The Mystery Keeper of Rodborough Common

 I am very lucky to have somewhere like Rodborough Common nearby. I leave my front door and head up to the end of my street where I cross through the churchyard before walking along the road towards the Prince Albert pub then go up until I'm at the cattle-grid where the world soon turns the colour of unfenced acres of limestone grassland. The land rises with a sharp swell up to the final anvil-flat limestone head of Rodborough Hill and I'm standing here in my green wellingtons already feeling my leg muscles tug and stretch with the steep walk up. Places like Rodborough Common refreshes human sanity with the reminder that our world is despite its technological confidence utterly dependent on the Earths fertility. The top of Rodborough Hill has long been a common, a term which in the medieval manorial system designated land outside the fields that was regarded unfit for the plough and left as common land to the peasants where they could graze a few cows, geese or sheep, gather scrub wood, berries, mushrooms, and catch the animals that dwelled on it for some extra protein in the pot. Common land was different for every village and had very old roots going back to the Saxon kingdoms. It was part of the farmed landscape to have land that was rough, uncultivated and a ready source of free kindling and food for the subject population of serfs. Rodborough Common was never destined to be ploughland, its soil is clay brash full of stones and the hill top is exposed to winds that bottle into the valleys below whistling through from the Severn river plain and Wales beyond. But it has always been perfect grassland, the old limestone grassland interwoven with herbs, wild flower and grasses of so many kinds that it nature loses itself in a delightful abundance, as though getting carried away with its sheer creativity the common simply becomes common. What is rare and fragmented elsewhere in the Cotswolds and beyond is raucously everyones. Though Rodborough Common is not just grassland, it is many, many other kinds of land besides the one it is managed as. It is good thinking land in my case, and dog walking land for lots of others, cow pasture land for local farmers, butterfly flower suckling and mating opportunities land, bee pollinating land, glow worm land, skylark nesting land, orchid enthusiast spotting land and still more for the elusive animals and ubiquitous birds that dwell here. I walk on now to the old beaten cart track that runs up next to another not so steeply set track, and feel the uneven well trodden earth rising. All around me the worn out summer grass stands in tawney long-haired tangles, cluttered with dead stalks of wild flower. There are as well the colonizing thickets of hawthorn, clumps of young ash trees, birches, pines and cotoneaster escapees from gardens. I like the mixture of scrubland and grassland for there is a lot more for wildlife, the modern day commoners, to glean, to nest within and raise their young on. Photographs from a hundred years ago at the beginning of the century show a very bleak and denuded Rodborough Common that has now fortunately become more juicy and shaggy again.  Directly above me stands on a prominent edge the 17th century Rodborough Fort, that watches over Stroud below much like a wealthy clothier of the day would have gazed upon his kingdom of cloth mills and rackfields where the dyed cloth was strung out in long strips on hooks to dry. The fort resembles a mock castle with a wall surrounding it, where there are large pine trees pallisading its perimeters. The Edwardian photograph of the bleakly shorn common makes the fort stand out like a kind of Scottish manse in an empty moor within its grove of pines. When the mock-castle was built this was done by taking land out of the commons, and I wonder what the people at the time thought of this rather arrogant intrusion? Did they help build it? Did they wonder if it meant more 'forts' were coming to swallow up their rough and hawthorny commons? I always look at the fort like an anomaly, an eccentric statement . I leave the fort behind. I am thinking of the bird I saw up here, those name is echoed below in the name of a house and in a field. 

It is the view up here that expands the mind out of the lines and squares of street and house into the drifting country of clouds and distant hill shadows. I can see the entire valley below and all around the long hills creating secret corners and combes. At the mouth of the valley stands Doverow Hill softly moulded with its cap of trees, then beyond everything rushes out in a flood of vision into the flatter plains of the river Severn and beyond her twinkling curve more hills, the Forest of Dean and the spectres of Welsh hills dimly switching in and out of visibility. I am shown a layering of landscapes, of secrets, of possibilities and memories. How many times have people over generations come up and stood and felt their gaze unreeling further and further out? What did they see when they looked? The borderland of Gloucestershire siding up to the strange, unfamiliar and potentially hostile reaches of the Forest and the Welsh Brecons. Or a gateway to industrial riches in the mining of coal, iron and other metals from the ancient darkness beneath the Forest and the Brecons.  The view will follow me, altering slightly as I traverse over the rumpled grassland, popping up with a sudden change in perspective as I make my way along the hills spine of oolitic stone. The common is embroidered with many paths, heavy with the centuries of footfall that continue with dog walkers. The wild flowers are largely spent now, except for summers late tribute to the colour carnival of spring with the pale pink scabious and in corners little harebells. The scabious resembles a very intricate lacework of florets bunched together. It is a lovely dainty. Back in spring where the grass is fresher, cowslips ring out yellow days of sunshine. The fading pink of the scabious seems to shrink back from the sun and keep its light preciously for itself. Further on past another bit of the common that was enclosed in the area called Little London, there is a great nest of blackthorns that are now showing the purple of their sloes, a colour you are not sure you should be picking or staying away from. It is the tree of winter and early spring, that after its white blossoming becomes quite invisible among the bursting out of green leaves. Then suddenly with the leaves down the thicket with its berries and long dark thorns rears up like the embodiment of winter; the land now once giving and kind, has turned to a hard, spiteful crone who seems to be hiding the sun in a pot under her cottage.  

 I am nearly there now at the point where I saw that bird which for me has become like the keeper of Rodborough Hills mysteries. But my ear is drawn many times before I reach the place by the heckles of magpies and crows. They fill the air with their commonplace shabby shadows and their crude rustic talk. I see two crows together with wings that look like they have split white paint down them, an interesting genetic skewing from black to white. Magpies settle on hawthorns and I listen to them with their sandpapering chatter and clicks, feeling my mind discomforted by their chafing talk as if they are a group of sorcerers discussing curses and hexes to place on the human world. It is strange that magpies who are very familiar and possess beautiful darkly iridescent tail feathers have never seemed to be regarded fondly or in any good light as the robin might be. The sinister feeling they impart is one that shivers down the collective spine of generations. In cahoots with the devil or not they are part of us. That shadow we encounter in the magpies rattle is ours. We can think in magpie ways and have the capacity to behave deviously. Probably though the biggest deviant though is man, and the magpie is only telling us what he sees. The land rolls and rustles about my boots, dogs zip and pant along with their owners, i don't see many cows today but their cowpats crust the earth where they have been grazing. 

 Then I am at the other end of the common where the hillside curves into an amphitheatre of grass and young scrub birch and oak. I am now looking over towards a thickening beech wood no older than half a century or so, that ripples away in a belt halfway between hill top and hill bottom. There is the old roadside inn called the Bear with its later extension designed by a German architect that stands ahead between Rodborough Common and Minchinhampton Common. The Bear also marks the beginning of Amberleys belt of upmarket abodes scattered idyllically along the winding lane which crawls along the hillside before dropping down like an exhausted worm into Nailsworth. But this is all a distraction for my eyes are really looking at the creased hillside directly below my boots. Those creases are the cropping lines of the cows and formerly the sheep that have chewed their way all over the common. Their furrows make the turf look as if it were a rumpled carpet, wiggling roughly parallel lanes worn by years of constant grazing up and down the slope. I think it must have been sheep who created such intensive browsing furrows . The cows that graze the land here now are not such obsessive munchers. Trees, especially birch are springing up plentifully and that is the tree I suddenly see my bird swoop down from. 

Its slim pointed shape is mantled in clay-red brown with a grey-blue head and it plunges like a perfectly crafted dart straight into the grass. Then returns to the tall birch tree soundless and full of grace. where it tucks its wings together to rest on the branch. Unlike the crows or magpies this bird exists almost invisibly, hovering on the wind before vanishing again into the trees with a flash of its bold earthy colour. It has a startling long-reaching cry but this is reserved it seemed for the occasion, for this hunter is modest and not given to show or letting off unnecessary energy. I sit here for a while longer watching him on the birch tree while he watches the grass. He does not move, he has become master of all we humans have forgotten to be, as he blends in with every leaf and twig without disturbing anything. His name is in this land, he holds its mysteries. Further back and below the hem-line of beeches at the bottom of the common is a grass pasture on a green belt of all that remains of the farmlands of Stanfields which once went all the way down to Lightpill. This grass pasture is named in the old maps as Gastrells, and not far from it above the Tabernacle is a house named the Kestrels.

You call me kestrel, gastrell, stanyel, windhover, and you know nothing of what I see from my birch tree. The world is acutely focused, details sharper than the surface, my gaze is poised and watching the earth for every micro-movement. When the slightest breeze blows the grasses rush like a fire and I watch for beneath close to the heartbeat of the soil run and scurry the creatures that keep me alive, give me strength to hover and dive, find a mate in spring, keep my territory and survive the winter. My feathers and bones can feel this trees sap flowing like my blood, I am stillness for that is the way I must be. Every stirring in the air through the trees around is bringing minute change in my perception. Light and shadow fold and fold and fold, I watch where they meet in between where the shapes of the land come into keen relief. The moment is the world. I see the flickering of its body beneath the grass, and I have met the wind before my shadow can touch the ground, I have become the point of all I focus on and my wings and talons do everything exactly when they need to. I touch the earth, become the grass, my talons grasp tight as a vice. The wind turns, the air changes, light and darkness fold. My gaze pierces through it all.

Journey into the memoryscape of Driftcombe, Slad

Driftcombe is at the very back of the Slad valley, and one drizzled sunday a few weeks ago I struck out on my bike to explore this mysterious valley pocket, adrift in the trees. The rain was very pleasant after the persisting muggy heat we have been slowly stewing in this summer, it was a soft sheeting rain enough to cool the air but not enough to soak the parched soil thoroughly. The mood rain brings is conducive to contemplation and dreaming, and as its fur of drizzle wettened my face, arms and legs as I cycled away down the built-up snake of Summer Street I felt myself becoming moistened, softened up to the lands green electric seeking to fuse with my nerve centre and suffuse my brain with its hidden tracks. Summer Streets built-upness withered around me as the old worm-crawl of the original lane sheathed me and my bike, as I now meandered into the deepening hollow of Slad Valley. The lane twisted down, plunged beneath the breast of Swifts Hill which for me always has been the magnetic centre of this valley, its limestone grasses the mooring place for people to gather, begin walks, fly kites and enjoy the beautiful sightline from here through the Stroud valley to the Severn vale. Swifts Hill is pregnant with myriad wild flowers and grasses that flourish like a wild fire ignited by the sun like a match striking the limestone ground every spring. Limestone grasslands have rapidly been destroyed and lost over the Cotswolds and Britains other limestone landscapes with the rise of modern farming since the 1950s. Swifts Hill is a harbour, a safe haven now for that vanishing, eroded natural integrity of landscapes over this island; a beacon perhaps for the future. The rain drips and slithers among the dry grass blades as I cycle up the steep lane from Knap Farms polished up facade and pass under the well-knitted sward of Swifts Hill.I soon find myself in the lap of Laurie Lee country beneath the maternal shade of beech wood and Elcombe notched into the hill with its gentle huddle of cotswold stone cottages appears in the drizzle to have lain unchanged for a hundred years, apart from the cars parked outside. A sensuous peace spreads itself out here as I stop to inhale the green lushness feeling the rain washing over leaves and down bark; the bracken in the triangular-ish meadow, the gardens around the cottages, the verges, all is sweet green.
 I pass further on by another cottage and come to a fork in the road where there is a small green with a beech tree planted for a girl those middle name 'Joy' has been used to create an elemental blessing of joy in memory of her. She was born in the same year as me and died before the turn of the millenium before she could reach thirteen. There other signs here, memories in a way as well, one that says 'Fletchers Knap'(is this referring to a time when there were arrows being fletched up on the hill?) another that says 'Solomons Byre' (very evocative) and the last that says Furners Farm. So I continue the tarmac road taking me up where I see the old road ahead beneath the beech trees, rough and furtive looking, dodging away from the tarmac road, and take its route down into Catswood.
Catswood is named from a time when wild cats dwelled here scratching their claws on the bark of the beech trees, though I have read that the name cat could also have been in old times attached to the family of pine martens, weasels and stoats. The wild cat today has such strong associations with the bleak heights of Scotland i find it had to imagine it dwelling down in this green valley, though there were once wolves here and wild boar before mans hand changed wildwood to farmland.
I'm cycling now into the dank shade of the woods and my vision closes inward to the breath of the summer wood that is rank with old decaying wild garlic. The woods around me are of beech, a tree typical of these valleys, with their soaring smooth skinned bark and arboreal aloofness that seems to translate into their absence in tree mythology. By summer their leaves darken the wood and make it a brooding almost tomb-like place. These woods I see around me are not of great age, they are in fact what has grown up since farming began to dwindle out of Slads history from the middle of the 20th century. Reading 'The Turbulent History of the Upper Slad Valley and the Scrubs' (Patricia M. Hopf)
It dawned on me that the kind of change this valley has seen in its landscape within the last hundred years is like nothing before. The bushy woodiness of todays Slad is modern, before the woods were smaller and pushed right back while sheep grazing maintained an almost moor-like grassland quilt thoroughout the valley. For centuries sheep kept Slad trimmed, while dozens of peasants two-roomed cottages cluttered the tree-shorn hillsides with their vegetable patches, and pig pens.
 It was a full house back then, but now Slad is a echo of those busy, soil-under-the-nails days; an echo drowned in the resurgent trees and in the comfortable centrally-heated houses that reside here removed from an existence like the one before, but part of a world that seeks the peace and green of Slad as a balm of relaxation and an antidote to the high speed age. When my bike wheels are taking me is towards the bottle-neck end of Driftcombe where apparently at its rear is hidden the ruins of somewhere called the 'Old shop' which apparently according to popular story was a brothel beside the old road up to Bisley. Hidden is an extremely good word to describe Driftcombe. It has become utterly engulfed by woodland so that you cannot really see anything that might have been there in the past. I stop at a stile and read one of Laurie Lees poems printed on transparent fibre-glass that are part of a kind of poetry trail. He evokes a very hot summer and I enjoy his lucidly tangible and well-rooted words that capture his local Slad in a memory like freshly hardened amber. A buzzard swoops over the pastures beyond and cries its long sad haunting note that seems like it is hunting for a lost soul. Soon I will be a lost soul in the back of Driftcombe.
The rest of the journey becomes more oppresive with the overgrown woods clamping out the light and the sky. I catch glimpses sometimes of the valley below that has narrowed into a throat of leaves. I am leaving the world behind as this cul-de-sac of Slad gobbles me up. I finally stop at a gate where I leave my bike and tramp beyond into a meadow that is thick and soaking wet with horse tail growing up to my waist. Wearing shorts and sandals I soon feel like am wading through a stream as the horsetail and grass clogs my path. I turn back unwilling to subject myself to further soaking.
I want to find the ruins of that old shop but I feel the woods won't let me inside its secrets. The beech trees now greedily horde the memories of lost days and seasons when the old hamlet of Sidenhams clung to its bald hillside and families flourished and withered like meadow flowers.
Perhaps I should not intrude on the dreams of the ancestors that now lie slumbering and undisturbed by the farmers delving spade or the sheeps grasping jaws. I find a track that zigzags uphill through the woods until I emerge with damp seed-encrusted sandals into a rough pasture where I meet sheep. I am above the valley now and I sit to look out over the land. My gaze is carried like a swallow over wooded ridges to a gloomy clouded foreground where I can see the huge mothering prominence of May Hill over in the Forest. I did not expect to see this, and the view feels important as if May Hill has chosen to show itself only from this vantage, because there are few places that possess such a strong eyeline to distant May Hill. Beyond the pasture I am on the upland fields of what was called the Scrubbs and where the remains of a Roman Temple were found two hundred years ago with stone votive reliefs dedicated to Romulus and Mars-Olludios. An ancient site of worship for the old iron-age Celtic inhabitants of Slad that the Romans converted into a formalised temple. But you wouldn' think anything was ever here now beneath the monoculture. Below likewise you wouldn't think anything was ever here beneath the thick woods. Memories lie heavy like the rain on the soil dripping deep down into the earth. We may forget in the changes that continually grip our world, but the land remembers.

Apple Tree Earth

Apple Trees are perfect symbols of the Earths abundance, and her fragility both at the same time.
Like an apple tree, or an orchard, the Earth can support a human community but only if her bounty is cared for and respected. She will bring us good health but only if we tend to her good health with returning love. The plight of modern man is that he has forgotten to nurture his apple tree, and indeed has probably built a ring-road about it! Here's a poem I have written on that matter.

The Last Apple Tree

A sacrifice has to be made,

for the Earths heart of apples to give beyond today,

for her fruits are going,

but do we have the courage?

Do we have the love to surrender to what she is losing?

Have we heart to plunge into the darkness,

where Earth is now?

Like an apple tree standing in a waste of rubbish,

deforested, extracted and fracked.

She is waiting for us to return something.

 

The time was yesterday,

when the Earth,

called us,

in our sleep,

to let go,

of the oil-addiction,

and fast-lane living.

Waken man!

Waken woman!

Earth calls us like a blackbird in the morning,

the time is over,

no more blind destruction of her apples of life.

 

Today is the decisive hour.

Do we let go, step down,

for all the apple tree has given?

Now we must return,

with spirit and love,

restore the wounded world,

that once flourished around her roots.

 

Let's replant our feet,

like Earths last apple tree,

what are we waiting for?

She is calling us,

like a blackbird in the morning.

Robin Collins 2014