An Ancestral Attachment

I've been travelling this back road in the Cotswold Hills between Cirencester and Winchcombe for over thirty years and it never fails to inspire me.

The first part of my journey is on an old Roman road called the White Way. It was part of a network that radiated from the town of Corinium, then the second largest city in Britain, now, named Cirencester, a small market town of about 19,000 inhabitants. I follow this route until it dives down through Chedworth Woods and then swoops up and over a ridge to the tiny village of Compton Abdale. Climbing again I reach the lonely uplands where the road is superimposed onto tracks that that were ancient even in the Roman period. Up here, on the salt ways and the drove roads, people whose genes I carry have been active for thousands of years.

I could not be ensnared by a religious devotion but I am held in thrall by these hills. I suppose it's because of the ancestral connections. I've traced my family back for 500 years or more in the villages and hamlets sheltering in the remote valleys, places like Chedworth, Compton Abdale, Hailes, and Rendcombe. I've visited their churches to try and get a feeling of what they felt, the ambience that they experienced as they went through their rites-of-passage. I've stood in front of baptismal fonts and altars that date back a thousand years or more, that were old even before my family stood before them, chanting their arcane rituals. I have walked over their memorial stones, that pave the naves and chancels of these churches.

Walking, cycling or even driving the lanes, tracks and pathways of the Cotswolds, I am connected to the present and anchored to the past. Not everyone can have that certainty. I am fortunate. I need no more.