By Kevan Manwaring
A mild autumnal day. Sitting on a knuckle of rock. It’s oak o’clock at Bradgate Park. Everyone is here. The car park explodes with people and their pets, prams, and vehicles. Oak erupts from rock. Fallow deer graze nonchalantly amid the roots; suddenly bolt at some unknown signal. Leaves turn to flame – tiny hands grasping at the turning sun. The trees are in their Sunday best – this is peak autumn, and everyone wants their colour fix. Fifty shades of fall. The trees murmur their appreciation, whisper their secrets – covert chemical messages. Someone has etched I LIFT MY EYZ into a deer-stripped trunk – the tree is half-dead, but one branch is foliate, a sylvan resurrection. Fuggy headed, I set off to the copse on the hill, where green and blue meet, beyond the swathes of brown bracken. I want Bradgate’s headspace to blow away the cobwebs of work. I go looking for perspective and peace. Sunday, 20th October, 2019
When I first visited Bradgate Park, a picturesque deer park to the north of Leicester after recently moving to the city, I gravitated towards the iconic crags (the only decent hills in the area) and came upon one of the ancient, twisted, and strangely cropped oaks that haunt the heathland. It was hollow, although still alive, and so I wriggled in and let myself be held by it – feeling its strength support me. It had been an intense period of upheaval – moving house, starting a new job – and for the first time in weeks I felt grounded.
Rooted.
I have returned to Bradgate many times since – for trail-runs, walking, and picnics with friends – feeling a reassuring sense of sanctuary there, away from the unfamiliar urban vibe of the city. The hills and the headspace they afford are the extrinsic motivators, but the intrinsic reason for this feeling of safety is undoubtedly due to the oaks: for they remind me of a place I spent my childhood escaping too: Delapré Abbey, a former 12th Century Clunaic nunnery, which was the Northamptonshire County Records Office by the time I started walking my dog there, finding solace within the peaceful wilderness gardens. There I fell in love with oaks, my first tree and still my favourite. In a poem written in honour of Delapré’s genius loci, and importance to my personal development as a writer, I described the distinctive trees:
By salmon wisdom I am ever returning
along that avenue of gothic oaks,towards the white clock tower, still,
above the bolted coach-house.
‘The Green Abbey’
So, here, in Bradgate I had, for a while, found my new ‘Delapré’. Over the months my own personal narrative intersected with the continuing conversation of history there. Bradgate, a medieval deer park, which passed through several pairs of hands (including the famous Greys) was eventually purchased by a local shoe manufacturer, Charles Bennion, in 1928, who then generously bequeathed it to the city, in perpetuity. In 1931 the Bradgate Park Trust was formed and access has been allowed ever since. It is a popular destination for Leicestershire folk, and on a sunny day it can be brimming – but even if the carparks and teashops are fully, there is always space to be found in its 850 acres. Bradgate and the surrounding woodland is a SSSI: part of the ancient Charnwood forest, pockets of which still cover much of north Leicestershire, underneath which are coalfields. The slag-heaps are grown over now and are the last remnant of a once thriving industry – they seem at home next to the volcanic landscape formed 540 million years ago. The local mudstones are some of the oldest in the world, and preserved in them are some of the most ancient fossils. In 1954 a local schoolboy, Roger Mason, discovered an excellently well-preserved leaf impression, the first preCambrian fossil discovered at the time, which was named after him (Charnia Masoni).
At Bradgate there is a tangible sense of the past irrupting into the present – and not only in the distinctive spiky coxcomb of the ancient crags. The area has long been used and inhabited: as an Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic hunting landscape; an Iron Age enclosure; early Medieval hunting lodge; and then onto the Tudor home of the Greys. Their famous daughter, Lady Jane Grey (great-grand-daughter of Henry VII, and named successor by Edward VI, until the Privy Council declared her claim treasonous) was not born at Bradgate, as is the common misconception, but spent the first ten years there. She was, tragically, to become the ‘Nine-day Queen’, and was beheaded along with her consort, Lord Guildford Dudley, at the age of 16. The local folk, it is said, were so upset by this that they violently pollarded all of the oaks of the park in an act of loyal defiance, hence their distinctive appearance today.
The Lady Jane Grey ‘legend’ lends the park a certain melancholic air (made tangible by the poignant ruins of Bradgate House, the site of an annual summer excavation by the University of Leicester), which is not unpleasant. The whole place offers a poignant counterbalance to the pace of modern life and the vain ambitions of all those who perhaps get ‘above themselves’ – it is not the Leicester way. The local temperament is self-deprecating, and sometimes abruptly dismissive of pretensions. The much-missed author Graham Joyce (author of proto-folk horror novels such as The Limits of Enchantment, Some Kind of Fairytale, The Facts of Life, Dark Sister, and others – many of which are set in and around Charnwood) grew up in an old Leicestershire coal-mining village, where a local saying was “eave ‘alf a brick at ‘im”, a constant reminder to him not to be pretentious in his manner or prose.
A gloomy atmosphere lingers around the folly known as ‘Old John’, a well-loved landmark on the top of the highest hill in the park. Built by the Greys in 1784, the folly is, according to another local legend, a memorial to John, an estate worker killed in a bonfire accident during celebrations of the 21st birthday of the future sixth Earl of Stamford. It is reputed that the stonework at the side of the tower was altered to look like a handle, perhaps knowing John’s liking of ale. However, like the cluster of mistruths around Lady Jane Grey, things are not quite as they seem: John was not 21 until 1786; and a map of 1745 names the hill as ‘Old John’, preceding the legend by decades. The tower was used during the 19th century as a viewing point for the horse-racing practice circuit laid out by the seventh earl, and today it draws walkers and photographers as the natural epicentre of any perambulation of the park.
The tragic death of an estate worker, and massive, ancient oaks with folkloric associations gives Bradgate a similar feel to Windsor Great Park, with its legend of Herne the Hunter. And when one walks near the herds of grazing deer – the many-tined male presiding proudly over his females – it is easy to catch one’s breath, especially on an Autumnal morning, when shards of sunlight pierce the mist and gild the antlers of a snorting Lord of the Woods. At such times, Herne feels near.
On a dawn run on May Day this year I wended my way towards Old John, where I had heard morris dancers gathered to see in the summer. Rising through the mist, the distant jingle of bells and clatter of sticks guided me onwards – and I eventually found Leicestershire morris in full swing, fuelled by a ‘breakfast barrel’ of local ale. On the nearby Beacon Hill, a local druid group, the Charnwood Grove, perform their own open ceremonies to mark the turning of the wheel. Druids were an Iron Age priesthood, although these days they are more associated with Stonehenge and the Summer Solstice. The word ‘Druid’ derives from ‘derwydd’ – meaning ‘oak priests’, or ‘men of oak wisdom’. This is etymologically linked to ‘duir’, which means door, and Old John has a fine example of a sturdy, bolt-studded one. The acorn has become a metonym for ‘wisdom’, and the official symbol of our National Trails. Having walked several of Britain’s long-distance footpaths I have spent many days following the white acorns, which line the routes attached to signposts. Seeing one is always a reassuring sign that I’m on the right trail. For now, my amble around Bradgate was coming to an end. I paused to make some final notes:
As I wander amongst the oaks of Bradgate I wonder … will I ever put down roots? Will I endure? Will I weather the storms of life? Will something of me survive? The stags bellow across Bradgate and I feel the need to have territory to defend – a place to make a stand.
The beheaded oaks of Bradgate will last for a few more years yet, failing a Great Storm, or other ‘Act of God’. I leave, hoping for some of their longevity and sense of belonging.
Dr Kevan Manwaring is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Leicester. He has contributed articles to peer-reviewed journals e.g. New Writing, Writing in Practice, Axon, and TEXT. He is the psychogeography editor of Panorama: the journal of intelligent travel. He blogs and tweets as the Bardic Academic.