Joy in heaven

                                       
                                         A distant view of Piddington.


I pick my way through domestic Wootton in the direction of Grange Park. A neglected strip of woodland divides the two housing districts. In an untidy meadow I skirt a collection of travellers' horses. I'm always distrustful, particularly when like these they're untethered and there are foals, but this lot have their minds on a grassy breakfast and munch on, heads down.

On the other side of the woodland I'm staggered again by the sheer number of houses around me and their apparent lack of coherent aesthetic. I can sometimes see what the architect might have had in mind - an allusion to vernacular Northants three-storey cottages perhaps - but here, viewed from below by the stream, the effect is monumental, more Glasgow than Northampton. The mass of housing is so great that from a parish point of view and with August coming up fast, the Biblical expression about the 'fields being white unto harvest' springs to mind...which is what Grange Park Church is there to address from its 'Kairos Centre'. Since it's Monday morning, the coffee shop is open. Aneta serves me a Kit-Kat and a mug's worth. I chat to Jane and Lester. GPC is a 'fresh expression' running in tandem with the Baptists. (I remember that friends Kathy and Alan Patterson must be involved.) There's a lot of messy church being done: although a retirement village has opened close by, much of the local demographic is young. The vicar, Charlie Nobbs, has been at GPC for thirteen years but is moving off to a diocesan role down the Bedford Road at Bouverie Court, using his experience to foster other pioneering church projects. He's just been to the dentist round the corner (where the Crosses also go to see the excellent Mr Ghaffar) and has had some dismal news about a wisdom tooth. We chat. I put my foot in it by muddling up people we both know well and feel foolish. There's nothing so humbling as being dogmatically wrong. He doesn't hold a grudge and helps me plan my route out of the urban maze.

It's wonderful and important that people work with dedication bringing the Gospel to the attention of those living in places like Grange Park. But, I think to myself, I can readily identify the local school, and the local pub, and the local shops. How do I immediately know where the Christians are? Good publicity and visibly Christian lives are essential, but the Church needs help presenting itself to the passing community. I think we need recognisable buildings, and inside these buildings, helpful focuses of attention for worship. These fundamentals will hit us hard in the pocket, but to avoid being a remnant, we have to do this thing, if only the planners will let us.

Despite Charlie and Aneta's instructions, and mostly because quite stupidly I can't be bothered to retrieve a compass from the depths of my rucksack, I make an exit on the wrong side of the Country Park, and am paid out with a trudge round a field next to the M1. My consolation is a brief sighting of the rump of a deer as it bounds into the undergrowth, startled by my arrival. A path through what seem like back gardens takes one into Quinton. Hang on, this actually is someone's back garden, and very beautiful it is too: I missed the stile in the corner back there!

After I became a full-time musician, Sue and I briefly contemplated buying a house with Nigel the drummer and his partner Angie. Realistically, the places in Northamptonshire we checked out for this mild experiment in not-quite communal living were too grand and expensive, and among them were a lovely but damp-feeling house in Quinton, owned by a surgeon and his wife, who turned out to be the midwife who looked after Sue when Matt was born. Not long afterwards Nigel and Angie weren't 'Nigel and Angie' any longer, so this was something that just wasn't to be. Looking at where we might have lived, we might have done all right financially. Just around St. John the Baptist's church it's all very bijou, even a touch swanky.

I stop at the village seat. A small boy comes to play football in the yard between his front door and some barns. He sees me with a map and asks me if I'm lost - very charming! It begins to rain and I don my anorak, just where a chap is struggling with a strimmer, as one does when the cable needs replacing. Up the road and across the fields the countryside begins to roll, and there are long, green views. At first the paths are properly cut into the fields of wheat, but sod's law, just at the point where there's a long stretch as barley crowds over the footway from both sides, it begins to hammer down under a lively breeze, and despite rainwear and umbrella, I'm soon soaked from above and below. My Merrills are squelching, Goretex or no.

I seek sanctuary in an open Piddington church, another St. John the Baptist, and before long the church treasurer, Jill Watson turns up, surprised to see me eating my sandwich and dripping over their porch. I explain what I'm doing. She was in Weston Favell the other Sunday with their young people and had a look at where we worship. Very different buildings, she says. We have a carpet: they don't. We have a chapel: they don't.  But they have a servery, and an intimate, cosy nave. It's a very nice place to be, Piddington church. In fact I like everything about the village, which by its considerable size will surprise the innocent visitor because here, at the gateway to Salcey Forest, the road stops. As Steve Earle sings it, 'There ain't a lot that you can do in this town/Drive down to the lake and turn back around'. Except there isn't a lake here, just the trees.

But Piddington has a long history, right back to the Stone Age. Its Roman villa is well-celebrated. We even know who lived there at one point, a Tiberius Claudius Severus, probably a Brit who acquired Roman citizenship. Currently the archaeologists to whom we owe the annual excavations are turning their attention to what the gardens might have been like at the villa's peak. From post-holes they've discovered, they think that the Romans cultivated espalier fruit trees around the walls of the vegetable garden. I'm much moved by this ancient sophistication. There's a museum here, but it's only open on Sundays. I'll have to come back another time.

Round the back of Horton's 'The French Partridge' (as recently as the early 1980s Northamptonshire's only restaurant of repute, but tres, tres pretentious back then, despite serving what I swear were tinned potatoes on one occasion!) is the church of St. Mary Magdalene. It's now closed for worship, and from the outside it looks rather sad. I've never been very sure about Horton. The heart of the village is a private road which seems to me to breathe hostility to the world beyond, and the closure of the church just amplifies the apparent lack of warmth, reminding me of that old excluding county set and style we first knew. Sorry, Hortonians, just speaking as I find.

I walk back to Piddington and from there almost down into Hackleton on the Northampton road, looking in vain for the site of the Roman villa, trying to think where I'd have wanted to stick my personal mosaics and hypocaust. It's nowhere advertised, and probably very wise too, to keep the metal detectorist treasure hunters at bay. Hackleton has no Anglican church, but it does have a Carey Baptist chapel so named because William of that ilk preached his very first sermon in the village. The railway from Bedford to Northampton passed to the north of Hackleton, but one of the two stops between these two main towns was called 'Piddington' in recognition of the greater status of that village, even though it was situated more than a country mile away. Near here there were once two branch lines. One took supply trains to the site of a now defunct MOD ordnance depot. And just outside Horton, a bridge over the Newport Pagnell road signifies the disused track of the line which would have once carried punters to the Towcester Races a hundred years ago. The owner of a gracious house sited in the middle of Salcey Forest had himself a station built on this branch purely for domestic use. I believe the platform is still there somewhere in the bushes. Those were the days. Not.

I'm approaching the low point of my day as the weather, which had briefly threatened to become more clement, takes another turn for the worse. It's one of those occasions when the walker's always too hot or too cold. And now I have no choice but to extract the compass from my bag because the ruddy farmer has removed the line of a path towards Preston Deanery. I follow the be-thistled edge
of a field and find another path that will do. It crosses two more fields, goes round the end of a copse and passes uphill towards a sewage plant. Beyond that is a field where the path should continue, but all that's visible is a line of crushed crop where a previous intrepid and very likely irate rambler has pushed through the barley. Since the crop's already damaged I follow in his/her footsteps, only to find that the bloke/girl gave up half way across. And then a clammy hand clutches at my heart as I realise I'm walking without my beloved stick, a precious gift from my dad some twenty years ago. It's been my companion for literally thousands of miles since, once surviving unharmed on a West London tube station for an hour after I'd mislaid it. It's perfectly weighted, light yet stylish, and when reversed, capable of looking daunting in the face of threat from man or beast.

I consider. And then retrace my steps through the barley, past the sewage station, across the fields, round the copse, up the hill and along the edge of the thistly field to where I hope I left it, at the point where I'd been searching my bag for the compass I needed because the ruddy farmer had sown across the path. Grrr! And, be still my anxious heart, there it is, a silver coin in the corner of the swept room, snuggled down in the long grass awaiting my return.

It takes two more attempts before I unlock the secret of the route to Preston Deanery but eventually I reach the small, perfect, spare and beautiful church of St. Peter and St. Paul, now technically redundant, but open to visitors each day, and used by the benefice on special occasions. There are life size cut-outs of greyhounds laid on sacking in the chancel because one lordly owner kept his dogs there in the early 17th Century. In the tower is a mobile of papier mache pigeons. When the unsuspecting visitor enters a cooing soundtrack begins and the mobile starts to move. The tower was once used as a pigeon loft. It's an enchanting place with a chequered history. It is the wider Church writ in small.

The day ends as it began - with animals. On the way back to Wootton I run the gauntlet through two fields which are temporary home to over a hundred inquisitive young heifers. I shake my friendly stick in their direction and they run off to play at the opposite end of the pasture.

Stats man: 24 km. 8 hrs. 19 degrees max. 5 churches. 5 rain showers of varying ferocity. 1 small deer. 1 small hawk. 1 large hawk (red kite). 1 new Prime Minister Designate (female)

Lord

You are my strong staff,
My high tower,
My shelter from the wind and the rain.
In your places
there is delight and tranquillity.
I find joy and tears mingled
within your walls.
By your law of love
I am refreshed and satisfied.
You are balm for my feet
and rest for my aching limbs.
Thank you.
Amen.