Between the Lines
On top of the hill there was a clearing and the remains of what might have been a cairn of stones.
Lol had never been all the way up before, but Jane had said there was something of serious, serious importance here, and not just to her or even to the whole community of Ledwardine. This was possibly a national treasure.
She’d dragged him out to the edge of the village and then across the main road and over the fields to the first stile, which had a public footpath sign next to it. But if there ever had been a footpath it was long overgrown, and it had been a steep and slippery climb to the top of Cole Hill.
‘You can’t see much now,’ Jane said, among the gorse clumps on the summit, ‘but there was a Celtic settlement here once. So obviously that makes it Ledwardine’s holy hill, right?’
‘If you say so.’
Lol had felt slightly uncomfortable about walking through the woods with his girlfriend’s daughter, her navel exposed below the sawn-off summer top.
No, actually, it wasn’t so much this as her attitude: intense, no frivolity, Jane carrying a sense of purpose like storm clouds around her, intimations of war.
Now she was telling him about the name. How, in The Old Straight Track, Alfred Watkins had identified three other Cole hills, or similar, in Herefordshire. One definition of the word, apparently, was juggler… or wizard.
‘“Cole-prophet” – that’s another ancient term,’ Jane said. ‘So Cole Hill – serious, serious magical associations, Lol. I hadn’t realized that. And if I hadn’t realized it…’
Jane stood in the sunlight. Her hair was pulled back and her eyes seemed to be full of tiny sparks.
‘We live in an enchanted landscape, Laurence. And most of us just don’t see any of it any more. How dispiriting is that?’
Below them, the village was wrapped in greenery, and the mist made smoke rings around the church steeple. The view was dizzyingly seductive: you felt that if you fell into it, it would just absorb you and by the time you reached the ground you’d have evaporated.
Lol shook his head. His day had already been tilted. Monday mornings, he needed to establish a work pattern for the week: sit at the desk by the window, write songs. His livelihood. What he did. What he was supposed to do. So why had he been almost grateful to see Jane crossing the street from the vicarage, wearing her skimpy orange top and her sense of purpose?
Jane said she had the day off school to work on a project connected with A-level art, a portfolio she was compiling on landscape mysteries. Something in connection with this that she needed to discuss, and Merrily had gone off early to meet some angsty priest, so, like, if Lol could spare just one hour…
All around Cole Hill the paths were overgrown; there were broken stiles and barbed-wire fences. It had taken most of an hour just to get here.
Jane shouldered her canvas bag.
‘Nobody comes up here now, and that’s wrong. We all need to go to the high places. It says that in the Bible, so even Mum-’
‘Had you been to this… particular high place before, Jane?’
She frowned. ‘I’m here now, that’s what matters. It’s where the ancient energy is drawn down, to feed the village spiritually, to feed its soul. You know?’
‘Alfred Watkins actually said that, did he? About feeding energy into Ledwardine?’
‘Not exactly, but he would have said it if he hadn’t been a magistrate and stuff, with civic duties and all that crap. You have to read between the lines, Lol.’
‘Right.’
Lol would have to agree that reading Alfred Watkins entirely altered your awareness of the humps and bumps of the countryside – the way Watkins’s own had been altered when he’d stood on top of a hill not far from here and noticed, in a flaring of wild revelation, how ancient sites, from prehistoric stones and mounds to medieval churches, seemed to have been arranged in straight lines. But Watkins had seen them as the earliest British trackways; most of the rest was New Age conjecture.
‘So what do we do now, Jane?’
‘Watch the church. Keep watching the steeple.’
The steeple must have been half a mile away, at least, but from up here you felt you could prick your hand on the tip of the weathercock. Beyond it, to the west, you could see distant Hay Bluff over the mist, a dent in the sky at the end of the Black Mountains.
Jane put on her sunglasses.
‘And then we walk towards it.’
Lol followed her, keeping a few feet behind, sure now that something else was bothering her. Some problem between her and Eirion? They’d been together a long time. Maybe too long, for teenagers.
‘We came up the easy way,’ Jane said over her shoulder. ‘But we have to follow a different route down, to more or less keep to the line. The path zigzags a bit, but if we keep the steeple in view…’
‘Eirion OK, Jane?’
‘Fine.’ Her voice was a little too light. ‘Off to uni in September.’
‘Where?’
‘Depends on his A-level results. Oxford, if he does well. Bristol or Cardiff if he fluffs. Or, if he really fluffs, one of these joints that used to be an FE college until, like, last week?’
‘I see.’
‘I mean, it’s ridiculous how like everybody has to go somewhere. You need a degree to be a hospital porter now. You probably need a degree in, like, hygiene studies to clean lavatories. It’s-’
Jane slid on a small scree of pebbles and grabbed a sapling to keep from falling.
‘-All complete and total bullshit. Just a Stalinist government scam to destroy the individual, get everybody into a slot. Result is you’ve got people walking round with a string of letters after their name, and they’re like, you know, Homer Simpson?’
‘So, you, er…’ Lol thought he was beginning to get the picture. ‘If Eirion does well, you won’t see as much of each other, will you?’
A grey squirrel scurried up a fir tree ahead of them.
‘I just don’t see why,’ Jane said. ‘I mean why? Why do you have to waste precious years being lectured to by all these hopeless losers so you can wind up with some totally meaningless qualification that everybody else has got. Why can’t you just do stuff? Original stuff. I mean… you did.’
‘You got something original in mind?’
They climbed over a rotting stile on the edge of a decaying copse at the foot of Cole Hill. Jane waited for Lol. She was squeezing her hands together.
‘I want to find out things for myself – like, not formalized curriculum shit that just qualifies you to be like every other-’
She spun away. She might have been in tears. She moved rapidly through the trees and out to where another stile had been strung with barbed wire. When Lol reached her she was bent over the wire, breathing hard. The canvas bag was at her feet.
She had both hands around a pair of wire-cutters.
‘Jane?’
‘It’s supposed to be a public footpath. Nobody has any right to-’
Two ends of barbed wire sprang apart and Jane stepped back.
‘Jane, where did you get the wire-cutters?’
‘Gomer.’ Jane clambered over the stile. ‘You coming?’
All his foreboding becoming justified, Lol climbed over the stile and stumbled after Jane through tall grass, holding his hands up above the nettles. They came to a five-barred gate set into an overgrown hedge, strands of orange binder twine hanging loose from it.
‘I pulled that off last night.’ Jane opened the gate. ‘Now. Look at that.’
‘What?’
‘Just look! ’
Lol closed the gate behind him and stood and looked. He saw a gently sloping meadow full of Hereford cows, red-brown and cream, classic. You didn’t see enough Herefords in Herefordshire these days, but that clearly wasn’t what Jane had meant.
‘Oh,’ Lol said. ‘I see.’
Like the shadow of a tall pole, a path cut directly across the meadow. A visible path that could have been contructed or simply made by sheep crossing the field from gate to gate – dead straight from the gate they’d just come through to another one at a slight angle in the hedge at the bottom of the field. Both gates and the path were directly aligned with the smokey, sepia steeple of Ledwardine Church.
Lol walked towards the centre of the field, keeping to the path, and turned to see that the path was perfectly aligned, in the opposite direction, with the top of Cole Hill.
Some of Watkins’s lines demanded imagination, but this one spoke for itself.
Jane stood on the line, as if she was standing before an altar. Although the sun was high and warm, Lol saw her shiver. She wrapped her bare arms around herself.
‘Before you reach the village, there’s a mound just inside the orchard – behind Church Street? It’s not marked on the map, but it must be an ancient burial site, if only by its position in the landscape. Absolutely on the line. Like, it’s not very high now, but a lot of them aren’t any more; they’ve been ploughed in over the centuries. And then, on the other side of the mound, you’re dead on course, across the market place, for the church.’
‘You’ve convinced me,’ Lol said. ‘It’s a nice one.’
‘And… and, Lol, if you continue the line, through the church – I’ve only done this on the map, but it works, it totally works – within a mile, on the other side, you’ve got an ancient crossroads and a genuine prehistoric standing stone which is not very big but is actually marked on the map.’
‘Well, congratulations,’ Lol said. ‘You’ve found a new ley line.’
‘ Ley,’ Jane snapped. ‘Alfred Watkins called them leys. Ley lines – that’s just a term that’s been adopted in almost a disparaging way by so-called experts who say they don’t exist. And, OK, some of them you can draw the line by circling the sites on the map, but when you go there you can’t really see it. But this…’
‘Textbook,’ Lol said. ‘I suppose.’
‘I mean, I can’t claim any credit – except maybe for rediscovering it. This side of the hill’s been more or less hidden away for years, probably since the orchards went into decline. And, oh yeah, you know what this field’s called? Coleman’s Meadow. Geddit? The field where the track was laid out by the Cole -man, the shaman, the wizard…? And you can feel it, can’t you?’ Jane stamped a foot. ‘Come on, Lol. You’re an artist, a poet. Do not tell me you cannot feel it.’
‘Well…’
‘You stand on the track and you’re, like, totally connected with the landscape. And with the ancestors who lived here and marked out the sacred paths. Thousands of years ago when people were more in contact with the elements? So like whether or not you believe the leys channelled some form of mystical life-force through the land, or they were spirit paths where you could walk with the dead, or whatever… I don’t care. I don’t need to understand the science. I just need to know that I can stand here and feel I’m, you know, part of something… bigger. Belong.’
‘It’s probably the most any of us can ever hope for,’ Lol said. ‘To belong somewhere.’
They stood quietly for a few seconds. You could hear neither the sounds of the village nor the traffic on the main road, only birdsong and the grass wrenched from the meadow in the jaws of the Herefords.
The sun was already high. Caught in its glare, Jane, in her yellow crop-top, looked young and uncertain.
‘I need some information off you, Lol.’
‘For this… project?’
‘Sort of. I need to know who decides what happens around here. Like with the council and stuff. I mean, I think I know the basics. Just want to be sure before I make a move.’
‘A move?’
Oh, hell.
Jane looked at her feet.
‘Jane…’
‘What?’
‘This day off school, to work on the project…’
‘Look,’ Jane said, ‘it’s nearly the end of term, the exams are over, nobody really cares. And this is a major crisis. And anyway it’s connected with the project, which is about how artists have dealt with earth mysteries, the secret harmonies in the landscape.’
‘You’re not making this very clear, Jane.’
‘All right.’ Jane unfolded her arms and pointed. ‘You want it made clear, go and read it what it says on that sign.’
A small placard was affixed to the gate on the opposite side of the field. Lol wandered over. On the other side of the five-barred gate the path broadened out, and he saw that he was in the orchard at the back of his own cottage, which fronted on to Church Street. When he looked back, Jane’s ley was no longer obvious, which presumably was why she’d brought him down from the hill.
Lol adjusted his glasses and read what it said on the sign, which was headed HEREFORDSHIRE COUNCIL PLANNING DEPARTMENT.
What it said, basically, was that an application had been submitted to turn Coleman’s Meadow into an estate of twenty-four high-quality detached executive homes. It invited observations from the public.
Oh.
Lol turned, at a click of the latch on the gate, to find that Jane had followed him.
‘Only they’ll need to kill me first,’ Jane said.