In many places they are reduced sixteen or eighteen feet
beneath the level of the fields; and after floods, and in frosts,
exhibit very grotesque and wild appearances, from the tangled
roots that are twisted among the strata, and from the torrents
rushing down their broken sides . . . These rugged gloomy
scenes affright the ladies when they peep down into them
from the paths above, and make timid horsemen shudder
while they ride along them.
To enter these holloways, White said, was to access a world of
deep history, an unexpectedly wild world, buried amid the
familiar and close-at-hand. He visited his holloways in di=
erent weathers, to see how their moods altered with the changing
climate. During the >ercely cold January of 1768, when the
temperature in Selborne dropped to - 34 degrees Celsius, and
the leaves of laurel bushes were scorched brown by the cold,
and when the snow fell thickly enough to >ll the holloways,
White observed how it there became sculpted by the wind into
shapes “so striking to the imagination, as not to be seen without wonder and pleasure.” When the sun shone that winter,
reflected sunlight from the snow was bright enough to dazzle
animals and birds. Poultry sat in their roosts all day long, stupe>ed into inaction by the land’s luster.
Few holloways are in use now: they are too narrow and too
slow to suit modern travel. But they are also too deep to be >lled
in and farmed over. So it is that, set about by some of the most
intensively farmed countryside in the world, the holloways have
come to constitute a sunken labyrinth of wildness in the heart
of arable England. Most have thrown up their own defenses,
becoming so overgrown by nettles and briars that they are
unwalkable, and have gone unexplored for decades. On their
steep damp sides ferns and trailing plants flourish—bright
bursts of cranesbill or hart’s tongue, spilling out of and over the
exposed network of tree roots that supports the walls.
Dorset is rich in holloways: they seam the landscape cardinally,
leaving the coast and moving northward, uphill and inland,
cutting into the Jurassic Lias, the Permian sandstones and mudstones, the oolites and the chalks of the region. Along these
routes dray horses, carts, and carriages would have moved to
and from the harbors and bays, supplying and evacuating the
incoming ships.
My friend Roger Deakin had been tipped o= by a friend of a
friend about an especially deep and forgotten holloway near the
village of North Chideock, which lies in a small lush valley,
cupped by a half-moon of low green rabbit-cropped hills, the
horns of which rest upon the sea. There could have been no one
better with whom to discuss wildness. An original member of
Friends of the Earth UK, he had been fascinated by nature and
landscape all his life, a fascination that had culminated in the
late 1990s, when he set out on a journey to swim through
Britain. Over several months, Roger swam in dozens of the
rivers, lakes, llyns, locks, streams, and seas of England, Wales,
and Scotland. His aim was to acquire a “frog’s-eye view” of the
country. The book he wrote describing his journey, Waterlog, is
a funny, lyrical travelogue that was at once a defense of the wild
water that was left and an elegy for that which had gone.
So on a hot July day, Roger and I set o= for Dorset to see if
we could >nd wildness amid the dairy farms. We got lost several
times on the way. When he was unsure of the correct exit to take
on a roundabout, which was nearly always, Roger tended to slow
almost to a halt and squint up at the exit signs, while I assumed
the crash position in the passenger seat.
We reached Chideock—a one-song drive west of Bridport—
in the early afternoon, left the car, and began walking up along
the village’s main road, keeping where we could to the shade
cast by the big green-gold laurel bushes that lapped at the road.
The sun roared soundlessly in a blue sky. Hot light glared o=
every leaf and surface. Dust pu=ed up from the road wherever
we stepped. There was the smell of charred stone.
The path that Roger and I followed up into the hills was itself
the beginnings of a holloway, cut down ten feet or more into the
caramel sandstone of the area. Though no tra;c other than
walkers now passed this way, the road was still being deepened
by water. Heavy rain had fallen the previous week, and the holloway floor bore evidence of the water rush that must have
flooded it. Leaf and branch jetsam was tangled around tree roots,
and here and there patches of smooth surface stone had been
rinsed clean and exposed to the air, so that they lay glowing in
their >rst sunlight in nearly 200 million years.
At some point in the history of the road, hedging trees had
been planted to either side of it, partly to make way>nding easier
in poor weather, and partly to provide shelter from the winds
and sea storms that beat in o= the English Channel. Over centuries, these hedges had grown, died, reseeded, and grown
again, and now, unchecked, they had thrust up and out and over
the holloway.
One thinks of hedges as nothing more than bristly partitions—
>eld Mohicans. But these hedges had become linear forests, leaning into one another and meshing above the old sunken road to
form an interlocking canopy or roof, turning road into tunnel.
Near the summit of the western horn of the half-moon of
hills, the road became so overgrown that we had to leave it. We
scrambled up its steep eastern side and into the pollinous air of
the flower meadow that bordered it. I looked back over my
shoulder to where the sea lay blue. The heat bred mirages out
over the water—false promises of islands and mountain ranges.
