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Dear Friends,
One Monday morning in Cumbria, at the beginning of August, I walked up the lonning1 by the cottage with my dear friend, Baillie. We got soaked, and it was blowing a hoolie on the hill. No matter. It didn’t stop me doing some filming….
…. All of this summer, I was putting together short form video and phone reels as an expression of small moments of my life when I felt a powerful emotion. In doing so, I found my way back into my creative life as writer and filmmaker. In the last weeks of looking after my Alfie when he slowed down, and in the weeks after he died, I did little walking, writing or filmmaking and, just like you, it’s always, always walking that feeds my creativity.
Press play (and keep the sound on) for just one minute and five seconds of five days in Dorset earlier this summer when the emotion I felt was happiness. Happy that M and I had five wonderful years with Alfie. I was happy to be home in Dorset, happy to spend time with . And I felt happy watching a Border Collie called Wills having fun on the beach.
Some of the footage from the reel above is from the churchyard at St Stephen in Pamphill, walking distance from the meadow where M and I camp when we’re in Dorset.
St Stephen. Designed in the Arts and Crafts Gothic style by Charles Edward Ponting. Commissioned, honouring her late husband’s will, by Henrietta Bankes of nearby Kingston Lacy, and completed in 1907. There are no graves in this churchyard but, on the day I visited, plenty of confetti, horseshoes, bells and hearts in pastel shades.
I met writer Jane V Adams in Pamphill, it was the first time we’d met for real. We’ve talked a lot online, though, which is where we met on a course hosted by Dr Lily Dunn earlier this year. Anyway, soon, Jane and I were chatting away as if we’d known each other for an age while walking through woodland. I remember craning my neck, saying hello to the trees and a buzzard. Later, we met M and had a drink at our favourite public house in Dorset, the community-owned Anchor Inn, in Shapwick.
Still on the subject of Dorset, perhaps you’ve read an earlier piece I wrote here on Substack called Love in the time of Covid.2 Here’s an abridged extract:
I’ve stepped from under canvas into the day, wriggled my feet in the grass. At this early hour, I can taste the heft of the air and pay close attention. Woodland all around crackles like static, a buzzard mews overhead. There’s distant traffic hum from the trunk road that runs all the way from Guildford to Bere Regis. We’re about six miles from the sea as the crow flies, pitched at the eastern boundary of a long meadow, a grassy terrace underlaid with plateau gravel. As ever, I’m compelled to imagine the landscape across epochs of time.
The narrow road below winds through centuries old linear settlements. Across the road, in the valley beyond the ancient hedgerows, and the brick and flint cottages with thatched roofs, a river meanders through copses of trees, oozy meads and pasture.
Given the woodland, and the sensitive approach in which David cares for this place, it must be a habitat for hundreds of lifeforms. There are glow-worms, meadow grasshoppers, the only species of grasshopper that can’t fly because of their stunted wings, rare bats, deer. Yesterday, come dusk, we saw a buzzard and red kite sharing airspace while migrant and brown hawker dragonflies searched for prey just metres away from our pitch.
I’ve been tracing the lives of the people who lived there, building a picture.
Mature trees bound the north, east and west of the meadow. At the western boundary, there’s a network of woodland walks under great cathedrals of beech, Monterey pine, oak. The woodland floor is spongy with leaf mould, crunchy with mast, rutted with roots. A dense understory of cherry laurel alongside the pathways reminds me that the campsite was once part of a country house estate. The house survives, I’ve been tracing the lives of the people who lived there, building a picture. Alfie and I venture on a longer walk, under a girthy oak: a majestic waymarker to the steep, tree-rutted path down to the road and river beyond.
Well, four years on and I’m still building a picture of the lives of the people who lived in that house next to the meadow campsite. Mary, Harriet, William … not landed gentry like the Bankes family of Kingston Lacy, but what the newspapers of the day referred to as the “middling classes.” And, sometimes, I feel like I’ve got to know some of these people pretty well. Sometimes, I can smell this woman, that man, I can taste the food they ate, I’ve been privy to her accounts, his liaisons, their letters,3 their passions and prejudices.
“ …. but can you guess what no! it was a piece of Cold Porpoise or Sea pig I was again disapointed & was oblig’d to finish my dinner with bread & bread only for there was no cheese there is no cheese ate here but what is like sour curds tis good for nothing ….”
(from a letter to Mary in Dorset from her brother George in Rouen, 1775.)
So, there I was, wandering around the churchyard of St Stephen, looking forward to meeting Jane and, meantime, wondering about Mary and George and the world they lived in. Here’s what I wrote in my notebook later:
Mid-eighteenth century England, the movement for urban improvement is gaining momentum, with Dorset reflecting broader national trends. Across the county there are efforts to modernise infrastructure with, say, the extension of turnpike roads, improving the efficiency of travel and trade. Public lighting and drainage systems receive increased attention too as towns seek to address issues of safety and sanitation.
Another concern is the secure storage of gunpowder, a priority given the increasing demands of industry and military readiness. Committees oversee these various initiatives, involving local politicians, the merchant elite, and other members of the middling classes. But so-called borough-mongering mars the political landscape, electoral influence being bought and sold. Vested interests govern much of the decision-making, with local figures navigating a complex web of power to secure favourable outcomes.
Twenty-odd miles away from St Stephen (and while nearby Wimborne Minster and Poole are experiencing the stirrings of the Industrial Revolution,) Chaldon Herring, where Mary is born in the summer of 1748, remains untouched by such developments. The village, like so many rural areas, continues to follow a traditional, agrarian way of life. The village is in the Purbecks. Mary grows up knowing rolling hills, chalk downland, the coast, the smell of the sea. All around the village are open fields, abundant hedgerows and common land where villagers graze their animals.
Mary who, in 1779 at thirty-one, had married Lackford4 (a widower,) in Wareham - came to live in the country house next to what is now our meadow campsite in the last years (probably) of the 1700s. She lived in that house with her widowed daughter, Harriet, and domestic servants Jane, Emily and thirteen-year-old Eliza. Her late brother, George, who had written to her from Rouen in 1775, had his country residence a hair’s breadth away. Mary died at the end of September 1840, she was ninety-two, Lackford had died in 1797. I am slowly building facts such as these into a meaningful story of Mary’s life. A work of fiction, but that’s the only way I can really get to know Mary and other remarkable women like her. History has overlooked their stories.
All of this summer I’ve asked myself the big question I’ve been asking these past years: can knowing a landscape, its geology, geography, its history, and its people past and present, engender a greater respect for place, and for each other?
When you know the land beneath your feet, the history etched into it, and the lives that have unfolded there, it becomes more than just a backdrop, doesn’t it? The place turns into a living entity with its own character, struggles, triumphs.
Geology shapes place, influencing everything from plants that grow to how people settle and interact with the land. When I think about these natural processes, I see the landscape as a dynamic force, not something static (or as exploited as I might’ve thought.) My perspective shifts, encouraging me to think about, say, sustainable practices and, if you like, I feel a sense of stewardship.
Striving to understand people like Mary - how she thrived, struggled - and the time she lived in, creates a connection across time. Mary and her descendant’s lives remind me I’m a part of a continuum, and our actions today are just one chapter in the ongoing story of that place.
It’s the same back in Cumbria. Getting to know the past and present-day community deepens my connection to the village where M and I live, makes me feel more mindful as to the experiences of others. In coming to learn of shared history, connections, and the land that binds, it becomes easier to see others as part of the same fabric, deserving of the same respect and care.
Also, following lives over centuries I’ve a greater understanding of the cultural, economic and social differences between southern and northern England Oh! and what I didn’t know, four years ago, was that the Bankes family - who owned the estates of Corfe Castle and Kingston Lacy, originates in John Bankes, born in 1589, in Keswick, Cumbria, the son of a merchant farmer. (Keswick is twenty miles away from where M and I live.)
“When he was 15 he entered Queen's College, Oxford, and eventually began training to become a lawyer. He was called to the Bar in 1614, and became an MP for Wootton Bassett in 1624. He invested in the wad mines of Seatoller in 1622, when he bought a half-share in the mines from John Lamplugh …. John married Mary Hawtrey of Ruislip in 1618, and they had fourteen children. As his reputation as a lawyer grew, John was appointed Attorney-General to Prince Charles in 1631, and the Attorney-General to the King in 1634. He was also knighted in 1631. In 1635 Sir John invested in the estates of Corfe Castle and Purbeck, purchased from Mountjoy Blount. In 1636 he purchased the estates of Kingston Lacy.”5
Edited from a voice memo recorded on Thursday June 27, 2024
Thursday. Another churchyard. Here I am, in Stanbridge, a tiny village in the tiny hamlet of Hinton Parva. The closed (abandoned) church is St Kenelm and it’s just three miles north of Wimborne Minster off the B3078 Wimborne to Cranborne road. M has parked our car opposite the church, outside what was, I think, the rectory. Carr John Glyn (b. 25 June 1799, d. 1897) lived at that rectory. A newspaper in 1894 reported he was, at ninety-six, England’s longest-serving rector.6
While this place, this churchyard, feels ancient, St Kenelm is only one-hundred and thirty-six years old, an estate-style church rebuilt from the medieval church by Richard George Glyn (1831–1918) third Baronet, who lived in nearby Gaunt’s House, one of the family who founded the bank Glyn Mills & Co.
St Kenelm served as a chapel for a prep school in recent years.
“…. founded in 1903 in Broadstairs, Kent. The school's pupils were evacuated to Dorset during the Second World War, and the school itself was moved to Cranborne Chase in 1945. After a spell at Gaunt's House just north of Wimborne, the school finally took situ at Deans Grove in 1988.”7
Mary is buried in the family vault at East Lulworth, but I’m here searching for Mary’s daughter, Harriet, Harriet’s daughter Rose, and Mary’s great granddaughter Harriet Frances who, at four months old, died en route to Dorset from Rothley, in Leicestershire. I’ve walked around and around the churchyard but I can’t find their graves. So many crumbling headstones. Impossible to read.
All the same, I love this tangled churchyard, I feel an emotional release in being here, an acceptance of the passage of time. There’s an undeniable aesthetic appeal to old churchyards too, isn’t there? Melancholy and beauty. Weathered stone, crumbling walls, wildflowers.
St Kenelm is in a sorry state, broken windows, twisted lead, debris, vandalism. I’m walking around now for the last time and stop to look at the side-by-side headstones of two gamekeepers. Fifteen minutes on this and that app and I see that John, at thirty-five, died at Gaunt’s Holt from pneumonia in February 1902. George, “for seventeen years esteemed gamekeeper of Sir Richard G Glyn” was forty-seven and died in summer 1901 at Wimborne Cottage Hospital after contracting tetanus from an inflamed corn on his foot. I wonder what the connection is between the Glyn Baronetcy of Gaunt’s House and Mary’s family? Mary’s granddaughter named one of her children Carr Glyn. He ordained in 1867 and ministered until 1890.
I think about Mary’s daughter, Harriet, who married a Swiss merchant, Emmanuel. I think about the years and miles between them (Emmanuel died in 1822, Harriet in 1865.) Emmanuel’s grave, like Harriet’s, lost to time, somewhere in St Andrew’s churchyard off Birdcage Walk in Clifton, Bristol. Sunday November 24 1940, the first night of the Bristol Blitz, St Andrews reduced to rubble.
Thursday afternoon. M and I are making our way down the path to the dunes, to the beach. Cotswold sheep, Shetland cattle, stonechat and swifts, wild radish and field bindweed. Bumbles in the roses.
This beach, so many memories. Beach volleyball, beach parties, the sting from a weaver fish, greasy groynes. I remember Robert Wynn, who worked at the International Supermarket, who bought me a chocolate orange and asked my folks if he could take me on a date. We took the bus into Bournemouth, went to see Grease at the cinema in Westover Road.
Watching a Border Collie called Wills chasing waves, I’m thinking about the happy years M and I spent with Alfie. And I’m thinking about our journey to Carmarthenshire on Saturday, en route to Cumbria. We’re going to meet a Border Collie at a rescue and rehabilitation centre. He’s called Baillie.
And just like that, what was left of summer flew by in the flurry of caring for a puppy.
Cumbria’s Lonnings. Words and pictures by Alan Cleaver in Caught by the River. Online at < https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2015/06/cumbrias-lonnings/> Date accessed: Sunday September 22, 2024
For the full post: Love in the time of Covid.
Letters from George Garland to his sister Mary.
George Garland (1753-1825) was a merchant trading between Poole and Newfoundland. He served as mayor of Poole in 1788 and 1810 and was the Member of Parliament for Poole from 1801 to 1806. He was High Sheriff of Dorset for 1824/25.
Dorset Archives Trust / Dorset History Centre,
Bridport Road,
Dorchester,
Dorset DT1 1RP
Lackford had been at various times a merchant, a steward and a gamekeeper for the Bankes family of Kingston Lacy and Corfe Castle.
Bankes of Kingston Lacy and Corfe Castle, 1348-1981. Online at <https://archive-catalogue.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk/records/D-BKL> Date accessed: Sunday September 22, 2024
Longevity in the Professions. Cork Daily Herald, Thursday July 05, 1894. Online at <https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/> Date accessed: Thursday June 27, 2024
Alumni. Online at <https://www.dumpton.com/alumni-old-dumptonians> Date accessed: Sunday September 22, 2024
This is lovely, Bee and I'm so happy you met up with Jane!
This deep sense of place and home, landscape and buildings is exactly what I wrote about in my most recent book The Giant on the Skyline. I was writing about my area of home which is south Oxfordshire and across the downs into Wiltshire. I really tried to understand the way a place imprints itself onto us, and how we imprint ourselves into it, in return. I got very interested in the lives of normal people who lived there, and I am certain that sometimes we can touch the energy of the past, to feel their lives for a moment.