When I first had the notion of actually doing all of the walks before discarding the AA book of Weekend Walks I thought I’d do them in order. Then I discovered that the first one in the book was in the Scilly Isles, so clearly that was not going to happen. A trip would need to be planned. The Scillies are 45 miles of water from Penzance, and Penzance is 342 miles of rail from Norwich. It was not going to be a short trip and accommodation on an island only two miles by three is (hopefully!) going to be in short supply. I could find things closer to home in the meantime, but I got right on it, setting about the planning and eventually the months rolled around.
I find I am nervous about the trip. It falls after an abortive jaunt to the North-East and there are so many things logistically that could go wrong: trains, boats, AirBnB in Penzance, the flat in St Mary’s. Me making mistakes about things.
I get here though. After a few days in Penzance, and a side jaunt to St Michael’s Mount, I arrive on the island.
Landing feels very much like arriving in Guernsey does. A kind of spiritual home-coming. I wonder if I have small-islanders somewhere in my ancestry, or if it is the call of the sea, or something about the light. Perhaps it is just my evolution towards living more slowly, the desire to have little to do and all day to do it.
The travel gods are on my side thus far at least. The flat is ready early and I can check straight in. I even manage to manhandle my luggage up the steep external staircase without mishap (and try not to think about having to get it down again).
As well as the one planned walk, I have another mission on this trip. I have a grave to visit.
As it happens, the two dovetail neatly into my first exploration.
Whichever guide books or word-of-mouth tips we use, there are routes that don’t live up to their billing, and there are those that “meet expectations” as the survey phraseology has it, and then
there are the others. The others are the ones that are completely undersold, as if the describer wants you not to bother, wants to keep them secret enough for them never to be over-trodden. This is one of those others. Perhaps I too should be keeping quiet about it?
As ever on this long-term project, I'm conscious that I'm working from a thirty-year-old guide book: much will have changed. Part of the 'explore' aspect is around noticing what has, and what has not.
The Bishop & Wolf pub is still there, in the sense that the sign is above the door, the furniture can be seen through the windows, but it is closed up and sad-looking. According to the CAMRA website it is now permanently closed with its “future uncertain”. It was built as a house for Thomas Ekins, first land agent of the Godolphin estate, in about 1700 and is one of the earliest surviving buildings on the island. We can hope therefore that it’s survival can be ensured in some form or other. I’m sure the locals would not want it to revert to being a “home” for some wealthy individual, but this is where all of our arguments about “preserving buildings” become personal and political in equal measure. I’m not local. I have no right to an opinion but of course I have one and mine, for what it’s worth, is that someone should take it on and care about its story so far. Whether they make it a family home, or a holiday home, or a hostelry, isn’t really the issue. I would ask of them: “don’t muck about with the fabric, preserve the stories, allow people to access those tales” and say, "within those parameters, do what you need to do to give it its next chapter." After all, what is the alternative? Losing it altogether?
The Bishop & Wolf. I wanted to know what the story was. I imagined my own fairytale involving clerics and deep dark woods and howling dogs and broiling seas.
The truth is more prosaic. The inn was named for two local lighthouses.
The Bishop Rock Lighthouse was built in 1858, strengthened thirty years later, to mark a rock ledge about four miles west of the Isles. [1] The Wolf Rock Lighthouse, marking a rock ledge eight nautical miles west of Lands End, was built in 1869. I love that Trinity House quote “built” dates for their lighthouses as if they were constructed within a few months during a given year, and then go on to describe how long it actually took to build them. Wolf, for instance, was started in 1861 and by “the end of 1864 only 37 stones in the second course of masonry could be laid” due to the atrocious weather conditions that the engineers were working in. [2]
I have a love of lighthouses. I have a sadness for the loss of the romance of the idea of lighthouse keepers – though I suspect the last of them do not share that view. But mainly, I have a strong admiration for the guys who actually built the things. The engineers and architects and the grunt-work guys who hewed the stone and laid it, and manhandled the metalwork. I have walked some of our rugged coastline in good weather. I have not seen the worst that the seas can throw at it. Deep respect to everyone who had a hand in all of these constructions, and in their maintenance, and in their keeping.
Bishop and Wolf. I may write my fairytale someday. It might even involve lighthouses. But back at the pub there is a claim that its sign is unique for having different images to each side. Not so. Nothing unique about that: The Gardeners’ Arms in Norwich retains its original name and a sign to match, while also accepting that everyone calls it The Murderers and has the alternative depiction on the other side.
I set out walking. The school is also gone, but the older buildings remain and there is a planning notice attached to the fence.
On the other hand, the ‘broken stile’ I was warned about at the entrance to the nature reserve has been replaced with a gate, and the path through the reserve is boardwalk over the dampest areas. Not all changes are to be lamented.
Lower Moors is a 25-acre area of wetland managed by the local Wildlife Trust.[3] I’m too late / too early for the best of the birdlife – this is a migratory landing station – at its best in the spring and
autumn. Today it’s quiet. Just the usual small birds. A flash of something that might have been heron, but nothing to excite the interest of one who spends so much time on the North Norfolk wetlands.
The website also lists reeds and trees and flowers and aquatic plants, but tells me nothing about the thing that has me totally entranced in this space – and that is the lichen.
A lot of post-walk rootling around on the web brings me to the conclusion that it is a type of Cladonia. When the British Lichen Society use expressions like 'can be told apart by their chemistry’ – I decide to settle for that high-level, probable, identification. It is common, apparently, but nothing I have never seen it in such abundance. It gives the path through the trees an otherworldly quality…as though the trees are morphing into something else, or maybe from something else, becoming tree born of some alien being.
Onwards.
It started with an ordinary conversation about where I was next headed.
“Would you do something for me?” he asked. Then he told me the story. A woman, born on Tresco, married out of the islands but when she knew she was to die, too young, she wanted to return, to
lie in the hard rock of her birthplace – or near-to. Margaret Rose lies with her parents near St Mary’s Church, Old Town.
He made another life afterwards – as I am sure she would have wanted. The thing is: loving again is not a foreswearing of anything that went before It is not a letting go. It is not a forgetting. Nor is it a second-rate, second-best, making-do kind of love. It is simply a recommitment to life. If we are open to our hearts, we can love more than one person, indeed we cannot help but do so. We may love them sequentially, or simultaneously, either way we will love them differently. We love them for who they are, at that time, and we love from where we are at that time. One or other, most likely both, of these things will change and our love will change alongside: stronger and deeper, or not, depending. The only certain thing is that once we have loved, we do not forget. Nor should we, nor should anyone else be disconcerted or discomforted by that.
“Would you take something to put on her grave?” he asked. “Something small enough for your pocket.”
"Of course."
I don’t know what I expected. A stone, certainly. Perhaps I expected more heartfelt words, more poetry…but then a stone carried all the way, perhaps words weren’t necessary. Perhaps XXX From Norfolk is message enough.
I always think that there is something sad about faded plastic flowers on a grave – an ageing memory, a ghost of a thought – from however long ago. The plaque telling the tale of the footprints in the sand is still there. There is another stone, from I don’t know where. Grass grows over the spot. It is near a wall that blooms with flowers, wild and otherwise. To pick from the tended and planted would have been a desecration, a theft, but wild flowers are gifts. They are not to be uprooted, but are free for the gathering. I make a small poesy tied with a stem of wild wheat. Not much of a tribute – but perhaps enough of one. A small act of care for a woman I never knew, on behalf of a man that I only recently do. I place the flowers & the Norfolk stone on the headstone and stand for a while. Then I snuggle them safe at the foot of the stone. The flowers will wilt in the sun, and be washed away by the next Atlantic squall. The writing from Norfolk may last a few winters. The stone will remain, and the thoughts it carried with it.
I never knew Margaret Rose, but I sat with her for a while. Not thinking anything in particular. If there are spirits perhaps hers could reach through me into the little I know of one who loved her. If there are such things as spirits, she won’t need me to tell her – but I did anyway. I don’t know the man well enough to speak of his mind or his heart, so I told her the one thing that I know with certainty: she is not forgotten.
I am walking on my own account, and I came into this yard to bear witness to one grave, but then another also caught my eye.
In between, of course, I walked up to Harold Wilson’s resting place: there is an election due and my absence means I won’t be able to vote. The least I could do was to take a moment to send a prayer that we get a better government than we’ve had of late.
Or maybe it was just that this was a link back to my childhood, to watching the news with my parents and listening to them talk about the rights and wrongs of people in power before I was old enough to understand the nuances, the satire, the reality. I think things were better then. I do remember the hardships: winter of discontent, teacher strikes, miner strikes, “dole queue blues” which was the explanation routinely given for young men hanging themselves because they could not see a future. Or perhaps they did. Perhaps the future they saw looked like this, and they wanted no part of it. Even so, things were better then. Better when the humiliation of the young was limited to their schoolyard and not broadcast to the world. Better when our mistakes could be forgotten, not re-dredged again and again. Better when the parents of murdered children were allowed to be forgotten and have a chance of healing, not thrust again and again into the spotlight to wonder again why or how or if they failed. Allowed to stop being judged.
I did not linger by Wilson’sgrave.
Instead, I was arrested by that of one John Watts. Not a grave, as such, but a memorial stone. It stands hard by the path through the yard, so if it served as headstone to any of those named
they are much walked-over, or perhaps it has been moved from their resting place.
The much-lichened stone reads:
In memory of John Watts
who departed this life March 14th 1859,
aged 57 years.
He frequently long’d to be gone,
To join the bless’d spirits above,
To sit on Emmanuel’s throne,
And feel all the transport of love.
Also of Sarah Ann, his infant daughter
who died 1st Febry. 1835
aged 9 days.
Also of William James, his son
who died Novr 21st1836, aged 6 years.
Also of Prochorus Thompson, his son
who died 22nd July 1848
aged 3 months.
Also of Nathaniel, his son
who died at Cadiz, 3rd Decr 1848, aged 15 years.
Also of William James, his son, who was drowned1852,
aged 16 years.
Also of Rovena, his daughter
who died 3rd June 1855
aged 6 years.
Also of Sarah Ann Rogers, his daughter
who died 8th September, 1859
aged 21 years.
This stone is erected as a last tribute of affection
by his sorrowing widow.
Also of Sarah Watts, the loving wife of the above
who died Feby 13th 1870
aged 68 years.
~/~
Is it any wonder he frequently longed to be gone? How much pain can one heart stand? They say we are never given more than we can bear. We know that is not true. We all have a breaking point, and some stay broken. They say a parent should never have to bury a child. How, then, must it feel to lay to rest seven of them – not all fallen in one disaster, but over time. I wonder about the life of John and Sarah Watts. Were they happy – in those years between1836 and 1848, did they bless their good fortune, and go laughingly about their days? Were they grateful? Or were they ever-watchful?
I wonder about the conversations when he (or was it Sarah?) wanted to name another boy William James, a child conceived the year the first to bear that name died. Did they not think, neither one of them, that it might bring the ill luck of the first upon the second – or did one of them think so and were there arguments that one of them lost? When the later child reached his seventh year, did they wrongly think he had ridden it out?
I wonder if these were all their children, or if any survived.
And I note that the sorrowing Sarah does not claim these children. His son, his daughter…never “our”. She was the one who had the strength to bury them all and raise a stone and continue on, for a decade beyond the last of them.
I remember a poem by Sue Burge, written in Wiveton Churchyard in Norfolk, Also Rosetta in which she asks “why also Rosetta, why not Rosetta, Also Isaac”. The cynics would argue it is simple maths, that men choose younger women and women choose older men, but I know that isn’t true. I know we outlive our menfolk because we are the stronger, we are the ones who know how to bear it all, and go on. We are not “also” because we are the lesser, but because we have the fortitude to wait longer before we rest.
Before leaving, I step inside the tiny church. Plain white walls. The kind of steep pitch roof designed to shed snow. Stained glass windows. A solid granite alter. And candles. The website tells me that during the holiday season there is a candle-lit Epilogue service on Sunday evenings. A time for reflection. I’m suddenly struck by the phrase there but for the grace of God, go I. How rarely do we turn that around? Here by the grace of God, I am. I don’t believe in their gods and saints, but a sacred space may be a thin place and so I offer out (rather than up) what probably counts as a prayer…for sanity to return to the world, for a lessening of greed, for peace.
And then I walk on.
I follow the coast path around Peninnis (tautologically marked on my map as Peninnis Head). The granite rocks are fractured and soft-worn into nature’s own sculpture park. Rock-watching is like cloud-watching…shapes come and go as you move around them. The book tells me there are stories that the bowls were created by Druids for blood sacrifices – Druids and sacrifices are hardly a normal combination. I have no doubt, however, that local pagans would have gathered around the rainwater held in the stones. When you live surrounded by salt water, there must be something precious and holy about the fresh variety.
A few weeks ago, I heard an acquaintance telling someone that humans are naturally afraid of water. She was merely justifying her own fear. We are not. Quite the reverse – we are drawn to water. We are largely made of water and it calls to its own. The sensible have a respect for tides and depths and currents, but we are not afraid. And freshwater is second only to air as a necessity for life, that is in-born, and deep-rooted. We respect water, we are not afraid of it. Perhaps there are those who cannot tell the difference.
I love this part of the path. Rambling among the rocks, seeing fanciful figures: echoes of whale, a giant turtle, a sea-troll rising up out of the water. Somewhere beneath my feet is Izzicumpucca.[4]
In a cove, someone has raised small towers of stones, and balanced one ovoid rock on its point. I’ve no idea whether these were place in mindfulness, or just playfulness, nor do I much care. They are beautiful in their own way. As are most things when we take the time to look. Between the vastness of the sea, the sorrows of the past, churches, and rocks, and smaller stones, I stop to photograph flowers. That’s something I never used to do. Time moves on and we all change.
I think it is worth taking time to walk, and time to stop. It is worth thinking about other people's stories and the story of the land. And I also think it is worth accepting that some days are so full that they need rather a lot of words to tell about them.
And to still know there is more that will emerge from the memory of it.
~/ ~
[1 ]Bishop Rock Lighthouse | Trinity House
[2] Wolf Rock Lighthouse | Trinity House
[3] Lower Moors | Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust(ios-wildlifetrust.org.uk)
[4] For the tale of the Sea Bucca check out Mike O’Connor’s book “Isles of Scilly Folk Tales”
