A grey breezy Saturday made way for a warm bright Sunday. Soft innocuous cumulus clouds sprouted and formed into rows stretching from western horizon to eastern. However no rain threatened. It would be a lovely day for riding, and a productive day for the harvesters too.
I headed West with Brena, driving truck and trailer towards a quiet valley where the only businesses are horse breeding and arable farming. From the thin chalk soil of the gently sloping land spring forth racehorses and grain. But we are not the first inhabitants of that place. Tractors hum and Thoroughbreds graze amidst prehistoric burial mounds. Ancient field patterns remain as crop marks. Beech groves from who knows what antiquity gaze down, potential descendants of the wildwood that once enveloped these marches between past and present.
Away we rode, up the hill past racehorse gallops and over the grassy crest. An even quieter valley, dry and road-less, welcomed us. Here only grain is grown and farm workers come only to plough and sow in spring then to harvest in late summer. But today they were doing none of those things in the quietest of valleys, being busy over the hill harvesting by the road.
So Brena and I travelled in tranquility along a grassy path between fields of barley, the only noise being her footfalls and my occasional words of encouragement to her. The barley seemed to have shrunk, shrivelled in the warmth, dry and ready for harvest. Soon these fields too would be bare harrowed expanses, the soil roan with chalk and flint.
The Romans farmed here, and the Celts before them. Until the 1940s there the remains of Celtic strip fields graced the far hillside, only to be ploughed out as soon as the farmer mechanised. But it is the Romans who left the most for archaeology. To the south of the path that I rode along - which was to my left for I was riding westward (and in the centre of the following photo) - the remains of a sizable villa and farm complex have been excavated. The Romans intensified farming, requiring manuring of the fields, spreading fragments of broken Roman pottery and other rubbish to be found two millennia later for those people threw all their waste into the midden.
These were wealthy Roman farmers. Their villas possessed mosaic floors, underfloor heating and extensive barns and outbuildings. The remains of corn dryers have been found. So this was a prosperous and thriving valley for a few centuries long ago. Perhaps that was the busiest that it has ever been?
Today's farmers were busy a few miles to the north, hard by the great prehistoric thoroughfare that is the Ridgeway. This has been a broad open land since pre-Roman times, its woodland largely cleared by industrious Celts who sought a dry fertile place in which to live and farm. Probably the land was less arid then than now, the water table being much lower today thanks to a century of extraction for drinking and industry.
Two millennia ago this was the grain belt of England, jealous tribes storing their produce within chalk-walled hilltop fortifications that survive to this day. Today there are fewer people and new machines, lending a certain superficial modernity to the scene. But not everything has changed. Far from it. Only now, for the most part, people are obsolete except as consumers.
Mostly people are obsolete out here, and so are horses. But plenty of people visit the Ridgeway with its prehistoric fortifications, and some horses too. I saw six other riders, one distantly and five close by. Of the five who passed me, two appeared unimpressed, presumably because I look more like a Western rider than English. Some people here find that beyond the pale. It's their loss.
The grass up here is thick and lush, as perhaps it has always been. Brena is just the latest of hundreds of generations of horses to graze happily up here. The Celts rode here, indeed the transition of their culture from pedestrian to equestrian saw their garb change from robes to trousers. The Romans rode too, and all of them had chariots and farm carts. So we travel a well-trodden trail. We have auspicious predecessors.
