John Clegg was born in Chester in 1986 and grew up in Cambridge. In 2013, he won the Eric Gregory Award. Currently he works as a bookseller in London and his most recent collection, Holy Toledo!, was shortlisted for the 2017 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize.
If we trust a poet, we should assume that any information in a poem is put there for a good reason; I trust Christopher Middleton enough to believe that he would not call a poem ‘Shoreham Walk’ unless it has some relevance to Shoreham. So in April I took the train out there, with my sister and the poet James Brookes, to try and reach for ourselves
...a place
we found
called the kingdom
of children
you said, because
nobody frowns
as you climbed
vanishing up
a giant beech, red
as old blood
tall as the sky,
so many strong
branches it
was easy
We knew something about how to get there: our path should lead upward through a wood, containing nettles and oak trees (lines 1-3), with fields on one side containing wheat and potatoes and barley (lines 6-10 and 19). (We knew that the particular crops were unlikely to still be growing there, but there definitely needed to be room for three fields.)
We also had some contextual information: in 1965, when the poem was written, Middleton had two young children, which meant the sort of fifteen-mile route march I enjoy would probably be out of the question. We also knew Middleton was an enthusiast for the painter Samuel Palmer, who’d lived in Shoreham from 1826 to 1835, so any walks with a Palmer connection, we decided, would be preferred. Middleton had a car during this period (Anthony Barnett remembers being given a lift in it), but I think it’s more likely that he took the train; Shoreham is on a direct line from Sydenham, where he was living, and there’s nowhere in Shoreham today where it’s sensible to park. Provisionally, we decided, the walk should begin at the train station.
...a place
we found
called the kingdom
of children
you said, because
nobody frowns
as you climbed
vanishing up
a giant beech, red
as old blood
tall as the sky,
so many strong
branches it
was easy
We knew something about how to get there: our path should lead upward through a wood, containing nettles and oak trees (lines 1-3), with fields on one side containing wheat and potatoes and barley (lines 6-10 and 19). (We knew that the particular crops were unlikely to still be growing there, but there definitely needed to be room for three fields.)
We also had some contextual information: in 1965, when the poem was written, Middleton had two young children, which meant the sort of fifteen-mile route march I enjoy would probably be out of the question. We also knew Middleton was an enthusiast for the painter Samuel Palmer, who’d lived in Shoreham from 1826 to 1835, so any walks with a Palmer connection, we decided, would be preferred. Middleton had a car during this period (Anthony Barnett remembers being given a lift in it), but I think it’s more likely that he took the train; Shoreham is on a direct line from Sydenham, where he was living, and there’s nowhere in Shoreham today where it’s sensible to park. Provisionally, we decided, the walk should begin at the train station.
A landscape near Shoreham
The village sits at one end of a long valley, carved out by the River Darent in one of its livelier epochs (these days it’s about the friendliest most domesticated river in the world; after walking along it for a while you want to pet it). North, East or West could each plausibly have taken Middleton ‘up through the wood’ - we rejected West, which would have meant (if they’d started at the station) missing out on most of the village and Samuel Palmer’s house, and explored the North and East.
The hardest detail to reconcile with the countryside in either of these directions is the oak trees. They are not at all characteristic of the local woodland. The first we found were due North of Shoreham, two of them as per the poem surrounded by nettles, and even a few ‘rusty can tops’. But we decided they wouldn’t do. There was no beech anywhere; and, while we’d been briefly upwards through woodland, our route had taken us down a stretch of road, which would surely have been mentioned. My sister suggested the oaks (already ‘crusty’ when Middleton wrote the poem) might have been toppled in the storm of ‘87, so we went East and explored more carefully.
Starting in the centre of Shoreham and heading East up the road called the Landway, you quickly get onto an upward path through woodland. Turning left at the crossroads, you pass South through Meenfield Wood. To your left (through a thin screen of pine) are three fields - at present all of them are grass, but an old man I spoke to in the Kings Arms in Shoreham remembered potatoes being farmed on the hillside in the early 80s. (Middleton’s poem was written in the summer of 1965.) After about 500m, you come out in a field alongside a large beech tree (Google Earth coordinates 51.331696, 0.165059). It’s a natural place to pause; there’s a stunning view, over the little village of Otford and further West. Sevenoaks is tucked behind the spur of the valley. Standing there, surveying the landscape, you do feel like a monarch (or rather like Yertle the Turtle); if you have two children with you, it’s a natural point in your journey to decide represents ‘the kingdom of children’. It’s also a natural point - and the first, so far, on the walk - to stop for a picnic.
Author with beech tree.
I would have finished here, but a few days ago I was writing this up as a blogpost for Alan Brenik while he was on holiday in Rhodes, and thought I should look through Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham paintings, and discovered his ‘Landscape Near Shoreham’. It is clearly painted from exactly the same field; you can see (just underneath the darkest part of the branch that extends off to the right) the spur of the Darent valley, and some of the field boundaries can be reconciled with the view today. It’s a mystery what’s going on in the picture; two adults are lying on a main bough of the beech, and behind them like a nativity play are four (some people I’ve shown the picture to reckon three or six) small children, one of them holding a very long stick like a sceptre.
Samuel Palmer, 'Landscape near Shoreham'
Is it possible that the aim of Middleton’s ‘Shoreham Walk’ was to find where this was painted? Of course it’s impossible to be sure. But both the poem and the painting seem to describe the same landscape (the beech itself is not the same; Palmer’s is a copper beech like the one in the poem, and the beech there today is a plain beech). It wouldn’t be unknown in Middleton’s poetic practice to have a model left unspecified; the imagery in the first stanzas of ‘Male Torso’ (written seven years previously to ‘Shoreham Walk’) derives from the paintings on the Dionysus Cup in Munich’s Staatliche Antikensammlungen, something which Middleton did not mention in his notes to the poem or anywhere else. I think he liked the idea of there being a particular physical key which unlocked a particular idea or emotion; as he wrote, in the last line of ‘A Road that is One in Many’, ‘This is in the thing and shines in the things’.
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You can order Christopher Middleton's Collected Poems here.
John Clegg's Holy Toledo! is also available here.
