Bank and Lowe

When I’m walking, I watch the landscape change around me. I try to read its past in its present shape. Sometimes there’s a line of trees that used to be a hedgerow; sometimes there are the puddles and indentations of what was a stream last winter. I like it best when men-made structures stand softened by erosion and the grip of roots.

Two such structures sit close to the A51 and A34 just north of Stone in Staffordshire: Bury Bank, which started out as an Iron Age hill fort, and Saxon’s Lowe, which may have been a burial mound from the same period. (There’s a third, a tumulus, a short distance northwest at Waggersley, but it’s hidden from the path by a stand of trees.) Their origin may be prehistoric, but their present names indicate a more recent past, and today you can see the tops of lorries from a point halfway between them.

I’d known about both places for some time – they appear on maps of “Ancient Britain” and I’d talked to my parents about them on visits back to the homeland. But they are on private territory, behind barbed wire, high hedges and the sobriety of obedience to the law. I didn’t know that the Nun’s Walk ran between them.

Not long ago, I walked the Two Saints’ Way, which was inspired by an old pilgrimage route between the shrine of St Werburgh at Chester, and that of St Chad at Lichfield. In his encouraging guide to this excellent project (see the path’s website), David Pott carries the tradition of pilgrimage into a renewed, “outdoor” kind of faith. I’m not, and never have been, a Christian, but I am a historian, of sorts, and a walk between two important Saxon shrines, taking in swathes of Staffordshire’s industrial, medieval and natural history was impossible to resist.

This walk uncovered (for me) the path between Bury Bank and Saxon’s Lowe, which runs down from Tittensor Chase – hunting land once frequented by Norman aristocrats. My recurring obsession with changing landscape was in full flight very soon after I left the oddly archetypical suburban roads that make up Tittensor itself. (They reminded me of the place that George Bowling inhabits in Orwell’s Coming Up for Air.)

The guidebook spoke of entering a wood – but that wood had been completely razed, now just a few limbs and pin-needle-thick ground with roots running through it. It wasn’t unlike the spread of feathers left when a fox catches a pigeon in the back garden. We’re supposed to be upset when trees are treated this way, but no doubt this was a commercial plantation, about as full of “nature” as Wedgwood’s factory in Barlaston up the road. This is worked land – that is what those trees were for. They’ll probably be replaced by something similar. No tears from me.

On my left ran a broad expanse of parkland. Parks – especially the “picturesque” sort, like this, often landscaped in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries – are often considered a kind of false naturalness, what the human eye deems aesthetically pleasing, rather than what would naturally arise. But since reading Frans Vera’s theories on the “semi-open” landscape that he considers existed in the pre-Neolithic (ie, before major human intervention), I’ve always looked out on these manufactured vistas and wondered if they, rather than the regimented “country” of crop and pasture, are closer to the real thing – minus the herds of aurochs and wild horses, and large fanged predators, of course.

I doubt that pre-Neolithic nature included the “Private” and “Bull in Field” signs nailed high up on trees inside the fence – I couldn’t see any cattle at all in there, certainly not anything aggressively masculine. But some risks are not worth taking, and I stayed on the public side of the barbs. I enjoyed the elegant trees, the stands of green bushes, the grass at once lush and close-cropped. The spring sun gave everything a greater intensity, and a warmth that crept slowly over my skin.

Saxon’s Lowe appeared first, on the left of the path, near where the parkland is fenced off from more used fields. There’s some doubt expressed on the websites that catalogue ancient features whether it is really a burial mound, or whether it is natural. All I can say is that immediately it didn’t look quite natural to me. It’s steep sided, with bushes draped over its flanks like cloth, while the landscape around it is softer, more rounded – presumably the result of glaciation (and subsequent ploughing). It may be that King Wulphere of the Mercians was buried on the spot, in the 670s, above (or alongside) the original prehistoric tomb.

Another feature that makes me think that Saxon’s Lowe really is man made is the clear sight line between it and Bury Bank, the hillfort. On the path close by the Lowe I could clearly see the outlines of Bury Bank despite the high hedges along the A51 and the mix of trees on the bank top.

At this point I hadn’t been reading my guide very attentively, but straight away I thought – “that’s another Iron Age feature.” People in prehistory never built things in isolation. Even the most remote ramparts always turn out to be at the centre of a worked landscape in which each part has a function (see Of Place (2) for more on this). It’s a salutary reminder of the currents of change in all English landscapes.

But in change there are continuities, the things that I like to spot. One of the reasons why Bury Bank was built, perhaps, and certainly one of the reasons why King Wulphere spent much of his time on the site, is that it commanded two major routes through central England, as it still does, with the A51 at its foot and the A34 in the Trent valley below.

Underlying Saxon’s Lowe must be the original rise in the ground, reshaped by prehistoric tools, again by medieval ones, and now by modern trees, none of which, for all their height, were there 250 years ago. More than likely most of the robins, blackbirds and chaffinches singing in them had not hatched two years ago. But trees and birds – in far greater numbers, the latter, far fewer, the former – surrounded the Iron Age work parties.

The town of Stone, over which Bury Bank would look, if not drenched in trees, claims to owe its origins to this spot, where the pagan King Wulphere killed his Christian sons – David Potts tells this story in full in his guide. Their memorial stone became a place of pilgrimage, and from it the town took its name. Saints Rufin and Wulfad were said to have been converted by St Chad, towards whose shrine in Lichfield my path was leading. When I returned to the canal after leaving Stone, the guidebook pointed out another spot swathed in trees, in a depression in a field – St Chad’s (or St Rufin’s) well.

I often wonder how the pagan Saxons felt as the new faith took hold – not all of them can have made martyrs of their families. I wondered if I felt something similar, as I stood between the two old monuments looking down on green fields covered in pesticides and fertiliser, with the traffic going by.

It was a hot day, although not so hot that the heat haze made me imagine the ghosts of nuns walking down from the road. It seems that Bury Bank House, built in 1853, may once have housed a community of nuns, and that this long white line between smooth greens took the place of a cloister. It was easy to imagine some kind of contemplation there, in the still warm air.

The path fell from the house ahead of me, then rose towards the trees of the parkland behind me. Nuns’ feet swing easily down, move imperceptibly into effort, then pause at the top of the rise. Start them again, down the slope, up, and the walk becomes the swing of a pendulum, its track marked by verges of cow parsley.

What kind of fields were here then? Were they grazed, did women and children bend their backs stone picking, as if in a Thomas Hardy novel, or did untended intervals give rise to great flocks of butterflies coming up in waves before the nuns’ advance?

Whatever was there is not now – except that it is, because the path follows the same route, and the land’s contours remain under the vegetation. There was no one visible as I walked through.

On the stile that plonks you straight onto the tarmac of the A51, I spent a minute or two reading all the guidebook’s detail, in part making sure I don’t take the wrong route. When I looked back, Saxon’s Lowe had gone behind trees. Bury Bank was a heavy shadow. At a pause in the traffic, I ran across to the pavement and walked past house gardens down towards the Trent.