Odd, the durable significance of some places. You can understand a mountain or cliff or sprawling forest – places that awe the eye on the ground, horizon or map. More enigmatic are the little places. Slid away, unremarkable but exquisite in appearance or legacy, for reasons frequently forgotten but strangely lingering.
This one, historically, a bronze age grave, then Roman shrine, then outdoor court, place of execution, parish marker, gypsy haunt, poet’s muse. Today, the name of a road and the title of a plaque. This is Langley Bush, lost in a field near Peterborough.
The site stands slightly proud in fields yellow with summer. Old trees, of Southey Wood and Castor Hanglands, surround it. The bush, actually a hawthorn tree, on its little coaster mound looks like a bonsai sculpture, immediately singular in that way a tree can be when isolated. It commands inspection, analysis. This one is so branch frantic it looks blurred, as if blown by the wind.
The site has witnessed a transgression of belief systems. Excavation of this supposed pagan grave once yielded a worked stone dedicated to a Roman deity. The stone later marked a junction of four parishes. From Anglo-Saxon times the place had been an open-air court. The first thorn at this spot was recorded in 948. A gibbet stood here until 1721, choking life from heretic, traitor and criminal. Centuries of discussion, decision and death, right here.
Then Langley Bush entranced John Clare, the poet born not far away, in the village of Helpston. O Langley Bush! The shepherd’s sacred shade, began his poem named for this place. Clare often castigated civilisation’s constraints on the countryside. He wrote of it here in his journal of 1824, lamenting the bush’s unceremonious removal following the area’s enclosures. Langley Bush was “destroyd”, he wrote.
And so, the modern context. The John Clare society planted another shrub, in 1996, which now sits beneath pylon drapes, still behind a fence.
Clare loved Langley Bush; it was a fallen Eden to him. He ignored that gibbet past. Hopefully, history will ignore the modern ephemera that colour the fringes of this otherwise fine place with sour modern words: fly tip, filthy duvet, Budweiser, baby wipe.
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