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By Root 1429 0

my head in Ye Olde Village Puking Trough. But then, slowly and strangely, the place began to grow on me. As I strolled up Duke of Gloucester Street I underwent a surprising transformation. Slowly, I found that I was becoming captivated by it all. Williamsburg is big – 173 acres – and the size of it alone is impressive. There are literally dozens of restored houses and shops. More than that, it really is quite lovely, particularly on a sunny morning in October with a mild wind wandering through the ash and beech trees. I ambled along the leafy lanes and broad greens. Every house was exquisite, every cobbled lane inviting, every tavern and vine-clad shoppe remorselessly a-drip with picturesque charm. It is impossible, even for a flinty-hearted jerk-off such as your narrator, not to be won over. However dubious Williamsburg may be as a historical document – and it is plenty dubious – it is at least a model town. It makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, ‘Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let’s go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings.’ But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts.

A lot of Williamsburg isn’t as old as they like you to think it is. The town was the capital of colonial Virginia for eighty years, from 1699 to 1780. But when the capital was moved to Richmond, Williamsburg fell into decline. In the 1920s John D. Rockefeller developed a passion for the place and began pouring money into its restoration – $90 million so far. The problem now is that you never quite know what’s genuine and what’s fanciful. Take the Governor’s Palace. It looks to be very old – and, as I say, no-one discourages you from believing that it is – but in fact it was only built in 1933. The original building burned down in 1781 and by 1930 had been gone for so long that nobody knew what it had looked like. It was only because somebody found a drawing of it in the Bodleian Library at Oxford that they were able to make a reasonable stab at reproducing it. But it isn’t old and it may not even be all that accurate.

Everywhere you turn you are confronted, exasperatingly, with bogus touches. At the Bruton Parish Church, the gravestones were clearly faked, or at least the engravings had been reground. Rockefeller or someone else in authority had obviously been disappointed to discover that after a couple of centuries in the open air gravestones become illegible, so now the inscriptions are as fresh and deep-grooved as if they had been cut only last week, which they may well have been. You find yourself constantly wondering whether you are looking at genuine history or some Disneyesque embellishment. Was there really a Severinus Dufray and would he have had a sign outside his house saying ‘Genteel Tailoring’? Possibly. Would Dr McKenzie have a note in florid lettering outside his dispensary announcing: ‘Dr McKenzie begs Leave to inform the Public he has just received a large Quantity of fine Goods, viz: Tea, Coffee, fine Soap, Tobacco, etc., to be SOLD here at his shop’? Who can say?

Thomas Jefferson, a man of some obvious sensitivity, disliked Williamsburg and thought it ugly. (This is something else they don’t tell you.) He called the college and hospital ‘rude, mishappen piles’ and the Governor’s Palace ‘not handsome’. He can’t have been describing the same place because the Williamsburg of today is relentlessly attractive. And for that reason I liked it.

I drove on to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home for most of his life. Washington deserves his fame. What he did in running the Colonial Army was risky and audacious, not to say skilful. People tend to forget that the Revolutionary War dragged on for eight years and that Washington often didn’t get a whole lot of support. Out of a populace of 5.5 million, Washington sometimes