Who won?

Banbury Lane, the old drover's road, crosses Watling Street at Foster's Booth, which these days is pretty much a single settlement with Pattishall. Who was Foster? And why did he have a booth? (It conjures up the image of someone handing out tickets to A5 travellers: 'This way for the amusement park', and actually I suppose it may just have been the site of an early toll booth!) Disappointingly for some, Foster's has nothing to do with lager. It's probably just a corruption of 'foresters', and a 'booth' is a bothy. This was once an important crossroads as people driving animals on the east-west route met with the traffic travelling from London to Holyhead and-all-points-between. The inns hereabout must have done great business if they were up to snuff. And the bothy was probably a bit intimate and smelly!

A couple of short field paths to the west lies the hamlet of Cold Higham. St. Luke's church has an attractive saddleback tower, and as I'm sitting on a churchyard bench contemplating it, I get a cheery wave from Pauline the churchwarden. She's done the job for quite a few years now. She invites me inside, which is something you do if you're proud of your church. And quite right too: it's lovely. Because it's the Saturday morning before the fifth Sunday of the month, she's making preparations for the service tomorrow, which will be the only one in the benefice - which as you'll recall includes Pattishall, Gayton and Tiffield. I ask her if there'll be lots of worshippers from those other parishes. She thinks perhaps not many: people tend to stay put, particularly if they're more elderly. I wonder to myself if, when the benefices were designed (not just here, but more widely) there was too great a spirit of optimism that parishioners would embrace the full range of worshipping options. It's not going to suit everyone, being peripatetic. Since Cold Higham is as compact as it is, children don't figure largely in its ministry: there are virtually none. Here I especially like the cosy southside 'Potcote Chapel', complete with its oak effigy of one time Lord of the Manor, Sir John De Pattishull.

I strike out across the field, which has until recently hosted a crop of maize. Now cut to about six inches, the rigid, bamboo-like stalks are a considerable hazard when walking through them. I stumble and curse. Needless to say the right of way isn't matched by a path on the ground. I eventually avoid the issue at the expense of a few hundred extra metres and enter Grimscote by road. Grim it may be by name, but Grim reality it isn't: the little village is very pleasant. The name 'Grim' crops up a great deal across the Home Counties and East Anglia, and one can find various explanations of its meaning. Does it refer to a person, or series of persons, or does it have a theological, pre-Christian religious significance? I know 'Grimsdyke' on the Harrow Weald, which as a house is now a relatively fancy Best Western hotel, though it was once the home and nemesis of W.S.Gilbert. But the reference is to the ancient earthworks which meander across the Weald with no clear constructional purpose. There are similar ones hidden among the woodland near my old family home in Bexley, Kent. The suggested dates for them range from 300 B.C. to 800 A.D., and most likely they mark territory rather than having any defensive function. In Norfolk one can visit the Neolithic flint mines which are called 'Grimes Graves'.

From Grimscote there's a straight westerly path which climbs gently out of an impressively deep 'hollow way' until it becomes a broad track crossing between fields of brassica with (today) a beautifully grey view of the village of Stowe-Nine-Churches to the north. In a while I turn right onto the Towcester Road into delightful Litchborough. St. Martin's sits amid a number of highly desirable properties. It's open. Inside I discover I'm in a church of the 'Lambfold Benefice' (nice name!). I'm writing a version of the 'Mak the Sheep Stealer' Mystery Play at the moment, so I'm thinking a lot about sheep. St. Martin of Tours was a good European. He was born in Hungary, served in the Roman army, and ended up in France, and here he is with a church dedication in Northamptonshire. Pick the bones out of that, Brexiteers!

Litchborough church seems very well organised. On one wall there's a comprehensive selection of photographs showing the important people of the parish, lay and clergy. Many of the lay representatives are women, and many appear to be over fifty, and quite a few have titles which suggest specific training for their roles. Is this 'credentialism' always a good idea? Could it be argued that it amounts to a colonisation of the (approved) laity by the clergy? As a trend is it more or less pronounced in evangelical circles, and if so why? And how do our concerns about safeguarding interact with all this? As I leave I notice that a previous rector here was John Knight who succeeded Michael Glover as Team Rector of Emmanuel, Northampton. I'm sure John wouldn't mind me characterising him as a formidably, and sometimes fiercely evangelical priest.

Litchborough cricket club used to hold a regular Boxing Day match, but I don't think it's played any more - what a shame! I loved the Dada-ist eccentricity and enthusiasm of that. Afterwards they used to retire to the Red Lion for winter warmers, which is where I go for a sit down and a ginger beer.

From Litchborough I pick up the Knightley Way, walking roughly south-east towards Greens Norton. I remember walking the northern section of this supposed long-distance path many years ago and not being much impressed. It's named after a famous Northamptonshire family, and I'm sure they were worth more than this succession of notional field paths, ignored by both the farmers through whose land they pass, and sensible walkers who can find better ways of spending their time. Half way to Greens Norton the path skirts the manor house on which was centred the Caswell Research facility. Caswell has an honoured place in the history of computing. If I was a conspiracy theorist I'd observe that it's quite an out of the way situation for a 'research facility', but far be it from me...I wonder what else went on there?

As the spire of St. Bartholomew's appears ahead of me, I recall I once wrote a Morris tune called 'Greens Norton' for a library album of 'folk music'. It featured the splendid melodeon playing of folk celebrity Simon Care, who was born in Moulton. (A 'library album' contains incidental music designed to be used in advertising and on the telly: the users pay a royalty, some of which is passed on to the composer. If you get lucky, and your tune is picked up to be, say, the theme for all BBC snooker programmes - which happened to one composer for the same record company - then you get very rich. 'Greens Norton' has thus far only earned me a few quid over twenty years, but it's still out there, and who knows, one day it may make my fortune. But I'm not holding my breath.)

Before I make my way up the rise to the church, I try for a coffee at the Butchers Arms, but the best they can do is instant, though to be fair they only charge me a pound. It's Hallowe'en weekend and the pub is festooned with cobwebs. There are creepy Victorian-style reversing portraits on the walls, prim ladies and gentlemen from one angle, skeletons from the other. The door to the gents is unmarked except for a covering of ghostly ephemera. Further up the hill past the church a bloke with green and mauve face paint scuttles out of his house and gives me an embarrassed wave. He knows he looks an idiot.

I wasn't expecting it in such a busy village, but St. Bartholomew's is open too. I stand in the church on my own and for the first time in this series of walks feel how I miss the presence of other people in there with me. Maybe it's something about the fading afternoon light: the clocks fall back this evening. On the stand at the back of the church, there's a good leaflet drawing attention to features of churches in general (organs, pulpits etc.) and the quirks of this one - a stained glass window with a set of cricket stumps, a heavy old parish chest, and so on. And the Black Death is mentioned, as it was in Litchborough. There it carried off three incumbents in 1349 alone.

On the way back to Pattishall, almost at the top of the rising ground I pass Astcote Thorns, a large rectangular stand of trees with thicket in between, and am curious about its position. I suppose anyone with a historical interest always surveys the two sides of Watling Street anywhere between St. Albans and Wolverhampton and wonders where exactly the enraged Boudicca made her last stand against the Romans. Up to then she had been winning the battles. Now she lost the war and her life.

With the American presidential election looming, I'm thinking a lot about winning and losing. It feels as if there are significant seismic shifts occurring in public life, including religion, as people begin to absorb the implications of the internet and the nature of contemporary communications. In particular no one under the age of thirty really understands how profound the change since 1980. Maybe one could once easily discern the winners and losers in any social contest. Not now I think. The rapid movement of ideas, and the asserted right of each individual to their entitlement (whatever they think that might be) has complicated the issues which confront us to a massive, possibly an ungovernable extent. No one knows what to do, and the first step to our recovery might be to admit it.

The Church appears to be losing all its arguments hands down - which is partly why I'm walking and writing this blog. But never bet against 'Revival' in a spiritual sense, though whether that would necessarily have beneficial effects might be open to question. Think of the inquisition, or Salem. If we began to win the moral and spiritual war, would we oppress and persecute those who disagreed, just as surely as the Daesh have done in Syria/Iraq?

Stats man:  19km  s hrs.  15C. Little or no wind.  22 stiles.  12 gates.  53 names in the St. Martin's visitors' book for 2016 so far. They came from Finland, Poland, and Australia amongst others, as they walked the Knightley Way (poor things!) or repaired the loo, or researched their ancestors, or just enjoyed a beautiful place.

Father
You are our strength and salvation.
We pray for this divided world;
For what we will become;
That individual desire
May not Trump the common good.

That nationally and locally
In and out of church
We can grasp
That we are members of one another.

We ask it in Jesus name

Amen.