Pt 3 - 9:

 LITERALLY LITERARY 1

The Percy Hobbs on the outskirts of Winchester is famous as the very first of many genuine country public houses I visited in a dedicated in-depth study of country pubs all over the UK and Ireland. An actual house thrown open to the public it was small, intimate, friendly and warm with a jolly, rotund ruddy-faced innkeeper, hearty home-cooked fare and a nice line in Murphy’s Irish Stout. We arrived here late on the afternoon of a day which began with a lazy breakfast in Chiswick followed by a leisurely drive down the A31. I have to say I wasn’t too sad to leave the big smoke behind.

Chawton, Jane Austen’s family home in Alton, Hampshire, was our first stop on a mostly literary circuit which would take us in a wide arc south, then west and loop us back to London. I liked Chawton straight away for its lack of pretence. Preserved pretty much as it was when the last Austen walked out of the house more than a hundred years ago, there’s a gentle atmosphere about the place embodied on this particular summer afternoon by a mini-bus load of old biddies enjoying Devonshire teas in the shady back garden. There’s also an indefinable sense of playfulness you can’t help feeling is the spirit of the writer still in residence here. Her tiny scratched writing table with goose quill artfully parked in its inkwell is sadly evocative of a talent taken at just forty one, and most likely a virgin at that. So much promise barely fulfilled.

Down the road, Winchester was full of surprises. The first surprise was the lack of camping grounds. Luckily, we stumbled upon Morn Hill a little out of town with plenty of grassy space and The Percy on the corner. The Murphy’s went down extremely well, thanks.

Winchester Cathedral is more than a song by The New Vaudeville Band. Winchester and its cathedral occupy a much more significant place in English history than I’d realised. Although the England of the time was less a country than a loose confederation of fiefdoms, Winchester was the capital of Alfred the Great in the late 800s and remained the centre of power right up until William the Conqueror landed at Hastings in 1066. Alfred is the only English king with the title Great, and it was to Winchester Cathedral that William went to be crowned. As well as the mortal remains of Jane Austen, the cathedral is also the last resting place of Danish/Viking rulers going back thirteen hundred years.

Yes, Winchester Cathedral was the name of a ‘60s pop song, but the cathedral itself is an architectural hymn. After all the elaborate houses of worship we’ve seen, from the mosques of the Muslim world to the cathedrals of the Christian, I don’t know why it chose this moment to dawn on me that each decorative element within the building itself represents the work of some artisan’s lifetime. The pulpits, screens, pews, frescoes, vaulted arches and intricate masonry all created by individuals during a modest working life span by modern standards. No Ikea flat packery here.

Next door to the cathedral stands, or more accurately falls, the ruins of Wolvsey Palace. Once a great fortress, it’s now a hive of ageing art students lurking in the nooks and crannies busily sketching the crumbling cockeyed profiles. The path back to the bullet ran through manicured green parks and colourful gardens beside the crystal clear River Itchen. We detoured to have a quick look at the restored Old City Mill where the water thunders through sculpted channels to drive the wheel. The Itchen is naturally filtered through several layers of chalk to bubble out so clear the bright green marine grasses are visible rhythmically dancing on the river’s bed. The ducks and large white swans seem to be floating on liquid glass. And I got through that whole paragraph without a pun on Itchen.

From Winchester we swung through the New Forest. We were keenly anticipating a bush walk to blow away the London cobwebs but this part of Britain doesn’t do bush or walks, at least not as we know them in Australia. The forest tuned out to be a handful of venerable oak trees crowded out with scrawny pines. The Radnor Trail, which sounds like a Bibbulmun Track or an Appalachian hike, turned out to be a pebbled service road. No narrow tracks here, no foliage brushing your clothes, no birds in the trees, no bubbling streams or roaring waterfalls; just a thread of stagnant water in the middle of a clearing that looked like your local land management had been through with a bulldozer. The two deer observation platforms turned up deerless. We retired to the bullet deeply dissatisfied.

Determined to have a “nature day” we set course for the south coastal town of Swanage in Dorset, where our map showed a bird sanctuary and waxed lyrical about the dramatic coastline. We swerved off the main drag into a warren of narrow, hedged lanes which brought us out at the little birdie symbol on our Michelin map – the sanctuary at Arne. From the carpark a well-maintained track took us through a privately-owned Carolais stud to vast heathlands dusted with mauve and orange blooms. As we crested the last rise before the bay rafts of cord grass spread out before us. Gulls and Oystercatchers grazed on the glistening mud flats – I’ve always wondered why they’re called Oystercatchers, doesn’t take much to catch an oyster does it? Beyond the aptly named Brownsea Island the town of Poole lay like a mirage across the dull waters of Poole Harbour. A double-decker bird hide furnished views of the birds and wild deer sifting their way calmly through islands of grass.

Not far from Arne we came across the ghost village of Tyneham. Here’s an interesting story, and typically English if you ask me. It was commandeered by the military in 1943 with grovelling apologies and many promises about returning the village to its evacuated residents after the war. Tyneham and the surrounding area became a training ground, eventually for the D-Day landings. After the war the military just refused to return it to its rightful owners and it remains to this day part of a gazetted military firing range. At least the Fascists would have marched in and taken it over and you’d’ve known precisely where you stood. Today, most of the buildings have fallen into disrepair save for the church, the schoolhouse and the old red telephone box complete with antique phone. The most poignant site in the village, though, is the graveyard where there are a number of headstones dated post-1945, one as recent as 1994; villagers who had never really left Tyneham insisted on being interred here.

Swanage had something of a resort feel about it. With an air show and festival coming up it was fairly humming with visitors. There were a few hardy souls down at the beach, a grey sand affair fronting a bay full of dishwater. Along the landward rim a row of small bathing huts, what the poms affectionately call “shallies” which I think is an ambitious corruption of chalets, stretched off into the distance, each one with its own small front “yard” marked off with a kind of plastic fencing. It was all too quintessentially cute.

The atmospheric ruins of Corfe Castle dominated Hartland Moor as we drove around its base and up into the beautiful Dorset greystone village of Church Knowle behind it. The greystone buildings are unique to this part of the country, the slate rooves sometimes so weathered that from a distance they look like melted tar. The cosy New Inn was comfortably crowded but we found a table outside with a panoramic view of a lingering sunset over the patchwork Dorset countryside.

Our stately procession along the Dorset coast continued through Weymouth to Abbotsbury, where the brochures promised a unique beach “experience”. What Aussie can resist a beach experience? The first unique experience at Abbotsbury was having to pay a quid to park with half a dozen other cars about a kilometre from the beach. The second unique experience was arriving on the beach via a long boardwalk to discover that what looked like sand from the distant roadway was in fact pebbles the size of river stones. The third unique experience was the vision of fully dressed families pretending to have fun while avoiding the fourth unique experience, the bloody freezing brown water. Back in the bullet we had a unique amusement experience.

As luck would have it we stumbled upon Portesham during the Possum Fez Wik fete. What’s Possum Fez Wik? I’m glad you asked. In keeping with the quaint English tradition of pronouncing place names in a manner only vaguely related to their spelling, Possum is actually Portesham. Random incidental factoid contained in the Fez Wik programme - Possum is also Latin for “I can”. Fez Wik is an obscure medieval rendition of Festival Week, an annual celebration with its origins lost in the mists of time. I love that shit.

Portesham is a classic Dorset greystone village of chocolate box cottages with thatched and slate rooves. The high cloud had burned off, bathing the green in pleasant sunshine. Locals wandered around in period costume handing out programmes and selling raffle tickets. The stalls carried the usual stuff – jams, cakes, biscuits, tea cosies, teddy bears, handicrafts – and cream teas were laid on in the rectory. I entered the colouring in competition – ages 8 and over – but I’ll never know if I won because the judging wasn’t till tomorrow.

Nearby Hardy’s monument - that’s the sailor Thomas Hardy, Nelson’s favourite – afforded sweeping views of rural Dorset. Puffed quilts of farmland stitched together with hedges and embroidered with small copses rolled away in all directions, from Dorchester down to the south coast which lay now under a low haze.

Hardy’s cottage – that’s the author Thomas Hardy of Far From the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles fame – at Higher Brockhampton was closed. A humble building of grey render with a thatched roof, it was surrounded by an overgrown garden and a small forest with a woodland walk. Not sure whether this is just an urban legend, but the story goes that when Hardy died here his doctor removed his heart in accordance with the author’s wishes so that it could be buried at the cottage in his beloved Dorset rather than at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey where the rest of him would inevitably end up. The doctor performed the procedure in the kitchen; he was called away briefly and left the heart on a bench. When he returned he found Hardy’s cat preening itself and the heart missing. Too many cats, not enough recipes if you ask me.

Next week: the literary pilgrimage continues...