Into the woods...

Shortly after leaving Southwick I get lucky. Crossing the stream, I glimpse a flash of electra-glide blue skimming the water: a kingfisher, still one of the most breathtaking sights in the British countryside, because relatively rare, and invariably fleeting. And just where it’s flying, on a branch overhanging the rill, a black and white woodpecker, whether lesser or greater spotted I can’t tell you, leaning away from the bark as an experienced climber would on a rockface.
 

An erratum – or at least, a misapprehension. I thought the ‘World Conker Championships’ were still held at Ashton, but a correspondent tells me that in 2013 they moved to Southwick, and will be held there this coming Sunday. The entry form is available on line, so there’s still time to compete if you feel the force is with you, though this year the conkers are small, and the horse chestnut itself is threatened - now classed as ‘vulnerable to extinction’ across Europe. Use it or lose it. And if you have a secret conker-hardening recipe, don’t give it away.

 On the far side of the field the trees await. On the subject of Stephen Sondheim (see my previous post!), my personal favourite among his musicals is ‘Into the Woods’. Little Red Riding Hood sings:

‘Into the woods and down the dell

The path is straight, I know it well
Into the woods and who can tell
What’s waiting on the journey?
Into the woods to bring some bread
To Granny who is sick in bed
Never can tell what lies ahead
For all that I know she’s already dead
But into the woods…
Into the woods to Grandmother’s house
And home before dark!’

 So LRRH is on a pilgrimage too, of sorts. Nursery tales are where we explore our shadow sides. We don’t know what we’ll find when we enter the childhood which is still part of us each and every day. The wolf may be lurking in unexpected places. And yet, for many of us brought up on tales on Robin of Sherwood, the woods are where we like to be, outlaws and fugitives on the run from Authority. Oh yes, my walks are full of fantasy.

 

 Fortunately man-eating animals as well as conkers are also virtually extinct in Howe Wood and Great Colsters. I emerge from the forest and follow the track round and up towards Lodge Farm. My phone vibrates. It’s Matt on Facetime, and we have a jolly conversation feeling very modern, him in a European capital and me in the middle of the Northamptonshire countryside, until he asks why I called him, and I say I thought he’d called me, before realising that because my phone was in my trouser pocket and I was striding out in the way men do, it had called him of its own accord. Later I find I’d unintentionally called my stepmum in much the same way.

 Apethorpe (‘App-thorpe’!) is a very pretty hamlet (with quite a few cottages for sale) and in thrall to its own adjoining grand-manner Jacobean house, once called ‘Apethorpe Hall’, now retitled ‘Apethorpe Palace’, on account of it having been a favoured hunting lodge for James the First, back when Rockingham Forest really was Rockingham Forest, and not just a disaggregated set of woodlands. Given his ambiguous reputation, one can imagine that ‘Into the woods’ had a different range of meanings for Jack and his boys (and girls!) 

 

                                Eighteenth century justice: stocks and whipping post: Apethorpe 

St.Leonard’s website assures me the church will be open, but it isn’t, so I scoff an M&S chicken sandwich in the porch and admire a view across to the older buildings at the back of the Palace, which is now privately owned but with some involvement from English Heritage, such that visits may be made to inspect its splendours during July and August. On the OS map there’s an intriguing reference to ‘Gold Diggings’ south east of the Palace. A very good English Heritage article on the web tells me that this was the site of a Roman villa, unusually posh for around here, with hypocausts, galleries, more than one range, painted walls, bath houses, altars, the real deal. It further points out that for whatever reason the parish boundary between Southwick and Apethorpe was aligned with the villa, so in all probability a folk memory of the place remained after its decline. From artefacts found locally around Apethorpe, human history here goes back much further than the Romans. How big was the Neolithic population of northern Northamptonshire? The archaeologists and historians tend to the very conservative about this. Unhampered by any evidence or academic qualification I’m inclined to think there were more folk around than generally reckoned, though of course, life was much nastier, more brutish and short than today. Life and procreation tends to the abundant, it seems to me, until it doesn’t, as with conker trees and snow leopards.

 

I walk on across the fields, flat except where they were once dug for clay, and then drop down to Morehay Lane and the eastern entrance to King’s Cliffe, still at over a thousand souls, a sizeable settlement, little changed in size over two centuries. Up at substantial All Saints and St. James the church ladies are cutting and arranging flowers for tomorrow’s Harvest service, sneezing as they do so. The bells of All Saints are right in the centre of the church underneath the broach tower, accessed by a magnificent metal staircase. From the congregation All Saints’ high altar is a distant feature. An everyday altar sits on the west side of the tower, fronted today by a harvest loaf, which I hope and imagine will be accompanied tomorrow by a plethora of harvest gifts in the old-fashioned way.

 I’m not sure I can explain why, but this part of the diocese is so different to the south. One breathes Viking air. Celtic sensibilities are far away. King’s Cliffe is a highly individual place, with tiny paths given the status of ‘lanes’. By name my next port of call even sounds like it belongs to Yorkshire – Blatherwycke. It’s true that here we’re less than ten miles from Lincolnshire where accents quickly change and vowels broaden in directions that suggest ‘The North’ rather than ‘The Midlands’.

 There are a few disagreeable few moments in the fields beyond the King’s Cliffe allotments. Why does my sense of outraged justice kick in so quickly and dangerously in public spaces when for instance in matters ecclesiastical I’m generally so slow to mix it with issues and individuals I think are out of order?

 I hear him well before I see him. Someone’s riding a trials bike at manic speed somewhere ahead of me, obviously doing some kind of circuit, because the sound comes and goes. Across another field boundary he becomes visible, driving his bike round and round a grass field, maybe touching fifty or sixty on the straight sides, scattering a group of grazing horses as he goes. He passes me, casting an f-off look as I lean on my stick to observe his behaviour. When he next passes, I take out my camera, and point it in his direction, but do not take a photograph. There’s no point. He’s unidentifiable in his helmet and leathers, and my lack of zoom ( as opposed to his excess of zoom!) means nothing useful would result. His bike has no number plate anyway. I stroll on, and cross another hedge by a stile parallel to Willow Brook. Now he’s crossed into this  field too through an open farm gate. He rides round to confront me. I reverse my hold on my stick and grasp it half way down, showing the knobbly end. I make myself look as big as possible (that's not very big, really!)

 Him (muffled):  Why you taking photographs of me?

Me:  I wasn’t

 Him: You was…

 Me: I wasn’t. You can have a look if you want… (showing him the camera)

 Him: You was. Suppose it was my thirteen year old daughter…

 Me: Do you have the landowners’ permission?

 Him: You the landowner then? Anyway, it’s a footpath.

 Me: Which means you shouldn’t be riding on it.

 Him: Why you taking photographs of me?

 At which point I disengage. I’ve been stupid of course. This isn’t a situation in which I should have intervened or appeared to intervene. If I found a bull inconveniently in a field, would I do anything other than give it a wide berth? I have no knowledge of his possible reaction, or whether he might be carrying a weapon, and I'm a long way from assistance in a place where mobile reception is intermittent. Ironically, as soon as I get home, I receive an advisory from our local rozzers asking me to let them know if I see someone riding a motorbike illegally or in a way likely to endanger life.

 

After something like this, you replay the conversation, and if you have an interior life as vividly melodramatic as mine try alternatives for size, in which you play a more heroic role. I think about phoning the police, and when I arrive at Alders Farm look for someone to confide in. I find a gamekeeper shutting up shop for the afternoon, but the fields to the east aren’t their land: he doesn’t want to know. Oddly, I see his 4x4 a little later, tracking me from the far side of the field beside Blatherwycke Lake. The game bird business is clearly a Big Thing here. Perhaps he had wondered if  I was trying to distract him while my accomplices robbed his pens or undertook some animal liberation stunt.

Within the Christian community (at least in person, if not in print), I am so much more willing to hang back and not offer criticism, even when I see injustice or offence being caused. Is this good or not? How do you act in such situations? As I’ve written a number of times previously, how we learn to disagree well is a major issue for the Church – and is becoming a big question in our future national life too. Walking together in the Deep Woods requires discipline, and the finding of a common purpose. Leadership and imposition are not the same thing.

The comedian/musician Graham Fellows (aka John Shuttleworth) wrote a song about Blatherwycke because he was passing up the A43 towards the A1 and the North after a gig, saw the sign to the village, but left it as a regretted road-not-taken. In truth, although the setting is quite romantic, the church of Holy Trinity set above the pretty lake, and the atmosphere of the once Great House still palpable, it might not have been the peak experience Graham/John was hoping for. The little church is in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. Had it been summer it’d have been open, and there’s an address for the key, but I have some long way still to go and I move on, fearing any lapse in waymarking or map-reading will leave me vulnerable to fatigue: there aren’t many features between here and Southwick, just a lot of trees, and to the west, wide open vistas, uninterrupted by much in the way of human habitation. Who cleared Rockingham forest and when? And as in so many matters ecological and social/historical, how do we feel when we compare this clearance/enclosing with the destruction of the forest in poorer parts of the world today?

 

Beats per minute:  21 km. 6 hrs. 17  deg C. No wind to speak of. Sunny periods. 9 stiles. 9 gates. 6 bridges. One out of three churches open. Not only a kingfisher and a spotted woodpecker, but also kites, buzzards, yaffles, pheasants and partridges by the hundreds, squirrels getting in supplies for the winter.

 

Lord
When I am deep in the woods
Help me to find my way.
May I recognise the shadows for what they are
And not imagine them as dark forces
Overwhelming me.
Help me to find friends
And avoid foes.
And teach me
That wherever I am
You are with me
And will keep my feet from falling.
Amen.