Strange City: Thomas Willson and the Primrose Hill Pyramid

Artwork: Laura Haines

By Dan Carney:

In the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, increased migration into London and rising fertility rates caused the city’s population to almost double, from 750,000 in 1760 to 1.4m by 1815. Burial space was at a premium. London’s graveyards, generally centuries old, were already foul smelling and disease-ridden, overpopulated and unfit for purpose. Bodies were buried on top of others, with older corpses sometimes even exhumed, then scattered, in order to make space for fresh ones. By the 1820s, with the widespread implementation of cremation still several decades away, it was clear that the problem had grown too pressing to ignore. A lively public discussion was underway regarding the reformation of interment practices. 

A popular idea was the building of large out-of-town garden-style cemeteries - something first considered over one hundred years earlier by Christopher Wren - but architect Thomas Willson suggested an alternative solution. Inspired by the craze for ancient Egypt that was sweeping Europe, Willson proposed the construction of a vast pyramid mausoleum atop Primrose Hill. With a 40-acre base as large as Russell Square and a height of 1500 feet (four times the height of St. Paul’s), the 94-storey, granite-faced structure would contain 215,219 storage vaults, arranged honeycomb-like along concentric corridors, accessed via ramps and hydraulically powered lifts. There would be capacity for five million bodies, as many as could be interred in a more conventional 1000-acre “horizontal” cemetery. At the summit would be an astronomical observatory.

Willson first exhibited his idea at the Kings Mews exhibition space at Charing Cross in 1828 before publishing the plans in full two years later. He described his pyramid as a “coup d’oeil of sepulchral significance unequalled in this world”. It would “teach the living to die, and the dying to live forever”, and be the centerpiece of an ornamental site, where families coming to pay their respects to loved ones could picnic on the grass outside. It would also offer investors the chance to make a killing - freehold vaults would cost between £100 and £500, depending on size and location, with further income generated by leasing additional vaults to parishes. Willson estimated that, once filled - at a rate of around 40,000 burials annually for 125 years - his structure would bring in a profit of almost £8.2m. He set up the Pyramid General Cemetery Company in order to promote the project to interested parties. 

Reactions to Willson’s ideas were mixed. The London Literary Gazette was unequivocally hostile, writing: “This monstrous piece of folly, the object of which is to have generations rotting in one vast pyramid of death… is perhaps the most ridiculous of the schemes broached in our scheming age.” One prominent figure in the burial reform movement, John Claudius Loudon, was impressed with the capacity but also had reservations. Writing in the Morning Advertiser, Loudon feared the expulsion of foul-smelling gasses – “mephitic exhalations” - and was also perturbed by the idea of bodies being buried away from the earth, in “…any way which prevents the body from speedily returning to its primitive elements, and becoming useful by entering into new combinations – vegetable, mineral, or even animal, in aquatic burial.”

Willson’s plans went as far as being presented to parliament in 1830, but interest ultimately petered out, with planners and architects favouring the idea of garden cemeteries. Willson, however, persisted, resurfacing over two decades later at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace in 1851 with a model of a “Great Victoria Pyramid” mausoleum, earmarked for Woking Common but similar to his previous plan in most other ways. The project received favourable press coverage and another attempt was made to find investors, but interest again waned. Willson’s last sepulchral pyramid-related activity appears to have been in 1853, when he was accused of defrauding a young man called James Sykes, who had offered a £200 inducement loan to anyone offering him employment. Willson hired Sykes in the office of a “British Pyramid National Necropolis Company”, and had received the money, but had fired him several months later with no sign of repayment. Willson died in 1866, but his idea endured, at least in his own family. His son Thomas, also an architect, submitted a plan in 1882 for a pyramidal mausoleum to house the body of the recently assassinated US President James Garfield. Garfield’s widow was, however, unimpressed, and chose another design for her husband’s final resting place.  

Although the likes of Kensal Rise, Highgate, and the City of London demonstrate that the garden cemetery enthusiasts won the argument, Willson’s abandoned plans offer an intriguing insight into an alternate London, one in which his pyramidal sepulchre – taller than The Shard – would be the highest building in the city (and third highest in Europe), one of its most debated and controversial structures. The designer Laura Haines offers a glimpse into this parallel world in her 2016 project Metropolitan Sepulchre, envisaging the vast structure amidst the Blitz, then surviving as a tourist attraction, dominating the modern skyline. 

The Egyptian theme may have been a voguish peculiarity of the era, but with burial space running out in cities all over the world, particularly those high in populations for whom cremation is taboo, the idea of vertical burial structures in London – or its vicinity - may one day resurface. Some boroughs are now completely out of space and are “recycling” existing plots, back to burying fresh bodies on top of old. Vertical burial methods have been used in other cities for a while. The world’s tallest cemetery, the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica in Santos, Brazil, opened in 1983 and hosts around 16,000 burial units over 14 storeys. Current extension plans will see it rise when complete to 32 storeys, with space for 25,000 units. Echoing Willson’s vision of his pyramid as part leisure destination, the building also features a tropical garden, with turtles and a waterfall, as well as a classic car museum. 

In Petah Tikva, Israel, a 22-metre high structure at the Yarkon cemetery offers space for 250,000 bodies, with Judaism’s requirement that bodies be buried in earth cleverly fulfilled by dirt-filled pipes inside the building’s columns, technically connecting each layer to the ground. The six-storey Kouanji Buddhist temple in Tokyo requires mourners to use swipe cards to have their loved ones’ remains delivered to them via a conveyor belt system. Ideas for vertical burial structures have also been seriously discussed in cities as diverse as Mumbai, Paris, Oslo, Mexico City, and Verona. It may be that Thomas Willson’s ideas, usually a strange footnote in articles on unrealized buildings or 19th Century Egyptian Revival architecture, were simply slightly ahead of their time. 

***

Dan Carney is a writer, musician, and lecturer from northeast London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also worked as an academic psychology researcher, and has authored articles on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Maps in Sand

By David Lewis:

My family has passed through any number of forgotten towns and cities, losing languages and leaving our dead in overgrown graveyards.  What connects us to time and place?  Unless attachments are actively preserved, the connections become fainter with each generation.  

My grandfather William Eyton Jones was born in Llangollen, north Wales.  My grandmother Janet was born in Glasgow, but Llangollen became very important to her, and for my mother it was a second home.  When I was a child we visited the town to tidy the family graves and visit my mother’s cousin.  I felt that we belonged and did not belong; we ate ice cream in the sunshine with the other tourists, yet we had graves in the hillside cemetery and family on quiet back streets.  

I returned to Llangollen before lockdown to walk the streets and refresh the memories.  Strengthening these connections between memory, family and landscape is like maintaining maps in sand, retracing the outlines of a story to revitalise it, but what I am really strengthening is how my family feels about this town.  This was a landscape we knew for 160 years – windows, brickwork, chimney pots, the endless roar of the river; things of no importance, the secret elements of our lives unknown even to ourselves.  What stories took place on these streets? In thin sunshine I walked through love stories, family walks, chance encounters, laughter, funerals.  

I stopped at the war memorial.  The granite glinted in the sunshine, awaiting its moment of importance in November.  My grandfather knew and served alongside these Great War dead, the Hugheses, the Griffithses, the Lewises, above all the Joneses.  Family history is an emotional spotlight of memory and narrative that illuminates some people and hides others.  Many of these Joneses would be family who had faded from my story and become important in others.  Perhaps my grandfather joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers on the same day as these Joneses, the lost cousins from the hill farms.  Is it irreverent to think of this war memorial as a monument to unknown family?  Perhaps.  

The steep road to the cemetery was still narrow and quiet, but new houses were creeping up the hillsides, building on what was open farmland and a shaggy, gloomy playing field.  But the little cemetery was still a quiet place of yews and damp grass, wild-flowers and benign neglect, with superb views over the town and the distant hills.  My Llangollen grandparents are buried there.  This was the focus of our visits, the maintenance of their resting place; even today all my Llangollen excursions end at the grave. 

These maps in sand refresh family story and family history, but there is only so far back in time I can travel.  My most valued family connections to Llangollen are two battered 1930s photograph albums; my mother and her older sister at Plas Newydd, an uncle playing with his dog in the sunshine.  Yet one album is unlabelled, marooning the family in a permanent unknown past, their names forgotten.  Some I recognise, most I don’t.  For all the time spent reaffirming old stories, here is a bridge I cannot cross; I cannot travel back any further, and here the past cannot be reached.  

***

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside. He posts urban/rural images on Instagram -davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter -@dlewiswriter

Bitter Meadow – January in Bochum

By Marcel Krueger:

There are many bridges in Bochum. Sadly they never cross any water, but only ever rails, concrete and motorways. 

I've been in the urban sprawl of the Ruhr area since early December. My wife has started a new job here and we've rented a small apartment in the center of the city, planning to divide our time between Ireland and Germany in the coming year. I came here when the last lockdown in Ireland ended, with plans to go back to Ireland in January. But now the renewed lockdowns in both Germany and Ireland have prevented me from returning and spending January in my crooked house from 1875 by the harbour in Dundalk. So for the last weeks I've been strolling around Bochum, which is a completely new place for me. 

As I always do to get a feeling for a place, I sought out destinations that would link me to the past of the city in the 20th century: honorary graves of people who died during the upheavals of the Kapp Putsch and in the Red Army of the Ruhr in 1920, disused railway lines, former coal mines all over town. It is almost impossible to walk around Bochum and not encounter leftovers of this former main industry of the city: overgrown slag heaps, ventilation shafts, metal towers and red-brick buildings of former collieries are everywhere, and even if they  have been dismantled the former pits are still indicated by street names, subway stations and memorial plaques.  

But mainly I tried to revisit tragedies of the past. I really couldn't say why I always tend to do this. There is a certain level of escapism and horror, learning more about the terrifying things that humans had inflicted upon them by other humans as a privileged white European with a certain conviction that I'm safe from these horrors. Yet there is also an aspect of comparison to today, always: of how easy it is for totalitarian and populist regimes to lure people in and make them willing collaborators, a thing that is worth constantly reiterating. And it is also always revealing to see what a city choses to remember and honour officially, and what it chooses to forget; like the swastika on the helmet of a statue on a war memorial that had been erected in the central city park in 1935, only toppled by activists in 1983.

Some of these locations and sites I chose deliberately, upon others I just stumbled by coincidence, like the memorial dedicated to the men from the Hamme suburb who went and died in the wars of 1866 and 1870/71 in side street: Carl Hake from Hamme joined the 2nd company of the 53 infantry regiment, marched off towards the south and died fighting the Austrians in the Battle of Königgrätz on the 3rd of July 1866, far from home.    

On another walk I came upon a small park, one that seemed deserted. Paved trails and gravel paths sneaked around small hills on which thorn bushes and small trees grew, under the arms of massive electricity pylons looming overhead and a forlorn, low-hanging grey sky. I came across what looked like a piece of concrete wall topped with a rusted metal bar, and only as I stood close did I realise that there were words embossed in the metal bar. In German, it read: "A strict regime prevailed in the camp. At night people died in their bunks, then in the morning the living got up and went to work." 

During World War II the Saure Wiese, the Bitter Meadow, was one of 15 forced labour camps of the Bochumer Verein, one of the main steel and arms producers of Bochum and the Ruhr area and one of over 100 labour camps for forced labourers in Bochum and neighbouring Wattenscheid, a suburb today but a town in its own right back then. The people incarcerated here were mostly so-called Ostarbeiter, Eastern Workers, deported from the Ukraine and Russia, who had to work in the ironworks across nearby Essener Strasse, still in existence today as the Thyssenkrupp Steel Europe Bochum plant. In 1943, the camp had 765 Ostarbeiter and 290 "various foreigners" according to the records, who had to live here in subhuman conditions: they worked in 12-hours shifts seven days a week, and daily rations mostly consisted of watery turnip soup and 150 grams of bread. Viktor Schmitko was deported as a 16-year-old and brought to Bochum, where he worked from 1942 to 1945 and talked about his experiences 50 years later:

"We went to sleep and woke up only thinking of food. We went to sleep hungry and got up hungry again. That was hard to bear. I worked in the forge at the hot press with hot metal, that was hard work, on Sundays we also had to work, doing repairs, unloading wagons, that was hard too."

When Allied troops approached Bochum in spring 1945, the camps were dissolved and the surviving workers taken away in death marches and rail transports. The Gestapo shot 20 forced labourers in their headquarters, a confiscated villa at Bergstraße 76, just a few hours before US troops marched in, and buried their bodies in bomb craters in the city park.

Reconciliation with the fate of the Ostarbeiter and the camp at Saure Wiese did not happen immediately. First the remaining barracks were used for people whose houses had been destroyed in bombing raids, or German refugees from the eastern provinces. And then the area was buried under poison. The site had been used as landfill already before the war, but with the increased reconstruction and industrial output of Bochum after 1945 it was again used as a dumping ground for industrial waste. This continued until 1973, when it became clear that heavy metals and cyanides had reached the groundwater and almost completely polluted and killed nearby Ahbach creek.

The site remained a wasteland for the next decades, and only in 2007 was remediation work carried out. 45,000 cubic metres of contaminated soil were replaced, and at the same time the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime approached the city of Bochum and informed them of the history of the site. It was then decided to turn it into a memorial park that commemorates the camp and the fate of the forced labourers, but also invites visitors to actively engage with the fascist history of the area.

In 2012 the park I first discovered was opened: 10,000 plants and trees had been planted and a park of 65,000 square metres created. The ground plan of a barrack is reconstructed by stone blocks and several information boards document the history of the site; dotted around the park are parts of the artwork entitled "Laute Stille", Loud Silence, created by Bochum artist Marcus Kiel: the pieces of concrete and metal I encountered. Quotes from former forced labourers are cut into rusty steel strips, the harsh quotes intentionally contrasting with the quiet landscape.

When I visited it, the site of the former camp seemed eerily misplaced. Even though I found myself in one of the most densely populated areas of Europe, surrounded by millions of people and with one of the largest steel plants of the state just across the road, under the grey winter sky filled with sleet that crackled on the lines between the electricity pylons it felt like a much more remote site, like a former camp of the Moorsoldaten on the heath in Lower Saxony or place of long-lost tragedy somewhere in rural Brandenburg.  

I came to be immediately fascinated by the site, and have returned there a few times now, always discovering new paths, new leftovers of history: half-buried tracks leading nowhere, blackened and cracked concrete foundations in the undergrowth.  Maybe I return here because the setting and the emotions I project the former inmates to have left here correspond to my mood these days, constantly slightly on edge, constantly mistrusting my fellow man. But then I also discovered that the park is never really deserted, and encountered dog walkers, joggers and mothers pushing buggies through the gloom, all keeping their social distance while doing the same thing as I do, exercising outdoors. I wonder what the park looks like in summer: it is surely not shunned by the people from the nearby estates, and even if they bring blankets and beer and sandwiches, and play frisbee on the largest of the hills on a summer weekend it would not be disrespectful but appropriate.    

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

At Grunewald station: Memory and the danger of forgetting

By Paul Scraton

The S-Bahn train stops at a station on the edge of the forest. On one side of the tracks, a trail leads into the woods. On the other side, the leafy streets of one of Berlin’s most well-to-do neighbourhoods. I come here a lot, especially in the summer. I go for walks or a run through the forest. I climb the Drachenberg for views across the city or go swimming in the cool waters of the Teufelsee. Every time I am reminded of what Berlin holds within its boundaries. These places of peace, places where it is possible to find solitude. Places where it is possible to feel a thousand miles from the city, and yet it’s just a short train ride away. What a privilege it is...  

For around 50,000 of Berlin’s Jews, Grunewald station on the edge of the forest was the last place their feet touched the ground of their home city. From here, train after train after train took them away. Took them to the camps, to the very worst places of the human imagination. For a long time, there was no acknowledgement on the ground of this suburban station’s role in the crimes of the Holocaust. No recognition. It was only later, much later, that Platform 17 was turned into what it is today.

Along the platform on each side of the railway track, destinations are listed – Auschwitz, Riga, Theresienstadt – along with the date and the number of Jews who were deported in each transport. On this train, 17 Berliners were taken from their city. On this train, it was 51. On this train; 100. People leave stones on the edge, marking the trains that carried their loved ones away. Flowers rest and candles burn beside a memorial plaque. In this city of memorials, Platform 17 at Grunewald station is quietly one of the most powerful, and one that I feel all Berliners should take the time to visit at least once. 

Now, perhaps, more than ever. It is 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. We continue to remember the crimes of National Socialism, but we are slowly, sadly coming to the point where the last of those who can tell us what they saw and felt in those dark times will no longer be with us. It feels like a dangerous time. There are those that will say we need to draw a line beneath it. There are those that will say that we need to move on. And yet we must remember. Now, more than ever. 

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German President, stands at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘we Germans remember. But sometimes it seems as though we understand the past better than the present.’ He stands there and reminds us that Jewish schoolchildren in Germany have been spat on in the schoolyard. Not then, but now. He reminds us that it was only a thick wooden door that prevented a massacre in a synagogue in Halle. Not then, but now. 

‘That is why,’ he continues, ‘there cannot be an end to remembrance.’ 

At Grunewald station I walk slowly along the platform and read the dates and places, the destinations of those trains that will forever symbolise the very worst of what we have done to each other. Birds sing in the trees. Nie wieder, was the response to the crimes of the Holocaust. Never again. For 75 years the survivors have carried and shared their memories. They have made sure we’ve not allowed ourselves to forget. But the responsibility belongs to all of us. Nie wieder. If that is to mean anything, we must continue to remember. We must confront the past and we must understand the present. We don’t get to draw a line. We cannot allow ourselves to forget.

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place

Motzstrasse

By James Carson:

On a warm autumn night, I ordered a beer at a bar in the Schöneberg district of Berlin. On one of the plasma screens positioned behind the bar, Danny Kaye was duetting with Kermit the Frog. On another, a different coupling was in progress between a half-naked firefighter and a young man with a hunger for a half-naked firefighter. A third screen was advertising forthcoming events: Leather Pride, Halloween, Christmas. Before long, another year would have passed into memory.

In a city freighted with history, Schöneberg carries the weight of the past with a rare delicacy. A few blocks from the bar, the art nouveau U-Bahn station on Wittenbergplatz is a testament to Berlin’s imperial heritage, and to its 19th century transformation from  “a dingy city in a marsh” – as Mark Twain put it – to “ the Chicago of Europe.“

Next to the station, an understated sign displays the names of  Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau and the other prison camps where millions were murdered. Many of them began their hellish journeys at Wittenbergplatz.

Further south, the sandstone city hall of Schöneberg was the location for John F Kennedy’s famous speech, in which – depending on who you believe – the President of the United States may or may not have proclaimed himself to be a jam doughnut.

This well-heeled quarter is an architectural Irish stew. Gründerzeit apartments, sporting preposterously ornate balconies, rub shoulders with plainer post-war facades painted in unexpected flavour combinations of aubergine and custard, beetroot and lime. Modern, glass-fronted hotels share the streets with antique stores, booksellers and sex shops. The famous names attached to Schöneberg are as diverse as the landscape: Helmut Newton, David Bowie, the Brothers Grimm.

It’s in this multifaceted neighbourhood that I found myself on a still, September night. Like many a gay bar from Brisbane to Baltimore, this one had a cross section of clientele: locals and tourists, the handsome and the hopeful, the deluded and the desperate.

A low buzz of conversation – punctuated by the occasional grunt escaping from the darkroom – was overlaid by a soundtrack of Europop. The barman conveyed quiet authority, his burly figure contained by a leather harness that was less of a fashion accessory, more a work of civil engineering.

I was embarking on my second beer when the cops arrived. Two, then four, then half a dozen police officers entered the small bar, and paused to survey the scene. Hello, I thought, it’s somebody's birthday, and I sat back to enjoy the show. I had to hand it to them: they looked the real deal, right down to their off-yellow uniforms and don’t-fuck-with-us expressions.

They fanned out, resting glances on clots of men around the bar. From somewhere, a wolf whistle was followed by a snigger. One of the cops caught my gaze, then released it before heading into the darkroom. The occupants must have thought Christmas had come early.  

Two officers were stationed at the door. One nudged the other and gestured in the direction of the plasma screen, where the firefighter was no longer merely half-naked. The cop’s mate gave a little smirk.

The lights went up, Sophie Ellis-Bextor was cut off in her track and the show began. I looked on as the police did their thing: asking questions, taking names. The years fell away.

During the 1920s, Berlin was a magnet for people in search of the freedom to be themselves. In Motzstrasse, Marlene Dietrich performed at The Eldorado club, where men dressed in lace frocks and called themselves Letty and Countess Marina. A few streets away, Christopher Isherwood chronicled a decade of decadence in the company of Sally Bowles and an assortment of male playmates. Beyond Schöneberg, more than 100 Berlin bars, cafes and clubs welcomed homosexuals, lesbians, transvestites, and any curious souls open to the idea of difference as a way of life.

The new era of tolerance extended to wider society. In print, on the stage and on the cinema screen, gay men and lesbians began to emerge from the shadows. And in medicine, a pioneering physician, Magnus Hirschfeld, attempted a better scientific understanding of homosexuality.

While some regarded Berlin as enlightened, others viewed it as degenerate and perverse. By the beginning of the 1930s more bars were being raided by the police. Names were taken, arrests were made and most bars were closed. A fortunate few, like Christopher Isherwood and Magnus Hirschfeld, escaped the worst. Hirschfeld’s library was an early victim of the Nazi book burning frenzy.

Homosexual men now lived in fear. Affection and affectation became incriminating acts. A gesture or a look could lead to the concentration camp. Once there, inmates were ‘re-educated’, through slave labour, castration and horrific forms of surgical experimentation. Almost two-thirds of the 50,000 homosexual men sent to the prison camps died there.

I approached the barman who was grimly observing the police as they checked ID cards.  “Is it drugs?” I asked, in a low voice. He rewarded me with a look that Berliners hold in special reserve for imbeciles, and nodded towards an ashtray on the bar.

As quickly as they’d arrived, the cops were gone. The soundtrack resumed, accompanied by a chorus of resentment.  

“They made us feel like criminals!” said one aggrieved voice. “Yeah, said another, “You can smoke dick in here, but you get treated like shit for a fucking cigarette!” I’d never answered tobacco’s siren call. It was this that had spared me a brush with the law.

Today, The Eldorado is a supermarket, with a photograph of Marlene Dietrich at the door, and further down the street, the Hirschfeld pharmacy is named in remembrance of an early champion of gay rights. On nearby Nollendorfstrasse, a plaque outside Isherwood’s apartment offers a reminder that these storied streets are where Cabaret was born. And at Nollendorfplatz, a triangle carved in pink marble remembers the homosexual victims of a regime that promised to make Germany great again.

It was business as usual when I returned to the bar the following evening. Except now there was a hand-scrawled note taped to the door:

NO SMOKING – BY ORDER OF THE GOVERNMENT

***
James Carson is a writer from Glasgow. His work has appeared in various magazines, including From Glasgow to Saturn, The Skinny and ExBerliner, and his stories have also been selected for anthologies such as Streets of Berlin, Tip Tap Flat and A Sense of Place.

Beacon Bound, Part V: Equilibrium

Since Spring 2018 we have followed Nicholas Herrmann as he walked the length of The Ridgeway, an ancient road stretching for eighty-seven miles across chalk downland between Overton Hill and Ivinghoe Beacon, in memory of his grandfather. With this final installment, Nicholas’s journey is completed. You can read all five parts of his walk here.

Tiredness threatens to fell me like a storm-damaged tree. It squats in my skull, crawls down my body: tightening tendons, tying muscles into knots. My back is rigid, my legs are locked, and the ankle injury that started in Uffington has spread to the ball of my foot. I feel semi-petrified, almost stone. At the Ridgeway’s eastern extremity, I step from the car stiffly. I might have forgotten to stretch this morning, or I could have a cold coming on, but maybe this is what seventy-three miles feels like – an accumulated tiredness, the journey catching up with me, the way adding weight. It’s the eve of my thirtieth birthday, and I feel old.

I just have to make it another fourteen miles, today only half: Coombe Hill to the hamlet of Hastoe. We arrive to mud and wind, the night’s rain wiping the world of colour. A short walk along a road and across a field takes us to the lip of the scarp, which we traverse like trapeze artists, balancing high above the Aylesbury Vale. Shortly, we reach the Coombe Hill Monument: erected in memory of the men from Buckinghamshire who died during the Second Boer War. The huge column has on top a torch of gilded flame, with four stone orbs positioned on plinths around its base.

It marks the Edge of the World. This is where, on Sundays, my grandparents would bring the children to run off steam when they lived in nearby Chalfont. I can see why they gave this place such a striking title: sitting on one of the highest spurs of the Chilterns, the monument marks a precipice, transforming the hill into a battlement. With my neck craned, I circle the column that has twice been damaged by lightning since it was first erected in 1904. Before pushing on, I look back the way we’ve come, searching the horizon for the scrawl of the Berkshire Downs. Gradually, the sun pushes through the tangled sky to illuminate the landscape, bringing back words from another Ridgeway memorial: Light after darkness. Hope in light.

The path eases us on to Bacombe Hill, the last chalk hill before the Wendover Gap, and down into Wendover. We stroll along the main street past the town’s many pubs, resisting the siren song of red lions and white swans, opting instead for take-away pasties to warm our wind-bitten hands. I scold my mouth on the cheese and onion filling, as ahead of us clouds shroud the hillside, Wendover Woods becoming Fangorn Forest in my mind.

Then, through a small park and past the burgeoning Wendover Memorial Community Orchard, planted for the fifty-nine men from the Parish of Wendover who died in the First World War. The River Misbourne joins us for a way – a charming chalk stream that runs clear and shallow. Once more, the path slopes gently upwards and away from the town, the ground yellowing as we trample the last of autumn into the earth. We’ve walked all the way to winter: the trees are skin and bone now, bark and branch. Old chalk pits riddle the hill like ancient craters from a meteor storm. As we approach the summit, a sudden gust of wind eviscerates the clouds, the sun hurling our shadows into the trees and igniting the forest.

We reach the car as the world grows dim, vapour trails skating across the glacial sky. Back at Coombe Hill, we walk out to the Edge of the World, its torch now dark. On a cold bench we drink the last of our coffee, as the lights down in the Vale – Wendover, Oxford, Aylesbury – shiver into life.

*

The last day starts with a detour. A mile or so from Hastoe is Hardings Wood, a sixteen-acre patch of ancient forest that Richard Mabey bought in the early 1980s, turning it into a community wood project to clear out inappropriate plantings, and free up regeneration. When Mabey’s depression struck, the land was almost lost, saved at the last minute by a local trust set up by two of his friends. It’s a difficult place to find – at first we drive past the coordinates, expecting a sign or stopping place. After consulting the map, we double back to find the entrance hidden beside a narrow country lane. The wood itself is steep and compact, the path barely visible beneath the brambles. It feels untouched, almost forgotten. I’m with my parents and brother for the final day of our journey, the four of us winding our way to the wood’s centre where we unpack our flasks and have coffee in the trees. The bitter steam mingles with the smell of the forest floor: earthy and warm. It’s quiet, the wood sheltering us from the morning’s chill. Above, beech trees bend in the breeze that cannot reach us.

I don’t know if my grandfather ever came here. I never spoke to him about Richard Mabey – I only discovered the writer’s work this year. But something about Mabey reminds me of John; the two seem like kindred spirits – the same generation, the same interests, the same bewildering knowledge. I know my brother bought him The Cabaret of Plants, and he owned a copy of Flora Britannica that he kept on a shelf guarded by dragons. Perhaps John did make the trip here once, or at least imagined he was here, sipping coffee in the leafy quiet beneath a creaking beech as he flicked through Nature Cure or Home Country.

On the Ridgeway, we amble along the tree-lined King Charles Ride – the straight, main path through the woodland of Tring Park. Further on, my mother picks a palmful of rose hips and shows me how to eat them, gently squeezing out the sour orange jam. To me, rose hips aren’t delicacies – they’ll forever be ‘itch bombs’, the stuff my friends and I would put down each other’s backs at school when we weren’t pelting each other with ‘puff balls’, the strange white berries that burst on impact and popped underfoot. I find these beside the path, too: snowberries. My father tells me he used to do the same, weaponising nature in the playground. I picture him tearing around Coombe Hill with a fistful of puff balls, and wonder if John ever did the same. To children, some things are so perfect, they’re obvious. Twenty years ago, the site of rose hips and snowberries would have caused the walk to descend into war, but my brother and I move on, leaving behind the ammunition and continuing into the next field.

We cross over the A41, where from the footbridge I glimpse the Beacon for the first time. My feet feel lighter as we hurry past the train station at Tring – a town famous for a pair of dressed-up fleas at its Natural History Museum, which John loved and took us to see when we were small. We pause on a bench at the foot of a hill to look back at the town. The final outpost before the Beacon.

As we start the last ascent, I feel the familiar swell of fatigue. My family must feel it too – the next couple of miles are covered in silence. We crunch over beech masts and climb through a wood, emerging to turbulence. The end is now in sight. We can feel its pull. Our pace quickens: a race against the dying of the light. Beneath us, a disused quarry floods the landscape with green water. As if to urge us on, a red kite sweeps up the hillside and hovers unsteadily overhead, before pitching and rolling away. Our party continues, floundering along the undulating ridge, the distance between us growing, the Beacon bobbing in and out of site like a life raft.

I wait for my father at the bottom of Ivinghoe Beacon, and together we finish the trail. A trig point and a map are waiting at the top. We trace the path with our fingers, recalling the places we’ve passed through. Then we walk to the edge and look back towards Avebury, finding nothing much in the haze. The wind soars up the slope and swirls around us; in the Vale, the clouds lean on Ivinghoe. The forecast promised rain this weekend, but miraculously not a single drop has fallen.

Before heading back, I whistle across the valley, weee-ooh, ee oo ee oo ee oo, and wait for a reply that doesn’t come.

It’s been twelve months and a cycle of seasons since my grandfather died and we unfolded the map. It’s hard to remember a time before the Ridgeway, and I don’t want to. The path has been a lifeline, a conductor, a tether. It’s allowed me to learn about John, understand the rhythms of his mind. Now I’m faced with the end: in front of me the path stops, cut off by a steep slope, the lights of Leighton Buzzard blocking the way ahead. But when I turn to leave, I realise where I’m standing isn’t the end at all. It’s the beginning of the trail – the old road is unfurling in front of me, eighty-seven miles to the west. It’s all yet to come: the beechwoods and berries, Thames and downs, the castles, chalk and sarsens. On the way back to the car, my father and I start discussing where to walk next, making plans for the new year.

When a star dies, the collapse can create an event of such immense gravitational force, matter is compelled from far and wide, and all light is extinguished. That point in space, once brilliant and warm, turns impossibly dark.

But after the collapse, the remnants might form something new. Drifting through space to gather together, finding each other, beginning to grow. And maybe, if the conditions are right, infalling molecules will gather momentum to create light from nothing; a blinding equilibrium to eradicate the dark.

Light after darkness. Hope in light.

The farewell was beautiful.

About the author:
Nicholas Herrmann is a writer and photographer based in Bath. His work has appeared in journals and online, and his writing has been shortlisted for the Bath Novel Award and Janklow and Nesbit Prize. He is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at Bath Spa University. He is currently working on his first novel. You can find him on Twitter: @NickPSH.