The uplift, after the deadening effect of Westerham, is in finding ourselves on Beggars Lane — which flows into Green Lane, before being absorbed by the Pilgrims Way. It feels as though we have come through some sort of test. The hedges are high and the air is ripe (humming, throbbing) — with slurry. We might be the last humans. Uninhabited lanes and deserted farmhouses (protected by barking dogs) remind us, yet again, of The War of the Worlds. Complacency and patriotism, the givens of a great empire, challenged by fanatical aliens, viral invaders, off-screen primitives. It’s wafer thin, a membrane, the liberal-democratic consensus: aspirations, dialogue, technological advances. Pyres of dead sheep, smouldering dumps, are always in the next field. The estate, hidden behind a screen of poplars, contains a row of bacteriological research prefabs, where whitecoats are paid to think the unthinkable. To amuse themselves with ‘worst case’ scenarios.
On a farm, between the M25 and the Pilgrims Way, I take the final photograph that turns out to be something close to what I intended: a mass of tyres holding down a black polythene mound. A long-roofed barn, the kind Samuel Palmer liked to sketch, peeps over the curve of this Michelin dome. Call it: Death of the Motorway. A beach of black rubber necklaces. A negative of the Great White Tent on Bugsby’s Marshes.
Focus, which had been playing up since we left Merstham, gave way entirely: into the Valley of Vision. My spectacles were lost, abandoned, and my camera had a bad case of the Gerhard Richters: Richter pastoral. Snapshots with the shivers. The results, from here on, were truer to the way I felt, the way I really saw the road, than all my previous impersonal loggings. Incompetence meant: insight. Inscapes. The photograph of ‘Renchi on the Pilgrims Way’ is a painterly stew, not an identity card. The abandoned blue shirt, hanging across the white ground of the T-shirt, is a squeeze of Vlaminck.
There is liberation in these soft images. The road sign I recorded, PILGRIMS WAY, is now a long thin shape that defies interpretation; you can’t tell if it’s stone or tin. But the green that surrounds it, busy with black smears, white floaters, has a wondrous ambiguity. I’ve never (on our orbital walk) had the courage to let go in this way, the economics of photography require a visible return. I’m only doing it to keep a record of where we’ve been, the provocative details I’m sure to forget.
There is no detail. Wrecked focal length has pushed me into territory explored and espoused by visionary filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage (friend of the Black Mountain poets). The optics of risk. (‘My first instruction, then: if you happen to have a light meter — give it away,’ Brakhage wrote. ‘We must deal with the light of Nature, then with the Nature of Light. And set your science aside, please, as we’ve no more use for it than what is of it as embodied in the camera in hand.’)
The blurred images, first, simplify the narrative — then worry me towards a deeper, more considered sense of place. What doesn’t matter — script, commentary, hierarchy of significance — vanishes. It seems that the ‘faulty’ camera is now dictating the terms: I didn’t pass it over to anyone met on the road, no such person existed. And yet, here we are, developed print in hand: Renchi and I in the same image. Two figures standing in a gap in the hedge. Distance is realised by bands of colour. The white lines on the road float free — like angelic footsteps. The camera, unprompted, has produced a double portrait.
Notice: a dead hare. Leaping. Flying. A messenger spirit; ears erect, hind legs stretched. With sharp focus, the creature is a roadside casualty, crawling with flies. Roadkill unworthy of the satchel. Now it’s a force of nature.
The rest of our walk is recorded on the same terms: soft shapes, ripe colour, more dream than document.
Our way, respecting the lie of the land, was straightforward: in theory, on the map. A footpath through Chevening Wood, across the north-flowing M25, to Otford. It had been a long day, but the early evening light, the North Downs behind us, churches among woods, brought us close to Samuel Palmer and his nocturnal wanderings.
I was delighted to find, in a letter from Palmer to George Richmond (fellow ‘Ancient’), intimations of the appropriate astigmatic vision. Palmer, met in town, was an eccentric figure: short, enveloped at all seasons in a trailing coat, protected by the broad rim of a Mad Hatter’s topper. His arms and legs were afterthoughts, vestigial appendages on a stubby torso. He felt the cold. He wore long white mufflers, layers of waistcoat. His coat was a tent. Every stroll through London was an expedition: pockets bulging with spare rations (biscuits, pies, cheese), inkwells, pens, sketch pads and libraries of books. Eyebrows lofted in an expression of perpetual surprise — the world too much in his face — he blinked behind a pair of large round spectacles. He was well aware of his own absurdity, he knew that he set young ladies ‘a-giggle’. From Shoreham, on 14 November 1827, he wrote to Richmond:
Tell them that herein is my disadvantage — whereas mine eyes are dim save when I look at a fair lady — and whereas I can only see their lustre thro’ my goggles, those said unlucky goggles so scratch’d and spoil’d that all the fire of the love darting artillery of my eyes is lost upon them and rebounds not to my advantage, the ladies seeing only two huge misty spheres of light scratchd and scribbled over like the sun in a fog or dirty dish in a dark pantry, as lustre lacking, as leaden and as lifeless as a lad without a lady. But tell them sometimes to think on me, as I very often think of them, as in sullen twilight rambles, sweet visions of lovely bright eyes suddenly sparkle round me, lume my dusky path — double the vigour of my pace, rebuild my manhood and renew my youth.
Our sullen twilight ramble ran straight up against the Chevening Estate; private road, path denied. A considerable detour. Arthur Mee in his guide to Kent writes of ‘a beautiful public walk through the park’. A walk that is now off-limits. We strain local hospitality by finding a hosepipe, with which to top up our water bottles, alongside a muck heap in the Home Farm.
‘Kent has no lovelier corner so near to London,’ gushes Mee. ‘It comes at the end of a lane that has no turning.’ This is very true. But turn we must, for a weary half-circuit of the park, dropping close to the motorway — before coming back to the village and St Botolph’s Church.
Chevening was the home of the Stanhopes. The house, Mee guessed, was ‘basically probably Inigo Jones’. Basically probable or not, the version I carried home, a smudge among the trees, would require an Indiana Jones to unravel its secrets: the private chapel, the Tudor and Elizabethan tombs that predated the Stanhopes.
Also buried here was the third earl, Charles Stanhope, politician and experimental scientist, who married William Pitt’s sister. Stanhope, aspiring to oblivion, erasure, asked to be interred at Chevening: as ‘a man of no account’. As a politician, the third earl acquired the nickname of ‘Citizen Stanhope’, by proposing to acknowledge the French Revolution. He found himself in a parliamentary minority of one. A medal was struck with that motto.
Mee glosses Citizen Stanhope’s scientific achievements: ‘He invented means for safe-guarding buildings against fire, took out patents for steam vessels, devised printing appliances which he presented to the public, perfected a process of stereotyping, had original ideas about electricity, shared lightning-conductor experiments with Benjamin Franklin, invented a microscopic lens which bears his name, devised a new way of making cement more durable, and found a way of curing wounds in trees.’