Common Land ( VILLAGE TALES EP. 47 )

Whether you walk just to walk, or just to look and listen, the countryside is a beautiful place to explore, and we are lucky to have it, but there used to be more of it, and it’s there, the other side of a wall. The ‘Enclosures Act’ robbed the people of one fifth of the whole country! It was the common land that ordinary people had used and enjoyed for centuries, but the gentry put a wall round it and called it ‘theirs’.

Our small village numbers four or five keen walkers, and their emphasis is walking. They are members of various walking organisations and take walking very seriously. There are others like myself that do not take walking seriously, instead we take looking and listening much more seriously, and use walking merely to get us to places where we can look and listen. If I was walking with serious walkers I would be left behind staring at a view, trying to identify a flower, or what bird it is I can’t see, whilst they have disappeared into the distance. I would catch up just in time to see them packing away their energy drinks and muesli snacks, and about to move on. 

I am a proud ambler. I amble along to see what the country can reveal of itself. I may spend as much time stationary, or at least moving slowly, as I do walking briskly. Having been born with an insatiable curiosity I can’t pass something unusual without wondering what it is, why I haven’t seen it before, what it does, and why it even exists. In my group of amblers, I am average. On an ‘amble’ I could be in company, ahead there might be one or two, and behind us others, though unseen beyond the bend.

I can imagine my parents constantly requesting I ‘Catch up’ only for me to tormented them with persistent ‘What is this?’, or ‘Why is that?’. I have discovered what they didn’t. The answer to a child’s perpetual ‘why’, is to tell them, and to give them as full an answer as is possible, and as you would a fellow adult. Mostly what children want is attention and when the answer is very long and detailed, they not only learn something, they daren’t ask another question.

Besides flora and fauna, my fellow amblers have a fascination for the remnants of our industrial past. Industrial archaeology is what an antiques dealer friend would call it, but his interest is in mills, old brick kilns, ironworks, canals and such. Our interest, due to our locality, is usually confined to a smaller scale, but ancient evidence of human activity is beguiling in whatever form. Our curiosity can be sparked with quite insignificant remains, a gate post, sans gate, in the middle of nowhere, a wall well made, more than is required just to keep stock from wandering. With their purposes hidden in time, it’s enough to make us wonder. Wonder when this place which is now, nowhere, used to be something and somewhere. It’s a clue of some past activity important enough to need something and one that required it should be well made. 

Whether it’s industrial or agricultural archaeology walls feature prominently, which is rather stating the obvious. Canals and rivers, in the past, the thoroughfare for any bulk cargo, had finely engineered stone jetties and loading wharfs in abundance, now they are sometimes hardly visible beneath branches and brambles. Our walls have had many uses but it’s mostly guesswork that we country amblers have to go on to know what remains as a witness to a past activity. A wall is one thing, but four walls are another. 

Starting at the Old Drum and Monkey, walk to the west, past the car park on your right and then the village hall on your left. The lane soon turns northwards and on the left hand side amongst some beech trees there is a well used kissing gate through which the path leads up across the common. After a couple of hundred yards there is a commemorative bench from which the village lying below is not so far removed that it ceases to be real. The path continues its gently climb until much of the surrounding landscape is visible. Kilnbury, the iron age fort, is higher to east of the village and that conceals the view towards Shipston, and beyond that, Shaftesbury. 

Looking back from the brow of the common, to the left is Croft Hill on the slope of which is Davinia’s SSSI and not so far away the gothic clock tower of Brimstone, the Dawson residence, peeps above a cluster of trees on the Shipston road. Turning away and beyond the brow, trees build up on either side of the path until well into the wood there is where footpaths cross, and where Lola, Paul’s dog, would stare at what I couldn’t see. Down that right hand path, more used than it was, it now it leads to Whistling Jack’s, and a bench where families regularly picnic. 

Continue a few hundred yards more and a footpath drops down onto a broad thoroughfare that is as straight as a die, and probably Roman. It’s a surprise to find in comparison to our meandering footpath something so intentional. Vegetation has encroached from both sides but the firm surface is still three or four metres wide and extends in both directions as far as the eye can see. Tall beeches meet overhead and make a vaulted ceiling, that has the feeling of a cathedral and provokes that sense of wonder and respect.

By the bank to the right of our path is what appears to be half hidden mounds of fly-tipped rubble. A closer examination reveals a more organised structure, typical of one wall being just a curiosity, and more being a fascination. The remains are of a single room, a worker’s shelter or a tally gate. A gap in the wall and a stone threshold facing the track indicates a doorway. Not enough of the walls remain to know if there were any windows. There’s more rubble remaining on the northern side which could have been the stack. Even if a dwelling, something of this age and of this type, it would be unusual for it to have had a substantial floor, so what has grown within the walls was predictable. Nature reclaims everything eventually.

Back home, it was no surprise that the remains didn’t feature on my OS map, neither was I  surprised of what else I was reminded.

It is more likely that you have driven along a straight road for some distance, rather than a country path, to then find it suddenly takes a sharp turn, and meanders aimlessly as if its lost its concentration, before finding its way back and continuing in its intended direction. It’s not unusual for the detour to have on one side a wall, sometimes a very long one. We can dismiss it as an irrelevant relic, even the magnificent stone gateway, that like the one at Delamere that leads to nowhere. The drive has gone, the parkland is no longer strewn with deer, or overseen by a substantial Rococo residence, the estate has ceased to be and the land has been divided up and sold off. 

Evidence of the ‘enclosures act’ is everywhere. Land that for centuries that had been ‘common land’ and used by ordinary people, by edict of parliament, a local landowner could claim it as their own, fence it, wall it, and prevent anyone else’s use of it. Roads were diverted and footpaths prohibited so as no common person may trespass on land that for centuries they had been free to use to earn a living from, and enjoy. 

Talking to Milton Peacock, a retired solicitor, in the Drum one evening, it came as a surprise that enclosure acts only ceased in 1914 having presumed that such legislative theft by the gentry was confined to the dark ages. 

He told me that a fifth of the total area of England was stolen, and pointed out that Blythe Hall was among thousands of estates that claimed common land and then built walls around it.

That pile of rubble was once the home of a character called Martha living by the then Shipston road, an old Roman road. Overnight it became the property of the Delamere estate, as did several hundred acres of adjoining common land and other properties. Travellers were Martha’s source of income, but when they diverted the road, she lost her passing trade. The refreshments she made, the herbal medicines and potions, vegetable dyes and beer that her mother had made before her were treated with suspicion. When she cured a young girl of a rash they accused her of witchcraft. When she wouldn’t leave of her own accord, her hovel was burnt down. I have mentioned Delamere Park and its mis-management before, but when itself suffered several fires it led to the bankruptcy of the estate. Perhaps she was a witch after all.

Not far from Shipston Delamere set back off the Shaftesbury road, a cottage once rejoiced in the name of ‘Marthas Cottage’. It was from where she took up her trade again after the village built it for her, ironically from materials salvaged from the ruins of Delamere Park. 

The common land was never returned, but at least we’re permitted to walk on some of it.

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Written and read by Barkley Johnson.