In 1994 there was a determined and sustained protest against the Batheaston-Swainswick bypass, a road designed to destroy the local communities and ancient trees in its path. Sam Burcher joined the protestors.
We are up on God’s green hill, Saving Solsbury! It’s my first night in a protest camp, and I wonder what I’m doing here. I’d hitched a lift to London from Glastonbury Festival and somehow landed here. My feet are stone cold, and feel as if they might crumble before the dawn.
But the day comes whole and new and the camp is getting organised. There’s a fire to be mended, wood to be gathered and sacks full of food from the locals to be sorted. And there’s coltsfoot to smoke and liquorish to chew. It’s the end of June in Somerset and it’s glorious.
After breakfast there’s a strategy meeting to discuss pixies putting sugar into the fuel tanks of diggers. Then there are banners and faces to be painted. Later, I lead the candle-light vigil into the woods to the incessant sound of drums. Chatting up the yellow jacketed Group 4 security guards, we gain a defector.
I go to Bath and meet a programmer with a room full of computers and learn to use a horoscope package to make charts for the tree-dwellers.
But back on Solsbury, the Group 4 heavies are throwing punches as we try to stop the diggers. I scamper back to camp, having learned to avoid violence. Later, some of the protesters return to the fire with bloody heads and torn sweaters.
I’ll never forget Rob’s voice, a distillate of hedgerows and didgeridoos. He named me “Cherub” to protect my anonymity. Although later back in London Phoenix of the Rainbow Tribe nicknamed me, “Snoggersex Sam.” I don’t know why.
Rob had a room above an abandoned stable where he made a shrine to nature on a millstone and worried about the world. “Always leave a place better than you found it,” he’d said.
We rowed with no rollocks to Bradford upon Avon to get fresh supplies for the camp – sleeping bags, boots and the like – pulling the boat over rocky weirs. “Bollocks no rollocks!” we’d joked.
And Rob ate seed from his palm, nothing was wasted.
The journalist from the Daily Mail slept in a yurt for a couple of nights. George Monbiot mucked in and gave us sanguine advice. We all slept in the communal bender. I didn’t think it was possible to sleep peacefully in the same space with so many people, but it was bliss.
I meandered within the force-field of Solsbury Hill and the surrounding water meadows consulting the hedge sparrows about the new road. They said they wanted peace from the diggers, fewer roads and less traffic. But the bypass got built anyway.
The woods were devastated.
Photos: Adrian Arbib
