Hautdesert
Map coordinates: OSE 268: locator 96 horizontal, 65 vertical.
Route: Although Sir Gawain could have forded the River Dee at Poulton
Abbey, we had to drive south a few miles to a bridge, and then north along the
Dee to the A55, then to the A51 and the A54 into the Peak District via Wincle
and Danebridge on the River Dane. Here is the best candidate for the location
of Bertilak’s castle, Hautdesert.
Log: The locations
of Bertilak’s castle Hautdesert and of the Green Chapel are suggested in SGGK
by landscape features that are found in the same area as the language of the
manuscript--that is, the Peak District of the NW Midlands, at the juncture of
Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Cheshire, near the River Dane, in and around Swythamley
Park (Edwards 1997 and Duggan 1997, citing MacIntosh, Samuels and Benskin 1986;
Elliott 1997, 1984).
The land there is hilly, high,
and almost devoid of trees, sheep country until you come down into the Dane
Valley, at which point it becomes possible to imagine Sir Gawain lost on Christmas
Eve in a tangled forest, and then coming across a “high wilderness,” which is
what the name Hautdesert would suggest. Landscape features in the area
that are mentioned in SGGK occur
near Swythamley. The words for them used by the poet are distinctive to the
language of the region, and some are
still in use today. For example, in Bertilak's hunt for the boar (lines 1421
ff.), the poet has the hunters assemble at a place that features rocherez
('rocky hillsides', 1427, 1432), a flosche ('swamp', 'marsh', or 'pool',
1430), and a knot ('rocky knoll', 1431, 1434). Words for these features
survive as the names of the modern Roaches, an
outcropping of rock visible from Swythamley; Flash, a location two miles north-east
of the Roaches, and Knotbury, which is a half-mile north-west of Flash.
Swythamley today is 16 acres surrounded by a stone wall that keeps visitors from straying off the public footpath going around it. However, at Park House, along the northern boundary, we found someone willing to let us onto the property for a few minutes, and it was from her we learned that until recently red deer (deer are hunted by Bertilak in SGGK, Fitt III) had lived at Swythamley and that Swythamley had always been owned by gentry, although it was now (i.e., July, 2002) for sale.