The Road to Little Dribbling (25 page)

One of a great many difficulties with this story was that Geoffrey was writing six hundred years after the events described and, as far as can be told, was making everything up anyway. If Arthur existed at all, he could have been any of several historical figures, only some of whom had a connection to Cornwall. Arthur’s seat, Camelot, may actually have been on the other side of the country in East Anglia. It has been suggested with some plausibility that the name Camelot may have come from
Camulodunum,
the Roman name for Colchester, in Essex. What is certain is that Arthur, Uther, Merlin, and all the others never saw Tintagel Castle for it wasn’t yet built.

I had a respectful look around and read the information panels, then descended to sea level to have a look at a natural feature called (again without historical basis) Merlin’s Cave, then trudged all the way back up to the cliff tops. I walked back into the village to find that it was still packed with people, almost none of whom seemed to be heading for the castle but were evidently content to nose around in the shops looking at candles and tarot cards and the like.

On my first visit, all those years ago, after viewing the castle I returned to the parking lot, hoping that my lady friends would take pity on me and convey me back to the known world—it was, however faint, my only hope—but the space where their car had been was bare. So I walked out of town on the road on which we had come in, presumably without a great deal of thought as to how foolish it was to leave the only inhabited place for miles just as darkness was falling. I can’t imagine what outcome I hoped for, but before long I was hungry and cold and pretty well lost. It was at this point that I came across a lonely farmhouse—and this is, let me say, an absolutely true story—with a B&B sign out front. I could hear quite a lively argument going on inside even before I reached the door. It stopped at once when I pushed the buzzer. After a minute, the door was opened very slightly by a haggard-looking woman. She didn’t speak but just looked at me with an impassive expression that said: “What?”

“Do you have a room for the night?” I asked.

“A room?” She seemed astounded. I expect she had more or less forgotten that she had a sign out front. Then, remembering, she said quickly: “It’s a pound.”

Confused as always, I thought she was describing the nature of the lodging. “A pound like where dogs sleep?” I asked in tentative dismay.

“No, it costs a pound.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’ll be fine.”

She showed me to a room at the back of the house on the ground floor. It was a bit cold and spartan, with a narrow bed, bedside locker, a chest of drawers, and a sink with just a cold tap, but clean.

“Is there anywhere around here I can get something to eat?” I asked.

“No.”

“Oh.”

“I could do you something. Won’t be much.”

“Oh, that would be great,” I said, sincerely grateful. I was starving.

“Cost you another pound.”

“Fine.”

“Wait here. I’ll bring it when it’s ready.”

She left me in the room. Almost at once the most ferocious shouting ensued from a room nearby. It was clear that I had now become part of the argument. Over the next half hour, doors and drawers slammed and voices were continually raised in anger. Something heavy—possibly a toaster—crashed against a wall. Then abruptly all the noise stopped. The next moment my door opened and the woman brought a tray in. It was a wonderful, enormous meal. It included a large slab of cake and a can of beer.

“Leave the tray outside the door when you’ve finished,” she said, then left and the arguing resumed at an even more intense and angry pitch than before. I ate quietly, half expecting my door to fly open at any moment and a man about seven feet tall in bib overalls to be standing there with an ax, but that never happened. Once the woman shrieked and said, “Put that down!” and then things like “You just dare” and “Go ahead, you sick bastard.” There was the sound of a struggle and a chair being knocked over. Then it went quiet for a while and then there were more ructions and the sounds of things being flung. I didn’t know whether to intervene or escape out the window. Instead I sat on the edge of the bed and ate my cake. It was delicious.

I went to bed about 8 p.m.—there was nothing else to do—and listened to the fighting in the dark. After about an hour it moved upstairs, where it continued intermittently until about eleven when at last the house grew quiet and we all slept.

In the morning my haggard hostess brought me an enormous, lovely breakfast on a tray. “You need to go when you finish that,” she said. “I’m going out and I don’t want to leave you alone here with him.” She put the tray on the chest of drawers, accepted two pounds from me and departed. A few minutes later I heard a car go down the driveway.

I ate the breakfast in about seventeen seconds, gathered up my things, and stepped out of my room for the first time since arriving. Down the corridor a man was standing at a mirror adjusting a tie. He looked at me without expression, then returned to the tie.

I let myself out the front door and walked briskly and without a backward glance the four miles to Boscastle, where I got on the first bus that was going anywhere. This was in 1972. Except for my few visits to Penzance, I hadn’t been back to Cornwall since.

Chapter 13

Ancient Britain

I
DIDN’T DO
S
TONEHENGE
justice when I went there in
Notes from a Small Island,
but in those days it really didn’t do itself justice. Back then, the parking lot and visitor center stood conveniently but unattractively near the stone circle, just off the busy A344 highway. The visitor center had the warmth and charm of an army barracks. The exhibitions were grudging, the snack bar grubby. The whole thing was commonly termed a national disgrace.

Well, what a transformation. Today, discreetly tucked away behind a neighboring hill, there rises a sleek new reception area, glassy and inviting, with a generous exhibition space incorporating informative displays and space-age technology. The old parking lot and visitor center and a good stretch of the old A344 have been taken away and grassed over, a blissful improvement. Once there were plans also to put the very busy A303, which skirts the southern edge of the site, into a tunnel, which would have made Stonehenge the silent and solitary wonder it once was, but that plan was eventually rejected as too expensive. Still, with the recent improvements, Stonehenge is a thousand times better than it was until just a couple of years ago.

Not everyone is entirely happy with the new arrangements. For many overseas visitors Stonehenge is just one stop on a whirlwind day tour from London that also takes in Windsor Castle, Bath, and sometimes Stratford-upon-Avon, too. It used to be that such visitors could get the complete Stonehenge experience—see the stones, look around the gift shop, discover to their dismay that there were no nachos or pizzas for sale, buy a box of fudge to eat until something cheesier became available, visit the restroom, put on a plastic poncho because it was evidently time to look a little ridiculous, then climb back on their tour bus and depart—all in about ten minutes. Now, with the new visitor center more than a mile from the stones, it takes that long just to drive to the site, which is more time than people doing the south of England in a day can comfortably spare.

I, however, was enchanted from the moment of arrival. The admission price of £14.90 brought only a small cry of pain to my lips. The new exhibition space was excellent—or as excellent as these things can ever be. It is an impossible task. The exhibition must satisfy people with brains, interests, and language skills of all different capacities, and it must keep the crowds moving along, to accommodate the steady flow of new arrivals from behind, so it can’t invite lingering. But once we have allowed for that, it is awfully good.

Much of our knowledge about Stonehenge is surprisingly recent. For most of my lifetime, Stonehenge was thought to date from about 1,400
BC
, but now it is known to be a thousand years older than that, and a large part of the surrounding earthworks are older still. The cursus, a giant oval ditch nearly two miles long, predates Stonehenge by hundreds of years, as do many of the burial mounds and processional avenues. Something about this site drew people long before anyone decided to erect stones there. Many came long distances—from as far as the Alps and the Highlands of Scotland—but for what purposes precisely will probably never be known.

Nothing of course is more mysterious than the great stone circle itself. The Stonehenge we see today was built from two types of stone: sarsen, an immensely hard sandstone that forms the giant uprights, and bluestone, which was used for the smaller encircling stones. The sarsens were brought from the Marlborough Downs, which are generally described as nearby, but you try dragging an eighty-thousand-pound rock twenty miles over open ground and see how often you use the word “nearby.” Today seventeen of the big stones are still standing, but once there may have been thirty. The smaller but more numerous bluestones—eighty or so of them altogether—came 180 miles from the Preseli Hills of western Wales. That is truly extraordinary. How did people in lowland England know about the existence of special stones on a mountaintop in distant Wales? If they thought the stones were sacred, as they clearly must have, why didn’t they build their shrine in Wales? Why go to the immense effort of bringing them all the way to Salisbury Plain? It wasn’t to help complete the great stone circle that we see today. We now know that the bluestones were brought to Stonehenge five hundred years before the great stone circle was built. This is another new fact, known only since 2009. As with everything at Stonehenge, the more we learn the more wondrous and inexplicable it becomes.

When I first came to Stonehenge in the early 1970s, you were still allowed to wander among the stones, to touch them and lounge against them and perch upon them. Soon afterward, however, that practice was stopped in the interests of preservation and everyone was made to stay on an outer encircling path, which is clearly a shame. At the new visitor center they have addressed this problem by placing two full-sized replica stones—one a bluestone, one a sarsen—just outside. Visitors can thus feel and inspect both types of stone before they see the real thing, which is a great help. Sarsen is a sandstone, but harder than granite. The display block at the visitor center lies on its side on wooden rollers, to show how it is believed the stones were moved. It is an excellent presentational stroke because it conveys the immensity and weight of the thing instantly.

Most people travel to the Stonehenge circle from the visitor center on a conveyance called a land train, but a discerning few elect to walk—a much better option because it gives you a chance to settle into the landscape and get a sense of the spaciousness of Salisbury Plain. You see the stones for the first time from about a half mile away and below you as you emerge from a stand of trees at the top of a long, low hill.

At first sight, they seem surprisingly modest, dinky even—we are used, after all, to seeing big buildings in our world—but with a little effort you can imagine the awe it must have evoked in people who had never encountered anything larger than a hut. And it actually takes no effort at all to be struck silent by the beauty and perfect majesty of it. You realize at once that this is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary things ever created by humans, and it is all the more remarkable for being totally without precedent. The wonder of Stonehenge isn’t just the energy and organizational skills necessary to get it built, but the vision of it.

How, in every sense of the word, did they do it? How did anybody get the idea, how did they persuade hundreds of people to join in the endeavor, how did they find and select the right stones, haul them across the country, shape them to perfection, heave them into position? How anyone could conceive such a harmonious assemblage in a world with nothing to compare it with is a mystery way beyond answering. And it was all done by people who had no metals to work with, no tools sharper than flint or antler.

Why Stonehenge was built where it was is a question not easy to answer, even speculatively. The site is not especially prominent. It isn’t served by a mighty river or bounded by natural grandeur. The materials necessary to construct Stonehenge were all far away. There must have been other places easier for pilgrims to reach. Yet, for some reason, unknown numbers of people invested vast amounts of energy and thought into making one of the most literally perfect structures ever made. The fastidiousness of it is staggering. The Stonehenge site slopes slightly, but the builders allowed for that and made the uprights different heights so that the lintels would remain perfectly horizontal all the way around. The stones are not standing on top of the ground, like dominoes on a tabletop, but are embedded in the earth, in some cases up to a depth of eight feet, to keep them from toppling. Somebody wanted them still to be standing forty-five hundred years later. The sides of the lintels are gently curved, so that they can neatly fit a circular structure. This was a meticulously engineered monument.