Steven O’Brien

A Walk Through Rackham Land

Ideally, if you go into Rackham Land you should go on your own. Take a deep breath and walk. Don’t look for Rackham. Let him come to you. Walk until the brambles snag your right sleeve and the relish of a cool October wind comes sneaking through the thickets. This will be Rackham’s discreet hailing.

The marches of Rackham Land are hemmed on three sides by fast roads. The fourth side is open to the east with woodland and downland, and not a town in sight. It is a quiet demesne; far quieter now, perhaps, than it has been for two millennia or so. True, the shimmer zips of infrequent trains shears straight through the middle, but there are scarcely any people on the paths.

Burpham lies on the south side of the downs which is tamest lee. It is good to start here as the walk will take you down to the long carved river and then up into what I know as the ‘empty quarter.’ There is a leper’s window low in the wall of Burpham Church. In the middle ages the afflicted could come and watch the miracle of the mass. On the Sabbath they would shuffle for miles from a quarantined colony at Lee Farm and no one else would walk their route that day. It is still called the Leper’s Way.

The church is the well-spring of tracks that utter across the chalk. Now of course Rackham Land is only a place of the imagination. Its borders and expanses are arbitrary. But then all landscapes are imaginary. The Grand Canyon cares nothing for us, although we invest it with splendour. So too with this small bailiwick of English countryside, a few miles long and fewer across. Place only opens in names, reminiscence and witness.

For instance, the name Burpham purrs with the reason of its existence. In the year 900, when the Vikings were marauding, King Alfred decreed

that stockaded settlements should be built right across southern England. These were refuges for the people. Livestock could be quartered and food stored. Troops were garrisoned behind the ditch and pallisades. Burh in Old English is ‘fortification’. The Saxons built defensive walls on this high place overlooking the Arun. In time a small village grew there, so Burpham is the ‘hamlet within the fortress.’ The poet Ted Hughes once said that every word has a goblin inside it and that this goblin is its meaning and its life. I know that Rackham would have understood this (but more of his Goblins later).

Take a stick, a crooked one, when you come to Rackham Land. A stick for swishing and poking, and for pointing. Hold the stick level on two fingers and the past and present will be balanced. Rackham is an excellent pathfinder. With his jackdaw’s stare he spied over all the nooks and stooks of the land, and he used them.

I start my walk by going through the churchyard and stepping over the gap in the wall that is a kind of stile into a field. This is the threshold. The instant I tread the corn stubble I am in Rackham Land. To my right there is a metaled road as far Peppering Farm. I look back along the river. The teeth of Arundel Castle’s turrets and chimneys are clean in the autumn sunlight. Across the valley the steep ranked trees of Herons Wood and Offham Hanger is an outlying relic of the Wealden forest. As the road becomes a loose track the gravel amplifies my footsteps. Very quickly it is as if there are two pairs of boots climbing slowly up, instead of one.

It is here between the hedgerows that Arthur Rackham begins to stroll alongside me with a dry ‘ahem’ at my elbow. He is alert as a squirrel and energetic as a cricket in his walking britches. The way he links my arm is thoroughly Edwardian. He is taking me to beat the bounds of his green compass.

It is 1920; Rackham, his wife Edyth and their daughter Barbara have taken an old flint-walled house at Houghton. He is from Lewisham and occasionally refers to himself as a cockney. He is an outsider but carries

a hunch that his family sprang from here long ago, for he discovers that Rackham Hill rears two or three miles away. ‘It is more than likely that we did originally live there and took the name when we migrated.’ In Old English ‘hreac’ meant ‘hayrick,’ so Rackham is the place, or house of the hayricks. Now there is certainly something rickety and tumble-blown about the man himself. Even in his tweeds he looks like a gangly London clerk, so the surname fits him well. He is as breeze-ridden and spindly as his drawings.

Rackham and I are now going downhill to the river. He shows me how the early October hedges are still busy with birds. There are flicks and skitters at the side of our vision. There is a cross stitch of industry and mischief. Here a quick black eye shines among the brambles. Here a yellow beak gives an outraged needlecry of territory defended. These are the inklings of Rackham’s pixies, goblins and pucks. The gleeful, pointy little child-sprites who hide under the beech tree in Arundel Park.

We cross to North Stoke on the wooden suspension bridge. It wasn’t here in 1920 but Rackham comments in his dry South London voice that he could have used it as a prompt for illustrating Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It is worth remembering that by 1920 Rackham is already an internationally acclaimed artist. He has travelled widely. He has exhibited in Paris and Barcelona and New York.

The Arun tide is a strong, guttering muscle. Three rushes seethe in the soft wind. He is staring at them and I can see how he will use their dance in his drawing. He traces their shift and poise with his long fingers. I mentioned earlier that Rackham Land is quiet. There is hardly any human sound at North Stoke. I can hear a chainsaw a long way off, but nothing more. As the church door swings shut the cold nave chants with silent echoes.

It is scarcely more populated when the Rackhams arrive in 1920. The Great War has winnowed the young farm labourers. In gun harnesses the big draught horses have thrashed and died in morasses on the western front. And, in any case, by 1920 the drift away from the land has been going on