THE WRONG WAY DOWN

THE RUDGE

         “East to west?”, echoed the Downsmen suspiciously. The idea of taking the Ridgeway into Wessex - rather than away from it - seemed a novel proposition, eccentric and even faintly heretical. Although anyone could walk the 91-mile rump of squashed-up sea-snails, heaved from the ocean some 65 million years ago, it was widely accepted that, in the end, we’d all finish up in Tring.

         Even our guidebook directed us east and, for a while, we tried to unravel it backwards until we found ourselves entangled in bewildering detail. Minute directions were unnecessary; we pointed ourselves down The Great Ribbon of Turf as it bobbed across England and stowed the book. I preferred the previous, 1976 version anyway: although the style was antique (“You could walk the Ridgeway in a lounge suit if you really wished”), the author, rather thrillingly, encouraged Hefty Hikers to sort out The Gentry who had stolen his wife’s handbag. How refreshing: a guidebook which suggested that, if the natives displease you, you should thrash them .

 

         I set off, westwards, from the top of Ivinghoe Beacon, grateful for the company of Caroline Hamilton. She had once walked to the North Pole and was trained to shoot polar bears and go to the lavatory in her sleeping bag. Although the Ridgeway would make her boots seep blood, she never winced and never lost her appetite for local specialities like Nasi Goreng and chips.

         We were immediately plunged into an ancient landscape of beech hangars and meadows of milkwort and ladies bedstraw. It later occurred to me, as we moved west, that we were being dragged further and further backwards in time. For now, we skirted amiable railway towns, spread out neatly at the bottom of the escarpment: first, Tring, where new Country Homes, made from dog-biscuits and lacking chimneys, were nibbling their way into the countryside: then Wendover, with its Toby Jugs and Cribbage leagues; finally, Princess Risborough, where the over-65’s migrate, drawn no doubt by favourable hairdressing concessions. At the end of our first, warm summer’s day, we stood on Coombe Hill, once sea-bed and now a giddy 845 feet above it, and surveyed a glorious panorama of parklands and stately homes - Mentmore, Halton and Chequers. Chequers was given over, in 1917, for the use of overworked Prime Ministers and, just beyond it, was a little buttock of greenery.

         “Up there,” observed Caroline, “PMs’ wives can run around naked and scream - and embrace all of England!”

         Lifted by this thought, we hurried through the dark, dinosaur-legged beechwoods, where nothing thrived but Dog’s Mercury and sanicle, in search of a pub. I loved the pubs around here; although they were splendidly bucolic, no-one seemed the least perturbed to find a stranger drinking at his elbow. At The Bernard Arms, President Yeltsin and John Major had enjoyed a typical English pint, attended by their cavalcade of snipers and special envoys. At The Swan, we were generously briefed by one of the regulars, on his 34 uncles and aunts. We were treated like grandchildren by the lovely old publicans at The Carrier’s Arms and no-one (except us) laughed at the mountain-bikers, who were trying to shovel pies into themselves whilst trussed up in prophylactic suits. Even the teenage girls, who were plotting pregnancies in the Snug, made a big point of leaving us alone.

 

         For a short time, around Chinnor, the Rudge turned ugly. Livid turquoise lime quarry lakes drained the colour from the sky and we stumbled across the Ridgeway’s only fly-tip. We were fascinated; there was a copy of “Are you Destined for Sexual Success?” and a pair of velvet slippers. What lives are led behind the chalky lace curtains of Chinnor.

 

         Free again, the path bounded up over the chalk uplands and down the centuries. We passed the splendid manor at Britwell Salome, its very name redolent of Restoration debauchery, and Swyncombe, still drowsy from the effects of the Norman Conquest. Beyond Ewelme, we crossed a field so improbably large that I thought I saw the curve of the earth defined in wheat and poppies. In 1953, it had yielded a stupendous treasury of gold, carelessly mislaid by some Romans. From here, we scrambled over roots, down Grim’s Ditch, its origins now so prehistoric that no-one can soberly explain it. It wriggled, like a huge crooked furrow all the way down to the Thames.

 

         The Thames conveyed the outside world momentarily into our adventures. Boats and towpaths brought Londoners to the pretty villages along the banks, which, it struck me, were slightly over-geraniumed. They were relentlessly picturesque but also over-enthusiastically possessed; Goring was ringed by high fences and I noiselessly accused the locals of being rock stars and advertising barons, who had suffered a rush of money to the head and moved upstream. That said, King Alfred recognised the arterial qualities of the valley and when he standardised the language, he selected the Wallingford dialect. There are now 360 million people all over the world speaking variations of Wallingford.

 

         In Goring, we met up with my wife and five friends, loaded up with Guinea Fowl & Pine Kernel Pies and set off, a babbling, booted Luncheon Club, into the western Chalklands. From now on the landscape would be different. The beechwoods thinned and fell away. A great seared savannah unrolled itself ahead of us and the path was fringed with scabious and yellow rattle, wild thyme and the umbelliferous burnet saxifrage. I was constantly enthralled by the beauty of my own country and, at the same time, experienced the curiously pleasing feeling of being a foreigner from the present. Here were forts and funerary complexes that pre-dated the pyramids and shared views with nothing more modern than Roman temples. I don’t know why the antiquity of the Ridgeway should have so surprised me - the word itself had miraculously extricated itself from the Saxon name “hrycweg” - but without the Luncheon Club to propel me forward, I’d still be there, gaping at the ribbon-development of castles; Segsbury, Uffington, Liddington, Barbury and the Saxon ones whose names would look like typing errors.

         No less intriguing were the natives that we encountered on the downs. There was a family, living with their goats in “23X Salisbury”, a double-decker bus that had found its terminus in a hollow of candytuft and hairy hawkbit. Another family were out hunting hares, with dingoes. Down in Letcombe Regis, where the Riot Act was last read out, eleven tractors were parked outside The Greyhound, heaped with brawny children. Their fathers were hurling staves at a sort of skull (a game apparently) and then, suddenly, they all mounted their machines and roared away, leaving a heady tang of diesel. The village had inspired Jude the Obscure and, the previous week, was busted for 60kg of cannabis.

 

         Taxis took us to Wantage, where Alfred was born.

         “On Saturday nights, the farmer boys and the stable lads like to come hecklin’,” the driver warned solemnly. Alfred’s kinsmen were already congregating round his statue. “At New Year, the council covers the statue with scaffolding and, every year, the farmer boys tear it down. Last year, they even brought spanners”.

         Despite the threat of an Ancient Heckle, I was charmed. Wantage was attractive and cheerfully pagan: you could dance your way back into the seventies and have your animals blessed at the church. We booked into the pub and were given beds in a converted diner off the square. Of course, no-one slept; all night, agricultural machines hurtled through the town, inches from our heads.

 

         In the morning, we clambered back onto the Downs. It was improbably tranquil except that, rather surreally, a twister was moving along the horizon, sucking a tiny thread of straw, helter-skelter, into the clouds. We ambled on, through Betjeman country, into Wiltshire. Betjeman’s wife, Penelope, was a high priestess among Ridgeway people; she played the harmonium appallingly, rode around the downs on an Arab mare called Moti and encouraged her house-guests to defecate in her kitchen garden, to enrich the earth.

 

         Despite its hopelessly romantic name and its position in the middle of a bald patch on the map, Ogbourne St George was disappointing. It was once a railway station for sheep but as the track had now vanished, the village was left looking a little undecided. We negotiated taxis to Marlborough.

         I will always have fond memories of Marlborough. Encrusted in grime, blood and thistle-down, we should have been evicted for brigandage but instead we found ourselves enveloped in the hospitality of The Ivy House. They kept insisting that walkers (if that’s what we had been) were welcome and they spoilt us with hot water, fluffy towels and wine. The town itself was achingly elegant and I wanted to poke my head through every sumptuous doorway - but it was all shut. We ate Chinese take-aways on the steps of the town hall, the widest shopping street in England spread out before us like a twinkling electric feast, and were delighted to find that, for all his Regency splendour, Marlborough Man still had a place in his furry heart for Choc Ices in Batter, obligingly deep-fried by the Chinese.

 

         We rode the sugar rush all the way into Neolithic Wiltshire. A light plane rose from a field of poppies and a hobby snatched a linnet from the sky and cracked its neck. I still couldn’t shrug off the feeling that I was an alien on this corrugated landscape of strip lynchets but then even the boulders that were abandoned here by glaciers, are still referred to as sarsens, or foreigners, and they’ve been here for millions of years.

         As we passed a clutch of cottages, boldly named Newtown, I wondered if the Downsman wasn’t, in truth, a hopeless optimist; he had built Silbury hill to try and reach heaven and Wandsdyke, 60 miles of trenches, to keep the Danes out. His descendants were no better; a few hundred yards in front of the Wandsdyke, at Pewsey, a line of mossy pillboxes guarded the Avon & Kennet canal against the Wehrmacht. Surely the German intruder would have come, like his neighbour the Dane, the Saxons and, now, the Luncheon Club, from the east: the wrong way down the Rudge?