Hardy’s Knuckles by Estelle Phillips

The dream started when my days were hard. Night after night I walked through a steep sided dry valley shrouded in mist; long grass slicked my thighs with dew. A puff of wind rolled downhill and the mist parted to reveal that the far side of the valley was covered in trees and the near side was grassed.  The great slopes of land, forested and bare, swept down meeting in interlocking spurs on the valley’s floor. Where the tips interlocked, a clean edge of the forest zigzagged away to a gilded horizon. Sun warmed my skin like a parent’s embrace, and I woke. The dream’s warmth remained, a comfort through cold days, and the view of the valley stayed in my mind, nourishing my hunger for peace.  As my life improved the dream faded but I remembered the valley and wanted it to be real. After years of fruitless searching, I resigned myself to it being ‘dream-country’, a fictional landscape like Hardy’s Wessex, created by the author as the setting for his novels.

A decade later I drove in the rain from Broad Chalke, a Wiltshire village along the chalk streams of the Ebble river to the small town of Shaftesbury, just in Dorset. I had moved back to Wiltshire, where I grew up, and reacquainted myself with the area by travelling narrow country lanes instead of ‘A’ roads. This lane meandered below the chalk downs until a turn scarped past Win Green, the highpoint of Cranborne Chase. Crowned with a circular beech copse, the Green overlooks nearly a thousand square kilometres of chalkland, carved in the ice age. I arrived at a crossroads and the panorama below me opened up. Grassland tumbled away to a perpetual succession of hills and vales, terraces and heath, forest and fields, speckled with farms and villages as far as the Quantock Hills over fifty miles away, a brushstroke on the horizon. The Larmer Tree Gardens occupy this high ground. Created in 1880 by General Pitt-Rivers these gardens are known for their follies, peacocks and parrots and an outdoor ‘Singing Theatre’, its domed back painted with a romantic landscape. The road to Shaftesbury followed the ridge and bent past a row of beech trees. I glanced to my right to admire their smooth bark, but the view beyond startled me, a jolt of recognition. I slammed on the brakes.

‘My God!’

Hazard lights flashing, I opened the window and stared between the trunks. I felt my fingers shaking and my lips quivering. A car hooted behind and its driver gesticulated. I scrunched the gears, stalled, restarted, pulled over, got out and looked down. The valley was deep and steep, one side grazed the other forested and trees wove through spurs to faraway hills. There was no mistaking the valley of my dream.

*

This valley and I go back years, we are friends and I belong to its slopes. It is now my habit to visit the valley whenever I can. Nestled within a basket of hills, its most striking feature is the zigzag meeting of trees and grass in the valley floor that I dreamt about. These interlocking spurs are known locally as ‘Hardy’s Knuckles’ after their resemblance to the writer’s hands folded at his desk.

A stile invites entry from the road to the valley’s grass side. Today a peahen greets me on the verge and tilts her head to look at me from each eye. I shoo her to safety through a gap in the stile. Neck feathers ruffled, she struts off among the grassy tussocks away from the Larmer Tree Gardens where likely she came from. It is late afternoon; cowslips bob heads in a gentle spring breeze and cumuli queue in the sky. On the hilltop ahead, a windsock flutters at the end of a narrow grass strip, marking the runway for a local airfield. I straddle the stile, and scan the gulley that troughs the valley floor. It is sprinkled with white dots and these are what I have come for.

Sunshine pours between the clouds and illuminates slopes with patches of gold, aureate ghosts that float over grass, disappearing between spurs and reappearing on the hills. A flock of birds fly below, from the stile they look like gulls; I recognize them as pigeons when they alight in the forest, a brown ocean with emerald isles of early canopies. The laced branches and endless trunks of the forest entice me, but I prefer the grassy slope, not for the blackthorn, hawthorn and gorse but its anthill sized bumps which bobble from ridge to gulley and texture the valley like tweed. Their formation is a mystery; few of them are homes for ants.

In the gulley undergrowth is sparse. A peaty aroma wafts from beechmast, cups and decayed leaves. The white dots are easy to spot; the gulley is the perfect place to play a game I invented, ‘Flint Life’. Made from silica rich seawater squeezed out of plankton, flint formed in gaps between compacted chalk. Because of this, the stone has irregular ‘nodules’ that look like amoeba, ranging in size from an inch to a foot. Encased within a layer of chalk, the inner flint ‘glass’ is a window on the stone’s Cretaceous creation; fossils of sponges, echinoids and shells can be found in flint silicate, as can ammonites, fossilized plants and ‘trace fossils’ like burrows of animals. If you wet flint’s glass, layers of fossils might come into relief in its belly, a snapshot of ocean bed teeming with life. To read a flint is to know earth memories and the game’s challenge is to learn flint history. ‘Flint Life’ has no minimum or maximum number of players, no limit of time or ‘gos’ but stones must not be chipped, knapped or split in the process. I record my best findings but you don’t have to, and there is a ‘bonus’ for flints with holes. Each time I visit, the valley and I play a round of the game it inspired.

I ponder where to begin, take the plunge with a nodule the size of a loaf and crouch to examine it. Typical of ‘gulley flint’ this stone has blemished and pinpricked chalk cover over beige silicate. Two white-rimmed eyes look through the trees towards the sky and I peer into the irises for fossils. There are none, and I move on to a brick-shaped flint. The formal shape is unusual and hosts a silicate interior of demerara coloured stripe, sandwiched between an algaed chalk top, the base cratered like the moon. Maybe the stripe started out as a plant stem.

I dart from flint to flint. Where the gulley meets grass, platoons of stinging nettles hold ground and avoiding these I nearly miss a flint. Its face is unevenly scooped and filled, twigs and leaves decompose in its bowl, a home for moss.

The clouds are clearing as the sun sets and dusk begins the transition to night; bumps slant their shadows over the valley’s near side and enhance its tweedy texture before the forest’s shade creeps up along the grass, smoothing the texture with darkness. Even in the dimming light, a large flint stands out for its thickly layered chalk. I turn it over and find a voluptuous worm glistening in the soil, saddle clearly marked and segments shiny with moisture. The worm freezes, then contracts and elongates. In three short shucks the worm is gone. I think I have frightened the animal. Ashamed, I replace the stone before moving on.

I am far in the gulley, within a fold and under Hardy’s skin. The darkening sky is a triangle overhead, a light aircraft chugs from its tip to a corner. The forest shade creeps further up the slope. The temperature drops.

A mass of white glimmers ahead of me. I hasten forward to a lake of flint; the choice is vast and there is not time to examine each stone before darkness falls. Bright white beckons on the farther shore and I pick my way towards it. Two feet off I halt: the white is skull. Though it has been here a while, the eye sockets are round and antlers are still attached. I imagine the stag’s intelligent eyes, the shake of his regal head, and power in his leaping thighs. His death is confusing and I look about. A few feet away his lower jaw teethes the dirt, further off his scapula spades upward and a stack of vertebrae nestles in nettle stems. I stagger across the flint-lake to them, find myself among the scattered bones and step away. Immediately I find another skull, round and small and missing its nose. Normally I pray for a creature found dead in my garden but faced with this graveyard I do not know what to say, ‘Dear God please look after the souls of these creatures You took in good order of things.’ Did He though? I don’t know if the deaths were natural or inflicted, or if humans were the cause, in which case I need to beg forgiveness. In the end I do not pray at all and know this is a mistake.

I drag myself further into the gulley. Cold air seeps through my clothes and clings to my skin. I wrap my anorak tight about me. Beechmast and twigs crunch under my feet and a trilogy of notes breaks my rhythm. I peer through the forest, see pigeons and crows. Again, the trill. Beams of light illuminate the leaves, but the trees hide the nuthatch. There is movement across the peak and I cast my eye upward to see the silhouette of a doe trot through the trunks. She eclipses the sun and I blink as a childhood memory returns: my sisters and I loll on vinyl car seats, Mum sits in the passenger seat and Dad drives. We have been to the beach, our feet are sandy and we want to go home but detour because Dad wants to visit an airfield. We expect a control tower, jets and radar but see only a windsock in a field on a hill. After Mum and Dad have wandered around and found someone to talk to, we get back in the car, but after a minute Dad slows.

‘Look!’ I see only a valley of two halves, one side forest, the other grass. The halves meet in the lowest part of the valley and zigzag to the horizon.

Dad points emphatically.

‘A doe!’ She grazes the ridge. Our car crawls past her and the doe lifts her head and stares at us. Her animal gaze has me spellbound and conveys a world I don’t know. The doe flicks her tail and bounds into the sun. Dad turns to Mum,

‘What a beautiful sight.’

The penny drops: the windsock that flutters over the valley signals the same airfield my family visited when I was a child. To know my dream’s origin is precious to me. Invigorated, I start to climb the footpath and immediately stub my toe.

The flint’s edges are embedded, but straight away I see grass tufts through a central hole. Blades droop on flint with artful ease and caress its surface. A tiny beetle scurries down a sheaf and disappears through the Polo-hole centre. I contemplate the site of the flint in the sun, the coincidence of earth, seed and rain, which caused grass to germinate and grow through a hole, where the beetle lives fortressed in stone.

I climb. The turquoise sky blends to violet, dandelions close their petals and crows wheel from tree to tree. At the stile I look back. The windsock wraps around its mast and I wait for dusk to pass into night.  My dream and memory intertwine and linger in the curves of spurs and the zigzagged edge of forest. The valley arrived in my sleep when times were bleak and is now part of my woken world. Squawking erupts and I investigate, finding the peahen preening her wings on her roost. She objects when she sees me and her shrieks echo through the forest. I select two sticks from under her tree, make a cross with dry sedge and leave it on my dashboard. Next time I will plant it in the graveyard and pray.

***

Part of Literature Works 2024/25 Word Space cohort of emerging writers, Estelle is a writer and performance poet living in rural Wiltshire. Runner-up in Yeovil Literary Festival (Novel) 2022, Estelle’s work is published in the U.K. (BBC, The New Blackmore Vale Magazine, Dialect and Mslexia) and U.S.A. (Rock And A Hard Place, Dark Yonder, Kingfisher). Her U.K. poetry publications include Motherhoodlum (Jawbone) and The Headless Horseman (Chase & Chalke/Cranborne Chase National Landscape). Winner of Dorchester Literary Festival’s 2023 poetry slam, she has performed at The Royal Albert Hall and Southbank. Her writing for stage includes The Trapped Doe and 110 m.p.h. Estelle is writing a nature recovery memoir. Follow her on Instagram @estelle-writer44

The photographs embedded in the essay are by the author. The photograph at the head of the essay is by Jon Woolcott, for Little Toller.