Usually if you mention The Cotswolds in Southern England people think of this posh rich countryside region full of wealthy London barristers and manor houses.
But for me, aged eighteen, training as a student riding instructor at an isolated farm in the ‘Upper Slaughters’ – it was an eery sort of a place.
There were only two of us trainees at the old farm house on the hill. Myself and a whisp-like blonde girl called Alice who had also just turned eighteen. We were living there as full time working students, under the watchful eye of Granny Hanks and her anarchic Border Terrier ‘Milly’ .
The farm was part of a huge old country estate dating back to the 1500s, and the farmhouse was solid stone, with icy cold flagstone floors and only the fireplace and an antique kitchen Aga for heating. Being so high up there we looked out across both the upper and lower slaughters, – which sounds sinister, but is really just an old Anglo Saxon word for ‘muddy place’.
A small river wound through the valley of Lower Slaughter but on Upper Slaughter the winds howled across the hills like banshees.
Out exercising the horses every morning we’d get so cold we’d have to tell jokes and sing and whistle just to stop ourselves crying from how frozen our hands were.
But it was beautiful too.
A patchwork landscape of raw sweeping fields, broken up by scraps of woodland, – surviving relics of the ancient forests that once stretched across the entire landscape. Every field and track bordered by many miles of crumbling honey-coloured dry-stone walls.
There were blizzards that winter, the sort of snow you hardly ever see in England.
Snow drifts so high and deep that we’d keep long coloured ropes tied to the dog’s collars so we could find them and pull them out when they totally disappeared into it. One morning we had to dig the horses out of all the North facing stables, and because the farm workers had been at a lock-in that night, at the village pub two miles down the hill, they were stuck there, and we’d ended up alone. Totally snowed in, just us and Granny, twenty five horses, two dogs, a barn full of cattle, and two hundred sheep to look after until any one could reach us again a week later. One of the neighbouring farmers died of a heart attack in that blizzard, and his poor wife was stranded with just his corpse for company till a helicopter could be sent out once the blizzards had cleared.
But it’s something else that always comes to mind when I think of that winter in the Cotswolds – something peculiar, which I’ve often wondered about in the following years. And yet the funny thing is how at the time we barely thought of it at all.
We certainly noticed it, Alice and me, when we’d exercise the horses out on the farm tracks across the ridge above the valley. In fact we noticed it so often that we’d even expect it, especially on a still day, when the winter sun was out and the wind was quiet for once.
Strangely you could never tell which direction it came from – it was somehow just there, floating in the air around us, hanging in the tops of the leafless winter trees. I want to call it music, the ethereal music of a flute… except there was not really much of a tune, it was more just a half-made melody, haunting notes, calling out, as if waiting for an an answer that never came. The sound was clear and soothing, and we usually heard it above the small willow woods where the ewes liked to browse and rest by the river. We’d hear it so often that I guess it became a part of the scenery to us, but when Alice mentioned it to the farm workers one day, they just laughed and asked if we’d been at the waccy-baccy again.
Finally when spring came Alice and I both moved on, to new jobs, new places, different parts of the country, and we lost touch. But a couple of years later Alice phoned me out of the blue.
After all the small talk and catching up on on life we started to reminisce about our time at the farm. We talked about the blizzards and the dead neighbour, about our favourite horses and riding in the mornings in two pairs of gloves in the bitter cold, but most of all we talked about the strangeness of that ‘music’ – that would float around the isolated valley, miles from anywhere or anyone, -and which still to this day i can’t explain.