The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot Read online

  During the nineteenth-century surge of old-wayfaring, walkers were drawn particularly to the paths of the English downlands: attracted by their involvement with prehistory and by the ideal of freedom they appeared to enact in their sinuous motion. A chalky mysticism established itself, a belief that it was a super-conductor of the sympathetic historical mind, allowing simultaneities and compassions to reach out across millennia. On ‘the first // Inhabited heights of chalk’, wrote Louis MacNeice – born in Belfast but educated at Marlborough, near the Downs – ‘I could feel my mind / Crumble and dry like a fossil sponge, I could feel / My body curl like a foetus and the rind / Of a barrow harden round me, to reveal / Millennia hence some inkling of the ways / Of man before he invented plough or wheel’.

  Arguably the oldest of these chalk paths is the Icknield Way, which rises somewhere on the heath and pine forests of south Norfolk and then runs west-south-west over chalk-land top-dressed with boulder clay, until it reaches the distinctive summit of Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire. There it joins the Ridgeway, which leads on through Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire – connecting Iron Age hill-forts, Bronze Age barrows and Neolithic burial chambers – and at last drops down to the sea at Dorset, thus linking the English Channel in the south to the Wash in the east.

  The origins and history of the Icknield Way are shrouded in myth and confusion. It is now not thought ever to have been a single path, but instead a skein of parallel tracks, sometimes a mile from outer mark to outer mark, following a line of communication made easy by the trends of the landscape. It is possible that the entire route is post-Roman, confected into being by enthusiastic antiquarians. Despite these uncertainties the Icknield Way has long appealed to walkers hoping for communion with the prehistoric. It has cast its chalk-spell widely and keenly.

  Within a mile of my home in Cambridge runs the grassy Roman road I had followed on my winter night-walk. In spring its wide verges are brocaded with flowers, and for much of its length it is bordered by hedgerows of briar, hawthorn and field maple. Seven miles south-east along it lies the village of Linton, through which passes the Icknield Way.

  Just after dawn on a late May day I slipped out of the house while my family was asleep, got onto my bicycle and pedalled along quiet streets and paths – up onto the whaleback hill of chalk, past the great open field behind the beech wood – before turning onto the Roman road. The forecast was for warm dry weather extending unbroken for a week to come. There were sixteen or seventeen hours of sunlight each day. The scent of dog-rose sweetened the air. A crow flopped from an ash tree, its wings silver with sun. I felt filled with a boyish excitement. In my pack was a copy of Edward Thomas’s The Icknield Way, his prose account of his journey along the Way.

  I was cycling downhill along the Roman road, near the Iron Age ring-fort, when the accident happened. Happy to be on the move, I let the bicycle gather speed. The rutted path became rougher, my wheels juddered and bounced, I hit a hunk of hard soil the size of a fist, the front wheel bucked and twisted through ninety degrees, the bike folded in upon itself and I crashed onto it, the end of the left handlebar driving hard into my chest. The breath was bashed out of me. There was a sharp grating pain in my ribcage. My elbow was bleeding and my kneecap appeared to have grown a subsidiary purple kneecap. The severest injury appeared to be to my self-respect. What a fool I’d been, biking like a dizzy vicar down the road, too full of the romance of the way. I would have to limp home, not even two miles along my first path.

  But after various diagnostic prods, it seemed that all might not be lost. The kneecap was injured but unbroken. I had cracked a rib, possibly two, but this seemed a minor impediment to walking. And the bicycle could, with some botched repairs, be just about persuaded to move. So I cycled on to Linton, slowly. A warning, I thought superstitiously, had been issued to me: that the going would not be easy, and that romanticism would be quickly punished. It was only a few miles later that I remembered the letter a friend had sent me when I told him about my plan to walk the Icknield Way. Take care as you pass the ring-fort, he had written back. When I mentioned the fall later, he was unamazed. ‘This was an entry fee to the old ways, charged at one of the usual tollbooths,’ he said. ‘Now you can proceed. You’re in. Bone for chalk: you’ve paid your due.’ It was the first of several incidents along the old ways that I still find hard to explain away rationally.

  Thomas followed the Icknield Way in 1911, in the depths of one of his worst depressions. He moved fast and then he wrote up the journey fast, in a matter of weeks. The Icknield Way is an unconventional book: partly a guide to the history and geography of the Way, partly a meditation on its metaphysics and partly a record of Thomas’s own bleak unhappiness.

  Surprisingly (given that it is a book set in an arid summer landscape far from the coast), but unsurprisingly (given that the geological origin of chalk is both submarine and morbid), The Icknield Way is preoccupied throughout with seas, drowning and islands. The chalk infiltrates Thomas’s imagination, changes his mind, stirs deep-time dreams and bathyspheric descents. He dedicated the book to a recently dead friend, Harry Hooton, with whom Thomas had walked ‘more miles … than with anyone else except myself’, and the Icknield Way – with its uncertain history, its disputed route and its debatable limits – becomes in Thomas’s hands a metaphor for the unknown domains that attend our beginnings and our ends.

  In the 1890s a folklorist called John Emslie had walked the Icknield Way and collected the stories he heard told along the path. In many of these stories the Way – if followed far enough – passes out of the known and into the mythic, leading to kingdoms of great danger and reward. Emslie was told of one man who had ‘travelled along this road till he came to the fiery mountains’. Another spoke of it as going ‘round the world, so that if you keep along it and travel on you will come back to the place you started from’. ‘All along my route’, wrote Emslie, he had heard similar tales: that the path ‘went all round the world, or all through the island … from sea to sea’. It was, in this respect, a path that stood as a prototype for all others, at last returning uroboros-like to engulf its own origin.

  Thomas was compelled by the Way’s existence as a braid of stories and memories. In one of his most enigmatic prose passages he suggested that paths were imprinted with the ‘dreams’ of each traveller who had walked it, and that his own experiences would ‘in course of time [also] lie under men’s feet’. The path’s sediment comprised sentiment, and to follow a path might therefore be to walk up its earlier followers: this in the hunter’s sense of ‘walking up’ – to disturb what lies hidden, to flush out what is concealed. In setting out along the Way I was turning Thomas’s cryptic vision back on himself, hoping to summon him by walking where he had walked. It was to be miles and years before I understood the difficulties of such a recovery.

  In Linton, I hid my damaged bike behind a hedge and walked my damaged body out of the village by its main street, under a rising sun. The cloud caul was breaking up and a lemony light pushed through the gaps. The path led me past Linton Zoo and from behind a high hedge came the grunts and calls of the inmates: zebras, lions, storks and cranes. I passed a thatched cottage with hollyhocks bobbing in the wind at its walls, and roses by its doors. The visuals were deep England but the soundtrack was Serengeti.

  Quickly I was onto the chalky field-edge footpaths whose route corresponded roughly to that of the Way. I went through a narrow tunnel of spindle and hawthorn. A brown hare belted along the track, halted, regarded me briefly, then pivoted on its hind legs and dashed back off and away, as if committed to the path’s pursuit. Within an hour the sun was fully out. Skylarks pelted their song down, lifting my spirit. Light pearled on barley. The shock of the crash began to fade away. Hawthorn hedges foamed white with flower and wood pigeons clattered from the ash canopies.

  For the first eight miles of the day I saw no one at all, and had the peculiar feeling of occupying an evacuated landscape, post-apocalypse or in civil lockdown. So
few people now labour on the land that the people one tends to meet on footpaths are walkers, not workers.

  I followed a continuous line of bare white chalk, moving by hedge and field-edge bearing roughly west-south-west. I met a covey of French partridges with their barred sides and Tintin-like quiffs; three cock pheasants with their copper flank armour and white dog-collars (hoplite vicars); a grebe on a pond, punkishly tufted as Ziggy Stardust.

  The landscape’s emptiness spooked me, and it was an unexpected relief to hear the distant hum of the M11 motorway, growing to a roar as I neared it. The motorway occupied exactly the place in the landscape that a river might have done, running where two chalk ranges dipped down into a valley, and the sun-strikes off windscreen and paintwork lent it the distant dazzle of moving water. I approached it on high ground through the sage green of young cereal crops. Suddenly, above the roar of the cars, I heard someone singing. A ghostly high carolling, intermittent and tentative. It took a few seconds to understand that it was the song of the pylons, a long line of which marched away into the distance. I stood under one of them, listening to the spit and fizz of its energy, and the humming note that formed, with the other pylons nearby, a loose chord.

  Great Chesterford was the town where I forded the motorway. In houses near the road’s edge, bird fanciers kept parakeets which hopped around in their cages on faded St George’s flags, chirruping to one another. I rested on the motorway bridge, arms hung over the railings, watching the rush of cars and the heat-waves rising from the asphalt. It was a perpendicular meeting of the Icknield Way (opened circa 4000 BC) and the M11 (opened 1975).

  The middle hours of that day were also devoid of people. There was other company, though: family groups of roe deer which emerged from copses and rode their long legs off through the barley. I found a skylark’s egg, baked dead on the ground, but intact, the green of its shell covered in brown jottings and scribblings. I curled my fingers round the egg and carried it in my hand for a mile or two, for luck and for its weight in the palm. In the villages through which I passed I saw deer skulls mounted on the flint walls, reassuring flickers of paganism in a landscape that might otherwise have been dreamed up by Enid Blyton. Greens smooth as snooker baize. Village ponds with yellow flag irises, in which carps burped and bubbled. Red phone boxes, freshly painted.

  Around noon I neared the outskirts of Royston. Here, the path of the old Icknield Way aligned with the main A-road through the town. The hedges and field entrances were blocked with fly-tipped rubbish: computer monitors, inner tubes, carpet strips, a vacuum cleaner whose transparent body was filled with black flies. Dog-rose waterfalls cascaded from high hawthorn hedges. Shoals of starlings, dense and particulate, shifted above the rooftops.

  The place names on the eastern fringe of Royston were pastoral throwbacks – Wheatfield Crescent, Poplar Drive, Icknield Walk – longing allusions to a time when this had been country, names settled on by developers to bump up the house prices or by a planner hoping to improve the town’s mood at its margins. Starlings chattered on chimney pots and aerials – their feathers sleekly black as sheaves of photographic negatives – making their car-alarm trills, their aerosol-can rattles and their camera-shutter clicks. Their cheery urban rip-rap seemed to offer the ideal welcome to Royston as I walked the busy road, and there appeared to be nothing at all left of the Icknield Way.

  Old paths rarely vanish, unless the sea eats them or Tarmac covers them. They survive as subtle landmarks, evident to those who know how to look – as Thomas did. ‘Even when deserted,’ he wrote, ‘these old roads are kept in memory by many signs.’ He called such lapsed ways ‘ghostly … roads’; Walter Scott referred to them as ‘blind roads’. Such paths also expressed themselves in custom, law and place names. ‘It is one of the adventurous pleasures of a good map,’ Thomas wrote, ‘to trace the possible course of a known old road, or to discover one that was lost. A distinct chain of footpath, lane and road … leading across the country and corresponding in much of its course with boundaries is likely to be an ancient way.’

  This was Thomas’s wager: that the old persisted alongside and despite the new, surviving as echoes and shadows, detectable by an acute mind and eye. For him, map-reading approached mysticism: he described it as an ‘old power’, of which only a few people had the ‘glimmerings’. He approached paths as not only solitary places but also sociable ones, where once-silenced voices might be heard. In his poem ‘Aspens’ he imagined that the wind-stirred trees at an old crossroads were giving whispered voice to a now-vanished village, and he eavesdropped on ‘the clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing’ of old smithies and inns. He liked to follow lines of white-beams, the tree most associated with paths in the chalk counties, and the tree’s fallen leaves – which lie often with their silvery undersides uppermost, and can preserve their pallor until the following spring – reminded him of Hansel and Gretel’s pebble trail.

  Thomas was correct to think that long-term acts of wayfaring leave long-lived imprints. In the early twentieth century, much amateur energy was devoted to discovering and taxonomizing such marks: the furrows of forgotten tracks, the aligned scatters of eoliths (worked stones, dating from early phases of human occupation), the back-filled boundary ditches whose routes shimmered into view during rain or drought. Closely examined, the countryside revealed itself to be full of ‘shadow-sites’. A shadow-site was the relic trace of a path, earthwork, post hole or ditch, hidden often in plain view but apparent only under certain circumstances – especially when the sun was low and bright, throwing its light at a slant and thereby lending revelatory shadows to the land.

  The rise of aerial photography – developed first as a military technique but diverted after the First World War into archaeological research – also meant that these shadow-sites could be seen from above, from which perspective their patterns often stood out against the ground-level confusions. Landscape ghosts that had lain unseen for millennia suddenly reappeared. Aerial photography, as the historian Kitty Hauser has written, made possible ‘innumerable queer resurrections’, offering assurances that ‘no site, however flattened out, is really lost to knowledge’. One such resurrection occurred thanks to Major George Allen, an early pioneer of aerial photography as an archaeological aid, who designed and constructed a large camera that he could manipulate while flying solo. In the winter of 1936, after heavy rain, Allen flew over the Icknield Way near Royston and took one of his best photographs. Horizontally across the image run a series of near-parallel lines. Uppermost of these is a railway track, upon which a train happens to be chuffing eastwards, trailing a long plume of steam. Below that is a road upon which a single car is driving westwards. Concealed to the passengers of either train or car, but clear to the bird’s-eye view of the camera, are other lines in the landscape: the dark streaks of back-filled Iron Age ditches running north–south, medieval field boundaries, and – within a few yards of the Tarmac – the white rutted tracks of the Icknield Way itself. ‘What is astonishing to the point of uncanniness,’ writes Hauser finely of this image, ‘is the way in which these ancient features … secretly share the landscape with the living, as they go about their business.’

  I held Allen’s photograph in my mind’s eye as I walked the stretch of the Way between Royston and Baldock: the alignments of old path, new road and railway track, the co-present ghosts of the former and the future.

  ‘A white snake on a green hillside’ was one of Thomas’s descriptions of a chalk path’s motion through the land. The image is brilliantly compressive: a Zen koan. Emerging south out of Royston and onto Therfield Heath, I saw that its green slopes were alive with snakes. Chalk downs rise on both sides of the heath, leaving a cupped lower arena and lending to the whole space the air of an amphitheatre. The upper ridge is crinkled with broadleaf woods into which dozens of white paths disappear enticingly. Other paths lead to the crest of the heath, where the densest concentration of barrows in the Chilterns exists: ten Bronze Age round barrows and a Neolit
hic long barrow.

  That bright afternoon it was instantly obvious, even across thousands of years, why prehistoric people had chosen to bury their dead in such a location. The heath was busy with people: walkers strolling up to see the barrows, children running and shouting. I stopped to eat and watch. The pleasure these people were taking in their landscape – and the feeling of company after the empty early miles of the day – gave me a burst of energy and lifted my legs.

  Then came miles through the backstreets of Baldock and the industrial estates of Letchworth Garden City, where shipping containers – Maersk, Mitsui, Hamburg – were stacked high behind galvanized spike fences, ready to be lorried off again. Late in the day, my feet blazing, I rested in a churchyard in the village of Clothall. A wall of gold-green laurels leant forwards over the graves. I lay sleepily among the tombstones and late primroses, listening to the bees, watching the swifts hunting above the church tower. ‘The eye that sees the things of today, and the ear that hears, the mind that contemplates or dreams,’ Thomas had written, ‘is itself an instrument of antiquity equal to whatever it is called upon to apprehend … and perhaps … we are aware of … time in ways too difficult and strange for the explanation of historian and zoologist and philosopher.’ It was an idea to which he returned often in both his prose and poetry: that there are certain kinds of knowledge which exceed the propositional and which can only be sensed, as it were, in passing.