Country diary: A white hart appears from behind the willows

Clopton, Cambridgeshire: Our imaginations are already stimulated by the deserted peasant village; this extraordinary fallow deer completes the pictureA horse-fearing dog led and followed us towards a village that was no longer there. We picked our way over sticky ground along a thin grass strip on the upper slope of a ridge. On either side of us were ploughed chalk and clay fields, from which in baked summer we had collected shards of pottery, turned them over, then dropped them for other dreamers to find.Bare soil became grassland and we stopped, overlooking bumps, humps, mounds and criss-crossing waterless streams. On these sculpted foundations, a sizeable community had lived during the reign of Richard II, whose emblem was a white hart. The hated poll tax of 1377 recorded 104 men making a payment. All four of us heard medieval chatter from below, sniffed woodsmoke in our nostrils, grew a church, a manor house, peasant dwellings, and pictured open fish ponds in the hollows where willows and sallows now grew tall. Continue reading...