Going down The Keats Road

The Golden Triangle (Butleigh to the left)

In my previous post, Fecundity and Desire – a flirtation with the concept of a sadomasochistic landscape - I began ruminating about To Autumn before admonishing myself. DON’T GO DOWN THE KEATS ROAD! I wrote in my notebook.

But why ever not? To avoid kitsch and cliché, I suppose, but I like to think I’m cute enough to give the former a wide berth and, as a Latin Catholic, I think the former should be embraced, not eschewed. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense, even if I felt a little like Aragorn – or maybe Legolas – traversing the Paths of the Dead; would walking The Keats Road open a can of worms or a Pandora’s Box?

Well both, as it happens, but not until I’d entered The Golden Triangle.

Enough already! Let me explain.

My first port of call was obviously To Autumn, even though summer was fighting tooth and nail and to maintain its grip on the year. Fighting tooth and nail but not quite succeeding; it took a while for the mist to clear the Cathedral City and when it did the ‘swelling gourds’ and ‘fruit with ripeness to the core’ were all too evident. Summer had tucked her bat under arm and was heading back to the pavilion. 

Season of mists ...

But To Autumn isn’t just a sensual elegy to the passing of the year, it invokes a contested landscape; how you perceive it depends on whose side you’re on. Jerome McGann accuses Keats of deliberately ignoring the political landscape of 1819 - the poem is ‘an exercise in political reactionary’. Rather than addressing social and political unrest Keats devotes himself to ‘the idealised view of nature’. McGann’s criticisms have been refuted by, amongst others, Andrew Motion but he has a point. When academics start lamenting the decline of peasant rebellions in Latin America the prospect of any sort of rural revolution in the English countryside seems impossibly remote; in the deserted or Anglo-Saxonised villages of continental Europe, too. Does To Autumn give the middle classes permission to perpetuate this rural idyll, sanitised and made banal?

... and mellow fruitfulness

As if by magic, the Keats Road led me to The Golden Triangle in search of an answer. The Golden Triangle, to the uninitiated, is a product of modern mythology, though I’m not sure whether Keats would have approved or not. Its points lie in the South Somerset villages of Butleigh, Barton St David and Baltonsborough, none of which, according to local hearsay, have ever possessed any sort of council housing. Its fame – or, perhaps, infamy – is enhanced – or exacerbated – by the influence of the £33,000-a-year Millfield School, sometimes mocked – perhaps unfairly - as an educational establishment for the ‘sporty but thick’. Academic prowess or no, its presence pushes up already-inflated house prices by another percentage point or no.

The result? A pastiche, in places, though not of Poundbury proportions; we must be thankful for small mercies. Somerset rural chic has a dynamic of its own, the peasant replaced, to a certain extent, by the artisan and the academic and a steady flow of creative refugees fleeing the capital. And now we have a Waitrose in Wells I expect to see more of them on my doorstep.

More of them on my doorstep. What on earth am I saying? I am one of them.

From agriculture to astrology: what would Keats say?

Whilst studying Geography and Landscape Studies at Weymouth University (aka Dorset Institute of Higher Education) back in the eighties, my best friend – then a dedicated Marxist - refused to enter stately homes and country houses because they effectively celebrated poverty, inequality and the abuse of power; he wanted them all pulled down. I wonder what he’d make of the Golden Triangle, the hovels of the peasantry now sought after by Guardianistas and neo Kulaks at inflated prices. I like them but then again, I tutor their children so I’m part of the same system. 

Organic peasant chic: the old and the new

Meanwhile there has emerged a current of rural functionalism that has shaped the landscape of the Golden Triangle in the last few decades, village infilling and small housing estates; homes for locals and the less well-off. It started with bungalows but has progressed – if I can use that participle – to become more ‘Somerset’. It’s less bland, but it’s still bland and it tries too hard to be both less bland and more ‘Somerset’; I left the Golden Triangle wondering when – and where – the new Somerset might emerge because we sure as hell can’t go on rebranding the past, Golden Age or not.

Bungalows and rural functionalism in The Golden Triangle

 Next post: Landscape and Negative Capability 

Meanwhile, back in Über-Somerset ...

 References

Jerome McGann: Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism, MLN (1994)

Andrew Motion: Keats, University of Chicago Press (1999)

Nicholas Roe: John Keats and the Culture of Dissent, Clarendon Press (1998)

Über-Somerset

Some of you might recall the short-lived BBC soap opera, El Dorado, which ran for a year in the early 1990s. Set in the fictional town of Los Barcos on the Costa del Sol it purported to portray the lives of British and German expat communities, in all their gory detail. 
Okay, so maybe you don't remember the series; you haven't missed much, suffice to say that expatriate communities often create landscapes which are more country of origin than the country of origin itself. And it doesn't just apply to northern Europeans, it was said of the Arsenal striker Jose Antonio Reyes that walking into his London home was like entering a miniature Spain, or that Chicano communities in Los Angeles immerse themselves in a mexicanidad more mexicana than Mexico itself.
It might take a girt, humungous stretch of the imagination to apply similar theories of cultural or ethno-landscapes to rural Somerset but it was a line of thinking that struck me on a hike across the scarp that overlooks King's Sedge Moor and is capped by the infuriatingly appealing village of High Ham. Under a soft and sultry sun, with the Levels stretching out to the north and west, the brooding bulk of Castle Nerôche and the Blackdown Hills to the south and the ever-visible Glastonbury Tor always on the eastern horizon I walked through a Somerset that was more Somerset than any guide or gazetteer has ever tried to convey.
But Somerset has always seemed different to me, curiously un-English, its red-tiled roofs and blue lias walls reminding me of France and Spain.
It was the orchards that tipped the landscape over the edge and into that Über-Somerset dimension. I should mention here that I have an almost erotic obsession with orchards that may or may not have something to do with visions of prelapsarian landscapes in which a deliciously transgressive Eve defies God and plucks the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. And if you look at it that way, Eve's act becomes one of subversion and rebellion, like sticking a finger up to a pedantic, petulant God. Whenever I walk past an orchard of gnarled trees, bursting with flower or heavy with swollen fruit I think of Eve and the heady pleasure of succumbing to temptation which, in a neat twist of theology, turns her from villain to heroine. 
The Levels shimmered in the heat, beneath my boots the red earth was bone-dry, as if the sun had baked it to a sacred dust. Everywhere I looked was Somerset, every step I took was a step out of the tedious and the mundane and into my imagined Somerset. And like Eve I surrendered, not as a passive, unwilling victim but as an active participant in my own self-sacrifice. I let Somerset into my mind and my body, let her explore every deep and dark declivity; for the briefest of moments I was Somerset and Somerset was me; we tripped out of history into a universe where the sun, heavy with age, had entered into one eclipse too many and where the stars had cut great swathes into the sky with the incessant passage of their weary orbits. 
Somerset was, Somerset is, Somerset always will be.

Path of the Day

It's girt and it's lush; who could possibly resist its allure?
Bridleway from Highbury to Upper Vobster, Somerset
Grid ref: 697497
Click here for the music

The Joy of Mud

Yes, filth is fun! If only we’d allow ourselves the indulgence of wallowing in it, literally and metaphorically. I spent much of yesterday afternoon observing my fellow ramblanistas negotiating the sticky paths of east Somerset: a sort of ramblanista anthropology, if you like. It struck me as a little odd – perverse even – that so many of my comrades went to such great lengths to circumnavigate the girt humungous pools of thick, soggy sludge. They were all, to a man and woman, perfectly attired and shod in boots that cost the equivalent of several bottles of Bombay Sapphire gin, so why the avoidant-gymnastics that might have resulted in a twisted ankle? Or even a comedic arse-over-tit tumble into the dirty brown goo?

Head down, plough on through whatever obstacles nature puts in your path; that’s the ramblanista way.

So you think you know your mud? Here's sodden soil from the three counties of Wessex: Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire, can you guess which mud is from which county? Answers below.

Needles to say your correspondent sought to lead by example, embracing the saturated earth and splish-sploshing through the mires with a laugh and a care-free smile. Not my fault if I was taken for a madwoman! Trouble is, I bought my boots for the dry Spanish Meseta, not the sopping-wet Wessex countryside and, not for the first time, I paid a price for my wilfulness. But who gives a toss? I wore my dirt-splattered leggings like a badge of pride; by the end of a quite wonderful afternoon I was caked in layers of thick Somerset dirt, from head to toe.

Me and mud. We do like to get up-front-and-personal. But then we’ve got form; we go back a long way. It’s a little known fact that in my previous life I was briefly employed as a soil engineer and subsequently spent a fruitless year studying the esoteric delights of geotechnical (i.e. soil) engineering at the august institution that now trades under the rather splendid moniker of Bolton University – how I got from there to Latin American politics is anyone’s guess. And all this despite the fact that at the late and much-lamented Dorset Institute of Higher education I bunked all my soil lectures – well they were first thing Monday morning, I was a geography student, what else did they expect?

Ah well. Aren’t our truest loves the ones we used to hate. The story of my lust for mud is a long and complex narrative which might well be Jungian in its origins. But you know what? Sometimes you’ve got to give the theory a good hard kick in the cojones and send it home with its tail between its legs.

On with action! ¡No pasarán! 

Dorset mud: sophisticated, erudite and perfectly formed; the honest-to-goodness yeoman of Wessex soils. The mud-connoiseur's - and thus the ramblanista's - mud of choice.

Somerset clay is thick and red, very much like the cider. A rustic, buccolic mud; a peasant amongst soils, but none the worse for that!Okay, it's a bit of a give-away! Pilton Festival - that's Glastonbury to you - of course. But did you know  that the festival's location was carefully chose by Glastonbury-based (where else?) soil feng-shui expert, Strobe Chernozem? 

Wiltshire mud. Cloying and insecure, it sticks to your boots and holds on for dear life. A little bit aristocratic and a little bit twee; if Laura Ashley sold soil they'd source it from Wiltshire.