ESSAY: THE MARCHES

Everyone has his own idea as to what makes an ideal stretch of countryside. Some are moved by grandeur: their spiritual home is the Alps or the Scottish Highlands; others prefer water and gravitate towards the coast or the Lake District. But for a few, myself included, nature's most spectacular effects are almost always too obvious. To have one's breath taken away by soaring peaks and vertiginous ravines is sublime, but the power of scenery to evoke such responses can be short-lived. We quickly become used to vast distances and broad perspectives. After an extended passage of fortissimo we want nature to play andante.

This is why I enjoy a quiet and undramatic countryside. For me, the perfect ingredients of a landscape are: hills, but not too intimidating; trees, but not too dense; buildings, but emphatically not too recent. A touch of water here and there refreshes and charms the eye, but is not obligatory. No doubt it is a Freudian caprice, but I dream of low swelling promontories enveloping secret valleys decked with hanging woods and orchards. Above all, I relish intimate landscapes interwoven with small fields and lanes where the scene is continually unfolding and where one is both surprised and delighted by the chance encounter – the unexpected gates screening a classical small manor house or the simple Saxon church at the end of its yew alley. Distant views are not ruled out in my imaginary Eden, but they should not force themselves upon the attention. Rather, they should be seen framed by hedgerow trees, appearing blue and remote beyond slopes of hillside and wood.
Nowhere in the world is this quality of intimacy seen to better advantage than in Britain, and nowhere more in Britain than in the Welsh Marches. The Marches proper straddle south-west Shropshire and north-west Herefordshire and cross into Wales to take in the east of old Montgomeryshire and Radnorshire. I am convinced that nowhere else is such variety of pleasing countryside compressed into such a small area – measuring barely forty miles by twenty five. Considering that the industrial sprawl of the West Midlands begins little more than an hour away, the survival of this enchanted land seems miraculous. For enchanted it is: from the high-crested hills of south Shropshire – the Long Mynd, Caer Caradoc and Wenlock Edge – to the impossibly convoluted and hidden lanes of the Clun Forest, and from the forgotten stone hamlets along Offa's Dyke to the graceful half-timbered villages of north Herefordshire the modern age is kept at arm's length. Time here seems to dance to a different and older tune.
But there is nothing of the picture postcard about the Marches. It is workaday countryside. Unlike the Cotswolds it has escaped the fate of having a vernacular architecture which is too obviously pretty. The farms may be small but they are true family farms, not agribusinesses. Nor have the villages become dormitories for city commuters. In village post offices the voices have a warm and lilting timbre which is the local happy blend of Shropshire and Welsh. And to its eternal fortune the Marches has escaped the depredations of the tourism industry. No busloads of visitors arrive, to be decanted into unfinished hotels and overpriced gift shops as they are propelled from one ‘heritage’ site to the next.
In fact the charm of the region lies in its not having obvious attractions for tourists and day trippers. To this it owes its survival – and to the fact that it is on the way to nowhere, for west from the Clun forest is almost literally nowhere – the empty mid-Wales uplands, the wildest and least populated part of southern Britain.
When I think of the Marches I see lanes near Clunbury in May, the hedgerows creamy with hawthorn blossom and the banks spilling over with Red Campion, Bluebell and Queen Anne's Lace. Away and beyond, the cuckoo's cry echoes through overarching beeches. All  is new-budding, clean, the green dazzles. This is England as it has always been, and still is, under the skein of tarmac.
I think of Hopton Castle, buried deep in spinneys and orchards, its ruined tower like a tale from Arthurian romance. In Brampton Bryan fine but fading houses of village Georgian suggest an older country civilisation, their red brick fruit walls sheltering sleeping gardens. Church, cottages and byres surround the green. Not here the stark steel and concrete sheds of modern farming; nothing breaks the eye's harmony. Beyond in the manor's park, cloud-led shadows breast rolling woods and race the lambs across water meadows.
Lying, amidst bilberry and broom, on the Long Mynd's broad back in high summer I can see the land falling away in lazy undulations, valley after sunlit valley. These wide spaces are warm and intimate. Gold and green beneath, the fields ebb and flow; the country round is pastoral, embroidered with hamlets, haycocks and farms. To the east Wenlock Edge yields in turn to Brown Clee, the Malverns standing sentinel beyond. Rising in the far west on the land's edge, great Cader Idris marks the boundary of earth and sea. Here in this wide country all is peace, the lark and the high clouds hold sway.
Descending at a slow pace into the loveliest of valleys, the Onny, one passes down a beech avenue to Bridges. On past Whitcot and Hardwick the willow-fringed East Onney brook glides through pastures where the grass rises almost to the cattle's knees. This is lush, rich, dreaming countryside, like a child's picture book, where the cottages and farms, neat as toys, lie as though enfolded in a counterpane and protected by painted hills. But surely no lanes in England are as mysterious as those by the secret West Onny? Flanked on the one side by the park of Linley Hall and on the other by the Stiperstones, no traveller on these shadowed by-ways can escape a certain disquiet, if only from the brooding stillness – as of hidden watchers in the woods. Those with time to stop and listen may feel the West Onny to be a place of old magic – older than Christianity, older still than Celt and Roman and Saxon. The trees themselves stand witness to the ancient roots of this region: Holly, Elder, Rowan and Oak – their names a litany of British antiquity.
With high summer the hedges and spinneys take on a dense mantle of green and the evening air is softened by meadowsweet, honeysuckle, wild rose and dog rose. For the walker, the shaded sanctuary of a grey valley church becomes irresistible. Those of Mainstone and Llanfair Waterdine are especially beguiling. Lying remote in their steep valleys, sheltered by ferned and thymy hillsides, something of the peace and piety of centuries permeates these simple buildings. They are remote from the world in more senses than one. Embroidered on their pew cushions are the names of small nearby farms – Garbett, Graig, Selley – conveying the sense of close-knit isolation which characterises this sparsely-peopled countryside. Their interiors breathe that peculiarly ecclesiastical fragrance of wood and stone and mild damp. The churchyards are a riot of harebell, cowslip and willow-herb embowering ancient headstones in various stages of gothic decay. Here, one feels, would be a refuge from the world's strife; here one could find peace. Such intangible emotions must surely have inspired the Cistercians and Carmelites who built their monasteries in valleys like these. Did they find among these green hills that stillness for which the world cared, and cares, so little?
In the heat of summer noon a ripple of river gleams through the trees. Teme and Clun, Unk, Camlad and Kemp – the charms of these Marcher waterways belie their terse Saxon names. Rising as Welsh mountain springs, they fall and flow eastwards along cwm and vale, under stone bridges, through market towns, beneath castle and abbey walls, and broadly at last into the greater confluence of river and sea. The upper reaches of these rivers are little-known. Fed by countless brooks and shaded by overarching trees, their banks are inaccessible to all but the most determined. Herein lies their charm: as new-born streams they pass through haunts of bird and wildflower where few have ever trodden. Even in traffic-choked Britain there are still remote woods and shallows where badger, heron and stoat are rarely or never disturbed by man's uneasy proximity.
From high ground in the Marches the eye is drawn inexorably westwards. Beyond and away in the blue distance is Wales, its ranges striding over each horizon. This is a realm of unfathomable antiquity, mythic, remote. South stretch the Beacons and Black Mountains, north the Berwyns and Snowdon. Nature stages her effects with careless prodigality in this vast arena; legions of martial clouds lie low-threatening across river and vale, a pinion of sunlight illuminating a single patch of emerald on a far-flung mountainside. At dusk the fading west displays a wide expanse of sunstruck crests and piled gold clouds, turning purple, green and blue-grey as the curtain of night falls.
The valleys and hills of Montgomeryshire are more intimate. Here on the Welsh flank of the Marches the country rolls and dips into steep-sided sheep-speckled cwms. These border hills are hardly hills - many are wooded knolls where the wind frets through larch and mountain ash, and the buzzard's plangent mew echoes as it wheels on the high currents. But in late September, on certain glorious days as scarlet hips ripen in the hedgerows and the scent of wild fruit blows warm on the breeze, the light in this countryside turns serene and translucent, bathing pastures in rich hues of Viridian and Indian Yellow. During these hours of autumnal peace time seems suspended. Magically lit by the sun's declining rays, woods and streams take on a radiant glow, orchards become Arcadian groves, half-evoking images from Virgil or from a mythological Golden Age. Such days are unforgettable; the innocence of childhood is in them and, more intangibly, nature itself takes on a new significance – is somehow glimpsed as a mirror of the self, intimating a forgotten or hidden truth which was once apprehended but has now slipped from consciousness.
Is it too fanciful to think that, for pre-industrial people, sensations like these were far from uncommon? Were the physical hardships of life on the land more than recompensed by intense perceptions resulting from the daily transaction with nature? It is, perhaps, idle to speculate, but undoubtedly the Marches are among the few remaining regions of Britain where such pastoral intimations can still be realised.
The year dies at last, and the colours of autumn fade from fields and spinnys. Hedges latticed with hoar frost loom out of the mist and in the dun light of morning blackened spindrills shivering with dew rise from brakes and briars. In the wood the fox's bark rings cold. In Clun and Kempton, Yarpole and Burrington and a score of hamlets along the Marches the sharp breath of wood smoke from cottage chimneys blends with burning leaves like incense.
Now that the land lies hard, unyielding, it is time to return to home and hearth, to the shelter of solid walls and thatch that have weathered centuries of winter storms. As the wind harries the black woods outside, we draw closer to the blazing ash logs while thoughts slip away towards long days of summer. Maps are pored over. Expeditions are planned with meticulous care. New and hitherto untrodden corners of the countryside invite discovery and are explored in the imagination.
All this will be in the coming year, with the rebirth of green in the woods – with the renewal of life and light. Now, with winter closing in along the Borders, it is the resting time – the time of night and dreams. And, as a log slips in the grate, the dogs stir momentarily then settle down to a more profound slumber.
 © Charles Jackson 2011