It’s often struck me that camping life of this kind is perhaps the Platonic form of a certain type of postwar English sociality. Amenities are frugal, but pleasantly so. You have neighbors, but not too close. (It’s an unwritten rule of camping that you don’t pitch your tent right next to someone else’s unless you absolutely have to.) People say hello, but socializing is optional. Everyone’s kids play together, only vaguely supervised. The dogs are generally well-behaved. And, importantly, it’s high-trust by definition: after all, you can’t really lock a tent. 

In the absence of any phone signal for doomscrolling, I took for holiday reading a forthcoming book on English pastoral. In Fields of Green traces this literary trope of ideal rural landscapes as a response to the development of modern England. Its author, André Gushurst-Moore, argues that England has always needed “pastoral” as a literary mode where we can take refuge from upheaval, technology, and social fracture in the temporary Arcadia of England’s rolling green hinterlands. 

That’s certainly how it felt to take a holiday in a grassy field, without handheld access to the relentless rage and demoralization fodder online. The feeling of implicit trust in the campsite was also as restful as the lack of phone reception. But this year, I found my peace troubled by a nagging fear that environments of this kind might be, in some fundamental way, under threat.

From my tent you couldn’t drive far without passing signs for the nearby town of Great Yarmouth, Rupert Lowe’s constituency and heart of the Restore Britain movement: the epicenter of an angry, anxious sense to the effect that Britain used to be a high-trust country but isn’t any more. That is: Britain in general used to be more like my East Anglian campsite, but is growing increasingly hostile, fractious, and genuinely dangerous. 

Restore output typically blames this phenomenon on immigration. And it’s true that there is evidence linking illegal migration in particular both with other kinds of criminal activity, as well as the sort of friction that arises when incompatible social norms come suddenly into collision. But is the sense of decaying cohesion really just the fault of foreigners? Were we really always a “high-trust” society, until those immigrants came along and ruined it? I’m not sure we were. Rather, that sense of comparative national unity marked both the culmination, and end, of “Great Britain” in her imperial pomp. 

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If, in Gushurst-Moore’s telling, pastoral has always served as idealized respite from a more turbulent real-world England, that grittier England is also to be found in literary history. In prewar literature in particular, this England comes across as a vigorous, exciting, but not particularly “high-trust” place. Defoe’s 1722 Moll Flanders recounts the first-person narrative of a career criminal. Dickens’s 1839 Oliver Twist is set almost entirely in London’s criminal underworld. Plenty of other literary works detail the rampant fraud, theft, violence, and criminality of early modern and Georgian Britain. It was, in fact, predominantly the Victorians who set the nation on a path toward the centralization, order, and robust public mores that would eventually produce the “high-trust” Britain, that now feels as though it persists only in rural hinterlands and middle-class enclaves. 

As certain of their own correctness in every respect as they were dedicated to large-scale infrastructure, technological innovation, improving the morals of the poor, and expanding British dominion to every corner of the earth, the Victorians established the road patrols that ended the highway robbery of the Moll Flanders era. They also founded the police force that tackled the pervasive criminality of Oliver Twist’s London. And they built the factories and schools that, for better or worse, drilled generations of working-class Britons into regimented assembly-line work punctuated by shift-end bells. 

The English pastoral dream grew more intense, and was more desperately clung to, as real-life Great Britain industrialized, stripping coal-fields, belching smoke into the sky, and unrolling canals, railways, and roads across the landscape. Evocations of deep England such as The Wind in the Willows (1908) were, in this sense, a product of their own antithesis in the cities and suburbs — where, by the time Kenneth Grahame wrote it, most British people lived. 

The historian AJP Taylor observed, in his Oxford History of England, that “Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman”. But that fateful August, just six years after The Wind in the Willows was published, the world of order, industry, and moral purpose the Victorians built came to its climax, and also the beginning of its end. 

When war broke out in 1914 every facet of Victorian innovation — the factories, the administration, the large-scale coordination of workforces, the patriotism — came together in a whole-of-society war effort. The English novelist Mary Augusta Ward described this phenomenon in 1916: an enormous, coordinated mobilization that reached into every corner of English society and geography, and re-oriented every part of it to supporting the same cause. 

After 1918, that regulatory Leviathan never really went away again. With the Second World War it expanded still further, adding blackout rules, rations, the mass evacuation of children from city centers, and a host of other emergency measures. By and large, everyone pulled together, under the organizing moral focus of existential threat. Those wartime habits, and the cultures they produced, persisted well into the long 20th-century peace that followed, legitimating the establishment of a nationwide welfare state, National Health Service, and much else we now take for granted. 

This is why we’re still obsessed with the wars: they really did create modern Britain. Wartime Britain also represented the pinnacle of that “high-trust” culture whose disappearance is now routinely blamed on immigration. But the Victorians, who turned a relatively lawless Moll Flanders Britain into that orderly, industrial empire of our recent past, understood something we’ve chosen to forget in the decades since: that order always implies a measure of violence. 

Periodically, when Elon Musk decides, in his wisdom, to intervene in British politics, he likes to imagine all of Britain and her inhabitants as basically hobbits: bucolic, small-minded denizens of rural Arcadia, desperately vulnerable to predators. But this is both wrong and unhelpful. Yes, Tolkien’s Shire is one of the most famous evocations of that pastoral idyll. But historically, Britons were the despoilers of the Shire as well as its hobbit inhabitants. The Romantic spirit of Wordsworth, and the Arts and Crafts movement led by John Ruskin, harked back to a mythic, rural deep England; meanwhile, technologists  and visionaries in the real-world 19th-century Britain had little compunction about driving roads and railroads through those fields of green in pursuit of “improvement”. 

This people produced Cecil Rhodes as well as John Ruskin. They invented steam engines, sterilization, and vaccination, not to mention a host of lethal weapons. They imposed law and order on Britain, routinely resorting to corporal punishment, hanging, or deportation. They did the same to a great many other geographies besides — some of which retain the bones of our common law to this day, even while agitating for reparations. Even education was delivered with unembarrassed, righteous ferocity: the tyrannical, pedantic Mr Gradgrind, in Dickens’s novel Hard Times, vividly illustrates the methods used to impose knowledge and manners on the children of Victorian Britain.

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By contrast, since the two wars Britain has seemed determined to hold fast to our legacy of wartime solidarity, order, and peace, built on those brusque Victorian foundations — only now, without ever needing to be tough. It’s as though we want Elon to be right; as if, were everyone only to play by the rules, all of England might be forever Arcadia. But instead, it’s allowed that culture of order and common purpose to soften, by degrees, where its goods are rapidly evaporating. We congratulate ourselves on having abandoned “Gradgrindian” teaching, while teachers collapse under the stress of bad behavior in the classrooms and kids learn nothing. Local policing is nonexistent. Rules are only for suckers. Our border enforcers hand out visa-sponsorship licenses to vape shops, or Islamic centres allegedly linked to the Iranian state. 

But the decay in our capacity to enforce even the rules we have is as much, or more, a cause of immigration as its effect. And, pace Restore Britain, plenty of the rule-flouting is home-grown. Just recently, for example, the BBC reported on a huge rise in hare coursing, a deeply medieval-sounding illegal bloodsport, in which participants coordinate online to mass-trespass onto farmland and gamble on sight-hounds chasing hares across open fields. Such events are reportedly often linked to wider criminal gang activity; but there’s nothing to suggest the gangs themselves are anything but British. They just aren’t doing the postwar “high-trust” thing. 

Fifty dead hares dumped outside your country shop hardly evokes Arcadia. Nor, as the secessionist villagers of Piddington in Oxfordshire recently realized, does the prospect of having your community of 400 imminently outnumbered three-to-one by 1,250 male asylum seekers at a nearby military base. 

It’s understandable that, after the two wars, no one wanted ever to live through anything so horrible again. The result was a desire both to preserve Britain’s war-forged social cohesion, and also to reject every trace of the toughness, and willingness to follow through with violence, that many blamed for the catastrophe of war. There followed some halcyon decades of peace with very little violence — but those decades are now, palpably, at an end.  

And yet the mistake wasn’t to dream of Arcadia as such. It was imagining (as Elon Musk still apparently does) that all of England could be preserved in a state of bucolic green. That’s never what these islands have been. The best we ever managed was preserving some pastoral space amid the upheaval. 

In the aftermath of our decades-long holiday from enforcing the rules, it’s going to take more than just being nice to strangers while camping to sustain this — or the postwar utopia of rules. We also need the piratical adventurousness of the Moll Flanders era, and the ambition, toughness, and self-belief of the Victorian one. Perhaps even, if we haven’t the space to jail criminals, we should do as they did. (It would be popular.) 

The price of some pastoral idyll is accepting that every such peaceful community has an edge. In the 21st century, you can’t hide from the internet forever — even, as those poor hares found out, in the countryside. And especially in the internet age, no space of “high trust” will stay that way for long, unless we stand ready to defend it. 

I always called the largest mound a hill fort, though I have no idea if it qualified for the title. This was no Maiden Castle. The ring’s centre can’t have held more than a family and a few pigs. Yet here it still was, thousands of years on. That modest earthwork was my first experience of Deep England — or Deep Britain, since the fort was constructed centuries before England was born.

Deep England is not a place. It is a shock. A sudden awareness of time freed from measurement and scale. Such a shock can be triggered by a hill fort, a shaped stone, a worn staircase. But you don’t need to tramp the Sussex countryside to find Deep England. It can be felt in the paintings of David Inshaw and Simon Palmer, the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, the work of Alan Garner. And at this time of year, it can easily be found in John Masefield’s 1935 Christmas tale The Box of Delights, one of those children’s books best enjoyed by adults.

A brush with Deep England might produce feelings of recognition and homecoming; equally, time’s long drop can inspire eeriness and threat. The best art devoted to England’s deep past is always a shuffling of the familiar and the strange. This makes Christmas the perfect time to reflect on the passage of centuries. There is a strained cosiness to modern Christmas, but beneath the lights and mulled wine lurks the black pause of the year’s end. It is a time for barred doors and ghost stories. John Masefield understood these things.

Masefield was Poet Laureate from 1930 until his death in 1967. In 1953, Muriel Spark declared that “John Masefield is known to all of us… I do not think there is any need of a book to make him wider known.” My father can still recite Masefield’s poem “Cargoes”, drummed into him as a schoolboy in Sixties Belfast. And yet, a few short decades later, Masefield has joined the ranks of the unread. This is not an unusual fate for a Poet Laureate, but it is sad in Masefield’s case. He wrote good verse, and although some of his work has withered on the page, much still sings.

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If anyone under the age of 60 knows of Masefield today it is because of The Box of Delights. The story is simple enough. Kay Harker is going home for the Christmas holidays. He meets an old eccentric on the station platform, a Punch and Judy showman with a fondness for gnomic utterances: Cole Hawlings. But he is in trouble. He is being hunted across England by dark forces, and although he has powers of his own, they are waning. He asks for Kay’s help: “Now that the Wolves are Running, perhaps you would do something to stop their Bite?” Kay agrees to safeguard the Box of Delights, a magical object that serves as a doorway to the distant past.

Masefield was a great proponent of the old-fashioned yarn. In his autobiography So Long to Learn, he emphasised the importance of straightforward storytelling. The rarefied devices of celebrated writers did not interest him. He wanted the spare, salty narratives of earlier epochs: “The sagas with their simple power made the story-telling of most of our masters almost absurd. What was Flaubert, with his labour and richness of language; what was Pater, with his learning and instinct for felicity, to the tellers of the Laxdale or Njala sagas?” For Masefield, “literature” was an obstruction, an elaborate rood screen that hid a story from its audience.

The Box of Delights is a great story simply told. But it is not just the story of Kay Harker. It is the story of Britain. “A nation’s past is the poet’s pasture,” said Masefield, and Kay’s adventures bear this out. The winter landscape surrounding his village is a map of the past: the ruined Abbey, the Roman road, the hill fort known as Arthur’s Camp, even the trees that advance and retreat as Kay moves through time. He marches with legionaries, fights alongside ancient Britons, and gallops through the forest with Herne the Hunter. Always the Wolves are there, a sinister army that harries mankind. Cole Hawlings is himself a figure from the deep past, though fading now. Once the forces of good and evil were evenly matched, but his enemies have learnt new tricks. They employ the latest technology and prosper in plain sight amid respectable society, while Hawlings and his allies must live on the run.

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The tale’s Christmas setting serves as more than a cosy backdrop. The Box of Delights is a book about time, and the Winter Solstice is the appropriate moment to consider the passage of countless years. More specifically, the book is about deep time unfolding in one particular place. And so it is appropriate that in the final chapter, Kay attends the Christmas service at Tatchester cathedral, the thousandth such service to have been held there — the rhythms of worship are the only clock that can measure deep time. While Masefield’s reach extended back far beyond the arrival of Christianity in Britain, the novel is unambiguous in its religious message. Greed and aggression are punished, and the weak triumph at the close. Even Cole Hawlings, who has been knocking about “since Pagan times”, adheres to the new faith:

“In one place, the river ran through a wide cavern, the wall of which had been painted with a procession of men leading bulls and horses. ‘That was our old religion, Master Harker,’ Cole said, nodding towards it. ‘It was nothing like so good as the new, of course…’”

The Box of Delights remains in print. It was brilliantly adapted for the BBC in 1984, with a grizzled and twinkling Patrick Troughton starring as Hawlings, and a play based on the book is currently on at the Royal Shakespeare Company. There is no doubt that the novel has an enduring appeal.

While much of the dialogue is couched in Blytonisms (“splendiferous!”), and although its commitment to place and history could not be less fashionable, the story still delivers. It is perhaps more powerful now than when it was first published. Masefield’s world has joined the far-off epochs visited by Kay, just as ours soon will. Layers and layers of time and history will deepen Deep England further. As Cole Hawlings says, “Hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs it goes. And then all the way back again.”

It’s impossible, when observing the strange disorders of our current politics, not to feel we are trapped in an intervening period — between an old, discredited order and whatever follows it, for better or worse. It’s a crisis, as Gramsci famously wrote, which “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” There is no popular faith still adhering to the old institutions — the political system, journalism, the church. And yet the alternatives rising up to succeed them — the political religions of the internet, the grifting hot-take economy — seem in many ways worse. Now, indeed, is the time of monsters.

In Edgelands, a new series of videos for UnHerd, I’ll explore the strange and unsettling manifestations of our new political era. Travelling across the country, and further afield, I’ll meet people on the edge of politics — conspiracy theorists, idealists, visionaries and eccentrics — who each in their own way encapsulate this political moment. Much of what we consider offbeat or kooky may have a wider appeal to ordinary people than the London media consensus realises. Perhaps, on the margins and in the hidden recesses of the internet, new political realities are being born which will come to shape all our lives.

For the first episode, I travel to the wild cliffs of Tintagel, on England’s mist-shrouded Atlantic fringe, to meet John Mappin, a scion of the Mappin & Webb jewellery dynasty whose engagement with the kookier fringes of American conservatism has raised eyebrows. A cloud of overwhelmingly negative headlines surrounds Mappin, mostly derived from his flying the flag of the QAnon conspiracy theory from the roof of his Cornish hotel, Camelot Castle.

QAnon adherents, followers of an American political religion birthed from the internet, believe that the world is run by a Deep State cabal of bloodthirsty paedophiles, against whom the saviour Donald Trump was locked in a secretly successful campaign. Representing American politics at its most alien and outlandish, through its overlap with anti-vaccine sentiment and Covid conspiracy theories, QAnon may have more reach in Europe than anyone at first expected.

But is Mappin really, as the headlines claim, the leader of Britain’s QAnon movement? Have the wilder reaches of American conservative politics taken root in Deep England? Or is Mappin a classic eccentric of a traditionally English type, the sort of utopian idealist that has always been drawn to the Celtic fringes, and to the blurry borderlands between myth and reality? Is he dangerous, as the headlines warn, or is he, in his own way, sincerely trying to build a better world?

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With more Twitter followers than the vast majority of journalists, and his own successful YouTube channel devoted to his worldview, Mappin is simultaneously a fringe figure and a genuine cultural phenomenon worthy of study. A product of the British establishment who has taken up the cause of anti-establishment populism, and whose beliefs are now shared by a discomforting number of people in Britain as well as America, Mappin is creating his own political reality from his clifftop castle.

Yet perhaps the standard response to this new politics — the recourse to the new breed of disinformation specialists and official fact checkers — is less productive than exploring these world views on their own terms, and trying to understand what drives them. Perhaps it’s only by exploring the fringes that we can fully understand the crisis of the centre, and discern the strange political futures taking shape within the mists. Welcome to Camelot Castle, and to Edgelands.

It seems especially sad to me that he should have died so far from home, for Ravilious was one of the painters who caught something of the eternal essence of England. This has sometimes been called Deep England, a counterpart to the French conception of la France profonde — a phrase used to refer to an idealised, authentic France, rural and traditional, in touch with history and unpolluted by the modern world of industry, progress and rationalism.

Similarly, the idea of Deep England is focused on the England of the village church and the manor house, the maypole and the inn, the stone circle and the hedgerow. It is a place of stillness and peace. The landscapes of Deep England are beautiful and sometimes wild, but never overwhelming. Except in a few cases, it has never been a conscious ideology. However, it is undoubtedly there, as a powerful background for many of our artists, an unmistakeable vision of the country as something very ancient, with a distinct charm, a specific atmosphere.

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Perhaps because of his unusual style — essentially figurative but with a dreamlike quality — Ravilious caught this well. Not for nothing did that (hopefully) immortal English institution, the Wisden Cricketers Almanack, choose his woodcut of Victorian gentlemen to adorn their front cover.

One of my favourite paintings of his is called ‘Shepherd’s Cottage’, which portrays a man hoeing the garden of an old house. In the foreground runs a lane, separated from the garden by a stone wall overgrown by ivy. In the distance the fields rise up to the slope of the South Downs.

It could easily be trite or twee, but the surrealist influence, and slightly odd use of perspective, means that it lacks the bucolic idealism of a sentimentalist. Ravilious generally avoided this trap. In his work there are no rosy-cheeked children tramping home to snow-covered cottages, and no buxom milkmaids leaning on five-bar gates while a handsome lad takes the cattle home in the soft light of sunset.

Ravilious was not alone among his contemporaries in making the English countryside his special subject. Between the wars he was part of a circle called the Great Bardfield group, a loose association of painters, sculptors and engravers based in and around the Essex village of that name. He was also friends with Edward Bawden and the Nash brothers, Paul and John. The Great Bardfield artists were highly diverse, yet one of the things they had in common was a love for the scenery of their native soil.

What comes through very strongly from a great deal of their work is a settled, secure Englishness. Crucially, this is unsullied by any kind of dubious politics. This was not always the case with exponents of English ruralism between the wars; love of people and land can easily shade into blood and soil nationalism of the aggressive and sinister kind.

Henry Williamson, the writer and countryman best known for Tarka The Otter, who wrote the most wonderful lyrical descriptions of Devon and Kent, became a follower of Oswald Mosley, and was briefly interned at the start of the Second World War. He retained an unsavoury ambivalence about Nazism for the rest of his life. Ravilious, by contrast, was a strong opponent of fascism, as one might expect from his light and playful sensibility. He raised money for the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, and apparently had to be dissuaded by friends from enlisting in the British Army as a private soldier when war broke out.”

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His pictures put me in mind of a largely forgotten poem by Dorothy L Sayers, written in 1940 after the evacuation of the BEF from Dunkirk. It is called ‘The English War’ and, while not brilliant, conveys a sentiment which I find very interesting: a curious relief and relish, despite the disasters of Norway and Dunkirk, at the prospect of our once again fighting alone from our island redoubt, as we had so often done before. “This is the war that England knows”, she writes, when “men who love us not, yet look / To us for liberty”.

The poem refers to Drake and Napoleon and the Armada, the Cinque Ports and Plymouth Sound, appealing to a deep folk memory of being fundamentally an island race, and an old country. Sayers describes an England where terrains and environments have serious meaning and resonance because of the long continuity of the nation. This is why it is connected in my mind with Ravilious. His not-quite realist style gives the woods and hills and fields of England a fantastical air, a sense of mystery and enchantment, especially when he paints scenes or features that have endured for a very long time.

Arguably his best-known work, ‘Train Landscape’, shows the Westbury white horse from a carriage window. The Westbury white horse is not, in fact, enormously ancient — it was apparently created in the mid-eighteenth century. But it feels like it should be. It looks like something that has been there forever, and is redolent of the mingling of history and legend and myth. Many of our spectacular places have this same character — Tintagel, Lindisfarne, the fen country, the great Welsh castles.

Those Ravilious pictures which do not portray famous landmarks somehow retain a mood of magic and possibility. Looking at compositions like ‘The Causeway’, the modern world of speed and steel and the aeroplane seems to recede from view. You might easily expect to see King Arthur or Alfred the Great or Hereward the Wake emerge from the trees. A personal favourite of mine, ‘Wet Afternoon’, features nothing more exciting than a man walking down a country lane in a rain shower. Nevertheless, the hedges on either side of the lane are imbued with an air of fairytale anticipation.

In this connection, it is worth touching on Ravilious’ woodcuts and engravings. They use big bold shapes and overlapping interlaced patterns of black and white to create landscapes that are at once familiar and odd, natural and unnatural. Sometimes mythical creatures appear. A few of them are rather eerie because of the strange silhouettes of trees and hills, after the manner of the illustrations in a Brothers Grimm story. But those ones with a heightened impression of the uncanny are securely tied to real places. They are the product of a vision that was formed in, and continually inspired by, particular locations in a particular country — England.

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Even when Ravilious took up his brush in the service of his country, as a war artist, his approach never become bombastic or jingoistic. He painted the nation at war with the same understated, and unconscious, patriotism that informs his earlier pictures. The men in the wartime pictures, whether Royal Navy sailors braving the North Sea, or members of the Royal Observer Corps scanning the skies over the Channel, are carrying out their difficult and dangerous tasks with a minimum of fuss. You can almost hear the whispered banter and smell the steaming mugs of hot strong tea. The gentle, unshowy determination and grit that was for so long a part of the English self-image radiates out from the canvas.

One picture in particular touches on one of the paradoxes of the traditional English character. In ‘Convoy Passing An Island’, a track passing a cottage garden is contrasted with a long line of merchantmen steaming out into the North Sea. The homely blends with the grand and warlike. One might view this as an artistic attempt, deliberate or not, to reconcile one of the great tensions in our national self-image, between the conception of ourselves as a nation of no-nonsense islanders minding our own business — “this happy breed of men, this little world” — and the reality of our being a global superpower.

We will never know what Ravilious might have accomplished had he survived the war. The poignancy of his premature death is heightened for me by the erosion over the last few decades of the quiet, peaceful, modest, whimsical England that he recorded so beautifully. As Philip Larkin put it in his ‘Going, Going’:

“And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.”

One final thought: a fancy of mine is that he might have been a good choice to illustrate The Lord Of The Rings. Tolkien created fictional geographies that closely resembled those of this island, except with a heightened wildness, strangeness and antiquity. Ravilious, with his instinct for conveying the true nature of the English landscape, for giving his paintings and prints a strong sense of place and history and majesty, might just have been a perfect match.