WHILE GREECE and Cyprus have been dealing with torrents of rain, southern England has been basking in an Indian summer. At the small village of Selborne, confused squirrels were bounding about the lawns of Gilbert White’s house, the famous 18th century naturalist, as if it were spring.
The curious cardboard Greek god statue in the garden was covered with ladybirds and outside The Selborne Arms people were eating bubble‘n’squeak topped with a poached egg in their shirt sleeves.
Life in rural Hampshire, with the towering beech trees of the hanger brilliantly turning gold in autumn sun felt frozen in time: the landscape of Jane Austen, who lived just a few miles further in the village of Chawton.
There were no locked doors on the small church of St Mary where White was a curate and no famous 1,400-year-old Yew tree, for it had been felled by gales but little else had changed since White wrote of the five bells that were recast in 1735: “it was high festival in the village… by an order of the donor, the treble bell should be fixed upward in the ground and filled with punch. Of which all present were invited to partake.”
One of those listed bells still peals and engraved plaques around the bell tower walls name those who still ring to keep the tradition alive, taking two hours and forty minutes for the full ‘plain bob’, the name for all the permutations.
Wooden boxes are stacked beneath the bells for those too short to reach the ropes, not surprising as I notice the current ringers are mainly women. Two years ago, when the money was raised from donations, grants and cake stalls to add the final two bells to complete the eight scale, the village once again celebrated by turning them upside down and filling them with punch and all once more were invited ‘to partake’.
It was you felt a moment that White, who is considered the father of the environmental movement and first ecologist, would have applauded. The stained glass window celebrating the bicentenary of his birth shows foxes, rabbits, mice, a stoat and hedgehog with the words beneath, “For a faithful priest, a humble student of nature and a writer of genius.”
Whether White was a writer of genius I don’t know, but like many educated men of his generation he was a lover of knowledge. His house remains a place of pilgrimage for those who believe the enthusiastic amateur can always play his part.
As I sat on a seat in the graveyard near White’s unassuming headstone and watched a green woodpecker fly across the valley it struck me that it is not just the natural world that evolves, as he so carefully documented, but traditions too, if they are to survive. I hoped he would be pleased that his church and the pub, those backbones of country life were still thriving but that now it was women who were pulling the bells and the pints.
