Now that the pheasant shooting season is over, the beaters’ white plastic feed-bag flags remain furled around their hazel poles and tucked in welly racks outside every other cottage door. We walk through the privately owned estate village of Linkenholt and loop around the small flint church of St Peter.
The arched window to the left of the porch is beaded with round, chalk sea-urchin fossils – shepherd’s crowns or thunderstones. It is unclear whether they were part of the 12th-century church or its mid-Victorian rebuild. Either way, when the one-room schoolhouse was built next door in the same style, the corresponding window was embellished with shepherd’s crowns. Similar palm-sized echinoid fossils resurface from time to time in these knucklebone fields; they sit snugly in the hand or pocket – and line several cottage windowsills, including our own.
Leaving the village, we slither down Cleeve Hill. The pheasant-trampled wood is greening with dog’s mercury and the spotted, curled tuiles of cuckoo pint. With Sheepless Hill at our backs, we walk away from the dew ponds at Buttermere, seeking another small body of water. This landscape does not hold on to its water. William Cobbett noted this in his 1830s Rural Rides: “You see the ups and downs of sea in a heavy swell [and] one would expect endless runs of water and springs. There are none: absolutely none.” Though the mud slicks like china clay and the winterbournes below overflow.
A glimmered disc shows us the blank white sky. Lawless Pond (officially known as Rockmoor Pool or Troc Mere) sits deep for a dew pond. It is an eye where four parishes and three counties – Berkshire, Hampshire and Wiltshire – meet. It also sits on the dividing line between south-east and south-west England. We walk around it and through all the parishes, counties and divisions of land.
Though surrounded by private estates that incorporate whole villages, the pond belongs to no one. Can a pond be common land? Tales persist of folk in it up to their waists, making deals outside the law: a place of moonshine and moonraking. On its edge, a blue plastic feed-tub sits on sputnik legs. A gamekeeper has been feeding the wild teal.
