able to draw a map, from which it would then be possible to extrapolate, with accuracy and speed, the position of that stratum as it snaked through the entire English underworld.
One could do it for one stratum or, with patience, for all strata. One could then draw a map of the underneath of England just as readily as one could map the overground. And if it might be possible to map the underneath of England, then by extension one could make a map of the hidden underside of the whole wide world beyond.
It all depended, though, on his making one so-far-unmade discovery: He needed to find that the aspects of rocks that were so recognizable within the patterns of the coal measures, occurred just as well in the rocks that lay above them. The miners were skeptical. But William Smith was not. He believed that there would be a pattern out there. He needed simply to lay open a great slice of English countryside and see for himself, firsthand. The new canal would be his one opportunity for doing so.
6
The Slicing of Somerset
Sonninia sowerbyi
T he British have an unrequited love affair with their railways. The older, the more obscure, the smokier, the more inefficient, and less commercially successful they are, the better. Dr. Richard Beeching, whose infamous 1965 report resulted in the closure of five thousand miles of old, inefficient but much-loved track and the attendant two thousand railway stations—most of them wrongly remembered as cottagelike and fretworked, with endlessly congenial stationmasters and rose beds planted on the platforms—is still regarded as a villain. The evidence of Beeching’s savagery—abandoned lines now swathed in grass, old bridges rising over emptiness, stations now turned into houses or small factories, or left to rot—remains everywhere. And whole communities in remote and pretty parts of Dorset, Cumberland, Norfolk, and Yorkshire curse him yet, as the man who ruined forever an enchanting and supremely British way of life, along the country railway.
The Camerton & Limpley Stoke Railway, in North Somerset, was as pretty a railway as they come. It was known by localschoolboys, and for obvious onomatopoeic reasons, as the Clank. Its economics, however, made no sense at all, right from the moment it opened for business in 1907. Its tiny income—from a dwindling number of coal mines, from a mill that packaged wool dust, and from the carrying of luggage to and from a boys’ school—doomed it to extinction even before Lord Beeching had the opportunity of getting his hands on its seven miles and seventy-eight chains of track. The last fare-paying passenger traveled on the morning after Valentine’s Day, 1951.
But the Clank was memorialized in the minds of many million of Britons of my generation because it starred, though unrecognized by most who saw it, in one of the most successful British films of the time. It was called The Titfield Thunderbolt , and it was a comedy, made in 1952. It told the story of a line that was due for closure but might be awarded a reprieve if it could show that it could be run, by the villagers who depended on it,with greater efficiency than a competing local bus service. The train was run by a team that included the vicar, the local squire, and the ladies of the Women’s Institute. The bus, by contrast, was owned by a pair of curmudgeonly and profiteering blackguards from a grim slum town nearby. Who won and who lost I will leave for those who have not seen the film; but for this account of William Smith’s life, the story of the film is less important than the setting in which it was made.
The Camerton & Limpley Stoke Railway.
For The Titfield Thunderbolt was filmed in the valleys of the Cam and Midford Brooks, at the eastern end of the Camerton & Limpley Stoke Railway, in countryside that was—and still is—as lovely and as unmistakably English as any landscape imaginable. The film seemed then, and still seems in its time-warped look today, to be set in
One could do it for one stratum or, with patience, for all strata. One could then draw a map of the underneath of England just as readily as one could map the overground. And if it might be possible to map the underneath of England, then by extension one could make a map of the hidden underside of the whole wide world beyond.
It all depended, though, on his making one so-far-unmade discovery: He needed to find that the aspects of rocks that were so recognizable within the patterns of the coal measures, occurred just as well in the rocks that lay above them. The miners were skeptical. But William Smith was not. He believed that there would be a pattern out there. He needed simply to lay open a great slice of English countryside and see for himself, firsthand. The new canal would be his one opportunity for doing so.
6
The Slicing of Somerset
Sonninia sowerbyi
T he British have an unrequited love affair with their railways. The older, the more obscure, the smokier, the more inefficient, and less commercially successful they are, the better. Dr. Richard Beeching, whose infamous 1965 report resulted in the closure of five thousand miles of old, inefficient but much-loved track and the attendant two thousand railway stations—most of them wrongly remembered as cottagelike and fretworked, with endlessly congenial stationmasters and rose beds planted on the platforms—is still regarded as a villain. The evidence of Beeching’s savagery—abandoned lines now swathed in grass, old bridges rising over emptiness, stations now turned into houses or small factories, or left to rot—remains everywhere. And whole communities in remote and pretty parts of Dorset, Cumberland, Norfolk, and Yorkshire curse him yet, as the man who ruined forever an enchanting and supremely British way of life, along the country railway.
The Camerton & Limpley Stoke Railway, in North Somerset, was as pretty a railway as they come. It was known by localschoolboys, and for obvious onomatopoeic reasons, as the Clank. Its economics, however, made no sense at all, right from the moment it opened for business in 1907. Its tiny income—from a dwindling number of coal mines, from a mill that packaged wool dust, and from the carrying of luggage to and from a boys’ school—doomed it to extinction even before Lord Beeching had the opportunity of getting his hands on its seven miles and seventy-eight chains of track. The last fare-paying passenger traveled on the morning after Valentine’s Day, 1951.
But the Clank was memorialized in the minds of many million of Britons of my generation because it starred, though unrecognized by most who saw it, in one of the most successful British films of the time. It was called The Titfield Thunderbolt , and it was a comedy, made in 1952. It told the story of a line that was due for closure but might be awarded a reprieve if it could show that it could be run, by the villagers who depended on it,with greater efficiency than a competing local bus service. The train was run by a team that included the vicar, the local squire, and the ladies of the Women’s Institute. The bus, by contrast, was owned by a pair of curmudgeonly and profiteering blackguards from a grim slum town nearby. Who won and who lost I will leave for those who have not seen the film; but for this account of William Smith’s life, the story of the film is less important than the setting in which it was made.
The Camerton & Limpley Stoke Railway.
For The Titfield Thunderbolt was filmed in the valleys of the Cam and Midford Brooks, at the eastern end of the Camerton & Limpley Stoke Railway, in countryside that was—and still is—as lovely and as unmistakably English as any landscape imaginable. The film seemed then, and still seems in its time-warped look today, to be set in
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