Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

After marriage and the Italian tour, Palmer settled in London — but made regular excursions to Cornwall and Wales, in search of exploitable scenery. From Tintern Abbey he wrote to George Richmond, begging him to ‘come hither’. The sublime in its tamest form appealed to Palmer. He had no taste for the cosmic agitation of Turner. ‘After my pastoral has had a month’s stretching into epic I feel here a most grateful relaxation and am become once more a pure quaint crinkle-crankle goth,’ he gushed.

The quaint and the crinkle-crankle are what he found at Underriver. He lodged at Underriver House — now a private property, unhandsome but very sure of itself. Palmer and Linnell produced reams of five-barred gates, views from an eminence on Rook’s Hill: Linnell’s ‘Underriver’, Palmer’s The Golden Valley, or Harvesting with Distant Prospect . We set out to find this spot. Renchi had his sketchbook, his coloured pens.

The morning was misty: we saw nothing beyond the hawsers as we crossed the Dartford Bridge. At Underriver, the mist lifted. We parked in a pub and set off through the usual empty lanes. The Palmer franchise was everywhere in evidence: unpicked fruit, blackberries in the hedges, orchards, cobwebs on gates. Round the back of Underriver House, at the end of a gravel drive, we spotted something that might have inspired Palmer’s pen and ink drawing of 1829, Ancient Barn . Except that the barn had enjoyed a tasteful and imaginative makeover (along with every other Kentish oast house): it was now, certainly, a property — with studio windows, bright wood, a managed garden.

A man we met in the lane — affable, alert, in trainers and jogging gear, walking a lean dog (with a pedigree that shamed us) — confirmed the barn’s provenance. He was the owner. It was murder, he said, for an hour every morning (ten minutes from the motorway), then peace returned. The Golden Valley was regilded. It seemed an enviable way of life: morning walk, restored barn. If you had the equity.

Past Absaloms, another heritage farm, we climbed Rooks Hill. Remembering the Palmer catalogue — Near Underriver ( c . 1843) and View from Rooks Hill (1843) — we felt sure we were on the right track for our five-barred gate (now replaced by a stile). Yes, this was it. The same gap in the trees. The Golden Valley revealed, pretty much as the painters had it. Palmer’s red-roof barn is now a corrugated shed. His melancholy cattle are pigs in hooped shelters; industrial swine, pre-bacon lollers in shit. A few goats. From the corrugated shed, a screeching of guinea fowl (who have just had their fortunes told) puts the necessary tremble into the landscape.

As Renchi sketches, the mist clears. A reference book — Underriver ( Samuel Palmer’s Golden Valley ) by Griselda Barton and Michael Tong — is open on his lap; the double page of Linnell and Palmer spread out for comparison. A line of poplars interrupts the prospect. Gentle hills to the south, the rim of the Weald. Palmer doesn’t do smell or sound (as Breughel does), he’s interested in grading light; achieving float, solipsism. A landscape voyeur. A peeper through curtains of foliage. He prospects, he acts as a pimp for estate agents and developers. This place is magic: buy it.

We returned to Shoreham by the back route, avoiding Seven-oaks. It was important, we felt, to make the sideways link with the M25. On the day of that first expedition, with Kevin and Marc, we had walked the Darent Valley like a ditch — seeing trains, but having to imagine the motorway.

Driving out of London towards the coast, you might notice a traffic-monitoring camera on a pole sticking out of woodland, just after Junction 4. That was our marker. To the west of Shoreham you climb steeply; the village tidies itself away, leaving the church spire. You come up alongside the chalk cross, mentioned on the war memorial by the river. After the first ascent, through Meenfield Wood, you hear the chant of the M25. Intimations of civilisation.

Down across fields to Timberden Bottom, then another brief ascent to the tunnel under the motorway. Shivering against a five-barred gate is a dying animal, a sheep covered in flies. There are no shepherds, few farms. Renchi sets off to find a human who might be interested in the loss of his investment. Empty houses, barking dogs: no resolution. A mascara of black insects outlines the sheep’s blank stare, the white rubber eyes. They feed on dead sight.

Renchi is being slightly mysterious about our destination: Badger’s Mount (which is depicted on the OS map as an enclosure of spiked huts). When we emerge on the west side, the motorway is still with us, visible through the woods. We are back inside the hoop. We circumnavigate Badger’s Mount, which is indeed an enigma, coy about its attractions. The perimeter is a wilderness of impenetrable scrub, low fences woven in, piss-off signs (courtesy of MOD).

A fortnight after the World Trade Center attack, paranoia is justified; it sings. Now I remember a postcard Renchi sent, after the first Shoreham walk, that said:

In Cambridge I dug again for anecdotal reference to unblock the blank disguise of the North Downs and discovered there was an Earth Tremor in Westerham in the 18th century that shook buildings and caused more than a ripple on the pond. Sadly the earth did not open quite wide enough to swallow two of their local heroes…

Another angle came from a friend’s brother’s partner’s nephew who worked for a defence contract at Fort Halstead (not on the map but near the M25 near Otford) with computer company LOGICA.

The village we were approaching was Halstead, ribbon-development filling a fork in the road. Why should such a place, where you might meet a traffic cop having a tea break, boast of a substantial ‘Police Office’? And nothing else: beyond ‘Church, remains of’, Old Rectory and pub.

Politically sensitive forensic investigations, Renchi had heard. Fragments bagged when the bombers hit the City or Docklands. Badger’s Mount to Fort Halstead: the story of the motorway circuit, of England. His instinct about this site was confirmed by the presence of sanctioned woodland (the sort that reminds me of Alfred Hitchcock, sylvan backdrops hovering at the margin of disbelief). Here, once again, was that Epping Forest mix: trails for the disadvantaged, bird cards — and bunkers where the police gun down cut-out terrorists. Check in at the hut, pick up a leaflet: Orchid Walk, Owl Walk, Lizard Walk. (‘The Lizard walk is also available in a large printed booklet for the visually impaired.’) Obey the rules: ‘Continue through the kissing gate, here the woods open up to shrub land. Turn a quarter right towards the bottom of the valley and continue up the other side to a concrete stile.’

Ecology and secrecy. Fort Halstead is a green fort. Tony Sangwine, the motorway horticulturalist, began with the MOD. First, a protective curtain of greenery. Then creative planting to improve the quality of life for the mole people, the Official Secrets mob. Whoever laid out Fort Halstead did a good job. Scrub, thorn and thicket at the rim, then tall trees and low buildings (after the fashion of the Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey). You don’t see the barbed wire and the swivelling CCTV cameras — until you make the initial penetration, until it’s too late.

An off-road vehicle with official markings tracks us, all the way from the roundabout, keeping its distance. There is only one entrance to the Fort. A long driveway, screened on both sides, leading to a set of gates. The police vehicle parks itself by the gates. No challenge, nothing said. I’m not taking out my Sony DV. I’m not risking an out-of-focus snap. A quick Palmer doodle from Renchi would summon a snatch squad. It’s all for our own good, of course. To preserve democracy and the free world. If we’ve learnt anything on our tramp, it’s this: Blake was right. Energy can only be understood as a system of contraries, polarities, oppositions: Fort Halstead mirrored, across the M25, by Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham. Palmer at Underriver working in pen and ink to counter Churchill’s splashy Chartwell oils. The world is kept in balance, the wheel spins. Blake was wise enough to journey in his imagination: ‘over trembling Thames to Shooters’ Hill and thence to Blackheath, the dark Woof. Fort Halstead, surrounded by orchids and lizards and owls, was the kennel of that Woof.