An animal running through the undergrowth somewhere towards the lower village bleated wildly, suddenly making me realise I hadn't actually seen another living soul since entering the valley, and I ached for my young family, back enjoying the comforts of their grandparents house. I therefore returned, perhaps a little rapid of foot, to my car and drove on, out of the hamlet and its dead fields, onto the primrose scattered roads of the woodlands once again. The woods darkened, only throwing the primroses into further highlight, as the slope to the lower valley fell away ever sharper to my left and I travelled south. As I drove, passing places became less and less frequent until I was thankful for the absence of the residents – it would have been of considerable difficulty to meet another vehicle, and I didn't much enjoy the prospect of pulling over on my side of the road, precipitous as it was. Therefore, it was with some relief that I finally found myself back in the lower valley. Driving towards the crossroads, I must have drifted into one of those fluid moments of unconsciousness one occasionally feels in cars, whereupon one wakes and wonders how one has driven for the last five minutes, and did one unsafely pass any other road users? It seems to me that this must have been the case, as I found myself missing the crossroad entirely, and the subsequent church with its Georgean tresures, and instead found myself driving again out of the hamlet at the foot of the valley on the road to Lower _________.
Kicking myself, I turned around and drove back, looking out for the hamlet's church, but somehow missed it, and found myself back at the bridge. However, this was plainly not the bridge I had arrived at before, for I was on the downstream road, facing upstream to the village I was sure I had just left. Confused, and wondering if I had had some kind of brainstorm, I drove on, only to find myself on the road to Upper _________. Unable to turn round or reverse on the treacherous road, I had little option but to drive on to the village and turn round there. Reaching the dirt track to St Michael's some ten minutes later, I decided to keep driving, round and down to Lower _________, and therehence to the hamlet and escape. Some quarter of an hour later, having passed through Lower _________, I found myself back by the village pub, but still the first church was nowhere to be seen, and, driving on, I somehow missed the crossroads and found myself again on what I assumed was the road to Upper _________. This time, however, I didn't recognise the track. Instead of heading through the woods, it rode up onto the ridge above the village, coming down, passed a sizable axe-shaped burial mound which I had the vaguest recollection I had visited by bicycle in my teen years. Grasping at this memory for the associated routes, it faded such that I wondered if I had, infact, ever been there – the whole recollection seemed to slip uneasily in and out of fantasy, as when one recognises someone on a train from some other aspect of one's life and struggles to think who they might be, despite knowing very well one meets them every week.
As I struggled with this feeling, the road rose up and turned to join the roads at the head of the valley, before descending into Lower _________. Such perigrinations, you might imagine, would be worrying, but perhaps the strangest part of all was how little concerned I was. While a small doubt festered in one corner of my mind, somehow I was convinced that I had simply missed roads and junctions the first time through the valley, and all would be well if I could simply try enough roads. Driving out an untried route from Lower _________, past the old school, I found myself back at the head of the valley and joining the road to the tumulus, but, instead of taking me onto the watershed, it took me into Upper _________, though not, perhaps, as I remembered it at first, for the house with the dishes was now cleared of technology, and the field of the village well surrounded by a clearer boundary of decaying stone walling. Nevertheless, the primroses still shone from the road, and the snow brightened with the chalk in the roots of the fallen beech, and in the woodlands something fleetfooted raced through the undergrowth, chasing ahead of me.
23 Dec 2019