The end of all our exploring
The day started auspiciously and unusually:
A chat at the bus stop with a direct descendant of Tom Paine:
‘My father maintained that we were related.
We did have first editions, in fact:
The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason’;
The 54A took us to Cirencester,
Where we congregated by the church,
Overhearing a conversation,
‘Hello. Pleased to meet you. I’m John the verger’;
Near where, in the aftermath of the Peasants’ Revolt,
‘Divers of the king’s lieges of Cirencester … assembled
And gone to the abbey … done unheard-of things
To the abbot and convent and threatened
to do all the damage they could’;
Fifteen years later they beheaded
The Earl of Salisbury and the Earl of Kent –
But we walked out through the Bathurst estate,
A colonial landscape for those with eyes,
To turn right by Alexander Pope’s seat,
Past vast polo grounds,
To reach a lambent pocket of arable land,
Hard by a bronze age tumulus,
Where ploughed field tesserae,
And nearby Ermine Way
Suggest a sumptuous Roman villa,
And where we processed along a gleaming pathway –
Like so many genius loci,
Hooded like cucullati against the rain,
Until a rainbow arch summoned Robin Treefellow
To declaim his hymn to Cuda,
Goddess of Cotswold fertility,
There by the fossil-full ploughed fields,
Where Penda of Mercia,
The last pagan king of England
Once held his crimson sword aloft in victory.
Spring waters trickled their music,
Rivulets reflected storm threat light
In the growing puddles of a rising water table,
While the ghosts of Welsh drovers silent stood,
In the elemental alchemy of autumn.
We followed a Christian path to Daglingworth,
To Anglo-Saxon wall carvings of the crucifixion,
And a sundial whose gnomon shadow,
Danced to the music of time,
As Robin sang the Dream of the Rood;
Thunder and lightning alarmed a flock of rooks,
Their silhouettes flashing across the western sky,
While we surveyed the vast abyss of time
At Daglingworth Quarry: dinosaur footprints
Once imprinted at the top of these rocks,
Far above the fossils of oysters, scallops and sea urchins,
Deep down in the quarried recesses
Of this revelation of eternity.
We carried on, fording our way through torrents,
The swelling River Churn and the Dobunni
By our side, the oppidum melding
The Cotswold hills with the Vale of the Thames,
Here in the high big sky country,
Betwixt the magic of Sabrina,
And the ancient tracks of Wiltshire.
Gilded cumulus climbed high in the west,
While lustrous moss on drystone walls,
And shining woodland lichen led us on
Past Bagendon, to follow a trail
That arrowed through medieval greensward,
Straight towards the tower
Of Cirencester’s church,
Past Roman and medieval gateways,
Mute sentinels of time.
And there by the cross was a friend,
Covered in dust and flakes and shards of masonry,
After a day spent carving saints for niches;
She told us of her endeavours,
A lone woman carving her art
In a masculine fellowship of masons.
We wished her well and bade farewell,
Knowing once more that,
‘the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time’.