IN 1944—in fact, on D-Day—Madeleine Bunting’s father, then just 16 years old, stumbled on a small green patch, with a ruined farmhouse, in the Hambleton hills on the edge of the North York Moors. Here, over subsequent years, he built a chapel, decorating it with his own muscular sculptures of Noah, the Virgin and an Unknown Soldier. This place, “the Plot”, became a site of family pilgrimages and picnics, tense, happy and haunted all at once. While his marriage disintegrated, John Bunting’s love for the Plot endured. His daughter has written the story of this tiny patch of land as a way of understanding the father she never really knew.
The Plot—like most acres in well-trampled England—has had a busy history. Stone-age man left arrowheads there; bronze-age man built barrows. William the Conqueror got lost on the moors nearby. Herds of cattle came down the drovers’ road that crosses it. White-robed Cistercian monks from Byland Abbey tilled the soil, and Scottish forces in 1322 defeated the English army.
More recent invaders have included grouse-shooters, tourists and that bane of Britain’s wild places, the Sitka spruce, marching in regular plantations. The countryside around it has shrunk, and now the farmers are leaving. The Plot remains as Ms Bunting’s father intended it, a sanctuary from the chaos and rottenness of the world, tenderly filled with handcrafted monuments in the style of the vanished monks.
As a way of analysing a difficult relationship, this book is a wonderful device. Though she is focusing on the landscape, not the man, Ms Bunting gets very deep. She comes to understand her father’s grim embrace of beauty and continuity, and his guilt at being left alive after others died during the war. “The Plot” could be shorter: much of the social commentary gets humdrum after a while. But as it stands it also provides a contemplative, wistful and sometimes disturbing view of England.
The Plot—like most acres in well-trampled England—has had a busy history. Stone-age man left arrowheads there; bronze-age man built barrows. William the Conqueror got lost on the moors nearby. Herds of cattle came down the drovers’ road that crosses it. White-robed Cistercian monks from Byland Abbey tilled the soil, and Scottish forces in 1322 defeated the English army.
More recent invaders have included grouse-shooters, tourists and that bane of Britain’s wild places, the Sitka spruce, marching in regular plantations. The countryside around it has shrunk, and now the farmers are leaving. The Plot remains as Ms Bunting’s father intended it, a sanctuary from the chaos and rottenness of the world, tenderly filled with handcrafted monuments in the style of the vanished monks.
As a way of analysing a difficult relationship, this book is a wonderful device. Though she is focusing on the landscape, not the man, Ms Bunting gets very deep. She comes to understand her father’s grim embrace of beauty and continuity, and his guilt at being left alive after others died during the war. “The Plot” could be shorter: much of the social commentary gets humdrum after a while. But as it stands it also provides a contemplative, wistful and sometimes disturbing view of England.