Available in St. Michael's Farthinghoe...
I think I'm in Brackley's Pocket Park. The Banbury railway line used to run through here on its way forward to Buckingham. The path scrambles up and down over what were once maybe two levels of track bed, and then there's a muddy slipslide up, over and down the straight road which now bypasses the western edge of town. In the 1950s someone was thinking sensibly about how a rural line like this could work. Perhaps it could be re-imagined as a bus on rails? A couple of one-carriage diesel railcars with go-faster chevrons on their cabs were brought down from Derby, but not even their cost-effective running could make the route pay. The passenger service had disappeared even before Beeching wielded his mighty axe. The other side of a stream the path pulls up over crop ready fields to a farm. After a series of well kept gates I join the lane into Hinton-in-the-Hedges, past the Cricket Club whose first 2017 fixture is yet to be announced.
The village has a lovely name, and although I wish I could tell you its significance with authority, I can't. There's another Hinton not far away towards Daventry, so I guess it's differentiating itself from that, and the OS map shows a very unusual pattern of field strips clustered in a fan around the village centre. Medieval strip fields are ubiquitous, except that their extent and location is usually only detected on the ground by ridge and furrow contours in larger contemporary fields. Cartographically the H-in-the-H configuration looks atypical, but today I don't get a chance to look at them. If I'm to believe OS 191, presumably lots of small fields = lots of hedges, hence the name, but nothing on the Web will confirm it.
Walking through the village I miss the path up to The Most Holy Trinity church and creep up on it from the side through the small playing field. Holy Trinity is in the Astwick Vale benefice where Simon Dommett is in charge, although he lives in Aynho. Simon was a jolly curate in our own parish a decade and a half ago, a man who always displayed the virtues of having been out in the world and done another job successfully before taking up his priestly calling. (Current Diocesan Directors of Ordinands please note: 23 year olds straight out of college may not immediately make the best clergy. If you have a moment, just think about why DDOs may think they do!) If you look Simon up on the internet, you'll find that the national newspapers took an interest when he camped out overnight for a couple of weeks in one of his previous churches to frustrate lead thieves. I don't know if this was nosy journalism or enterprising PR by him.. When I see Simon, I shall have to ask.
Inside the church, my eye is drawn to the splendid coat of arms hanging on the north wall which honours the Queen. Too old or young to be ER of course. It's marked AR, and so celebrates Queen Anne. There are also some great, rather fading photographs in the back corner. One shows the village children's cricket team for 1926. There are two girls among the boys. I hope they weren't there just to make up the numbers. Perhaps they were variously a fearsome opening bowler and an elegant, prolific number four bat.
Not far away across the fields is the other ecclesiastical building in the parish, the chapel of St. Peter at Steane Park. I ring ahead to make sure it's OK to visit, and Georgina promises to let me in if I call at her office in the house grounds. The chapel offers a charming broad facade to the visitor in its garden setting, beside fishponds surrounded by snowdrops and first daffodils. Simon Dommett and his team are mandated to say or sing six services a year here, and although inside there's the customary notice proclaiming that child safeguarding procedures are in operation, there's little sign that this legal requirement is much needed. The atmosphere is rather like a much loved garden shed. Some maintenance is going on. The old box pews are confusingly arranged - indeed the whole interior seems eccentrically aligned. The makeshift pulpit and altar are next to each other on the east wall. To my left as I face them there's a step down to a lower chapel. But if one imagined the whole thing turned round by ninety degrees, it would be logical to think of that as an antechapel from which one would approach a possible altar placed on the wrong i.e. south wall. Puzzling!
I plod northwards along a path which takes me past one of those odd small, circular copses whose origin could be anything from a quarry to a bomb crater to an ancient site. At a farm I turn left and eventually enter Farthinghoe up the hill and along the Cockley Road. The 'hoe' is on the far side of the village where the ground drops away more sharply. The children are enjoying a noisy lunchtime in the school playground as I open the door to St. Michael and All Angels. There's a table in what used to be the schoolroom there, now a spacious vestry, and I sit down to have my lunch too. Back in the south nave is a dreamy reclining funerary statue of George Rush fashioned in a pseudo-classical style. It's by Charles Regnart, fashionable and well-thought of in early nineteenth-century London. This work in white marble is said to be his masterpiece. Old George is wearing his slippers: a bible is clasped in his hands. It's rather touching, and very affectionate.
In refuelled state, I plunge south on a metalled road with the sun on my back, and get slightly lost in the boggy, soggy recesses of Coleready Plantation, emerging by the 'Delta Force' paintball facility. How very 1990! Having been sent up relentlessly on the telly as everything you don't want for the purposes of 'building your team' (i.e. encourages aggressive, partisan, individualistic behaviour!) I thought this regrettable fad had passed into history. Amongst the trees is a neglected, tracked military vehicle. Signs along the permissive path advise me that I'm not standing in a 'spectator area', and hint at danger from flying bullets. I always smile to myself at the phrase 'permissive path'. One expects to find canoodling couples round every corner hastily rearranging clothing.
At the road I zig-zag onto what I think is a continuation of the path. A chap is coming towards me from the opposite direction, which reinforces my mistaken impression that I'm headed the right way. He asks me if I'm lost, which should always be a sign that not everything is as it should be. In slightly gung-ho, maybe even self-righteous fashion, I confirm that I'm tickety-boo en route for Charlton. He tells me that I'm going a funny way about it, and as we look together at the map I see I've misread some pretty obvious details.
Paul is footpath warden for Charlton, so he should know a thing or two about what goes where. He also tells me that if I'm hoping to find a church in the village I'll be disappointed: it went long ago, as more recently did the Methodist chapel. Those that worship have to traipse up the road to Newbottle. I'd misread that too - although I'd plead some minor mitigating circumstances. There's a rather un-OS like vague blob in the middle of Charlton which I'd myopically misinterpreted as a church symbol. Lamely and somewhat patronisingly (as I think in retrospect) I thank Paul for his work and help, and get on the right track.
Later on, a bit of research tells me that I've been talking to Sir Paul Hayter, one time Clerk of the Parliaments, and now Chairman of Northamptonshire Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England. This makes me smile because there's been a programme on the telly this last fortnight about the House of Lords (very good it's been too!), in the course of which a familiar face from my student days has shone our from the screen. David Beamish until very recently held the same post that Sir Paul occupied with distinction a decade before him. David ( now Sir David), Robin ( now Sir Robin) Masefield and I used to hold silly conversations together in their room in (Third?) Court at St. John's College Cambridge. I seem to remember Robin was much involved in the University Tiddly Winks team. I can't recall whether he was lobbying for, or it was actually possible to get, a half-blue for this. All these men have had distinguished, contributing careers in British public life. I've had an interesting life, but not one with such profile, or indeed one rewarded by any public honour. How do I feel about this? You make your bed. You lie in it. My dad would be more disappointed than me, I expect. But I do feel just a tinge of regret that I haven't made the difference I would have liked.
Stats man: 21k. 6 hrs. 11 degreesC. Mild, even warm in the sun, but not yet t-shirt weather. 18 stiles, 20 gates, 5 bridges. One busy woodpecker near Steane. One goat sharing a field with his friend the donkey near Brackley: the goat curious about me, as goats are inclined to be: the donkey disdainful, true to his own calling.
In memoriam:
Our friend Michael Jones passed away last Sunday. He was a great man. His energy and vitality were infectious. He cycled into Northampton and back, and then suffered a stroke from which he didn't recover. He took over a pawnbrokers' business from his parents and turned it into a fine jewellers with a glittering reputation, which still occupies perhaps the prime commercial site in Northampton so appropriately at 1 Gold Street. He was a Lay Reader, and a fine, humanely Biblical preacher. The shop's advertisement in our parish magazine used to have as its strapline 'The One'! He was a believer in common ownership, and practised what he preached in his own business. He and Anne were instrumental with others in founding Workbridge and the Daily Bread co-operative project, promoting sheltered employment. According to Anne, he was always 'noisy': he certainly could be controversial, and was quite happy setting cats among pigeons if he thought it was required. When as chair of the governing body at Weston Favell Upper School he introduced me as a new governor (I was wearing a particularly lairy jacket, and had much more hair then!) he said 'Now this is Vince Cross. If we hadn't seen it, we wouldn't have believed it'. He was enthusiastic and encouraging about our music-making at St. Peter's, and also more recently about this blog. He and Anne were great walkers. They visited 700 of Simon Jenkins 1000 best churches, and at various times tramped the whole of the South West Coastal Path as well as undertaking the pilgrimage to Santiago di Compostela. He will be missed so much by so many, but chiefly of course by Anne and the rest of their family. Their diamond wedding would have been celebrated together later this year.
Lord
We thank you for these great people;
Giants of ambition and faith;
Possessed of the gift of encouragement;
Nurturers of the talent of others;
Seeing you in all men and women.
We pray that you will raise up their equals
From our daughters and sons
So that the flames of hope, faith and love
Still burn among us
And keep us warm
As we too grow old and weaken
And that with them we may be brought
To the glory of your eternal Kingdom.
Amen.
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