Upland

CHAPTER ONE

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The consolation of small hills

The North Downs of Kent were the first hills I saw. They were the highest hills in the world. I knew this when I stood on them and gazed into the blue distance where the world ended.

- Frank S. Smythe, The Spirit of the Hills (1935)

On the low hill above my home in Hornsey, North London, I can on a clear day see beyond the distant dome of St Paul's and the towers of the City to a faint line on the horizon. The mass this line defines is so smudged and far away that it pales into a haze. It's as if it wasn't the solid chalkland, cloaked in wood and meadow, that I know it to be, but rather something vaporous, neither of this earth, nor of the sky. I know from the map that I am looking at the North Downs. But from where I stand, they could belong to another world, a world from which I'm separated by gulfs of time and space.

I'm standing on a balustraded terrace in front of Alexandra Palace a few weeks after the world locked down. Even the North Downs, visible from where I stand, are forbidden, impossibly far away. In ones and twos people promenade along the terrace, as they would have in the Palace's Victorian heyday, but keeping more distance. The slopes below me are busy with single people, couples, small families desperate to be out and about, in touch with the world, yet not touching it. I must, for the moment, be content with this most modest of hills, the eastern end of a low ridge extending westward to Muswell Hill, Highgate Wood and Hampstead Heath. This ridge, partly composed of glacial till (an agglomeration of gravel fragments in a matrix of clay), was the southern limit of the Anglian ice sheet, which reached what was to become North London around half a million years ago.

To the south, across the Thames, the land was left uncovered, the hills ungouged by ice. But, over time, valleys and gaps were worn by the persistent, quiet power of water. I've wandered up some of the tributaries of the Thames that drain off or cut through the North Downs: the Wey, the Wandle, the Ravensbourne, the Darent, the Medway. Rivers are the complements of hills. Hills rise to the sky; rivers flow, inexorably, the other way. The sides of river valleys are the slopes that shape the hills, give them height, and their heights depth. There would be no uplands without lowlands, just as there would be no light without the darkness that frames it. It is one of those linguistic ironies that, in southern England, uplands are called 'downs'- 'down' in this sense coming from Old English dun, 'hill' or 'high open land'.

Perhaps a place to start, before rising up into the hills, is in one of the lowest of the lowlands, amid the mudflats of the estuary of the River Medway, downstream from where its waters cut through the North Downs at Rochester. Just as in the Downs there are names for every type of landform - commons and coombes, tops and bottoms, warrens and holes, hangers and heaths - so those flattest of flatlands, the estuaries, have their own special features: oozes and saltings, creeks and reaches, tidal islands and treacherous marshes.

One cold spring, over the course of a number of scattered days, I walked with a couple of older neighbours up the Medway through the North Downs to the High Weald and the Ashdown Forest. We started at Swale station, just short of the Isle of Sheppey, and began to make our way upriver along an embankment that kept the sea from the lower-lying land of Ferry Marshes. In the distance, looking up the Medway through a thin mist, a line of pylons strode across the landscape. Downriver stood the giant cranes and liquid-gas storage tanks of the Isle of Grain. Smoke or steam drifted lazily up into the sky. Closer by, the glassy water was coated with swirls of livid green scum and dull sheens of oil, edged with oystercatchers, shelduck and discarded tyres.

Near Slaughterhouse Point a sign told us that this was private land and that there was no footpath - despite the fact that we were on a public right of way. Large heaps of white ash smoked - some kind of waste disposal was at work - and a man on a tractor confirmed we could not pass. The Medway was once used for other forms of waste disposal. Hundreds of convicts were formerly held in prison hulks anchored in the estuary, and some of their bodies were dumped on an area of tidal marsh called Deadman's Island. Every now and again, as the tide shifts the mud, human bones still come to the surface.

On the second day of our journey, we traversed the interlocking confusion of three of the five Medway Towns - Gillingham, Chatham and Rochester. In the past, this built-up stretch of the river was home not only to a large naval dockyard but also to several army barracks. On the inland side, by the village of Borstal (now home to a young offenders' institution and an adult prison), the viaduct carrying the M2 over the Medway marks a clear boundary between town and country. If we were to continue following the river from here to Maidstone, we'd be winding along endless meanders, through marshes, by sewage works, around the fenced perimeters of industrial estates. A more attractive alternative was to cut the corner and follow the path along the crest of the North Downs. And so we escaped from the estuarine flatlands up onto the heights.

At the start of our path there was an inauspicious sign. It read:

NO TRESPASSING.
VIOLATORS
WILL BE SHOT.
SURVIVORS
WILL BE SHOT
AGAIN.

Things improved after that. As the hum of the M2 grew fainter, the path took us gently upward onto Nashenden Down beside a hedge of hawthorn in bright white flower. On the other side of the path, a meadow drifted downward towards the river. Overhead, the sky was filled with lark song. Once up on the top of the escarpment, we looked out across the Weald, a wide, rolling landscape of woodland interspersed with fields, some pale green with young hay, others gold with buttercups or the acid yellow of oilseed rape. The smooth, wooded slopes of the Downs on the far side of the Medway were cut by the wide, white scar of an old chalk quarry. It might have been the remains of a vast fortification line on the Western Front. Here and there at the side of our path poppies grew from the broken ground.

To the west, the gently scalloped ridge of the North Downs receded, fold behind fold, marking the northern edge of the undulating plain of the Weald, like a coastline above a vast inland sea. Somewhere along that edge, unseen in the valley of the River Darent as it cuts through the Downs between the M20 and the M25, lies the village of Shoreham. It was in Shoreham in the 1820s and 1830s that the painter Samuel Palmer spent nine years making his visionary landscapes, while living in a run-down cottage nicknamed Rat Abbey. In Palmer's pictures the Downs become a hallucinatory Eden where it is always spring or summer, a prelapsarian garden in which trees are plump with blossom, and the moon looks down on steep-domed hills thick with ripening corn. The boles of old oaks are swollen with unspoken histories, woolly sheep rest beneath billowing clouds, boughs bend under the weight of fruit. Everything is pregnant with undelivered tension.

In the end, Palmer was drained of vision and returned to London. Perhaps the increasing unrest among agricultural workers - suffering from lowered wages and increased mechanization - had shown Palmer that the misty-eyed ruralism of his youth was a lie. He had spent nearly all of the small legacy he had been living on, and now had a wife to support. Back in London he turned to painting more conventional landscapes, in tune with popular taste.

Hills can heighten the conflict between dream and reality. The North Downs Palmer painted were more like the mountains in an Italianate religious landscape than the inconsequential uplands of northwest Kent. Palmer may not have been paying heed to the topography, but was he experiencing a more powerful vision, revealing some deeper truth? Just as he idealized the Downs, so the people in his paintings are depicted as contented sons and daughters of the soil, wielding their sickles and tending their flocks in the midst of nature's bounty. In reality, the agricultural labourers of his time were facing impoverishment, even starvation. Out of desperation they had begun to resort to violence: the new threshing machines were destroyed, ricks were burnt, cows maimed. If caught, perpetrators faced imprisonment, transportation, even death. Perhaps some ended up in the hulks on the Medway, their bodies later dumped on Deadman's Island. Was Palmer keeping the flames of beauty and hope alive? Or was he performing a conjuring trick to distract himself and us from the harshness of his times?

*

When, several decades ago, I told my father I was moving from Scotland down to London, he was worried about my sanity and my soul. 'You know, don't you,' he said, his voice troubled, 'that you have to travel more than a hundred miles from London before you can find a hill above a thousand feet?' He was, as in so much else, right. But height is relative. Sometimes even the smallest of hills can provide some balm to the soul - something recognized by even the greatest of mountaineers.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the name of Frank Smythe was as well known to the British public as that of Chris Bonington is today. Mountaineer, writer, lecturer and photographer, Smythe was one of the first Englishmen to make a living out of mountains - and...