White Horse Pilgrim

Changing view

I have searched for old pictures of the hills near here where the cavalry was trained and exercised. Images seem to be few and far between. The only source that I have discovered, a military history group, guards its archive closely. I have not been able to acquire a single picture. Therefore I shall rely on a similar view taken in another country.The spiked pickelhauben give a clue as to the army.

The hills are silent here, and probably lie still wherever that old photo was taken too. It was all a very long time ago, and no-one pictured could be alive anymore. But a look at that image brings to mind the sound and smell of so many horses. The cavalry might indeed have been a fine employment so long as peace prevailed.

Tolkien was a horse trainer in the army reserve back before the First World War, which may be why the Lord of the Rings contains so much detail about horses. Disliking the hardships of military service, Tolkien was released back to civilian life at his request. Siegfried Sassoon had a bit more success as a cavalryman before transferring to the Infantry in order to see more action. He was to receive plenty, but survived to write Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man and its successors.

More cavalry

A little more research found this rare film. This is the kind of unit that my former neighbour belonged to. It's a pleasure to look at the riding and to appreciate the horsemanship. I'd like to be so agile that I could run alongside a horse on the lunge and simply spring aboard.

Occasionally I did come across that kind of lively spirit around horses, most often amongst young peasant men. Romania is not a country that I would associate with horsemanship. That is not to say that the farm horses were neglected - far from it - however for the most part they were equine tractors. I didn't come across many horse lovers, just a lot of men who could work a horse competently on a farm or in the forest.

I'd like to think that a couple of my staff were almost naturals with horses. They rode fluently despite little formal instruction. Theirs was a confidence that the horses seemed to recognise and respect. I loved going out riding in the mountains with Cornel. Most often he could be trusted. Provided that no drinking den detrained him, he would get to the other end in good order, his horse too. How I miss those rides.

Now in the busy technological West I struggle to find that old fluency. I'm nearest to it when hitching a trailer, loading my horse and going out to ride. Yes, cavalrymen made good mechanised soldiers through their dash and initiative. Having become a skilled trail rider did much the same for me, teaching me to treat life as a matter of finding a dynamic equilibrium across rough ground. Yet I feel as if I'm getting towards the end of those lessons, as if their range has been exhausted. Now the ground is too strange, not exactly rough but simply confusing. Sometimes pointless too. Well, I guess that most probably I've learned how to learn. That's the next trick to pull from my bag.

Here's a picture of a German cavalryman in Africa before the First World War. There's more good simple equipment, though that rifle must have got in the way. Like my neightbour, nice equipment, pity about the cause.

Horsemen of the Apocalypse

I found this picture whilst delving into history. Most particularly I was looking into a part of the history of Eastern Europe where I used to live. One superficial thing that struck me about this picture is the way in which folded blankets are used between horses and saddles, just as I did at my riding centre and still do today. There is a lot to be said for a good army blanket. But that is by far the least important thing to draw from the picture.

A former neighbour told me a little about cavalry engagements during the Second World War, in his case fighting with the Romanian army supporting the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union. The Eastern Front was a callous brutal business from which few men or horses returned. The Romanian army, so I was told, was so short of resources that the men of his unit needed to provide their own horses. My cavalry veteran informant got as far as the River Don by Summer 1942, over half way from his European home to the Caspian Sea deep in Asia. There at the Don Elbow he was injured sufficiently severely to be invalided out of the army. And that is why he lived. His fellows went on to Stalingrad, from which few returned.

Supposedly a book was written about the Romanian cavalry on the Eastern front, titled (I believe) Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I haven't succeeded in getting hold of a copy.

Most of my trail rides carried me across relics of that war. There were shell craters on the mountains, defensive trenches decaying on high ground, bunkers crumbling in the forest, and the wreckage of bridges blown up in 1944. There were more sights than memories, at least more physical remains than stories that anyone wanted to own up to. From 1945 to 1989 those stories were taboo, and by then much had been forgotten. But one thing was clear enough: there was no glory in any of it. There was none of the swank of Western peacetime cavalry in an aggressive invasion. The stories that I heard were, for the most part, the tales of men who rode out to settle scores both national and ethnic. The accounts of bored, frustrated men seeking adventure. In doing so they brought new defeat upon their people, though that wasn't the way their path seemed to lead in the beginning.

I am sorry for them, deluded as they were (and some still are, to judge by things that were said to me - which is one reason why for a while I fell a little out of sympathy with Romania). However I am more sorry for the horses that those men dragged into that bloody conflict. They at least were innocent.

Ancestors lived here

Silent and mysterious, Segsbury camp lies abandoned on the ridge. A circular chalk rampart nibbled by sheep, it sits incongruous between modern fields. But its organic smoothness, its curves and the very material from which it is made, the camp fits into the rolling hills. Three thousand years old, it might still have been tenuously occupied when the Romans arrived in 43AD. By then its glory days as a centre for tribal agriculture and commerce seem to have passed: so the archaeologists tell us.

Past the camp I rode, another traveller on horseback, a speck upon the long history of this place. But at least I think about that history and wonder. Mostly one can just speculate and wonder. On a quiet day the traveller might stop here, imagining himself or herself a final inhabitant of the place. The group walking, the farmer in his tractor, they might represent the first trudging Roman legion confident in its superiority. Like horses through all antiquity Brena would nibble the grass. Only unlike most of her historical predecessors she's more of a family member than a chattel. And I look at that rampart as a place to take in the view or to sit in the sun rather than a final defence against neighbours. Sic transit gloria mundi. But sometimes the mundane isn''t such a bad thing.

Castles crumbling

I had been about to write that, since I want to restart work on my novel, posting will become a little less frequent. I was thinking of posting three times a week, or thereabouts. Then I became intrigued by Jess's account of a Medici castle.

We didn't have the Medici in Transylvania, however Vlad the Impaler came by historically when he felt like burning a town or slaughtering its inhabitants. I'd have chosen the Medici any day. Later on the Habsburgs showed up, and for about a decade that territory was on the frontier between Austro-Hungary and Russia. The military roads cut into the mountains are used to this day by shepherds, and tend to be referred to as the "Maria Theresa Roads". Hurriedly prepared fortifications were thrown up too, probably intended for scouts and advanced guards.

We had a regular lunch stop in the lee of an old fortress. It wasn't as impressive as Jess's Mugelo citadel, however there is a practical limit to what one can build on a mountain top in a hurry. There were two steep-sided earthen ramparts enclosing square spaces some thirty metres across. In-between those lay foundations that might have been barracks and stables. The fort seemed more of a point to sortie from than a defensive structure, though a few troops might have holed up there against lightly armed adversaries.

Later these forts would have been dismantled, the wooden structures turn down, in order to deny them to outlaws. There were highwaymen until a hundred years ago, for this was Austro-Hungary's "Wild West" (other than being to the east).

To this day these hills are remote. One could ride for hours in summer and meet the occasional shepherd. Outside the high grazing period of barely four months one might see no-one all day long. This was not a place to go alone and get hurt. Until recently there was no mobile phone signal out there. Even now there cannot be any road access up there. The occasional cross or stone marked the grave of a shepherd or traveller for whom the journey had proved fatal. I was told that lightning was the most common killer, and needed no persuasion to shun the hilltops when thunderstorms approached. Burnt skeletons of struck trees and bushes proved the point. The morning after one especially violent storm shattered relics of trees smouldered pungently, and that after a night of rain.

We rode through the quiet hills one May week and nearly had them to ourselves. On a sunny day that was delightful. The whole world seemed at peace. I suppose that we might have felt a little differently in the 19th century, had we been Austrians in what was a conquered fragment of Romania. Back then we'd have stuck to the roads where gendarmes were posted for protection. But if back then we'd have been ourselves - an Englishman accompanied by two American ladies - we should have been intrepid travellers well on the way to writing a book about exploring lovely remote countryside - and how we survived deep rural food, rustic board and eye-wateringly primitive sanitation. Just as Bram Stoker was fabricating a tale set just a few miles away, we'd have brought back a refreshingly authentic tale.

On wars and horses

D and I were discussing what do do over the coming week when she reminded me that the film War Horse is about to start showing in our town's cinema.

I have avoided going to see the theatre production chiefly because I expected to find it upsetting. I've read too much about the slaughter of the 1914-18 war to see this production as a simple play. I have too deep an imagination not to visualise the whole pointless bloody slaughter of innocents. Plus I have seen a modern army with gun horses only just over a decade ago, and that makes it all the easier to imagine another army with its horses in war.

Today I rode across the broad fields of Churn, where cavalry trained from the late 1800s to the beginning of the Second World War. Try to imagine this scene in summer with tents ranged across turf, lines of horses tied, khaki-clad men riding or working, and a railway station to the right with a siding full of horse boxes. Try to imagine the smell of hundred of horses and their droppings, the scent of trodden grass and lay, and the odour of men who labour in a place with little water for washing. Think of the crack of arms from the rifle range that lay straight ahead at the end of the road.

I've even dreamt of going to see the film. Dreams do throw up some peculiarities: for instance I travelled to a cinema in a city by tram (which some of you would call a streetcar). The film did upset me, and I was comforted by two strangers. On some level I recognise them, however I simply cannot place whom they might be. Maybe another dream will reveal more?

It all happened long ago, those men with their horses in that awful war. However my grandfather fought in the First World War (in the Engineer Corps, not with the Cavalry). Within living memory these fields were used to train and exercise cavalry. A handful of the final generation of cavalry soldiers may still be alive: they would be in their mid-nineties by now.

From the hill above I gazed down into the quiet valley. The horsemen have gone, and their horses are long dead. The camp has gone too, and the railway as well. The station platform lies beneath a thicket, silent and ruined. None of them have any memorial here of stone or bronze. Nor have they a memorial of peace. Day and night their successor, the helicopter units, exercise in the skies above preparing for dispatch to another foreign war.

Roman fields and Celtic memories

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.

 

Who was counted?

I’ve been reading Miklos Banffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy, a remarkable novel in three parts - They Were Counted, They Were Divided and They Were Found Wanting - set in the decade before the First World War. The work is massive and passionate like War and Peace rolled into one with Anna Karenina.

It’s especially poignant for me. I've seen many of the great houses described, all now desecrated or ruinous. Their occupants were scattered like chaff in the brutal winnowing of revolution or burnt in the crackling fire of war. I know the landscape, much of it still beautiful, indeed I've ridden through it.  I've sat on a horse atop a bare hill from which it seemed that I could see the whole of Transylvania about me ringed by distant mountains.

I can empathise with those of Banffy's characters stuck in poor relationships surrounded by bad influences. A lovely landscape makes human folly seem all the uglier.

I know the feeling of exile driven out taking just courage and memories, though I escaped more lightly than most of Banffy's compatriots.

Some of these feelings hardly can I express in words. Yet by thought and writing I can begin to draw out the easier of these sentiments in communicable form. There is water still to flow beneath that bridge, a flux drawn along healthily by the Transylvanian Trilogy. 

But exploring the places where Banffy's action took place is like wandering a wasteland inhabited chiefly by ghosts mingled with a new population unrelated to the former. They seem like two sides of a coin, or two oblivious casts separated by a curtain. Connections have been severed. That reminds me of Egypt. Present day Egyptians bear no relation to the people who built the pyramids and temples. They just live there and quite sensibly benefit as best they can from the situation. The past means little save as the guarantor of an income. Transylvanians in general, however, haven't quite worked out just what the past might be worth. Hence few relics do better than moulder, many are lost already and more will be lost.

I started off oblivious to the past too. The landscape I saw and the present day occupants. It all seemed so rustic, so fascinating after the dull modern place where I lived. But soon those people became mundane, their lives repetitive, their society devoid of culture. Then the ghosts stepped forward reminiscing of a past seemingly glorious but ultimately tragic. The first seeds of their destruction they sowed then others completed the deed. Wisdom had fled leaving a vacuum to be filled first by small-mindedness then by cruelty. Now the dust is settling on the ruins. A fascinating instability of character and culture has been crushed into safe stable sediment.

Today's people do not hear the ghosts for they speak another language. The ghosts present the bones of a culture that few can hear. Those few are eccentrics like me. It's strange to reach out and touch the past, to grasp a historical gnosis and enter a strange beautiful world that no longer exists. Even at this distance that knowledge enriches.

I'm left with a mass of emotions. All is more strongly flavoured there. Food tasted better. Drink was more powerful. Goodness is pronounced and evil depraved. The powerful love that I felt for that vast landscape with its bare-headed lowland hills stretching one after another to the wooded mountains will never leave me. Nor perhaps will the sense of regret at what that land might have been had good people taken responsibility in good time. Fascination at the life of a century ago excites me. The joy of being able to ride here and there is unforgettable. As for my experiences I hold on to the good and let time wash away the remainder. It's better that way. Besides I am living in 2011 and not, however vicariously, in the last days of Austro-Hungary or any other historical time.

From the air

I'd like to present a selection of the photographs that Danielle and I took from Peter's helicopter on Christmas morning.

This is the view moments after we left the ground.

 

Here is an old farmhouse within a frozen medieval moat.

 

 

These are fields showing the distinctive signs of ridge and furrow cultivation.

 

Here are earthworks marking the site of Wormleighton, abandoned during the English Civil War of 1642-51.

 

The Oxford Canal which winds about hugging the contours was frozen.

Today's Burton Dassett Country Park was once an ironworking site.

From aloft the country park a view sweeps southwest towards Edge Hill.

Here's Edge Hill, scene of a major Civil War battle, beneath a bright blue sky.

This view sums up the mystery and spaciousness of a snowy English countryside.

After setting us down Peter took off with another three passengers.

 

This trip was a wonderful highlight of the holiday and a great opportunity to see the English countryside from the air. There are so many fascinating features best spotted from above and indeed brought out most clearly by a combination of sharply angled sunlight and snow.

A big thank you to Peter for making this possible.

Things afoot

D and I spent the weekend visiting Larynn and her partner M. We took Doru too, and the roan beast enjoyed his holiday visting friends and grazing a nice pasture.

I'm sure that Larynn won't mind me saying that she created quite a spectacle in a flowing red dress riding a borrowed mobility scooter with her plastered leg much in evidence. Few invalids are quite as active or as elegant.

Generally she seemed to drive the scooter around at full speed irrespective of the terrain, a determined approach that impressed me even as I jogged along behind bringing her crutches.

Full of curiosity, Josh and the goats monopolised her visits to their field.

Neighbours flew a very rare bird into L & M's farm, for their land encompasses a private airstrip.

When I have time I'll post some more about this unusual and special machine. Suffice it to say that the peculiar shape of the cabin windows suggests the original function of the aeroplane, and that it can take off in just ten times its own length (and land in half that).

We visited with the aim of encouraging Larynn and raising her spirits, and in that we were successful.

However I was rewarded with not just reciprocated friendship but the opportunity to witness an unforgetable flying display as if I had stepped back seventy years and moved eastward.