What happens in an old farmhouse when the farmers have left?
Perhaps only a poet-historian-storyteller can say. These
traditional work centres were established centuries ago, sometimes
in the village street, often far away in their own fields. But the
pattern of the toil was the same. This quietly vanished a few years
ago. Ronald Blythe describes the going of it in his celebrated
Akenfield. Some years before this his friend John Nash had rescued
an already abandoned farmhouse in the Stour Valley from total
dereliction. It was called Bottengoms. Nobody knows why. John Nash
called himself an Artist-Plantsman. Behind both artist and writer
there existed many generations of farmers and shepherds. Old houses
will always have their say. For Ronald Blythe at Bottengoms Farm it
was in the form of a meditation on past and present. He found that
the ancient place asked more questions than it gave answers, and
was challenging, and was energetic rather than spent. It must have
been part of a prehistoric settlement in a stony valley and also a
farm seen by the young John Constable, whose uncles ground its
corn. For they were Bottengoms neighbours, and were known to the
artist as the Wormingford folk. Ronald Blythe himself knows what
the old farm is talking about. Its great days and routine days, its
seasonal labour and play, its faith and despair. Its land was both
poor and rich in snatches, flint fields and mossy pastures, vast
trees and weeds and high skies. Once Queen Elizabeth arrived to
hunt below where the Stone Age people lay in their circular graves.
Inside Bottengoms there are telling handprints and footprints
everywhere, and this is their tale. It is a tale told by a true
countryman who has looked and listened all his life. And mostly in
his native place.
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