Hudson wrote the book in 1909 and his conversations with a shepherd, Caleb Bawcombe, reveal a land that time forgot and many hanker for. A period of agrarian simplicity when everyone knew their neighbours and their place and order reigned in the land. I found a copy marked 'Xmas 18' and settled down in Rosie to enter the rather pompous mind of Hudson, and soon became glad that he saw his vocation as chronicling the passing lives of the simple folk who had no letters or means of recording their mostly oral tradition. I entered a fascinating world which brought the Downs to life albeit in the 19th Century.
I bumbled around Salisbury cathedral, which is magnificent, and the various landmarks which put the city firmly on the tourist trail, but it was the land that Hudson evoked that caught my interest. The topography seen from Old Sarum makes Salisbury's import throughout the last millennia clear and this view must have made the founding fathers wonder why they had built their original city on a hill. It didn't take Jack and Jill many pails of water to realise the valley below was the better spot. Hudson pictures it as an open hand; Salisbury as the palm, with five fingers representing the evocatively named five valleys of the rivers Nadder, Avon, Wylye, Ebble and the smaller Bourne. Water from high country on the downs finds a meeting place and a city grows around this confluence. The chalk beds of the streams and rivers are enchanting allowing clear, reed strewn flows where trout linger in the currents and fly fishermen cast lazily into pools that beckon on warm summer days. Leland called the city 'the pan and receiver of most of the waters of Wiltshire' and upon this bounty Salisbury became the centre of the universe for the folk documented in Hudson's book.
There was an edge to tranquil middle England that had out it squarely in the nation's focus. Tape cordoned off a park by the cathedral and a visible if polite police presence provided a heightened sense of a city still under siege. The Russians aren't coming, but they had certainly been! Quite brazenly poisoning traitors. Their legacy was evident in the teams of security around the Zizzi restaurant, the chain now unfortunately now linked to poison. I opted for the safety of Cote Brasserie and found a space for one where I could hear the kitchen gossip and make jokes which they politely laughed at. There was a sense of calm but an underlying menace as the poison may still be active. The perfume bottle which had 'allegedly' been used in the poisoning was found in a bin by a rather thrifty bloke who had then presented it to an elated girlfriend. Things went downhill from there. The waitress told me' it could happen to anyone'. I like to think not but I caught the sentiment. Not quite the sense of bonhomie or reckless abandon usually founding a cathedral city. Still in a sense of enchantment at the wonders of the Cathedral close I ambled round the streets which whispered of Hudson's portrait. Fish Row and Butchers Row harked back to a time when the market town buzzed with a Wiltshire burr. ' The Corn Exchange is like a huge beehive, humming with the noise and talk, full of brown-faced farmers in their riding and driving clothes and leggings, standing in knots or thrusting their hands into sacks of oats and barley.'
Such a cultivated city could not fail but contain a Rutherford Walk!
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