Heaven ON YOUR doorstep
After decades of roaming the globe, Travel Editor Frank Barrett has found the perfect place to write a book about... Britain!
PERHAPS it is a by-product of decades of travel writing, but the more I see of abroad, the better Britain looks to me. After visiting New Zealand a few years ago, I jokingly remarked that travelling 24 hours to other end of the Earth was a long way to go to end up somewhere that looked a lot like Scotland but which was substantially less interesting.
When I flew to Shetland recently – just an hour-long flight from Edinburgh – I found myself in place that, as far as I was concerned, outclassed New Zealand, if not in scale, then certainly both in ambience and in character.
Shetland is a group of remote islands so special and so intriguing that once again I wondered at our passion for far-away places when the exotic is so close at hand. Heaven, it seems, is much nearer than we all think.
My passion for domestic travel has been triggered by research on my new book Treasured Island, a trip around the literary places of Britain. I thought I knew Britain and then I began a journey which took me down lesser-known byways – the empty lanes of North Devon, the backroads of Cumbria, the gentle hills of the Borders, the wuthering moors of Yorkshire. My eyes were opened: you don’t have to venture far before you realise we have the good fortune to live in an incredible country.
In the United States, you can drive for 24 hours and the scenery will barely alter. In the UK the landscape changes almost hour by hour, from the blasted heaths of Dartmoor to the lush, flat lands of the Somerset Levels; from the lofty peaks of the Cairngorms to the sweet vales of Fife.
If landscape influences what writers write, it is not surprising that Britain has produced so many great and varied poets, novelists and dramatists, each one a product of their environment. Whether it was A.A. Milne, who visited Ash- down Forest in East Sussex and found Winnie-the-Pooh, or Kenneth Grahame, who cruised the Thames and discovered Toad Hall, the list of top-class British writers whose works have become not just part of our lives, but part of our landscapes, is a long and growing one.
Inevitably I see this most in the place where I was brought up, the area known as the Welsh Marches – the border country between England and Wales. For most of my childhood I lived about 100 yards from the River Wye with a view of Tintern Abbey: a building that inspired not just the artist Turner but also William Wordsworth, whose Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey was the final poem in the Lyrical Ballads, a collection he produced with Coleridge .
There is probably some sort of literary ley line that runs from the Lake District down to Cornwall because along this narrow band, especially on the England-Wales border, poetry and great literature seems to come out of the taps.
At the top end of the Welsh Marches is Oswestry, the home of Guinevere, wife of King Arthur and secret lover of Sir Lancelot (Camelot seems to have been a bit of a Dark Ages Dallas).
In the grounds of the ancient fort which was probably Guinevere’s childhood residence, local lad Wilfred Owen completed his basic training before heading to the Western Front where he wrote the poetry which laid bare what he described as ‘the pity of war’.
There’s a plaque at 69 Monkmoor Road in nearby Shrewsbury that records the fact that here on November 11, 1918, Owen’s mother received a telegram – at the very moment the town’s church bells rang out to celebrate Allied victory – informing her that her son had been killed in action.
The lovely town of Ludlow, 31 miles south of Shrewsbury, has become well known for food – its famous annual food festival takes place next weekend. Ludlow is set among the ‘blue remembered hills’ described by poet A.E. Housman in his extraordinary 1896 collection, A Shropshire Lad.
Housman was born and raised not in Shropshire but in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. It seems that he hardly ever visited Shropshire – for him it was a state of grace rather than a place to visit (it is said that he wrote the poems with a Shropshire guide to hand to help find places to fit his rhymes). One of his poems begins: Clunton and Clunbury, Clungunford and Clun, Are the quietest places Under the sun. In fact, most of the villages around Ludlow are as sweet as you could imagine. It was Clunton that drew Look Back In Anger playwright John Osborne for the final years of his life. He is buried with his wife in the churchyard at Clun, while his former house, The Hurst, in Clunton, is now used for residential writing courses – it’s hard to imagine a more perfect spot.
HAY ON WYE, 30 miles south of Clun, has become indelibly connected with literature as this town full of second-hand bookshops is the setting for the UK’s pre-eminent literary festival. The annual jamboree has attracted everybody from Bill Clinton to Benedict Cumberbatch. But well before the Festival, Hay on Wye was written into posterity by the Reverend Francis Kilvert in his wonderful diary composed when he lived near the Welsh border town. He lived for a time in Clyro, a few miles from Hay, which has another strange link to lit- erary greatness. This was the home of the Baskerville family, friends of Arthur Conan Doyle. He borrowed their name for Sherlock Holmes’s most famous adventure which he located on Dartmoor. Clyro’s Baskerville Arms pub has a model of a dog over its entrance, but this hound looks as if it might lick you to death rather than bare its teeth.
Kilvert is buried in Bredwardine which sits at the northern end of the magnificent Golden Valley. The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe writer C.S. Lewis had a picture of the Golden Valley on his nursery wall – a fact recalled in the film Shadowlands.
Follow the River Wye some 30 miles south-east beyond Hereford and you will find one of the most important villages in the development of modern English verse. Dymock in Herefordshire was
where Edward Thomas was heading one fine day in the summer of 1914 when his train paused unexpectedly at Adlestrop. His poem Adlestrop captured not just this blissful pause at a lovely country railway halt, but effectively marked the end of Edwardian innocence. After the outbreak of war, Thomas insisted on joining up and was killed during the Battle of Arras in 1917.
When he stopped at Adlestrop, Thomas was on his way to Dymock to meet his good friend, the American writer Robert Frost, who had crossed the Atlantic in the hope of building a career as a poet. In Dymock, Frost wrote one of the best-known poems of the 20th Century, The Road Not Taken, describing how a walker chose the road ‘less travelled’ and reflects on how this might have affected his whole life.
Unlike Thomas, Frost enjoyed a long life – he read a poem at the inau- guration ceremony of US President John F. Kennedy.
Two writers connected with the Dymock poets were W.H. Davies (‘What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare’) and Eleanor Farjeon, a close friend of Thomas. Farjeon wrote the words to Morning Has Broken, something often mistakenly credited to Cat Stevens, who turned the hymn into a pop hit with significant help from Rick Wakeman’s piano ornamentation.
St Mary’s Church in Dymock has an excellent display about the poets, including several films which are well worth sparing time for.
A short drive down to Coleford, in the heart of the Forest of Dean, takes you to Dennis Potter country. Many of his best-known works were set here, including The Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven – and, most appropriately perhaps, Blue Remembered Hills, a story of a Forest childhood in the Second World War (although, bizarrely, the TV play was filmed in Dorset). Potter’s archive is housed in the excellent Dean Heritage Centre near Cinderford.
I paused in Tintern whose literary immortality was conferred by Wordsworth; his Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey marked a transcendent point in his literary career. The village police station, the house where I lived, is now a doctor’s surgery.
Head towards Chepstow and the A48 eastward takes you through Tutshill, the spiritual home of Harry Potter (a spiritual brother of Dennis Potter?). The Rowling family lived in Church Cottage which has the distinction of its own Wikipedia entry. According to Zoopla the property last changed hands for £400,000 (Harry has obviously worked his magic).
Like the church in Dymock, I halfexpected St Luke’s Church in Tutshill to have a small information board about the village’s most famous daughter, especially as she lived next door – J.K. Rowling and her sister earned money as church cleaners. But the only mention I found of the church’s connection with literary greatness was a single spidery reference left by a tourist in the church’s visitors’ book.
A local told me that Ms Rowling’s famously litigious nature has produced something of an information vacuum; there are anxieties that anything they do to publicise their link with the author may incur her wrath. I’m sure they’re mistaken – she would surely be delighted to be memorialised in the church.
If the fickle finger of fate had picked me rather than Jo, I have to say I would have raised no objection at all to a presentation of my literary greatness…
Frank Barrett’s book Treasured Island (AA Publishing, £16.99) is published this week.