Bohemian Paradise

Britons have little sense of growing up in a country invaded many times, marched over by countless army boots and living under numerous hegemonies. Those of us born and schooled in Britain have lived with the notion that whilst the British Isles have been invaded by Romans, Germanic tribes, some Vikings and some Norsemen, none of these subjugated our ancestors to a tyrannical yoke or foreign regime that altered our country’s destiny forever. The Romans ran both out of ideas for governance and patience with our ghastly climate; they turned their back on Britain. This made it easier for the westward marching Germanic tribes who arrived after A.D. 410 leading to the establishment of Anglo-Saxon Britain. The Vikings tried to absorb us into their kingdom in the eleventh century but good King Edward the Confessor, an Anglo-Saxon, sent them packing. For over two thousand years my family’s Britishness has developed and remained intact. Along the way we gladly took on board some welcome civilizing influences from Rome, Germany, Denmark and (post-1975), from Brussels and Strasbourg. Yet some time in the past twenty-five years, a slim majority of English cooled on being receptive to regional European arts, law, business and philosophy. Sadly, absorbing some of the best features of culture over La Manche (separated distinctly from the dreadful ones) seems anathema to many English.

Bohemian Paradise

Bohemia (found on a modern map with difficulty, the Paradise is then just 200 square kilometres of it) has a very different history. These were our thoughts as four of us prepared a five-day tramp through the Bohemian Paradise. In every account of Bohemia, in every guide and history book the would be explorer is confronted with the numerous occasions of occupying peoples being pushed out of this part of what is now the Czech Republic. First it was the Boii tribe of Celts being moved on by Germanic tribes (whose successors took on the Romans in Britain in the fifth century) in the first century A.D. Around the turn of the 5^th to 6^th century Slavs moved in when the Germans moved out. By 700 Slavonic tribes were starting to federate even beating off invasion from the Franks and by so doing gaining influence and assistance from the Pope in Rome. Ah, ha, the Roman Catholic Church was never slow to get in on the act of geographical influence. In the 9^th century Byzantine Christian missionaries were on the scene but the Papacy in Rome took a hold on the people in Bohemia. However, by 1300 a Czech state was being formed. Then some acquisitive Germans returned. For the hapless Bohemians their country lay at a busy mainland European crossroads for restless conquerors - a landscape feature of which Britain has no experience.

King Otakar

There were kings of Bohemia from 1212 starting with Otakar I, followed by Otakar II, Wenceslases I and II, John of Luxembourg. Following them was Charles IV who gave his name to not only a famous bridge in Prague but also a university and a square. Another Wenceslas (IV) followed Charles when economic and political matters turned sour. The Hussite reform movement was born as a consequence of these bad times, so named after Jan Hus, whose statue still stands proudly in the old Prague town square. Master Hus met a fiery end as a result of the growth in prosperity of a landowning aristocracy and civic institutions. If Bohemian history was complicated before, it became doubly so now. Fighting broke out in the towns between the ordinary citizens and the rich, land-owning gentry (a similar situation to France in November 2018), as well as between the Hussites and the Catholics. Again, this was all very un-British; fighting in the towns was not something we did, at least only rarely such as in 1381 and at Peterloo in 1819. Maybe such fighting will feature once more in the English shires by 2020 if the national politicians in London continue to fail us north of the Trent.

The Hussites had a huge influence on the way that Bohemians lived, although they did not have it all their own way with many citizens preferring the Catholic style. In 1458 something else happened that would never occur in Britain; a Czech noble (George of Podebrady) with political skills was elected King of Bohemia. Next up on the throne was a Pole by the name of Vladislav Jagellon but royalty was in constant conflict with common peoples and urban centres and the Jagellons also gave up on Bohemia. This temporary vacuum gave way to the all conquering and dominant Habsburgs. The Habsburgs came from Austria and they reasserted the Catholic faith in Bohemia. By absorbing the kingdom of Bohemia into their empire the Habsburgs ruled until the First World War. Phew. That is a rushed précis of nearly two thousand years. And all this before the Munich Betrayal, the Nazis and German occupation, the influx of Communism and Soviet occupation, the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and finally Bohemia – as part of the 1993 creation of a Czech Republic – becoming welcomed in to the EU in 2004.

As we began our tramp through a small part of the region known as the Bohemian Paradise I pondered why we had come all this way for a five day walk in a pleasant rural setting when there are many pretty walks in Britain. What is so special about this Paradise? Why is it so different and how has man and the landscape collided in a distinctively different way to that of say, the Lake District in England?

Rock town

This landscape developed from a submerged plain around 66 million years ago. When the waters receded and mountains were formed to the north, sand and silt built up, eventually leading to the creation of huge sandstone blocks. So called ‘rock towns’ were formed, characterized by sandstone rock towers as high as 55 metres and canyons with sheer sides. Our dramatic walk took us through these towns – they are not populated today – and then up to explore castles perched precariously on crags. After day one we knew that England has no countryside like this. Kentmere, Langdale and Borrowdale never boasted any castles. Sandy tracks through stands of birch, fir and spruce alternated with open fields and dense forests. I felt almost a sense of being in an Alpine setting yet without the snow-capped mountains of Switzerland, just gently rolling hills.

Trosky Castle

Our first castle we visited was at Frydstejn. Now a ruin it was built in the 14^th century. It dominates the skyline on a prominent ridge. Next up was Vranov, constructed in the 15^th century. We ticked off Valdstejn, Hruba Skala, Kost, Trosky and Parez – lonely fortifications atop sandstone heights, visited now only by climbers, tourists and buzzards. The social history of these castles is quite unlike those in England and Wales where most remained in a single, family ownership through centuries of plague, famine and civil war. Reading the history of Valdstejn it is typical of how Bohemian castles changed ownership frequently. The Wallenstein branch of the wealthy Markvatics family started out from Valdstejn. The castle had been built in the late 13^th century. It was built on massive sandstone towers from which the word Waldenstein, meaning ‘forest stone’, is derived. In the ensuing two hundred years ownership changed many times. In around 1550 the castle burnt down. The wealthy regional landowners were defeated in an uprising in 1620 when Albrecht of Wallenstein bought the Valdstejn estate. Subsequent owners and occupiers were Vaclav Holan Rovensky, Jan Antonin Lexa of Aehrenthal. Finally in 1824 the property was made accessible to the people, it was confiscated from the Aehrenthals. The community in the town of Turnov now owns it.

We discovered the Bohemia landscape to be still populated thinly with small farms and villages.  Not much has changed since the end of the First World War. Apple orchards abound providing smallholders with an income and passing trampers with a free lunch. (In my mind, along the way during our Bohemian tramp, I envisioned Josef Schweik, a soldier of the First World War from Prague, bumbling his way through the landscape, picking apples and doing all he could to avoid being called to actually fight. The Good Soldier Schweik is a brilliantly comic piece of fiction by Jaroslav Hasek first published in 1930. Its real humour is the satire on army life, the military career of a fat dog fancier, Schweik, from the city and the buffoons running the military machine in 1914. Schweik was a malingerer and contrived to get himself lost in the Bohemian landscape, travelling in the opposite direction to which he should have been.) The cost of living today is low, compared to England, but economic growth is assured. The locally brewed beers are some of the best I have tasted anywhere in the world. The country’s population of ten million is concentrated in cities such as Prague, Brno and Pilsen where, amongst other activities, they profitably manufacture Skoda cars and computer security systems. The Bohemian Paradise is popular with climbers, trampers and film makers – drawn to the dramatic rock formations and rolling landscape largely untouched by the spoils of industrialization such as pylons, wind turbines and factories.

Brexit leaver

Tramping through the Bohemian Paradise I further became envious of the tranquility we found both in the villages and with the people. After its turbulent history and hosting reluctantly dozens of warring peoples, who swept across its landscape with little respect for local traditions, it is now a landlocked community peacefully knowing its place in the world next to neighbours which do not, at last, threaten it – Germany, Poland, Austria and Slovakia. The Bohemians of today are largely irreligious, law abiding, educated and welcoming to foreigners. In their historic yet peaceful landscape their modest prosperity and political stability is desirable. In contrast we unconquered people now live in a politically fractured state, riven with suspicion of anyone we don’t agree with, deriding all politicians and not at all sure where we fit in our landscape. I guess that most Britons could not identify Bohemia on a map (I struggled to do so before our visit) yet they would do well to learn to where their plumbers, builders and care workers are returning, back to their Paradise. Bohemians have it all as we set about earnestly despoiling our country for a generation.

Brexit remainer

Cartmel: a landscape with horses & betting folk

If you could call the thing a horse. If it hadn’t shown a flash of speed in the straight, it would have got mixed up in the next race. P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves

I don’t know the first thing about horseracing. Furthermore I am not a betting man. So why should I attend a race meeting in Cartmel? Being invited by a kinswoman living three miles from the picturesque racetrack was a good enough reason. With the additional attraction of a day tramping on the gentle southern fells in late summer in fine walking weather, plus tea and cake at Sizergh Castle, I was drawn once again to the Lake District. And the Cartmel peninsula was a part of Lakeland I had never been, a node of Britain that demanded inspection.

The village of Cartmel gives its name to the peninsula in the remoter south of Lakeland. This is a flat spit of land jutting south into Morecambe Bay. Modern day Cartmel is known for its Michelin starred restaurant and being the home of sticky toffee pudding. However, being a user of neither of these populist inventions, I am more interested in the founding of the community when a priory was established on the banks of the River Eea, close to the site of the racecourse. In 1190 The First Earl of Pembroke commissioned the priory and thus laid down the foundation of eight hundred years of a typically English heritage. For Cartmel you can substitute any one of hundreds of other villages in Britain that grew in a similar fashion, even if each one has its own setting, culture and mysteries. There is, however, one aspect of British life that binds these villages together. The horse, and Cartmel ‘does’ horses.

Morecambe Bay near Cartmel

By nurture I am a city boy. My earliest encounter with an herbivorous quadruped was being seated, aged two, on the back of a Gorleston donkey when on a family holiday in Norfolk. Reports and photographs reveal I was unimpressed with this experience. So when I married a country girl who believes the horse is “the most beautiful creature on earth” I decided to learn more about these animals. A trade off one time with my future wife resulted in my giving her driving lessons and she taking me for a few sessions of horse riding. The former went well with no mishaps. The latter are remembered for two hair-raising incidents. The first was when I lost control of my nag, which took off at great speed on a downhill and grassy track and forced its passage between my teacher and a ditch – ‘totally infra dig, my dear sir, you scoundrel!’ The second resulted in the traffic on the crammed Fosse Way being halted as my mount was spooked by a burned out lorry tyre lying in the grass verge and so it backed out on to the tarmac. It had a point, where else was there to go? Following the advice of top sportsmen down the ages, which is ‘get out at the top”, I retired from horse riding. This was a good move because as soon as I did I began to appreciate what intriguing and graceful animals they are. (Horses can be obstinate, nasty and cantankerous too but they probably learned such traits from their drivers.)

The horse has shaped the English landscape. The growth of the economy, the exploitation of the land and the expansion of farming were, for nineteen hundred years, heavily dependent on the horse. Horses enabled people to travel from town to town in far less time than it took to walk. Farmers hitched ploughs and threshers to heavy horses thus managing to till the land more quickly and efficiently. Ponies were sent underground to pull coal trucks away from the face of the seam. In warfare cavalry achieved superiority over infantry. Soldiers, idling away the time between battles, started to race their mounts and found that horses galloping in a straight line could run fast. It was in the reign of King Henry II that the racing of horses became common. 

Three Kings

By 1680 regular race meetings were being held in Lincoln. By 1750 steeplechasing across country was popular. The term ‘steeplechasing’ referred to the fact that a visible church steeple was used as a marker for the horse and its rider to pinpoint in their cross country race over hedges, dykes and ditches. Onlookers discovered they could make money off their mates by running a book on the outcome. Breeders discovered they could make even more money by pairing speedy stallions with fertile mares.

Would a first time visitor to the Cartmel area think that this landscape is still dependent on horses? Probably he or she would not. Set in the southern extent of The Lake District, (a name sadly in decreasing use, now folk refer to Cumbria – a modern and soulless name), Cartmel is ringed by romantically denominated villages such as Holker, Birkby, Allithwaite, Stribers, Eggerslack and Howbarrow. Few houses here, some small farms, many woods; this is not a wealthy land, especially when comparing with Newmarket, Epsom, Aintree and Sandown. Yet horseracing thrives. Horseracing is the second largest spectator sport in Britain. As we found out on a warm and late summer day in Cartmel, race meetings bring together peoples of all types and class, regardless of wealth, to have a flutter and some fun along the way. They have done for a long time. The earliest record of racing here is in 1856. Yet mule racing probably took place on this site in the fifteenth century, organized by the monks in the adjacent Cartmel Priory. Cartmel racecourse is small but attracts one of the highest crowd’s for any jumps track in the country, with up to 20,000 people attending a public holiday meeting.

Mountains, rivers, lakes, and meadows - nature’s living and vibrant emblems - all are found in their natural beauty in The Lake District. Cartmel looks north to the fells where death on the slopes is too often an occurrence as some tourists - inappropriately shod and ill prepared for rough terrain - discover too late. Cartmel also looks to the south where the sands of Morecambe Bay look benign when the tidal waters retreat leaving a vast flat area holding cockles and flounders. For all its quaint beauty the peninsula has witnessed terrible deaths of men and women drawn, with their horses, to the cockle beds in the sands between Grange and Poulton-le-Sands, now Morecambe. In 1769 Thomas Gray wrote of a Cockler in Poulton

 “driving a little cart with two daughters in it, and his wife on horse-back following, set out one day to pass the seven mile sands, as they had frequently used to do: when they were half-way over, a thick fog rose, and as they advanced they found the water much deeper than they had expected: the old man was puzzled; he stopped, and said he would go a little way to find some mark he was acquainted with; they staid a while for him, but in vain; they called aloud, but no reply: at last the young women pressed their mother to think where they were, and go on; she would not leave the place; she would not quit her horse and get into the cart with them.”

The old woman was washed away and perished. The daughters clung to their cart and drove the horse on; sometimes it swam, sometimes it waded. Finally the cart was brought to land and safety. The brave horse and the girls survived. The bodies of the parents were found when the tide ebbed, that of the father just a few yards from where he had left family. In February 2004 twenty-one Chinese illegal immigrant workers were drowned near the same spot as Gray’s Cockler over two hundred years before. This shocking tragedy inspired films to be made and songs to be written. In the decades between the two catastrophes numerous other fishermen, tourists and daredevils have died in the sands.

Yet this Lakeland landscape always entices the walker, the poet and the painter. Elsewhere in The Lake District motorists queue to enter the National Park, running their engines and spewing fumes, in order that they may eat fish and chips in Ambleside or feed the ducks at Bowness-on-Windermere. Fortunate and blessed are the residents of Cartmel and nearby Field Broughton which fewer tourists find. Apart from on seven racing days a year here motorists and gargantuan coaches do not clog the lanes. Even on race days the wily locals block the village, directing the motorized racegoers to parking at distance from the track.

My equine education has taught me far more than the horse being pivotal to the development of the English form of agriculture. That the hedges of Leicestershire are sculptured for jumping over is now easy to see. That the racecourse at Catterick provides entertainment for squaddies and North Yorkshire gentry fascinated me on an earlier racing event. That the Thoroughbred breed has been developed for speed and that the beast loves to race are now familiar to me. The city boy has now had the scales lifted from his eyes. I have learned of the completely English folklore and culture – to say nothing of the separate language - that surrounds people, places and horses that stretch back two thousand years. For Henry II’s successors the horse was an essential component of the English landscape too. Henry VII forbade the export of any horse without royal permission. Henry VIII made horse stealing an offence that ranked with the transgressions of two of his wives – punishable by beheading. Elizabeth I introduced coaches drawn by horse (in 1555 a first carriage was made for the Earl of Rutland). By the seventeenth century horse-drawn carriages ousted the sedan-chair and hansom cabs, the stanhope, tilbury, gig, brougham, landau and phaeton were all developments of a basic idea – that of the conveyance of people by horse through the landscape. It is said that Elizabeth II is never happier than when out racing her Thoroughbreds.

P.G. Wodehouse’s words should have warned me. A farmer we met at Cartmel, who keeps horses for his wife and daughter to ride and also trains horses to harness, is a wise man and my saviour at the track. When we asked him tentatively for his tip for the last race (my one wager in the second race resulting in a last place) he replied, “Oh aye, aye… Keep your money in your pocket”.

Figures of a Landscape: an introduction

“…it was only then that I saw how tenuous, really, the hold of all these people had been on the land they worked or lived in”.

V.S. Naipaul (1932 – 2018), The Enigma of Arrival.

High on a hill in Picardy stands the lonely Thiepval Memorial to the 70,000 missing Allied soldiers who died on the Somme. At school I was captivated for life by the literature emanating from the First World War so I later went in search of the place.* I have twice stood there, looking up in awe at the names of the men and women commemorated. My first sighting of the acres of British and German graves was by chance, in 1971 on the return leg of a road trip to Italy. Northern France in those days had no autoroutes and the main Route Nationale took travellers directly through the warzone. Ten years later I joined a tour of the Somme battlefield, stood in the preserved trenches and went to Thiepval. In 2016 I was again at the Memorial for a one hundredth anniversary ceremony in the company of a British Prime Minister and a French President. I felt like an insignificant figure in a historic landscape, for this is a landscape still resounding with stories of men’s courage, catastrophes and compatriots. This is a land that has been marked forever by a previous generation’s commitment to war.

In counterpoint to the human induced horror experienced by the Tommies in France is the vengeance nature unleashes on mankind. On 22^nd February 2011 an earthquake wrecked a beautiful city and rent the urban landscape of Christchurch in New Zealand. Picking my way around the ruins four years later I felt a similar sense of devastation that I experienced in the Somme trenches. What man can do to obliterate a landscape, nature can do to mankind.

The landscapes of Britain are now mostly protected by, and subservient to, the will of farmers, planners, developers, grouse-moor shooters and walkers. There have been rare natural disasters in recent years such as Cockermouth in 2009 and Mousehole in 1981. Yet on other continents many people live in perpetual fear for natural disasters. When such landscapes and people collide cataclysmically it is the former that often comes off on top. Fires in California and Eastern Australia with floods in the Caribbean and Bangladesh take lives and property frequently.

My interaction with landscapes includes amusing, dramatic and wistful episodes. Confrontation with a deadly serious East German border guard, (yet he smiled), in Cold War Berlin; saving the life of a buddy on icy Foule Crag in Cumbria; and gaping at the gas chambers at Auschwitz; all have left me with vivid images up to fifty years later. For me landscapes are inspirational, humbling, historical and, on the last hundred feet of a mountain climb, tiresome. Yet when standing on the summit of Ben Nevis in a whiteout one recent June my sense of triumph was matched by my wonderment of the permanence of the place.

Nonetheless, my travels in other landscapes reveal countless examples of man’s success at controlling his places. I ask myself, is this a good thing? In this new century we are learning more each year of the cost of that control; put crudely that cost is called ‘commercial development’. The scale of the downside of economic expansion (its sole purpose is to feed the billions of this planet’s inhabitants) is represented graphically and daily on our screens. Images of Indian rivers overflowing with plastic and the polluted oceans poisoning the fish stocks are ubiquitous. Today I read in my newspaper of a Leatherback turtle, washed up dead on a Cornish beach, its belly full of a plastic bag ingested in mistake for a jellyfish, and its body scarred by swipes from a propeller blade. What we see now are landscapes under pressure from man. In turn they are taking on more assistance from the elements to push us back.

This blog explores the relationship between person and place. I look at landscapes I have visited and record my impressions on how people and the land have related to one another. Some times they co-exist happily. Sometimes they do not. Forest fires, earthquakes, warfare and human internment (at Port Arthur and Auschwitz) have stamped notoriety on previously unremarkable locations. And then there is the Lake District in England, my choicest landscape of them all. How do crowded communities and political upheaval beset our island? I find the supplicatory sheep are now outlawed in areas where once they provided a living for man. I find that ‘rewilding’ is a dangerous concept, and besides, a hopeless objective as this island is too crowded to exclude people from parts of it.

The late, great Alfred Wainwright – council worker, fellwalker, guidebook writer and artist – said of Blencathra, one of the mightiest mountains of England: “This is a mountain that compels attention, even from the dull people whose eyes are not habitually lifted to the hills”. I apply his sentiments to the entire landscape on earth. It “compels attention” so that we learn to live better in it and pay it more respect.

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* My bookshelves have long given space to the poems, plays and novels of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, R.C. Sherriff, Robert Graves and later a prize winning series The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker. These have been joined, a century after the event, by some thoughtful and freshly interpretive accounts of the war. Readers looking for a new perspective on events that culminated one hundred years ago this autumn might be rewarded by the study of work by Andrew Roberts, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, Gary Sheffield and David Stevenson, amongst many more. The often romantic ideals surrounding the novelists and poets are put into perspective by some of today’s writers who remind us that the British nation as a whole supported the move of going to war in 1914.