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They built a terrace overlooking the sea and paved the road from Drizzle. But five years later, when the mud began to poison them, they abandoned the town in a week and fled to wash themselves in the waters at Bath. The little Regency mansions with their marble floors and dainty iron balconies were deserted. The sheep flooded the road again and when the fishermen came down from the hills Wilton Hunt killed himself. They buried him beneath the pyramid sitting astride his favourite horse.
The town remained in disgrace until a Victorian parson called Hercules Shanks passed through Rams Horn while painting pages for A Dictionary of Small Wild Flowers. On the cliffs to the west of the town he stumbled upon some fossil bones. He collected a fragment of skull and several teeth and carried them back to London. For a time he used them as paperweights and then, grown tired of the novelty, gave the remains to a friend and forgot them. But Charles Darwin had published The Origin of Species and the parson’s bones were soon exhibited as evidence of modern man rising from the ancient ape. The fossil fragments became a sensation. The size of the teeth suggested that early Rams Horn Man was a flesh-eating giant. A naked, pagan brute. The beast inspired a penny song sheet and correspondence in the Tatler.
The parson, who knew in his heart that God had created the world both perfect and complete on 23 October 4004BC, at nine o’clock in the morning, argued that the bones were those of a fossil horse. But London laughed at the very idea of Shank’s pony and the parson felt ridiculous. His sermons were ignored and his family was attacked in the street.
For a thousand years the town was a clutch of cottages, cut from earth and stone. The people were small and as ugly as gnomes. Brothers married sisters because the bible had not reached them: pilgrims on the road from Drizzle always drowned in the mud of the Sheep. The Rams Horn men smoked seaweed, cured in a mixture of rum and honey, while the women made shawls from the scales of fish. In fair weather they would take to the sea in shallow boats hunting for lobsters and dogfish. In foul weather they would hide in their hovels, watching the sea spray through the shutters while mussels cracked sweetly in driftwood fires.
In the summer of 1348 a French fishing boat full of corpses drifted into Melcombe Regis and the Black Death infested Dorset. Thousands perished, churches burned and towns fell empty. But Rams Horn was spared, since even the rats would not cross the river. Two hundred and forty years later, when Drake engaged the Spanish fleet, the people of Rams Horn stood on the top of the limestone cliffs and watched the smoke from the English cannon. But they could not guess who had won the day and received no news of the battles. They were a wild, forgotten tribe of men.
And then, at the beginning of he eighteenth century, a physician called Wilton Hunt, on a grand tour of England, suggested that that mud from the Sheeps Mouth might cure fever, fainting and fits. Among the crumbling cottages he constructed a bath-house, shaped like a pyramid, and filled the tank with the mud. When the news was carried to London the rich and the foolish, forbidden to venture abroad by Napoleon, flocked to Rams Horn to wallow and gossip.
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