Hollow ways and hidden ways

A generous Blipfriend recently sent me a copy of a slim volume called Holloway by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards. It's a tribute to the writer/environmentalist/naturalist Roger Deakin who died, much too early, in 2006.

Hollow ways are ancient paths, tracks and lanes that wind through the countryside and over the centuries have become so worn down by footsteps, running water and erosion that they sink into the landscape, concealed to all save those who know them. Macfarlane first explored these shadowy ways with Deakin in Dorset and this book is an account of a return visit with two companions.

Mostly these sunken routes are found in areas where soft sandstone or chalk wears away readily so that with the passage of time it's possible to travel below the surface of the land: useful for anyone who might want to move about covertly - poachers, smugglers, lovers, recusants, outlaws. Here in west Wales the hard bedrock does not yield so easily to erosion. But there are similar hidden ways, secret ways, where high banks and thick hedges create shadowy tunnels like this one I found myself entering today. It's part of a network of rat runs between the two communities of Fishguard and Goodwick: Cwm Brandy/Brandy Valley, a tangled, marshy corridor through which contraband was once sneaked from the beach to the turnpike road above, under the noses of the excise men.

Deakin and MacFarlane were inspired to explore the hollow ways in part by the classic spy thriller Rogue Male wrtitten by Geoffrey Household just before WW2. The plot concerns a man who sets out to stalk and kill an unnamed (but thinly disguised) European dictator; caught and tortured he escapes back to England but is pursued by secret agents determined to capture or kill him. Keeping to the sunken lanes of Dorset he goes to ground like a hunted quarry and holes up in a badger's sett. Now, the strange thing is that this story is very vivid to me although I was a young teenager when first I read it. I have my father's copy still (the original 1939 edition, marked 7s/6d: no dust jacket, slightly foxed). Dipping into it I was surprised that while I remembered many of the details I had forgotten that the protagonist is kept company in his hiding place by a feral cat to whom he gives the name Asmodeus. I'm happy that the gift of Holloway has reacquainted me that fact.