PsychoGeography #40: Rocks and rolling stones

My friend Charles, who affects substantial, fleecy sideburns, and farms confetti flowers in the Vale of Pershore, has told me (and at my insistence often re-told me) about a clan of itinerant agricultural workers named Buggins. The Bugginses still come by annually to pick soft fruit and pull up spring onions in the Vale, which is the market-gardening zone to the south of Birmingham. They are nomadic, illiterate and cut off from the settled lives of those they labour for. According to Charles, the Bugginses are mentioned in R D Blackmoore's romance of Exmoor brigandage Lorna Doone. The novel was written in the 1860s but the action takes place 200 years before that, which raises the teasing possibility that the Bugginses have been doing their singular thing for rising 300 years.

My friend Charles, who affects substantial, fleecy sideburns, and farms confetti flowers in the Vale of Pershore, has told me (and at my insistence often re-told me) about a clan of itinerant agricultural workers named Buggins. The Bugginses still come by annually to pick soft fruit and pull up spring onions in the Vale, which is the market-gardening zone to the south of Birmingham. They are nomadic, illiterate and cut off from the settled lives of those they labour for. According to Charles, the Bugginses are mentioned in R D Blackmoore's romance of Exmoor brigandage Lorna Doone. The novel was written in the 1860s but the action takes place 200 years before that, which raises the teasing possibility that the Bugginses have been doing their singular thing for rising 300 years.

I find the idea that this posse of throwbacks (or perhaps, more justly, never-thrown-forwards) is still among us, unmonitored by the state, having truck with neither the Inland Revenue nor the National Health Service, peculiarly heartening. It suggests to me that the world remains a strange place, in which local time is not yet fully calibrated to the global release of new mobile-phone technologies. I feel sorry that these noble refuseniks, these English Roma, should've leant their name to the expression for a mediocrity's tenure ("It's Buggins' turn"), and how it happened I'm at a loss to know.

I'd like to write a book about the Bugginses. I'm convinced that by following them, living with them, breaking bread and bones, I would discover the human equivalent of primordial woodland. Doubtless, I'd be speedily disabused as they whittled the plastic from scratch cards and debated their share portfolios, but I'm never going to know this because I'm never going to write the book. I prefer to keep the Bugginses as a Rousseauian ideal rather than discover that they're daytime TV-real. The Bugginses' story gives me the same thrill as tales of Appalachian mountain people cut off from the 21st century, or Australian Aboriginals, who walk in from the vastness of the Gibson Desert having wholly missed out on the last two centuries of genocide and exploitation.

I'm in a similar position, vis-à-vis these Bugginses, to the one Family Self found itself in last week during a jaunt to Stonehenge. Having done the obligatory circumambulating of the menhirs, we headed off across Salisbury Plain in search of the perfectly remote picnic spot. To the right of the road were army firing ranges, to the left of the road the same. From time to time we reached "tank crossings", although the idea that these steely behemoths would give way to our Fiat Multipla was frankly incredible. Eventually I pulled off up a rutted track and we laid out the plaid on a patch of wasteland in between the MoD's red flags and stentorian "PRIVATE PROPERTY" signs. We ate cheese sandwiches to the homely whistle and rumbling thud of artillery fire in the mid-distance.

Over where the shells were falling lay the village of Imber, abandoned by its inhabitants since the Second War. A hardy perennial in the colour supplements, Imber - and its Dorset sibling Tyneham - are the bricks-and-mortar equivalents of the Bugginses; they are anachronistic bits of England, time-locked away from our modern eyes. I know that the Defence wonks (crazy euphemism - crazy guys), let parties on to the Imber range from time to time, to see the flora and fauna that have flourished, free from the fatal barrage of pesticides. And Tyneham has its own book, a magisterial piece of social history called The Village that Died for England by Patrick Wright.

Wright uses the fate of Tyneham as a lens through which to examine the growth of the environmental movement in England, uncovering along the way some of the dubious associations green fingers have made with brown shirts and red flags.

But I'm less interested in the historical significance of these hidden hamlets, than their place in our geographic unconscious. Just as the urban dweller feels himself to inhabit a mondial grey citadel, no longer surrounded by a sea of countryside, so the rural population are caught in a reticulation of Tarmac and concrete. It isn't so much that the distinction between town and country has been blurred, but altogether eliminated.

The Bugginses are different. They don't have to go up to town to march in support of their faux-authentic sporting pursuits. They simply keep on skulking through the undergrowth, resolutely undemonstrative. I like to picture them as swarthy of face and horny of foot. Rather like Tolkien's Hobbits, they are fond of their food, and while they have little magic in them, they're adept at being unobtrusive. So unobtrusive in fact, that none of the military has ever noticed them sojourning in Imber and Tyneham, villages perfectly suited to their entrancing oddity.