Only fitting that a train (among other) disruptions would go on to define the final part of my pilgrimage. It begins with my shuttle from Stonehenge back to Salisbury Station, where I would complete the final leg of my journey over to Oxford, being an hour late. This required changing my train ticket to a later time, at which point I accidentally clicked on the right day, just on the wrong week, inadvertently booking my train for precisely a week later than the time I needed to leave, and which also then charged me for the price of a new ticket when it wasn’t supposed to.

Which led to me making the wrong decision to speak to the station agent about the mistake rather than trying to go through the third party app (Trainline). Turns out when the train station adjusts a ticket purchased through a third party app, it becomes impossible to correct the mistake or get a refund, with both parties punting the responsiblity back to the other in an effort to absolve themselves of any responsibility or decision.

Should have just rented that car.

Which meant I payed three times over for the same ticket. On top of this, the train also ended up being disrupted.

In all of that, being rerouted provided me with a fresh dilemma. The town of Woking had been on my list, being the hometown of H.G. Wells. As things go, other things took priority and it gradually ended up being taken out of the potential plans. Being re-routed, I now had an opportunity to do a short layover in Woking before continuing on to Oxford. I took the opportunity, partly because I was already missing my window of opportunity to arrive in Oxford before the college grounds closed their doors, and because my father in law was a big fan of H.G. Wells. I figured I could document the place and find him a souvenir. I couldn’t find a souvenir, but I did document the place, seeing his home, the bridge, the location of the martian landing (Horsell Common), the martian tripod sculpture in Crown Square, the memorial statues, the murals (all marked by the heritage trail). I added that to my list of blue plaques from London (including a 5,000 square foot townhouse at Regent Park where he died, which I found out was listed 5 years ago for 13.95 million pounds).

While I didn’t have an accompanying book to fill in his story, Wells’ name popped up so often in association with the others I was visiting that it seemed fitting to be able to work him in to the picture. In either case, given everything that happened just to finally get on that train, I was relieved to be on route and ultimately heading to my primary destination: Oxford.

Grieving the loss of that opportunity to fully experience the college grounds of Tolkien, Carroll and Lewis, I set out to make the most of my experience. In what I felt was a stroke of genius at the time, I was able to book a ticket for a 1:00 am train, which would then take me to Reading where I could transfer to a bus heading to Heathrow for what was an early morning flight. This both extended my stay in Oxford, while also putting me in transport for a fair portion of the night (as opposed to wandering the streets). There I could relax and have a place to store my luggage (which was now missing a whole wheel).

A stroke of genuis until the bus ended up being cancelled. But I digress.

My time in Oxford would be framed by two graves (Tolkien on the front end, Lewis on the back end, being located at opposite ends up the city), with a visit to St. Mary’s Passage to see the famous Narnia door anchoring the middle of what was a tour around the outskirts of Magdalen College, the (under construction) Eagle and Child, getting to stand at the foot of Christ Church where Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) lived and worked (and the Meadows that were his inspiration),  Alice’s Shop (the 15th century grocery store that the real life inspiration for Alice frequented), getting to stand at the doors of  the Church of St. Mary’s where Lewis preached the sermon The Weight of Glory, and taking a cab ride out to the gravesite of Lewis and the Kilns/nature reserve (where Lewis wrote his books).

In all of that, perhaps the most profound moment for me was simply sitting on a bench along the river, close by St. Mary’s Passage, with N.T. Wright’s newest, God’s Homecoming, in hand. A formative voice in my life, and a resident of Oxford, I was able to imagine being surrounded by all those who walked these same streets: Tolkien, Lewis, Carroll, Susan Cooper, and the still living author Stephen Lawhead, with Wright’s reminder of this relationship between the spaces we call home in this world and the great promise of God’s coming to dwell amongst it, reminding me of how all these stories speak to the hope of transformation. All of this converging on these very grounds. Here is where my childhood stories truly come alive, dancing as they are in my imagination under the now moonlit skies, all being brought in line with an important turn in my own theological understanding all these years later.

Having come all this way, I am able to look back on this pilgrimage and consider it through the lens of that cosmic story, the same one that informed each of these voices now standing in front of me. The Story that carries us all, making sense  of the very human joys and struggles all our stories represent. I have noted this along the way, but it feels to me to be a profound thought to consider, each of these voices reflect a part of a much larger conversation, one that flows directly from their communion with one another and which points to the world they both experienced and observed right in front of them. One of the reasons the Inklings themselves remain so present in my own imagination is because here, at this very point in history, I also find the buried remnants of my own past. A past when I once understood and knew what this sort of communion was, and occupied a world in which it was still possible. Here, in the lives of these literary voices, is this rare moment where divergent voices converge in this singular space working to preserve the lost art of discourse and debate. Friendships that see in their differences a window into the most important questions that all our lives are asking through our acts of living. A people for whom every conversation is, by its nature, of utmost importance. Where every discussion, big or small, is seen as a life and death matter. Discouirse that shared equal space with the simple joys of laughter and celebration which informed their life together around the table at the same time.

As Michael D.C Drout suggests in his masterful book The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R Tolkiens Creation, in taking stock of the textual and literary criticism of Tolkien’s body of work and creations, it simply does not do to reduce it to just another entry into what were the common genre writings of his time. This does not have the power to explain why these stories mattered, and indeed continue to matter. Applying this to the whole of this community of writers shaping the character of England at this time, these stories do indeed represent a particular resonant force in history that seems unique and rare, and to dig into Tolkien’s world brings us into a more rational conversation about why this is. This moment in time represents a convergence of disparate feelings in what were the shifting tides of history on a meta level. This is why these stories continue to speak today, because they bring an important conversation about this intersection of worldviews to the forefront. The present shape of our own political realities, finding their own sorts of shifting tides in a more micro fashion, belongs to the larger narrative that this collection of literary voices both capture and preserve. It is their critique of modernism that becomes the necessary tool for understanding how we arrive where we are today. It was their ability to take the stories of the old world and carve out a conversation with the new that gives us the lens through which to see the revelance of appealing to and reclaiming the notion of it all belonging to a larger Story.

And I have become convinced at this point in my pilgrimage that one of the key factors that enabled this unique moment to emerge was the communion that these literary voices shared with one another. In our now global world, we simply do not find this at work today. The communion that inspired them to find their inspiration in one another’s creative work, as though the creative act itself needed this ongoing collaborative process, is a lost art, given now to a more superficial prioritizing of ideological divides. The richness of the symbols that ring out over these ancient grounds, indeed representing a lost language, contrasts heavily with the tendency today to write modern morality tales, bent as they are towards our obsession with utilitarian definitions, symbols and metaphors left swimming around without an actual anchor. Narratives that no longer seek revelation or the uncovering of mystery, but rather the continued deconstruction of these things in favour of a world built on facts and propositions. Where the need for our stories to wrestle with and acknolwedge the weight of our existential questions through story has come to be seen as inferior academics, traded for a tendency, in its endless ebb and flow, for grabbing on to older patterns of deifying a natural world that has similtaneously been reduced to our arguments for a robust physicalism and material reality, both in and outside of our modern religious systems. An act that sits uncomfortably alongside an equal commitment to its reigning humanist assumptions. This has become the shared language of our day, only, as Mircea Eliade once so brilliantly put it in the book The Sacred and the Profane, such language has little explanatory power when it comes to making sense of actual human experience and observance of the world.

Of course there are great stories still being told, great storytellers still telling them. What I think this pilgrimage is opening up for me though is that we’ve lost the ability to articulate why these stories have the power that they do. Not unlike my own act of growing up out of the juvenile nature of my childhood self, the world now sees itself as having grown up out of its old world superstitions.

Thus, to recover my childhood stories, to encounter them in their world, becomes an act, for me, of learning what it means to grow into my childhood, not to stand above it. Here this process reaches into the most fundamental of all my questions: why do we tell stories in the first place. What draws us to its apparent power. What allows this to endure.

And even more important, what world do these stories reveal and how do we inhabit such a world.

My generation, existing as we did in a world both before and after the internet became a thing, is often described as being the last of the living voices whom know what it is to exist in both worlds. We are in fact prone to thinking in terms of this liminal space (there are genuine studies demonstrating this), holding both worlds together even when we don’t realize it. One of the great vantage points this provides is seeing the ways in which the myth of progress, the central and guiding narrative of the new world, works to reshape the world. This hands us a certain conundrum. We are tasked with adopting the ways of the new world while knowing what has been lost in the erasure of the old. We can see firsthand the ways in which we are shaped by the world we’ve been handed, and we can also see how this foreward movement works, built on a constant demand to reject the past and valourize an unnamed future, which as I said in my previous reflections actively works to judge and erase the relevance of our present.

To have the world after the internet bury the old world in its wake is to feel the myth of progress actively working to throw the very value of these things into question. The only value that remains is the constant rejection of our past.

This basic awareness is, in its own way, a kind of fervent, perpetual existential crisis, and whether we feel it or pay attention to it or ignore it, its there. For those of us who watched the world change right in front of us in real time, it’s imbedded in the way we participate in the new world. No single generation since has experienced the same kind of transition. Even the present dialogue around AI must reach back to that old world in order to make sense of its inherent crisis and wanted anxieties.

Sitting on that bench, thinking about these figures that played such a formative part in my own childhood, I realized that the basic shape of this unique generational vantage point mirrors the shape of this literary community, having one foot in the old world of a now dying Empire, and one foot in the new world of a rising one. One foot in a world on either side of a world shaping war. One could argue, no generation since has that same vantage point. This is what makes it unique.

In many ways then, this journey into my childhood stories was about recovering a lost language. Or perhaps it was about learning how to speak all over again. Voices which once taught me how to read the world, how to ask my questions, are the very ones my adult self would grow to rebel against. Here the new world taught me that the true point was learning how to grow up out of those childhood stories, that life is defined by our constant and necessary rejection of the past, and that our greatest tool to this end was science, and the only true explanatory narrative the myth of progress.

I recognized something here in my journaling. I knew what it was to be taught by the world to be angry at my upbringing, to be mad at the ways it indoctrinated me into its old ways of thinking, to blame religion for all of the worlds shortcomings. I knew this well. I also knew the ways in which a whole generation, not content to toss away those old stories (or unable to do so), came to be defined by a wanted acceptance of this anger, trading the old critiques of these shifting worldviews for a targeted embrace. Where everything becomes metaphor, and subsequent questions about and any challenging of what these metaphors are in fact rooted in becomes taboo and intollerant. 

What I recognized was, both of these ways of approaching the world had left me feeling equally unable to speak for a long, long time. The outright confusion of being taught to be angry about such indoctrination on one hand, but having no recourse for expressing what it was to feel lied to by the other side as well. Try to speak and it becomes an exercise of being saddled in with one side or the other as part of this same inevitable game of modern apologetics. 

Maybe the worst part of this is feeling like, for so long I’ve carried this sense that not only is there no recourse, there’s not even the shared language needed to communicate these feelings, for explaining what this space that I am occupying actually is. Which is perhaps why, encountering a shared language in these litearary voices feels so incredibly liberating. To enter into a space that seems like it would feel equally out of place in the world I described above is something I have so desperately been craving. Here I am allowed to speak. I am allowed to leave my anger behind. I am in the company of others whom understand, and whom intimately communicated these feelings through their writings. They believed that story finds its power precisely in the way it reveals a world that is both beyond us and right in front of us. They shared the restlessness of my childhood questions, and saw it not as something I needed to grow out of, but as something I needed to learn how to embrace and to know more intimately. That such an exercise is not anti-intellectual or a less than academic exercise, but rather the most rational venture we can embark on.

Here, in the safety of this place, I am free to pursue a full knowledge of this world as it is. I am free to embark on the quest that was set out before me all those years before: that invitation to remember. 

“We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” (T.S. Eliot)

With my bus being cancelled, I utltimately found myself being rerouted straight to Paddington Station, where I now find myself waiting for the first early morning express train to Heathrow. Indeed, arriving back where I started. It’s a neat experience, getting to watch this space go through what, for it, is a routine process of this transition between the final train of the night and its first morning departure. The quiet, gentle and methodical nature by which the noise begins to disipate, the lights, however briefly, get turned off, and the cleaners move about doing their thing. And then the slow, gradual process by which the lights come back on and the first travellers start to arrive, indicating the beginnning of another day. A dance that happens with the distant clues of those first glimmers of the morning sun sneaking their way in, letting us know that this brief moment of reprieve is readying for a new day. A cycle that I know will be repeated when that sun goes down, and yet here I get to witness it for this one, single, unique moment.

The simplye rhythms of a life, the life of this space, particpating as on ongoing act of creation. A space that is now far more familiar than the one I first encounterd upon my arrival.

Soon I will be stepping on that train and eventually boarding my plane to return home. Where those similar rhythms are waiting to be re-established in my own city, my own home, my own place of work. And yet I return to these spaces a different person. I return with this pilgrimage, this quest, now a permanent part of me, shaping the memory of who I was against the revelations this act of exploration sought to bring about. This is not progress, but transformation. An act of becoming. And what I am bringing with me into these familiar rhythms is a deep rooted sense that this act of becoming is in fact an act of growing into my childhood, not against it. This has always been the case.

Perhaps it is the case that I have never in fact felt closer to who I actually am than when I was that young kid encountering these stories for the first time. Aware of all the complicated feelings and emotions, carrying the raw struggles of simply learning what it means to exist in this world, and trying to figure out what this world is. And yet, the wonder of my adult self is that it gets to grow in its knowledge of what this is. That is the thing, I think, these authors understood, in an age where we didn’t draw the same lines between childrens stories and adult ones. These were stories that transcended such distinctions. Stories that we are meant to reencounter at every turn of our lives, asking the same questions simply from a different vantage point. That is how and why they endure.

As the sun comes up on the final full day of my literary pilgrimage, I find myself climbing the hill to the heart of the ancient city of Exeter. Knowing this was the central hub for all trains travelling in any direction, be it west to Cornwall, South to the Salisbury Plains, East to London, or North to Wales and the Dales, I decided to utilize the split ticket option and stop for an early breakfast before continuing on my way to Stonehenge.

The city is known for containing the Exeter Book, the, to quote, “largest surviving poetry anthology from the Anglo-Saxon era (970 AD).” Maybe slightly less well known is that this is the birthplace of Penguin Books (1934), being designated today as a UNESCO City of Literature.

Just for kicks, it’s also home (Powderham Castle) to the Courtenay family, whom I’m fairly certain has no ties to my own Courtney line (we come from a different Irish root of the similar sounding namesake), but hey, let ones imagination run wild when such encounters call for it.

Fun fact: it’s also home to the first independent library and first woman librarian. And, for that matter, the early suffrage activist Mary Willcocks.

Another fun fact: this is where Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the Book of Were-Wolves and Morgery of Quether, one of the inspirations for Bram Stoker’s Dracula (this is where the character Jonathan Harker comes from). It’s also where Bram Stoker’s brother (George) is buried.

Michael Morpurgo (War Horse), Philip Reeve (The Exeter Riddles), Thomas Hardy (The Woodlands), Gene Kemp (The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler). This city, nestled in an area called Devon, was where the writers of Englands literary history came to study and develop their craft (including Charles Dickens). Standing in the train station (the Exeter St. Davids station) is the Penguin vending machine, a reference to Sir Allen Lane (the founder of the publishing imprint, whom came up with the idea of Penguin books while waiting at this very station following a meeting with Agatha Christie)

If all of that sounds like a wikipedia page full of information, it is in fact my jotted notes I took while I was preparing for the trip. The stuff that connects me to the very roads I’m walking and their relevance to my childhood stories. My interests here, though, also spill out from Exeter into the surrounding area. When my plans had still involved a rented car, my carved path to Tintagel/Torquay was a stop at Mevagissey, the setting for Susan Cooper’s Over Sea, Under Stone, through Dartmoor National Park, the inspiration for and featuring the different locations of the plot for Doyle’s The Hounds of Baskerville, and my carved path from Torquay, running through Exeter was the northern edges of Exmoor National Park, the place where Coleridge wrote The Mariner and the start of a 50 mile stretch celebrating his life and works.

Exeter would be the closest I would get to the convergence of these stories (with the exception of the train being 6 miles out from Mevagissey), my train ride taking me mostly around the edges of these places. One of the things that struck me here at Exeter, a thought that I had been carrying with me ever since leaving London, is just how interconnected these literary voices actually were. It’s as much the case that one would be tracking down the heritage of a single voice, as doing so places you in these meeting points of what was a larger community of voices. These stories reflect an active and ongoing conversation, each of them tied to one another. They didn’t all get along. They disagreed, they had spirited debates. But they all shared a similar passion, and, as I have been discovering through these stories, a similar interest in critiquing the present shape of the world they had been handed and thus inhabited. They have become models for me in doing just this in the world I have been handed and am called to inhabit.

In many ways Exeter would be a symblic bookend anchoring the journey ahead of me leading towards Oxford. Oxford too would become a place where this community of voices comes most alive for me in both spirit and consciousness.

Also, it’s here that I finally solved the puzzle of what an English flapjack is. Yes, I know I could have googled it. And no, it’s not a pancake like it is in America, which was my only previous association with the name. Also yes, it’s quite delicious, cheap (you’re always most conscious of your spiralling budget on the latter end of a trip, right?), and often (or always?) gluten free, Glad I tried it once before I left.

Before leaving Exeter I stop at Sainsbury’s for a budget lunch option. Pro-tip (which I am absolutely not- it’s the tip I got from the pros): the grab (or take) and go meal options, which are everywhere precisely because this grocer is everywhere, are your go to option for $5 dollar (or a fiver) breakfast/lunch options. They are fresh, good, and come with an extensive enough variety to not become tired or repetitive. Burrito in hand (or in my bag), with a side of crisps and sparkly water of course, I begin the rest of my trek to Salsibury Station, where I will be catching a shuttle over to Stonehenge.

Here I will look out my train window to the north and begin to imagine what my limited time has relegated to a potential future part 2 of this pilgrimage. I have already started putting the pieces together as I’ve gone along in fact, including some things that rerouted plans caused me to miss, and as well the unoffical completing of my literary tour of the British Isles. The tour to Canterbury and Dover Castle would be one thing I’d love to do on the other side of London, but the central starting point for me would be to complete my tour of the King Arthur landscape, simply from a different starting point: Glastonbury, the legendary isle of Avalon where we find the end of Arthur’s tale. It’s here where you find the famed countryside of Camelot. Symbolically however, this is an entry point into Wales, where the impassioned debate over Arthur’s true origins still persists. My journey, should I be able to return, would begin here, before moving up into Wales with its own rich history relating to these old stories (this is also where we find other locations of Susan Coopers novels), from Wales to Birmingham, to complete my tour of Tolkien, and from Birmingham to the Lake District to complete my pilgrimage through my childhood stories with a visit to Beatrix Potter’s hometown and inspiraiton. From there I would cross the waters to Ireland to fully connect the two lines of my family tree.

But thus is the restless mind of wanderlust. Here I am, my imagination being pulled back from that norther view and future planning, suddenly realizing I am now in Salisbury. At which point I panic, because I can’t remember which end of the car I left my luggage on. With the doors opening, I of course choose the wrong end, only to run like a madman to the other, promptly grabbing the wrong bag. More panic ensues, and a mad dash back inside the car, where I hand the now startled and frazzled owner their bag and grab the right one.

Gotta love train travel. Yelling into the void for the train to wait isn’t going to keep those doors from shutting.

Stonehenge

Of the handful of sites which have existed in my minds eye ever since I was a kid, this would be near the top. Nothing broke open my imagination like the story of these stones, most recently occupying the heart of one of my favorite series from my favorite authors (the Bright Empire series by Stephen Lawhead). I loved the way they symbolized that ongoing conversation about the relationship between the spiritual and material natures of this world which we occupy. The enduring mystery that historicists love to claim they’ve gotten close to solving in their desire to reduce it to material terms, and the work of others in preserving the myth that gives the place its sacred grounding. Here reality, and the clash of these particular worldviews, gets broken wide open, at least for me. I haven’t even boarded the final shuttle and I can already feel the excitment and anticipation of a good 43 years worth of fascination coming to a head.

The “it’s just a pile of rocks” people be damned (apoologies for the crassness). To view it that way is to fail to see the simple power of occupying a space: a grave, a monument, the endless plaques preserving the history of London as a living thing. In truth, everything can be reduced to “a pile of rocks” in this approach. Here, in this moment, this is about why this space, this place, matters to the larger Story.

In preparation, although I have been consuming material on the place since I was likely 7 years of age, I chose Aubrey Burl’s Stonhenge: A Complete History. It’s a wonderfully balanced book (unlike Ken Follet’s horid recent work of historical fiction), seeking to uphold the mystery while allowing history to bring the tangible earth of this site into detail. What stuck out for me is the ways in which each successive layer of a still active site for Druids today, keeps reaching backwards, as though seeking after an eternal Truth to explain its existence. This would become more clear as my shuttle drops me off at the entrance and I make my way through that first clear obstacle which is the visitor center. (by all means, take advantage of the museum and purchase that souvenir- I admit, I bought a shirt- but for me it was a stark reminder of the ways tourism can mark these sacred sites in particular ways). 

I was given the advice before I left to make sure and walk the path up to the stones rather than taking the bus. The way the stones gradually come into view, the way you can wander through the fields amongst the sheep, the way it gives you a sense of the larger landscape to which these stones belong, is all part of the integrity of that experience. It’s a way of allowing the stones, which are now fenced off, to regain their presence in what becomes an ever present and ever more aware sacred story.

Once you reach the stones, the site itself is designed as a labyrinth, with the circle gradually bringing you closer and closer to the monument as you go around (gimmicky photo-ops included if you want). Here its about seeing the meaning of each new angle, with each stone holding its own significance. The final stage of the labyrinth brings you pretty close to the stones, you just can’t touch them or wander the inner circle (although there are select tours that do take you into the inner circle prior to the visitor centers opening hours, nearby Amesbury does have similar neolithic stones which you can wander through and touch for free). Still, being this close to the Stonehenge circle was, for me, a surreal, likely once in a lifetime, experience.

“Belief is the sense organ of faith, as your eyes are the sense organ of sight.” (Stephen Lawhead)

For Lawhead, one of central themes that runs through his stories, each inspired by the different corners of this vast, ancient andscape and its perserving of an old, eternal Story, is this conception of the human journey as one that seeks to find the necessary intersection between spiritual truth and earthly kings. He is especially attuned to the conversation that exists between Christianity and the enduring symbols of a celitic age that draw us into history’s witness to this deep undercurrent of belief. This is something that captured my young mind, as someone who has always wrestled with the nature of the metaphysical. This invitation to embark on the necessary adventure with the characters of his books, themselves being pulled from long held traditions, in a way that seeks a broadening of our world, not a narrowing of it. That seeks to understand how this tangible witness fits with the narratives we use and employ to explain it. Lawhead, occupying the same space and the same streets that Lewis and Tolkien once travelled touches on this fervent need to find a narrative that can make sense of all the world’s stories. In my later years, this would form the necessary crisis point that found me at my own intersection concerning this very quesiton. In many ways, this pilgrimage is acting as the culmination of a decades long attempt to flesh this out, following words that were handed to me in the form of a quest: the invitation to remember a world long buried by the narrowing practices of my adult self.

As it is with all of these encounters, every space seems to capture the very same tension when it comes to our need to interpret them. The very thing that inspired these literary voices across the isles to wonder about the facts of the figurative “adult world” we have been handed, motivates the need to tell the stories of these places again and again which seek to reenchant it. As Burl suggests in his book, “today, all that is left is the wreckage.” The ruins, for as difficult as that might be to imagine standing next to it. Ruins that must then be interpreted.

Ruins that beg the necessary questions that continue to hold the mystery intact: why did they build it?

There is no way through this question that doesn’t bring us to the simple observation of the site’s “sacred” presence. Whatever the answer to that is, the reason we are standing there looking at these stones today is because they bear witness to that essential story. That’s the great irony of historians whom seek to reduce this site to “mere stones,” which they can then methodically explain away. Such an explanation leaves us with a portrait of a thing that had no real reason to be preserveed. It likewise hands us a narrative in which the modern world, with all of it’s accomplishments and creations will have no reason to be sought or remembered. A world devoid of history where all such questions begin to fade, and with it any sense that what we are seeking through the witness of history is the mystery itself.

We can spend all of our time seeking to explain the how, but, as Burl demonstrates, the question that remains on the otherside of all this unearthing is why. Thats where our true quest begins. To unearth that question is to find that intersection between the transcendent spirit and the earthly kings. This is, in fact, what brought these stones back into view after endless years of neglect, was the rediscovery of the sites sacred importance.

“It has ever been thus. The way is hard and narrow, it is true. But it is a path beaten smooth by the countless others who have gone before us. And good news! We do not have to walk it alone. God Himself is with us and has blessed us with friends for the journey.” (The Fatal Tree, Bright Empire Series)

“God has always worked through the small, the insignificant, the powerless- it seems to be sewn into the very fabric of the universe.” (The Spirit Well, The Bright Empire Series)

It’s a wonder for me to consider that the ground I am standing on was travelled by those who moved these stones. By those who’s continued rites brought these stones to life, revealing a world shaped by unseen exisetences. By those who continued to preserve its power to reveal the Story against great odds. This is, in many respects, what we might call one of those liminal spaces, where God indwells creation in all of it’s sordid and often bloodied witness. And where this indwelling can be found, we find the necessary communion with one another.

I do not embark on this pilgrimage alone. I remember the words of Agatha Christie, which I talked about in my previous blog, as she embarks on that train in an effort to go it alone, following the world shattering nature of the affair and eventual divorce from her husband. I talked about how this act, in the light of her larger story (and the Story that drew her to grow in her understanding of the world), actually worked to reveal the simple truth that none of us move through this world alone, regardless of a tendency to convince ourselves that we do.

And the most powerful thing, in my mind, about the fact of this communion, the same communion all of these literary voices shared with one another, is the ways in which these sacred spaces, for as insignificant as I feel standing next to these massive stones, are precisely where we are called to see that the mystery finds its indwelling, its truest expression, in the continued partcipation of these seemingly insignficant lives in these acts of communion with one another. The cosmic Story these stones are telling ultimately call us back into the world of the everyday. This is where we find the collision between the Empire and the sacred gaining its revelance.

This is, in fact, the story of the ancient Druids that stood at this site all those yearas ago. Where the sheer force of the Empire deems them the enemy, the sacred work continues to happen through the small and the insignficant acts of communion. This, for me, feels like good news.

David Suchet, whom helped bring Agatha Christie’s iconic detective, Hercule Poirot, to life on the small screen from 1989 to 2013, wrote a recently released book called Travels With Agatha Christie, in which he, along with his wife Sheila, retrace the steps of her early promotional tour for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 (which became known as the Empire Mission Tour).  As Suchet suggests, “Agatha used her own life in her novels, and it leaps off the page,” and this particular moment in Agatha’s life becomes a window into the world she once occupied and a way into understanding some of the key events shaping her life within that world at the time.

All along the way, with his own journey finding the same world a century later, Suchet provides a contrast between these two vantage points, both as a means of bringing a full bodied view of Christie to the surface with all of it’s wanted complexities, but also as a grander witness to the ways in which story endures and is perserved through the passage of time.

For perspective, “By the time Agatha was on this expedition, the British Empire covered around 35.5 million square Kilometers across the world, roughly a quarter of the earth’s total land area.” This was “just following the First World War,” Agatha being 31, married, and the mother of two,” having just published her second book (The Secret Adversary). 

What’s at once admirable and revealing about Suchet’s approach here is, he never uses the contrast of these “worlds apart” perspectives, this visible gap that exists between the world he is now encountering through hearing the stories of those whom “the Empire had tried to exclude” and the world Chrstie would have known back in 1922, to diminish the validity of her story. Rather, he uses it to capture a more nuanced conversation about the ways in which we discover the important figures of our childhood and our culture.

By getting to know Christie, and indeed Christie’s text, “in her world,” we can begin to appreciate who she was and why she told these stories. It becomes a unique point of analysis to locate her stories in the midst of a modern world now beginning to be thrown into question in the aftermath of the war. War permeates so much of Christie’s stories. As she is embarking on this Empire Mission Tour, signs are all around her depicting an already crumbling Empire. One of the more fascinating aspects of her life and her stories is that this is the reality in which her notoriety really begins to take off all around the world (as Suchet says, her books are second in sales only to the Bible). In many ways, her stories stand in the gap between the shifting tides of two world Empires, Britain on one side, America on the other, bearing witness to a global literary legacy that retains its roots in England defined through a sort of prophettic restlessnes with modernism itself. In a very personal way, this disilluisonment with the world emerges in her later stories as well, following a devastating affair and divorce, the thing that sparks what then becomes an enduring love for train travel (deciding to head out on the Orient Express, a life long dream, in order to seek a fresh start of outside of the public eye)

Agatha is defined as a woman with a hidden exuberance and quirky personality, passionate and pious, someone whom carved a deep love for the sea, for travel for the natural world, and for people. Who’s personal story quietly transformed the world of her encounters as a strong, independent woman and spirit, translating her own feminist concerns into a simple act of doing and being who she is in the face of so much uncertainty (read up on her surfing exploits, you won’t regret it). In his most apt descriptive, Suchet describes her as being “very sensitive to the world,” translating that to her deep felt need for drawing out real and honest characters through her stories.

“One must do things by oneself sometimes. Either I cling to everything that’s safe and that I know, or else I develop more initiative, do things on my own.” (Agatha Christie)

I talked about some of the ways my choice to switch from the car to the train ultimately ended up sacrificing and/or throwing into chaos certain parts of my trip in my previous blog in this space. One of the very real things I gained, an experience I wouldn’t otherwise have had, was the chance to enter into Christie’s story via the mode of transport she most loved. The simple joy of travelling this particular route along the coast up to Torquay, her place of birth and her continued home, is magical. A ride in which every turn brings a different seaside village or ocean vantage point into view.

Hearing her story, I spent some time thinking about my own solo trip, a product of our present life situation in which certain responsibilities have limited my wife and I from being able to travel together the way we have for most our married life. I feel the anxiety of that once powerful push against this idea of getting creative with our plans, with this concept of venturing out on my own bringing deep feelings of uncertainty. I feel the tension she describes, in making sense of how such points of initiative fit with the fact that none of us are ever truly doing anything “on our own.” This revelation from Christie is not so much a wanted grasp of a sought after individualism, but an invitation to keep the world that is shaping her in view, in times when life threatens to bury it. To hold fast to that simple need to be a participant in this thing we call life. For Christie, the bigger the world became, the more meaningful home becomes.

Torquay is her home, of which she describes it as “my home, off and on, nearly all my life.” It sits at the heart of what has been coined the English Riviera. This is a place where the waters carry a rich bluish tinge and the streets a golden hue, where the emergence of the sun, which I got to witness from my deck as the clouds finally cleared, giving way to its setting, reveals a once hidden space that before didn’t exist. Dig a little deeper and you find the long standing economic struggles that seperates the town from the enchantment of its High Street, This remains the modern shape of the town, and I found it equally interesting to read through the present state of its politics and the ambitious plans for revitalization that is reimagining and reshaping the immediate future of the area. But to gain a glimpse into Christie’s world, the immediate interest is in walking what is called the Agatha Christie mile.

I could recount my own experiences here of walking in her footsteps, but this was my guide, and it does a wonderful job of bringing these spaces alive. For me, I booked a seaside room at the Imperial Hotel overlooking Beacon Cove, the place where she once thrilled over the simple act of bathing in the sea. For my part, arriving at that train station and stepping off on to the same platform, walking down the same streets, imagining the area that once was her home, seeing the plant collection that inspired her more fun, maccabre sensibilities, strolling the same shorelines that continue to define her conception of “home,” it led me to think more deeply about what it means to love the homes that we have inherited. This is the thing Agatha Christie modeled, this practice of expanding our view of the world, an act that this pilgrimage was opening up for me in this very moment, while simitaneously allowing that to shape our participation in the homes we have inherited. And what lies behind that is the similar revelation which shapes all of the literary voices of my childhood: the powerful role that story plays in binding these two things together.

Christie never got to see the world that Suchet is encountering in his travels today. In some ways it’s quite a different space. In many ways it’s very much the same. It’s the fact that Christie lived her life in the world that was right in front of her that felt so poignant to me. It’s a reminder that, for all the ways in which the modern world sells its myth of progress, this problematic way of measuring our present based on scapegoating the past and the valourization of an illusioned future only serves to bury the world that is right in front of us, disconnecting us from the real invitation. This is what Suchet intuitively picks up on in “minding the gap” between Christie’s travels and his own, something that Christie’s own journey observes through the acts of writing and creating it inspired: this modern myth can only ever condemn the world we are called to inhabit. To inhabit the world that is right in front us, as Christie so modeled, is to learn how to love it.

The evening sun is setting as I drag my now weathered luggage up the cobblestone streets of York back to York Station. I am heading, briefly, back to London, this time taking a different route on a train that is both running and on time. Here the landscape, still visible in the slow descent of the night shadows, winds its way backwards, from the open fields of the Yorkshire hills to the populated centers of the London suburbs. My destination: the sleeper train to Penzance, where I will be exploring the grounds of Arthurian lore and walking in the footsteps of Agatha Christie.

It’s worth pausing here for a second to fill in an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to weaving together the story of my travels up to this point. Before things went awry with my train to York (see my previous post), and in fact precisely on route from Moreton on Marsh to Birmingham where I was catching my connecting train to York, I made a decision to pivot from my previously laid plans. I had a rented (or sorry, hired) a car for my time in Cornwall, a decision that had been met with a heavy word of caution by many of the different voices in my online UK/England travel groups. The words “don’t do it” were probably the single most common word of advice I got in the months leading up to this trip. The combination of likely getting saddled with a stick shift despite asking for an automatic, having to learn the rules of the roads and its endless roundabouts, of those forecasted hour long drives turning into a 3 hour white knuckle “drive 30 below the speed limit” reality, of the scenery getting hidden by the endless hedgerows; all of this added up to a singular conclusions: hiring a car made it the wrong way to go.

Despite the fact that I drive a school bus for a living and was proficient at driving manual, those opinions had left me with these persistant nagging feelings of uncertainty ever since I booked the vehicle. Now, in this moment, with my feet on the ground, and having seen the roads up close and personal, it wasn’t so much that I feared the drive (that part I felt was slightly overblown), rather it was the fact that I now spent most of my trip getting comfortable with and learning the rules of the train system, I started to think I could easily navigate the coming days by cancelling my car and switching to train travel instead, although it did require a few intentional sacrifices:

The cons:

• getting from Penzance to Tintagel, the location of that Arthurian history, meant planning around the extra time needed to accomodate an hour train ride and the additional hour and 15 long bus ride to get there,
• the freedom to traverse the trails of Coleridge and a planned visit to where site where Watership Down was written (a stop along the way from Stonehenge to Oxford) had to be taken off the list

The pros:

• saves money
• removes the anxiety

The biggest hit felt to be missing out on Watership Down, one of those locations that felt particularly important to my journey when it came to the literary side of England, but I did welcome the notion of simplifying the trip and easing some of those nagging anxieties.

But of course, as things go, just as soon as I make this decision I find myself facing my first real challenge when it comes to the realibility of train travel (once again, see my previous post on Yorkshire). I now find myself replacing one nagging anxiety with another.

For now, one of my biggest worries- making it to my costly sleeper train- could be set aside. The familiar sites of London were coming back into view, and I was an easy tube ride away from Kings Cross to Paddington station, where I would find my accomodations for the night. I had taken a sleeper train three times before, twice in Italy, once in Ukraine, where we crossed the border into Poland. This would be the first time I experienced a sleeper train without interruptions. In Italy we opted for the cheaper seats rather than the bunks, which was basically one endless revolving door, and in Poland, while we had beds, the border crossing ensured that actual sleep would be hard to come by. 

This was probably one of the best sleeps I had during my trip. There’s something about the gentle movement of the train and the absence of interruptions that equalled a kind of serenity, crackin the curtain open from time to time to let the passing countryside lull me back into my dreams. And the simple joy of falling asleep in one place, and waking up in another. That can’t be beat.

I arrived in Penzance at 7:00 a.m. The sun is shining, I can hear the gentle sounds of the Atlantic pushing in against the seawall across the concrete parking lot currently obscuring it from my view. Having uprooted my initial plans to make my way to the rental place, I had left this morning open to last minute decisions. The first order of business was getting a picture of St. Micheals Mount at low tide, which I had timed out perfectly. This is when the water clears, revealing the golden granite pathway to the island hidden underneath. It’s a magical sight, and if i had the time to actually visit the island I absolutely would have, with its historic castle and church, visible from the shore, beckoning with its promise of a perfect detour.

The second order of business was deciding whether to stay in Penazance or head over to St. Ives, where I could find some breakfast, before ultimately making the long trek over to Tintagel castle. This, however, is where things started to go wrong.

Beginning with a delayed train going to Bodman Parkway, which is where you transfer to the bus heading to Tintagel.

This mattered to my plans, because this single bus operates on 2 hour intervals (or a bit over, in fact). Meaning, when you miss one you have to wait over 2 hours for the next one. Suddenly the lack of a car was having a direct impact, as the fact of missing that early bus connection meant a choice between a very quick turn around at Tintagal or a very late arrival at Torquay, which is where I was spending the night.

I had three choices in this moment.

Option 1: Cancel my plans to Tintagel, and reroute myself either to some extended time in St. Ives and/or the old medieval center of Exeter, which was on route to Torquay.

Option 2: Go with the quick turn around at Tintagel

Option 3: Head straight to Bodmin Parkway and hire a cab from there

I did check my cancelled hired car to see if a rental was still available: it wasn’t.

The only thing I knew was that Penzance was clearly a port city, and while I am sure it’s a worthwhile place to explore with the right amount of time, here it felt more like a point of transit. Whatever my decision, I needed to get back to the train station and be on my way.

I decided to look into hiring a cab. I tried one of the local companies. They informed me they had no availability. I then happened upon a third party site that suggested it had found me a cab at a cost. That cost being 70 pounds one way. In a rash decision I decide to make the booking for a return trip as well, eating the cost purely so that I could gain what I deemed to be likely a once in a lifetime investment exploring Tintagel castle. After all, that was my primary reason for making this trek to Cornwall.

I make the booking online, which involved paying with my credit card, only to find out that they take the payment first and then work on finding you a hired car. So now I was stuck with this pending transaction and no guaranteed cab.

If you’ve ever been in this kind of situation in a place that’s still relatively foreign to you, it’s not a great feeling. Months of planning suddenly all crashing down in a single moment. What i thought would be simple was anything but, and it felt like the clock was ticking on both a wasted day and burning a potentially hefty price tag.

In any case, knowing that I needed to do something, I got back on the next train heading to Bodmin Parkway, knowing that I would either be stuck there in a middle of nowhere station wasting 2 hours, or I would hear back from this booking along the way. What really becomes aware in this moment is that I am travelling back in the same direction I had just come from. I might be wrong, but I don’t think the sleeper train has a choice of getting off at additional stops. It doesn’t have the same sliding doors as the other cabs, and it requires the attendant unlocking and opening the doors for you to get off. Nevertheless, I started to think about how getting off at St. Ives or Bodman Parkway on the way down would have been a much better plan. given my pivot away from a car rental.

As it was, there was nothing I could do about it in the moment, and it was at the precise moment I passed through St. Erth, where St. Ives comes into view, that I took a breath.

While it would have been a nice place to grab breakfast, I would get my seaside town experience in Torquay, and simply seeing it from the train satisfied my wanted curioustiy about this colourful, touristy, beach retreat (which is not really my thing anyways). If engaging a planned pilgrimage was going to teach me anything, it would be learning how to take the experiences that are right in front of me for what they are and what they have to say. That breath felt like a good time to begin some breathe prayers. We sould see how the rest of the day shakes up, but for this moment: exhale.

I am reminded now that I am treading the grounds of Arthurian lore, an awe inspiring thought for someone who has long been captivated by these old stories. And if my accompanying audiobook, Malcolm Guite’s Galahad and the Grail, and my great courses choice of King Arthur: History and Legend by scholar Dorsey Armstrong, were any indication, all such quests are bound to face adversity. Equally so, all such quests are bound to encounter their maidens, which, according to Armstrong, was not about the romance but rather about marking the start of a necessary adventure, one which can authenticate ones kinghthood. The maidens in this sense can occupy any number of different roles. In fact, this is why these stories feature knights making seemingly endlessly dumb decisions that leave them embarking on puzzling ventures and often completely unnecessary journeies with little more reason than “just because” (as Armstrong puts it). It would seem I’ve got this covered with my decision to leave such plans to the last moment and falling prey to a $270 Canadian credit card charge (that’s what went my statement officially said) in my efforts to make it to the grounds of King Arthur’s castle. Just knight me now.

Deep breathes. As I continue to watch the landscape transform in front of me, I simitaneously begin to appreciate having that extra hour of sleep that brought me to Penzance, regardless of now retracing my steps, and the opportunity to experience this full journey in the daylight.

I arrive at Bodmin Parkway. Still no word back from my hired car. Just the looming charge still staring me in the face from a third party site that may or may not be legit. As I walk off the train with nowhere to go but sit and wait, I see a cab waiting at the station. It’s not tracking me down, but as I approach I recognize the name on the side. It’s the initial local cab company I contacted, whom had informed me there was no availability. Recognizing the name, I decide to stop and ask, just to ensure they weren’t there for me. No, he says, but upon briefing him on my present situation he says he remembers me. He was the one I had been dialguing with earlier. He asks if he could see my third party site. He shakes his head. “I’ve been driving for many years,” he tells me. “I’ve never in my life heard of this site.”

My heart begins to sink again with the recognition that this is looking to be one of those inevitable regrets I would be taking with me to my grave.

More deep breathes. These breathing exercises are beginning to wear thin by now.

The driver of the hired car can see my sense of defeat. That’s when he tells me to hold on for a second as he picks up his phone. A minute later he tells me he’s tracked down a local driver of a small business in town. A reputable and trustworthy small business who is able to be here in five minutes. It might be the case that I end up eating the costs of this failed third party venture, but he would get me to Tintagel for a flat price of 50 pounds.

Here was my figurative maiden helping the plot progress to the next chapter. The driver indeed shows up 4 minutes later, and I’m standing at the foot of Tintagel Castle in 30, now with a good four hours to explore the grounds and the town before catching the (3 pounds) bus back to Bodmin.

About halfway to Tintagel I also (finally) get a message, after my repeated attempts to contact them using the only modes provided- the online message service and email, that my now expired booking was being refunded because “they couldn’t fill the request.”

Deep breathes again, as I consider the very same roads I would have been travelling in my rental car.

Yep, lots of hedgerows.

Later, on the bus route back to Bodmin, which extends a half hour ride to a full hour and 20 via a meandering route through the areas different towns, the landscape would be much more visible and tranquil. What started in chaos ultimately resulted in a quick transfer from the train to a hired car, and later on a perfectly timed bus and train ride to Torquay where I will end my evening. For now though, a meeting with Merlin awaits.

A highlight of my trip by far: reaching the top of those towering cliffs overlooking the Atlantic, the shores of Ireland sitting hidden off in the distance, the statue of Merlin standing with it’s back turned, looking out towards the castle ruins and the coastal town, sword in hand. It is an arresting and truly majestic scene, one that, with the aid of the Great Courses book in hand, resonates with its deep rooted history. Here I am invited to imagine the once imposing castle walls, now visible in remnants, standing atop these cliffs, built here as they once were because of it’s connection to the Arthurian legends. As a growing body of evidence seems to be supporting amidst a still hotly debated mash-up of working theories, it’s here in these grounds that the historical figures gave rise to the legend that we know today, working its way Eastward and, eventually, back westward, being woven into the fabric of the lands ancient formation and the cultures that drive it as it goes.

What we know for a fact is, somewhere in the 4^th and 5^th centuries, which Armstrong defines as the true (and only) dark ages in the history of Britain, a moment in time where history seems to legitimately stop and disappear from sight, some unexpected force led seemingly by a singular dramatic figure did the impossible, both leading an unimaginable resistance against the much more powerful forces invading from the North and now sweeping it’s way across Britain. And leading them not to be destroyed but rather to retreat and flee. It would be soon after this that the name Arthur begins to make its way through royal lineages for unknown reasons, giving good credence to the preservation of what becomes an oral heritage of a true historical account. An oral heritage that gets preserved in these centuries now through the layers that are built over top, hence handing us the significance of Tintagel, a place marked by the convictions of those whom existed in prxominity to these centuries that this space and this figure were hugely important to their existence and their perseverance.

The legends of Arthur that we know today are a product of centuries of constant movement, from Britain (or as some might argue, from Scotland) to Wales, from the Netherlands to Germany, and on to Scandinavia and Italy before ultimately swinging back again into England primed and ready to be re-appropriated as a freshly anointed origins story and myth for the emerging Empire. Thus it becomes, as these things so often do, a fusion of the many cultures and stories it encounters on its journey through these different lands, each giving it a unique spin and addition as it converses with, a phrase I’ve often repeated along this journey, all the world’s stories. One can’t help but find in the story of this development a sense of this shared experience across these lands, a story powerful enough to connect these different cultures to a larger, sacred Truth enfolding the whole, and indeed the story, at its beating heart, has always served this very purpose.

As such stories do, the reigning image here, as one stands at the edge of these looming cliffs, is one of towers and ruins. In this contrast we find the shape of this movement through history, where the transient reality of Empire clashes with the enduring reality of these sacred spaces, in this case reaching back into the lands ancient celtic roots. As I learned in Bath, it’s always the eradication of the sacred spaces that the Empire’s constructed temples save for last. Standing here in this space, letting Guite’s masterful work of poetry wash over me in its eclectic prose, I am drawn to seek that sacred source, the Truth that stands above this movement, beckoning us to look for those liminal spaces that remain. I feel like this is one of those spaces.

This is the power of Story. It roots us in this sense of Truth. It finds a way to make sense of all the world’s stories. It leads us to look over that great expanse of ocean, and then to turn with the sheer force of that great Wizard towards the story of the lands now spilling out before us. An invitation to then participate in the Story to which this belongs, to wield the magic of that great mystery that is the chaos of the deep waters into a force that can then transform these now divided lands.

Towers and ruins.

It’s in the ruins of these lands that we are invited to dig deeper and reach further to recover the power of those old stories to remind us of the adventure we have been invited to embark on, adventures we might call a life, a life that then binds us to the stories that echo the mystery flowing outwards from that dramatic shoreline. Where all such stories seek to find that Story which can  reveal the necessary sacred truths that lie at the heart of the magic that once enchanted these lands.

This, it would seem, has always been an inherent part of the human experience. The need for Story. The need to tell our stories as we embark on such foolish and seemingly futile adventures as imagining a transformed world. It’s here where we authenticate our true identity as children of our maker rather than being relegated to slaves of the Empire. It’s here where our quest seeks the grail, that mysterious sacred presence that evades, in the lore, all but one. A mystical force that, as Armstrong helps explore, seems to have its roots in every culture, with every effort to locate its origins beyond its emergence in the Arthurian legend in the eleventh century, leading us to dig deeper and reach further.

To work ones way back down from the summit, to follow in the direction of Merlin’s unbroken gaze, is to chose to step into the journey, to embark on the quest. This is the way one must travel, across the awaiting rivers and hills and fields, however foolish the journey might appear. For me, this journey will be bringing me to the English Riveria, to walk the footsteps of one of the great mystery writers in England’s history, and perhaps all of history. 

  

And look! In through the window of the train carriage, next to his rattling first-class teacup, can be spied a notebook, which is aspiringly, if provisionally, titled: The Complete Guide to Britain’s Only Named Wind.

Marverlous! It’s about time someone wrote a book for Helm

…  I intend to capture its very spirit and I shall record it in detail for the Quarterly.

Capture it’s spirit! Did you hear that, Fitz? Bodge is intending to have a windy seance….

Charles, never underestimate the value of the amateur’s diary. Never dismiss oral evidence. Where would we be without it?

Sarah Hall’s newest novel, Helm, was another one of the books that accompanied me on my pilgrimage to rediscover my childhood stories as one who is now approaching his 50th year of living. Set in Northern England, on the entry point to the Yorkshire Moors, it’s premise recounts the story of Britain’s only named wind- Helm. The book opens with a quote from Edward Thomas (The Mountain Chapel),

When gods were young. This wind was old

Mass begins this, then, by delving into a cosmic origins story,

“In the beginning there was no Helm. Boring for the world, obviously. There were aeons before Helm arrived. The necessary arrangements had to be made, on the planet and in the sky. It would take Ages for Helm to be recognized, let alone named… But in the beginning nothing else had a name either.”

Before going on to tell of Helm’s wide angle view of history’s emergence and inevitable movement through time itself, here the story of Helm is drawing us into what we might call the eternal mystery, while similtaneously reminding us of the ways in which this mystery places us in direct relationship to this world that we know.

One of the more powerful moments of my trip comes from my tour through the Yorkshire Moors. Moving through the Howardian Hills, a landscape that emerges dotted with a mix of lavender fields, unsuspecting (and relatively new) vineyards, castles and Abbey ruins, we eventually make our way around to the market town of Helmsley, nestled in a valley at the entry point to the North York Moors National Park.

Part of this tour was supposed to include travelling on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway (hello Harry Potter), which is located here, and of which we did a drive by, but this was the one day of the week when it doesn’t run.

As stated in our email, in exchange we are given both transportation and admission to the famous Abbey in Whitby. A fair exchange in my mind, as that was my main destination on a tour that otherwise would have dropped me off at the town center adjacent to the bottom of those 199 steps up.

What the email didn’t say was that this exchange also meant we could stop at High Blakey Ridge, an incline sitting at the center of the Moors before winding its way down through Danby and a series of smaller towns leading to the North Sea. This is where I encountered Helm.

It’s something our tour guide prepares us for, walking through the lore that gives it it’s agency. He reminds us again about the force we are about to encounter before we open our doors, one that is as sure as the ground we would be standing on. “Let it hit you,” he says. “Experience it.” And here we open the doors to what can only be described as an otherwordly experience, encountering a wind unlike anything I have experienced before. Hall’s narrative suddenly breaks open, coming alive in a whole new way as I wander the hillside looking out over the valley, sheep gently grazing the one side, the expansive views opening up on the other. There’s something here that witnesses to the unbroken relationship between the intangibles of the sacred and the groundedness of the earth. Something that calls out and needs to be named.

This experience, rooted now in memory,  is what I carry with me to the North Shore, a town soaked in it’s own lore, the grand ruins of Whitby Abbey standing as its own witness atop those looming cliffs, looking out into the seas expanse as it keeps watch over the town. As writer Shayle Follows writes in a 20206 article for the Whitby Guide,

One of my favourite things about Whitby Abbey is that you do not even have to be standing beside it to feel it’s presence. It is always there, sitting high above the town, sneaking into the background of your photos and making every view feel a little more dramatic. Whether you are walking along the harbour, looking back from the beach, or exploring the cobbled streets below, the Abbey has a way of stealing the scene.

As Follows goes on to say, it’s easy to see why Bram Stoker was taken with this place. It’s why we endeavor to walk those steps at all, the very setting for what becomes his iconic novel. Here, standing at the top, with Robin Hood’s Bay looming in the distance on one side, Newcastle Upon Tyme on the other, is my introduction to the town sitting below, every turn of those 199 steps giving you a new and fresh vantage point to it’s rows of coloured houses and market shops lining the River Esk as it spills out into the North Sea waters.

Once you decend those steps and venture out into the streets, making your way to the Whitby Bridge, the central connection between the two sides of the river, you are greeted not just by that expansive view of the world, but a living, breathing culture. Crossing that river is where you enter into the story of Whitby, from it’s Viking heritage (as I learned, this is written into the town’s named streets: nothing like names such as Haggersgate to immerse you in its character), to it’s role in the story of Captain Cook, which you will find embedded in nearly every corner of it’s architectural design. It was here that Cook learned the ways of the sea and where the boats were built, eventually launching him into the pages of the history books.

A fun suprise here. Whitby is also home to Caedmon, cited as the English language’s oldest known poet. You can learn about him at the Abbey, but his presence stands witness to a fascinating and enduring story that reveals his own witness to this relationship between the natural world (anchored in his love for it’s creatures) and the enduring, sacred presence of the Divine, his poetry wrestling with the tensions inherent within that relationship from the vantage point of God’s love and God’s judgment. A cross memorial stands up by the Abbey documenting his importance, itself looking out over a town that remains a calling card to spiritual seekers. a town visibly marked by the gothic obsessions it happily claims as its birthright. Here Stoker’s words ring out into this intersection of these two working tensions, the expansive mystery being held in the chaos of the waters and the quiet dance of the humans seeking to name it where land and water meet.

The words of Stoker come to mind here:

There are mysteries that Man can only guess at which age by age may only solve in part

Recounted in an article for Time magazine by Dacre Stoker and JD Barker, Bram Stoker, in the summer of 1890, stopped at the library in Whitby and requested a specific title (The Accounts of Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia by William Wilkinson), to which he opened “to a specific section” and jotted in his journal. What follows is a map, outlining a journey that begins in London and ends on the shores of Romania, and the accounting of a shipwreck called the Dmitri, out of which the mysteries surrounding the history of this shipwreck, originating as it did from Eastern Europe, blends into the pre-existing Yorkshire myths regarding Barghest, a large black dog, which in this account was stated to be observed by the crew to have escaped the ship and run up the 199 steps and into the graveyard of St. Mary’s Church. The article describes the famed Irishman now finding a smile forming across his face as he sees what the article calls “a blurry place between fact and fiction.” A liminal space where the world just might be able to break open and unsettle our senses, and, dare one say, begin to make some sense. In a startling phrasing, the article states,

“Bram Stoker did not intend for Dracula to serve as fiction, but as a warning of a very real evil, a childhood nightare all too real.”

But the first 100 pages of the novel, which set the stage for Stoker’s alleged intent, were purged from it’s original form, out of fears coming from publishers back in London over the great evil of a murderer still on the loose, and what such a story might do to those seeking to control it. What remains still buried in history, perserved only through the bits and pieces of journal entries and writings from which we gain glimpses of it, witnesses to Stoker’s own uncomfortable relationship with what was being purged, namely his convictions about the true nature of this world we occupy and the nature of this thing we call evil.

Here I found myself thinking back through my pilgrimage, a pilgrimage that pushes through similar stories held in the pages of England’s vast literary voices. Voices standing in the midst of modernism’s persistant grip on the world of the ever emerging West, and wrestling with visions of a world now being buried underneath. Here sacred truths are being purged and redefined, traded for the rhetoric of what is being branded the age of reason, a rhetoric these voices found to be deeply ironic.

Stoker believed, as did the authors that share this same breadth of conviction, that truth, and its bedfellow reason, is found in the enduring power of story. This is what preserves truth and persists against our tendency to reject rationality in favour of that which we can control. To the modern world, any story that confronted the deep rooted fears of such an enterprise becomes reclaimed and reappropriated as lore, a fun remnant of an old world now purged of it’s original meaning and relegated to the field of the classics. A field now controlled by the newly claimed powers of it’s constructed academia. And yet, to dig into the history of these stories, to let this history speak, is to recover a very different story, one that witnesses to a very different understanding about what is true about this world that we both observe and experience, the very world the metaphors of these old stories seek to reveal.

Read through any of the plethora of articles wading through the complicated waters of our attempts to retreive Dracula’s origins story, and you’ll find this basic line being drawn in the sand: those who downplay Stoker’s convictions about the world he was trying to capture and reveal, and those who seek to bring that world to the forefront. The former, almost without exception, will inevitably lean into the vampire motif, believing that to dispel this in terms of the modern myth is to keep a story’s witness to the sacred and spiritual dimensions of this world at bay. And often, likely motivated in response, the latter doubles down on the legitimacy of a world of vampires, using the same modernist questions and approaches to prove such a world exists.

Both I think would miss the real point and fall into the same trap. The real question is, what is the shape of the world that this story is seeking to reveal. To what do the metaphors and symbols and images and creatures point. What gives these metaphors their power. What does this clash of myths reveal about the nature of all the world’s stories.

This is about whether or not this world has a spiritual dimension to which we ascend, or whether this world is defined according to the wanted materialism that hands the modernist  narrative its power over the world, to which we can then reduce the world to that which we can control.

It is known that Stoker drew inspiration from Emily Gerard’s article The Land Beyond the Forest, I find this a fascinating window into the mind of an author who was drawn to write about a world which we must ascend towards, a world which story could in fact reveal to its hearers, especially in the face of evil. It is the view of the materialist that dissects this story in terms of a modernist imposition, finding a split between nature and spirit and believing that the ultimate deconstruction of the spirit comes from proving that vampires are not real. But this is not how story works. This is not how the world Bram Stoker was accupying would have thought about these images, these metaphors. This story emerges precisely because of his conviction in a truth that transcends, a conviction that hands us a world which we cannot control. This, in my opinion, is the real source of that fear that sought to purge the book of the very history (the observation and experiences of the world Stoker was attempting to put into words and symbol) that tells us what he believed to be true. To be confronted by a world we cannot control is to have our wanted need to remake the world in our image undermined. It is to raise questions about the very modern enterprise that hands us this control. It hands us a world where our moral constructs do not have the power to define it, judge it, or control it, let alone make sense of it.

As I find in Sarah Hall’s story, theirs is a world where an encounter with the wind compels us to name it. This, I wonder, is what all of these stories are doing. This, I wonder, is what this pilgrimage is revealing. If the modern world that left these writers restless sought to remake the world in our own image, they found the power of story in the act of naming the world. This was their counter to what they perceived to be modernisms failure to make sense of the world, precisely because in naming it we are then handed a world that stands apart from us. That stands above us. Like the Abbey overlooking the town of Whitby, a story that then calls us to ascend those steps in order to encounter this reality as it is, something that then has the power to transform us, precisely because we cannot control it. A much more arduous and risky endeavor than reducing it to the whims of our wanted fancies and demands.

I would find this sentiment repeated as I return to those ancient walls and cathedrals of York, the clash between that modernist sensibility and the power of story highlighting the city’s own obsession with the latent spirituality inherent in Harry Potter.

Here, one of modernisms great apologists has penned a story that sparked a wanted need in it’s hearers: a need to re-enchant the world at long last. Perhaps against her own wanted intentions, the story has taken on a power all its own.

I think too about my later encounter in Oxford with a space shared by both Lewis and Pullman, two authors appealing to story for very different reasons, one seeking to reclaim a world buried by modernism through the telling of the old stories, the other seeking to bury the old world by reappropriating those old stories in service of the modern narrative. If ever there were a veritable expression of the present conflict, this would be it. What remains certain in my eyes though, is that the stories from which Pullman is drawing, the stories that permeated the world of England’s great literary voices, emerged precisely because of their shared conviction that the modernist narrative had failed to make sense of all the worlds stories, the very world they/we observe and experience. To encounter them on their terms is to allow them to speak, The question simply becomes, how does this speak to us.

For me, re-encounterimg the writers and stories of my childhood in this place, not only continues to validate the restlessness I held as a young kid, it reminds me of why that matters to the questions I am asking. It asks me to wonder in a reality that is both beyond me and that invites me to ascend those steps in my continued seeking of the truth it wants to reveal. And, dare I say, it continues to ask me to risk giving up my need to reduce it to terms that I can control. What it promises in exchange is actual transformation, but even more so an invitation to participate in that transformed view of the world and its inhabitants.

A day in the Cotswolds. That’s what my tour was called (shout out to the wonderful people at Go Cotswolds, a small grassroots company with a small passionate team who will quickly tell you before the tour starts: there’s no way to actually see the Cotswolds in a day). Another early morning wake up call, but for me this is what vacation is all about.

The day will eventually take an unexpected turn, but for the time being I remain blissfully ignorant of that (eventual) chaos. This moment is about my continued journey into these spaces that informed my childhood as a young reader. I talked about what the Cotswolds are in my previous blog on my visit to Stratford Upon Avon. This day was about travelling to a handful of it’s greatest hits: Stow on the Wold, Bourton on the Water, Broadway, Chipping Campden, Snowshill, Bibury, Moreton on Marsh.

When I mentioned my interests in the literary side of the country, the tour guide got a slight gleam in her eyes. I am told they like to tailor the tour as much as possible to the interests of the travellers in each unique group, and this, it would seem, was an easy mission. After all, if, in the history of this place, all roads lead out of London, the great literary minds of my childhood had a special fondness for the Cotswolds.

Of note:

• Stow on the Wold is where Lewis Carroll found his inspiration for the titular character in Alice in Wonderland
• Tolkien’s presence is felt all over the place, having spent much time traversing these grounds, including the famous Tolkien Door (also Stow on the Wold), the Broadway Tower (which I think my tour guide worked in just for me, influencing Tolkiens concept of Amon Hen), the Rollright Stones (which we never got to see), the Bell Inn in Moreton On Marsh (where I got to sit where Tolkien once sat, soaking in the inspiration for The Prancing Pony), and the countryside. For Tolkien, these influences reach all the way up into Birmingham (where I will end up at the end of the day), the place of his childhood, where sites like Sarehole Mill, Moseley Bog, Perrott’s Folly hand us the mill in Hobbiton, the Old Forest, the two towers, and is also the location of the church where Tolkien found himself being mentored by Father Francis Xavier following the death of his parents.
• J.M. Barrie’s history at Stanway House, where he had an amateur cricket team with Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne (can you imagine!!??)
• T.S. Eliot’s history in Chipping Campden, where visits with a close friend inspired what became his greatest poem (Burnt Norton), inspired by the manor of the same name
• Beatrice Potter, who’s famous book was inspired by Gloucester (for me this was a drive by)

My favourite of the places was Stow on the Wold. Hard to beat standing at that door.

Bourton on the Water is small and quaint, and the sort of place you would want timed for a sunrise or a sunset. It’s popularity definitely means crowds.

This is similar for the famous Arlington Row in Bibury, a place that makes you long for a picture without the crowds, which is ironically why the crowds are there in the first place.

In contrast, the grand streets of Chipping Campden, a bigger center (relatively speaking), are conditioned for those crowds, offering a welcome market town vibe with a decent area to explore off the beaten (High Street) paths.

I’m probably not alone here I’m sure, but second to walking or biking the Cotswolds Way, which I imagine this space is really designed for, is driving the countryside. I had a taste of this on the hour long bus ride from Moreton on Marsh to Stratford Upon Avon, which is quite beautiful, and this would be equally true for the train ride running through the opposite side of this storied terrain. This brings you through small towns such as Shipston on Stour, Limington, Honebourne, Blackminster, Upper and Lower Moor, and bigger places such as Gloucester and Evasham, framing your windows with a novelesque, page turning journey. On our tour, crossing over to Broadway and stopping in Snowshill (the picturesque town that provides the home and backdrop for Bridget Jones), Cotswold Lavender was one of the sites which would, for watchful eyes, break open as you emerged from the Hedgerows in their brilliant colour.

And then of course there’s your companions for the day, a small crew of people from around the world. One couple from Michigan making their first trip to England at 80 years old (and still rocking it) to meet their family (and heritage) after a lifetime of never having the opportunity. A middle aged mother on a mission to get pictures of those lavender fields for her daughter, and a couple bound and determined to find their ways into conversations with the locals at every stop (and consequentially became our running commentary on the old wool producing families still residing in the area). Although sadly the only time I had with her was the drive from Stratford Upon Avon to Moreton on Marsh, where she would transfer to the other tour (secret Cotswolds, which ironically was the trip I initially signed up for before time restricted my ability to get to Stow on the Wold), there was a wonderful woman from Australia whom would have made a great conversation partner along the way.

In talking to a friend, I spoke about my overall experience with the Cotswold’s, suggesting that I am absolutely glad I went, I enjoyed experiencing it, but I am not sure I feel a strong need to return. I would qualify that statement by saying, if I did return, I would endeavor to see it from the vantage point of travelling the Cotswolds Way.

Slow travel that has the luxory of soaking in multiple days of sunsrises and sunsets from different angles. Which is to say, I absolutely see the allure and the magic of the place for many, and this, I think, is it’s element. The reason, If I was to throw out a guess, for my slightly tempered response is the simple realization of what this space currently is, at least when it comes to its popularity as a tourist destination: a retreat for the rich. A place you wonder through and admire while knowing it remains essentially untouchable for most of us.

A place where you get bits and pieces of the generational life which still remains, much of that still connected to those old world practicies (hang on to those encounters when they come along the way), but mixed in with the big money, where you have to assume these figureheads have distanced themselves, through their walled off estates, from the same streets we are treading in interest of grabbing those sought after shots of the buildings and architecture they (thankfully) have been forced (by law through regulation) to preserve.

Saying all that, I know that there is a whole world to discover underneath the present layers. This is the same world that inspired those literary voices. This is a history that reaches back to early settlements, that contains important pieces of the UK’s history. And certainly, the further out you get from the popular centers, the more connected you start to feel with this still active heartbeat. A world untouched by the industrial revolution. There’s an irony here. When I made the change from the secret cotswolds tour to the day in the cotswolds, it was with the voice of one of the ones running the company ringing in the back of my head saying, I get the draw of the big hitters, but my favorite is the secret cotswolds. I feel like this might have been the right way to go for me personally, looking back, however, here I was driven by the need to see that famous Tolkien door. You could say I am the problem. In fairness, this was the theme of my personal pilgrimage, and it was, legitimately, a single decision that meant choosing between being able to see it or missing it altogether.

So there, I suppose, is my easy ticket back. If I was to return, the secret tour would make a great pairing with the Cotswolds Way. That to me feels true to seeing the place in its element.

Leaving all potential regrets behind, my day in the cotswolds nevertheless left me with some pictures and some memories, some great conversations and some more to imagine. The final moment of my day was heading to see The Bell Inn, as this is where we ended (and technically started) our tour, in Moreton on Marsh. A picture perfect finish to a relaxing day. Now it is onwards to Birmingham and then to York

Which is precisely the point in which things begin to go off the rails (pun intended).

Initially Birmingham was a stop over for the night, allowing me plenty of time to explore some planned Tolkien sites shown above (the Oratory of Saint Phillip where Tolkien was raised by the priest following the death of his parents, and home of St. John Henry Newman) the inspiration for the two towers in Perrots Folly and Edgbaston Waterworks Tower- pictures taken from google), which are very close togetherbut a window of oppportunity to visit Whitby, which was high on my list, reorganized this evening around a later train to York (the meeting point for my tour of the Yorhsire Dales and Whitby. So plans shifted to a quick cab ride out to see the church and the towers during my stop over.

As things go, timing is everything, and disrupted trains can easily upend any tightly scheduled plans. Thus I arrived in Birmingham with just enough time to check out it’s famous canal front. I would have to live with existing in proximity (a 30 mintue walk away to be precise) to these sites, although I reassure myself with the simple thought that Birmingham would be the necessary middle point for a planned return to the U.K prioritizing Wales and the Lake District. In any case, this would be, as it turns out, an omen for the rest of the night.

Arriving in Birmingham, I was immediately hit by what, I could only assume at the time in my ignorance, was a convention of some sort. I am talking the crazed fanatics kind, where I found myself navigating through crowds decked out in costumes and riding a next level demonstration of enthusiasm.

Or maybe this is just Birmingham, I thought in the moment. What do I know. In any case, that twinge of regret over not trying to call over that cab and making a mad dash for my Tolkien sites still sits with me, but given what was actually going on- England, I find out, was playing in the World Cup- I am not sure that would have been either possible nor the smartest move in the end. Not to mention I am sure that cab ride would have been at minum 120 canadian dollars. 

But then again, given the chaos that was about to ensue, I was minutes away, as it turned out, from getting some extended time in Birmingham. That’s how things go. At least I get a decent story from it all.

After my quick leisurely stroll (more an opportunity to stretch the legs), I returned to the train station to board my train to York. All seems good. I do indeed board the train, and (a very full) train does indeed depart the station.

Mere minutes into my departure (I am talking 10 minutes in), I get a muffled announcement come over the intercom. I can’t quite make out what it’s saying, but I catch hints of some sort of disruption. I chalk it up to connecting trains and dismiss it, as I am on a direct line to York. Settling in for the couple hour ride, the next thing I know a train agent is making his way up the aisle, stopping to chat with the different seats as he goes. I get my ticket ready, as I assume this is what he wants. By the time he arrives at my seat I’m getting the gist that there is more going on and that this just might impact me after all. Sure enough, I get the same shared pronouncment that this train, which is supposed to bring me to York, is being shut down. And not just this train, but an ever lengthening list of trains now also going dark, one after the other. Something about an electricity shortage or something like that. Our next stop would be the end of the line, and efforts to then redirect us using different connecting trains was falling apart in real time. This included the final trains of the night going to York being cancelled.

As I mentioned, had this happened in Birmingham, this would have given me that extra time I needed to get to my wanted sites, given that I would have changed to the later train prior to it being cancelled. Anyone with experience in how this works knows that the station is obligated to get you to where you are going, which means when all else fails they end up putting you in a hired cab. Best case scenario would have been getting an extended stay in Brimginham and eventually getting that cab from there. As it was, a train packed full of people now found themselves stuck at this middle of nowhere stop,. To make matters worse, the heat wave and the main event (the world cup) seemed to have emptied every vending machine of water, the one thing I failed to stock up on before I left (or more accurately couldn’t, as they were sold out in Birmingham High Street station as well).

For context, I am now somewhere in the vicinity of the Nottingham area, which is also bringing up one of my other regrets: not being able to get out to Sherwood Forest, and that feeling that I could be spending my time there instead of in this station. I have deep affection for the Robin Hood lore, but it was one of those places that required the good part of a day using the train, and doing my research, while it’s described as a quaint stop (the city of Nottingham), the forest itself was more about the lore than a needed destination in and of itself. A nice place to visit, as I heard many say, but not a priority.

But the lore nevertheless was a big part of my childhood, so here I am, once again looking from a distance knowing I am in proximity to it, biding my time with an increasingly restless crowd decked out in costume and short fuses. I can confirm, I got way too much information about way too many of their relationships over the fading hours of this unplanned stopover.

Eventually we got word to follow the station worker out to what was now a fleet of waiting taxis. When I say waiting, what it ultimatley demonstrated itself to be was another angsty mob, this time apparently made up of every possible available taxi fighting things out for the right to the desired contract. This was a windfall for them. I changed hands no less than four times just on route to “a” taxi. After one heated exchange between drivers, what should have been taxis with six people each started to be emptied out, sending half full taxis on their way. I can only assume this was an effort to give as many of them a piece of the contract as possible, and/or avoiding an all out war. What started as six in my cab filtered down to two. Me and a Russian lady who lives in York.

I should mention: it’s now approaching midnight. Some Russian Vodka feels like a needed thing right about now.

When we finally arrive at York Station it’s definitely past midnight. My reserved hostel isn’t far away, but navigating it in the dark was still a fun exercise. The first thing that greets you is the old city walls. Walking through these gates, which reminded me a bit of our time arriving in Krakow, you enter the old city center. At one point what I assume to be a cat or a dog comes running by me with a significant sized prized prey in it’s mouth. What a greeting from the otherwise empty streets.

The further up I go into the heart of the old city center, the closer I get to what is the ominous glow of light emanating from windows reaching up and down the street. TVs. Pub after pub, restaurant after restaurant, home after home, all still with their doors open and tables packed watching the still running game. Eventually I arrive at my hostel. I should mention, I have never stayed in a hostel before. I don’t really know how they work. In this case I made my way into the building where I had to push my way through the crowd of people to find what I eventually discovered was the check in point at the bar. They gave me directions to the room. I grabbed my key and made my way back out to the central halway to go get settled in. My first instruction: find the door that says basement on it. I’m looking. I can’t find anything. A guy notices me wandering around and asks me what I’m looking for. The basement, I say. He says oh, it’s over here. He opens a door for me and I head down the stairs. Suddenly the door shuts behind me and I find myself in the dark. The door I came through locks on the other side., so I can’t get out the way I came. I start feeling around through the faint glow of emergency lights dotting the roof. Damp, old stone walls. Some shelves. How am I going to get out of here?

This went on for about a good 7 minutes, when the lights suddenly come on, and the guy from the bar is standing there. A split second where I am slightly uncertain about how this is shaking down, but he apologizes. The guy who  let me down here, into what appears to be the supply room, didn’t know who I was or what he was doing. “You went too far,” he explains in his thick British accent . He then guides me up a back way I never would have found in the dark, out the door and towards my room.

At this point I am more than ready to head to bed. I have no idea what the actual etiquitte is for a hostel, but I am also not too concerned at this point. Plus, it seemed like everyone was still up at the bar watching the game. So I throw on my phone’s flashlight and find my bed number- great, it’s a top bunk. I don’t change, I just find the closest outlet, toss my bags up on the bed with me, shut the curtains, and curl up around it.

Ping.

Dang it. I neglected to turn my phone notifications to silent. I pull back the curtain, crawl back down the ladder, and silence my phone. Only to find myself considering another dilemma. If I leave my phone down here how do I hear my alarm? If I take it up with me, how do I charge it? I consider that my first instinct to leave it on the ground charging perhaps isn’t the best move, and opt out for charging my portable charger and keeping my phone with me. instead. As I finally look to get what appears to be about 5 and a half hours of sleep before needing to get up for the next day’s tour, for whatever resaon I find the words of the cotswolds way marker back at Chipping Campden playing through my head.

“Now the light falls across the open field, leaving the deep lane shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon.” (T.S. Eliot)

Sitting adjacent to The Salisbury plains is an area known as the Cotswolds, a word that combines the phrase sheep pen (cot) with hills (wold), reaching back to the Roman introduction of the Cotswold Lion (sheep) into these still rolling hills.

Here is a world preserved in time, having escaped the sweep of the industrial revolution that turned it’s eyes instead towards the most illustrious coal mining industry further East.

Today it has morphed into a veritable tourist industry, where robust laws continue to ensure that the wealthy (outside of long term residents, the only ones who could actually afford properities in this area today) must adhere to strict rules regarding what they are allowed to build/rebuild/renovate/destroy.

These are fairytale villages, which is the draw for many looking to escape into this other-world, easy to romanticize as a quintessential image of the English countryside, representing a different age disconnected from the trappings of the modern world. And walking the streets of these different villages, it’s easy to fall under it’s spell, with it’s unique golden coloured stone drawing in vibrant glows and casting out unaided reflections amongst the old world architecture, moving here and there as it does with the ever sloping and rising streets. Some day, perhaps I will be able to do the 164 km path called the Cotswold Way, beginning at Chipping Camden, which is the easiest way to really immerse ones self in the interconnected villages that make up this once ancient seabed.

Perhaps a lesser known fact about the Cotswolds is it’s position as an inbetween place, consistently finding itself positioned between two warring sides. One might be surprised by how such an innocent setting could contain the bloody history that it does, and yet sitting between the Welsh lands to the West and the Essex to the East, bordering the Druids to the South on the Salisbury plains and the intruding northern tribes to the North, and most notably being the site of the civil war of the 1600’s.

It’s actually the civil war that becomes most significant to beginning my journey through this area, arriving in the town of Stratford Upon Avon, made notable as the birthplace of William Shakespeare.

If you are like me, Shakespeare represents something of a complicated relationship. A standard text in school, notoriously difficult to grasp, and yet the neverending onslaught of adaptations, stage, screen, and literary, are littered throughout my childhood.

Knowing little about the individual but knowing much about these stories became my window into exploring why he matters, not just to the story of this space, but to my literary pilgrimage. One curious source that accompanied me on this front is called Shakespeare and the Resistance by Clare Asquith. One of the fascinating things that comes from taking a fresh look at common histories is the ways in which perceptions and misconceptions are able to be overturned, which is precisely what Asquith’s well researched treatment of two of Shakespeares famous poems does (Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, published a year apart in the aging and dying years of the Elizabethan era, often sold as Medieval Englands true golden years).

What this window first reveals, which a growing body of research seems to be supporting, is that these golden years overshadow the real political turmoil now buried underneath. This matters to our understanding of England’s history. More so, it matters to our understanding of Shakespeare’s writings, and indeed the person behind the writings. As Asquith writes,

“In shakespeare we discover a man deeply engaged in the struggle to bring true tolerance and humanity to England.”

As she goes on to note, it would be “the change in tone in Shakespeare near the end of his life” which becomes our jumping off point for seeing his body of work through a different set of eyes. This change in tone, while long embedded in different theoretical musings, does reflect a change in demeanor, but what gets missed through handed down histories of the Tudor age is that this change reflects “that of a revolutionary, looking over a failed attemp at resistance towards the Tudor Monarchy.” Just to underscore how deeply this narrative of the Tudors, and subsequently it’s literary figurehead (Shakespeare), has formed the public consciosness of an entire era, Asquith writes about the present state of scholarship, saying:

“Now crumbling, this myth has for centuries formed the foundation stone of an England which dated the birth of its empire and the establishment of its national church back to the days of the Tudors, and adopted Shakespeare as its national figurehead.”

Here, on the cusp of the most bloodied years of England’s illustrious history, two civil wars which would result in the death of nearly 4.5 percent of the population of the British Isles (although more in number, World War 1 sits at 2 percent), sits a now romanticized era of advertised prosperity giving the eventual rebuilding of the British landscape it’s guiding myth, and it is the stories of Shakespeare, purged of it’s political edges, which get reconstituted as its central text.

It’s absolutely worth reading through Asquith’s carefully argued premise, but for the sake of a gross summarization: to truly understand the texts of Shakespeare, one needs to understand how such works operate in times/places of political control. Where texts must be careful in adhering to a given narrative, handed down by the powers, but where writers use the guise of these surface narratives to lobby hidden agendas and critiques of that power in their metaphors and symbols and language. This becomes a way of subverting the powers, precisely because readers of the time pick up on these working metaphors and symbols even where the establishment remains willfully ignorant.

This, Asquith argues, is what gives the change in tone in Shakespeare’s later writings it’s revelatory nature. This reveals the voice of an artist, who spent his life championing a resistance of the Empire and who is now looking upon the failed end result of his efforts: a looming civil war. Here hopeful optimism shifts into a feeling of despair, bringing all manners of existential questions with it regarding the point of it all on the cusp of a life now exiting the stage.

A much different portrait than the Tudor age we’ve been handed over the years. But this is what makes a pilgrimage like this worthwhile. Standing in front of Shakespeeare’s house, walking the streets of his inspiration, gazing over the percieved tensions now apparent in the legacy of the Royal Shakespeare Theater, which was showing the play The Cherry Orchard, starring Helen Hunt and Kenneth Braughn, this very night (perhaps one of my great regrets choosing not to try for last minute tickets to the sold out show, but the price tag was looming large). A legacy that reaches to London and it’s famous Globe, a reconstruction of the very playhouse which once sat on the banks of the River Thames as a grand statement of the Eliabehan era, housing Shakespeares plays.

This inspired me to think back on my own life, given that this pilgrimage marks my official road to 50. What does my life reveal on the surface? And what would my story reveal in light of such revisionist history? This is a question I ask, not because my life resembles anything like Shakespeare’s legacy (about the furthest from it), but because there’s something here that I think applies in important ways to any given life. The tension of existing in a world where we are woven into its constructs, a product of its dominant narratives, often in ways we don’t give much consideration, and yet also being marked by these points of resistance and diversion. We find this in the process of growing up, in the ways our young selves try to wrestle some semblance of our own story out of the expectations of a home, some sense of that sought after independance the differentiates us from our parents and our siblings amidst a shared upbringing. We find this in the ways this percieved independence then faces it’s own challenges of the institutions and expectations which we find in the world on the other side of this transition, on the other side of our “leaving the paramaters of this shared upbringing” seeking the allure of something we can call our own.

I do wonder if sometimes (or often times) I fall into the trap of thinking this act of resistance is, in and of itself, the viritue. Standing here wondering about this storied life, existing now, as it does, a ghost of a never ending reconstruction of the buried past, I consider the ways in which I can begin to see past this mantra I’ve been handed, which says life is just the continued process of opposing the past and replacing it with whatever comes next, and I imagine what it might look like to think more deeply about what a storied life actually means as an actual act of formation rather than simply an othering of the things we feel we must oppose. The ways in which my life, as all lives do, demonstrate this same push and pull that marks Shakespeare’s works, attempting to speak between these larger forces of hope and despair, even as it works to carve out a story in the middle, allowing us to become coherent participants in the plot.

A reality in which things like legacy lay far outside of our control, even as we find ways to believe that our choices, our actions, matter to something bigger than ourselves. A reality where all of our small acts of resistance walk this tightly strung line between forming community and subsequently driving wedges between it.

And then simitaneously asking, for all the ways we are lured in by these acts of resistance, the much more difficult question becomes, what is it that I embrace. This can come in the form of questions such as, what is it that I believe. Or the more probing question, what does my life, a life that is and will be ultimately be controlled by the interpretation of others, reveal about what I believe.

William Shakespeare can’t stand where I am standing now and look back over the long history of interpretaiton that ultimately persists beyond his control. His life, in many ways, is just as much the voice of the Tudors as it is now becoming an act of resistance. Both of these things are true about his legacy. And what hits me, somewhat hard, about recognizing this in this moment, is that in my own 50 years of living this is also true for me.

As something of a cynic I have long wrestled with this tension. As a young child, for whatever reason now lost to the passage of time, I became resltess with this notion of seeking a kind of integrity between my life and what I actually believe to be true about this world. By this I don’t merely mean the old adage of walking the talk, or ideas about ones life matching ones words. That to me is a dangerous moralism. What made me restless ran deeper than this. Something akin to Shakespeare’s adage, “We know what we are, but not what we may be.” It was more about seeing my life in light of a much bigger Truth that exists beyond me, and this insatiable desire and need to know what that Truth is. We know where we are, but not what it might be, that might be another way of rephrasing that.

What kept me awake at night, reading books like Charlotte’s Web and Watershipdown into the late, dark hours, was this unsettled feeling of a lived life that anchors itself in truths that might ultimately prove to be little more than illusions. And I don’t mean simply in the religious sense, but in all of the ways we build our lives on given convictions which drive our choices, which justify the shaping our our lives in our hearts and minds,. and upon which we find meaning and hope. As Shakespeare once said, “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” The issue here is, to be true to thine own self requires alligning ones self with what is true about this world. That’s the restlessness.

Hard questions for an adult mind, let alone for my 7 year old self. Those  who know me understand that I am never far from my next existential crisis. In this moment however, as I continue my walk along the River Avon, the medieval town ebbing and flowing with the different curves and turns of the winding pathway,  I was seeking a conversation between my adult and child self. A way of perhaps probing the nature of this restlessness at its core.

This will come with my ensuing tour of the larger Cotswolds area. There awaits the inspiration of its rich literary heritage, this area inspiring the likes of T.S. Eliot, Tolkien, Beatrix Potter, J.M. Barrie (this is where he wrote Peter Pan), Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll. Each wrestling with these bigger questions in their own way. But in this moment, what Shakespeare is calling me to embrace is this simple recognition: I can be an interpreter of my own life. I can be part of this conversation in the here and now. I don’t need to stay on the surface, I can do the necesary digging. I can learn how to allow the tensions to hand me a life which will likely tell mutliple stories all at once, the same life that, as all lives do, can also be told from multiple perspectives when seen from the numerous eyes looking in from the outside. Each with their own wanted and vested interests in the ways our lives intersect. To be reminded that those perspectives are also beholden to the same process as I am now engaging for my own story, and that I am likewise engaged in telling the stories of others in the same fashion.

Including the ways in which I am interpreting the story of Shakespeare in the here and now. To echo his famous words, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.” And yes, “Lord, what fools these mortals be.”

And maybe, just maybe, we can allow ourselves to concede that Truth has a power all its own. That learning to trust this basic credal confession is the point, something that stands above my life regardless of how much access I have in this present moment to any complete knowledge of it. That learning to trust this confession is perhaps the greatest form of knowledge I can obtain.

What drove Shakespeare was not a rejection of a world bigger than his story, but a deep conviction that it existed. That the simple statement, there is Truth about this world to be obtained in all the ways in which it lays hidden, could motivate him towards challenging the marriage of Empire and Church that brought such bloodshed to his slice of existence. For him, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here,” rings true. And yet his own existential wrestlings utlimately rest on his most famous of sayings, “To be, or not to be, that is the (ultimate) question.” From this flows the ensuing hopeful expression, however much it gets mired by the qeustions of his waning years, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth (insert our names here) than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” With this reminder, I continue to step into the unknown of my own aged years.

Somewhere along my travels, upon hearing my itinerary, someone asks me what I thought of London. Not a difficult question to answer, but I did find my immediate, in the moment, off the cuff response to spill out suprisingly quickly. A two-word descriptive. How was London?, London I mused, was “a lot.”

This isn’t a bad thing. It does however feel true to my experience of an immersive, if entirely too brief foray into its people, its design and its culture. What I hear most often from articles or guide books is that London remains one of the, if not the most diverse cities in the world. This makes sense. What might have surprised me to this end is that it’s most dominant image for me as a foreigner, it’s particular British aesthetic and presence, while certainly woven into the whole of it’s fabric, is not really as on the surface as I might have thought. What does dominate the city’s modern presence, for example, is something like the strong middle eastern influences. Or the nature of its endless stretch of self contained neighborhoods, where you could choose to stay enitrely wihin the boundaries of a single neighborhood and still, save for the main stretch of it’s famed royal tourism, experience most of what London offers as a whole (which by the way, is a stark contrast from somewhere like New York City, where each neighborhood is its own distinct and required destination).

Or it’s coffee shops.  The sheer amount of coffee shops was truly unexpected for a place I associated specifically with tea.

Beyond this though, what makes the city so unique, to me anyways, is the way it has transformed itself through layers upon layers of this coexisting framework, with past and present seeming to exist as naturally as scones and afternoon tea. Or cream and tea. It presents itself as a rich conversation of the different facets of its story, where every corner, every turn, every hidden passageway, becomes a chapter.

It’s bittersweet this morning to feel the force of these last few days slipping away as I am boarding my train back at Paddington Station heading now for the Salisbury plains, or more specifically the old Roman Britain city of Bath. Here is where the larger story of England and Britain awaits. As the train departs into the subtle rays of the early morning sunrise, my excitement is building. Here I am, heading towards what is arguably some of Britains most sacred spaces, spread out across these flattened river plains.

“In Britain there are hot springs furnished luxuriously for human use. Over these springs Minerva presides and in her temple the perpetual fire never whitens to ash, but as the flame fades, turns into rocky lumps.” (Solinus Collectanea, 3rd century)

The first thing earlier travellers to Bath would have seen as they arrived within the city limits is the head of Medusa staring out from the temple-pediment over the old lands of what was then Roman Britannia. Scholar Miranda Green describes this in her book Sacred Britannia, suggesting that “the visible and odour-laden billows of steam” emanating from the hot springs would have immersed this site in a real sense of mystery and uncertainty.

One of the crown jewels of the famous Roman Baths is it’s display of the goddess Sulis Minerva, standing in it’s glass case as a clear demonstration of this fusion of the local (Sulis) and Roman (Minerva) Deities, marking the complex nature of the history of these grounds. Gilt Bronze sculptures from Roman Britian, as the descriptive reads, were incredibly rare. The unexpected discovery of this head helped to shape the story of this Romanized city on the southern edge of Brittannia, giving the Baths both it’s context and it’s story. This once standing and still marvelously preserved Temple would have stood beside the sacred spring, looking out over the great altar and then outwards into the city’s mystical presence, with the cobblestone streets weaving their way around the river Avon. This is something walking through the exhibit brings abanduntly to life. For me, there is something profound about walking these roads and navigating this space that dates back to the first century AD. Not only is it a window into the time of Jesus, it’s a window into the localized religious ethos of both the Romans and the indigenous peoples.

A second head adorns the complex. This is Gorgon (meaning, water god), which here is Oceanus, otherwiset known in the Celtic Tradition as The Green Man. This is recognizable as a face that is either surrounded by or dispersing foliage from it’s eyes, ears, and nose.

Something that I learned: You will find this image adorning many of England’s churches, according with the prominant Medieval era story about an aged Adam and his son Seth, whom returns to the gates of Eden seeking the oil of mercy. Here he is given seeds from the Tree of Knowledge, which he plants in Adam’s mouth upon his death. From this grew the tree that would eventually provide wood for Jesus’ cross, capturing the sacred story of rebirth, resurrection, and salvation.

In the case of Bath, travellers came here for healing, in a time when, according to Green, “spiritual healing went hand in hand with empirical medicine.” These were liminal spaces where the sacred coexisted with an accute awareness of the natural world, something you will find throughout the old celtic lands and it’s experiences with countless stories of the Fairies.

Eventually the demise of the Temple would come through rising sea tides, leaving a city that continues to this day be shrouded in certain mysteries when it comes to questions about it’s Roman origins. What we do know is that it’s demise goes “hand in hand” with the demise of the Roman occupation of Roman Brittania. In this wake, the city is perserved, and indeed revitalized, through the re-emergence of it’s own sacred story, sitting as it does in conversation with this visible Roman influence. When you step off the train, which I was privileged enough to do in the early morning hours before the city wakes up, you are hit with a sense of its quiet grandeur.

Yes, for anyone who has spent time wondering the cities and streets of Italian city centers, this feels undeniably Roman in it’s architecture and design and later Georgian influences. Yet what makes it so intriguing to explore is that it is also recognizably different. For as Roman as this space appears, you can’t escape the notes of ancient Britian giving the city a foundation.

In keeping with my literary theme, Bath is best known as the home of Jane Austen, who’s complicated relationship with the city remains perhaps the best window we have into it’s later, modern embrace of class systems and social customs. What’s interesting here is that, for all that has obviously changed over the years about the city, it remains defined as a place of retreat and sought after healing, with the old temple ruins remaining at the center of it’s now Georgian influence market town flare built on spas, food and leisure.

I confess, of more interest to me than Austen is the fact that I could stand in the spot where Mary Shelley wrote the novel Frankenstein. The physical history has since been demolished to make space for the touristy demands of the Pump Room, but you can still stand in that same space. Pairing this with my later visit to the famous steps of Bram Stoker’s Dracula still feels kind of surreal.

Ultimately though, what would capture my attention here on this part of my journey is that broader historical story to which Bath belongs and is now awakening in my own spirit. Later on in her book, Sacred Britannia, Miranda Aldhouse-Green speaks about the nature of religion, or spiritual beliefs, and its enduring power. One of the more profound learnings that can come from traversing the lands of Britain comes from digging into the relationship between the land’s indigenous beliefs and it’s era of Roman rule. Here we find this curious notion of standing in a space in-between, on one hand opening me up to experience something bigger than myself while simitaneously bringing that all to familiar story of Empire to stark realization.

Speaking of Bath in this sense, as a conversation between these two essential forces that seem to define our world, Green draws out an important observation about the larger historical narrative for those seeking to understand and for those seeking to find what it can reveal;.

“While old indigenous beliefs may have been forced to take a back seat during colonial oppression, they are often not dead but hibernating, biding their time on the sidelines until the tyrannous regime is ended.”

In terms of Bath, we can feel this tension in writings such as that of Emeritus in his 3rd century writings.

“This holy spot, wrecked by insolent hands and cleansed afresh, Gaius Severius Emeritus, centurion in charge of the region, has restored to the Virtue and Deity of the Emperor.” (Gaius Severius Emeritus, 3rd century inscription)

Green outlines from the ancient records such as Tacitus on the rebellion of Boudica in AD 60, how the most important part of the State Religion in Romes newly aquired province of Britannia was the Imperial Cult, and as it is with all such conquests, it was always the Temple which was the last thing to be rebuilt and the sacred symbols the last to be destroyed. This is how colonization worked. This is how you subjugate a people. 

Green digs deep and biting when she comments on this familiar and popularized idea that polytheism equals tolerance in ancient Rome, a rhetoric which you will find represented in much of Western academia, As she states, this is simply not accurate, and the story of Roman Britannia outlines why, including, as I will be visiting later, the history that runs through the all imporant story of the Druids of Gaul.

“The beliefs and cults of the conquering power will always take precedence over those of subjugated peoples.” And that subjugation is fueled by the ways in which Empire dismantles the sacred. If the Romans “brought to Britian a fully formalized, hierarchical religious system, based largely on that of the Greeks, they also introduced new technologies of worship: image-making on an industrial scale, and epigraphy.”

And perhaps more to the point,

“However inclusive romanitas was in its attitude to foreign religious systems, there was little doubt that, within the Empire, the gods and goddesses of Rome took precedence, at least officially.”

Thus Green outlines the reason for writing her book in the following sentence:

“The focus of Sacred Britannia is the manner in which the juxtapostion of two-cultures, each very different from the other… played out in the arena of religion and ritual.”

This is, in other words, how the whole of history plays out in relationship to these two forces.

What was striking me, standing on these grounds in this moment, imagining the ways this history was being shaped and built in this period, was the question of how this space was sought out precisely so that it might cut off the source of its own appeal to the sacred, it’s abiding connection to the sacred realities that shape these lands the Empire is reshaping. As will be a continued theme over the course of my trip, this space, which historian Ian Morris ultimately outlines in his massive work Geography is Destiny: Britain and the World, A 10,000 Year Old History, as one that is being uncannily peserved for us today through a brute fact of geogrpahical location, the question that follows any inquiry into these still standing structures is always, why did they build it here. Why did they tear down here? The colonization of and creation of Roman Brittania, the collapse of Roman rule, the developing history of the Arthurian legends, the invasions from the North, the rise of Britains medieval story. All of this leads us tothe same question, over and over again. This is, in fact, the question that allows us to resist subsuming the whole into any particular point in a given historical development.

The temple here was built in 60/70 AD after the Roman conquest of Britian. This conquest ends in 300/400. The historical King Arthur emerges in a veritable dark ages in the 5th and 6th centuries, somehow pushing back against the conquerers from the north against impossible odds. Following the later recasting of the Arthurian legend, the larger forces of Western expansion then eventually have their say in the 12th century on, revitalizing as well the stories of Greek mythology as a wanted source and justification of it’s own abiding myths, which now become the story of modernism and western civilization built on a new British Empire.

And what sits underneath it all is this inevitable battle between the witness of these indigenous peoples in their abiding sense of the sacred, and the never ending story of the rising and falling Empires that seek to remake the world in the image of the Emperor. We often think of “Western society” as an enduring secularized symbol that somehow escapes the scrutiny of these basic truths about the way history works, with that reappropriation of the grand myths of it’s wanted origins, be it in Homer’s tales or the development of Arthur, acting in service of this imagined virtue of an inclusionary society and a unifying ideology. And yet, this is no more the case with medieval Britian or modern day America than it was with Roman Brittania.

As the great literary heritage of England suggests, this is what these minds were wrestling with in the midst of the great wars. The rise of modernism had left us with a world slowly being robbed of the single greatest tool that we have for making sense of all the world’s stories: the power of Story itself. Here the world of a now dominant Western Empire was continually seeking a narrative that was built on othering the past, cutting ties with what it deemed to be the old supersitions, and raising up it’s much grander myth of progress as the new wanted spirit of the age, and what gets sacrificed is the stories of these indigenous spaces.

Here’s what’s striking: Mary Shelley was a veritable prophet to this end, writing perhaps what remains one of the most enduring crtiques of modernism that persists to this day. She sits at the percipice of two worlds, knowing and seeing how history works. One could say something similar about Austen, with her stories about class and social systems appealing both to a hopeful yet lost romanticism while equally operating as a cycnical critique of the world she was forced to inhabit in their move to Bath.

Peer under the veil and what you actually find is the same old story of Empire, saving the eradication of the sacred witness for last and erecting it’s grand temples in ways that ensure the worship of it’s Imperial Cult remains the source of it’s enduring power. What makes modernism distinct in this regard is, in the recasting of it’s origins story using the old myths, here the West has a sweeping, catch-all dismissal of the sacred, allowing it to recast this history in the light of its ongoing redefinition of the modern myth. Like Rome, the Western Empire’s most definiing trait is the way it appeals to inclusion by quietly undercutting the witness to the sacred in these indigenous spaces, but it does this in it’s own distinct way. Religion is allowed to coexist precisely because it is defined, in modern terms, as human invention, and in so far as it serves the greater Imperial Cult of our time it can remain in the fabric of these modern socitieties, mostly as a relic that now becomes a plaything for the rise of a new academia. Once again, this is the thing these great literary minds were constantly wrestling with in their time, and it finds its own likeminded exprression here, for me, in the streets and temple of Bath.

Another common factor in my encounters with all of these authors will be the astonishing discoveries of just how connected they all were. I was raised on these stories, but perhaps ignorant about the ways in which they were fostering such important conversations amongst one another in their time. All bent in the same direciton: standing in the shadow of the enlightenments seeming failed experiment, asking to where do we look for a narrative that can make sense of all the world’s stories More shocking yet that these relationships can span the likes of Woolf’s widely documented cycnicism towards religion and a mind like T.S. Eliott finding his own vaunted cycniscm being held accountble to it. Even the likes of Lewis and Tolkien were not always on the same page. And yet, this simple, basic intuition that something had been lost and something needed to be reclaimed in this shift westward runs throuth the whole.

Standing there in front of Sulis Minerva, I wondered about what it means for this space to be called sacred. I wondered about the city that surrounded this Temple. I wondered about Britian. I wondered about the world. Indeed, as a Christian I wondered about this man named Jesus who was immersed in the very same world dominated by the very Empire that was reconstructing this space Where this conversation about gods and idols and images and Empire would come to dominate the themes and interests of the source material (the Christian scriptures) and it’s authors. I then think about the layers of history that follow the creation of this city, eventually handing us a prophetic critique like the story of Frankenstein.

I wonder about the witness to be found in these eyes now staring back at me from behind the glass. My eyes then looking fowards in my imagination, looking backwards. Seeking some Truth about this world that is able to make sense of all of the worlds stories amidst of this essential tension of the shape of a world always staring down the Empire in return. Here, in this space the longing for the sacred speaks into the visible agency of that Empire. It says, I’m not dead, one only need to look a little closer to find a world that is still filled with it’s witness. One simply needs to ask why this Temple was built here, in this space, why it was conquered.

I decide to take a stroll over the Pulteney Bridge, an old style market corridor filled with shops, and head straight up the large main street towards The Holburne Museum. As I am walking I notice a William Wilberforece plaque marking the residence of one of the great forces for abolition, bringing about the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. A plaque you also find near Victoria station at the spot where he died. I again wonder about the ways this witness to the sacred breaks through the noise of Empire.

I then come to river, now leaving the city limits to follow the towpath around to Bathhampton. At one point I come across an opening, revealing a view of Bath sitting down below in the valley. I pause for a moment. Here I am given a different view of the temple and it’s city, one that feels to tell a bigger story.

And yet, even here I am brought back to the sacredness of that early morning arrival. Empty, quiet with the sun gradually creeping around the corners of it’s narrow streets. Sitting down on the patio watching and waiting for the cafe in front of me to open, observing as the owners move about in their daily routine. Soon the streets begin to fill with life, locals showing up seeking cappuccinos and pastries, friendly faces bantering across open windows. The spirit of a place in full view. This, it seems, is indeed a sacred space. 

One of my earliest childhood memories reaches back to when I was around 5 years old, growing up in a north end neighborhood defined by it’s proximity to the railyards and the iconic steel bridge that spans it’s tracks, connecting downtown to this isolated hub of immigration and settlement. Here the neighborhood was our playground, made mostly of gridded residential streetes that led to a park down the block.

Somewhere in these memories, buried in what would become for us a series of moves from the North End to the Kildonan areas further East, is an image of an old tree. Despite my best efforts, I have not been able to track this old tree down. I’m not precisely sure which house or what age it belongs to on that timeline. What I do know however are the ways in which the image of this tree continues to capture and preserve the emotional presence of my childhood experience. It’s a tree we would visit together, finding in it’s branches a veritable fortress against the forces of that adult world threatening to impose it’s will on our desired acts of imagination. More vivid perhaps were the moments I would spend here by myself.

Once again, the memory is blurred, displaced, just out of reach. But there is one dominant memory that stands out above the rest. What I feel when this memory pops into my head is notes of transition. I imagine this moment sits somewhere between another move from one neighborhood to another. I can see myself on one particuarl afternoon making the trek to this tree on my own, grieving a loss of some kind. The loss of a space? The loss of a group of friends? A loss of a phase of my childhood? I can’t be sure. What I can do is follow this moment into what feels like an important part of my awareness of this veritable part of life: the act of growing up.

The famous children’s author and creator of the world’s most loveable bear, Winnie the Pooh, spent a good deal of time thinking about what it means to grow up in the midst such a strained memory. Gyles Brandreth’s revealing biography, Somewhere a Boy and a Bear: A.A. Milne and the Creaiton of Winnie-the Pooh, a book that takes us far outside the 100 acre wood and, in being less about the bear and more about the writer, into the complicated realities of Milne’s family dynamics, functions as a reminder of the ways in which our childhood stories emerge from the expansive nature of such adult lives. As author Mac Barnett notes in his recent book Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children, there is a deep rooted connection between our adult and child selves, as our childhood stories are, by their nature, being told by the adults. This fundamental truth about our childhood stories is precisely the thing that awakens us to the process of “growing into our childhood,” not above it or beyond it.

When I was first entertaining this idea of a literary tour of England, a means of encountering my childhood stories in light of quickly approaching 50 years of living, Milne and the 100 acre wood was near the top of the list of must visit sites. Somewhere in these stories, stretching from the shores of their England origins to their popularized Winnipeg ties and it’s continued migration up Ontario’s North Shore, sits one of those early voices of my childhood whom helped me to make sense of my own struggles and questions. Someone for whom the creaiton of these stories reflects a very real wrestling with the world his adult self was throwing into question.

For Milne, so much of his storytelling revolves around this playful yet weathered banter between the modernist mantra sweeping across England at the time and the memories of a lost world drowning in it’s wake. You can hear this in his famous poem, Now We Are Six. which juxtaposes this notion of growing up into our own wanted maturity with this notion of a sort of pre-existing Wisdom that can only be “grown into,” not obtained nor created.

“When I was five, I was just alive. But now I am six, I’m as clever as clever. So I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever.”

What he sought was the Wisdom of ones childhood, something he found in his growing fascination with philosophy and the philosophers. Here in this poem you find the idea that growing up has less to do with obtaining knowledge of propositional statmenents of facts as it does the discovery of a way of being, a way of living. Less to do with modernist conceptions of “forever,” enslaved as they are to the finite language of modern progress, and more to do with growing into an awarness of a “kind” of reality that has the power to endure. One way of knowing seeks to bring about an awareness of truth through a strident belief that to be an adult means to do away with our childhood selves. The other seeks to more fully understand a world our childhoods once knew and inhabited before the endless progression of loss threw it all into question. For Milne, this is the space where that infinte crisis of that clash between Life and Death can be grappled with, breaking open a world that, more and more, requires the singular greatest tool of our childhood selves in order to be obtained: the sacredness of our imagination.

Having returned from a morning exploring the old pathways of Dahl’s own adult inspiration, I spent the ensuing hours I had waiting for my next train to East Grinstead, heading towards the Southern shores of Brighton, enjoying a stroll along the Thames, the most important river in London’s history, and the same banks upon which London’s great medieval history was built. It’s a long stretch spanning the recognizable Tower Bridge on one side, and the area of Westminster on the other. Here is where you find the city’s larger than life processions of royalty and sacred lineage colliding, where the crown jewels of The Tower of London coexist with the honored graves at Poets Corner. There is something endlessly fascinating to me, taking in the image of the massive dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral looming  inbetween these two familiar (and heavily touristed) sites, about this peculaiar (to my own north american sensibilities) relationship that exists here between the sacred and the profane. The ways St. Paul’s Cathedral came to carry the monicor “the writers church.” Where, in what is arguably a far more realized “secularist” society than America, these robust conversations between ideas and mystery still seems to exist.

Here I let my mind wonder through images making up an imagined montage of this city’s emergence in time and space, where history and modernism now collide in an explosion of somewhat muddled ideologies. The more one wanders these streets the more one realizes the rich legacy of the one thing that still endures: a deep awareness of the importance of and the power of story in navigating this terrain.

My way to the train at Victoria Station brings me through St. James Park and Trafalgar Square (which was unfortunately gated off due to construction), and up towards the southern edge of Kensington Gardens/Hyde Park. This is where you find the famous Harrods Department Store and the old stomping grounds of Virginia Woolf, or further south the Churchhill Estates. Across the river sits the massiave Battersea Park, a view you get from the train as you pass by those iconic towers.

The journey to East Grinstead, leaving from the quiet pomp of Victoria’s interior, opens up a slightly different countryside than the western route heading to Great Missenden. Once you cross the river and leave the city limits, you find yourself in a consistent string of suburbs, weaving around the Eastern side of Gatwick Airport towards the well preserved medieval high street of East Grinstead. The landscape doesn’t really begin to quiet until you leave Hurstgreen. That’s when the countryside opens up. I am aware in this moment that this will be the nearest I manage to get to Canterbury, reminding me of just how rich the English landscape is in it’s literary presence is overe this vast expanse of land.

East Grinstead is the closest train station to Hartfield, the location of Pooh Corner, where A.A. Milne lived on the edges of Ashdown Forest in his estate. Milne came up with his stories during his time at this estate, while he composed his books in London (at a house on 13 Mallord Street). When you get off the train you have to catch a bus that then takes you the rest of way to the relatively remote village of Hartfield. A fun ride for anyone not accustomed to travelling the narrow England roads.

Given that I had a bit of time to kill waiting for the bus, a line that runs straight down the East Grinstead High Street, it was an easy walk to this central hub, from where I could catch the bus at any number of stops lining the way. The town is known for it’s singular and lengthy extended High Street, developed in the 14th century to accomodate trade between London and the South Coast. it’s a stretch that runs on and on unencombered by the normal hedged rows and meandering corners that define most of these medieval centers. What makes it striking to see up close is the image of it’s buildings, all designed, as they described it, using old world timber and in a like model.

I spent some time perusing the different shops that line the way, exploring it’s bookshops, enjoying a coffee, and taking in the hustle and bustle of the crowds. And eventually I was off on another hour long bus ride straight into the even more remote countryside.

The first thing they recommend doing for anyone looking to explore the heritage of Milne and Winnie the Pooh, is stopping at Pooh Corner. It’s a small tea room with a lovely and suprisingly informative free museum and a shop. Here you can walk through the different rooms of the museum, getting a sense of who Milne was, and pick up your map which will guide you along the towpath, a path that becomes its own adventure as you cut through different estates and large fields, jumping fences as you go. The deeper you get into what eventually becomes the 100 Acres Wood (or Ashdown Forest), the more remote it somehow becomes.

One of the more important sites, which sits at the halfway point of the route, is Pooh Sticks Bridge, a small, wooden structure spanning an understated creek which is maintained by the heritage center. This is the famous location upon which we find that famliar picture of Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear hanging over it’s rails playing a game of Pooh Sticks. A sign dotting the site invites you to set your inhibitions aside and engage your imagination, giving you the rules for play. Further up you will come across the houses of Piglet and Owl hidden in the forest (Pooh’s house is before you hit the bridge). And further up still is a memorial.

I brought a picnic supper to eat at the bridge. I dangled my legs over the  edge and watched the current flow with the gentle breeze pushing through the shaded enclave nestled deep within the forest. A welcome space given the height and the strength of the sun beating down on those vast fields one has to cross to get here. The quote that hit me in this moment was Pooh’s wondering about the power of the river’s image when it comes to making sense of one’s life.

“Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.”

The true force of this wisdom comes from the simple observation that our adult selves tend to think such knowledge comes from reducing the world to something we can control and explain. Here at the river Pooh rediscovers the importance of that great mystery that keeps pulling us back . Such moments then carry the force of necessary revelation, a recognition that our adult selves in all this push to get where we think we are going have forgotten what it means to truly know what this world is. That we have neglected both the water’s source and it’s essential presence.

Here on this bridge Pooh comes to know what they seemed to always be forgotting with the passage of time, a simple truth about a moments permanence in the face of what becomes a persistant march towards never ending loss, if purely because such moments are what allow us to transcend the finiteness of such conceptions of time. Here, with Pooh, we discover that life is found in simple acts of play, in simple acts of friendship, in simple acts of love. This is the eternal shape of our existence.

There is something important that follows this revelation however. As Pooh goes on to say, “You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.” What was it for me to get back on that bus, board that train, and return to where I started at Victoria Station? How do we preserve these moments. How do we retain this knowledge?

What will it be to board that plane and eventually return home, having met with my childhood stories face to face? As Pooh Bear once said, “Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again.” However it is that I find myself here in this moment on this bridge communing with Pooh the philosophers, this seems to be the even greater challenge.

I do board that bus. I do get on that train. And upon my return to Victoria Station I take the long and winding path through Hyde Park/Kensington Gardens back to my hotel, moving with the slow setting of the sun as the path snakes along the gentle curves of the Serpentine Lake. Something strikes me at this point in my journey. For anyone who has traversed these grounds, you might notice a statue of Peter Pan on the far Western corner of the park. You might not know that it’s here where the famed story has its origins, telling of an infant seeking to escape the trappings of the adult world by flying out of his nursery window where he then comes to reside with the fairies and the birds at Kensignton castle, desperate as he becomes to never lose the knowledge that he has been gifted in his innocence. The statue stands at the place where Peter Pan lands in the book The Little White Bird, which becomes Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.

Perusing much of the commentary on the history of this legacy, it’s worth pointing out that the source of this tale stands at a great distance from what the story ultimately becomes, but here we find some of that shared, universal longing to give voice to what these authors saw as the most necesary and eternal questions regarding what it means to be human in a world that brings immense tension and struggle. That they consistently understood, this simple posturing that turns ones view back towards our childhood signfies that this is the place, if we truly desite to understand our questions, our adult selves must begin. As Milne ends his most beloved book,

“But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.” (The House at Pooh Corner)

For me, I wonder about the enchantment of that now lost tree. I wonder about why it remains a signficant part of my memories, for as clouded as it might be. Here in this moment I am able to imagine a little boy and his imagination still playing in this space, wrestling with the questions and seeking to make sense of things in the face of a world that threatens to steal it away. Perhaps, I wonder, that’s the enchantment I seek. If we must, as Pooh says, leave the forest to find life, it remains equally true that we are free to return when we need it.

And above all, watch with glitering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” (The Minpins, Roald Dahl)

They often say, don’t meet your heros. It’s no secret that meeting our childhood stories can have the same sort of impact due to the ways it can desenchant our romanticizing of these figures. My experience with her book Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, was mixed, a book that accompanied me on my pilgrimage to England to do precisely that- meet my childhood stories, but one of the things author Lucy Mangan does extremly well is cut through the noise of our complicated relationship with the past in order to reclaim these stories and figures as essential part of who we are. As such interrogations tend to go, how, we ask, do we approach these figures born from a world we deem not just foreign to our own, but somehow morally inferior. How do we, in other words, embody what it means to “grow into our childhood” in a way that doesn’t demean it or rewrite it.

In the case of Roald Dahl, a figure I am preparing to encounter on day 2 of my pilgrimage, we meet a (fill in the blank with children’s writer, wartime fighter ace, spy, celebrity, husband to a film star), whom would go on to be plagued by accusations of misogyny and anti-semitism.

The grounds by which Mangan prepares our adult minds to meet our childhood is the intentional undercutting of our modern pretenses. To bury the past by way of convincing ourselves that we somehow stand above it is to distance ourselves from the reality of our lives in the present. This practice, of “othering the past” has more to do with protecting our adult selves from the pains of internal critique than it does holding our childhoods to account. Where the needed process of growing up into our childhood is exchanged for growing out of it.

As Roald Dahl once said, “Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.” This holds true for Dahl. Traversing the grounds of his own inspiration must mean the same for me if I am to approach my childhood stories in a way that allows them to actually speak. After all, the minute we assume that we stand above the past is the minute we acknowledge that one day the past will stand above us. Which is another way of saying, this way of thinking leaves our judgments flowing back in our direction. One of the ways in which this journey was able to speak to me was by inviting me to seek a better narrative, a better way of understanding our relationship to our childhood stories, existing as they do in relationship to our childhood selves.

I wake up in that small, cramped room soaked in sweat and still aching from overextending myself the previous day. The cracked window hadn’t seemed to help, although I’m slightly grateful that there doesn’t seem to be any stray birds or other creatures taking advantage of that open invitation to share my accomodations. I might have slept. I’m not sure. What I do know is that my alarm is telling me to get up. The day’s agenda is calling, and the early sunrise spilling through that still open window seems  to be in agreement.

My next walking map directs me four blocks down to a breakfast place called Oatis, where I find an order of freshly prepared coffee and blueberry pancakes affording me a proper greeting to a new day.

Yes, that four block walk still resulted in me walking the wrong direction not once, but twice. My mental map can only get me so far when any and all sense of north, south, east and west has been completely overturned.

Before I leave, I grab an extra order of an oat-bowl to go (or to put it in proper English terms, to “take-away”), ensuring that I don’t need to worry about lunch. Cheap and convenient. The bus schedule says I’ve got seven minutes to catch a bus that is a 3 minute walk away.

At which point I once again walk out the door and head in the wrong direction. My eventual redirection leaves me watching the bus pass straight by my stop while I’m still waiting on the opposite side of the street for the light to turn green.

Actually, true story. That bus ended up stopping at the same light that eventually turned and allowed me to walk across. There I was, now staring straight at the driver waving my hands in order to get him to open the doors and let me in. To which he promptly ignored me. My first thought- what is this, Winnipeg?

Thus, there I am on the proper side of the street watching the driver take off without me. A slight panic sets in- I have 40 minutes to get to my train heading to Great Missenden, Roald Dahl’s hometown and the inspiration for his stories, and a decision to make. Thankfully I had printed off a walking map for preicsely this scenario. With one caveat: it’s a 35 minute walk to my destintion: Marylebone Train Station. Yes, I walked it. And yes, I ultimatey made it, grateful for the  one hour reprieve the train ride would offer me.

Unlike the train from the previous day, which brought me from Heathrow to Paddington, this trip introduces me to the simple joys of train travel in England. The route begins by meandering through the Southhampstead neighborhood before gradually leaving the city limits behind in favour of the lush landscape of the Croxley Hill Lakes region. From here it’s a serene mix of villages and greenery that confirms why the English countryside is considered an enchanting place. In an area essentially devoid of mountains, it is dominated by rolling hills, clear lakes, and medieval villages. The sort of landscape where you are afraid to blink for risk of missing another standing castle or stone abbey.

By the time the train arrives in Great Missenden, all of the noise of the city is gone. This is a different world defined by a different pace. Exiting the train bring me down a hill and straight into this village that one could swear was pulled straight out of any number of Dahl’s stories. A fairytale-esque landscape marked by a small high (main) street and a singular road leading up to the church on the hill where Dahl is buried.

I duck into the first building that greets me to grab a coffee. Here my attempts to order a simple drip coffee open up a conversation not just about coffee culture in England (if you want something other than the traditional espresso drinks you have to order an americano- because only north americans order their coffee like that), but about my travels. Apparently they found my accent “lovely,” and I got a whole backstory on the other north american whom had decided to move to their town and whom was the star of the show around these parts. Everyone loved it when Charlie (irony noted) would come in to chat, which he did on a regular basis. I never got to meet Charlie, but I did apparently make their day.

Coffee in one hand, my walking map in another, my pilgrimage takes me halfway up the high street to a hidden alley tucked between two buidings, which I don’t think I’ll ever get used to. Everytime I duck through one of these tiny passageways I start to feel like I’m heading down an endless rabbit hole that I might never come out of. I did learn something important though about these paths from my coffeeshop converstaion. One of the very real quirks about the English landscape is this concept of the right to roam. This is going to become the norm from here on in, but these pathways, or towpaths, essentially lead you through what here in North America would be deemed private land. Hence why these routes have all kinds of fun instructions, such as hopping over wooden turnstiles and fences, and cutting through large fields, and navigating through hedges sepearting one property from another. It might seem unusual to me, but this is in fact how these layers of history remain present and active in the life of the people. This is how one gets to these spaces that defined Roald Dahl’s own childhood experiences, and how locals continue to tread these same paths.

Eventually this towpath arrives at Angling Spring Wood, which was both Dahl’s personal playground and the backdrop for Fantastic Mr. Fox and Danny the Champion of the World. This path takes you in a large cricle through a meadow and up to a farmhouse lookout over the countryside, eventually landing back at the High Street where you find such landmarks as the Petrol station from Danny the Champion of the World and Maltida’s library. Right in the center of High Street is the museum, marked by a replica of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory gate, and housing a recreation of Dahl’s writing room with real world items (the chair being the most iconic).

The height of this journey leads you up the hill to the old church, still looming large over the town as it keeps watch. Underneath what (I think is) a giant oak tree surrounded by benches is Dahl’s grave, with footprints from the BFG walking from the benches to the gravestone. The BFG was, and still is, my favorite story (and adaptation) of Dahl’s. It taps into these themes of learning what it is to belong in this chaotic world, and about the nature of growing up and forgetting our childhood. It is the story that most captures the spirit of my present pilgrimage, and the one that draws me most intimately into the life of this compplicated writer. Here I find this image and invitation to learn what it means to grow into our childhood, not past it or above it, and this is really what drove Dahl towards wrestling with the tension of his raw and direct observations about life and it’s brute nature on one side (you can see that in the often sharp and direct handling of his characters in terms of the child-adult relationship), and finding hope in the power of story. In the power of the book. To borrow from the BFG, “Don’t gobblefunk around with words.” Rather, learn what it is dream like a child, and to let that childhood temper your cycnism about the adult world. You can definitely feel how these woods, the quiet setting of this town, became and remain a sacred space for doing just this. 

Mangan suggests that at it’s core, Dahl believed the writing process begins and ends with telling a good story. Not a lesson, not a morality tale, but a good story. All else follows from this. Apart from this the world cannot make sense. Apart from this the author can only expect to stand above the inherent power of this simple truth about the human experience rather than being informed by it. One of the beautiful things for Mangan about stepping into these stories as an adult is finding these glimpses of an author who was above all else human. A complicated creature who was aware of his quirks and shortcomings You can see this in his writings, which, as Mangan points out, far from being misogynistic are littered with a wanted humility we might miss, for example, in the strong female characters whom grace his pages. In many ways this was a man whom was a product of his own time and place and all of the complex parts that shaped it (beginning with the backdrop of war), but whom found himself restless, seeking those hidden truths reminding us that this world is, in fact, shaped by magic. I loved this thought as I contemplated my own complicated legacy and story on the train ride back into the city, eating my oat-bowl and dreaming about my next adventure. If the morning was spent connecting with the magic of a good story, the afternoon would be bringing me to the doorstep of A.A, Milnes fascination with philosophy. For now, I have an hour to read.