A Week with Ratty, Mole, and Mr. Toad; Or, My Week at The Island of Misfit Farm Toys

I finally left London (four weeks ago, mind you, but I seem to be very behind on this blog) and had to spend a week in the Market town turned City of Reading in Berkshire at The Museum of English Rural Life.

My Airbnb host asked me how I found Reading.  And I answered, simply, "unremarkable." And she said: "That's a really good way of putting it."

I decided not to actually stay in Reading, but rather in a small village to the west called Pangbourne, which, unlike Reading, was very remarkable.  It really did look like something straight out of Wind in the Willows. I probably could have saved about thirty dollars in train fare had I stayed in Reading proper, but it was well worth it for the satisfaction of walking down tree-lined footpaths everyday as part of my commute.

The public footpath from the center of the village to the little street where I lived for a week.
It was, of course, lovely, but not so lovely the one night I got in after dark and had to make my
way via the tiny light on my Kindle.  Whistling in the Dark, anyone?

The house where I was staying had a footpath leading out into a bunch of fields and copses (coppices?) by the River Pang.  It made for a great evening walk after sitting in the archives all day. Almost anywhere you are in the British countryside, there are hundreds of these public footpaths. It isn't that they are government maintained like a lot of trails in state and national parks in America.  Most (even in the so-called National Parks) are on private land. They are maintained primarily, it seems, by feet over hundreds, if not thousands of years.  A lot of these footpaths have been used by walkers and riders since before Europeans even discovered America, so while the landowners may have changed again and again, the public is given Right of Way over the land, and as long as they don't harass anyone (or anything, especially woodland or cattle), anyone can pass through it.  

But for an American, with an early education (via "Trespassers Will Be Shot" signs, and the whole Fences Make Good Neighbors mentality there) in the sacro-sanctity of private property, I always feel a) wrong and b) vulnerable when going through a gate like this:    

In my head, I know that these fences are not built to keep me out, but to keep the sheep/cows/horses in, I'm still a little afraid of being yelled at, or finding myself with an assfull of bird shot.  

A lot of these pathways were once used non-recreationally.  They were just pathways between farms and amenities.  It isn't uncommon at all to come across ruins of old farmhouses or mills or schoolhouses or inns.

an old Inn

A bridge over the River Pang (which at this point in its progression was unspectacular and more like a stagnant pond than a river).

 Once I got away from the fields, the paths began to get quite brambly. Nettles everywhere, and I hate nettles.  I was wearing a pair of black yoga pants that offered almost no protection to my calves.  While I was getting stung by the nettles through my clothes, I passed a lady runner with bare little legs running through thigh-high nettles without flinching.  I, on the other hand, decided to turn back.

 On the way back, I passed by a weedy, but obviously still-in-use field of allotments. Everyone thinks that allotments were a product of WWI and WWII, but they aren't. While many new allotments were created during the wars, especially in and around urban centers, allotments in Britain were created in consequence of the switch from traditional peasant agricultural economy within feudal systems to capitalist agrarian economy.  I won't go into exhaustive detail (this is part of what I work on so I could go real nerdy on you), but the end result was that many peasant farmers who used to have gardens on their small farms (separate from the crops they grew for market or as payment to the Lord of the Manor) were pushed off the land and instead became agricultural wage laborers working for a master. Many of them might live in tenements in the village with no land at their disposal to grow things like potatoes, root vegetables, greens, that would supplement the bread and grain they bought with their wages. So the allotment (along with the preservation of grazing commons) was a way that parishes tried to give poor day laborers access to these dietary supplements. So allotments start popping up in the 17th and 18th centuries when this transformation began.  Allotment sites like this one are almost certainly relics of the 18th century and not WWII, unlike the huge highway-side allotment fields outside of London.

It's not terribly common for people to keep animals on small allotments like these, but, according to my host, most rural councils were now allowing chicken coops on allotments.  Though, despite higher fencing, you have to be prepared to lose some hens to the foxes.  

As for the University of Reading: well, it is pretty unremarkable as well.  Contrary to popular belief, Oxford and Cambridge are not the only good universities in England.  They are, however, the oldest and prettiest, though not all the individual colleges, as my fellow 2009 NEH Fellows (couldn't avoid that) will attest, are architecturally inspiring.  Churchill College, where we were housed that summer, looks like something out of the Eastern Bloc.  I was kind of thinking that The University of Reading would still have a Victorian/Neo-Gothic charm like Durham University or The University of Manchester, but The University of Reading (which it turns out is one of the "second wave civic universities") looks more like Tri-County Tech.  In fact, this little brick walkway was the prettiest thing I saw on the whole campus:  

Aesthetics of the university aside, The Museum of Rural English Life, was a neat little place with a very friendly archive staff. The museum is housed in a large late Victorian brick house, built for a local merchant in 1880, and converted into a Ladies' Hall of Residence for the University in the 1930s.  Now the Ladies reside in co-ed dorms built in the 1980s, and the Museum bought the place about 10 years ago.  It is what you would expect for a house built in that era: big windows, ugly tiling, creaky staircases, and dark wood paneling.  

For some reason, I can just see the four-horse carriage pulling up to the door.

The MERL even had a nice little (visitors room), something that nobody else has, for researchers to eat lunch, drink not-half-bad cooler water, and collect local attraction pamphlets.

My lunchtime view on the one day that it was not raining.  

My set-up in the reading room. I spend a long time every day just staring longingly at my computer at my Eblum. 

 I actually didn't go through the actual museum part of the MERL until my last day. It had a certain charm, I'll give it that, and I certainly spent much more time going through it than their average visitors (bored 8-year-olds on a school trip and groups of retirees who mainly just want to find the cafe), but it was pretty chaoric, curatorially speaking.  It's pretty much the Island of Misfit Toys, except with implements of husbandry.  Most items didn't have obvious labels (and the ones that did were labeled thus:)

And there was no chronological rhyme or reason as you walked through. You'd have a primitive tractor from 1904 beside an iron plough from 1740.  Function could sometimes be discerned:

And sometimes could not be....

I have some academic interest in ploughs (is this how Americans spell it? I'm having some linguistic forgetfulness), but this glorious wall of them is a) suspended on 2nd and 3rd story levels b) are not labeled in any way, and c) don't seem to be terribly well bolted down.

Some sort of early wood-powered threshing machine (seems a bad idea to be burning wood in a wooden structure that handles mostly straw).

A station where you could try on steel-toed farm boots, straw hats, and linen smocks if you were a child and unafraid of headlice. 

 At some point, they must have ran out of money, energy, and space, so the back of the warehouse just looks like this:

Here's a better view of the wall of ploughs, with some sort of post-modern centerpiece depicting the industrialization of agriculture.

But the chaos of the MERL did not prevent my heart leaping for joy at this wall of about a hundred different kinds of butter paddles.  I don't really even know what one does with a butter paddle, but something about seeing them lined up for the sake of posterity made me very happy.  

"The smell of that buttered toast simply spoke to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cozy parlor firesides on winter evenings, when one's ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries."  Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows.