Wild Garlic

Beauty comes in at the eye, but memories enter via the nose. Like the smell of school semolina and new born babies, the scent of wild garlic is one which has stuck in my brain and is forever associated with one time and one place.

The place is here, the damp valley of the River Bollin as it winds its way through the Cheshire countryside, just after its confluence with the River Dean and close to the village of Mobberley. The time is 1997, when Oasis ruled the charts, New Labour is on the brink of power and Swampy is famous.

There should be the smell of wood smoke too, but as I walk the muddy path for the first time in ten years my imagination adds that. It adds other things too, things that have no place in such an idyllic English country scene, arc lights, security guards, police in riot gear or on quad bikes.  

It is May now. The ground is wet, the trees have a thin covering of leaves. Here and there the hawthorn is in blossom. The path rises to drier ground and the scent of garlic, fresh in the damp air, diminishes. As it does so a high pitched whine also rises and then turns into a deep roar. The angry sound subsides to a sigh and a gleaming white jet airliner rises above the trees in front of me.

This is why I was here ten years ago, to stop this bit of Cheshire countryside disappearing under concrete in order to become Manchester Airport’s second runway. We failed, but not though want of trying.

This place changed me, all those years ago. The person who left this spot was not the one who arrived.

Partly this was my age. Twenty seven, what astrologers call the Saturn Return, when the great ringed planet completes its orbit around the sun and returns to the position in the sky it held when you were a baby, a time which has traditionally marked the end of youth.

Partly this was the inevitable result of the way my life was moving. Ten years after leaving my parents home I was, like Odysseus, on the eve of finding my true home and, in due course, my Penelope.

But in no small part I credit the magic of this place, and of the spell that was woven here by the noble wizards and warriors who tried to save this little piece of England from the concrete.

I wasn’t aware of the changes that were taking place in me at the time. A friend I wrote to regularly though was. She noted the change in my letters. At first they were full of the politics of the protest, with talk of Climate Change, emissions targets and government policy. By the end though I wrote about nothing outside of the immediate area of our camp. I described the trees, the mud, the sights and the sounds, the mysterious visitors in the night, and the smell of the wild garlic. My fight had moved from the political to the personal.

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Politically this was the tail end of the Road Protest Movement of the 1990s.

That had started in 1993, on legend-haunted Twyford Down in Hampshire, with a motley collection of Travellers and young activists camping out to stop the widening of the M3 motorway round Winchester. The travelling army then moved to London in an attempt to stop the building of the M11, then up north to stop the M65 near Blackburn.

It all came to a head in 1996, when the building of the Newbury Bypass saw ten thousand trees chopped down and over one thousand arrests. By then the cost had become too much for the treasury and the government pulled the plug on the 'greatest road building program since the Romans'. There was a final cameo at Fairmile in Devon, where Swampy became a tabloid sensation after holding out in his tunnel for a week, but then there were no more roads to oppose.

So when Manchester Airport planned to build a second runway on 400 acres of Cheshire Greenbelt, the travelling circus moved up north and set up camp. This was almost my back yard and so, not having much else to do at the time, I came and joined in.

I pitched my tent in the camp known as Wild Garlic. Located at the heart of the development site, where the new runway would cross the River Bollin, we were as far as possible from civilization and completely out of sight. The camp itself was a cluster of ash, beech and birch trees on a slope, with farmland at the top and flood meadow at the bottom. 

We were definitely rather more chilled out than the big camps. Whilst the others put up fortifications to keep people out, we decorated our ‘front door’ with ribbons to invite people in. Our token defensive gesture was a wooden drawbridge over the muddy ditch that marked the limit of the camp. Come the day the authorities decided to pay us a visit, this was defeated by a policeman with longer than average legs. 

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Ten years ago there were a lot of police in the quiet woods. 

Walking the footpath I am now on by day you would have passed them parked up in their vans, usually bored. Beyond them the Land Rovers of security guards patrolled around a fence topped with barbed wire. More security guards huddled in groups, their rank indicated by the colour of their helmets.

Within the fence were the five camps where the protesters lived. Everyone was waiting for the day when the courts would allow the authorities to begin removing them. Around the camps vehicles had churned the grass into mud so that passengers taking off from the airport looked down on five islands of green amongst a sea of devastation.

By night the area was even busier. Whilst the security clustered under arc lights, figures would move silently in the shadows. When morning revealed a section of fence missing or a lighting rig toppled, the blame was laid at the door of the ‘pixies’.

These three groups of people - police, security and protesters - interacted with each other and this place in complicated ways. 

The security guards, the unemployed of Manchester offered a few weeks’ work at basic pay, were suspicious of the police they were supposed to be working with. They would tell me that once they were home and had taken off their uniforms they were regarded once more as the enemy by the boys in blue. Such was life in nineties Britain. 

Of the protesters, they were mainly incredulous. Most had grown up in the city on council estates. When I first arrived, a group watched in wonder as I put up my tent and seriously questioned if I intended to sleep in it. Of the people who made their homes in rickety ‘twigloos’ in the branches of trees, they had only admiration.

The police were more reticent in their dealings with us. Always with one eye on more serious matters, they usually dealt with us fairly whilst keeping their distance. An extremely laid back liaison officer was assigned, a veteran of two decades carrying a machine gun around the airport, and friction was mostly avoided. 

For example, when the police started taking an interest in the pits we were digging around the camp and covering with tarpaulins, a confidential intelligence briefing was produced with diagrams of IRA mortar positions recently used to attack Heathrow Airport. Noting the similarity we agree to allow an inspection of our holes. Having thus been reassured that our toilet facilities were not a danger to anyone except the person using them, the authorities were placated.

The protesters, meanwhile, were a very mixed bunch. Many were veterans of the previous campaigns, but for many others though this was their first experience of both protest and life outside of the city. Some, products of the antibiotic age and rebels against the advice of parental authority figures, neglected basic hygiene and soon retired from camp on health grounds. 

Those who survived though soon settled into a routine of work and fun. Most took to the air, constructing homes in the sky and aerial walkways to link them.

Those of us with no head for heights though would burrow into the red earth. The clay soil was perfect for this and so we dug in like soldiers preparing to endure a heavy bombardment. The Manchester clay is apparently similar to the soil of the Somme, to the extent that in the First World War the 'clay kickers' who had dug the Manchester sewers were drafted in to tunnel under the German lines. If they were like other soldiers in the trenches, they would have used garlic as a natural antibiotic.

And whilst we tunnelled the aeroplanes continued to fly. The camps were at the end of the original runway, and planes taking off appeared to graze the top of nearby Zion Tree, deafening whoever happened to be occupying the Pterodactyls' Nest twigloo. On the surface the first hint of a take-off was the high pitched whine which slowly turned into a bass roar. Underground the order was reversed, starting with the tunnel walls shaking and ending with the hiss of the plane passing overhead.

Opponents of airport expansion we may have been, but seeing the operations of a large airport at such close quarters it was hard not to be amazed by the marvelous technological achievement of modern air travel, which has joined the world together like no other invention. At any one time there is the equivalent of the population of Manchester in the air. On 99 days out of 100, every single one of those passengers will arrive safely, which isn't something you can say about many means of transport

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However it is an achievement only made possible by the chance existence of oil. The kerosene used as aviation fuel has twice the energy density of TNT, and every day Manchester Airport used 3000 tons of the stuff. As it combines with oxygen when it is burnt, a ton of aviation fuel produces three and a half times its own weight in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas and the primary component of man-made Climate Change. In addition the vapour trails of high flying jets also heat the air. A quick back-of-an-envelope calculation suggests that the contribution to Global Warming from the aeroplanes using the airport is about half of the total emissions from the Greater Manchester area.

Those planes keep me company as I continue along the path. The River Bollin meanders through the trees on our right, a lazy river today with large areas of mud exposed on its flanks, dotted with the debris of previous floods.

But its merry wandering is brought up short when it meets the new runway. Here, at the point that marked the edge of River Rats camp, it has been funnelled into a new course which runs straight as a die under the tarmac. Where my cosy little tunnel was dug there is now a vast, semi-circular cavern ten metres high.

On this side there is no trace of Wild Garlic camp. What I do find though is a newly erected sign board, part of a walking trail marked out around the perimeter of the airport, which tells me that near this spot was found the remains of a Bronze Age village. This is remarkable news. Our primitive camp had been built on top of a settlement from the days of the pagan Britons. I had no idea.

We'd known they were here before us, of course. How could we not? A short walk from the camp, beyond the range of the patrolling security guards, was Lindow Moss, a little community on reclaimed land on the edge of the commuter town of Wilmslow. Lindow Man, known locally as Pete Marsh, had been found there.

Pete, a man who had done no manual work in at least the last year of his short life, had suffered a head injury and apparent strangulation before being dropped into the murky waters of the Moss. This suggests a ritual 'triple death' in Earth, Air and Water, a theory supported by the traces of mistletoe in his stomach, a plant sacred to the Druids of these isles.

Analysis of the radioactive carbon in his bones suggests a date for his death around the first century CE, so this sacrifice could have been made at the time of the Roman invasion of Britain. Could Pete have come from this village, the one found under out camp, and given his life in an attempt to stop the invasion of the globalizing empire that invented concrete?  

So was this perhaps another reason this spot had such a profound effect, these ancient echoes contained in the soil? 

At first digging my tunnel had been a chore. I would force myself to work an hour at time underground, holding back the fear of becoming trapped, or of the roof caving in, before coming up for tea and fresh air. Then one day, as the siege lines around the camps drew closer, my view of the world changed suddenly. Safety, I now felt, was underground behind my locked steel door. My fear was of being caught in the open before I could reach the entrance to the tunnel. 

From then on I slept under the earth, dreaming that I was in a homely cavern deep underground. Perhaps I was influenced by Alan Garner, whose novel The Weird Stone of Briningamen opens with the story of a farmer from nearby Mobberley who sells a white mare to a bunch of knights sleeping under Alderley Edge.

Either way, it was because of this that I missed the pixie. Not one of the ones out to do the fences, but

a real one. Maybe.

Eviction day was approaching and things were tense in the camps. In Wild Garlic Ollie left a candle burning in his tree house when he popped out and set fire to the thing. In River Rats there was a climbing accident and Jonathon, a local man, was attacked by persons unknown whilst wandering in the trees at night.

And then Kim saw her Pixie.

Kim was from the Liverpool Earth First! group, a bunch of radical anarcho-greens from the big city, and so was not the sort person to be usually found out in the woods contemplating her navel and talking to the spirits in the trees. So it was therefore a bit of a shock to her when she leaned out of her tree house one night and saw on the ground below her a real live pixie. The fellow was about two feet high and looked a bit like Dobby the House Elf. She looked at the pixie, the pixie looked at her, and then it ran off through the undergrowth.

Two other people though confirmed that something had been in the camp that night. One person saw the creature running off, but it was too quick for him to identify it, whilst another heard but it but didn’t see it. 

 

I never actually found the tracks, but I suspect it was a fox, as we knew they visited our camps. Or maybe pixies pretend to be foxes sometimes to confuse the cynics, or that maybe pixies are just foxes that you catch a glimpse of in the night at special times. Anyone who’s heard a vixen’s mating cry in a lonely forest at night knows there is no ‘just’ about being a fox; they are spirits of the forest in their own right.

Kim’s story wasn’t unique. Many other people found living in the camps brought on mystical experiences. Living in twigloos brought on powerful dreams and some felt able to communicate with the trees they were guarding. Others saw black cats leaping from tree to tree or heard drumming coming from empty camps. In the woods of Newbury an amphibious beast launched itself out the canal whilst security guards claimed to have seen the ghosts of Civil War soldiers whose graves had been disturbed.

It was in those Newbury woods that Jim Hindle was led by dreams to defend the solitary Middle Oak, whilst at the same time he was haunted by a seeming premonition of its destruction. Druids blessed his tree, but still the dreams continued. Then, one morning, he woke to the sound of chainsaws. Another oak, almost Middle Oaks's twin, sited next to the main road and connected to it by a single strand of rope, like an umbilical cord, had been felled. Middle Oak survived and still stands today.

So if I was changed by my time at Wild Garlic, it was an experience I shared with many others.

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"Sorry"
"F*ck off"

This was the sum total of my conversation with one of Britain's elite soldiers, who I had just caught sneaking over the bridge from Zion Tree to Wild Garlic. Eviction day had found me on guard duty rather than in my tunnel. 

Following on the from the scary men-in-black were much politer police in their riot vans, then swarms of yellow coated security guards in Land Rovers, cheerful Welsh bailiffs on quad bikes then specialist climbers and underground rescue people. Watching them was the assembled mass press corps with their satellite link up vehicles. 

I joined them on the grass next to the Wilmslow Road and found everyone was being served tea by the mobile soup kitchen of the Salvation Army. We were being evicted, but in a very curious way.

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It is now 17 April 2010 and I have returned to the Bollin Valley again, but I find a very different scene to my last visit. 

Venus as the Evening Star sinks slowly into the West, following a blood red sun. The new moon hangs in the sky over the red eyes of the airport's radar dish. Wild garlic still infuses the night air. But the skies are empty, the wood is silent. There are no planes.

An Icelandic Volcano has grounded planes across Europe, and Manchester Airport is shut.

Thirteen years before, we produced a tape of songs recorded in the camps. It is a unique musical record, for a variety of reasons, one of which is that most of the songs are interrupted by a plane taking off. One contribution was called "Silence". Then it was ironic, now it seems prophetic.

In due course the ash clouds will pass and the planes return. Newly washed chives flown in from Ethiopia will reappear on the supermarket shelves, and travellers will return from far flung destinations.

But for tonight at least, I am alone with the spirits of this place and able to dream that another world is possible.