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Land Writings
“Elegant, scrupulous and excitingly experimental, James Riding’s walking-acts find new ways
back into – and out from – Edward Thomas’s life and work. His book – Land Writings – sets out
the political worth of being artistic in an era when the humanities are under widespread
pressure.” Robert Macfarlane, Reader in Literature and the Geohumanities, University of
Cambridge, and author of Mountains of the Mind, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Landmarks
“Riding offers us a strikingly original take on Thomas, and at the same time delivers a very
different way of writing geography imaginatively. Journeying by stages and phases, the worlds
his words evoke are anguished, eloquent, tormented, candid, addled, claustrophobic, schizoid,
snarky, scabrous, enigmatic, dizzying, difficult, daring, grotty, crotchety, conversational,
melancholic, sensational, and magical. And that’s not the half of it.” Hayden Lorimer,
Professor of Cultural Geography, University of Glasgow, and editor of Cultural Geographies in
Practice and Geographers Biobibliographical Studies
“This is a complex, rich and risk-taking piece of work… a fascinating read. It is memorable, ‘gets
you’, and makes theoretical arguments current in human geography about landscape, poetics,
authorship, embodiment, memory and experience. What got me the most was its swooping
quality, whether it was swooping through Thomas’s poetry and life from tranquil rural England
to the hell of trench warfare, being swept through the streets of central London in a peaceful
protest met by police violence, or just freewheeling down a hill on a bike at dangerous speed.
There is also its mashup/juxtapositional aesthetic which emerges most strongly through the
remembering of fragments of poetry in landscape, but also through recurring oddities like the
lyrics to the Smiths’ song, Heaven knows I’m miserable now.” Ian Cook, Professor of
Geography, University of Exeter, and co-author of Doing Ethnographies and co-founder of the
Museum of Contemporary Commodities
“The clue is in the title. As he trails Edward Thomas and leads us hand in hand, James Riding’s
questing and questioning reflections in, on and about the British landscape – personal,
sceptical, celebratory, performative – help refashion our attitudes to notions of place, once
more. Unafraid to trouble the past, to reveal his own wayward attitudes and approaches, and to
describe his perceptions, involvements and experiences in candid detail, he achieves an
enfolding that successfully evokes what it is to be fully present in a landscape. A significant and
provocative addition to new writing in geography, in a challenging range of registers that wear
their scholarship easily.” Mike Pearson, Emeritus Professor of Performance Studies,
Aberystwyth University, and author of Site-Specific Performance, Marking Time: Performance,
Archaeology and the City, and In Comes I: Performance, Memory and Landscape
“As he journeys in imaginary fellowship with Thomas, Riding goes to the heart of a landscape
methodos: a mode of thinking about place that is also a way of travelling through it, linking the
walk to the peripatetics of memory and mood, intimation and association. A quiet and beautiful
book, Thomas’s poetry is never far away from this most personal of engagements.” Jessica
Dubow, Reader in Cultural Geography, University of Sheffield, and author of Settling the Self:
Colonial Space, Colonial Identity and the South African Landscape
“In this breakthrough text, James Riding establishes himself as a significant land writer and
voice in contemporary cultural geography. Riding’s work arrives at a time when there is much
discussion and debate regarding ‘creative turns’ in cultural geography. In this context, Land
Writings offers a sustained, full-throttle engagement with traditions of narrating landscape,
selfhood, memory and travel, and one that is notably shorn of the timidity and qualifying that
often accompanies academic ventures into creative registers. From the start, you hear a
confident, original voice, and as the chapters unfold, so does a story quite different from the
one you might imagine.” John Wylie, Professor of Cultural Geography, University of Exeter,
and author of Landscape
Land Writings:
Excursions in the Footprints

of Edward Thomas
By
James Riding
Land Writings: Excursions in the Footprints of Edward Thomas
By James Riding
This book first published 2017
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2017 by James Riding
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-9138-X

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9138-7
For Mum, Dad, and my Grandma Eileen
“It becomes clear, as it is not in a city, that the world is old and troubled,
and that light and warmth and fellowship are good.”
—Beautiful Wales, Edward Thomas
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ................................................................................... viii
Edward Thomas: A Geographical Biography .............................................. 1
Death Drive: Edward Thomas’s Grave........................................................ 9
Kotor: A Vertical Walk ............................................................................. 19
Steep: A Dot-to-Dot Walk ......................................................................... 24
The Manor Farm: A Walk Poem ............................................................... 36
The Chalk Pit: A Residual Walk ............................................................... 48
Fellowship: The Birthday Loops ............................................................... 65
Kettled: A March on Parliament ................................................................ 89
The Start: London to Guildford ................................................................. 97
Guildford to Dunbridge ........................................................................... 112
From Dunbridge over Salisbury Plain ..................................................... 119
Three Wessex Poets ................................................................................. 127
The Avon, Biss, and Frome ..................................................................... 132
Trowbridge to Shepton Mallet ................................................................. 138
Shepton Mallet to Bridgwater.................................................................. 149
Bridgwater to the Sea .............................................................................. 157
The Grave of Winter ................................................................................ 164
Bibliography ............................................................................................ 167

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to note here that this is a book based on the books of other
writers. As such in this book when words are italicised, they are words
taken from other texts encountered in landscape, or, they are the words of
others recalled whilst wandering through my memory of these journeys on
the language of landscape. The encountered writers and their texts are
included in a bibliography at the end of this book. I would also like to
thank here, supportive colleagues in the Department of Geography at the
University of Exeter and supportive colleagues in the Department of
Geography at the University of Sheffield, the Edward Thomas Fellowship,
Colin Thornton, John Wylie, Jessica Dubow, Hayden Lorimer, Ian Cook,
Mike Pearson, Robert Macfarlane, and the subject of this book, Edward
Thomas.
EDWARD THOMAS:
A GEOGRAPHICAL BIOGRAPHY
“He [Hilaire Belloc] is such a geographer as I wish many historians were,

such a poet as all geographers ought to be, and hardly any other has been.”
—A Literary Pilgrim in England, Edward Thomas
“Edward Thomas was, from a young age, a walker, both by night and day.
In his mid-twenties, when he was suffering from depression, he would
often set off on long walking tours, alone, in the march-lands of Wales and
England. Like so many melancholics, he developed his own rituals of
relief, in the hope that these might abate his suffering, and that he might
out-march the cause of his sadness.”
—The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane
Whilst out walking one day, in the shade at the age of thirty-six, with the
First World War looming, Edward Thomas decided to become a poet. In
the few years that followed, believing he belonged nowhere, he tramped
across rolling chalk downland, stitching himself to the landscape. Gently
slanting from the door of his stone cottage, the South Downs – a range of
chalk hills that extend across the southeastern coastal counties of England
from Hampshire in the west to Sussex in the east – became day by day the
mainspring of his poetry. As a perennial poet and essayist of the South
Downs, he remains an enduring presence a century later in the downland
he trampled daily, treading and documenting a series of paths around the
village of Steep, East Hampshire, where he lived until enlisting. Since his
death, in 1917, at the Battle of Arras, Edward Thomas has been habitually
reappraised and channelled by poets and writers tracing his tracks through
the British countryside. This continued presence prompted J.M. Coetzee,
writing scenes from a provincial life in 1960s London, to ask, “What has
happened to the ambitions of poets here in Britain? Have they not digested
the news that Edward Thomas and his world are gone forever?”
Almost one hundred years to the day after Edward Thomas completed
his first poem, about a pub near the village of Steep – where a sarsen stone
memorial was installed on a wooded escarpment in 1937, dedicating the
entire hillside to the poet forever after – this book gives consideration to
the question J.M. Coetzee poses, gathering whether Edward Thomas and
2 Edward Thomas: A Geographical Biography
his world are gone forever. Or if indeed, as Walter Benjamin writes of the
language of landscape, each poem, its content, its world, is palpably there,
in and of the world, sparked into presence like the little heap of
magnesium powder lit by the flame of a match, when moving through
landscapes. Travelling in the main with a literary society named the
Edward Thomas Fellowship, founded over a quarter of a century ago to
foster interest in the life and work of Edward Thomas and to preserve the
landscape he knew of, the following book is a description of memories
materialising and shards of text manifesting themselves at moments, when
walking in the South Downs and beyond.
Of course in recent years, the rhythms of the subject in landscape, as it
lingers, waits, detours and ruminates, has established itself quite
comfortably as a method of researching landscapes in the area of the
humanities that attends to the experience of the phenomenological body
(see for example the geographical writings of Tim Cresswell, Stephen
Daniels, Dydia DeLyser, Caitlin DeSilvey, Jessica Dubow, Tim Edensor,
Tim Ingold, Hayden Lorimer, David Matless, Mike Pearson, Mitch Rose,
and John Wylie). Yet such work, even when it does involve specific
representations of the world, has tended to abstract that work from the
landscape in which it was written, and in so doing, has used representation
to reflect back upon landscape, noting the historical importance of
representation in creating an image of a region. My concerns in this book
are therefore twofold. On the one hand, it seeks to remain within and
expand the phenomenological re-turn in the humanities and, on the other,
it seeks to encourage a phenomenological re-reading of the way in which
humanities scholars have dealt with representation – or what in the
discipline of human geography may be read as a non-representational
perception of representation. In this way, I suggest that one can both retain
the impulse of phenomenological investigation – foregrounding the shock
of the poetic – while also addressing an aspect with which recent critics
have taken issue. Namely, a de-centring of the very individual and
emotional experience of travelling in landscape, and the old concern that
phenomenological and existentialist research has jettisoned the substantial
power of representational acts.
On a literary walk, I follow members of a literary society around a
place which their literary hero portrayed in writing or held dear, until they
have had enough or have seen all there is to see. When we reach a spot
where an event occurred, or a memory is recollected, or maybe a poem
was written, we stop to undertake a ritual reading, or memorialising,
before moving on. This is then repeated until the loop is complete or a pub
is reached. A walk practising poetry usually happens two or three times a
Land Writings: Excursions in the Footprints of Edward Thomas 3
year. The regular meets when the society of fellows actively travel to and
within a literary landscape are a vital part of their voluntary
memorialising, and the mutual enactment of literature and place – with the
literature mediating, altering and enhancing their experience of place and
the place doing the same to the literature. Hitching a ride with such literary
societies who memorialise, preserve and claim landscape in this way,
through what Tim Ingold has called a form of “right” or “correct” walking
– reasserting poetry as they go – highlighted the individuality of a poetic
landscape. I witnessed their movements, garnered their knowledge of
poetry, monitored at poetic sites their detective-work, borrowed their
representational findings from their regular reenactions, spoke of
memories from previous loops and – legitimised by the undertaking of an
outdoor leisure pursuit – mimicked their art of being moral, occasionally
mobile, historically and environmentally sensitive healthy citizens.
On these loops of the South Downs, representation – for so long
deemed a “dead” sphere of critique – could actually be witnessed, felt,
seen, heard, or bumped into and could therefore be researched like any
other thing. Literature moored itself, detached itself, interacted with,
reassembled and transformed the multiple places we travelled through. Far
from being abstract text, literature became a part of the vitality of those
places, affecting how we moved through them, manifesting itself as a
material composition, a presentation, in and of the world – not as
representational imaginary, pattern, gaze or construction overarching
landscape. In the mêlée, the place and literature mutually perform each
other – adding, dissolving, maintaining, circulating and deconstructing
meaning, symbolism, identity. Here, the two are being held in a porous
process of intertwining, becoming and disentangling.
Now, to return to the subject of this book. The articulation of the life of
Richard Jefferies, written by Edward Thomas in 1909, anticipated his own
future. For Thomas, Richard Jefferies was more than a nature writer – he
was a guiding spirit of the English landscape, affecting a profound
influence upon his own writings. Thomas regarded Jefferies as something
of a mentor, once describing the body of work he created as a gospel, an
incantation. A similar mystic communion with nature draws them
together, alongside a number of sympathetic resonances. A family
connection – Thomas holidayed as a child in Swindon, where his
grandmother lived, part of his intellectual and spiritual development –
their life spans – Thomas lived only fourௗmonths longer – and a creative
intensity squeezed into the last few years – a slow gathering, followed by a
late spate. Their work is not a naive celebration of flora and fauna, and a
dumb blast at modern society, a meditation on purely the trees and the
hills. The landscape is specifically peopled and their books are altogether
more complicated, precise, witty, technical, nuanced, scholarly and
painterly. Jefferies is best known for his writings about nature, agriculture
and the countryside. The Gamekeeper at Home, Wildlife in a Southern
County, The Amateur Poacher, and Round About a Great Estate are his
most celebrated pieces. In Nature Near London and After London; Or,
Wild England, he also writes extensively about London and its surrounds,
about satellite towns, about the salvo of coming industrialisation and about
the perceived loss of a harmonious interaction between nature and people,
a rural order. Loss came to define Jefferies as a writer. For Thomas, loss,
the loss of a connection with nature, and the inability of the individual poet
to fully represent this loss became his poetic source, down the line.
Admixtures of social commentary, environmental action and personal
musing, describing the half-ruined buildings and disappearing practices of
the time, for leisure and work, their words act like little time capsules,
demonstrating the value of representational acts.
In 1906, Edward Thomas published The Heart of England. The book
begins with Thomas leaving London, on foot, with the reader initially
stumbling upon an archetypal suburban street scene, unbroken rows of
houses, all the same. Everything is described in vivid detail, as Thomas
follows a boy of nine years old, moving briskly in every direction, and a
strange, free, hatless man, ignoring puddles – a traveller. Colours, angles,
flows, lines, loops, patterns, textures, sounds, smells. The mood becomes
darker as night falls and Thomas travels further into a pre-emptive
Ballardian suburbia. It is a place which has no meaning, no history, and as
such nothing understandable to Thomas – half-built, unnaturally devastated,
dejected, sorrowful, and despairing. “The rain formed a mist and a veil
over the skeletons round about, but it revealed more than it took away;
Nature gained courage in the gloom” (Thomas, 1906: 7). Thomas sets out
that night, so as not to endure another night of torment, the noise of his
heels and stick staining the immense silence. He feels entrapped on his
exit from the city – in a borough of London once nothing but fields.
Looking up at the thousands of people in their lighted windows, he
proclaims, “most men are prisons to themselves” (Thomas, 1906: 8). Not
the brave, cheerful lights, in the distance, which we strain our eyes for as
we descend from the hills of Kent or Wales: a place of refuge in complete
darkness.
The first landscape Thomas encounters after leaving London is The
Lowland. Of the landscape, Thomas writes, “how nobly the ploughman
and the plough and three horses, two chestnuts and a white leader, glide
over the broad swelling field in the early morning” (1906: 23). He
continues to express his love of ploughs and what they represent for a
further five pages. Evident in these pages, is a desire to preserve practices,
which due to mechanisation during the Industrial Revolution of the
previous century, are witnessed less and less. By writing about traditional
rural practice, he is preserving something of the landscape before him. It is
this longing to “make the glimpsed good place permanent”, which is
evident in Thomas’s later – more famous – poetry, “although somewhere
beyond the borders of Thomas’s mind, there was a world he could never
quite come at” (Thomas, 1964: 11). The book ends with a collection of
traditional folk songs.
I decided to begin with this particular Edward Thomas book, as it turns
out to carry thought on landscape-performance-memory to challenge,
echo, and surprise our own. As David Matless (2014) has emphasised in
his writings on the Norfolk Broads, older books, perhaps beyond where we
would normally look, also offer a resource, for our thinking of current
living landscapes. I could easily have begun with the book, The South
Country from 1909, in which Thomas wanders through every season, and
covers all the counties from Hampshire to Cornwall, and from Surrey to
Sussex. As he travels, his mind also wanders, involuntary memories
materialise, and past events are recollected. Whilst in East Hampshire,
Thomas (1909:9), foreseeing our current wonderment with representing
immediacy, perception, and affect, writes:
“The spirit of the place, all this council of time and Nature and men,
encircles the air with a bloom deeper than summer’s blue of distance; it
drowses while it delights the responding mind with a magic such as once
upon a time men thought to express by gods of the hearth, by Faunus and
the flying nymphs, by fairies, angels, saints, a magic which none of these
things is too strange and supernatural to represent. For after the longest
inventory of what is here visible and open to analysis, much remains over,
imponderable but mighty. Often when the lark is high he seems to be
singing in some keyless chamber of the brain; so here the house is built in
shadowy replica. If only we could make a graven image of this spirit
instead of a muddy untruthful reflection of words!”
In 1913, Thomas set off on a bicycle from London when spring was about
to begin. The plan was to pursue spring and witness the metamorphosis of
the landscape, the further he got along a preordained route westerly. It was
not until more than a month after a false spring had visited London though
that he finally did get going, in the second week of March. The journey
along roads and lanes from London to the Quantock Hills – to Nether
Stowey and Coleridge Cottage, Kilve, Crowcombe, and West Bagborough,
via Guildford, Dunbridge, Salisbury Plain, Bradford-on-Avon, Trowbridge,

the Avon, the Biss, the Frome, Shepton Mallet, and Bridgwater – in
pursuit of spring was published in 1914. His soon to be good friend, the
poet Robert Frost, concluded that the book was poetic and that “Thomas
was a poet behind the disguise of his prose”, encouraging him on their first
meeting to begin writing poetry (Thomas, 1985: 223). This is unclearly
discussed in a number of biographies, where Thomas appears Frost’s
“debtor, in verse and in inspiration” (Sergeant, 1960: 209). Thomas though
was in pursuit of the poetic long before meeting Frost. Riding out of the
capital westward following the return of spring, to the sacred site of
Coleridge Cottage in Nether Stowey, Somerset, was not his first poetic
excursion. As R.G. Thomas (1985: 223) writes, “we can see Thomas
clearing the ground [in his prose] in preparation for a thorough
understanding of the self that, he feared had gone astray”. On returning
from the pursuit springwards Thomas wrote eighty-five poems in
sevenௗmonths, from November 1914 to the day he enlisted. It is now
widely understood, rightly so, that Thomas had been a poet all his life, and
that “Frost produced the enharmonic change, which made him not a
different man, but the same man in another key” (Farjeon, 1958: 56). Put
simply, “Robert Frost kick-started Thomas’s poetry” (Longley, 2008: 15).
Of the one hundred and forty four poems written, during the final two
years of his life, “sometimes at the rate of one a day”, The Manor Farm
(1914), The Combe (1914), Adlestrop (1915), The Chalk Pit (1915), A
Tale (1915), The Path (1915), Lob (1915), Aspens (1915), The Mill Water
(1915), Wind and Mist (1915) and many others still resonate, despite their
speedy execution (Sacks, 2004: xxiv). The startlingly arresting views of
English landscape, the eulogies for ancient beasts of the British
countryside and the descriptions of disturbing, strange and beautiful
folkloric archetypes have defined him as a person, after extended periods
spent withdrawn and morose doing hack work. The prolonged state of
introspection Thomas suffered before eventually deciding to become a
poet is played out in his poems in what Edna Longley (2008: 14) terms
“poetic psychodrama”. The poems habitually feature a split self or a
“switch between patient and analyst”, reflecting the mild schizophrenia he
was diagnosed with after undergoing psychoanalysis in 1912 (Longley,
2008: 14). A doppelganger, performing the role of his analyst, haunts the
landscapes Edward Thomas wanders, acting as a knowledgeable precursor,
taunting his attempts at nature writing and poetry. Alongside a landscape
imbued with a human agency, the doppelganger is played off against the
voice of the poet, redirecting his feelings, as if in a process of transference.
Thomas captures the fleeting, fractured moments, of intimate

disintegrating places, set in the wider context of a disappearing, encroached
upon English countryside, preserved for eternity in dark, eerie, haunted,
uncanny verse, beset with loss, due to his “residual mystical inclinations”
(Longley, 2008: 14). His poetry is conversational, and it is simple, honest,
and understated, in a “disarmingly low-keyed tone of voice” (Motion,
1980: 169). “The sound of sense” (Motion, 1980). Moments of thought
and memory perforate, and expound all that is “ungraspable in the very
nature of words, and memory, and consciousness” (Danby, 1959: 313),
leaving, therefore, only disconnected impressions of landscape, providing
merely a series of fragments for the reader. Lanes, trees, woods, brooks,
pits, roads, hills, farms, pubs, paths, houses, chapels, signposts, and
animals are interwoven with places, weather, people, and countryside
practices. Rejecting the fuss of modernism and the pomp of traditionalism,
Thomas continues the distinctly English plain style of Chaucer, early
Wordsworth, John Clare, Richard Jefferies and Thomas Hardy. He does
not sit very easily with the present, preferring the past, but is in many ways
a covert modernist in his style. His verse subtly upsets. Rhyme schemes
are rarely used, and a rhyming couplet is particularly rare. In short, his
poetry resists categorisation. He is on the cusp of old and new, “between
antiquated traditionalism and elitist modernism”, an isolated figure, not
included in Michael Robert’s epoch-defining Faber Book of Modern Verse
(1936) (Wisniewski, 2009: 1). Despite this, Ted Hughes once described
Edward Thomas as “the father of us all”. Edna Longley reiterated this
statement, arguing Thomas began the modern poetry movement with
Robert Frost and W.B. Yeats, due to their rejection of a constricted verse
and imagism led poetry, allowing freedom (Longley, 2008: 20).
Furthermore, his melancholic version of Romantic Ecology (Bate, 1991),
or eco-historical writing, naturalistic but very much committed to the
workers who cultivate the landscape, shares many similarities with current
ecological thought. He is a pastoral melancholic, “longing to make the
glimpsed good place permanent” (Thomas, 1964: 11). Today, Thomas’s
poems are disturbingly in a time of renewed nationalism, appropriated and
often praised for their “Englishness”, in spite of his Welsh heritage (see
Wisnieski, 2009), and the landscapes he represented have in many ways
become an archetypal “rural idyll”. An idyll, which due to Thomas’s
hatred of nationalism and his feeling of belonging nowhere, subversively
remains preserved for eternity in eerie, haunted, uncanny verse.
Edward Thomas died in the battle of Arras on Easter Monday 9th April
1917 at 7.36 a.m., hit by a stray shell at the Beaurains observation post
(Thomas, 1985: 292). There was not a scratch on him. The sound of the
blast stopped his heart. He was thirty-nine. A sombre war diary, found in
his pocket at the time of his death was included in a new edition of his
collected poems. In the diary, he writes how a shell landed beside him a
day earlier but did not explode. A crumpled letter containing a fragment of
poetry remained with his body, along with the diary, and a photograph of
his wife. The poems, which Thomas completed in the final years of his
life, were first published shortly after his death, and have never since been
out of print. Letters written to friends and family have also been published,
a fragment of autobiography, and many biographies, including two new
ones, Now All Roads Lead to France: the Last Years of Edward Thomas
(Hollis, 2011), and Edward Thomas: From Adlestrop to Arras: A
Biography (Moorcroft Wilson, 2015). Guides to his poetry and the
landscapes that the poems represent exist too, in order to complement all
of his topographical and critical work, and new poems found only recently
in a box have been shared widely. Thomas has a hillside dedicated to him,
which is marked with a sarsen stone, and two stained glass church
windows. His name is etched on to the war poet’s memorial in
Westminster Abbey, and his homes are marked with plaques stating that
the poet once lived there. And over a quarter of a century ago, in 1980, a
Fellowship, a band of brothers, was established formally, to further
perpetuate his life and work and to conserve the countryside known to
Edward Thomas and recorded in his writings, by repeatedly walking it –
its roots go back further, to the laying of the sarsen stone memorial in
1937. This desire to preserve and remember has a politics, for there is a
geopolitics of memory, as certain stories are remembered and others are
hidden. Indeed this archival desire, a desire that humans have in the
troubled present to give meaning to and to memorialise and document a
still and dead past, is described by Michel Foucault as a distinctly modern
idea. And the contemporary desire to turn the lands of England into one of
Thomas’s poems, or the using of landscape poetry to construct an
imagined past is a primary concern in this book. This appropriation of the
words of poets and writers, the art of the past, has a real politics that can
presently be seen in a backward looking British political landscape.
DEATH DRIVE:
EDWARD THOMAS’S GRAVE
““I am not taking a pilgrimage,” I said to myself when I visited the

graveyard at Port Bou in the spring of 2002. Indeed I was not even sure I
wanted to visit the graveyard. I do not think this was entirely due to fear of
cemeteries on my part. Nor was it because I am also attracted to them. It
was more because I feel uncomfortable about what I discern as an incipient
cult around the site of Benjamin’s grave, as if the drama of his death, and
of the holocaust, in general, is allowed to appropriate and overshadow the
enigmatic power of his writing and the meaning of his life. Put bluntly, the
death comes to mean more than the life. This cult is at once too sad and
sentimental, too overdetermined an event – the border crossing that failed,
the beauty of the place, the horror of the epoch. It really amounts to a type
of gawking, I thought to myself, in place of informed respect, a cheap frill
with a frisson of tragedy further enlivened by the calm and stupendous
beauty of the landscape. In any event, one does not worship at the grave of
great thinkers. But what then is the appropriate gesture? Death is an
awkward business. And so is remembrance.”
—Walter Benjamin’s Grave, Michael Taussig
09.11.11. Very early morning, Imperial War Museum archive.
“You are not allowed to take photographs.”

“They are not going to be reproduced.”
“You are not allowed to take photographs.”
Scribble it down on scraps of paper instead. Eyes clogged with sleep dust
still, head a little fuzzy. There was stuff here that no one had ever bothered
to look at. Why would anyone? A document about an Edward Thomas
Centenary Memorial. Signed in 1978 by Myfanwy Thomas, youngest
daughter of the poet and writer Edward Thomas, Alec Guinness, famous
actor and local resident, Jill Balcon, famous actress and local resident, and
Douglas Sneglan, the then vicar of Steep – a village in East Hampshire,
where a sarsen stone memorial was installed on a hill above in 1937. It
will be the centenary of his death soon. The document began with a
quotation: Steep on Tuesday, and for all I know ever after. These words
headed a letter written by Edward Thomas on July 21st 1913, as he moved
10 Death Drive: Edward Thomas’s Grave
in to his third and last house in the village. He had just returned from a
bike ride in pursuit of spring, a poetic undertaking out of the capital west,
and had met little known American poet Robert Frost a matter of weeks
earlier. Frost would tell Thomas that the pursuit springwards was a series
of poems and to begin writing poetry. And he was about to learn of the
First World War, where he would soon be killed by a stray shell at the
Battle of Arras. Steep was to become, during his final four years, the
centre of his spiralling world, the mainspring of his poetry.
The pursuit of spring, setting out from his childhood home in Clapham,
London, is often overlooked as an important milestone in his life. On it, he
finds the beginnings of his poetic voice. In Pursuit of Spring was first
published in April 1914, following its writing up. By December 1914,
Thomas had written his first poem. Into the next two years, he crammed
all his verse writing. As the document in the Imperial War Museum
archive said, most were written about Steep and its surrounds. In addition
to the pursuit springwards, Thomas had been walking rough-circles almost
daily from home and back since moving to the village. He abused
notebooks on these loops. It was though the writing of In Pursuit of Spring
that provided Thomas with a greater understanding of the self. It also gives
the reader an insight into his split psyche, his depressive illnesses. He
writes down some of the demons that had been plaguing him, using the
pursuit as a form of therapy, and the pursuit itself lived on in his poems.
Sections of prose from the pursuit were fashioned into haunting depictions
of landscape, landscape threatened by war and the relentless force of
industrialisation. While the Other Man, a doppelganger, is a recurrent
character in his verse, his other self, his nagging doubt. He recurs again-
and-again in his poems, and is first introduced in the book In Pursuit of
Spring. Riding westward out of the capital was to be the start of his
epically creative last four years.
A century later I resolved to set off by bicycle, tracing the journey that
Thomas had made – once I had established when spring had begun, or
more accurately was about to begin. The plan was to then pursue it and
witness the metamorphosis of the landscape and myself, the further I got
along the preordained route. It was not until more than a month after a
false spring had visited London though that I finally did get going, in the
second week of March. The ride was to be my first journey of this kind.
On the road for an extended period, out in the open countryside or
weaving through dense traffic. It remains to be seen what remains for a
poet and a topographic writer, the subject, I, in a post-human world.
Riding to the holiest of holy poetic sites from the capital seemed like a
good way to find out what remnants there were. A journey along roads and
lanes to the Quantock Hills in pursuit of spring. Thomas becoming a bard

on that bike. It all started a couple of years prior to the false spring though,
with an urge to walk in a strange way. Differently to what I was used to,
and to document this act. To walk away from an industrial northern town
to its nationwide opposite, an affluent rural southern village and
experience what poets meant by the sublime, placing Edward Thomas at
the centre of the journey as a provocation. And in a sense, to undertake a
poetic apprenticeship, training myself to look again at the world. I have to
admit, I have developed an unhealthy obsession with Edward Thomas, as
he aided and inspired, becoming both the subject and the object of this
work and at the same time neither. The ripples had to stop somewhere
though. I had to give up the ghost.
The un-photographable A4 single sheet document in the Imperial War
Museum confirmed that a memorial to mark the centenary of his birth –
March 3rd 1978 – would be placed in Steep, complementing the entire
hillside above, which had already been dedicated to the memory of
Edward Thomas. He would be in Steep, ever after. The hill has, since
1980 especially, become a site of pilgrimage. A literary society founded
then – known as the Edward Thomas Fellowship – has grown up around
the site. They repeat a birthday walk yearly, culminating in a site-reading
by the inscribed stone. It has essentially become a grave where flowers
and poems are left – Thomas’s body though is buried in Agny Military
Cemetery, northeast France, near where he was killed. Like the Walter
Benjamin memorial in Port Bou, on the border between Spain and France,
the Edward Thomas Memorial Stone is a fake grave, depending on how
we classify a grave. In his non-pilgrimage to the site where Walter
Benjamin took his own life, fleeing the Nazis, Michael Taussig writes,
“When we get down to it, why trust that any grave contains what it’s
supposed to? One of the most important events in life, namely, death, is so
shrouded in secrecy and fear that most of us would never dare to check.
Who knows what goes on up there in the graveyard of Port Bou? Maybe
none of the graves have the right body, or any at all?” I would add to that,
why does it matter whether a grave contains bones? The body does not
hold the remnants of who we are in death – does it even hold who we are
in life?
In addition to the memorial stone above Steep, the Fellowship has
drawn all over the village itself. Each of the three houses that he rented
there has an oval plaque adorning its frontage. Edward Thomas Poet lived
here. And opposite a war memorial with his name on, there are two lancet
windows in the church representing his life. A life that has to an extent
been reduced to a final few years, the years when he reached a creative
tipping point, and began writing poetry at an astonishing rate. And to his
death, his heroic death at war – a war which still haunts this quiet corner of
East Hampshire. The cult is at once too sad, too sentimental, as Michael
Taussig notes. Oddly, the house where he was born, 61 Shelgate Road,
Clapham Junction, declares, EDWARD THOMAS 1878-1917 ESSAYIST
AND POET lived here. The blue plaque marked his whole life – 1878-
1917 – not the years he dwelt in the house, telling also something of his
previous life as an essayist. It was placed there not by the Edward Thomas
Fellowship but by London County Council. The terraced house was just
off Northcote Road, Clapham – a typical busy London suburb. It was not a
place that Thomas particularly liked, hence his move to the little village of
Steep in later life, a village that has become an Edward Thomas theme
village, as if all he ever was, was the local hero poet. And that poetry was
something transcendental, which simply flowed forth when he looped the
place.
Another poet of the same era, Thomas Sturge Moore, lived in the
village but is forgotten mostly, overwritten by the memory-work of the
Edward Thomas Fellowship. It is as if they have claimed the place for
Edward Thomas – and all the place now is, is a memorial, a poem, an
imaginary, thanks in part to their material reminders. Their name suggests
so. Fellowship implies stewardship, ownership, guardians, and protectors
of the landscape. It suggests an older understanding of landscape, landschaft,
shaped not by landscape painting and photography but by stories and tales,
which distribute a territorial belonging, creating a sense of community for
those that are part of the cult. The village is cluttered with poems, now
landmarks, festooned with bookmarks. They may have been forgotten sites
without the mapping of a few intrepid members of a literary society.
Afternoon: Steep, East Hampshire, in the traces of Edward Thomas
again. This is not a pilgrimage – I kept telling myself. Simply a final act of
remembrance in Steep – the first without the Fellowship present – on the
way to somewhere I had resolved to visit, despite this supposedly not
being a pilgrimage: the site of his death near Arras and his grave in Agny
– a place which as of yet the Fellowship have left well alone. The village
of Steep is set around two streets at the base of a hill called the Shoulder of
Mutton, and another lane runs along the ridge and leads to the memorial
stone. Two of the houses rented in the village by Edward Thomas are
below, and one is above on the edge of the wooded escarpment. I began
my intervention at the solitary pine, covering the village with new words,
alone in a field beneath the pined ridge, the stone just about visible. Bits of
paper attentive to the form and experience of walking in landscape were
tucked under branches ready to be found, or to decompose before any
finding. On one of the pieces of paper I carried with me on this journey

was a poem, entitled End. It was written about the solitary pine, which was
noticed in this landscape on my first meeting with two members of the
Edward Thomas Fellowship, and was written of in the poem No One So
Much as You by Thomas. It felt like an end, a gift to Edward, as he is
called in the majority of this book.
End
The pit of my stomach fell out
at the sight of the solitary pine.
Seeing it alone, rooted, in the centre
of a vast expanse of dusty green
lit faded memories. They flashed
as the pine loitered in my head
bringing to an end the distant
dream of redemption I had had.
From the solitary pine, I drove to a pub. It was frequented on my third

walk in this landscape. A rough-circle walk with a solitary member, called
Doug. We had walked to The Chalk Pit and back. Thomas had written of
the accidental amphitheatre in 1915. The seventeenth century pub that we
passed on the way, called the Harrow Inn, was also a regular haunt of his. I
decided to write a poem after discussing the life of actor, local resident,
and fan of poetry, Alec Guinness, with Doug. The pub was not open for
some reason but there were people inside. As I drove away, after leaving
the poem on a bench, someone came out to read it; they seemed bemused
by the fly posting.
It was time to head up to the common site of pilgrimage, the memorial
stone that looks down on the village. I drove back out of the village of
Steep, past The Aspens and the two houses with their plaques. When in the
car, I followed the road as it twisted uphill through a pine forest. A deep
coombe was beneath, The Path, The Mill-Water and A Tale down there. I
parked beside The New-House and walked the rest of the way. The view
came in instalments, until I reached the stone, and out from beneath the
canopy. Michael Taussig and his words haunted the journey that I was
making, driving from the memorial stone to his actual grave, unsure as to
whether that was a good idea. Or, whether it was a tracing too far, to
follow Thomas to war, and in a sense bring war back to this place. When I
got to the stone though, I realised that the war remained ever-present here.
There was a poppy stuck under the octagonal plaque, on the face of the
sarsen stone, and some flowers had been left. So, I got about my business
of remembering and left another poem. I slipped under the flowers a poem
written about the hillside – Edward’s Hill – called Gazing. I had written it
after my walk with Doug, when we had stared from this spot.
After canvassing the village, cluttering it with representation, I drove
to two other famous sites nearby. The first was the green lane. Thomas had
written a poem about it in late 1916, just before he travelled to France. He
was given some leave soon after, during which he returned to 13 Rusham
Road, Clapham, to see his family over Christmas, before shipping out. He
completed only two more poems after this date. I left down the green lane
the first poem that I had ever written, after finding a dead mole with Colin
and Larry, two members of the Edward Thomas Fellowship – the walk
which marked the start of the bookmarking, chasing Thomas’s footprints
across poetic lay lines, between ancient literary sites.
Mole
Water had gathered in the deep trenches
where wheels had passed over for centuries,
down the narrow treacherous green lane.
Drenched cheap trainers began digging at my feet

leaving me looking down more often to concentrate,
I noticed when slowing and studying my gait
on the ground a dead mole face up arms outstretched;
there was not a scratch upon it.
Its heart stopped from a fright, a loud noise,

perhaps a blast from a gun. Bending down
I reached for the mole and stroked the fur on its belly,
before picking it up. It was not larger than my palm;
touching it I was surprised at its warmth and its softness.
Not long since it had gone.
I would drive to 13 Rusham Road in the traces of Edward Thomas, after

doing one final thing – the last thing in a landscape that I had spent four
years looping. From the green lane, I drove past the pub with no name,
about which Thomas wrote his first poem, to The Manor Farm, the site of
a poem written by Thomas in 1914. It is of all his poems the one where the
poem does seem to “furbish the charm” of the place, much like the George
Wither poem about a pond in Alresford, which does exactly that,
according to Thomas when In Pursuit of Spring. The Manor Farm is the
most idyllic of all his poems, the rural idyll. And you really can imagine
him coming here again and again in order to write it. Before walking over
to the farm, yew, and church, I left a description of a meeting. The first
meeting with the group of people who work tirelessly to preserve his
memory. There is an old phone box there. Inside it, in the shadow of the
manor farm I left, A Meeting. This place, on that first meeting with it, held
no connection with my psyche. Now, in the part of the brain where
psychology and topology meet, it coaxes vast forlorn horizons,
monumental emptiness, whole mournful memoryscapes.
I was told on my first meeting with the Fellowship, a famous story. It
was the story of why Edward Thomas went to war, as he was over the age
of conscription. The story is often eagerly regaled on the Edward Thomas
Fellowship birthday walks, or memorial-loops. Thomas was asked by his
good friend Eleanor Farjeon, why he wanted to go to war and what he was
fighting for. He replied by scooping up some earth, crumbling it in his
hand, and sprinkling it out. “Literally for this”, he said. It is a story that I
have always been fascinated by, as his body was never returned to the soil
he crumbled. The final thing that I was going to take from this landscape
was some soil and I would transport it to Agny, France, and his grave. The
ancient yew that Thomas wrote of so beautifully had been in the landscape
for centuries before him, and would be there centuries after. From beneath
it, I took a handful of earth.
11.11.11. Odd singularity, cosmic portal transit date. Poetic lay-lines

eminent, particularly on this date of remembrance. Trekking from 15
(formerly 13) Rusham Road across the Channel, Southampton to Le Havre
by boat, ending up in the flat, flat land of northeast France. Gravelines was
the name of the first place in France once off the boat, suitable for this
final tracing, a death drive from the memorial village, and his poems, to
his grave, and on to the grave of Wilfred Owen. A transportation of earth,
nature, poetry: earth-growth itself. I was glad it was nearly all over, it
needed to come to an end. I wanted to be myself again, remove Edward
Thomas: a part of me since summer 2008. The death drive had become
apparent over the four years in the traces of Thomas. How can it be a form
of therapy to write down experiences? You end up never really feeling, or
confronting, anything. Instead, look down on a version of yourself moving
about places. Emotions are prevented from being fully understood and bad
times are never gotten over. They are instead, as if by magic, turned to
prose. Or even worse, bad times are manufactured, in order to become
muted prose. It is cyclical.
Mud, cloying mud, beneath a dreary sky: nothing else for miles. As if a
giant rotavator had passed over the whole landscape, chopping everything
up. These were the famous fields, nowhere to hide. Dug into the land are
trenches – some left open, like an open wound: for memory’s sake. There
were no wild poppies – not even they can survive modern farming
techniques. Arras had two squares around which cafes noised. Middle-
aged Americans were heard through the din. Here to re-visit the war: dark
tourism – a fine line between curiosity and gawping. They spoke of
memorabilia – old guns, ammunition, medals. And sites of interest. A
parade passed by. I had to get out of the open. It was too busy. Heading in
the car to Beaurains instead. It was seemingly just a through-place to
somewhere else – flanking a single road for half a mile on leaving Arras.
There was no mention of Edward Thomas in the place that he died. The
observation post was nowhere to be found. You go through a field and
down the back of a garage to get to the graveyard. It backs on to a street of
grey houses – put there at a later date. Agny was small but it was difficult
to find – hidden away, intimate. The feel of the place was a monument to
death in itself. Cold scrubland: a wonderful behindness to the scene. I
remembered the triumphant memorial stone at Steep – surveying all before
it.
Graveyard, cemetery: peaceful. In contradistinction to the path leading
to it, it was neat, ordered. Mist clung to the cherry trees around about. And
as in the Edward Thomas poem The Cherry Trees, they bend over and are
shedding On the old road where all that are passed are dead. Gravestones
stood in numbered lines, facing a single large cross. Roots and branches
encroached and overhung, as if nature was trying to take the space back. It
was a deadly silent little patch of earth. Row C Grave 43, was through the
only entrance and off to the right. The site mimicked the epic silence that
fell, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in
1918. When after four years of fighting, The Great War was finally over.
Lest we forget: how we remember. Bits of poetry were inscribed on
gravestones. Most had the Ode of Remembrance taken from the Laurence
Binyon poem For the Fallen at their base.
And there it was before me, the stone I had been searching for. Second
Lieutenant P.E. Thomas, Royal Garrison Artillery, 9th April 1917, Poet.
The grave next door sadly had written on it: A Soldier of the Great War,
Known unto God. It made the non-pilgrimage seem silly and ridiculous.
Although I did feel a strange sense of an ending, a giving up of memories,
of the past, knowing what was about to happen. On the grave that I had
come to pay my respects to, there were previous signs of homage. Grass
was slightly worn directly in front of it and it was the only grave in the
cemetery with something left at its base. There was a weathered piece of
paper with a poem written on it, a photograph of Adlestrop train station –
closed in 1966, a bench is now all that is left, with a plaque on it that
quotes the famous poem – and a couple of poppies. The poem scribbled on
the decaying paper was poignant. Someone who knew Edward Thomas
well had left it. It was not a famous poem like Adlestrop, always included
in best-loved poems anthologies. Rather an obscure one, that has recently
become the title of a new biography. The final three stanzas were written
down, although the last one had been taken by the rain and wind. I
sprinkled the soil from beneath the yew, and patted it down, reuniting
Edward Thomas with the soil of England. A collapse of self and world
impossible in life, achieved in death.
Before leaving, I wanted to know something of the other dead buried
in the graveyard. A register was held neatly inside a gatepost. It explained:
The cemetery contains 408 commonwealth burials of the First World War,
118 of them unidentified, and 5 German graves. It was begun by French
troops, and used by Commonwealth units and field ambulances from
March 1916 to June 1917. Two further burials were made in April 1918.
And in 1923-24, 123 graves were brought in from battlefields east of
Arras. The original 40 French graves have since been removed.
A visitor’s book was attached to the register. Most comments were about
Edward Thomas. Here are some of them:
I came from Spain to visit Edward Thomas, one of the greatest poets
England has given, RIP / I remember Adlestrop / To honour all those brave
men and to find Edward Thomas / Remembering Edward Thomas, English
Lit graduate and researcher of the poet / Ex Lincoln College remembering
Edward Thomas / Visiting the poet P.E. Thomas, thank you and all your
comrades / In honour of all those who died and fought, and Edward
Thomas / Visiting poet Edward Thomas whose poetry I admire, and which
sustained me when sad / Peaceful beautiful place, remembering Philip
Edward Thomas and other World War One heroes / Beautiful place, well
cared for, very moving – I remember Adlestrop / We came to find Edward
Thomas / Re-read ‘As the team’s head brass...’ wonderful poem, RIP
Edward Thomas / Edward Thomas, All roads lead to France / Came to see
Edward Thomas’s grave, RIP.
From there I drove away – my attempt to forget, through a final remembering,

failed – to the graveside of another member of the Artists’ Rifles, Wilfred
Owen: the poet who robbed war of its last shred of glory. Unlike the
poems of the period, monuments shamefully lack the nerve to project the
awful purpose of themselves. They are a betrayal of the dead: victims of
an incapacity, century just past, to devise a commemorative mode – a
century that, more than any other, needed such a mode. Most memorials
are inimical to meditative remembrance. They purposefully forget, wipe
over, sanitise history. An exercise in gaining an aesthetic sensibility is
something which counteracts this, as poets of the period did. There is a

poetics there which can be harnessed, if a glimmer of the subjective
condition of the poet creeps in to interpretations of landscape: the shock of
the poetic.
KOTOR:
A VERTICAL WALK
“But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with
the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and so unexpectedly. If
they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as
time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting
weight. Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly
proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some way blind us
to life... And yet what would we be without memory? We would not be
capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart
would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere
never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the
faintest trace of a past. How wretched this life of ours is! – So full of false
conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras
loosed by memory. My sense of estrangement is becoming more and more
dreadful.”
— The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald
I am not a walker, well not in the rambling outdoorsy sense. Like everyone
else I dislike being cold and damp and never learnt, or got taught how to
walk in such a way; how to appreciate the great national parks like a poet.
To clarify: I had probably been for about twenty real countryside walks in
my whole life, before the summer of 2008. Of these twenty walks, the
majority were with my parents in the Lake District. Even then, most of the
day would be spent staring through the car window, sat in a twee little
coffee shop leafing through guidebooks, or, on occasion, we would stand
beside a lake, usually Windermere, admiring the view out across the great
literary landscape. William Wordsworth, Beatrix Potter, Alfred
Wainwright and their texts mutually encountering, enacting, unsettling,
transforming, interacting, inventing and reinventing the Lakes for a kid
from a cotton town.
Thinking back now, going for a walk as a child actually involved very
little opportunity to stretch my legs. At most, we would walk for a few
hundred metres, taking two or three hours to do so – once you include a
refreshment stop. Planned walking routes which looped over hills and
through trees, were very rare. I vaguely recall a moany walk which gave
on to a beach somewhere. It was a line walk of roughly a mile, climbing a
20 Kotor: A Vertical Walk
knot and descending to the sea. Beyond that memory fails me. I am
assured though by my parents that we walked reasonable distances on
occasion. When I left school, as is common, these excursions ended
altogether. Leaving me all alone with some guidebooks, stories and
poems, to crack the country code and find out how to walk vast landscapes
properly. Needless to say, there was no attempt made to do so and venture
rural. I resolved not to leave the safe confines of the city again in order to
walk, and have never owned a cagoule, some walking boots, or a stick.
I did not need to in Manchester, a city haunted by its faded past. The
place where it all began: smog, chimneys, factories; industrialisation,
capitalism. Remnants still exist: a shock of red brick here and there, a few
canals, a number of now renovated mills and a number of ruins in
Castlefield and Ancoats, and the imposing civic architecture along Oxford
Road and Deansgate. While south of the city centre are Rusholme,
Fallowfield, Didsbury, Levenshulme, Burnage, and Longsight and rows
and rows of terraced housing. And beyond the concrete collar, the orbital
motorway, sits Hulme, cut off from the city for years. The Arndale still
squats hideously over Market Street too. More or less the Manchester
W.G. Sebald witnessed, all lurking behind the recently fitted stone and
glass facade. Derelict industrial edgelands, ruins, ignored meadows,
guerrilla forests, the city parks, urban nature, found via ginnels, back
streets, buildings, culverts, tunnels, and canals, as I criss-crossed the city
on foot: stitching my psyche to its fabric. Places dotted around the city
where I would go for bits of time: houses, pubs, lecture theatres, benches,
restaurants, clubs, squares, buses, libraries, cafes, shops, bars etc. Usual
haunts.
There was one walk beyond the city from that period though, which I
can remember well. The only walk forever enshrined in my memory. It
happened a few months before I moved down south. And I was on holiday
in Montenegro with my then girlfriend, who had also participated in the no
rambling rule despite being from walking stock – her great grandfather
was a pivotal member of a noble body of scholarly and cheerful
pedestrians, The Order of the Sunday Tramps.
Hippo Hostel, Budva, Montenegro. The only private room in the plain
white building had squeezed in, a narrow hard bed, with a chrome fan as
its face. The shower room, shared by forty or so people, was opposite, and
there was a quiet, still, little garden, which you had to climb down and in
to from the road. I spent a whole day there once, lazing beneath the
flowering vines, reading the W.G. Sebald book, Vertigo, whilst my then
girlfriend, C, read Kafka. The quiescence played with the range of fleeting
memories written delightfully and the next day the book was taken on a
trip to the world heritage site, Kotor. It was safely stowed in a pink
rucksack – a monkey key ring dangling and guarding the zips – whilst we
rattled along on the humid old bus watching the landscape slide by. It took
about an hour to get there, winding along possibly the most picturesque
road in Europe; skirting the edge of the Bay of Kotor, beneath sheer
limestone cliffs. It was familiar scenery, reminding of a youth spent
driving around the Lakes. That did not stop it from being an epic and
entirely different experience though. The sun helped, causing the vast
bowl to glisten and blind, distancing thoughts of Cumbria.
As soon as the bus pulled in at the ruin of a bus station in the old town,
we walked directly to the water and jumped off a thin stretch of
boardwalk, into the crystal-clear fjord like river canyon. Being more
comfortable wild swimming than rambling my body seemingly evolved to
a life aquatic, free to dive down to the rocky bed visible deep below,
before coming up for air. Others mirrored my movements. We all then
floated for a while on our backs in the freshwater, like a wreath of lily
pads, looking up at the mysterious castle. It appeared unreachable and
inaccessible for tourists. C broke the silence and splashed me a few times.
She wanted to reach the castle that we were all inadvertently focused
upon. I was not so keen. C swam in though adamant that we should
attempt the climb and transfixed her gaze on the narrow path, zigzagging
upwards. Towelling off in the shallows she once again implored me to
walk up to the medieval fortress. I paddled in but only rested for a while
on the shingle, pretending to read a little more of Vertigo – my mind
though was on the cloud castle. Sitting and looking up into the heavens,
we were drawn on to our feet simultaneously. The tip of the tower miles
up above and the tiny flag fluttered proudly, beckoning us forth. It was
midday and the sun was baking our faces, so we stocked up on water,
weighing the pink bag down, before attempting the climb.
A few metres below a little chapel, a woman was sitting on one of the
thousands of steps in the shade of a tree, selling tickets to enter the
winding path through a gate. With a large yellow ticket in hand, in no time
at all we were on our way up the mountain. A perfect line of poplar trees
focused the eye forward, dead ahead, to the chapel the woman guarded.
The path, flanked by a low banister of stone, was at this point wide enough
to walk side by side, and talk of the increasingly spectacular view of the
fjord from round the next zig or zag. We chose to walk on the rough
gravel, rather than up the steps, as the slope was quite shallow. Walking
hither and thither across it with ease, and taking lots of photos, we were
scooting up the mountainside, taking hairpin bend after hairpin bend,
enjoying the increasingly sublime scene laid out before us. Monumental
22 Kotor: A Vertical Walk
mountains, pretty old town, clear fjord, and clear sky. Until we stumbled
upon the beginnings of the fortress, despite still being hundreds of feet
beneath it. A number of half-ruined stone walls converged, creating a
succession of roofless cubes. We looked inside them all. In the last was a
rectangular opening, which allowed us to peer over the edge at another
little church. This one was in the middle of a field and had beardy horned
goats guarding it, supported by hopping bunnies. It was the rabbit hole.
The field and church had no right to be there. We were ascending a
slanting staircase carved into the side of a mountain. It made no sense.
And a sense of disbelief occurred at what we were seeing, so surprising
was it. Acres and acres of fine grazing land just appearing out of nowhere,
a hidden plateau as smooth as a bowling green or the baize of a snooker
table. The church was a lot further away than it seemed. C did not come
down with me. I continued instead alone, with C and the hole getting
smaller and smaller for a few minutes. Goats began to surround, and it was
all getting a bit weird. The church could house anything, or anyone, and it
was no closer than when at the gateway peering in. On turning back, C
was no longer standing in the opening. The dark rectangle was the only
feature on the great grey wall before me, aiming for that, quickly, leaving
the church and goats behind. It took some effort to reach the opening with
a hand.
Back on the path, C was snapping away at the fjord unaware of the
surreal experience. Water was necessary. Gulping the liquid down
provided scant relief from the sun, which had now been searing our scalps
for almost two hours. We discussed giving up and going back down but
the flag still beckoned us, two ships in the night drawn on to the rocks.
And on continuing to climb the zigzagging path, we came across more and
more bizarre walls, spreading out like the roots of a tree holding the
mountainside in place. The higher we climbed the narrower the path
became and it had no banister or steps at all by then, forcing us to straddle
the limestone at times. Worried that C would fall off and crash to her death
before my eyes – leaving me to find her smashed carcass at the bottom two
hours later – I resorted to telling her about every single rock on the path.
On each bend, we would stop to take on the drips of water left from our
two large bottles. By then we were making incredibly slow progress, baby
steps were a necessity at that altitude for novices. The path felt like it was
never going to end, and we could continue forever, zigzagging all the way
to space. But it did, all things always come to an end. It was an odd ending
though, as the path did not stop its zigzagging. In fact, it carried on, twenty
or thirty feet above us, ascending into the clouds. But we could not follow
this thread any further, we had exhausted its connective possibilities.
Downhill was the only way from here. The flag was now at eye level,
along with an extensive fort, releasing the child within me. I played war
for a bit, ducking and diving in and out of empty rooms, pretending to
shoot C. Until the sun overcame, and I had to sit in the shade. C took a
photo of me. We then took another photo with the flag behind us, our big
faces covering the landscape, the only people for miles, gazing out at the
fjord, now so far beneath us. Wordsworth would have appreciated the vast
view out across the water, arced by jagged mountains, scraping the bluest
sky and Kotor looking like utopia from up high. How we descended the
staircase to the old town is a mystery. I had mild sunstroke mixed with
waves of vertigo. Maybe I was carried down, laid across the backs of
beardy horned goats, or, maybe none of the story told happened at all, and
we just sat beside the fjord all day reading our books, sipping nikšiþko
pivo. After all, I am not a walker.
STEEP:
A DOT-TO-DOT WALK
“The world that revealed itself in the book and the book itself were never,
at any price to be divided. So with each book its content, too, its world,
was palpably there, at hand. But, equally, this content and world
transfigured every part of the book. They burned within it, blazed from it...
until one day from an alien source it flashes as if from burning magnesium
powder... and while our walking, habitual, everyday self is involved
actively or passively in what is happening, our deeper self rests in another
place and is touched by the shock, as is the little heap of magnesium
powder by the flame of the match. It is to this immolation of our deepest
self in shock that our memory owes its most indelible images.”
—A Berlin Chronicle, Walter Benjamin
I struggle now to remember much of the car journey, bar the route taken. It
was early in the morning and warm. The drive itself though has been
wiped from my memory, usurped by more recent drives to the same place.
Driving that day must have been automatic, with myself and the car
affected only by the ebb and flow of traffic. All that is left in my memory
– perhaps for the reason that I wanted to write exactly this – is a vision of
a version of myself, sat in the car, on a nothing stretch of road. I recall
being anxious about meeting some members of a literary society bent on
revering a poet, with only a basic grasp of poetry to hand. Time appeared
to be going slower, the faster I drove. It was not until a few miles from
Petersfield that landscape and road began to have some sort of connection.
As the road followed what appeared to the untrained eye to be ancient
folds and gashes in the land. It twisted and dipped increasingly, hanging
on to, following and bridging a shallow meandering stream. Road and
stream were knitting the landscape up, as a generic array of things slid
past: field, hedgerow, field, hedgerow, field, hedgerow, green, brown,
green, brown, green, brown, bisected by sky, blue, blue, blue, clouds,
wispy white, crows, black swoops, a gap, five bar gate, oak tree, standing
alone, one in every field, cow, cow, cow, side on, unmoving. The road
descended rapidly into darkness at a copse and turns became tighter and
tighter to mediate for a slant in the land. While shadows danced on the car
in front, as we bunched, and the dashboard lit up. A bright white light
inundated my retina. Petersfield Railway Station was on the left: the

meeting place. I parked there and waited. After ten minutes or so, two
gentlemen arrived sporting suitable attire, carrying a book of poems and an
explorer map. Dressed in gear, which was less shiny than I had imagined.
Woollen socks, corduroy trousers, leather boots, tweed cap. The cagoule
was bagged; an aluminium stick was on show, jutting from a hand,
indicating that I had not driven through time, but the Downs of Southern
England.
The men stopped by the awkward automatic door of the old stone
station. It opened and quickly closed unsurely. The bearded man was
Colin – the honorary secretary of the Edward Thomas Fellowship – and
the one wearing a flat cap and carrying the aluminium stick was Larry –
the honorary treasurer and membership secretary. I remember being struck
throughout by a feeling of estrangement despite being in a homely, safe
landscape. They were staunch Edward Thomas enthusiasts, frustrated that
he was not a household name, like many of his contemporaries. This
corner of Hampshire provides the ground base to the majority of his
poems. It is known as Little Switzerland locally. On the map we pored
over it said Steep. The disciplined walk was so focused around Edward
Thomas that at times the landscape felt unnecessary, a distraction from the
poetry. The landscape became more noticeable at designated stopping
points, where the scene unfurled itself, and we strained to get a better
view. Or when the poetry told us to see and we tried to glimpse the past.
We often stopped and pondered the poem in the place it was written
almost a century earlier, before reading it aloud. The landscape is still
apparently as it was, time has slowed down, but I was unable to
substantiate this, merely picture. The poetry has according to Colin and
Larry, preserved the landscape and given it blue-plaque status, national
importance; a narrative, which was largely unreadable to me. When we
were not talking about poetry, I was versed in the history of the Edward
Thomas Fellowship, Edward Thomas, his life, and his heroic death in the
First World War. Colin spoke of how, on the morning of Easter day 1917,
a stray shell blast stopped his heart and left not a scratch upon him – he
was 39: the sombre landscape of the Arras offensive in North Eastern
France still haunting this quiet corner of East Hampshire, dislocating and
merging different times and places, from Adlestrop to Arras. There was a
letter found in his pocket when he died, with a diary, and a photograph of
his wife. Written in the diary was a story of a shell landing beside Edward
a day before his death. It did not explode. At Steep Church there is a
memorial to the dead of the Great War. Inscribed on the wall of the church
were the names of the men who perished in the trenches. Edward Thomas
26 Steep: A Dot-to-Dot Walk
was one of the names. A sombre reminder of the great loss suffered before
a walk in the footsteps of a poet. A lost generation of heroes, of which
Edward was one, memorialised here.
Of course, explained Colin, Edward did not need to go to war. He was
over the age of conscription. Reading the words, For King and Country,
prompted Colin to question the devotion of Edward, to a monarch. Not so
much King but certainly country, he went on to say. What followed, from
Colin, is the most repeated story about Edward. And, along with his
writing, is part of the reason why he is held in such high regard, by the
people who wander this landscape regularly. It is the story of why Edward
went to war. The oft-told story of the poet bending down and picking up a
handful of earth, crumbling it between his fingers, and replying, literally
for this. I think he was defending a way of life too, said Colin. A story
then not of nationalism, but of preservation, gaining mythical status within
a new band of brothers: the Fellowship. Edward essentially believed he
had cherished England thoughtlessly, visually, slavishly. Fighting was
necessary in order to look again, uniformly, at the English landscape. He
wrote poems still once enlisted, all but one written whilst training in
England. Whilst other poets of the period produced verse verging on
nationalist manifesto, Edward continued writing what he knew, the
English landscape, a landscape now more disturbing than ever. Colin told
me, it has been suggested by some that Edward knew he would be killed at
war, and that he welcomed death. And the poems that he completed in his
final years were a suicide note. Death was a final solution to the
melancholia suffered as a man and a writer, as it enabled a fusion of self
and world, impossible in life.
Leaving the church through a gate cocooned in a wooden arch, we
turned left past Bedales School. Students from the school were wandering
around the impressive grounds. The glass entrance hall was filled with
sculptures and two large leather couches. Edward sent his children to
Bedales unwontedly and did not agree with the teachers on occasion. Nor
did he agree with the elitist education system in place at the time. He
preferred to align himself with the working class, according to Colin,
which comes through in the subject matter of his poetry. Edward often
spoke with the peasant worker, the farmer, the mill-worker, the
ploughman, and the quarry man on his many excursions. These
conversations were later in his life written up into poems. He was not a
wealthy man himself, despite writing all his life. And would not have been
able to afford the fees to send his children to Bedales and subsequently to
university today. It was still a necessity for him to do hack work, as he
called it, to pay the bills. This irritated him and likely contributed to his
depression. Eventually for Thomas writing review after review became an

unsatisfying existence for a man who had essentially always wanted to be
a poet.
To emphasise the struggle for money Edward faced, Colin and Larry
walked me across the road to number 2 Yew Tree Cottage. The cottage is
set back from the road, down a narrow path, flanked by hardy hedges. The
small white semi-detached cottage was the third and last house Edward
rented in the area. He lived there with his wife Helen and their three
children from 1913 to 1916 – the time when the majority of his poems
were created. Edward could not afford to buy in the area, even then, which
is why they rented. Luckily on occasion he was moved by what he saw in
the village and would be able to write about it, which is why they stayed.
One such example of this is in front of the house, a large shrub, old man,
or lad’s-love. The feathery shrub, which we rubbed on our hands, gave off
a pungent scent. Myfanwy, Edward’s youngest daughter would pick at the
bush every time she walked in and out of the house. Her father, Edward,
was guilty of doing exactly the same, on one occasion when he mislaid his
key, being transported Only to an avenue, dark, nameless, without end at
the smell of the herb. Before we left the garden, a ritual reading of the
poem Old Man took place and we rubbed our hands on the leaves once
more. The smell wafted up from my hands into my nostrils. The words
began to play with the scent and I was transported somewhere else by it.
The poem modestly and clearly transcribes the process of trying to
remember. And it is an example of a poet using simple words to say
something profound. As when the childhood memory wanted was not filed
away ready simply to be remembered, feelings of estrangement grew. It
illustrates the slippery nature of memory. Important memories can be lost,
unimportant ones retained, and we may remember something one day but
not the next. I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray And think of nothing; I
see and I hear nothing; Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait For
what I should, yet never can, remember; No garden appears, no path, no
hoar-green bush Of Lad’s-love, or Old Man, no child beside, Neither
father nor mother, nor any playmate; Only an avenue, dark, nameless,
without end.
Not far from 2 Yew Tree Cottage is the Cricketers Pub. The pub stands
on a crossroads, the entrance to the village. We waited in the empty tarmac
square in front of the pub for a few moments. Across the road from where
we were standing was a garage. The shape, brick and age of the building
suggested it was a stop off point in the past. It was actually a blacksmith’s
cavern and a little shop. The sounds of the pub and the smithy, glass and
anvil, would have been clinking away all day, for half a century before
even Edward moved here. Now there is no clinking left. The pub is
nowhere near as lively as a pub should be and the garage was silent. It at
least had people working inside it though, but not today. We were left with
only one noise above the distant hum of the a3, the Aspens. Blowing about
in the wind they talk together Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the
top, as they did in the days when Edward walked this route. We turned
back on ourselves away from the talking trees to another memorial. This
time it was a marble column with a wreath of poppies placed carefully at
the base. Once again we looked for the name of Edward Thomas. It was
about half way up. We stood for a few moments, to pay our respects
before turning left towards a cast iron bench, painted cream, looking out
across fields where the rich kept their horses. We sat on the pretty bench,
encircled by the Shoulder of Mutton in the distance and watched the
horses prance, tails swishing side to side in unison. Their little white shoes
amused me. These were no ordinary horses; they were new to this area. As
such they altered the vista from this little cream cast iron bench we sat on.
The Fellowship had no problem with the elegant prancing horses. Some of
the ramblers and locals did though. Colin told me of how he had been
approached by a local group to argue that because the site had special
literary significance it should not be changed in any way. This includes
allowing the stables to erect fences across the sloping fields. They had a
petition with some names on and were ready to turf the horses off the land.
Colin laughed at the ridiculousness of the story. The horses are still here,
happily, blissfully ignorant.
We wandered down an anonymous lane past the field of horses,
towards the Shoulder of Mutton. Gazing up at it, it looked more like a leg
of mutton. The ghosts are up there, to be summoned. Visions of Edward
running down the shoulder with Myfanwy on his shoulders were
abounding. This was a common sight. Collective memories it seems, of
the once witnessed. There was a repeated excited noise from my fellow
hikers who were perceiving fading markers in the landscape. A water-mill
where once men had a workplace and a home. Traces of what it once was
remain. Whilst the waterfall still flows, the mill and wheel are no longer
there with not enough demand to turn a profit. The mill had given way to a
large detached property, in keeping with the rest of the village. Ruins were
a common sight even in the days of Edward, as people began to move out
of the area to London and Southampton. Edward felt a duty to write poetry
about their fleeting existence but he could not alter the fact that the world
was becoming increasingly mechanised. Mass industry was coming. In the
silence of the Downs, the waterfall roared away. It is useless now,
powering nothing, idly foaming. Pity thought the three of us, as we
imagined it in its heyday, with workers clocking in. The site has returned
to nature, who adds flowers here and there. We read The Mill-Water in
homage to what was left, and left.
Climbing upwards past the waterfall through Lutcombe Bottom
following the river, eventually led us to a small crystal-clear lake
surrounded by trees. It had no right to be there amongst the deep coombe.
It looked artificial; a number of interlinked pools, a small waterfall, and a
bathing area on the shallow side. Lord Hawder owned all of the lakes at
one time. Only a few years ago, he gave all the land to the country of
Great Britain under the care of Hampshire County Council. This should
have allowed the area to become a part of the proposed South Downs
National Park, but to control the saplings through coppicing is labour
consuming and it would very quickly fall apart. The area surrounding
Steep was drawn around for maintenance reasons, and it sat for a while
outside of the boundary line of the new national park. The decision has
since been reversed and the landscape Edward Thomas wrote of, and
perhaps furbished and glorified with his words, is now a national park.
Beyond the lake system was a chalk track about ten feet in width. It led
us up steeply in to some trees. Water ran down the chalk eroding away the
surface, revealing the past in tiny rivulet. The story of a lady who dropped
a box of blue plates on the path we walked was retold; smashed fragments
still sparkle against the white rock, just, and tell the tale. The woodcutters’
cottage had gone bar footings, leaving the path redundant, going nowhere
but to a clasp of trees. Nettles grow making visible what once was. I
picked up a blue shard but later lost it, it disappeared into emptiness,
swallowed by landscape. Trampled back down to be found again next year
or the year after. Luckily the event is immortalised in verse by the poem, A
Tale. A tale through which to see this coombe. Memories fixed in space.
The shards continue to be found a century after the event. When they
eventually are all gone, the site will lose the enchantment with which it
held us. This prompted Colin to ponder dropping another box of willow
pattern plates. It was the authenticity of the story and the site, which made
it special. There was no plaque, no staging of the past, and it was not being
sold to us as heritage. We read oddly two versions of the poem – Edward
could not decide on which one was best – before walking up the chalk hill
and out of the trees.
The deep coombe, dark and wet, was now below us. Fern and wild
garlic almost covered the bracken completely. We had walked up a narrow
path along the eastern edge of what now appeared to us as a large valley.
The path narrowed further the higher we climbed Stoner Hill. Little steps
had been cut into the chalk and mud to allow the ascent to be done upright.
I was unsure whether they had been ground down by the feet of people
over centuries or had been dug away by a single person. To my left on the
edge of the steep drop was an embankment of moss, under which could
have been anything. It served well as a banister rail. The blue aluminium
stick was now a useful appendage. We stopped and leafed through the
book of poems to the poem, The Path. I presumed this must be the path
that Edward wrote about. The one we had just used to climb the hillside. It
runs along a bank and there is a precipitous wood below. It was not
though. For many years people had walked to this site and read the poem,
without realising it was the wrong path. There was another, which has
gone to the winding prickles of bramble branches. Left to return to nature,
unused for so long by humans. It went nowhere but to the top of the deep
coombe. Stopping suddenly at the edge where the trees end, it overhung us
by thirty feet or so. A vista before the trees topped it perhaps. An old lady
remembered the path though, the one which led to some legendary or
fancied place. We tried to find the entrance to the secret path. Cockshott
Lane though was now a tarmac ribbon, which extended across almost the
full length of the Shoulder of Mutton. Some of the path was covered over
because of this. We could see some smaller trees and a line of nettles. I
walked into the trees a little further to gain a better view. But only
succeeded in getting myself entangled. The entrance to the path was now
locked. I wondered whether the path was as thickly covered with prickly
branches beyond the part we could see. And hoped there was an area at the
end of the path left untouched by the workers – the bramble and the nettle
– where you could still stand and look over the edge, down at the deep
coombe and dream of diving over the parapet. The aspens will catch you.
If not the damp ground would at least soften your fall. Darkest days spent
looking in to the darkest deepest ancient coombe. Stare for too long and
you will get vertigo and go.
The route we took from Stoner Hill must have been unremarkable as I
am struggling to remember it completely. We turned left and on to a busy
b-road towards Froxfield. The road wound around the opposite side of the
coombe. It looked like I imagine Switzerland to be. Fir trees and steep
hills. We followed the road for a while leaving Little Switzerland behind. I
remember the road widened, straightened, and descended. There was a pub
at the lowest point of the road on the right. It was bright blue and looked
old. The road then ascended again. For the first time on the walk, I could
see for miles in every direction across fields of corn and barley. North
Downs clear behind, south clear before. I wonder whether to trust what I
am now writing. Perhaps the more I think and re-think these sentences the
further away from the original memory I am getting. There was definitely
a succession of turns, all along narrow straight lanes. We passed a farm

with a metal five bar gate. There was a cow trough and cowpat but no
cows. A big dark blue barrel type object. A tractor. The ground had been
concreted. I think I can remember a ploughed field. There were some quad
bikes over the hedgerow out of sight. The sound was piercing. Nothing
was said. We left a lane and crossed one of the many freshly ploughed
cornfields. In front of us was a meadow with a town in the distance that I
am unable to remember the name of. It had something to do with either
Ivor Gurney or Richard Jefferies. The pub with no name was on the other
side of the meadow. I have no idea of the route we took to reach the
meadow. My memories of the meadow are a little more vivid. No doubt
because I have a point of poetic reference, the pub. Images flash now and
again of a view over towards the pub with no name.
Ignoring the previous paragraph where I lost myself, we somehow
walked from the secret path to a pub with no name. Once inside the pub,
we were confronted by a stick and boots belonging to Edward Thomas,
material reminders, resonances, traces. This was his favourite haunt,
apparently. The pub was dark and cool. It was also very comforting. There
was a wedding party in. The bride squeezed past our sweating dirty bodies
propping up the bar in order to reach the door. She was still in her flowing
white gown. A line of people followed her until we were the only people
left in the pub except the bar staff. I ordered a pint of no name bitter. Larry
tried the no name strong bitter. It was a lot darker and clung to the glass as
he tipped it down his throat. We sat for a while to rest. I began to relay
what had just happened in my head of the lost journey. My hay fever had
become uncontrollable, allowing me to concentrate on nothing else but my
body. I could remember only the basics of the landscape we wandered
through to reach the pub, green cornfield, barbed wire fence, a line of trees
in the distance, a desire path. Sitting there in a local country pub, I began
to feel like a city boy more than ever, too clean, not used to the pungent
country air, out of place. I longed to be back in the warm beating heart of
natal Manchester, with its grey concrete and red brick. While feeling more
and more dreadful in the countryside, sneezing away and folding the one
tissue I had this way and that, my companions looked increasingly at
home, their tensions visibly seeping away. We walked over to the stick
and boots and stared. Quality pieces of kit even now. The stick was a
perfect fit for the hand of Edward. Carved from one thick branch of holly.
The leather boots still looked useable, and were about my size. The
corporeal techniques Larry and Colin employed seemingly began working
whilst sat near the artefacts that once belonged to Edward. Some sort of
mystical connection with Edward was being awakened. They talked of
him and stared deep into the things left in the corner of his pub. It seemed
as if they were attempting metamorphosis. Colin reaching for the stick,
and a world beyond this life, transmogrified before me, becoming a
strange new modern Edward.
No one else had grazed any of the anonymous lanes with us. Even the
cows, sheep, and wild horses had gone. No doubt to make way for the very
modest influx of cagouled ramblers we had not witnessed jostling with the
ghosts of place. Outside the pub there is a large pond. It lies only a few
strides from the door. I had not noticed it when we entered the pub with
my face inside a tissue. Lilly pads floated on its surface. Grass surrounded
its gently sloping sides. Rushes growing around the edge merged the water
further with the bank. It is difficult to see where the pond begins. A sign
notes this along with the depth of the water. Ignoring the sign, a single
cow stood at the water’s edge, eating the lush grass. On the other side of
the pond from us were a few pub benches. The sort of benches which
remind me of childhood sat eating salt and vinegar crisps and drinking
syrupy coke. On these benches, the Fellowship used to sit each year to
write a huge birthday card for Edward Thomas. Colin has kept all of the
cards and looks back through them occasionally to remember the names
and faces of the people who sadly no longer make the walks. The wind
picked up as we walked away from the pub in order to take a photograph.
In my view now was the pub in its entirety, and the pond, very little else.
This was a rather isolated local. A public house that is public for birds,
squirrels and such-like. An outpost up in the wind, as Edward noted in his
very first poem, a long poem describing the pub. In it, there is also a tale
about a barmaid with a cockney accent. It is a conversational, simple
poem, written in a low-key tone. This was to become his style.
Sneezing abated, we began walking down a narrow sunken lane, with
trees on either side casting shadows on the shiny damp tarmac. We aimed
for The Manor Farm with the sound of Larry’s stick staining the immense
silence. A bright light at the end of the dark tunnel, opened out and gave
onto a scene, which seemed uncannily like I had been there before. The
power of representation perhaps, or the quintessential village green, or
maybe I had been here before. A large farmhouse, a small church, a great
yew tree, crossroads, signpost, and post-box, all in the misty haze of a late
summer day. Everything was incredibly silent and still. Wandering away
from the others, I opened the wooden gate of the little church and walked
beneath the great yew tree, opposites in size and age then and now. I could
still hear nothing, wandering amongst the old crumbling gravestones, no
voices, no birds, no wind, indeed no life bar my crunching soles. Turning
to leave the churchyard with its overgrown grass, brambles, ivy, and that
great yew, I looked over the hedge and at the manor farm and knew This
England, old already, was called merry. Perhaps this place is in, as the
poet writes, a perpetual season of bliss unchangeable, slept in Sunday
silentness. Upon which a car drove past and the spell was broken with a
splutter. Disappointed, I walked back through the gate, underneath the yew
tree, now less enchanting, and met Colin and Larry once more, who were
still reading the poem aloud beside the farm.
To reach the memorial stone, we had to travel down a halcyon green
lane, where now September hides herself, which seemed endless in its
density. A tunnel of green, with deep trenches a couple of metres apart
where wheels had passed over for centuries, no doubt deepened since
Edward wrote the poem, The Lane. Some water had gathered in the
trenches making it difficult to walk along the narrow lane, and the cheap
trainers that had been digging at my feet all day were now drenched. I
toyed with the idea of taking them off but thought better of it. Instead, I
was looking down more often to concentrate, slowing, and studying my
gait, not bothering to look over the top of the sharp hedges of holly. In
doing so, I noticed a dead mole on the ground, face up with arms
outstretched. There was not a scratch on it. Its heart stopped from a fright,
a loud noise, perhaps a blast from a gun. Colin bent down, reached for the
mole, and stroked the fur on its belly, before picking it up. It was not
larger than his palm; touching it, I was surprised at its warmth and its
softness. Not long since it had gone. The end of the long, narrow, straight,
arduous lane, felt like the gateway to another world. I could now see cars
shooting past and the fleeting fusion of self and world was over.
With only gratitude instead of love a pine in solitude cradling a dove.
With only gratitude instead of love a pine in solitude cradling a dove.
Colin was looking over at a solitary pine in a cornfield. Breaking out of a
daydream, I acknowledged Colin and his repeated excited statement. The
pine looked lonely in the centre of a vast expanse of dusty green. Colin
explained how the pine was written about in the love poem No One so
Much as You. Colin knew the significance of the pine, even if no one else
did, making it a special tree, symbolising his connection to this landscape.
I had witnessed personal knowledge of the landscape we wandered, an
example of individual place-making. We stood and waited for a moment in
silence, and then Colin read the whole poem aloud. The sad words of a
dying love drifted on the breeze. Expertly delivered, in an accent befitting
the poet himself, Colin read the final lines: That I could not return, All that
you gave, And could not ever burn, With the love you have. The words
were now cradled by the pine not a dove. Colin returned to the solitary
pine year on year with the rest of the Fellowship for the birthday walk. A
line of people waiting to be shown the next poetic-site, wander past the
pine. Larry and Colin always stop and look at the pine. Colin said he can
feel the other members of the Fellowship watching him whenever he
wanders over to the pine, wondering what it is that they have missed,
doubting their detective-work. I got closer to the pine becoming as solitary
as it, and imagined a line of people watching on. The words from No One
so Much as You, stream back now as I write and I am back under the pine.
The solitary pine loiters in my head sometimes: alone, rooted, and lonely,
it lights faded memories and brings to an end any distant dreams of
redemption.
An imposing house peering over the edge of a steep hill down
Cockshott Lane. Inscribed on the side of it were the words, Edward
Thomas poet and his wife Helen lived here 1909-1913. The Fellowship
had organised the hanging of this plaque and took great pride in it, as a
material celebration of his work and life. Colin explained that Edward
hated the house. A story of him leaving the house late at night during a
storm with a gun was eagerly retold. Edward’s wife, Helen, saw Edward
leave with the gun. A shot rang out moments later across the fields through
the gloom. She heard the shot from the house and feared the worse.
Edward was particularly depressed during this period. An hour after
hearing the shot, Helen was relieved when Edward returned with the gun
in his hand. On cue the weather began to change, mist descended and the
wind began to moan in the trees, who were seemingly talking to each
other. Still feeling a sense of dread after hearing the previous poem, I
wanted to get a move on. Not before reading a poem about the house, The
New House, upon hearing which a sense of dread became deeper. I heard
distorted by the wind: Nights of storm, days of mist, without end; Sad days
when the sun shone in vain: Old griefs and griefs not yet begun. Then it
was over. End of a poem, end of the loop almost. We had only one more
thing to see on this whistle-stop tour: the memorial stone. It has sat on the
Shoulder of Mutton since 1937, when the hill itself was dedicated to the
memory of Edward Thomas.
Walking past Old Litten Lane, we reached the pinnacle of the dot-to-
dot loop: the Shoulder of Mutton Hill. A name, which until the Fellowship
petitioned the Ordinance Survey, was not on the map. It had been replaced
by a newer name with less history and no poetic residue. The hill
dedicated to Edward Thomas needs to have a name, which the poet
himself would remember. The landscape unfurled itself and the memorial
stone could be seen stood about thirty feet in front of us, looking solid,
almost human in its qualities, surveying the landscape imperiously. With
trepidation due to the steep slope and the incoming gusts, I walked slowly
and carefully towards it with Colin and Larry following a pace or two
behind. Stopping next to the memorial stone, I looked out with Edward
over the South Downs. Colin and Larry did the same. It was a while before
anyone said anything. After what seemed like an age, I turned to look at
the inscription on the memorial. Written on the octagonal plaque set into
the hard sarsen stone was: And then I rose up, and knew that I was tired,
and continued my journey. Colin explained that this line is taken from an
essay written by Edward. How true it felt to me and my aching body,
dressed in inappropriate, wet, clinging, painful clothing at that moment.
Peering deep into the stone, silently staring, Colin placed a hand upon its
shoulder and lent for a while in thought. After a minute or so, he began
describing the difficult task of erecting the stone in 1937. The story
involved winches and a team of people to remove it from Avebury, where
it once stood in a sacred sarsen stone circle. The spot henceforth was a
place of pilgrimage. Each year the Fellowship come to pay their respects.
A poem has been written about the stone, but I forget whom by. Edward
would like the fact that the stone has mystical inclinations attached to it, as
he liked to think of a world beyond the world we know. The eroding
memory-prompt silently stared back at us before we broke its gaze and
turned around to look over the landscape once more.
Still gazing across the Downs, Larry began to tell us a story of an
elderly member of the Fellowship. Not being able to quite remember a
name, I was told and shown with actions, how he rolled head over heels
down the hill regaining his footing occasionally, and only stopping once at
the wooden fence about twenty feet below. The gentleman was fine but
did not attempt the entire walk again. Colin was laughing loudly by this
point and was also joining in with the actions where appropriate.
Subsequently he told a similar story involving his grandson and himself
and of course, Edward and Myfanwy who used to hurtle down this very
hill. Before we descended the vertiginous escarpment following in the
footsteps of Edward and Myfanwy, we passed a bench looking out over
the sixty miles of Downs. The bench had written on it In memory of
Rowland and Cherry Watson whose enthusiasm led to the dedication of
the Memorial to Edward Thomas in 1937.
I stopped there for a moment letting the others wander on and sat with
the dead on Edward’s Hill, looking out through the gloom, thinking sad is
the parting thou make me remember. What an elaborate suicide note these
poems have seemingly turned out to be. And then I rose up, and knew that
I was tired, and continued my journey.
THE MANOR FARM:
A WALK POEM
“The whole technique of photographic copying ultimately depends on the

principle of making a perfect duplicate of the original, of potentially
infinite copying. You had only to pick up a stereoscopic card and you
could see everything twice. And because the copy lasted long after what it
had copied was gone, there was an uneasy suspicion that the original,
whether it was human or a natural scene, was less authentic than the copy,
that the copy was eroding the original, in the same way as a man meeting
his doppelganger is said to feel his real self destroyed.”
—Campo Santo, W.G. Sebald
“The simple lack of her is more to me than others’ presence.”

—Letters, Edward Thomas
I do not know whether to tell you this. It is not really a story worth telling,
and is not interesting in any way, but it happened. The reason for including
it is that I am trying not to omit anything. Inevitably, though, some
memories will be written and some will not. A week after meeting Colin
and Larry, I had another go at a loop around Steep. I was supposed to be
meeting four or five members of the Fellowship. Colin said they were
writers who took a particular interest in Edward. They were to tell me of
the link between Edward Thomas and the peripatetic writers who
influenced him. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, Hazlitt, De Quincey,
Emerson, Jefferies et al. Whose footprints can be seen scattered about his
writing. The walk was to take place early in the morning and I was to meet
the writers at the same place that I met Colin and Larry, the railway
station. Getting there was hard work, I seem to remember. I had to wrench
myself from the peaceful surroundings of the New Forest and drive to
Southampton initially, before getting on the m3. The morning sun was
already streaming through the tent and I could hear footsteps and voices in
the vicinity. No doubt descending on the shower block to beat the morning
rush before I had chance. Bacon being cooked on a camp stove wafted
over my way as I unzipped the flap of door. Rubbing my eyes, I recall
slowly piecing things together. I had slept in my clothes, they were now
grimy, and I had drunk a lot judging by the lack of saliva. Passed out, no
doubt. C lay next to me inside a sleeping bag, serene in the bright light
now dropping through the opening. She had not been stirred from her
sleep, so I left her to her dreams and exited quietly. I stumbled through a
sort of porch area of the orange and green house tent, and saw the extent of
the debauchery. I remember it seemed as if a few days had elapsed
between going to sleep and waking up. In reality, it cannot have been more
than a few hours. Beyond the large windows of the Georgian inspired
facade were scorch marks, empties, fag ends, playing cards strewn, and
deck chairs in a huddle fencing off the mess. All the remnants of young
life, in a single scene. Increment by increment. Carnage followed by
decay. The modern-day drug-fuelled binge in a teacup, a cup of rancid ash
in the end. Rather than facing the hell of screaming kids and pushy
parents, I opted for the hose ten feet away. This did at least remove the
sheen of gear from my eyes enabling me to drive. I made it to the car
without incident and started the engine, spoiling the naturalness of the
morning chorus. To make amends the tyres made a wonderful crackling
sound on the gravel as I slowly wove around the shockingly bright tents.
Up ahead, a few stumpy horses were blocking the exit but parted
gracefully as the car got nearer. At the end of the lane was the busy road,
which carves through Ashurst. I followed this until reaching a roundabout.
Beyond the roundabout memory recedes with road to nothingness. I got
lost somewhere around Southampton docks. Big ships, tall things, heavy
industry, water, told me it was a dock. Getting lost is at least a memory of
the journey. I could not now say how I became not lost, or how I found my
way on to the correct road even. I remember knowing I was now late and
becoming flustered and then being on the a-road to Petersfield. The scar of
pointless m3 must have plucked me from Southampton and plonked me
there. Anonymously diverting me through important historical land. I saw
something on the a272 that I had not seen before. It had not been there the
previous week. Well the armchair cut into the landscape had been. A
quarry of some description now given back to nature, or a very interesting
geomorphological event involving ice. Just not the hundreds of people
now packed into it. There was a large black stage at the base of the steep
curve, facing the crowd. Driving slowly due to the bottleneck and looking
down to my left, I could hear some muffled noise. Most of the sound was
kept in the rock amphitheatre, and around the next corner the repetitive
beat of the muted music had gone. I was over and behind one of the arms
of land. As the road straightened, I passed camper van after camper van,
either parked or driving in the opposite direction.
I was late to arrive at the station. I drove to the end of the long thin car
park and back again. Rays of sunshine were visible against the pale aged
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opinions a weekly digests for you from the almost uniform opinions
of the whole of the daily press, in war and peace to be incontestably
and entirely American.
“Now, I should scarcely make bold to be so frank about these
observations if some of my new friends had not reassured me with
the information that they are not novel, that a distinguished
Englishman has put them into what you have considered the most
representative and have made the most popular book about your
commonwealth, that in fact you rather enjoy having outsiders
recognize the success of your efforts in uniformity. There is, of
course, no reason why you should not be as similar to each other as
you choose, and you must not interpret my surprise to mean that I
am shocked by anything except the contradiction I find between this
essential similarity and what I have called your passion for
education.
“On Mars it has for a long time been our idea that the function of
the school is to put our youth in touch with what all sorts of Martians
have thought and are thinking, have felt and are feeling. I say ‘put in
touch’ rather than ‘teach,’ because it is not so much our notion to
pack their minds and hearts as to proffer samples of our various
cultures and supply keys to the storehouses—not unlike your
libraries, museums, and laboratories—that contain our records. We
prefer to think of schooling as a kind of thoroughfare between our
past and our present, an avenue to the recovery and appreciation of
as many as possible of those innumerable differences between
Martian and Martian, those conflicting speculations and cogitations,
myths and hypotheses regarding our planet and ourselves that have
gone into the warp and woof of our mental history. Thus we have
hoped not only to preserve and add to the body of Martian
knowledge, but also to understand better and utilize more variously
our present minds. So it seems to us perfectly natural, and has
rather pleased than distressed us, that our students should emerge
from their studies with a multitude of differing sympathies, beliefs,
tastes, and ambitions. We have thought that such an education
enriched the lives of all of us, lives that ignorance could not fail to
constrict and subject to hum-drum monotony.
“So when I return to Mars and report that I found Earth’s most
favourable continent inhabited by its most literate great people, a
people that has carried the use of print and other means of
communication to a point we Martians have never dared dream
about; that this people has at once the most widely diffused
enthusiasm for education and the most comprehensive school
equipment on Earth; and finally that this people is at the same time
the most uniform in its life—well, I fear I shall not be believed.”
On subsequent visits the Martian might, as a wise man does
who is confronted by a logical impasse, re-examine the terms of his
paradox.
As regards our uniformity, fresh evidence could only endorse his
first impressions. The vestigial remnants of what regional cultures we
have had are rapidly being effaced by our unthinking standardization
in every department of life. The railroad, the telephone and
telegraph, the newspaper, the Ford, the movies, advertising—all
have scarcely standardized themselves before they have set about
standardizing everything within their reach. Not even our provinces
of the picturesque are immune, the places and things we like to think
of as “different” (word that betrays our standard sameness!) and
glamorous of our romantic golden age. In the Old South, Birmingham
loves to call herself the Pittsburgh of the South; our railroads have all
but hounded the packets from the Mississippi; it is notorious that our
apostles to the Indians, whether political, religious, or pedagogic,
wage relentless war on the very customs and traditions we cherish in
legend; the beautiful Missions that a kindlier evangelism bequeathed
to them are repeated and cheapened in every suburb and village of
the land, under every harsher sky; those once spontaneous fêtes of
the plains, the “Stampede” and the “Round-Up,” have been made so
spurious that the natives abandon them for a moth-eaten Wild West
Show made in the East; and in only a year or two even New Orleans’
Mardi Gras will be indistinguishable from its counterfeits in St. Louis
and elsewhere.
As with these adventitious and perhaps not very important
regional differentiations, so with the one fundamental demarcation
our people have all along recognized as conditioning the give-and-
take of American life. The line between the East and the West,
advancing from the Alleghanies to the Rockies and then part of the
way back, has never stayed long enough in one zone to be precisely
drawn, but it has always been sharply felt. Since Colonial times the
East has meant many things—wealth, stability, contacts with Europe,
refinement, industry, centralized finance—and the West has meant
many things—hardship and adventure, El Dorado, outlawry, self-
reliance, agriculture, vast enterprise; but they have never been so
close to meaning the same things as to-day. To-morrow they will
merge. Even now the geographical line between them may be drawn
anywhere in a belt two thousand miles wide, in which it will be fixed
according to the nativity of the critic rather than by any pronounced
social stigmata. East or West, there is a greater gulf between the
intelligent and the unintelligent of the same parish than divides the
intelligent of different parishes. East or West, Americans think pretty
much the same thoughts, feel about the same emotions, and
express themselves in the American tongue—that is, in slang. If the
slang, the accent, the manner differ noticeably, as they still do, there
are not wanting signs that another generation will obliterate these
differences too. Publishing, to be sure, tends to concentrate in the
East, though without impoverishing the West, since all notable
circulations have to be national to survive. The very fact that the
country’s publishing can be done from New York, Philadelphia, and
Boston demonstrates our national unanimity of opinion and
expression.
Before it overleapt the geographical walls, this national unanimity
had wiped out every class distinction but one, which it has steadily
tended to entrench—the money line. Families may continue to hold
their place only on the condition that they keep their money or get
more; and a moderate fortune, no matter how quickly come by, has
only to make a few correct strokes, avoid a few obvious bunkers,
and it will found a family by inadvertence. The process is so simple
that clerks practise it during their vacations at the shore.
Besides money, there is one other qualification—personal
charm. Its chief function, perhaps, is to disguise the essentially
monetary character of American social life. At any rate, Americans
are almost as uniformly charming as they are uniformly acquisitive.
For the most part it is a negative charm, a careful skirting of certain
national taboos: it eschews frank egoism, unfavourable criticism,
intellectual subtlety, unique expressions of temperament, humour
that is no respecter of persons, anything that might disturb the status
quo of reciprocal kindliness and complacent optimism. The
unpopular American is unpopular not because he is a duffer or a
bore, but because he is “conceited,” a “knocker,” a “highbrow,” a
“nut,” a “grouch,” or something of that ilk. We do not choose, as the
Martian suggested, to be as similar as possible; we choose not to be
dissimilar. If our convictions about America and what is American
sprang from real knowledge of ourselves and of our capacities, we
should relish egoists, disinterested critics, intellectuals, artists, and
irreverent humourists, instead of suppressing them when we cannot
mould them. That we do not relish them, that we protect ourselves
from them, is evidence that we fear them. What reason should we
have to fear them save a secret distrust of our asseverated
convictions? Our unanimity, then, would seem to the Martian to be
an artificial substitute for some natural background we lack but
should like to have; and a most dangerous wish-fulfilment it is, for it
masks our ignorance of what we are and what we may reasonably
become. Far from being self-knowledge, Americanism would seem
to him to be a hallucination, an article of faith supported only by our
determination to believe it, and to coerce others into believing it. The
secret of our uniformity would be a stubborn ignorance.
At which point our critic would have to re-examine his earlier
impressions about our “passion for education,” and strive to
understand the uses to which we actually put our educational
establishment, to appraise its function in our life.
Beginning with the kindergarten, it provides us a few hours’ relief
from our responsibility toward our youngsters. Curiously, the
Americans most given to this evasion are the Americans most
inveterately sentimental about the “kiddies” and most loath to employ
the nursery system, holding it somehow an undemocratic invasion of
the child’s rights. Then somewhere in the primary grades we begin to
feel that we are purchasing relief from the burden of fundamental
instruction. Ourselves mentally lazy, abstracted, and genuinely
bewildered by the flow of questions from only one mouth, we blithely
refer that awakening curiosity to a harassed young woman, probably
less well informed than we are, who has to answer, or silence, the
questions of from a score to three score mouths. So begins that long
throttling of curiosity which later on will baffle the college instructor,
who will sometimes write a clever magazine essay about the
complacent ignorance of his pupils.
A few years, and our expectation has shifted to the main chance.
We begin worrying over grade reports and knotting our brows over
problems in arithmetic by way of assisting our offspring to the
practical advantages of education. For the child, we now demand of
his teachers solid and lasting preparation in the things whose
monetary value our office or domestic payroll keeps sharply before
us—figures, penmanship, spelling, home economics. For us, the
vicarious glory of his “brightness.” But we want this brightness to
count, to be in the direct avenue to his career; so we reinforce the
environment that gently discourages him from the primrose paths of
knowledge. Nothing “practical” is too good for the boy at this moment
—tool chests, bicycles, wireless, what not. Thank God, we can give
him a better start than we had. As for arts and letters, well, we guess
what was good enough for his dad is good enough for him.
Meanwhile we are rather pleased than not at the athletics and the
other activities in which the grammar school apes the high school
that apes the college.
The long spiral of repetitive schooling in study and sport has now
commenced its climb: year by year reviews and adds its fresh
increment to last year’s subject-matter in the classroom and on the
field. Is it so strange that when the boy meets his college professors
he is cock-sure of knowing to a hair the limits of what is normal and
important in life, beyond which lie the abnormal interests of the
grinds? That mediocre C is a gentleman’s mark? Not his to question
the system that, in season and out, has borne down on passing
instead of on training, and that ends somewhere, soon or late, with a
diploma and, amid family plaudits, graduation from family control.
The high schools are expected to fit ninety-five per cent. of their
charges for life and five per cent. for college. If our boy and girl are of
the ninety and five, we demand very early specialization toward their
precious careers, wax enthusiastic over the school’s model
mercantile and banking establishment, expand to know our children
are being dosed with a course in “Civics,” generously admire the
history note-books in which they have spread much tinted ink over a
little stereotyped information, and in what we fool ourselves into
believing are the margins to all these matters proudly watch them
capture a class numeral or a school letter, grumblingly pay for real
estate signs that have gone up in flame to celebrate some epochal
victory, and bear with their antics during hazings and initiations. It’s a
democratic country, and if the poor man’s son cannot go to college,
why the college must come to him. Nor are we without a certain
undemocratic satisfaction in the thought that he has stolen a four
years’ march into business over the rich man’s son, who spends his
college hours, we assure ourselves, acquiring habits that will leave
him weak in the hour of competition.
Meanwhile the straddling masters are cramming the other five
with all the dates and rules and verbs and prose passages which
long and bitter experience has demonstrated to be likeliest on
entrance examinations. From the classrooms, as term follows term
with its endless iteration of short advances and long reviews, there
rises the bruit of rivalry: masters decorously put forward the claims of
their own colleges; pupils rejoice when their future alma mater
notches another athletic victory to the well-remembered tally; the
weak of heart are urging upon their bewildered parents the superior
merits of the “back-door” route to some exacting university—by
certificate to a small college and transfer at the end of the first year.
There are high schools in whose cases all this is
understatement; and of course there are innumerable others,
especially in these days when the most rigorous colleges have lost a
little of their faith in entrance examinations, where it is absurd
overstatement. Nevertheless your son, if he goes to a representative
Eastern college from a representative high school, goes as a man
steals second in the seventh. And his subsequent instructors marvel
at the airy nonchalance with which he ignores “the finer things of
life”!
The private secondary schools, save those that are frankly
designed to relieve parents of recalcitrant boys when the public
schools will have no more of them, are pretty much without the
ninety-five per cent. of non-college men. Frequently they have their
charges for longer periods. So they are free to specialize in
cramming with more singleness of mind and at the same time to
soften the process as their endowments and atmospheres permit.
But at bottom the demand you make of the “prep school” is the same
demand your bookkeeper puts on his son’s high school: you want
your boy launched into college with the minimum of trouble for
yourself and the maximum of practical advantage for him; your
bookkeeper wants his boy launched into business with a minimum of
frippery and a maximum of marketable skill. One boy is experted into
college, the other is experted into business. You are both among
those passionate believers in education who impressed the Martian
on his first visit.
Some educator has announced that the college course should
not only provide preparation for life but should itself be a satisfactory
portion of life. What college student so dull as not to know that? For
the most part, he trusts the faculty to provide the preparation—
sometimes it would seem that he dares it to—but he takes jolly good
care that the four years shall give him life more abundantly. He has
looked forward to them with an impatience not even the indignity of
entrance examinations could balk; he will live them to the top of his
bent; and he will look back on them tenderly, even sentimentally, as
the purplest patch of his days. So the American undergraduate is
representative of the American temper at its best. He is the flower of
our youth at its moment of perfect bloom, its ideals not yet corrupted,
its aspirations unwithered. As he thinks and feels, all America would
think and feel if it dared and could.
At this point, therefore, the Martian’s inquiry into what we expect
from our educational establishment would have to shift its point of
view from the older to the younger generation. The Martian would be
much in demand at our colleges, both as a sure-fire lecturer and as a
shining target for degrees certain to attract wide publicity to the
donors. Let us imagine him setting aside a page in his notebook for a
scheme of undergraduate emphases, grouped and amended as his
triumphant progress permitted him to check up on his observations.
Athletics would of course head the list. Regarded as play—that
is, as they affect the spectator—college sports proffer a series of
thrilling Roman holidays extending from the first week or so of term-
time to the final base-ball game and crew race of Commencement
week the next June, and for some colleges there may be
transatlantic sequels in midsummer or later. It is by no means all play
for the spectator, whose loyalty to his institution makes it his duty to
watch the teams practise, follow the histories of the gladiators who
are at once his representatives and his entertainers, and drill himself
in songs and yells at noisy mass meetings; to bet on his college
according to his purse and without any niggardly regard for his sober
judgment as to the event; then to deck himself in the colours, march
to the field, and watch the fray from the cheering section, where his
attention will be perpetually interrupted by the orders and the abuse
of a file of insatiable marionettes who are there to dictate when he
may and when he may not give throat to his enthusiasm; and finally,
if Providence please, to be one of the snake-dancing celebrants of
victory. If he have the right physique or talent for one of the sports,
he will find himself conscripted by public opinion to enter upon the
long and arduous regimen that turns out the annual handful of
athletic heroes—to slave on freshman squads, class teams, scrub
and third and second teams, and finally perhaps, if he has been
faithful, to play a dull minute or two of a big game that is already
decided and so receive his coveted letter and side-line privilege as a
charity. Or at the dizziest pinnacle of success, a “star,” to endure the
unremitting discipline of summer practice, incessant training, eating
with his fellow-stars at the training table, in season and out to be the
butt of instruction and exhortation from all the experts of the
entourage. As they affect the participant, then, college sports are to
be regarded as work that differs from the work of professional
sportsmen chiefly by being unremunerated.
The student’s next most vivid concern is the organization of the
social life in the academic commonwealth of which he is a citizen.
Every American college has, or fancies it has, its own tone, its ideal
type of man; and good citizenship prescribes conformity to the spirit
of the place and observance of the letter of its unwritten code. For
the type is defined by a body of obligations and taboos transmitted
from generation to generation, sometimes through the mouthpiece of
the faculty, sometimes by way of the college “Bible” (to use the slang
name for those handy manuals of what to do and what to avoid
which the college Y.M.C.A. issues for the guidance of newcomers),
but most often by a rough process of trial and error which very
speedily convinces the freshman that the Fence is for seniors only,
or that it is impracticable to smoke his pipe in the Yard, or that it is
much healthier to take the air in a class cap than bareheaded. The
cherished “traditions” of a college are for the most part a composite
of just such privileges and prohibitions as these, clustering round the
notion of the type and symbolizing it; and, curiously, the younger the
institution, the more insistent it is likely to be about the sanctity of its
traditions—a college feels the need of a type in much the same
degree that a factory needs a trademark.
Conformity thus becomes an article in loyalty. Sometimes the
mere conformity is the desiderate virtue, as used (at least) to be the
case in Yale. Sometimes the type will go in for individualism, as at
Harvard a decade ago, where the thing to conform to was non-
conformity. One tradition is probably universal: is there anywhere in
America a college which does not boast that it is more “democratic”
than others? Democracy undergoes some engaging redefinition in
support of these conflicting claims, but at bottom it refers to an
absence of snobs, arrogant critics, incomprehensible intellectuals,
bouncing wits, uncomfortable pessimists—in short, the
discouragement of just such individual tastes and energies as the
Martian found discouraged in our social life at large. The money line
remains. Theoretically, the poor may compete in athletics and in
other student enterprises and reap the same social rewards as the
rich: practically, they may compete and go socially unrewarded,
precisely as in the outside world. It is natural and seemly that this
should be the case, for the poor cannot afford the avenues of
association which are the breath of society to the rich. There have
been football heroes whom the well-to-do have put in the way of
acquiring wealth after they left college, but this is patronage, not
democracy. There are also colleges proud to be known as poor
men’s colleges, and for that very reason devoid of the democracy
they boast. Not long ago the president of Valparaiso had to resign,
and it developed that among the counts against him were the deadly
facts that he had attended the annual alumni dinner in dress clothes
and had countenanced “dances, athletics, fraternities, and such.” No,
all that we really mean by democracy in college is the equal
opportunity to invest one’s inoffensive charm and perfectly good
money in a transient society, to be neighbourly across geographical
and family lines, to cultivate the local twist of the universal ideal—to
be a “regular fellow.” Which is very much what we mean by
democracy outside. Whatever the precise type of man a college
exalts, its characteristic virtues are those that reflect a uniform
people—hearty acceptance of unexamined ideals, loyal conformity to
traditional standards and taboos, unassuming modesty in “playing
the game,” and a wholesome optimism withal.
But as for genuine democracy, the unrestricted interplay of free
spirits against a common background, what college can boast that its
social organization approaches even the measure of equality
enjoyed by its disinterested scholars? There was a modicum of it in
the free elective system that obtained in Dr. Eliot’s Harvard. There
was an indifference to seniority that sorely puzzled the graduates of
other colleges. Alas, freshman dormitories descended upon it,
treacherously carrying the banners of “democracy”; and a “group
system” of courses began to externalize intellectual interests to
which the elective system, abused as it was, had offered every
opportunity for spontaneity. It may be that the Amherst of Dr.
Meiklejohn’s experiments, or the Smith that President Neilson
envisages, will recapture opportunities now fled from Cambridge.
These cases, after all, are exceptional. For the typical American
college, private or public, marshals its students in two caste systems
so universal and so familiar that it never occurs to us to scrutinize
the one and we are liable to criticize the other only when its
excesses betray its decadence.
The former, the divisioning and tagging of every recruit with the
year of his graduation, looks to be an innocent convenience until you
have surveyed its regimental effect. Freshmen are green; so we clap
ridiculous caps on them, dub them “Frosh” or “Fish,” haze them,
confine them to a York Street of their kind or impound them in
freshman dormitories, where we bid them save themselves, the
which they do in their sophomore year at the expense of the next
crop of recruits. It is not so much the occasional brutality of hazing
parties and “rushes” that should arrest us here, nor yet such
infrequent accidents as the probably insane despair of that Harvard
freshman whose phobia for eggs drove him to suicide to escape the
inflexible diet of his class commons, as it is the remorseless mob
invasion of personality and privacy which either leaves the
impressionable boy a victim of his ingrowing sensibility or else
converts him into a martinet who in his turn will cripple others. In the
case of the Cornell freshman who was ducked for stubbornly
refusing to wear the class cap and was saved from more duckings
by an acting president who advised him—“in all friendliness,” said
the newspapers!—to submit or to withdraw from college for a year, it
is not necessary to applaud what may have been pig-headedness in
the victim, or to flay what may have been wisdom in the executive, in
order to admire the single professor who stood ready to resign in
order to rebuke his college for her bigotry. What was really significant
here, however, and what is everywhere characteristic of this sort of
benevolent assimilation, was the tone of the university daily’s
editorial apologia:
“Complete liberty of action has never been recognized by

any but avowed anarchists; granted the validity of the law, there
can be no charge of intolerance in the enforcement of it.”
The legal “validity” of an arbitrary tradition! No “intolerance” in its

enforcement by Judge Lynch! The editor of the Cornell Sun went on
to say that the existence of the “law” in question is “no secret from
the prospective Cornellian,” implying, no doubt, that to offer oneself
for matriculation at Cornell is ipso facto to accept the whole body of
Ithacan tradition and taboos, along with their interpretation and
enforcement according to the momentary caprice of the majority, as
a contrat social. Small wonder he called the refractory freshman a
“red.” The young editor’s reasoning should recommend his early
appointment to a place in the greater Sun.
The caste system of academic seniority, like all caste systems, is
worst at its base. Such customs as the sequestering of the upper
classes in their private quads or ovals, the jealous protection of
senior privileges, and the calendrical elaboration of the alumni
programme serve to import a picturesque if rather forced variety into
our drab monotony. That men should choose to organize themselves
to protect some more or less irrelevant distinction is of no special
importance to outsiders so long as they do not use their organization
to dragoon minorities or to bully individuals. Yet, speak out against
the exploitation, and you will be accused of attacking the fellowship.
Criticize the shackling of freshmen, and there will not be wanting
college editors to call you a fanatic who cannot bear the jolly sight of
cap and gown.
The other system of caste, to which we give sharp attention
when it goes badly wrong, is of course the club hierarchy. Wherever
there are clubs their social capital will necessarily fluctuate with the
quality of the members they take in. The reformers who deplore the
institution of “rushing” have of course exaggerated its evils, but the
evils are there. In young colleges, and wherever clubs are insecure,
the candidates are liable to be spoiled for any club purposes before
their destination is settled; wherever the candidates must do the
courting, either brazenly or subtly, they tend to debauch the club.
The dilemma holds, in one form or another, all the way from the
opposed “literary” societies of the back-woods college to the most
powerful chapters of the national fraternities; and it is particularly
acute where the clubhouse is also the student’s residence. Any
remedy thus far advanced by the reformers is worse than the
disease.
In many of the older colleges the equilibrium has been stabilized
by a device similar to the gentlemen’s agreement in industry. The
important clubs have gradually adjusted themselves into a series
through which the clubman passes, or into which he penetrates as
far as his personality and money will carry him. So the initial
competition for untried material is done away with or greatly
simplified; one or two large freshman or sophomore clubs take in all
the likely candidates; the junior clubs do most of their choosing from
among this number; and the senior clubs in turn draw on the junior.
Meanwhile the member turnover is perhaps trebled, and initiations
and other gay functions multiply.
It is to be remembered, however, that not all the brethren shift
onward and upward year by year. Many have to content themselves
with clubs already won, and those who pass on are a narrowing
band, whose depleted ranks are by no means restored in the
eleventh hour recruiting of “elections at large,” deathbed gestures of
democracy after a career of ballotting to exclude candidates who had
not taken all the earlier degrees. Thus increasing distinction is
purchased through the tried and true method of decreasing numbers.
To be sure, the same end could be served if all would remain in one
club and periodically drop groups of the least likely members.
Initiations might be reversed, and punches be given to celebrate the
lightening of the ship: it would be no more fantastic than a good part
of the existing ceremonial. But—it would be undemocratic! And, too,
the celebrations might be fatally hilarious. The present pre-initiation
discipline is one that tests for regularity and bestows the accolade on
the inconspicuous, so that the initiates turn out pretty much of a
piece and the entertainment they provide is safely conventional. But
reverse the process, assemble in one squad all the hands suspected
of being exceptional—all the queer fish and odd sticks—and there’s
no predicting what capers they might cut as they walked the plank.
The real evil of the club caste is its taste for predictability, its
standardization of contacts, its faintly cynical sophistication where
life might be a riot of adventures and experiments and self-
discoveries—in one word, its respectability. Not that it does not
provide much good fellowship and a great deal of fun (including the
varieties that have distressed its moral critics). But that everything it
provides is so definitely provided for, so institutionalized, and so
protected from the enrichment different types and conditions of men
could bring to it that it is exclusive in a more sinister sense than the
one intended by the critics of its alleged snobbery.
Normally the club system is by no means so snobbish as it is
thought to be; it dislikes, and is apt to punish with the black ball, the
currying of social favour and the parade of special privilege. For
youth is youth, and in the last analysis the enemy of caste. It is the
glory of college life that the most unexpected friendships will
overleap the fences run by class and club regimentation. It is its pity
that the fences, which yield so easily to irregular friendships once
they have discovered themselves, should nevertheless be stout
enough to herd their victims past so many unrecognized
opportunities for spontaneous association. The graduate who looks
back fondly on his halcyon days is very likely passing over the
Senior Picnic and his row of shingles to recall haze-hung October
afternoons of tobacco and lazy reminiscence on the window-seat of
somebody who got nowhere in class or club, or is wistful for the
midnight arguments he had with that grind who lived in his entry
freshman year—nights alive with darting speculation and warm with
generous combat. Of these clandestine sweets he will say nothing;
he is a regular fellow; but he affords one of the proofs that the well-
worn social channels are not deep enough to carry off all the wine of
free fellowship. And that even the moderate caste of college,
securely established as it seems, must defend itself from youth
(even from its own youth!) is demonstrated by two phenomena not to
be explained satisfactorily on any other hypothesis. What is all the
solemn mummery, the preposterous ritual, the pompous processions
to and from temples of nightmare architecture, the whole sacrosanct
edifice of the secret fraternities, if it be not an embroidery wherewith
to disguise from present and future devotees the naked matter-of-
factness of the cult? And, on the other hand, what are the too early
maturity, the atmosphere of politely blasé languor, the ubiquitous
paraphernalia for comfort and casual hospitality that characterize the
non-secret and citified clubs of the “indifferent” college but so many
disarming confessions of the predictability of everything—the
predictability, and the necessity for quiet acceptance? Under all the
encouraging variations and exceptions runs the regimental
command of our unanimity: if you are to belong, you must conform;
you must accept the limits of the conventional world for the bounds
of your reality; and then, according to the caprice of your genius loci,
you will play the game as if everything, even the minutiæ of the ritual
your club has inherited from freer spirits, were of tremendous
moment, or you will play it no less thoroughly but with the air of one
who knows that nothing is of any moment at all. The clubs, that have
so often been criticized for their un-American treason to democracy,
are only too loyally American.
The third emphasis would be corollary to these two—the political
management of athletic and class and club affairs. The politics are
those of personal popularity, the management is that of
administration rather than legislation, the spirit is the American flair
for petty regulation. Where issues are in question the tone is almost
certain to be propagandist, conservatives and radicals dividing a field
littered with hard names. College life has accumulated an
abundance of machinery for the expression of the managing instinct,
and most of it works. Nowadays the lines of representation finally
knot in a Student Council, which is at once the Cabinet, the Senate,
and the Supreme Court of the undergraduate commonwealth. The
routine of its work is heavily sumptuary, and such matters as the
sizes and colours and seasons for hatband insignia, the length of
time students may take off to attend a distant game, the marshalling
of parades, are decided with taste and tact. Then, abruptly, it is a
tribunal for major cases, just if severe: a class at Yale fails to
observe the honour rule, and upon the Council’s recommendation
twenty-one students are expelled or suspended; it was the Student
Council at Valparaiso that secured the president’s withdrawal; and at
Cornell it was the Student Council that came to the rescue of
tradition when a freshman refused to wear the freshman cap.
Invariably, one concludes, its edicts and verdicts will support
righteousness, as its constituents understand righteousness.
The constituents themselves are ordinarily on the side of light, as
they see the light. Not so long ago the faculty of a small New
England college decided to dispense with compulsory chapel: the
students voted it back. Moral crusades spring up like mushrooms
and command the allegiance of all but the recalcitrant “rough-necks,”
whom student opinion is sometimes tempted to feel are beating their
way through an education for which they make no equivalent return
in public spirit. A typical campaign of the sort was recently put in
motion by the student daily at Brown: the editors discovered that “the
modern age of girls and young men is intensely immoral”; they
penned sensational editorials that evoked column-long echoes in the
metropolitan press; they raised a crusade against such abominations
as petting parties, the toddle (“Rome,” they wrote, “toddled before it
fell”), and “parties continued until after breakfast time”; almost
immediately they won a victory—the Mothers’ Club of Providence
resolved that dances for children must end by eleven o’clock....
And now the undergraduate will emphasize study. But a sharp
line must be drawn between study that looks forward merely to the
A.B. degree as the end of schooling and the beginning of business,
and study that is a part of professional training, that looks forward to
some professional degree at Commencement or to matriculation in a
graduate school. Both come under the head of preparation for life;
but in the former case the degree itself is the preparation, whereas in
the latter case it is recognized that one must master and retain at
least a working modicum of the subject-matter of the professional
courses and of the liberal courses preliminary to them.
The arts man, then, recognizes only the same necessity he has
faced all the way up the school ladder—to pass. If he have entrance
conditions, they are mortgages that must be paid off, perhaps in the
Summer School; he must keep off probation to protect his athletic or
political or other activity status; beyond this, he must garner enough
courses and half-courses, semester hours or points, to purchase the
indispensable sheepskin. Further effort is supererogatory so far as
concerns study per se: prizes and distinctions fall in the category of
“student activities,” hobbies, and belong of right to the “sharks”;
scholarships, which in America are for the poor only, have to do with
still another matter—earning one’s way through—and are mostly
reserved for the “paid marks men,” professional studiers, grinds.
Upon his programme of courses the student will often expend as
much mental energy as would carry him through an ordinary
examination: he will pore over the catalogue, be zealous to avoid
nine o’clocks and afternoon hours liable to conflict with games, make
an elaborate survey of the comparative competence of instructors,
both as graders and as entertainers and even (quaintly enough) as
experts in their fields, and enquire diligently after snap courses.
Enrolled in a course, he will speedily estimate the minimum effort
that will produce a safe pass, unless the subject happens to be one
that commends itself to his interest independently of academic
necessity. In that case he will exceed not only the moderate stint
calculated to earn a C, but sometimes even the instructor’s
extravagant requirements. There is, in fact, scarcely a student but
has at least one pet course in which he will “eat up” all the required
reading and more, take gratuitous notes, ask endless questions, and
perhaps make private sallies into research. The fact that he holds
most of this labour to be self-indulgence will not temper his
indignation if he fails to “pull” an A or B, though it is a question
whether, when the grade has sealed the course, he will be much the
wiser for it than for the others.
On the evils of the course system there is probably no new thing
to be said. Such devices as the “group system” at Harvard interfere
with liberty of election without appreciably correcting the graduate’s
ignorance of the courses he has passed and cashed in for his
degree. Recognizing this fact, certain faculties have latterly
inaugurated general examinations in the whole subject-matter
studied under one department, as notably in History, Government,
and Economics; but thus far the general examination affects
professional preparation, as notably for the Law School, much more
than it affects the straight arts career, where it provides just one
more obstacle to “pass.”
This business of passing is a seasonal nuisance. The early
weeks of term-time are an Arcady of fetching lectures, more or less
interesting assigned reading, and abundant “cuts.” Across the
smiling sky float minatory wisps of cloud—exercises, quizzes, tests.
Then up from the horizon blow the “hour exams,” first breath of the
academic weather that later on will rock the earth with “mid-years”
and “finals.” But to be forewarned is, for the prudent student, to get
armed, and Heaven knows he is amply warned by instructor,
registrar, and dean. So he hies himself to the armourer, the tutor, one
of the brotherhood of experts who saw him through the entrance
examinations; he provides himself with bought or leased notebooks
and summaries; he crams through a few febrile nights of cloistral
deprivations and flagellations; and the sun shines again on his
harvest of gentlemen’s C’s, the proud though superfluous A or B,
and maybe a D that bespeaks better armour against the next onset.
Or, of course, he may have slipped into “probation,” limbo that
outrageously handicaps his athletic or political ambitions. Only if he
have been a hapless probationer before the examinations is there
any real risk of his having to join the exceedingly small company of
living sacrifices whom a suddenly austere college now “rusticates.”
(For in America suspensions and expulsions are the penalties rather
of irregular conduct than of mental incompetence or sloth.) In four
years, after he has weathered a score of these storms and
concocted a few theses, the president hands him a diploma to frame,
he sells his other furniture, puts mothballs in his cap and gown, and
plunges into business to overtake his non-college competitors.
Student opinion recognizes that the man enrolled in professional
courses or headed for a graduate school faces more stringent
necessities. He may devote himself to his more specific training
without the imputation of being a “grind,” and if he pursues honours it
will be in the line of business rather than of indoor sport. He will be
charier of cuts, more painstaking as regards his notes and reading,
and the professional manner will settle on him early. In every college
commons you can find a table where the talk is largely shop—
hypothetical cases, laboratory experiments, new inventions, devices
for circumventing the income tax. All this, however, is really a
quantitative difference, not a qualitative. Of disinterested intellectual
activity he is if anything more innocent than his fellow in the arts
school.
So much for the four great necessities of average student life—in
order of acknowledged importance: athletics, social life, politics,
study. Deans and other official but theoretical folk will tell our Martian
that the business of college is study and that all the undergraduate’s
other functions are marginal matters; but their own conduct will
already have betrayed them to him, for he will not have missed the
fact that most of their labour is devoted to making study as dignified
and popular as the students have made sports and clubs and
elections. These four majors hold their places at the head of the list
of student emphases because no representative undergraduate
quite escapes any of them; the next ones may be stressed more
variously, according rather to the student’s capricious private
inclinations than to his simpler group reactions.
Now, for instance, he is free to “go in for” some of the
innumerable “student activities,” avocations as opposed to the
preceding vocations. There are the minor sports which are not so
established in popularity that they may conscript players—lacrosse,
association football, trap shooting, swimming, and so on. There are
the other intercollegiate competitions—chess and debating and what
not. The musical clubs, the dramatic clubs, the magazines, and
many semi-professional and semi-social organizations offer in their
degree more or less opportunity to visit rival institutions. Then, too,
there is in the larger colleges a club for almost every religious cult,
from Catholic to Theosophist, whose devotees may crave a closer
warmth of communion than they realize in the chapel, which is
ordinarily non-sectarian; a club apiece for some of the great fraternal
orders; a similar club for each of the political parties, to say nothing
of a branch of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, with another
organization forming to supply the colleges with associated Liberal
Clubs. Moreover, all the important preparatory schools, private and
public, are certain to be represented by clubs of their alumni, some
of which maintain scholarships but all of which do yeoman service
scouting for athletes. Frequently there is a Cosmopolitan Club for
foreign students and travelled Americans. And, finally, there are
clubs to represent the various provinces of knowledge—the classics,
philosophy, mathematics, the various sciences, and so on
indefinitely. Then, in colleges in or near cities, there are well-
organized opportunities for students who care to make a hobby of
the Uplift and go in for social service. While, for amateur and
professional sharks and grinds, there is the honour roll of prizes,
scholarships, fellowships, distinctions, and other academic honours.
Verily a paradise for the joiner. Day by day, the calendar of meetings
and events printed in the university paper resembles nothing so
much as the bulletin board of a metropolitan hotel which caters to
conventions.
If at first glance all this welter of endeavour looks to be anything
but evidence of uniformity, at second will appear its significant
principle. Every part of it is cemented together by a universal
institutionalizing of impulses and values. There is scarcely a college
activity which can serve for a hobby but has its shingle and ribbon
and certificated niche in the undergraduate régime.
Even the undergraduate’s extra-collegiate social life, which
would probably stand next on the Martian’s list, is thoroughly
regimented. Speaking broadly, it is incorrect to call on girls at the
nearest girls’ college; and, speaking still more broadly, there is
usually one correct college whereat it is socially incumbent to pay
devoirs. In coeducational institutions the sex line is an exacting but
astonishingly innocent consumer of time and energy, of which the
greater part is invested in the sheer maintenance of convention.
Along both these social avenues the student practises a mimicry of
what seems to him to be the forms regnant in secular society and,
intent on the forms, tends to miss by a little what neighbourly ease
really exists there, so that he out-conventionalizes the conventional
world. The non-college American youth, of both sexes, would
scarcely tolerate the amount of formalism, chaperonage, and
constraint that our college youth voluntarily assumes.
The word “fussing” is the perfect tag for the visiting, the taking to
games and dances, the cherishing at house-parties, and the
incessant letter-writing that are the approved communications across
the sex line. You make a fuss over a girl, and there it ends; or you
make a fuss over a girl and get engaged, and there it ends; or—and
this is frequent only in the large Western universities where well-nigh
all the personable youths of the State’s society are in college
together—you make a fuss over a girl, you get engaged, and in due
time you get married. So far as fussing is concerned, sex is far more
decorous among collegians than among their non-collegiate fellows
of the same ages and social levels. There is a place, of course,

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Land Writings Excursions in the

Footprints of Edward Thomas 1st

A Nick Land Reader Selected Writings 1st Edition Nick

Noah s Ravens Interpreting the Makers of Tridactyl

Noah s Ravens Interpreting the Makers of Tridactyl

The Footprints of Partition 1st Edition Anam Zakaria

Public Drinking and Popular Culture in Eighteenth

Excursions in Modern Mathematics 10th Edition Peter

Excursions in World Music 8th Edition Timothy Rommen

In the land of Oz Howard Jacobson

Excursions in the Footprints

This book first published 2017

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2017 by James Riding

ISBN (10): 1-4438-9138-X

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... viii

Edward Thomas: A Geographical Biography .............................................. 1

Death Drive: Edward Thomas’s Grave........................................................ 9

Kotor: A Vertical Walk ............................................................................. 19

Steep: A Dot-to-Dot Walk ......................................................................... 24

The Manor Farm: A Walk Poem ............................................................... 36

The Chalk Pit: A Residual Walk ............................................................... 48

Fellowship: The Birthday Loops ............................................................... 65

Kettled: A March on Parliament ................................................................ 89

The Start: London to Guildford ................................................................. 97

Guildford to Dunbridge ........................................................................... 112

From Dunbridge over Salisbury Plain ..................................................... 119

Three Wessex Poets ................................................................................. 127

The Avon, Biss, and Frome ..................................................................... 132

Trowbridge to Shepton Mallet ................................................................. 138

Shepton Mallet to Bridgwater.................................................................. 149

Bridgwater to the Sea .............................................................................. 157

The Grave of Winter ................................................................................ 164

Bibliography ............................................................................................ 167

“He [Hilaire Belloc] is such a geographer as I wish many historians were,

via Guildford, Dunbridge, Salisbury Plain, Bradford-on-Avon, Trowbridge,

Thomas captures the fleeting, fractured moments, of intimate

““I am not taking a pilgrimage,” I said to myself when I visited the

09.11.11. Very early morning, Imperial War Museum archive.

“You are not allowed to take photographs.”

lanes to the Quantock Hills in pursuit of spring. Thomas becoming a bard

finding. On one of the pieces of paper I carried with me on this journey

From the solitary pine, I drove to a pub. It was frequented on my third

Drenched cheap trainers began digging at my feet

Its heart stopped from a fright, a loud noise,

I would drive to 13 Rusham Road in the traces of Edward Thomas, after

11.11.11. Odd singularity, cosmic portal transit date. Poetic lay-lines

From there I drove away – my attempt to forget, through a final remembering,

something which counteracts this, as poets of the period did. There is a

inundated my retina. Petersfield Railway Station was on the left: the

depression. Eventually for Thomas writing review after review became an

a succession of turns, all along narrow straight lanes. We passed a farm

“The whole technique of photographic copying ultimately depends on the

“The simple lack of her is more to me than others’ presence.”

“Complete liberty of action has never been recognized by

The legal “validity” of an arbitrary tradition! No “intolerance” in its

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