RICHARD JEFFERIES AND BURDEROP
BY J. B. JONES
From the Worthing Calvacade, 1946
SOMEWHERE Jefferies maintains that a single hedgerow would provide sufficient material for a lifetime of book-writing. Like Mummery, the Alpinist, he loved the old trails best, though both men were daring pioneers. To Jefferies the Burderop country was a microcosm of all the rest, a fancy he knew how to develop in Sport and Science. In Hitler you see again the horrible weasel of Hodson Woods. And that frightfully realistic story of stoat versus wounded gamekeeper in Wood Magic is not a jungle horror, but a Burderop drama post-dated from Surbiton halt on the short but dolorous road between Coate and Goring.
Coate, his birthplace; Badbury, site of his best loved spring ; Snap, where Cicely’s uncle lived; and Burderop — down, plain, and woods — indicate the limited area included by Jefferies in Round About a Great Estate. Wild Life and The Amateur Poacher go slightly farther afield; his famous Story, if we omit London and a few Sussex allusions, is concerned entirely with Liddington and Burderop. Wood Magic speaks for itself. The Gamekeeper at Home may be looked on as Burderop in quintessence, though many will assign that distinction to Round About, since the downs come so largely into the picture.
Burderop Down is the eastern half of the huge Burderop-Barbury massif, Barbury, being higher by a few feet, secures precedence. A wonderfully defiant-looking block, this, both in length and height, when approached from Swindon. In reality it is but a mere facade, as is so often the case with chalk hills, but what a grand piece of deceit 1 If these downs were 10,000 instead of 900 feet high, Burderop arête would furnish a magnificent spectacle, with its cornice of snow curling over toward Smeathe’s Ridge opposite. As it is, the crest is sparsely topped with firs, hard-bitten by time and tanks, Edward Thomas’” long thin line of trees that seem Titanic wayfarers trooping dejectedly.”
The view northward from Burderop Hill is by no means as impressive as toward Marlborough, for which Alfred Williams’ Villages of the White Horse must be consulted. But Jefferies seems to prefer a civilised cornland to a tumbled down-land scene. Says he in Round About a Great Estate : ‘The stunted fir-trees on the down gave so little shadow that I was glad to find a hawthorn under whose branches I could rest on the sward. On either hand hills succeeded to hills, and behind I knew they extended farther than eye could reach. Immediately beneath in front there was a plain (Burderop), at its extreme boundary a wood (Burderop), and beyond that the horizon was lost in the summer haze (over the Cotswolds). It was one vast expanse at noonday; nothing but yellowing wheat beneath, the ramparts of the hills around, and the sun above.’
Jefferies was rarely happier than when aloft on the downs. This is where his comrades, the men in the tumuli, lived; to him these mighty hills were “alive with the dead”. His bronze plate on the Jefferies-Williams Memorial sarsen erected where he often walked looks steeply down on the barrows he commemorates in Wild Life in a Southern County and in The Story of My Heart. It was sited so that it should.
Engrossed by the vision of ghostly sportsmen crowding Burderop ‘s long-forgotten racecourse below him, he is awakened by noticing one of the (then) newly-introduced steam-ploughs at work on the Plain, and ponders on the changes involved down there since the time of his Draycott forbears. Sitting in 1944, perhaps under Jefferies’ hawthorn, I looked around on the same wide expanse, but cannot print what changes I saw. No matter, for they can well be guessed. Liddington, Burderop, Barbury and Hackpen will once again relapse into their ancient silences, all the recently made wounds in the down-land turf healed by Father Time as cleverly as he has patched up the scars of prehistoric delvers and Hitlers.
Before we leave High Burderop, attention must be paid to Jefferies’ Barrow in Gypsy Lane, where the hill plunges eastward into the Og valley as if making for Whitefield Copse ahead. In his Wild Life in a Southern County Jefferies, describing his journey from White Horse Hill to Barbury, calls a halt at Burderop’s sector of the Ridge Way which he is following to note the sycamore -crowned bowl-barrow by Draycott Foliat: “ Nearby is an ancient tumulus on which grows a small yet obviously aged sycamore tree stunted by wind and storm, and under it the holes of rabbits—drilling their habitations into the tomb of the unknown warrior.” Busy local legend has it that hidden gold and bad luck await the excavator. But what can be the age of this tree? It looks to-day exactly as Jefferies saw it nearly a century ago!
In the same connection he remarks the Iron Age camp, otherwise Barbury “Castle,” just above him, and “ below, two more turf-grown tumuli, low and shaped like an inverted bowl.” Of course, these appear again in his cele¬brated Story, when Liddington’s moving experiences cede the place of honour in its pages to Burderop’s buried chieftains, and where Jefferies, caught up into mystical union with the spirits of these men made perfect, outsteps the present with “ I cannot understand time. It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine.”
Another easily identifiable spot, and such are extremely rare in Jefferies, occurs in his Round About a Great Estate. Cicely, the lovely girl there sketched so charmingly if slightly, goes for a walk from Coate toward Greenhill. She has passed the Reservoir, and “two meadows from the lower woods of the Chace is what seems from afar a remarkably wide hedge irregularly bordered with furze. But on entering a gateway in it you find a bridge over a brook which for some distance flows with a hedge on either side. The low parapet of the bridge affords a seat—one of Cicely’s favourite haunts—whence in spring it is pleasant to look up the brook ; for the banks sloping down from the bushes to the water are yellow with primroses and hung over with willow boughs. As the brook is straight, the eye can see under these a long way up Cicely’s seat on the arch over this Rip Van Winkle waterway dug to feed the Reservoir, is still there to be sat upon, but not one in a thousand of the inhabitants of the big town nearby has the dimmest idea of its existence, nor cares a kick about such things. Why should they! Do they not live in the “Town without a Soul”?
Burderop derives from burgthorp, a name with a Danish admixture, suggesting a habitation near a fort. The latter may refer to Barbury Castle, or more likely to a large rectangular camp recently discovered within Burderop Park itself. “The great house at Okebourne Chace “ is thus mentioned, only to be dismissed, in Round About a Great Estate, nor does Jefferies write about it much elsewhere. Its forerunner was Early Elizabethan, but was completely reconstructed, “presumably in Georgian times,” according to its present chatelaine, Miss Joan Calley. Alfred Williams tells us that Queen Elisabeth passed the night there once : “The bedstead on which she slept—a fine old specimen of carved and painted oak—is still preserved, and the room has scarcely been touched since. Another trophy hanging in the great hall beneath is a pair of military top-boots said to have been worn by Oliver Crom¬well, so that here we have the singular mental spectacle of the Protector’s boots under Queen Elizabeth’s bed.” The Gamekeeper’s Cottage, with its inscribed stone of 1741, may, or may not, afford a clue to the date of rebuilding of the mansion.
Burderop Woods held at least one of Jefferies’ thinking-places : “The tall firs (near the Pitching) pleased me most; the glance rose up the flame-shaped fir-tree, tapering to its green tip, and above was the azure sky. By the aid of the tree, I felt myself, and in that intense sense of consciousness prayed for greater perfection of soul and body …”
Another such thinking-place, also described in The Story of My Heart, was on the eastern outskirts of Chisledon village : “ I paused a minute or two by a clump of firs, in whose branches the wind always sighed—there is always a movement of the air on a hill. There I could think a moment.” Though most of these trees have been destroyed, there are still (1944) seven weather-beaten ones, Jefferies’ firs, lining New Road, between the railway bridge and the highway to Marlborough. All honour to the Chisledon parish council for promising to protect them, decrepit-looking as they are.
Okebourne is Chisledon-cum-Badbury. In Badbury combe is Tibbald’s mill, subject of one of the most interesting chapters in Round About a Great Estate. Here also rises the secluded spring about which Jefferies writes in his Story, referring to the same again in Meadow Thoughts : “The spring rises in a hollow under the rock, imperceptibly and without bubble or sound …To this cell I used to come once now and then on a summer’s day, tempted, perhaps, by the sweet cool water, but drawn also by a feeling that could not be analysed. Stooping, I lifted the water in the hollow of my hand carefully, sunlight gleamed on it as it slipped through my fingers. The water was more to me than water, and the sun than sun … Beside the physical water and the physical light, I had received from them their beauty.”
Fringing Burderop Woods on the north, running through the Reservoir, and turning up in distant Sussex, is a thin layer of red Greensand. Jefferies noticed it at Coate and by Wolstanbury Hill. Did he realise what a bond of union he had here? Wild Life in a Southern County speaks of Coate “precipices facing the water like a cliff. Along the edge above runs a shallow red-brown band ...” In The Open Air, dealing with the same phenomenon, he writes : “On the warm red sand—red, at least, to look at, but green by geological courtesy, I think—of Sussex, round about Hurst of the Pierrepoints, primroses are seen soon after the year has turned”. That is how far he gets. Yet his Cicely’s favourite haunt was by the “brook” whose banks are yellow with primroses growing in soil as red as ruddle! Telepathy or his geology was at fault here.
On the height of Burderop Down stands, since December, 1939, a joint memorial to the two famous Wiltshiremen, Jefferies and Alfred Williams. Another, to the same tragic, gifted pair, is on Liddington Hill, 4 miles away, where a plaque was affixed in 1938 to the Ordnance Survey pyramid. The two monuments looking across the Draycott gap physically separating them would, were they sentient, rejoice in a common memory. The Vice-Chairman of the Memorial Committee, a man of 86, asked me a few days before he died, knowing he would never go up on distant Burderop, “ Don’t you think that just one or two of us could baptise the Stone unofficially and privately ?” A typical Victorian, he resented war’s tyranny in forbidding commemoration of such an event. Some months after his death his suggestion was acted upon.
Water, fetched from the Longpond, was poured upon pyramid and sarsen. A sarsen-stone has numerous natural cavities in it, and on the shoulder of the Barbury Stone one of these hollows is filled at every storm. Into this the last drops of water were reverently emptied, on August 9, 1940, and John Lee Osborn’s wish fulfilled,
Jefferies’ bronze reads:
“It is eternity now,
I am in the midst of it.
It is about me in the sunshine,”
Williams’ tablet is inscribed:
“Still to find and still to follow
Joy in every hill and hollow,
Company in solitude.”
Words from Burderop, they have been scanned of late by a multitude of the finest British and American manhood. Some of the latter would have it that our two heroes were buried under the Stone, and erected rude crosses to them. Warriors of both nationalities careered round it in their mighty Churchills and Shermans, cutting up the down, but always leaving the Jefferies-Williams monolith inside a circle of untouched “sweet, short turf.”
Coate, his birthplace; Badbury, site of his best loved spring ; Snap, where Cicely’s uncle lived; and Burderop — down, plain, and woods — indicate the limited area included by Jefferies in Round About a Great Estate. Wild Life and The Amateur Poacher go slightly farther afield; his famous Story, if we omit London and a few Sussex allusions, is concerned entirely with Liddington and Burderop. Wood Magic speaks for itself. The Gamekeeper at Home may be looked on as Burderop in quintessence, though many will assign that distinction to Round About, since the downs come so largely into the picture.
Burderop Down is the eastern half of the huge Burderop-Barbury massif, Barbury, being higher by a few feet, secures precedence. A wonderfully defiant-looking block, this, both in length and height, when approached from Swindon. In reality it is but a mere facade, as is so often the case with chalk hills, but what a grand piece of deceit 1 If these downs were 10,000 instead of 900 feet high, Burderop arête would furnish a magnificent spectacle, with its cornice of snow curling over toward Smeathe’s Ridge opposite. As it is, the crest is sparsely topped with firs, hard-bitten by time and tanks, Edward Thomas’” long thin line of trees that seem Titanic wayfarers trooping dejectedly.”
The view northward from Burderop Hill is by no means as impressive as toward Marlborough, for which Alfred Williams’ Villages of the White Horse must be consulted. But Jefferies seems to prefer a civilised cornland to a tumbled down-land scene. Says he in Round About a Great Estate : ‘The stunted fir-trees on the down gave so little shadow that I was glad to find a hawthorn under whose branches I could rest on the sward. On either hand hills succeeded to hills, and behind I knew they extended farther than eye could reach. Immediately beneath in front there was a plain (Burderop), at its extreme boundary a wood (Burderop), and beyond that the horizon was lost in the summer haze (over the Cotswolds). It was one vast expanse at noonday; nothing but yellowing wheat beneath, the ramparts of the hills around, and the sun above.’
Jefferies was rarely happier than when aloft on the downs. This is where his comrades, the men in the tumuli, lived; to him these mighty hills were “alive with the dead”. His bronze plate on the Jefferies-Williams Memorial sarsen erected where he often walked looks steeply down on the barrows he commemorates in Wild Life in a Southern County and in The Story of My Heart. It was sited so that it should.
Engrossed by the vision of ghostly sportsmen crowding Burderop ‘s long-forgotten racecourse below him, he is awakened by noticing one of the (then) newly-introduced steam-ploughs at work on the Plain, and ponders on the changes involved down there since the time of his Draycott forbears. Sitting in 1944, perhaps under Jefferies’ hawthorn, I looked around on the same wide expanse, but cannot print what changes I saw. No matter, for they can well be guessed. Liddington, Burderop, Barbury and Hackpen will once again relapse into their ancient silences, all the recently made wounds in the down-land turf healed by Father Time as cleverly as he has patched up the scars of prehistoric delvers and Hitlers.
Before we leave High Burderop, attention must be paid to Jefferies’ Barrow in Gypsy Lane, where the hill plunges eastward into the Og valley as if making for Whitefield Copse ahead. In his Wild Life in a Southern County Jefferies, describing his journey from White Horse Hill to Barbury, calls a halt at Burderop’s sector of the Ridge Way which he is following to note the sycamore -crowned bowl-barrow by Draycott Foliat: “ Nearby is an ancient tumulus on which grows a small yet obviously aged sycamore tree stunted by wind and storm, and under it the holes of rabbits—drilling their habitations into the tomb of the unknown warrior.” Busy local legend has it that hidden gold and bad luck await the excavator. But what can be the age of this tree? It looks to-day exactly as Jefferies saw it nearly a century ago!
In the same connection he remarks the Iron Age camp, otherwise Barbury “Castle,” just above him, and “ below, two more turf-grown tumuli, low and shaped like an inverted bowl.” Of course, these appear again in his cele¬brated Story, when Liddington’s moving experiences cede the place of honour in its pages to Burderop’s buried chieftains, and where Jefferies, caught up into mystical union with the spirits of these men made perfect, outsteps the present with “ I cannot understand time. It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine.”
Another easily identifiable spot, and such are extremely rare in Jefferies, occurs in his Round About a Great Estate. Cicely, the lovely girl there sketched so charmingly if slightly, goes for a walk from Coate toward Greenhill. She has passed the Reservoir, and “two meadows from the lower woods of the Chace is what seems from afar a remarkably wide hedge irregularly bordered with furze. But on entering a gateway in it you find a bridge over a brook which for some distance flows with a hedge on either side. The low parapet of the bridge affords a seat—one of Cicely’s favourite haunts—whence in spring it is pleasant to look up the brook ; for the banks sloping down from the bushes to the water are yellow with primroses and hung over with willow boughs. As the brook is straight, the eye can see under these a long way up Cicely’s seat on the arch over this Rip Van Winkle waterway dug to feed the Reservoir, is still there to be sat upon, but not one in a thousand of the inhabitants of the big town nearby has the dimmest idea of its existence, nor cares a kick about such things. Why should they! Do they not live in the “Town without a Soul”?
Burderop derives from burgthorp, a name with a Danish admixture, suggesting a habitation near a fort. The latter may refer to Barbury Castle, or more likely to a large rectangular camp recently discovered within Burderop Park itself. “The great house at Okebourne Chace “ is thus mentioned, only to be dismissed, in Round About a Great Estate, nor does Jefferies write about it much elsewhere. Its forerunner was Early Elizabethan, but was completely reconstructed, “presumably in Georgian times,” according to its present chatelaine, Miss Joan Calley. Alfred Williams tells us that Queen Elisabeth passed the night there once : “The bedstead on which she slept—a fine old specimen of carved and painted oak—is still preserved, and the room has scarcely been touched since. Another trophy hanging in the great hall beneath is a pair of military top-boots said to have been worn by Oliver Crom¬well, so that here we have the singular mental spectacle of the Protector’s boots under Queen Elizabeth’s bed.” The Gamekeeper’s Cottage, with its inscribed stone of 1741, may, or may not, afford a clue to the date of rebuilding of the mansion.
Burderop Woods held at least one of Jefferies’ thinking-places : “The tall firs (near the Pitching) pleased me most; the glance rose up the flame-shaped fir-tree, tapering to its green tip, and above was the azure sky. By the aid of the tree, I felt myself, and in that intense sense of consciousness prayed for greater perfection of soul and body …”
Another such thinking-place, also described in The Story of My Heart, was on the eastern outskirts of Chisledon village : “ I paused a minute or two by a clump of firs, in whose branches the wind always sighed—there is always a movement of the air on a hill. There I could think a moment.” Though most of these trees have been destroyed, there are still (1944) seven weather-beaten ones, Jefferies’ firs, lining New Road, between the railway bridge and the highway to Marlborough. All honour to the Chisledon parish council for promising to protect them, decrepit-looking as they are.
Okebourne is Chisledon-cum-Badbury. In Badbury combe is Tibbald’s mill, subject of one of the most interesting chapters in Round About a Great Estate. Here also rises the secluded spring about which Jefferies writes in his Story, referring to the same again in Meadow Thoughts : “The spring rises in a hollow under the rock, imperceptibly and without bubble or sound …To this cell I used to come once now and then on a summer’s day, tempted, perhaps, by the sweet cool water, but drawn also by a feeling that could not be analysed. Stooping, I lifted the water in the hollow of my hand carefully, sunlight gleamed on it as it slipped through my fingers. The water was more to me than water, and the sun than sun … Beside the physical water and the physical light, I had received from them their beauty.”
Fringing Burderop Woods on the north, running through the Reservoir, and turning up in distant Sussex, is a thin layer of red Greensand. Jefferies noticed it at Coate and by Wolstanbury Hill. Did he realise what a bond of union he had here? Wild Life in a Southern County speaks of Coate “precipices facing the water like a cliff. Along the edge above runs a shallow red-brown band ...” In The Open Air, dealing with the same phenomenon, he writes : “On the warm red sand—red, at least, to look at, but green by geological courtesy, I think—of Sussex, round about Hurst of the Pierrepoints, primroses are seen soon after the year has turned”. That is how far he gets. Yet his Cicely’s favourite haunt was by the “brook” whose banks are yellow with primroses growing in soil as red as ruddle! Telepathy or his geology was at fault here.
On the height of Burderop Down stands, since December, 1939, a joint memorial to the two famous Wiltshiremen, Jefferies and Alfred Williams. Another, to the same tragic, gifted pair, is on Liddington Hill, 4 miles away, where a plaque was affixed in 1938 to the Ordnance Survey pyramid. The two monuments looking across the Draycott gap physically separating them would, were they sentient, rejoice in a common memory. The Vice-Chairman of the Memorial Committee, a man of 86, asked me a few days before he died, knowing he would never go up on distant Burderop, “ Don’t you think that just one or two of us could baptise the Stone unofficially and privately ?” A typical Victorian, he resented war’s tyranny in forbidding commemoration of such an event. Some months after his death his suggestion was acted upon.
Water, fetched from the Longpond, was poured upon pyramid and sarsen. A sarsen-stone has numerous natural cavities in it, and on the shoulder of the Barbury Stone one of these hollows is filled at every storm. Into this the last drops of water were reverently emptied, on August 9, 1940, and John Lee Osborn’s wish fulfilled,
Jefferies’ bronze reads:
“It is eternity now,
I am in the midst of it.
It is about me in the sunshine,”
Williams’ tablet is inscribed:
“Still to find and still to follow
Joy in every hill and hollow,
Company in solitude.”
Words from Burderop, they have been scanned of late by a multitude of the finest British and American manhood. Some of the latter would have it that our two heroes were buried under the Stone, and erected rude crosses to them. Warriors of both nationalities careered round it in their mighty Churchills and Shermans, cutting up the down, but always leaving the Jefferies-Williams monolith inside a circle of untouched “sweet, short turf.”
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