Where the Chalk Came From, from A Norfolk Songline

There is another story (no less extraordinary) that tells of a time, many, many, many years ago, when great lizards lorded it over the world. A time when our closest relatives were little tree-dwelling lemurs, part monkey and part mouse.

A time when this land that we inhabit was beneath an ocean. For seventy million years the ground we tread was at the bottom of the blue sea. For seventy million years microscopic sea creatures worked on the calcium carried down to the sea by ancient forgotten rivers - and produced chalk.

It took thirty thousand years for one foot of chalk to form.

Infinitely slowly the chalk was made, and the silicon from the sponges of that ancient sea-bed compacted into hard nuggets of flint. For seventy million years the chalk formed, and then, for another seventy million years continents shifted and re-aligned themselves.

The great lizards’ lordship came to an end. Species appeared and disappeared. Slowly the world began to take on the shape that we know today. And over those one hundred and forty million years, so the story goes, our tiny lemur-ancestors evolved into human beings.

And then, about half a million years ago, the ice came.

For nearly five hundred thousand years the came and went and came and went. Huge plates of it, hundreds of yards thick, accumulated above this land.

The seas grew shallow and the ground was smoothened and burdened by relentless grinding acres of ice.

And when, at last, the ice melted and moved down to the sea it left the gently curving hips and shoulders, the groins and long ribbed backs, the stretched anatomy of the land we know today. The streams of molten ice deposited beds of gravel. The shrinking glaciers covered the bare white body of the land with sheets of soil, blankets of boulder clay, counterpanes of thick tilth.

The sleeping, wounded giant of the land, the great grandfather of all the grandfathers, the great grandmother of all the grandmothers, asleep beneath its bed-clothes, was ready for a new dream. It had glimpsed them before, now they were coming again. The two-legged ones, the people were on their way.

They came from south to north, following the retreating ice. Treading what is now sea-bed they journeyed on foot across the bleak fens of the north-sea-land. They came with spears and arrows tipped with shards of flint and carved antler; a scattering of people across the broad back of Ymir, a handful of clans spreading out across the pale shanks of Albion, a new unfolding in the dream of the land.

They followed the herds of deer and horses along the treeless higher land where the chalk ridges rose above the deeper clay. They followed the migrating herds along the chalky hills, the ridged spine of the sleeping land. And as they hunted they pressed a tangle of patterns into the land with their feet… trackways. One of those tangled trackways followed the life of the land from (what is now) Avebury to Ivinghoe Beacon to Royston Heath, it forded the river Thet then followed the edges of the higher ground to Hunstanton and Holme, weaving the first traces of human activity onto the landscape.

That line of memory, that first furrow in the skin of the land, is called the Icknield Way. The easternmost strand of the last reach of that ancient way, stretching from Blackwater Carr to Sea-Gate, has come to be called the Peddars Way, and that’s where my journey begins.

From Cockyhoop Cottage to Anmer Minque,

From Fring Cross to Neats Ling,

From Geddings Farm to Sea Gate,

The rise and fall of the waiting land.

Where frost and flint

meet crop and crumb,

from Blackwater Carr to Broom Covert,

from Bridgham Paddock to Toppers Grove.

Where clay and clunch

meet sap and skin,

from Sparrow Hill to Threxton Hill,

from Caudle Springs to Petygard Hall.

When wild and tilth

meet spore and sperm,

from Fring Cross to Neats Ling,

from Geddings Farm to Sea Gate.

Where sun and salt

meet blood and barley,

in the rise and fall of the sleeping land,

in the rise and fall of the dreaming land.

Where marl and mere

meet pluck and pity

there the stories are,

spoken and spelled,

pressed and patterned,

scratched and scarred

into the chalk skin of the land,

into the white hide of the waiting land.