Tramping
He was the Welsh tramp poet who urged us all to ‘stand and stare’, to ‘stand beneath the boughs’ and savour nature’s beauty. Come with us to the Cotswold town where W.H. Davies ended his wandering days.
Walk in step with a supertramp.
AT SOME POINT in our working lives, haven’t we all wanted to chuck it all in and just walk? Walk and walk and walk. To live simply and observe closely. To roam from place to place with not a care in the world and all the world at our feet. 128 years ago one man did just that.
His name was W.H. Davies.
William Henry Davies is best remembered (though not always credited) for the poem Leisure, first published 110 years ago. ‘What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?’ it begins. By any measure his own life was an extraordinary one and in spite of a languorous outlook, Davies was a prolific writer. And a prolific walker, too.
Standing and staring is precisely what I was busied with, having walked to the idyllic cottage in deepest Gloucestershire that Davies briefly called home. It’s tucked into a hillside on the edge of Nailsworth, a few miles south of Stroud among the rippling Cotswold Hills. Taking my cue from its previous owner I was lost in thought, reflecting on his life as a self-professed supertramp.
Nowadays the word tramp, together with its surly cousins trudge and traipse, has some grim connotations. As a noun it has been bandied about as a demeaning term for a homeless person. As a verb it still conjures misery, much as it did originally, evolving from a Saxon word for walking with heavy steps. But it hasn’t always been so. Throughout history tramps and tramping were both vilified and romanticised. In Britain, where Vagabonds and Vagrancy Acts criminalised tramps, it came to have wistful overtones as industrialisation confined many city-dwellers to stifling urban lives. Tramping was a kind of freedom. Even today, what we in the UK might term trekking or backpacking is known as tramping in New Zealand. Americans use it in the same context; in 1992 when Christopher McCandless embarked on his fateful journey into the Alaskan wilderness (see the book and film
Into the Wild), he renamed himself Alexander ▶
Supertramp. Likewise for Davies there was nothing demeaning about tramping. To him it meant a sense of wanderlust, and a craving for simplicity.
From tearaway to poet
In the best spirit of tramping, Davies’ journey to Nailsworth was a long and meandering one.
He was born in 1871, in the Pillgwenlly district of Newport in South Wales, and raised by his paternal grandparents after his father’s early death. To say he went off the rails in his teenage years would be putting it mildly. A habitual truant and playground scuffler, he was arrested for shoplifting at the age of 15 and sentenced to twelve strokes of the birch. But Davies was also a voracious reader, engrossed in ‘wild adventure books’ from a young age, progressing to the works of Wordsworth and Shelley, Milton and Shakespeare. Coupled with the influence of his Cornish grandfather (a retired sea captain), they stoked his yearning to travel.
After school he briefly worked as an ironmonger and was later apprenticed to a picture framer, but by his own admission was a poor workman, often drowsy from reading long into the night. At 21 his feet were as itchy as ever. Adventure called when his grandmother passed away in 1893, leaving him a small inheritance.
Davies bought a passage across the Atlantic, where he’d spend seven eventful years as a drifter, ‘beating’ his way across North America. Travelling light with only a pipe and the clothes he stood up in, he walked and ‘freighthopped’ – stealthily boarding freight trains for a free ride. When he couldn’t find shelter, he’d sleep under the stars. When he couldn’t find casual work, he’d beg or steal. Many a drunken escapade was had. Stints in Michigan’s ‘boodle’ jails provided bed, board and company over winter.
After several transatlantic crossings working aboard cattle ships, Davies returned to America
“What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. No time to stand beneath the boughs cows.” And stare as long as sheep or
THE OPENING COUPLETS FROM LEISURE
for the final time in 1899, hoping to strike it rich in the Klondike Gold Rush with fellow hobo Threefingered Jack. But tragedy struck. A mistimed jump as he tried to board a freight train in Canada saw his right foot crushed under the wheels, requiring amputation below the knee. A maimed Davies returned to Britain where he swapped crutches for an artificial limb, and traded dreams of gold for literary fame. Embracing a long-held ambition to be a poet, he lived rough in London dosshouses while he honed his verse. With the self-publication of The Soul's Destroyer and Other Poems in 1905 his work drew critical attention.
Davies met Edward Thomas, who at the time was the literary critic for the Daily Chronicle). A fellow writer and wayfarer, Thomas took Davies under his wing, renting him a tiny cottage ‘two meadows off’ from the Thomas family home at Elses Farm near Sevenoaks in Kent. ‘Sweet William’, as the Thomas children knew him, was sheepish about the subject of his wooden leg, so when Edward engaged the local wheelwright to fashion a replacement, it was billed as a ‘curiosity cricket bat.’ With Thomas’ encouragement, Davies penned the first draft of his life story in just six weeks: The Autobiography of a Super-tramp, published in 1908. Irish playwright George Bernard-Shaw suggested the title and agreed to write the preface, so impressed was he by the raw manuscript.
With the success of his autobiography and meteoric rise to fame, the wayward boy from Newport moved to London where he was fêted
by the literary bigwigs of the time (among them D.H. Lawrence), who were fascinated by this bona fide tramp and his authentic voice. For Davies, rubbing shoulders with the great and good was a chance to collect autographs. He’d take to the road again for A Poet’s Pilgrimage, which chronicled a walking tour through his native Wales.
Back in London Davies fell in love with Helen Matilda Payne (21 years his junior), who he married in 1923. And after a lifetime on the move, he eventually settled here in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, where I’ve come to tramp in his footsteps. What brought him here? According to his friend and solicitor John Haines, Davies was fond of the Cotswolds and wished to be “near to Wales but not in Wales, as he wanted freedom not to be haunted by any sort of trail from the past.”
Homecoming
Davies moved to Nailsworth in 1928, and lived in a series of four different houses until his death in September 1940 at the age of 69. His first home was Axpills (later known as Shenstone), a grand Edwardian townhouse on Chestnut Hill. He’d sell up a few years later and rent The Croft – another spacious dwelling on Nympsfield Road. Next came Yewdales, a mid-terrace property at the bottom of Spring Hill. Finally, after suffering a stroke in 1938, he moved into the squat, two-storey cottage called Glendower on the winding back road up to Watledge, a leafy hamlet on the outskirts of town. ▶
Fans of Channel 4’s Location, Location, Location
might think Davies was in dire need of help from Kirsty and Phil, but as a friend later put it, periodically upping sticks was indicative of his restless, roving spirit. Moving house was akin to moving on. Putting down roots didn’t come naturally. During his early years in Nailsworth, Davies’ small, stocky figure was a familiar sight about town. But as age, injuries and illness took their toll, he retreated deeper into the privacy of his successive homes. Most mornings he would retire to his study and spend idle hours waiting for a spark of inspiration to ignite a frenzy of poetic productivity.
His first three homes in Nailsworth were all within ten minutes’ walk of the old marketplace, where I’d set off half an hour earlier. I’d scooted – quite literally and in order – all round the houses, before crossing the Stroud Road for the lane up to Watledge.
Dogeared around the edges from its days as a mill town, Nailsworth (‘Nelly’ if you’re local) is the real
Cotswolds. It’s not the spotless, pretty-pretty version you see in the brochures, but somewhere exuding character. Davies would have passed workshops and railway sidings en route to the hillside cottage where he would end his days.
It was a walk that proved increasingly difficult for the ailing tramp-poet.
You can’t miss Glendower. Hunkering in the hillside, the cottage is outwardly as eccentric as its one-time occupant. The honeyed stone exterior is all wonky windows, weathered tiles and skew-whiff iron railings. In recent years it was renovated by volunteers from The Friends of Glendower, enabling Davies’ great-nephew to move back in. A stone tablet inscribed with the opening lines of Leisure testifies to the poet’s last years here. On doctor’s orders, his was a largely housebound existence by then
– a bitter irony for a man who’d spent much of life homeless. Davies could still enjoy the jungly rear garden however, left to overflow with weeds and wildflowers. Due to the slope of the garden, he could step straight from the upstairs drawing room onto the lawn, where he’d feed saucers of milk to a pet toad he’d named Jim. It was at Glendower in 1939 that Davies penned the lines of Nailsworth Hill,
included in the last book of poems published during his lifetime, The Loneliest Mountain.
Davies paints a vivid picture of the pale moon as ‘she rests her chin on Nailsworth Hill’, bathing the world in ethereal white light. Shouldering into the Avening Valley a mile to the east, this woody bluff is my next port of call. I turn up a sidetrack that rises invitingly to Minchinhampton Common.
The best time of year to wander this scalloped plateau is from spring through to late summer, when its grasslands are a kaleidoscope of limestone -loving flowers: lemony cowslips and powder-blue field scabious. Fragrant orchids perfume the air. The flora draws bees and butterflies in large numbers, including the recently returned Large Blue, last recorded here 150 years ago. Dog walkers and golfers share sweeping views over Gloucestershire’s ‘Five Valleys’ with a motley herd of cattle, which roam the common as livestock would have done in the Middle Ages. By grazing on the encroaching scrub, these fussy eaters employed by the National Trust help maintain the fragile grassland ecology. It’s a pastoral custom older than the numerous lumps and bumps scored across the common, which mostly date from the Iron Age. In the midst of these earthworks is a Neolithic long barrow called Whitfield’s Tump, over 5000 years old. It’s named for a Methodist preacher who gave a sermon to 10,000 people gathered there in 1743. Incredibly, this sacred site remains licensed for services today.
From the open high ground I turn downhill through the village of Box and into Box Wood – a gloriously ferny tangle of hazel and beech trees sheltered in the combe below. Notched into the hillside, it was a sylvan garden belonging to Box House, but nowadays goldcrests and great spotted woodpeckers are the brightly feathered lords of the wood. I’d like to think Davies would have come here
before his final housebound years, when he could still enjoy a country stroll (albeit walking stiffly). He was an acute observer of nature, who took great delight in fields and hedgerows, woods and streams. Seeing folly and injustice in mankind, he found solace in nature. Tramping was an escape.
A millworker’s path tucks downhill to a hairpin bend in a road called the Devil’s Elbow. The onward route through bare trees drops me at a junction with the Avening Road, opposite The Weighbridge Inn. Davies was no stranger to country pubs on his tramps and we know from A Poet’s Pilgrimage that he was partial to a quart of good ale. So it seemed only right that I should duck inside for a swift half by the fireside. Muddy boots are more than welcome.
Behind the inn, a bridleway rises straight and steep into Hazel Wood, where mosses and ivies cling to the trees in emerald clumps. Fungi push through the leaf litter at their roots, like imp-sized saucers of melted caramel. Centuries of footfall have hewn a sunken trackway up to a stone wall on the brow of the hill. And from here I squelch my way eastward towards Avening, turning back over the high wold. Before I retreat into the darkening streets of Nailsworth, I stop à la Leisure ‘beneath the boughs’ of an old oak.
This year marks 150 years since Davies’ birth, and a little over 80 since his passing, but his legacy could not be more alive and relevant. His plain yet profound words still resonate today. In our hyper materialistic age, when so many of us lead frantic lives, making time for life’s simple joys is vital for our mental health. We can’t all go tramping across continents, but we can slow down and press pause sometimes. We all need time to stand and stare.