Saturday 19th May
Stanton Drew – Glastonbury
I wake to sounds outside my tent. Am I imagining things? No, there’s definitely someone or something out there.
I unzip the inner zip, and then slowly unzip the outer. To be greeted by one of the most delightful morning scenes I’ve ever been greeted by: a gang of a dozen young bullocks are standing in an arc around the entrance of my tent, silhouetted against a fresh blue sky, all staring back at me with reciprocal bemusement. After ten seconds of friendly-enough mutual contemplation they decide to resume the game that I have so politely interrupted: Lick The Tent. Doesn’t matter who or what’s in it, dare you to lick it. As with youngsters the world over, the peer pressure is on, and the bravado is out. They’re all sporting numbered yellow plastic earrings in their right ears, and 1772 is by far the most adventurous. What a great and amusing way to start the day, watching bullocks at play, close up enough to smell their sweet and steamy breath. There’s something exquisitely beautiful and intelligent and sensitive about bullocks, and cows in general. A cow’s gaze can sometimes touch your heart as deeply as a dog’s, sometimes more so – because they don’t seem to want anything in return, not even your love.
I am glad, though, that I pitched my tent next to that recumbent menhir. I’m not too sure what the official statistics are, but I’m guessing that tents and their inhabitants occasionally get trampled by boisterous bovines.
He may have left us early, but at least he was trampled doing what he loved, by beings that he loved...
I dress – it’s always awkward dressing whilst lying on your back in a small tent – and crawl out to greet the day. The bullocks by now have dispersed, and are mooching and masticating all around the place. Having arrived at the stones in the gloaming, it’s marvellous to see them in their sun-lit glory: a proper chunky circle of stones. The church and village now lie upon the western horizon, and in every direction there are undulating fields and ancient hedgerows and May-green trees. Such a sturdy and pretty English scene.
I go a-wandering, barefoot, through the morning dew, but when I turn back to view the circle from afar, I see an old Landrover driving through the field. For a few seconds, I entertain the outside hope that the occupants won’t notice my vaguely-disguised tent. But then they drive right up to it, and park right outside. Ah. Busted.
Now, the phrase wild camping doesn’t sit that easily with me. It smacks a bit of hipster re-branding. Back in the day – my over-pampered millennial child – it was just called camping. I guess it does make it sound a lot more adventurous and heroic, and it does differentiate real camping from molly-coddled campsite camping, and I shouldn’t be such a middle-aged moaner – but, whatever you call it, I reckon there are several sensible rules if you’re camping beyond the bounds of English law. Unless you’re camping in the middle of the woods or in the middle of nowhere: pitch late and strike early. More generally: leave no trace, and don’t get caught. Hmmm. I’ve just broken two of these unofficial rules – and on only my second night out. I’ll be up before the hobo beak, if I’m not careful.
I decide to return to the tent, confess my sins and bear the consequences. As I approach, one of the vehicle occupants begins shouting something or other at me. Being half deaf, I don’t have a clue what she’s saying. I just smile and nod and wave with both of my hands and shout back, “I’ll pack straight away! I’ll pack straight away!” and that seems to satisfy her honour. They drive off without even looking into the whites of my eyes. I guess I’m not the first meandering hippie to chance it camping out at Stanton Drew, and I won’t be the last.
As I pack, the scattered bullocks decided to reconvene, and by the time I’m ready to exit the field, there’s a fair-sized bunch of them come to see me off. Turns out the game this time is Lick That Rucksack Strap, and now there’s quite a collective friskiness to the players. 1921 is by far the most daring, with 1944 and 1966 riding his confident wake. Every few paces I can sense their excitement – and their collective physical momentum – rapidly rising. So, every few paces I have to turn around and calm it all down. It turns into an inter-mammalian game of Grandmother’s Footsteps, which makes me laugh out loud. And the determination of 1921 to wrap his tongue around one strap in particular is remarkably strong and focussed – several times I have to properly lean into him and push him away and assert a degree of fleeting authority. It takes me ages to get to the safety of the field’s gate, but I do so with a big smile on my chops, and all my dangling straps intact.
As I enter the village church – dedicated to St Mary The Virgin – I’m met by the dreamy scent of lilies and the sound of human song. Turns out a wedding is imminent, and the local community choir is doing a last-minute rehearsal. I’m about to turn around, but one of the choir spots me and welcomes me in with a wave, so I plonk myself in a pew and get pleasantly lost in song-filled daydreaming. The inside of the church is whitewashed, the atmosphere feels clean and gentle, and the exposed roof rafters of the nave seem shaped like a seafaring keel, riffing, I’m guessing, off the Latin, navis – ship.
Ah, I realise that part of me is tired of being a lonesome, non-aligned, learner-mystic, and part of me – but by no means all of me – is hungry for an established religious vessel like this to carry me across the spiritual seas. Maybe I’ll find such a vessel on this journey? Maybe it will find me? I’m definitely spinning around and around in a homemade coracle right now, rather than ploughing purposefully through the waves in some tried and tested ship. There again, maybe I’ll finally take the mystical plunge, jump overboard and surrender to the ocean – and a coracle is probably as good as a ship for a drowning.
I swing by The Druid for brunch, and watch excited wedding guests arriving for a pre-service drink or two – a tradition, I suspect, that goes back several millennia. Some look dapper, some look elegant, some look gawky, one or two are oozing a little sexiness, and the celebratory buzz is sweet and fills the pub like an extra portion of sunshine. The headline of the pub’s copy of The Sun – SHE’S GETTING HARRYED IN THE MORNING – reminds me that there’s at least one more wedding happening today, although I would have thought Harrying is more of a honeymoon activity.
I do hope that the wedding party have brought their own fiddlers, and are all finished by midnight.
Two beer-swilling walkers – out walking from pub to pub – enquire about my journey. They suggest the Nine Ladies stone circle in Derbyshire and the nearby Flying Childers Inn.
I put ‘em both on The Map Of Possibilities, and peruse it for my next destination. Glastonbury is down the road, just the other side of Wells. It’s a no-brainer. Glastonbury is calling. Some counties I don’t have a clue about, and Somerset is one of them. Where does it begin and where does it end? And, apart from cows and cider and Glastonbury Festival, what does it do? Some sort of Arthurian fog seems to obscure it from my brain’s cartographical department. Somerset is my Lincolnshire – I don’t really know where it is, or how big it is.
I’m just leaving Stanton Drew when a car, unbidden, pulls over and offers to take me to a lay-by on the A368. It’s a man-woman couple, and I can tell it wasn’t his idea to invite some weirdo hitch-hiker into the car. She, however, fires away with questions, including the one often in people’s minds, but rarely spoken: “Have you ever had any bad experiences?”
Hmmmm. Twice I’ve appeared on local radio to talk about hitch-hiking, and both times, after some pleasantly disarming pre-air chat, the opening on-air remark has been, “So, tell me about some of your bad hitching experiences.” Which kind of makes sense, because journalism thrives on tragedy and drama, and who wants to know about common kindness?
“Well,” I reply, “out of several thousand lifts, I’ve had three that I would consider dodgy, but nothing I couldn’t handle.” And I leave it at that. They’re only going a few miles up the 368 and drop me in the last lay-by before they turn off.
I suspect every hitcher’s got dodgy stories to tell. Last week, in Oxford, I threw a little pre-pilgrimage drinks party in Liz’s garden. Twenty or so friends turned up – ninety per cent of whom were ex-hitchers. And, like old soldiers reminiscing about the war, the old hitching stories came out. And soon got quite dark. One friend’s friend was murdered whilst hitching. Another friend was once driven to some woods, and the driver pulled out a shotgun and ordered him to “Run!” In the end I had to ban the bad stories, and insist on cheerier ones, lest I get cold feet about the whole endeavour.
My dodgy lifts are a little less dramatic.
The first was ages ago, with an old Wiltshire boy, and half way through the lift I looked right and noticed that he had a hand down his trousers and was masturbating. I didn’t know what to do – I was quite young – so I just ignored what was happening, looked straight ahead, nattered and chattered away nervously, and asked him to drop me off at the first junction that we came to. I felt more sullied than frightened by the experience.
The second was with a guy driving south out of Edinburgh. Somewhere along the A1 we pulled over at a lay-by for a piss stop, and when I got back in the car he was sitting in his seat flipping through a porn mag, and asked me if I wanted to look at it too. I mumbled something about not being into the sexual objectification of women or something, and he got all embarrassed and put it away. Weird thing is, though, I didn’t get out of the car and let him drive off – instead I asked him to drop me at the next service station. It was an awkward fifteen minutes, but my overwhelming feeling was of pity, rather than fear. I could sense that he was a very lonely man.
The third was hitching from Chievely Services bound for Oxford one late evening. It was already beginning to get dark, which isn’t a very pleasant time to hitch – as you can feel yourself turning into a shady figure by the minute, and I didn’t have a sleeping bag with me. So, when a carload of four lads pulled over, I over-rode my better judgment and got in. I soon realised that they were all high as a dozen kites, and I was their entertainment. Their conversation just got more and more twisted, and they kept on looking at me to glean my reaction. Then they went joy-riding down some back roads, and insisted on dropping me off in some random village. Fortunately, it was just psychic violence, I guess, but it left me rattled. And in the middle of nowhere. I ended up walking through the countryside till I found the A34, and then spent the rest of the night walking along its verge all the way to Didcot, where a lorry driver picked me up at dawn.
So, that averages out at less than one dodgy lift per thousand, which ain’t a bad statistic, I know. Having said that they were “nothing I couldn’t handle,” I think a more honest reply would have been, “None of them turned out bad.”
Whilst my dad was a seasoned hitcher, mum only tried once – with her mate Mary from teacher training college. They ended up getting hassled by some lads in the middle of sleepy Norfolk, and one of them had run out into the road to flag down a passing car. But mum told the story with such a lightness of touch – even with a hint of comedy – that her experience never put me off. And, alas, even as a boy I already knew that women’s experience of life could be very different from men’s. I’m sure the dodgy lift statistic is a lot worse for women hitchers.
Whatever the statistics, and however you dress it up and celebrate its success stories, there’s no way of getting round the fact: hitch-hiking is a fundamentally vulnerable way of travelling.
Ten minutes standing at the front of the lay-by, and a bare-chested young buck pulls over, on his way to Cheddar Gorge for a Saturday run in the hills. He’s recently finished doing an engineering apprenticeship, and says he wants to learn some eco-building skills, but I can sense something of the traveller-spirit stirring inside him, wondering what lies beyond his familiar shores. He asks quite a few questions about hitch-hiking – I guess it’s just not part of youth culture any more – and I encourage him to give it a go some day. He parks at the top of the Gorge, shakes my hand, and is off, bounding up the slope in pursuit of that mysterious elixir that runners pursue, and that we non-runners can only even vaguely imagine.
It’s an easy walk down into Cheddar village itself, snaking through England’s very own Grand Canyon, which provides a merciful shade. I am simultaneously bemused, entertained and in awe of all the rock climbers. But Cheddar village is a weird little village – as if a sleepy Somerset backwater has been cross-bred with an out-of-season Skegness. A group of charity fund-raisers all dressed in various costumes accost me. I recognise Wonder Woman, one of the Teletubbies and those two annoying 118 blokes from the TV adverts, but I haven’t got a clue who the woman in the orange suit is, nor the bloke in the green dress holding a posy of flowers. I put a couple of quid in their collecting bucket, but it does feel like Cheddar village has seen a bit too much of the brown acid. A shopkeeper recommends the White Hart or the Black Dog, but I enter both and neither tickles my choosy biscuit, even though I’m parched and thirsty and ready for beer.
A mile of so out of Cheddar, just next to a field of inquisitive lamas, I finally find a suitable hitching spot, and am soon rewarded – by a neo-hippie family on their way to Wells. Turns out that the driver did his undergraduate dissertation on hitch-hiking – “Is hitch-hiking a form of ecological resistance to car culture?” For his research he’d both hitched around and driven around picking up hitchers.
“And what was your conclusion?”
“Ah, hitching’s totally dependent on car culture.”
I feel weirdly disappointed. I had been hoping for a more complex, or romantic, or revolutionary conclusion. “Maybe it would count as resistance,” I suggest, “if you did a bit of surreptitious criminal damage to every vehicle that picks you up?”
He looks at me askance.
When they drop me off in Wells they suggest I visit the Rifleman or the King Arthur in Glastonbury, but recommend that first I head to the Assembly Rooms, as today is the day that they chose the annual Glastonbury Bard. Sounds apt and promising.
My next lift – a young Glastonbury local rather than a neo-hippie – kindly drops me off right outside the Assembly Rooms, and I get chatting to Lisa on the door, herself a former Bard. She informs me that today is St Dunstan’s Day – St Dunstan being Glastonbury’s official saint. “He was a bit of an alchemist too,” she adds with a proud and knowing metaphysical glint in her eyes. “That’s why there’s an international alchemists’ gathering going on in town right now.”
The Choosing of the Bard doesn’t begin for a while, so I grab a beer, grab a seat, and begin reading a piece about St Dunstan, written by one of the aforementioned international alchemists.
Quite a saint he was, and still is for that matter: patron saint of goldsmiths, silversmiths, locksmiths, blacksmiths, jewellers and even armourers; one-time Abbot of Glastonbury; major restorer of the English monastic tradition; and even Archbishop of Canterbury for a couple of decades or more. He sure had a lot of strings to his bow, and for a couple of centuries after his death was one of England’s most revered saints. A famous folk story tells of him grabbing the Devil by his nose with a pair of red-hot blacksmith tongs. Another tells of him refusing to remove a hoof shoe that was causing the Devil pain, unless the Devil agreed never to enter a place where a horse shoe is hung over the door. I’ve always wondered about that superstition.
Turns out that the alchemists also claim Dunstan as their patron saint. His name is even attributed to an alchemical text published in the 1660s – “Philosophia Matura: Of the Stone of the Philosopher.” It is said by some that he diverted waters from both the white and red springs into the Abbey to be used in his alchemical experiments and rituals. And six centuries later, the infamous John Dee found mysterious red and white powders in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, along with a secret text written in an unknown alphabet.
There’s something in the Glastonbury waters that seems to thicken most plots. The New Age movement is not particularly new.
I raise my bottle of beer. Happy Saint’s Day, Dunstan. Wherever you are. And whoever you were.
To be honest, I’ve never quite got alchemy. Maybe it’s one of those things – like jazz music and knitting and smoking a pipe – that I’ll take up in my later years.
Alas, the Choosing of the Glastonbury Bard proves to be a most lacklustre affair. I think romantic me was expecting overflowing horns of mead and fine flurries of improvised verse, and buxom wizards and wise old wenches, but I find myself literally nodding off on several occasions. The applicants all give their best, and the outgoing Bard sings and spouts but doesn’t quite convince me, and so when the judges – all former Bards – adjourn to make their decision, I make my exit. Only one of the five candidates – all finalists from prior knockout events – seemed in any way up to the job, in my not so humble opinion. I really hope she gets it.
Heading out of the Assembly Rooms, a woman spies the scallop shell sewn onto my rucksack and enquires if I’ve done the Camino, which I haven’t. The shell was a gift from my late friend Sanri – for my 2008 clockwise hitch around Britain. We get chatting about the scallop shell’s rich associations – St James, the Camino, pilgrimage in general, and good old pre-Christian Aphrodite. “And did you know that the ancient Greek for scallop,” she asks rhetorically, “can also be translated as vulva?” I didn’t. I’m learning a lot today. And she says that the scallop shell wasn’t just a pilgrim symbol, it was also very practical – as a measuring scoop for food, ensuring that pilgrims got something to eat, but didn’t take the piss. I guess you would have used it for scooping water from rivers and streams, too. I bet there was a good pre-pilgrimage trade in large scallop shells, the deeper the its basin the better. Before parting, she recommends that I visit Boscawen-Un and Tregeseal stone circles in Cornwall. I scribble ‘em down on the ever-increasing Map Of Possibilities.
I decide to head up to the Tor for the night, but, lumbered with a full pack, the climb almost finishes me off, and I reach the top drenched in sweat, even though the sun has already fallen off Avalon’s edge. And then I discover that someone has already made their bed in the tower, and someone else is shuffling around on the east side, so – no longer feeling like a specially-anointed, lone spiritual super hero – I make my bed against the outside of the north wall, put my sleeping hat on, pull my sleeping bag around my shoulders, and fall asleep under the Somerset stars, lullabied by a strangely warm and strong breeze...
I unzip the inner zip, and then slowly unzip the outer. To be greeted by one of the most delightful morning scenes I’ve ever been greeted by: a gang of a dozen young bullocks are standing in an arc around the entrance of my tent, silhouetted against a fresh blue sky, all staring back at me with reciprocal bemusement. After ten seconds of friendly-enough mutual contemplation they decide to resume the game that I have so politely interrupted: Lick The Tent. Doesn’t matter who or what’s in it, dare you to lick it. As with youngsters the world over, the peer pressure is on, and the bravado is out. They’re all sporting numbered yellow plastic earrings in their right ears, and 1772 is by far the most adventurous. What a great and amusing way to start the day, watching bullocks at play, close up enough to smell their sweet and steamy breath. There’s something exquisitely beautiful and intelligent and sensitive about bullocks, and cows in general. A cow’s gaze can sometimes touch your heart as deeply as a dog’s, sometimes more so – because they don’t seem to want anything in return, not even your love.
I am glad, though, that I pitched my tent next to that recumbent menhir. I’m not too sure what the official statistics are, but I’m guessing that tents and their inhabitants occasionally get trampled by boisterous bovines.
He may have left us early, but at least he was trampled doing what he loved, by beings that he loved...
I dress – it’s always awkward dressing whilst lying on your back in a small tent – and crawl out to greet the day. The bullocks by now have dispersed, and are mooching and masticating all around the place. Having arrived at the stones in the gloaming, it’s marvellous to see them in their sun-lit glory: a proper chunky circle of stones. The church and village now lie upon the western horizon, and in every direction there are undulating fields and ancient hedgerows and May-green trees. Such a sturdy and pretty English scene.
I go a-wandering, barefoot, through the morning dew, but when I turn back to view the circle from afar, I see an old Landrover driving through the field. For a few seconds, I entertain the outside hope that the occupants won’t notice my vaguely-disguised tent. But then they drive right up to it, and park right outside. Ah. Busted.
Now, the phrase wild camping doesn’t sit that easily with me. It smacks a bit of hipster re-branding. Back in the day – my over-pampered millennial child – it was just called camping. I guess it does make it sound a lot more adventurous and heroic, and it does differentiate real camping from molly-coddled campsite camping, and I shouldn’t be such a middle-aged moaner – but, whatever you call it, I reckon there are several sensible rules if you’re camping beyond the bounds of English law. Unless you’re camping in the middle of the woods or in the middle of nowhere: pitch late and strike early. More generally: leave no trace, and don’t get caught. Hmmm. I’ve just broken two of these unofficial rules – and on only my second night out. I’ll be up before the hobo beak, if I’m not careful.
I decide to return to the tent, confess my sins and bear the consequences. As I approach, one of the vehicle occupants begins shouting something or other at me. Being half deaf, I don’t have a clue what she’s saying. I just smile and nod and wave with both of my hands and shout back, “I’ll pack straight away! I’ll pack straight away!” and that seems to satisfy her honour. They drive off without even looking into the whites of my eyes. I guess I’m not the first meandering hippie to chance it camping out at Stanton Drew, and I won’t be the last.
As I pack, the scattered bullocks decided to reconvene, and by the time I’m ready to exit the field, there’s a fair-sized bunch of them come to see me off. Turns out the game this time is Lick That Rucksack Strap, and now there’s quite a collective friskiness to the players. 1921 is by far the most daring, with 1944 and 1966 riding his confident wake. Every few paces I can sense their excitement – and their collective physical momentum – rapidly rising. So, every few paces I have to turn around and calm it all down. It turns into an inter-mammalian game of Grandmother’s Footsteps, which makes me laugh out loud. And the determination of 1921 to wrap his tongue around one strap in particular is remarkably strong and focussed – several times I have to properly lean into him and push him away and assert a degree of fleeting authority. It takes me ages to get to the safety of the field’s gate, but I do so with a big smile on my chops, and all my dangling straps intact.
As I enter the village church – dedicated to St Mary The Virgin – I’m met by the dreamy scent of lilies and the sound of human song. Turns out a wedding is imminent, and the local community choir is doing a last-minute rehearsal. I’m about to turn around, but one of the choir spots me and welcomes me in with a wave, so I plonk myself in a pew and get pleasantly lost in song-filled daydreaming. The inside of the church is whitewashed, the atmosphere feels clean and gentle, and the exposed roof rafters of the nave seem shaped like a seafaring keel, riffing, I’m guessing, off the Latin, navis – ship.
Ah, I realise that part of me is tired of being a lonesome, non-aligned, learner-mystic, and part of me – but by no means all of me – is hungry for an established religious vessel like this to carry me across the spiritual seas. Maybe I’ll find such a vessel on this journey? Maybe it will find me? I’m definitely spinning around and around in a homemade coracle right now, rather than ploughing purposefully through the waves in some tried and tested ship. There again, maybe I’ll finally take the mystical plunge, jump overboard and surrender to the ocean – and a coracle is probably as good as a ship for a drowning.
I swing by The Druid for brunch, and watch excited wedding guests arriving for a pre-service drink or two – a tradition, I suspect, that goes back several millennia. Some look dapper, some look elegant, some look gawky, one or two are oozing a little sexiness, and the celebratory buzz is sweet and fills the pub like an extra portion of sunshine. The headline of the pub’s copy of The Sun – SHE’S GETTING HARRYED IN THE MORNING – reminds me that there’s at least one more wedding happening today, although I would have thought Harrying is more of a honeymoon activity.
I do hope that the wedding party have brought their own fiddlers, and are all finished by midnight.
Two beer-swilling walkers – out walking from pub to pub – enquire about my journey. They suggest the Nine Ladies stone circle in Derbyshire and the nearby Flying Childers Inn.
I put ‘em both on The Map Of Possibilities, and peruse it for my next destination. Glastonbury is down the road, just the other side of Wells. It’s a no-brainer. Glastonbury is calling. Some counties I don’t have a clue about, and Somerset is one of them. Where does it begin and where does it end? And, apart from cows and cider and Glastonbury Festival, what does it do? Some sort of Arthurian fog seems to obscure it from my brain’s cartographical department. Somerset is my Lincolnshire – I don’t really know where it is, or how big it is.
I’m just leaving Stanton Drew when a car, unbidden, pulls over and offers to take me to a lay-by on the A368. It’s a man-woman couple, and I can tell it wasn’t his idea to invite some weirdo hitch-hiker into the car. She, however, fires away with questions, including the one often in people’s minds, but rarely spoken: “Have you ever had any bad experiences?”
Hmmmm. Twice I’ve appeared on local radio to talk about hitch-hiking, and both times, after some pleasantly disarming pre-air chat, the opening on-air remark has been, “So, tell me about some of your bad hitching experiences.” Which kind of makes sense, because journalism thrives on tragedy and drama, and who wants to know about common kindness?
“Well,” I reply, “out of several thousand lifts, I’ve had three that I would consider dodgy, but nothing I couldn’t handle.” And I leave it at that. They’re only going a few miles up the 368 and drop me in the last lay-by before they turn off.
I suspect every hitcher’s got dodgy stories to tell. Last week, in Oxford, I threw a little pre-pilgrimage drinks party in Liz’s garden. Twenty or so friends turned up – ninety per cent of whom were ex-hitchers. And, like old soldiers reminiscing about the war, the old hitching stories came out. And soon got quite dark. One friend’s friend was murdered whilst hitching. Another friend was once driven to some woods, and the driver pulled out a shotgun and ordered him to “Run!” In the end I had to ban the bad stories, and insist on cheerier ones, lest I get cold feet about the whole endeavour.
My dodgy lifts are a little less dramatic.
The first was ages ago, with an old Wiltshire boy, and half way through the lift I looked right and noticed that he had a hand down his trousers and was masturbating. I didn’t know what to do – I was quite young – so I just ignored what was happening, looked straight ahead, nattered and chattered away nervously, and asked him to drop me off at the first junction that we came to. I felt more sullied than frightened by the experience.
The second was with a guy driving south out of Edinburgh. Somewhere along the A1 we pulled over at a lay-by for a piss stop, and when I got back in the car he was sitting in his seat flipping through a porn mag, and asked me if I wanted to look at it too. I mumbled something about not being into the sexual objectification of women or something, and he got all embarrassed and put it away. Weird thing is, though, I didn’t get out of the car and let him drive off – instead I asked him to drop me at the next service station. It was an awkward fifteen minutes, but my overwhelming feeling was of pity, rather than fear. I could sense that he was a very lonely man.
The third was hitching from Chievely Services bound for Oxford one late evening. It was already beginning to get dark, which isn’t a very pleasant time to hitch – as you can feel yourself turning into a shady figure by the minute, and I didn’t have a sleeping bag with me. So, when a carload of four lads pulled over, I over-rode my better judgment and got in. I soon realised that they were all high as a dozen kites, and I was their entertainment. Their conversation just got more and more twisted, and they kept on looking at me to glean my reaction. Then they went joy-riding down some back roads, and insisted on dropping me off in some random village. Fortunately, it was just psychic violence, I guess, but it left me rattled. And in the middle of nowhere. I ended up walking through the countryside till I found the A34, and then spent the rest of the night walking along its verge all the way to Didcot, where a lorry driver picked me up at dawn.
So, that averages out at less than one dodgy lift per thousand, which ain’t a bad statistic, I know. Having said that they were “nothing I couldn’t handle,” I think a more honest reply would have been, “None of them turned out bad.”
Whilst my dad was a seasoned hitcher, mum only tried once – with her mate Mary from teacher training college. They ended up getting hassled by some lads in the middle of sleepy Norfolk, and one of them had run out into the road to flag down a passing car. But mum told the story with such a lightness of touch – even with a hint of comedy – that her experience never put me off. And, alas, even as a boy I already knew that women’s experience of life could be very different from men’s. I’m sure the dodgy lift statistic is a lot worse for women hitchers.
Whatever the statistics, and however you dress it up and celebrate its success stories, there’s no way of getting round the fact: hitch-hiking is a fundamentally vulnerable way of travelling.
Ten minutes standing at the front of the lay-by, and a bare-chested young buck pulls over, on his way to Cheddar Gorge for a Saturday run in the hills. He’s recently finished doing an engineering apprenticeship, and says he wants to learn some eco-building skills, but I can sense something of the traveller-spirit stirring inside him, wondering what lies beyond his familiar shores. He asks quite a few questions about hitch-hiking – I guess it’s just not part of youth culture any more – and I encourage him to give it a go some day. He parks at the top of the Gorge, shakes my hand, and is off, bounding up the slope in pursuit of that mysterious elixir that runners pursue, and that we non-runners can only even vaguely imagine.
It’s an easy walk down into Cheddar village itself, snaking through England’s very own Grand Canyon, which provides a merciful shade. I am simultaneously bemused, entertained and in awe of all the rock climbers. But Cheddar village is a weird little village – as if a sleepy Somerset backwater has been cross-bred with an out-of-season Skegness. A group of charity fund-raisers all dressed in various costumes accost me. I recognise Wonder Woman, one of the Teletubbies and those two annoying 118 blokes from the TV adverts, but I haven’t got a clue who the woman in the orange suit is, nor the bloke in the green dress holding a posy of flowers. I put a couple of quid in their collecting bucket, but it does feel like Cheddar village has seen a bit too much of the brown acid. A shopkeeper recommends the White Hart or the Black Dog, but I enter both and neither tickles my choosy biscuit, even though I’m parched and thirsty and ready for beer.
A mile of so out of Cheddar, just next to a field of inquisitive lamas, I finally find a suitable hitching spot, and am soon rewarded – by a neo-hippie family on their way to Wells. Turns out that the driver did his undergraduate dissertation on hitch-hiking – “Is hitch-hiking a form of ecological resistance to car culture?” For his research he’d both hitched around and driven around picking up hitchers.
“And what was your conclusion?”
“Ah, hitching’s totally dependent on car culture.”
I feel weirdly disappointed. I had been hoping for a more complex, or romantic, or revolutionary conclusion. “Maybe it would count as resistance,” I suggest, “if you did a bit of surreptitious criminal damage to every vehicle that picks you up?”
He looks at me askance.
When they drop me off in Wells they suggest I visit the Rifleman or the King Arthur in Glastonbury, but recommend that first I head to the Assembly Rooms, as today is the day that they chose the annual Glastonbury Bard. Sounds apt and promising.
My next lift – a young Glastonbury local rather than a neo-hippie – kindly drops me off right outside the Assembly Rooms, and I get chatting to Lisa on the door, herself a former Bard. She informs me that today is St Dunstan’s Day – St Dunstan being Glastonbury’s official saint. “He was a bit of an alchemist too,” she adds with a proud and knowing metaphysical glint in her eyes. “That’s why there’s an international alchemists’ gathering going on in town right now.”
The Choosing of the Bard doesn’t begin for a while, so I grab a beer, grab a seat, and begin reading a piece about St Dunstan, written by one of the aforementioned international alchemists.
Quite a saint he was, and still is for that matter: patron saint of goldsmiths, silversmiths, locksmiths, blacksmiths, jewellers and even armourers; one-time Abbot of Glastonbury; major restorer of the English monastic tradition; and even Archbishop of Canterbury for a couple of decades or more. He sure had a lot of strings to his bow, and for a couple of centuries after his death was one of England’s most revered saints. A famous folk story tells of him grabbing the Devil by his nose with a pair of red-hot blacksmith tongs. Another tells of him refusing to remove a hoof shoe that was causing the Devil pain, unless the Devil agreed never to enter a place where a horse shoe is hung over the door. I’ve always wondered about that superstition.
Turns out that the alchemists also claim Dunstan as their patron saint. His name is even attributed to an alchemical text published in the 1660s – “Philosophia Matura: Of the Stone of the Philosopher.” It is said by some that he diverted waters from both the white and red springs into the Abbey to be used in his alchemical experiments and rituals. And six centuries later, the infamous John Dee found mysterious red and white powders in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, along with a secret text written in an unknown alphabet.
There’s something in the Glastonbury waters that seems to thicken most plots. The New Age movement is not particularly new.
I raise my bottle of beer. Happy Saint’s Day, Dunstan. Wherever you are. And whoever you were.
To be honest, I’ve never quite got alchemy. Maybe it’s one of those things – like jazz music and knitting and smoking a pipe – that I’ll take up in my later years.
Alas, the Choosing of the Glastonbury Bard proves to be a most lacklustre affair. I think romantic me was expecting overflowing horns of mead and fine flurries of improvised verse, and buxom wizards and wise old wenches, but I find myself literally nodding off on several occasions. The applicants all give their best, and the outgoing Bard sings and spouts but doesn’t quite convince me, and so when the judges – all former Bards – adjourn to make their decision, I make my exit. Only one of the five candidates – all finalists from prior knockout events – seemed in any way up to the job, in my not so humble opinion. I really hope she gets it.
Heading out of the Assembly Rooms, a woman spies the scallop shell sewn onto my rucksack and enquires if I’ve done the Camino, which I haven’t. The shell was a gift from my late friend Sanri – for my 2008 clockwise hitch around Britain. We get chatting about the scallop shell’s rich associations – St James, the Camino, pilgrimage in general, and good old pre-Christian Aphrodite. “And did you know that the ancient Greek for scallop,” she asks rhetorically, “can also be translated as vulva?” I didn’t. I’m learning a lot today. And she says that the scallop shell wasn’t just a pilgrim symbol, it was also very practical – as a measuring scoop for food, ensuring that pilgrims got something to eat, but didn’t take the piss. I guess you would have used it for scooping water from rivers and streams, too. I bet there was a good pre-pilgrimage trade in large scallop shells, the deeper the its basin the better. Before parting, she recommends that I visit Boscawen-Un and Tregeseal stone circles in Cornwall. I scribble ‘em down on the ever-increasing Map Of Possibilities.
I decide to head up to the Tor for the night, but, lumbered with a full pack, the climb almost finishes me off, and I reach the top drenched in sweat, even though the sun has already fallen off Avalon’s edge. And then I discover that someone has already made their bed in the tower, and someone else is shuffling around on the east side, so – no longer feeling like a specially-anointed, lone spiritual super hero – I make my bed against the outside of the north wall, put my sleeping hat on, pull my sleeping bag around my shoulders, and fall asleep under the Somerset stars, lullabied by a strangely warm and strong breeze...