Four seasons with John clare
200 years ago out of a hovel in a fenland village walked one of our greatest natural observers.
out of a hovel in a fenland village, emerged one of Britain’s greatest observers of nature: the poet and writer, John Clare. 20 years ago I stumbled into the ghost of Clare’s world; a remnant of heathland that captured me as absolutely as it did him. Since then I’ve been on a journey into a landscape. His landscape.
During his lifetime John Clare would rise from nothing to be celebrated in the highest literary circles. then just as quickly he was spurned, to end his days in a madness of forgotten genius. his world was the then far-eastern limits of northamptonshire, now Cambridgeshire, around the village of helpston. this was where he was born and spent his formative years; a place he walked and understood with an intense intimacy; a land that shaped him and his work, in poetry and prose.
When i first read his words, the originality of his observations made the hair on the back of my neck tingle. i’d never read anything that conveyed nature the way i saw it. he saw the depth of things. two decades on, i’m still reading his work, getting different things from it as the years go by.
A believer in communicating in his local dialect, Clare had a whole vocabulary which he used in preference to the ‘correct’ english. he did this consciously; he was no fool. At first look he’s the bumpkin that made good, nothing more than that. On a second, longer reading he stands up as the literary genius he was. the word flaze is one of my favourites. it means a flaring candle and his work is a little like this: always bright, yet unpredictable, never to be left unguarded.
thanks to his writings we can all share in his landscape. though changed in many ways, there are still places and particular times of year that take you back. grab a book of his poems and come with me through a year in his world. Winter. snow still covers the thatch on Clare cottage, the early home of John Clare. i dodge the drips and cross the road, heading out of helpston in the direction of the morning sun, boots crumping (crunching) through the fast-vanishing snow. Summer. Beyond the barns the horizon opens up across the ‘fenny flats’, as Clare called them. uncomfortably wide and heavy with sky, the fields are full of wheat, golden and ripe, brushing my left leg with a harsh and brittle rattle, as i head towards the landmark that is College Cottage. Autumn. the young, ambitious sun of post-dawn interrogates the day’s intentions. i struggle to see beyond its glare. A sound has me looking north. large skeins of geese ‘describing every letter of the alphabet’ straggle across the wastes of this leaf-tossed sky.
three fields out and i’ve re-lived three seasons, the memories coming clear and vivid. interlaced with them are the things i know about John Clare and his favourite corners of this world. getting to know Clare’s world happened naturally: it was my local patch and i started to explore it more and more. i’d see a fox, then that night, search out references to foxes in his poems. A double link to this unremarkable corner of Britain bound me ever closer to it. the route i now walk loops lazily east, south and west of the village, visiting areas that seared themselves into the very essence of his being.
i head way out east towards Woodcroft Castle, a royalist stronghold in the english Civil War. Clare worked here for a few weeks, in one of his first jobs, but it didn’t last: wet feet and illhealth saw to that. turning west it’s not long before something hits me: the horizon. no longer flat, it now sits loftily for these parts, looking down on helpston. from this angle it’s a continuous belt of woodland. midautumn and the beech trees have bet all their chips on red. the oaks on the other hand, are wavering – still green, yet ready to throw their lot in any night now.
there’s a roman villa marked on the map south of helpston. Back in the early 19th century Clare had a deep interest in all things archaeological, as did many thinkers of the time. the obvious difference: Clare was a peasant and not the landed gentry. Once he’d gained some fame after the publication of his first book in 1820, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, and The Village Minstrel: and other Poems shortly after, he got to meet the owners of local estates. through these contacts he got involved in the excavations at the villa. A plantation of poplars now marks the spot, their leaves the limp yellow of an unfulfilled autumn. Directly south of here i pass along the eastern fringe of Oxey Wood, another place referred to in much of Clare’s writing. it’s early march and a weak morning sunshine spears into the fringes of the wood, picking out the stark blooms of wood anemones.
next, a bit of jiggling along country lanes that crankle ( bend or wind) about. Verges here are wide and ancient, which in the midday warmth of late may fizz and pop with an exuberance of cow parsley. All this brings me to Castor hanglands. this sprawl of woodland is what made up a significant part of the horizon earlier, and the track in passes under characterful oaks. each one i know in person, whether it’s a stark and wintry outline, or softened with the yellow-green flowers of spring, hardened with the dead green of high summer, or tainted with the rust of autumn. it’s early December in my mind as i pass under them, the fox hounds from the local milton estate – one of JC’s main benefactors – washing by, the hunt master’s scarlet jacket colouring a link to the past. thankfully, the hounds are only being exercised.
the Castor hanglands national nature reserve covers nearly 90 hectares of varied habitat – scrub and grassland as well as mixed woods – and this remnant of heathland is the real link with the John Clare story. he loved to wander up here. it was a place little visited by villagers and he would spend time with the various gypsy crews that passed through, learning their music and noting their habits, including a fondness for eating the hedge pig ( hedgehog). Cooked whole, the spiny outer would peel off once done. thin drifts of smoke and scent are easy to imagine here, on what is the remnant of Ailsworth heath.
summer on the grassland is busy. insects of a variety rarely seen are everywhere – under, on, in everything. Common lizards bask in solar puddles, skittering under logs as i pass. in winter the anthills of the heath (a sign land use has been unchanged for centuries) wear an insulating blanket of snow. even in
such conditions I’ve seen green woodpeckers digging deep into the hill’s core for the riches within. There’s an oak I like to sit under, sawning ( loitering) for a few minutes to tune into this secluded reminder of a time long ago. I’ve even been here under a full moon, when the cool lunar light casts sharp-edged night shadows.
I head into the trees in search of silver. Silver-washed fritillaries to be precise, along with white admirals, and the occasional purple emperor butterfly. High in the now waxy green of the summer oak canopy, I fix my gaze. There is a world of butterflies way above the normal line of sight. I move west through the wood, heading for King Street, the ancient route of a Roman road between Peterborough and Lincoln. Tracing (walking) my way past ponds that in spring are riddled with great crested newts, as well as the water-blab (marsh marigold), I encounter a carpet of crab apples among the fallen leaves. I’m reminded of hedgehogs again, and JC’s poem, which describes them rolling on the fruit to collect them on their spines.
King Street runs to the west of Helpston, bisecting Clare’s landscape as the railways would in the latter half of the 19th century, then the power lines of the 20th. Standing still proves too much for a woodcock. Its nerve breaks and it flees cover in a whir of wings, exploding from only a few feet away. One of JC’s favourite spots is along here. Langdyke Bush was an ancient hawthorn tree that grew out of a Bronze Age burial mound or tumulus, itself pre-dating the Roman road by a thousand years. Here he liked to sit for hours, but eventually the tree was felled and yet again – along with the enclosure of much of the local common land – Clare’s world was altered, constrained, and put out of bounds. Today, the spot is rather a let down. The tumulus is still there, along with a replanted hawthorn tree, but it sits in private land, out of bounds by ten metres which might as well be ten miles. If that’s not enough, those power lines run overhead, marching north along the the old Roman highway, as I do too.
I soon reach Swaddywell Pit, known as Swordy Well in Clare’s time, after a Bronze Age sword pulled from the pool (thought to be a spring, long since dug out). It’s the subject of a powerful and original poem, The Lament of Swordy Well, where JC wrote of the land’s constant exploitation by man from the point of view of the land itself. He gave it a voice. Environmentally and poetically, Clare was way ahead of his time.
I move north again, past Hilly Wood ( private property in Clare’s time, and now), and the rippling fields of early summer. In my mind’s eye I see a sight
In 1809, when Clare was 16, an act of Parliament was passed Inclosing Lands around Helpston. Fields were parcelled up and turned to private property, ‘no trespassing’ signs went up and access to the countryside was restricted. It profoundly upset Clare and he wrote many poems of protest against ‘Each little tyrant with his little sign’.
that stopped me in my tracks a few years ago: a dozen fallow deer in single file, the buck leading with a velvety set of antlers, up to their necks in a sea of feathery barley. It awed me as much as any David Attenborough documentary showing mass migration of wildebeest. This was my backyard, my reality – my memories, and also the site of Clare’s.
I close in on the village once more. It’s always spring when I walk through Rice Wood and yet heading up the main street of Helpston it’s winter again, then autumn, spring, winter, summer, each step crashing down onto another memory, another season. Maybe I’ll stop in The Bluebell, Clare’s local, for some stingo (strong beer) before heading home.
Knowing a place intimately is a great thing. Deepening that understanding with historical, literary and personal experiences can leave you with a fruit so ripe and juicy, so nourishing, it will sustain you through the hardest winters. Make this walk through John Clare’s world, into nature and back in time.
The clock-a-clay is creeping on the open bloom of May, The merry bee is trampling the pinky threads all day” from Summer