That feeble fifth-place ranking captured the depressing atmosphere of weary run-down rubbishness in which we who lived in the “Auld Grey Toun” were marinaded. Our local bookshop and cinema had closed down by that point, so there was not a lot in the way of culture or entertainment, although — to be fair — we did get the panto every year and I once saw Fife’s premier Frank Zappa tribute act, Frank McZappa, play in a pub. Speaking of pubs, we had no shortage of those, and we were also lucky enough to have a swimming pool, bingo hall and some ruins. You might say it was a bit like Waiting for Godot, only we’d all long since given up waiting.

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Why they burn witches in Scotland

By Diane Purkiss

Not that long ago, I would have ridiculed the very notion that Dunfermline contained any mysteries worth bothering about. My teachers did at least try to instill some civic pride: as a child I was taught that my hometown was Scotland’s “ancient capital”; that in the 11th century an important king named Malcolm Canmore built a tower there; that his wife Margaret became a famous saint; and that Robert the Bruce, the last Scottish king to defeat the English in battle, was buried in the Abbey. After that, nothing much seemed to happen for 500 years, until Andrew Carnegie was born. But he had to leave Dunfermline to become successful: a fact that was not lost upon any of us.

That’s a decent amount of history for a small town that nobody visits. And later, I learned more: Charles I, later to attain some notoriety, was born in Dunfermline’s royal palace; and Robert Henryson, a major medieval poet, had been headmaster at the high school.

And yet even to a child it was obvious that Dunfermline was centuries past its prime. Malcolm’s Tower (the “dun” in Dunfermline) was a circle of old bricks in on top of a hill frequented by nobody. The Abbey nave had fallen into disuse after a new bit was added in the 19th century, while all that remained of the royal palace was a wall — which was a great backdrop for staging mock-World War II battles, until Historic Scotland put a gate on it and started, rather too optimistically, charging for entry.

Saddest of all was Saint Margaret’s Cave, a once-sacred grotto, which was accessed through a shed in the car park behind The City Hotel, and which was closed for much of the year (the shed’s design drew heavily upon the “public toilet” school of architecture.) I was told by a guide that the city council had almost filled in the cave completely when they were putting in the car park, but a grassroots campaign had prevented that outrage. Thus even our history seemed a bit rubbish; the town was a place where people did things that were forgotten, or left to achieve greater fame elsewhere. I turned my back on Dunfermline in favour of Moscow, and then Texas, and for a long time I thought that seeing family was the only possible reason for visiting the place.

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Nineties Russia prepared me for coronageddon

By Daniel Kalder

But my attitude began to change the first time I brought my children to visit. Little Texans, they were growing up under a bright, limitless blue sky; I took them at Christmas, with the benefit that they would see the town as I remembered it, with horizontal rain and mid-afternoon darkness. One day I took them to visit Robert the Bruce’s tomb in the Abbey. The guide was telling the same story I had first heard 35 years earlier, when suddenly he mentioned, as an aside, that there were six other kings buried in the Abbey grounds, but nobody knew which one was which: “We know where they are, we just don’t know who they are.” Having travelled fairly widely in post-communist Europe and Asia, I had seen many identities assembled on less evidence than that. Yet here was Scotland: a country with a nationalist government sitting just across the bridge from this pile of kingly bones — and neither they nor anybody else seemed to care.

I was impressed by this grand an act of forgetting — this sustained, centuries-long indifference. We’d even managed to lose Robert the Bruce — that most legendary of warriors — for hundreds of years: his tomb was accidentally rediscovered in the early 19th century. And our kings, I later learned, were not the only things that we had mislaid.

When next I returned, I spent a couple of mornings in the local library, reading old books on the history of Dunfermline. It turned out that the Auld Grey Toun had been a major site of pilgrimage for centuries, a place of holiness and miracles. Visitors had come from far and wide to venerate the relics of Saint Margaret. One of those relics was her head, which remained on Earth long after her soul had departed for its eternal reward. It was a fixture at the Abbey right up until the Reformation, at which point concerned Catholics spirited it away — first to Edinburgh, and then to the continent — so that it could escape the orgy of iconoclasm taking place in Scotland. The plan worked, and Saint Margaret’s head survived for a further two centuries, before disappearing in a different orgy of iconoclasm: the French Revolution.

It was also around this time that I picked up a copy of the Arden edition of Macbeth, and, reading the notes, realised that the “Malcolm” who kills Macbeth in Shakespeare’s drama was the same Malcolm who married Saint Margaret and built the very tower that put the “dun” in Dunfermline. You’d think my English teacher might have mentioned this, but she didn’t because — I am sure — she did not know. It was as if Dunfermline, secretly interesting after all, was clouding the minds of those who inhabited it, sustaining a miasma of boredom to prevent anyone from looking too closely. How could a place that had once been so rich in mystery, and a sense of the numinous, now be so bereft of it? Our capacity for forgetting awed me. It still does.

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Don't call Abingdon ordinary

By Eleanor Parker

This time last year I was home again, and decided to follow the Tower Burn into town, a route that many have trod and re-trod over the centuries. Its banks were overgrown with nettles and the section closest to Saint Margaret’s shed (which was closed) was strewn with litter and serving as the last resting place of an errant shopping trolley. From there, I walked through the car park and on to the Glen, where I paid a visit to Malcolm’s Tower. A bit of the ancient tower had fallen off and lay on the ground amid crisp packets and beer cans. Not too far away, Abbot House — a medieval building containing a contemporary mural by the celebrated writer-artist Alasdair Gray — was also boarded up.

I was heading for the Abbey when, all of a sudden, I spotted a numpty with a hurdy-gurdy standing at the entrance. Intrigued, I lingered a few minutes, and the next moment I saw Gordon Brown leaving the building in the company of some people who I assumed were local dignitaries; I think the Earl of Elgin may have been among them. They were celebrating the opening of ‘The Fife Pilgrim Way’, a new walking route that, it was hoped, would lure tourists over the bridge from Edinburgh into Fife so we could extract some money from them while they drank deep of our sacred history. That’ll be the history surrounded by nettles and beer cans, then? My cynicism was so profound that I could feel a “Disgusted of Texas” email to the Dunfermline Press coming on.

But when I got back to the States, the business of life swept me away and it was weeks before I remembered that I was going to write that letter. And now, a year later, I wonder: what if this level of disregard for the past is, well, typical? What if Dunfermline is just a particularly pronounced exemplar of our natural state? I remember visiting Konye-Urgench in Central Asia, where a kid was grazing a goat outside the ruins of an ancient fortress that clearly meant nothing to him; and also VDNKh, the giant Stalinist exhibition centre in Moscow, where shoppers browsed for washing machines and fridges, indifferent to the monumental totalitarian architecture that housed them. I think about the epic of Gilgamesh, which disappeared beneath the sands of Iraq for so long. The heritage industry exists to serve visitors who are disconnected from the history they stare at. Locals, well — they forget.

Even so, all those forgotten things lie heavy upon Dunfermline and everyone in it. The glory of the town is not so much its past but its status as a mysterious monument to aging — to decay, loss and death. It reminds us that glory days once gone do not come back; that you don’t need to be so dramatic as to decline and fall: sometimes to decline is enough. That which is interesting is not visible, and that which is visible is not that interesting. But if you stare long and hard at the town, it will begin to reveal its secrets. It only took 40 years or so for them to start opening up to me, and as the years pass, I find that the heavy gravity of the Auld Grey Toun exerts an ever-stronger pull upon me. Each time I return it is as if I am edging my way ever closer to some central enigma of existence.

Another satirist, every bit as biting, took the opposite view. Jonathan Meades loves Birmingham, its “aptitude for substance over cosmetic style”, its “self-deprecating, unboastful, and peculiarly ironic humour”, and, most of all, its accent: English as it was before the great vowel shift. It is the closest thing we have to Shakespeare’s English; the Bard knew the northern reaches of the Forest of Arden on which Birmingham was sited. Meades asks you to declaim Polonius’s  “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” in Brummie. It makes perfect sense. An all-Brummie Hamlet would be quite the show.

Birmingham not only attracts satirists, it creates them. Christopher Spencer, aka ‘Cold War Steve’, has become the cold-eyed visual chronicler of Brexit Britain and its post-pandemic wasteland. His bleak, biting collages of two-bit celebrities, floundering mendacious politicians, and Harold Shipman, mark him out as the heir to Hogarth, to Rowlandson, to Gillray. He has tapped into the radical, non-conformist tradition of Birmingham.

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Ramsgate's difficult relationship with Europe

By Aris Roussinos

Birmingham did not become a city until 1889, when it was already the dynamo of late Victorian Britain. It was a mere municipal borough when it became the “best run city in the world” under its charismatic mayor, Joseph Chamberlain — a self-made dandy, whose fortune derived from screws; a political liberal with a loathing for the aristocracy. In that, he was true Brummie.

Birmingham’s identity was forged, literally, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the centre of a trading and manufacturing network built on iron and coal from its hinterland — what would become known as the Black Country. It was strongly Protestant: a Brummie, John Rogers, compiled the first authorised edition of the Bible in English and was martyred for his sins in 1555 during the reign of ‘Bloody’ Mary. It became an arsenal for the Parliamentary forces during the Civil Wars, attacked by the Royalist Prince Rupert in 1643 — an event satirised in the tract Prince Rupert’s burning love for England, discovered in Birmingham’s flames.

When Charles II was restored, Nonconformism came under fire. But the Act of Uniformity of 1662 — and the Five Mile Act that followed, banning dissenting ministers from within five miles of a borough — didn’t affect Birmingham, a thriving metropole but an unincorporated one. In fact, the repression worked in its favour, as it became a haven of dissent, nonconformist in every sense, welcoming those who were different. And then it changed the world.

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How Birmingham gave birth to heavy metal

By Paul Lay

If we can point to the Ur-moment of the Industrial Revolution, it is surely 1709, in Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, where the Brummie Abraham Darby constructed the world’s first blast furnace using coke — abundant in the Black Country — to make cast iron. The nearby town of Ironbridge made his achievement tangible.

The Industrial Revolution in Birmingham and the Black Country was different to that in the North of England. There, it was about textile manufacturer on a grand scale, chewing and spitting out a low-paid, low-skilled workforce. In Birmingham and the Black Country, it was built on highly-skilled, highly-paid specialisms, incremental and adaptable. In the 100 years after 1750, Birmingham registered three times the patents of any other British settlement. Matthew Boulton’s Soho Manufactory, of which his Soho House residency remains in the city’s North-West, is where he teamed up with Scotsman James Watt to produce an improved steam engine, central to British manufacturing prowess at the time. No more would mankind be limited to the energies of hand, of water, of beast.

Culture accompanied this revolution. Birmingham became a focus for the British Enlightenment, centred on the Lunar Society. Ignoring the barriers between art and science, it often met in Boulton’s Soho House. Among its luminaries were Watt, Erasmus Darwin (who was an influential poet as well as an empirical scientist), Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood and Joseph Day (who wrote the anti-slavery tract, The Dying Negro in 1773.)

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By Ralph Leonard

Political radicalism peaked in Birmingham during the febrile Days of May, just before the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832; the nation had been radicalised by Thomas Attwood’s Birmingham Political Union. Its vast political assemblies on Newhall Hill were the largest the nation had seen. Lord Durham, who drafted the Reform Act, noted that “the country owed Reform to Birmingham, and its salvation from revolution”. You’ll have heard of Peterloo, because it happened in Manchester, where people shout loud. But the real action was elsewhere.

And it didn’t end there. The Second Reform Act of 1867, which brought some of the male working class into the democratic fold for the first time, was led by MP for Birmingham, John Bright. The street named after him once housed the Futurist cinema, a haven, like the old Arts Lab in Aston, for those seeking European cinema during the 1980s.

By then, Birmingham was suffering. It had been bombed heavily, and inevitably,  during the war — but remained prosperous, maintaining its position as the nation’s manufacturing hub. Until the 1970s, the average wage in Birmingham and its environs surpassed that of the City of London. Preposterously, there were those associated with the Heath government during the early 1970s who thought the region should be levelled down, that it was overheating, that too many people wanted to live there, to the neglect of other cities. They didn’t have to wait long. The assault on manufacturing that began in the early 1980s hit Brum hard. Unemployment, which was 7% in 1979, rose to 20% just three years later. But it is a quietly resilient city.

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In defence of working-class conservatism

By Peter Franklin

Sometimes one wishes that it blew its own trumpet a little more, but bragging is not in Brum’s nature. So I’ll do it. Its great orchestra, the CBSO, is one of Europe’s finest — brilliant at discovering world-class conductors: Simon Rattle, Sakari Oramo, Andris Nelsons, and now the mercurial Lithuanian Mirga Grazynyté-Tyla, whose repertoire is bold and original. She gets Brum and Brum gets her.

Graham Vick’s Birmingham Opera Company is simply the nation’s (and one of Europe’s) finest — a model of innovation, which mirrors the city in its diversity and its radicalism. It has engaged thousands in performances of the highest quality, making use of the city’s industrial spaces and architecture.

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has prospered, too, with the arrival, to join its Pre-Raphaelites, of the Staffordshire Hoard. This has been a reminder of the region’s deeper past, rooted in Mercia and the magic of settlements with names such as Wednesfield (‘Woden’s Field), Willenhall, Wolverhampton and, perhaps the greatest Anglo-Saxon name of all of them, Bloxwich, birthplace of Noddy Holder.

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Forget the Elgin Marbles — give the North East its treasures back

By James Barr

But let’s return to the present, and Cold War Steve. Not all his visions of modern Britain are bleak. He has created one wonderful exception. It’s called Benny’s Babbies, named in honour of the dim-witted character in the little-lamented Birmingham-based soap opera Crossroads, who became the very woollen-hatted embodiment of the Brummie ‘daft’apporth’ in the city’s darker days. But Cold War Steve’s image is pure joy: a collage of the people and places that are Birmingham, crowned by Black Sabbath atop the Rotunda, and the statue of King Kong that became something of a cause célèbre in the 1970s.

Jumbled in this image are the mediocre and the magical, the surreal and stable, and what you realise is the sheer diversity of Brum’s people. The latter is still the city’s greatest strength; it has come a long way from the division of the 1970s, when the population was fired up by Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, made in the Midland Hotel in 1968, and stoked by the IRA Pub Bombings of 1974. Birmingham has passed through that fire, thank God, and feels at ease in its diversity. It doesn’t bang on about it, it just is.

Much has been made of late of Britain’s supposed ‘world-beating’ capacities — in trade deals, in vaccines, its test and trace capacity — most of them chimerical. Birmingham — self-deprecatory, modest but assured — represents a blueprint for a better Britain, at ease with itself, less concerned about being number one, just content to be itself.

Viewed on a clear day from the chalk cliffs of Ramsgate, the matching white cliffs of France’s Cap Blanc Nez, our isle’s separated geological twin, shimmer on the horizon. In 1940 newsreels, Goering was famously shown peering at a defiant Britain from over there, no doubt picking out the town’s landmarks — the tall church spires that guided ships into harbour, the gaps and folds between the dazzling cliffs — through his binoculars. Heavily bombed in World War Two, and the marshalling point for the Little Ships of the Dunkirk evacuation, Ramsgate and Thanet’s proximity to continental Europe, source of both threat and promise, has shaped the region from the beginning of Britain’s recorded history. Perched on the edge of England, surrounded on three sides by the North Sea, the Isle of Thanet is simultaneously both marginal and central to our island’s story. Wherever it was finished, the first draft of the nation’s history was always written here.

Joined to Ramsgate by the village of Pegwell — a series of flint-walled cottages perched precariously on chalk cliffs concealing tunnels that lead to long-disused smugglers’ caves — sweeps the broad expanse of Pegwell Bay. For thousands of years the bay’s sombre mudflats, quaking bogs and salt marshes, patrolled by long-legged wading birds and basking seals, have served as the first beachhead for migrants and adventurers, missionaries and invaders making their way to this island.

It was here, in 2017, that archaeologists discovered the expeditionary fort built by Julius Caesar in 54 BC to defend his newly-landed legions from the hostile Celtic tribesmen, and here that the legions of Claudius returned in 43 AD, this time to stay. Here, too, were the great oyster beds of Ritupiae, singled out by Roman gourmets like the poet Juvenal for special praise, part of the network of trade and empire linking this lonely shoreline to the great hub of Mediterranean civilisation.

On the other side of the bay, the great flint fort of Richborough, built half a millennium of Roman rule after Caesar splashed ashore, failed to dissuade Saxon raiders from seizing the island for their own.

According to legend, the Jutish brothers Hengist and Horsa, summoned by the Romano-British king Vortigern as mercenaries, first came ashore right here, beginning the process that carved out Saxon England from Celtic Britain. A wooden longship, a gift of the Danish government, commemorates this turning point, its dragon-headed prow looking fiercely out across the North Sea towards its distant homeland.

Under the later Saxon king Ethelbert, Pegwell’s lonely mudflats welcomed more peaceful continental migrants in the guise of St Augustine and his retinue of monks, sent wading ashore here on a mission to civilise the northern barbarians, an effort culminating in the great church of Canterbury and the beginning of England’s 1700-year Christian story. Even today, a fragment of the missionary saint’s bone is still revered in my local church, Pugin’s wondrous neo-Gothic confection of St Augustine’s, a dream in incense-clouded stone of England’s lost High Middle Ages. The England we live in now was birthed on this lonely stretch of low chalk cliffs and brown and squelching shore.

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'Global Britain' is in for a rude awakening

By Aris Roussinos

Where England ends, Europe begins, a geographic fact that built Ramsgate, the town where I live and write this. Still a modest fishing village wedged in a gap between the chalk cliffs, Ramsgate boomed as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. So many regiments passed through the town, so many warships and troop transports hugged the harbour for shelter, that ranks of Regency villas, handsome in brick and stucco, formed up along the cliffs to house the colonels and admirals, sea captains and majors quartered here.

By the war’s end, Ramsgate had played host to so many eligible officers that, in a fit of “scarlet fever” (named after their red uniforms), the town had become an extension of the London season, with fashionable debutantes and anxious spinsters alike hurrying down in flocks to bathe in the North Sea’s chill green waters and marry well. Ramsgate’s street names — Wellington Crescent, Plains of Waterloo, La Belle Alliance Square — still bear witness to this brief moment of Regency glamour, when hussars and dragoons clip-clopped along the fishing port’s cobblestones to board the ships that would take them to death or glory in the continent’s wars. 

The postwar peace cemented Ramsgate’s status as England’s fashionable resort of choice. Lords Canning and Liverpool strolled the town’s leafy squares discussing the business of government. King George IV and Princess Victoria holidayed here, splashing in the brisk North Sea, and delighting the local burghers with their regal presence. Wilkie Collins summered here, as did Dickens before he settled on the more firmly genteel charms of Broadstairs, just along the coast. Karl Marx, too, would holiday here with his long-suffering family, putting aside his lifetime’s work of global revolution for a week or two to enjoy the minstrel bands on the seafront promenades, dashing off brief notes on Europe’s political convulsions to his fellow revolutionaries while Mrs Marx and the children picnicked on the sands with Engels. 

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Why Stamford said no to modernity

By Mary Harrington

Along with kings and revolutionaries, statesmen and writers, the town attracted artists in its heyday. William Powell Friths’s 1854 painting Ramsgate Sands — bought by Queen Victoria to remind herself of her childhood holidays — captures the crowds of mid-Victorian holidaymakers down from London by train, paddling, fully-clothed, in the lapping water, sheltering under umbrellas from the sun in their top hats and hooped skirts. The French painter James Tissot sketched fashionable ladies in crinoline taking tea overlooking the mast-filled harbour, while an impoverished Vincent Van Gogh taught art in a squalid school here for his room and board while admiring the “harbour full of all kinds of ships, closed in by stone jetties running into the sea on which one can walk,” where “further out one sees the sea in its natural state, and that’s beautiful.” Writing to his brother Theo, praising the shafts of light that burst through the black clouds after a squall, Van Gogh observed “this town has something very singular; one notices the sea in everything.” 

Turner, a regular visitor to neighbouring Margate, famously remarked in a similar vein to Ruskin that “the skies over Thanet are the loveliest in all Europe,” a quality given to them by the North Sea, which forms the clouds that reflect the dying sun’s most lurid moods. Still the violent drama of their sunsets — the livid reds and golds, oranges and pinks — make the sea and sky seem more real and vivid than the ground you stand on. Indeed, living here feels, at times, more like living out at sea than on land. 

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Sun, sea, sand – and shooting up

By James Bloodworth

All through the year, sudden sea mists drift ashore and blanket the town in white cloud. The lights of fishing boats blink out at sea through the chill fog even as the road in front of you is swallowed by the gloom. In winter, the North Sea winds make the town’s Victorian houses list and creak like wooden ships in high swell, as waves of rain lash against their window glass. Cars and fixtures rust quickly here, wooden doorframes and windows peel and warp in the harsh salt air. The trees along the seafront are bent sideways by the wind; the salt sea air smells sharp, and fresh, like a living thing caught wriggling in a net.

As far back as 1536, the essayist William Camden remarked that Thanet’s locals were “as it were amphibious creatures, and get their living both by sea and land; for they deal in both elements, and are both fishers and ploughmen; for the same hand that holds the plough, steers the ship likewise.” Smugglers and wreckers as well as fishermen, the locals were viewed with some disfavour by the Customs men sent down by Whitehall to disrupt their illicit trade with the continent. “The seamen here are generally reputed excellent sailors, and shew themselves very dextrous and bold in going off to succour ships in distress,” stated an early 19th century visitor, “but they are too apt to pilfer stranded ships, and ruin those who have already suffered so much.”

The sudden winter storms still disgorge many treasures for Thanet’s dog walkers and beachcombers. Every year, cannon balls and human bones, hunks of amber and painted porcelain are washed ashore from the vast ships’ graveyards lying out at sea, onto the treacherous and shifting sandbanks that reveal themselves, like the smuggler’s tunnels in the chalk, only at low tide.

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Hull's irresistible perversity

By Matthew Sweet

A local economy based on smuggling, tourism, fishing and European war has not prospered from the modern era. Like the rest of Thanet, Ramsgate is one of the most deprived areas of the country, sharing little of Southeast England’s wealth. Unemployment is high, life expectancy is low, and better times seem always, like France, barely visible on the horizon. The crumbling Regency and Victorian townhouses, no longer home to scarlet-coated officers or holidaying revolutionaries, have recently attracted another wave of invaders — middle-class London families like my own, priced out of the capital and displacing locals in turn. 

Thanet’s locals and its new army of DFLs — Down From Londoners — still live not-quite integrated lives. Like the rest of Britain, only somewhat more so, in Ramsgate the Somewheres and the Anywheres live jostled side by side. Home, until recently, to the only Ukip-run council in the UK, Thanet’s relationship with the European continent is still an ambiguous thing, and the vote for Brexit here, at 64%, was among the highest in the country.

These tensions find expression in micro-local culture wars, like the battle to re-open the old RAF Manston airfield as a commercial hub. An anti-airport poster in a window here, like an EU flag or BLM placard, is an almost certain signpost of a Londoner-in-exile, as much a marker of gentrification as doors and windows in the sombrest Farrow and Ball shades.

Proximity to the continent is writing Thanet’s history still. An RAF A-400 plane is, as I write, flying back and forth, skimming low above the sea outside my office window, scanning for the migrant boats which are landing in ever-increasing numbers. It is a strange and troubling vision of modern Britain to paddle in the sea with your children while a grey Border Force cutter patrols just offshore, searching for the latest boatloads from the coast of France. Distant past and present still collide here, peace and war, Britain and Europe and the wider world beyond still meshing in strange and unexpected ways as, perhaps, they always have and always will.

It’s not true anymore. Since the beginning of this century, three million visitors have submerged themselves at The Deep, Terry Farrell’s dockside aquarium. 19,000 immigrants have settled in the city, 4,800 from Poland. In 2017, Hull’s status as UK Capital of Culture attracted 5.3 million people to gallery exhibitions, music events and multimedia shows.

Larkin has become one of the attractions. The poet’s sculpted likeness stands in the city, a solid materialisation of Hull’s cultural capital. He welcomes tourists by the barriers at Paragon Station, through which he once passed to take the London train to attend librarians’ conferences and forage on Old Compton Street for Danish porn. Perhaps your mum and dad have seen him. (At the station, I mean, not in Soho.)

This is not an article about how great Hull is. People from Hull don’t write those. Hull, like Liverpool, has its back to England, and thinks of itself as a separate city-state. But we don’t possess that implacable Liverpudlian self-confidence. We do self-doubt and self-pity and shame as well as pride — and we don’t do pride in an uncomplicated way because we’re awkward and bloody-minded when it comes to ourselves as well as others.

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Don't call Abingdon ordinary

By Eleanor Parker

Hull doesn’t like being told what to do. In the English Civil War, it refused entry to the king. In the EU referendum, 67.6% voted in favour of Brexit, despite the imminent arrival of a German-owned wind turbine factory — its best economic hope for years. (It remains so.) Hull celebrates its association with abolitionism: a massive statue of William Wilberforce soars above the grey-and-turquoise FE College. Generations of Hull schoolchildren have been sent to the Wilberforce Museum and gazed upon the shackles and manacles of slavery.

When Oswald Mosley visited the city in July 1936, crowds turned up to boo him and some local children cut the wires of his PA system. And yet, in 2009, Hull sent a British National Party candidate to the European Parliament. (Unfortunately, the tweedy neo-Fascist Andrew Brons did not stand for a second term, robbing his constituents of the opportunity to atone for having elected him in the first place.)

Do you want the tour? We could continue the far-Right theme and visit the Ferens Art Gallery to meet Percy Wyndham Lewis – Vorticism’s chief explosives officer, Hitler fanboy and amateur airman. He’s easy to spot — in Mr Wyndham Lewis as ‘Tyro’ (1920) he depicted himself as a reptile-green bandit baring his incisors from an ochreous void. To stand before him is to feel the burning contempt of a Modernist Ubermensch — except Hull has caught him and fixed him, like a prehistoric insect caught in amber.

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Did Colston deserve his watery grave?

By Matthew Sweet

Less care, unfortunately, has been taken with the friendly face of Modernist Hull — Alan Boyson’s Three Ships, which adorns the side of the British Home Stores building on Jameson Street. It is a landmark of the city and the largest mosaic in the country. Earlier this year, the Council was narrowly prevented from demolishing it — but only for the moment. If they decide it is “unsafe” they might yet pull it down. Hull’s perverse streak showing again.

Hull’s separateness brought Larkin to the Humber and nourished his work. He wasn’t the only one. Hull welcomes artistic migrants. The poet Douglas Dunn was nurtured by the city — it gave him the subject of Terry Street (1969). Basil Kirchin, an audio experimentalist who made soundscapes with birdsong, insect chirrups, the cries of zoo animals and the screams of children, took refuge on the Hessle Road. If you’ve heard his album Worlds Within Worlds (1971), you can indulge your dreams about what he was trying to escape.

Hull is still playing this role. Poets and artists thrive here. It might be because the Humber Estuary is the English landscape’s best shot at true abstraction — three miles of water and an immensity of sky: Larkin’s “unfenced existence”. On the other hand, rents are low, studio space is plentiful, and there’s good coffee on Humber Street.

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Why the North East of England is different

By Dan Jackson

Some indicators of Hull’s separateness have vanished. The fishing industry, and the lonely, dangerous lives of its seagoing workers. The Ladas that rolled off Russian boats, then rolled over Hull’s wide, uninclined roads. The chunky dial behind the living room curtain that changed channels on the Rediffusion TV — a stormproof radio and television service that arrived through cables under the pavement. (The famous cream-coloured phone boxes are the last memorials of Hull’s status as the Galapagos of British telecommunications.)

Gwenap, which, until it closed in 2009, was thought to be Britain’s oldest sex shop. (At one stage the sign over the door read: “Blow Up Dolls Suit Reformed Terrorists: Make Love Not War.”) The Radburn-style towers of Orchard Park, where travelling people pastured their horses on the traffic islands, and my grandfather surveyed the East Riding from the fourteenth floor of a twenty-storey highrise. (When one tower, Milldane, came down in August 2013, a photograph appeared to show a ghostly figure standing on one of the balconies.)

Walk down Whitefriargate, past the Land of Green Ginger, and you’ll encounter the true spirit of Hull’s oddness. It’s located just inside the Hepworth Arcade, a light-flooded Victorian shopping mall. The window display has barely changed in 50 years. Thick coils of plastic dog turd. Rubber custard creams and bourbon biscuits. Fake bluebottles entombed in Perspex ice cubes. Soap that makes you dirty. Sweets that burn your mouth. Sweets that make you fart. Sun-bleached envelopes bearing line drawings of people from the olden days with nails through their fingers and their eyes rolling in their heads like roulette balls.

Dinsdales joke shop has been in the same family for four generations. Behind the glass-topped counter, there’s always a member of the clan who will supply the history lecture or delve into a musty cardboard box to pull out a tiny tin of 1930s itching powder. (“Worse that a cartload of fleas,” claims the slogan on the lid.)

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The shop is small. You can’t ignore your fellow customers — or what might be going on inside their heads. On a recent visit I got talking to a cheerful woman in her sixties who was there to buy exploding cigarettes. These, she explained, would be handed out to anyone who tried to cadge a fag from her on the street. (“That’ll teach ‘em,” she said.) Her haul also contained a couple of dozen little plastic bags, the sort you use to take cash to the bank. Inside each was a crumpled fake tenner. She slipped one into my pocket, but the rest were destined for scattering on the pavements of Hull, where they would act as little punishments for anyone whose spirit might briefly be lifted by the idea of getting something for nothing. The joke shop manager, showing a fine understanding of the psychology of her clients, pulled out a stack of fake winning Irish lottery scratch cards. She had, she said, placed one of these just out of reach of her mother-in-law, with hilarious consequences.

If Hull was on the couch, what would it say? That we had a great industry and we mourn it. We mourn, particularly, the legions of the drowned, upon whom our prosperity depended. But we also breathe a quiet sigh of relief that we are no longer that city whose male population disappeared for weeks on end, came back, drank their wages, beat up their wives and disappeared again. And we’re thankful that nobody is suggesting a post-Brexit return to the stinking feculence of the whaling business.

We’d talk about Hull’s image, too. Hull was the crappest town in the Book of Crap Towns (2003) — whose authors declared that the place “smelt of death” and would, come Judgement Day, be “leased out indefinitely to Satan to provide housing for the Damned”. Jasper Carrott used to joke that restaurants in Hull closed for lunch. When The Economist wrote about Hull, it saw “Britain’s rust belt” where “teenagers in baseball caps and tracksuits wander aimlessly”. (A sight never witnessed, of course, in the prosperous South.)

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And we’d talk about Larkin, and his poem This Be the Verse, and its image of misery deepening from generation to generation. The first line is the one everyone quotes: “They fuck you up…” Perhaps, in Hull, we’ve always been a little fucked up. In recent years, the rest of the country seems to have joined us. And I have to say: being fucked up is fine. It’s survivable, anyway. Being fucked, not so much. That’s more serious. The distinction is important. And it would be foolish to pretend, with Covid-19 the subject of our present chapter and a no-deal Brexit the possible matter of the next, that it wasn’t being asked.

Is Britain fucked? Go to Hull. Wander its streets, and you might find out. See its wide impossible sky and the great grey stripe of its river. Gaze upon the pale blues and greens of the Boyson mosaic, the shining contours of Dinsdale’s plastic dog turds, and you may discover the answer. Don’t tell us though. We won’t listen.

And just as calm was restored, yet another witch was arrested, in October: Andrew Man, apparently a wandering magician from Rathven, who could cure sick animals and people using skills given to him by “the people of the hills”.

Andrew does not fit our stereotype of the witch. For one thing, he is a man. For another, unlike the blank-faced and completely innocent victims of the Salem witch trials, Andrew did believe himself capable of using powerful magic. According to his testimony, he was the lover of the Queen of the Fairies, and had gotten many children with her. He was also helped by a supernatural entity called Christsunday, and had seen the king that died at Flodden (James IV) and Thomas the Rhymer with the fairies, along with other dead people.

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The material in Andrew’s confession includes the tips of some huge story icebergs. Perhaps most interesting is the forgotten culture of Gaelic-speaking regions of Scotland. In Aberdeenshire, the Highlands meet the Lowlands, and it was there that Christianity alternated between assimilating with the Gaelic paganism that preceded it, and clashing savagely with it. The fairy Otherworld lay alongside the everyday world, and it was both dangerous and exciting; its moral neutrality was intolerable to a Christian theology that emphasised life as a war between evil versus good. The witch trials of the sixteenth century were another Christian attempt to purge the last vestiges of Gaelic paganism from rural Aberdeenshire.

For Andrew Man, there was a fairy underworld, physically below the world of men, and culturally subordinated or even repressed or forgotten. Andrew and other magic users were left to carry the traces of this underworld to the surface. In the harsh light of resurgent Scottish Calvinism, such stories were of course misinterpreted as tales of demons. But in the twenty-first century, we are relatively familiar with the idea of the Queen of the Fairies, thanks to us fantasy literature. The very strange figure to us is Christsunday.

Christsunday is a curious name. Perhaps it was meant to be read as Christian at first glance, but the entity in question could hardly be mistaken for a Christian one. From Andrew, we learn that Christsunday is a stag some of the time — a stag that bursts up out of the snow. In Gaelic writings, deer are often able to pass from this world into the Otherworld, and to guide mortals across that border. Figures who rise from below are associated not only with the fairy realm, but with a particular idea about fairies: that they are linked to the dead who die before their time (like James IV and Thomas the Rymer.)

This movement of the Otherworld — from perpetually at the margins of human life, fitfully accessible to those with guidance, to a dark underworld inhabited by the dead — lightly Christianises the Gaelic Otherworld and assimilates it to an afterlife of punishment for sin. These dead figures can be understood by pious Christians as in hell or Purgatory, even though in pagan Gaelic tradition they are in neither.

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This kind of partial Christianisation was common in cultures that abruptly met medieval Catholicism in its evangelical form. New world cultures are full of figures like Christsunday: Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, is an ideal example. The word saint is a Christian cover hurled over what is very plainly an Aztec goddess: Mictēcacihuātl, the “Lady of the Dead”, who ruled Mictlan, the last layer of the underworld. Similar processes occur in both Hoodoo and Voudoun, and also in fully creolised religions like Santería.

But just as the modern Catholic Church condemns the votaries of Santa Muerte, so both the Presbyterian Kirk and the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church sought to condemn those who told tales about such hybrid figures in sixteenth-century Scotland.

Nevertheless, even as local folklore cloaked itself with Christian imagery to protect itself, Christianity appropriated local imagery to make itself more influential. For Andrew Man and most of his countryfolk — for pagans throughout what is now Britain — the solar year still dominated understandings of the supernatural. (If you strip the word Christ off the name Christsunday, you are left with Sunday — or SUN-day.) Medieval Catholicism made a reasonable fist of appropriating this, converting the figure of Sol Invictus, the unconquered Sun, into the figure of the risen Christ.

As long as the agricultural year dominated human experience, the seasons of the sun mattered profoundly; the yearly growth cycles of crops kept representatives of solar triumph in circulation, even if they had once been owned by the Romans and were always disowned by pure Christians. The compromise arrived at in medieval Christianity was, however, unacceptable to reformed Protestantism: it was the pagan elements absorbed by Christianity that ardent Protestants sought to destroy.

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And it was this, ultimately, that condemned Andrew Man to death in 1597. There has long been a connection suggested between a tentatively identified Gaelic stag-god, sometimes called Cernunnos, and Dīs Pater, a Roman lord of the underworld. Andrew himself would not have known these names, but it is likely that some of his interrogators would have been able to make the link. Certainly, Scotland’s James VI made any number of such connections in his book Daemonologie, published the same decade as Andrew’s trial.

For a Christian courtroom, the idea of a dark world beneath, from which people might frequently emerge — an underworld dominated by a highly sexual queen — could not be made to harmonise consistently with any Christian idea of a wholly spiritual resurrection. It may have felt uncomfortably close to a medieval story of the birth of Christ from his human mother’s flesh. Such adjacencies killed Andrew because they could not be tolerated.

We use the words witch hunt now quite lightly, to mean job losses at the very worst. But in 1597 it meant the loss of everything. Liberty, and life. Among many losses are lost records: we have only fragmentary material on any of the Aberdeenshire trials, and for some we have no records at all. That is as the prosecution wished. The last thing the record offers on the Aberdeenshire witch panic is a series of chilling payments for the materials of execution: 20 pieces of peat, four tar barrels, a length of rope to tie the victims to the stake, along with their stories that might unsettle the prevailing religious powers.

It’s worth remembering how these identities were forgotten. It was no accident; they were deliberately destroyed, burned to the bone. It is not insignificant that the last linguistic traces of Highland Gaelic paganism are about to disappear with Scottish Gaelic. In England, witches were not burned, but hanged as felons. In Scotland, they were first strangled to death, and then the body consumed by fire in a ritual designed to ensure that they were gone completely, gone for good. Such extirpation suggests an uneasy sense that stories like these might still emerge out of the Gaelic underworld, bringing with them a horde of restless dead rebels — who might threaten current governance in the way that the Aberdeenshire witches terrified the ruling class.

Tourists who come to Oxford from around the world rarely make their way to Abingdon; it’s a working town, not a showplace. Its central shopping area was a casualty of post-war planners, a mass of modern concrete and chain stores; to the north, new housing estates are creeping ever closer to the famous university city. What might have been Abingdon’s chief tourist attraction, its cathedral-like abbey church, was destroyed five centuries ago.

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And yet few towns are better proof of just how long and rich the history of apparently ordinary places can be. The two caveats in Abingdon’s claim to longevity (“town”, rather than city, and “in continuous occupation”) are significant, because it’s in these smaller communities — and the remarkable continuity of their institutions and collective lives — that the bedrock of British history lies.

The monks of Abingdon were making books and writing history centuries before any scholars came to settle in Oxford. One of the most influential figures in the late Anglo-Saxon church, St Æthelwold, was abbot here in the tenth century. A vigorous and industrious man — and a champion of educational and religious progress — Æthelwold didn’t spend long at Abingdon. But it still bears traces of the work he did to build up the abbey: a stream in the town, once the abbey millstream, follows the course Æthelwold and his monks set for it a thousand years ago. They may have been copying the line of the prehistoric defences, already ancient by Æthelwold’s time.

Æthelwold and his fellow abbots were running a school at Abingdon when Oxford was just a crossing-place over the Thames. But by the twelfth century, when Abingdon’s most famous son was born, the balance was already beginning to shift. Abingdon’s own saint, Edmund, was born into a middle-class family in the town around 1174. His mother wanted him to be well-educated, so she sent him not to the abbey but to school in Oxford, which by that time was gathering the communities of teachers and students who would form the nucleus of the university.

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A devout and studious boy, Edmund made the most of his opportunities, and prospered both in Oxford and at university in Paris. He was known for his skill as a lecturer, his attention to his students, and his generosity to poorer scholars. He ended his career as Archbishop of Canterbury, but it’s as “Edmund of Abingdon” that he has gone down in history — and how he’s remembered here.

His mother Mabel is buried in one of Abingdon’s medieval churches, and around the town you can see representations of her symbol: three interlocking circles, which she drew on Edmund’s palm to remind him that with all his learning, honouring the Holy Trinity must still be his highest aim. By drawing those lines on her son’s hand, she left her mark on the town as surely as the people who traced out its medieval street plan.

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Behind the little church in which Edmund’s mother is buried stretches the site by the Thames where the abbey of Abingdon once stood. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century, the abbey’s buildings were destroyed, leaving a huge expanse of empty ground. Some of that space is now a public park, with bright flowerbeds, a swimming pool, and a broad green space where children play over the footprint of the abbey church marked out in the grass. The building would have been the size of the greatest churches in England — imagine Wells Cathedral — and no less splendid. Nothing of it survives.

But in a town thousands of years old, a couple of hundred years seem like nothing. It’s worth remembering that the abbey acted as the town’s heart for more centuries than have passed since its destruction. Throughout the Middle Ages, it was an imposing presence in Abingdon — one of the greatest landowners in the county, as well as the chief provider of education and healthcare. Losing it must have ripped the heart out of the town, but the wound closed over, grass grew on the site, life went on. Though the big church was destroyed, the town’s smaller churches went on doing their work, and other monuments to medieval philanthropy endured: a complex of beautiful almshouses which have been looking after the town’s elderly since the fifteenth century, and a school which traces its origins back more than 750 years.

Today Abingdon is small enough to have maintained its identity, but big enough to have a thriving community willing to celebrate it. I first visited during a heritage festival, which revelled in an eclectic mish-mash of moments from the town’s long history: a display of medieval pilgrim badges, some Anglo-Saxon beads, a few men in khaki to remember Abingdon’s First World War dead. Of course, the town has seen plenty of tragedies in its thousands of years: plenty of loss, change and suffering. That’s what “continuous occupation” means — a long history of living and dying.

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As in any town, the history of Abingdon isn’t fossilised, but always developing, adding new layers. Part of Berkshire since the time of Alfred the Great, Abingdon was gobbled up by Oxfordshire in 1974, and most recently it’s become part of a region branded ‘Science Vale UK’, which intends to be “a global hotspot for enterprise and innovation”. But you can have innovation and still remember the past: a place of enterprise this has always been, as much now as when Æthelwold marked out his millstream. The stream keeps going; so does the town.

That’s what British history is in a place like this — accretive and accumulative. The history of an island where people have lived in the same places for thousands of years is less a series of discrete moments, however violent and disruptive each individual event might be, and more like a stream — countless days flowing into each other, carrying onwards the place and its people. At this strange time of social disruption, when everything is “unprecedented” and a “new normal”, there’s comfort in the thought of that continuous flow.

If, like the ap Harris and their descendants, you appreciate a ruck then — despite its genteel, beside-the-languid-Wye ambience — Monmouth is your kind of town. As well as the castle ruins, there is the Nelson Museum — the victor of the Nile and Trafalgar performed quite a lot of trysting with Emma Hamilton hereabouts. But my own personal place of “have-a-go” pilgrimage is the Wetherspoons situated (of course) on Agincourt Square.

I am an expert on that watering hole, The King’s Head, a rambling coaching inn dating from the 17th century, since I spent multitudinous hours under its stuccoed ceilings during the interval between collecting one child from Extra-Curricular Activity A at 5pm and waiting for the other to finish Extra-Curricular Activity B at 9pm. (We sometimes even spent the night in the pub, rather than do the 50-mile round trip home and back again to school in the morning. Country life, eh?) There are advantages to Wetherspoons, I find: their reputation as déclassé keeps out sanctimonious snobs. You are pretty safe from Emily Thornberry in a Wetherspoons.

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I have digressed. The truest reason I love The King’s Head is that William Cobbett once gave a lecture there: an event commemorated by a nice print on the wall of the man — in red jacket, white britches and black boots, all properly Georgian — and a bit of accompanying biographical text.

Cobbett was a scrapper on the same majestic scale as our Henry V and our Horatio, except he dished it out to Vested Interest rather than Jean-Pierre Foreigner. He is the faded star of the British Awkward Squad (Capt. Jon. Swift; Vice Capt. Geo. Orwell) and he needs a boost. He needs a blue plaque on every place he ever visited. In his long life — he was born in 1763 and died in 1835 — Cobbett was a farmer, Tory, soldier, Radical, MP, agony uncle (his books include Advice to Young Men), and the founder of Hansard.

His obituary in The Times, after categorising him as a “self-taught peasant”, declared Cobbett “by far the most voluminous writer that has ever lived for centuries”. The funniest, too: when some town council somewhere banned his anti-Malthusian play Surplus Population, he riposted with a drama entitled Bastards in High Places.

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Above all, though, Cobbett was the champion of the rural poor, the village labourer and the small farmer. He was their one true tribune. He spoke at The King’s Head in 1820 because country folk were suffering a triple wham from agricultural depression, enclosure and the rise of agri-business. Or, to precis, “Hodge” (his name for the generic farm worker) was low-waged or unwaged and deprived of the bits of land he had once enjoyed under commoner’s rights.

Cobbett railed against “The Thing” (the capitalist, manufactory system) and the centrifugal, corrupting force of smoky London (“The Wen”, in Cobbettian). But he was no bloviator: he was a farm boy, and hence entirely empirical and properly pragmatic. He spent a decade travelling around the English sticks to discover the true state of affairs. His descriptions of his horseback journeys were published in 1830 as Rural Rides, the first sociological study of the English countryside.

No dry-as-dust tome by the way, the Rides: it brims with pinned-to-the-specimen-board descriptions of people and places, nature, wit. Cobbett knew beauty and, the proper Englishman that he was, he loved horses:

The finest sight in England is a stage coach ready to start. A great sheep or cattle fair is a beautiful sight; but in the stage coach you see more of what man is capable of performing. The vehicle itself, the harness, all so complete and so neatly arranged; so strong and clean and good. The beautiful horses, impatient to be off. The inside full and the outside covered, in every part with men, women, children, boxes, bags, bundles. The coachman taking his reins in hand and his whip in the other, gives a signal with his foot, and away go, at the rate of seven miles an hour.

One of these coaches coming in, after a long journey is a sight not less interesting. The horses are now all sweat and foam, the reek from their bodies ascending like a cloud. The whole equipage is covered perhaps with dust and dirt. But still, on it comes as steady as the hands on a clock.

Speaking at The King’s Head coaching inn in Monmouth must have been the dream gig for Cobbett the horseman.

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When you go to that Wetherspoons yourself, take a copy of Rural Rides with you, sit under Cobbett’s portrait, and ask yourself the following question. Given all the Westminster-overlooked problems of British country people in 2020 — from the absence of public transport to abundance of second-homers — who speaks for us now? Where is our champion, our Cobbett? The one of us who can speak for us? Where?

Cobbett’s solution to the woes of the Regency rural poor was a return to a barter-based Medieval economy under gent paternalists with a sense of noblesse oblige, plus Parliamentary voting reform, creating a Britain where there would be “room for us all, and  plenty for us to eat and to drink”. In the bon mot of his biographer Richard Ingrams, Cobbett sought a “Brave Old World”.

Even in the 19^thcentury, the call to go “back to the land” — vacating the towns and dismantling the factory system — was unrealisable nostalgia. But that is not to say that Cobbett’s proposals were meritless. One in particular needs dusting down today: self-sufficiency, as promoted in his manual and manifesto, Cottage Economy.

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Of course — and I hear your sniggers — self-sufficiency has become a Tom-and-Barbara Good Life laugh, if a slightly strangled one now that, due to Covid “collapsology”, your neighbours are fleeing the Wen for a house with a large garden in Norfolk. If you truly believe self-sufficiency too quaint, ponder this: in France some 20% of the fresh produce consumed is still raised in the kitchen garden, the potager. Then ponder this also: during Covid, France’s newspapers declared “Potagers et jardins, les stars du confinement”. Well, obviously. Soul, stomach, sense of self-reliance, re-connection to healing nature all satisfied by a quarter of an acre. Every one of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” ticked. Voila!

Actually, self-sufficiency, autarchy, backyard farming — call it what you like — is a venerable British tradition. Once upon a time governments even sponsored self-sufficiency via Smallholdings Acts authorising acquisition of land for those wanting to grow their own. Between 1908 and 1914 alone, 205,103 acres were purchased in England and Wales for smallholders and allotmenteers. In return for service in the Great War, 24,000 soldiers were settled on plots in our green and pleasant land. The allotment movement was boosted by Round 2 with militaristic Germany, 1939-45, and the “Dig for Victory” campaign. By 1943 there were 1,400,000 allotments in the UK, producing a gob-smacking 1.3 million tonnes of food.

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Then came the outbreak of peace, the population doubling to 60 million, and an expansion of housing which caused hard-pressed local authorities to sell land to developers. Currently, there are a niggardly 250,000 allotments in the UK, and the waiting lists are as long as rake handles. But now that BoJo has decided that money does, after all, grow on trees, why not spend a casual couple of billion purchasing land around Britain to be divided up into plots for village people and townspeople alike? (I propose this be called “The Cobbett Scheme”.)

So, when you are in Monmouth, do visit The King’s Head. Cobbett, the man who dined alike with Pitt and farmworker, who hated cruelty to animals, and appreciated a good pint, would have been entirely at home in a Wetherspoons —with their CAMRA ale, RSPCA Freedom Food eggs, Marine Stewardship Council fish (I have eaten in Michelin starred restaurants with less ethical food and drinks policies) and its merciful absence of stuffed shirts.And, alongside Rural Rides, have Cottage Economy with you, and ask yourself this ultimate question: do we not need more self-sufficiency in this country?

I say we do. As the Sex Pistols should have sung: “Autarchy for the UK!”

You keep going, finally outside London’s blast radius, free from its cultural and economic gravity but not yet into the post-industrial North. Names on the motorway signs reek of Middle England. Grantham, birthplace of Margaret Thatcher and the Dambusters. Melton Mowbray, birthplace of the pork pie. This part of the world is about as Brexity as it gets: in 2016, in some parts of Lincolnshire, 75% voted to leave the European Union.

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If you’re more comfortable in the post-Blair Britain of social liberalism, buy-to-let portfolios, Eurostar minibreaks and ironic bunting, you probably don’t want to stop in Lincolnshire. You should stop in Lincolnshire.

Pull in at Stamford, a town preserved to an almost surreal degree from the depredations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries thanks to its near-feudal relationship to the nearby stately home, Burghley House. This colossal sixteenth-century ‘prodigy house’ was constructed by William Cecil, Lord High Treasurer to Elizabeth I. Today it’s still owned by the Cecils (confusingly, the Marquess and Marchioness of Exeter), though the family themselves now mostly live in British Columbia.

Down the road, Stamford itself is almost wholly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century in its architecture, and permanently besieged by people filming the type of BBC costume drama that can’t decide between nostalgia and trying to cancel the past on the grounds of being old-fashioned.

BBC Costume Drama History, roughly speaking, covers an era that began with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and lasted until the sexual one began (as Philip Larkin put it) in 1963. After 1963, Britain modernised, with a capital M, and since then anyone who demurs has been increasingly shoved to the margins. You’d be forgiven for thinking we had no history at all before the BBC Costume Era (BCE). But in fact the BCE is barely the tip of a huge, mostly submerged iceberg of Britain’s past, the vast majority of which lies under dark waters, in a time where people spoke strangely and really didn’t think like us at all.

Stamford in the BBC Costume Era was pretty dull, largely ignoring the Industrial Revolution and earning its keep mostly from North-South coaching traffic, farming and a malting business. Its more violent, colourful and contentious formative years lie further back.

The town gets its name from its position on the Roman-built Ermine Street. This ancient road, now mostly over-written by the A1, in those days crossed the river Welland in a gravelly water-meadow, giving it the name ‘stone-ford’. After the Romans left in around 400AD, Stamford persisted as a small settlement known for glazed pottery but not much else. The Vikings changed all that.

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When the Viking chief Ragnar Lodbrok was captured by King Aella of Northumbria in 865, legend has it that Aella executed Ragnar by throwing him into a snakepit. Whether this happened or not, Ragnar was definitely killed: his sons Hvitserk, Ubba, Bjorn Ironside and the superbly named Ivar the Boneless were so infuriated that they recruited an enormous band of Scandinavian warriors, known in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 865 as the ‘Great Heathen Army’. This horde piled into longboats and headed south from Scandinavia to wreak revenge on the soft Saxon southerners.

Unwisely, the then king of East Anglia, Edmund the Martyr, gave Ragnar’s sons and their army food and horses in exchange for agreeing not to attack his kingdom. This pusillanimous move did him no good in the long run: having conquered York in 866, Ubba and Ivar the Boneless returned to East Anglia, where in 869 they killed Edmund for refusing to renounce Christianity. By then the Northmen had a firm foothold in England, and in 874 they consolidated their political power across the East and Midlands.

The Great Heathen Army was always a coalition force, and the region was divided between their various factions. Stamford became a fortified Danish ‘burh’ — one of the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw — that is, the castle stronghold of a Danish horde who henceforth ruled the defeated Anglo-Saxon peasantry in the area according to Danish law and custom.

Stamford’s new Danish rulers built their burh on the north side of the Welland. Thanks to its position at the foot of Danish Mercia, it was of strategic military importance, and Danish Stamford remained a political hub in the East of England until 918. At that point, it fell to two of Alfred’s children, the formidable warrior queen Aethelflaed of Mercia and Edward of Wessex.

Rather than trying to rule Danish Stamford, Edward established his own parallel burh on the south side of the Welland, with Danes and Saxons facing one another across the water. One gets a sense that the atmosphere was probably somewhat bad-tempered to begin with. The antipathy must have waned over time, though, because by the Norman Conquest some 150 years later Stamford was booming. Its twin boroughs over-spilled their bounds on both sides of the river, suburbs spread out along approach roads and iron-smelting thrived in what’s now St George’s Street. It became, in its way, a happy story of integration.

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It didn’t last. There’s no record of the Norman defeat of Stamford’s existing population, but it can’t have taken long. In 1070, a mere four years after the Battle of Hastings, the Norman abbot of Peterborough took refuge at Stamford with 160 men when pursued by Hereward the Wake’s anti-Norman insurgency.

But Stamford’s brief prominence as a site of strategic military importance, for invaders first from the North and then from the South, gave way to an increasingly respectable-but-marginal status once invaders stopped coming. Out of the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw, Stamford was the only one not to become a county town, and it flourished instead as a coaching stop, and a centre for the wool trade — an industry so fundamental to the medieval English economy that it funded the Hundred Years’ War.

Grown prosperous on the proceeds, in the Middle Ages Stamford was one of the biggest towns in England, with a castle, 14 churches and even (briefly) a breakaway university founded in 1333 by dissidents from Merton and Brasenose colleges in Oxford. In the 1840s, though, Stamford made a decision to side-line itself. Faced with the prospect of a railway hub, the people said thanks but no thanks. In this they were supported by then 3rd Marquess of Exeter, another William Cecil, who didn’t like the idea of his pretty town being ruined by the march of progress. The hub station was instead built in Peterborough.

Then in the 1960s Stamford retreated still further, with the construction of an A1 bypass. In doing so, it reached the end of the BBC Costume Era, having politely opted out of the March of Progress. From a pro-development point of view, this was the wrong choice. Stamford and Peterborough both had between 4000 and 5000 inhabitants at the start of the nineteenth century. Today, the population of Peterborough is around 200,000, while Stamford houses barely a tenth of that.

From a cultural and aesthetic point of view though, you can argue the toss. Peterborough today is a mess of ring roads, racism and ugly buildings, voted worst place to live in Britain for the second year running in 2020 and notable chiefly for being home to the UK Passport Office and a particularly unattractive multi-storey car park. Stamford, on the other hand, is quietly prosperous, with a thriving Civic Society association and an Urban Group dedicated to keeping the town clean, litter-free and friendly.

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Perhaps shaped by its convulsive foundation in successive waves of invasion, Stamford’s bone-deep conservatism has, finally, become the town’s main stock-in-trade: in 1967, it became England’s first conservation area. Today Stamford covers barely more than two square miles, and yet it contains 446 listed buildings — a conservation density whose gravity pulls in tourists, down-sizers, retirees and restaurateurs as well as BBC location crews.

As the story we’ve been telling ourselves about modernity and progress starts to look increasingly rickety, it’s worth wondering whether Stamford was right to opt out. We might yet discover that larger but uglier — more atomised and therefore less liveable — urban areas could learn a thing or two from this prosperous small town about getting the balance right between economic development and grassroots civic life.

That’s if we get things right, and our small country can hold its communities together. If we don’t, we may yet find ourselves facing the more distant ghosts of Stamford’s past: the vengeful raiders, bull-runners, market-day massacres, religious schism, invasions and counter-invasions of those darker and stranger days before England’s BBC Costume era. I catch myself sometimes wondering how many of those older shadows are truly gone, and how many are just sleeping.

For the most perfect summation of how his Northumbrian upbringing shaped the man who became one of the greatest footballers, and football managers, of his generation, turn to the 1971 Tyne Tees TV documentary Big Jack’s Other World. It is a joyful, time-travelling 25 minutes, as Jack returns to Ashington for a weekend of whippet racing, brass bands and pints in the club. For me, it was almost exquisitely painful to watch: having grown up in Northumberland in the 1980s, I saw the glowing embers of the pit village life he describes so fondly, as well as characters who look and speak and laugh like the kind, hard-working folk I knew in places like New Hartley and Seaton Delaval.

For Northumbrians, “h’yem” (home), has a more profound meaning than just the place where one lives. It means belonging to a homeland, a heimat; it evokes the spirit of the Welsh hiraeth, or the Portuguese saudade — that sense of longing for a missing time and place.

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What’s so striking about this film about Jack’s homecoming is the magnetic personality of the man himself. He’s a natural in front of camera, displaying an easy charm as he meets his old neighbours, and respectfully asks if he can have a look inside 114 Beatrice Street, the colliery row where he grew up and shared a bed with his three brothers until he left home to join Leeds United. Not only is Ashington the only English town to have three native World Cup winners — Jack and Bobby Charlton, plus the England cricketer Mark Wood — but Beatrice Street alone produced three Footballers of the Year: the Burnley and England star Jimmy Adamson grew up there, too.

When Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, visited Ashington in 2018 he was struck by just how badly depleted the town had been by 40 years of decline. In a speech, he remarked that what he saw of the town’s local economy had shocked him, even as he was impressed by the warmth of its people. In his words, here was “barren economic tundra, permanently leeched of nutrients“.

But in Big Jack’s Other World, we see Ashington at perhaps its most confident and prosperous: the pits were still major employers, Station Road was the biggest shopping area between Newcastle and Edinburgh (with one of the grandest Co-op stores in the North of England), and the working men’s clubs — of which there were dozens in the district — were genuinely luxurious, and vied with each other to have the fanciest concert rooms to attract the biggest stars.

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In the film we see Jack in his element, getting a round in at the Northern Social Club in North Seaton — “there you are lads, get stuck into these” he says, setting down a tray of pints in front of his confreres — before launching into an arcane debate with his father about what type of wild geese they saw that morning. Indeed, with his fascination for birdlife and love of angling on the Tweed (or, in later life, on the Moy in County Mayo), Jack was a great naturalist in the Northumbrian tradition of Lancelot Brown, Thomas Bewick and the fly-fishing Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey.

The only jarring note amid all this cheerful bonhomie comes with Jack’s views on “women’s lib”. Even in an era where male chauvinism was hardly uncommon, the North East of England stood out as unusually patriarchal. Where it was typical for men and women to work alongside each other in the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, the coalfields of Northumberland and Durham were different. Here it was a mark of pride for a miner that his wife did not take on paid work outside the home — where she was needed to service the “aristocrats of labour”, as the pitmen saw themselves, much as a groom would look after a horse.

So as the Charlton menfolk stagger back home after their midday session, they’re greeted by an irritated Cissie Charlton standing at the stove in her housecoat. Ensuring that the men of the house were fed first was a custom that my own grandmother — a pitman’s wife — observed well into the 2000s. As they sit down to their dinner, Jack holds forth on the duties of women, and how girls should be brought up: “strictly.” How the women felt about this was not discussed. This is what purely economic analyses of the decline of mining towns like Ashington tend to miss: the fact that these coalfield communities relied as much on a reserve army of (largely unpaid) female labour — and all the constraints and narrowed horizons that came with that — as much as they did on government backing for nationalised industries.

Yet Jack himself had taken one look at the coalface as a teenager and decided the pitman’s life wasn’t for him. And though he was always loyal to Ashington — and even campaigned alongside Arthur Scargill in the 1980s — he was clear-eyed about the limitations of the world he grew up in. As Danny Finkelstein noted in a perceptive piece about how forward-thinking and entrepreneurial Charlton always was — in football coaching and in his business interests — when Jack looked back on the defeat of the miners’ strike, he remarked: “If you were to talk to some of them now, they would tell you that the closing of the mines was the best thing that ever happened to them. They have found a new lifestyle, and, more importantly, new hope.” But for many of them, “new hope” meant leaving Ashington behind.

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Tyne Tees TV itself was once an important vehicle for regional pride. The 1970s was its golden age of documentary making, with serious attention given to caricatural North East pursuits, with wonderful films on leek-growing and pigeon racing — both manifestations of that typical Northumbrian love of the natural world. But then, as Antony Brown wrote in his 1978 book Tyne Tees Television: The First 20 years, A Portrait, the station’s purpose was to paint a portrait of:

“a land of wide skies, bent vowels, saints, footballers, shipyards and an inventive tradition which has produced the finest engineers in England: its landscape swings from wild moorland to industrial cities and back again to the sea-fretted coast of Northumberland, Durham and North Yorkshire.”

Jack Charlton was great on the grandeur of that Northumbrian landscape. In a later travelogue for Tyne Tees, The Coast of King Jack, he swaggers along the Northumberland littoral from Amble to Bamburgh like a bandy-legged gun slinger, tossing out historical tidbits and bantering amusingly with the locals. Since Jack’s death, I have read so many testimonies from ordinary people about his personal warmth, kindness, and approachability. These qualities were nurtured in the tight-knit streets of Ashington, the “biggest pit village in the world”, and Northumbrian sociability is still one of the region’s strongest selling points.

Jack took charge of Ireland’s national team in 1986, a fraught time for Anglo-Irish relations. It was his personal charisma, and love of a pint — as much as his prowess as a football manager — that undoubtedly endeared him so much to the Irish people. After sending them into raptures at Italia 90 and USA 94, no man since the thirteenth century came closer to being anointed High King of Ireland than Big Jack (although honorary Irish citizenship and the Freedom of Dublin were high enough honours).

As this touching David Squires cartoon in the Guardian illustrated so well, here was a man who was genuinely loved. Other than perhaps the great Terry Wogan, no one did more to affect a rapprochement between England and Ireland — after decades, even centuries of mistrust. Bill Corcoran of the Tyneside Irish Centre said it well when he tweeted:

“A mighty Northumberland footballing statesman. His influence, in bringing friendship and peace between people, in his beloved England and Ireland in terrible times was pivotal but under-appreciated.”

Or, as the Irish international Johnny Giles once put it, Bobby and Jack Charlton were “great ambassadors for both football and for working-class England”. What’s made Jack’s death so poignant is that part of that old working-class England has died with him.

Dan Jackson is the author of the best-selling book The Northumbrians: The North East of England and its People. A New History, published by Hurst (2019)

Dungeness is an odd sort of place, to put it mildly. To get a sense of what it is like, think of an artists’ community in a near-desert of shingle, consisting of houses built from driftwood and old train carriages, all on a storm-battered headland in Kent, with a globally unique ecosystem, a tiny steam railway, and of course those two gigantic nuclear plants dominating the view to the south.

Its remoteness and unique atmosphere has proved irresistible to artists, most famously the film director Derek Jarman, who moved to a cottage there after falling ill with AIDS in the 1980s. One of my favourite painters, Eric Ravilious, executed a striking picture of the old lighthouse in 1939. The year after that, Dungeness Point was the scene of a darkly comic vignette of wartime history: two Nazi spies who were landed there blew their cover by attempting to buy alcohol before noon at a pub in nearby Lydd, and were later hanged.

Had there not been a war on, it is easy to imagine that the landlady who reported Herr Meier and Herr Waldberg might not have been such a stickler. Romney Marsh, of which Dungeness forms the southern boundary, had for many years the reputation of a place where the law’s writ ran a little unevenly.

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In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries smuggling was rife. It is one of the closest points to the continent on the whole English coast, conveniently furnished with numerous gently sloping beaches, and in past centuries was inaccessible and hard to navigate for the stranger. Rudyard Kipling, who lived not far away, at Burwash on the Sussex Weald, contributed to the image of the Kentish smugglers as charming rogues with his famous poem ‘A Smuggler’s Song’:

“Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark —
Brandy for the Parson, ‘Baccy for the Clerk.
Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie —
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by!”

Another builder of the romantic legends was the author Russell Thorndike. He wrote the Dr Syn series, splendidly preposterous old-fashioned swashbucklers about a mild-mannered Church of England cleric, the Vicar of Dymchurch, who moonlights as The Scarecrow, feared chief of a gang of smugglers. They lead the Revenue a merry dance over the course of seven novels. I was introduced to the books by my father, who is himself a mild-mannered Church of England cleric living on Romney Marsh, but not as far as I am aware a notorious brandy smuggler.

People who have heard of the Marsh are often familiar with its two most famous institutions. Firstly, the Romney breed of sheep, which is now farmed all over the world, from South America to New Zealand, where it makes up more than half of that country’s 40 million-strong flock.

And secondly, the narrow-gauge Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, the 1920s brainchild of millionaire enthusiasts Captain Howey and Count Louis Zborowski, and now a popular attraction for tourists from all over the world. Its fame has spread considerably — there is a Shuzenji Romney Railway in Japan, closely modelled on its English namesake. During the Second World War, a special armoured train ran on the railway’s line, acting as a sort of mobile anti-aircraft unit; it scored only one success, but certainly looked good in propaganda newsreels. Indeed, the entire line was taken over for military purposes, which was hardly surprising given that the enemy lay less than 30 miles away.

The proximity of Europe has been pivotal in the Marsh’s history. Those original continental troublemakers the Romans had a port at Lympne, a village which now lies some distance from the shore following the retreat of the coastline. You will still occasionally hear the chauvinistic local legend that William the Conqueror initially attempted to land near New Romney, but was seen off by the hardy locals, and only then tried his luck further west at Pevensey, where he made his successful landing against the (by implication) soft and irresolute Sussex men. The tale has a kernel of truth: it seems that some of the Bastard’s men did disembark at New Romney by mistake and were rebuffed, but it was a small scale engagement.

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Long after the ructions caused by the Normans, the French continued to be a source of unquiet, as well as informal duty-free booze, on the Marsh. From 1800, the coast was heavily fortified against a feared Napoleonic invasion, with the building of the Royal Military Canal at the foot of the surrounding hills to delay any invading French army, and a chain of small gun-emplacements called Martello towers, alongside larger forts at Dungeness and Hythe. Later, the district was expected to be one of the sites for a Nazi invasion; inspection of captured plans after the war confirmed that this had indeed been the enemy’s intention. The field next to my parents’ house contains a concrete bunker dating from this time, presumably intended to defend the road into town from the beach.

Romney Marsh is not nowadays marshland as most people would imagine it. There is no great Grimpen Mire waiting to entrap the incautious traveller, and no squelching bog. For some centuries, most of the Marsh has been grazing pasture. This has not always been the case: well into the second millennium AD, what is now the Marsh was a mix of shallow tidal lagoon and true marshland, with the River Rother snaking through the southern parts.

The lay of the land was radically altered by a series of fierce Channel storms in the second half of the thirteenth century, culminating in the notorious Great Storm of 1287. Old Winchelsea, a substantial place with an estimated population in the thousands, was entirely obliterated and most of the island on which it stood submerged, Atlantis-like, by the surging sea. The modern town of Winchelsea, founded by the survivors of this event, stands on top of a hill: they weren’t taking any chances (although their eventful history wasn’t over — Winchelsea suffered French and Spanish raids during the Hundred Years War and was burned by the French in 1360).

The aftermath of the Great Storm was tough for the place in which I grew up, New Romney. Not only was it severely damaged but, having been a thriving port at the mouth of the Rother, the town’s economic fortunes also declined rapidly after 1287, as the course of the river had shifted well to the south, rendering the harbour useless. Whether the storm itself was directly to blame, as local folk history suggests, or whether the lower Rother and the harbour had become gradually choked with silt and shingle over many decades, and the storm was simply the last straw, the town became something of a backwater.

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The fluctuating shape and extent of the Marsh, and changing patterns of land use, have resulted in numerous once thriving communities being abandoned. Within a day’s walk of my parents’ house, there are at least four ruined churches situated far from any modern settlements. One such example is the dramatic All Saints, which served the long-extinct parish of Hope.

Not all these lost communities vanished as suddenly and dramatically as Old Winchelsea. Broomhill, close to Dungeness, gradually became uninhabitable due to the encroachment of the sea in late medieval times. Many villages and hamlets were badly affected by the Black Death or by the malaria which seems to have lingered well into the eighteenth century.

Other relics reflect the more recent past. Close to the trackbed of the partially dismantled Appledore-New Romney branch line, a casualty of the Beeching Terror — the rails remain in place as far as Dungeness, for the sole purpose of transporting spent nuclear fuel — stand three very strange concrete structures. One is a large convex vertical wall, measuring about 200 feet from end to end. The other two resemble giant satellite dishes, set in sturdy stone bases. One is about 30 feet in diameter, the other about 20 feet. They are acoustic mirrors, the legacy of interwar experiments with creating an early-warning system for enemy aircraft crossing the Channel. Similar installations survive at Hythe, and on the cliffs near Dover, but they were never used in anger, having been superseded by radar by the mid-1930s.

The mirrors contribute to the somewhat eerie beauty of the Marsh, with its long unimpeded views and big skies. Perhaps too the precariousness of the Marsh’s existence adds a certain drama and savour to the contemplation of its landscape. After all, most of the land between the Royal Military Canal and the Channel is at or below sea-level: everyone who lives on the Marsh depends on the coastal defences. In the Dr Syn books, Russell Thorndike quotes a fictional though highly apt motto for the Marshfolk: “Serve God, honour the King, but first maintain the Wall.”

It’s hard not to draw lessons for what we might think of as our uniquely modern dilemmas: the inescapability of some kind of entanglement with our European neighbours, however secure we may feel in our island redoubt; the imperative for humility and flexibility in our dealings with the inexorable forces of nature; and the need to accept inevitable change to maintain the broad shape of a way of life.

The musicologist, poet and novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner — author of that tale of modern witchcraft and female rebellion, Lolly Willowes (1926) — met her lifetime companion, the poet Valentine Ackland, in Theodore’s home. They are buried together in the graveyard of the village church, St Nicholas. The writer and publisher David Garnett, author of the Kafka-like novella Lady into Fox (1922), which tells of a newly married young woman transformed suddenly into a fox, was a frequent visitor to the village. The society hostess and patron of the arts Lady Ottoline Morrell, who helped arrange financial support for Theodore when he faced poverty, swept in from time to time.

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Around eight miles from Dorchester and not on any beaten path, the village was a strangely numinous place when I used to visit it some years ago. Alone in the church, I found a single page torn from Theodore’s short story collection Fables (1929) lying on the ground, which I picked up and left on a battered wooden table at the entrance. On another visit I noticed an old-fashioned telephone box that seemed misted up. On opening the door I discovered the interior was completely festooned with cobwebs. I’d have liked to have known if the phone was still working, but that would have meant stretching out my hand and possibly damaging the spiders’ work. So I closed the door and left the webs intact.

Later, struggling up a precipitous path leading to the sea, I located a memorial stone dedicated to Llewelyn hidden in long grass not far from the cliffs. This was after several failed attempts to find it on earlier visits. Along the way I would pass Chydyok, the brick and flint cottage where he lived with his wife, the American suffragist and writer Alyse Gregory. In order to be with Llewelyn in this remote place, she had given up the editorship of The Dial, a magazine based in New York. She had written on Katherine Mansfield, Marcel Proust and Paul Valéry, among other contemporary authors, and commissioned many notable reviews, including one by T. S. Eliot of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Living there was not easy for her. For some years Llewelyn carried on an affair with the poet Gamel Woolsey, who lived in the nearby seaside village of Ringstead with her partner Gerald Brenan, who became author of The Spanish Labyrinth (1943), a study of the events leading up to the country’s civil war. Like Llewelyn, Gamel suffered from tuberculosis.

When I was slowly picking my way up the steep path, I often recalled a story told me by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, of how he visited Llewelyn when he was living in a shelter set up for him in the garden. Lying on a bed, Llewelyn pushed a book toward him and whispered, “Read to me about the Kingdom of the Fairies”. The book was Leviathan, in which Hobbes attacks the Catholic Church as “a kingdom of darkness” and compares it with the fictional realm of the fairies. Oakeshott, who records the episode in his Notebooks 1922-1986 (2014), read to the seemingly dying man “until the sun went down”.

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Llewelyn returned from the brink of death at many points in his adult years; he eventually died in Switzerland in 1939, aged 55. His life-long closeness to death was one of the chief inspirations of his personal philosophy: an impassioned, life-exalting atheism. The other was his devotion to sexual pleasure, for which he repeatedly risked reinfection in erotic encounters, in the sanatoria where he recuperated whenever his illness worsened. Despite having contemplated joining the priesthood in his youth and remaining respectful of religion throughout his life, the Cambridge philosopher seems to have had an instinctive sympathy with the frail libertine unbeliever.

Oakeshott’s interest in the Powys family extended to John Cowper, whose book The Meaning of Culture (1929) he reviewed, and Theodore, whom he remembered consuming vast quantities of gin in the local pub, The Sailor’s Return. Oakeshott shared John Cowper’s view that “the essence of culture is the conscious awareness of existence”, and for both of them that included a full consciousness of human mortality. Interestingly, the book of Theodore Powys’s that Oakeshott mentioned to me most often was the novel Unclay (1931), in which Mr. John Death comes to the village of Dodder to “unclay” two of its inhabitants, loses the parchment on which their names are inscribed and falls in love with one of them.

The meeting place of three brothers, Chaldon Herring was home to three philosophies. Each of them took as a given the passing of Christianity. But whereas Llewelyn welcomed the decline of religion, Theodore — even though he had no trace of belief in him — thought it the only subject that mattered. His best known novel, Mr Weston’s Good Wine (1927), tells of an old man in an overcoat and brown felt hat who arrives in the village of Folly Down in a mud-spattered van to sell two wines — the light white wine of love and the dark wine of death. Time stops, and the old man disburses his wares throughout the village. At the end of his visit he instructs his assistant Michael drive him to the top of Folly Down Hill, and drop a burning match in the tank of the van. The two of them — God and his angel — then vanish in the smoke.

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A later novella, The Only Penitent (1931), has a country vicar forgiving a mad old man called Tinker Jar — another avatar of God — for creating the world, and granting him the supreme gift of everlasting nonbeing. Far more subversive of established pieties than anything in the canon of conventional atheism, Theodore’s tales of a Deity yearning for its own annihilation are among the most beautiful allegories in English literature.

The third of the brothers was the most elusive. In his Autobiography (1934), he describes himself as a follower of Pyrrho of Elis, the ancient Greek philosopher reputed to have founded scepticism. John Cowper Powys cherished religion as an aesthetic phenomenon, not a system of belief. He kept open the possibility that something of him might survive death, only to renounce any such hope when he heard that his beloved Llewelyn had died. In later years (born in 1872, he lived until 1963) he wrote that he was happy death would be the final end for him. His greatest novel, Wolf Solent (1929) shows the central protagonist struggling to live as Powys himself tried to do: enjoying the fleeting sensations of life while enduring the sorrows it also brings.

Chaldon Herring in the interwar years was not only an unlikely gathering place for some of the brightest cultural figures of the time. Even more improbably, it was the scene of one of the most interesting twentieth century attempts to fashion a philosophy for people who no longer imagine any transcendental order. The avant-garde that flocked to the village may not have grasped this fact, and yet it may have been what drew them there. It remains extraordinary that some of the most radical experiments in post-theistic thinking should have been explored not in an ultra-modern metropolis or provincial city, but a village folded in a valley in deepest Dorset.