May days
Nowadays, to be on the road is to be home.
St Columba
St Columba
Friday 18th May
Windmill Hill – Avebury – Stanton Drew
Well, not a bad eve-of-pilgrimage kip, although not quite enough, and I do feel a little bit cranky. But I often feel cranky first thing. Of course, it got properly cold and damp just before dawn – as often it does under canvas – and the combination woke me up, and I had to put my little sleeping beanie hat on my balding bonce in order to conserve heat and lull me back to the land of snooze. I suspect it’ll take a few nights to get used to these new sleeping arrangements. Alas, no cosmic Windmill Hill dreams – that I can remember.
The view from up here, however, does verge on the cosmic: the Ridgeway to the east; Avebury itself to the south-east, tucked into a plush tree-ringed hollow; and just to the right of Avebury, and a tad further south, silhouetted against a bright yellow field of freshly-flowering rape, the mysterious Silbury Hill.
As with Avebury’s outer henge, it’s worth remembering that Silbury Hill would also once have been gleaming, beaming chalky white. Imagine seeing that for the first time in the early summer sun. Bosh! Half divine pregnant belly, half altar to the gods, possibly something else entirely, apparently it was once the tallest human-made construction in the whole of Europe. Building that hill – five thousand years ago – sure was a labour of love, sweat, coordination and devotion. Although experts are still debating the love and devotion bits of this equation. Were our pagan forebears anarcho-matriarchal syndicalists or patriarchal totemic totalitarians? Were the workers willing antler-wielders or resentful scapula-shovellers?
I hope you have realised by now, before we set off, that I am not the slightest bit scholarly about my approach to the sacred sites of these lands. I come from the suck-it-and-see-and-then-daydream school of mytho-archaeo-hoboism. But, whilst I’m more into muddy boots than pristine footnotes, I’d like to think that my fantasies and speculations are amenable to evidence.
I know you’re not meant to – sensibly fenced off as it is – but I once climbed Silbury Hill in the middle of the day, stripped naked, poured spring water over my head, and danced around shouting “Bollocks!” at the top of my voice. It’s a bit vague now, but I think I was really trying hard to break free from something or other that was holding me back. Knowing me, I was probably trying hard to break free from being me, which is never a sensible war to wage. There was a sort of sinkhole up there – an indentation, I believe, from an old archaeological dig that hadn’t been filled in properly – and I got the sense that if I jumped up and down hard enough there was a chance that the hill would open up and swallow both me and my burdens.
The outer layer of my tent is still soaking with nocturnal dew, but the sun’s rising fast and should dry it out swiftly enough. I hate packing up my tent whilst it’s still wet. Worse still: I hate unpacking my tent when it’s still wet – because I can never be arsed to separate the outer from the inner, and climbing into a cold and soggy tent, well, that’s a properly unpleasant experience, trebly so if it’s still pissing down and cold as fuck and your boots and socks are wet and your feet are beginning to rot and you don’t know whether to cry, or whether to laugh.
Atop one of the burial mounds I improvise my morning spiritual practice, stripped to the waist so that my thirsty skin can soak up all the sunlight it needs. I’m not one who normally feels such things, but there’s a particular indentation in the ground that feels buzzing with energy, almost like a giant vent of air rising from the earth. There’s cosmic potential in me yet.
Back at camp, I scoff some DIY hobo-muesli, wash it down with a pan of herbal tea, and then mosey off site – and out of sight – to find a suitable place for my morning crap, remembering to take with me my freshly-purchased fold-up shit-pit-digging trowel.
I’ll spare you the finer details, but crapping outdoors – in the evolutionarily-road-tested squatting position – can be a proper pleasure, and not just a welcome relief. Mindfulness, so it seems, can be applied to most human activities. And the views are usually far more entertaining than the limp, damp towels hanging on the back of the bathroom door.
How did pilgrims of yore go about their itinerant crapping? I’m guessing that most of them would – like the proverbial pilgrim bear – have shat in woods along the pilgrim way. But what did they wipe their pilgrim arses with? In my scatological travel books, dew-speckled moss is far more pleasant than any aloe-vera-infused disposable wet wipe. But dew-speckled moss isn’t always near to hand. Dry moss with a bit of spit on it? Were there particular leaves that did the job particularly well? Excavatory twigs, perhaps? Large, smooth, round pebbles skilfully manoeuvred? Or did you just spread your pilgrim buttocks far and wide and pray for a puritan break? There must be historians who know and study such sordid details.
And what was a typical pilgrim travel kit back in them medieval days? Did you just stuff everything into a big leather satchel and sling it onto your back? Where did you hide your money? If you got caught out at night, where did you sleep? Did you carry a tinderbox and get a fire going? Did you roll yourself into a smelly woollen blanket and curl up amid the roots of a sturdy oak? Did you take it in turns to stay awake, on guard for robbers, or the devil, or wolves? How did you weather the rain, and what if it rained for days, and what if you got soaked to the skin? And what if your footwear never dried out? And what did you smell like, and did you try and cover up the smell, or was mortification and putrification of the flesh considered part of the spiritual path, and where and how and what did you wash – and other such puzzles buzz around my morning brain.
When I return – slightly lighter – to my encampment, the tent’s almost dry. But it takes me ages to pack everything up. It always does. And, yes, it’s official: I have packed way too much stuff. I always do.
A proper high-tech hiker or weight-watching camper could probably weigh in at half my weight, and I do admire and envy their dedication and budgets. But I’ve always been a bit of an over-packer. I guess my middle-aged spine will insist on jettisoning some of this load along the way, and soon enough I’ll find out what’s vital and what’s not, but right now, I am heavily prepared.
Rather than return to Avebury the way I came last night, I walk back along an old and deep-rutted farm track, and decide to swing by the village church, which is dedicated to St James – presumably James, son of Zebedee, rather than Jesus’ brother. Are there any churches dedicated to Jesus’ brother? I guess there must be. Ah, despite technically still being a member of the Anglican Church – I tried to resign once, but they don’t make it easy – my Anglican jigsaw is still missing quite a few pieces.
The sweetest of laminated notices is pinned to the handsomely-riveted old church door:
WELCOME all Pilgrims
All faiths and none
from near or far
We pray you find Peace here
We pray you find God’s love here
We hope you will rest awhile
Please know
you are welcome
HOME
What a lovely welcome. It might not sound that special to non-Christian ears, but it’s quite something for a rural church to explicitly welcome people of “all faiths and none.”
Visiting churches and chapels has always been one of my hobbies, and I especially love opening the doors of ones I’ve never visited before. You never know quite what is going to greet you. I’ve opened some and burst into tears, and I’ve opened others and practically turned on my heels.
At first I find St James’ a bit depressing. I sit in a pew in the nave for a few minutes, and drink it all in. And sniff it all in, too. Having been brought up in rural Anglicanism, I’m very familiar with the smells of country churches. A high note of brass polish usually sits on a low note of stone-infused Victorian dusty-dampness. And then each individual church seems to riff off that, depending on the state of its heating system, the brand of its wood polish, and the extravagance of its “flower ladies”.
What’s striking about this church, though, is the impressive and gorgeously-coloured rood screen. You rarely come across rood screens in rural churches, most of them having been removed or destroyed in the wake of the English Reformation. The top of the screen is ornately carved and painted with blues and reds and greens and golds, and the bottom half holds ten gilded panels depicting various apostles and saints.
I leave my pew and walk through the screen’s open door into the chancel, and the atmosphere suddenly lifts. There’s a sweet sense of elevation and sacredness in this particular part of the church. I guess that was one of the functions of the rood screen – not just to support the large rood cross above, but also to delineate the inner chancel from the outer nave, creating a sort of architectural hierarchy of holiness.
Ah, I remember this architectural theology very well from my childhood. Love and divine power – tangled with righteous judgment – flow down from God the Father, through the stained glass above the altar, through Jesus, through the priest, through the chalice of wine, over the altar, past the choir, past the pulpit and past the squire, before finally filtering through to the parishioners – the more well-to-do sitting at the front of the nave, and the poorer sitting at the back. It was like that in our village church, anyway. That stuff went deep into my boyish being, and that old-fashioned view of a distant and fatherly God – who is fundamentally “out there” – still lingers inside me, a bit like a dormant virus living at the base of my spiritual spine.
I sit down in one of the choir seats and find myself quietly mumbling a prayer, asking for a blessing on my pilgrimage from a sort of God I believe that I no longer believe in.
I haven’t got much of a clue what prayer is. But it seems to hit a particular spiritual spot that my meditation seems to miss. Or a particular note. Or perhaps even a particular spiritual musical key. An inter-personal key. The key of I–Thou?
I get this sense that part of me wants this pilgrimage to solve a lot of my problems. And that I’m probably more interested in what I can receive than in what I can give. And maybe that’s not the best vibe to bring with me. But what’s the point of hiding quiet desperation from the Maker of All Creation? For all my love of spiritual teachings and spiritual maps, and despite my ability to quote the mystics, I really know very little about the spiritual path.
If I listen carefully enough, though, I can just about hear a voice saying that I am in safe hands. That the pilgrimage will both hold me and carry me. In response, I feel a bit like the father of the mute boy in Mark’s gospel: “Lord, I believe – but help me in my unbelief!”
A display at the back of the church explains that the rood screen was disassembled and hidden behind a false wall for over two hundred and fifty years, before being rediscovered at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that “from traces of colours found, the loft and screen are to original colours.” It’s a similar colour scheme to Tibetan Buddhist temples. The display also informs me that once upon a time a Saxon church stood on this very site with walls four-feet thick – and, yes, when I look up, I can make out several circular Saxon windows.
I sometimes wonder if I’ve got any Saxon blood in me. But I feel quite Roman and Norman, too, and before my hair turned grey, there was a tinge of red in my beard. I suspect a DNA test would come back Heinz 57. But I’m not ready yet to be disavowed of my genealogical fantasies.
The old church font is a slightly wonky and chunky marvel – depicting some Christ-like figure vanquishing a pair of dragons. This church has finally won me over.
I swing by a gift shop to buy some postcards, and then head back into the stone circle. I am naturally drawn to the feminine Cove. I get out my hip flask and pour some single malt onto the ground, in honour of my ancestors – in particular mum and dad – and in honour of my journey too. There must be a word for a blessing that is also a request for a blessing. Or maybe such reciprocity is inherent in the act of blessing? A sort of spiritual version of Newton’s third law – as we bless, so we are blessed. Dad used to baulk at this particular ceremony of mine – “That’s a waste of good whisky, Stevie boy!” he’d say, shaking his rational head. I hope you appreciate it now, dad.
It’s strange, but I feel a lot closer to my dad now than I ever did when he was alive. He was my headmaster when I was at primary school, which was a very weird experience, and then when I went to boarding school – well, that was pretty much the final nail in the coffin of our faltering relationship. I remember the day after he died – almost ten years ago now – I found myself forgiving him everything. It was so easy to do. And then a wave of such profound love for him washed over me. Instantly followed by a wave of profound regret – that I’d never felt that depth of love and forgiveness whilst he was still alive. I still carry some of that regret with me.
I haven’t got a clue where we go when we die. I’m not even sure if I believe in the continuity of the human soul. Where is dad now? Did any of his momentum go elsewhere? I take a good glug of whisky.
A prayer in church. A blessing amid the stones. Good whisky. It feels like this pilgrimage has officially begun.
The view from up here, however, does verge on the cosmic: the Ridgeway to the east; Avebury itself to the south-east, tucked into a plush tree-ringed hollow; and just to the right of Avebury, and a tad further south, silhouetted against a bright yellow field of freshly-flowering rape, the mysterious Silbury Hill.
As with Avebury’s outer henge, it’s worth remembering that Silbury Hill would also once have been gleaming, beaming chalky white. Imagine seeing that for the first time in the early summer sun. Bosh! Half divine pregnant belly, half altar to the gods, possibly something else entirely, apparently it was once the tallest human-made construction in the whole of Europe. Building that hill – five thousand years ago – sure was a labour of love, sweat, coordination and devotion. Although experts are still debating the love and devotion bits of this equation. Were our pagan forebears anarcho-matriarchal syndicalists or patriarchal totemic totalitarians? Were the workers willing antler-wielders or resentful scapula-shovellers?
I hope you have realised by now, before we set off, that I am not the slightest bit scholarly about my approach to the sacred sites of these lands. I come from the suck-it-and-see-and-then-daydream school of mytho-archaeo-hoboism. But, whilst I’m more into muddy boots than pristine footnotes, I’d like to think that my fantasies and speculations are amenable to evidence.
I know you’re not meant to – sensibly fenced off as it is – but I once climbed Silbury Hill in the middle of the day, stripped naked, poured spring water over my head, and danced around shouting “Bollocks!” at the top of my voice. It’s a bit vague now, but I think I was really trying hard to break free from something or other that was holding me back. Knowing me, I was probably trying hard to break free from being me, which is never a sensible war to wage. There was a sort of sinkhole up there – an indentation, I believe, from an old archaeological dig that hadn’t been filled in properly – and I got the sense that if I jumped up and down hard enough there was a chance that the hill would open up and swallow both me and my burdens.
The outer layer of my tent is still soaking with nocturnal dew, but the sun’s rising fast and should dry it out swiftly enough. I hate packing up my tent whilst it’s still wet. Worse still: I hate unpacking my tent when it’s still wet – because I can never be arsed to separate the outer from the inner, and climbing into a cold and soggy tent, well, that’s a properly unpleasant experience, trebly so if it’s still pissing down and cold as fuck and your boots and socks are wet and your feet are beginning to rot and you don’t know whether to cry, or whether to laugh.
Atop one of the burial mounds I improvise my morning spiritual practice, stripped to the waist so that my thirsty skin can soak up all the sunlight it needs. I’m not one who normally feels such things, but there’s a particular indentation in the ground that feels buzzing with energy, almost like a giant vent of air rising from the earth. There’s cosmic potential in me yet.
Back at camp, I scoff some DIY hobo-muesli, wash it down with a pan of herbal tea, and then mosey off site – and out of sight – to find a suitable place for my morning crap, remembering to take with me my freshly-purchased fold-up shit-pit-digging trowel.
I’ll spare you the finer details, but crapping outdoors – in the evolutionarily-road-tested squatting position – can be a proper pleasure, and not just a welcome relief. Mindfulness, so it seems, can be applied to most human activities. And the views are usually far more entertaining than the limp, damp towels hanging on the back of the bathroom door.
How did pilgrims of yore go about their itinerant crapping? I’m guessing that most of them would – like the proverbial pilgrim bear – have shat in woods along the pilgrim way. But what did they wipe their pilgrim arses with? In my scatological travel books, dew-speckled moss is far more pleasant than any aloe-vera-infused disposable wet wipe. But dew-speckled moss isn’t always near to hand. Dry moss with a bit of spit on it? Were there particular leaves that did the job particularly well? Excavatory twigs, perhaps? Large, smooth, round pebbles skilfully manoeuvred? Or did you just spread your pilgrim buttocks far and wide and pray for a puritan break? There must be historians who know and study such sordid details.
And what was a typical pilgrim travel kit back in them medieval days? Did you just stuff everything into a big leather satchel and sling it onto your back? Where did you hide your money? If you got caught out at night, where did you sleep? Did you carry a tinderbox and get a fire going? Did you roll yourself into a smelly woollen blanket and curl up amid the roots of a sturdy oak? Did you take it in turns to stay awake, on guard for robbers, or the devil, or wolves? How did you weather the rain, and what if it rained for days, and what if you got soaked to the skin? And what if your footwear never dried out? And what did you smell like, and did you try and cover up the smell, or was mortification and putrification of the flesh considered part of the spiritual path, and where and how and what did you wash – and other such puzzles buzz around my morning brain.
When I return – slightly lighter – to my encampment, the tent’s almost dry. But it takes me ages to pack everything up. It always does. And, yes, it’s official: I have packed way too much stuff. I always do.
A proper high-tech hiker or weight-watching camper could probably weigh in at half my weight, and I do admire and envy their dedication and budgets. But I’ve always been a bit of an over-packer. I guess my middle-aged spine will insist on jettisoning some of this load along the way, and soon enough I’ll find out what’s vital and what’s not, but right now, I am heavily prepared.
Rather than return to Avebury the way I came last night, I walk back along an old and deep-rutted farm track, and decide to swing by the village church, which is dedicated to St James – presumably James, son of Zebedee, rather than Jesus’ brother. Are there any churches dedicated to Jesus’ brother? I guess there must be. Ah, despite technically still being a member of the Anglican Church – I tried to resign once, but they don’t make it easy – my Anglican jigsaw is still missing quite a few pieces.
The sweetest of laminated notices is pinned to the handsomely-riveted old church door:
WELCOME all Pilgrims
All faiths and none
from near or far
We pray you find Peace here
We pray you find God’s love here
We hope you will rest awhile
Please know
you are welcome
HOME
What a lovely welcome. It might not sound that special to non-Christian ears, but it’s quite something for a rural church to explicitly welcome people of “all faiths and none.”
Visiting churches and chapels has always been one of my hobbies, and I especially love opening the doors of ones I’ve never visited before. You never know quite what is going to greet you. I’ve opened some and burst into tears, and I’ve opened others and practically turned on my heels.
At first I find St James’ a bit depressing. I sit in a pew in the nave for a few minutes, and drink it all in. And sniff it all in, too. Having been brought up in rural Anglicanism, I’m very familiar with the smells of country churches. A high note of brass polish usually sits on a low note of stone-infused Victorian dusty-dampness. And then each individual church seems to riff off that, depending on the state of its heating system, the brand of its wood polish, and the extravagance of its “flower ladies”.
What’s striking about this church, though, is the impressive and gorgeously-coloured rood screen. You rarely come across rood screens in rural churches, most of them having been removed or destroyed in the wake of the English Reformation. The top of the screen is ornately carved and painted with blues and reds and greens and golds, and the bottom half holds ten gilded panels depicting various apostles and saints.
I leave my pew and walk through the screen’s open door into the chancel, and the atmosphere suddenly lifts. There’s a sweet sense of elevation and sacredness in this particular part of the church. I guess that was one of the functions of the rood screen – not just to support the large rood cross above, but also to delineate the inner chancel from the outer nave, creating a sort of architectural hierarchy of holiness.
Ah, I remember this architectural theology very well from my childhood. Love and divine power – tangled with righteous judgment – flow down from God the Father, through the stained glass above the altar, through Jesus, through the priest, through the chalice of wine, over the altar, past the choir, past the pulpit and past the squire, before finally filtering through to the parishioners – the more well-to-do sitting at the front of the nave, and the poorer sitting at the back. It was like that in our village church, anyway. That stuff went deep into my boyish being, and that old-fashioned view of a distant and fatherly God – who is fundamentally “out there” – still lingers inside me, a bit like a dormant virus living at the base of my spiritual spine.
I sit down in one of the choir seats and find myself quietly mumbling a prayer, asking for a blessing on my pilgrimage from a sort of God I believe that I no longer believe in.
I haven’t got much of a clue what prayer is. But it seems to hit a particular spiritual spot that my meditation seems to miss. Or a particular note. Or perhaps even a particular spiritual musical key. An inter-personal key. The key of I–Thou?
I get this sense that part of me wants this pilgrimage to solve a lot of my problems. And that I’m probably more interested in what I can receive than in what I can give. And maybe that’s not the best vibe to bring with me. But what’s the point of hiding quiet desperation from the Maker of All Creation? For all my love of spiritual teachings and spiritual maps, and despite my ability to quote the mystics, I really know very little about the spiritual path.
If I listen carefully enough, though, I can just about hear a voice saying that I am in safe hands. That the pilgrimage will both hold me and carry me. In response, I feel a bit like the father of the mute boy in Mark’s gospel: “Lord, I believe – but help me in my unbelief!”
A display at the back of the church explains that the rood screen was disassembled and hidden behind a false wall for over two hundred and fifty years, before being rediscovered at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that “from traces of colours found, the loft and screen are to original colours.” It’s a similar colour scheme to Tibetan Buddhist temples. The display also informs me that once upon a time a Saxon church stood on this very site with walls four-feet thick – and, yes, when I look up, I can make out several circular Saxon windows.
I sometimes wonder if I’ve got any Saxon blood in me. But I feel quite Roman and Norman, too, and before my hair turned grey, there was a tinge of red in my beard. I suspect a DNA test would come back Heinz 57. But I’m not ready yet to be disavowed of my genealogical fantasies.
The old church font is a slightly wonky and chunky marvel – depicting some Christ-like figure vanquishing a pair of dragons. This church has finally won me over.
I swing by a gift shop to buy some postcards, and then head back into the stone circle. I am naturally drawn to the feminine Cove. I get out my hip flask and pour some single malt onto the ground, in honour of my ancestors – in particular mum and dad – and in honour of my journey too. There must be a word for a blessing that is also a request for a blessing. Or maybe such reciprocity is inherent in the act of blessing? A sort of spiritual version of Newton’s third law – as we bless, so we are blessed. Dad used to baulk at this particular ceremony of mine – “That’s a waste of good whisky, Stevie boy!” he’d say, shaking his rational head. I hope you appreciate it now, dad.
It’s strange, but I feel a lot closer to my dad now than I ever did when he was alive. He was my headmaster when I was at primary school, which was a very weird experience, and then when I went to boarding school – well, that was pretty much the final nail in the coffin of our faltering relationship. I remember the day after he died – almost ten years ago now – I found myself forgiving him everything. It was so easy to do. And then a wave of such profound love for him washed over me. Instantly followed by a wave of profound regret – that I’d never felt that depth of love and forgiveness whilst he was still alive. I still carry some of that regret with me.
I haven’t got a clue where we go when we die. I’m not even sure if I believe in the continuity of the human soul. Where is dad now? Did any of his momentum go elsewhere? I take a good glug of whisky.
A prayer in church. A blessing amid the stones. Good whisky. It feels like this pilgrimage has officially begun.
Dad was a hitch-hiker during his college days in the late 1950s – regularly making the trip between Stoke and Durham, where he was training to be a primary school teacher, and between Stoke and Dewsbury, when he was courting mum. Every now and then he’d wheel out one of his hitching stories: the lift with the ladies’ underwear salesman from Wigan; the lift in a Rolls Royce; two hours in the back of a lorry, in pitch darkness, trundling over the wintry Pennines; the time when two tired businessmen picked him up, installed him in the driver’s seat, and promptly both fell asleep. And every now and then we’d pick up a hitching airman – we lived near RAF Cranwell and RAF Waddington – one of whom had the cheesiest, smelliest feet ever. So I guess hitching runs in my blood and was always in my pot of possibilities.
Apart from once hitching a ride during a school cross-country run – and achieving the only athletic victory of my life – my own hitching career began shortly after my eighteenth birthday. I was living and working in Harrow at the time, had recently joined the peace movement, and there was a Christian CND gathering up in Coventry, at the old cathedral. So, I took some time off work, packed a bag, walked out to the A404, stuck out my thumb, and hoped for the best. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. For reasons I can’t remember, a lorry dropped me off on the hard shoulder of the M1, and some passing traffic cops gave me a bollocking and sent me yomping across a muddy field, but somehow I got to Coventry and back, and before long I was hitching up and down the land like a seasoned Christian pacifist hobo.
It was the mid-1980s – the time of “Thatcher’s Britain” – and hitching was common as picket lines and peace camp muck back then. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people did it. Sometimes I’d get the tube out to Brent Cross, follow the esoteric pedestrian route to the beginning of the M1, and there’d already be a dozen hitchers there, lined up along the hard shoulder, all setting out on the great trek north – or maybe just popping up to Dunstable in order to pick up a giro. The back of every signpost at every service station was crammed with hitchers’ graffiti – from the witty to the political, and from to the very rude to the very desperate. Me and my friend Mil used to leave messages for one another on a particular sign.
I remember once hitching down to Glastonbury and getting dropped off at a roundabout, and there were already a good twenty other festival-bound hitchers there. A VW kombi pulled over, my friend got in, a couple of others pushed in front of me, and then the door was slid shut. That was the last I saw of her – and my tent – for three days.
They were giddy days – my young adult horizons opening wide before my very eyes, and hitching was the way I found out what lay beyond those horizons. And for the next twenty years hitching was my main form of transport – lorries, Jags, Robin Reliants and all. According to back-of-an-unbranded-fag-packet calculations, I must have hitched a good four or five thousand rides – and not just around the British Isles, but also around Ireland, Germany, Canada, the States, and even South Africa. But in my forties I began using the train a lot more, especially during the winter months, and then in early 2013, looking after my mum back up in Lincolnshire, it was finally time to take the plunge and get my driving test – nominally so that I could ferry mum to and from medical appointments, but also because it was time for this passenger-poet to grow up and get in life’s prosaic driving seat. It’s remarkable how many poets don’t drive, or learn to drive much later on in life. I suspect we’re unusually ambivalent about both responsibility and power. Ahem...
Of course, once I got my driving test – and later inherited mum’s car – driving soon became an “indispensible” part of my life. But every year I go on a little hitching adventure, just to stop my thumb from getting rusty. Three summers ago I hitched to Berlin, two summers ago to the Lakes, and last summer I hitched up to Iona and back. But, as you may have noticed, hardly anyone hitches nowadays. Driving around, I’ve only seen four hitchers in the last five years – and, of course, I picked them all up and went out of my way to assist them. My karmic hitch-hiking bank account is pressed down, shaken down, and overflowing. But hitching definitely feels like a dying language, in Britain at least. I don’t know what it’s like in other countries.
A few years ago I came across an article by Satish Kumar in which he described a pilgrimage he undertook around some of Britain’s sacred places – including Glastonbury, Canterbury, Lindisfarne and Iona – to mark his fiftieth birthday. Apparently, it’s an established tradition in India – for men at least – to undertake a pilgrimage at the age of fifty, and I made a mental note to treat myself to a hitch-hiking pilgrimage when I finally hit my first half-century.
But when I reached fifty, I was in such a raw psychic state that I would have got washed up on the rocks of Watford Gap before I’d barely left harbour. I wasn’t much sturdier last year – in fact there were a couple of times when I actually felt suicidal – but this year I’ve sensed a little bit more fuel in my reserves. It feels like it could be now or never to have one last big hitching adventure. It’s not as if any of us are getting any younger.
I pull out my Map of Possibilities. It’s one of those £1.99 AA ones you sometimes find in service stations, and on its overview of Britain I’ve written loads of possible pubs and sacred sites to visit, many of them suggested by friends. My rough plan is to travel counter-clockwise around the mainland, taking in some of the islands too. But I also want to be open to deviation – I’ve even brought my passport, just in case. I’m planning a bit of a break at the beginning of July – for my niece’s wedding followed by Noisily Festival – but, other than that, for the next few months the British Isles are my oyster bed, and my thumb is my Oyster card. I know that a pilgrimage is traditionally from somewhere in particular, via a particular route, to somewhere particularly sacred, so undertaking a circular pilgrimage – and half making it up as I go along – is a bit of a post-modern experiment. But a pilgrimage from Avebury to Avebury somehow tickles my post-modern fancy. We’ll see. Some of my experiments go wrong, and some kick up treasure. Why take the tried and tested path when you can get totally lost instead?
I consider visiting Bath Spa, as it’s just down the road. But, nah, I’m not ready for the bright city lights right now, much as I’d love to visit its ancient hot springs. I feel like I need to fill my lungs with several days of country air. On the map, just to the west of Bath, encircled Stanton Drew catches my attention.
Stanton Drew, Stanton Drew. All I know about Stanton Drew is that it’s a pretty big stone circle, and some neo-pagans consider it up there with Avebury and Stonehenge. Should be quite a straightforward journey, although getting around Bath could be a bit tricky. I nip into the Red Lion and ask one of the kitchen staff for a big piece of cardboard.
I’ve always hitched with a sign, even if it’s just a simple PLEASE. I feel naked without one. And deciding what to put on a sign is for me part of the art of hitching. “TOWARDS BATH PLEASE.” A little bit weird, but keeps my options open – and shows that I’m open to short lifts, which ain’t always the case.
I’m actually beginning to feel a little bit nervous, a bit vulnerable even. It’s not a particularly scary sense of vulnerability, more a sort of tender tension in my belly and a slight anxiety in my mind. The last few years have shredded my confidence to bits, and here I am, about to put myself at the mercy of complete strangers, day after day. Whose idea was this?
There’s that famous quote attributed to Margaret Thatcher about a man of the age of twenty-six who still catches buses being considered a failure. What about a man twice that age who still hitches lifts?
I can feel myself wobbling. Edge of adventure wobbles and rusty hitching wobbles. And that’s OK. Because, let’s face it, you can’t have a true adventure without taking some sort of risk.
Thich Nhat Hanh’s wonderful little mindfulness prayer comes to the rescue:
Breathing in, I calm my body
Breathing out, I smile
Dwelling in the present moment
I know this is a wonderful moment
That’s better. I repeat the prayer several times, until it begins to settle in. I’m not completely convinced that I believe that this is a wonderful moment, but I get his drift, and it’s put a Mona Lisa smile on me chops. “Go get ‘em, Stevie boy!” I hear my dad calling.
I hoick my large rucksack onto my back, adjust and tighten the belt and straps, attach my day sack to my front, and depart from Avebury, ambling along in the direction of the A4. I soon come across a little lay-by. Hmmmmm. Hitch-hiking is full of minor dilemmas such as these: whether to carry on walking out to the Beckhampton roundabout, which may or may not have somewhere to pull over, or to chance it from here? I decide to give it ten minutes. I take my day sack off, plonk my rucksack on the ground, and replace the day sack on my back. My body remembers the rest: stand behind rucksack but slightly to the side, hold out the sign with my right hand, hold out my left thumb with a fairly straight arm, lean into my left leg, relax the whole posture, tilt my head to left, and adopt a gaze and a vibe that distinguishes me from both a mad axe murderer and a free-loading hippie – not too keen, but not presumptuously laidback neither.
I’m still sort of shuffling into my outer and inner hitching postures when the first lift of my journey pulls over. He can only take me a couple of miles before he turns off, so we don’t get stuck into conversation, but he’s an ex-hitcher himself, and one of the founding members of the Campaign for Real Ale. We both agree that whatever else is happening in this crazy world of ours, if you like good beer then it’s a very good time to be alive.
My second lift is with Mattie, who’s heading to Frome – so I re-jig my route to stay with him all the way down to the A36. “The problem with Frome,” he says, “is that they recently built a Steiner School there – with taxpayers’ money I hasten to add – and it’s attracted all the hippies. And not just hippies: rich hippies. The worst sort! You can spot them a mile off!” I feel a bit like the wide-mouthed frog in the Wide-Mouthed Frog Joke when he comes across the wide-mouthed-frog-eating snake and asks him what he eats. Not that I’m financially rich, but I’m definitely a hippie, and I know a handful of hippies in and around the Frome area – or “the ravers’ graveyard”, as it’s known in some circles. I find myself narrowing my mouth as I speak.
A couple of Bristol boys – landscape gardeners – pick me up off the A36, on their way up to the A4. We don’t chat much – occasionally lifts aren’t that bothered about conversation, particularly if there are two up front. So I just lean back and enjoy the ride. My fourth and final lift of the day is from a very smart Polish businessman in a swanky new Merc, taking the back roads to pick up a client from Bristol airport. When he learns of my mission, he offers to take me all the way to Stanton Drew. I never refuse an offer like that. A mile and a half down a country road in a car, however swanky or unswanky, only takes a few minutes, whereas that distance on a sunny afternoon like this with a full pack can take a very hot and sticky half hour. I ask him to drop me off at the village pub. “It’s probably called the Druid,” he quips, and we both laugh as The Druid’s Arms comes into view.
Four lifts. Given the rather wonky route I took, maybe sixty miles in all. Waiting included, I’m guessing two and a half hours. A fair enough cross-country rate. But I don’t think I’m going to be keeping any statistics for this journey. As the system theorists say, as soon as you begin trying to measure a system, you begin to affect the system. Que sera, sera...
Outside the front of The Druid – as I’m pretty sure the locals must call it – over a very welcome pint of Buscombe Original, the gently descending sun sneaks under the brim of my donkey hat and begins toasting my nose and cheeks. Today definitely feels like the hottest day of the year. Without my faithful donkey hat the skin of my skull would already have begun roasting, for sure – delicate lily-white English poet that I am. It’s a good, well-travelled hat, a little bit cockeye, perhaps – but the sort of hat that you can accidentally sit down on and it’ll bounce back to life without a word of complaint. Ah, the Buscombe Original slips down my parched pilgrim gullet very easily indeed.
When he learns of my pilgrim purpose, a local recommends that I take a look at the stones in the pub’s rear garden. Intrigued, I buy a second pint at the bar, order a vegan curry, and go out back.
Well, The Druid’s Arms might not be in the middle of a stone circle, but I am delighted to discover that it’s got three impressive stones of its own – two standing, one fallen. A few clouttie ribbons are tied to a nearby young ash, suggesting that I’ve stumbled upon an active pagan pilgrimage spot. On the other side of the pub’s garden wall lies the village church – just a hop, skip and jump away – and the slowly descending sun is beginning to gild its stone whilst simultaneously setting fire to its western windows. And now a blackbird has just begun piping its evening reel. Not a bad profession I’ve stumbled into.
When one of the kitchen staff comes out with my meal, he fills me in on the stones. “They’re called the Cove, but I don’t know why. One of them’s the bride and one’s the groom, and that one there is the drunken vicar. Apparently their wedding celebrations went way past midnight, and the Devil turned them all to stone.” He pauses for brief inner theological contemplation. “Actually, it was probably God who turned them all to stone. And the three stone circles,” – he nods his head in the direction of the church – “are all the dancers, and there’s an avenue of stones too, and I think they’re the band of fiddlers who got everybody into trouble in the first place. Something like that.”
Ah. Sunlit, rosy pub garden. Sunlit, rosy-hued church. Ancient stones literally within reach. Quite a sweet and apposite syzygy. And this meal is some of the best vegan pub nosh I’ve had in ages: sweet potato, spinach and chickpea curry, with half-and-half rice and chips. Stodge. Flavour. Protein. Roughage. Perfect end-of-day pilgrim grub.
By the time I make it to the largest of the three stone circles, the sun has just slipped over the horizon, and the twilight is doing its slightly fluorescent, trippy, light-wave-bending thing, and the waxing moon is pursuing the departed sun, and I just wander around drinking it all in, encircling the circle and touching each well-seasoned stone in turn, before pitching my tent in the lee of a fallen giant.
Before brushing my teeth and heading to bed, I stand in the middle of the circle, raise my hip flask to the moon, and finish the remains of the ceremonial whisky. A very good end to a very good day. And a very good start to the journey...
Apart from once hitching a ride during a school cross-country run – and achieving the only athletic victory of my life – my own hitching career began shortly after my eighteenth birthday. I was living and working in Harrow at the time, had recently joined the peace movement, and there was a Christian CND gathering up in Coventry, at the old cathedral. So, I took some time off work, packed a bag, walked out to the A404, stuck out my thumb, and hoped for the best. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. For reasons I can’t remember, a lorry dropped me off on the hard shoulder of the M1, and some passing traffic cops gave me a bollocking and sent me yomping across a muddy field, but somehow I got to Coventry and back, and before long I was hitching up and down the land like a seasoned Christian pacifist hobo.
It was the mid-1980s – the time of “Thatcher’s Britain” – and hitching was common as picket lines and peace camp muck back then. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people did it. Sometimes I’d get the tube out to Brent Cross, follow the esoteric pedestrian route to the beginning of the M1, and there’d already be a dozen hitchers there, lined up along the hard shoulder, all setting out on the great trek north – or maybe just popping up to Dunstable in order to pick up a giro. The back of every signpost at every service station was crammed with hitchers’ graffiti – from the witty to the political, and from to the very rude to the very desperate. Me and my friend Mil used to leave messages for one another on a particular sign.
I remember once hitching down to Glastonbury and getting dropped off at a roundabout, and there were already a good twenty other festival-bound hitchers there. A VW kombi pulled over, my friend got in, a couple of others pushed in front of me, and then the door was slid shut. That was the last I saw of her – and my tent – for three days.
They were giddy days – my young adult horizons opening wide before my very eyes, and hitching was the way I found out what lay beyond those horizons. And for the next twenty years hitching was my main form of transport – lorries, Jags, Robin Reliants and all. According to back-of-an-unbranded-fag-packet calculations, I must have hitched a good four or five thousand rides – and not just around the British Isles, but also around Ireland, Germany, Canada, the States, and even South Africa. But in my forties I began using the train a lot more, especially during the winter months, and then in early 2013, looking after my mum back up in Lincolnshire, it was finally time to take the plunge and get my driving test – nominally so that I could ferry mum to and from medical appointments, but also because it was time for this passenger-poet to grow up and get in life’s prosaic driving seat. It’s remarkable how many poets don’t drive, or learn to drive much later on in life. I suspect we’re unusually ambivalent about both responsibility and power. Ahem...
Of course, once I got my driving test – and later inherited mum’s car – driving soon became an “indispensible” part of my life. But every year I go on a little hitching adventure, just to stop my thumb from getting rusty. Three summers ago I hitched to Berlin, two summers ago to the Lakes, and last summer I hitched up to Iona and back. But, as you may have noticed, hardly anyone hitches nowadays. Driving around, I’ve only seen four hitchers in the last five years – and, of course, I picked them all up and went out of my way to assist them. My karmic hitch-hiking bank account is pressed down, shaken down, and overflowing. But hitching definitely feels like a dying language, in Britain at least. I don’t know what it’s like in other countries.
A few years ago I came across an article by Satish Kumar in which he described a pilgrimage he undertook around some of Britain’s sacred places – including Glastonbury, Canterbury, Lindisfarne and Iona – to mark his fiftieth birthday. Apparently, it’s an established tradition in India – for men at least – to undertake a pilgrimage at the age of fifty, and I made a mental note to treat myself to a hitch-hiking pilgrimage when I finally hit my first half-century.
But when I reached fifty, I was in such a raw psychic state that I would have got washed up on the rocks of Watford Gap before I’d barely left harbour. I wasn’t much sturdier last year – in fact there were a couple of times when I actually felt suicidal – but this year I’ve sensed a little bit more fuel in my reserves. It feels like it could be now or never to have one last big hitching adventure. It’s not as if any of us are getting any younger.
I pull out my Map of Possibilities. It’s one of those £1.99 AA ones you sometimes find in service stations, and on its overview of Britain I’ve written loads of possible pubs and sacred sites to visit, many of them suggested by friends. My rough plan is to travel counter-clockwise around the mainland, taking in some of the islands too. But I also want to be open to deviation – I’ve even brought my passport, just in case. I’m planning a bit of a break at the beginning of July – for my niece’s wedding followed by Noisily Festival – but, other than that, for the next few months the British Isles are my oyster bed, and my thumb is my Oyster card. I know that a pilgrimage is traditionally from somewhere in particular, via a particular route, to somewhere particularly sacred, so undertaking a circular pilgrimage – and half making it up as I go along – is a bit of a post-modern experiment. But a pilgrimage from Avebury to Avebury somehow tickles my post-modern fancy. We’ll see. Some of my experiments go wrong, and some kick up treasure. Why take the tried and tested path when you can get totally lost instead?
I consider visiting Bath Spa, as it’s just down the road. But, nah, I’m not ready for the bright city lights right now, much as I’d love to visit its ancient hot springs. I feel like I need to fill my lungs with several days of country air. On the map, just to the west of Bath, encircled Stanton Drew catches my attention.
Stanton Drew, Stanton Drew. All I know about Stanton Drew is that it’s a pretty big stone circle, and some neo-pagans consider it up there with Avebury and Stonehenge. Should be quite a straightforward journey, although getting around Bath could be a bit tricky. I nip into the Red Lion and ask one of the kitchen staff for a big piece of cardboard.
I’ve always hitched with a sign, even if it’s just a simple PLEASE. I feel naked without one. And deciding what to put on a sign is for me part of the art of hitching. “TOWARDS BATH PLEASE.” A little bit weird, but keeps my options open – and shows that I’m open to short lifts, which ain’t always the case.
I’m actually beginning to feel a little bit nervous, a bit vulnerable even. It’s not a particularly scary sense of vulnerability, more a sort of tender tension in my belly and a slight anxiety in my mind. The last few years have shredded my confidence to bits, and here I am, about to put myself at the mercy of complete strangers, day after day. Whose idea was this?
There’s that famous quote attributed to Margaret Thatcher about a man of the age of twenty-six who still catches buses being considered a failure. What about a man twice that age who still hitches lifts?
I can feel myself wobbling. Edge of adventure wobbles and rusty hitching wobbles. And that’s OK. Because, let’s face it, you can’t have a true adventure without taking some sort of risk.
Thich Nhat Hanh’s wonderful little mindfulness prayer comes to the rescue:
Breathing in, I calm my body
Breathing out, I smile
Dwelling in the present moment
I know this is a wonderful moment
That’s better. I repeat the prayer several times, until it begins to settle in. I’m not completely convinced that I believe that this is a wonderful moment, but I get his drift, and it’s put a Mona Lisa smile on me chops. “Go get ‘em, Stevie boy!” I hear my dad calling.
I hoick my large rucksack onto my back, adjust and tighten the belt and straps, attach my day sack to my front, and depart from Avebury, ambling along in the direction of the A4. I soon come across a little lay-by. Hmmmmm. Hitch-hiking is full of minor dilemmas such as these: whether to carry on walking out to the Beckhampton roundabout, which may or may not have somewhere to pull over, or to chance it from here? I decide to give it ten minutes. I take my day sack off, plonk my rucksack on the ground, and replace the day sack on my back. My body remembers the rest: stand behind rucksack but slightly to the side, hold out the sign with my right hand, hold out my left thumb with a fairly straight arm, lean into my left leg, relax the whole posture, tilt my head to left, and adopt a gaze and a vibe that distinguishes me from both a mad axe murderer and a free-loading hippie – not too keen, but not presumptuously laidback neither.
I’m still sort of shuffling into my outer and inner hitching postures when the first lift of my journey pulls over. He can only take me a couple of miles before he turns off, so we don’t get stuck into conversation, but he’s an ex-hitcher himself, and one of the founding members of the Campaign for Real Ale. We both agree that whatever else is happening in this crazy world of ours, if you like good beer then it’s a very good time to be alive.
My second lift is with Mattie, who’s heading to Frome – so I re-jig my route to stay with him all the way down to the A36. “The problem with Frome,” he says, “is that they recently built a Steiner School there – with taxpayers’ money I hasten to add – and it’s attracted all the hippies. And not just hippies: rich hippies. The worst sort! You can spot them a mile off!” I feel a bit like the wide-mouthed frog in the Wide-Mouthed Frog Joke when he comes across the wide-mouthed-frog-eating snake and asks him what he eats. Not that I’m financially rich, but I’m definitely a hippie, and I know a handful of hippies in and around the Frome area – or “the ravers’ graveyard”, as it’s known in some circles. I find myself narrowing my mouth as I speak.
A couple of Bristol boys – landscape gardeners – pick me up off the A36, on their way up to the A4. We don’t chat much – occasionally lifts aren’t that bothered about conversation, particularly if there are two up front. So I just lean back and enjoy the ride. My fourth and final lift of the day is from a very smart Polish businessman in a swanky new Merc, taking the back roads to pick up a client from Bristol airport. When he learns of my mission, he offers to take me all the way to Stanton Drew. I never refuse an offer like that. A mile and a half down a country road in a car, however swanky or unswanky, only takes a few minutes, whereas that distance on a sunny afternoon like this with a full pack can take a very hot and sticky half hour. I ask him to drop me off at the village pub. “It’s probably called the Druid,” he quips, and we both laugh as The Druid’s Arms comes into view.
Four lifts. Given the rather wonky route I took, maybe sixty miles in all. Waiting included, I’m guessing two and a half hours. A fair enough cross-country rate. But I don’t think I’m going to be keeping any statistics for this journey. As the system theorists say, as soon as you begin trying to measure a system, you begin to affect the system. Que sera, sera...
Outside the front of The Druid – as I’m pretty sure the locals must call it – over a very welcome pint of Buscombe Original, the gently descending sun sneaks under the brim of my donkey hat and begins toasting my nose and cheeks. Today definitely feels like the hottest day of the year. Without my faithful donkey hat the skin of my skull would already have begun roasting, for sure – delicate lily-white English poet that I am. It’s a good, well-travelled hat, a little bit cockeye, perhaps – but the sort of hat that you can accidentally sit down on and it’ll bounce back to life without a word of complaint. Ah, the Buscombe Original slips down my parched pilgrim gullet very easily indeed.
When he learns of my pilgrim purpose, a local recommends that I take a look at the stones in the pub’s rear garden. Intrigued, I buy a second pint at the bar, order a vegan curry, and go out back.
Well, The Druid’s Arms might not be in the middle of a stone circle, but I am delighted to discover that it’s got three impressive stones of its own – two standing, one fallen. A few clouttie ribbons are tied to a nearby young ash, suggesting that I’ve stumbled upon an active pagan pilgrimage spot. On the other side of the pub’s garden wall lies the village church – just a hop, skip and jump away – and the slowly descending sun is beginning to gild its stone whilst simultaneously setting fire to its western windows. And now a blackbird has just begun piping its evening reel. Not a bad profession I’ve stumbled into.
When one of the kitchen staff comes out with my meal, he fills me in on the stones. “They’re called the Cove, but I don’t know why. One of them’s the bride and one’s the groom, and that one there is the drunken vicar. Apparently their wedding celebrations went way past midnight, and the Devil turned them all to stone.” He pauses for brief inner theological contemplation. “Actually, it was probably God who turned them all to stone. And the three stone circles,” – he nods his head in the direction of the church – “are all the dancers, and there’s an avenue of stones too, and I think they’re the band of fiddlers who got everybody into trouble in the first place. Something like that.”
Ah. Sunlit, rosy pub garden. Sunlit, rosy-hued church. Ancient stones literally within reach. Quite a sweet and apposite syzygy. And this meal is some of the best vegan pub nosh I’ve had in ages: sweet potato, spinach and chickpea curry, with half-and-half rice and chips. Stodge. Flavour. Protein. Roughage. Perfect end-of-day pilgrim grub.
By the time I make it to the largest of the three stone circles, the sun has just slipped over the horizon, and the twilight is doing its slightly fluorescent, trippy, light-wave-bending thing, and the waxing moon is pursuing the departed sun, and I just wander around drinking it all in, encircling the circle and touching each well-seasoned stone in turn, before pitching my tent in the lee of a fallen giant.
Before brushing my teeth and heading to bed, I stand in the middle of the circle, raise my hip flask to the moon, and finish the remains of the ceremonial whisky. A very good end to a very good day. And a very good start to the journey...