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.