Phil Rickman - The Secrets of Pain

Bishopstone, a hamlet with a church, was no distance from Brinsop. Directly east of it, two more Roman roads made a kind of V-formation into the point of which was tucked something identified on the map as RAF Hereford. Which could only be the SAS camp. Just before the Roman roads converged on MAGNIS (ROMAN TOWN) the ruins of which, according to several Internet sites, had still been visible in recorded memory. Much of the masonry had gone into the foundations of Hereford. By 1772, the antiquarian William Stukely was discussing a fine mosaic floor unearthed at Kenchester and the remains of a temple, and also noting that one Colonel Dantsey had paved his cellar with Roman bricks.

Around the original Roman army camp there had been evidence of streets and shops. The remains of a shrine had been uncovered near the Wye, part of a villa found in the river itself.

Lol went through to his kitchen for a glass of water, digesting the key point: the SAS, quite recently, had moved its headquarters from Hereford itself to a former RAF base at the convergence of two Roman roads serving a Roman military base.

Back to the roots.

Brinsop Church, however, was part of a different story. He remembered it now. Remembered a wet Sunday when he and Jane had been enthusiastically defacing another copy of this same map, circling every stone, mound, cross and old church, marking up every conceivable alignment of prehistoric sites and then checking them out to see if they’d found anything that Alfred Watkins had missed. Alfred Watkins of Hereford, the original Simple Trackway Man on whom Lol and Danny had based the song. Whom Jane claimed for an ancestor.

Lol pulled down his copy of The Old Straight Track, Watkins’s masterpiece, the book which, long after his death, had sent generations of Brits – young hippies, old hippies, pre-hippies, post-hippies like Lol, post post-hippies like Jane out into the countryside, to find the stones and mounds and mysterious church formations that lit up an alternative Britain.

OK, most archaeologists rubbished the idea, but it was still exciting to think of being surrounded by ancient landscape patterns, which also drew in churches because so many of them had been built on sites of prehistoric pagan worship. You saw church towers and steeples, you saw four thousand years of ritual.

And, in the middle, the Romans.

Alfred Watkins had suggested that the Roman roads had often followed the old straight tracks – in his view more by design than accident, as if the Romans had merely widened existing prehistoric routes. Lol felt a twitch of connection. He’d known that, of course. Even worked it into ‘The Simple Trackway Man’.

From moat to mound we’ll mark the ground

From barrow to camp we’ll carry the lamp

From Roman road to trader’s track

And over the pitch and all the way back.

Interesting to think this guy Byron, a man who could rape a friend’s wife, might have been on the same trail, fascinated by the same magic landscape.

He’d drawn lines across the aerial photos.

Lol found a pencil and, using the edge of The Old Straight Track as a ruler, drew in three of the lines that he and Jane had found radiating from Brinsop Church, one linking it with four other medieval churches.

Brinsop Church was on a site of some significance and, although it was only a few miles away, he’d never even seen it.

The sun was low in the sky over Ledwardine, but there were a good two hours of daylight left to find what could be found. Lol picked up his car keys, went out to his truck.

Two hours.

Brinsop Church was locked now. Maybe the smoking ghost of Syd Spicer was inside, waiting there in motionless, crampless silence, the way the SAS could. Waiting for a signal.

Lol moved among the graves through the soft light. The bell tower was crisp against the cooling sky, the giant conifer black, like a knobbly monolith.

It didn’t matter that the church was locked. Outside, the landscape had revealed itself. The Ordnance Survey map was opened out in his head, the lines drawn in.

At the end of the short grass, before the woodland began its march up Credenhill, you could see, like an entrance to the underworld, what the OS map identified as moat. Alfred Watkins thought some moats might have been dug not for protection but to mark the tracks by reflecting sunlight or beacon fire or lamplight.

Lol had looked across the dark stain of the moat to the wooded thigh of Credenhill, imagining the pale essences of long-gone villagers walking the spirit paths that intersected here. Syd Spicer following some distance behind, cautiously adjusting to being dead.

In the adjacent field, a stile gave access to a squat monolith on top of a circular stone slab with a metal drain cover set into it. On the stone it said The Dragon Well. As it was unlikely that a dragon had died here, what did it actually mean?

Half an hour ago, standing at the side of the lane somewhere around Kenchester, Lol had gazed out over the fields which enclosed the ghost of the Roman town. He’d seen isolated farms and, further away, on the higher ground, the frames of this year’s polytunnels spreading like worm-casts.

He’d driven past the SAS camp with its armed guards. A military base built close to, maybe even on top of, the buried remains of another. What could that mean? What could it mean to Byron Jones?

A cyclist was bobbing along the lane, dipping periodically behind the hedge, heading this way. Lol waited. The man wheeled the bike to the dead end of the track. He was thin and bearded, maybe in his early sixties, wearing a scarf and a flat cap.

‘Nice truck,’ he said. ‘Animal or Warrior?’

‘Animal.’

A match flared. The guy applied it to a roll-up.

‘Used to have one meself. Comfy, for a truck.’

He looked like an archetypal peasant, therefore obviously from Off.

‘On your own, mate?’

‘It’s what country churchyards are for,’ Lol said. ‘Being alone.’

‘Not so much these days. One of the finest St George churches in England, this, but who bovvers now?’

The guy checked him out again, then took a step back.

‘Hang about… I fink… stone me! I was at your gig. In the floods? At Ledwardine? Hey… how cool is this?’

Lol smiled, a bit bashful. This never used to happen at all, but it had occurred a dozen or so times since Christmas. Local recognition: a mixed blessing.

‘Forget what I said,’ the guy said. ‘This is exactly the right setting for you, Lol. There should be a soundtrack. Sunny Days?’

The edges of his Londonish accent were rounded off, as if he’d been living here a good while.

‘Well, you know, that was a long time ago,’ Lol said.

‘Well, I had it first time around, I’m proud to say. Hazey Jane. First album I ever bought by a band a good bit younger than me. Big fing, that, when you first accept younger guys can get it right. Seventeen, was you?’

‘Another lifetime,’ Lol said.

The guy put out a hand.

‘Arthur Baxter. Bax. I live a mile or so back there, over the pitch. Still come here most nights, on me bike. Meet the dragon.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘You feel his breath?’

‘Like a blow-heater?’

‘Exactly.’ Bax grinned. ‘You know the story?’

‘Um… no. You got time?’

‘Got all night, mate – the missus is rehearsing a community play, down the leisure centre at Credenhill. Dragon’s drinking at the well, right? George comes down off of Credenhill, lookin’ for trouble. Slash, slash, spear downa froat, all over.’ Bax took a meditative drag. ‘You out here looking for inspiration, Lol? If you’re not, don’t spoil it for me. I wanna point to a song one day and go, I was there when he got that one.’ Bax drew deeply on his cigarette, offered it to Lol. ‘Try this? It ain’t bad.’