I park up in Old's Mill Lane, and stroll round to pick up the south-westerly path which leads through sheep fields from Grange Farm over a collection of well-kept stiles down to the stream which feeds into Pitsford Reservoir. On the far side I avoid a herd of cows and calves and negotiate with a farm dog that I'm not worth the trouble of his teeth in my knee. Then, after a turn off the track into a dip, it's a short distance to Scaldwell's village green.
Wikipedia isn't very kind to Scaldwell (written by a disgruntled resident/ex-resident?) It is, it says, a tiny village without shops or a pub, and its population is mostly ageing. Well, there are three hundred people living here, which makes it more than tiny in my book, and the ageing thing is probably subject to revision. This is just the kind of place where aspirational thirty-somethings would like to live. Me too, if I could afford it. True, it has no pub, and the button on the village website marked 'Events' has nothing happening in July, dear boy. But there's a Scaldwell Club open on a few evenings a week, so locals can buy a drink without getting in their car and travelling to the fleshpots of Brixworth.
SS Peter & Paul's church is shut, but I eat a sandwich on the bench next to the allotments, and ponder what might be entailed in the 'Bread Service' which has been held every year since the significant one of 1666. There was a lot of ironstone in the fields to the west of Scaldwell, and for fifty years until the early nineteen sixties it was extracted on an industrial scale. One of the saddle-tank locomotives used on the little railway, named after the village, is preserved in a museum in Brockham, Surrey. I daresay all this provided Scaldwell with extra 'bread' for a while.
These days there's no sign of that industrial past, and a long undulating path stretches across ripening wheat fields towards Lamport. It's a moment of high summer, the point when I always feel regret for the passing year and the coming end of the golden time. So many opportunities wasted. So much to do. I think to myself that it's a round half century since 1967's 'Summer of Love', when my affair with rock music really began. The line up at that year's Monterey festival famously included not only Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin (in her role as lead singer with Big Brother and the Holding Company) but also Eric Burdon, The Mamas and the Papas, The Who, The Byrds, The Grateful Dead, Buffalo Springfield and Simon and Garfunkel, amongst others. In the October of 1967, John Peel hosted his first Top Gear Radio 1 programme (nothing at all to do with Jeremy, Richard, James and testosterone fuelled motor cars!) and I was quickly hooked, thereafter attempting to combine my weekend study of Thucydides and Ovid with listening to Skip Bifferty, Mandrake Paddle Steamer, Chicken Shack et. al.. I was an innocent, mostly ill-informed bystander of the political difficulties of the day, and as a South East London schoolboy would have had to answer a definite 'no' to Hendrix's album title enquiry 'Are you experienced?' , but at the domestic level perhaps we all responded to the strait-jacketed post-war attitudes of an older generation with scepticism and a longing to do things differently. So in those regretful memories of mid/late teenage years is also a sense of another golden era ended, not just because of the passage of years, but because 1967's optimism and idealism are largely out of the window today. And yet, and yet, as Stephen Stills sang back then, right now in 2017, 'There's something happening here/What it is ain't exactly clear...There's battle lines being drawn/Nobody's right if everybody's wrong...'
I turn left at the main road and cross the field to Hanging Houghton. This is partly because I love the name of this small village which looks out over the valley from its beautiful position. I also know there was once a chapel or church here, and wondering where it might have been, I want to be in the place to pray briefly for those who live there now without its benefits. I can see a couple of candidates for the building's one-time location, and just generally wander around, nosing, remembering that in Sue's mum's later years we saw the new development of houses here above the farm and were tempted to buy. It would have been a good investment, I think, but the place was certainly too remote for a fit person in their eighties, and perhaps for us too.
The Swan at Lamport provides a lunchtime drink and a loo. It's trying to be a gastro pub, and it's perfectly clean and everything, and the staff are nice, but I'd have preferred to tap up whatever tearoom arrangements are in place at the Hall except it doesn't open until 2. On the road beside the Grand House is All Saints church. Something bad must have happened here in recent times.I can't get in, and the notices advising of the church's surveillance by a security company are obvious and legion. Next to the front door is a small war memorial in the shape of a Celtic cross carrying the name of William Barnard Rhodes- Moorhouse V.C.. Sources variously have Rhodes-Moorhouse as born in Yorkshire, London and Lamport, but it seems that actually the family moved into Lamport Hall later in the year of his birth -1887. His mother was of Maori descent through her own mother, which interestingly gets William included on the Northamptonshire Black History Association's alumni list. He was always clearly fascinated by the mechanical, and became the first flyer to be awarded a VC, killed as a result of injuries sustained in a daring bombing raid on the railway station at Courtrai in 1915. As he lay on his deathbed, he commented that for him the experience of dying, that journey into the great unknown, was like his first solo flight. His family later lived at Spratton, and there's an individual commemoration of him there too.
Away from Lamport, I take the bridleway which runs north-east from the Old road along the crest of the slight ridge at about 150 metres. Eventually this meets another broad byway which carries me south-east to the lost village of Faxton, once the Saxon 'Fakr's Farm'. The breadth of the path is telling. What I'm walking along was once the main access to the little village, and is sometimes given as one reason for its decline - because it was so poorly maintained, and must have been impassably muddy in the sharp dip a couple of hundred metres from the houses. Most 'lost' villages in the South Midlands are the result of enclosures and other regrettable actions by landowners in medieval or post Civil-War times. Faxton held on long after that, recovering after decimation by the Black Death. Its church, unusually dedicated to St. Denis, patron saint of Paris, was only demolished in the nineteen fifties. All that remains of it now is a font and various gravestones lying somewhere in a field, although I don't find them. A watercolour by John Piper, now held in the V&A, shows the ruins of the place before it was finally pulled down. You'll find its likeness on the web. The last Rector of Faxton was W.M. Watkins Pitchford, whose son Denys (was the name a coincidence?) became a celebrated twentieth century author and illustrator in his own right. Did Piper and Watkins Pitchford know each other? I think they must have done. Possibly they met at the Royal College of Art where both studied. Piper had a penchant for wild-looking ecclesiastical buildings but his depiction of Faxton is relatively muted. Under the name BB ( a kind of shot used against geese) Watkins Pitchford wrote many books, often for children, often with countryside themes. The gentle singer and muse of early Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett, was a devotee. No doubt BB's eccentricity and whimsicality appealed. 1967 again.
All that survives of the ancient farm apart from the churchy bits is a single house in a copse. On my hippie kick, I find myself singing an (adapted) Joni Mitchell lyric:
'I came across a child of God
He was walking along the road
I asked him where are you going
And this he told me
He said "I'm goin' down to Fakr's Farm
Gonna join me a rock n'roll band
Gonna camp out on the land and set my soul free"
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden...
And if you know the rest of the song, you'll know why the sight of so many butterflies (everywhere plenteous this year according to D. Attenborough) coppers, whites, red admirals and even one peacock, brought a tear to my eye in this maudlin place, as the bombs still fall, not now in Vietnam, but in Syria, Yemen and in unknown places in Africa. There is still everything to do.
Stats man: 14 km. 4 hours. 19 degrees. Cloudy but clearing with a chilly north-easterly breeze.13 stiles. 13 gates. 4 bridges. Two churches still standing. Both closed for the day. No one to talk to.but the sheep, the chien mechant and the butterflies.
Dear Lord
I thank you for those who work the land.
Who produce our food.
Who keep an environment
Where I can feel at peace
And feel you close.
I pray for fair and thoughtful trade
For unselfish sharing of the earth's resources
For a restraint of the greed
Into which we all so easily fall.
I pray that in my own habits
And conversation
I may show real solidarity
With the poor of the world.
Lord
Forgive my hypocrisy.
Amen
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