Eastern Passage (16 page)

Although the hospice is said to have been founded around 1050 by a nobleman named Bernard, the signature rescue dogs were not part of the establishment until the mid-seventeenth century when one of the monks saw a mountain dog dig out a pilgrim buried by an avalanche under ten feet of snow. Thereafter the dogs became a fixture of the hospice and, eventually, the principal reason for its far-flung fame.

The gale was growing stronger and the swirling snow changing to sleet as we climbed into Liz, turned up the heater, and began the descent into Switzerland.

The road became slush-filled tracks with a high snowbank on one side and what seemed to be a sheer abyss on the other. I was riding the brakes when a hulking great
bus
emerged out of the murk ahead, coming full-tilt at us.

I could only watch helplessly as we slithered forward, coming to rest nudging bumpers with the monster. The driver, a wild-eyed man, thrust his head out his window. His mouth worked furiously but the wind blew his words away so he rammed his vehicle into reverse and went careening backward down the mountain to disappear into the murk.

I inched forward, expecting to come upon a hole in the slender guardrail through which bus, driver, and passengers had plummeted into eternity. However, we soon came upon the bus, its rear end jammed into the inner wall of snow and its driver imperiously signalling me to pass.

I did this with my outside wheels a foot or two from the lip of the abyss. Fran claimed she heard manic laughter, then the bus was behind us, and we were very much alone again.

Some time later the wind dropped, the murk thinned, the grade eased, and the road became recognizable as such. The sun shone and a picture-book alpine valley opened below us. We passed green
meadows where pipits sang as they gaily performed their mating flights amongst herds of plump, surefooted cattle.

As we hurried across France to keep a date with the cross-Channel ferry, I persuaded Fran we should spend our remaining time abroad exploring amongst the antiquities of the British Isles. When we reached London we asked a knowledgeable friend where we might go and he suggested we spend a week or two around Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire.

“You’ll find lots of old bones thereabouts,” he assured us, “some as go back before old Adam’s time; before what our teachers used to call the Dawn of Human History. And” – he paused for emphasis – “Wotton’s got some of the best cider anyone of
any
age has ever tasted.”

Next day we headed Liz toward Gloucester, stopping for a night at an inn on the Thames called the Compleat Angler. Our room overlooked a great weir where, on a misty night in 1942, I had had an argument with a swan while paddling a Canadian birchbark canoe “liberated” from Lady Astor’s boathouse. The swan won and I had to swim ashore while the canoe went over the same weir that, a hundred years earlier, had caused much distress to the travellers in Jerome K. Jerome’s wonderful book
Three Men in a Boat – Not to Mention the Dog
.

As we continued westward, we came to an old cemetery in which we found the grave of a man who had been laid to rest in 1728 at the age of sixty-three. The tomb carried this inscription:

We were going back into time, but not nearly far enough or fast enough for me. Fran was for lingering in little places like Upper and Lower Slaughter to see what their cemeteries might reveal, but I hurried us on to Wotton-under-Edge.

Wotton (pronounced Wooton) proved to be a town of four thousand, huddled under the edge of the Cotswold escarpment. When I stopped to ask a policeman the way to the Swan Inn, where we had booked a room, he hopped into the back seat and guided us to it.

As the proprietor of the Swan poured us our first glass of the ambrosial local cider, he also briefed us about Wotton-under-Edge.

“A thousand years ago, Wotton was a thriving little place making its living out of the wool trade. Fairs for cloth-makers, buyers, and wool merchants were held every summer. Lively events, I take it. Around 1200 one got out of hand and the whole village went up in smoke. So Wotton was rebuilt closer to the escarpment where the wind ain’t so strong, and they added ‘under Edge’ to its name.

“Gloucestershire was getting to be a regular holiday camp for the high and mighty by then. Henry the Second came here looking for a bit of fluff and found Fair Rosamond, as he called her, though Jane Clifford was her proper name. Henry built her a love nest that only he had the keys to and he surrounded it with a high-walled maze even he got lost in when he’d had a drop too much. But his wife, Queen Eleanor, had a trick or two of her own. She bribed the builder to show
her
the way in and then she did for poor Rosamond. Made her drink poison.

“Rosamond’s gravestone tells the story:
Here Rose the Fair, not Rose the Chaste, reposes. The smell that rises is not the smell of roses
.

“So Henry lost his light-of-love, but Edward the Second lost the lot. In 1326 Edward’s French wife, Isabella, and our Lord Berkeley
fell in love and set about getting rid of Edward. He was hustled into a dungeon in Berkeley Castle, where, him being a weakly chap, it was thought rough treatment would do him in. Rotten food. Stone floors to sleep on. Spot of torture now and again, though nothing as would leave a mark, mind you. But Edward kept his pecker up until his jailers lost patience and one September night they strapped him to a rack, face down, and poured molten lead into his bottom.

“Lord Berkeley was conveniently out of town at the time. When he got the news, he hurried back here – terribly shocked, of course – and had the bod examined by a bevy of his pet priests.
They
couldn’t find a mark on him. Concluded the poor sod had died of natural causes.

“Isabella and Berkeley lived happily ever after … which just goes to show …” He went off to pull a pint of ale for a customer. When he returned he added this snippet.

“The last wolf in Gloucestershire was killed near Wotton in 1281. Ah … the last
natural
wolf, you might say. The two-legged kind was still around. Still is. Fouling the manors and mansions round about. There’s those of us would be happier with the four-legged kind. Perhaps you might send us some from Canada?”

We explored the countryside during the days that followed. One morning we drove north to Uley Bury, one of many steep-sided limestone peninsulas jutting out from the Cotswold plateau toward the Severn River estuary and the sea.

Standing eight hundred feet above the coastal plain, Uley spur thrusts to the west like the prow of a titanic ship. Its “deck” encompasses some fifty level acres and its exceedingly steep slopes are mossed by what remains of ancient forests. Although it is a natural feature, it has the appearance of a human construct because human beings have been modifying the spur through five millennia and have succeeded in reshaping it into a feature that will testify to human obduracy long after the pyramids of Egypt have crumbled into dust.

The carefully levelled crest has been cut off from the parent plateau by several deep ditches dug across the neck of the spur. Banked-up soil and rock from these massive excavations became ramparts that are still fifteen to twenty feet high. Ditches and ramparts were rendered even more formidable by log walls and rows of sharpened stakes. A narrow elevated pathway across them was defended by earthwork forts, now reduced to shapeless mounds.

This was the
least
of what had been accomplished. The upper slopes of the spur itself had been reshaped into two enormous ditches one above the other, each twenty feet deep, dug between three mighty earthen ramparts. The quantities of earth and stone that had to have been dug and moved in order to produce this colossal works boggled my mind. And it had all been done by hand, probably without even the assistance of draft animals.

The first people to use the Bury seem to have been Neolithic herdsmen who, around 3500 BC, stockaded livestock on the windswept crest of the spur behind wooden fences or piles of brush intended to keep the stock in and predators out. For about a thousand years, Stone Age people lived on the crest in spring, summer, and fall, probably descending into the shelter of the forests during hard winters. Then things changed. Mankind made a “great leap forward” by discovering how to smelt and work tin and copper. The Bronze Age had arrived, bringing better tools – and deadlier weapons.

In the troubles that inevitably followed, people began making use of the Bury as a place in which to defend themselves against their own kind. Ditches were dug and banks raised. These protective works remained of modest proportions through a millennium, suggesting that war and the rumours of war were then still of relatively rare occurrence. But around 1000 BC mankind here made another spectacular technological leap by learning to smelt and work iron.

The Iron Age seems to have reached Gloucestershire around 700 BC. In its wake it brought not only deadlier weaponry but invaders from Europe, ones who knew how to wield iron axes, swords, and spears and had no hesitation about doing so. In their desperate attempts to resist these invasions, the people of the Bury (who may never have numbered more than a few hundred) expended almost unimaginable effort improving their fortress and the encircling ditch-and-rampart systems.

By 300 BC the enclosure on the crest had become home to a more-or-less permanently beleaguered people being assailed by a singularly ruthless warrior race from across the Channel: the Celts. True products of the Iron Age, the Celts were fierce conquistadors before whose iron might no Bronze or Stone Age people could long hold out.

The Celts stormed Uley Bur, probably slaughtering the male defenders, seizing their women and cattle, and occupying the lands and habitations.

Although the Celts reaped rich rewards from being at the leading edge of the technology of their times, there was a price to pay. Weapons that can kill an enemy inevitably turn upon those who wield them. The Celts began turning upon each other. They refurbished captured hill fortresses, and built more like them. These became tribal strongholds from which they mounted raids on other Celts. Uley Bury acquired new ditches and ramparts, together with new walls of stone and timber.

The Celts did not remain at the forefront of “civilization.” Shortly after the beginning of the Christian era, the Romans invaded England. The Celts resisted furiously but now were militarily outclassed. One by one, their hill forts were assailed by Roman legions equipped with giant catapults and other modern inventions. One by one, the forts were taken and the defenders enslaved or put to the sword.

Thereafter, most of the hill forts, Uley Bury amongst them, stood abandoned.

Fran and I picnicked in the shelter of a gatehouse mound, catnapped in the pale sunshine, and then explored the Bury.

“Mind you keep your eye peeled for adders,” we had been warned. “Little devils’ll be out looking for a bit of sun. But not to worry – unless you step or sit on them.”

We met no adders but, as we climbed to the highest part of the ramparts, did meet a fox, who gave us a casual wave of his tail.

We looked northwest across the good farmland of the Severn valley and beyond the muddy-hued estuary to the distant Welsh mountains. Snowdon, the highest peak in Britain, was a looming presence on the farthest horizon. To the south, I could see the grey void of the Bristol Channel and the Exmoor hills of Devon. Southeast lay the chalk cliffs of Wiltshire. Bursts of watery sunshine swept over this magnificent panorama, illuminating distant details – a fishing vessel ploughing the estuary; a glitter of wet slate roofs from some village far to the northwest; and fighter jets swarming from an airfield near the smoky sprawl of Bristol.

Close at hand was a tumbledown hut sheathed in galvanized iron. It seemed an inexplicable anomaly in such a place, and later I complained about it as being a desecration.

“An observer corps station during the war,” I was told. “Fellows used to perch up there night and day listening and looking for Jerry planes. Did it myself. I was up there one moonlit night Jerry bombed Bristol. A sight I won’t forget. Whole damned place looked to be going up in flames. Searchlight beams thick as hedgehog quills. Ack-ack flying about thick as rain. A stick of bombs fell straight across Wotton, blew up half a dozen houses. Towards the end, a Jerry pilot jettisoned a big one that crashed down right into the Bury. Like a bloody earthquake, it was. Scared the lights out of us chaps on watch though it hurt nobody except rabbits.

“Ah, yes, this old Bury has seen some queer sights in its time. And I don’t doubt, given the nature of the beast, it’ll see some more.”

“The beast?” Fran asked.

“The two-legged one, me dear. The two-legged one, don’t you know?”

5
WES’MAKDDN