The Karleton Kreeper

The song of the lark was abroad in the Marsh, with March greening the tips of the willows – but in Hugh Barde’s heart it was December.

He’d come out of his door in disgust, and now stood in the shadows, looking at his courtyard in deep dissatisfaction. Damn Hildegard! She’d been at him again. The same bloody subject – Sir Guillaume. How much better their knightly neighbour was as landlord. How much more successful. How much better maybe even as a man.

The despicable knight– him, a knight! – had just expanded his estate again, so his holdings now nudged right up against Hugh’s on two sides. The little hill on which Sir Guillaume’s handsome castle stood had always been irritatingly visible from Hugh’s chamber window, but now his churls could also be seen not far from Hugh’s front door, cutting brushwood and digging a ditch to drain the two carucates Hugh had not been granted by the King.

Guillaume, it was well known, was also manoeuvring to get the acres of waste along the coast road – right where Hugh had always intended to plant his town. Soon the jumped-up bastard’s corn would be waving right in front of Hugh’s own gates, his sheep baa-ing balefully on all sides. If this wasn’t stopped, soon the fame of the Bardes would start to fade, their line bleed into the peasantry. One day, Hugh thought, trees could be growing in this garth, uprooting all the Bardes’ embankments.

Guillaume, blast him to Hel, was cousin to the King, thanks to artful marriage into one of the oldest families in Falaise. That was why he was granted lands. That was why he was Lord Justiciar, holding life and death over the district, and with entrée at Court. All this, although both Barde lines were older, and incomparable at war. Yet Hugh’s father – a descendant of both Charlemagne, and the man who had won the way up out of the Malfosse – hadn’t even been given permission to fortify his own bailey! Hugh looked around sourly, thinking how shabby his holdings seemed, and how small. Ever since coming back from the wars, everything had seemed unsatisfactory.

It appeared not even Heaven favoured the family. Hugh had spent three whole years in the Holy Land, and at Aleppo had felled the Saracens’ giant champion – while Guillaume had stayed at home eating, reckoning up deeds and scrip with his fat fingers and soft hands. They didn’t even have a halfway-decent house-chaplain, Hugh reflected bitterly, as he noticed that shaven-headed spiritual advisor slinking out of the chapel, and towards the kitchens with their ale-barrels. As well as being a sot, he was also ignorant and lecherous, spending less time with the Church Fathers than with the miller’s mooncalf daughter.

Hildegard couldn’t really understand the way courts worked. She was only an English noblewoman, and so scion of a failed nation – although that little detail didn’t stop her having commanding airs. Hugh’s mother had had these too – sniffily conscious of her Mercian bloodline, and obviously regarding her husband’s people as brutal arrivistes. Once, when especially exasperated, Hugh’s father had confided in him that he wished he had found some nice quiet bride from the old country.

National pride lurked in even the mangiest and muddiest of Karleton’s vassals, for all their bowing and scraping and tugging of their stringy forelocks – as if they still hated, just waited to overturn their nation’s fate. Our nation’s fate now, Hugh corrected himself glumly. Two of these half-fellow countrymen trundled past at that moment, inclining their heads in what Hugh was sure was false fealty, towing a cart piled with fresh-cut reeds. Hugh looked sourly at their smocked backs, suspecting they were smirking.

Hugh’s Norman ancestors had now been in England for over a century, and of course his English antecessors since time out of mind. Hugh’s Norman grandfather had symbolically placed their bailey on the outline of an ancient fort. Yet Hugh still often felt he was not fully of this place. He wasn’t quite accepted, not privy to its secrets – didn’t know its still half-heathen gods. The full-bloods seemed a people of primitive beliefs, dwelling in a realm of ghosts.

Their superstitions could be contagious, even for Hugh, who had read a little, and travelled widely. There were odd moments, even on the bravest of days in the season of the year, when Hugh was eager on the trail of the boar, that he would find himself drifting into peculiar reveries, as if suddenly seeing himself from outside. All earthly sounds would die away, and he was suddenly unsure about where on earth he was, and what he was doing and why. Moments when it seemed nothing was real.

Some unanticipated movement might cause him to pause – or breaking through an arras of trees to find some hot and muffled clearing, where something important seemed just about to happen, or maybe had just been. Moments when the only noise was Bayard’s breathing, as the great big-eyed bay laid back his ears in fear, and goosebumps rose along his glistening neck. Some deeper than usual dappling or shadow – the monstrous shape of some trunk – the way roots seemed to swarm out of the ground… Hugh would foolishly imagine darting eyes amid the tangling leaves, cold watchers among the boskiest brakes of thorn.

There were wolves out here sometimes, of course, and cats – not to mention brybours, wandering robber-gangs who sometimes stooped to murder, about whom Guillaume naturally did nothing. The only crime he cared about was poaching, as might have been expected from such a voluptuary – who reportedly enjoyed watching miscreants being beaten in his basements.

But Hugh also sensed less corporeal dangers – dangers not easily driven away by the angriest barking of alaunts, or the most stoutly-wielded steel. The boars themselves could be more than just meat – capable of biting and excreting as burningly as any bonnacon, giving off infernal fetor, some even capable of shapeshifting. Witches still lingered in some corners of the woods, and leaf-clad wodewoses padded the greenest glades of all.

Even out on the open moor there were sunsets that seemed significant, dangerous dawns, and aery phenomena. The moon sometimes had a corona, at that season when ice-floes encrusted the beach, and your breath hung before your face like your essence escaping. On the night the old king had died at Thorney, a flaming star had arced over Karleton, charging eastwards at colossal speed before dousing its glim somewhere out at sea. The year of the Great Hunger, a vast skeleton had been seen by many out over the waters, grinning and stretching a long arm towards the land.

On the clearest and coldest nights, the alaunts would sometimes bay for unknown reasons, joined by the limers and greyhounds, signalling something unseen. These would awaken other dogs, and so others, and so others – on endlessly out across the silvery east, across expectant leagues of fen and moor, broad river and misty ditch, making churls curse and scratch on their paillasses, lords stir and mutter in their tapestried chambers, and wakemen look upward in interest. These eldritch alarums could carry all the way to Lincoln, to vex the uneasy moneylenders in their fancy new houses on the Hill, and the canons in the Cathedral, whose slumbers were too often filled with sin.

Even under the fullest light of day’s eye, there were lanes no-one liked going down, and particular pools in the fens, black and cold as could be, showing shivering facsimiles of the firmament, and tremulous reflections of reeds – whole worlds inverted, as if reversed men might be growing downwards into some underland. Summer’s lightning-flash adderbolt flies betokened the nearness of vipers, whose red tongues also lolled forth from the marsh-flowers gathered as simples by the goodwives.

The Anglais thought these pools held hags, or monsters they called nicors, Sir Guillaume had once informed Hugh superciliously (well knowing Hugh’s half-blood inheritance) – serpent-spirits that crept out at night to drain the udders of kine, or batten on the tender throats of children before taking them below. Their vapours were blamed when men sickened in the Marsh with unaccountable fevers, and grew yellow with unhealth and waking dreams. Women grew fractious and thin-haired in the noxious fumes, and brats often died at the dug.Hugh didn’t reject these stories nearly so readily. It couldn’t be denied that strange things did happen.

The Blue Stone, for instance, that had been dragged with such labour from the Bishop’s bovate, had eventually needed to be reinstated to stop the bad luck. Even Hugh’s hall was visited in the night by what the maids called boggarts – casting charms or stealing, sometimes just nuisances, sometimes something much worse. The maids propitiated them with dishes of milk, which would be empty the following day – although Hugh guessed this sometimes had more to do with cats, house-cousins of those at large in the greenwood. Hildegard had one – a grey Grimalkin that would sit with her while she span, glaring at Hugh, and hissing if he came too close. It was with her now, he knew – a changeling for a fine lady’s chamber, a watchful reminder of old darkness under trees.

Hildegard was right, though. It was unfair the way they were treated. If only, he thought yet again, he could find some way to distinguish himself. There were so many things he yearned to do, to turn the waste into fine estate, and secure a future for the boy. He saw the bailey made good, an elegant abbey arising, rows of robbers in gibbets, the trim roofs of a gated town with carts coming clopping from the coast, each carter leaving a token of respect to the Bardes, who had made the Marsh to bloom. 

He turned his head. What was that? Something odd was happening down by the ash-grove. There was a crowd – a very large crowd, several hundreds perhaps, with others coming at a run. They couldn’t allbe from Karleton. But whoever they were, they should all be working, he thought, as he walked their way irately.

But as he neared, he realised the reason for this strange stoppage. One word stood out amid a hubbub of wildly excited noise – wyrm, wyrm. As they noticed his presence, the crowd faltered and fell sullenly silent, looking down, or at each other, or away.

Hugh spotted a solid sort of servitor – Asser of Markebi, the master-mason. “Well, Asser? What is all this?”

Asser cleared his throat. “It’s a worm, sire! They say a great worm has come to Ormesbi – burning everything, eating people! A worm, sire, with a single huge eye like a burning wheel!”

“Nonsense!” said Hugh reflexively – but his heart sank into his stomach. Everyone knew dragons existed outside the tales boys were told – the saint taming the Tarasque, the dreadful Guivre of the Seine, the Shaggy Beast of La Ferté-Bernard, the loathly Lambton worm, Piers Shonks of Pelham, the white wyvern of the West and the crimson firedrake of the Welsh, locked together forever in fight far under Cambria, contesting for the country in eternity.

Had not the most learned geographers written of terrible lizards, and hadn’t Ptolemy set a dragon in the night-sky? Hugh had himself seen a crocodile in the Holy Land, and dragon’s blood on sale in apothecary shops. Kings of England had carried a dragon device. The Conqueror too had been called dragon for his desolations. Were not huge bones sometimes found in fields, or seen in the faces of cliffs? At Conisbrough of the Warennes was a stone showing a writhing beast beset by bishops. Hadn’t Sir Richard Buslingtorp bested a fierce Python just a few years before? The gold he had found afterwards had been the making of his fortune. Tiny dragon-like things could even be seen in Lindsey’s ponds, cousins to the cave-dwelling salamander, which crouched amid all flames unscorched.

In any case, the Bible was clear – such terrors had been in Babylon and would squirm forth again, crawling masters of the ground, agents of Chaos, emissaries of evil, harbingers of The End. Every Rogation-day, the churls carried a dragon effigy while they beat the bounds, immolating it after to feed the fields, and as insult to creeping Pontius Pilate. There would always be such beasts, until all lands were drained and tamed, and the End of Days.

Asser propelled a scarlet-faced man forward. “This is John of Ormesbi, sire. I knew his father – a man right worthy. He has run here to tell us what he has seen this day.”

John looked up defiantly into Hugh’s face, obviously not expecting to be believed.

“This morning, sire, a giant serpent, with wings, and a great rolling eye, landed on our hill like thunder! Longer than the church, it was – taller than the trees, blacker than night, hungrier than the wolf! It ate the sheep, the swine, and some of our people – and scorched up all the earth with its foul breath and trampling claws. Everyone fled! No-one can withstand such! I and all these others ran all the way, to warn you.”

The crowd burst back into babble, while Hugh tried to assess John’s worth. Eventually, he asked, “Did you take this report to the Lord Justiciar?”

“Yes, sire, with these men, and other men from Ormesbi, and Calesbi, and Wormesgay, and Burwell. From everywhere. But the lord just said – well…“. He paused, and looked away in indignation.

“Well?”

“The lord sent down a message, sire, by his steward, saying these were lies, and that we had better return to work, or face whipping!” The crowd groaned and seethed and muttered. “Norman scum! Always the same! That’s how they treat the people!”

John spoke up again: “But these are no lies, sire. I swear it, on the Virgin’s life!”

Asser interposed gravely. “Master Barde, I believe this man is in the right.”

Hugh’s brain was awhirl. Of course Guillaume wouldn’t go. He’d always been a coward, though who wouldn’t be when it came to dragons? Cowardice could never be an excuse, though – not for such as valued their honour. And now all were looking to him. There was no-one else. And sometimes – he gulped – even the worst fears needed facing. At last he nodded.

I believe you, John of Ormesbi! I believe you.” He clapped John on his shoulder, startling him, and himself, with his condescension. “I will go!” he said, and the crowd inhaled in admiration. Before he could change his mind, he started issuing orders. “You, boy – to the hall! Send for the priest Godric, and Athelstan my esquire. Bid them meet me in the courtyard!”

“Yes, sire!” Several boys raced away to be first with the news, as Hugh walked quickly towards his hall, followed by most of the crowd. As he approached, Hildegard was already issuing forth, holding the hand of their wide-eyed son, three-year-old future of the line.

“I have heard this strange news, husband! Is it true? And are you then riding out?”

Hugh nodded rather stiffly, but then Hildegard broke out wonderfully into a radiant smile – a smile he had never seen before. “The Bardes are never fainthearts!” she cried proudly. Hugh straightened instinctively, and then she drew him apart, speaking in low and eager tones. “Our neighbour has spurned this challenge?”

“He has, wife!”

“This then is your chanceour chance! Kill this thing, and tell the King, and Guillaume too is finished. He cannot be Lord Justiciar if he does not do the Lord Justiciar’s work! And then, husband, and then…well, who could be better fitted than a dragon’s bane?”

Hugh was struck by this. But there was one obvious difficulty. “But what if I miscarry! What if… well, what if I don’t come back?”

“You will not fail, husband! But – if you do, then you will have died like Roland – an example to our son, and certain of a place at Heaven’s board. I should be proud to be widow of such a man!”

Hugh couldn’t help wishing she had seemed less easily accepting of that prospect. Hildegard however kept talking, “But I know you can do this, husband. And when you do, you will have your reward. Your rights. Do this thing, for our son. Do it, for your honour. The King cannot refuse you anything if you succeed. And nor” – she paused significantly – “nor could I!”

Hugh could see it all – the grateful countenance of the King – the downfall of Guillaume, reversion of his lands to the Crown and so to him – a barony, and crest – a market charter. Above even these swam that superb new smile of his wife’s – a smile that filled his heart, and seemed to strengthen his sword-arm. He inhaled deeply of fragrant future-time, and a new kind of life with a Lady as wife.

Then his esquire Athelstan arrived, with boys and accoutrements as brilliantly burnished as the day they had been stored – chainmail, breastplate, bascinet, helm, long shield, and sword. Another boy came struggling after, battling to balance the long lance last levelled in the Holy Land. The stable-boy also came hastening, leading Bayard by the bridle, and another boy trotting alongside, tightening the girths of the war-saddle last straddled against paynim in Palestine. Everywhere was frantic with life, as if half the Marsh had come.

“Hold!” Hildegard cried, and all astonishingly did, struck by her command and clarity. “Goodwife, lend me your dirk.” To murmured delight and surprise, she sliced a strip of blue cambric from her own bodice. “Here, husband. My token!” She smiled yet again, but Hugh had no time to dwell even on that as he found himself beset.

The courtyard teemed with clamouring men and women of all ages and degrees, and from several estates, noisily exchanging advice about the best ways to deal with dragons. Lore was dredged up from murky depths, rich and shiny and strange as upcast from a ditch. There was a cacophony of contradictory suggestions, drawn from everywhere and nowhere. “Look for the gold! – Don’t look in its eyes! – Watch for its tail! – Don’t let it speak! – Give it an ox head! – Give it milk! – Bind it with a virgin’s girdle! – Watch for the wart! – Its blood burns fire! – Quench it in the lake!”

Hugh’s soldiering sense somehow asserted itself, and he went over to the corner to urinate before donning his array. He had once disgracefully bewrayed himself outside Jerusalem. As he adjusted his britches, he saw the priest Godric emerging furtively from the fortuitously unattended kitchens, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, as if wiping ale away, which almost certainly he was. Hugh considered him dissatisfiedly; if only there’d been time to bring the Bishop, or even the Abbot from Louth.  

There you are, priest! Look lively! We have a great work to do!” Hugh moved over to the waiting esquire and house-boys, and now stood still among them, arms outstretched, as they began to gear him up. Athelstan’s fingers moved swiftly over Hugh’s sturdy frame, expertly buckling and lacing, every moment weighing him down more heavily.  

“A great worm, sire!” said the priest. “Can it be true?”

“Why not? They’re in the Bible, aren’t they?”

The priest seemed unsure, then brightened. “There was one in the Garden, sire. It tempted the woman! And, err, there were some more, near the end!… Or were those gryphons?”

Hugh snorted. “I seem to remember there were a few more than that! But let’s not worry too much about fine exegetical points!”

The priest smiled ingratiatingly. “Of course not, sire! Of course not, ha ha!” He paused for a moment. “May I just say, sire, how admiring I am of your great courage? And how proud I am to have known you? It has been my great privilege to have served you in howsoever humble a capacity…”

 “You’re still serving, man! You’re coming with me! You, Father, are my spiritual buckler and shield! You’re the best I can do at short notice!”

There was rough laughter from all within hearing as Godric gawped. “Me, sire? You don’t mean it, sire! I mean, you can’t. And…and what about the Rector at Ormesbi? Or Calesbi? I would not wish to impinge on their privileges… Or perhaps Oswald of Burwell …”

Hugh smiled grimly. “Eaten, for all I know! They’re probably choking the beast right now! It’s up to you, I’m afraid, Father. This is your chance! So go and get your book, and your cross, and your water, and get ready to ride – there’s a good priest. In fact, who not put on all your gear? It can’t do any harm. You, boy, go with him to help – and you, get the priest’s palfrey. You, fetch Dagobert and Manu. Today is the hunt of hunts!”

All the dogs had sensed the excitement, and were moving and moaning in the kennels, snapping impatiently at each other, whimperingly eager for the off. With difficulty, the kennel-hands eventually extricated white-and-black Dagobert and brindled Manu, Hugh’s favourites – veteran companions of la chasse, gashed with tusk of boar and tooth of wolf, slobberers over Hugh’s hands, and sires to many lusty pups. They almost pulled their handlers off their feet, nearly strangling themselves as they surged towards their master, drooling and whining. Everywhere was a-thrum with thrilling errantry and an acrid tang of fear, like the end of some age, or the start of a new.

All too soon, Hugh found himself clambering onto Bayard’s broad back, for what he couldn’t stop thinking might be the last time. Athelstan waited stolidly by, on his horse Godwine, Hugh’s lance resting in straps alongside his saddle until called for. The priest was being shoved unceremoniously up onto his mount, the humorously-named Godspeed, tricked out almost comically in full canonicals, holding miserably on with one hand, while the other clutched his book. Vials of holy water and chrism, plus some wafe, were in a bag belted across his body, sohe wasprepared for all eventualities. When he thought nobody would see, he slurped surreptitiously from a large leathern flask. Last came the huntsman and the whipper-in, who would run behind, or in front, depending on the fleetness of the hounds and the closeness of their quarry.

As the little group lined up to leave, an awed silence came down, broken only by the panting and whining of the dogs. Athelstan leaned down to rumple young Athelstan’s curly head, while his wife wept openly. At the back of the throng, the miller’s daughter’s eyes devoured Godric, but he was too preoccupied to notice, muttering intensely to himself. Hildegard stood out easily to her husband – noble in blonde and blue, holding the hand of the infant Hugh. As she and he exchanged a gaze of understanding, he fastened her cambric around his armoured neck, and nodded. She raised her right hand in salute, and smiled as if in wistfulness, or farewell. “Ride hardily, husband!” she called, clear as a church bell.

He weakened – but all eyes were on him – on the Bardes. He turned at last, and said “Let’s go” – and the retinue moved out amid cries of “Good luck!” and “God be with you!” People streamed out through the gates behind, and cheered the plucky party out of sight. Whatever happened hereafter, Hugh knew, Karleton wouldn’t be the same.

The fields fell unnaturally silent and still. Almost like the deserts in Isiah, thought Hugh, habitations of dragons and courts for screech-owls. Tools and barrows and lunch-pails lay where panicking people had dropped them. Bundles of reeds awaited unbound, eels were escaping from a basket, and a tree leaned crazily half-sawn. A cart of stone for the priory at Greenfield stood driverless, its still-yoked oxen grazing unconcerned. A hare that on any other day could have ended up on the high table raced away when it saw them, and a squirrel chittered angrily from an ash. The hounds had stopped barking, but were surging powerfully on, towing their stumbling and swearing attendants.

Hugh cantered at the head of the little line, wondering what he had let himself in for. It had been easy to be brave in the courtyard. But this really might be the last time he rode this road. That really might be his last hare. Those, his last sheep – and that his last oak burgeoning into leaf. Would he see it in full festoon? Would he see his son as man? A murder of crows going over brought back the battle-birds of Acre.

He wondered what his companions were thinking. These might be the last men he would see, and he realised he knew almost nothing of their lives. Yet even those now so cursingly busy with the dogs doubtless also had terrors. As for Athelstan, his esquire of twenty years – even he was an enigma, riding as always behind, expressionless as usual, sure and steadfast as a shieldwall, and just as blankly incommunicative. But the priest seemed the least knowable of all. Hugh had often wondered what possessed a man to take the tonsure, and now it looked like he’d never know. He observed Godric – so puny and uncertain in his seat, so ashen and muttering, letting Godspeed lag – and felt pity with his contempt.

“Ride up with me, priest!” Godric grudgingly spurred alongside. Hugh spoke more jocosely than he felt. “What about a bit of praying, eh? In English, if you like! Better simple faith than Norman blood, eh?” He would have liked Latin, but Godric’s Latin was notorious.

“In English? Of course, sire! Err, let me see, dear Lord, deliver us from evil! Um, shield us from the beast. Err…deliver us from evil. Shield us from the beast that crawls in the dirt…”

Hugh listened impatiently for a while. “What about one of our own? Guthlac, maybe?”

“Good idea, sire! Good old Guthlac! Err, dear Blessed Guthlac, deliver us from evil. Shield us, o sainted one, from the beast that crawls in the dirt, err…”

Hugh shook his head regretfully, and spurred on – searching inside himself instead for words that might suit saints. But he was acutely aware of his inarticulacy, and conscious of certain past transgressions. Maybe any words would be inadequate. Norman blood might be needed after all. Deus vult, he sighed in conclusion, Deus vult – and might to the smiting hand!

The priest fell back. He took another draught from his flask, then another. Godspeed was soon overtaken even by the profane and puffing men on foot, who stared at the priest contemptuously as they were towed past. He fell yet further behind, and Godspeed stopped to tear at grass, as Godric’s flask swiftly emptied.

Not far now, Hugh knew. Not far enough! Ketsbi Lane (medieval records rarely seem to capitalise words like “lane” or “church” (see Calesbi below) and often join them with hyphens to proper nouns, but it’s up to you) unrolled into the valley, and up again the other side, to the crest beyond which he knew they would find…what they would find. Whatever would find them. He registered Calesbi church with its gleaming walls to the south, and Burwell’s little tower to the north – reassuring sights for a once familiar world now in perilous play, his world that might be coming to its end. A storm came even from the blueness behind, clouds piling over the nearby ocean, a sudden squall blowing them on, and setting the trees to frantic dancing. Not far now. Not far enough…

Sky white in front – too white to be right – and then that white was forming a flaw – a wavy uncertainty, shimmering like the air that radiated from the soil in the long month of Leo, cutting off men’s heads, and inverting all elements. A buzzard circling Ormesby Top seemed suddenly to stop, and just wink out. The breath of the basilisk, Hugh groaned, sickeningly realising he had brought nothing to shield his face. The very shape of the wold was snakelike – those tormented stones a supple spine, that boulder a bulging and baleful eye.

An enormous roaring was now around, and a clashing of claws on scales – metal on metal, like the swords they had beaten on shields at Aleppo as they eagerly awaited the infidel attack. Heats of Hel now too, and charge of lightning, and a rank stench emanating from everything – incendiarized exudations of a thousand charnel-houses and cess-pits, worse than the scourings of sickrooms or the foulest fewmets of the wickedest wolf. As Hugh bit back vomit, and fought a desperate urge to flee, vast and sweaty steams swirled down and cloaked the crest in cerements of dread.

Bayard was twitching and whickering, with staring eyes and shining flanks, terrified but still true – true like a steed of ancient times, this wonderful warhorse of the Norman world, the finest mount between England and Jerusalem. Hugh stroked him to soothe, stroked Hildegard’s cloth, and wondered how the world would be for their boy.

Athelstan was now alongside, for the first time ever unsure, eyes huge as Hugh’s, and as affrighted. “Sire, you see…?” But he recalled his duty, and place, and was handing Hugh his lance as the breathlessly boiling and mire-bespattered hound-handlers caught up, their frothing and straining charges only just held in check.

“The dogs, sire?” panted the almost expiring huntsman, as the maddened hounds reared up to claw the air.

“Unleash them!” Hugh somehow said, swallowing down his soul.

The slipped alaunts bounded away berserkers, frothing to be first to find, and rend, leaving their handlers rolling helpless on the ground.

Startlingly in that same second, the priest miraculously materialized, a pale rider on wings of storm, unnaturally upright and even in that moment faintly risible – shouting indistinguishable oaths as he incredibly overtook them all, holding on with one hand while waving the Cross, chasing the hounds towards the crest behind which lay certain death. With the hounds Godspeed melted into the monster’s mists, and vanished from view.

“He’s drunk!” shouted Athelstan, amazed.

“He’s full of spirit all right!” Hugh joked grimly – his last joke – and gritting his teeth and gripping the lance with his gauntlet, with a tremendous shout he spurred Bayard up the slope.  

All images: Derek Turner

The Bishop in winter

Derek Turner is the editor of the Brazen Head, and the author of the cultural history/memoir Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire (2022). He has written for journals including the Spectator, Country Life and the Guardian, and his poetry has appeared in Quadrant.

Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln between 1235 and 1253, was one of the great intellectuals of thirteenth century Europe, and is seen as one of the founders of modern science. He was a poet, preacher, translator of Aristotle, writer of instructional and theological works, and the first English intellectual to think seriously about the nature and physical properties of light. His writings on light were a major influence on Isaac Newton, and are still read today by physicists as well as scientific historians

The Bishop in winter

Back to the city with last of the light

With blackbirds in blackthorns heralding night –

Death under branches, dun season of dearth,

As cold beyond cold beads the East Country earth.     


The Bishop’s steed stumbles, his secret’ry starts,

As their party picks home from farthest-flung parts,

Hoping for hearth as sky’s black flag unfurls,

To swallow all sinners in unfeeling world.


Dark thickens, air thins, numbs fingers and feet,

As steely shoes clink along once-Roman street –

Miles yet to go under stars sharp as swords –

Moon chills still waters at bitter-bleak fords.


But the Bishop sees brilliants – bright spangling gems –

As Greeks once glowed great through his wide-angled lens.

(Ancients who asked of the nature of things

Set fire in the mind of the man with the ring.)


Stars prick the plain and shoot among planets,

Strewn shining diamonds on blanket of jet;

Broderies worked in black covering cloths,

Showing the road for benighted and lost.


Chains of bright Being, strung tapers of Truth,

Worked by great Hand in Universe youth;

Divine by design, O celestial flame,

O Artisan fine, all praise to Your name!


All rays can illumine if seen the right way –

Rushlights for reading, brave bright of broad day,

Flames on friends’ faces, oriflamme of bird’s bill,

Glass that spills sun in his church on the hill.


Tomorrow will stride across seas, swamps and fields,

Gilding all lands as the beaten black yields –

Sun of The Son, most golden of forms,

The world by the Word made suddenly warm.


But now the old Bishop, out here in the dark

Must ride through the small hours bearing his spark –

He shivers, considers new treatises great

And longs for Cathedral, his lamp in the waste.                                                           

“Glorie of Spayne”

I started awake as the plane came into land. The cactuses along the edges of the runway suggested even to my stupefied senses that we were no longer in Birmingham. Distinctly un-English heat fell heavily on our heads and draped itself around our shoulders as we walked into the terminal below the giant, magic word, “Sevilla.” As our taxi whizzed along the Avenida Kansas City into the long sought-for metropolis, we moved surreally sideways in culture, space and time.

Once established in Seville’s old town, we ventured out for a first foray into a streetscape which had not altered in its essentials for several centuries – narrow calles, often cobbled, lined with white several-storeyed houses, with a whiff of drains, interspersed with baroque churches of gilt-encumbered altars, wounded Jesuses and weeping Virgins.

In August, these churches are eerily expectant, open only briefly in the evening, lavish theatrical sets for rare individual worshippers. It is hard to visualize them in Holy Week, when they thrum with eldritch energy, as hundreds of pointed-hooded ‘penitents’ parade monstrances and lurid Passion tableaux into the streets under the regard of thousands – phone-pressing tourists of course, but among these also true believers, witnesses to a faith that still subsists in this land long ago hard-won from Islam.

Wilting after our early start, and unaccustomed to 38˚ heat after an English summer hitherto notable only for its almost complete absence of sunshine, we dined gratefully on Greek salad in the Alameda de Hercules, under the gaze of the Greek god and Julius Caesar standing on the tops of Roman columns – statues of the mythical founder of the city, and the emperor who gave it its first urban statute.

Celtiberian sculpture

Seville is ancient indeed, its locale inhabited by ‘Celtiberians’ at least a millennium before Christ, who founded a town called El Carambolo (later absorbed into Seville’s western suburbs) and traded in precious metals mined in the hills around. Greeks and Phoenicians came to trade in copper, silver and gold, and some settled along the banks of the broad river then called the Tartessos.

The Phoenicians’ settlement was called Hisbaal (a reference to their deity Baal) or Spal, the dankly powerful remnants of which underpin one of Seville’s latest landmarks, built between 2006 and 2011 – the huge wooden structure (perhaps the world’s largest) nicknamed ‘Las Setas’ (The Mushrooms) because of its shape, from the top of which on an August afternoon there are near-blinding views of the brilliant-white contemporary skyline. 

The Romans took Spal from the Phoenicians’ Carthaginian successors (Hannibal’s wife is said to have come from this area), and dubbed it Hispalis – although their chief settlement hereabouts was the colony of Itálica, founded by Scipio, whose well-preserved ruins are just northwest of the present city. They renamed the Tartessos the Bætis, and the surrounding province of Hispania Ulterior (later Hispania Bætica) became prosperous and prestigious, with Emperors Hadrian and Trajan both born in Itálica (possibly also Theodosius) – and the poet Martial a long-time resident, who interestingly records seeing castanet-clicking Tartessian dancers some seventeen centuries before the word ‘flamenco’ was first recorded.

The name Andalusia comes from the Arabic term for the entire Iberian peninsula, al-Andalus, ‘land of the Vandals’ – a reference to the Germanic tribe that overran Iberia after the fall of the Western Empire, and then fought enthusiastically among themselves. One eighth century Visigoth kinglet had the bright idea of requesting military assistance from nearby North Africa, within view just across the Pillars of Hercules. Like many an importer of mercenaries before and since, the unhappy kinglet then found himself unable to get his ‘guests’ to go.

From 711 onwards, Moorish armies surged across much of present-day Spain and Portugal, and famously menaced even France, before ultimate downfall more than seven centuries later, in Europe’s pivotal year of 1492. The Moors were more than formidable fighters; they were also agricultural innovators, instigating impressive irrigation schemes and introducing lemons and the oranges with which Seville is now synonymous. They gave the Tartessos/Bætis its ‘final’ name, Guadalquivir, derived from the Arabic for ‘wide river,’ erected some still-extraordinary edifices and presided over some highly cultivated courtly cultures which both perpetuated Greek learning and encouraged new intellectual experimentation (within politic limits).

Moorish Andalusia is often adduced as an historical example of ‘tolerant’ Islam – a rhetorical counterpoint to other portrayals of Islam as a narrow-minded and rebarbative force bent on global domination. One suspects this is overdone; many of the Christians and Jews who lived under Moorish suzerainty cannot have seen their situation so sunnily. They were subject to onerous special taxes, and there would have been daily indignities. Even by the standards of the early Middle Ages, the annual tribute of one hundred Christian virgins to the Moorish monarch must have grated, while the most tendentious Moorish apologist cannot deny the frequently vicious internecine conflicts of the courts. Some Moorish dynasties were ostentatiously brutal, like the 11th century Abbadid ruler who ‘decorated’ his forts with flowers planted in the skulls of enemies.

Moorish influence is nevertheless everywhere to be seen in southern Spain, and indelible – from repurposed former mosques, and the characteristic castellation of their forts, to the plashing fountains in private courtyards that afford psychological as well as visual relief amidst August’s punishing heats. The Mozarabic Christians living under and influenced by Islam were later mirrored by the Mudéjar Muslims living under and influenced by Christianity, and their cultures run into each other in all kinds of ways – from architectural styles and the colourful azulejo tiles for which modern Spain and Portugal are noted, to cuisine and language. Even the Spanish national hero known as ‘El Cid’ – the eleventh century warrior Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar fought both with and against Moorish forces, depending on circumstances. Andalusia’s still notable Christian ardency may also be a paradoxical legacy of Islam – its defensive fervency a reaction to humiliating centuries of second-class status.   

It is probably impossible to separate ‘Moorishness’ from a more generic ‘Mediterranean’ culture, where modes of living on all coasts have always borne similarities, because of the shared climate and geography on top of millennia of intellectual or more violent interactions. But there is ‘un-European’ exoticism to be found in the culture of Andalusia – a culture which for many outsiders has become a kind of shorthand for all of Spain. Specifically Andalusian traditions such as flamenco, bull-fighting, and tapas – as well as its arid, olive-treed, ruined castle-dotted landscapes – have become stereotypical images of the whole country, which must surely irk many Aragonese, Asturians, Basques, Castilians, Catalonians, and Galicians.

The Moors, so long militarily dominant, eventually became etiolated – divided among themselves, and some of their rulers possibly too ‘civilized’ to worry about their frontiers. Burgeoning Christian kings of an increasingly self-conscious and gradually coalescing Spain placed ever-growing pressure, and Seville was retaken by the Christians in 1248. In 1492, the last Moorish ruler in Spain, King Boabdil of Granada, was forced to hand over the keys of the Alhambra – famously weeping as he looked back on Granada for the last time, for which his mother rebuked him, “You do well, to weep like a woman for what you failed to defend as a man!”

Seville’s most expansive days were now to come, as it became first the launching pad of epic expeditions, and then chief port for the Spanish Empire, safely upriver from dangerous Barbary corsairs, but with easy access to the Atlantic. Audacious navigators set off down the turtle-haunted waterway, most celebratedly Columbus, who may have been Italian but had a crew made up largely of local men. A modern statue of one local boy, Rodrigo de Triana, stands in the Triana riverside district, his plinth bearing the laconic inscription “Tierra!” (Land!) – the single word he shouted when he was the first to espy the Americas.

Magellan’s equally world-altering expedition set out from here in August 1519, five tiny (approximately 50 tons) carracks like the Victoria, tasked with finding a western route to the spice islands. The Victoria was the only one to return, in September 1522, the first ship to circumnavigate the world. Magellan had been killed in the Moluccas, and the Spanish are proud that it was one of their own, the Basque captain Juan Sebastián de Elcano, who completed the voyage. As he wrote in his none-too modest memoirs, “I was the first to close the globe in my wake…my journey has become a legend.”

A seaworthy replica of the Victoria – harbinger of whole Indies fleets – is tied up alongside at Seville, beside a small museum explaining something of the context and consequences of that world-changing voyage. Coloured late fifteenth century portolan charts show carefully inked coastlines as far north as Britain, as far south as the Cape of Good Hope and all around the Mediterranean littoral – but blank or simply sketched spaces almost everywhere else, conveying the immensity as well of excitement of the navigators’ tasks.

The Golden Tower

The Golden Tower nearby, which was once used to store the vast treasures brought home from the Americas, now holds a small naval museum, in which the achievements of earlier Spanish sailors are linked proudly to the modern navy. By the late sixteenth century, Seville had become fabulously wealthy, with a population of over 150,000. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, the Spanish controlled an estimated 80% of the world’s silver, mined in South America (Argentina is named after the Spanish word for silver).

A less well-known commodity was cochineal, which arrived in Seville by the shipload (in 1587 alone, an estimated 72 tons – equivalent to over 10 billion beetles), and sold on under Spanish monopoly – dyeing the famous velvets of Venice, crimsoning cardinals’ robes across the Catholic world, and even Buddhist temples in Siam. This is not to mention Spain’s long domination of the tobacco trade – symbolized in Seville by the Antigua Fábrica de Tabacos, where Bizet’s gypsy Carmen rolled cigars and dreamed of her toreador.

In Spain – at least, in Andalusia – there is little public evidence of the angst presently eating at other Western countries with colonial pasts. To make an anecdotal but possibly not wholly worthless point, many obvious tourists as well as residents (we met Seville residents from Colombia and Venezuela) appear to bear Mesoamerican physical traces, suggesting not just the length of these connections but also an ease with them. Road names and statues referencing the Empire remain sturdily in situ, and buildings like the many national pavilions built for 1929’s hugely ambitious (but unluckily-timed) Ibero-American Exposition retain their original names. Evocative documents like the crew lists, cargo manifests and royal charters of globe-redrawing expeditions are guarded by serious-faced security at the Archive of the Indies, beside the Cathedral. Epic imperial undertakings are almost as intertwined with ‘Spanishness’ as Catholicism.      

Inside the Cathedral – built on the site of a grand mosque, and the world’s largest church by cubic area – is the late 19th century tomb of Columbus designed by the sevillano sculptor, Arturo Mélida. This was originally intended for the cathedral at Havana, but was erected here instead after the Spanish-American War showed Spain’s imperial glory-days were finally over. Columbus’s coffin (which may not actually contain his remains, which were moved several times) is upheld by four imposingly inhuman figures, symbols of the kingdoms of Aragón, Castile, León and Navarra. The lance held in Castile’s free hand once impaled a secondary symbol, a pomegranate – Granada in Spanish, a lapidary insult to the last of the Moors.

The Columbus monument

The main surviving part of the old mosque is the Cathedral’s bell-tower, the Giralda, which was once the minaret. Those uneasy with such old Christian triumphalism ought to recall that the mosque itself had been a triumphalist structure, symbolically built on a base of smashed Roman statuary. The Giralda – named after its sixteenth century giraldillo (weather vane) – is now the stereotypical symbol of Seville, seen everywhere on tourist ephemera, and more lastingly in the many old paintings seen around the city, showing the city’s two patron saints, Justa and Rufina, upholding the tower to prevent it falling during the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. The Cathedral displays a fine Justa y Rufina by Goya – although the most famous painters associated with Seville are Murillo, Velázquez and Leal, all born in the city, with examples of their works on display in churches, museums and former palaces.

The most beautiful artwork in the Cathedral itself is undoubtedly the altarpiece designed by the Flemish carver Pieter Dancart, which was begun in 1482 and took 80 years to complete (the Spanish controlled all or most of modern-day Holland and Belgium between 1556 and 1714). Showing 45 scenes from Christ’s life, it is the world’s largest altarpiece at almost 90 feet high and 72 feet wide, and is coated with an estimated three tons of gold. The Spanish love of precious metals also extends to silver, with the word “Plateresque” (‘in the manner of a silversmith’) coined to describe first Spanish, and then any architecture, of the 15th-17th centuries that combines Gothic proportion and scale with especially ornate or flamboyant designs.

The ponderous lugubriousness of the Spanish brand of Catholicism is everywhere evident in Seville – perhaps most searingly in the Hospital de la Caridad, founded by Don Miguel de Mañara (1627-1679), and completed in 1674. Mañara had been a notorious youthful libertine, until one day he had a terrifying ‘preview’ of his own funeral procession. Shaken to his soul by this ‘sight’ (and an outbreak of plague, which killed thousands of Sevillians), he joined a local brotherhood, whose avocation it was to inter the bodies of criminals, plague-victims and vagrants, and used his family fortune to found the Hospital for the relief of the poor and dying – for which it is still used. Dignified venerable men saunter in and out of the stately complex, or sit outside the front in short-sleeve shirts, composedly awaiting destino.

The Hospital’s magnificent chapel was decorated by eight paintings by Murillo, and four of his works are still here; the others, looted by the French during the Peninsular Wars, ended up ecumenically in London, Ottowa, St. Petersburg and Washington. There are also two striking paintings by Leal, on the theme of the Triumph of Death – one showing a trampling skeleton pointing to the words In ictu oculi (‘in the blink of an eye’), and the other, inscribed Ni más, ni menos (‘no more, no less’), showing a rotting coffin and a decomposing bishop so gruesomely realistic Murillo marvelled “you have to hold your nose to look at it.”

Leal painting at the Hospital de la Caridad (detail)
Leal painting at the Hospital de la Caridad (detail)

Mañara himself decomposes in the crypt, although his stone was set at his request in the chapel’s doorway so it could be stepped upon by all comers. He also left a small body of disconsolate writings, translated as Discourse on Truth. Here is a characteristic extract:

Seek out Alexander, call for Scipio, and perhaps their ashes will be in some mud wall or in the soil of a garden…Who would believe that the body of Julius Caesar, whom the whole world feared, is now growing cabbages in an orchard?

From Seville’s Roman fathers, Mañara came even closer to home:

Consider a vault; enter it with consideration, and set yourself to looking at your parents, or your wife (if you have lost her), or the friends you knew; consider the silence. Not a sound is heard; only the gnawing of the maggots and the worms can be heard. And where is the noise of pageboys and lackeys? Everything comes there; observe the jewels of the palace of the dead: some spider webs.

Upstairs in the Hospital’s hot, still and silent treasury, possibly overcome by the horror of the human condition, a security guard dozed at his desk.

Alcazar is another word derived from Arabic, and examples may be found in many Spanish towns. Seville’s Alcazar is one of the best known and largest of these citadel-palaces – begun in the eighth century on the site of a Roman barracks, and later strengthened and adorned by the Abbadids, and then the 12th/13th century Almohads. The Alcazar we see today is however mostly a Christian construction, begun not long after 1248. King Pedro I of Castile and León (r. 1350-69), amusingly nicknamed both “The Cruel” and “The Just,” carried out major reconstruction cannibalising other Moorish buildings, and much of this is still visible today.

Pedro was certainly capable of cruelty, notoriously murdering the Archbishop of Santiago – and, here in the Alcazar, his own cousin (Pedro himself was later murdered, stabbed to death in a tent). On the other hand, he generally protected Jews, merchants and peasants, and sided with the Moors on occasion. One emir gave him an enormous ruby as reward for assistance rendered, which ended up in the English Crown Jewels. The English took Pedro’s part in the Castilian Civil War of 1351-69, the Black Prince personally helping him win the Battle of Navarette of 1367. Two of the daughters Peter had with his pulchritudinous mistress, María de Padilla – so beautiful it was said courtiers vied to drink her bath water – married sons of England’s Edward III, so becoming wives to the first Dukes of both York (Edmund of Langley) and Lancaster (John of Gaunt). He is honoured in Chaucer’s ‘Monk’s Tale’ – “O noble, O worthy Petro, glorie of Spayne.”

Back in Pedro’s dream-palace, there are marble-columned windows, arched and vegetation-shaded verandas, pierced pendant friezes and fretwork and overhanging rooves, and syncretical juxtapositions, with Christian lion symbols ‘guarding’ the gates, and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s personal motto Plus Ultra (‘Yet Further’) appearing on walls near older Kufic inscriptions still lauding Allah. The frantic and repetitive geometric patterning of Moorish wall-tiles seen here and in many other places strongly suggest artistic frustration of not being allowed to depict figures; beautiful though the tiles undoubtedly are, they offer little human interest.

Through a great door to the right is the Salón del Almirante, named in honour of Columbus’s official title of Gran Almirante (Great Admiral). In this suite of rooms, Columbus, Balboa and others discussed and plotted some of the earliest American voyages, and changed the world. In the Capilla de los Navigantes, a striking 16th century altarpiece shows the Virgin protecting precisely-drawn Spanish ships under her cloak, as well as Columbus and Charles V.

Outside, sun-punished brick walls and Roman-to-medieval columns surround green rectangles of water gulped by goldfish, while red dragonflies oviposit eggs doomed too to be engulfed. Tourists wearing alarming ensembles sip endlessly from plastic bottles, dutifully press audio-guides to moisture-beaded ears, and photograph themselves with fountains. Green parakeets make a similar chattering commotion high up in the crowns of palm trees and among the prickly pear and rosemary, and higher still screaming swifts dash in search of dipteran dinners. Choruses of cicadas chirr and click halfway-down, and ground-level grasshoppers perform prodigies of propulsion flying from your feet. Blackbirds bounce across browned grass, sparrows spik in verdant box-hedges, and geckos charge up the plinths of classical heroes.

Trees are among the chief adornments of southern Spain, valued by enlightened planters over the centuries not just as shelter-givers and food-providers, but often for their own sakes. These trees come from everywhere – Africa, Asia, the Americas and even Australia – planted by botanical benefactors but now abundantly naturalised in this country which scarcely knows snow. Cypresses and pines define boundaries, and mark out classical prospects. Oranges and lemons aromatise and stud even the severest streets, offering festive-hued fruits among arsenic-green foliage. Three-hundred-year-old planes peel picturesquely and susurrate in public squares. Bays and laurels offer flavours for gazpacho, and evergreen crowns for victors. Almonds, avocados, bananas, figs, pears and pineapples prosper in gardens and parks. Enormous rubber trees with writhingly restless trunks spring dynamically skywards and drop hard small seeds with a clack onto the pavements. Cactuses stand stark as skeletons, and palms like punctuation marks, their fronds often fondly intertwined in city balconies by those recalling Christ coming to Jerusalem.

The Holy City comes to mind again not far from the Alcazar, in the Casa de Pilatos – ‘Pilate’s House’ as conjured by the Marqués de Tarifa upon his return from Jerusalem in 1519, where he was said to have seen the study in which the Roman decided the Galilean’s fate. A charmingly anachronistic ‘replica’ of this room stands within a ducal home rich in realer antiquities, including a statue of Athene that may go back to the fifth century BC. Black and white mosaics and reflecting fountains cool down courtyards, and creeping plants climb vermilion walls towards unbroken blue. A column in the chapel is supposed to represent the one at which Christ was flogged at Pilate’s order. Another Rome-recalling tradition tells of an orange tree in the garden sprouting from the spot where a servant unthinkingly dumped the ashes of the Emperor Trajan.

Out beyond the city limits, old olives define the rustic scene, twisted veterans of countless droughts somehow still standing on red earth and endlessly recirculating dust, offering oils for the people and shade for black belligerent bulls. Holm oaks shed acorns for the long pigs whose desirable dried jamón hangs from hooks in supermarkets and delicatessens alike, sweetened and wizened from air-curing, or stained by old smokes.

We come into Cádiz – which claims to be the oldest city in Europe, founded in the second millennium BC – from the north, along an equally venerable highway. Navies of Carthage, Rome and Spain were stationed here, and still are (it is also the base of the US Sixth Fleet) – sleek grey frigates visible from the road, elegantly dangerous presences among the Atlantic haze. Its strategic importance attracted unwelcome English attentions often during England’s long wars against ‘the Don.’ In 1587, Drake made havoc in the harbour, ‘singeing the king of Spain’s beard’ as he exulted to Elizabeth, provoking the metaphorically scalded Spaniard to launch the following year’s unlucky Armada. In 1596, the Earl of Essex did more singeing, and Nelson in 1797.

Cádiz shimmers with sea-longing, poised perfectly on the very edge of Europe, every azure horizon beckoning to adventure. A botanical garden along the front contains rare trees from as far away as the Antipodes, and huge cruise ships bulk along the seafront. We raced across burning beach sands to plunge into welcome waves, among tourists but also natives (gaditanos) – a very ‘continental’ blend of highly respectable matrons in voluminous one-pieces, and tattooed and topless young. Salt affects the very stone of Cádiz, coating, pitting and weakening buildings, including the austerely grand Cathedral, which towards the end of the 20th century began weeping stone onto the congregation. 

We downed paella in the plaza before the Cathedral, the sun refracting through soap-bubbles blown by a children’s entertainer. Small children chased these sprites across the square, while a saxophonist playing pop excited epidemic chorea among slightly older tourists, with groups of up to 50 dancing along despite the heat. It seemed appropriately Saturnalian in a city celebrated for exuberant Carnaval.

The Cathedral crypt contains the remains of Manuel de Falla, born in Cádiz in 1876, composer of Nights in the Gardens of Spain and most famously, El Amor Brujo – notes from which sound out upon the hour from the clock of the town hall. His cantata La Atlántida is inspired by the view of the Atlantic from Cadíz, and the tenth of Hercules’ Twelve Labours, the task of capturing the cattle of the three-bodied monster Geryon, whose island of ‘Erythia’ is identified with this area.  

As well as evocative, the city is elegant and prosperous, chic with 19th century promenades and smart restaurants, and famously liberal in its politics. In 1812, the Cortes of Cádiz was set up as the first Spanish parliament which aimed to represent all classes, and all parts of Spain and its dependencies. It ratified the Constitution of Cádiz, Spain’s first constitution (and one of the world’s first written constitutions) – which established the country as a constitutional monarchy under Joseph Bonaparte, theoretically with almost universal male suffrage and a free press. It was suppressed just two years later, after the French had been expelled and Fernando VII restored – at the urgent demand of the populace. That Constitution is now, arguably ironically, seen as something of a democratic landmark.

The Alhambra

In 1832, the American writer Washington Irving published his fourth book on aspects of Spanish history, Tales from the Alhambra. The bestselling author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle had been much influenced by Walter Scott, and it shows in all his Spanish works, which range from highly romanticised histories to straightforward historical fiction. He sparked a huge interest in what had long been an overlooked era, in a poor part of a declining country. He was besotted with Spain, which he had first visited in 1826 while attached to the American Embassy, and saw the Alhambra as the country’s mystical heart. Granada in particular captured his imagination, and he had already published The Conquest of Granada (1829), which fictionalised the centuries-long struggle which ended in 1491, with the capitulation of Boabdil the Unlucky. As he wrote in Tales, “To the traveller imbued with a feeling for the historical and poetical, the Alhambra of Granada is as much an object of veneration as is the Kaaba or sacred house of Mecca to all true Moslem pilgrims.”

He spent several months in the dilapidated and war-damaged old fortress, in a state of exaltation, sleeping fitfully in former palatial apartments and breaking fasts in the celebrated Court of the Lions. His panegyrics encouraged other writers to come, and so ineluctably today’s tourists, who descend on the town by the million each year.

The 2023 edition of Rough Guide to Andalucía waxes Washingtonian in calling the Alhambra “the most exciting, sensual and romantic of all European monuments.” But were Irving to visit now, he would find it stripped of most of its melancholy mystique, erased by sheer numbers of sightseers – including, of course, ourselves! But it is still a highly suggestive silhouette in reddish stone – a place seemingly worth toiling towards although on top of a steep hill, even at noon in August when the sun beats back up at you from the flinty cobbles, and even the trees have been stunned into stupor.

There was a Roman settlement here, which the 711 invaders renamed and reused, but it was always less important than Cordoba. It was not until the 1240s that Granada would become prominent, and over the next 250 years ever more precious to the Moors as their other kingdoms went under one by one. Most of the present complex dates from the middle of the 14th century, when the Emirate was at its apex.

By 1491, Granada was the last Muslim state in Europe, and embroiled in civil war even as Fernando and Isabella’s forces encircled the city. After a ten-month siege, by November all was over, and Boabdil’s vizier handed over the keys to the fortress on 2 January 1492. Boabdil was granted an estate not far away, but the same year left Spain forever, along with many other Muslims, and he died in Morocco in obscure circumstances sometime between 1518 and 1533.

The Christian monarchs treated Boadbil and his retinue chivalrously, but a triumphal reaction was inevitable from the moment their silver cross banner first fluttered from the fortress’s ramparts. They converted the last of Spain’s mosques into churches, and stipulated the expulsion or forced conversion of Spain’s Jews, and then those Muslims who hadn’t left, understandably regarding them as a potential fifth column.

Fernando and Isabella lived and worked in the Alhambra for some time – it was allegedly at the Alhambra that Columbus first broached the idea of sailing west in the hope of finding India – and they are both buried in the city, in the nearby Capilla Real. This is a moving building in its own right, where the monarchs’ unpretentious lead coffins may be glimpsed (but not photographed) through the gate of their vault below their showier effigies above. The sacristy contains central national-religious relics that still radiate romantic force – Fernando’s sword, Isabella’s crown, and even the banners that flew on 2 January 1492.

Back at the Alhambra, Fernando and Isabella’s grandson Charles V built a Renaissance palace (now containing an excellent late medieval art collection) by demolishing one of the palace’s wings. Napoleon’s troops wreaked terrible damage between 1812 and 1814, and planned to destroy the whole complex on their retreat, but a crippled Spanish patriot (and benefactor of all humanity) named José García removed the fuses. What remains after these vicissitudes is as beautiful as it is stately.

Visitors enter through the remains of the 13th century Alcazaba, a fortress built on top of an earlier fortress. There are stupendous views from the Torre de le Vela (Tower of the Bell) down over the Rio Darro, the vast white-brown vega, and the stage-set-like Sierra Nevada, whose peaks in winter can be capped with snow. This is a landscape of the grandest proportions, that might have been designed equally for acts of great chivalry or acts of great cruelty. Many famous Western films were made in central Spain, to transfer the toughly uncompromising psyche of Spain to even more epic vistas.

Granada, from the Alhambra

A garden softens and sweetens the senses, an ordered paradise of creepers, myrtles and roses – leading to the Palacios Nazaríes, a strange confection to find amid such mighty walls. Built quickly, and intended partly as a pleasure house, the suite of splendid rooms is decorated with Islamic calligraphy and motifs, below which successive rulers held court, conducted business, received guests and relaxed. In the case of Yusuf I (1333-54), it was also a place to die, the sultan stabbed to death while he prayed.

The harem is approached through Irving’s favourite Court of the Lions, named for the twelve stylized beasts supporting the fountain, which, an ingratiating inscription insists, are held in check only by their respect for the sultan. The Sala de los Abencerrajes has a ceiling of almost impossible ornateness – a sixteen-sided dome with frothy stalactite tracery and high windows covering a reflecting fountain, the delicately incongruous scene of an atrocious if apocryphal crime, when a sultan is said to have murdered 16 members of the Abencerraj family.

A set of atypically Islamic figurative portraits look down on the Hall of the Kings, followed by the domed hall of the favourite wife, and the quarters of all the others, ending in the Royal Baths, where sultans and sultanas would disport themselves to the strains of blind singers. At the end we reach the geometrical gardens of the Generalife, a high-up demi-paradise for fretful Berbers, a place to watch festive fireworks, stroll away the cares of state or plan a tryst, under the guardianship of great walls and the gaze only of eagles.

We hired a car and headed north from Seville to see family, grateful to swop ring-roads for ever emptier highways. We were heading for Iberia’s parched and less-known heart, and the borderlands of Extremadura. Quiet roads, and even quieter fields – mile after mile after mile of olives, oaks and thorn trees, mile after mile after mile of thirsty terrain stretching to blue and purple distance or unreal mountains, the whole expanse almost without movement, except for rare and vast birds of prey gliding along on baking thermals – griffon vultures, coldly viewing the campo, Roc-reminiscent even in the distance, their very name suggesting fabulous creatures.

Armies have marched and counter-marched this way since always, trudging sandals or boots caked with dust, sweating and swearing in armour or uniform, from the Romans via the Visigoths, Moors, Christians, Wellington’s Britons and Soult’s French, up to Franco’s ‘Army of Africa’ who in 1936, in an early setback for the Republic, took the town of Mérida – our first stop outside Andalusia, and one of the most impressive Roman sites in a country with many such.

In Merida’s Roman museum
Roman river deity

Founded in 25 BC, its original name of Augusta Emerita indicates its importance as imperial foundation, and nature as colony for ex-soldiers. It was one end of the Silver Way, the Roman road that ran to the mines of the south, and became capital of the province of Lusitania. Its aqueduct, bridge, triumphal arch and theatre are wonderfully complete, and the columns, walls and other features that are found in unexpected places all over town suggest much remains to be uncovered. A memorable museum preserves monumental sculptures and mosaics – a melange of classical culture, from fauns, funerary steles, huntsmen on the trail of fabulous beasts, satyrs and river deities, to a Laocoon and a massive bull’s head still so full of force it might be about to burst from the wall.

The theatre, which was built around 15 BC and seated 6,000 spectators, is the most striking structure, with its fantastically well-preserved first century AD façade of two tiers of Corinthian columns, with statues of gods. The more downmarket neighbouring amphitheatre was used for gladiatorial contests and held 14,000. Standing in its ring amid the great silence of Spain’s high summer, it is difficult to visualise such violence, to think of those thousands of tense or shouting voyeurs, to think of this sand spattered with gobbets of gore. Yet real men, pumped with adrenalin or in a state of terror, once had to run down these now largely unroofed walkways and blinking out into the sun, amid the bloodthirsty roaring of the town, to kill others who had done them no harm, or transfix bristling but terrified beasts from boars to Barbary lions.

More pacific thirsts could be slaked by waters brought from several miles north, along the city’s second greatest landmark – the 1st– 3rd century Milagros aqueduct. The 2,700-foot-long structure is one of the most intact of all aqueducts, its double deck arched outline proudly emblazoned on tourist ware, and attractive to nesting storks. Nearby is the 60-arched bridge over the Guadiana, at 2,600 feet one of the longest of surviving Roman spans.

Oblivious to architectural distinctions, the Guadiana flows on to the handsome if obscure town of Olivenza, whose chief claim to national fame is as having been a Portuguese possession between 1297 and 1801. In that latter year, French and Spanish troops invaded Portugal to prevent it supporting Britain, and the Spanish commander plucked oranges as trophies to send back to the queen (reputedly his lover), which has resulted in it being called the ‘War of the Oranges.’ The Spanish kept all the territory they took on the east bank of the river, although the Portuguese government’s official position even now is irredentist. The sundered nature of the area is emblematized by the late medieval Ajuda bridge on the road to the Portuguese town of Elvas, destroyed in 1709 during the War of the Spanish Succession, and never rebuilt. When we swam in the Guadiana’s opaquely green waters one evening, we were floating in international legal limbo.

Olivenza museum

Hispanicization programmes pursued by Spanish governments from the Bourbons to the Francoists are now being quietly dropped, with renewed interest in the area’s Portuguese heritage symbolised in bilingual street signs, and Portuguese nationals in the area permitted to vote in Portuguese elections. Olivenza’s best known son is probably Paulo da Gama, older brother of Vasco da Gama, who commanded one of the ships of Vasco’s fleet on the famous 1497 voyage to India, which opened up the sea route from Europe to the East by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Deep roots and spreading branches are to be found even in Olivenza, and could be symbolized by the unique Jesse Tree carving in the town’s chief church – at 45 feet tall probably the world’s largest, and filled with rich fruits.

Jesse Tree at Olivenza

Cáceres has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986, and its intact medieval Ciudad Monumental attracts film-makers, most recently those responsible for Game of Thrones. But medieval artefacts seem almost modern when compared with the prehistoric hand-prints in the close-by Cave of Maltravieso, at more than 67,000 years old the oldest known anywhere. Crude Celtiberian figures in the city museum speak of stories told and forgotten before the Romans were heard of – who got here as ‘late’ as 25 BC.

Pigeons and crows rise with a sudden flapping and fly in flocks across the otherwise deserted Plaza Mayor, their shadows accompanying them companionably across the cobbles, clearly outlined by the hardness of the light. The Cáceran cityscape suggests massy strength, with its parapeted towers and turrets of convents and grand houses, red-brick or limestone or white stucco, red-roofed and almost completely lacking vegetation. Rare windows look onto worn stone steps and burning back-alleys where every tall wall or gateway or church pavement may carry vaunting coats-of-arms of caballeros once militant in faith and family pride. Bears, castles, crosses, eagles, putti, swords and suns are everywhere in evidence – armorial cliches, but still strength as well as melancholy.

Carvings seen in Cácere’s churches are sometimes stranger, from the archway graffiti of centuries ago choristers (as artless as the hands of Maltravieso), to a rampant lion with an inconveniently erect penis, beset by snarling disembodied dogs’ heads. In one hushed interior is a startlingly sable Jesus close to a preternaturally pale one of alabaster, whose fine blue cracks could almost be the ‘blue blood’ once so prized by hidalgos.  

Hidalgos were often also conquistadores, like Vasco Núñez de Balboa. His statue is one of the first things you see on entering his birthplace of Jerez de los Caballeros – although the caballeros in this case were the Templars, whose town this was. The Jerez of today is deathly still even by Spanish summer standards, at the junction of unimportant roads in a landscape as bereft of people as it is full of toponymic significance, with place-names referencing the nearby frontier with Portugal, as well as spiritual frontiers, on the boundaries of reality and reason – Eremita de Nuestra Senora de los Santos, Convento de Rocamador, Salvatierra de los Barros, Valle de Santa Ana, and the ominously evocative Valle de Matamoros  (‘Valley of the Moor-Slayer’).     

Balboa came from the lower nobility, a class often fiercely proud of their descent, but rarely rich. In 1500, he joined in an exploratory voyage to present-day Colombia. He tried farming in Hispaniola but failed, escaping creditors by stowing away back to Colombia, and then moving to Darién in present-day Panama. Here with a few others, he founded Santa María de la Antigua, the first permanent European settlement in all the Americas, and began to grow rich by barter or war with the local tribes. By 1511, he was Darién’s governor and captain general. He organized expeditions into the interior in search of gold and slaves, often using brutal methods, such as torture or using dogs to tear enemies to pieces. 

Hearing folk-tales of a fabulously wealthy kingdom somewhere to the south, governed by an emperor who was initiated in gold (“El Hombre Dorado”), Balboa requested reinforcements, but although these were forthcoming, enemies at court ensured he was not given command. He started out without them, and in September 1513, standing with “wild surmise / silent, upon a peak in Darién,” (as Keats described the moment famously, although giving the credit erroneously to Cortés) was the first European to see the Pacific, which he promptly claimed for Spain. He was restored to royal favour, and named governor of this exciting new sea, and of Panama.

But rivals continued to intrigue against him, even as he persisted in his exploratory endeavours – in 1517/8, masterminding the transportation of a fleet of ships overland across the isthmus in pieces, to explore the Gulf of San Miguel (1517–18). In 1518, he was summoned home to Spain, whereupon he was indicted on trumped-up charges of rebellion and treason, and executed in January 1519.

Not content with birthing one restless spirit, this little town also gave rise to Hernando de Soto, the first European to penetrate deep into the territory of the modern United States, and the first to encounter the Mississippi River.

De Soto’s father wanted him to be a lawyer, but when Hernando was still a teenager he informed his father he wanted to be an explorer instead, and left for the New World in 1514. He prospered in Panama through daring and slaving, and came to control the area we now know as Nicaragua. Tiring of 16th century respectability, harum-scarum Hernando loaned Pizzaro two ships and sailed with him to Peru as his captain of horse. He was instrumental in the Incas’ downfall, but thereafter fell out with the less gentlemanly Pizarro, and returned to Spain.

Jerez must have seemed terribly limiting after such expansive experiences, although he dutifully endowed a chapel in the town’s church. Unsurprisingly soon he was back across the Atlantic, as governor of Cuba, with added extravagant royal remits – to conquer what we now call Florida, and explore modern Ecuador, plus special rights to whatever riches he could find along the Amazon. Seen from today’s perspective, it all seems like a fever dream, which makes it rather appropriate that de Soto should have died from that cause in 1543, in the hut of an Indian chief, about as far from parched Extremadura as it was possible to get in the 16th century. Many today would probably argue both men should have stayed in Jerez.

Cordoba rose to eminence in the second century BC, as the Romans’ Corduba, the capital of Hispania Ulterior. It supported Pompey, and was accordingly destroyed by Caesar, but rebuilt itself to become capital of the new province of Hispania Baetica. Lucan was born here in the first century AD, nephew of his fellow Corduban, Seneca the Younger. After the Moors conquered the area, Cordoba became a cultural and political powerhouse, one of the three chief cities in the Muslim world (after Baghdad and Cairo). In the 12th century, it was the birthplace of both the Muslim polymath (and pioneering interpreter of Aristotle) Averroës, and the Jewish philosopher Maimónides, although the latter had to leave Spain after refusing to convert to Islam (he later became Saladin’s astronomer).

The Mezquita, Corduba’s world-renowned mosque, which is now the city’s cathedral, was begun (and finished!) in 785. The ingenious architect economically re-used columns from the former Visigothic cathedral, and close examination of capitals reveals some ‘un-Islamic’ figurative carvings, including a demon, a monk and a bare-breasted woman. The Mezquita was originally open along one side, but that side was bricked up after conversion to cathedral, leaving a rather crepuscular interior.

A forest of columns, in a variety of handsome stones, stretches away in all directions, all made uniform in height and given aesthetic unity by alternating light stone and red brick in tiger-striped arches. Even crowded with tourists, the effect is very impressive, its stripped-down simplicity clearly designed to induce a state of raptness.

In the gardens of the old Alcazar, there is a statue showing Columbus meeting Fernando and Isabella here in 1486, and other kingly or classical sculptures define lines of sight, or stand at the tops of steps. Clipped cypresses give shade for shrill cicadas, and carp cluster in the warm baths of rectangular pools.  Some of the prisoners of the Inquisition, which used the Alcazar buildings between the 16th and 19th centuries, could probably get tantalizing glimpses of the gleaming garden, although by the 19th century the whole town had become shabbily poor. Those sad buildings remained in use as a prison into the 1950s, but now shelter instead tremendous Roman mosaics, evidence of Augustan glory days.  

Battling through thick undergrowth along the banks of the Guadalquivir, I looked out for snakes, but happily only disturbed ducks, egrets, and a frog, which hopped disgustedly away as I approached – a pleasingly amphibian touch for so dry a land. Another amphibian landmark then loomed into view – the reconstructed and seized-up Albolafia waterwheel, the last of many to whirl in these waters, grinding grain and pumping water for the Alcazar. Ungrateful Isabella found it too noisy, and demanded it be disabled during her stays – a circumstance demanding Tarot metaphors about Wheels of Fortune and a Queen of Swords.

I stepped outside Spain, to be greeted with a breezy “Good morning, sir!” by a burly West Midlander policeman. This is another of Spain’s disputed borders – the airport runway that both bridges and divides Spain from Gibraltar. Hundreds of tourists were streaming over from the Spanish side to sample the anomalous state of the Rock, so geographically Spanish, so culturally caught in a hard place.

This has often been a controversial frontier, as befits so unignorable and strategic a promontory – for ancient heroes, one of the limits of the known world, and even for moderns, a key to the Mediterranean. Even before the ancients, there were heavy-browed hominids here, who left their skulls for us to find – in 1848, the first adult Neanderthal skull ever discovered. Joint ancestors of ours still reside here – the several hundred Barbary macaques on the upper reaches of the Rock, which grab food and gurn and publicly clean their private parts to delight and disconcert visitors.

The duty-free shops for which Gibraltar is renowned seem like excrescences when seen against the massive ruggedness of the Rock, its notorious egg-and-chips and British newspapers more than usually unpalatable. But such are inevitable accompaniments to long British expatriate presence since its capture in 1704 – flavours of home for old-time sailors and soldiers and modern financial consultants alike.

Other British traces are pleasingly Ruritanian – a neat little courthouse, the Governor’s mansion, a modest cathedral, seat of the delightfully named Bishop in Europe, and Union flags everywhere. But there is seriousness here too, the colony a source of invisible earnings through taxation and e-gaming, a centre for ship repair and real wargaming and, not least, a psychological salve for British bad feelings about a century of ineluctable decline.

Monument in the Trafalgar Cemetery

The mariners in the Trafalgar Cemetery would have scarcely understood this busy pleasure-seeking Gibraltar, which in their day must often have felt Godforsaken, a limit to their known world. They nevertheless defended it resolutely, right from the start when the Spaniards tried to take it back; on one occasion in late 1704, the whole defence rested on just 19 marines and one officer in one redoubt, who somehow held on as their numbers were whittled down to six. Generations of British army engineers since have used their service-time shrewdly to mine the monolith with batteries, emplacements, roads, stores, tunnels and walls to deter potential retakers.

Africa, from Gibraltar

Naval frigates still call here, but now most shipping is more pacific – cruise liners and yachts, and far more importantly, cargo vessels beating up or down the Inner Sea for Suez or Atlantic. Africa beckons beyond those storied Straits, almost within swimming distance, a blue coast once of legendary danger, but now just bad conscience for well-fed Westerners eating ice-creams at Europa Point.

The close-at-hand Catholic Shrine of Our Lady of Europe is in a fairly modern building, earlier incarnations having been sacked more than once. But it contains a fortunate 15th century wooden icon, a Virgin and Child so venerated the Shrine would be saluted by ships – except those of the English in 1704, who looted all the silverware and threw the decapitated icon into the sea. The pieces were fortunately found by a fisherman, who gave them to a priest. The statue was kept across the bay at Algeciras until 1864, when it was returned to the Rock, although unrestored until 1997. In 2009, Benedict XVI gave the much-tried Shrine a much-coveted (and surely deserved) Golden Rose.  

We came back to Seville with the days ticking down, and too much still unseen, or unseeable. But there was time, just, for some secular shrines – shrines like the Palacio Lebrija. The countess who bought the 16th century house in 1900 was an inveterate collector, lucky enough to live before laws were brought in to protect historic sites. Perhaps the collected items were also ‘lucky,’ because they could have been scattered or destroyed by less appreciative discoverers.

Countess Lebrija lavished prodigious pesetas on antiquarian and artistic loves, making her house a salon for the most cultivated sevillanos, floored with mosaics from Itálica, remaking rooms to fit their floors rather than the other way around. She ransacked her own ancestral home too, removing hundreds of 18th century tiles from her country place, to give her sophisticated town interiors charmingly naïve rustic verticals. There are affectionate caricatures of countryfolk in the fashions of 250 years ago, got down with rapid strokes by journeymen painters – farms slumber on vanished afternoons, hunters pursue the hart, and hounds harry hares – glimpses of a Spain disappearing even in 1900.

Tiles at the Palacio Lebrija

The Palacio de las Dueñas is the Seville home of the Dukes of Alba, one of Spain’s oldest grandee families, prominent since the 12th century. The Dukes of Alba are descended from James II of England, and the family name Stuart recurs in their history. Behind the bougainvillea which blankets the façade are peaceful patios leading off state rooms holding an art collection dominated by 16th and 17th century Italian painters. There is also a later, uglier collection of bull-fighting ephemera, ranging from lurid posters to the stuffed heads of rare bulls that wreaked revenge on their tormentors.

Antonio Machado was born at the Palace in 1875, son of the Palace caretaker. Machado would become a Modernist poet, friendly with Verlaine and Wilde, earning a reputation for evocations of lost places and overgrown gardens. On a plaque on the Palace front is an extract from one of his poems: “This light of Seville … is the palace / where I was born with his rumour of fountain. / My childhood are memories of a patio /and a bright potager where the lemon tree ripens.” The lemons are luckily still there – and even more flavoursome, the chapel where Amerigo Vespucci may have married.

On our last evening, we found ourselves by ‘chance’ eating outside the oldest tavern in Spain, Las Escobas (The Brooms), close to the Cathedral – so named in allusion to a local broom-maker whose manufactures were bought by a whimsical former landlord to be stuck on the tavern ceiling.

A more famous habitue is said to have been Cervantes, who came to Seville in 1587 in search of work, and would stay there until around 1600. He applied several times to go to the New World, but was turned down, rather unsurprisingly, as his left arm had been rendered useless at the Battle of Lepanto. He had also spent almost five years as a slave, so could hardly be described as an optimal employee.

He found less exciting employment in Seville as a government agent, collecting produce for the ill-fated Armada. He was equally ill-fated, or maybe worse, in a later job collecting taxes, and spent some time in the prison at Seville. Don Quixote was almost certainly written elsewhere, but Cervantes’ experience of Seville’s seamier side did inspire his ‘Exemplary Novels. Rinconete and Cortadillo tells of Seville’s thieving fraternity, and Dialogue of the Dogs of the city’s slaughterhouses.

We sank a sangria to Spain’s greatest writer, and this captivating and connected city – and watched our bags and wallets, and regaled ourselves on meats, as the clangour of Cathedral bells echoed down the streets.

All photos: Derek Turner

The ghost coast

Adam ran his hand over his balding scalp. The dunes shimmered all around – expectant, empty of any movement except his, although he knew rare beetles trundled through rough grass, and he could hear toads, chirring contentedly somewhere amongst orchids and buckthorn. He couldn’t see the sea from here, but it would be far out at this time, perhaps exposing the ribs of the Sprite, which had foundered here fatally in 1888.

A track wended up a slope surmounted by wind-tortured hawthorns and a World War Two pillbox – an outsized armoured helm in lichened concrete. This had always been a watchful coast, wary of invaders or worried by water, fearing one day it might break through to complete the drowning of Doggerland. There were times – more and more often – when Adam remembered the world’s hugeness, and hardness. Its terrible hardness…

He sighed, and sweated up the slope. Bone-weary though he was, his eyes were darting everywhere. He had tofind it. Had to. It would be his first. It would be his last. It would crown the day, this year – in fact, his nature-watching life. And it would be the perfect sign-off for this place, which he’d soon be leaving for good.

Angela had loved it here. So many days here with her, sharing the exultance of seeing some creature that according to the textbooks shouldn’t be there at all, some visitant magically manifesting thousands of miles outside its accustomed range. Once, when lying beside her under bushes, watching a vagrant warbler almost never recorded outside Central America, she had breathed just audibly, “It’s like a miracle!”

So it was – although there was also sadness surrounding such wanderers, so far from home, never to return, fated to end among unfamiliar dangers, trembling in unaccustomed cold, calling out plaintively into unanswering air for flock or mate.

Birds had been Angela’s passion – house-sparrows as much as any exotic warblers. She had never taken any species for granted since reading as a girl about the passenger pigeon. They had even given their daughter the name of Martha, in honour of the elderly endling which had fallen to the floor in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, the last representative of flocks which had once broken branches by sheer weight of superabundance. On that proud day at the font in sunlit St Michael’s, with smiling family all round, they had never considered their choice might be so portentous…

Adam was more interested in insects. They had fascinated him since he was four, after a hoverfly had alighted on his outstretched hand like a benediction, a gold-and-black bejewelled being gracing his hand in a God-ray of sunshine slanting through trees.

He had lived insects and arachnids since, keeping ants and stick-insects, rearing moths, watching Attenborough, reading books like The Life of the Spider and The Soul of the White Ant, habitually turning over stones and rotten logs – in incessant search of insect lives, their meanings, their secrets, their symbolism.

Medieval illuminators had made minibeasts into miniature marginalia, and philosophers had seen them as metaphors of society and statecraft. The bee-kings that became queens as science advanced – the toiling workers so infinitesimal in themselves, but whose united efforts brought strength and sweetness to the world. Adam owned a small 1660s still-life, an anniversary present from Angela – a Delft bowl of apples, grapes, pears, and pomegranates, festooned with delicate butterflies – a Golden Age representation of Earth’s bountiful interconnectedness. Insects intersected with everyone everywhere always; their fall would also be ours.

He had become an academic, a writer of papers and addresser of conferences, a campaigner and charity trustee – so often dull and dry work, filled with frustrations, but energised always by that childhood encounter, and then the prospect of the whole planet losing its pollinators – losing its life. Losing its soul.

Whenever things got bad, there was balm in the multi-legged multiverse that began outside his back door. He would switch off machines and go into the garden – there to lose himself in the polished elegance of earwigs, watch whirligigs writing in an unknown language across the pond, or look into the compound eyes of bee-flies and wish he could see the world their way. Invertebrates had more sense than some vertebrates. Their unflagging energy was humbling as well as inspiring, an example of courage to him and to everyone – how they would resurge after every reverse, like bees building each spring, or Robert the Bruce’s spider in the cave. Insects had seen dinosaurs pass; woodlice would probably see us out.

He interested himself intimately in insects’ activities, intervening like a god when provoked by some miniscule plight. Even today, with his mind filled with his quest, he stooped to move a burnet moth caterpillar from a bare sandy tract that from its perspective must have seemed miles wide, and placed it on the sappy stem of a ragwort. Caterpillars found out in the open were often dying, he knew, driven insane by parasites eating them inside. But maybe this one might just make it. And anyway, it was indecent to leave a helpless creature – just as sick people deserved treatment, at whatever cost, and however distant the chances of success. However futile, even – however blackly written in the book of mitochondrial heredity.

An emperor dragonfly angled electrically into view, and he watched it zigzag away like an escaped ampere – a spectacular insect, whose even larger ancestors once darted over drowned Doggerland. Land and sea so often seemed interchangeable along this littoral, confusing even the animals. He sometimes found insect-falls along the advancing edge of the sea – ants, devil’s coach-horses, ladybirds – tiny fragments of feeling kicking their legs helplessly or crawling desperately away from the water at the salt end of all things, pitifully paralleling the great human-falls of history. He always lofted as many as he could away to safety, although aware he was making little difference, and that all safety was at best a postponement. Under every summer beachscape lay freezing physical forces, under sun-warmed wavetops a constant churning of cold deeps, and under the fine sand sliding earth plates, all part of the constant longshore drift of life into detritus.

As Adam aged and ailed, some of his students joked that he looked like a late-summer lepidopteran. Mr Mothman, they called him – an upright and ugly imago. His skin grew dry, thin and chitinous, and his bones increasingly prominent, as if he was turning inside out, developing an exoskeleton. But why shouldn’t his softness hide inside? Life had so often shown him need of a carapace.

How he wished Angela could have been here today, of all days.

Late yesterday evening, when Adam had been reading a local nature blog, he briefly stopped breathing. Just a few casual words, written by a local nature-guide, mentioning that a Camberwell Beauty had been seen the previous day. It was the most wonderful of shocks. A Camberwell Beauty!

For much of his life, Nymphalis antiopa had been flitting through Adam’s imagination – an apparition flapping always in front, just out of reach. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t known of the butterfly’s existence. But then his first home had been on Coldharbour Lane, where the butterfly was first recorded in 1748, by a man named Moses Harris, who called it ‘Grand Surprise’ to register his astonishment at its size and striking appearance – richly maroon wings, with blue dots and creamy yellow fringe, and powerful un-butterflyish flight.

It had stuck out even in Moses Harris’s still semi-rural, semi-magical London, with Camberwell still famous for fruit growing, and Peckham Rye nearby, where Blake would soon see angels in the elms. Science itself was still in a state of wide-eyed and wondering innocence, where each day brought discoveries which could still be attributed to God’s benevolent grace, and clustering new species were named after characters from Greek myth. There had been many Antiopes in Attica, but Adam was sure the Beauty must have been named after the daughter of Aeolus, or the consort of Helios, or maybe in honour of both, seeing that the creature was the most perfect union of air and light.

The boldness of the Beauty had clearly compelled Harris, who as well as being an entomologist, had also been an engraver and theorist of colour. Adam had sensed the other man’s aesthetic and aurelian excitement across the gulf of years – although for Adam excitement had always been mixed with melancholy, because the Beauty hadn’t been seen in Camberwell since the early twentieth century.

Others people had noticed, and mourned the butterfly’s absence. It had been referenced in literature and music, and there was a huge mosaic of one on a building in Burgess Park, moved there in 1982 from a demolished 1920s printworks, which had used the already rare butterfly as emblematic of their expertise. Adam remembered the mosaic in its prominent original location, and being told that the Luftwaffe had ironically used it as a navigation aid for raids.

But Adam felt the insect’s absence almost physically – felt it like a folk-memory of destroyed wildness, felt it like the pains amputees imagine in absent limbs. He almost envied the long-dead who had glimpsed the Beauty in habitats like those he had known – battening in Brixton back-gardens or fluttering up Forest Hill, or beating between the Hammer Horror monuments of Nunhead Cemetery, a Gothic shade among the white angels and the ivied urns – the Germans’ name Trauermantel (‘mourning cloak’) so suitable in that context, so redolent of the insect’s elusiveness, and adjacency to extinction.

Nymphalis was quite common elsewhere; Adam had even seen a subspecies in Sweden. But it was surrounded with special significance for him and all English lepidopterists, including the Edwardians who were the last to see it in London. Those Edwardians, with which Camberwell always seemed synonymous – those bicycle-clipped, moustached City clerks, with their copies of Illustrated London News, and Elgar on wax cylinders – so often seemed frozen in photos, fixed in period the way old collections of coleoptera were pinned to museum boards. But they had been wonderfully alive in at least one respect – to have had even an outside chance of seeing Beauties in their rose-gardens, flying in from some other realm to enrich their Arts and Crafts universe.

The Camberwell Adam had known as a child, then heard about as an adult – an anthill without purpose, a place of bad air, cars, crime, and riots – had seemed daily less likely to throw up Beauties. So now, one had kindly come to him, was waiting for him, possibly just over this hill – his personal ‘Grand Surprise’ sipping the sap of a willow, or winging royally across rabbit-nibbled clearings, the ultimate prize for hours of exertion on the hottest day of the year, the culmination of a life’s longing. This was circularity. It felt a little like – destiny.

How could it have come? Some came over the sea in some years, but very few, and never this far north. There were theories about pupae carried in cargoes of Scandinavian timber. There were also rare private rewilders, eccentrics or idealists who raised and released animals they felt ‘belonged’, animals which had a moral right to be in particular places. Aged eight, Adam had met one, the famous Leonard Newman, who had signed Adam’s copy of Complete British Butterflies in Colour – a book outdated even then, but still on Adam’s shelves. Newman had reared thousands of Beauties and let them fly in Kent one hopeful spring, then waited…and waited…and given up.

Adam knew why Newman had done this; skies that had known the Beauty must one day know it again. But he wanted to think this specimen had somehow made its own way here, acting on some unknown impulse, linking his early life with his late – bringing old London to modern Lincolnshire. It would be kismet – completion – closure.

He had sometimes worried that if he ever caught up with the Beauty it might feel like an anti-climax. Species ticked off lists were like sports trophies – wholly inadequate, tinny mementos of a very different day, a different outlook, whole other worlds of happiness and health. And this just wasn’t any species. The Beauty dwelled by itself. It had flown in front of him for so long that finding one might feel more like losing something. But if this was a risk, it was one he had to take. What else would he do? What else could he do? It was his nature. Angela would have understood – and Martha.

He fantasised hotly, the sun boiling the reddened skin of his scalp. There might be more than one. A venturesome individual might be the vanguard of a viable colony. Could this bold outrider be a scout – the crest of a climate-adapting wave, coping with change by expanding range? He knew, in truth, this was a fancy too far; the Beauty liked cooler climates. But somehow, somewhere among all this global destruction and private desolation, some species must find a way forward, lead a rebirth and recolouring of the cosmos. How wonderful it would be if at least a few beautiful things could defy the world’s contagion…Was that too much to ask? There was so much loss, so much waste and death…

He stopped to get breath, and looked up, to see the sun well on its way to the west. There weren’t many hours left. There were never enough. There was never enough time for anything. Angela and Jane were also now flying in front… He pushed on through trees and across a wide wasteland, while a large butterfly on the highest branch imperiously flared indigo wings, and indifferently watched him pass.

Refracted future

Humani Victus Instrumenta – Ars Coquinaria. 1570s engraving

The Mirror

Tim Bragg, Sycamore Dystopia, 2023, pb., 292pps., £10

Ever since the ancients invented automata, writers have wondered about the implications for humanity, and ruminated about the nature of consciousness. The Industrial Revolution would spawn increasing concern about subservience to machines and “Satanic mills.” The Great War and then Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (from which we get the word ‘robot, based on a Czech word, robota, meaning ‘forced labour’) made many people anxious about out-of-control technology – a theme revisited every generation since, as seen for example in the 1984 action classic, Terminator. Today, the growing sophistication of artificial intelligence has turned a trope into a cliché, the subject of articles, books and documentaries which often really tell us more about contemporary concerns than they do about possible futures. Musician-novelist Tim Bragg’s newest book is therefore in a certain idealist-nostalgic-pessimistic vein; this does not mean it is not distinctive or worthwhile.

As in Orwell’s Oceania, or the pages of Fahrenheit 451, the world of The Mirror is a surveillance society, where the state strives to control thought. Like Bladerunner, there are huge and ugly megalopolises, and androids, and people who might be androids. Like Logan’s Run (film version), there is a mysterious and romanticised threshold that must be crossed. As in The Handmaid’s Tale, the authorities limit fertility. Like The Matrix, almost nothing is what it seems. As in many dystopias, there is an unjust government with a privileged ‘Inner Party,’ sinister secrets, ecological impoverishment, and bleak living conditions for the lowest echelons – and of course ‘red-pilled’ rebels seeking to upturn the system. This highly literate author imbues all these obvious influences with ideas of his own.

He brings the genre up to (future) date, setting his story in 2073, and reflecting upon today’s worries about self-image, the control of data, the time we spend online, the cashless society, the food we eat (insects bulk large in The Mirror’s meals), and the erasure of the past. Every citizen wears a ‘mirror’ device, which delivers a limited range of computer-generated entertainment and information, but most importantly allows the authorities to monitor the population. Emotions and sensations are all suspect – except those provided by pills or virtual reality, from ‘conversations’ with ancestors to sexual intercourse. There seem to be no local or national identities, or even any kind of economy.

The pivotal relationship is between two girls, Mia and Karella, who are arriving at physical and sexual maturity; there seems to be no ‘transgenderism’ in The Mirror world (which is plausible, as those who are so exercised by this today will have exited the scene by 2073). Both characters are well thought-through, and nuanced. Bragg’s emphasis on youthful female sexuality however feels slightly discomfiting, even though of course novelists must always be permitted to imagine themselves in guises or roles other than their own. It is however germane to this story, because both girls are being exploited by a highly intrusive state, with Karella the subject of life-long transhumanist experiments, and Mia being viewed as a brood-mare for a eugenics programme. Their every emotion is parsed for psychological significance, and there are constant interventions – for example a dogged therapeutic insistence on treating Mia’s phobia about swimming (a happy intervention, because her instilled ability to swim matters greatly later).

Like everyone else, Mia and Karella are under the purview of a panoptical ‘Hub,’ and an elite organisation called Earthly Living Kingdom (ELK). Mia’s own mother is an ELK Guardian, a senior operative of a group whose sinister plans become increasingly apparent, and the mother-daughter relationship is consequently complex. Mia’s father is absent – or is he?

There are menacing ELK operatives, partly countervailed by a sub-world of gathering rebellion, led by Ned, an IT expert who convenes a secret cell to keep alive fast-fading arts – in effect, the authentic human spirit, at risk from rationalist thinking, cultural coarsening, and technological reductionism. Mia finds especial inspiration and solace in the music of Bach, which although available through approved channels, has fallen into desuetude. In 2073, those who wish to hear such antediluvian sounds risk seeming at best eccentric – and at worst, refuseniks in ‘need’ of pharmaceutical intervention, or biotechnological ‘rebooting.’ Bragg has clearly thought a great deal about the psychological benefits of music for everyone in all ages, here showing synaesthesia as a means of inner escape from one-dimensional mundanity.

The ‘biohacker’ artist Neil Harbisson, by Hector Adalid. Wikimedia Commons

He handles generally well one of the perennial problems of dystopian literature – accustoming readers to invented concepts and specially coined terminology without interrupting the narrative with long screeds of explication. He has tried hard to come up with new idioms. French phrases are unexpectedly widely used. Anglo-Saxon expletives however appear to have gone out of vogue, to be replaced with what seem now insipid new terms of emphasis (“sparking uterus”), which seems an unlikely eventuality – but maybe this symbolises his surmised society’s distance from earthy realism. Some are more believable, such as “abundant” to express enthusiasm. There is admirable restraint and wit in the conversations between the human protagonists and the Rai robots who do much of the work (and are constantly being ‘improved’ by technologists and theorists obsessed with ‘migrating’ consciousness from human to machine, and even more worryingly back again).

The Mirror is a deeply well-intentioned book, and what is even more important, sensitively intelligent – a worthy reflection on issues which are swiftly becoming salient, and which seem certain to become even more so.

Un-harkened Angel

Angel

Alex Kurtagic, London: Spradabach, 2023, hb., 997pps.

DEREK TURNER finds mordant fun in a tale of modern alienation

In 2009, Alex Kurtagic published Mister, his novel of a highly-cultured IT consultant operating within what he saw as the hellscape of contemporary Europe – a man too intelligent for an age suspicious of intellectual distinctions, and too independent-minded for a continent in thrall to neurotic pettifoggery. In Angel, we meet a similarly misfitting man, but one with even less adaptive ability – indeed, a man almost without agency. This is a behemoth of a book about a midget of a man, wandering solitarily in the drab wasteland of these times.  

Angel is a student of 17th Century literature at an English university, whose unhappy fate it is to combine refined tastes and fastidiousness with an inability to impose these on even his immediate surroundings. He is physically slight and correspondingly cowardly, chronically short of money, and not even compensatingly articulate. Traditionally, angels enunciate glad tidings, but this one (aspiring poet though he may be) can barely sustain a basic conversation. He is announced to, rather than an annunciator. His most obvious resemblance to Biblical or Hebrew angels lies in his essential insubstantiality.

Angel is surrounded by people infinitely more impressive than he is – especially women, from his formidable mother and sister, and brilliantly inductive fellow-students to the mothering Amelia who (for some incomprehensible reason) pants to enfold Angel in her ample embonpoint. He is an incel, but unlike some incels, not potentially dangerous. He is not even angry – although the debased nature of his university, and society, deserves almost unlimited contempt. Kurtagic’s front-cover oil of his Van Dyck-bearded subject excellently conveys the nervy nature of his character, his twitching worriedness and state of blinking surprise at the awfulness of almost everything.

We do not lose sympathy for Angel as the tale unfolds, because we never really develop any. Even if somehow we could, he would haemorrhage it with his every action, or more precisely inaction. It is only at the very end that we start to feel sorry for him, but we can never feel respect. He is epically inept and wholly dependent on others, unable to perform the simplest task without mishap. He gets a menial job, but can’t manage the hours. He is given expensive things, and loses them. He is given excellent advice, and makes no attempt to follow it. He gets blamed even for things that aren’t his fault – and we are neither surprised, nor particularly perturbed. The reason he has no money is that he burned through a generous grant from his wealthy and influential parents in pursuit of an American woman (Madison) so obviously unworthy that people who have never met her instantly smell the gold-digger.

Huge events unfold around him, which culminate in unexpectedly dramatic style, but he is so busy mooning about his love-interest (and feeling sorry for himself) that he misses all the portents. And yet this over-specialised evolutionary aberration ends up as one of his cohort’s rare survivors. His near-invisibility ensures that he is mercifully overlooked by the most malign influencers, except when he accidentally offends à la mode ‘activists’ of one kind or another. He does encounter real rebels, but (probably luckily for him) never capitalizes on these encounters, through distractedness or pusillanimity.

But if we cannot admire Angel, we can smile at some of his pratfalls and predicaments. The author’s mordant sense of humour is abundantly in evidence, as his protagonist lurches from one petty indignity to the next – building up debts, humiliations and resentments, borrowing money he can’t repay, exasperating his family, failing his few friends, irritating his tutors, losing all his clothes at the launderette (and all his illusions about Madison), and vomiting all over the fragrant front of the only woman in the world who wants anything to do with him. Angel’s phobias are Ruskinian in their rarefaction, as he registers disgust with bad table manners, dirt, drunkenness, earrings, oxter hair (on women), tobacco and tattoos.

This is however not just a novel of amusing incidents, but also of serious ideas. The author is a determined logophile, and even those with above-average vocabularies may encounter words that are new to them, or that they have forgotten. These pleasing encounters contrast with sometimes over-long staccato dialogue sections when Angel is trying to attract the attention of barmen or shopkeepers, or, yet again, failing to explain himself to his supposed intellectual peers.

Sophisticated sociopolitical arguments are seeded through this book – about sex differences, elitism, the nature and purpose of universities, and freedom of conscience – but none of these viewpoints are expressed by Angel, although we infer that he generally agrees with their conservative-reactionary tenor. There are shrewd observations of today’s cry-bully tendencies, with their manic oscillations between psychological extremes, attacks on easy Aunt Sally targets, and protesting-too-much parading – and excellent evocations of cityscapes in all their Bladerunner alienness, or broken-down decrepitude. Strewn names of books, films, and paintings betoken authorial wide interests, and the book’s production values hint at his awareness of the importance of aesthetics in shaping worlds. Kurtagic is certain there is such a thing as ‘good taste’, and that it is at root a moral choice. This is weighty literature, in more than just a physical sense.

We eventually leave Angel all alone, contemplating the ruins of all his hopes and with no obvious avenue of escape, with even his once-powerful parents implicated in his downfall. It is a desolate outcome indeed even to so inglorious an odyssey, and even for someone not obviously deserving of respect – because behind his seriocomic unfolding can be seen substantive insights into 21st century society, and in his deeply-grained disappointment something of ourselves.

This review first appeared in The Miskatonian (Home page – The Miskatonian) and is reproduced with permission

Fathers of Botany – Fossil Trees of Lesbos

Image: Courtesy of Dimitris Yeros

DEREK TURNER is editor of The Brazen Head, and a novelist and reviewer, who writes for journals including Country Life and the Irish Times. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published in 2022 (Hurst)

Fathers of Botany – Fossil Trees of Greece

“We were searching to rediscover the first seed

So the ancient drama could begin again.” (George Seferis)


Tree from Titanic time, chlorophyll from Chronos –

A plant to make the Iliad feel young;

Older than Achaea, bough from Europe’s birth,

Corinthian column from anonymous earth.


Cell-structure chthonic, bark architectonic,

First saplings convert light for all lungs;

Dawns before dinosaurs, green deaths in deep glades

That shivered before any islands were made.


Steles sway in dead winds, mark skies meteoric –

Ossified weathers striated in stumps –

Hold in their heartwood earth’s earliest mysteries,

The comets and climates that changed before histories.


Rock sounds of ages and petrified tracks –

Trees shooting endless in verdant triumphs,

Creatures of ancient wing, instinct with sap and spring,

Once stood on these redwoods’ spread rooftops to sing.


Sang songs of the spheres, remote, melancholic,

Strange songs for lost woods in an alien tongue –

Harmoniously unify heavens and world

As seeds from stone cones let Creation unfurl.


Then day cataclysmic: deep doom from first physics:

Drums beating, bass booms as world structure unslung,

Ashfalls before Hades, heats pre-Hephaestus,

Flames black out the birds, stones alter the atlas.     

II

Metamorphosis – an ageless land’s axis,

New architect orders for the new world just sprung –

Stump of the sacred grove, and pillar of Zeus –

Shoots for the Stagirite, seeds Theophrastus.


Human analogies bud bright philosophic:

Trees rise, carry crowns, then return to the dung.

Though statues, they sow evergreenness from roots;  

Even now that they’re dead, we climb them for truths.

Deep state

DEREK TURNER is editor of The Brazen Head. He is also a novelist, reviewer, travelogist, and the author of the chorography Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire (Hurst, 2022). www.derek-turner.com. Twitter: @derekturner1964. Instagram: edge.of.england

“Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England”

‘Pike’, Ted Hughes

The plumber’s van’s been standing since the small hours

At the fishing-place beside the chartered town;

Its driver has been sounding deeper waters

Since he set up as the night was going down.


He saw the sun come wheeling up from ocean,

Watched whitening sky go glowing into gold;

Heard the birds orchestrate their calling,

Stamped booted feet to counteract life’s cold.


Cynosure of today these level courses –

These muddy understated lowland drains

Whose depths hide evolution’s shining forces –

Silver knights swim pricking on these plains.


Other men stare silent at reflections,

Itching for a twitch upon their lines,

Unknowing echo ancient Izaak Walton,

Compleatest anglers, contemplating time.


Coarse fishers here can sit on thrones like Doges

Wedded to the waters of their wealth;

Serene for once among the mace and sedges,

Each man an island nation to himself.


Slow surface holds deep state of planted kingdoms,

Mirrors showing sallow, alder, oak –

Chlorophylled and kingly-symbolled leaves

The royal trees on any English road.


The tops of reeds stand proud among sheet-silver,

Their dirty roots outshone by swelling light –

Excaliburs – or the lances of dead riders

Who rode here once to set the east alight.


Waterfowl calls urgently to offspring –

Brown fuzzy balls bob cheeping at her steer.

The angler cannot stop himself from smiling,

As he casts for luck across the haunted mere.


(Awake by now at home, his fishing widow,

Sipping her first coffee of the day.

Smiling at her grandkids out the window –

Her ducklings’ ducks, so soon to swim away.)


The plants that edge the lake have grown here always;

Reseeded from some Anglo-Saxon store –

Marginalia from the seventh century,

Still richly green if now less filled with lore.


Epona tails of Rome and Celt connections

Vanished lands in floreated forms –

Lush lowland lawn, these thronging herbs of nations,

Forget-me-nots and flags, dog-rose and thorn.


Apothecaries prospected these elixirs,

Water-mint and yarrow, woad and rue –

Cut and dried for daubed dog-Latined ewers,

Cures for flux, stone, plague, and marsh-ague.


Pallid fish slide silent near the surface

Or nose among new-inundated grass,

Animals always searching for advantage,

Ghosts glimpsed in oxidising antique glass.


Carp suck and spap and rise to find him casting;

Their ancestors gaped for God-believing men;

Now endless sky, that abbey’s painted ceiling –

Great fane forlorn, foundation lost in fen.


He throws his line along the deepest margins,

His hook hangs in the decomposing ooze;

He hovers with all fish beyond all ageing –

Quick and dead commingled in long view.

A poet’s pole position

Arctic Elegies

Peter Davidson, Carcanet, 2022, pb., 72pps. £11.99

DEREK TURNER feels impelled to look to the north

There are poets associated with particular places, or special states of mind, but Peter Davidson has made a geo-poetical genre of his own, as celebrant of a cardinal point. His interests are wide-ranging, but magnetized in one compass direction – towards ‘Norths’ geographical and conceptual, Norths as landscapes and mindscapes, Norths as essences of bleak beauty and soughing melancholy. Auden, Larkin and others celebrated septentrional subjects, but Davidson brings a clarity and suggestiveness all his own to the lonely latitudes that lie above the treeline.

Davidson studied literature and art history at Cambridge, and taught at Warwick and Leiden before spending many years as Professor of Renaissance Studies at Aberdeen. He is now Senior Research Fellow at Campion Hall, University of Oxford. His earliest writings were monographs on Scottish drinking songs, but he has also edited works of the 16th century Catholic martyr St. Robert Southwell and the 17th century Royalist diplomat-poet Sir Richard Fanshawe, and written an opera libretto (part of which features in this book).

A 2005 topographical tour-de-force, The Idea of North, set him undeviatingly on his compass course, and he followed up with Distance and Memory (2013), and The Last of the Light (2015). His 2018 book, The Universal Baroque, was a radical revisioning of cultural history in which national labels were rejected as otiose, and the very word ‘baroque’ released from its period prison. In his latest book, 2021’s The Lighted Window, the illuminated opening is seen in all its symbolical aspects – as sign of warmth and welcome for those out in the darkness, alternately allowing insights into interiors or outlooks onto wide worlds.

He has gazed northwards from different standpoints, but always through a prism (or snow-globe) refracting an English Catholic sense of dislocation and loss. Northern Europe has long been mostly Protestant (or post-Protestant), but he stakes an older claim, of the far North as fiefdom of ‘the Faith’. His Norths seem often empty, yet always echo, with thin ghost-voices wired on winds across gulfs of territory or time.

He is a celebrant of half-light and half-memories, looking out through long library windows onto winter afternoons with the cold coming down hard – of gloaming peregrinations across parklands and along secretive streets – of old houses and of wildness, of solitary ships and wandering stars, snowstorms and woodsmoke, falcons and thorns – bittersweetly aware of sacrifices made, failed schemes, doomed adventures, long exiles, lost expeditions and causes. Like Rose Macaulay, he takes pleasure in ruins; like Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, he finds substance in shadows.  The North, he notes in Distance and Memory, can be a place of “grim consolations” and wintry raptures, where dearth and even death can be counterbalanced by pristineness and purity. The lights of the North are conventionally held to be harder than those of the temperate zones – but even under the most unforgiving rays this evocative writer finds ample room for romance and ornate symbology, conveying great meanings in vastly evocative blank verse.

From a British vantage point, Norths are not necessarily polar wastes, but can be Pennine hillsides, Yorkshire towns, or Hebridean isles. Even those motorway signs on the edge of London which read “A1(M) The North” act almost as ambassadorial outposts, indicating richly-imagined places, and suggesting the supposed attitudes, habits, and traits of those who dwell in them – guardedness, practicality, sternness, stubbornness, terseness, thrift, toughness. The folksong phrase ‘North Country’ has long elicited images of lakes left by the Ice Age, broad fells, and drystone walls – and even today’s political term, ‘Northern Powerhouse’, is more romantic than rational, conjuring a domain of latent strengths. Entire Northlands can be evoked immediately in everyday architecture and art – stained railway arches, empty mills, the evenings of J. Atkinson Grimshaw – or even sounds – foghorns, geese, the haunted songs of Joy Division. In other countries, their Norths can be our Souths; an Italian’s idea of North may be Austria, and an African’s Italy. In Australia or New Zealand, vague notions of Northness may be swivelled to the South, with Antarctica taking the Arctic’s place in the cultural imagination.

The English east coast under snow. Image: Derek Turner

One of Davidson’s lost causes is the Stuart succession, with ‘Jacobite Song’ launching this second collection for Carcanet (following 2008’s The Palace of Oblivion). The forces of the pre-Reformation, clannish, chivalric Caledonia that briefly terrified Anglican, mercantile, rationalist England in 1745 are honoured in absentia – “The regiments like snow all overborne / The boat rowed far from the cold shore, long gone. / O blackbird taken in the fowler’s snare / He is now far who will return no more.” His king over the water has now gone over the ice, once-bonnie emblem of a past that has “Faded, flown, taken, frozen, falling, gone.” Later (‘Secret Theatres of Scotland’), under a carving of a stag in 1740s plaster he ponders scratched Scots words of desolate departure, graffiti of the gone – “Lang befor daylicht, he began his flicht”.

We then journey to find the jaded, tired Queen of the Adriatic reflected in Murano-made convexity in ‘Venice Glasses I’, one of three poems inspired by Victoria Crowe’s paintings. We can almost smell the Grand Canal and see gondolas rocking gently at their posts as another frantic day fades out – “When vanished things take shape in the stir of the waters / When glimpses and shadows pass at the edges of glasses”. This is a black and dank prospect, suggesting slimed piles and a faint under-whiff of sewage, mercifully uplifted by ‘Venice Glasses II’, where an overflying aircraft scrapes a bright stripe across the darkening welkin.

Back in the hushed old-maid austerity of Edinburgh, he scans second-hand bookshops well-stocked with the frigidly unsatisfactory productions of the eighteenth century – “A back room full of quarto shelves of Scotland / The August pleasures of dead advocates”, searching for sparks of passion within rows and rows of reason – “These wintry precincts of enlightenment / Which hold out for the moment, just, they hold.”

He hovers above 1845-8 to birds-eye the high-tech, high-hoped, disastrous Sir John Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage, which got frozen in forever, where “The ice grows downwards building in the dark”. He soars skua-like back to anxious England, and awaiting Lady Jane, pacing in her garden, seeking psychic aid to link to her too-long absent spouse, and eventually enlisting patriotic public opinion to make the Admiralty send in too-late search. We think of those famous pictures of the frozen corpses discovered long after – the luckier ones who died earlier, and received obsequies, before the rest perished miserably out in the white hell, benighted among bitterness, enmired in allegations of anthropophagy, insanity, lead-poisoning, and uncertainty. Davidson prays for intercession for these expeditionaries still – “Lord of the treasuries of Hail, absolve them now, / Queen of Miraculous Snowfall, lead them home.”

In ‘The Early Christian Monuments of Wales’, a poem titled like a treatise, we find evidence of earliest missionaries in monoliths on hawthorn-studded hills, and crude lettering in eroding inscriptions – the gospellers who gave birth to the monks, and the monks to the Matter of Britain – “Words growing thin in time’s vastness, names themselves breaking” – apostles long unreachable, and yet omnipresent even in today’s physical and psychological landscapes. Some poems are more straightforwardly devotional, like ‘St Edmund Campion meditates on the Passion’, or ‘Sonnet for Trinity Sunday’, but his abstractions are rooted in the natural kingdom of the North – “For we are God’s hands and eyes through each green day / Of dog-rose and elder, plough-furrowed leaf of the hornbeam.” Serenity of God is one with sublimity of scenery.

Faith filters into everything he writes – onto the fretted neck of John Dowland’s lute (‘Mr Dowland’s Midnight’), and into his allusions to Caspar David Friedrich’s hyperborean heroism, (‘Dialogue at Kloster Edelna’), and the works of other painters (‘Pryde’s Ghost’, ‘Rex Whistler’s Blues, August 1938’). The most personal lyrics of all thaw all permafrost to remember old friends, taste again late fruits once eaten in disordered once-elegant rooms (‘Lastness, or Rory’s Apple’), and honour his ages-ago aunt, losing her mind yet still able to remember Rilke (‘September Castles’).

Davidson’s conservative, mordant philosophy feels very far removed from those of most modern poets – indeed, it diverges radically from all modern outlooks – but there are times when he can cut through the deepest coldness, to pierce the most glass-slivered heart. He shows us in Arctic Elegies a land and state of mind both lyrically described and thrillingly delighted in – a land and state of mind both eminently deserving of celebration, and capable of shining suddenly with beauty and transformative warmth.

Parnassus, and patria

Tumuli at Revesby in Lincolnshire

Sunken Island: An Anthology of British Poetry

Various authors, edited by Alexander Adams, foreword by William Clouston, London: Bournbrook Press, 2022, pb, 55pps, £12.50

Bournbrook Press is an offshoot of Bournbrook Magazine, founded in 2019 to offer a “primarily British audience with traditionalist, socially conservative argument and entertainment”. This venture’s newest publication is something unusual, and unlikely to be financially profitable – an anthology of original poetry put together specifically to appeal to small-c conservatives, a subset of the population not noted for their interest in new verse.

Poetry written for political purposes always runs a risk of being bathetic, just as other arts can easily become ‘artivism’ – a point amply understood by this collection’s editor-contributor, who has written an informative book on this subject. I have a 1900 anthology on my shelves, Heroic and Patriotic Verse, and while much of the verse is excellent (it includes Byron, Goldsmith, Gray and Shakespeare), some has dated less well, including ‘Of old sat Freedom’ (one of Tennyson’s windier effusions) and the frankly indigestible ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’. The verse in Sunken Island is similarly uneven, but when it is good, it is, as Social Democratic Party leader William Clouston notes in his Foreword, “both serious and enjoyable”.

Clouston also points out that this book’s eight contributors are not “blind to the country’s flaws”, and this gives this collection both muscle and a certain wryness of outlook notably absent from some patriotic poets, like Rupert Brooke or Henry Newbolt. There is no bombast to be found in Sunken Island, nor sentimentality, nor Patience Strong-style platitudes. The two prevailing emotions are love, plus loss – an odd echo of Hugh Kenner’s A Sinking Island (1988), which concluded that “there’s no longer an English literature”. 

Kenner’s gloom is to some extent gainsaid by the poets in here, who suggest that a kind of distinctively English literary sensibility may still be discoverable – or at least a British one, because one of the poets included (the pseudonymous ‘Columba’) is Scottish, while another (Rahul Gupta) is a noted exponent of traditional alliterative verse. This does not mean that the other six contributors are stodgily suburban, nor even a hundred percent English. Alexander Adams is a justly well-regarded artist whose work is in the V&A (several of his drawings are used in Sunken Island). Benjamin Afer calls himself an “authentic reactionary”, but authors futuristic novels. Daniel Gustafsson is a bi-lingual (Swedish) doctor of philosophy, as well as a highly-regarded poet. A. Robert Lee taught in America and Japan, and lives in Spain. Nicholas Murray is a biographer of Kafka and Chatwin, and a Fellow of the Welsh Academy. S. D. Wickett is an aficionado of Lovecraft and Phillip K. Dick, and affianced to digital media.

The poems vary greatly in style. Nicholas Murray’s six short contributions feature everyday vexations, from standing on a train station concourse to being bitten by someone else’s dog (for which he apologises, the most stereotypically ‘English’ moment in the book). He notices small things, and honours the 19th century clergyman-diarist Francis Kilvert, who did too – “…the man of God whose fine gift / for seeing things lights the day / As sunshine after sudden rain”. He looks into a painting of a Lancashire landscape, and remembers its departed artist. He is abashed by the force of nature, in the form of a night wind which blew away rooftiles, and “glib proposals”. He then eavesdrops on an imagined conversation between James Joyce and Percy Wyndham Lewis, as verbose Irishman and Vorticist Englishman consider quantity, and the urgent need to stir things up, to dissolve “the solid shell”. 

A Robert Lee’s contribution, ‘From…’, addresses Englishness, coherent but complicated, encapsulated by the “multi-there” and “multi-then” of his own odyssey from 1950s Manchester via London, America, and Japan to 2022’s Spain. “The initial from takes on lengthening distance…” while everything changes and he changes with it, but remains in some ways strangely the same. ‘From…’ is more impressionistic jottings than verse, yet it ably conveys diverse textures and odd connections – between Manchester, Lancashire and Manchester, New Hampshire – between London periods and London postcodes – between the Kents of Chaucer and supermarkets – between the island mentalities of Britain and Japan, and the “inside outsider” status of being a Spanish-speaking Englishman in Spain. In him, national nostalgia seems in permanent tension with what Germans call Fernweh – ‘farsickness’, a wish to see far-off places – and perhaps he needed to get away to understand where he had come from. As Kipling asked, “what should they know of England who only England know”? Lee at least has come “to relish the from and the to: England’s away-day, England’s away-life”.

Adams’ poem ‘Roadside Diner, Shropshire’ is less sanguine, a contrast between the heartbreaking hills of Housman, and the plastic-bottle spotted county Adams and companion view from a bleary café window, downing terrible food while “vital, indifferent” traffic dashes by, heading nowhere purposefully. This England is, he repines, “an absent people, a civilization surrendered”, and sometimes he feels like a “lone journalist remembrancing a defeated land”. Lack of legacy nags and nags at him, as he sees sunning girls arising and going “back to life, leaving nothing of themselves” – fewer traces than even the evanescent, underestimated flowers of May.

Daniel Gustafsson’s ‘Bulbs’ strikes a brighter botanical note, reminding us that even the gnarliest corm in the coldest ground pushes green spears upwards each spring, offering potential for beauty and self-realisation. His work is rhizomed in Yorkshire, a county whose notoriously crumbling Holderness coast offers plentiful metaphors for erosion of substance. “The guards have let us down”, Gustafsson warns, political leaders and opinion-formers mere “architects of entropy”, letting everything slide into the abyss out of sheer carelessness. “We’ve seen our footings fall / to sludge… have seen, through slurred decrees and sleights of hand, / a state of blank forgetfulness / usurp the patterned sand.” Spurn Point at the northern tip of the Humber could be nationally emblematic, a sandy spur soon to be an island, near where the great port of Ravenspur once saw kings land, and monks build monumentally. The East Riding’s erosion is symbolic to him of a country’s “great diminishing”, as a former “common ground” is washed across by shallow sloganeers, who impose their views on others like some postmodern Morality Police.   

Gustafsson’s lyrical wistfulness is given a more combative edge by Benjamin Afer, whose ‘Lines on an English Street’ express feelings of inner exile, the author feeling alienated from his ancestral domain by demographic changes as symbolized by ethnic restaurants – “a surfeit of whiffs”, from an alphabet soup of eateries in High Streets that have somehow become Grand Bazaars. “It’s a solitary walk the Englishman beats / In the swelling crowds of the English streets”, he insists bleakly, notwithstanding possible economic upsides: “The happy ringing of tills and drumming feet / Make a merchant at home on the English street.”

The collection closes on an unexpected crescendo, with four extracts from larger works by Rahul Gupta. The author, who holds a doctorate in alliterative verse, and is undertaking a major translation project from Old Norse, is alive with logophilic intensity, pouring torrents of words onto pages as if upending some wonderfully capacious cornucopia. Familiar words are deployed in unexpected ways, unfamiliar ones summoned from OE word-hoards where they have lain too long asleep, and new ones are smithed – and all are marshalled to striking mythopoeic purpose.

Gupta’s chief area of operations is the post-Roman, pre-English world, when Angles, Celts, Jutes, Saxons and Scandinavians moved across claimable spaces between downfallen towns, where horse-masters could be kings and stones sacred, and ravens battened on bodies at real battles whose locations we have lost, and which we barely now remember even as names. This is ‘Matter of Britain’-territory, Gog Magog-country, the Logres that lies under even the ugliest parts of everyday England, giving the least imaginative modern Englishman some vague sense that he belongs in some continuum. This epic subject – so liable to be conventionalised and sentimentalised – gains vastly in vitality at his hands.

‘A Norse Étude’ is a combat scene condensed from all the hyperboreal epics, from Heimskringla and Orkneyinga to Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon, imagining “horny-nebbed” hooded crows descending on men falling under a hail of “Flanged arrows as flinder- / fledges leapt from edges / over shields, bows shrilling, / when shank-deep was dankness / of gore”.  Poems were – and are – also weapons in these wars of all against all, as tribal minstrels interpret and invent legends, weaving words “from that web of swords”, trying to forge the future by capturing the past.

‘The Turn and Fall of Leaf’ could be a title from Tolkien (to whom Gupta has been likened), a lambent disquisition on autumn, its colours and significances, its glories and sadness, as the glowing greenwood goes glorious, then brown and blighted. Winds pick up and shiver the timbers, and their chlorophyll clothes weep to the far-below floor. Secret glades are shockingly made naked, and rides are mounded deep in dry detritus – “pathways choked, by parched masses: / crinkled chamoisy, crunched underfoot / as shuffling drifts. With shift and ruffle / They enswathe the sward”.

Time for ‘The Onset of Winter’, with clouds and winds as “sky-skirmishers, obscure armies / of ill omen”. The Wild Hunt passes, baying and foaming hounds headed by Herne, antler-masked “wood-warlock of the warrior-band”, in elemental pursuit of white harts from heraldry, while berserkers and whippers-in howl and scream and “chew the shieldedge” in frenzy. And then – the chase passes and the thrumming hoofbeats recede into infinity. Nature exhales, and all is suddenly motionless. Overhead, “Hunter and Hound are hovering still” in a sky diamonded with stars and a moon of mother-of-pearl.

At other times, winter deals harsh hail and sleet to punish the patient earth – “gravel-grain that grows no harvest”. Yet other days, snowfall hushes all noise, subdues all striving; a giant Cold Genius walks the whitening land with his finger to his lips, casting crystals of infinite variety indifferently over the quick and the dead, obliterating boundaries, ivorying all the colour-fields. “All wear his harness: / ironhardened earth” and “The ice tightens / Wonderfetters”.

But there is release at last, as even in winter there is the possibility of warmth. In ‘The Midwinter Sun’, the “all-tending orb” suddenly rides high and reaches down with effortless sensuality. He “…drives the spore: he inspires the bud, / as the twig whitens, to untwist her whorl: / he parts her petals; the pollen to smoulder / from flaunting catkins”. Blinking, yawning animals emerge from hibernation, hungry for the starting grass, conscious of urgent impulses that make the male hen harrier seek out multiple mates, send hares careering across champaigns, adders intertwine Gordianally, and unsettle cattle in crew yards. The poet tracks Phoebus lovingly through his golden ascents, then Wheel of Fortune downturns, as the “traitor-barons…eclipse the glory of his lion’s mane”, as so often before. The uncertain sun sinks into the sea, and troubled men set out in tiny boats, “travailing westward /… on benighted tides, / In search of the dawn.” Like all his others, this is a virtuosic performance, a welcome reminder that there is still blood in the tradition.

The contributors to this volume could all be seen like Gupta’s metaphorical sailors, navigators of unknown waters, seeking Sol-ace in a gathering dark, reaching for verse to reverse eclipse. If sometimes their reach falls short, at other times it does not, and always they are honourably-intentioned. This public-spirited Parnassian project can be judged a success if even a few of the many other anxious among the English are inspired to poetry in their turn.