Thanks to Richard Styles and Kel Portman for the above photos.

Sometimes a walk is as powerful as a play or film or football match,
You can’t sleep afterwards,
Your mind keeps revisiting snatches of conversation,
Or landscape technicolour pictures appear in your head,
Or memories of moments but they’re not memento mori,
It’s all alive and vital,
Not Coleridge’s Lime Tree Bower My Prison,
Instead, a diorama of recollection:
We talked, inter alia, of the following:
The Sublime, the Gothick, the Picturesque,
The unacknowledged ubiquity of slavery money,
And its Keynsian multiplier effect,
Both immediate, delayed or submerged;
Slavery:
‘The Shame that dare not speak its Name’;
Alexander Pope, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
King Arthur, fable, myth, memorialisation,
The invention of tradition,
Heritage and Counter-Heritage,
The Grand Tour,
‘Rule Britannia’;
A Celtic monk’s marginalia as we passed a puddle:
‘In the water’s canvas bright sunshine paints the picture of the day’;
Tobias Smollett, Daniel Defoe, Tristam Shandy, Ozymandias,
Sapperton Tunnel, the source of the Frome, the Slad Brook,
The watershed at Miserden,
The edgelands around the Thames and Severn Canal,
King George the Third’s visit to the tunnel,
18th century sight-seers,
Inland navigators, canal leggers, bricklayers;
Ecophilia, Topophilia, Logophilia,
Ocular-centred walking and the visually impaired,
Podcasting and the recording of …
The senses when out walking,
The squelch and oozing of water beneath one’s boots,
The fragrance of spearmint,
The cry of a buzzard,
The taste of spring-water,
The sharp touch of a nettle,
Learning how to describe what we see when we see …
The Blake-like vision of the universe within the palm of one’s hand;
Or remembering Caliban:
‘Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.’
We talked of different walking practices:
The pre-researched, the contextualised, the informed,
The drift, the derivee, the detournement,
The unexpected, the ad-lib spontaneous extemporised,
The performative, the collective, the democratic, the led,
How Kel practises a 5,000 pace rhythm,
With a mix of the random and the rendezvous,
Collecting keepsakes from the flotsam and jetsam
Of the landscape,
Material for ambulatory art;
Taking readings of elevation and distance,
The mensuration of a trip through a botanist’s eye,
Eye Bright, and clumps of autumn crocus;
Musing on the duality of meanings of ‘folly’,
Its etymology;
The search for the hidden narrative of slavery,
Triangular metaphor in a landscape,
Viewed through a Claude Glass gaze,
Then cross-examining the practice of walking,
Methodology and form rather than content:
How eight to twelve is just the right number,
There is no dilution of experience for anyone then,
But there is a critical mass to generate the diverse and heterodox,
And the walk can operate collectively and democratically,
A psychogeographical/mythogeographical/performative
Anarcho-Syndicalist Collective,
Sharing thoughts and observations,
Ambling through cycloramas and panoramas
Of space and time,
Even if the path lies straight in front of your nose.

The Tempest and Sapperton Church

Introduction

I am not saying there is a direct link between the Jacobean panelling in St Kenelm’s and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I am merely pointing at the way they are connected by the zeitgeist of ‘The Age of Exploration’, and its consequent mix of ‘the exotic’, imperialism, slavery, the engendering of an ideology of racism, and Christianity’s attitude towards the ‘heathen’.

The Tempest was probably written in 1610-11; the panelling is Jacobean. Neither came out of thin air. The late 16th century saw Elizabethan expeditions to ‘the New World’ (Raleigh, Roanoke etc.), whilst a colony was successfully founded at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Tobacco production and the fabled tale of Pocahontas followed in its Jacobean wake.

As regards Africa, and the Americas, Sir John Hawkins’ slaving voyages gained the royal backing of Queen Elizabeth as early as the 1560s. This inter-continental new world now meant that England – and Gloucestershire – were now situate within the broad reaches of the ‘Black Atlantic’ and the ‘Atlantic Archipelago’. We have an early parish record entry to confirm this: in 1603, on the 22nd November, in Bisley, John Davies, ‘ye black’, was buried.

Yet despite Hawkins’ predatory slaving on the African coastline, and despite exploitative English protestant attitudes towards first nation peoples in the Americas, a considerable body of evidence points to the 18th century Age of Enlightenment as the crucible for the development of an ideology of racism. Not the 16th or 17th centuries. So what did the figures on that 17th century panelling mean to those who commissioned them? And how were they first ‘read’ by those who first viewed them? And how have those readings changed over time? And how do we read them now?

Before we think about that, however, we have to think about the memorial in the church to Henry Poole, who died in 1616. It includes the ‘head of a black man’. The Poole family were wealthy landowners before the reign of King James, and even though Henry became even wealthier, are we going too far in seeing the black head as symbolic of the source of a new treasure chest?

Mark Hewlett wrote to me after a visit to the church:
‘It seems that the Poole memorial may not have been constructed until circa 1730, more than 100 years after his death.  I am not sure why it took so long.  This may make the inclusion of the head of the black man even more obscure. The head is set in the wall at the side of the monument.  It clearly seems to relate to the memorial but not to be an integral part of it.  See the attached pic – head is on the wall on the right. It is difficult to know what to make of it.  Is it a depiction of a slave? Is it a black servant?  The head seems to be represented in a classical way. Is that a laurel wreath?  The person depicted seems to wearing a purple (?) garment… not really very slave like?  Possibly not really very servant like. Why did the maker of the monument include the head of a black man (more than 100 years after the death of Thomas Poole)?’
The information booklet in the church tells us: ‘To the right, on the wall, is a bust of a black man. Maybe the Pooles had West Indian plantation connections. At any rate they were clearly very fond of this man, presumably a retainer.’ Well, well.
Now to the Jacobean panelling: this was, of course, originally in the secular setting of Sapperton Manor: the Atkyns family bought the manor house from the Pooles in 1661; the first Earl Bathurst then acquired it before demolishing it in 1730. The panelling was then donated to the church.
So with a nod to post-colonial studies and to historical phenomenology, what do those figures on the panels tell us about attitudes towards ‘race’, ‘the exotic’, wealth, slavery, the ‘noble savage’, Christianity, ‘the heathen’, ‘The Age of Exploration’, and ‘The Age of Empire’? What can we disentangle with minute observation? And can we be value-free in our minute observation and consequent description?
The figures, male and female, reveal bare torsos, often with necklaces, or charms or amulets. The aureoles on the female breasts are accentuated. Legs and genitalia are concealed behind a panel decorated with sinuous tendrils, cornucopia, and feline, demonic heads. Hair and headdresses adorn faces that show a variety of expressions, through differing positions of lips and mouth, together with direction and type of gaze. One male shows alarm and anger, with his hand clutching his chest – has his necklace or amulet been stolen from him? The beards on the males are more suggestive of Jacobean, European fashion.

How does Caliban and The Tempest fit into all of this?

‘This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first,
Thou strok’st me and mad’st much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in ‘t, and teach me how
To name the bigger light and how the less,
That burn by day and night. And then I loved thee,
And show’d thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.
Cursed be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you,
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o’ th’ island.’

‘You taught me language, and my profit on ‘t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you

For learning me your language!’

‘No, pray thee.
[Aside.] I must obey. His art is of such power
It would control my dam’s god, Setebos,
and make a vassal of him.’

‘I’ll swear upon that bottle to be thy true
subject, or the liquor is not earthly.’

‘I’ll show thee every fertile inch o’ th’ island,
And I will kiss thy foot. I prithee, be my god.’

CALIBAN [sings]
‘No more dams I’ll make for fish,
Nor fetch in firing
At requiring,
Nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish .
‘Ban, ‘ban, Ca-caliban
Has a new master. Get a new man.
Freedom, high-day! High-day, freedom!
Freedom, high-day, freedom!’

‘Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.’

‘I say by sorcery he got this isle;
From me he got it. If thy greatness will,
Revenge it on him, for I know thou dar’st,
But this thing dare not.’

‘As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed

With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both. A southwest blow on you
And blister you all o’er.’

PROSPERO
‘For this, be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps,
Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up. Urchins
Shall, for that vast of night that they may work,
All exercise on thee. Thou shalt be pinched
As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging
Than bees that made ’em.’

CALIBAN
[aside] ‘These be fine things, an if they be not
sprites. That’s a brave god and bears celestial liquor.
I will kneel to him. ‘  He crawls out from under the
cloak.

‘As I told thee before, I am subject
to a tyrant, a sorcerer, that by his cunning hath
cheated me of the island.’

How does ‘Ye Black’ buried at Bisley in 1603 fit into all this?

That terse parish record entry:
‘John Davies, ye Black, buried 22November 1603 Bisley’,
Can blow your mind when you pass the village,
Cycling to Oakridge and Sapperton,
On the trail of the Mason-Dixon line,
Africa, and America,
And the sugar plantations
In the West Indies;
It’s high up, Bisley,
The wind blows cold, the rain sweeps in,
The snow can settle,
And ‘vapours rolling down a valley
Make a lonely scene more lonesome’;
So how do we rescue you, John Davies,
‘From the enormous condescension of posterity’?
How do we recreate your life to give voice to you?
These questions might be rhetorical,
They might be existential and ontological –
What was your real name?
Why John Davies?
How did you end up in Bisley?
Where were you born?
How long was your life in Bisley?
Did the weather quickly kill you?
Had you no immunity against the common cold, flu and so on?
Could you speak English?
Did the locals point at you, laugh and mock?
Were you a slave?
A servant?
A fashion accessory?
Were you baptised into the Christian faith?
Were you buried in consecrated ground?
Did you cry yourself to sleep?
How did your mind cope with this exile?
And with this stolen identity and stolen self?
Did you die of melancholy?
Was death a blessed release?
How can we memorialise you?
‘John Davies, ye Black, buried 22November 1603 Bisley’,
How should we memorialise you?

And now to ‘The Enlightenment”: How does that fit into all of this?

The ideology of ‘race’ developed more forcefully and systematically in the 18th century, alongside the slave trade. The associated rise of capitalism with associated ideas of individualism, self-help, and property, were also part of the mix contributing to the development of racial ideology. In consequence, slaving and slave ownership were seen as quick and obvious ways to gain honest wealth.

Roderick Random, by Tobias Smollett:

Smollett’s descriptions of a surgeon’s life on board ship in the Royal Navy are much trumpeted. But there is much – forgotten or ignored – on slaving too, at the end of chapter LXV and the beginning of chapter LXV1:

‘In less than a fortnight after our separation, we made the land of Guinea, near the mouth of the River Gambia, and trading along the coast as far to the southward of the line as Angola and Bengua, in less than six months disposed of the greatest part of our cargo, and purchased four hundred negroes, my adventure having been laid out in gold dust.
Our complement being made up, we took our departure from Cape Negro, and arrived in the Rio de la Plata in six weeks, having met with nothing remarkable in our voyage, except an epidemic fever, not unlike the jail distemper, which broke out among our slaves and carried off a good many of the ship’s company; among whom I lost one of my mates, and poor Strap had well-nigh given up the ghost. Having produced our passport to the Spanish governor, we were received with great courtesy, sold our slaves in a very few days, and could have put off five times the number at our own price; though we were obliged to smuggle the rest of our merchandise, consisting of European bale goods, which, however, we made shift to dispose of at great advantage.’

CHAPTER LXV1

‘Our ship being freed from the disagreeable landing of negroes, to whom, indeed, I had been a miserable slave since our leaving the coast of Guinea, I began to enjoy myself… I calculated the profits of my voyage, which even exceeded my expectation; resolved to purchase a handsome sinecure upon my arrival in England, and, if I should find the squire as averse to me as ever, marry his sister by stealth … ‘

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Commentaries usually centre on Crusoe’s relationship with Man Friday and his key capitalist values of practicality, self-improvement and self-help. But we also see those values applied to slaving – ‘negroes’ have become commodities and an easy passage to wealth and status.

‘You may suppose, that having now lived four years in the Brazils, and beginning to thrive and prosper very well on my plantation, I had not only learned the language, but had contracted acquaintance and friendship … and that in my discourses … I had frequently given them an account of my two voyages to the coast of Guinea … how easy it was to purchase upon the coast for trifles … negroes, for the service of the Brazils, in great numbers …

It happened being in company of some merchants and planters of my acquaintance … three of them came to me the next morning … the question was, whether I would … manage the trading part upon the coast of Guinea, and they offered me that I should have my equal share of the negroes without providing my part of the stock.’

Disenchantment: The Picturesque Cotswolds and ‘Colonial Countryside’
A Walk in the Park

David Olusoga: ‘Few acts of collective forgetting have been as thorough and as successful as the erasing of slavery from Britain’s “island story”.’

The following descriptions from the internet describe the beauty of Cirencester Park. There is no mention of something else … more of that, later.

1. ‘Cirencester Park is a superb example of a forest-style garden, occupying 3,000 acres branching out from Cirencester. The park is privately owned, but it is open to the public free of charge, by kind permission of the owner, Lord Bathurst..’
2. ‘Cirencester Park and Estate: At the end of Park Street you cannot help but notice a very tall hedge, the tallest yew hedge in the world. This marks the beginning of the precincts of the Bathurst estate, or Cirencester Park … Provided that you are out of the park by 5pm, you can walk through the park from Cirencester to Sapperton, watching the church, in direct line with the avenue, gradually recede into the distance. THE ESTATE: The park is essentially an early 18th century creation, the great era of English landscaping, the result of a collaboration between the 1st Earl Bathurst and the poet and landscaper, Alexander Pope, who was a frequent visitor to Cirencester
3. “Perfect Cotswold countryside wander.”
4. ‘Alexander Pope, a fellow Tory and leading figure in London gardening and architectural circles, was a good friend of the 1st Earl and a frequent visitor to Cirencester. Bathurst and Pope became collaborators and together they planned the pinnacle of Bathurst’s life’s work – the creation of a sublime landscaped park … Lord Bathurst was a great believer in seasonal colour, something that is standard in gardening design today, but was rare and expensive to achieve in the 18th century. He spent a great deal of time and trouble choosing the species of trees to be planted and it is thanks to his extraordinary foresight that the park still boasts some of the most stunning vistas in England. Lord Bathurst was an early proponent of the Gothick Revival style …

That Missing Something Else

The church at Sapperton is outwardly modest and yew tree shadowed,
But inside is a huge rococo stone effigy to Sir Robert Atkyns
(Once of this Frome valley parish at Pinbury Park);
His father owned and lived at Sapperton Manor,
‘A very grand building, rather overpowering’,
According to Alan Pilbeam in Gloucestershire 300 Yeas Ago.

A 1712 picture of the house and grounds is engrossing:
It shows umpteen bays, finials, gables, chimneys and trees,
And a vast estate of sylvan straight-line avenues,
Progressively receding into far distant vanishing point.

A bowling green stands in the foreground of this landscaped geometry,
With three diminutive figures triangulated in leisured sport –
Their pose captured forever like a draughtsman’s contract.
And as these figures went about their contracted play,
Sir Robert completed The Ancient and Present State of Glostershire
Before dying of dysentery – his book published posthumously.

The house was demolished some twenty years later,
But you can walk to its ghosts down the track by the side of the church:
‘A grassy mound of rubble below the church marks its former site …
The unusually flat surface beside the mound was the bowling green’ –
We descended to this spot to recreate and limn the bowlers’ triangle,
In a draughtsman’s liminal contact, contracted through time,
Surveyed with scales of justice.

The Sapperton estate was acquired by the Bathursts
(Patrician beneficiaries of the profits of slavery),
Who promptly demolished the grand house
(The Age of Elegance and Reason),
And though Alexander Pope might wander through this valley,
Augustan couplet praise, two a penny,
As surveyors completed their triangulations …

A
Slaving ship from Bristol,
The Middle Passage to the West Indies,
And a healthy profit back across the Atlantic …

Meant a different triangle …

Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst

‘The Sense to value Riches, with the Art
T’enjoy them, and the Virtue to impart,
Not meanly, nor ambitiously pursu’d,
Nor sunk by sloth, nor rais’d by servitude;
To balance Fortune by a just expence,
Join with Oeconomy, Magnificence;
With splendour, charity; with plenty; health;
Oh teach us BATHURST! yet unspoil’d by wealth!’

That Missing Something Else

The English Heritage publication Slavery and the British Country House, edited by Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann can put you right, however. Madge Dresser writes that ‘Commercial considerations as well as political ones may have reinforced the tendencies of private proprietors of stately homes to offer the public an even more deracialised version of their past history, when that history is offered at all. Take, for example, a grand country house belonging to the Bathurst family and one associated now more with horses than slavery.’

It’s true that the third Earl (a member of Lord Liverpool’s ‘Repressive Tory’ cabinet) supported abolition by the 1820’s – and that’s what comes up on a Google search for ‘Bathurst and Slavery’. You don’t get a mention of Benjamin Bathurst’s late 17th century Deputy Governorship of the Leeward Islands, nor his Royal African Company’s position and shares. He died in 1704 and the house at Cirencester Park was built ten or so years later ‘for his son, Alan, the first Earl … the grounds designed with the help of Alexander Pope.’

The estate itself, is vast: when you wander through the Arts and Crafts village of Sapperton, or visit Coates, or Pinbury Park, or innocently follow the River Frome, or search for the source of the Thames, try to connect this sequestered Cotswold pastoral with the Atlantic ocean and shark-shadowed ships on the Middle Passage to the plantations.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

– T. S. Eliot

‘The stately homes of England
How beautiful they stand
To prove the upper classes
Still have the upper hand’

‘Heritage’:
Grandeur, wealth, stability, beauty, power, art, culture, landscaped gardens,
Arcadia, follies, the classics, aesthetics, elegance, manners, the Grand Tour,
The Augustan Age of Elegance,
The Age of Enlightenment –
This is the overt heritage of the English Stately Home.

But what of the covert heritage of some of these august piles –

Plantations, sugar, tobacco,
The triangular trade,
Slaving,
Slavery,
Slavery compensation,
Colonial office in the West Indies,
A concealed Keynsian multiplier effect,
A hidden Venn diagram link …
Or innocent coincidence on the journey
From the counting house to the country house …

So let us walk together, with our map.
To reflect on the cult of the picturesque …
Alexander Pope,
A triangular cultural trope:

The

Cult of the Sublime,
The Romantic Imagination,
The fashion for the Gothick,
The Shakespearian trope of this ‘sceptred isle’,
The lyrical self-contained world of the stately home,

Think about Goldney House in Clifton,
Where as Roger H Leech put it, wih M Leone:
“The setting out of these elite falling gardens can be seen as forming part of the process called ‘Georgianisation’, in this instance the ‘ideology of naturalising the hierarchical conditions of social life through landscape architecture’.

And that means we have to leave the insular world of the stately home,
Within this ‘sceptred isle’,
And think about The Tempest,
Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban,
Especially the representation of poor Caliban,

For ‘heritage’, like ‘charity’, does not always begin at home.

Thoughts derived from a reading of
Creating Memorials Building Identities The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic
(Alan Price Liverpool University Press 2012)

Doors of No Return,
Historic, documented, liminal places,
Not gone with the wind, but both visible and invisible,
Spaces and places in the black Atlantic archipelago
With messages and mementoes from the slaving past,
Open doors to the truth –
But we too have landscapes that require re-reading,
Reinterpretations that acknowledge a history
That might be interwoven with the triangular trade,
But whose messages are obscured or buried –
The home of Stroud Scarlet, for example;

So how do we create a counter-narrative?
That is,
“A performative counter-narrative, what we might call a ‘guerrilla memory’”,
Or “Lieux de memoire, sites of history, torn away from the moment of history” (Pierre Nora),
Memorialisation that moves beyond ‘obsessional empiricism’
and ‘the fetishisation of surviving historical documents and sources’,
To a counter-heritage, a counter-memorialisation.
18th
Century
Sea Doggerel
21st Century Shadow

‘All
ship-shape
and Bristol fashion’:
Stroud Scarlet and trade expansion,
Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Benin, Angola, Gambia.

The
Door
of No Return:
Atlantic Middle Passage,
Nevis, Barbados, Jamaica,
Virginia, Haiti, South Carolina.
Fill the hold with sugar, cotton, tobacco –
Still casting a ship-shape triangular shadow.

The Thames and Severn Canal History and Guide by David Viner

The first Earl Bathurst was an early supporter of the canal idea,
to link the Severn and the Thames,
imagining the union of the two great rivers
on his estate;
Cirencester Park would see a
‘Marriage … which would be the
Admiration of Posterity’,
wrote Alexander Pope.

Bunce Island in Sierra Leone was once an early British slaving headquarters: ‘In exchange for slaves and other valuable commodities the British offered glass beads, bundles of cloth, gunpowder, European metal goods, tobacco pipes, bottles of liquor and European weapons. Until a few years ago the ground was … littered with tiny glass beads and fragments of pottery … Most of these grim souvenirs have been hoovered up by tourists … but many more relics of the trade lie beneath the soil, along with iron nails used to attach shackles and chains to African arms …’ Black and British A Forgotten History – David Olusoga

The Thames and Severn Canal History and Guide by David Viner

‘The prosperity of the Stroud woollen industry between 1690 and 1760’
also stimulated proposals for the canal.
(This also coincided with the Bristol boom-time for slaving profits
– how much of that cloth that was bartered
for slaves in Sierra Leone and beyond
came from Stroudwater,
I wonder.
We are allowed to wonder.)

The placid waters of the Stroudwater Navigation and the Thames and Severn Canal; the rustic banks of the Severn, and the meads by the Thames, all deceive the senses. Our senses should be alarmed, like Scrooge with Marley, with apparitions of coats of arms, purses, chains, links, cash boxes, keys, ledgers, deeds and padlocks. And spectral sharks might appear to leap from the bloodied inland waters. Think of that at Bathurst Meadow Lock.

Finally, terra firma and permissive rights of way:

From 1967: Near the Round Tower, Cirencester Park S0 998026
‘A row of deserted cottages stands near the Ewepens, on the ‘Bisley Path’, the former main road from Cirencester to Bisley and Painswick, and Gloucester. At this point the road branched off for Minchinhampton and Coates, through what is now Cirencester Park … ‘this road became the private property of Earl Bathurst’ in 1818.

Property is Theft: a Masque
‘Town and Gown’
In Cirencester;
And in the shire:
‘Smock and Crown’.

Despite the high walls, we are allowed to walk the estate …
(The post-modernist illusion of equality;
Marcuse’s ‘Repressive Tolerance’;
Gramsci’s cultural hegemony;
The ‘we’re all in it together’ illusion.)

Conclusion

David Olusoga: ‘Few acts of collective forgetting have been as thorough and as successful as the erasing of slavery from Britain’s “island story”.’

Thanks to Mark Hewlett for the above photos and below comments.

Credit To Deborah Roberts for the above photos.

9.3 % Swing

A red island in the sea of Cotswold blue
A red outcrop in these blue remembered hills
We’re not 25 grand smug shepherd’s huts
We’re red brick, spit and sawdust, woollen mills

A red rose amidst the snarling thorns of May
A red flag sewn from Stroudwater Scarlet
We’re not the headmistress’s blue-rinse smile
We’re the crimson kiss of a wanton harlot

We’re not Farrow & Ball “complacent blue-tit”
We’re not weekend waxed-jacket and tweed knickers
We’re not honey-dipped, chocolate-box bollocks
We’re not mimsy-boo-boutique more tea vicars

We’re anarchist printers, poets and painters
We’re the ghosts of Huguenot weavers
We sing protest songs up a hornbeam tree
We’re the New Lawn vegan-green believers

We’re not Johnnie Boden, we’re Jonny Fluffypunk
We wield pen and brush not polo mallet
We steer to the left through canals of Budding beer
A splash of vermilion from art’s rich palette

We don’t twitch the curtains of seething disapproval
A Little Metropolis, we think out loud
Welcome mat unfurled, we’re citizens of the world
We’re the People’s Republic of Stroud

by elvis mcgonagall, june 2017

Credit To Mark Hewlett/Bob Fry for the above photos.

Jo Cox Commemorative Walk Saturday June 17th: 4 miles or so, around Nailsworth; meet by the clock near Hobbs at 10 o’clock. A performative walk: referencing FGR’s success; David Drew’s success; Jo Cox’s first speech to parliament: “We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us”, and, finally, working class local history. Please wear FGR colours or red or whatever. I have prepared some materials – if anyone would like to read/perform, then please contact me. You may wish to read/perform something of your own – again, please contact me. I would particularly be pleased if anyone would like to read something from their heart about Jo Cox. I do not have the time to count numbers – just turn up, but it would be helpful if you could let me know if you are going. Many thanks, Stuart.

The Windrush joins the Thames at Newbridge,
Flowing beneath the elegant Taynton stone bridge,
Once a port of call for that Burford quarried stone
On its way to Oxford and London,
As well as a defeat for the Parliamentarians …
The sight of so many swans gliding on the waters,
So close to King Charles’ Oxford,
With their mute depiction of feudal hierarchy:
These birds are for monarchs old and new, not
‘Yoemen and husbandmen and other persons of little reputation’;
A heron interrupted the flow of my thoughts down stream
To Hart’s Weir footbridge – more English quaintness:
The weir has gone, but a right of way remains to Erewhon;
Then Northmoor Lock, before reaching literary Bablock Hythe:
Matthew Arnold’s scholar-gypsy,
‘Oft was met crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hythe,
Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet,
As the punt’s rope chops round’;
None of that now at the Ferryman Inn and its chalet purlieus,
Instead a meander inland before returning to the waters
At Pinkhill Weir, before another short roadside detour,
And a boatyard and chandlers and a stride to Swinford Bridge
(Swine-ford),
Where feudalism and modernity meet:
A toll bridge, built at the behest of the Earl of Abingdon in 1777,
Where a company still charges drivers today
(But not pedestrians!),
Then on to the now invisible Anglo-Saxon cultural importance
Of Eynsham, and Eynsham Lock,
Evenlode Stream and King’s Lock
(King denoting kine),
Underneath the Ox-ford by-pass
(You’ve heard its constant roar for over an hour),
To Godstow: ‘Get thee to a nunnery!’ –
‘The use of detectors is strictly forbidden’,
Fair Rosamund, Alice Liddell and Charles Dodgson;
Pat the astonishing free grazing common lands of Port Meadow:
Horses gallop free, while a train passes in the distance,
Kine, countless, standing in the waters,
Swans gazing at the stationary herds,
Port Meadow, a feudal gift to the burghers of Oxford,
Courtesy of Edward the Confessor,
Honoured by William the Conqueror;
But the industrial revolution was calling:
A boatyard, a footbridge, Osney Bridge, a canal,
And a train back to Stroud.

I arrive at William Cobbett’s rotten borough of Cricklade:

‘I passed through that villainous hole … the labourers look very poor, dwellings little better than pig beds and their food nearly equal to that of a pig. This Wiltshire is a horrible county.’

But last January, Cricklade looked like a Thomas Hardy film set,

A gently rising hill of a quaint and prosperous street,

All purposeful early morning bestirring,

Inns, butchers, bakers and – who knows – candlestick makers,

While beyond the bridge, fritillary water meadows,

With light like pewter – steel grey clouds – shafts of sunlight,

Aspen and willow, silver light on rippling water,

Sepia post card Victorian baptisms at Hatchett’s Bridge;

Today, the first of September,

‘Where are the songs of spring?’ –

Mists from Keats over the river,

Gossamer webs; plump, ripe apples …

Mellow fruitfulness and cider oozing from the presses;

But the trickling Ray wanders down from the Downs,

To offer the Thames its tribute,

And the sunlight trips through time:

Saxon peasants till the harvest fields,

A discarnate presence in the mist-lands;

King Cnut crosses the various watercourses,

Crushing the yellowing leaves, slashing the blood red hawthorn.

The wind soughs in the reeds,

As I cross the line of battle, to reach

Castle Eaton’s seeming quietude,

Once the scene of Dark Age carnage:

The clash of sword on sword,

The cries of pain and anguish,

The crimson ground and river,

The runes and riddles of death;

Today, an army of house martins,

Betwixt Mill Lane and the church.

We cross back into Wiltshire,

Along an ancient bridleway’s grassy track,

Dividing two open, brown ploughed fields,

A tractor working its way across the broad expanse,

While cows chew the cud and the barns fill with hay bales.

We walk past ridge and furrow and nettled old thoroughfares

Of the deserted medieval village of Inglesham,

With its 13^th century church

(St. John the Baptist, originally Saxon),

Wall paintings guarded by William Morris.

A wave of weeping willow,

Roundhouse on the river,

Confluence of canal and river,

Where I used to swim as a boy,

Mum too in her gilded young days.

Broad, confident river, now,

Girth increased by the Colne and Leach,

Halfpenny Bridge by the old wharves,

Linking the Midlands, the West Country, London,

Hubbub of clanking, scraping, lifting, carrying,

Rattle of toll coins, babel of banter, accent and dialect;

There: iron, copper, wool, cheeses, brass, coal and hides,

Stone for St. Paul’s and Cobbett’s Great Wen,

But over there, in the quiet solemnity of the churchyard,

Shelley composes his summer evening verse:

‘The wind has swept from the wide atmosphere


Each vapour that obscured the sunset’s ray,

And pallid Evening twines its beaming hair


In duskier braids around the languid eyes of Day:


Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men,

Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.

They breathe their spells towards the departing day,


Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea;


Light, sound, and motion, own the potent sway,

Responding to the charm with its own mystery.

The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass


Knows not their gentle motions as they pass.


Thou too, aerial pile, whose pinnacles


Point from one shrine like pyramids of fire,

Obey’st in silence their sweet solemn spells,


Clothing in hues of heaven thy dim and distant spire,


Around whose lessening and invisible height


Gather among the stars the clouds of night.


The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres:


And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound,


Half sense half thought, among the darkness stirs,


Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around,


And, mingling with the still night and mute sky,


Its awful hush is felt inaudibly.



Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild


And terrorless as this serenest night.


Here could I hope, like some enquiring child


Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight


Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep


That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.’

(Shelley, Mary Godwin – future author of Frankenstein – and Thomas Love Peacock were at Lechlade, about to abandon plans to explore the country by river and canal. Shelley had been rusticated from Oxford for writing The Necessity of Atheism; the churchyard plaque doesn’t mention this…)

While Shelley was developing his radical ideas, Allen Davenport had left his Ewen -Thames obscurity behind, and was in the thick of the action in London, as we have already seen. Here’s another snippet about Mr. Davenport:

He penned republican poems,

Would have been part of the 20,000 strong-crowd at Spa Fields in 1816,

Stirred by the speeches of the Watsons:

‘The Land is the People’s Right!’

‘The produce of the land belongs to those who cultivate it’,

‘Will Englishmen any longer suffer themselves to be trod upon, like the poor African slaves in the West Indies, or like clods or stones?’

He might have pinned up some of the 5,000 planned for posters:

BRITONS TO ARMS

The Whole Country waits the Signall from London to fly to Arms! Haste, break open Gunsmiths, and other likely places to find Arms!! Run all Constables who touch a man of Us. No Rise of Bread, No Regent! No Castlereagh. Off with their heads. No Placement Tythes, or Enclosures! No Bishops, only useless lumber! Stand true or be Slaves for Ever!

I met Jim Pentney at Lechlade – he had made the journey by canoe – and I placed Jim’s carving of our Allen Davenport stone from Ewen on the table with our afternoon tea. It was like Livingstone and Stanley: ‘Mr. Pentney, I presume.’

Another stage completed on the journey of the stone to the Reformers’ Memorial at Kensal Green – a very different landscape from the flooded and impassable fields of last January.

Here’s Jim’s account of his journey in the canoe:

1^st September 2016

‘Sweet Thames Run Softly’

First autumn dew on the windscreen and Stuart will be on the train to Swindon to catch the bus to Cricklade. But ‘Iva Knu’ – Dew and Knu. A misty drive with my inflatable companion (Iva) deflated in the back.
Down a lane at Down Ampney, Old Father should be somewhere here …….. and Vaughn Williams’ Lark Ascending
A gate, a stone and an inscription
Down Ampney Airfield from where in 1944/5 Dakotas and gliders took off for Arnhem
Where to blow up and launch? Not here
Rescued by William Morris, at Saint John the Baptist, Inglesham, A pair of sunglasses lay in the grass by the door. The mist had lifted into bright sunlight. I tried them on – shady. Clean shaven since Saturday. No it’s not me.
Nourished by a ploughman’s pasty, pass the lowing herd o’er the meadow To the river and off upstream.

Dragon flies escort,
A family of ten swans
Part for me to pass

Loose hands, don’t grip tight
The paddle handle or an oar,
‘Or you’ll get blisters’

Lazing up the flow
Lie back against the pack and
View the kites’ regard

From passing open pasture the banks grow wooded.
Heron grey reeds stand close in the water
Broken branches snarl.
Dip and duck below a fallen trunk
And brambles scratch the canvass.

Turn before Hannington Bridge
Willows wave and leaves applaud
And tea awaits at Lechlade.