our river

River Ray at Westmead, Swindon

As befits a town in the middle of England, Swindon is very close to the east-west watershed. Three or four miles west, the waters drain into the Avon basin*. But here, the water drains east, eventually. Swindon has no main river, it was all about the railway, but the little River Ray winds through West Swindon, on its fifteen-mile journey north from the Marlborough Downs to meet the infant Thames at Cricklade.

I was thinking about our deeply ingrained dream of being transported, of moving without effort, the excitement of motion that even a thousand commutes can't quite numb. It wasn't all a dream, even before BMWs, before express trains and horse carts. Even in prehistory, children began life by being carried around. We can pretend that there's something heroic about racing drivers and jockeys and fighter pilots and astronauts, but still, there's something infantile about it, these small figurines being hurtled along by forces greater than their own.

In prehistory, too, someone could have dropped a coracle into the river just here, and been floated (if not quite effortlessly) for two hundred miles downriver and into the wide arms of the Thames estuary.

Because we are animals, moving around is the essence of our way of life. But moving around under our own steam quickly becomes hard work. The dream of being transported is to get a free ride.

Transport has meant so many things; liberation, enlargement, discovery, the greed of knowledge. Pioneering, penetration, exploitation. Escape, from suffocating home, from consequences, from the tribe's pettiness and from ourselves. Mastery and display. Finding God, finding our destiny. An unhinging, perhaps an illusion, a flight of fancy, out of our minds.

*

* In the seventeenth century there was some talk of connecting the two, thus allowing boats to travel cross-country from London to Bristol. John Aubrey says that one idea was to cut through the hill at Wootton Bassett.

(See "Henry Briggs" in Aubrey's Brief Lives ed. Oliver Lawson Dick.)

The Thames-Avon connection was finally made in 1810 when, after a century of work on the rivers Kennet and Avon, and then on a canal between them, they were finally linked by the opening of the famous flight at Caen Hill, Devizes.

Dryden on Stonehenge

John Dryden in 1693, portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller

[In the National Portrait Gallery. Image source: http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw01952/John-Dryden?LinkID=mp01369&role=sit&rNo=1 . I've slightly lightened the image.]


Dryden's interesting poem prefixing Walter Charleton's Chorea Gigantum (1663), ends thus:


Nor is This Work the least: You well may give
To Men new vigour, who make Stones to live.
Through You the DANES (their short Dominion lost)
A longer Conquest than the Saxons boast.
STONE-HENG, once thought a Temple, You have found
A Throne where Kings, our Earthly Gods, were Crown’d.
Here by their wondring Subjects They were seen,
Joy’d with their Stature and their Princely meen.
Our Soveraign here above the rest might stand;
And here be chose again to rule the Land.
These Ruines sheltered once His Sacred Head,
Then when from Wor’ster’s fatal Field He fled;
Watch’d by the Genius of this Royal place,
And mighty Visions of the Danish Race,
His Refuge then was for a Temple shown:
But, He Restor’d, ’tis now become a Throne.


"To my Honour’d Friend Dr. Charleton, on his learned and useful Works: and more particularly this of Stone-heng, by him Restored to the true Founders."
 Complete poem:  http://www.bartleby.com/204/19.html]




The story of the future Charles II being at Stonehenge was perfectly true.


"On 6 October (1651) the King, Julia Coningsby and Henry Peters, Colonel Wyndham's servant, left Trent for the home of Mrs Amphillis Hyde at Heale House between Salisbury and Amesbury. Though sleeping at Heale, Charles spent his days at Stonehenge, returning to the house each evening after dark." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_of_Charles_II]


Charles was 21. He was incognito, fleeing across England following final defeat at the Battle of Worcester. His black hair was close-cropped and he wore countryman's clothes. His unusual height  (to which Dryden's poem alludes) was apt to draw unwanted attention: Charles was 6' 2".


Charles left Heele House on 12th October; he boarded the Surprise at Shoreham on 15th October.


Whether he really spent five full days at Stonehenge I am not sure.  Aubrey Burl says only that he was there on 7th October with Colonel Philips, "reckoning and re-reckoning the stones".




Walter Charleton's book disputed Inigo Jones' claim that Stonehenge was a Roman temple (Jones' claim had been made back in 1620, following his survey, but was not published until 1655, three years after his death) .


In fact, Charleton claimed, Stonehenge was clearly Danish. And it was not a temple but a place of royal ceremonial,  where kings sat publically in state. (Charleton was the first of many to claim that the Altar Stone was originally upright: it was a throne, he thought.)


Charleton's claims were rebutted by John Webb, Jones' nephew. Stuart Piggott calls it "a forgotten controversy conducted on forgotten lines of argument . . . It is is a microcosm of the battle of the Ancients and Moderns, with Jones, Webb and Charleton on the far side of the intellectual gulf, Aubrey and Stukeley on the near side..."  (quoted in Aubrey Burl, A Brief History of Stonehenge, p. 37).

Charleton made no independent survey of Stonehenge and the main value of his book, maybe, was that it made him aware of John Aubrey's discovery of Avebury, which he mentioned to the king. Charles, as we've seen, had become interested in the mysteries of Stonehenge. Charles summoned Aubrey for an audience, and shortly afterwards met him at Avebury to explore the site.


The clear-minded Aubrey made short work of the Jones/Charleton theories. He knew about stone circles in parts of the UK that neither the Romans nor the Danes ever occupied. He realized that they were the work of pre-Roman people. (For him that simply meant "Druids". No earlier phases of British prehistory were known at the time.)

Charleton was a royal physician and a Fellow of the Royal Society. But in 1663 it was easier to talk the talk of science than to walk the walk. (Something that's not unknown even today..!)

*

Still, Dryden's poem shares the excitement of science, the feeling of liberation. Here's how it begins:




THE LONGEST Tyranny that ever sway’d
Was that wherein our Ancestors betray’d
Their free-born Reason to the Stagirite,
And made his Torch their universal Light.
So Truth, while onely one suppli’d the State,
Grew scarce, and dear, and yet sophisticate;
Until ’twas bought, like Emp’rique Wares, or Charms,
Hard words seal’d up with Aristotle’s Armes.
Columbus was the first that shook his Throne;
And found a Temp’rate in a Torrid Zone,
The fevrish aire fann’d by a cooling breez,
The fruitful Vales set round with shady Trees;
And guiltless Men, who danc’d away their time,
Fresh as their Groves and Happy as their Clime. Had we still paid that homage to a Name,
Which only God and Nature justly claim,
The Western Seas had been our utmost bound,
Where Poets still might dream the Sun was drown’d:
And all the Starrs, that shine in Southern Skies,
Had been admir’d by none but Salvage Eyes.



When science, empire and capitalism got together, there wasn't much future for the "guiltless Men" and the "Salvage Eyes". To discover, explore, and exploit... That was what science meant at the sharp edge, just as it does today (its prime victims now being industrial animals, natural ecologies, the earth, the seas and the climate -- though human material is not neglected either.)

John Aubrey: The Natural History of Wiltshire (1656-91)

John Aubrey in 1666, portrait by William Faithorne

[Image from the Ashmolean Museum website]

The book I have read is in fact an abridgement first published in 1847. The book was not published in Aubrey’s lifetime and represents a sort of ongoing compendium of “papers” that was added to over many years. He had freely offered these papers to Dr Plott, so he does not seem to have thought of them as a book, even when “tumultuarily stitch’t up”.

[This 1847 edition is available on E-Gutenberg.]

I pointed out a maybug on the pavement of a residential street in Bath. “Look at his antennae, they look like fans”, I lectured happily to a child in the vicinity -  “and look! his poo is green!” The child lingered while we strolled off up the hill. When we were far enough off, there was a stamping sound.

Of his own secret impulse to “make a scrutinie into the waies of nature”, Aubrey says that generally “’Twas held a sinne”, and of himself “Credit there was none; for it gets the contempt of a man’s neighbours”. So it does still, except in highly buffered zones such as universities (where, however, Natural History is not regarded as a subject).

"Natural History" certainly gets away with a lot.  In Aubrey’s book, it's an almost unlimited subject: it comprises,( apart from weather, plants, animals, etc,)  such things as architecture, agriculture, the “historie of cloathing” (i.e. the cloth trade), notable families and “accidents”. This scopelessness is essential. (And why tie yourself down to Wiltshire? Aubrey is quite content to go outside his county when he as something interesting to report.)

Aubrey saw things differently from us. In his time people didn’t move around much, and some districts were healthier than others, so that he speaks of the North Wiltshire folk, for example, as “phlegmatique, skins pale and livid, slow and dull, heavy of spirit; hereabout is but little tillage or hard labour, they only milke the cowes and make cheese; they feed chiefly on milke meates, which cooles their braines too much, and hurts their inventions” etc. etc. The explanations sound like guesses, but his observation may be fairly sound. Man in those days was an animal who varied with his habitats. Now we are all under glass, so to speak, and a uniform strain.

On June 3rd, 1647, Aubrey’s mother noticed the sky, in which two rainbowy circles were intersecting around the sun. As Aubrey remarks, she might not have noticed it at all but for the accident of going outside to look at the dial. I saw something similar while on the beach at Benidorm (30/3/02 18:00), though on this occasion there was thin cloud, the sort that makes sundogs visible, but Aubrey says that when his mother saw the haloes “it was a very cleare day”. No-one else in Benidorm seemed to be aware of the phenomenon, which lasted all the time we were walking back to the hotel. Just being outside (as most people must have been in June) was not enough - “few took notice of it because it was so near the sunbeams”.

[I saw three suncave arcs and two sunvex arcs. If they were the Parry arcs and other exotic haloes, I am obviously lucky or spend too much time looking at the sky. I can also report an authentic Wiltshire observation; a complete lunar rainbow seen while driving westward on the A303 at Amesbury (19/1/03 19:20). The rainbow appeared for only a couple of minutes. To me it looked like a white beam, arising as from a spotlight, but bent into a bow. I was driving and couldn’t pull over in time to have a good look, but Laura said she could make out faint rainbow colours, in particular if she didn’t look at it directly. From these somewhat casual remarks you will gather that we had never heard of lunar rainbows and consequently had no idea of their intense rarity (the Met Office receives about two reports a year). If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have stopped dead on the carriageway. Alas! it’s most unlikely that any person previously informed about lunar rainbows has ever gone on to see one. Has a lunar rainbow ever been photographed? And those colours... – if only we’d checked, we could have dealt a blow to the common surmise that the moon doesn’t produce enough light for a lunar rainbow to be coloured. But Laura can’t rule out the possibility that the colour she saw was just the tinting along the top of my windscreen...] 

The difficulty of discussing plants in the days before Linnaeus is brought home to us vividly. At Priory St Mary: “In this ground calver-keys, hare-parsely, wild vetch, maiden’s honesty, polypodium, fox-gloves, wild-vine, bayle.” John Ray, who wrote some contemporary notes on the manuscript, complained: “Calver-keys, hare’s-parseley, mayden’s-honesty, are countrey names unknown to me.” Local knowledge may have been great, but knowledge cannot be passed on using such unsystematic equipment.

Of the “wich-hazel” Aubrey was well aware that in some counties it was called “wich-elme”. To our minds it seems impossible not to go one step further and to state that the trees quite obviously are elms, and not hazels. Some such perception of natural groupings must have enabled Linnaeus to develop his genera, though he didn’t conceive of a common origin. Aubrey has only one kind of classification, which loosely equates to the species; though he can say, as of the hazel, “Wee have two sorts of them”. This would clearly pose an interesting problem if all hazels were supposed to be connected by kinship to a primordial pair (in Eden, perhaps). But I think that this was not conceived. Local varieties were probably assumed to be “just there”, their ancestry a cloud. God could have intervened many times, making special creations. In Aubrey’s time many insects were believed to emerge from inanimate material.

Considered as a whole, Aubrey’s conception of his county is rather like an account of the “wonders” that you’d find stepping through the grounds of a spacious country seat. He is anecdotal. The world in which he lived had less structure, less roads, less development, less grasp.

Dr Ralph Bathurst, Dean of Wells, and one of the chaplains to King Charles 1st, who is no superstitious man, protested to me that the curing of the King’s evill by the touch of the King doth puzzle his philosophie: for whether they were of the house of Yorke or Lancaster it did. ‘Tis true indeed there are prayers read at the touching, but neither the King minds them nor the chaplains. Some confidently report that James Duke of Monmouth did it.

Such a passage opens a window, and the view is very curious. A whole fabric of credulity is being forked over by inappropriate mental instruments. It must collapse, or retire into some more shadowy mode, such as ceremonial, but has not quite done so for Aubrey. He is prepared to record the story that woodpeckers can drive out iron nails with the help of a leaf; he reports an experiment, apparently in confirmation, and suggests that it be repeated. But John Ray impatiently cuts the traces: “without doubt, a fable”. For science is also about seeing what experiments not to bother with.  

Undoubtedly Ray’s cold clarity has given us a vast fresh field in which to roam. But I like the emphasis that Aubrey’s conceptions place on the Orcheston Grass and the Glastonbury Thorn. He is alive to individual phenomena, to the peculiarities of place. It is credulity, but it’s also an openness of mind that seems to me now an important component in our relations with nature. We need, not to “recover it”, for it was only a hint, but to find something like it.

(2002, 2003, 2014)

Aubrey's 1666 survey drawing of Stonehenge

[Image from Bodleian Library]