A Journey to Avebury is the name of a short silent film made by Derek Jarman made in 1971. Shot in wobbly Super 8, and saturated with burnt orange hues, it has an otherworldly eldritch atmosphere that is hard to describe. Suffice to say it is hardly be the sort of thing that the then English Tourist Board might have chosen to promote the stone-encircled Wiltshire village. Too painterly and surreal by half for such considerations, the film is both beautiful and slightly disturbing, and has the feel of a psychedelic adventure about to go wrong. With wind-blown trees and shifting clouds against Martian skies, A Journey to Avebury evokes the strangeness of a landscape that is already inherently deeply weird. The weirdness owes much to the implacable monoliths that dominate the village, although Jarman’s focus on the rolling Wiltshire landscape that surrounds the village, with its bare fields and isolated clumps of trees, is equally suggestive of a territory that exists outside the usual constraints of time and space.
Avebury is undoubtedly an extraordinary place – a village that not only lies at the heart of a sacred Neolithic landscape but one that uniquely sits within the sweep of a stone circle. Not surprisingly it is a much visited location, especially in the summer months, as visitors that range from newly retired to New Age travellers come to walk the circle of stones and pay tribute to this ancient, stone-bound place. After several visits to the village myself, its megaliths and raised banks, pathways and lanes have become firmly imprinted in my mind. Some places fade quickly but Avebury is somewhere that etches itself on the memory.
Even in prehistoric, monument-rich Wiltshire, Avebury has a particular gravity. It feels as if it is at the centre of things, a focal point for the megalith-strewn landscape that surrounds it. Nearby are other, even older monuments that put the stone circle and avenues of Avebury into context: the destroyed stone and timber circle of The Sanctuary, the chambered West Kennet Long Barrow and, most remarkable of all, the man-made chalk Mount Fuji that is Silbury Hill. These are all connected, by footpaths, tracks and, as many believe, ley lines, although it is the monument of Avebury that gives the impression of lying at the beating heart of it all.
Visiting Avebury is like going to meet an old friend from the past. Last summer, I did just that: arranging to meet a friend whom I had not seen for decades at the village. We sat at a bench in the churchyard of and reminisced about shared memories from forty years ago. Time stretched and compressed obligingly – but perhaps the location helped.
Like Stonehenge, the megaliths of Avebury were likely associated with ritual and social gatherings. They may also have functioned as some sort of solar calendar. But if Avebury is a place of measured time, it is also a place that stands outside time. The past, present and future rest easy here, although in the right light the village with its New Age atmosphere can appear to be perpetually locked in the 1970s – perhaps 1971, the same year that Jarman came here to make his film.
A Journey to Avebury (1971) by Derek Jarman
Also, this excellent fantasy drama TV series for children, broadcast on ITV in 1977, was filmed almost entirely at Avebury. Children of the Stones by Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray
Of all London’s lost rivers it is the Walbrook that is the most irrefutably lost: lost to time, lost to place… well, almost. An important source of water in Roman times, when its banks were lined with the workshops of Roman industry – tanneries, potteries and glass workshops – the river has not been visible on the surface since the 15th century when the last open sections were vaulted over. Ghosting the boundary of Roman London, its confluence with the Thames lay close to what is now Cannon Street Station Bridge. Where the Walbrook began is less certain, although what is clear is that its course flowed between the City of London’s two principle hills – Ludgate and Cornhill. Some say its source was a spring close to what is now Shoreditch High Street, while others point to higher ground at Islington.
Lost to time, perhaps, but there clues to place – in street names, in signs, in places of worship, in the Roman street plan. The walking route tracing the Walbrook’s course that I describe here is faithful to that given in Tom Bolton’s excellent London’s Lost Rivers: a Walker’s Guide Volume 1.
I begin on Curtain Road that runs south from Shoreditch. Holywell Road that abuts it to the east is an intimation of the location of the aforementioned spring. Curtain Street leads to Appold Street and through Broadgate Circle, an upmarket shopping and leisure hub that until 1984 served as a railway station and which was formerly a burial ground for the Bethlehem Royal Hospital, better known as Bedlam. It also served as a mass grave for victims of the various bubonic plague outbreaks in pre-Fire London – grim, no doubt, but dig down almost anywhere in central London and you will find human bones sooner or later. The River Walbrook would have passed through here before flowing along what is now Bloomfield Street to reach the Roman-built London Wall, which served as the boundary of the City until the 18th century. The Walbrook is believed to have flowed through a hole in the wall at an aqueduct close to where Bloomfield Street meets the Wall.
Channelling the disappeared river, I pass through elegant iron gates of the Wall into Throckmorton Avenue, then turn right and left into an alleyway opposite a barber’s shop that seems incongruous amidst all this high-rise estate of capital. But even financiers need to be shaved and shorn occasionally – sharp haircuts and a regular supply of barista coffee are the basic necessities of life in the City. The alleyway leads into to the narrow passageway of Tokenhouse Yard, at the end of which is the reflected light of the north wall of the Bank of England, the building’s Portland stone preternaturally aglow in the gloom of an overcast November day. The magnetic pull of capital here is almost spiritual: money buys, Jesus saves, sinners spend. Sir John Soane, the Bank of England architect, surveys the scene from his statue recessed high into the wall, while the ghost of the river traverses beneath the building, symbolically moistening – perhaps laundering – the horded lucre in the vaults beneath.
Riverwards, beyond the Bank, lies the Church of St Stephen’s Walbrook and a street of the same name. The elusive river is acknowledged at last. The church, originally situated on the bank of the Thames, was moved here in the 14th century. The Walbrook would have flowed just west of here. The street is dominated by the block-length, Norman Foster-designed Bloomberg building, which has an undulating profile that hints at the vanished river. On its ground floor, an etched glass door leads into the London Mithraeum, a museum dedicated to the Mithras temple that once stood on the banks of the Walbrook nearby. A place where Mithras and Bacchus were once worshipped by Roman soldiers, Mammon has since taken over as chief deity on this patch of expensive real estate.
Just south of here, within sight of Cannon Street Station, is the Church of St Michael Paternoster Royal. Alongside are Whittington Gardens, named after the famous cat-loving, four-time Lord Mayor of the city who is buried here. This was the original location of confluence of the Walbrook with the Thames – the mighty river has shifted south in the two millennia that has passed since Roman times.  Upper Thames Street now flows with traffic where once the tidal river lapped. The modern confluence, theoretical as it may be, lies not far away along Cousin Lane, a narrow street that traces the long wall of Cannon Street Station down to the railway bridge over the Thames. Here there is a pub and steps leading down to the water. There is also a river path that leads west along Walbrook Wharf, where black barges lie tilted on the shore awaiting the incoming tide. Â
The tide is out and so I descend to the beach, which is covered with assorted pebbles, water-blunted bricks and a few rusted scraps of iron. Scattered among the pebbles, a small piece of pottery reveals itself at my feet – curved, brown; reassuringly rustic. Roman? Who knows, probably not, but somehow it feels right. A votive offering – it marks the place where London began.
Much of the fabric of Birmingham’s history is, like the city’s modest river, the oft-culverted Rea, half-hidden or tucked away from sight. Occulted beneath flyovers and underpasses, the city’s past flows sluggishly beneath redundant factories and car parks. Unconvincingly disguised, and with the vaguest hint of rusting metal, it escapes as vapour from drains and manholes. It goes with the territory: this is a city where there is a strong tendency for destroying evidence of the past, of knocking things down only to build them again in rearranged form. As the city’s coat of arms proclaims in its simple motto, it is the Birmingham tradition – ‘Forward!’ The subtext is ‘Don’t Look Back!’ The past is bulldozed. Even so, modern high-rise Birmingham, brash and shiny though it may be, is replete with ghosts of the past, of industry, of once busy factories and workshops. The whole city is a ghost factory.
These days there is a new-found reverence for some of Birmingham’s more iconic anti-heroes. Peaky Blinders with its skewed myth-making has afforded the city some retro-gangster glamour, while established city brands like Black Sabbath have become the stuff of legend. Now there is even a Black Sabbath Bridge on Broad Street spanning the canal, where the likenesses of Aston’s own heavy metallists – Geezer, Bill, Ozzy and Tony – are immortalised on a bench (iron, naturally). Who’d have thought that in the halcyon days of my Birmingham Town Hall gig-going youth it would be faux-demonic Black Sabbath who would be chosen as the musical emblem of the city? My money would probably have been on the Moody Blues or Roy Wood.
In Victoria Square, the neoclassical Town Hall is just as I remember it, all pale stone and Corinthian columns, but its immediate surroundings have changed dramatically in recent years. A tram line now passes in front of it that follows a route through the Black Country to Wolverhampton, somewhere that seems exotically distant from this city centre ground zero. Between the town hall and the tram tracks stands Antony Gormley’s Iron:Man, a six-metre-tall leaning metal figure that pays tribute to Birmingham’s erstwhile industry, its original heavy metal heritage.
Head downhill from Victoria Square, past the stainless steel, baking foil roof of New Street station, past the aluminium-disc-clad blobitecture of Selfridges, through the Southside district and the areas that are now marked on maps as Gay Village and Chinatown. Soon you’ll arrive at the former industrial district of Digbeth, which nowadays is probably the closest thing Birmingham has to a Bohemian quarter. This part of the city is actually the oldest quarter, the location of the original Saxon village at a ford on the River Rea, around which the satanic mills of Victorian Birmingham would later cluster.
Digbeth High Street is in a state of flux, one side of it enclosed in chain-link. Gentrification might be too strong a term, but Digbeth is undergoing change: empty factory sites are being cleared to await new development. Tram tracks are being laid down; pavements are being widened and made pedestrian-friendly, flower beds are being set out awaiting planting. The side streets that slope down beneath the railway arches are lined with one-time industrial buildings that have morphed into event spaces – ghost factories stand at every corner. The wall murals that abound have already been here long enough to develop a patina of age. As I wrote in an earlier post, the transformation has already been going on for several years.
Digbeth is the location for Supersonic, an annual festival of experimental music that celebrated its twentieth anniversary this year. Supersonic is by no means a heavy metal festival but the spirit of Black Sabbath permeates like a benign, if mischievous, presence. Performances take place in two neighbouring buildings, one of which served as a warehouse in a previous life. Dark clothing is almost de rigueur, as are Sunn O))) T-shirts. Light-hearted doom is perhaps the oxymoron that best fits an atmosphere that I can only describe as feel-good apocalyptic. The music is loud but the mood is calm; the ethic is kind, inclusive and super-friendly. Perhaps it helps that this is Birmingham. Would it be the same in Manchester or London?
The Sunday night headliners Lankum play a glorious set of drone-laden alt-folk to an ecstatic crowd. Alternating between heart-rending murder ballads, frantic Irish jigs and dark sea shanties, the music veers from gentle to violent, from elegiac to almost frightening. In one of the between-song chats with the audience, guitarist Daragh Lynch mentions that he was delighted to discover that both of Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler’s parent’s were Irish and concludes from this that heavy metal must therefore be an Irish invention. We all laugh. But Birmingham, and especially Digbeth, did once have a sizeable Irish presence. It’s all part of Birmingham’s proud black, white and brown cosmopolitanism. The city was built on metal and people. Iron Man (Black Sabbath); Iron:Man (Antony Gormley) are both worthy tributes. While Birmingham’s iron has rusted to be replaced by stainless steel and aluminium, its people shine on.
For a number of reasons it had been weeks since I had ventured out of the city for a walk. Cities are fine but brick, concrete and tarmac can get monotonous: too much noise, too much body swerving of fellow humans and traffic. I wanted water and trees, a church or two maybe; breeze and birdsong, a chance to breathe. So I took the train to Brandon in the Brecks.
Leaving the station I walk south along the main road towards the town centre and then, after crossing the Little Ouse River and the county boundary into Suffolk, turn left down a minor road called White Hart Lane. Here, almost immediately, is an edgeland of newly built bungalows on one side of the street and fenced paddocks on the other, although the separation between urban and rural is fluid in places like this.. Beyond the paddocks is a line of trees that hides the river. Brandon lies in the midst of a large forested expanse – the vast conifer plantations of Thetford Forest – and a sort of unthreatening wolf border rings the town. The forest is relatively new, though: just over a hundred years old – considerably less than the life span of many trees. Before the intervention of the Forestry Commission in the 1920s and 30s, this expanse of southwest Norfolk and northwest Suffolk was a relatively infertile, sand-blown region where the main industries were flint mining and raising rabbits for the fur trade. Indeed it was overgrazing by large rabbit warrens that was partly responsible for the poverty of its soil in this dry region known as the Brecks.
White Hart Lane gives way to Gas House Drove, a narrow lane that traces the back walls of gardens. More paddocks stretch away towards the river to the left; ponies graze unworriedly. There are notices attached to field gates that request visitors not to feed the horses; other signs inform would-be horse thieves that the animals are electronically tagged and fully traceable – the equine equivalent of ‘no cash left in this vehicle overnight’. Further on, beaten up caravans and abandoned rusting cars enhance the edgeland feel – a seldom observed zone where the accepted rules of orderliness do not apply.
The track narrows further as it threads through tall pines. Crossing a wide woodland ride I come across man on a mobility scooter walking his dog. ‘Is it straight on to Santon Downham?’ I ask. ‘It is if you want to take the scenic route,’ comes the cheerful reply. So I take the ‘scenic route’ and soon arrive at a cluster of houses around a large green – the village of Santon Downham – where a telephone box has been repurposed as a booth for a defibrillator. The box also serves as a library. I scan the books, Len Deighton’s mostly, but there is also a DVD of Sexy Beast, a personal favourite that stars Ben Kingsley as a sociopath gangster in a role that is a far cry from the actor’s portrayal of Gandhi earlier in his career.
The Church of St Mary’s, the self-titled ‘Church in the Forest’, is on the far side of the green. I venture inside to find the bright unfussy interior illuminated by dappled forest light filtered through stained glass. One window featuring St Francis is particularly charming as it depicts the saint surrounded by the sort of birds that are local to the Brecks – crossbill, golden pheasant, kingfisher, heron and barn owl. While it is endearing, it doesn’t flinch from realism – the owl is shown holding a freshly killed mouse in its beak.
The river is not far away and I end up at the footbridge by the St Helens Picnic Site on the Norfolk bank. A group of youths with rucksacks are lounging by the water and I identity them as Duke of Edinburgh award initiates although I could be wrong. A few minutes later they march off together in an easterly direction, some individuals clearly more enthusiastic than those who straggle at the rear. A little further along the road is Santon House where the tiny Church of All Saints stands complete with tiny turreted tower. I take a quick look inside before sitting on a bench outside to eat the sandwich I had brought with me. A chaffinch sings perched on the very top of a pine tree, cock of the walk, although the jackdaws shuffling proprietorially around the picnic site probably think differently.
Back at the St Helen’s footbridge, instead of crossing back to the Suffolk side I follow the path that leads west along the river’s north bank. A few hairy Highland cattle are slumped in the long grass of the meadow between the road and river. Mature willows line the riverbank; it looks like perfect otter territory but these are elusive creatures and I see no sign of them. Reaching the bridge at Santon Downham I decide to continue along same river bank all the way back to Brandon. Although the path is well-defined and firm underfoot, the surrounding landscape is pleasingly unkempt, with plenty of rotting timber and tangled dead grass that has weaved itself into a carpet over posts and fences. Nature, I am told, thrives on untidiness such as this.
I meet a group of birders coming the other way: green-clad middle-aged men with sensible outdoor clothing and expensive German optics; one of them carries a heavy tripod with mounted SLR. They tell me they are on the lookout for lesser spotted woodpeckers. This stretch of riverbank woodland is supposedly one of the most likely places to see these elusive birds in East Anglia. They have had no luck as yet but they accept their failure gracefully. We compare notes. I have seen the mandarin duck and grey wagtail they mention, and had heard greater spotted woodpeckers drumming away unseen on my way to Stanton Downham on the Suffolk side, but lesser spotted…no.
Lesser spotted woodpecker: it sounds like a made-up name, the sort of thing a non-birder might come up with to make fun of those with an interest in birds. While to some ears it might sound prissy and pedantic, to the average birder it is merely a precise non-Latin description of appearance and habit.
Thoughts of the bird transport me far away in space and in time. I tell the birders that I have not seen a ‘lesser spot’ for decades but this is not strictly true. A memory comes back of a trip to Japan in 2015 where, walking a trail through cedar forest south of Osaka, a lesser spotted woodpecker flew down to a low branch close to where I had sat down for a rest. It was a fleeting view but an unexpected one in a country where birds, other than ubiquitous large-billed crows, seemed quite elusive. Much of Japan is anything but unkempt and nature is contained and controlled – topiary is unbounded, trees are pruned within an inch of their lives, rivers are canalised. Then I thought back to a time decades earlier in south Norfolk where a lesser spotted woodpecker had nested in a branch above a footpath close to my rented cottage, a place that I called home for three years. A small, undemonstrative black and white bird: like so much else they had become rare and were now one of our fastest declining species. Who would have thought a shy, sparrow-sized bird could evoke such a sense of loss and trigger that sense of emotional distress associated with environmental change known as solastalgia*? At least, here in the untidy, bird-rich woodland that flanks the Little Ouse River, there was still hope. After all, nature thrives on untidiness.
*Solastalgia – a neologism coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2005, which he describes as ‘the homesickness you have when you are still at home’ and is usually related to environmental change in a home environment.
In the past I have chosen a rural walk to celebrate the turning of the year; this year though, I have opted for something more urban. Together with my friend, Nigel Roberts, I continued along the route we had both been following for some time: London’s Capital Ring. For this midwinter walk it would be the moderately hilly stretch that lies between Greenford and South Kenton in London’s northwest outer suburbs.
We convene at the small coffee bar at Greenford Underground station. The low winter sun is unseasonably bright in our faces, intense enough to require squinting. Light counts for everything at this time of year. Setting off under the railway arches we walk past the appropriately named Rising Sun pub and the entrance to a massive retail park. Soon, we reach the path that will take us up Horsenden Hill. The hill is one of the highest points in north London, and even halfway up the slope the view opens up to the west in the direction of Heathrow, an aerial procession of slowly descending aircraft confirming the hill’s location on the approach flight path.
The hill was once an Iron Age settlement, and before this it was sometimes frequented by Neolithic flint knappers. The summit is furnished with a concrete trig point and a few benches – most have the seat part absent, rotted away or stolen for firewood. Up here, it is countryside quiet with no hint of city clamour although we do come across a few fellow wanderers: the men we see are mostly seated alone on benches with a can of lager in hand; the women, in contrast, tend to be walking purposefully, avoiding eye contact as they stride ahead. Who can blame them? Lone figures in the landscape engender a sense of melancholia and it is easy to assume that these are people with the weight of the world on their shoulders. But I know that when I am out walking on my own a casual observer may well think the same about me. The truth is: I enjoy walking alone sometimes; it is a pleasure, however it might appear.
The path leads us downhill through woods of oak and beech. Parakeets screech in the branches overhead. The birds are ubiquitous now and certainly, within the orbit of London’s suburbs, they are rarely out of sight or earshot. I had seen my first of the day hours earlier whilst entraining to London that morning, a sleek green figure that swooped over the carriage as we passed over the M25 on our way to Liverpool Street. Parakeets, corvids – magpies, crows, jackdaws – woodpigeons: these are the birds that have taken over the green spaces of the capital. Small birds have been chased away to find sanctuary in suburban gardens. It comes as a relief to hear the passive-aggressive song of a robin holding firmly to its territory.
The route descends Horsenden Hill to Sudbury Hill before climbing again to Harrow-on-the-Hill. Harrow is as conspicuously wealthy as we imagined – huge house and gardens, security gates, high fences, a smattering of Arts and Crafts among the stylish mansions. Harrow – of Saxon derivation meaning ‘sacred grove’ – seems like a displaced Chilterns village: far enough from central London to give an impression of rurality; close enough to make commutes into the City feasible. It’s handy for the eponymous school too, of course. The various school buildings dominate the upper part of the village: crow step gables, decorative brickwork, signs announcing private property and CCTV. There’s a restaurant called Old Etonian that looks closed (even Harrow has to settle for being second best sometimes) and a specialist outfitters’ that displays various uniform items in its windows. The gaps between the buildings afford hazy views of the glass hi-rises of City of London, ten miles distant – a view that for many of the students is not so much aspirational but more a matter of destiny: inherited wealth, uncles that work in City trading; money, old and new, that regularly takes itself on holiday to the Caribbean.
The flamboyance of the school buildings is one thing but it is on the playing fields that we pass through where the sense of privilege really hits home. Of course, to contemplate such things might be seen to participate in the politics of envy. But really it is the politics of inequality. The sheer scale of the sports facilities is breathtaking – a huge area with tennis courts, athletics tracks and so many football pitches that the widely scattered goal posts seem like hoops for a giant-sized game of croquet.
Eventually we leave the school premises behind to follow a track that traces the boundary of a hospital complex. Hemmed in behind lopsided Leylandii and a chain link fence, the side of the path is littered with disposable masks and drinks cans. In places there are signs of fly-tipping: old mattresses, a bin bag stuffed with large cuddly toys. When future archaeologists dig down to find the stratum that represents the Anthropocene what will they make of the artefacts they find there – the blue Covid masks, the slim energy drink cans and nitrous oxide canisters? Votive goods of some sort, or items connected with ritual use?
The underground station at South Kenton, our anticipated end point, is closed for repairs. So we walk to Preston Road then take the Metropolitan line to Baker Street. After beers and a Lebanese meal we head to Oxford Circus for our respective tube lines. Oxford Street, unlike the near lifeless streets of the outer suburbs we encountered earlier, is frantically busy with shoppers. Christmas lights in the form of brightly illuminated snowflakes span the street above our heads. Light is returning. As reliable as ever, the year has turned.
Now, with the promise of autumn in the air, it feels almost nostalgic to look back on those hot days of just two months ago: the end of July, record temperatures; the countryside baked and arid. A visit then, to Dungeness on the Kent coast, a headland jutting out to sea just to the east of the Sussex border. One of the largest expanses of shingle in Europe, it is a fabled place. Hitherto unknown, my only reference points are those places closer to home like Norfolk’s Blakeney Point and Suffolk’s Sizewell and Orford Ness where, until recently at least, there was a lighthouse. Dungeness, I learn, has two – an old and a new; like Sizewell, there is a nuclear power station. Like both, there is shingle galore.
The modern mythology of Dungeness precedes it. Much of it is connected with the filmmaker Derek Jarman, who lived here in a fisherman’s cottage in the 1990s. We arrived on what was predicted to be the hottest day on record and stayed overnight at a B&B on the coast road at nearby Lydd-on-Sea. The shelved beach was entirely of pebbles, nearly all flint, most of which were black although some were a warm shade of amber. I clambered awkwardly across loose, sun-blasted stones to take a swim, glad of the water’s relative coolness. The sea was tepid mulligatawny, warmed by the incoming tide flowing over hot pebbles. Across the bay lay the white low-rise of Folkestone, and beyond this Dover’s celebrated cliffs. Later, when the air cleared a little, we could see Boulogne gleaming across the Channel. Boulogne-sur-Mer: another country, closer here than even the horizon, although we, as a nation, were allowing it to drift from view. The water, the English Channel, had become both a salty barrier that kept us apart us as well as a fluid channel that connected us. The French, always better dressed, call it La Manche, ‘the sleeve’. Language has its own agenda; language slips from tongues and connives to confuse – La Manche: c’est la mer. La Manche: c’est le mur. La France: c’est l’amour.
The next day really was the hottest day on record. We drove to Dungeness to find Jarman’s house. Prospect Cottage, black-painted wood with bright yellow window frames, looked to be in excellent condition. The cottage was close enough to Dungeness Power Station to be within the acoustic shadow of the menacing clang and whir of its machinery. The garden was clearly a work of love, a metaphor for Jarman’s dwindling years, an exercise in making the most of limitations: a temple to pebbles and the salt-tolerant flora that would grow in their presence – sea kale, yellow-horned poppy, red valerian, fennel and clumps of tough spiky grasses. Beach debris, like sea-bleached driftwood, provided makeshift statuary, while circles of larger pebbles were arranged like henges. Unlike most gardens it seemed an extension of the landscape rather than any sort of imposition on it.  Here on a bleak shingle spit, framed by the terrifying machinery of nuclear fusion, was, as the title of Jarman’s book suggests, modern nature.
We drove on past the red and white banded new lighthouse to a pub close to the old lighthouse and the power station – the Britannia Inn (‘Fish & Chips, Pizza’), which had trestle tables lined up outside in its car park that afforded unbroken views to the concrete edifices of Dungeness B. It was hard to imagine something that could simultaneously be both so English and so weirdly incongruous. Signs in the shingle across the road warned of the necessity of a licence for filming and photography in specific areas. Like Orford Ness in Suffolk, Dungeness has become a brand with associated commercial interests. Membership cards of any psychogeographic-inclined affiliation were invalid here.
A boardwalk led across the shingle to a bench. Coming along it back towards the road were two policeman carrying binoculars. We had already noticed a large police presence in the area – patrol cars, transit vans with anti-riot shields poised above windscreen. At first, perhaps naively, I had thought it was a matter of security – keeping an eye on the power station, an obvious if not particularly vulnerable target for would-be terrorists. Then it dawned that they were here to watch the sea for migrant rafts. France was at its closest here and the English Channel was about as calm as it ever gets. It was high season for people smuggling.
Some of the houses that lined Marine Drive in Lydd had first floor balconies that looked out to sea. A few had flagpoles with flapping St George or Union flags. Here at England’s south-eastern edge, the Continental ‘other’ in plain view, expressions of nationalism appeared to be defiant and full-throated. I wondered what sort of welcome any raft voyager who successfully beached here would receive from those who had seen them approach through the telescope mounted on their verandas. Somehow I doubted that many would have the kettle boiling and the Hobnobs ready on a plate.
Dungeness’s watchfulness is nothing new. In the heat of the first afternoon I had taken a walk to see the Denge sound mirrors located on an island in what had recently been designated an RSPB reserve. Now designated Scheduled Ancient Monuments, the sound mirrors, constructed of concrete in three radically different designs, were built between 1928—1935 and were an intriguing precursor to the invention of radar just before World War II. Strange objects to find in any landscape let along here among the shingle and marshes of the West Kent littoral, the idea was that they would detect the sound coming emanated by low-flying enemy aircraft coming across the channel – an early warning system of ‘Listening Ears’ as they became known.
It was a historical fact, dictated by location and landscape, that Dungeness had long been keeping its ears and eyes open to intruders from across the sea. If such liminal places were ever to participate in a twinning scheme then Orford Ness in Suffolk, with its secret bomb testing facilities and comparable edge of the world atmosphere, would be a natural contender. Both Dungeness and Orford Ness watch and listen as the flint pebbles grind and roll on their beaches in ever-shifting Heraclitean flux. Panta rhei: ever moving, never the same, always the same.
For one week this June this small island off the Antrim coast was a constant presence. The cottage we had rented stood high on a hill a couple of miles outside the resort of Ballycastle and the view to the north was an uninterrupted panorama of sea, sky and the long, low profile of Northern Ireland’s only inhabited island. The view depended on the weather, of course, which was something that changed constantly and wavered between overcast and mixed spells of sunshine and showers.
The L-shaped island that hugged the northern horizon was always visible, although in less clement weather it was sometimes little more than a hazy grey outline, a vague smudge that sat on the water. Sun or shine, two of the island’s three lighthouses were always in view, winking at intervals to alert shipping – the waters around Rathlin Island have a long history of shipwrecks and the remains of many unsuspecting vessels lie gathering barnacles at the bottom of the Atlantic close to its shore.
On sunnier days, more detail became evident and the island’s magpie cliffs of basalt and chalk could be clearly discerned, as could the houses and church of the village by the harbour. It was on these brighter days that other landforms also took shape on the horizon. Most days we could make out the southern end of the Scottish peninsula that is the Mull of Kintyre but now and then, far beyond the island, more distant places came into view – the hills of Islay and the unmistakable rise of the Paps of Jura.
From our perspective the island appeared to be at the edge of things. The most northerly point in Northern Ireland, it was the place where the island of Ireland gave way to the Atlantic. A small island that lay off the coast of another larger island, it seemed to be more an outlier than a stepping stone to anywhere else. But it was a place that had not always been so peripheral: long before today’s national divisions had come into play Rathlin had been central to the ancient Gaelic kingdom of Dal Riada, a political entity that included the coast of Argyll in western Scotland as well as part of what is now County Antrim in Northern Ireland.
Some days we could make out the ferry, Spirit of Rathlin, plying its way between Ballycastle and the island. On a day that promised to be calmer and sunnier than most we made the journey ourselves. As we drew closer to the harbour at Rathlin an increasing number of seabirds could be seen bobbing about on the water – a taste of what we would soon be seeing on the island itself. These were mostly guillemots but there were also small parties of gannets flying low over the waves, identifiable even at distance with their butter-coloured necks and long ink-dipped wings.
At Rathlin harbour, a bus – the ‘Puffin Express’ – was waiting to drive passengers across the island to the RSPB bird reserve at its western point. Here, steps led down to a viewing platform opposite the cliffs and stacks where the seabirds nested. The malodorous smell of guano grew increasingly strong as we descended – observing seabirds up close is undoubtedly one of the least glamorous aspects of bird watching. From the viewing platform vast numbers of seabirds could be seen at their nests opposite on the rocks – as closely packed as an urban high-rise but with distinctly separate enclaves of guillemot and razorbill, kittiwake and puffin. Closer to the viewing platform, a few fulmars, contemptuous of the excitable human presence and unperturbed by the relentless glint of expensive optics, had made their nests in the grass just beyond the barrier.
Driving back to the village, past fields of sheep and grazing cattle, our driver stopped the bus briefly to point out a cave to our left. It was the entrance, he said, to the stone axe mine that had existed on the island in Neolithic times.
In Belfast, a few days earlier, I had gone to see the so-called Malone Hoard at the Ulster Museum. The hoard was a collection of 19 beautifully polished stone axes that had been discovered on Malone Road close to the museum. The axes were around 6,000 years old and clearly ceremonial objects of some kind: not only were they too large to be of practical use for chopping trees but when they were discovered some of the stones had been found aligned vertically in the ground. Even behind glass, they were undeniably beautiful objects and had a curvy heft about them that seemed to invite handling. Given the understandable restrictions imposed by museums, this, of course, was not possible.
The axes had been identified as being made from a rock called porcellanite, a hard, dense impure variety of chert so-named because of its physical similarity to unglazed porcelain. Unlike flint, porcellanite does not flake easily and has a texture that accepts a fine polish and keen edge. There were only two possible sources of this scarce rock in Northern Ireland. Both were in Antrim. One was at Tievebulliagh, a 402-metre mountain in the Glens of Antrim; the other was on Rathlin Island. Both sources yielded rock of exactly the same physical and chemical makeup so it was impossible to tell which had been used for the Malone Road axes. For reasons of romance rather than anything more scientific, I preferred to think that these precious objects had originated here on the island.
Back off the bus, we sat on the beach at Mill Bay listening to the piping of oystercatchers and watching grey seals as they made forays through the rafts of seaweed that lay just offshore. Seaweed was once a profitable business here. A little further on towards the harbour, an abandoned kelp barn stood roofless next to the shore. It was built of blocks of the same Cretaceous chalk that make up the white cliffs we could see from our rental cottage on the mainland.
After an unproductive listen for corncrakes in a field we had been told about by an RSPB warden we made our way to the jetty to wait for the ferry back to Ballycastle. Notwithstanding the lack of corncrakes, it had been a satisfying few hours. We were by now brim-full with all the wonders that Rathlin Island had to offer: the seabirds – the smell, the noise, the frantic flying about; the wider natural history of the place – the seals, the kelp, the garden flowers that had gone feral and colonised the island’s dry stone walls. Then there was the geology – the Cretaceous chalk and Tertiary basalt of the cliffs, the flints on the beach, the cave with its supply of elusive porcellanite. It would have been nice to have taken a peek inside the cave where the stone axe mine had been but it did not really matter. Prehistory, myth and memory are all intertwined and we make our own emotional truths. Whatever the true archaeological facts of it, in my mind at least the Malone Hoard axes would always be associated with this place on the edge of things.
Picking up from where we left off, back in November, my friend Nigel Roberts and I travelled to London on Wednesday* to walk Section 14 of the Capital Ring. We arrive at our starting point at Hackney Wick by way of the 26 bus from Liverpool Street Station, whose upper deck gives excellent views of upwardly and downwardly mobile Shoreditch and Hackney along the way.
Hackney Wick, an East London zone heavily revamped by the 2012 Olympics, is already starting to develop a distinct patina – a place that is part bohemia and part industrial estate, with pleasing, professionally executed murals amid rag-tag graffiti.  We require sustenance before we set off, so bacon and egg rolls are purchased from a snack van near the station. The rolls, amply filled and luxuriously lubricated with brown sauce, are excellent value and of sufficient deliciousness that I am tempted to adopt them as an alternative monetary unit – a BER (Bacon and Egg Roll), a benchmark by which to compare prices. As I sit on a bench gnawing away, Nigel – always one to document every detail en route – Milibands me with his phone camera, capturing my awkward mastication for the benefit, no doubt, of his thousands of Facebook followers and leaving my political career in tatters even before it is begun.
Suitably caffeinated, we follow the ramps that take us beneath the multiple tracks of the former Great Eastern Railway before returning to The Greenway again. We cross Waterworks River and then Stratford High Street, which is busy with traffic and lined with gleaming new office blocks. One of these bears a mural of a Victorian woman with baskets of lavender – a memorial to the onetime Yardley soap factory that stood nearby. Equally intriguing is a strange tower that stands a little way down the street by the river. It is something I have seen from the train many times before and had always wondered about. The Stratford East Tower, on close inspection, is built of timber and mimics an elongated (and leaky) ice cream cone. What it really represents, of course, is an Olympic torch – another architectural heirloom of the glory days of 2012. These days, more prosaically, it also houses a mobile phone mast hidden within.
Back on The Greenway, a Thames Water crew is carrying out some sort of maintenance of the sewer below. Aluminium ladders lead underground through open manholes that offer our noses a mild hint of that which flows beneath. Just beyond here, down a slope to the right, stands the quite magnificent edifice of the Abbey Mills pumping station behind high razor wire fencing. Constructed by Bazalgette in the 1860s, it originally housed the beam engines required to pump city sewage 40 feet up to the height of the Northern Outfall Sewer. Byzantine-style, and yellow brick with cupolas, it resembles nothing less than a cathedral, Bulgarian Orthodox perhaps? St Bazalgette’s? Or maybe even Catholic? – Spain already has its own Our Lady of the Sewers**, so it is not such a far-fetched notion.
A little way beyond the pumping station is Abbey Creek The tide is out, leaving a grey expanse of mud stippled with fragments of wire netting, dead shopping trolleys and other Anthropocene detritus. Overlooking the creek is another relic of the pumping station: a curious piece of ironwork that resembles a giant nautilus fossil… or maybe a super-sized tuba, a fiendish instrument that can only be blown by the foul breath of the sewer beneath.
Back on The Greenway itself, a little further on, large white letters on the wall spell out:
L O N G L I V E C O M M U N I S M
Nigel, channelling revolutionary БРСМ*** spirit, poses for a photograph with a raised fist. It feels anachronistic. Perhaps, by way of balance, or simply to bring it up to date, there should also be another that says:   Â
D E A T HÂ Â T OÂ Â N E O L I B E R A L I S MÂ Â Â and/orÂ
O B S E R V E Â Â T H EÂ Â D E A T HÂ Â T H R O W SÂ Â O F Â Â
L A T EÂ Â C A P I T A L I S M
Such slogans are absent, although they are easily brought to mind by a head swivel across to the silhouetted high-rises that mark the distant City of London – the sky-piercing monoliths of Canary Wharf Tower and The Shard being the most familiar of the cluster. Here, encapsulated in glass, steel and concrete, are the architectural marker stones of the London Launderette, the machinery of which is currently rinsing roubles on fast cycle. Londongrad: an established playground for oligarchs, kleptocrats, KGB cathedral fanciers and Premiership billionaires – bullion for bricks, gas for glass, irony for iron, gold for goalkeepers; cash for condos, cash for honours, cash for tennis. Another hidden sewer: the secret culvert of dirty money that seeps unseen into The City.
We cross another railway line and then have views through trees to the stones and avenues of the East London Cemetery. Next we pass Newham University Hospital and some giant concrete balls at the junction with Boundary Lane. At a primary school playground a little further on we leave The Greenway behind, heading south to reach the ramps that take us across the dual-carriageway of the A13. Looking east beyond the red brake lights of queued traffic is the modest rise of Becton Alp, a fake hill made by piling the toxic spoil of a former gas works. It is no Silbury but at 36 metres is still the highest artificial mound in London.
Our walk ends with a meander through Beckton District Park. This area feels more Ballardian suburb than gritty city edge. Nigel observes, ‘This could be Worcester, you know.’ And he is right, it could be almost anywhere. The trees planted in the park come from far and wide, each bearing a sign to identify species and provenance. Tired and footsore by now, we forget to look until the last one – Algerian Ash.
The DLR from Royal Albert Station speeds us back into central London – a driverless train through the heart of The City providing all the metaphors you might possibly need. Later, over beers in a Soho pub (1 pint = 2BER), we discuss prog bands we saw back in the glory days of the last century. A man at the next table joins in the conversation. He tells us he likes visiting pubs that come with a bit of history. Currently he is on a tour of George Orwell haunts in the city. After a quick chat about The Road to Wigan Pier, a book we both admire, I ask: ‘So did Orwell used to frequent this place.’ His reply was unexpected, ‘No, but Dennis Nilsen used to come here to look for victims, I think.’
* Wednesday, February 23 – the day after ‘Palindrome Day’ 22.02.2022; the day before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine 24.02.2022
** see Paul Richardson’s Our Lady of the Sewers and other Adventures in Deep Spain 1998
 *** БРСМ = Belarusian Republican Youth Union (…only kidding, although Nigel is undoubtedly a Belarus pioneer of sorts)
In recent years I have got into the habit of taking a walk on the day of the winter solstice, December 21. Yesterday’s walk was along the section of the Boudicca Way that lies between Venta Icenorum and Norwich.
Venta Icenorum, which lies a few miles south of the city close to the village of Caistor St Edmund, was a walled Romano-British settlement that served as the civitas or capital of the Iceni tribe. The town was laid out sometime after Boudicca’s violent uprising against Roman rule in the winter of AD61 and so there is no chance that the famously vengeful Iceni queen was ever connected with the settlement itself. It is also debatable that Boudicca ever walked this precise territory but the Iceni queen is certainly local enough to at least deserve a mention.
Like many recently, it is a drearily grey day and there are few other visitors to the Roman town. I walk a little way along the walls before leaving the site to head uphill along one of High Ash Farm’s permissive paths. Damp and dreich, low cloud has largely expunged any colour from the landscape. The fields are harvested and bare, and the sense of midwinter inertia is strong despite the reasonably mild temperature and lack of snow. Light is at a premium; but the days are changing and more light will be here soon.
At the top of the hill a planting of Scots pine marks the site of an Anglo-Saxon graveyard, a situation that offers views down to St Edmund’s church and the low flint and brick walls of the Roman town. The Southern Bypass buzzes with cars and lorries in the distance. Beyond this, the impassive concrete cuboid of Norfolk County Hall marks the entrance to the city for traffic from the southeast.
The way traces a minor road for a while before dipping downhill into a valley. It then follows a footpath uphill to arrive at Caistor Lane and the curiously named French Church Farm. Another footpath leads north away from the road climbing gently up the valley side. Here, I pass a family – mum, dad, granddad, two kids – eating sandwiches on a bench halfway up. These are about the only walkers I have seen so far. In a field to the right, keeping well away from the mobbing crows that predominate the landscape around here, is a lone pair of Egyptian geese. At the top I emerge at Hallback Lane, a delightfully green, ancient trackway lined with coppiced hazel and ancient oaks. Halfway along is a wizened old oak that is familiar to many who live around here. Dubbed ‘the Africa Tree’, it bears a hollow in its trunk that delineates a fairly accurate outline of the Dark Continent. French Church, Africa Tree, Egyptian geese – something seems slightly out of kilter here.
A path to the right takes me up around the top of Caistor Chalk Quarry, close to the fence that protects it from public intrusion. The quarry is far larger than I had imagined. Steep sandy cliffs frame a deep hole and wide expanse of scarred earth; scattered extraction apparatus, storage hangars and piles of gravel and flint sit on the exposed chalk bedrock. The quarry, I later learn, is the last remaining inland section of the Beeston Chalk formation of the Upper Cretaceous. The exposed seam here is directly connected to the chalk pavement seen thirty miles away at Beeston Regis on the north Norfolk coast. Although this is the first time that I have actually seen it, I already have a connection with this place – a few echinoid fossils gifted to me over 30 years ago by an erstwhile neighbour, a lovely man called Russell who used to work at the quarry.
I join the Arminghall Road and follow it over the Southern Bypass, which is, as always, frantic with commuter traffic. Soon after, I leave this behind to take a footpath across a damp meadow towards the Arminghall henge. Truth be told, the Bronze Age henge probably looks a lot more impressive seen crow-eyed from a drone overhead. Originally, a horseshoe of wooden posts open to the southwest, now it is little more than a symbol on the OS map, a vague rise and depression in a pylon-spanned field. There has been a suggestion* that the henge may be orientated to the winter sunset over Chapel Hill to the southwest. Today though, no sun is visible, and the summit of the low hill, which once bore a church dedicated, like that at the Venta Icenorum site, to St Edmund, is engulfed by the Norwich to London railway line.
A footpath leads along the River Tas behind the large electricity substation that occupies the field next to the henge. A little way along this, the brutalist bulk of County Hall emerges through the trees beyond the railway line that hugs the opposite bank. I pass under the graffiti-adorned pillars of the rattling A146 to emerge just shy of the bridge at Trowse Millgate. Across the ring road roundabout, is Bracondale and my route into the city centre. I am almost home now. Only 3.30pm and darkness is starting to fall, Tomorrow, at least, there will be a little more light.
Stoke Newington, London N6. We are here to walk part of the Capital Ring that circuits the capital by way of 15 stages. Slightly perversely we decide to begin at Stage 13, which links Stoke Newington with Hackney Wick by means of a park and a path alongside the River Lea and Lea River Navigation. Less defiantly, we will follow the overall route clockwise as suggested. To go widdershins might be an enticement but we are civilised men not maniacs.
Firstly though, Abney Park cemetery beckons. The main Egyptian Gate on the high street is closed but there is a way round the side that funnels us between barriers into the non-conformist boneyard. The park, as much arboretum as cemetery, is quiet – dense foliage neutralising the din of traffic from the roads that surround it; just a few muffled barks from exercising dogs and the jungle shriek of an unseen parakeet. Quiet or not, the tree-lined paths are fairly busy with strollers and dog-walkers. We come across one woman who has no less than seven small lead-dragging dogs in her charge, including a one-eyed pooch that clearly bears a grudge against binocular humans.
We have no purpose or aim other than just to wander and take it all in – the trees, the gravestones, the gothic atmosphere, the knowledge that this cemetery was the inspiration for the hidden fragment of Paradise that Arthur Machen wrote about in his short story N. We find no such paradise garden but instead plenty of interesting angel-perched tombs and several oddities – a wooden marker that asserts mysteriously ‘Elvis put his hand on my shoulder’ and the simple stone gravestone with the legend: ‘Thomas Caulker 1846—1859 Son of the King of Bompey’. Bompey, we later discover, was an early 19th century West African chiefdom that was eventually incorporated into Sierra Leone in 1888. The stone looks like a fairly modern replacement. What is curious is that the 160-year-old grave is still attended – a single flower has been recently placed upon it.
We exit the park to join the Ring; a sign right outside the cemetery confirms we are on the right path. My companion Nigel takes a photograph of me in front of the sign and as he does this a cheerful Black woman pushing an empty shopping trolley offers to take a snap of the two of us – she assumes we are tourists, and in many ways she is right. We head up Cazenove Road, where a fading ghost sign on a gable advertises a discontinued brand of whisky and an abandoned charity shop, as niche as you like, boasts a Bosnia & Herzegovina connection. It is all comfortingly multicultural – orthodox Jewish men in black hats and long coats rub shoulders with Muslims in white skullcaps and shalwar kameez. Looking at our map to check the route, one of the latter, a helpful elderly Pakistani, asks if we need directions and points us towards Springfield Park. There is no denying it – we really do look like tourists.
At the rise of the park the Lea Valley suddenly comes into view beyond – a proper valley, a river-carved ha-ha that slopes down to the water and sharply up again. A sign at a viewpoint helpfully informs us that we are standing on Hackney gravel, below that is London clay. Another parakeet screeches, this one perched in a tree, lurid green, channeling the tropics.
A more at home, native species – a heron – stands guard on a houseboat close to the footbridge at the bottom of the park. It sees us but looks unperturbed. We cross over the river to the east bank and start walking south. Walthamstow Marsh stretches away to the east, all reed, sedge and soggy pasture; rising above the marsh, beyond the railway, stands an island of modern development that may or may not be offices. There is an almost endless line of houseboats moored to both banks. Nothing too chi-chi – vaguely counter-cultural but mostly no-nonsense make do and mend: heaps of burner firewood, car batteries, plants in plots, well-used bicycles; a few seasoned boat dwellers going about daily chores, clenched roll-ups, dreadlocks piled high.
Across the water, a little further along, is a pub with outside trestle tables stacked for winter: The Anchor & Hope. Not the Hope & Anchor, the historic pub rock venue in Islington that we remember hearing tales of in our youth. Anchor & Hope – Anchor (or at least moor) and Hope your boat doesn’t sink? Anger and Hope maybe? There seems to be plenty of anger about but hope can be elusive; as they say, it is the hope that kills.
Approaching Clapham Junction Viaduct we hear the two-stroke put-put of a barge on the move. Another barge comes from the rear to slowly overtake and the two boatmen exchange chummy bargee greetings as they pass on the water. A sign under the viaduct arches indicates that this is the original location of A V Roe’s workshop where the first all-British powered flying craft, a precarious-looking tri-plane held together with wire and glue, was built in 1909. Inspired by the Wright Brothers’ achievement of just six years earlier, the aeronaut successfully managed a short wobbling flight across the adjacent marshes, a sight that must have given the local herons quite a start.
At Lea Valley Ice Centre the path diverts along the canalised Lea River Navigation, the wide green expanse of Hackney Marshes stretching invitingly to our left. We detour briefly to view the former site of the Middlesex Filter Beds, now a designated nature reserve, where we find the granite blocks that once held the pumping engine in place rearranged into what has become known as the ‘Ackney Enge’. A little further on we find the hope we had been looking for back at the waterside pub: a footbridge over the water has a draped banner that proclaims BELIEVE IN OUR COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION on one side, and on the other, DARE TO DREAM BEYOND CAPITALISM. Hope indeed.
Shortly before reaching Hackney Wick we pass beneath a roadway where the supporting concrete arches have been comprehensively decorated with all manner of found objects – bottle tops, cans, bits of wire, keys, keyboards, electronic components, beer cans – all lovingly glued in place and spray-painted. As I stop to take a photograph, a man on a bike appears out of nowhere to inform me that the artist, a lovely fellow by all accounts, was a friend of his who had died quite recently. He pedals off back into the shadows as quickly as he arrived. Then I notice a portrait of the artist attached to the second of the pillars. The artist in question looks remarkably like the man I have just spoken to. Could this be a ghost artist obliged to return and show visitors around his urban art gallery, a revenant on a bicycle?
East of Elveden 