“The lane ends and once more all is the same” - Edward Thomas
There is never anybody else on the lane, because the lane goes nowhere. It begins as a side road on the outskirts of the village. If you did not know this, you would not think to look, because the cars on the main road come around the corner so fast that even a few minutes is enough to put you off walking. This is the countryside, but it isn’t walking country. There are better places to take your dog.
The main road turns through pine tree plantations. Every now and then there is a gate, too high to see over, with the hint of a huge house behind it. You have never seen these gates open. The side road—the beginning of the lane—is not signed. It dips into the trees. At the bottom, there is a large, bungalow-like building that looks like a village hall, with a purple sign out front, in Greek lettering, and two new, ugly houses behind, incongruous with the fields and paddocks surrounding them. When you Google the name on the sign, you find that the building is an ‘independent church’. Through the windows, you can see chairs, tables and a projector. You have never seen anyone in the church, but there are videos of the services on YouTube. There are rarely more than a few people in the congregation. You feel a little sorry for them. You wonder if it is a cult.
Past the bungalow, there is a gate. To the right of the gate, the road turns into the lane. It is a real lane, wide enough for a car, though a car would have trouble soon enough, green and pebbled, with a ditch on either side, one of those lanes around which the greenery has formed an arch, or tunnel—the kind of tunnel which implies say that the lane will never end. It is a real lane, even if it doesn’t go anywhere, even if it starts next to a carpark. It is a real lane, which is why you keep coming back to it, even though the lane is never more of a lane than here, where it begins, with the green arch and the hill rising.
To the left, a field appears, rising through a series of small plateaus, like an Iron Age fort. The map will tell you that this is, in fact, an Iron Age fort, though not one of any significance. England is full of them. If you are on a hill in England, you are probably on the bones of a home. Today, it is pasture for a small herd of rare-breed sheep, brown, dainty, and faintly shy, and two well-fed donkeys.
Lanes like this are made for walking. It is incredible how much difference a few metres make. In theory, a path only needs to be the width of one person, or two people, to allow space to pass by comfortably. The walking routes which criss-cross the English countryside—the routes which you take when you are ‘going for a walk’—are mostly confined to thin channels between houses, narrow dirt paths among scrub, muddy tracks half-impressed into sheep fields or cut through rows of corn. They are as narrow and unobtrusive as they can be and many owners still want them gone. You learn to move through the landscape furtively, skirting golf courses, moving in series, standing to the side to let people pass, looking for entrances in hedges like mice making their way between skirting boards. A real lane (a lane like this) is about the width of a one-way road, with enough room for two pairs of people, or two horses, to pass comfortably. Enough width for someone to walk along, with her thoughts on either side.
Presumably, most country roads were lanes once upon a time. The most obvious place to see this is in the Yorkshire Dales, where the lanes wind along the valleys, lined by dry-stone walls. A lane like this will need to have been built with the landscape in mind—rather than climb straight, they will drape themselves around the side of the hills, affording glorious views, though there is one particular lane in Wharfdale that rides straight up the flank of a moor like string over a hunk of beef. Once, ou stayed in a cottage where you could see it out of the kitchen window, white, straight and sheer. A lane like that is more of a command than an invitation. Many of the best lanes, the ones still left, are old Roman Roads. Ordinance Survey maps are full of straight lanes labelled Roman Road. Many of the Roman Roads are probably older than the Romans.
A bridleway is good, of course, but a lane which was once the main road for travellers is better, because it will follow the countours of the land. It helps to think of yourself as a car: you want to cruise and you want good views as you cruise. You want the long, green tunnel of trees to break open as you reach the summit, and for the country to appear in all directions. You want the oaks to line one side of the road, curling over. But cars have taken most of the best routes. The scenes you see while driving are scenes someone once saw on foot, like the series of yew trees set behind wide, grass verges which line the high road above Stockbridge. The yews appear, beautifully, for a few seconds, then are gone. You think more people would be willing to walk longer distances if walking was not so often a matter of squeezing between hedges or dodging cars. You know we need more national trails, more “rights of way”, but you think that this is fiddling around the edges. The roads need to become lanes again.
When you reach the top of the hill there is an old oak, set in its own space beside the lane and a narrow cut of wet, green field, which the lane briefly bisects. The oak is a perfect oak. The lower branches droop almost to the ground, like a big top. The bark is dark and wizened. The branches form a delicate, lung-like structure, which gains in density as it approaches the trunk; delicate and dense, like a design carved into wood. Which is only to say that the oak already contains all the things it might one day become. If you turned it upside down, the whole thing would float, trunk in the air like a mast.
Another field follows in quick succession, surrounded by trees, deep, green, and as empty as the lane itself, though red and white signs warn you that someone will shoot your dog if it interferes with the livestock. Sometimes, there is a deer standing, alone, halfway down the slope. Nearby, there is a large house with a huge garden. The people who own the house have built two wire fences in parellel, next to one another, one six foot, one around half the height, with a space the width of a deer (or a person) between them. Once, you scared a deer into the gap and it ran back and forth, flinging itself between the wires.
As the lane descends it enters another, wetter wood. Here, it narrows into a path. There are tall, thin trees which only have room to bloom in the canopy. Every other tree carries a small, painted sign halfway up its trunk, like a child holding a certificate to their chest. The signs feel like an insult. Now the path descends more steeply still, before coming out of the woods at a cottage named “The Brickworks”. A few more steps and you reach a tarmacked road through another village. There is a line of oaks hanging overhead, forming more than half an arch, and an old postbox sunk into the grassy, dock-leaved verge, its red paint fading into something natural. A few metres further on you reach a thirty miles an hour sign, which could be the remnant of an ancient civilisation, then a small square of cottages. For a moment the lane returns, more beautiful than ever.
A convoy of cars pass, eight or nine of them, far faster than thirty and close enough to graze your elbow, if you had left it out a little late. You catch a glimpse of the individual faces, blank, bored and boring. Usually, no one drives this way, but today there is a motorway closure miles away, and their satnavs have sent them here. The lane ends, for the final time. You have only been walking for a matter of minutes. You could be anywhere.
I felt like I was along for your walk down a lane—and even felt some of the frustration and disappointment of this journey. Good writing ✍🏻