Walking to Camelot (11 page)

“I don't know much about John Dryden, Karl, other than what I learned in high school — he was a poet and a satirist. But I do remember one line of his that I rather cherish.”

“And what line is that, John?”

“ ‘Beware the fury of a patient man.' ”

“Are you making a dig at my impatience again?”

“No, but if the shoe fits, you know?”

“Ha! Life's too short to dawdle.”

We wanted to visit Canons Ashby House, but it is closed. However, the Trust kindly allows walkers to pass through the grounds without charge. A famous statue of a shepherd boy playing a flute stands on the front lawn.

While lingering in the sunshine here, we cannot help but observe several National Trust workers on the grounds trying to fire up a weed-killing machine that belches a lot of smoke but kills no weeds. Seven workers move along at a snail's pace with this monstrous devil, but the weeds are still very much present after they pass. If all seven workers used a simple handheld weed-eater — even an old-fashioned scythe — they could have finished the job in under an hour.

That said, the National Trust has become the driving engine for preservation of hundreds of heritage buildings and sizable tracts of nature reserves. Incorporated in 1895, the Trust's purpose is “the preservation for the benefit of the Nation of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest, and, as regards lands, for the preservation of their natural aspect, features and animal and plant life. Also the preservation of furniture, pictures and chattels of any description having national and historic or artistic interest.” It boasts the largest membership of any charity in the country, with 3 million paid subscribers and 40,000 unpaid volunteers. The Trust owns more than 6oo,000 acres of countryside, 600 miles of coastline, and over 250 heritage buildings, and 13 million people visit its properties each year.

The writer A.A. Gill decries the Trust as a backward-looking keeper of the nostalgia industry, but it is hard to be critical of the one agency in the world that works indefatigably to not only preserve historic structures but keep the countryside green and frozen to development. It may be that the Puck of the garden has replaced the Green Man guarding the ancient forests, but one can only work with repairing, redressing, and preserving what we have left to us. Bemoaning the sins of one's ancestors is surely a nihilistic exercise. The Trust is the envy of like organizations in countries such as Canada, where it is difficult to find patronage beyond meagre government resources to conserve heritage sites.

Our route out of Canons Ashby takes us down a steep hill on a minor road that leads to the valley below, where we cross over a stile, then a narrow plank over a stream, known as a “sleeper bridge,” to enter the derelict village of Moreton Pinkney. This place has seen better days, though there is a pretentious manor house with a Victorian tower and a couple of pubs: The Crown and England's Rose, renamed from Red Lion in honour of Princess Diana.

A footbridge leads over a gentle stream to follow a hedge-lined track. A sign at a farm gate warns: “Danger — Guard dogs loose.” A little later on, another sign: “Trespassers may be seriously injured.” We stop to consider.

“Somebody's trying to tell us something, Karl. Maybe walkers have strayed too often off the path here.”

Karl just gives me that half-smile of his, takes a swig from his Thermos — he won't admit it, but I know there's ale in there — and sallies forth, oblivious to the fierce barking that erupts from kennels halfway across the next field.

The path continues relentlessly downward to become a wickedly wet bridleway. At the bottom is one vast series of mudholes. From this fetid primeval ooze it is a long, long climb up a slippery scarp to the pleasant village of Eydon. It seems that every cottager is in her front yard this Saturday, edging herbaceous borders, killing weeds, and generally cleaning up. We pass a village green where the medieval stocks are still intact. I cast them a nervous glance, for I am dirty, grungy, and dishevelled enough to be ensconced there as some tramp despoiling the spiffy village vista.

We quench our thirst on an outdoor picnic table at the Royal Oak
.
A farmer on a tractor wielding a huge, yawning bucket motors down the street and loads up people's excess sod. A bloke at the next table tells me that the village elders appoint a specific day in spring to spruce up the place, and that most cottagers join in. Some poor lad we watch is being excoriated for spraying rat poison all over his mother's flower garden.

John Grindlay runs the Eydon Kettle Company from his home here. His
STORM
kettle is portable and allows one to boil water anywhere, being an improvement on a design that originated in Ireland. If we were English and absolutely had to have a cuppa every hour along the trail, this would be a necessity for the backpack. I point this out to Karl, who is singularly unimpressed.

“To hell with tea — where's our next real drink?”

“Coming right up, at the Griffin in Chipping Warden.” With that, he quaffs the last dregs of his Guinness and hoists his pack.

At the other side of the village, we begin our descent into the valley of the infant River Cherwell. “Infant,” says the
Guide
—I'll say! When we cross over a footbridge, this majestically named stream is no more than a ditch clogged with willows, alder bushes, and bulrushes. This is the first stream on our journey that flows southward, emptying into the Thames at Oxford.

I remark to Karl on a large herd of cows in the field we are approaching.

“Stop calling steers ‘cows' — steers are castrated male bulls,” he says. “Cows are female.”

“Then what are bullocks?”

“Bullocks are the same as steers.”

“What about castrated females, then — are they heifers?”

“Dammit, no! They don't generally castrate the females — a heifer is just a young female that hasn't yet given birth.”

And with that, Karl clumps down his walking stick and marches ahead.

“Oh, bollocks!” I shout after him. “Why don't we just call them all ‘bovines,' then?”

Just before ascending a bridleway up a hill, I catch up with Karl. He is standing poised with his walking stick, pointing to a field below, from which a ghetto blaster is blaring the original Don McLean version of “American Pie
.
” Dozens of gaily painted caravans and lorries occupy a vast meadow. Gypsies, or “tinkers,” as they are sometimes known, were historically associated with green lanes, because the tracks were wide enough to accommodate their trademark horse and cart. Nowadays they use lorries or cars to haul their caravans (trailers in Britain are called “caravans”), and the green lanes are too muddied up by horses anyway.

“What do you think, Karl? There must be fifty caravans down there.”

Little waifs, dogs, and horses gambol about, while gaudily clad women with long black hair, glittering hoop earrings, and ankle-length cotton dresses mill around what looks like a communal cooking fire. An aroma redolent of borscht, sausages, chips, and horse manure wafts our way.

Karl smiles. “Live and let live, John. They don't seem to be harming anyone; and I like the self-sufficiency I see down there. I wouldn't mind tasting some of that borscht, either.”

“That doesn't sound like you — where's your Dutch order­liness and cleanliness?”

Karl laughs and shrugs. “I guess I admire their resourcefulness.”

Atop the hill, sheep roam everywhere. Although sheep are usually seen as cowardly creatures, a mother with young lambs will run fearlessly toward you if you come too close, to divert you from her babies. And why do they shit every time you approach them? Are they all incontinent?

Clearly visible on the hillside just beyond us is a golden track that resembles the yellow brick road in
The Wizard of Oz,
and for a moment I turn euphoric. Then we descend into a miasma that alters the spirit.

Just a half mile or so short of Chipping Warden, we en-counter a bevy of tumbledown farm cottages. Then we cross a brook and enter a wide track through a spinney, where we navigate through several mouldering, derelict concrete air-raid shelters, huddled together and forgotten. It's dark, dingy, and clammy in this scrub spinney, and we cannot exit the place fast enough. It gives me the creeps. And there is much evidence of mice and rats about. The shelters exist because of the nearby airfield, one of the most important in
RAF
Bomber Command during World War
II
.

We bear left from the evil spinney and enter Chipping Warden, where we stop to refresh ourselves at the Griffin Inn. Wide greens fronting ochre-hued thatched cottages give the place real character. The word
Chipping
is often found in village names in England, as it is the Old English word for “market.”

The big-cheese landowner in Chipping Warden during the eighteenth century was the Duke of Beaufort. The chap had serious marital problems. A bill was moved in the House of Lords in 1744 to dissolve his marriage with Frances Scudamore. Witnesses from Chipping Warden included a farmer who testified “That in the beginning of June, 1741, he observed a Man afterwards found to be Lord Talbot meet the Duchess as she was walking alone in the Fields near that Place; and thereupon mentioned adulterous Familiarities which passed between them.” The House Journal carefully omits details as to the “Familiarities,” but records that witnesses testified “as to the sending for a Midwife to the Duchess; her being delivered of a Daughter.” So it was not just the common folk who used the footpaths for their dalliances.

It was an altogether humiliating exercise for both husband and wife. The common people began twittering about fornication in the fields. When hubby sued for divorce, Frances countersued, alleging the duke was impotent — and he then had to go through the execrable ordeal in March 1743 of demonstrating before court-appointed examiners that he was physically capable of having an erection.

The origin of the term “lover's lane” lies with the green lanes and footpaths where lovers met for over a thousand years throughout Britain. In E.M. Forster's novel
A Room with a View,
Lucy and Cecil pause “where a footpath diverged from the highroad.” The path was a more intimate alternative to a public walk along the road. Lucy chooses the propriety of the highroad because she is not yet ready for courtship intimacies and the pleasures of the path. Paths, in fact, were graded in terms of how well used they were in order to estimate the chances of an unwanted encounter while engaging in a moment of intimacy. Tennyson's poem “Marriage Morning” attests to the differentiation:

Woods, where we hid from the wet,

Stiles where we stayed to be kind.

We are having a squishy time trudging through fields of muddy sod mixed with sheep feces. Dirty weather adds to the ordeal. Raindrops the size of mothballs pelt down. After two hours of drenching, bone-chilling rain, we reach our
B&B
, a large stone farmhouse set back from the lane beside a clump of elm trees. I am now officially a water rat. A rosy-cheeked, middle-aged landlady greets us with a smile. She is all business and ushers us in to the parlour for the customary tea and biscuits. I am still shivering and have a premonition of a cold, miserable night. So I pose the taboo question:

“Do you suppose that we could have some heat in our rooms so as to dry out? I'd like to hang my wet clothes on the radiator.”

Shocked silence. “We generally don't turn the heat on between the May bank-holiday weekend and September,” she replies with chilly hauteur.

Oh-oh! Cross-cultural angst. Is it perversity, tradition, or mere frugality that promotes this English mindset? I wonder.

“Uh, well, we are very wet, you see.”

“There is a big tub in your room, so you can take a nice hot bath. As for your clothes, they should dry out by morning. Tell you what, if they are not progressing well by the time you two are back from the pub, I can pop them in the dryer.” Her bright eyes flash with what she considers an eminently sensible solution to the problem.

Karl shrugs and says he is going to his room to have a hot soak. But my mettle is up.

“Look,” I say, “perhaps we are just wimpy North Americans, but if I don't get warm soon I am liable to get pneumonia. We've been walking in a chilling downpour for a couple of hours. Let me pay you ten pounds extra for putting the heat on tonight.”

“What?” The woman's cheeks become even redder and puffier. “Why, that's just not done, you know, this time of year!”

But I can see she is thinking, and probably needs the money. Now, perhaps, we will discover if the national mania over heat is based upon frugality or just custom. Her wheels are definitely turning.

“All right now,” she says, after a long pause. “I will turn on the main thermostat to heat your rooms for precisely two hours — take the chill off, perhaps — and that will cost you five pounds extra. Heat is very expensive in Britain, and the thermostat controls the whole house, so it does seem like a waste when one can always put on a jumper.”

And that definitely spells the end of discussion.

Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,

To see a fine lady upon a white horse;

Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,

And she shall have music wherever she goes.

—MEDIEVAL BANBURY NURSERY RHYME—

THE ELDERBERRY WINE
so fortifies me that I hardly notice the frigid bedroom and sleep like a baby. Next morning we decline breakfast and opt for an early start. Our path intersects the delightful Oxford Canal. A gaudily painted canal boat bedecked with potted plants is just passing through a complex-looking lock. Karl laughingly points with his walking stick toward a couple of Holstein cows leaning over the steep bank, their big brown oval eyes fixated in curious wonder upon this strange craft passing below them. Thank you, my bovine ladies — you're looking beautiful this morning.

The canal was completed in 1786 and linked the coal fields of Coventry to the Thames at Oxford. Today one can walk for miles along its 78-mile towpath. Like so many of the byways and green roads of England, canals have become pleasure corridors when once they were chiefly used for freight. The last time that animal power was used to haul a flatboat down the Canal was in 1959, when the
Friendship
was drawn by a mule. The Oxford is one of the favourites in a national canal system that draws tourists from all over the world to sample the slow pace of travel through England's countryside. Its special delight is that, unlike most inland waterways, it meanders and twists in wacky loops amid myriad hills, allowing boaters to enjoy unique, bucolic landscape perspectives. One might even glimpse fairies in those hollow hills.

Farnborough lies at the very fringe of the Cotswolds. The village sits on the south scarp of the Burton Dassett Hills. It is unworldly in its charm, highlighted by the savoury butterscotch stone walls of the church. The spire is Victorian but the remainder of the structure is medieval. At the entrance to the churchyard is a lychgate — typically a covered, little structure, and in this case slate-roofed. Inside are cherry-red pews that gleam in polished splendour.

Farnborough Hall is another of those mega-piles built by the rich in the eighteenth century. Alas, it is closed. We decide to compensate by taking refreshment at the Inn at Farnborough, a sixteenth-century pub, where we sample some genuine Warwickshire hooch known as “hooky.” The menu claims, “The Inn also serves ‘proper coffee' by trained baristas.” I didn't see a barista anywhere, but Samuel Pepys would have felt at home here knowing he could enjoy strong coffee. Of course, Pepys would have had to first sort out which Farnborough was on offer. (There are five towns of the same name in England.)

A couple of hours later we stand gaping like scared skydivers on a viaduct over the
M
40 motorway, the vast freeway connecting London to Birmingham, and I experience another vertiginous moment. Vehicles rush feverishly below us, spewing their carbon imprint over the countryside. The noise is deafening. The moment passes: a long field with a red rock path, a stile, an apple orchard, and presto! We arrive abruptly in the ancient village of Warmington, a million miles in time and space from the
M
40.

Nick and Helen are waiting for us at their
B&B
, which adjoins a pond that is home to three white ducks who wander tamely about the green all day. Helen settles us in and kindly offers to wash and dry our clothes. Nick is an accountant who works from home via the computer, travelling to London by train twice a week to meet with clients. They are quintessentially polite, helpful, and low-key.

We walk to a pub recommended by Nick only to find that although drinks are served, the kitchen is taking two weeks off. (This drives North Americans up the wall — how do you build and maintain a business if you are so erratic in service?) I ask the barkeeper to recommend another pub, and he says to go to Horley, but when we arrive there we are told they don't serve food either; so we catch a cab to Wroxton, where we actually find victuals.

The White Horse Inn is warm and sumptuous. Golden lamps glow in every window. Karl and I both tuck into a scrumptious fisherman's pie. Instead of wine, I wash my fare down with two iced Smirnoffs, while Karl orders a couple of double Scotches. Then I finish the other half of Karl's pie, not because he didn't like it, but because he has a tiny stomach and is what one would call a “grazer.” His grazing habits do not extend to alcoholic beverages.

It's time to hit the sack. I order a cab back to our
B&B
.

“My feet feel like they've been ravaged from a forced march.”

“How do you think all those Roman soldiers felt, marching forty or fifty miles a day with packs heavier than yours?”

“How is it that you have no blister problems?”

“Because I am a tough old logger from the woods — my calluses have built up over decades.”

“A tough old logger with brass balls is more like it! I think I will dump some more clothes and get some blister treatment tomorrow in Banbury.”

“You'd do better to dump some of those useless books.”

“Never.”

We have decided to stay in Warmington for two nights so I can treat my feet and Karl can take a day to drive up to Yorkshire in a rental car. Karl has a family tradition of burying capsules with notes and coins all over England for his children to find. He began this tradition long before the advent of geocaching, a
GPS
-based system for hiding treasure in containers that hit the scene in North America in 2000. One of his daughters reciprocates and buries a capsule or two for Karl to find using a treasure map she gives him. The current one is for a certain Yorkshire abbey, where the capsule is buried near a bench beneath a large oak tree a specified distance from the abbey entrance.

BANBURY HAS BEEN AN
important market town for over 1,500 years. It lies at the junction of two ancient roads — the Salt Way and Banbury Lane — and once had the largest cattle market in Europe. Nearby Cherwell Valley produced the famous Banbury cheese.

An impressive market cross, a church that resembles a cathedral, and a strange monument of a young woman astride a horse combine to impress the visitor. The market cross itself is a replica, as a Puritan
MP
removed the original in the sixteenth century. The Puritans, like Henry
VIII
before them, destroyed so much of England's architecture. It took the prudish yet pragmatic Victorians to replace the market cross, in commemoration of the marriage of Victoria to Prince Albert.

The Banbury Cross nursery rhyme has survived. William Gladstone sang the popular rhyme to his children every day as they took “rides on his foot, slung over his knee,” and in the 2011 film
Anonymous,
Queen Elizabeth
I
is heard singing the final lines while dancing in her bedchamber. Speculation still rages as to whether the statue of the “fine lady” on the horse celebrates Elizabeth
I
or Lady Godiva. My money is on Godiva.

At Boots pharmacy, I find a blister prevention spray that will give me a new layer of water-resistant skin each morning. Contrast this with the nineteenth-century folk remedy prescribed by Francis Galton in
The Art of Travel:
“Blisters? Simply make a lather of soap suds inside your socks and break a raw egg into each boot to soften the leather.” Yuck!

During the last week we have encountered many humble chapels and meeting houses that denote the historical presence of Methodists, Baptists, and Quakers — people who were regarded by Anglicans as only slightly more palatable than Roman Catholics. The Quakers were imprisoned at Banbury in the seventeenth century for attending services at their meeting houses. John and Charles Wesley frequently roamed this part of the countryside, preaching at first in open fields. For them, their fellow Anglicans had become too detached from scripture and had morphed into the “frozen chosen.”

Banbury was a hotbed of religious dissension during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It wasn't until 1689, with the Act of Toleration, that Nonconformists were exempted from attending Anglican church services. Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710 that the residents of Banbury showed “continuous zeal.” In 1790, rather than pay additional taxes to repair the unsafe foundations of the town church, the citizens opted to blow their church up with gunpowder.

Banbury still holds a traditional “mop fair” each autumn — a form of labour exchange that dates to the fourteenth century. After the Black Death wiped out entire villages, labour shortages emerged and landowners searched desperately for workers. In market towns throughout England, people would congregate on the appointed day in the town square to bargain with prospective employers. Food, refreshment, and entertainment soon turned these hiring meets into vibrant fairs. An individual would signify his or her employment preference by displaying some emblem — a shepherd held a crook or tuft of wool; cattle workers held clumps of straw; a field labourer held a shovel; while dairymaids carried pails, and housemaids held mops or brooms. If a bargain was struck, the employer had to seal it by handing over a few shillings to his new employee.

Intense partying occurs on the first weekend in July with the Banbury Hobby Horse Festival. Since 2000, Morris dancers have adapted their traditional costume ritual to the peculiar traditions associated with the lady on the white horse. Many costumed animals appear on the streets during this raucous weekend — Eustasia the unicorn, Vibria the dragon, and other such creatures. There is a colourful parade, street vending, raucous music — and on the bandstand appears a fiery preacher who vehemently denounces the gaudy, pagan festival, claiming that people are “following those jingling bells to hell!” He is in deadly earnest. One year even the preacher smiled when one of the Four Horses of the Apocalypse handed him a note proclaiming “The end of the world is neigh!” The contrary preacher has himself become an important actor in this riotous event.

The moral degeneracy of Banbury was bemoaned for centuries. In 1628, when a huge fire destroyed much of the town, the presiding vicar, William Whately, gave a two-hour sermon on the depravity that had merited God's “severe judgment.”

Banbury's character has amused the English in other ways. A proverb from 1662 takes note of the culinary passion of residents for baking their renowned cakes and buns: “Banbury zeal, cheese, and cakes.” A Banbury Tinker in English folklore is someone who tries to mend things but only makes them worse.

The Elizabethan-styled Reindeer Inn is one of the chief architectural wonders of the town. I stop here for a pint of lager and admire the antique charm, especially the great Globe Room, with its awesome panelling and decorated doorways. After being suitably fortified, I feel compelled to go down the street to sample the famous Banbury cake, a spiced, currant-filled pastry similar to an Eccles cake. Formerly made exclusively in Banbury, these cakes have been baked since 1586, and were once shipped around the world.

Now, I am expecting something mouth-wateringly sensuous. I know, silly mistake. The English do not like excess — in their food or much else. So when I bite into the pastry, it is a tad disappointing. And a little dry. Bill Bryson writes of English taste, “They are the only people in the world who think of jam and currants as thrilling constituents of a pudding or cake.” And James Joyce has his hero in
Ulysses
feed the gulls with the Banbury treat: “He halted again and bought from the old applewoman two Banbury cakes for a penny and broke the brittle paste and threw its fragments down into the Liffey. See that? The gulls swooped silently, two, then all from their heights, pouncing on prey.”

Of course, one can always order a spotted dick. This popular dessert includes dried fruit — again, currants or raisins — but at least it is usually served with custard to make it palatable. Hospital bureaucrats at Gloucestershire
NHS
Trust renamed the dish “spotted Richard” in 2001, concerned that people would confuse it with male genitalia. After a wave of protest over such prudishness, the Trust restored the true name in 2002, so “spotted dick” it remains.

Then there is the famous cream tea, served with a scone, jam, and “clotted cream” — a culinary mystery. Why the English are so stingy with the fat content in most dessert items and yet encourage clogging of arteries with clotted cream is beyond my comprehension. The cream would be classed as pure butter in North America, as it has a typical fat content of 64 percent. Lathering such richness on a dry biscuit mixed with gooey jam is not my idea of gastronomic decadence. Yet the monks of Tavistock Abbey in Devon were making clotted cream in the fourteenth century, so it has a lengthy tradition.

Odd culinary tastes still prevail. Take Marmite, a black, gooey spread favoured by schoolchildren much like peanut butter is in North America. It is utterly revolting. One food reviewer calls
A Clockwork Orange
a Marmite film. In a typically self-effacing English way, even the Marmite website has termed it “noxious gunk,” and the manufacturer provides a forum for people to rant about how much they hate it.

That said, one of the greatest myths — horrid English cooking — is no longer tenable. Between the time I first began to visit England in the 1980s and today, there has been a sea change in restaurant and pub food, so that some of the best gourmet dinners I have ingested have been at remote country pubs. Continental cuisine has raised expectations and become dominant, though it's still possible to be served mushy peas and soggy carrots. The advent of the gastropub in the late nineties sealed the deal. Pub grub was no longer sufficient.

The first reputed gastropub was The Eagle in Clerkenwell, London, which opened in 1991, and the concept took off from there. At first, steak and ale pie, shepherd's pie, lasagne, bangers and mash, and Sunday roasts were served. Then the better establishments expanded to gourmet delights like baked Dijon salmon, chicken tikka masala, filet mignon with balsamic glaze, Cornish game hens with garlic and rosemary, and a favourite treat — beef Wellington. Tikka masala has now overtaken good old fish and chips as the national dish of England.