Wapley Hill

I wrote this as a sample chapter for a book; perhaps not surprisingly I didn't get the deal! It is an earlier piece of the Hill Fort post you might have read. It tries to capture time and landscape, a sense of place, which is what I am aiming for in my work at the moment.

In high summer the narrow road is as dusty as Italy, the yellow-grey dust hanging in the air long minutes after a vehicle has driven past, clinging softly to the hedges and wildflowers and lower branches. In autumn the roads are muddied by the farm vehicles heading for the fields, cartloads of stones put down to strengthen the entrances, the yellow earth churned to muds and chocolate, the fields vast Zen gardens of brown earth with a lone tree to mark older fields, lost boundaries. The white stone path leads steeply upwards from the lane, a slash of bone-dry stones in summer, a gentle stream in winter. And deadly straight; a pull for calf and thigh muscles, designed for the petrol engine and therefore able to ignore the contours, ignoring older, gentler roads which were designed for horse or human foot. Only at the first of the older paths does the new road lose confidence and start to wind. The hill falls away to the left, a stand of sighing pines, distant fields and woods. Already we are a good height above the lower rolling landscape, the valley floor.

The older route through the woods is more pleasant than the new road, more enclosed, quieter. It seems to mark a boundary between thick pine forest and more open, more mixed woodland, although even this is still dense with fir trees. At a sharp bend in the trail is an old oak tree, thick with ivy, almost invisible against fir saplings and hedge. Beyond, the cleared field drops sharply, neatly towards the road.

The lower slopes are heavily wooded, thick pine forest planted darkly, fringes of escaped birch or beech trees, the occasional shaggy oak. This is a commercial landscape, as agricultural as the fields that surround it, but as the land levels out the woods are varied and unexpected; a patch of gentle birches, an avenue of golden-green beech a mile long across the hillside, the floor a golden-red carpet of leaves. The pine trees press around these erratics and stand in long tight rows on boggy ground, made soft by rain and decay and the stumps of their predecessors, some draped in lichen like white paint, a sort of offering on a makeshift shrine. They are tightly packed to make them grow tall, to waste less ground, to make each tree merely a collection of planks growing together. Filtered from above by spindly whips of branches, the light at ground level is weak and aquatic, and rotting stumps resemble broken equipment from a huge, forgotten shipwreck. Narrow paths between the trees lead nowhere, perhaps to glades of livid green moss, pale mushrooms, more rotting wood, more moss. The gloom leads off into the trees.

This year or the next the machines will come and lay waste to this sighing army of trees, deep wheels and chains and gangs of men will clear a stand of timber twenty, thirty, perhaps forty years old, clearing the ground for new plantations and leaving a charnel ground of splintered trunks, deep trenches, heavy mud. The tracks these machines leave can be seen for years, false trails, parallel trenches colonised by mosses, grasses, brambles, saplings until they eventually disappear altogether, worn down by rain and slow growth. The hill seems littered with these old trails. And at the top of the hill is the bald space, the old hillfort itself.