The Wold shoulder

The Wold shoulder is where the chalk of the Sarrum county gives out and the coal country begins, a line drawn by the ground and by no reeve. Above it are sheep walks, winterbournes and stone walls; below it the coal lies over the chalk and the land turns to pits, engines and pumped water. Shepherd Elias Wardell, who walks the shoulder and keeps its walking book at Wold Ash, will take a visitor to a spot where he may set one foot in each country. He drives flocks over the line twice a year and says both sides treat him courteously, and no one else.

Before 4460 the shoulder carried coppice and timber above the sheep. The coal was known long before it was worked, for it breaks the surface in three places and the shoulder folk dug it from under the turf for their own hearths; anything dug deeper drowned by Candlemas, so they waited for an engine that could lift the water. The engines came, and with them Blackdown and the pit villages, none of them a parish. The shoulder is still held by six old villages, from Little Wether, the largest, down to Hoggett Green, each with its own vestry, bounds and quarrel with its neighbour, while Wold Ash, a borough that has lost its charter, keeps the shearing, walking and drove tallies of the whole shoulder unpaid.

The engines have been paid for in water. Four bournes here have changed, and the dates are sure because Editha Prole and her mother noted them for sixty-one years: two run three to six weeks shorter at each end, one rises half a mile lower than in 4570, and the Combe Bourne has been dry since 4589 and its bed is now a lane. Two springs have gone since 4600 and a third is fitful. In 4614 Joan Skerrit, weighing what Blackdown's number three level pumped against the rain on the shoulder, proved the level was drawing water from three miles of country beyond the line.

Each side despises the other and needs it. Long Hazel, cut on a twelve-year turn, marks three parish bounds at once, and two of the old holdings are said still to keep a Lady, as old valley ground does. Not all of it is open country. Two combes on the shoulder are sealed ground, where beasts graze up to forty yards short of the head and will go no further unless driven, and paid men stand watch there by night on a rota, as they have for eighty years. Nobody will say what they guard, and the shoulder treats both combes as feral and keeps away.