Disclaimers and Acknowledgements

THIS IS EMPHATICALLY not a guidebook. If it intrigues people into making journeys of their own along the older paths of the country, then those making decisions over stiles and hills and bridleways should consult the many gazetteers that set out routes.

By far the best and most inspirational for the Icknield Way are Ancient Trackways of Wessex, by H W Timperley and Edith Brill (1965) and The Icknield Way by Anthony Bulfield (1972), although both are old enough to need supplementary maps; or the useful booklet publication by Ray Quinlan and the Cicerone Press, The Greater Ridgeway, which is small enough to fit in a pocket.

Julian Cope’s wonderful and eccentric The Modern Antiquarian (he uses his rock-star girlfriend in the pictures of megaliths to give scale) is too big to fit most coffee tables, let alone pockets, but details many prehistoric sites, as does Aubrey Burl’s Rings of Stone, illustrated by Edward Piper.

The word ‘Celt’ has occasionally been used. This is the archaeological equivalent of smoking in a restaurant and I should make the disclaimer that I am well aware that it is a loaded and tendentious term – but there are times when no other word will quite do and the reader can add their own judicious pinch of salt. The alternative is to say ‘Brythonic’, but that sounds as if you’re lisping.

Nor have I bothered to put Iron Age ‘hill-forts’ in inverted commas the whole time. Their use may well not have been exclusively or even partially military, but that is the common name we know them by, and archaeological pedants can add their own ironic quotation marks.

Barry Cunliffe has studied hill-forts extensively and produced many excellent publications on the Iron Age, just as Mike Pitts has on the Neolithic in Hengeworld and other works. I am also grateful to John Blair for his Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire and to John Peddie for Alfred: the Good Soldier.

Eminent writers like John Steinbeck and Peter Ackroyd have attempted modern versions of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, but nothing can match the cadence of the original text in Vinaver’s edition of the Winchester manuscript: Malory: Complete Works, edited by Eugène Vinaver (Oxford University Press).

There are fine biographies of Malory, William Cobbett, Kenneth Grahame and Richard Jefferies by Christina Hardyment, Richard Ingrams, Peter Green and Edward Thomas respectively, and an equally fine biography of Edward Thomas himself by Matthew Hollis. Despite many biographies of Orwell, the best source about his life remains his own writing: Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (four volumes, Secker & Warburg).

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My thanks to those who offered hospitality or guidance along the way: Jeremy and Paula Lawford, Richard and Clare Staughton, Kevin and Rachel Billington, Tim Copestake, Chris and Jane Somerville, Peter and Eleanor Buxton, William and Aliya Heath, the Rainbow Circle, Roger and Maha Thomson, Andy and Heather Martin, Adrian Poole, Maisie Taylor, Matthew Champion, Laurie Gwen Shapiro, Nicola Keane, Benedict Taylor, Barry Isaacson, Bob Colenutt, Mick Conefrey and numerous pub landlords.

Simon Keynes for advice on the Anglo-Saxon period, Francis Pryor for similar advice on the Bronze Age, and Oliver Rackham on prehistoric woodland, with the usual disclaimer that nothing I have included is in any way their responsibility.

My agent Georgina Capel, my editor Trevor Dolby at Preface and all those at Random House who helped with the production of the book, along with Adam Burton for the illustrations and John Gilkes for the maps.

Irena and my children for sharing some of the walking and all of my life.