The village of Wychcombe is recorded as ‘a manor call Wickcoomb’ in the Domesday survey of 1086. By the thirteenth century, the parish could boast two churches: St Constantine’s, situated precariously and impractically on a granite escarpment 730 feet above the main street and now no more than two ruined walls, and the still-standing St John’s. By the 1500s, Wickcoomb had split into two settlements: Wychcombe and Underhill. After this point, Underhill expanded and Wychcombe stayed more or less the same size, coming to resemble, from above, a densely wooded forked tail attached to the posterior of the larger settlement. The 1921 census recorded the population of Underhill as 666, causing much merriment in the four alehouses the village then possessed, although by the census of 1961 that figure had dropped by 98: a reduction often assumed to be down to the human cost of the fight against Hitler but in fact down to the progress of agricultural machinery and the subsequent decrease in rural employment opportunities, resulting in an exodus of residents to urban areas. Many in the village would come to remember the war as the most fulfilling period of their lives. Most of the wealthier households by this point had a wireless, which had invariably been sold to them and repaired by a Mr Henry Salter of Plymouth, a small man who rarely paused for breath while imbibing liquor and telling his many embellished stories of life on the road and who, on his trips over to charge people’s wet batteries, would often stay on for a few days and organise sing-arounds amongst his drinking companions. Always matriarchal, the village in this period became even more so. Social gatherings were organised by Land Army girls who had taken occupation of the outlying farms and Wychcombe Manor. The manor had until late in the previous century been the ancestral home of the Bambury family, who during the late 1700s kept fourteen parrots and England’s last house jester: a man of barely four feet three inches in height whose routines included chewing the feathers off live sparrows to see if they would still fly (they didn’t). These days the mainline train barrels over the viaduct past the luxury flats the manor has now been converted into, as passengers strive to stifle their irritation at the sound of one another’s antisocial mastication and shrill offspring. Sometimes, a fox, hare or a deer will be visible from a window, but it is a rare commuter who will notice, since most are too deep inside the more compelling universe inside the screens they take with them everywhere. Few look up to admire the abandoned but still very attractive Wychcombe Junction station where some of those very foxes who run alongside the train have been known to sleep and breed.
The passenger railway arrived here in 1847, although it was predated by almost two decades by another, which took granite across my flanks, down to the coast, where it was shipped off and used to make bridges and walls. Before it fell under the infamous axe of British Railways chairman Dr Beeching in the 1960s, Wychcombe Junction – and its now defunct adjoining branch line – brought many a carless traveller to the moor. The station might also be considered partially responsible for an openness to outsiders not common to all villages in the area. Many who have visited Underhill have remarked upon a feeling of being ‘protected’ or ‘watched over in a kind way’. It is thought that this can largely be put down to the presence of Underhill Tor, towering over the village at 1,350 feet, from whose summit it is said, on a clear day, both coasts of the south-west peninsula can be seen. Home to an acclaimed golf course and once believed to be the site of volcanic activity, the tor is not subject to the hype of some of the other more talked-about hills of the south west but is every bit the match for any of them in terms of history and natural beauty, and outdoes most of them in terms of height and girth, making, for example Glastonbury Tor, at just 518 feet, look kind of weedy by comparison. The tor is distinguished by the pile of rocks at its peak which have been variously likened to ‘a step stool’ (not totally inaccurate), ‘a bumpy kind of nose’ (maybe), ‘some piled pony poo’ (way off), and ‘a small mystic staircase’ (yes!). On its rear slopes is found some of the most beautiful ancient woodland in the country, hosting an abundance of wildlife, including roe deer, marsh fritillary butterflies, woodcock, bog asphodel, ring ouzel, cuckoo and kingfisher.
Look at me. I have fallen into my old trap of talking about myself again, haven’t I?
You are all very fast nowadays. Nearly all of you, anyway (I strive to steer away from generalisation). I wonder where you believe you are going with it. It’s an illusion, of course, most of the time: speed, and the efficiency and ease it promises. A new superfast train corridor smashes through ancient woodland, fucks over a couple of Elizabethan farmhouses, rapes and pillages the homesteads of hares, otters, stoats and badgers, but it’s OK because Stewart will be home from the office a whole half an hour sooner, and be able to use the time to play computer games in his living room, rather than on the go. Your connections and your engines get slicker yet you feel more rushed, more pushed, and the days evaporate like never before. You fly at warp speed towards your destination, thirsty for it, never stopping to consider that destination is another word for death. You do not factor in what is missed until it is too late. The default position is that progress is pace. But when will this state of nirvana that it’s all leading to occur, where each person will operate at peak speed and be perfectly happy and undelayed and no longer have to walk or use their mind? And will it all be worth it? Away from technology’s grand illusion, everything moves at the same speed as ever. A grand old beech, poorly for some time, was felled on my shin yesterday. The 211 rings on its trunk tell the truth. Run your finger along them. They’re smooth, consistent, redoubtable. The space between them didn’t change just because somebody invented the microchip or the fax or the microwave oven.
It would be so much easier if there was one individual to blame for it, rather than collective human greed and self-delusion, if we could, say, pin it on Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Dr Beeching or Tim Berners-Lee, but we are not in a superhero film, where a supervillain is mandatory; we are in the world, where supervillains are amorphous entities made of money and nepotism and spin and many many grasping hands. I will say this, though: Beeching trod on my toes once, during his brief destructive reign as British Railways chairman, and he was the smuggest of gits while he did it. He didn’t even take the time to learn to pronounce Wychcombe properly before mooching around the station with his clipboard, condemning it – gave it the long ‘y’ at the beginning, like some nobhead. ‘WHYchcoombe Junction, you say, over in Devon? Hmmrph. I suppose that is feasible, provided I am back in East Grinstead by supper.’ Afterwards he submitted his findings to his boss, Ernest Marples, the Minister for Transport, who, it should be noted, was married to Baroness Ruth Alianore, a tarmac heiress who held a stake in the M1 and other new major roads. I rued a lost opportunity, so when Beeching returned eight years later, to officiate at the opening of a new heritage steam railway in the area (the chutzpah of the man!), I was ready. It was a windy day and the sharp, heavy tiles I succeeded in dislodging from the roof of the station as he walked past came within eight inches of doing their job, but ultimately – being six miles from here – it was outside my range.
No, I am not able to control weather. You could say I just have a stake in it, like Baroness Alianore and her early motorways.
Unlike a tree, I don’t have rings, and they don’t grow. I flourish, then I die back, then I flourish. The circle is not unbroken – at least not unless somebody builds a high-speed rail link through my core. But my contours do change. I have one more buttock than I once had. Over on my left knee, where St John’s churchyard can be found, I’m lumpier than I once was. People look at the couple of hundred gravestones and they think that’s it, that’s history. They don’t consider the others beneath the earth, all the centuries before that, all the bones piling up, changing the shape of the land. All the forgotten lives that felt like something more than this, something that mattered, when they were being lived. There was a period of about forty years, going from the last century, stretching into the very early part of this one, when the cemetery was kept very neat, over-mowed and over-strimmed. The shrieking of the beetles and butterflies as they died was a kind of tinnitus for me. Now mercifully the volunteers responsible for its upkeep lean towards a wilder aesthetic. The fact presents itself in stark beauty: wildflowers love dead people. On an early spring day like today, primroses, celandine and forget-me-nots are rife. It’s a cheery technicolour place with a light mood but on an ink-washed afternoon in the darkest, wettest heights of winter walkers feel a shiver as they explore its corners. If the beheaded statue of John Maypoll, a six-year-old child who died of polio in 1913, or the three mysteriously nameless graves inscribed with nothing but ‘Cholera, 1847’ don’t do it then the carvings inside the building itself generally will. The oldest and crudest of these dates from the 1100s. Most frequently discussed is the Sheela-na-gig on the north wall, and what is variously referred to as ‘The Bird Lady’ and ‘The Girls’ on the font. These are described thus in the second issue of Jack In The Green, the pagan-inclined Devonshire history pamphlet, by the pamphlet’s editor Simon Bridestow in May 1993:
‘For me this is the most haunting of all the West Country’s na-gigs, owing largely to the vastness of the exposed vulva and the angle at which the head is set back from the body, being redolent of both decapitation and extreme ecstasy. Such suggestion of ecstasy seems to support the argument that the na-gigs that appeared throughout Europe were not so much a warning against sin as a celebration of the power of the feminine. Not totally dissimilar in theme, and possibly carved at a very similar time, is the once-seen-never-forgotten Bird Lady carving on the font, in which a male figure adopts a supplicatory position below a female possessing some sort of club or staff and a wreath of hair, overlooked by birds and very similar apparent duplicates of herself. These duplicates have been called “sisters” and “ghosts”. In 1988 while walking the north moor I met an old man called Graham who’d grown up in Underhill and told me that as a small child he’d heard the woman/women on the font referred to as both “Sally Free and Easy” and “Old Meg” but had never known why.’
Other articles in the May 1993 issue of Jack In The Green include Jackie Tinsdale on Devon river sprites, Alan Bradford on the argument that some of the old carvings on the stones in the Trembling Hill stone circle are actually breasts, and Bangy Doddsworth’s account of the time he was disorientated by piskies in the mist up on Combe Moor. Adverts included steer the attention of readers to a forthcoming gig by the partially reunited John McCandle’s Dirt Band in Underhill village hall, the Whiddon Tracey Good Food Market and a family (in fact, Simon Bridestow’s) seeking accommodation on the high moor. Though barely remembered now, the magazine sold out of its 800-copy print run and was given pride of place in the post office by Jim Swardesley’s predecessor, Jeff Bryant. When he took over, Swardesley continued the tradition of selling the work of local authors and, to this day, along with various walking guides, a visitor can, should they wish, while paying for their stamps, purchase such works as Lunar Freedom, the new collection by Kathy McGregor, better known as The Nude Poet. The cover features a tasteful shot of McGregor from behind, unclothed, sitting in the centre of the Trembling Hill stone circle, watching the sun rise over my head.
Looking down towards the post office now, I can see there is quite a queue outside. Swardesley, as ever, handles it coolly, cracking jokes, enquiring about the health of spouses and children and grandchildren and grandparents and parents, showing an uncanny recall for first names. ‘SIT!’ a woman yells at a Japanese Akita outside the door, sending a tremor through the waiting line. ‘I think the whole village just sat down,’ Swardesley wisecracks to Ruth Cole, who is waiting for a receipt for some handmade notebooks she just sent to Greece. Next up is Pat Gutteridge, who is here to collect her pension. Swardesley doesn’t try her with a joke, as he knows from experience she’s not one to stop for a chat. After this, in the stonewash jeans she is known for, she will purchase the two items she always purchases during her weekly shop, some vodka for herself and some sausages for the crows in her garden, plus some other provisions. She lives four miles from the village and always walks home, usually via Combe Woods. Last night a tree came down, entirely blocking the footpath, but today on both journeys she climbs the adjacent bank and vaults the trunk, in a manner reminiscent of a lanky nineteen-year-old boy. Next week, she will be seventy-one, an occasion she will celebrate alone by baking herself some cream cheese pound cake and watching a VHS of the film The Full Monty. People look at Pat and what they see is loneliness, countryness, a bony facade the world can’t get past. But in her youth Pat engaged for several years in what those same people might describe as living. She resided in London, danced on tables, took cherubic musician boys home with her and told them what to do. Nobody would ever know now, apart from herself, but in a documentary about the touring life of the folk supergroup Equinox, she can be seen in a post-gig gathering in a hotel room, smoking and laughing, exuding Gaelic beatnik chic with her sharp cheekbones, black turtleneck and fringe. For an eighteen-month period, but no longer than that, people sometimes mistook her for the folk singer Anne Briggs. To her left in the hotel room sits the singer Donovan Leitch, whose advances, earlier in the night, Pat had batted away.
But Pat was quick-tempered in her youth, never one to stuff an opinion with feathers. Her fallouts were large, and often cataclysmic. When she lost a daughter to cancer and a partner to suicide, she – being an orphan – did not have a family to look to for support, and the friends she turned to instead let her down. The aggregate result of this, several years on, was her decision that the people she could truly rely on were crows. Crows, who never vanished during hard times, or stopped speaking to you when you gave them some unfiltered advice about their career. Crows, who would land on her arms and shoulders in the pub garden, always her arms and shoulders, never anyone else’s. Crows, who ate every last bit of her sausages and never complained. They gathered around her waiting for worms as she turned the soil in her garden, which wasn’t officially her garden, just a thirty square foot patch of ground between her back door and the dry stone wall where the moor in its harshest form began and which hadn’t been claimed by anyone else and which some bastard could now prise from her cold dead hands if they wanted to take it away from her. People looked at her and thought, ‘That’s the kind of person who never cries.’ But it wasn’t true. Back in September of 2008, when she’d seen a crow nailed to a fence post outside the Cavendish farm, she bawled, sporadically, for most of the following day.
One day, when Pat was with her crows, turning the soil for her and for them, she found an axe. It’s still only her and the crows who know about it, to this day. It’s a quite remarkable axe, a little over ten inches long, apparently unused, and dating from 700 bc, although it might seem a little less remarkable if you knew just how many axes of a similar vintage were still buried on the moor. There are even a couple in the river around a mile further up the valley from Pat’s, not far from the empty building the map calls Megan’s House. I doubt they’ll be found any time soon, as it’s not a bit of the river people often have cause to get into. The ravine is too narrow and you couldn’t get a boat down there. I could tell you properly about what is still buried here, down under the rivers, in the peat, in the soil beneath the reservoirs beneath the old farmland that they drowned to build them, and it would blow your mind into a million tiny pieces, which you’d never find again, and then those pieces would also sink into the earth, forever. So much is buried, so far down, and we live – even the more archaeologically inclined amongst us – only on the top one or two layers. Just as you can’t any longer get to what Pat once was because it’s buried under what Pat has become, with only the odd shard or two coming to the surface, you can’t really reach the past of here, the past of me, and what I am made up of. But that does not mean it is not still there.
My thoughts didn’t always take this form. I could have told you plenty of things but the language I spoke in was not the one I speak in now. ‘Nope, sorry,’ you would have said. ‘That’s just a noise.’ But then the noise would have stayed with you, shaken you, loosened your bowels. You would have found great difficulty in not thinking about it, especially in the capacious hours just before dawn. But even then the noise was relatively comprehensible and well mannered by comparison to what it had been. Once, much further back, the noise came with fire and lava. Did it? I feel like I know it did, but it was so long ago, so all I can do is trust in the innateness of that feeling. And then the inevitable question follows: How did I go from that to this? How did I become so sapped, so self-conscious? How did I get this tediously well behaved?
It’s your fault. You’re seeping into me, in all your ways. You’ve been doing it for millennia, but you do it much more than ever now.
You keep photographing me. Why? Is it because you’re worried you’ll miss me when we are not together? I don’t recall when the very first photo happened but the oldest known that remains intact can currently be found at the Devon Heritage Centre, at Chidleigh Babbots. It was taken in 1886 by Cecil Boyland, who, as a well-off rector, became the first resident in the village to own a camera. I am not the focal point of the image. That honour goes to the peat-cutting brothers Jude and Peter Mortimer, who can be seen outside their one-storey cottage, leaning proudly on their spades. A spectacularly large cockerel pecks away at grain to Peter’s left. But I’m dominating the background, looking pretty damn fine, feeling myself in a major way, a slight monochrome suggestion of swirling mist above my rocks. It’s probably the most mysterious and impressive I’ve looked on film, with the possible exception of a shot from 1977, where I’m looking down casually on a merganser duck taking flight above a clam bridge, captured by a lone, gangly figure, a regular visitor to the area, American. There was something about that day, too. A dank magic. I was in one of my moods, in the best and worst possible way. I think you can almost feel it in the photo, but not quite.
So, yes, there have been some good photographs of me. That is a stone fact and I have no quibble with it. But please can you stop taking them? Take a few, maybe, but not so insanely many. It’s not helping anyone in the long run, least of all me. Why not paint me instead? Paint me like one of your French hills. Paint me like Joyce did. Not exactly like Joyce did, but as freely as Joyce did. Paint my trees in a way that reminds me of the time your Palaeolithic ancestors hunted wild pigs within them, swirl the colours and shapes in a way that hints at the still-discernible cellar holes where my old farmsteads have rotted back into the earth. Elevate me with your art, rather than devitalising me with your mimicry. Conjure your version of the fire-breathing cardinal enigma I once was.
It’s getting dark now. Except that’s not true because it never gets properly dark ever these days, even in the countryside. I can see the lights of the village twinkling in the bowl of land beneath my feet. It’s one of the advantages of a hilly landscape, that view. It’s extremely pretty when viewed from above. A fairytale scene. But later on, when people have gone to bed, some of those lights will stay on; there will always be some light somewhere, whereas in a true fairytale, the darkness, when it comes, is absolute. There are places where you still feel that dark up here, more than you will in 99.9 per cent of places in the rest of the United Kingdom. Some of the lonelier stretches of the river. Up by the kistvaen on Trembling Hill, half a mile past the silver and lead mine. But it’s still not the same, not like the old dark. Imagine: you’re in, let’s say, 1544. You look at the carvings in your church from many centuries ago, a time that seems so unimaginable and unreachable, and you try to understand their meaning, and you can’t read, so all you have to go on is what someone else in your village who also can’t read told you. First came mass literacy, then came the light. We use the light and shine it on the literature. We read our pagan pamphlets and our books and our WikiLinks and attempt to comprehend the past, and often believe we do. But light, like speed, is often an illusion. We angle our light on our previous findings, which were also made in the time of light, and we make our theories and we think we understand. But that light is like a slim epilogue to history. No, not even an epilogue, nothing so large, more like a brief acknowledgements page at most. You just can’t ignore the deep thick black that went before, just how long it lasted, just how dense and inexplicable it was, and all of what was buried within it.
I honestly can’t tell you how dark it once was around here. I couldn’t even begin to make you understand.