The Straight Lines of Oppression

 Up in the lovely, formerly Northamptonshire village of Helpston for a visit for the John Clare Weekend. I look at a map. And the thing jumps out.

The straight lines.

Straight lines are nearly always the sign of colonisation, don't you think? When the Romans built Ermine Way and King Street across the Fenny edges in straight lines, they were defying custom and - let's face it - gravity. Most noticeable in the Roman road across Hardy's "Egdon Heath" (Black Heath near Dorchester). The road goes straight over hills. In sheer logistical terms nonsense - any sensible Beaker Person would go round. But in the language of Empire, of domination - if a legion has to climb in a straight line to the top of a hill, every hairy-bottomed Celt for miles around would see the sunlight glinting off the armour and think, if they're so stupid as to climb up like that, what will they do to us if we revolt?

And then the drainage of the Fens. Straight lines. The road from Helpston to Glinton. A straight line. One that superceded John Clare's wobbling and merry route - in his mind if not in reality - from his real home to that of his imagined alternative wife, poor Mary Joyce. Until it too was bisected by another straight line - the iron road from Peterborough to the North.

And these straight lines like the Roman one were the marks of control - of the Duke of Bedford and suchlike landowning chums, deciding to drain away the traditional lives of Fenfolk and uplanders alike, in the interests of fields of waving turnips. Once you get out there, where the horizons are distant and the skies are vast, if you look at the middle distance it's all straight. Straight roads, square fields, straight dykes intersecting at right angles. It's all straight lines. Order imposed on the fenny primal chaos. Draining out the Wills of the Wisp with the curves. The fields have been joined to fields until there is no-one on the land.

The borders of the United States, as you head west, are straight. Some states are, allowing for the curvature of the earth, as near rectangles as you can get on an oblate spheroid. Straight lines imposed on the winding trails of those who were there first.

And the borders of the Middle East and Africa - drawn by rich Westerners on  paper napkins, according to legend - straight.

A straight line on a map is an act of aggression. A defiance of history, folklore, custom, tradition and geography. Two fingers up to the land, to the people that lived with the land, to God, who apparently chooses to seat Godself in a triangle around a round table. It has no place in the mental landscape of a free person who chooses not to oppress others. It is the oppression of Nature and human nature.

Let us go round hills, or wind up them to winding ridgeways. Let us reclaim the crooked roads of our crooked ancestors. Let us see straight lines for what they are - the mark of Empire, the mark of oppression. Wanderers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but a few hours due to your less efficient route planning.

And avoid Milton Keynes. It's all straight lines.