"Open, open, green hill!" - the way to Elf-land.

Can Tim and Winnie, and Stanley the gnome, throw light on an issue of our time?

What you are about to read, or, at least, I hope are tempted so to do, is … hmm … do you know, I don’t fully know myself. And I wrote it. Is it just a piece of whimsy or is there more to it than that?

I’m hoping there’s more to it. I’m hoping it might help us - me, for starters - better understand what the hell is going on right now in the world. It’s just a start. But at least it is a start.

To explain …

A month ago I felt impelled to write something rather different from my usual stuff:

Subsequently, the idea dawned that it may have been a door opening into a newly discovered place, a magic world, where it might be possible to set out and grasp some of the complexity that is turning our current all-too-real world upside down and inside out.

So, having started, I’m going to try pushing further with the meanderings of Tim, Winnie the dachshund and Stanley the black-clad gnome.

---

There were tears in Tim’s eyes. He couldn’t help it. They were tears of gratitude. Stanley smiled. Stanley the gnome, that is. For just a few moments he had lifted the curtain that keeps the hidden world hidden.

Winnie, of course - Winnie the dachshund, that is - already knew about it. Dogs do. There are some distinct advantages to not being human.

“That was amazing,” said Tim, “How did you do that? Did you hypnotize me when I wasn’t looking?”

“I just thought ‘Open, open, green hill!’ making sure, of course, that I did it with intention,” said Stanley.

Tim felt and looked bewildered. It was the cognitive dissonance of it all: he knew what he had just seen but couldn’t actually believe it. It was a trick, wasn’t it?

Stanley smiled: “Time was when you would have known all about it and been able quite naturally to access it.”

“Oh, come on …”

“Really,” Stanley affirmed.

“Well, why can’t I do it now, then? What stopped it?” asked Tim.

“Reading,” said Stanley.

“Reading?”

“Reading. Or, rather, the ubiquitous printed word.” Stanley adopted one of his regular poses, standing astride his bicycle with his arms folded atop the handlebar.

“In fact,” he continued, “I do believe I can actually quote one of your writers on the subject” Stanley closed his eyes and intoned:

““Open, open, green hill!” - you needed no more recondite sesame than that: and, whoever you were, you might have a glimpse of the elfin dancers in the hall that is litten within by neither sun nor moon; or catch at the white horse’s bridle as the Fairy Prince rode through.” ¹

Stanley opened his startlingly bright eyes once more and looked … well … gnomish.

“Fairy tales,” murmured Tim.

“You sound dismissive,” said Stanley. Tim shrugged his shoulders.

Tim and Stanley had first met just a month earlier, and then only briefly, but in the subsequent four weeks Stanley had popped up on a dozen or so occasions during the walks that Tim and Winnie took each day. Every time, the conversation had come easily, discussing all manner of topics and opinions.

Stanley smiled: “You’re a rationalist, Tim. I’ve learned that about you over the past few weeks. But, you know, you do see beyond the literally physical, tangible world around you.”

“Really? I do, do I?” queried Tim.

“Yes. I’ll give you a simple example: when you talk about the landscape and the surroundings you do so in a way that makes it clear you value more than just what I suppose you’d call the reality of what is around you.”

Tim looked quizzical.

Stanley continued: “A while ago you mentioned the work of John Buchan and the novel Midwinter.”

Tim smiled: “Ah, yes, Old England, huh?”

“Exactly. When Midwinter explains to Alastair, the novel’s protagonist, how to get across the land, Old England, undiscovered.”

Tim smiled and took up the story: “Alastair asks …

“Where is this magic country?”

“All around you – behind the brake, across the hedgerow, under the branches. Some can stretch a hand and touch it – to others it is a million miles away.”

“As a child I knew it,” said Alastair, laughing. “I called it Fairyland.” ²

Stanley nodded: “There you are, and I do believe you quoted it word for word.”

“Well, yes, I love it but it’s just golden corn isn’t it?” said Tim. “Anyway, you keep quoting writers but started out saying reading was the problem. That’s hardly consistent, is it?”

“The printed word,” Stanley emphasized, “that was the issue, and the widespread availability of the printed word. Printing with movable type.”

“Ye gods!” said Tim, “that was aeons ago!”

“1455 CE - Johannes Gutenberg - in Mainz, in Germany, where my own forefathers come from.”

“So, how is that relevant?”

“Because it’s the event that instigated the modern world” said Stanley.

“I think you’re going to have to explain that,” said Tim and started out in the direction of the green hill. After taking a few steps he stopped, recalling that, just a little earlier, the hill had appeared to be alive with activity. He paused and turned: “It is alright, is it, to walk here?”

Stanley nodded and Winnie scuttled forward onto the hill to prove the point.

---

The gnomes of Crocker End, where we first met Tim, Winnie and Stanley, also featured German author and essayist Karl Philipp Moritz who visited England in 1782 and wrote an account of his journey, very rationally titled Travels in England in 1782.

One of Herr Moritz’s endearing features, to my mind, was his dedication to the works of John Milton. The author of the preface to the book writes:

In 1782 Charles Moritz came to England with little in his purse and ‘Paradise Lost’ in his pocket, which he meant to read in the land of Milton.

Subsequently, in Moritz’s account we learn that on 13th June 1782 he was travelling on foot from Windsor in the direction of Oxford …

The fine green hedges, which border the roads in England, contribute greatly to render them pleasant. This was the case in the road I now travelled, for when I was tired I sat down in the shade under one of these hedges and read Milton. ³

Farther along, Moritz happened upon a common, in the middle of which was a tree with a bench seat around its trunk …

Beneath the shade of this tree I reposed myself a little, read some of Milton, and made a note in my memorandum book that I would remember this tree, which had so charitably and hospitably received under its shade a weary traveller. ⁴

And some time later, when Moritz reached the Derbyshire Dales, he wrote:

As I proceeded and saw the hills rise before me … I was just reading the passage in Milton relative to the Creation, in which the Angel describes to Adam how the water subsided and …

Immediately the mountains huge appear
Emergent, and their broad, bare backs upheave
Into the clouds, their tops ascend the sky.
Book VII, 1.285

It seemed to me, while reading this passage, as if everything around me were in the act of creating, and the mountains themselves appeared to emerge or rise, so animated was the scene. ⁵

So, nearly two and a half centuries ago, this visitor to England fulfilled his objective to read a challenging poem, in a language that was not his native tongue, and that had been written more than a century earlier, in 1667.

Would that happen today?

It might, of course, but, if a current article in The Spectator that includes the following is anything to go by it seems a lot less likely:

It’s a whole new cause of gloom to discover that even students who have actively signed up to study English literature at university are struggling to read books. ⁶

People’s reading skills and capacities are, apparently, plummeting. Increasingly it is the case that they can only accommodate short-form messaging. Which explains why universities are introducing ‘reading resilience’ courses.

It’s the launch of the iPhone in June 2007 that did it, apparently: that seems now to be generally accepted as the inciting incident that changed the world or, at least, changed the human operating system.

Gutenberg’s 1455 CE innovation where he combined elements of various technologies, including the Roman wine-press and the goldsmith’s punch⁷ (Gutenberg, himself, being a goldsmith) to create a printing press with movable type, was an earlier instance of this rare and hugely discombobulating phenomenon whereby a box of spanners gets thrown into the fundamental human operating mechanism.

---

“Oh, come on, Stanley, pull the other one! You’re telling me that you know what it was like before the arrival of the printing press?”

The little group were now high on the hilly path and Tim found himself fascinated and irritated in equal measure by Stanley’s confident assertions about things that happened centuries ago. He felt bemused, too, by the ease with which Stanley manoeuvred his bicycle across the uneven terrain. Why doesn’t he find it quite hard work? Tim wondered.

“It was an enchanted world,” said Stanley.

“An enchanted world” echoed Tim.

“Yes. Everything was alive. Every tree, every stream, every stone, every everything. All was enchanted. Don’t forget, at the bottom of the hill you caught a glimpse of the bright side of it all. But what inevitably gets most remembered, of course, is the dark side - black magic and witchcraft.”

Tim rolled his eyes: “I really don’t believe I’m having this conversation.”

Stanley smiled. “If you want to grasp what’s going on now, you need to accept that your rational view maybe isn’t all that there is.”

“Well, I don’t actually doubt that because, face it, there is a lot of irrational stuff going on right now.”

They progressed to the top of the hill in silence. Tim did so because the exertion made him a little short of breath. Winnie did so because there was just so much to sniff. And Stanley did so as he pedaled effortlessly along because he was thinking how best to explain it all.

At the top of the ridge he hopped off his saddle and resumed his talking stance: “In the late 1940s there was a lovely play called The Lady’s Not For Burning. It’s set around the year 1400 in an English market town. The lady who is not for burning is called Jennet and she’s accused of witchcraft. At one point she sarcastically says:

I promise not to leave behind me
Little flymarks of black magic, or any familiars
Such as mice or beetles which might preach
Demonology in your skirting-board.
I have wiped my shoes so that I shouldn’t bring in
The soft Egyptian sand which drifts at night,
They tell me, into the corners of my house
And then with the approach of naked morning
Flies into the fire like a shadow of goldfinches.
The tales unbelievable, the wild
Tales they tell! ⁸

See? A modern evocation of the enchanted world.”

Tim nodded. “Interesting” he said, “Today’s approach is different, of course, but, maybe not so different as we think, in some respects at least.”

Stanley’s bright stare felt disconcerting, silently pushing Tim to develop his train of thought. “Well,” Tim continued, “We’ve always demonized others … humans, that is … it’s the in-crowd and out-crowd thing, isn’t it … but at the moment we seem to have gone completely over the top about it all … demonization on steroids.”

“Uh, huh,” said Stanley, “You know, in France, in the 1630s, there was a charismatic priest called Urbain Grandier who, it seems, was not averse to misbehaving. This seems to have discombobulated an entire Ursuline convent, in which all of the nuns, including the Mother Superior, Soeur Jeanne des Anges, claimed to be possessed by devils. It even became a tourist attraction, would you believe, attracting gentlemen from England who enjoyed seeing the naughty cavortings of the women who were in the clutches of furor uterinus.”⁹

“Good heavens. What was the upshot?”

“Grandier was tried, found guilty and burnt at the stake.”

“That’s awful.”

“Yes,” said Stanley, “and Aldous Huxley makes interesting observations about people’s opinions at the time:

Most of the visiting physicians came away with the conviction that the phenomena they had seen were all too natural … all the men of letters who wrote about Grandier after his death stoutly maintained his innocence. On the side of the believers were the great masses of illiterate Catholics. (The illiterate Protestants, it goes without saying, were in this case unanimously sceptical.)¹⁰ [My emphasis]

“Wow, mass behaviour! Sounds just like today!” said Tim.

“Doesn’t it just,” agreed Stanley, “So, would it be fair to say that the arrival of digital technology has caused the resurrection of ancient lore? Has it released the means to ‘preach demonology in your skirting board’?”

And with that Stanley hoisted himself onto his bicycle saddle and pedaled, knees akimbo, down the other side of the hill. “See you again soon,” he called back.

Winnie issued a bark of agreement. Tim waved, then thought I really have to try it! Quietly, he said “Open, open, green hill.”

Thanks for reading.

1. Kenneth Grahame. Pagan Papers, The Fairy Wicket (1898)

2. John Buchan. Midwinter (1923)

3. Karl Moritz. Travels in England in 1782 (1783)

4. Karl Moritz. Ibid.

5. Karl Moritz. Ibid.

6. Sam Leith. We’re all doomed if English literature students can’t read books, The Spectator (6 October 2025)

7. Norman Davies. Europe, a history (1996)

8. Christopher Fry. The Lady’s Not For Burning (1948, 1949, 1950)

9. Aldous Huxley. The Devils of Loudon (1952)

10. Aldous Huxley. Ibid.