An early repost today, reworked.
For the past five years I have walked a path every day, twice a day.
To me, the path’s chief significance is its ability to get me from the main road, up onto a plateau in the forest. It is surrounded on each side by steep banks, which serve to rid the dog of the worst of his angst. He does not use the paths, but runs up these earthworks which are almost vertical. It is one of my favourite sights, this dog at right angles to myself and the world.
If this were Narnia, the path would be the wardrobe. Were it Hogwarts, it would be platform nine and three-quarters. The path is a leafy limbo, a place in between the worlds of civilisation and arborialisation.
But to me, for half a decade, that was all that was extraordinary about it.
Until the middle of last month, when a lot of Very Important Signs appeared at the start and finish of this little interpolating stretch of muddy gradient.
It appeared, from everything the forest rangers were telling us, that this was a very significant stretch of mud indeed.
It dates, I now know, from 1702. On reading this at the top of the path, my children became extremely excited very quickly. I looked at them, nonplussed, until they enlightened me. It was a year before Samuel Pepys, that diarist of the prattling clerical ranks, died at the ripe old age of 70.
This track had a purpose. Because our forests surrounded a great castle, and they were hunting forests.
This path, the sign said, without a shadow of Carry-On double entendre, was a queen’s gully.
This was news to me. I always thought gullies were American canyon-like natural phenomena, carved over aeons using natural forces , primarily water.
But this had been cut out of the hill by men at the dawn of the eighteenth century, to make a gradual slope, at the behest of a queen. Now the wooden supports which held up each side needed to be replaced, and it would take 21 days.
Queen Anne came to the throne the very year this was cut. It appears it must have been a very early command of hers, to cut a path through the forest so she might follow the hullabaloo without mounting a horse. Rather, she would hurtle after her Prince and his hunt in a carriage.
Miles and miles of track were cut away for her: but she had need of a carriage with good reason.
The Queen was 37 years old. She had had 17 pregnancies and as least 12 miscarriages and stillbirths. She was poorly with gout and riddled with disease. Yet she still moved huge quantities of earth to jump in a carriage and follow her heart, at speed.
Following one’s heart at speed – and moving the earth to achieve one’s will – are the premise of another, very different woman.
Catherine The Great was born less than 30 years later than this path. One of my favourite pictures of this voracious, charismatic life-lover is a portrait of the ruler, dressed head to toe in mans clothing, seated on a horse.
What a woman. Farmed out to Russia from Germany to marry the 16-year-old Russian prince Peter, it soon became clear he was no match for the young firebrand. She scorned the Lady Macbeth role and instead schemed to change her situation.
A plot was raised to depose Peter.
Intrigue must have come naturally to her. Many of the plotters in the ring were quite sure they were deposing the Tsar so that his son Paul might eventually rule, with Catherine as a caretaker Regent meanwhile.
But somehow Catherine ended up double-crossing the lot of them. She won the loyalty and dedication of every soldier in St Petersburg. She needed no-one else: she declared herself Catherine II, sole ruler of Russia.
And so began a stunning period for the nation.
Her first two years were spent making split-second raptor-like decisions. She weighed who was friend and ingratiated herself carefully: and judged who was foe, despatching them mercilessly and efficiently.
Presently, she was in a position to change things in Mother Russia. She was widely read and loved the ideas encapsulated by the French Enlightenment. She was a great lover of Voltaire.
And she changed that vast nation: she reformed the law to give everyone equal rights. She formed an education system with a greater number of schools available. She organised the country into provinces and appointed staff to run each one.
While she was a woman of action, her words speak just as loudly for her. She once told someone: “You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient.
“Unfortunate empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of human beings.”
She had strings of lovers: but she wore the trousers.
She died of a stroke aged 67, and not in the bizarre circumstances the urban myths often relate. She was a clever woman who faced life and took almost unimaginable responsibility: who steered a notoriously shiftless vast nation and imposed some kind of order upon it. Against all the odds.
She had her faults. She and the British Queen were chalk and cheese.
But like Anne, she was a woman who, at a time when women were traditionally powerless, bucked every trend.
Kate Shrewsday 
Terrific and terrifying:
The Queen was 37 years old. She had had 17 pregnancies and as least 12 miscarriages and stillbirths. She was poorly with gout and riddled with disease. Yet she still moved huge quantities of earth to jump in a carriage and follow her heart, at speed.
To be so “old” at so “young” an age.
Love the picture you painted of her carriage . . . as well as that of Catherine.
I suppose, even for someone who had had a life of privilege, life was harder then. These days she would have had a much better deal.We live in enchanted times and live long.
That’s what I like about your country–wherever you walk, it seems you know who was there before.
We are so small, Kathy, that these things are easy to take note of. A crowded country with countless layers. I long to see Texas where history is a little younger and prehistory is as old as the mountains.
Our history and prehistory aren’t so well marked as yours, I think. As you say, it’s spread out. For the most part, we sort of nod at the historical markers and go on. EXCEPT in New England–they hang onto the past. And, of course, Texas remembers the Alamo. (I appear to be replying from the Austin Sisters in Crime newsletter.)
To walk such a path on your daily rounds! You most literally must soak up history and its significance–and I think I must know more Catherine-lore than historical fact. I’m challenged to think a second time! I enjoy imagining with you, Kate. Debra
Your visits are always appreciated, Debra 🙂 I was chuffed to find the path had such an august history. I walk it differently now, but the dog shows no respect whatsoever.
What a privilege to walk with history every day, as if the beauty of the place itself weren’t enough. The thoughts I’d think while walking there … !
Wel, absolutely, PiedType: thoughts flow much better after ambling up the gully onto the hill.
Poor old Anne, rattling around like that in a carriage, no wonder few of her pregnancies went full term. I agree with the comments of your other readers, what bliss to encounter history on your doorstep daily!
Thanks Cindy for reading this 🙂 I know you came upon it first time round, and that you’re a Catherine The Great fan….I feel for Anne. I see the carriage as a sign of her determination to be at the heart of the fun, even when health dictated otherwise. And it is fantastic to think it rattled up and down that path.
Such different women, yet each used her power (such as it was in Anne’s case). Not always something women do easily.
I found the sense of history lurking over me quite overpowering in the UK, parts of Europe and China. Here at home there is little recorded history of much more than 100 years. So I feel no need to wonder who was here before, animal and human equally the “invisible” history that only requires a generalised tip o’ the hat from me.
Maybe where people have lived densely for centruies there are many ghosts all staring at me and that’s what I feel?
I have absolutely no doubt that is the case. I have grown up with the sense of people before me and layers of happening: perhaps I am just used to it. But I do long, one day, to see the wide open spaces of South Africa – Naomi’s photographs show the beauty of a place which has not been trodden by man.
In Africa we tread, often just lightly, leaving only footprints that disappear with the next rain, and remains that return to nature. Of course too much exposure to the modern world means we are leaving more and more trails of debris behind us.
Tout change, Sidey. One day I’ll see the beautiful landscape of SA.
Fascinating history, tied up to your path. I quite agree it is magical!
I hate to be the one to say it, Kate, but your kids are freaks – fancy knowing when Pepys died at their age! I didn’t know it and still had to work it out from the clues you left.
Impressed again 🙂
I would love to portray my kids as budding prodigies but sadly I must confess the school curriculum covers Pepys these days. Fire of London, yada yada yada….
Just a simple path with so much history to it – thanks for sharing Kate. You have brought your walk so vividly to life for us. I am so grateful that I didn’t live then.
Me too, Rosemary. We have drawn the longest straw, here in the 21st century.
We certainly need more of the calibre of Catherine the Great. What changes she wrought in Russia. And for the people, not for herself! I loved this Kate. Wish you had been my history teacher way back when. I may have paid attention, lol!
😀 Thanks, Denise! She was quite an iron lady, wasn’t she?
Isn’t it grand to walk a path and suddenly find a remarkable history of it? I love those moments in life. We don’t have too much history of note where we live right now. Oh, there are the ancient sloughs, carved from glaziers in aught whenever and local lore has it that the Marx Brothers had a chicken farm a mile or so from here, and attempt by their mother to keep them out of WWI. She eventually gave it up as they weren’t prone to farming, much preferring to go to baseball games and play the ponies at the racetracks. Ah, to find a path, carved for a queen, right under your foot. Well told, Kate.
I’ve always found Catherine II intriguing.
Oh, I don’t know, Penny: finding a Marx brother’s chicken farm sounds like a dream come true to me 😀 (They are heroes of mine- the brothers, not the chickens)
I’ve often wondered about the truth of those myths… a stroke seems somehow too commonplace a death for one such as Catherine the Great. 🙂
It does, Ruth. Hello 🙂 Her death is shrouded in history…
Most informative and entertaining.
Hi Col! Thanks!
I see a certain parallel between those weighings of Catherine and the Blogosphere, Kate 😉
How apt, BB: you are right: the skilled bloggers become very good indeed at weighing…
Whenever I find a place to have so much history attached I always try to put myself back in a time when it was recorded to have been used. I try to imagine the surroundings, the weather, even the smells. I’ve no idea whether my imagination is anywhere near accurate, but I like doing it! This post was a fascinating read, Kate. And Pepys provides a link to the seventeenth century that I haven’t as yet made a connection too: hmmm…
I agree totally, Tom: smell is so important to our imagination. The stunning thing about this location is that those same forest leaf-mouldy toned would have surrounded Queen Anne as she flew through the forest. Nothing much has changed there…. and enjoy Pepys. Just trying to source a Pepys on Kindle, think there’s a chance he might be free.