Of Place (1)

More than any of the paintings, it’s the unfixed idea of Nash’s fixation that intrigues me. What in the form of those hills snagged him? I ask because I’m snagged too and I don’t know if it’s just the fact that he was caught first that fascinates me. Paul Nash was an official war artist in both world wars. He was a Modernist who explored several different media, and a respected critic. He also developed strong affinities with places that had long histories of human occupation.

There’s a firm quality to obsession with place, but it’s not one that’s easy to rationalise. I get drawn into a mood that seems to underlie Peter Ackroyd’s London: A Biography and Thames: Sacred River – this bit of earth is a door into… something. For Ackroyd it seems to be a pagan conviction that place itself has a power and memory. I’m sympathetic to and sceptical of that view in almost equal measure. What was Nash’s tie to the Wittenham Clumps? He saw them as a young man, and immediately started drawing them. He said that this was when he understood what it meant to be a painter. In his late years he would stare at them through binoculars, physically distant but compelled to examine their detail.

I must describe the hills. There are two of them. They rise above the Thames, separated by a lower ridge. In the eighteenth century both hilltops were planted with beeches. The hill to the west – Castle Hill – is topped with an Iron Age hill fort. These ramparts and ditches are still a formidable climb, drop and climb. The construction is far more impressive than many “hill forts” I’ve explored. It also once had the “Poem Tree”, a beech trunk carved in 1844 by Joseph Tubbs. Over the years the letters stretched far out of shape with the tree’s growth, but a transcription of the lines is shown on a nearby information board. The tree died in the 1960s and fell down in 2012.

It’s easy to understand how Tubbs was stirred to put knife to bark to reflect on the long history of the landscape below. The views enwrap the whole eye, green in its endless variations as far as the Ridgeway, one of the oldest roads known, crossing hills under a clear sky (if you’re lucky).

The hill to the east is Round Hill. I have read that it was the ritual centre that accompanied the defensive structures to the west. I don’t know whether this is true, but the beech plantation that tops it is studded with trunks ideal for climbing. Is there anything so human as to climb a tree for the fun of it, feel the whoop of the limbs in your hands, the intimacy of lichens on your skin, changing the shape of the world by shading it with leaves, swinging it on the flex of new growth? I never heard that Nash climbed any trees up here, but with my head close to breaking through the canopy I feel close to the place, and sway on the breath of its changes.

Two more things, one of which I don’t think Nash painted, and the other that he certainly did. The first is the Sinodun Hills, two very long mounds, which run parallel to the river and to each other on the opposite bank from the Clumps. “Iron Age defences” is how they’re usually described. Certainly where they are at their tallest it would have been quite a challenge to run up the first, down its slope, up the second and down its slope – though the present risk of breaking an ankle in the rabbit hole probably wasn’t part of the design. In low sun in winter their zigzag is counterbalanced by a cloth of spiders’ threads. Some hang like vaporous breath in the stumpy hawthorns.

I don’t know how effective they’d be as a real defence – there doesn’t seem to be anywhere for the defenders to stand – but they mark the land as owned, even if that ownership has changed, telescoped and been compromised with rights of way across the old flood plain. Those rights are cutting deep into the fabric of the monument, as paths wear deeper and deeper into them.

What makes the Sinoduns particularly special for me is their accretion of another era’s archaeology into that of 2000-plus years ago. They knew what they were doing in the Iron Age, but it’s a mystery now. There’s also some debate about the real purpose of the artillery pill boxes at either end of the earthwork. To my untrained eye they look well placed to drop shells on any Nazi flotilla making its way upstream. But how much damage could a couple of guns, a few men, some barbed wire, really have done? I’ve heard it suggested that the 1940s Stop Lines were really a ruse to help stiffen the population’s belief in defiance, just like the melting down of garden railings and saucepans is said to be. The doubt always refreshes the interest of the place.

Second, to the east of the Clumps is a third, lower, less noticeable hill, marked on the maps as Brightwell Barrow. No barrow there now, just a single tree on the boundary between two vast arable fields. Nash painted it in 1912 with a group of trees on the top. On my weekly journeys into work in London, I look for the Clumps, then find myself focusing on that one tree, wondering if beneath it there’s the footprint of a ploughed-out barrow. It helps expand my perception of the landscape of this area. Above the borderland marked by the Thames the Clumps make up three parts of an identity. Here’s a hypothetical description: Round Hill, belief and ritual, Castle Hill, living and protecting life, Brightwell Barrow, memory and inheritance.

On Round Hill, in this inevitably oversimplified scenario, the inhabitants of the area would call on the genius loci of the river, hillsides and air to look kindly on their kin, crops and livestock. On Castle Hill they took concrete steps to protect each of those things against more concrete threats, such as cattle raiders and floods. A look to Brightwell Barrow would remind them of the ancestors who brought them to this land, and established them as its custodians.

From the train I can also see a barrow still standing, just below the top of a ridge. Just as it slips out of the carriage window’s range it’s possible to see it and the three Wittenham hills at once. I wonder if all these elements work together, making this landscape a whole entity long before intensive agriculture brought its single-crop fields.

When, close to that barrow, I see a village grouped around its church, and the footings of a fallen bridge that carried the road to that church, I feel as though the inconstancy of things is being demonstrated precisely through things whose age ought to set the seal on permanence.

So there, along with the wildlife of the Clumps’ grazing land, and the view of the river flexing its back, are some of the things that obsess me about the place that obsessed Nash. I don’t think he loved the Clumps for those reasons. His words about them tend towards the general – “marvellous”, “enchanting”. And is “love” the word for a response so compulsive? As an artist, he was drawn to their shape, their “tree-ness”.

But at some level maybe the hold of a place over a mind become something that the location never embodies at any one time, so that every visit, or recreation in image or word is an attempt not quite to catch that embodiment unawares, but to discover one more fragment that makes us (he or I) sure that it exists. Nash certainly remarked on his continual discovery of “new aspects”.

His visions of the Clumps changed radically during his life. In his early pictures, from around 1912, such as The Wood on the Hill there is detail and cross-hatching to create a naturalistic view. In the later pictures such as Sunflower and Sun (1942) the Clumps (seen from far off) are schematised, their colours stretching the credulity of the eye that they are really the ones he saw. At first the images are close up, setting the viewer in the then-cultivated land on the hillsides. The Earth Trust, a locally based conservation, environment and community organisation, now pastures sheep where those soil browns and crop yellows spread.
But in staring through binoculars from a friend’s house on Boars Hill, west of Oxford, he made the Clumps into straining forms, eliding perspective, demolishing naturalism. His vision’s intensity grew so much it wrenched the objects of his gaze into alien shapes, colours, suggestions. What is there of the Clumps in those late pictures? But they are there. Why did Nash need to see them so clearly to make those “non-real” images? But he did. Whatever it was in him that needed the Clumps demanded that he spend time at that window – and still, at the end of his brush they mutated into something far other than what seem from the fields at their foot, or from the window of a high-speed train.

Still, all art, even the most naturalistic, is a transformation, aiming at freezing the endlessly mutable. This may be where the quest to find the embodiment of the place comes back. I might insist that what Nash put on his canvas was precisely his drive to embody what it was that enthralled him in what he saw. But I can’t say what was in another person’s head. I can only look at the hills, the pictures, overlay memories.