A Somerset Lad

Tot the south, the parish boundary of High Ham extends to the lowland beyond Picts Hill, to the north it stretches across the moor towards Pedwell. The King’s Sedgemoor Drain begins, on the moor to the north, below Ham Hill, the steep ascent into our village, and runs north-west to meet the River Parrett at Dunball. The drain, into which runs a network of rhynes, was built in the final decade of the Eighteenth Century. Its construction brought drier land but it also brought an extinction of the commonage rights enjoyed by many of the poorer people of our community. Drainage was something resisted by those who lost their livelihoods.

Writing in Wetland: Life in the Somerset Levels in 1986 Adam Nicolson described the spirit of the local people:

The classic instance in the seventeenth century was King’s Sedgemoor, entirely owned, as its name implies, by the crown. The Stuart monarchy was desperate for money and the draining of the moor represented a handsome opportunity. Agents were appointed, plans drawn up and negotiations opened with the freeholders who had rights of common on the moor. The Agents reported that,

“the very ditches of the enclosures will so drayne it, sucke out the water and the land will soon become warm, solide and full of fruite.”

This may have been optimistic but it was not on technical grounds that the scheme failed. The prospect of the extinction of their common rights made the freeholders resist. Their obstinacy, their defence of independence and their simple obstructionism made any progress impossible. Eventually, in 1632, Charles I sold off 4,000 acres of the unimproved moor at £3 an acre. The main agent, John Battalion, was summoned before the Attorney General in 1635 to explain the failure. In words which exactly reflect the intransigent saltiness of the moors and the moor-men, he explained how the whole business had

“fylled and cloyed with many more perplexityes, questions and queres than I ever dreamt.”

That is the reality of the place, of its natural conservatism and refusal to be cowed by higher authority. When, in the eighteenth century, the more elaborate scheme for the moor was introduced, it met with the same sort of opposition, which this time failed. As one enthusiastic improver complained:

“there is no propriety in calling a publick meeting with a view of gaining signatures of consent. . . . At all publick meetings of this nature that I ever attended noise and clamour have relent.’ sound sense and argument. Once men have joined the opposition, their pride will not let them.”

It is thirty-five years since Patrick Sutherland and Adam Nicolson captured the spirit of the Levels. As the life they described has slowly disappeared, so has some of the spirit of the place. Looking at the photograph of a cousin with whom I once spent an evening making cider, a man who delivered vegetables to our house every Saturday, I wondered how much of the metropolitan cosmopolitanism that now besets the place he would have welcomed.

Growing up in sight of Glastonbury Tor. I lived for three years in Newtownards, Co Down near where to Louis MacNiece’s mother was buried at Carrowdore. I took services in the church to which is attached the graveyard in which MacNiece lies beside his mother. I lived for three years in Larne, Co Antrim, a neighbouring town to Carrickfergus, where MacNiece grew up in the rectory. Reading his autobiography The Strings are False, there are many moments of recognition of familiar landmarks.

The description of his days at Sherborne, where he was sent to the preparatory school when he was ten years old evoke childhood imaginings:

Euston, Waterloo, then Dorset. County Down had been different from Co. Antrim, the drumlins of the former seeming to me highly exotic and it being also the county where I had eaten a turkey’s egg in a farm near my mother’s grave, but Dorset was most unlike either. Woods, yellow stone houses and fossils for picking. I was not used to buildings with style nor to such a variety of landscape, though I missed the Irish light for the lack of which my father condemned all English landscape as ‘stodgy’. I came to Sherborne with no preconceptions about it, but before my four years there were up I was reading into this country of the Dorset-Somerset border a wealth of legend, mainly drawn from Malory. From a point within walking distance we could see Glastonbury Tor which someone, possibly our headmaster Littleton Powys, told us was the site of Camelot. So I organised some of the boys into Knights of the Round Table, I myself being Sir Gawaine (we tactfully had no King Arthur), and we roamed the country with lances, once luckily finding a cave. This make-believe, which we might have been thought too old for, did, I think, enhance my feeling for the Arthurian legends. After all, nearly everyone who reads Hamlet is playing Hamlet in his head. But Hamlet is for adolescents (which we all to some extent remain) whereas Arthur’s knights have fewer problems too old for a prep school. And their battles and joustings have the fascination of cricket averages, while the country they move through is, like Spenser’s, so indeterminate or never-never that it can easily be superimposed even on the parklands and quarries and pinewoods of Dorset. This transposition was helped by the placards saying ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’.

Playing the knights of the Round Table would be thought absurd by most boys of such an age group now, it would be an activity considered immature by those who inhabit the virtual reality of the world online. Few of the eleven year old boys I meet have an awareness of the legends that filled the story books of the past, few have any knowledge of the backdrop of history against which such legends grew.