Entering Bitham Lane byway to Mount Prosperous, chalk dust hangs suspended in the air like a thin veil. Something has dashed ahead – someone on a horse, perhaps. The old holloway is tunnel-like here, its sides steep as a railway embankment – though no trains ever passed here. A dunnock’s cartwheeling song plays out.
Sun and shade pooling on the greening chalk makes fawn spots on the empty track ahead. This is an old farm-to-farm route, the bare earth camber eventually giving out to grasses and bugle where fewer walkers have reached. A thick hedge of buckthorn and dogwood, elder and guelder rose, flowering wild privet, apple, cherry and wayfaring trees, protect the traveller. From the bare hills and arable fields, the covered trackways look like great, trundling, woolly bear caterpillars.
Near the curiously named Bungum Lane, there is puzzling graffiti; an old name chalked on a new fence. Above a storm drain, dug into an old rubbish dump of Shippam’s Paste bottles, earth-filled tin teapots and half-moon potsherds of willow pattern, is the name “Oliver Cromwell”. I wonder if old allegiances die hard out here, just an afternoon’s walk from a civil war battle site of 1643.
The reassurance of a wayfaring tree, Viburnum lantana, is an apparently sure sign that you are on your way somewhere. The lanterns of white flowers are over and the fruits beginning to form. Both are loved by insects. The name was coined by the herbalist John Gerard in his Generall Historie of Plantes (1597). He noticed the tree lining every trackway between Wiltshire and London. At some unmarked point, I pass from Berkshire into Wiltshire on the way to Prosperous Farm, where the agriculturalist Jethro Tull (1674-1741) perfected his horse-drawn seed drill and invented the horse-drawn hoe, despite the resistance of his labourers.
A century later, William Cobbett (1763-1835) rode up this track from one farm to the other, interviewing rural workers and seeking the spirit of those agricultural labourers at Prosperous, when tensions were building over pay, employment and the threat of new machinery.
By then, it would have been autumn and the leaves of the wayfaring trees would have flared red, like lit bonfires down the old track.
