Written (as far as I can remember), for Country Living magazine in the spring of 1998

When I climbed the Wrekin again in February of this year, it was the first time I had visited this Shropshire landmark in more than a decade. The last time was with my grandfather, round about his eightieth birthday: this time it was with my wife, and my twenty-week-old daughter, who didn’t seem to enjoy the experience much. It was an unexpectedly bright Saturday afternoon, the sun was in her eyes, and the cruel hilltop breeze was making them water. By the time we reached the summit, her howls could probably be heard over most of the county. I had been anticipating at least a few moments of silence in which to contemplate the amazing landscape laid out on all sides around me, but it wasn’t to be.

It takes about an hour to reach the top. The path is forgiving enough at first, rising smoothly through coppery woodland (it always seems to be autumn in Shropshire), until you reach a halfway point where, many years ago, a row of brightly-painted swing-boats would be waiting to raise the spirits of the weary and complaining child. Those have long gone, now, like the old tea-rooms which once stood at the foot of the hill, their windows sending out beacons of welcoming light through the dusk. After the halfway point, things become more serious. The summit itself does not become visible until the last minute, and meanwhile a succession of challenging inclines leads you on from one false hope to another. Your target is the Needle’s Eye, a large rock which, according to local legend, was split in two during a fight between two quarrelsome giants. It’s worth the struggle. ‘It is not often that such a gentle climb is so richly rewarded with such magnificent views,’ writes Vincent Waite in his excellent guide, Shropshire Hill Country. I don’t know if Mr Waite strolls up Kilimanjaro on a regular basis, but this isn’t my idea of a gentle climb. He’s right about the views, all the same. And what I love about it is that, from the top of the Wrekin, I can see not just the whole of Shropshire, but an entire emotional topography, too: a landscape of the heart.

Over to the north, for instance, beyond the unlovely sprawl of Telford, lie the villages of Edgmond and Tibberton, which I used to visit often as a child. My maternal grandparents lived in nearby Cherrington, in a house called The Rise where we spent most of our early Christmases, little more than an hour’s drive from the outer suburbs of Birmingham where I grew up. My memories of that time have begun to dissipate and fragment. I can remember apple orchards and strawberry beds, visits to my great-uncle’s cheerily imposing farmhouse, a den I built for myself amongst the shady outbuildings, with its own letterbox through which my grandfather liked to post teasing, pun-filled letters: always a few waiting for me when I arrived. This was hardly deep country – not wild or dramatic enough for some tastes, I suspect – but I think of it as gentle and unassuming, like my grandparents themselves, and I grew up loving it fiercely.

Looking north from the top of the Wrekin, then, I can catch glimpses of my past: but to look west is to strain towards another country, a country of the imagination, a country which for many years I only knew through the medium of film. It was in the mid-1980s that I saw Michael Powell’s movie Gone to Earth for the first time. I was living on a grimmish council estate in South London in those days, and when I taped the film one Saturday night and turned on the video after some grisly metropolitan evening out, it was as if the Welsh marches themselves had suddenly risen up outside the sitting room window, driving away my vistas of Bermondsey and Peckham like a bad dream. I had never seen a film which brought the British countryside to such eerie life, catching so much of its heart-stopping beauty or changing moods.

Gone to Earth is adapted from the novel by Mary Webb, the unofficial poet laureate of Western Shropshire. The plot concerns a wild country girl caught between the conflicting passions of the local parson and the lusty squire, and although it has its moments of preposterous melodrama and shaky acting, its austere, painstaking and deeply-felt regionalism make it unique, and for me at least render all other objections irrelevant.
It was released in 1950, and no such film could be made in Britain today. Lugging heavy and expensive equipment from one Shropshire hill village to another, billeting an entire crew (including Jennifer Jones and David O. Selznick) on a hotel in Church Stretton, Michael Powell and his cinematographer, Christopher Challis, took unimaginable pains over the project. Challis wrote years later of ‘hours of patient waiting in rain, cold and sleet for just the right angle of sunlight across a landscape, 5 a.m. calls day after day to catch the early morning mist: it was all so very worthwhile.’

I have kept my tape of Gone to Earth, and whenever I turn it on to watch Jennifer Jones running barefoot across the Long Mynd, or capering towards the Stiperstones at twilight, I realise it has that rare ability – found in a very few works of art – to make you feel that you have fully inhabited its world. And so that Saturday afternoon on the Wrekin, looking north and looking west, I found that I could see two Shropshires: the one where my grandparents used to live, and the one where, thanks to Michael Powell and Christopher Challis, it almost feels that I have lived myself. In a way, it’s hard to know which is the more real.

© Jonathan Coe 1998

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