The River

‘I come from down in the valley

Where mister when you’re young
They bring you up to do like your daddy done…’

                                    (Bruce Springsteen)

Goodness, have I really been this way before? Nothing that I see around me on the path away from Gretton is familiar. I thought I’d walked pretty much the length of the Jurassic Way back in the day, but know I never reached its northernmost end at Stamford, so at some point must have stopped. Which could therefore be just about here. I can’t even remember why I gave up. Did I just lose interest? Or did the paths through the remaining tracts of Rockingham Forest look too logistically complicated? Forgetting’s an odd and unsettling business…and all the more as the years tick on.

I turn off the metalled road opposite Gretton’s pocket park and tread a hardcore track.  It’s already mid-morning break at the primary school, to judge by the distant infant shrieking. I’m on a plain above the Welland. On this clear September morning there’s the illusion of an immensely long unbroken view – but the mid-ground drop into and out of the river valley is hidden. Along a nicely planted bridleway beside a farm, down into a grassy dip, at an angle across a shorn field, and then I begin to hear a nervous horse behind me.  She’s being ridden ultra-cautiously by a lady who has for company an older gentleman on a pushbike. They catch up with me at a pair of gates. I try to be chivalrous to allow them through, but the gate mechanism is recalcitrant and I make a proper meal of it. The mare’s very jumpy, and with this new and incompetent human close at hand has to be coaxed along with soothing voice. The gent moans about the farmer. ‘The latches don’t comply for horseriding…’  I don’t know on which side of the hedge I’m to continue. He puts me right and the three of them are soon out of sight, the horse and rider making easy passage across the rough pasture, the bicycle and its passenger rather less so. The path crosses what I guess to be the old cutting of a long extinct ironstone railway, and then skirts a succession of woods: Dryleas Wood, Hollow Wood, Household Coppice, Lodge Coppice. The light is brilliant, the path dappled in the shade of the trees, the breeze lively and at my back. The path hangs a left by the lake at desirable Harringworth Lodge and continues beside a long wall which has been built with far more care than strictly necessary. Either there was always money hereabouts, ostentatiously displayed, or the wall demarked old-money agricultural from incomer industrial use.

Across the road, at the top of the hill, I have a distant view of the principal architectural interest of the day, the Harringworth railway viaduct. It flies across the Welland valley on eighty-two arches of forty foot symmetrical blue-brick span, a Midlands miracle of Victorian effort and engineering. There are twenty million bricks in the entire structure, all of them fired from local clay. HS2 eat your heart out. Oddly of course, to my twenty-first century eye, it adds to the landscape, rather than the other thing.

The other side of Shotley lies the village which gives the viaduct its name. There’s a little parked procession of cars by the roadside near the church of St. John the Baptist. A funeral, I think to myself, but no, the tailgate of each car is open, so it must be a walking group, divesting themselves of their boots. They’re from Melton and Oakham, mostly cheerful ladies who say I should have joined them this fine morning. I don’t know if this is a chat-up line, but just in case, I tell them I’m a pilgrim. They show suitable interest, though whether it’s the kind of curiosity usually reserved for an unusual museum exhibit on a U3A trip, it’s hard to say.

 

The church gates of St. John’s are in disarray, and the stone posts trammelled by the kind of useless red and white fluttering tape which indicates minor structural disaster, but which in Tibet would be taken for rather unimaginative prayer flags. Jan Gray, who’s come into the church to check that supplies are laid in for Saturday’s Ride and Stride points out for me the ornamental ironwork which used to greet visitors to the church, and is now stashed pro tem on the north side of the nave pending reparations. Apparently a lorry turned incautiously late one evening, and having done the damage, skipped the scene of the accident, not realising that he’d been caught on camera from a nearby house. Hah!

St. John’s is lovely. The organ is unusually placed, on a plinth above the Tryon family vault, very prominent from the p.o.v of the congregation: something not every organist would relish, and some a little too much. See those feet dance, baby! They have things set up that way in Blackpool’s Tower Ballroom where organ talent is celebrated as much as any rock n’roll guitar god. In the opposite corner the font is raised up a little too, which must make baptisms that little bit more inclusive and welcoming. The church’s information leaflet is, if I were being critical, a  tad dry, but tells me a few intriguing things. For instance, one of the bells, cast at the accession of James I, is inscribed ‘Nunc Jacobus ego cano vobis ore iucundo’ ( Now, I James, sing to you with a joyful voice ), which raises more historical questions than it answers.  And why, I wonder, is a clarinet once used in worship at St. John’s, now marked as ‘held, but no longer on display for security reasons’?

 

I wander along the lane which runs beside the noble viaduct before turning towards Seaton. I find it easy to forget the human cost as I marvel at such beautiful engineering. The hours were long, the working conditions primitive, the lifestyle not conducive to good family values. Some died. A leaflet from St. John’s tells me that there was a Curate of the Railway Mission, who tried to look after the souls of the hundreds of workers employed on the site, some of whom were housed in settlements at Seaton and Gretton. This is an untold piece of People’s History, now inaccessible.

 

 

There’s a good pub in Seaton awaiting the walker who’s toiled up the hill: The George and Dragon. Time was there was a pub in Harringworth too, but the White Swan (with a rep for being one of the oldest hostelries in the county), is currently up for sale. Has lack of custom been its downfall, or a disintegrating fabric?

 To some extent it puzzles me that churches within the same benefice vary so much. Jan tells me that numerically speaking, congregations in Harringworth are disappointing, yet the church there feels loved and welcoming. Initial impressions of All Hallows, Seaton are less favourable, but maybe I caught it on a bad day between cleaning sessions. Everything seemed untidy, unswept and clunky, and its website pictures rather flattering. However it’s open, and that’s a Good Thing, isn’t it, and as I passed through there was someone high in the belltower making sure everything was tickety-boo, and a woman was using the peace of the churchyard to read a book, though I couldn’t see whether it was Thomas Aquinas or Fifty Shades of Something. Interestingly, if you live here, the viaduct is ‘The Seaton Viaduct’.

 

The stroll on to Lyddington is thoroughly Rutland, pretty and undulating. I learnt the latter word precociously, because it figured prominently in the individually written route descriptions that once upon a time the AA would send members if they were making a car journey to some unknown and dangerous part of the country – in our case, being Kentish, to Pembrokeshire, Cornwall, or Yorkshire e.g. ‘ …In two hundred yards turn left at the crossroads, signposted Little Crockenhampton, and proceed along the A3406 for fifteen miles through gently undulating countryside…’.  As they arrived in the post these documents were among the sources of my many solo childhood anticipations, along with five shilling boxes of Brock’s fireworks (‘Pagoda Fire – what will that do?’), the shapes of wrapped Christmas presents and the progress of the Cox’s apples on our garden trees. My, we were newly arrived middle-class, but we were happy…

The path ejects me from a woody reverie into the middle of Lyddington’s stretching main street. Everything about the place speaks of a high status history – the width of the road, the sheer number of handsome dwellings with a long past, and at its heart the church of St. Andrew and the adjoining Bede House. The visitor enters the church under the tower through nicely etched glass doors. Inside is an enticing, welcoming space. St. Andrew’s immediately endears itself to me because by the south side of the rood screen is a modern carved stone head, matching the more ancient ones around the aisle roofs. It depicts the one-time Bishop Bill Westwood, who confirmed me at Emmanuel church in 1983. He is bespectacled and owlishly genial. He carries his crook, whose shape reminds one of St. Peter’s key. The likeness doesn’t quite catch his waspish side, but you can’t have everything. There are good concerts in Lyddington from time to time, and a grand piano sits, elevated, in a side aisle. We hope, don’t we, that those who come to listen to the secular, return for the sacred.

 

The Bede House is an attractive medieval building, once part of a bishop’s palace seized from the Bishops of Lincoln at the last gasp of Henry VIII’s purges, and turned into almshouses late in Elizabeth’s reign. It’s in the care of English Heritage, and since it’s Thursday, is open today. I poke my head in and out of the gift shop, and eat a sandwich at the table in the small garden, then look for a loo and find myself in one of the little cells. I retreat, intending to move on. A lady scuttles out of the shop. ‘There is a charge for admission, you know…’ she shouts across the grass somewhat combatively, and then returns swiftly to mind her cash register. I consider, and then follow her to ask politely where the admission charges are displayed (they’re not, and I’d genuinely thought that if I stayed to look around this would be a free experience!) She says that actually she agrees with me – they should be clearly posted. Later I look up the site, and see that an adult entrance charge of £6.50 is proposed. I’m torn. English Heritage does good work, and as taxpayers, I think we should help preserve our valuable past. But actually, the Bede House is rather a slight visitor experience for the money, requiring a fair bit of historical imagination. And the light, bright ambience of St. Andrew’s next door, Bishop Bill n’all, the property of the very cash-strapped Anglican church, is free to everyone. What do you make of that, pop-pickers?

 

I go down to the river once more near Thorpe by Water (or rather first up, and then down, which surprises me, not having looked closely enough at the contour lines), and then have a grinding trudge uphill to Gretton because a farmer’s ploughed out the footpath into stiff milk chocolate soil across three consecutive fields. Sue always says she can never remember from one extreme season to another the effect of summer’s heat or winter’s cold. And I forget until each autumn how hard it can be to make way over the tilled earth. How do women repeatedly offer themselves to the excruciating pain of childbirth?(assuming they have the choice!) Forgetting is a necessary part of human experience. And yet I have great difficulty with the expression ’forgive and forget’. If forgiveness is mere forgetting, what moral value does it have? And if I remember with regret and anger in my heart, as for instance I’ll probably do as we leave behind the fellowship of Europe on account of the prejudice of many and the privileged financial gain of a few, how will I really forgive? This paradox is understood by many where it comes to the crunch of principle – as perhaps in Northern Ireland, where the Battle of the Boyne is remembered and still, after centuries, unforgiven by some. We might want it otherwise, but reconciliation can never be a quick fix.

Here’s a kicker. One of the five rivers in the ancient, mythological Greek ‘Hades’ is Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, symbolically linked to personal death, and escape from the cycle of violence and sin. The Greek word for truth is ‘aletheia’, as in the gospel writer John’s ‘the truth will set you free’. So for an educated person in Jesus’ time the word literally meant ‘not-forgetfulness’.

But maybe I’ve told you this before: I can’t remember.

 Water under the bridge:  18.5 km. 6.5 hrs. 22 deg. C. Sun and cloud. An impish, lively breeze from time to time. A buzzard, curious about me, near Harringworth church, beautiful with the sun on his/her wings. Three churches: all open. 7 stiles. 15 gates. 3 bridges. One railway line to cross near the return to Gretton. Caution required here. To the north there’s a curve to the track which might give reduced time to the walker in the face of a southbound train.

 

 

Father

Only you can do this
So please have mercy on your children.
Heal our memories of hurt and failure
And help us move on
Unburdened
To see you more clearly
Love you more dearly
Follow you more nearly
So that together
We build your Kingdom
Here on earth
Tending your garden of delights
As you always planned.
Amen.