High up in the hills there is barely any sound. You pause by a chalk bank. A wizened old apple tree, twisted and stunted from a lifetime of winter wind, bows before you, its fruit dusty. You listen, and all there is, is the gentle sound of the wind running through the trees. Having escaped the city with its noise of traffic, construction, sirens, a near constant clamour; it’s good to be somewhere where you have to listen hard to discern its sound.
Sometimes it is great to get out and walk somewhere really old. And not old in the conventional way London is seen as old, which is old enough. Not a time span of some two thousand years, which by anyones standards is old. I mean older than that. More than twice that age. Its August, the tail-end of a long and stifling summer. London is quiet, it has emptied itself out. Most people have gone on their holidays. Offices are half empty, schools are abandoned to caretakers and maintenance teams, and the endless procession of international visitors – for once – have the city to themselves. Everything slows down this month and taking the opportunity I made off for a few precious days. West along the M4 – queueing at Hangars Lane on the north circular beforehand you consider it the least romantic of escape routes, you glimpse tired families outside Ikea, a collection of uber eats lads in line astride their scooters rolling cigarettes. You negotiate the traffic around Heathrow, the crowded service stations, but eventually as you motor westwards, the ground begins to lift, the suburbs fade and then you turn off and head along narrowing lanes, through sleepy villages, climbing the great chalk shoulders of the North Wessex Downs, and onto the spine of an ancient trackway, the Ridgeway.
I spend much of my time walking through history, filming it, talking it, writing it, and in London this isn’t necessarily a choice, the past is simply everywhere, its almost like its in the way. A wonderful obstruction to those who enjoy such things. It survives in all manner of unlikely ways, in its street names, in the boundary marker studs, the drinking fountains and bollards, the coal hole covers and the cabmen’s shelters, the names of its pubs, the width of an alleyway or the kink in a road. London’s history, from its foundations up, stacks itself vertically, Roman, Saxon, Medieval, Tudor, Stuart, Georgian, one city literally standing on the shoulders of the previous one. One after another like a rather wonderful, but heavily compressed cake.
Out here, though, the past doesn’t rear itself up like in the city. Instead, its sunken into the hard chalky ground, rutted and hollowed by thousands of generations of feet. A long ribbon of chalk, cut into the land, unspooling over the hills and out of sight. In this open landscape it urges you to follow. People have been moving across this landscape for over five millennia. Colloquially, the Ridgeway, is known as the oldest road in Britain. It survives today as a protected byway, some eighty-seven miles of trackway following the chalk ridge formed in the age of the glaciers. It starts at Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire and finishes in the ancient ceremonial landscape of Wiltshire. It keeps to the high ground as the old routes were want to do, avoiding the marshes, the deep forest below. A traveller on foot in the neolithic period would have much to fear in the thick forest, at least up on the high hills they could see trouble coming. Its estimated to be in the region of five thousand years old. Long before London, before Rome, before Christ, before kings and queens, before even the idea of England. This was a land populated by a small number of people who belonged to the end of the stone age, at that time they were changing the landscape before them, the use of cereal crops and the domestication of animals. The first touchstone of something we might cautiously call a society, began at the same time these paths were being first trodden into the chalk. And people have been moving through this landscape ever since.
They travelled great distances along this ridgeway, converging in the sacred landscape of the Wiltshire downs. Amongst ritual causeways, gathering grounds and tombs, sites older than Avebury and Stonehenge, whose great stones wouldn’t rise for many generations. The people came, we think at the turning of the year, equinox, winter or summer, or if indeed it varied, we remain unsure. They brought their cattle, their sheep and pigs with them, whose butchered remains still surface under the trowel during excavations. On these occasions marriages may have been made, disputes settled, agreements struck, allegiances promised. I often find myself wondering, whether there was already, at this early date, some form of a hierarchy, a higher order, an individual set above the rest. But we shall never know. The mystery will remain. The ceremonies completed, the people would leave, turning back to the ridgeway and walking the way they had come. Much like festival goers in our modern times.
But who were they, these early people? Were they to become the tribal peoples later documented by Caesar? The Brigantes, the Durotriges, the Iceni? Or had too much time already passed for identity — theirs, or ours, looking back — to mean very much at all? And the eternal question, when so much merges and the edges soften: what’s in a name, after all? We shall never know, not for certain, not in any real detail. Over time, the journey itself, and the landscape in which it was made through, grew as important as their destination. Using antler picks and the shoulder blades of cattle, they raised great earthen burial mounds, strangely shaped like their flint axe-heads.
And that’s where I found myself, high above the world, tramping the same path as my ancestors and thinking deeply of them. I was making for one such place in particular, a long-barrow tomb I hadn’t visited since I was a child, and knew now only as a handful of loose memories. A white horse dancing along the flank of a hill, the hawthorn in full bloom, and the musty animal smell of an underground chamber set beneath heavy stone. So this was, in a way, a pilgrimage too, not just to the ancestors who have laid beneath these skies for five thousand years, but to my younger self, and to my family, who walked this same path a few decades before. How strangely these things thread together, and align.
The Ridgeway rolls away through fields of gold. Old hawthorns lean and crouch along the path, bent into strange shapes by decades of exposure to the wind. Up here everything is expansive and still, the downs roll away either side, without end. A group of fallow deer stand stock still amongst the stubble of a wheat field, exposed by a line of dark green corn. Above a red kite turns overhead, its wings outstretched, floating in the thermals. Somewhere beyond the hill a tractor is at work, unseen, a rising cloud of dust indicating its presence. And always, ahead, that pale thread of chalk.
I know it’s close now. There’s no sign yet, no marker, just some instinct built from a map long studied. The Ridgeway crosses a metalled track cutting straight across at right angles, linking a farmhouse with the wider world, there is a tall thickly banked hedgerow. You cross through, to the left a plantation of trees, young and orderly, planted in neat straight rows. To the right, much older ground and a deeper stand of beech trees, great big towering trees. And it’s this way that I go, towards the beeches.
There is no gift shop, just a modest English Heritage information board, a path worn thin through the field, and then, with no great fanfare, a facade of enormous sarsens stones in a clearing among the trees. Wayland’s Smithy. A name given by the Saxons, we shall never know its original name. What stands here is a Neolithic long barrow, though the ground beneath it had already been worked. Archaeologists found an earlier structure: an oval barrow, paved with smooth stones, two massive tree trunks set at either end.The remains of fourteen people were found here, eleven men, two women and a child, and with carbon dating we know they were laid to rest here around five thousand five hundred and sixty years ago. The larger structure we see today came a few generations later, encasing the older mound entirely, and bringing with it those great facade stones, ten feet in height and weighing around seven tons.
The sarsens stones stand grey and lichened beneath the beeches now, guarding the transepted stone chamber. You can still climb across the entrance stone and enter the chamber. Its dark in there, two small grooved spaces, earthen and musty. The memory returned unbidden, being a small child and clambering through and into this small space. Grave robbers worked this site for centuries, several hundred years of pilfering, so little remains of the people who had been laid to rest in this later phase.I came back out into the daylight and stood a while at the entrance, thinking about the community who’d built this place, the people laid to rest inside it. What were their names?
And it’s exactly there, in everything that’s been lost, that time turns intimate. The details are gone, the names are lost, much like a grave stone worn smooth in a cemetery. But someone loved these people enough to build this place and place them up here. Someone remembered them, for a while and then, in time, everyone who remembered them was gone too. Now all that remains are the stones and the ancient path.
I stood for a while under the great towering beeches. Ancient as the tomb itself. The wind moved the dry parched canopy, lifting and disturbing the heavy branches, a crisp yellowing leaf came spiralling down through the stillness, entirely unhurried, and absentmindedly I watched it settle on the floor by my feet. There are places where history is contained and categorised, a document behind glass, a date memorised for an exam or indeed a history walk across London; and then there are places where instead, it is something entirely different, personal, gets under your skin, it is instead; felt. The distance between then and now disappears, and you become aware of the procession of lives strung out between you and that first person who crossed this hill.
Back on the Ridgeway, following the path, I thought of myself again as that little boy, retracing those earlier steps, and that memory cemented in me again the image of all those who had come before. The path has no interest in us and our tidy little divisions of history. Neolithic slides imperceptibly into Bronze and then Iron Age, Roman into Saxon, kingdoms harden into countries, and then before you know it a plane crosses the bright blue sky; beneath which walkers arrive and walkers move on. The hawthorn grows, falls, and another rises in its place. Chalk works its way into the tread of one more pair of shoes.
London has taught me a great deal about change. The lesson is mostly that things are impermanent, that buildings vanish, streets are rerouted, fortunes invariably rise and fall. The Ridgeway offers you a rather different deeper view. It reminds you how brief the whole performance is, and how brief we are within it. Which I think, if I’m honest, I rather needed. A little humbling. A little recalibration. A reset. And after that there was nothing especially profound left to do but turn back towards the pale path, and carry on walking.
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