Christopher Somerville

We left the house on Christmas morning as the first crack of light was spreading in the east. Down empty roads and muddy lanes running with water, to a little parking space where the puddles were iced over. The first time this year I’d pulled on hat, scarf, thick gloves, thermals and padded winter coat.

Across a racing stream on a footbridge slippery with frost, and up a frozen grass slope to the long barrow darkly silhouetted on the skyline against a sky already broadened into a peach coloured dawn, the blue above streaked with dozens of drifting horsetails of cloud.

I wormed my way into the cold, damp stone passage that led back for 30 feet or so into the artificial hillock of the barrow. The floor where I knelt was wet and muddy, the stones hard against my back. At the entrance a big ammonite embedded in one of the kerbstones. Looking out, the view was south-east up a gentle slope to a wood on the skyline.

It was a half-hour wait, with the invisible sun lighting up the higher features of the village in the valley, church tower and fine tall buildings, the golden light gradually creeping down the slope behind the houses, and crowds of rooks becoming agitated and vocal at the sunrise they could already see from their vantage points fifty feet in the air.

At last the moment came as the first shallow arc of the sun rimmed the hill, spinning like a ball, its intense light diffused behind the ivy-thickened skeletons of the trees. The clouds gleamed, the peachiness of the sky leached into pale blue, and a finger of dazzling sunlight approached down the sloping field, entered the passage, and lit up the back wall of the burial chamber in an unbroken wash of light as bright as polished silver, as it has done at every winter solstice since the architects of the barrow aligned it so precisely 5,000 years ago.

The River Severn’s estuary was at a fantastically low tide as we crossed the ‘new’ bridge on a day of no cloud whatsoever. Looking seaward through the stroboscopic flicker of the bracing wires, we could see the tidal outcrop of the English stones fully exposed and slathered in red mud. Downriver, the little hump of Denny Island off Portishead stood marooned in a huge desert of sand. Other sand and mud banks lay around the widening tideway like beached whales. Unwary strangers might even suppose you could cross the five miles from the English to the Welsh bank on foot and do no more than bespatter your spats. And maybe you could, if you were able to walk on water while negotiating quicksand, slow mud, sudden drops, fathomless pools, and the second highest tidal range in the world sneaking round the corners to cut you off.

Over in Wales we hightailed it to Llanfihangel Crucorney, a placename whose sound put the immortal walking writer John Hillaby in mind of ‘a toy train scampering over points’. LC lies in the River Monnow’s valley that forms the eastern boundary of the Black Mountains and Brecon Beacons. It’s a great jumping off point for walks westward into those mountains, but today we were aiming east to climb The Skirrid (Ysgyryd Fawr, the ‘big split one’), a tall hill that lies north-south with its head cocked and spine raised like an alert old dog.

The Skirrid is made of tough old red sandstone lying in a heavy lump on top of thin layers of weaker mudstone – hence its history of slippage and landslides. We came up to it in cold wind and brilliant sunshine across fields of sheep, skirting its western flank through scrub woods, gorse bushes blooming yellow and holly trees in a blaze of scarlet berries, with the dark purple crags of the northern end hanging over little rugged passes of landslide rocks fallen in a jumble.


The ascent is short, steep and stepped, but it’s the sort of ‘starter mountain’ that families with six-year-olds can manage. Many were out – mums, dads, children, students, ‘maturer’ folk such as us, all hurrying to revel in this one-in-a-thousand day before the threatened reintroduction of lockdown in Wales should come into force.

Once at the peak in this unbelievably clear weather we gasped to see the landscape laid out in pin-sharp detail a thousand feet below and fifty miles off – Malverns, Black Mountains; farmlands rising and falling towards Gloucestershire and the Midlands; the slanting tabletops of Penyfan and Cribyn over in the Brecon Beacons; Cotswolds, Mendip, Exmoor; and the south Wales coast trending round into far-off Pembrokeshire.

Nearer at hand a grey streak of softly glimmering sea showed the tide rising in the Severn Estuary past Brean Down’s promontory, the slight disc of Flat Holm and the hump of her sister island Steep Holm, their lower edges lost in mist so that they looked like floating islands in some fabulous sea.

A short but magical walk in the green lanes and meadows around Glastonbury Tor. It’s only a hop and a skip from the village, a landscape of short steep rises and falls, above which the Tor stands out like a beacon. I’ve known this piece of country all my life, and have added and subtracted the tower on the Tor in my mind’s eye countless times, trying to decide if the hill itself would be so remarkable and eye-catching if it wasn’t completed by that finger of stone pointing up to the sky.

A network of lanes surrounds the Tor. Some are proper green lanes with grassy floors and thick hedges through which you get an occasional striking glimpse of the hill, its smoothly rising back silhouetted against the sky, bristling with the tiny figures of pilgrims ascending to the crowning landmark. Other lanes are stony or laid with cracked old tarmac. All are narrow, single-track roadways, overhung with ash and beech, a few of the ash looking sick and limp from ash dieback disease. A perfect comma butterfly sunned itself with scalloped wings outspread, not a tatter in its fabric.

We walked a rising lane through a holloway cutting. Beech trees clung to the exposed strata of rock with roots as grey and knobbled as old men’s fingers. Out along a ridge with grassy verges, where giant hogweed raised multiple heads packed with chunky purple and silver seeds. Northwards we had a wonderful sunlit view of the whole Mendip range from the little quiff of Crook Peak in the west to the hills beyond Shepton in the east, with the towers of Wells Cathedral shining at the foot of the ridge. Nearer at hand lay shapely Launcherley Hill, always a magnet to my eyes, the archetype of a West Country hill, a rounded patchwork of pastures, hedges and trees.

Back round the northern meadows, paying our respects as we passed the twin giants Meg and Mog, huge old trees now split, dried and skeletal, but still exuding a kind of ruined majesty.

We went to walk east of our village where the landscape turns from craggy limestone hills to long downs of chalk and greensand, moulded by rain and wind into a gently rolling, green and white countryside.

Near the start we came across an all-too-familiar scene – a mile or so of pasture through which the footpath ran unmarked over neglected stiles, to pitch up at a done-up farmhouse where the right of way passed across the farmhouse garden. An unguarded electric fence blocked access to the gate leading into the garden, where all signs and waymarks had been removed, to give the impression that there was no right of way. We hollered for the owner, who first sent the dog out, then somewhat shamefacedly emerged from the house and admitted that, yes, the path did cross her garden. No apologies for the electric shock we got crossing the fence, however!

It’s been very noticeable in recent times how many rights of way have been obliterated or obscured, waymarks and signposts removed, and obstacles erected around nice country houses whose new owners have done the properties up to the nines and decided unilaterally that the rights of way they accepted when they bought the house can be quietly abolished. Poverty of resources at County Hall has led to the laying off of many of the county Footpaths Officers whose job it is to keep our wonderful and unique network of paths open by making sure that householders and landowners do toe the line about maintaining access. The Ramblers organisation do the best they can – and we walkers are the best weapon they have in the fight to preserve what amounts to an irreplaceable national treasure. Keep walking those paths, folks! Rant over!

Up on the downs the views were breathtaking, far north to the Cotswolds, far south to Salisbury Plain. John Morgan was an unfortunate felon hanged for murder on these downs in 1720, and his name lives on at Morgan’s Hill, now a nature reserve where we picnicked among pyramidal orchids, yellow rattle, scabious and blue butterflies.

From here the Wessex Ridgeway took us south through a long valley where I was thrilled to see a corn bunting on the barbed wire fence between fields where oats and beans and barley grow. A stout little bird with a streaky breast, increasingly rare as its habitat and food sources have come under pressure from modern pesticides.

The homeward path led over Oliver’s Castle hillfort, where in 13 July 1643 an army of Parliamentary soldiers was routed by Royalist cavalry, many of them pursued at a panicky gallop till they tumbled in a terrible heap of men and horses down the steep face of the downs into the cleft known now as the Bloody Ditch.

No such awful scenes on these slopes today – just marbled white butterflies, bee orchids and lesser butterfly orchids, and of course the sky-filling songs of larks.

Leaving the village early on a hot windy morning, we skirted the west end of Quarry Hill. Ash dieback disease has got a firm grip of the young trees here, and is reducing them to pale skeletons in the wood. On the far side we crossed the dry yellow pastures of Dragondown where the cattle plodded one after another towards the shade of oak trees now turned as dark as iron by this two-month drought.

In the quiet green valley of the Russet Mere stream beyond Dragondown, a private revolution is taking place. The old knockabout farmhouses, beautifully sited but long neglected, have been bought up and spruced to the nines. The former dairying pastures of poached slopes and tough grass have been transformed into wildflower meadows thick with buttercups, knapweed, clovers and silky grasses with lovely names – Yorkshire fog, cock’s foot, crested dog’s tail. Aspens in stout tree guards, rustic park fencing and carefully signed paths all point to new influences, welcome ecologically, but oddly troubling too. At what point do the economics of everyday farming fall below feasibility, obliging the old farming families to give way to well-heeled conservers of the countryside?

Food for thought as we wandered the path through these delectable meadows and up to the strange gritty outcrop called Monk’s Kitchen. From here a really wonderful view down over the track of an old railway sneaking round the foot of Quarry Hill, and out across fields and woods to a prospect opening over the distant coast and the Quantock and Exmoor hills beyond.

The path to Holdfast Farm below had been impenetrably blocked with a crop of wheat. Damn you, farmer! We pushed our way along the field margin ploughed and sown right up to the spiky hedge. Hmm, yes, old style farming ahoy!

Up on the rise beyond we stood looking down on our neighbour village with its tall grey church spire, roofs and trees – a classic English view in early summer.

In a quiet green valley beyond.