Ring the Hill E-Book

Tom Cox

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 386

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A hill is not a mountain. You climb it for you, then you put it quietly inside you, in a cupboard marked 'Quite A Lot Of Hills' where it makes its infinitesimal mark on who you are. Ring the Hill is a book written around, and about, hills: it includes a northern hill, a hill that never ends and the smallest hill in England. Each chapter takes a type of hill - whether it's a knoll, cap, cliff, tor or even a mere bump - as a starting point for one of Tom's characteristically unpredictable and wide-ranging explorations. Tom's lyrical, candid prose roams from an intimate relationship with a particular cove on the south coast, to meditations on his great-grandmother and a lesson on what goes into the mapping of hills themselves. Because a good walk in the hills is never just about the hills: you never know where it might lead.

Leseprobe

Also by the author

FICTION

Everything Will Swallow You

1983

Villager

Help the Witch

NON-FICTION

Notebook

21st-Century Yokel

Close Encounters of the Furred Kind

The Good, the Bad and the

Furry Talk to the Tail

Under the Paw

Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia

Nice Jumper

CONTENTS

Island-Hopping

Jenny Doesn’t Live Here

Nearly Northern

Minor Alps

Old Fat Bum

The Lion, the Witch and the Dress Code

Acknowledgements

‘For he conducted his life as

everyone does—by guessing at

the future’

—Annie Proulx,

Accordion Crimes

‘The man the hare has met

will never be the better of it

except he lay down on the land

what he carries in his hand—

be it staff or be it bow—

and bless him with his elbow

and come out with this litany

with devotion and sincerity

to speak the praises of the hare.

Then the man will better fare.

‘The hare, call him scotart,

big-fellow, bouchart,

the O’Hare, the jumper,

the rascal, the racer . . .

The creep-along, the sitter-still,

the pintail, the ring-the-hill . . .’

—Anon,

The Names of the Hare

(Thirteenth century)

ISLAND-HOPPING

(2018–19)

When you arrive at my house – my current house, which might not be my house for very long, since that increasingly seems to be the way of things with me – something you will probably notice about it before long is that it is in the sea. Not the extreme bottom of the sea, low tide perhaps revealing a chimney pot and the weatherworn edge of a seventeenth-century gable, but certainly not what could be considered officially part of the mainland. It’s a fact that makes itself more apparent on some days, and from some vantage points, than others. When the mist is heavy and you stand at the summit of one of the abrupt, isolated hills common to this part of Somerset, the realisation becomes stronger that, not all that many centuries ago, all the low ground as far as the eye can see was underwater: first proper sea, then a sort of marshy half-sea, dotted with small, tall islands, where semi-feral humans lived off fish and a king could successfully hide in times of trouble. I am fascinated by this place, and like it more every day, although I did not fall instantly in love with it. As most people who have got any kind of living under their belt know, though, the kind of love that arrives at first sight is rarely the most fulfilling.

I moved here at the beginning of the crisp, golden, hazy days: the period when, after the scruffiness of late summer, nature gets the decorators back in. It was a time of year that I already associated with the heart of Somerset and now probably will forever: the season when the region shows off its long, cosmic sunsets, the intricate embroidery of its skies, to best effect. In August I had made the mistake of boasting about a long period of excellent health and been summarily punished for my smugness with a back injury and chest infection, but the golden days kept stretching on and I was determined to make the most of them, so I hobbled out into the dry sea, past its sparkling coppery trees, coughing my way to the top of the island lookout points, doing a commendable amount of exploring for an invalid. I’d ordered the map before I’d booked the removal van: one of the lovely personalised ones the OS do nowadays, with your house at the dead centre. You get the privilege of choosing the cover photo yourself. Mine was one I’d taken on my first visit to Glastonbury Tor, in autumn 2015, at dusk, of the silhouettes of two Danish women watching the sun fall into the sea just below Weston-super-Mare, seventeen miles to the west. In Somerset and Dorset, more than in other coastal counties, I always get the impression the sun takes its nightly rest in the sea: nowhere too far away, but not quite in a spot you could easily swim or row a small wooden boat to.

I came to live here in the other sea – the inland sea that is mostly, but not always, dry – by accident; and then again I didn’t. Accidents are often an amalgamation of intentions, hopes, misfortunes and the knock-on effect of experiences, which arguably makes them not all that accidental at all. I impulsively left a part of the UK I love in order to live out a crazy, ambitious writing experiment in a brutally cold, topographically hostile spot; when I decided it was over, which was quite quickly, I ran back as soon as I could into the arms of part of the UK I loved but ended up in a house where I found it extremely difficult to work; I looked for a quieter, more private house to write in a couple of places which I thought might provide a balance between my social and working needs; I didn’t find one, but I fell, in a subtle way, for a house in another area, not all that far away, an area I didn’t know well at all. That all happened in under twelve months and accounts for why I am now in the sea. In other words, I am here as a direct result of being me. In this instance it has been expensive and tiring, being me, but I don’t regret it.

Twenty-one is the number of houses I have now lived in. I can’t claim full responsibility for that total. My parents moved a lot when I was growing up. In my ancestry, on the Irish side, there is evidence of travelling salesmen, so maybe that’s an additional explanation for the wanderlust. I’m disturbingly good at moving now: the packing, the labelling, the sizing up, the prioritising and deprioritising of bullshit admin. I wouldn’t say it gets easier, but doing stupid things during house moves in the past has, finally, after many years, made me marginally better at not doing stupid things during house moves. There is no better illustration of the human brain’s ability to blank out bad experiences as a coping mechanism than that of moving house. ‘Never again!’ we say, after a move, feeling like we have been slowly backed over three times by a large tractor with tyres caked in hot manure. But after a while, the details of exactly why it was so traumatic fade. ‘Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all?’ we think. But it was. Probably worse, in fact. Our memory is lying to us. If I was ever stuck for inspiration for writing, I would apply for a job as a removal man. It’s not just that removal companies see the intimate, behind-the-scenes paraphernalia of strangers every day; moving – stressful enough on its own – often happens when at least one other big life event is taking place. Bereavement, a break-up, a change of job, a financial crisis. It’s hard for people to keep their masks on when they’re mid-move. Movers see people stretched and fraught. They see a full flame ignited under stories that have been left on simmer for years.

I suspect my movers thought me oddly phlegmatic, my packing amazingly orderly, when they took my stuff from the edge of Dartmoor to east Somerset, but they were dealing with a rumpled relocation veteran. It was ultimately just another day in my peripatetic recent life. But I know, even so, from overhearing their banter, that they found amusement and intrigue in the quirks of my possessions. Why would anyone go to the trouble of buying this many books and records yet not replace that filthy, dented car, with all the bits hanging off it, or own any furniture made after 1972? ‘You’ve got a lot of lamps and plants, mate,’ one mover told me. ‘I have,’ I replied. ‘You’ve got a lot of lamps and plants, mate,’ his colleague told me, an hour or so later. ‘I have,’ I replied. I love the plants, and wouldn’t want to be without them, even though they don’t make moving any easier, and merely living with them is a much finer art than you assume, at times feeling like hosting a party attended by fourteen quiet but oddly high-maintenance friends, all of which you must keep constantly happy. ‘Jim needs a lot of encouragement to come out of himself but don’t talk too loudly around Celia, and make sure Matilda always has a drink by her side even though her husband Bob is teetotal, and don’t worry if Greg seems very down and colourless early in the evening: he doesn’t really reach his best until 2 a.m. Also, don’t dance too close to Bianca or open the curtains suddenly when she is nearby if it is a nice sunny morning.’ The biggest of the lot – a vast Dracaena, taller than most rooms, which had lodged with me almost forever, in a huge pot full of earth and big pebbles, and which even the burliest of the removal men would not risk carrying alone – became very opinionated when I was experimenting with room arrangement, just when I thought I’d got through the move relatively unscathed. That’s where the back injury came from. A deranged disc, necessitating hundreds of pounds of chiropractor treatment. It wasn’t the Dracaena’s fault, though. It was mine for being an idiot, and, without evidence, believing myself to be in possession of the strength of a man four times my size.

All the same, I can’t deny that there is an awful lot I like about moving. I get obsessively excited about the idea of being out in a new area, exploring on foot. When I began to show small signs of nomadism in my twenties, it reignited an earlier worry of my mum and dad’s: that their house troubles during my childhood might have had a lasting psychological effect on me. If this is true then I view it only as a positive one. The six moves I’d been a part of by the time of my nineteenth birthday, plus the weekend walking trips we made to escape houses and jobs that were making my dad unhappy, are probably part of the reason I am now such an enthusiastic minor explorer, well-travelled in a small and unglamorous way. What a visit to the Harry Potter studios probably is to others, a visit to the headquarters of the Ordnance Survey – such as the one I took last summer – is to me. Discussions of the OS are probably the only time when I become truly patriotic. It is a place palpably full of love. All the employees seem to have been there forever – in some cases marginally longer. Martin Jones, a draughtsman I met, had worked there long enough to remember the summer of 1976, when, arranging a landscape in the record-breaking heat, he would often realise he had a tiny copse or church stuck to his forearm. He didn’t look nearly old enough to have been there that long. Clearly that was what working for the OS did for you. Nowadays, there is no need for miniature adhesive copses or churches, as everything is laid out and stored digitally: a rare instance in modern life where the transfer of an experience from three dimensions to two has not sapped it of nuance, perhaps has even furnished it with more nuance, since the zoom feature on the new digital OS maps allows an extra capacity for detail. Nonetheless, I stick evangelically with my paper versions, many of which are now flecked with farmyard mud or crimped by rainwater.

On the eve of my latest move, I spread a brand new, soon-to-be-mud-spattered OS map out before me, just as I had on the eve of my previous few moves. Immediately I could see plenty of intriguing stuff going on. Washing Stones Gully, less than a mile from my back door, caught my eye immediately. Over to the east, on the edge of thick woodland, there was something called Maggoty Paggoty. What on earth was that? Clearly it was mandatory that I soon walk the six and a half miles separating it from me and find out. I do not understand how anybody who loves art or language or detail can fail to love maps. What objects in everyday life are more endlessly magical, and more endlessly taken for granted? When it seems we are attempting to hastily cram more and more onto the surface of the land and blot out its mystery, maps offer solid evidence of something more permanent beneath all we have built in hurriedness and greed, something that will outlive our nonsense. Somerset, to me, especially at its heart, is the most map-like county to walk in. There are hills, but not so many that you can’t see the land spooling out in front of you for long distances. You crest them and, although you might not be in the greenest place in the whole country, you sense how much green is still out there. It is here that the sense of living in a palimpsest is at its most apparent: petrol stations, telephone exchange boxes, unimaginative new blobs of executive housing, sewage plants, concrete smears of agribusiness, they all tend to fade away. All the reassuring patterns of the earth are still there but much of what we have daubed on top is not. The situation looks better than it did when you were down in it.

Easily the most striking and famous of the islands above the dry inland sea, and one of the best viewpoints in the whole county, is the Tor at Glastonbury: alleged birthplace of British Christianity, alleged burial place of King Arthur and home of the Holy Grail, alleged gateway to the faerie underworld and alleged site of many other alleged events. The contrast of the surrounding low, fairly sensible, agricultural ground makes the Tor look all the more otherworldly, sticking up 521 feet into the heavens, with its pointy stone finger at the top. You can’t see it from my house because another less singularly shaped island is in the way, but it’s visible from virtually everywhere else within a ten-mile radius. The extended stone middle finger, which is all that remains of the fourteenth-century church of St Michael, always beckons rather than insults. I became hypnotised by it and felt it was vital that I travelled to it on foot as soon as possible after settling in.

I planned my route on the personalised OS map: it should not be much more than six miles, across mostly flat ground. But everywhere I went, footpaths seemed to have been blocked off by the local farmers. Electric fences had been strung across fields a matter of inches beyond stiles, leaving no room to circumvent the intangible produce they were protecting. Some stiles were only retrospective suggestions of stiles. Paths clearly marked on the rigorously detailed map petered out, unannounced, into raging tangles of bramble and overripe blackberries. I picked a few sloes from a hedge and sat on some sandy stubble, hot, bothered, and flummoxed. I decided I should probably file a report to Paul, who I met at the OS, whose job it is to keep Britain’s rights of way totally up to date. But then I remembered a story about an altercation between a farmer and a newcomer in a village near where I used to live – the details of the exact offence were blurred by time, but the image of a coffin set alight and left outside the front door remained in my mind – and I thought better of it. In the end, I was not totally unable to see the farmers’ point. Who precisely were they obstructing? Who actually walked around here, for fun? From the information I could gather, the answer was essentially just me. I could not help but appreciate the irony of the fact that I’d spent the last nine months living in two of England’s last remaining upland wildernesses – the Peak District and the edge of Dartmoor – yet it was here in this apparently benign flatland where I was facing some of my biggest challenges as a hiker. I was now edging, zigzagging, hare-like, into the more geometrical area of flatness west of my house: an area of arguable, somewhat fluid borders referred to as the Somerset Levels or Sedgemoor. Being a Dartmoor evangelist – never happier than in clean, acid air, walking through clouds, or climbing lichen-splattered boulders – I had scoffed at this idea of the sunken part of the landscape being cited as ‘moor’, but it had its own tricksiness, a stark mathematical wildness. With dead ends and detours, my route to the Tor turned out to be closer to ten miles than six, and the amount of time lost zigzagging through the sea meant that my plan to walk back had been scuppered.

I didn’t see the Tor at its best that evening. Dusk was coming on but the weather was a little drappy – a Somerset word I’d recently learned, which means ‘starting to rain slightly’. Even without the benefit of one of its legendary sunsets, the view from the top pushed you back onto your heels, opening the world’s mouth and allowing you to see humblingly down its throat. It is no surprise that people have been coming to this place on pilgrimages for thousands of years. Even if the bodies of King Arthur and Guinevere were not really found in the grounds of the ruined abbey down the hill in town, even if Joseph of Arimathea, great uncle and undertaker of Jesus, did not allegedly plant his staff across the valley in the earth of Wearyall Hill, causing the Glastonbury Thorn – and, by extension, British Christianity – to grow, travellers would have been seduced and summoned by this tall island: a green ladder to the heavens which seems much closer to the celestial threshold than hills two or three times its height. Tonight there were the usual two dozen people milling about the doorless church at the summit and a man in the doorway, meditating. Few words were spoken. I counted three foreign accents, which was not at all unusual, and nine shawls, which was less unusual still. The view, though muted by weather, was vast and silencing. To the south-west, flanking the Polden Hills, the Levels stretched out, with their cross-hatching rhines: ribbons of water used to drain the marshy sea, where in the past a hungry person might annihilate an eel using a fork-like implement known as an eel prong, waiting, ideally, until the eel was asleep in the peaty side of the ditch, to make the task easier. To the north was the darkening grandstand of the Mendips. It was from their direction that in November 1539 the last Abbot of Glastonbury, Richard Whiting, was brought with two of his monks, on the orders of Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, fastened to a hurdle and dragged to the top of the Tor by horses, before being hanged, drawn and quartered where I now stood. As the light faded, above Wells (Britain’s fourth smallest city, where some of Whiting’s body parts were exhibited) the giant, glowing-red telephone mast began a dialogue with the Tor. There were other towers on hills nearby – the Hood Monument above Butleigh, the Pynsent Monument at Curry Rivel – but these two were the ones who had the big stuff to say to each other. ‘I am the now, and I’m what’s coming,’ said the telephone mast, ‘and I have no respect for any of this. Nothing that went before me matters.’ ‘You are taller in stature,’ replied the Tor, ‘I’ll give you that. But that is only one kind of size. I dwarf you in every other way. You would not even begin to be able to guess at the multitudes I contain.’

Long before that mast could help you send a text to your cousin to tell them Sunday’s barbecue had been put back an hour or Snapchat a stranger a photo of your naked body, I came here, only semi-knowing where I was in any historical sense, and listened to some live music in some fields four miles up the road. I’d just turned nineteen and it was my first Glastonbury Festival. When it was all over, my girlfriend and I walked through the gate and along a small country lane, passing hundreds of queuing cars, down a hill, until – at the bottom of the steep part of the hill, just where the ground began to flatten out and a smattering of cottages appeared – we reached the car containing my dad, who kindly drove us home to Nottinghamshire. Remembering this, standing on the Tor, I found two aspects of it remarkable. First: how illustrative it was of the faith people had in the times and vague meeting points they’d arranged, in the days before mobile phones. Second: the fact that the point where we found my dad’s car in the long queue was quite possibly directly outside the house where I now lived. I looked out from the island across the cow pastures and rhines and sham footpaths I’d negotiated to get to the Tor, back towards the house, and noticed smoke billowing from its roof. The smoke reached for the sky, then danced north on the breeze, diminished slightly by the drappy rain, in the direction of Worthy Farm, where the festival’s organiser, Michael Eavis, would already be making plans for next summer’s event, for which tickets would cost almost precisely five times what my girlfriend and I paid for ours in 1994, and which, unlike 1994’s festival, would not feature a succession of drug dealers crawling through holes in the fence then waking you up to try to sell you Benzedrine.

It didn’t look like the fire brigade had arrived yet but no doubt they would soon. Someone in the village would have raised the alarm. Maybe Eavis would assist in getting the blaze extinguished. In 1963, when the fourteenth-century tithe barn at Pilton, three miles away, was struck by lightning and caught fire, Eavis – then just twenty-seven and not yet in possession of his world-famous music festival – was one of the first to raise the alarm. But it was presumptuous to rely solely on Eavis. He was far busier now, I expected, than he had been then. I’d heard he liked to turn up in pubs around here and, uninvited, sing ‘My Way’, and it was getting on for seven. There was not much I could do. I didn’t yet have a number for my next-door neighbours. I could call my landlady but she was in Spain. Less than a month earlier, in a pub in Bristol, somebody had stolen my rucksack, which contained my wallet, my journal, my phone, a Lush bath bar and my car keys. The following morning, using some cash that a friend had kindly loaned me, I’d caught an early train back to Devon. I had felt anxious, since I could not remember for sure if my spare car keys were at home or in a jacket in my locked car parked near the pub in Bristol, but also very freed, having been materially reduced to nothing more than the clothes on my back, a return train ticket and £31.30. It was as if many of the complexities of my life had floated away, and I was realising my essential core being for the first time, which was just a transient collection of experiences and opinions and hopes, blundering along to the next destination, maybe picking up a few more along the way.

You could say there were similarities in my current predicament. Certainly, I liked my books, my records, my plants and my furniture, but undertaking the next house move without them would be much easier. My main worry was my two cats, but I knew them well and felt confident that they would have fled well clear of the house as soon as the fire began and, when the smoke had gone, would return – although I would surely find them cowering in a field long before that anyway. From here I could just pick out, across the dry sea in the gathering gloom, the field I suspected they were most likely to retreat to, but it looked different to the way I remembered. The wood abutting it was gone and I couldn’t see the farm on the slope where the hill begins to get steep, in the direction of Washing Stones Gully. Had it burned down too? Precisely how much damage were I and my fire responsible for? I swung my vision gradually thirty degrees anticlockwise where, a mile north, I re-orientated myself and found the spot containing my actual house, which appeared to be smoke-free. I set off down the slope, reburdened by the clutter of material life, but genuinely relieved about the cats, who would have been ill-suited to a life solely on the road.

All day, HGVs bump and bang along the road below the Tor, staining dark cottages darker with their exhaust fumes. Signs in the cottage windows offer cartomancy readings and beg for the road to be diverted. PLEASE SLOW DOWN. SACRED SITES AHEAD, asked a notice tied to the leg of a pavement mannequin, as I reached the foot of the Tor. She looked quite smart, with her flower headband, blue anorak, fluorescent t abard, long hippie skirt and wellies, but in a couple of weeks’ time, in a period of high winds, I would drive past and notice her upside-down legs sticking out from a hedge; an incident from which she would partially recover before vanishing forever six months later during Storm Gareth. I decided to pop into her local, The Rifleman’s Arms. A lady with a busy sleeve of tattoos was telling a friend about another friend who had fallen out with her because the friend claimed she ‘didn’t text regularly enough’. The lady with the busy sleeve of tattoos said she had done nothing wrong apart from not wanting to be on her phone all day. ‘Exactly!’ I thought, already over-involved. My intention was to have a quick drink, without getting carried away and becoming what the Somerset drinkers of the nineteenth-century called ‘overtookt’, then call a taxi. I’ve only taken the taxi option once during a walk, and, even when circumstances made it the only option, it felt like the lamest kind of chickening out. This, however, wasn’t to be a sequel: of the six local taxi companies I called, only one came close to agreeing to pick me up. ‘I’m having my tea but I could do it after, maybe,’ said the driver. I asked him how long his tea would take him to eat. ‘A couple of hours or so,’ he said. I imagined him on a high dining chair with a mesh of wooden beads beneath him, looking regal and entitled as a doting wife brought out each successive course, each one a little larger than the last: prawn cocktail, jellied eels, sturgeon, beef bourguignon, trifle, a really massive apple.

If you make your way back to my house from the Tor via the lanes, avoiding the main roads and unreliable truncated footpaths, you take the lowest ground: the deepest part of the reclaimed sea, threaded with the rhines the monks of the Middle Ages dug to drain it. Arguably nobody enjoys a better view of the Tor than the travellers who have constructed their own small, easily dismantleable neighbourhood along here. I passed about two dozen of their caravans in total. A couple were empty, their innards appearing recently ransacked, their doors gone or hanging by a single hinge. The occupied ones glowed with light, music and the aroma of weed, and maximised the luxury potential of their rhine-side locations. One announced itself with an appropriated AREA UNDER SURVEILLANCE sign. Another had constructed a hammock by wedging a mattress into the crook of a willow overhanging the water. A couple of hundred yards away, on the River Brue, whose surface solemnly reflected dark silver sky, a plank had been nailed into a board submerged in the bank, for diving. Crooked tents and parasols and tarpaulins had been shoved together outside caravans, haphazardly: Frankenstein’s awnings. I startled a couple of herons and they made their escape on big hushed wings the same colour as the river, charting a path between realities.

On the skyline to the north, Whiting’s death church and the glowing red telephone mast, symbols of the old and new religions, continued their debate, until night gradually snuffed out the former. Looking towards the long, blurring wall of the Mendips, taking in the commanding hills and flatlands, it struck me that I had in my haphazard way ended up living in a landscape that was a composite of the two very different places on opposite margins of the country that I had loved most deeply and chosen to spend most of my adult life in: Norfolk and Devon. It was not twee or manicured but it was definitely not rugged, either. It was anti-rugged. In this light, from this perspective, it was like looking at a scene concocted by an imagination obsessed with a time that will never be. Not much could be added, atmospherically speaking, besides perhaps an eel crying through the dark. Maybe it was because I was tired and emotional and still five miles from a place where I could rest my aching back but I couldn’t stop thinking about the poor eels, the image of them sleeping innocently in their peat hideaways and waking to the horror of being pronged. I’d once met a man who used to catch and sell them for a living in Cornwall. He’d even briefly had a pet one, which lodged alternately in a large tank in his house and the leat that flowed beside it. The eel went missing from the tank at a particularly lively party he and his wife held and was found over twenty-four hours later under a sofa cushion, caked in fluff and, miraculously, alive. It went to live outdoors permanently after that. The former eel catcher, who confessed he’d never been very good at catching eels, told me about the noise the eels would make as he stalked the Cornish rivers, searching for them: a bark-moan that seemed to come from the most unfathomable well of loss and despair. It was a noise, he said, that still haunted him now in his less robust moments, over a decade after he’d quit his job as an eel catcher.

I did not hear the noise of an eel as I negotiated the dark, early autumn lanes beside the rhines here, in the dry sea, but I did stumble across something no less outlandish or liminal. A mile from my house, I rounded a corner beside a large orchard – a sleepy, houseless stretch of lane – and realised that I was being flanked by fairy lights, dozens of tiny bioluminescent spots of green. After mentally replaying my time in the pub – with an awareness of Glastonbury’s reputation – and assuring myself that at no point had my drink been left unattended, I realised that I was staring directly at a vast colony of glow-worms, the first I’d ever seen, and active here in the hedges, a place where I’d never expected to see them, two months after what I’d been assured was glow-worm time. Had I not had all the problems with the footpaths earlier and arrived at the Tor so much later than expected and failed to find a taxi, I would not have been here to witness them. It was indicative of a lesson I had learned about walking: that a mistake or a wrong turn was something to be embraced, an experience not always synonymous with only failure and frustration. I can think of no stronger example of this than a walk I’d done two summers previously on the fringes of the Stourhead estate, twenty miles east of here, where Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire intersect. A moment of lackadaisical navigation had led me into thick woodland past a shag rug of foxgloves and, in trying to find my way back to the correct path, which would lead me to my destination, King Alfred’s Tower, I’d become hopelessly disorientated in a series of wildflower-heavy clearings. It was not so much that I had lost my natural compass, more that the entire concept of compasses had evaporated, and I became under the impression this would now be my habitat forever more: a psychedelic space walled in by trees on all sides. It was early June, the exact time, maybe even the exact hour, when everything had reached the apex of its growth for the year, and I stumbled and tripped over tussocks and difficult boggy ground, warmed by a beating sun, with poppies and foxgloves and ox-eye daisies all around, until I felt like I was spinning in a dream, and flopped onto the ground, exhausted, contentedly defeated. A cloud of holly blue butterflies gathered above me and instinct told me that the right thing to do was wait. I let myself slip into the delight of a half-nap, until a potential way out suggested itself in the wood fifty yards down the hill directly below my left big toe. I walked back to my car along lanes where large flocks of unseen sheep could be heard shouting together at the tops of their voices, a noise that from an individual sheep can seem to smack of the most terrible depression but in chorus sounded totally joyous, as if rows and rows of hearty pensioners were behind the hedges all saying ‘Yeah!’ over and over again. I never found the tower.

A few weeks after my experience with the glowworms, I retraced the Stourhead walk, and could not see how I had got it so drastically wrong on my first attempt. Horse chestnuts were scattered on the quieter lanes through the woods, sealed and spiky. If goblins had a game of bowls, then abandoned it in a hurry, it would look like this. In drappy rain, I followed the route I’d planned on my OS map, took a few simple twists and turns, climbed past fresh log piles to the top of Kingsettle Hill, turned left onto a wide grassy path and watched the sun crash through the clouds as Alfred’s Tower materialised ahead of me. The entry fee for the tower is cash-only, and all I had in my wallet was seven pence, a bank card and an old Gnasher the Dog Beano fan-club button badge missing its pin, but I managed to sweet talk Chas on the door to let me up for what I described as research purposes. I was not telling an untruth: everything is research, if you want it to be.

County borders are rarely denoted by very sudden marked changes in terrain but, from the top of the 160-foot folly, the different characters of farmy, verdant Somerset (west and north-west), bald, yellow Wiltshire (east and north-east) and furry, ridgey Dorset (south, south-east and south-west) were very discernible, especially with the clarifyingly abrupt sunlight. The tower was built by the banker Henry Hoare in 1772 as a showy commemoration of King Alfred’s victory over the Danes in 879, which Alfred purportedly initiated from this spot after hiding out on the Somerset Levels in the house of a peasant woman and burning her cakes. The word ‘folly’ refers to a building with no purposes other than to demonstrate the indulgent eccentricity of the person who decided to build it, but people seem strangely reluctant to use the term for big buildings. Few people I have spoken to about Alfred’s Tower have called it a folly, whereas the dovecote above Bruton, four miles to the west, is often called a folly, even though it’s not one. For over two centuries the dovecote, which also once belonged to the Hoare family, has been specifically used to house pigeons and doves, which, if you climb through the hole in the wall like I did, can still be witnessed above you, cooing from various slots in the brickwork, like furry singing packages in a pre-Reformation Royal Mail sorting office.

In the days of late autumn, as the last of the gold disappeared from the treetops and hedges, the starker aspects of living in the sea became more apparent, and I found myself frequently popping over to the Bruton area and asking it for a little hug, which it always offered unconditionally. It had the same spellbinding mists and long sunsets as Avalon but its hills were not such loners, and were struck through with rumpled coombes and wooded holloways that gave me a small, gentle fix of the Devon walks I missed, without any accompanying belief that I was settling for Devon lite. The Brue, such a minimalist, geometric river from the coast to Glastonbury, underwent an almost total character change here, becoming paintable and cuddly. John Steinbeck and his wife Elaine lived in a cottage on the edge of Bruton in the spring and summer of 1959. Nine years later, when Steinbeck was dying, they both stated independently that their period here was the happiest of their lives. I wonder if they were able to suppress a chuckle at Sexey’s Hospital, in the centre of town – or, for that matter, Sexey’s School, located on a lane called Lusty Gardens – unlike literally every other person I took to Bruton. (‘Which hospital are you going to? I’m going to the sexy hospital.’) Like ordering a pint of Butcombe ale, if you can talk about it without giggling it probably means you’re properly entrenched as a Somerset resident.

Bruton is all art and secret backways and artisan baking and well-spoken children and – a mark of its past as a wool town – stone ram carvings. Many speak of the increasing house prices, the ‘down from London’ aspect of the population, but if you listen to Pentangle’s brilliant interpretation of the old murder ballad ‘The Bramble Briar’, renamed ‘Bruton Town’, you might conclude it has never been a place where the peasantry have blossomed. In the song, which prior to my first visit had been the source of pretty much all my information on Bruton, one of the two sons of a wealthy farmer finds out his sister is indulging in relations with the family’s serving boy. The brothers take the lad on a spurious hunting trip, kill him and hurl his body in a thicket, all of which their dad seems to have no problem with. When their sister finds out, she sits with her lover’s blood-soaked body for three days and three nights, until finally she gets hungry, heads home, and life resumes. The name of the farm is not specified in the song but something tells me it’s not the one on top of Creech Hill, which is notable for its silage lake, in which the wrecks of boats and vehicles rot away, half submerged. From here, near the site of a former Roman temple, the town looks so tiny and perfectly placed in the valley bottom that its buildings might have been painted on fine cardboard then carefully placed by the hands of surgeons or nineteenth-century draughtsmen. I recommend the view this spot offers not only of Bruton but of the head and shoulders of Alfred’s Tower, poking up above the woods at the top of the horizon. I also recommend the unusually furry, eerily silent German shepherd who crept up on me from behind as I gazed across the valley, and slowly, calmly stared at me: a rare farm dog more interested in mind games than bluster or violence. Nearby was a large barn, where cows were listening to thumping 1990s R&B on what I at first thought was a radio but on further evidence could only have been a mix CD or Spotify playlist devoted specifically to the genre. The last bee of the year followed me a few yards down the valley, back in the direction of town.

In my garden, the leaves on the back hedge fell away, revealing that my neighbour was a horse. A strikingly handsome cock pheasant began to pay me visits, twice daily and more; an isolated flash of colour on an increasingly grey scene. The crisp, misty punctual days had ended, replaced by graceless dishwater ones that didn’t fully happen, if they did happen at all, until gone 11 a.m., by which point at this time of the year, let’s face it, it was essentially evening, and you were already wondering about what to have for tea and what book to read and whether that bit of damp kindling you’d found was going to be enough to get the woodburner going. In an attempt to add some sparkle to a December morning I filled my bird feeders to overflowing and sat back to watch the action. The pheasant, I realised, was the one my landlady had told me about, whom she called Clarence. She talked about what a mystery his singleness was, especially in view of his appearance, and when I saw him I puzzled over the matter too, but then I realised this made me one of those people who assume that everyone who is single is desperately looking for love, without taking into account that some enjoy their own company, are very content in a single state and don’t view it as a position of intrinsic sadness.

When the feeder was full, it meant more robins, dunnocks, blackbirds and blue tits dropping seeds on the grass for Clarence to vacuum up, along with the flakes of last night’s poppadum I’d left out for him. He had become quite bold, for a creature who had been bred to exist in a constant state of terror. Sometimes he’d see me through the picture window in my living room and, so long as I avoided sudden movements, carry on pecking about, maybe let out a triumphant ‘ch-kauwck!’ and fluff out his feathers a bit. I told myself I was providing a refuge from the people who wanted to kill him but all I was really doing was making sure he had a constant supply of food and taking care not to be boisterous in his vicinity. As I was leaving the house late one day, I noticed he was in the back field, and, fearing for his safety, shouted ‘Clllaaarrrrence!’, but then remembered he had no idea he was named Clarence, and was a pheasant. He did a little run, in the way he did, which as with all pheasants looked like he was saying ‘Shit shit shit!’ His ‘ch-kauwck!’ joined the undersong of the day. Other ingredients in the undersong included the clop of three horses farther along the lane and a succession of gunshots two or three fields away. The undersmell, meanwhile, was cow. In truth, it was more of an oversmell – fairly constant since my arrival. There had been plenty of cattle close to the two Devon houses where I’d lived, but their aroma never pervaded the air in the way it did here in the reclaimed sea.

Beside the A303 – the road into the west, the ancient road, a big road that is something of a big-road anomaly in that it often acts like a secretary to landscape rather than like landscape’s pissy, inconsiderate boss – men in green semi-camouflage attire were shooting Clarence’s contemporaries in the fields. There might have been women too, I can’t say for sure. I only saw men. Presumably the camouflage gear was in case they encountered an unusually pecky and violent pheasant who crept up on them from behind and tried to fuck them up. They would no doubt argue that what they were doing was traditional and historical as opposed to, say, a grand act of cowardice taken out on a defenceless animal bred purely to indulge their bloodthirsty twattery. I suspect it is unlikely that these men, so in thrall to tradition and history, would practise the even more historical art of dressing only in a loin cloth, starving themselves for a while, then attempting to bring down an animal five times their size while unarmed.

Not far past the turning for Warminster, I noticed a dead hare on the verge: soggy and half-black and sinewy. A few miles on from here, as you head east, the land turns sinewy too. I am interested in this terrain but, unlike Bruton’s, it’s not one I could imagine offering me a hug when I needed it. Strangely, for a county best known for Stonehenge, a landmark so closely associated with summer solstice, Wiltshire always feels like winter to me. Maybe that is partly because winter is when I have most frequently walked in it. But each time I go, I look in vain for the places where summer might happen. I love soaking up the Neolithic ambience on the Wiltshire Downs but I can’t shake a stronger feeling that I’m walking around a film set: a balder, one-colour, parallel Britain, underpeopled, overthatched. The book I had just finished reading – also set in Wiltshire – was not about winter, but it was overwhelmingly wintry. A book well-known at the time of its publication but now a little bit overlooked, by a dead writer, in which nearly everyone either dies or seems to be in some kind of bucolic yet austere antechamber for death. Perhaps more of an antegreenhouse for death. Greenhouses crop up in the book a lot.

I plan some of my walks in advance but an increasing number get scheduled on the day they happen, in a burst of scattershot inspiration, like the walk is a verse I’d been waiting to write but couldn’t, until inspiration struck. Were I a session musician, I’d probably be a nightmare to collaborate with on a group project. ‘Where is Tom?’ ‘Oh. He’s at another recording studio, sixty miles away. He decided at the last minute that he wasn’t in the mood for country rock today and that he would record with another band instead. They play funk.’ Today, for example, I was meant to be doing something completely different, but I found myself driving to Wiltshire, propelled spontaneously eastwards by the vivid pictures created by the book by the dead writer, which was called The Enigma of Arrival. It had been written during the mid-eighties, by the former Booker Prize winner V. S. Naipaul. Naipaul describes Wiltshire almost as you expect an alien might and to an extent that is what he is, as someone who spent the first two decades of his life in Trinidad, even though he’d already lived in the UK for several years before he relocated to Wilsford cum Lake, near Stonehenge. He disguises the location to an extent, but it’s not hard to work it out, just as it’s not hard to work out that his reclusive neighbour and landlord was Stephen Tennant, former cherubic Bright Young Person of the Bloomsbury Set and inspiration for Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Even though it’s at the commercial end of the county, you can see why it was a good place to escape, both for Tennant, whom Naipaul never spoke to and only saw twice in the whole of his decade of living there, and for Naipaul himself, who was in a quiet period of ‘withdrawal’ during his time there. It seems impossible that the tourist bustle of Stonehenge is only a couple of miles away. As I climbed out of the village, I got a decent view of the landmark from a ridge at the highest point of a farm track. It looked like a little green birthday cake in the distance topped with grey candles. Another part of the film set.