearing around Bristol in the 1980s to stop travellers parking up under flyovers or on lay-bys. Now you get them around even motorway service stations.

Like the good burghers of Suffolk, we like the idea that there are still some romantic souls travelling the highways and byways of old England in the traditional manner. We just don’t want them to come our way.

*

When I was eighteen, I used to ride a motorbike across this stretch of southern Oxfordshire to Henley Sixth Form College where I was briefly a student.

The Sex Pistols were at full throttle around then. One day I made the mistake of listening to Never Mind the Bollocks before getting on my motorbike and was more hyped up than I should have been, with Steve Jones’s incendiary guitar riffs running through me like too much coffee or amphetamine. This would not have mattered – I knew the route like the back of my leather glove – if a farmer hadn’t decided to put loose gravel down on the corner of a country lane that had done perfectly well without it for the previous year.

The bike skidded and I landed in the corner of a nearby field. The bike came off worse than I did, with bent forks. A farmworker was leaning over a gate, watching me. He had a drawl so slow you could play an entire punk song by the time he had finished one of his sentences.

‘Sorry about that … I only jus’ put that gravel down.’

I was too winded by the fall to say anything. As so often in life, a suitable riposte came to me only in retrospect. Nor was it something The Archers could have broadcast.

It was a cold winter and I got in the habit of stopping off for a ‘whisky mac’ (ginger wine and cheap whisky) at one of the many small country pubs that still lay along the old coaching route from London to Oxford. At one, the Crooked Billet in Stoke Row, there was no beer pump at the bar. The elderly landlord went down to the cellar for each pint, drawn directly from the barrel. The only food was a packet of pork scratchings. A dog was in permanent occupation of a battered old sofa in front of the fire. There were two rooms, or ‘snugs’, both so small and close together that you could hear every conversation in the pub. Most of the time there was just one group conversation going on anyway.

Today the Crooked Billet is a gastro-pub of the fanciest sort: tuna carpaccio; seared diver-caught scallops; Moroccan spiced rump of local lamb, harissa, chargrilled Mediterranean vegetables and barley couscous. No ploughman’s lunch, but there is always the ‘sticky-glazed pink-carved duck breast with foie gras mash’.

A large conservatory extension has been built out from the bar, in which candles are lit at each table for dinner. Worst of all, there is no bar.

Not far away on the Thames, the Leatherne Bottel has suffered a similar fate. This was once a favourite for boating folk messing around on the river; it was where the ‘Three Men in a Boat’ stopped to hear the famous fishing story in which every visitor to the pub – and the barman – claimed to have caught the large perch stuffed and hanging over the bar, only for it to turn out to be plaster of Paris.

The whole pub is now made out of plaster of Paris. The interior has been gutted and replaced with Los Angeles faux gilt and naked cherubs. The waitresses wear black. There is a maître d’. On a recent visit I made by boat, when there was no alternative place to stop, we found that the chef and some of his staff had thrown ‘a hissy fit’, as they say in Pinewood, and trashed the toilets in true rock-star fashion, before leaving.

But deep in the woods between the two, I now came to a pub that had changed not at all. At the Black Horse near Checkendon, the beer was still fetched from kegs. For food the choice was between a pickled egg or a pickled onion. When I asked the pub landlady if she could describe the difference between the bitters they stocked, she said, briskly: ‘Well, it’s all beer.’ Then she went back to watch the television in the kitchen. In the old days, Norman had told me, he usually paid for his pint here with a brace of pheasants.

Higher up on the Chilterns, I ended the day at another pub I liked, the Fox and Hounds at Christmas Common. The landlord there had occasional music nights when locals turned up and busked – a group of Irish musicians or, the night that I arrived, a lad called Alex in a woolly hat singing ‘Cocaine Blues’ and then the Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. His voice had the right rasp to it, as if he were still smoking in the now smoke-free pub – a change, incidentally, that no amount of nostalgia for the old pubs causes me any regret. Under the bar lay the landlord’s enormous grey Irish wolfhound, the noblest of dogs, and one with a fine Celtic pedigree – the Celts used them to attack the Ancient Greeks at Delphi. I always trust a pub with a dog.

Alex started up on a cover of the Kings of Leon’s ‘Sex on Fire’, and the man at the bar beside me told me he used to hear the song being played at Basra on British Services Radio when he was in the army. He said it reminded him of driving out into the Iraqi streets in the sunlight, when you didn’t quite know what was going to happen next.

*

The next morning, I made a small detour to St Peter’s at Easington. Compared to Ewelme, it would have been hard to find a plainer, more bare medieval church, or a more out of the way one, down a tiny lane in a hamlet of just a few houses. I later discovered that many inhabitants of nearby Watlington were unaware of its existence. A rare historical report of the fourteenth-century church described it as ‘very ordinary’, but it was the austerity that attracted me: there was no steeple, it backed onto a farmyard and looked like a barn; inside, there was a plain, battered Norman font and whitewashed walls. It was the sort of chapel to which Malory sent his Grail knights.

The church had a record of one Roger Quartermaine, who in 1683 ‘desired to be buried in Easington churchyard. I bequeath to my son, Roger, my wearing apparel and my Bible; to my daughter, Martha Shepherd, my table and form, my brass porridge pot, and my little brass kettle.’ That detail about the porridge pot caught my eye; if you don’t have much, it matters to whom you bequeath your few possessions.

The reason for searching out the old church was a fine painting by John Piper, which had piqued my curiosity; he had used the long grass in the overgrown cemetery to make St Peter’s look even more as if it were in the middle of a meadow.

The Pipers had lived not far from here, in Fawley Bottom. John Piper worked with another local, John Betjeman, to produce The Shell Guide to Oxfordshire, as well as to other counties. His ‘romantic modernist’ sensibility had helped bring landscape painting back into the fold of modern art in England when abstract work was sweeping all before it: Piper’s early studies of prehistoric monuments, which he, like Paul Nash, appreciated, were followed by paintings of old churches, washed in bleak, monochrome colours to preserve them from any charge of sentimentality.

I admired John Piper greatly. But it was his son Edward, also an artist, whom I had known and whom I thought of as I walked on from the church along the high lanes, with the wide curl of the Chilterns ahead revealed by the slight ridge I was traversing and the sunshine that had accompanied me for most of my journey.

Many ghosts had already joined me on my walk. You can’t get to fifty without having a fair amount of friends who have died. Jeremy Sandford, Roger Deakin, and my old mentor from film school, George Brandt, all had jostled around my thoughts. I had met most of them when they were themselves in their fifties, and I was younger. Now I was their contemporary, so to speak.

But of those who had died, Edward was perhaps the one for whom I felt the most affinity. I had got to know him in the late 1980s. His art was selling well both here and in the States; his dealer wanted to commission a film about him, as none had ever been made. Knowing that I admired his work, and had been unable to afford to buy any, he approached me with an offer made attractive because I would be part-paid in paintings.

I went to see Edward at his studio in Somerset. He began by saying that he was hopelessly shy and reticent, particularly when discussing his art. Then he never stopped talking.

Edward had grown up in the shadow of the reputation of his father John, to whom he was close, but he reacted in the best possible way – by taking the essence of his father’s work and steering it in a completely new direction. While John’s English landscapes were drenched in a subdued drizzle, Edward’s looked as if they might have been painted in the South of France. He brought the colour and light back into English landscape. A child of the ‘Here Comes the Sun’ sixties – a child growing up in these same Oxfordshire hills – he took the saturated colours of Pop Art, a movement he briefly dallied with, and poured them over his landscapes.

His pictures reminded me of how long England had been under the clouds artistically. From Turner through to John Piper and Lowry, painters had loved to portray the country as one of clouds, mists and rain, with a brooding black sky behind. No wonder the English had become so convinced that we had such bad weather, as our artists were always telling us so – fallaciously. If my travels abroad had taught me anything, it was that we had a fabulous climate: temperate and mild, with a surprising amount of sunshine. Five minutes in the Andes, or the barren plateau of Tibet, or India before the monsoon – let alone Washington’s humid summer – would have had most of the moaners in bus shelters throughout the country scurrying back to this ‘green and pleasant land’, as Blake described it just before the artistic weather-front closed in.

With the odd exception – like Eric Ravilious, whose clear planes of colour needed light, or foreign visitors like Raoul Dufy – you had to go back to Constable to find much sunshine around in English artistic skies. And it was Constable who started the move to grey. His cloud studies persuaded fellow artists that bad weather was more interesting.

As I looked at the hills where Edward had grown up, bathed in sunlight, I thought that he was well suited temperamentally to flood the colour back. As I got to know him during the intensity of filming, I found him both energetic and vital. He had inherited the striking looks of his father, who even in his eighties was described as one of Britain’s most handsome men: they both had deep-set, piercing eyes, a high domed forehead and sculpted cheekbones. But whereas this look suited John’s more melancholy temperament, it didn’t quite match Edward’s more extrovert character. His face didn’t fit him, somehow; perhaps why he didn’t like to be photographed or filmed.

He engaged with life: with jazz, which he played constantly, either himself or on record; with the fireworks show he organised annually for the Chelsea Arts Club; with his art, of course; but above all with women, or rather the female form. While I liked his landscapes for their colour and vibrancy, it was his nudes for which he was best known. Perhaps because his father had not really ‘gone there’, and certainly because of his own sexual energy, Edward was obsessively drawn to paint nudes.

There were a lot of them. All round his studio were paintings of nude women in mirrors, in stockings, in washes of purple and green like Matisse (whom Edward admired, with a twist: his Red Knickers was a sixties tribute to the master’s Red Studio). We filmed him in the studio drawing a model called Diane, with my cousin Rachel Bell as a female camera operator so that it would not feel voyeuristic or intrusive; Edward himself often undressed when he painted his models.

Diane was unusual in that Edward had got to know her when she bought some of his paintings. Edward engaged all of his models with a light banter, a mixture of running commentary on his work – ‘That line’s wrong, I’m bored with that – let’s start again’ – and discussions about how they might want to rearrange themselves on a chair or sofa. His wife and first model, Prue, had taught him, he said, to make the model feel that she was the subject and not the object of any painting.

His nude women were very English – pale skinned, either brunettes or with flames of auburn hair. One was the mother of some children at the same school as his own. Edward told me how nervous he had been, going round to her house, knocking on the door and asking her to pose – to which, like most of the women he asked, she agreed.

Anyone who ever thought that Englishwomen might be less inherently sensual than their European counterparts should take a crash course in Edward’s nudes. He encouraged his models, as one of them put it, to be relaxed with their own sexuality, and they were. This was not nudity of a classical purity but of a bedroom directness, in which genitalia were displayed and celebrated (Edward complained that while classical art taught the student much about ways of painting a nose, or an eye, there were few antecedents for how to paint a vulva). The poses were often chosen by the models themselves.

Another reason that models liked Edward was that he worked incredibly fast. At art school he had hated the Slade’s insistence on meticulous observation and draughtsmanship, going instead for the quick, intuitive line. Edward had given up Pop Art because he couldn’t be bothered to spend so much time filling in the big, solid blocks of colour that the style required. As he had grown into his mature period, his drawing got faster and faster, like one of the straightahead, hard-bop Art Blakey standards he listened to while working. I watched him do one painting where the ink was still wet on the first line he’d drawn as he came to the last.

This approach ran a high risk of failure and the paintings could jack-knife. But when his line ran true, there was a fluidity to his nudes and portraits that I found entrancing.

Edward was restless with his disciplines too, picking up photography along with the painting. He journeyed from Dartmoor to the Orkneys to photograph Rings of Stone: The Prehistoric Circles of Britain and Ireland, written by Aubrey Burl and still the standard gazetteer on the subject. He photographed Stonehenge under snow and intuitively showed how stone circles reflected the landscape around them, as at Balquhain, in north-eastern Scotland, which Keats described as ‘a dismal cirque of Druids’ stones, upon a forlorn moor’. It was seeing Edward’s pictures of the circles around the country that had first got me interested in the Neolithic culture that produced them.

Like his father, he travelled England for the Shell Guides, covering some thirty counties at great speed. Being Edward, he took the opportunity to photograph not only the landscapes but also plenty of nudes in the landscape, often treating their flesh very texturally, as Bill Brandt did.

Needless to say, the nudes didn’t get into the Shell Guides and have rarely been seen. Edward showed them to me in portfolio. One was of a nude woman lying face down among seaweed, so the curves and texture of her back contrasted with the black, sinuous folds of the water and the plants. At about the only ever exhibition of his photos – in the Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock – the National Trust thought some prints too explicit and asked that they be withdrawn.

The process of filming together was intense because Edward was an intense person. But it acquired a further urgency. The exhibition Edward was preparing, and at which the film was to be shown, had already been billed as ‘Edward Piper: The First 50 Years’. Halfway through the filming, Edward discovered that he had terminal cancer. Understandably, he told no one but his close family. What I thought of as a film marking a staging post in Edward’s evolving career – his father John was still alive and very much working at eighty-five – was suddenly, for him, a final testament and the only film of him painting that would ever be made; but I did not know that.

I struggled to contain and absorb everything that he poured into the documentary, and could not understand his exigency. As well as filming him at work in the studio – a joy, because he worked so fast – we followed as he rushed around Bristol at equally great speed to complete a landscape painting, and then back home drew one of his favourite models, Christine, sitting in the garden with a blaze of flowers around her auburn hair.

Edward might have worked at great speed but there was always a moment when he would pause and appraise, whether a model or a landscape or his work. One thing he often talked about was how to stop and look, particularly at landscape; how easy it was to walk through a place without truly seeing it, and how the painter’s gaze could isolate the important detail and compress.

I was in my twenties, starting a fledgling film career and at first nervous of the considerable Piper charisma; Edward treated me like one of his models to put me at my ease, by talking non-stop on everything from jazz to Matisse. He had the gift of talking to everyone, young or old, as if they were equals. Kenneth Clark had described his parents John and Myfanwy as ‘two of the most completely humanised people I have ever known’; Edward inherited that. The studio house that he and Prue converted in Somerset, with a print of Picasso’s New Year on the kitchen door, was filled with light and music and very good cooking; Prue, as well as being a skilled ceramicist, was a cookery writer.

I admired Edward for bringing the Mediterranean to England; for his love of colour and women and good food; and for the sense of an ancient culture rippling under the landscape. He was never apologetic about the country, in the way that so many artists and intellectuals feel they have to be.

And then he was gone. So quickly. I only discovered his full name in the obituaries: Edward Blake Christmas Piper. His father John was devastated and died shortly afterwards.

I had a few of Edward’s paintings as a result of the filming – a magical woman’s head against the trees, like an English dryad, and some of the nudes. What should have been a friendship that continued for another twenty years had been cut short. But I could hear his light, high voice inside my head as I headed towards the Chilterns, telling me that he wasn’t sure if Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch was as good a jazz record as everyone said it was.

*

I reached Watlington, the town just under the Chilterns that marks the start of the Icknield Way’s long traverse across those hills. Several nearby farms and houses are called Icknield, as is the secondary school.

Watlington was an attractive market town that I already knew, as my sister Katie and her family lived there, with a fine medieval Town Hall at its central crossroads; lying on the Oxford coaching road from London, it used to have even more pubs than elsewhere in the county – a dozen at least. Then late in the nineteenth century, a Methodist spoilsport called George Wilkinson bought six just to close them down.

Edward Thomas passed through here not long afterwards, describing it as ‘all of a piece and rustic, but urban in its compression of house against house’. To escape the noise of a ‘pleasure fair’ that was passing through, he went into one of the surviving taprooms, ‘where the music did not penetrate and the weary were at rest. It was a most beautiful evening, and the swifts were shrieking low down along the deserted streets at nine o’clock. I should like to see them crowded with sheep from Ilsley, and the old drover wearing a thistle in his cap, or with Welsh ponies going to Stokenchurch Fair over the Chilterns.’

Like me, Thomas measured out his progress in this part of the world by pubs, from the Plough at Britwell Salome to the Shakespeare at Wallingford, and preferred the taprooms where there were ‘men, politics, crops and beer’ to the private bars where he found nothing but polished tables and trapped flies buzzing around – and nothing to smell. He had a lovely phrase for the Chilterns that lay ahead of me, ‘wooded on their crests and in the hollows, not very high, but shapely’.

There was a fair taking place in Watlington on the day I passed through. The local morris men were dancing.

Morris dancers can make real countrymen uneasy. In Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem, set in a Wiltshire village, there is much mockery of the local man who dresses up in his garters and bells for the visitors on the village green.

I felt ambivalent, but also sorry for the dancers in the heat. The narrow streets of Watlington were trapping the summer sun. They were dancing in front of a barbecue on the pavement outside the local butchers, and their faces had taken on the livid hue of the roasting sausages as they hit their batons and twirled their handkerchiefs; how they must have itched to use those same handkerchiefs on their perspiring brows.

The troupe were from nearby Towersey and followed a pattern I’ve observed right around the country: all were old men except one; the older ones were built more like rugby fans than rugby players, so their white shirts were pulled tight over substantial girths that swayed ponderously as they swung around each other; the only young man was, as always, lean enough to emphasise the contrast in stomach size.

The local women were looking on more out of the historical reverence that afflicts the English than from any particular lust or admiration. Only a musician playing the squeezebox, with a jauntily tilted hat and less need to sweat, exuded the air of nomadic restlessness and allure that the morris men once brought with them: for they are no more English than the white wisteria which so gracefully adorns the more upmarket cottage walls along the High Street.

Nor is the dance quite as old as is sometimes thought. Rather than the medieval tradition people assume it must be, like a mummers’ play, the term ‘morris dancing’ derives from ‘moorish dance’ and originated in Spain in the fifteenth century, with the dancers using swords rather than sticks to tap each other as they swirled. Brought over to England at the time of Henry VII, when the costumed Spanish dancers gave an energetic presentation before the king in the Christmas celebrations of 1494, it proved a popular success.

A century later, in 1600, Shakespearean actor Will Kemp performed ‘a morris dance’ all the way from Norwich to London as a publicity stunt, although by then the dance had lost much of its Spanish associations – not surprisingly, given the hostility to Spain shown by the Tudors throughout the late sixteenth century.

Its popularity was ensured when Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans banned the dance; its subsequent re-establishment by Charles II could be seen as a return to a ‘Merrie England’ of ales and dancing on the village green, although in fact it was about as authentically English as a paella.

*

One of the onlookers at the morris dancing told me about a funeral that had recently been held in Watlington for Nathan Buckland, the patriarch of the local travelling showmen community. A horse-drawn cortège had gone down the high street and 600 people had packed the church.

His widow Julie told me what had made her husband so remarkable and well loved. Any hesitancy about intruding on her grief, after a forty-two-year marriage, she removed by reassuring me that, far from it, she wanted to talk both about him and about the secretive showmen community. Secretive because over the years they have often experienced prejudice. Villages that quite like the excitement of an annual fair are often less enthusiastic about the travelling showmen who accompany them, with their caravans and supposed ‘loose morals’. They get tarred with the same brush as other travelling communities.

‘Some people put showmen down as gypsies – and there’s good and bad in them, like all of us,’ said Julie.

I was impressed that Watlington, which Edward Thomas remembered as hosting a pleasure fair when he passed, had always gone out of its way to offer the travelling showmen ‘winter quarters’, a plot where more than twenty large families put up their mobile homes in the months when traditionally they rested. Nathan, born in 1945 to one of those families, had grown up in these winter quarters and at the local school, Icknield College. It had left him with a deep attachment to Watlington.

He married Julie when she was just eighteen. She showed me an old black-and-white photo of the two of them emerging from the same church he had just been buried in. They were covered in confetti and looked impossibly young; around them were the smiling faces of the travelling showmen community.

Julie came from a travelling family too, of fourteen children, and had grown up in a fairground atmosphere, travelling for the better part of the year: ‘I remember the small villages being very friendly. It was often cold when we arrived and they’d always bring you a cuppa tea. The fair was a big thing in those times. Light up a place for a few days.’

After marriage, Nathan and she had toured the country with his fairground attractions: ‘kiddie rides’, as Julie put it, with octopuses and double-decker buses on floats, coconut shies, darts win-a-prize stalls and just about anything that worked with the punters.

Later, Watlington Council gave Nathan permission to buy up the disused watercress beds on the edge of town and for his family and friends to put mobile homes there more permanently. Compared to the aggravation at Dale Farm that was filling the papers – Basildon Council had spent £18 million to evict travellers from land that had previously been derelict anyway – Watlington’s more enlightened attitude had paid dividends.

For the showmen community had helped energise Watlington. Nathan had extended the town social centre, the Memorial Club, and organised local fairs. ‘Showmen are born organisers,’ said Julie: ‘it’s what they’re good at. And they have to be.’

Not that travelling showmen were finding things easy. Government legislation on sites where they could stay, and the indiscriminate hostility of some councils to all travellers, meant that fairs had been cancelled in parts of the country. However, councils had not had it all their own way, because of ancient legislation that guaranteed ‘charter fairs’.

Between 1199 and 1350 over fifteen hundred charters were issued, granting the right to hold markets or fairs. The Crown had realised that fairs were an excellent way of raising tax, and so created new ones and brought existing ones under their jurisdiction. The majority of English fairs were granted royal charters and reorganised to fall in line with their European counterparts.

For that reason Thame near by, almost a sister town to Watlington, found that when at one point noises were made about closing down their ancient fair, on grounds of the collateral damage it caused, they couldn’t. Nathan had been involved in that dispute, pointing out to the town worthies and the police that the incidents they complained of – drinking in the town centre, youths getting out of control – happened all year round. The fair was too convenient and easy a target to blame.

There is still a puritan mindset at work in England. We like our ‘keep out’ notices. Villages have got better at installing playgrounds for children; yet facilities for teenagers are often non-existent, and most of the local bus services that took them to anywhere more exciting have folded. If you could bottle the teenage boredom of Saturday night in a country town, where the only place to meet is the disused bus shelter, then you would understand why the coming of an annual fair is still a cause for real excitement and pleasure.

*

In Peru I usually travelled with a mule – so that it could carry my kit as well as be company of a limited sort – but that wasn’t so feasible in southern England.

I had toyed with the idea of taking a dog along with me for the second half of the walk. Not that I’ve got one. But occasionally I walked my neighbours’ sleek and beautiful rottweiler when at the barn. And my sister’s family had a parson’s terrier. Both were fine dogs. John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, when he crossed the States with his large poodle, was one of my favourite books and an inspiration for this journey; I grew up to John Noakes’s television programmes about walking the Cornish coast path with his border collie, Shep. And I was aware, not least because my children kept telling me, that a book with a dog in it would be commercially attractive.

But there were disadvantages. For a start, both candidate dogs had names I didn’t feel like shouting across a crowded field of walkers: the rottweiler was called Portia (like naming a gladiator Phyllis); the terrier, even more improbably, was called Spartacus. More seriously, the way I was walking would not work with a dog – too many impromptu stops and starts and stays with friends. I met a lot of dogs along the way anyway – particularly at Iron Age hill-forts, where dog walkers were often the only other visitors. It made for a perfect constitutional circuit: once round the earthworks of a fort and no need to scoop.

I was able to borrow a dog of my own just for a day though, as I passed Watlington, where my sister lived. Spartacus could come with me.

‘You can let him off the lead,’ said Alex, my brother-in-law, an incurable optimist, ‘but he may not stay with you.’

Within the next hour I had dragged Spartacus out of willow ponds, hedges and just about any cover that conceivably contained a rabbit. Dog-walking was the modern equivalent of medieval falconry – it required the owner to be led into unknown territory that they would otherwise not investigate. This was fine if it was a local landscape that you were happy to explore; not if you had a whole country waiting for you to cross.

I sat down on a bench outside a pub when I got to the next village along the Icknield Way, Chinnor, exhausted by having detoured past so many rabbit burrows. A man joined me and we got talking, mainly about Spartacus, as an easy and obvious point of conversation. It took all of a minute before he made the usual joke about ‘I am Spartacus’. I guessed he was about thirty-five, dressed eccentrically for the country, in pale tracksuit and trainers – more an urban look – and with an iPod looped to ostentatiously large and white Sennheiser headphones. He was very tanned. He said he had just been on holiday to Tunisia, where the clubbing was better than Ibiza.

I explained that the dog wasn’t mine and that my travelling lifestyle made it difficult for me to have one. He was sympathetic.

‘I know what you mean. And to be honest, I always think, “who needs a pet when you’ve already got a penis to look after.”’

It was unanswerable.

*

I arrived at Whiteleaf Cross at dusk, a late-summer dusk, alone after a happily weary Spartacus had been repatriated. There were two horses with their riders on the hilltop. A long bench had been erected above the Cross, which was fine for looking out into the valley but hopeless for seeing the Cross. The only way to get a decent view of it was to walk all the way down the hill to Princes Risborough; to be honest, at this time of evening, I couldn’t be bothered, given that I would also have to walk back. I was already thinking about where I wanted to sleep, and if there was a discreet place in the woods to put up a small tent. So my view of the Cross was a bizarre, foreshortened one, looking down from the top-point.

The Cross was a much more recent carving in the chalk than the White Horse at Uffington, but still of great antiquity. The first historical reference occurs in 1742, but that does not help date it. Many antiquities were first recorded only in the eighteenth century; no one had yet used Optical Stimulated Luminescence dating to check further.

It takes the form of a small cross atop a very large pyramidal base. The entire chalk figure is some 250 feet high, visible for miles, not least because the base of the pyramid – known locally as the ‘globe’ – is also very wide, at over 400 feet. From early measurements taken when the Cross was first recorded in the eighteenth century, it has been growing over the years, particularly at its base, which has more than doubled in width during its regular scourings.

There have been many explanations for the Cross: that it marks a Saxon victory over the Vikings, as it was once supposed the Uffington White Horse did; that like the Cerne Abbas giant it was a phallic symbol, later bowdlerised; that it was a wayside cross for travellers along the Icknield Way, put up at any point since the West Saxons adopted Christianity in the seventh century; that soldiers in the Civil War, which raged around here while Charles I took refuge in nearby Oxford, carved the cross when they were bored (an idea that has the virtue of both ingenuity and implausibility).

More arresting is the curious fact that there are so few other chalk crosses along the Downs or elsewhere in Britain – I could think of only one, a much smaller cross at Bledlow. Given the prevalence of ‘pagan symbols’, you might expect the Church to counter them with symbols of its own. Then there could have been more outbursts of the sort provided by the Reverend A Baker in 1855, who rhapsodised when approaching Whiteleaf Cross:

Bursting for the first time on the eye of the traveller from the northern direction, it presents an awful and almost spectral apparition of the Sign of the Son of Man looming heavenward above the peaceful Valley, beside the ancient and everlasting hills.

My own idle thought was that because the pyramidal base on which the Cross stands is so grossly out of scale with the Cross, it may have originated as a straightforward triangle on the hill, guiding travellers, to which a cross was later added by the local monastery or church – a cross that due to the toponymy had to be much smaller as, put simply, they ran out of space at the top of the slope.

I had also just passed a more recent example of a figure in the chalk, just where the M40 slices across the Icknield Way. A giant :-) had been carved on the side of the hill, to help or irritate commuters heading down to London each day, particularly if they happened to be archaeologists. One can imagine the thesis that will be produced in fifty years time: ‘The emoticon as landscape art-form; early twenty-first-century predictive text’.

During the Second World War, so that the Cross did not guide enemy bombers to Oxford, it was covered with brushwood; on VE Day, this was ceremoniously burned on the top of the hill.

There were lovers sprawled over the grass above the Cross. A young Asian couple had set up what looked like a photographic studio so that the man could take pictures of his girlfriend with the meadow and hills behind her. He had reflector boards, parabolic lights and enough camera kit for a full Pirelli calendar, not that there was anything unchaste about the pictures he was taking of his girlfriend, if that is what she was. She tossed her hair and gazed at the sun so as to take advantage of its soft modelling light.

I looked back at the sun myself, as it was fast setting behind the distant towers of Didcot Power Station. The towers emerging out of the orange haze looked like the lost towers of Avalon. Either that or a cooling station had gone critical.

There was very little time left to get up a tent. I headed on down the slope behind the Cross and then even further, to get away from the golf course (I didn’t quite have the nerve to bed down in a bunker); but as I came over the brow of Pulpit Hill, I found what I had been looking for – Chequers Knap, a perfectly formed prehistoric barrow, just off to the side of a hollow-way lane. By now even the dog walkers had gone home, so I could set up the small tent I had first used thirty years ago in the Andes and was still serviceable: a Vango Expedition A-frame that was about as old-fashioned as it was possible to get, with the virtues of simplicity and strength. I had seen too many fancy igloo or bender tents get blown off hills to trust them.

Did the stars look brighter if seen when sleeping on a prehistoric barrow? Unlikely but true.

*

There’s nothing quite like waking up under a tree to make you appreciate them. Along the ridge line of the Chilterns ahead of me ran the still surprisingly deep forests of beech.

The forests of England. Not the phrase you’re supposed to use, as strictly speaking ‘forest’ applies only to a royal hunting ground. But the one we all do. Before consulting the archaeological research, my preconception – widely shared, I suspect – was that England was largely wooded until the arrival of the Romans. Prehistoric Britons might have made a few inroads into the densely wooded valleys, but preferred the wide-open expanses of Salisbury Plain or other high, treeless places like Dartmoor or the Berkshire Downs; the Romans cleared some lowland areas for their settlements and built connecting roads; with the arrival and gradual domination of the Anglo-Saxons during the Dark Ages, more woodland was slowly lost and a pattern of villages emerged, ready for the Domesday book to record after the Norman conquest.

This has now been shown to be wholly inaccurate. Much of England had been cleared as early as 1000 BC, some two millennia beforehand. The Bronze Age saw intensive farming on a scale that we are only just beginning to appreciate. As one academic expert put it (Oliver Rackham in The History of the Countryside):

It can no longer be maintained, as used to be supposed even twenty years ago, that Roman Britain was a frontier province, with boundless wild woods surrounding occasional precarious clearings on the best land. On the contrary, even in supposedly backward counties such as Essex, villa abutted on villa for mile after mile, and most of the gaps were filled by small towns and the lands of British farmsteads.

Rackham describes the immense clearance that had been undertaken during the Bronze Age and makes the bold claim that ‘to convert millions of acres of wildwood into farmland was unquestionably the greatest achievement of any of our ancestors’. He goes on to remind us how difficult it was to clear the woodland, as most British species are difficult to kill: they will not burn and they grow again after felling. Moreover, in his dry phrase, ‘a log of more than ten inches in diameter is almost fireproof and is a most uncooperative object’. The one exception was pine, which burns well and perhaps as a consequence disappeared almost completely from southern Britain, the presumption being that prehistoric man could easily burn the trees where they stood: the image of pine trees burning like beacons across the countryside is a strong one. It took the Forestry Commission in the twentieth century to reintroduce large amounts of conifers, an unwelcome decision.

Some Bronze Age woodland was naturally kept and managed for what it could provide: timber for building materials, smaller wood and shrubs for fuel, acorns for pigs (which were often turned loose in the woods in autumn), hazel and other trees suitable for coppicing. But this was small scale. When the Domesday book recorded a relatively low level of English woodland – a much lower proportion than modern France, say, enjoys today – this was not a recent development, but the way it had been for millennia.

The idea that England 3,000 years ago was already as suburban as the outskirts of Basildon has not been absorbed into the popular consciousness. Nor will it ever be readily, for we suffer from what might be called Sherwood Syndrome: the need to believe that much of England – that most of England – was both wild and wooded until modern history ‘began’ in 1066, or indeed stayed so until much later; and that these ancient forests were the repository of ‘a spirit of England’, the Green Man, that could be summoned at times when we needed to be reminded of our national identity; where Robin Hoods of all subsequent generations could escape, where the Druids gathered their mistletoe from the trees, where the oak that built our battleships came from.

It is a further irony that the most heavily wooded county of England is now Surrey, thought of as the most suburban. One farmer there told me that it was the county that had the most trees and the most divorces.

There is another popular assumption that follows on from the first – that the Icknield Way I had taken so far across the high ground of Dorset, of Salisbury Plain and of the Wiltshire and Berkshire Downs had kept high because this was naturally treeless land, while many of the valleys the ancient trackway looked down onto would have been wooded and more difficult to cross. Not so. The ridgeway route kept high because it was dry all year round, a good winter road. For many sections of my walk, there had also been a ‘Lower Icknield Way’ that wound around the hills below in the valley, but would have been practical for livestock only in dry summers.

The landscape that Bronze Age travellers surveyed in 1000 BC, around the time the White Horse of Uffington was carved, would of course have been different: no Swindon, Didcot Power Station or M4 motorway for a start; nor, from where I now looked out, Aylesbury in the Vale that bears its name. But a cultivated system of fields and pastureland would already have been there, albeit in a different formation.

What the work of archaeologists over the last few decades does suggest is that we possessed the land very early – that England was shaped long before the arrival of the Romans, whose occupation can be seen as a brief, anomalous interlude that interrupted the continuity of British history.

The idea of England as a wild and wooded land until the arrival of the Romans is a powerful one. But like so many of the most persistent myths that survive about our country, it is as illusory as the lake from which the Lady’s hand emerges to grasp the sword.

There is another surprise that I find peculiarly exciting. There may have been much less forest than we might imagine, but what did exist was of a spectacular quality. The predominant tree in southern England was not any of the ones we might expect – alder, birch, hornbeam, let alone those national favourites, the oak, or the beech that now lines the Chilterns. It was the linden, sometimes called the small-leaved lime or Tilia cordata, not to be confused with the large, common lime trees that are used in cities for their ability to absorb pollution and have such sticky leaves, the Tilia vulgaris.

The linden was the elven tree of the Bronze Age. The lovely fresh green, heart-shaped leaves created handsome rounded domes in summer. In July, it sent forth fragrant ivory-white flowers. So many insects cluster around these flowers that today, if you stand under one, it often sounds as if the whole tree is humming. Easily coppiced, the resulting offshoots could be harvested, either for burning or for carving the fine-grained wood into pots and bowls. It had a fibrous layer of under-bark called ‘bast’, which could be made into rope. Even the leaves of the linden were used for animal fodder, the small round fruits eaten (tasting, apparently, like cocoa) and the blossom used to make a mildly sedative tea: a tree for Titania and all her troupe.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, these wonderful trees declined as more and more invasive species of elm, birch and alder arrived – let alone the beech trees that came much later. There are only isolated pockets of small-leaved limes now in our most ancient woodlands. Many people would find them hard to recognise. They are better known in Germany, whose poets from medieval times have celebrated the experience of being ‘Unter der Linden’, ‘Under the Linden Trees’, where lovers can crush the fragrant white flowers beneath them: Goethe’s Werther is buried under one, Hermann Hesse wrote of them and Berlin’s famous Unter den Linden avenue of limes is a national symbol.

A movement to replant them in England is slowly beginning, as we reassess our attitudes to woodland and move towards more broadleaf and traditional species.

But for prehistoric man travelling along the Icknield Way, as the green road entered the woods it would have become even greener: the colour of sunlight filtering through the translucent leaves of the lime trees would have been of a transcendental intensity.

*

As it was a Saturday, my children could take time off from school to join me, despite their manifold reservations about the potential enjoyment of walking a prehistoric route. They had refused to meet me at Stonehenge earlier: ‘What is the point of a pile of stones?’ as Daisy had put it.

But Cymbeline’s Castle on the slopes of Beacon Hill can claim to be the finest small hill walk in England – and it is very small, only some 800 feet above the plain. Climbing up from the old church below at Ellesborough, it does everything right. It remains steadily in view, isolated, as the summit to climb. It is steep enough to think about zigzagging up the cattle tracks. There is a fine view from the top. And as the name suggests, it is saturated in either history or myth, depending on your persuasion.

Cymbeline – or Cunobelinus – reigned as king of the Catuvellauni from AD 9 to shortly before the Roman invasion of AD 43. The Catuvellauni were the dominant tribe in late Iron Age politics. They had led the earlier resistance to Julius Caesar, who struggled to contain them.

But during the interregnum between Caesar’s invasion of 54 BC and Claudius’ more successful and permanent occupation a century later, the Catuvellauni enjoyed a quasi-Roman lifestyle without having to subject themselves to Roman political control. Roman goods like wine, olive oil and tableware were imported, in substantial quantities. Roman-style coinage was issued.

Cymbeline’s long reign created considerable strength. Likewise, his death in about AD 40 caused the destabilisation that allowed Claudius to invade. The subjection of the neighbouring Atrebates, continued after Cymbeline’s death by his son Caractacus, was the spark, or at least the pretext, for the Roman invasion; the Atrebatan rulers fled to Rome and asked for the Emperor Claudius’ protection.

If people know about Cymbeline at all, it is because of Shakespeare’s play (although Hawkwind also celebrated him in a song with the terrible rhyming couplet, ‘And it’s high time /Cymbeline’). Critics suggest that Shakespeare made up the events in Cymbeline from a few scraps in old chronicles like Holinshed, much as he did with King Lear. But one historical aspect Shakespeare captures well is the indeterminate nature of the British court, which was not yet controlled by Rome; the characters are lured alternately by the splendours of the Roman court and the wild places of Britain: ‘Let a Roman and a British Ensign wave / friendly together.’ It is a curious play, a hodgepodge of different genres and cultures that cannot quite make up its mind, like the Players in Hamlet, whether it is tragedy, comedy, history or pastoral: a play about confusion and confused national identity.

As you walk up to it, Cymbeline’s Castle stands proud in every sense from the Chilterns, jutting out from the ridge ‘just like a Forwards Operation Base, an FOB’, observed my older son Owen, the most military-minded of the children. ‘If England was invaded, this is the sort of hill that SAS men would hide up on and launch a guerrilla operation.’

It was a perfect position for the Iron Age hill-fort that stood there and which Cunobelinus is said to have inherited. ‘Said’, because the odd archaeologist has waved a tar-brush of doubt over the association with Cymbeline, despite the local village also being called Kimble, the antiquity of the name, the discovery of many coins near by and the way in which the hill dominates the Catuvellauni territory.

At the rear of Castle Hill was an ugly black observation camera on a metal pole. The hill backed onto Chequers, the prime minister’s weekend getaway, a brown slab of a country house that enjoys only a slightly less commanding position than Cymbeline’s Castle, and is set off to one side in the woods. In recent years, walkers have been dissuaded from making use of open access legislation, if it means getting close to Chequers; not in my backyard, or estate in this case. There were signs up trying to dissuade walkers from roaming too freely over the hillside.

Just along from Cymbeline’s Castle, and within sight of it, stood Coombe Hill, a Celtic word that had somehow breasted the Anglo-Saxon invasion, just as the hill stands proud along the escarpment. At 850 feet, it is one of the highest points, which goes to show how low the Chilterns are to start with.

A perfect viewpoint had been ruined by a monument Mussolini would have been proud of: a tower grotesquely out of proportion, that reared above the hill with an ice-cream cone pinnacle covered in gilt.

My children, not usually concerned with architectural appreciation, were appalled.

‘It looks so naff. Like one of those Disney theme-park things to show you’re in the ancient world.’

The tower had been erected to commemorate the dead of the Boer War, who deserved a better tribute. This was a politician’s speech of a monument, smooth-faced, inane and glib. Even its stability was suspect; there had been worries in recent years that it might fall down.

The children cheered up at the thought that we were so close to Chequers, indeed had a sniper’s view of its back entrances.

‘So do you think David Cameron might come up here with his family? Could I ask him for his autograph? Would he give me money?’

I explained that modern prime ministers no longer have purses from which they dispensed coins to any lucky subjects they encountered. And that no, I would not be wanting his autograph, nor that of any other recent prime ministers.

We were not far from the Getty estate where the red kites were originally reintroduced back in the 1980s, and there were some circling over Chequers below us, so that we could see their red upper wings, usually hidden. As they swooped over the hills with their unnatural, keening cry, I couldn’t help thinking of what an unfair but apt metaphor it was: the scavengers released here over the last thirty years, the free-market vultures unleashed by an all-party consensus.

We retreated away from the vainglorious monument and back into the woods where we found a bowl of beech trees where someone had set up a perfect swing on a very high rope, so that first Leo and then all of us could swing out high above the trees before circling back.

The best things in life were still free.

*

I’m writing this tucked into the nook of a convenient lone tree on the leeward side of Ivinghoe Beacon. Convenient because the Beacon protrudes north from this central block of the Chilterns, and so the wind funnels around the hill with ferocity as it sweeps across from the plains of Cambridgeshire that lie ahead. But in the protected hollow of my lone pine below the hilltop, with the setting sun falling on me from the west, even the ugly Coombe Hill monument behind me now looks atmospheric.

My children have taken the train back to Bristol, catching it with perhaps thirty seconds to spare, so I’m alone again.

I’ve come some 250 miles; 150 lie ahead. Edward Thomas passed drovers here taking their plump Dorset and Devon sheep on to Dunstable and East Anglia. I’m impressed again by the speed with which Thomas covered the ground: around thirty miles a day. But then poets have always been good walkers.

Much has been written describing the epic walks Coleridge and Wordsworth undertook together in the Lake District; little on why they did so. The assumption is that it was to experience the sublimity of nature at first hand – but they did not need to spend days and nights restlessly journeying for that. The poets escaped to the hills for a simpler truth: however arduous the walk, it was always easier than the alternative – having to write.

The physical labour of writing is much underestimated. When the walks ran out, and there was no escape from the desk, these fit young men in their twenties, who thought nothing of covering 100 miles in a couple of days, were laid prostrate: Wordsworth got heartburn from writing too much, together with ‘an uneasiness at my stomach and side’; Coleridge, who found it even harder, needed recourse to laudanum.

And oft, when in my heart was heard

thy timely mandate, I deferred

the task, in smoother walks to stray.

(William Wordsworth, ‘Ode to Duty’)

Writing has always been physically exhausting – or writing at that level. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge envied, yet also deplored, the facility with which Southey could produce his epics. They were right to do so. Who reads Southey now?

The Lake Poets were not alone. Keats and John Clare drove themselves in punishing walks: Keats covered hundreds of miles in Scotland, as well as his daily commute from London up to Hampstead; the vision of John Clare tramping endlessly across the fields of Northamptonshire in search of work or sanity is one of the saddest in all English literature, but also one of the most productive.

Writing for the sternest critic – yourself – produces a bilious mix of dissatisfaction and insecurity that eats away at the stoutest constitutions. No wonder that Wordsworth got heartburn. Or that Montaigne advised potential writers to become physically fit before attempting any work of value.

There is another reason for poets in particular to walk. By setting up an unwavering rhythm in their stride, they can allow any words in their head to deviate from that rhythm and then return to it. The pleasure and power of any metre depends both on adherence to a pattern but also on breaking it. A strictly metrical poem would soon become mechanical and dull. By walking, the Romantics had a constant metronome against which to compose and to rebel. The poetic feet in a line are not called that for nothing.

Edward Thomas’s and his friend Robert Frost’s fondness for walking could be seen to come out of the same kitbag. Many of Thomas’s poems are pieces of prose that have got up and walked out of the door.

That said, I had felt the urge to write, or even think, only occasionally when walking – otherwise I would have finished my own version of The Prelude from the Dorset coast to here. Most of the time the average walker goes through the usual cycle of thoughts: route-finding, the weather, clothing and wider issues of love, sex, money and the annoying tune you heard on the radio and now can’t quite get out of your head. The process is a bit like meditation. The initial five miles of each day’s walk just serve to clear the noise from your mind. Then random flashes of insight can start to emerge.

Kenneth Grahame, who paced many miles of these Oxfordshire trackways while composing The Wind in the Willows, wrote that

Nature’s particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking – a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree – is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe – certainly creative and suprasensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as if it were talking to you while you are talking back to it. Then everything gradually seems to join in, sun and the wind, the white road and the dusty hedges, the spirit of the season, whichever that may be, the friendly old earth that is pushing life forth of every sort under your feet or spellbound in a death-like winter trance, till you walk in the midst of a blessed company, immersed in a dream-talk far transcending any possible human conversation.

(Kenneth Grahame, ‘The Fellow that Goes Alone’, 1913)

Walking on your own can set up an interior monologue of peculiar power. However, it is also necessary at times to be jolted out of your own internal rhythms.

A few summers before, I had taken the children to Switzerland for a holiday. I wanted to show them some of the wilder, more open stretches that still lay in the less frequented valleys.

Early one morning we left the ramblers’ hostel on a hilltop and set off to a beautiful side valley that curled around to Mount Tounot, at only 10,000 feet a very achievable peak for young teenagers. We were alone in the valley. The air had that harsh silence you sometimes get in Switzerland, when the early sun has flash-dried the atmosphere, and the snow on the mountaintops seems to have sucked in all the moisture.

Owen put the Kaiser Chiefs playing ‘Ruby’ at full volume on his speakerphone. I felt like the museum guard who sees a visitor put a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

‘Owen! The whole point of coming here is to get some peace and quiet. They can probably hear that on the Matterhorn.’

‘Why not? There’s no one else around. And it’s boring walking in silence.’

‘Yeah Dad,’ the other two chorused.

We spent the next few minutes singing along to the chorus of ‘Ruby, Ruby, Ruby!’ I enjoyed it. Didn’t Marcel Duchamp put a moustache on the Mona Lisa anyway?

*

Just beyond Luton I came across some fields that had lungwort, or ‘poor man’s hosta’, growing freely on their edges. It was a common fancy in medieval times that the leaves were spotted from drops of the Virgin’s milk or tears, and the plant was known as ‘Jerusalem cowslip’. Further on, there were more exotic creatures like the burnt tip orchid, moon carrot and the startling Pasque flower in the nature reserves which here as elsewhere had shot up along the Chilterns.

This was the part of the world John Bunyan had walked in, the landscape of his Pilgrim’s Progress; he described the low hills I was walking across as ‘The Delectable Mountains’, a place where his pilgrims could rest: ‘a most pleasant Mountainous Country, beautified with Woods, Vineyards, Fruits of all sorts; Flowers also, with Springs and Fountains, very delectable to behold’. Bunyan lived in nearby Bedford, but travelled widely as a tinker, and later as a preacher. Like Malory, he wrote much of his book in jail, imprisoned in Bedford for his non-conformist views.

I had always liked Bunyan, and the simplicity and power of his parables. It was hard not to draw a comparison with England today, when most people were more concerned about the state of their haircuts than of their souls. The notion of grace, redemption, forbearance, patience – these were alien or at best hidden, much like the old medieval names of our familiar flowers in the hedgerows.

The virtues most trumpeted now were self-reliance and self-fulfilment, with much heavier stress on the importance of one’s immediate family than of the wider community or country.

Looking back from Warden Hill, I could see the lights of Luton. An orange EasyJet plane was flying in low from the south, while the neon flicker of Sainsbury’s caught my eye in the centre of the city. Below me, the banks of the prehistoric Drays Ditches gave way to a golf course, some of whose bunkers seemed to mimic and extend the earthworks.

Not for the first time, I was reminded of what a complicated country England was, of how many seams and layers it had.

I have been to empty countries, parts of Patagonia or the peninsula east of Murmansk, where you can travel in a helicopter for hours and not see a sign of human habitation. They have a wild beauty. But I prefer a landscape that has been given meaning by humans, like the Inca heartland of the Andes or the headwaters of the Ganges in the Himalaya, with their Hindu temples. The hills east of Luton, some of England’s least celebrated countryside, were clearly less dramatic than the Patagonian mountains or the Kola Peninsula. But the ribbon of the Icknield Way curved beautifully over the last outlying Chilterns, past medieval villages, nature reserves and one great surprise.

Ravensburgh Castle is one of the most important and significant of all the Iron Age hill-forts, the largest in eastern England. Moreover, it’s thought to be where the British mounted a heroic resistance to Caesar when he invaded.

Just to get an idea of the scale of the place: the perimeter wall is a kilometre long; it encloses eight hectares; when partially excavated in the 1960s, a thousand postholes were found, along with a rich haul of late Iron Age jewellery, like La Tène brooches.

You would have thought that it would be a national monument, lovingly tended and signposted from afar. But Ravensburgh, far from being treasured, is not even accessible to the public, let alone cared for. It lies on private land, just to the north of the Icknield Way, covered in scrubby woodland and used as a pheasant shoot.

Unless you’re prepared to trespass. Which of course I was. One of my prime problems with the open access ‘right to roam’ legislation (which does not apply to woodland) was that it lessened the opportunity for a good trespass. But this was private woodland with a vengeance, with enough ‘keep out’ signs to make an American rancher proud.

It seemed prudent to go after nightfall. Luckily there was a full moon. Striking across from the fields, I entered the woods cautiously. To me, pheasants meant one thing and it was not food: they meant gamekeeper. I could imagine one coming up behind me with a lot of attitude and a ‘You’re not from around here, are you?’ If not a baseball bat.

The wood was neglected: the white trunks of uprooted oaks that had toppled over gleamed in the moonlight, their undersides coated in the local chalk. In the past, when some of these trees had fallen, Iron Age artefacts had been found entangled in the roots.

I advanced with caution around the fort, at one point almost voiding myself when I stepped close to a pheasant in the dark and it shot up. The site was enormous. The only virtue of its complete neglect was that it was easier in the thicket of moonlit trees and shrubs to conjure up the ghosts of the Iron Age tribe who had lived here than if it had all been cleared.

James Dyer, the archaeologist who led the partial excavations in the 1960s and 1970s, made the plausible suggestion, from the scale of the fortifications and the artefacts found, that it was the base from which the Catuvellauni led the British resistance against Julius Caesar’s invasion. If so, it was well chosen. Even covered by trees and at night, I could see how precipitous the slope was on the southern side, and how the fort dominated the approaches to the north and west.

Julius Caesar, writing in his customary third person, left a description that fitted well:

The oppidum of Casivellaunus, which was protected by woods and marshes, was not far off, and a considerable number of men and of cattle had assembled in it. The Britons apply the name of oppidum to any woodland spot, difficult of access and fortified with a rampart and trench, to which they are in the habit of resorting in order to escape a hostile raid. Caesar marched to the spot indicated with his legions, and found the place had a great natural strength and well fortified: nevertheless he proceeded to assault it on two sides. The enemy stood their ground a short time, but could not sustain the onset of our infantry and fled precipitately from another part of the oppidum.

(Caesar, Commentari de Bello Gallico)

Earlier that day, like Caesar, I had sized up the location and points of access while there was still some light, and also the points of departure in case I too had to ‘flee precipitately’. The fort’s position commanded the valley. James Dyer had commented on ‘the great natural strength of the hill-fort which cannot be matched by any other in the Chilterns’. If cleared and properly maintained – let alone excavated, as Dyer could only scratch the wooded surface – it would be a fine landmark for nearby Hexton and this part of Hertfordshire between Luton and Hitchin, which was often ignored or forgotten.

After my evening venture into the wood, I felt I deserved a drink and a meal at the pub in Hexton, not least because it was called the Raven, so had some loose anthropological connection with Ravensburgh Castle.

However, there was a potential fly in my beer. As a conscientious girlfriend, Irena had informed me that walking used up only some 100 calories an hour and that if I kept eating nothing but pies as I crossed England, I would soon look like William Dalrymple. So I had promised to have more salads.

This went against the grain. A salad, as P G Wodehouse once remarked, rarely feeds the inner man. Particularly one who’s been walking all day, or trespassing in woods.

I approached the bar with trepidation. The barmaid had a mass of frizzy blonde hair and was comfortably upholstered. She looked sympathetic and I need not have worried. Prominent on the menu was a ‘black pudding and bacon salad’. Honour could be satisfied.

It was not a time to beat about the bush. I asked the barmaid – there was no way of putting this delicately – if the salad was ‘substantial’.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Very.’

*

As I climbed up towards Deacon Hill the next day, the path entered a delightful woodland glade. This was hardly unusual on my walk; much of the charm of the Icknield track I was following lay in how it entered and left woods right across England; in the retreat and advance of shadow and dappled light playing across beechmast before opening out again to the track across the hills.

But sometimes you arrive in a wood at precisely the right moment. The sunlight on the fields outside. Old man’s beard climbing headlong among the outlying trees, searching for the sun from its shady roots. And for me, one of the greatest pleasures England can provide: the soft murmur of wood pigeons.

I’ve been in love with that brooding, liquid call ever since I first heard it as a boy in Suffolk where we spent summer holidays in a caravan in a wood. I would wake to hear them playing call and response from the trees above. It is too variable a sound and call to pin down that precisely – though I like Simon Barnes’s attempt at a Welsh wood pigeon, ‘Steal twoooo cows, Taffy.’ It is too conversational to be a song, yet too melodic to be conversational. There are chromatic shifts within it that no other bird can quite manage. An oboe in the orchestra.

It came as a wonderful shock to hear it again in Peru, many years after Suffolk, when we were approaching a 12,000-foot pass that led to the Inca ruins of Choquequirao, which then still lay covered in jungle. After climbing up through an area of grassland, we arrived at a hangar of wood that guarded the pass. Wood pigeons shot out, at first startled, and then settled to give their plump, contented fluting as we made our way through the little-visited trees. One of our muleteers told me that they were called ‘cucula’ locally, a wonderfully onomatopoeic word.

They were much less common there than in England; here they are seldom valued or celebrated. If wood pigeons were as rare as nightingales, or such occasional visitors, we would make pilgrimages to hear them as well. Because they are a sedentary, year-round population (unlike in Europe, where they migrate) and because we have so many of them – an estimated 20 million, easily one per household – we take them for granted.

They are also a magnificent size, the largest of all adult pigeons, weighing some half a kilogram of contented plumpness. There is that coat of grey, with just a hint of pink and mauve at the breast, like a bridegroom in his tails and waistcoat. They have a wingspan of over two feet and can fly at fifty miles an hour, with some complicated acrobatics along the way.

It may come as a shock to many city dwellers, who assume that country shooting is mainly of pheasants, to learn how many wood pigeons are added to the bag. The British Association for Shooting and Conservation (patron: the Duke of Edinburgh) estimates that a third of all wood pigeons born each year are shot – a staggering amount. That same ability to fly at speed, twisting and turning, apparently makes them a challenge for those who like to call themselves ‘sportsmen’, although in my book sport involves a little more energy and ethics than lifting a shotgun to your shoulder and blasting at a wood pigeon. The BASC recommends that a gun which is ‘12-bore, double barrelled (28” barrels are good), choked improved and ½ firing 1 ounce (28 grams) of No 6 shot will drop pigeons stone dead at between 25–35 yards all day long’.

Why do I get annoyed at the idea of wood pigeons being shot when I’m quite happy for pheasants to grace both my pot and my table, and know perfectly well how they got there? Pheasants are bred to be shot. Wood pigeons aren’t. I realise the distinction is illogical. But I still could no more kill the owner of this magnificent liquid cry than shoot a soprano on stage at Covent Garden.

Today there is another reason why I have stopped in the trees for a while to listen to the pigeons glissade above me. Because even more than associating that sound with Suffolk when I was a boy, or Peru when a young man, it’s the sound I have been waking up to in my barn at Little Stoke for the last few years, and at my family house near by for nigh on thirty.

It’s a reminder of having left the place for good. ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura’; ‘In the middle of my life’s journey I found myself in a dark forest.’

*

I had already found that most country districts had a certain unanimity when it came to ‘who to go to’ for local knowledge on farming, in the same way as it was always obvious who the village shaman was in the Amazon. Asking people around this part of rural Hertfordshire, I was quickly directed to the same person, Peter Roberts, a farmer who had over forty years of experience before recently retiring.

He had now moved out of the farmhouse to make way for his son, and lived in a cottage by the old watercress beds near Whitwell. A thoughtful, white-haired man, he was convalescing from an illness when I saw him.

‘These cottages were all lived in by labourers before. Now it’s just me who’s had anything to do with farming.

‘It’s tricky soil. We’re on the edge of the Chilterns in Hertfordshire. Chalk, London clay, flint, we get it all. There’s a farmer I know near here has a sixty-acre field on a hill. He’s always said that you could plough the bottom of the hill with one horse, but you would need two for the middle and by the time you got to the top, it would be pure clay and three horses.’

The main change he had seen had been the loss of livestock. ‘There used to be eight dairy herds in this parish alone. Not any more. Not a single one. All gone over to cereals. No sheep either, apart from a few “hobby sheep”. Cereals pay better, and oilseed rape. Even then, we’re not really in the right part of the country. Time was when it helped being close to London. Not now. Better to be close to Felixstowe or another port. Most of the wheat goes for export so you want to keep transport costs down.’

‘Also it’s a heck of a job, milking. Work first thing in the morning and last thing at night. There just isn’t enough money to keep people interested.

‘On the farm estate I was managing, when I started we had 250 cows and 13 people working. Now there are no cows and just two or three people working, with a fair amount of casual labour.’

Peter was worried about his son, who had taken over the family farm. Not as to whether he could manage – he had diversified into light industrial units and a livery service for two dozen horses – but because ‘farming now is a pretty lonely business. At least they’ve got mobiles so they can keep in touch more than we could when I started.’ As if on cue, his son rings up. I had a vision of farmers all over the country trundling along in their tractors and using a hands-free.

‘It’s been a godsend, mobiles. Really helped farmers. Used to be that the only time they talked with anybody else other than their sheep was once a week in the pub, when they all got hammered together.’

Over the years Peter had become so concerned about the pressure on farmers, and their solitude, that he worked with Farming in Crisis to help those who had reached the end of their tether.

As in so many parts of the country, pheasant shooting was a big part of the local economy. ‘By the time you pay for the gamekeepers, there’s not a lot of profit, but it keeps them in work and gives value to the woodland cover. I’m always surprised, though, that the anti-hunting lobby don’t do more against shooting. They run around complaining about a few foxes when there are hundreds of thousands of birds being blasted out of the sky all over the country.’

I went over to see another farmer close by, John Cherry, who still worked a large 2,500-acre farm based around his old family home. John was just a few years older than me and had been farming for thirty years – or, as he put it, had spent ‘thirty years trying to batter the soil into submission’. An amiable, lanky man, with a mop of dishevelled hair, he hadn’t let the various trials and tribulations of farming spoil his sense of humour. If anything, he had begun to take a Zen approach.

‘We still don’t really understand soil science. The soil is an incredibly complex organism – second only to a coral reef – and it’s very easy to mess it up. Lots of chemical fertilisers can turn the sort of clay we’ve got here into concrete as hard as a runway.’

Like many, John had started to go easy on the fertiliser and look at organic alternatives, after a feeling that farming had lost its way in the mid twentieth century with over-intensive methods. But he had also become interested in another movement that for some farmers was, if anything, even more radical.

For millennia, the soil has always been ploughed before planting seed. Now the new ‘zero tillage’ movement has started to question this received wisdom. In John’s view, ‘The trouble about ploughing is that you can break up and destroy topsoil just as much as aerating it. What’s more, if you’ve had a dry summer, you lose even more moisture in the ground by turning over the soil.’

The new movement of ‘zero tillage’ – enthusiastically promulgated in parts of the world like Argentina, which has thin topsoil – suggests that the soil is left in place to do its own, more natural regeneration, and that direct drilling is used to seed fields. In the States, ‘no-till’ farming has gone from an experimental acre in 1962 in Kentucky to 90 million acres across the country and growing.

If adopted worldwide, said John, it may also stop us ‘going to hell in a handcart’. The erosion of topsoil has been a long-term, global problem. The Oklahoma dustbowl of the 1930s was created by ploughing up too much pastureland when prices were good. David Montgomery, whose book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations is the working Bible for the ‘zero tillers’, has traced the problem of ‘soil abuse’ from the earliest human cultivation in Mesopotamia to the American push westward and the pampas of Latin America. I had seen how prehistoric man had exhausted the topsoil in Dorset.

‘Zero tillage’ has some attractive side effects. Ploughing is labour-intensive and costly, using cumbersome equipment. It favours larger farms, which can justify the outlay. Direct drilling can be done with much simpler equipment on farms of, say, just 500 acres, allowing a return to smaller holdings and compacting the soil less in the process.

Despite the usual farmers’ moans, John and, earlier, Peter Roberts had shared a certain optimism about the future of farming. As John said, ‘It’s good to be feeding the world again after so many decades of having been seen as bloodsucking leeches living on subsidies.’

*

A country fête was taking place in a field alongside the Icknield Way and there were women everywhere: young ones gossiping with prams, older ones manning cake stalls, teenage girls hanging out with unsuitable youths.

It was the chance to make a few observations: that while the general level of pulchritude was high, the Englishwoman’s natural, perfectly graceful and curvaceous pear shape is not always best suited to jeans; that there were probably rather an unnatural number of blondes around – almost impossible these days to spot a Range Rover or luxury 4×4 in the countryside without a flash of blonde hair at the wheel; and that one of the most attractive characteristics of them all, young or old, was that they laughed a lot.

It would be a rash Englishman who dared generalise too much about the characteristics of the other sex sharing the island with him. Let alone if any of them are his readers. But my sister Alice, who has more licence, told me that many of her French friends had strong views on Englishwomen. One elegant Parisienne had confided to her that she couldn’t understand why Englishwomen were so obsessed by their animals and their children, and relatively uninterested in their husbands. ‘You make brilliant mothers but lousy wives,’ she had said to Alice. ‘You need to be more mysterious to your husbands and stop sitting on the toilet in front of them.’

Another had commented on the way Englishwomen appeared to give up on sex after marriage – the theory being, apparently, that British men cheated more than their American or French counterparts because British women didn’t take marital sex seriously enough; that British women didn’t work at their married relationships in general and the sexual side in particular. A French friend of Alice’s, by contrast, ensured that she made love with her husband three times a week – ‘at an absolute minimum!’

I wasn’t sure about all this, not having had too many locker-room discussions with either English or French women. Nor did a weekly quota system seem the best way forward; it sounded a bit pressurised. But it did seem unfair to put all the blame on Englishwomen for any lack of spark in their marriages. On my journey, I had met a lot of married men in pubs who looked as if they’d settled for a lifelong dependency on beer, belly and darts, and only ever smiled when they saw a pay cheque.

What was true was that in my own relationships, now that I thought about it, I had been romantically attached to wonderful German, American, and Latin ladies – and married a proudly Welsh woman – but not been involved with an English girl since leaving university thirty years before. Why was that?

And now I was walking out with Irena, who was Czech, albeit that she had lived here for decades. She also had strong views on Englishwomen: that they wore too much make-up, for a start, and that even if as a culture the English weren’t having much married sex, they were obsessed by it with their tabloids, high rates of teenage pregnancy and Ann Summers shops in every high street.

She had just accompanied me on the recent journey to Peru, with a long, ambitious trek into the jungle, but had shown little interest in any walks across England, quite apart from her work commitments during the week. Like Leo, she said she couldn’t quite see the point of taking a holiday to explore the country she was living in anyway. And the weather would probably be bad.

In fact the weather had been exceptional. I reminded her of this whenever I rang her up from some beautiful moor or wild place that had any reception (I was amazed how few did – one casual way in which the countryside was denigrated was that most mobile companies still couldn’t be bothered to supply coverage to a surprising amount of it).

Mobile phones are constantly being denounced, for their danger to driving, wallets and the peace and tranquillity of railway carriages; but there can be few finer pleasures than talking to the person you love when gazing out on a beautiful landscape and feeling connected to them. It certainly beats talking to the sheep.

*

At Ickleford, ‘the ford for the Icknield Way’ across the local river, the Hiz, I stopped at the church, or rather churchyard: I wanted to find the gravestone of Henry Boswell who had been buried there. Boswell, the self-styled ‘king of the gypsies’ in the eighteenth century, was said to have walked every road in the country by his death in 1760, at the age of ninety – a fabulous achievement worth celebrating and commemorating.

Someone had placed wooden owls in the yew trees around the churchyard. The joke was on me as I failed to find the gravestone, despite application to a kind woman helping in the church who made further enquiries, to no avail. It seemed Henry Boswell had spirited himself away, in one final, gypsy vanishing trick.

The vicar appeared, a vague-looking man with a beard. ‘Oh, I don’t know much about the churchyard, I’m afraid. I’m only the vicar. You’ll have to ask one of the locals.’

Maybe it was the frustration at failing to find Boswell’s grave, or the cold night I had spent sleeping out on the open on a hill the night before, but for some reason this answer reduced me to an equally cold fury. ‘I’m only the vicar.’ It encapsulated all that most irritated me about Anglicanism and its apologetic defeatism.

The Church of England had been forged in Saxon steel and defended against the Vikings; it had built some of the finest cathedrals in Europe and, in the King James Authorised Version of the Bible, produced a prose work of unparalleled beauty and rigour; it had engaged in honourable soul-searching over the ensuing centuries, debating with thinkers from the Reformation to the Enlightenment to Darwin; and now it was sedated on tranquillisers and being put out to pasture.

For a brief moment when I was young, it looked as if the Church of England might be jolted out of its long, slow decline. John Robinson’s Honest to God in 1963 was a brave attempt to address contemporary doubts and recast Christianity, in the way that theology had always done through the centuries. Robinson had just been made the bishop of Woolwich, an inner-city diocese, and was aware of how remote the Church of England had become. He drew deeply on the work of Rudolf Bultmann, a brilliant German theologian whose writings had not yet reached a wider English readership.

Bultmann had called for the Christian story to be ‘de-mythologised’ to give an authentic core engagement with its central premise and challenge, the crucifixion, without the accumulated trappings. Robinson wrote, in a lyrical sentence, that ‘it is in making himself nothing, in his utter self-surrender to others in love, that [Jesus] discloses and lays bare the ground of man’s being as love.’ The original gospel message, they both argued, had been mediated through a mythological framework of the first few centuries after Jesus that was now alien to the world-view of modern humanity, and needed reinterpreting afresh.

I admired the work of Bultmann and John Robinson, and had gone to meet Robinson in the early 1980s, in his final years. He had welcomed me to his cold, austere rooms in Cambridge, and made a bachelor lunch of soup and bread, which he shared with me. By then it was already clear that the Church of England had turned its back on even the modest reappraisal he had suggested; Archbishop Runcie had more or less said that the Church would not address such issues of theology. ‘Steady as she goes,’ was the cry.

Instead, he and his successors moved to a more evangelical style, in the belief that if you kept repeating in an ever louder voice what previous generations had believed, this would somehow convince any doubters. Any reinterpretive theology became ring-fenced, as if contagious. Rowan Williams, the most recent archbishop, while admirable for his progressive social views, had still promoted a return to doctrine and liturgy, seeing Honest to God as ‘a museum piece’ and ‘a transient phenomenon’ of those turbulent times, the 1960s.

The only hope for the Church now lay in the welcome arrival of women priests. Perhaps they, with the energy and compassion they brought, and their capacity for awkward questions, would demand more honesty to God, and less fudging of the issues.

I remember Robinson looking at me with infinite sadness at the end of that lunch – a man who had battled courageously and who had been treated in the way the English establishment does so well with visionaries, by sidelining and ignoring them. The shadow of the cancer that was soon to kill him was already in his eyes.

He had written:

It will doubtless seem to some that I have by implication abandoned the Christian faith and practice altogether. On the contrary, I believe that unless we are prepared for the kind of revolution of which I have spoken it will come to be abandoned. And that will be because it is moulded, in the form we know it, by a cast of thought that belongs to a past age – the cast of thought which Bultmann describes as ‘mythological’.

*

The old Kayser Bonder building in Baldock, so familiar to drivers along the A505 with its striking Art Deco façade, could be a symbol of the country’s changing fortunes in the twentieth century. First built by a film processing company, it later became a ladies’ stocking factory (the ‘Full-Fashioned Hosiery Company from Halifax’) and was later diverted to producing parachutes during the Second World War. I remember passing it when it stood empty during the early years of recession under Thatcher. Then it was turned into a giant Tesco, one of the first hyper-stores. As such, it attracted much opprobrium locally as a symbol of retail glitz. Nearby landowners of the more conservative sort still insist on calling it ‘the Kayser Bonder’, rather than ‘Tesco’s’ like everybody else. But I’ve always enjoyed the Tesco – a large, cheap and democratic store in a beautiful landmark building.

That said, I’m hesitant at choosing a pie from the in-store café, which was built before the current wave of Starbucks clones, with their faux-leather armchairs; this café still has the plastic, more infantile architecture of the 1980s service station – spill-proof tables and chairs, with a tray system for clearing. The pie also seems far too cheap; the old rule of thumb used to be that if the pie was cheaper than a pint of beer, there must be something wrong with it.

But this ham and mushroom pie has a surprising delicacy. The pie is remarkably fine in every sense – slender and textured.

I leave with the agreeable sense of surprise that has accompanied me for much of the walk. And with a bumper pack of boxer shorts for less than a tenner. My written instructions to the groups joining me for long trekking expeditions in South America have always included the suggestion, ‘Remember, a man, or woman, can do anything if they have clean underwear every day.’ And I’ve been on the move constantly since Oxfordshire.

The Icknield Way begins remarkably soon out of Baldock. Or at least one tendril of it does. The old low road, for dry weather, has been converted into a busy dual carriageway, the A505, thundering up and around Royston on its way to East Anglia. But the high road for wet weather, keeping to the chalk, still exists as a quite beautiful green lane, threading its way through a series of medieval villages.

The wide trackway curled and contoured intuitively over and around the slopes of the hills. Now that I had travelled the Icknield for hundreds of miles, I thought of the sheer number of travellers that must have journeyed along here over the last 5,000 years, their cattle carving a path through the landscape that had endured since Neolithic times: a monument in itself.

We have always been a restless, travelling nation. If Bruce Chatwin had taken a walk out of his front door along the Icknield Way, rather than travelling to the other side of the world to trace aboriginal paths in Australia, he could have hymned our own, English songlines.

One of the many ways we belittle the past is to assume that our ancestors were less mobile than we are today. Of course in some ways this is true: there were no EasyJets lifting off from Luton airport. But it would be wrong to think that they were sedentary. If anything, travel had a greater importance, for the movement of goods and ideas. It may have taken far longer to cross the country along such trackways as the Icknield; but this meant the experience was richer and more resonant than today’s quick swing and away around the M25.

One common denominator to the archaeological investigations I’ve witnessed worldwide over the past few years has been the evidence of how far prehistoric man travelled: the pilgrims found buried in Maya cities who had crossed thousands of miles of Mesoamerica to get there; the grave goods in Andean tombs that had come from the Amazon or the Pacific Coast; the Viking longboats at Constantinople. Let alone the original migration by Homo sapiens out of Africa and along the South Asian continent to China and the Bering Strait, a migration confirmed recently by mitochondrial DNA tests.

When the bones of the ‘Amesbury Archer’, who lived around 2300 BC and was buried near Stonehenge, were found and analysed in 2002, they showed that he had originally come from the Alps. Moreover, along with the arrowheads that gave him his name, he was buried with artefacts from France and Spain. He might well have walked along the Icknield Way to get to the Stonehenge area, having crossed the North Sea from Europe to East Anglia.

I was approaching East Anglia now. Much of that ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom may be flat, but it does at least mean that when you get to a hill, you can see for miles.

The East Anglians are sensitive about their lack of hills. I once had to interview Brian Eno, a task that should have been both pleasant and intriguing, but was made less so by his insistence that the interview took place at eight o’clock in the morning. He was in a filthy mood. So were my film crew, who had been forced to get up even earlier to prepare. A special rider had been added to the interview that we should not use footage of Eno when he was in Roxy Music and had long flowing hair and glitter costumes, now that he was more follicularly challenged and wore sober suits.

We began at the beginning, his family home near Woodbridge. ‘Ah yes, quite flat around that bit of Suffolk, isn’t it,’ I murmured. Before breakfast, my line in warm-up repartee was not as assured as it should have been.

Eno went ballistic: ‘It’s not flat. Why does everyone think it’s flat? There are plenty of hills in Suffolk. I hate it when people say that Suffolk’s flat.’

He was just warming up. Later we got to the reaction of critics when he put out his first, more conceptual, ambient albums. ‘They called me an old hippie fart. All those critics who had got punk so wrong and then had to jump on its bandwagon. I can name every one of the bastards [he did, in detail]. And now they call my work classic.’

I admired the last of the hills, knowing that they would soon give way to the flat lands. A large flock of deer ran up the other side of the valley. Few people walked this way any more; it was not on the ‘pretty list’ of British countryside.

Certainly Wallington, the first village I came to, was largely uncelebrated. English villages are as varied as lamb chops: some are lustrous, thick cut and gleaming, inviting the pan; others are shrunken miserable affairs, where the meat has already congealed from lack of interest. Such was Wallington. There was no pub. Two large and cheerless farms dominated the place. Under normal circumstances I would have pressed on to the more attractive villages just over the hills: Therfield in particular, which promised a pub with a singing landlord, sounded more my sort of place.

But Wallington had one single lure. George Orwell had owned a house here for the last ten years of his life, when producing some of his best work.

My heart sank when I saw it. It was not a house, but a mean little cottage, of the sort that people find picturesque if they do not have to live there. It was shallow, just eleven feet deep, with small windows and an unusual sunken door that was under four feet high. I thought of the lanky Orwell stooping to get inside.

He had been desperately poor when he came here with his soon-to-be wife Eileen (they married in the local church). To make ends meet, he wrote in the morning and sold groceries from the house in the afternoon. The rent was ‘extraordinarily low’, at just 7s 6d week. It was so cheap that the penniless Orwell took the cottage without viewing it beforehand. The first time he saw his new property was as its tenant, having walked the same green lane as me from Baldock, one April day in 1936.

The cottage then had no electricity, no hot water and no indoor lavatory. The outdoor cesspool frequently blocked up unless, Orwell noted in a letter, a certain sort of Jeyes toilet paper was used. The garden was full of tin cans together with – surreal touch – a dozen buried old boots. The landlord had cut costs by replacing the thatch with corrugated-iron sheeting, which made a thunderous noise whenever it rained.

The previous owner of the shop had been the local Manor Farm, whose owners had tried a more idealistic and cooperative way of working in the 1920s, at the time of the first Bolshevik experiments in Russia. The experiment in Wallington had failed, which was why the village store had been closed for a while before Orwell reopened it. The other farm in the village had continued to run in the more traditional ‘capitalist’ style. Orwell drew the obvious parallels and the village in Animal Farm is called Willingdon.

I felt enormous sympathy for Orwell and his new wife, Eileen. Life must have been cold and difficult. There was not much custom for their shop, which was fitted out as basically as they came – a few shelves and some jars with sugar, flour and other basics, and a bacon slicer. His best customers were the village children who came in asking for sweets. He needed to sell thirty shillings of merchandise per week to break even – but at least, Orwell reasoned, they could get their own supplies at wholesale prices.

The enterprise brought to mind the sad, small stores I came across in the Andes, invariably in the front room of a campesino’s house: the tins of Peruvian tuna fish, a few packets of pasta and some dry bread. A different universe from the gleaming display back at the Tesco in Baldock with its over 20,000 retail items.

Cyril Connolly came to visit, an incongruous thought. Connolly with his more old Etonian ways had not seen Orwell since the two were at school together. Orwell told him, briskly, that it was better running a grocery store than, as he once had, a bookshop. With a grocery store, customers came in for a specific item and left fast. With a bookshop, they could chat interminably and waste a writer’s time. But it was apparent to Connolly and other visitors how thin Orwell had become since school, looking ‘more like a scarecrow’.

Despite the privations, it was the place where Orwell enjoyed some of the happiest years of his life. Together with Eileen, he kept chickens and goats. Eileen was an intelligent, sharp child psychologist who shared Orwell’s political views and responded well to the austerity of their country living. She needed to: battalions of mice kept pushing the china off the shelves.

It was here that he wrote his career-changing The Road to Wigan Pier, based on the journey north he had taken the year before, with its still-current message that ‘economic injustices will stop when we want them to stop’. The book made his name. His novels had sold 3,000 copies each – this sold 50,000, helped by its promotion through the Left Book Club.

Before moving to Wallington, he had struggled to shape his material and find a style. Once in the village, encouraged by the writing of ‘Shooting an Elephant’, his short autobiographical essay about Burma, he found a simpler and more direct approach that worked well; it helped also to be writing about the injustice and poverty of the Northern working class when living in basic conditions; although unlike the family he describes in Wigan, there was no chamber pot overflowing under the breakfast table.

Orwell uses the book to fire with both barrels: ‘This nonsense about the superior energy of the English (actually the laziest people in Europe)’; ‘if the English physique has declined, this is no doubt partly due to the fact that the Great War carefully selected the million best men in England and slaughtered them, largely before they had had time to breed’; ‘there is at least a tinge of truth in [the Northerners’] picture of Southern England as one enormous Brighton inhabited by lounge-lizards.’

Sixty years after Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, class was still the elephant in the room. Orwell had pointed out in 1937 that it was fashionable to say class divisions no longer existed – and how wrong that was. Richard Hoggart made the same point in The Uses of Literacy a generation later.

Class distinctions in England don’t disappear. They just change. There are as many subtle, complicated shades of class difference as there ever were – often exaggerated in the countryside, where someone in a run-down cottage lives on the estate of someone with 10,000 acres and a Palladian country house. Let alone the three Range Rovers parked on the drive.

Here are my own problems with the English aristocracy: they wear raspberry-coloured corduroys; they’re often bone-stupid but think they’re clever; they have more money and infinitely more land than me.

And then there’s another thing I dislike about them. They can often charm me into submission.

Moreover, as I crossed the country I couldn’t help reflecting that there had been a time when such wealth brought more responsibility. In the past, if an aristocratic landowner was not serving the national interest, as a politician or statesman, he would be active locally, as a magistrate or promoter of local enterprise. At the very least, landowners employed many local people from the cradle to the grave: those who had been in service with them were given tied cottages.

With a few honourable exceptions, this has changed. The wealthy in the country still have servants, but they are often Eastern European workers, to whom all responsibility ends with their contract. The landed rich feel no obligation or desire to take part in national affairs, now that they have been booted out of the House of Lords; and even in local ones, many have retreated behind their park walls. Some of the larger estates have contracted land management out to international firms that concentrate on a lucrative return (like claiming large rebates from the Common Agricultural Policy), while easing tenant farmers out.

The only responsibility felt by today’s aristocracy seems to be to themselves. They concentrate on their holidays, their children and their hunting, shooting and fishing; or, for the more esoterically inclined, they go to find themselves in Bhutan or Benares or Bali.

At the other end of the scale, unemployment is still as endemic as when Orwell wrote in the 1930s. Then, some 2 million people were out of work in a population of just under 50 million. Today there are 2.5 million, and rising fast, unemployed out of a population of just over 62 million. So the percentage of unemployed has, if anything, gone up since the worst days of the 1930s depression. Yet it is no longer such a pressing national concern. We are complacent with it, comfortable with it. There is a brief flurry every year or so when new, rising figures are released. But nothing like 1972, when unemployment rose over the 1 million mark again and Edmund Heath’s government declared a virtual national emergency.

Of course a welfare state ensures that the absolute poverty of Orwell’s day is avoided. But what endures is what he identified so accurately as ‘the deaden, debilitating effect of unemployment upon everybody, married or single, and upon men more than upon women. The best intellects will not stand up against it.’ There are too many people looking at walls and counting out the hours over dead cups of coffee. Quite apart from the dead weight of their claims upon the State. Mass unemployment is the geological fault line under England: a malign slab, largely unseen, which one day may sheer off under us.

*

From Wallington, it was a fine swoop of just a few miles across the chalk hills to Kelshall. At the centre of this village stood the water-filled base of an ancient stone cross; and a very modern one beside it, put up as a Millennium project. Both marked Kelshall’s position as a staging post along the Icknield Way.

In my journey east across England, the village marked another change – a reminder that, coming out of Hertfordshire and into East Anglia, I was crossing the historical boundary into the lands the Vikings colonised. The name Kelsall was one the Vikings had given, meaning ‘cold stream’.

In the fourteenth-century church, there was a memorial to one of the figures from Anglo-Saxon history who interested me most: King – and St – Edmund the Martyr, who ruled East Anglia before the arrival of the ‘great army’ of Danish Vikings in 869. Edmund was then still a young man of just twenty-nine, having been king since a boy of thirteen.

He was killed by the Vikings – which in itself was not unusual. Kings of Northumbria and Wessex had been slain or fatally injured in battle with the invaders. But a legend attached itself to Edmund: that he had chosen martyrdom at the Vikings’ hands; that, in the words of his later biographer, Abbo of Fleury, he had let himself be taunted by the Vikings, shot full of arrows, like St Sebastian, and then brutally beheaded.

As a legend, it plays to two dominant themes in late Anglo-Saxon history as they tried to withstand the Viking raids. One is the more familiar, that of the Vikings as brutal and merciless thugs, the ‘slaughter-wolves’ as they are described in The Battle of Maldon.

In recent years, there has been much wringing of hands and soft shoe shuffling by historians about this traditional portrayal of the Vikings as storm troopers in longships. ‘We need to understand,’ they intone from the academic pulpit, ‘that they were traders as well as raiders – that history, written by their opponents, has been one-sided in its portrayal – it is far too easy to talk of invasions – we should be talking about assimilation – any large-scale “Migration Theory” is seductive but implausible.’

Well, up to a point. Certainly there is recent archaeological evidence from York, among other places, of Viking trading after they had conquered half the country and held it under Danelaw. But no amount of sophistry and revisionist history can disguise the brutality of the Viking raids – nor the length over which they were sustained. From the devastating attack on Lindisfarne in 793, when, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded, ‘the ravaging of heathen men destroyed God’s church’, right through to the Norman conquest of 1066, which the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada did so much to facilitate, the Vikings were an intermittent, anarchic presence that was about as subtle as an axe in the face.

What interests me most about the story of St Edmund is not the familiar tale of Viking brutality, but the Anglo-Saxon response. At times, the English reacted to the Viking threat with force themselves – as Alfred and his successors did, or the heroic warriors at the battle of Maldon a century later. But more often than not, they responded with that trademark English emotion: guilt.

The Viking raids, wrote Alcuin at the time of Lindisfarne, were God’s punishment of England for its sins. The martyrdom of Edmund, the way in which King Ethelred insisted on hearing mass before the battle of Ashdown, the increasing insistence on ever tighter canonical laws – like not marrying your fourth cousin – all came from a deep sense of Anglo-Saxon guilt, a guilt that had to be extirpated before the Vikings could be defeated.

We think of the Anglo-Saxons – if we think of them at all, which is rare, despite their 500-year control of the country at a crucial and formative time – as licentious immigrants from northern Europe with a fondness for mead. But after their conversion to Christianity, they became some of our most austere rulers: far more so, say, than the Victorians, perhaps yet one more reason why Alfred the Great was so revered in the nineteenth century.

That the Saxons should understand the Viking invasions as in some way their own fault, a judgement on their loose moral behaviour, was only compounded later when it really did become their fault: for paying the Vikings to go away, the Danegeld that kept them coming back for more.

Danegeld was first paid after Maldon in 991, a century after Edmund’s death and another battle at which the Vikings were victorious. The poem The Battle of Maldon initially celebrates the fighting quality of Earl Byrhtnoth and his men, as they try to withstand the invaders at the end of a narrow causeway on the Essex coast; this is when one of the men lets his hawk fly to the wood.

But someone has blundered – in this case Earl Byrhtnoth who, whether from naivety or hubris, allows the Vikings the free passage they ask for across the easily defended causeway and onto the more open mainland: an early example of the English playing cricket when their opponents are playing hardball.

Then the battle,

with its chance of glory, was about to begin.

The time had come for all the doomed men

to fall in the fight. The clamour began;

the ravens wheeled and the eagles circled overhead,

craving for carrion; there was shouting on earth.

(The Battle of Maldon, translated by Kevin Crossley-Holland)

In the ensuing mêlée, Byrhtnoth is killed, as are many of his men. But while the poem celebrates their heroism, it is also self-lacerating about an English shame – the cowardly desertion from the front of Godric and his brothers, compounded by Godric’s use of his dead commander’s horse, which makes the English foot soldiers, unaware their leader is dead, think that Byrhtnoth himself is abandoning the fight. Godric and his brothers ‘flee for the woods/ Fled to the fastness, and saved their lives’. What is more, this treachery, or at least failure, has been predicted by one of their number before the battle, Offa, when he foresees that the English may not live up to their fine words when it comes to the crunch.

In many ways, the Anglo-Saxon reaction to the Viking violence was the classic one of a victim: hatred and dislike of a brutal antagonist, but also a confused culpability in which they blamed themselves as well as their attacker.

St Edmund the Martyr’s death exemplifies this. No wonder that his burial place should become ‘Bury St Edmunds’ and be so visited as a shrine; or that a culture of guilt and of an obscure sense of failure should reside deep in the English psyche even after seemingly confident periods of expansion and Empire.

A woman in Kelshall church, of the kind and thoughtful sort who have kept the Church of England going, had come in to arrange the flowers. She told me that a few years previously there had been a local campaign in East Anglia to get St Edmund adopted as England’s patron saint in place of St George – or more correctly, readopted, as George had usurped him at the time of the Crusades.

The idea was attractive: St Edmund’s brave and gentle sacrifice as opposed to George charging after dragons. Moreover, Edmund had the advantage of being English (you can’t be more English than an Angle), unlike the Middle Eastern George, and sported a subtler and more attractive flag, of three gold crowns on a field of azure blue. But I knew that such a campaign was ultimately doomed to failure. George with his flag is as red-faced and bold as we would like to be, even though, in our heart of hearts, we know that we are not.