Wednesday 28 July 2021

Summerland, or the Spookiness of Rural England in August


Rural southern England is, for the tourist, like an archipelago of island villages separated from each other by gulfs of agricultural sea - fields, hedgerows, trees, tiny single lane roads, footpaths, ditches, brambles, woodland. 

Each village you pass through while driving is quaint, pretty, sleepy, and prosperous - pink/blue/yellow houses; ancient sprawling oaks on wide, perfectly trimmed greens; roadside stalls containing fresh eggs and honey; always a big 15th century pub with lots of BMWs and Mercedes parked outside; always an ornate, grand and beautiful church, impossibly large for such a small settlement and with an impossibly large graveyard dotted with yew trees; always a village hall with colourful bunting. 

Then within less than a minute you have driven through and you are on the other side and in a different world. Hedgerows cramp you in, occlude your vision. Through gaps in the foliage you see fields sweltering in the sun; copses of brooding trees, big and green; scarecrows; deer; distant farmhouses and water towers. On a hot day with no other cars on the road and storm clouds brewing in the distance you feel as though this landscape could have been here forever, and indeed could be endless - that you could drive for the rest of your life and see nothing but more fields, more woods, more scarecrows, more dilapidated barns and far-off solitary dwellings. 

Until you come to another village and a 30 mph speed limit sign and the pattern repeats. 

As a northerner and a city dweller I find this landscape both beautiful and disturbing. The truth is, I am more comfortable in the north's wild moors and bleak, windswept hills than I am in this bucolic bricolage where the furniture of a rural idyll - the hedges, fields, and country lanes - seem almost to crowd you in and swallow you. You are not being welcomed into rural bliss. You are darting from village to village, hoping that somewhere in between you don't stray down the wrong road and get gulped down into a timeless, measureless void - a countryside labyrinth from which there is no return and that will hold you suspended like an insect in amber for the rest of eternity. 

I envisage a setting in which the people dwell in small villages between which are fields and woodlands carefully husbanded by things that are malevolent and strange. The village-dwellers never stray beyond their boundaries unless they can possibly help it, and when they do, they always stick to the tried and true paths. They never go over that style, or go down that side track, or go into that copse. And as soon as they see somebody out there, working in the fields or walking down a track, hoe in hand, they freeze - or flee in terror. They live surrounded by the fear of long, hot, hazy afternoons when the fields doze in the heat; of mornings cool with mist and dew when the dwellers of the farmland are abroad; of the sudden eruption of motion as wood pigeons are disturbed by someone walking through the trees; of the distant sound of gunfire - pop pop pop - and bugles that signal a hunt has begun...

25 comments:

  1. I'm reminded of watership down, both aesthetically and of the first warren.

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  2. You've painted a very eerie picture.

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  3. I would play that setting. Relative distance in our age of motor vehicles makes a difference; there was a time when a lot of people could live their whole life never having left their villages and anything outside of that personal radius was "here be dragons".

    There are times - I'm a rural northerner - when the mist lies in valleys in the morning and you can't see any other settlements that it can still feel eerie and isolated. Seeing a church spire cresting a hill would be a welcome beacon of civilisation for any wanderers.

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    1. I suppose this is true everywhere but it always amazes me how easy it is to feel isolated in England even when you are not far from a big city. A small village in North Northumberland or the South Tyne valley is about as isolated as it is possible to get in the entire country, but even then you're only really an hour away from a big city.

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  4. I grew up in this landscape, and I can confirm that it is just as eerie, eldritch even, as you suggest.

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    1. Same here. I think the flatness of time in the English countryside helps. Dropped down in some places, you'd have trouble guessing what century you were in, let alone decade.

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    2. Good to know that the look & feel I got from so many 'young adult' oriented TV progs & books in the 70s and 80s wasn't wrong then, and still exists.

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  5. Wiltshire is amazing this time of the year.

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    1. I've never been to that part of the country, but I've heard it is very representative of what I'm talking about.

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  6. I'm in the US but I THINK I've been to the section of the UK you're talking about (I felt I had to see Stonehenge). I remember being a little surprised that the surrounding countryside, once we'd got out of London, reminded me a of drives through Iowa and Nebraska. Driving through Nebraska, it's easy to understand where "Children of the Corn" came from. Though the little patch of the English countryside I went through reminded me more of Iowa than Nebraska, it did have a character all its own as well.

    It seems to me that there's a lot of missed potential in the modern conception of fairies - I've been thinking about this a quite a lot recently due to reading some of the Queen Mab posts on False Machine. I'd love to run a game set in a world like the one you describe in this post where the fey are the main antagonists and are portrayed as really alien, unpredictable and frightening. Some of Pratchett's stuff - his Queen of the Fairies and her minions in the Wee Free Men and his depiction of elves in Lords and Ladies - is close to what I'm thinking of. Or Arthur Machen's "The White People," which does a wonderful job making the fey and their ties to witchcraft truly creepy. He hints at monstrous things while leaving so much unexplained that the connections remain truly mysterious (or at least that's how it felt to me).

    At any rate, thank you for the wonderful, thought-provoking post!

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    1. Yes, there's a lot of potential there, I think. I had an old idea to create a setting like that, called New Troy, and my forthcoming The Great North will have some of it too.

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  7. The HBO miniseries “The Third Day” captures some of this atmosphere I think.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Day_(TV_series)

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  8. Sounds like John Christopher’s “County” in contradistinction to the seemingly more dystopian “Conurbs”. Mind you, cross the border at Coldstream for a real sense of eeriness.

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    1. Yes, been to the Scottish Borders a lot and it is a very spooky place - most famously at Hermitage Castle.

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  9. Matches many of the UK TV series I saw in the 70s and 80s here in Australia. Certainly a different world from where I grew up. Eerie indeed, and something I've probably referenced in half the games I've ever run. And despite being in Australia, there are times in local winter, when it is dark and foggy, the rather old style lamp light at the end of the cul-de-sac that leads onto a green space with lots of pine trees makes me think of Narnia. Amazing how books read in one's youth stick with you, and good to see the creepiness still remains.

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  10. I've always found the South rather unheimlich.

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  11. My homeland. Not as dangerously magical, of course, as the deep oak woods...

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  12. Years ago, my National Guard rifle company went to the Salisbury Plain to train with the TA battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Going places in the service is sometimes like going to a whole other version of the place, just because of what you're doing. For me it was like a dark comedy. Americans not being able to tell British coffee from British tea. Americans seeing the actual Stonehenge in the distance and believing it was just a mockup for tourists. Americans being told not to cross fences, doing so anyway, and then chased back across the fence by an unhappy bull.

    Anyway, the RWFs were great hosts and fine soldiers. Of course, I suppose they were outsiders to the landscape too. Or maybe they knew the horror and did their best to protect us.

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    1. The coffee/tea thing would nowadays, sadly, not apply. We've been well and truly taken over by American-style coffee culture, so the days of crappy instant coffee in styrofoam cups are long gone.

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    2. You can still get crappy instant coffee in styrofoam cups, if you know where to look.

      (Possibly not in the South though)

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  13. That was my childhood, roving through the fields and woods of south east England, dreaming of Tolkien and D&D, wildly fantasising all the time.

    Years later (as a teenager) I read Mythago Wood and it really struck a chord with me, bringing back all those eerie feelings from long before and seeming like a place that I could easily have wandered into if I'd taken certain tracks off the more well-trod paths.

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  14. Watching Walking Through History with Tony Robinson and Time Team, I'm struck by how much England and it's varying terrain really established what I think a D&D outdoor adventure is like... but also the semi-post-apocalyptic setting as well. In that England seems built up on the ruins/dungeons of the Roman Empire.

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    1. Yes, and not just the Roman Empire, but the medieval period as well. I have a post I want to write about that...

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  15. Two years ago I spent four days walking across Dorset, from Bridport to Salisbury, and I have to say you've got it spot on. The things that go on between villages... I even stumbled on a place called Hell Lane, a track/stream sunk thirty or forty feet deep in a holloway, littered with parts of 4x4s which had perished down there, where the soft sandstone banks had been carved with the names of lovers and with sinister but complex and perfectly rendered mandalas.

    It's safer up North (and I say this as a southerner). But not much.

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