Old Sarum

There is a good deal of interest to be found in old guide-books to ancient monuments, and in particular those issued for the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works and its successors by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, in roughly the period 1950 to 1980. 

 

(One of my stories in Powers and Presences (Sarob Press) features a clerk who works in this Ministry: it’s non-stop glamour in my tales.)

 

These monographs, usually sold from ticket offices by stalwart custodians, were written in a brisk and breezy, uncompromising style by authors who were often redoubtable local antiquaries. Their task was public education, and they tackled it with zest. 

I acquired some of these during my assiduous visits to ancient monuments from the mid Seventies onwards, in the days when they usually were still staffed, often by ex-servicemen with a sort of on-parade air about them. I thought then that this must be quite an enjoyable job, especially at one of the less popular or more remote sites. Though it would hardly be well-paid, there would no doubt be plenty of time for rumination and reading. However, these modern castellans also often doubled as groundsmen, mowing the lawns, weeding, litter-picking, carrying out minor repairs. 

I remember once walking one hot shadeless day in the far west of Cornwall to the remains of a prehistoric village far from any main road and only found by many winding byways. I expected there might be informative sign-boards and not much else. But even here there was a lonely wooden cabin with a custodian, who seemed a bit like a signalman in his box among the birdsong on a quiet branch line. I hadn’t thought much about where to eat or drink and there had been no pub or café on the way. The sympathetic keeper in his kiosk made me a cup of tea and sold me a slab of souvenir chocolate. 

A good example to hand is the 1965 guide (4th impression, 1971) to Old Sarum, the original site of the city of Salisbury. This seems to have been part of an experiment to have more colourful covers: they were usually a regulation plain blue, with a touch of the RAF hue. On this one, however, a flourish of cirrus clouds hovering above the silhouetted citadel almost seems to suggest aery sigils. 

The impressive-sounding name of the author is augmented by a reassuring string of scholarly initials: H. de S. Shortt M.A., F.S.A., F.R.N.S. Hugh de Sausmarez Shortt also wrote The Giant and Hob-Nob, under the perhaps understandably abbreviated name Hugh Shortt, issued by the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum in 1972, and in a revised edition by other hands ten years later. I should imagine it is a child’s guide to local antiquities. Another publication the same year was Salisbury: A New Approach to the City and Its Neighbourhood, ‘with photographs by Sir Cecil Beaton’, which might make it a bit collectible. 

I only had to turn to the verso of the front cover of the HMSO guide before I came upon an alluring phrase: ‘The key to the lapidarium, which contains the stones mentioned on pages 5, 22 and 40 may be obtained from the custodian on duty in the ticket office.’ In the first place, The Key to the Lapidarium undoubtedly sounds like it ought to be the title of a late Victorian thriller. And secondly, you at once want to know about those stones. They turn out to include gargoyles with bulging eyes, cat-eared humans, and various grotesques with impressive rows of teeth. 

Because of its long history, Old Sarum gets quite a staunch guide, of some 50 pages. The chronology and archaeology of the site is carefully explained, with just sufficient glinting detail to ensure the account is not too dry: coins of Cunobelin (though suspicious); the gold ring of Ethelwulf of Wessex; the effigy of Bishop Jocelin; the stained glass window of the angel appearing to Zacharias; the porphyry paving imported from Italy; the old leper hospital. You feel as though you are wandering among notes made by M R James for stories still to write. 

The map at the back of the book showing Old Sarum in its neighbourhood has a range of place names all of which sound like the titles of songs from a semi-forgotten folk-rock album: Figsbury Ring, Grovely Wood, River Nadder, Ackling Dyke. I can almost hear the tunes and imagine the lyrics, full of allusions to pagan rites, shape-shifting and fairy ceremonies: ‘As I walked out on Figsbury Ring/I thought I heard the Good Folk sing’ and so forth. 

Moreover, earlier in the text, after explaining the various ancient routes to the old city, Mr de S. Shortt tells us: ‘A fourth road reaches Grovely Wood to the west from the Severn via the lead mines, so important to the Romans, in the Mendips. But it is lost in the wood and no one has ever traced its course over the last four miles to Old Sarum’. Lost in the wood! Never discovered! Who could resist such a thrilling mystery? It reminds me of a very beguiling book I found in Ross-on-Wye, A Lost Roman Road, A Reconnaissance in the West Country, by Bernard Berry (1963), the quest for a missing route between Bath and the Dorset coast. 

A slight disappointment is that there is only a paragraph or so about Old Sarum’s role as a Rotten Borough. The site began to diminish in the 13th century when a new cathedral was built in the plain, and by Tudor times there was said to be not one dwelling there. Despite this, it continued to send representatives to Parliament until the Great Reform Act of 1832: William Pitt the Elder was one of its MPs. The elections were held under a venerable Parliament Tree, alas ‘cut down in 1905’ says the guide. I’d like to think souvenirs were made from its ancient wood. Perhaps when polished in the right way on a quarter day they might emit the spirit of a Wise Statesman with sage advice.

The Old Sarum monograph seems to me to possess much of arcane interest and fortified me in my notion that such guides are well worth perusing.

(Mark Valentine)