Robin a Tip Toe: Ballad for Solo Violin, by Stephen Gamble
The Walk to the Scaffold : Grave
The Sighs of his Beloved: Andante cantabile
Robin's Tip Toe Jig: Allegro
Robin Set Free: Allegro
Leicestershire is the county of my birth, as a child I roamed the fields around the village I grew up in, with my friend John – a farmer's lad. As a youth I wandered further afield, powered by my bicycle, then my first car. The move to the city made my explorations all the more earnest.
I find people who do not know Leicestershire assume it is a flat landscape, when in fact it rolls. It is a county of low hills, shallow valleys, abundant hedge rows, and some delightful villages. Like any English landscape the history is written into the place names, and the architecture, and in the remnants of curious man-made features in the earth - almost hidden by the passage of time. If you sit quietly and observe the undisturbed growth of dandelions and keck, or the unfurling of wreaths of briars, or listen to the birdsong, or be still enough to feel the breeze, then the ghosts of the past will come and visit you, out of curiosity, and to tell you tales.
Robin a Tip Toe is a long hill that rises just high enough to disturb the horizon. In the distant past it was a place of execution, which is surprising because even though it is prominent, the population around about is sparse – so just who were the grizzly remains of the recently executed meant to deter from crime?
Was the local population greater in the past, or did a busy way pass by?
Nobody would notice a hanging up there now.
Was it an ancient meeting place, and the memory of communal gatherings persisted? There are visible remains of earthworks that may have once been defensive, perhaps indicating a hill fort.
The hill was originally called Howback, but gained a new name in memory of Robin a Tip Toe, who was brought to the hill to be hung for stealing a sheep. The stool he stood on was kicked from under his feet, the rope jolted tight, and Robin, who was a tall fellow, found in his struggle to breath that he could just reach the floor with the tips of his toes, not enough to stand, but enough to survive if he kept shifting his weight from foot to foot; and so he danced suspended between life and death. So impressed were the crowd that they called for mercy, and the authorities had him cut down. It seems there was an old law, that if you survived an execution, you could be set free.
What is the moral of this story?
That crime doesn't pay? Or that crime does indeed pay if you are tall enough?
That one should carefully measure both the rope and those to be executed?
That fortune favours the lanky?
That justice must be seen to be believed?
Whatever the moral, the story stands, written into the landscape, and repeated by those in want of a tale to tell.
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