Off the Beaten Track

March and April seem to have passed in the blink of an eye. The only thing to suggest we have reached the May Day Bank Holiday is the driving rain. Winter has refused to let go of us completely and I have had many frosty, early morning starts to check playgrounds for slipperiness. A 6.30am start can feel rough some days but it is always worthwhile in the end. I see lapwings performing their morning acrobatics and curlews heading out to find breakfast. Skylarks are singing high in the sky and there is the strangest sound that I have now identified as a snipe.

Now the nights are shorter, it feels good to be heading out in daylight. The lambs have quickly found just the right spot to catch the first rays of the sun. The cold but sunny mornings have revealed something else I hadn't spotted before. I took a photo of frost and shadows a few weeks ago and posted it in a message group. One of my friends said “You can really see the medieval field strips” I had never really thought my valley was inhabited at all so long ago, but the evidence seems to be there.

Our moors are dotted with bronze age burial mounds and our dales spread with farmsteads that seem to date back to the seventeenth century. But old stone track ways are visible here and there and the remains of wayside crosses tell me that people were passing this way in earlier times. But I'm not entirely sure what they were up to.

It has become very easy over this last year or so to come adrift from the twenty-first century. Most of the moments I enjoy could have happened to anybody in the last three hundred years, the last thousand, maybe longer. Before any of the lambs were born, I came across a sheep who had somehow got stuck on her back. An animal on its back with its legs in the air generally isn't a good sign but she was still in the land of the living and struggling to right herself. Her flailing pointy hooves and rolling eyes were a bit scary but a couple of shoves helped her back to her feet. I can sympathize with a heavily pregnant animal who has accidentally rolled down a slight incline and been unable to rise without assistance. I'm sure it's been a problem for ever.

My imaginary travels with Daniel Defoe have also brought an encounter with sheep. West of Blenheim, we come to the Cotswold Downs which he tells me are home to the best sheep and the finest wool in England. He also tells me that King Richard I sent some of these sheep to Spain where they used them to raise a new breed with wool so fine that we are now obliged to buy it for our own cloth. I assume he means Merino wool and I'm not sure this is true at all, but when the king was captured in the 1190s, it seems we did pay part of his ransom in wool. It is certainly true that half the wealth of England once rode on the backs of our sheep.

We follow the old Roman road called the Fosse Way via Cirencester to Bath. In the twenty-first century it is still visible here and there. Like the stone track ways around my village, they remind us how many people have passed this way before. In the eighteenth century it is crossed by other, perhaps older roads that also seem to be called Fosses. It has just become the local name for any road. Bath is quite a small place and Daniel thinks the baths are pretty much the only thing about it worth mentioning. Several of them are hung about with crutches that once belonged to those who had arrived lame but left cured. He is extremely dismissive of the tale that the city was founded by a king named Bladud who, while working as a swineherd, discovered that the mud found here cured his leprosy. I think that’s fair. It seems unlikely that leprosy could be cured by mud. But the same King Bladud was killed after he built himself wings and tried to fly from the temple of Apollo in some legendary version of London. Old tales of attempted human flight are a side interest of mine. I can’t think of a single one that ended well. They are perhaps a story for another day.

The next place we visit is Bristol where I find something surprising. They deliver all their heavy goods on sledges. Not just in the snow. All the time. The pavements are worn so smooth by them that they are terribly slippery in wet weather and down right treacherous in a frost. West again we come to the banks of the Severn. There is a ferry at Aust but he tells me it is ugly, dangerous and inconvenient. Instead we head for Gloucester where there is a bridge. But we don't cross there either and instead head north to Tewkesbury and Worcester, taking in the Malvern Hills. He vaguely mentions the famous Malvern witches but doesn't want to elaborate. Sadly, my searches turned up nothing. So I can't either.

I'm not sure if Daniel is reluctant to make that left turn into Wales (we know he hates wild places) or if he just wants to talk about the wonderful manufacturing hereabouts. There is a lot going on close by. Not just cloth making and dying, but the glass works in Stourbridge where they also make crucibles for the smelting of metal. Also there are the iron works in Birmingham.

In Worcester, he admits that we are not going to Wales at all. He will just tell me about the last time he went. He crossed into Wales via Hereford which lies low on the banks of the River Wye. It is, he says, much troubled by floods because almost all the rivers in Wales empty into the Wye. Wales was a mixed bag for him. He loved the valleys but the mountains were horrid and frightful. In places, he says, they 'darkened the air with their height'. He would certainly not have found his way without a guide.

I am interested to hear about Brecknock-Mere where maybe a city once stood that was swallowed into the earth and then drowned because of the sins of its inhabitants. I was sorry not to see all the ancient stone monuments he described. So many, I would no longer find Stonehenge such a wonder. His visit to the cathedral at St David's gave him a distant view of Ireland. This time he is happy to share a legend with me. St David was supposed to be uncle to King Arthur and lived to be 146. The cathedral was in a sorry state. The western part was pretty sound but the roofs had fallen in over the east end and the south transept. It was another casualty of the Civil War.

He also gave a most intriguing description of an event around Harlech in 1693. A strange fire had blown in from the sea which burnt barns and also poisoned the grass. As much as this sounds like a tall story it actually comes up more than once at the Royal Society in London. The fire was weak, it was blue. It didn't burn hot enough to harm people but it destroyed barns and hayricks. The poisoned grass killed livestock. It came from a sandy, marshy place and could be repelled by the sound of horns and drums. It's hard to know what the problem was but it all sounds very difficult.

Daniel was afraid he had made a mistake visiting Wales when he first saw the mountains, but I think, on the whole, the beautiful and fruitful valleys he saw made the journey worthwhile. The journey we've all made over the last year has been rocky to say the least. We haven't really got a guide. Nothing like this has happened to any of us and the path forward feels like a new one. It is certain that many people have trodden it throughout our long history but we can’t really ask them about it. So it is understandable if we feel a little lost, a little detached, nervous of what is on the road ahead. In the end though, it will be worth the journey.