Clungunford and Clunbury, Clunton and Clun

 © Stephen Bigger 1st October 2012

Clungunford and Clunbury, Clunton and Clun

Are the quietest places under the sun (Neglected Mountain, p.99)

 Stephen Bigger

Ida Gandy (1885-1977) is well-known in Wiltshire for gentle country books, most written in old age. A doctor’s wife, they bought a new practice in Clunbury, Shropshire from 1930 having fallen in love with the area during a holiday. She wrote her memoir of these years when she was 80, entitled An Idler on the Shropshire Borders. Clunbury is in the wedge between Clun, Craven Arms and Bishops Castle, skirting the south end of the Long Mynd and not far from Cwm Head and Prior’s Halt/Witchend. The area particularly features in The Secret of Grey Walls (where Jon and Penny arrive in Craven Arms and whilst some cycle to Clun, the others take the bus); and in The Neglected Mountain (where we meet Trudie Whittington, the Bishop Castle vet’s daughter who is to become Charles Sterling’s wife).

Ida Gandy’s book about life in and around Clunbury in the 1930s gives a delightful view of this section of Shropshire, telling how she tramped around with her young children, exploring, picnicking, and meeting locals. At much the same time, the Savilles visited the same area, so Ida Gandy’s book provides much local colour and atmosphere. The ‘idler’ of the title refers to the fact that everyone was busy with their tasks, and were surprised that she had the time to wander about with her two sons and daughter. This is how she described the local men at a farm auction: “Many of the men were of racy type, with faces which, if not handsome, were strongly individual, shrewd or humorous. Many wore faded velveteen jackets and brightly coloured scarves around their necks.” (pp.15f). The family got their milk from Chapel Farm, much as Witchend was serviced by its local farm. Being in the WI, Mrs Gandy went around meeting people, much as Mrs Morton was hospitable to the likes of Jasper Sterling and even the spy Mrs Thurston.

One local story has resemblances to The Secret of Gray Walls. A gang of poachers and sheep rustlers lived nearby around 1850. One in the house signalled the all clear by hanging a sheet out of the window. “At other times the gang would be off over the hills after sheep. They were such a wild, crafty lot that they never got caught. But things grew too hot for them at last, and they disappeared.” (p.28). The sheep were “true natives” – black-faced Clun Valley breed. But there were also white faced ‘Kerries’ (from the village of Kerry near Newtown) in abundance, and it was not unknown for the unwary to find that the black face on the sheep they had bought at auction washed off in the rain.

Another local story featured a young man who “sick to death of life on a tyrannical father’s farm, resolves to seek work in the town.” (p.41). Although mother and sister pleaded with him to stay, there was a fierce row during which the father threw the lad out into the pouring rain, telling him to go to the devil. The lad drowned as a footbridge over the river was swept away. There is a clear resemblance to the plot of Seven White Gates! Mrs Gandy was keen on amateur dramatics, as Saville also was, and wrote and produced a play about the story. She submitted it to BBC Midlands and it was accepted (with some modifications) as a radio play. The ‘young man’ was played by a porter at the local railway station. A follow-up national broadcast was made about life in a Shropshire village, reviewed excellently in the Manchester Guardian, and a piece for Children’s Hour about witchcraft in Shropshire (the devil’s chair, phantom hounds of Wild Edrick and similar). Perhaps Malcolm Saville heard some of these; certainly he talked with the same local people who, like Jenny, took these stories seriously. Like Jasper Sterling loving reading books in his lonely cottage and knowing them off by heart, Mrs Gandy describes another local who bought a shilling’s worth of second hand books and read and re-read them: she brought him new books when she visited.

A local train ran from Craven Arms to Llangunlo (and thereafter to Builth and beyond to mid Wales) via Knighton. She tells a story of this line of the day they went to Llangunlo but for the return journey she arrived with her children just as the train was leaving the station. During the two hour wait for the next, she describes how she chatted with the station staff, who received messages about which station the train had just left.

She liked to visit the river Onny, especially near Horderley (a short distance from Prior’s Holt/Witchend) and describes the little Bishop’s Castle railway at the Horderley crossing gates. Her daughter Jill was running on ahead: “But I soon realised there was no cause for anxiety. The funny little train came puffing gently along as though it had eternity before it, and in front of it ran six hens. That was the dearest little railway I ever met, and it passed through a rare bit of country, the Onny on one side and the Long Mynd rising, fold on fold, above it” (p.122). When clean, the engines could be seen to be painted green: it would be either Carlisle, with tender, or No. 1, a tank engine. The railway appears on the map in Wings Over Witchend and in the Foreword, Saville says: “If you are clever, you will be able to find traces of an old railway track which once linked Craven Arms to Bishop’s Castle”. In the story, the twins find the station’s derelict booking buildings full of stolen Christmas trees: “When they were nearer they saw that where the rails had once been laid in a single track was now a grassy lane, and here again the snow had been churned into mud by the wheels of cars. The old platform had nearly crumbled away. The windows of the tiny waiting room and booking office had been without glass for years, and as they stepped across the threshold they realized that they had fitted together another part of the puzzle. The old booking office was packed from floor to ceiling with Christmas trees” (p.187). Unfortunately, they were then kidnapped, and Mackie the dog shot at. Most of Saville’s villains hate dogs. Today the old station is a private house. On a separate visit to the Onny, after seeing kingfishers fishing, she says: “Above me the Long Mynd was again multi-colourerd. From a little grey home, guarded by two Scots firs, on the hillside, a woman came out and stood there with the low sunlight making a halo around her head” (p.124). The ‘lone pine’ two miles away clearly had some company. Nearby she watched cloggers making their clogs.  Incidentally, the stream that flows through Marshbrook (Onnybrook of Mystery at Witchend) is a tributary of the Onny.

On another occasion they went to the old lead-mines (the boys found an old mining truck and had great games riding down on it) and the Stiperstones, the Nipstone and the Devil’s Chair. There were many red squirrels and foxes, she revealed. They parked in The Bog, about which she had little pleasant to say; and by the time they got back to the car, the damp mist had settled over the Stiperstones.

Another Saville link is mentioned beyond Clun, which Mrs Gandy visited on a car trip (p.57). She had read The Lady of Bleeding Heart Yard which told her of Lady Frances Coke who at the age of 15 was forced by her stepfather Sir Edward Coke to marry Sir John Villiers, brother to the Duke of Buckingham. She was imprisoned, beaten, and given savage penance. Her children were declared illegitimate, and her husband went mad. Nevertheless she managed to get away and live in the Hall of the Forest, beyond  Newcastle village on the Welsh borders near Clun with her true love Sir Robert Howard. A brass to Sir Robert Howard is in Clun church. This story, and many other details, are found in Arthur Mee’s Shropshire (1939), written too late to guide the author at the time, but certainly a nudge to her memories. Elements of this Villiers/Buckingham connection are seen in Palace for the Buckinghams, but the use of the name Buckingham possibly shows an early knowledge of this story, and that the last Buckingham book was planned when the first was written and the name Buckingham first introduced (unless the Villiers connection was a happy accident).

The Neglected Mountain contains scenes in Bishop’s Castle Fair in the Summer Holidays. This is brought to life by Mrs Gandy, who calls them the “May Fairs”:

“Numerous gypsies camped in the small bye-lanes round the Forest when the season of the May Fairs began. Bishop’s Castle, Ludlow, Craven Arms, Knighton and Clun each had its Fair in succession. People from all the villages from miles around flocked in to ride on the roundabouts, have their fortunes told, see the Fat Lady, buy gingerbread and the clever toys that the gypsies made… One May evening, Jill [her daughter] and I lost our way in a tangle of small lanes up behind Clun, and found them alive with gypsies. They were picnicking on the grassy borders or wandering along with their dogs. The children, with heads of wild, black hair, kept stealing from holes in the hedges, to look at us. Horses and ponies, many of them piebald, strayed all over the place. The women threw at us those compelling, yet at the same time resistible, glances in which they excel… (pp.97-8)

I am sure that adventure is not too far away. Prejudice against Romany ‘gypsies’ was even then strong, so tales of friendships across the divide contained particularly important messages for child readers. Ida Gandy’s remembered account of life in the 1930s brings home the world that the Saville family encountered when they made their first visit, when horses and carts outnumbered cars, when water was taken by bucket from wells and streams, and people not only wore but made clogs and other family essentials. Mrs Gandy was also observant of birds, and like Malcolm Saville her favourite was the goldfinch. She describes watching a flock of herons, in a heronry of at least 28 nests, near the old iron-age enclosure Bury Ditches, which reminds us of Bury Fields, Alan Denton’s farm.  “The young birds made themselves known by a sharp, metallic clucking, first from one nest, then from another. Sometimes a mother gave an admonishing cry as though to order silence, an order that always seemed to be obeyed” (p.142). The one bird she does not mention, unfortunately, is the peewit, but if they had been common, a peewit call would not have been of much use as a club signal.

end