In Palmer’s day, as he points out in a letter to John Linnell, it was ‘very nearly as cheap’ to buy produce in Shoreham as in Borough Market, Southwark. Under the arches, by Southwark Cathedral, hops could be ‘got retail at less price than you would have paid for in its own garden’. Villages within a forty-mile circuit of London found themselves buying their own goods back — at a premium. The retail logic of Bluewater was already in place.
The Shoreham produce on which Palmer and his mates glutted themselves was only there because the local farmers supplied the London markets. The Ancients picnicked on loss-leaders, damaged goods; windfall that wasn’t required in the city. Tastes that were too unsophisticated for metropolitans.
In September 1999, at Palmer’s favourite season, no breakfast was to be had in the village. So the postman informed us. No call for it. We must go out onto the road, the A225, to a coffee stall.
Huge sunflowers sway against the red brick of the church wall, BLESSED ARE THE DEAD. So it says on the lych gate (where the bier was set down, during burial services, to await the coming of the clergyman). Marc Atkins stoops to photograph a sundial. A yew walk leads the eye towards low hills.
We straggle out of town. And there, in a lay-by on the busy Shoreham Road, is Daisy’s van: dispenser of monster burgers to the carriage trade. A forlorn cyclist in yellow helmet, rain top and tights is the only other customer. Daisy’s cuisine is criminal, the double cheeseburger is obscenely good value. It oozes yolk and tomato sauce and melted goo. Even Marc’s veggie burger looks a shovel of squashed hedgehog. His side order of retried potatoes, a coronary indulgence, spills from the plate. Rain drips into our blue-glaze coffee mugs. We settle ourselves around several white plastic tables, munching and monologuing, and trying to make ourselves heard above the traffic, the downpour; the commuter trains squealing into Shoreham station.
Nothing much on Palmer remains in print; the connection with Shoreham is kept alive by the tourist industry, by an extension of the blue plaque thesis. Addresses are of interest if a literary or social association can be claimed. The story must be grounded. The Valley Thick with Corn is franchised as a Shoreham illustration, even though its location is generic — and it dates from the period immediately before Palmer moved out of London.
The specific was always troublesome. In 1849, long after he left Shoreham, Palmer wrote: ‘If I am spared to go again into the country I hope to begin a new plan — not sitting down to local matter, but walking and watching.’ Walking and watching defined his art. Fretful movement to discover a landscape window, a boudoir of the picturesque — to be prettied up, peeked at through scratched spectacles.
As a sickly, hypochondriac old man exiled to Redhill, Palmer was ordered by his medical adviser to take some exercise. He had managed no more, in months, than an arthritic shuffle around the garden, kicking at weeds. Beyond the limits of his property, two walks were possible: ‘he dreaded the ordeal of either route’. The view had been ruined, he spluttered in traditional suburbanite fashion, by developers. Wrapped in an enveloping Inverness cloak, a copy of Virgil’s Bucolics in his pocket, he dragged himself to a certain five-barred gate.
‘Having touched the gate-post,’ as his son Herbert reports, ‘he returned scowling with anger and disgust much as a member of a chain gang goes back after exercise to prison.’
The business of the gate is pertinent. Gates are handy as destinations, somewhere to lean, a framing device: they promote a view. Weekenders walk to gates. Remember the sequence in Joseph Losey’s Accident? (Screenplay by Harold Pinter from a novel by Nicholas Mosley.) The unstructured Sunday afternoon (tennis, overlapping meals, booze, boredom): a short country stroll to work up a thirst, a five-barred gate. A few ominously inconsequential remarks: flies, nettles, corrugated earth.
When the M25 circuit had been completed, and much of the first draft written, Renchi and I returned to Kent to find a five-barred gate. Palmer’s Valley of Vision, stretching from Dulwich to Shoreham, didn’t finish there: it went on with the Darent to Otford, and beyond. A day’s walk to the south: to Underriver. The Golden Valley: the ‘heat of the soul’s infabulous alchymy’. Palmer’s nocturnal ramblings took him into the hills above Sevenoaks, where he watched the sun rise over ‘the flower of Kentish scenery’.
After marriage and the Italian tour, Palmer settled in London — but made regular excursions to Cornwall and Wales, in search of exploitable scenery. From Tintern Abbey he wrote to George Richmond, begging him to ‘come hither’. The sublime in its tamest form appealed to Palmer. He had no taste for the cosmic agitation of Turner. ‘After my pastoral has had a month’s stretching into epic I feel here a most grateful relaxation and am become once more a pure quaint crinkle-crankle goth,’ he gushed.
The quaint and the crinkle-crankle are what he found at Underriver. He lodged at Underriver House — now a private property, unhandsome but very sure of itself. Palmer and Linnell produced reams of five-barred gates, views from an eminence on Rook’s Hilclass="underline" Linnell’s ‘Underriver’, Palmer’s The Golden Valley, or Harvesting with Distant Prospect. We set out to find this spot. Renchi had his sketchbook, his coloured pens.
The morning was misty: we saw nothing beyond the hawsers as we crossed the Dartford Bridge. At Underriver, the mist lifted. We parked in a pub and set off through the usual empty lanes. The Palmer franchise was everywhere in evidence: unpicked fruit, blackberries in the hedges, orchards, cobwebs on gates. Round the back of Underriver House, at the end of a gravel drive, we spotted something that might have inspired Palmer’s pen and ink drawing of 1829, Ancient Barn. Except that the barn had enjoyed a tasteful and imaginative makeover (along with every other Kentish oast house): it was now, certainly, a property — with studio windows, bright wood, a managed garden.
A man we met in the lane — affable, alert, in trainers and jogging gear, walking a lean dog (with a pedigree that shamed us) — confirmed the barn’s provenance. He was the owner. It was murder, he said, for an hour every morning (ten minutes from the motorway), then peace returned. The Golden Valley was regilded. It seemed an enviable way of life: morning walk, restored barn. If you had the equity.
Past Absaloms, another heritage farm, we climbed Rooks Hill. Remembering the Palmer catalogue — Near Underriver (c. 1843) and View from Rooks Hill (1843) — we felt sure we were on the right track for our five-barred gate (now replaced by a stile). Yes, this was it. The same gap in the trees. The Golden Valley revealed, pretty much as the painters had it. Palmer’s red-roof barn is now a corrugated shed. His melancholy cattle are pigs in hooped shelters; industrial swine, pre-bacon lollers in shit. A few goats. From the corrugated shed, a screeching of guinea fowl (who have just had their fortunes told) puts the necessary tremble into the landscape.
As Renchi sketches, the mist clears. A reference book — Underriver (Samuel Palmer’s Golden Valley) by Griselda Barton and Michael Tong — is open on his lap; the double page of Linnell and Palmer spread out for comparison. A line of poplars interrupts the prospect. Gentle hills to the south, the rim of the Weald. Palmer doesn’t do smell or sound (as Breughel does), he’s interested in grading light; achieving float, solipsism. A landscape voyeur. A peeper through curtains of foliage. He prospects, he acts as a pimp for estate agents and developers. This place is magic: buy it.