The Man of Blackmore Vale by Jonathan Law

For many years – the years before marriage and children – this was the one way home; whether coming from London or Oxford, or Hants or Bucks, the last part of the journey was always the same and always the best. The train would divide at Salisbury and my part – the front few carriages – would begin its descent from the chalk into the green sheath-like valley of the Nadder. After Tisbury with its old-world station, the valley starts to broaden, the ruins of Wardour Castle loom, and then quite suddenly the hills pull back to reveal wide open vistas as we enter the Vale of Blackmore. Gillingham, Templecombe, Sherborne, Yeovil: the landscape of home.

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Blackmore Vale is a low-lying clay valley, perhaps twenty miles across, in the northern part of Dorset. It is a country of small woods and small pastures; but also of big views south and east to the chalk scarps that define its borders – Bubb Down, Batcombe Hill, Nettlecombe Tout. The low ground is broken up by isolated hills and a series of lumpy ridges, with most of the villages perched salubriously on the latter, skirts tucked up from the winter’s damps and dirt. It is a land of ponds, paddocks, and grazing meadows; of sturdy four-square farmhouses with thatched barns; of wizened orchards and straggling hedges; of boggy woods, teeming with wild garlic and ground ivy. It can be surprisingly bleak in winter and in summer scarily lush, with the extravagant vegetation imparting an odd pagan or folk-horror vibe. More than anything, it is a watery country, with a plethora of slow, reedy, alder-lined rivers: the Stour, the Cam, the Lydden, the Divelish; Caundle Brook, Shreen Water, and the delightful River Wriggle. And feeding these a whole plexus of streams, channels, dykes  and capillaries – in dry summers barely damp but given to sudden and dramatic flooding after rain. It is a land of handsome but often dilapidated mills, with all their appurtenances of weirs, leats, hatches, and sluices; of fords and water splashes and old stone bridges.

As a Somerset boy I was always a bit resistant to Dorset, which in my silliness I thought rather twee. But even so, this Vale of Blackmore had something I liked – a sort of saving scruffiness: its tin sheds and lean-to shacks; its rutted droves and waterlogged gates sinking wonkily into mud.

*

How do we separate the reality of a place, a region, from our private hopes and nostalgias, from its representations in books, films, or the culture at large? Is it even worth the attempt?  Almost certainly my ideas about this place have been distorted by several readings of Wolf Solent, the epically strange novel by John Cowper Powys. It’s that sort of a book. The story begins with the title character, a mystic oddball, on board a train from London to Sherborne – the journey I have come to know so well:

The austerity of Salisbury Plain yielded now to the glamour of Blackmore Vale. Dairy-farms took the place of sheep-farms; lush pastures, of bare chalk downs; enclosed orchards, of open cornfields … The green, heavily grassed meadows … the slow, brown, alder-shaded streams … made Solent realize how completely he had passed … into the more relaxed world, rich and soft and vaporous …

For Solent, a confirmed solipsist, the Vale is experienced less as a working landscape than a series of waftings and glimmerings. To a man of his temperament, this country of mossy woods and muddy river smells, of faint airs and iridescent twilights, is beguiling but also perhaps dangerous. And yet even Wolf, lost in his own personal mythology, finds that he cannot escape all human connection. As his train rolls on through woods and orchards and damp meadows, his thoughts return obsessively to the face of a stranger glimpsed on the station steps in London – a face marked by a terrible and inexplicable despair:

It was just the face of a man, of a mortal man … And the woe upon the face was of such a character that Wolf knew at once that no conceivable social readjustments or ameliorative revolutions could ever atone for it.

*

Of all the faces that we meet – on the train or bus, at a late-night garage or shouldering through the rush-hour crowds – why does one get into our heads and stay there, so that we can recall it years, even decades, later?

It clearly has nothing to do with beauty. Some faces are just memorably odd, and others seem somehow unreadable, and to bring us up against the mystery of human personality. In her book Fisher’s Face, Jan Morris wrote about her fixation with a particular photograph of Lord ‘Jacky’ Fisher, the great naval reformer, and how his odd, kind, arrogant, self-amused face troubled her for forty years.

Could there be any tenderness in such a man?  … There’s something disconcerting to those eyes … On the other hand, he does seem stupendously sure of himself… a face that is not only cynical, defiant and almost ludicrously egotistical but unmistakably tinged with sadness …

At some point in the 1980s I took the usual train from London and found myself sitting across from an older chap who did nothing very remarkable before getting off at one of the small stations in Blackmore Vale. I don’t really know why, but he has become my ‘Jacky’ Fisher; for forty years, hardly a month has passed when I have not thought of him in some way.

There was nothing outwardly striking about him. Thinning, straw-coloured hair; startled boyish eyes. I would probably have called him an old man, being then barely in my twenties, but in truth he could have been anything from late thirties to sixty-odd. And something made him even harder to place in terms of character, background or profession. So, yes, here was a small puzzle to worry out for the rest of the journey (rest of my life).

Dressed in old, heavy tweeds and clutching a battered briefcase, our man had the air of a housemaster at a small and down-at-heel prep school – of which there were several in that country. He had the look of a man who knew his Latin verbs. But this surely wasn’t right. There was something altogether too sturdy and buoyant about him – a physical sufficiency that lent him a strange air of innocence. A red circle in the centre of each cheek gave him the look of a farmer in a children’s story book. Yet he didn’t strike me as a man who worked outside in all weathers. Perhaps a gentleman farmer, returning from his annual visit to London to see the family solicitor? Or some sort of country solicitor himself? A travelling auctioneer? A salesman in some kind of agricultural product?

But none of that seemed quite right either. The telling moment came when he got up to leave. Briefly, he did a weird little dance on the balls of his feet, flexing his knees like a comedy policeman. Was he shaking the creases out of his trousers? Or perhaps just stiff from the journey? What caught my attention, I think, was the absolute lack of self-consciousness. There was something aristocratic about it.

*

I don’t think I had read much Powys then, or I might have recognized this chap as someone a bit like Solent or Magnus Muir or Sylvanus Cobbold – characters whose social status puzzles the modern reader, as they belong to a type now virtually extinct. In his introduction to Powys’s Weymouth Sands, Angus Wilson draws our attention to the historical reality of this type, men ‘who contrived by a combination of small jobs …  and small rents or inheritances to go their own way, yet did not cut themselves off … from society as it was accepted’. In other words, they were misfits, but not rebels; poor, but still somehow gentlemen.

Was this man with the tweeds and the briefcase a solitary sort of mystic, a dreamer or philosopher like Solent? On balance it seems unlikely. And yet he did strike me then as a man out of time – someone who had probably voted for Thatcher but would never thrive in the raw world she was bringing in. Could this be why he caught my imagination? Here was someone who now struck me powerfully as belonging to the past, whereas five or six years earlier I would not have had this thought.

When I was growing up here in the 1970s, this Dorset—Somerset country was swarming with types you just wouldn’t believe now – characters who could have stepped out of an Agatha Christie or old-school farce. The brisk ex-military or colonial type, the fluttery old maid, the little red-faced Irishman with a tip for the 2.30 at Wincanton: basically, the supporting cast of Fawlty Towers, but flesh and blood and living their own real lives. I think they were just about hanging on for the Falklands War, these guys; but by the time of Ray-Bans and Brookside and big-shouldered jump-suits they were gone.

And my chap, though more mysterious, was clearly of their type, like some strange creature left behind in a rock pool by the retreating tide. Maybe it was seeing him there, on that train, and having these thoughts, that made me understand for the first time that the world really was changing in ways I hadn’t begun to consider.

And that is how I see him still, stepping down from the train and into the mists of the Vale, so that he seems like the very emanation of the place; that soft, unfathomable country of small meadows and streams, of wizened orchards and crazed hedges, of mud gateways and cattle pools holding the last of the sunset; of small woods heady with garlic and stinking elder, of rutted lanes and puddled tracks, of mills and fords and water-splashes.

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Jonathan Law grew up on the Dorset–Somerset borders, not far from the Vale of Blackmore. After 30 years in book publishing, he now works as a freelance writer, editor and proofreader. He can be read more widely on his Substack.

The photograph at the head of this essay is of the northern stretch of the Blackmore Vale, taken from Castle Hill, Shaftesbury. Photo by Jon Woolcott.