The village of Ulverton, somewhere on the chalk downland of the Wiltshire‒Berkshire border, is one of the most real imagined places I know. When I first visited it in the pages of Adam Thorpe’s eponymous book, published in 1992, I passed through too quickly. Aged 19, at university and having a reading list set each week, I saw books as a challenge. The faster I could read one, the better. This extended to the reading I did in my spare time. I rushed through Ulverton’s pages in the same way many people drive through an English village today: too fast, with all the resultant blurred vision and fragmentary impressions.
Ulverton is not always an easy book, even when read as it should be – slowly, and with care. It is not always an easy book to encourage others to read either, containing as it does twelve stories that take place at different points in time in a fictional village over a 400-year span. These stories, though told in the first person, come in a variety of forms: diary entries, stream-of-consciousness narratives, scripts for TV documentaries. Each is written in language firmly rooted in the time in which it is set, and in the identity of the narrator.
Yet, in the unlikely event that I am ever asked to appear on Desert Island Discs, I know that Ulverton is the book I would take with me. It says so much about the way history works, about forgotten narratives, about memory. It is a brilliant exercise in linguistic skill and knowledge. More specifically, it is a revealing story of English rural life over the centuries, and of the changes experienced there. Above all, it is a deeply revealing insight into human nature.
These are bold claims to make for a book about which, at first, I felt lukewarm. However, the atmosphere of the opening chapter, the tale of a deserter from Cromwell’s army, the evocation of the village of Ulverton itself
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Subscribe now or Sign inThe village of Ulverton, somewhere on the chalk downland of the Wiltshire‒Berkshire border, is one of the most real imagined places I know. When I first visited it in the pages of Adam Thorpe’s eponymous book, published in 1992, I passed through too quickly. Aged 19, at university and having a reading list set each week, I saw books as a challenge. The faster I could read one, the better. This extended to the reading I did in my spare time. I rushed through Ulverton’s pages in the same way many people drive through an English village today: too fast, with all the resultant blurred vision and fragmentary impressions.
Ulverton is not always an easy book, even when read as it should be – slowly, and with care. It is not always an easy book to encourage others to read either, containing as it does twelve stories that take place at different points in time in a fictional village over a 400-year span. These stories, though told in the first person, come in a variety of forms: diary entries, stream-of-consciousness narratives, scripts for TV documentaries. Each is written in language firmly rooted in the time in which it is set, and in the identity of the narrator. Yet, in the unlikely event that I am ever asked to appear on Desert Island Discs, I know that Ulverton is the book I would take with me. It says so much about the way history works, about forgotten narratives, about memory. It is a brilliant exercise in linguistic skill and knowledge. More specifically, it is a revealing story of English rural life over the centuries, and of the changes experienced there. Above all, it is a deeply revealing insight into human nature. These are bold claims to make for a book about which, at first, I felt lukewarm. However, the atmosphere of the opening chapter, the tale of a deserter from Cromwell’s army, the evocation of the village of Ulverton itself and its surrounding landscape, the staggering amount of research Thorpe must have done – all these things drew me back to a second reading. I was a little older now, no longer at university and gradually learning the value of slowing down and of patience. This time I did not rush through Ulverton, and with each subsequent reading I have slowed down even more. This is the key to Ulverton, should you pick up a copy. To read it slowly is not only practical, making some of the more obscurely written passages easier to follow, it is also essential, because the twelve chapters are far more closely tied together than is initially apparent. Events in earlier chapters have echoes in later ones. Memories and objects resurface. A shop owner in the 1950s whistles Chopin as he works, because he heard an old man play the piano with his cottage window open in the 1910s. A twentieth-century pub unknowingly takes its name from the kind of ale drunk there two hundred years earlier. The Bronze Age knife found in a river is in fact a bradawl thrown there by a disgruntled carpenter in the late 1700s. All these present-day occurrences are the result of what people have done in the past. Paradoxically, Thorpe also shows how it is foolish to try to draw meaningful connections between, and to seek significance in, events past and present. From our privileged position as readers, we see how specific objects and locations recur in Ulverton across time – and how the book’s characters often see these recurrences in different ways and draw different connections between them. ‘We are spaced so, like scattered candles in the dark,’ proclaims the Reverend in 1689, and he is right. Ulverton illustrates how individual nature, and the specificities of the time in which someone lives, shape perception. Memory, or the fading of it, plays a role in this process too. ‘Recallin’ don’t get ramshackle,’ old Sam Daye tells a fellow drinker in 1803. Sam is partly right – the act of recollection itself, as Ulverton’s many characters show, is a habit that is never lost. But he is also wrong: the recollection of events does become ramshackle. The threads – the individuals, the places, the objects – that bind the chapters of Ulverton together are frayed. Across the centuries, a local legend about a shepherd soon deviates from the events that inspired it. The scandal surrounding the birth of a farmer is swiftly forgotten and confined to anecdote. A white chalk horse is regarded as ‘ancient’ by observers only a hundred years after a country squire ordered it cut into the ground. The truth of events soon becomes fragmented into endless perspectives – so that even when the voices in Ulverton tell us what they believe to be the truth, we cannot be wholly sure. ‘That’s the story,’ an old shepherd says at the end of his narrative. But is it? The shepherd’s chapter is later revealed to be a short story by a fictionalized version of Thorpe himself, who appears in the book’s later pages. This clever, almost sly appearance reminds us that the truth of things, the truth of Ulverton, can never be fully seen. Throughout, symbols recur. Red ribbons unspool and the seeds of wild clematis drift through the pages but an attempt to try and pin down what they represent, what they mean, is only ever the reader’s interpretation – just as our attempts to perceive the past are only interpretations too. Rereading Ulverton has undoubtedly reshaped my understanding of the workings of history, has helped me to understand just how haphazard and random a process it can be. But I worry that I make it sound like a somewhat dry piece of clever writing. This was the criticism levelled at it by George Monbiot’s fellow guests, when he brought it as his contribution to the BBC radio programme A Good Read in 2001. But to examine the book in this way is to overlook entirely the fact that Ulverton is also something deeply felt. Chapter 9, ‘Stitches’, is perhaps the best demonstration of how T horpe’s ability to capture the emotion in a human voice can be overlooked amidst all Ulverton’s complexity. It was the chapter I liked least on my first reading, and the chapter I like most now. It is writ ten in a stream of consciousness, and in it we inhabit the mind of an old ploughman, Jo Perry, as he walks the land in 1887. Slowly, what appears to be almost unreadable dialect begins to make sense. Over twenty pages, we hear of Perry’s long hard life – it ‘en’t bin no dish o’ t . . . jus about a sop in sour grease’. We see his deep knowledge of the land, his feelings about what industrialization is doing to it. We hear about the fates of characters who have appeared in earlier chapters, of Perry’s presence at events previously described. Above all, we feel his deep sadness at the death of his employer’s beloved son – ‘what you gone and got thyself that dang flammation on the bellowses for boy?’ – but also witness his denial of his own role in it. All this is heightened by the language: Perry feels far more real, far more like a ghost conjured up and allowed to speak, than if Thorpe had written in plainer, more modern English. Elsewhere, we encounter the unceasing love of a mother for her son who has been sentenced to hang for theft. ‘My lam my dov,’ she calls him in her letters, ‘they ont laye a hand on thee.’ The Cromwellian deserter, hauntingly described in the opening chapter as ‘the tiredest man I have ever seen’, returns from the killing fields of Ireland to find his farm gone and his wife remarried. Lady Chalmers’s claustrophobia and increasingly fragile mental state in 1743 are keenly felt, as her diary reveals how she is in ill health and confined to her room, abandoned by her lover and married to a lecherous older husband whose breath is all ‘bacco and spirits and gaming’. These voices speak, powerfully and truthfully. As Hilary Mantel said when the book was first published, ‘Sometimes you forget [that Ulverton] is a novel, and believe for a moment that you are really hearing the voice of the dead.’ Ulverton challenges the perception that the English countryside is a green and pleasant land, and it reminds us that, throughout history, we have been bound up in the cycle of the seasons. It also reminds us that people are not wholly bad or good. This is why I would take Ulverton to a desert island. It is why I am so glad I read it again. It is why it must be read, and read slowly, yielding itself like something pushed up from the chalky earth.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 88 © Ned Vessey 2025
About the contributor
Ned Vessey is a writer from Dorset. His work explores the relationship between people and place and has been published in The Guardian, Little Toller’s The Clearing and Ambient Receiver Journal. He can be found on Instagram at @nedvesseywriting.
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