Bog Myrtle & Peat

Georgeham lies in a cleft of the hills above the sea. The village crowds in every angle and shape around a noisy little stream, and there are steep banks of thatch and narrow streets which lead in sudden, twisting angles from the main road to Woolacombe. There’s a jolly pub and a tall, slate-grey church which stands against the sky like a tree; it should be a beautiful village, but while all the right ingredients are present and correct, their arrangement is only pretty. Perhaps if it were removed to a less glamorous part of the country, Georgeham would shine like a beacon – but in the heart of wondrous north Devon, the village is outshone by the beauty of its neighbours. I was glad of that – but approaching a place that is so closely associated with the writer Henry Williamson, I was in the mood to be picky.

Williamson wrote Tarka the Otter at Skirr Cottage in Georgeham in the early 1920s, and it’s fair to imagine that the village was more lovely then; smaller and more compact, with deeper roots which ran further into the surrounding fields. But even after he’d left this place and finally abandoned Devon altogether in search of new and richer creative streams, he always came back. He was buried there in 1977, a short stone’s throw away from Skirr Cottage, where he must have spent some of the happiest hours of his life.

There was nothing of pilgrimage or devotional concern in my visit to Georgeham. I’m not completely sure that I love Henry Williamson’s work, and I am certainly cautious of the man himself. He’s too thorny and problematic to permit an open declaration of love, and while it’s easy to dismiss the man for his politics, I’m equally certain that he can’t be ignored on account of his fascism either. It’s too easy to say “he was just a Nazi”, but I’m surprised by how much time I’ve spent damning him for that fact. It’s a point of personal insecurity that I should feel so keen to distance myself from his politics, and only weakness which drives me to labour the point. I’m not a fascist and I think that some of his views were damnable. That explicit disclaimer should be enough and I should be able to think past it, but there is nowadays something so profoundly toxic about Williamson that I’m troubled by a sense that in showing excessive interest in the man, I somehow endorse him. 

I could only go to Georgeham because it was not a pilgrimage. I’ve sometimes made the mistake of visiting literary landmarks in the past, and I’ve usually found them disappointing because my hopes were too high and I didn’t know what I was looking for anyway. But I feel cooler and more objective about Henry Williamson. I’m not an acolyte or a devotee, but I am very interested in what his writing meant and where it lay in relation to the man himself. He provides a useful way to think about nature and art, and while his is not the lens I would use myself, he certainly offers a valuable perspective on extensive acres of common ground. In this oppositional and carefully detached frame of mind, I walked around the church towards his grave and heard the first birds singing for the spring.

Devon’s a month ahead of us here in Galloway. The great tits are already singing, and the catkins greening up on the hazel trees. I saw daffodils and crocuses emerging, and heard the clatter of pigeons rutting in the ivy. Heading south at this time of year is like flicking ahead to the next chapter of a book which has begun to bore you. Hoping that things will pick up, it’s useful to bathe in a moment of progress and remind yourself that change is coming. It’s worth grinding onwards, and you can turn back your dog-eared page with a bounce in your step, knowing that it’s simply a matter of biding your time.

Henry Williamson’s grave is marked by a square and simple headstone which bears only the briefest of details. Beneath the words, there’s an owl motif which often served as his cartouche in many books and letters. You could wonder why it wasn’t an otter, but it makes sense when you realise that he only recently became “The Otter Guy”. His reach was far wider than Tarka, and owls evoke a broader, better sense of nature at large. The stone has slumped to one side in the shaggy, overgrown cemetery, and there is now a wreath of plastic poppies placed before it in memory of his experiences during the First World War. This wreath has only been in situ for a few months, but it’s already fading and covered in leaves. Before I even knew what I was doing, I had picked it up and was cleaning it with the cuff of my jacket. Then realising that I had no business here by the grave of a stranger, I suddenly put it back. It wasn’t for me to tidy up, and yet my impulse had been to defer and show respect. 

As I stood back, I was impressed by a powerful sense of connection – less for what Williamson represented in all his various guises and more to the fact of a man. Given that he generated such a wealth of imaginative energy and light in his life, it was striking to find him beaten back at last to a few square feet of worm-infested turf. I have sometimes been cowed by Williamson’s heat and contradictions, but it was suddenly possible to imagine that he was just a fearful, fragile person after all, no bigger or smaller than any one of us. And wondering this, I think my visit to Georgeham meant more than any panicked over-reach I’ve made to greater, more-loved figures.