Midsummer Days and (more) Imagined Geographies

Two journeys

Midsummer has been and gone. I spent the solstice weekend in Gloucestershire with two close friends, from school and university days, and then attended the mehndi celebration for another close friend’s son, whom I have known since he was born. It has already lodged in my memory as two perfect summer days full of colour, vitality, heat, friendship, celebration, and food, spent in the county of my childhood. Living close to the sea down here in the south-west, heat waves rarely hit us with the full force that can be felt further up the country and, although I always feel a degree of anxiety about spending extended time in heat (I am red-haired after all), I rather enjoyed the slow adjustment to living in the manner that such heat demands and the privilege of a weekend off work allows: rising early, lounging in the shade of the garden, whiling away hours in conversation and memories with dear friends, cooling down in the twilight as the bats began the fly.

Just sometimes, weather, place and imagination converge in glorious medley. My short drive from my friend’s house in Nailsworth to my other friend’s house in Prestbury, barely an hour long, was one such occasion. I could have taken the longer but faster route on the motorway, but instead I chose to follow the Painswick Road to Cheltenham, an old favourite from many years ago. I look forward to reading Rob Cowen’s book The North Road, where he follows the A1 up through England, and I understand well the imaginative power that a road can exert on you. The Painswick Road is the local name for the A46, a main road starting in Bath and heads north-east following the Cotswold escarpment towards Cheltenham. From there it skirts Evesham and Stratford-upon-Avon, both of which have childhood resonance, before heading into the less-familiar land past Warwick. It loses its way a little around the East Midlands conurbations of Coventry and Leicester, before a strong straight finish through Newark, Lincoln and culminating in the east port of Grimsby. A road that dissects the country in half, perhaps even along ancient Mercia and Anglian lines. Perhaps one day I’ll travel the whole route, but on that midsummer day, I picked the road up in Stroud.

Stroud is full of unsettling memories, for it was our first home together after a traumatically unsuccessful attempt to secure residency in Australia, where most of G’s family lived, and where he had spent his childhood. I passed Folly Lane where we renovated our first house together and from where it was a two-minute walk to my brief job in a parent education charity based in an old stone building at the foot of the hill (one of seven in Stroud), with the lovely Debbie and Deb. Here I reeled from the upheaval of leaving my home and work in the Lake District, but the place began the slow process of making home together and finding a place to belong.

The road winds up through close woodland to Painswick, where the buildings on the narrow main street were almost luminous in the morning sun, like the Cotswold stone had some inner light it was gifting back to the street. Two women in smart linen dresses shone as they walked down the narrow pavement. My family came from around this northern edge of the Cotswold escarpment and from the many journeys I made into the Cotswolds when they were alive, I recall the light and this glow of stone. I was tempted to turn off at Stamage’s Lane to find the stone house that we almost bought to renovate, the one that slipped away, but the road pulled me on, past the sign to Cranham where as a teenager I tackled the Cotswold Marathon even with friends, 30 miles walked overnight in February along the Cotswold Escarpment from nearby Gloucester. I recall I made it three-quarters of the way before the knee-high snow we had to plough through in soggy boots got the better of me. Checking Google, I find the event is still going strong and astounded to find the Sealey Trophy (my family surname), with its little leather boot, is still being handed out to the fastest winners. There’s even a Risk Assessment with what to do in Extreme Weather, an administrative detail that was sorely lacking in 1984.

I'd been reading Laurie Lee’s delightful As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and back on the road, I looked across to the ridge of the Slad Valley where he left his mother waving farewell:

I looked back again and saw the gold light die behind her; then I turned the corner, passed the village school, and closed that part of my life for ever.

The road wound up through the woodland, with fields of gold and fawn reaching out to the right across the valley. Heat bubbled up from grassy fields, sheep hid in shady hedgerows. It resonated with Lee’s description of the land he crossed heading east:

White elder-blossom and dog-roses hung in the hedges, blank as unwritten paper, and the hot empty road – there were few motor cars then – reflected Sunday’s waste and indifference. High sulky summer sucked me towards it, and I offered no resistance at all.

It was a scene unchanged since my childhood, and perhaps even since the 1930s when Lee walked to Spain. Unchanged in appearance perhaps but, under the surface, beyond the hedgerows, the world always changing, compressing, ageing. Further down the road, a vast flat plain - the site of Gloucester and its close neighbour Cheltenham - opened to my left and as I dropped down the escarpment into Shurdington, where the heat intensified in a moment. Whole fields were consumed in hot dusty noise, being swallowed by the construction of new builds. I entered Cheltenham along the Bath Road, its busy narrow street where I had shopped and revelled with family and friends in years past, then drove alongside the hospital where my dear great-uncle and aunty died decades ago, one by one, taking Laurie Lee’s old Gloucestershire with them. I was deeply rooted in this old world by the time I reached Rachel’s house in Prestbury. But, then, we whiled away the hot afternoon in the shade of an umbrella, first in the Royal Oak, then in her garden, and the future hurtled towards us, as we shared our own progress, plans and dreams.

Loved our mehndi outfits and having a sun-downer in Nailsworth

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Much of my writing in this Substack is about place and how I have come to know my parish over the years through my walks. But over the past three years, I have come to know my place in a different, more expansive, way, through cycling. The pace at which we travel through a landscape has a deep bearing on how we experience that place. On the slowest end of travel, the pleasures of walking have been well charted by many authors but on the speedier end, driving for pleasure probably ceased in the late ‘30s soon after the Michelin Road Maps and travel guides were published, enticing motorists out for spins in the countryside. When I was a child it was still normal to hear older people speak about going out for a Sunday drive, but the idea that one might take the car out for a spin for pleasure these days is almost impossible to imagine. It has been a joy to rediscover cycling in my middle years, for it surely finds the sweet spot between the two: slow enough to allow me to really sense the place as I travel through it and powerful enough to take me miles further than my feet can in a day.

The concept of place is a fluid and slippery one. On the one hand, it is a physical reality full of visceral details - rocks, tarmac, signs, buildings, trees, bodies of water. On the other, we cannot escape from the ways in which we construct places in our minds and the representations of place we encounter. Each physical place, rooted in geology and cloaked in human and more-than-human endeavours over millennia, has its own imagined geography. My earlier account of driving along the A46 is one such imagined geography, but allow me share another.

One of our cycling ambitions has been to circumnavigate the lower Tamar estuary, a route of around fifty miles. After a hiatus of almost four years, I recently made the decision to complete my two-thirds written novel, which I have set on the Cornish banks of the Tamar. There is a small section of land, between Cotehele in the north and St. Mellion in the south, which I have never visited in all my years living in West Devon, and it is here that I have set my novel. Our cycle trip around the Tamar would take in this place, making the journey one with high stakes attached, as my physical encounter with place rubbed up against my imagined geography. My deepest and unspoken fear was that the veil would be lifted by the mundanity of a place that was no different to all the others and that my imagination, stilted at best, would find it near impossible to continue with my writing.

It was a particularly fine day shortly before the solstice that G and I set off with the aim of completing the Tamar circuit that would see us cross over the Tamar Bridge into Cornwall in the south, travel up the western banks of the river as it narrows towards the northern crossing at Gunnislake, and back into Devon. Much of our chosen route would pass through the Tamar National Landscape, an area of outstanding natural beauty – this map shows it off a treat (if you want to have a sneak review of where my novel is set, it is in the small green bulge beneath Cotehele ;) ). After a brief dip in the sea near the Waterfront pub on West Hoe in Plymouth, we cycled up through the western towns of Stonehouse and Devonport, formerly the Three Towns of Plymouth. We shot past the grey granite walls of the docks hiding their dark military secrets and onto the Tamar Bridge before we knew it, startled by the ease with which the cycle lanes had carried us safely through the busy streets.

River view from Jubilee Green, Saltash

On the other side in Saltash, we peeled off the bridge and down an old steep hill towards the waterfront, pausing to take in the river view from the ‘other side’ in a small park, with Victorian ironwork lampposts and benches. We found Pill Lane on the northern edge of the town and picked up a narrow muddy bridleway through dense woodland that hooked up to the cycle path on the footbridge over the A38 at Carkeel roundabout. Another recharging pit stop at Costas (we have electric bikes), a brief stop to lust after the new bikes at Certini’s, then back deep into the shady leafy countryside alongside the river. Down through the strangely named Botus Fleming where a large house was still being built on the small parcel of land we had almost bought over ten years ago. The air was still and hot by now, the sun reaching its zenith in the sky, but the deep lanes along the river were deliciously cool. We couldn’t avoid a short and alarming spell on the dusty hot tarmac of the main road north at St Mellion, as large heavy trucks squeezed past us, but then we dipped out again and found Crocadon Farm, a beautiful old farm building, now a restaurant and café, set in acres of waving golden grass on the slopes of the river. I could barely tear myself away from the cool interior of the stone café, with its door open to the baking hot courtyard beyond, but soon we were back cycling through delightful lanes down to Halton Quay.

Approaching Halton Quay

We were entering the places in which I have set my novel and I think I held my breath as we sped down the steep hill, the river shining in brief glimpses through gateways and over hedgerows. Halton Quay has a pivotal role in the story, and my characters live and work amidst the cottages and fields around there, so this was the moment of truth. I propped my bike on the dusty gravel near the river and watched its brown expanse slide past me. The air was heavy with heat, but it was still, quiet, just the faint sound of a breeze in the trees behind us. It was an enchanting place. By some strange combination of intuition, close study of Ordnance Survey maps, and luck, I had chosen an enchanting setting in which to express the core theme of my novel: how being close to nature transforms us.

Halton Quay

The lanes up to Cotehele are the lanes along which my characters walk, and I had an uncanny sense of travelling through the lanes of my own imagination. After an ice-cream stop at Cotehele Quay, we struggled up the lanes to Gunnislake before being rewarded by the long steady sweep down into the town. Back across the Tamar, far narrower now, amongst the traffic, heart pumping as we climbed the hill on the other side, up onto the Bere Peninsula, back in Devon. It was an easy ride down the backbone of the land towards Denham Bridge, which crosses the Tavy hurtling towards the Tamar, and one final slow climb home back home to our village.

Since that day, my mind has re-arranged itself and a fuller picture of the Tamar valley has emerged to take its place in my writing bones. It is a rich and complex picture, a lived experience now. It is etched with deep lanes, golden fields and old apple orchards and, now and then, there are glimpses of the slow quiet brown river down there in the valley, doing its old appearing and disappearing trick, its ancient work of gathering and carrying the water of this land, out beyond the people places, out to where it meets the salt, out to the ocean.