Town and Country

                                                              Crown of thorns: Pytchley


Today I could do urban or I could do rural. In light of the beautiful sunshine would I prefer to contemplate grimy windows or the moderated ordure of the farmyard? I opt for things pastoral and park in front of the little church at Hardwick.

Where do you feel more comfortable? Do you like to look out over a vista of brick and tile, concrete and clay to the blocky shapes of the city, or over dappled greenery to blue remembered hills? I used to work with a good colleague who said that the countryside made her feel insecure - mildly agoraphobic I suppose - whereas she felt safe in the enclosed spaces of the town. I can recall the panic of being lost in the Great Outdoors, but I've more often felt threatened in stressed urban environments - Peckham, Deptford, the 'wrong' bits of Paris, Bethlehem, the suburbs of Eastern European cities, townships in South Africa. I can readily identify with that character in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities  : a single wrong left or right in the city, and the whole world turns upside down: his life unravels.

The Roman poet Martial gave us the phrase rus in urbe which Virgil had already traced out as an ideal some decades before. I have no evidence, but have always wondered whether the strange changes in (and even abandonment of) Roman British cities in the second and third centuries AD was an improvisation around this theme. Did the citizenry act out on their desire to get back to the land, and reject the Forum for the fields?

Until I began this long walk, I'd never really considered the differences between the urban and the rural in terms of the Diocese of Peterborough. The cultural gaps feel substantial. The financial contributions between Town and Country may be skewed. There may be unspoken differences in attitudes to faith between the two, mirroring political and social views. Things that seem important in the one may seem trivial in the other. It may actually be harder for individuals to believe  depending on where they are. Are we certain we know where the shadows of conservatism and radicalism are falling just now? The pattern may not be the same now as twenty years ago, and the forthcoming election may give us new information. If you had a free rein (country metaphor?) where would you want to put the resources. Go on. Choose! In this blog I'm saying I'd like us all to feel united of purpose. But is it remotely possible?

As I turn onto the field path which will carry me towards Orlingbury, I can hear a woman's voice savagely rebuking someone: 'Just because you're a bitch on heat, it doesn't mean...' As I check my map she continues to chunter on in like fashion at - ah, her poor pooches! - but she doesn't see me until I round the hedge end. As I come into sight, her demeanour changes on a dime. We nod familiarly at each other as country lovers should and smile civilised smiles. Presumably as I recede into the distance, her invective resumes.

It's perfectly dry now on the fields, apart from the remnants of this morning's heavy dew. I cross a series of rivulets, each trickling down their own little mini-valley, with Orlingbury's church tower clearly in view. But on a rising field there's a sign on the gate telling me to watch out for a bull. Like you do, I peer anxiously up and down the pasture, but there's no audible or visual evidence of bullishness. As I cross on the diagonal however, I see a herd of cattle the far side of the next fence/hedge. There are a lot of new calves among them too. The cattle eye me up as I walk towards them, raising their heads to sniff out friend or foe, and as I approach the field end, they move decisively and strategically, shielding their babies, and blocking my way through the gate. It's an impasse. They stare me out from a couple of metres distance, and no matter how I wheedle, cajole or threaten, they ain't goin' nowhere. I consider, and then decide I'm not going to risk it. There are too many of them, and they're too nervous. The consequence is at least a mile of detour, possibly more, and a tedious road trudge, but if in doubt, leave it out!

The road has me walk past Little Harrowden's 'The Lamb' - a Charles Wells pub, which takes me back. A long time ago, I wrote and recorded a number of radio commercials for this brewery. In fact their continued existence is probably entirely down to the sterling work I put in on their behalf! Me and The Prince of Wales Rattlers we should have a pint on the house every time we pass for singing Charles Wells, Charles Wells, CHARLES WELLS! with such gusto. I don't put this notion to the test. It's too early in the day anyway.

When I finally get there, the churchyard of St. Mary's Orlingbury is idyllic, even though the church itself is closed. A parishioner is doing some gardening. The sun is warm, the seat south-facing. I eat a chicken sandwich, and a trifle reproachfully a single freethinking brown hen appears from nowhere and walks delicately around my feet. It's only when you take the time, and have the sun in the right place that a chicken's glossy plumage can look so perfectly beautiful (although I suspect mescalin might have the same effect, judging by Aldous Huxley's experience with his corduroy trousers - the infinite in the ordinary!)

The current St. Mary's isn't enormously old: it's a replacement of the medieval church. It's locked, but inside there's an effigy reputed to be the likeness of a hero of local folklore: Jock of Badsaddle. The story has it that in the fourteenth century Jock dispatched England's last wolf. If this lacks a tad in the historical authenticity department, it's still a fantastic name. The man deserves a country ballad all of his own. And yes, there's still a Badsaddle Farm in the vicinity.

                                                        Inside Pytchley church: Easter   


It's not very far to Pytchley. I like the view as one approaches, with the Overstone Arms pub set directly underneath the church on the rise. Of course the village name makes me think of hunting, but since the passing of the Great House, I don't think any part of the Pytchley Hunt is still resident there.
Personally, I'm ambivalent about this strand in the British countryside tradition. I don't care for the class connections of the Hunt ( any Hunt!) and have never thought the environmental arguments in favour were up to much - it doesn't seem logical to me as a way of controlling the fox population - but there's something fascinating and involving about hunting as symbolic of the history of our countryside. At the age of fifteen I was very taken with Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man even though it was an 'O' level set text. But I really don't like the yah and boo between Hunt supporters and 'Sabs'. I suspect both sides enjoy too much the chance to scrap, and to caricature each other as the epitome of all they hate in contemporary society. Perhaps, a bit like the monarchy, we should retain hunting on its current basis for ceremonial purposes, an anachronism to remind us of our roots. By the large I think it's a practice that unhelpfully divides Town from Country. (By the way, lest I offend royalty-supporting readers, one doesn't necessarily get rid of 'anachronisms' unless one has something better to put in their place, and in the case of the monarchy, I for one haven't.)

The church and the pub are both open. I do the holy thing first, and enjoy the wide open space of the All Saints nave. There's a bit of room in the lounge of the Overstone Arms too. The patron and the chef are discussing the selection of the Lions team for New Zealand. No slot for hooker Dylan Hartley, England captain and club skipper at Northampton Saints, which doesn't go down well. It's actually a bit too empty in the bar ( no other conversations to overhear) so I sup up and leave quickly, moving on towards Isham across the very lumpy fields to the east of the village. British History Online mentions all kinds of Roman and later discoveries in the vicinity. I cross an obvious 'hollow way. In these kinds of places you always wonder how much archaeological work has been done. There's so much under our feet. Not everywhere can be dug, but if it hasn't been it would be worth getting the shovels out here, I reckon. Interestingly it seems lots of stuff has been found under the church.

Soon I cross garden land in front of an industrial scale battery farm where HGVs deliver foodstuffs to hoppers, and then the Weetabix factory appears on the horizon dominating the Burton Latimer side of Isham. Weetabix have been in the news in recent days. The Chinese have sold them. Americans have bought them. It seems Weetabix (how do you pronounce that in Mandarin?) products proved a hard breakfast sell in Beijing and Shanghai. I'm supposing there'll now be many local people worried for their jobs: these kinds of take overs often don't work out so well. Remember Cadbury's?

Gigs in Isham. Twenty or so years ago there was a festal evensong when we took our choir over from Weston Favell to sing. I recall a rather recalcitrant, creaky organ, and a somewhat uncertain reception from the small congregation. The church was cold and, well, not really very festal. And I know I did an evening with friend Brendan and band at the pub, which I'm fairly sure was then called the Monk's Head or somesuch. It was one of the last occasions before legislation from which I had to endure the 'spilt beer and fags' effect on my gear (the smell would last for weeks and repeated exposure would make it permanent which is one reason why fastidious old me did so few pub gigs. These days one leaves with the merest whiff of eau de Watney hanging about the person. The same hostelry now appears to have become the Bear and Beignet. This gourmet pairing sounds like one of the weirder concotions whipped up by aspiring Masterchef contestants before John and Gregg have knocked common sense into them: infinitely resistible. Well, I don't fancy a beignet and St. Peter's is locked, so I march on, contemplating the signs decorating the trees and fences of Isham.

                                                                Drivers need a by-pass!

It's true, the main road here, the A509 has become as they used to say, arterial. It's an obvious and necessary connection between the A14 (itself an A1/M1 east-west link) and the A45, so there's a steady stream of cars and lorries through the middle of Isham. But O Denizens of the Bear and Beignet/St. Peter's Church you pays your money and makes your choice. If you get your by-pass, you also get an infill between the by-pass and your village (see my posts re: Towcester). You'll lose your countryside and fresh air, and is that what you really want? Already Isham is very nearly part of Burton Latimer which is very nearly part of Kettering and Rushden, which will soon be joined to Wellingborough. I have to brave a quarter mile of a pathless A509 before I can veer off on the track to the Harrowdens. The traffic is bad. If you're contemplating this walk, don't consider it with children or in bad weather - more dangerous even than a field of cows!

St. Mary's, Little Harrowden lost its spire in 1703, but it's a pretty church in a parish that's apparently one of the 'longest and narrowest' in the diocese. Why? Geographical accident, I suppose. I go through the Romanesque doorway into the church past a parishioner who tells me a meeting's about to begin. And indeed within a couple of minutes more folk arrive. I briefly explain why I'm there, but no one's interested, so I leave them to do their thing, whatever it is. Should they have shown more concern?  I don't know: the whole world doesn't revolve around me and my obsessions, but perhaps a smile wouldn't have gone amiss. We're not a private club, are we? That said, solemn and sad things are part of church life, and maybe that was the content of their agenda. It doesn't do to jump to conclusions, though I frequently do.

There's a 'Doom' painting in All Saints, Great Harrowden, but the church there is locked so I don't get to see it. I spot the grave of Dorothy Darlow in the churchyard. Earlier in the day I'd read a piece she'd written remembering former times in Pytchley, and spend a moment contemplating the changes she'd have witnessed up to her death in 2014. When we came to Northampton in 1973, it was still the case that younger teenage children from town were frightened by escalators when taken on trips to London. If you lived in Rushden, for some Wellingborough was still the big place you visited only on special occasions. We were incomers, and the 'Eastern Development' of Northampton had just been built, to the consternation of established townees who thought it signified the End of Everything. These days I spend a lot of time thinking whether like them I've just become more conservative and scared as I've got older, or whether the nature and scale of societal change is now greater. Of course, I think the latter...

Statty man: 20.5 km.  6.5 hrs. 15 degrees C. 5 churches. One open. Two advertisements for axe-throwing as a pastime.

Lord
When I was little
Someone claimed the words:
'Bind us together, Lord, Bind us together,
'With cords that cannot be broken...'
For the Baptist 'National Anthem'.
I like the ideal
(the Baptist bit somewhat less)
But I can't live it.
'Do I love these people?
'I don't even like them!'
I once heard someone say.
I know what they meant.
We're so polarised.
Pro Brexit - Anti Brexit
Capitalist - Worker ( yes, still, apparently)
Monarchist - Republican
Town - Country
North - South
And I haven't even got onto
Race, Gender or Religion.
Help me each day, Lord,
To find humility
To remember my creatureliness
To show love
To go 'one down',
And so (perhaps) find Eternal Life.
Amen.

Revival hour

I love the slow-television reveal of the landscape as I breast the rise on Wilby Lane out of Great Doddington and watch the spire of St. Mary's on the far side of the valley increase in size as I approach. The drop down to the Swanspool Brook is steep for thirty metres or so, but up the other side I'm immediately into Wilby. I push open the church door as quietly as I can. There's still a loud creak. The Rector, Jackie Buck, is nearing the climax of their once monthly weekday Eucharist. For a few moments I sit on a chair at the back, and then go up to share communion with five church members surprised to find themselves suddenly a congregation of six. When the service is over, there's coffee and home-made cake. I introduce myself to Janet, Eileen, John, Margaret and Julia. They tell me a bit about the parish. I confide to Jackie that, looking at the long prayer list on the church notice board full-time ministry was never a vocation for me. All that giving of oneself, I say. She replies that it's a two-way process. I don't follow through on that. I'm thinking, but don't say out loud, that even Jesus felt the power drain away when someone in the crowd touched him. I know this is a rather introverted response. What personality type was Jesus? The benefice works well, Jackie tells me. There's a lot of sharing between Wilby and her two other churches at Ecton and Great Doddington.

Away from Wilby, I zig-zag through the Wellingborough housing estates to St. Mark's on Queensway. As so often with churches, its hall hosts a pre-school playgroup. Their Lenten meetings have been using a Rowan Williams text as a study focus - tough and intellectual stuff. Mandy Cuthbertson, the vicar, is moving on to be the Diocesan Advisor for the Healing Ministry. In the relevant pages on the Peterborough website Mandy says: '...I believe the Healing Ministry is not a sideline of the Church's ministry and mission, but an integrated part of it, for it was at the heart of Jesus' own ministry and teaching...'  The footnote to the page adds 'If you are concerned about any unusual, puzzling or troubling incidents, please contact the Bishop's office'. I very frequently am of course, but I suspect they wouldn't appreciate me phoning up every five minutes about the things which trouble me!

Off the hill and closer to the town centre is St. Barnabas'. It represents a slightly earlier period of church building than St. Mark's sixties' small-scale functionalism. I guess St. Barnabas' to be a creature of the nineteen thirties, massively brick built, like a holy relative of Cambridge's blank-faced, monolithic University Library, though in a much nicer material. It's no surprise to find that both churches are closed to visitors today. How could it be otherwise in this untidy, needy town? The descent into Wellingborough down Oxford Road is bleak, although it's personal memories which colour that. There to my left is Westlands Care Home where lovely Joan, my mother-in-law spent her last months declining into a largely benign dementia, which for all its benignity was immensely distressing for those of us who watched. She'd always been an energetic, kindly soul, known to many in Weston Favell because she believed you ought to be nice to and interested in everyone you met, even if you merely passed them in the street. Her talent for creative play made our Matt the man he is now, capable of deep thought, possessed of an amazing, compassionate work ethic, and a capacity for the best kind of silliness.

I stop by the Tithe Barn, and think of the monks of Croyland Abbey who founded an outpost of their fenland House here by the Swanspool and were rewarded by having a car dealership named after them. Because of them ancient Waendelburgh grew to become today's Wellingborough. The old name survives in the annual Maytime 'Waendel Walk' which beats the bounds of the town.

                                                                    Open for business?


Behind the Market Square (the medieval regulations permitted a Wednesday-only market here, but commerce got the better of that notion yonks ago) is the oldest extant building: All Hallows church. Behind heavy duty, firmly closed gates across the porch I can just glimpse a sign welcoming visitors. It's the second hostage to fortune I've encountered today. Earlier I'd smiled at a Borough Council notice which shouted across a derelict parade of shops that it was working in partnership with the local community (in vandalism? in bankruptcy?)  You can't only blame the clergy, there are all kinds of risks with open churches, and it's too easy to stand from afar and be critical, but isn't it obvious that if Christians want to make a favourable and lasting impression on the public, a church like All Hallows has got to be at the forefront of our presentation during working hours? At the moment it's too easy for people to ignore us.

The Victorian churches in this town are all huge, none more so than the URC: a huge temple of a place just up the hill. There was once a great deal of money sloshing around, and now it's all gone. I go to look for the Kilburn School of Dancing in Rock Street, now resident in a low profile, low rise building. When I left teaching, during the transitional year in which I slowly emerged as a professional musician, I drove once a week to Kilburn's former building in a vain attempt to enthuse the ten or so full-time students about singing. I hadn't a clue what I was doing, and I shouldn't think they benefited one iota from what I said, but I was cheap and I probably ticked a box for Kilburn's prospectus. I remember one of the girls was a junior lion-tamer. The one boy (poor, or lucky?) was called Kriss, though I assume that was a nom de guerre. To cheer myself up I used to play a cassette of Springsteen's 'Hungry Heart' on the way there and back. Quite loudly, drowning out my sorrows and doubts.

I have an appalling pulled pork wrap at the newly re-opened Castle Theatre. It's not the wrap or the pulled pork that's the problem, it's the mayo, the BBQ sauce, the coleslaw, the strange things in the salad they don't tell you about that combine to make it so dreadful. And all for a fiver. It gives a new meaning to the idea of 'take away' food. Please! Just take it away! Boom boom. I'd have paid more for them not to muck the meat about. However, I'm very glad that the funding has been found to give Wellingborough back its cultural heart.

Round the corner is another vast palace of religion, All Saints Church, whose nineteenth century architects probably had in mind a Roman-style basilica. Its geographical proximity to All Hallows means that they function as twin stars in Wellingborough's central ecclesiastical firmament. It's here that young Harrison Cook from our church has recently found a home for his enthusiastic musical talents. And again, within a half-mile or so is St. Mary's. Now I know from Simon Jenkins' 'Thousand Best Churches' to expect something special here: it's one of only three four-star rated churches in the county, which puts it in his UK top one hundred. So rather exceptionally, I knock on the keyholder's door, and ask if I can look inside. Peter Walker slowly and carefully establishes that I'm not going to steal the family silver and opens up. As Jenkins notes, the exterior isn't remarkable, but the interior is truly staggering. The Gothic inspired design is by Sir Ninian Comper, dating from 1908, under the financial patronage of the three Misses Sharman, and there are echoes of Italy all around the worshipper, though the ornate rood screen is British tradition incarnate. The money ran out, of course it did, so what Comper intended as a final decorative result is best seen in the lavish gilt and colouring of the side chapel. But even as eventually finished in the nineteen fifties, the main body of the church invokes in me a great sense of calm, something to do with the size of the space relative to the number of seats. This was a late-flowering part of the dreams which once existed for Wellingborough in the decades after the coming of the railway, when the tree-lined Midland Road would enable elegant folk to walk with their parasols (to provide shade from the sun not the rain - Wellingborough has less precipitation than almost anywhere in the UK)  up to the town centre. And to their right as they walked would be the splendour of St. Mary's, which now sits incongruously among the growing urban deprivation of Knox Road.

Peter tells me that the church is full each week. It's a centre of Anglo-Catholic ritual so intense it undoubtedly eclipses the Roman Catholics round the corner, and so people come from far and wide to participate - or perhaps just to be present - amid the grandeur of procession, incense and music. Do they have a choir, I ask? Peter tells me they have a Cantor, who was in the West End in 'Chess' and 'Phantom of the Opera'. It fits somehow. Peter smiles at the thought that the Bishop probably doesn't entirely approve of what goes on within the walls of St. Mary's. I'm unsure that I do either, but then, I'm reminded of Christ being anointed with spikenard, and think to myself that back when there was all that dosh in Wellingborough, this wasn't the worst use of it. But how to go on caring for it now? Ninian Comper wanted to be buried here, but they stuck him in Westminster Abbey, which is what you get for being good at art.

Before I go, Peter and I talk about Wellingborough's future, which is in a dramatically expanded housing stock, most of it to the east of town, where presumably it will become one with Rushden.
And so this is a little local test of the theory that building houses gets you out of the financial doldrums. Will Wellingborough's struggling economy recover and return prosperity to the place? The politicians believe so. I hope as the French say 'ca vaut la peine'. But the police will tell you that the EDL are strong around here, so something must be done.

The last Wellingborough church I visit today is St. Andrew's, up on the estates around the western edge of town, where friend Michelle runs the show. I hum and hah about phoning her beforehand, but decide to leave it to chance. In the event she's in the middle of talking a couple through a forthcoming funeral, but leaves them considering hymn options for a few minutes to show me the compact, friendly, neat space which is the church. Things are on the up. The congregation is increasing in number, and they're working with her to make the parish more effective. Michelle is lovely, so I'm not at all surprised, but it's good to see that she's in good spirits. Here's a parish which in some respects is the polar opposite to St. Mary's. Belief-wise they probably share a catholic perspective, but the manner of expressing what they believe is very different. If Revival is to come to Wellingborough, all hands are needed on deck, financially, culturally, and in terms of faith. Nationally the same is true. Can a Phoenix arise, post-Brexit, post post-modernism?

Stats Man:  19 km. 6 hours. 15 degrees C, and sunny most of the day. A chilly breeze. Six churches: entrance effected into three of them, by invitation or request. One eating experience, regrettable. One fly tip (avoided). No stiles (unsurprising). Nine gates. Sundry bridges across the Swanspool.

Father
These rhythms all around us:
The way the Church ebbs and flows:
In fashion/out of fashion:
Enthusiastic/withdrawn:
Promoted/persecuted:
Processional/Puritan:
Waxing and waning:
It probably seems insignificant to You.
But down here on the ground,
It's so easy to be worried,
Caught up in the preoccupations of today,
Anxious about the way things seem to be going.

Thank You for the faithful people I meet:
Trying to make sense of the Gospel:
Trying to follow You.
Add me to their number
By Your grace.
So may Revival come. Or not.
Whatever You will.
I ask it in Your name,
Amen.

Palm Court and Palm Sunday

It's going to be warm, so the weather pundits say, and indeed it's been dry and mild right through these last few days. And so that strange thing happens as the British give themselves permission to cast off winter clothes and live the dream, hood down, club music hitting every beat squarely, flesh and bling well on fat n'fun display. Driving along the multi-ethnic, multi-pubbed Wellingborough road on Thursday evening it felt like the Boys were back in Town. There were tint-windowed, suspension-lowered GTIs everywhere. People were spilling off the pavements even at nine o'clock. A vague suggestion of menace and 'who are you looking at?' hung in the air. Is it me that's changed or Northampton. A bit of both, probably.

But let's hear it for the sunshine. Clear blue skies today, every bird busy and singing its heart out, blossom to the maximum. Since I was last walking in Overstone, the builders have moved in. Readers will think I'm making this up to ride a familiar hobby horse, but we only noticed a few months ago how the fields towards Moulton are being gouged out by earth-movers. A large new housing estate is to be constructed there, with little infrastructural provision as far as can be seen, except that the A43 is to be dualled close by. That apart, the roads, the schools, the health services - they'll all just have to cope. It was announced back in 2014 apparently - but we didn't know, of course we didn't, because Northampton no longer has a daily paper, and we choose not to listen to local radio. The problem is there's always something useful among the junk in your inbox.

Overstone and Sywell run seamlessly the one into the other. There's Overstone Heights in Sywell, and I've just parked off Sywell Road, Overstone. I buy a copy of The Times in the village Post Office.  Mr. Murdoch's proxies are discussing pruriently the prospects of the US and Russia going to war, but that all feels a million miles away as I walk east along the straight road up to Pie Corner, a little close of modern houses next to Sywell's pub. I can find nothing to tell me why it was so named, unless the hostelry was (still is?) renowned for its steak and ale. The only reference I can find on the web has Big Ade, whoever he is, tell the world he thinks he'd fit in well there. A stile takes me into a lumpy field. I walk down to a dried stream bed and then up to the church of St. Peter and St. Paul. The handsome cottages to the far side of the church look like estate houses, sturdily and prettily built in an artsy and crafty Edwardian way.

The rapeseed is brilliantly in bloom in the fields. At first the path to Mears Ashby neatly cuts a broad swathe through the sea of yellow, but where it pulls up the other side of another little valley, it's narrower and I'm pushing through plants that are as tall as me and slightly damp on my shorts and bare legs.  It's dustily dry underfoot now. Too much more of this nice weather and the water companies will be crying drought. Perhaps I could have gone back to my Merrills today.

I would have said I knew Mears Ashby - we pass close to it weekly - but I find I don't. It's a severely square shape on the map, which if we were in France might suggest fortifications, but this is Northamptonshire and such things don't exist here. Inside the square there's another dip to the next stream on its way down to the Nene, and a little nest of roads with many distinguished houses representing a number of moments from the last four hundred years or so. A couple are up for sale and I talk to Maria from Jackson Stops, who's just been showing prospective clients around a little cottage. Too small for us, I say, but she smiles a charming smile and presses a business card upon me - Jackson Stops were the agency who negotiated our current house. All Saints church hangs solidly above a flowery ravine with a pond at its bottom. On the far side is the large Manor House. I stop and honour the name of Callis on some of the gravestones.  I was at college with Charles Callis from this local farming family. His brother Richard and wife Veronica worship at our St. Peter's.

I ignore the path which runs northwards from the village, fearing more wet rapeseed, and go by road instead, because I want to drop into the Beckworth Emporium for a drink and the loo. Beckworth is a tremendously successful business attracting hundreds of people every weekend (and many weekdays too) to its garden centre, café and fine foods shop. The staff are unfailingly pleasant and helpful, the ambience cheery and at Christmas you can watch the skating and buy a reliable well-priced, needle-fast tree. It's a regular breakfast treat for us. It does the simple things very well, and so has flourished. And after that endorsement, I'll expect 10% off all future transactions. The downside of my call on them today is a dodgy walk along the back road to Wellingborough, and I have to take conservative care, stepping into the ditch when in doubt until I can pick up the streamside bridleway to Hardwick.

Hardwick is the sort of nominal village equivalent of the Smith family name. You can find Hardwicks all over the shop. This one is a small collection of houses and farms around St. Leonard's church, with a postage stamp green and one tree. It was probably always a tiny settlement. Wikipedia tells me that there's an additional shade of meaning to wic  of which I was unaware: a village so named was dependent on another community close by - in this case I suppose probably Mears Ashby, although the expanding girth of Wellingborough creeps closer year on year. A youngish man is testing out a pushbike for his wife, who arrives back from work while he's doing so. They play with their pretty little, laughing pre-school daughter. I wonder if they ever have anything to do with the beautifully tended church. Perhaps they cut the grass. There's a notice in the porch to say that the benefice has been suspended. One reason that this might have happened, though not the only one, is that one of the churches in it may have been unable to pay its way. They still have a priest-in-charge though, Duncan Beet, but he's on his way elsewhere, so from now on there's an interregnum. I wonder what will this do for the churches of Overstone, Sywell, Mears Ashby and Hardwick? People can grow - in the modern parlance 'step up' - at such times, or they can decide to jack it in and go somewhere else, or nowhere at all. We are a supermarket culture, or so we're told, and the church is competing for trade. Is that right?

The lane takes a right angle in the village, and I walk up it towards the woods trying to ignore the lacework of litter beside it. Near Grange Farm two Transit vans pass me. There are three up front in the first and a single bloke driving the second. This is no statement of his marital status: there is just one of him! The gate to the farm is opened and they go on down the track towards it. They don't look right to me. Looking at the livestock around me, I think, 'Sheep rustlers?'

Generally speaking, compared with the west of the county, there are few footpaths around here. Why is that? I suppose the communities may be slightly more scattered, and in times past the population may just have been smaller. Or maybe rascally landowners shut them down long ago. Or maybe it's something to do with field use. Or perhaps wartime experience - airfields and so on - changed necessary permissions. It means more road walking for me, but round the back of the farm there are bridleways, a bit knobbly now that the ground has dried out. And horses obviously exercise on them regularly, because at one point I come to a little series of well-organised jumps. From the west side of the wood I can hear the sounds of shooting and I recollect that I've seen directions to a range off the A43 to Kettering. The fields are full of sheep, with winsome, just-past-gambolling lambs. It's hopeless trying to get pictures: I could be there all day. As soon as the camera comes out, the mummy sheep herd their little ones out of the way in a way that's truly very endearing. No human mother could be more protective.

Then I hear loud voices over the fields and raucous, revving engines. I can see the two Transits again, over to my left. Evidently not rustlers then. The blokes are standing, admiring trials bikes which have exited the rear doors of the vans. Soon they're racing them around a field very close to the sheep. I look for a verifiable phone number for the farm, but can't find one, and so have to leave them to traumatise the animals. Are they doing this with the farmer's connivance, or illegally. I don't know but I find it peculiarly distressing.

Up past the solar farm, I come back to the road near Beckworth, and walk back towards the car past Sywell Aerodrome, winner of several awards for being the best UK 'General Aviation airfield'. I have a drink at the bar of their fashionably Art Deco hotel, and study the clientele hanging out to watch the planes take off and land on the grass strip. It's a jolly place on a regular Saturday afternoon (there's no special event today, though next week their little aviation museum will re-open with a bit of formation flying, re-enactors and weather permitting, 'the appearance of a friendly war bird or two'). On this day before Palm Sunday, in this slightly Palm Court setting (no band though: just cheesy pop on the stereo), I reflect that there are as many people sitting in the sun as there will be in church tomorrow morning. Are we so much less attractive than this as a place to be?

Statto: 17 km. 5 hrs. 20 deg. C. Light breeze. One stile. Nine gates. One bridge. Three churches: all shut. One garden centre. One kestrel. One estate agent, mildly predatory. One Hawker Hunter, now toothless, proudly displayed. Countless lambs, universally appealing, some sooty. And on my I-phone, goodness, Northants C.C., winning their first county match of the season by an innings. On April 8th!

Father
Walking in the Sunshine of Your Love today
I found it hard going.
Everywhere looked
(here we go with the cliché )
'achingly beautiful'.
Pain in my heart, you see,
And fatigue in my muscles.
I was thinking about Trevor,
Whose life we'll celebrate on Wednesday,
Returned to heaven so early.
And these things I report:
All so transient.
The life of those lambs:
So short.
I ask you again to help me understand this,
And to accept all that we have
So fleetingly
As precious gifts from You to us
And to find a proper response
To Your kindness and generosity.
Amen

Looking for Flora

The kids of Croughton All Saints C. of E. look a happy bunch as I skirt their playground on the north-easterly path out of the village. And so they should on a day like this. The early mist has burnt off, and the sky is a universal, hazy blue. I'm wearing an anorak, a gilet and a hoodie. The anorak comes off immediately, and the gilet follows it shortly afterwards. Hey, this really could be spring! Underfoot things have dried out considerably over the last few days, and some groundsmen will be glad. The English first-class cricket season begins today at an unprecedentedly early date. And it's not yet even April.

I have one last church to visit in this quadrant of the Peterborough galaxy, and then, phasers discarded, shields down, I'm off on a small extra-diocesan exploration of Flora Thompson country. The Klingons haven't reached Oxfordshire yet.

Sometimes I come across things in the country I just don't understand. And here's one of them by the path near an old quarry opposite the entrance to the Croughton airbase. It's a large marble (or faux-marble) plinth with a few holes drilled into it. As I look and prod, the only thought which comes to mind is the Obelisk in Kubrick/Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey, and given the proximity to all things spooky just over the road, it seems entirely possible that it's been dropped by an alien intelligence. What its function really was/is, I haven't a clue.

I disturb a pair of nesting red kites from where they've been holed up in an old barn, and crossing a ford find myself halfway between a long line of sheep who scatter right and left. I look ahead and see a pair of Not-So-Little White Bulls in the field beyond. More to the point they've already clocked my presence too. They shift their position at the feeding trough and stare me out. Hmm. I try to avoid their air of sullen menacing challenge with an alternative route, but all around the perimeter of the medieval village of Astwick I run up against impenetrable barbed wire and brush. There's no choice but to pick up the gauntlet.

In the event they're all pizzle and no action. Without missing a chew their gaze follows me one hundred and eighty degrees around their field until I find a stile to hop over. Then, after a trek across a stony field, I waste even more time trying to locate a safe way to cross the A43. After les bêtes blanches, my bête noire! I come into Evenley by School Lane which has the great merit of being close to the Red Lion so today it's pub before church. My sandwich and GB at one of the picnic tables are serenaded by Heart FM from the opposite house. They're playing Whitney Houston's 'I will always love you'. This alone would be 'bad, very bad' as Donald Trump would have it, but the builders up on the scaffolding join in the chorus loudly and out of tune, which relegates the experience into the 'terrible, absolutely terrible' category.

                                                              Village green, Evenley.

St. George's church is down a back lane of modern detached houses opposite a farm. In fact quite a lot of Evenley seems recently improved or rebuilt, and the crisp, handsome spire on the church is no exception. The building is Gothic Revival, dating from the 1860s and replaces a medieval church which presumably became non-viable. I read Psalm 46 to cheer myself up on a day in which DT is writing an executive order effectively reversing all Obama's climate change legislation, and the SNP are about to call a second vote on independence north of the border. Oh, and tomorrow Theresa May will trigger Article 50. Not a good week in the news.

From School Lane again I head south diagonally through some back gardens ( there's a right of way!) en route to Juniper Hill, Lark Rise in Flora Thompson's series of late Victorian memoirs of country life. I've been there on one previous occasion, and of course it's a bit disappointing in one sense, because there's not much to see. There were only ever 25 households even at the settlement's height. There are far fewer today. The inn is now a private house, and on the wall of another dwelling there's a Victorian post box, superseded by the Georgian one on the lane. The fields around seem to have relatively scrappy soil - or so it appears to my untutored eye. In the play, Flora's little brother Edmund (Edwin in real life) asks his mum plaintively 'Why are folk in Lark Rise so poor?'

Poverty is never glamorous, whether of the urban or rural sort. 'We were poor but we were happy' is rose-tinted spectacle nonsense: a rationalisation. People make their own fun somehow, of course they do, with a bottle of cider on the back of a hay wain or at a sing-song in the church hall, but it's compensation for what they lack. And somewhere along the line the result will always be resentment, rebellion or outright revolution depending on how hard a population is driven. What will Brexit bring? We must hope for the best, but I'm wary of the hard Brexiteers, and their allies in the Press and the mob. They've tasted blood, and they may have all kinds of other objectives, unpalatable to the likes of me. They're probably no friends to faith, any more than they are of immigration, and part of their de-regulating agenda might see the state cutting free from the established church....which would therefore also see the end of the monarchy. But that would be the least of our troubles. Deregulation of building in the countryside and curtailing access to it might also come under the remit of this blog, and then there would be the NHS, benefits, employment rights, capital punishment...the list is long. Why else, they will say, did we leave the EU?  It's as hard to imagine being poor when you're rich as it is to exactly feel what winter's like when you're basking on your sun-lounger in the July heat.

I walk on down to Cottisford ( Fordlow in the books ). It's sort of the other half of Juniper Hill, but a little over a mile away. There are a few relatively impressive buildings, a lovely manor house - which has its part to play in Flora's narrative - and the tiny church of St. Mary the Virgin, which probably has Saxon origins.

Inside the church, tribute is paid to the fact that Flora (then Flora Timms) worshipped there, and on the wall is a plaque to the village's First War dead. The last name is Edwin Timms'. He went to Canada, and came back to fight for freedom with a Canadian regiment, only to lose his life at Ypres in 1916. This part of the story is the sad climax to the Bill Bryden production of Lark Rise to Candleford, much celebrated during the nineteen-seventies. Two of the eleven mentioned on the Cottisford plaque have the name of Cross. Flora lost a son of her own in the Second War, and she died shortly after it. I'll take away from my visit the memory of the lively stream which flows down past Manor Farm, and imagine her and Edwin playing around it, as I'm sure they must often have done.

I knew nothing about the Tusmore Estate before I arrived in it, and walking in from Cottisford first impressions are hugely positive. The tracks are superbly maintained and clearly waymarked. I turn right up a path flanked by ancient yews and then by lime trees. Energy and commercial bustle radiate from around me. I see the splendid Palladian house materialise beyond the trees, and glimpse a obelisk topped with gold sparkling away to my right. In front of the house a large team of builders are constructing or refurbishing a vast wall which begins to block the view of the façade as I come nearer. The waymarks have become more vague. I nearly miss the gate opening the way to the gravel drive which crosses the frontage parallel to the new wall and terrace.

Intrigued, I google 'Tusmore' on my I-phone. The house looks in such amazing nick. And then I discover what I've been missing. For all its initial appearance this is a new house dating from 2004, designed by architects Whitfield and Lockwood for the banker and entrepreneur Wafic Said. Now comes the slightly weird bit. I've been taking some photographs as I go, both of the long view of the house, and also of the assiduous building work. I see that a couple of the builders notice me and point. I walk on. There are now two broad gravel drives divided by a central reservation of beautifully kept grass, quite dry and firm underfoot. I can see from the map that the right of way continues along the frontage to hang a left at the end of the buildings. A very tame pheasant, gorgeously marked and lit by the bright sun, is strutting its stuff along the inner of the two drives. I cross the green strip to get a closer look, and possibly a snapshot. Then a 4 x 4 purposefully exits the house's courtyard car-park and I'm told abruptly from its cab to get off the grass: the path is along the gravel behind me. I protest that I'm doing no damage. The driver informs me that I'm on 'private property', and then watches me all the way to the corner for as long as it takes. He clearly got into the 4 x 4 to drive fifty metres just for the job of seeing me off.

What do I conclude from this? Well firstly and obviously, the estate employee is strictly in the right and I'm in the wrong, however petty he may have been, though there aren't any helpful signs on the ground showing where the right of way goes. Secondly I must have been caught on CCTV photographing the building, and of course I look well dodgy being in my ratty walking gear and all - so there's an element of disrespect being shown because of my appearance (but that's nothing new: I remember the way the police used to treat me when driving our ancient rusting, mustard coloured Transit dressed in a donkey jacket). But when I look up the details of Wafic Said, I can see that he has all kinds of interesting international connections ranging from the Assad family to Margaret Thatcher. He was the entrepreneur who facilitated the Al-Yamamah arms deal with the Saudis back in the nineteen-eighties. Doubtless therefore he has a lot of enemies: hence perhaps the heightened security and its interest in scruffy walkers. Who knows who I might be? But, Mr Said (not that you're ever likely to read this!)  that's the price of British values and tradition. These paths are our paths, not your paths, although they're your responsibility. A cat may look at a king. 'Mother, why are there so many poor people in Lark Rise?'  I think this is a time when we have to be very clear what kind of country we want to be, or Ian Duncan Smith, Bernard Jenkin et. al. will sort it out for us to our very great peril. I'm preaching, I know. I'll stop in a minute, and go back to being cuddly.

And the house, architecturally speaking? Very interesting.  I don't know what I think. Maybe we're never satisfied. Something of equivalent size designed in a brutalist style would be instantly condemned as an eyesore, and would certainly have HRH Prince Charles crossing Mr. Said off his Christmas card list. Yet there seems something unsatisfactory and fake about what Whitfield and Lockwood have done. Provisionally I think that as a curiosity, in the way that Stowe is, it all adds to the gaiety of the nation, and publicly deserves a chuckle not criticism. But when the Daily Telegraph in 2004 heralded it as a template for the building of further new, great country houses, I think they were 'aving a larf'!

And now I'm going to leave the gracious pastures of South Northamptonshire to tread the mean streets of Wellingborough, and think about quite different issues and people...

Stats bore.  22.5 km. 6.25 hours. 15 degrees C. sun, then cloud with a strong afternoon breeze. 21 stiles. 13 gates. 5 bridges. One unpleasant man. Pheasants by the score, scuttling. One fox, not at all lazy, jumping over the bush in Tusmore. One muntjac, unsuccessfully hiding. Larks in the fields, but not Rising.

Father
We pray for the poor of the earth
And ask for justice and reconciliation;
For deliverance from famine
And an end to war.
We pray too for the rich and powerful;
For a spirit of charity
And the gift of wisdom and restraint.
We pray for ourselves,
Wherever we are,
That we may be kind and loving,
Mild of speech,
Slow to anger and
Quick to see good,
That your righteous Kingdom may come among us.
We ask it in the name of the Prince of Peace,
Jesus our Lord,
Amen.

Anniversary

Happy Birthday to this blog!

It's exactly a year since the first posting - though it took nearly another month for me to properly get out and about. In the time since then I've visited/lurked outside/eaten my sarnis in the churchyard of plus or minus 118 churches in the Diocese of Peterborough (the plus or minus being the odd church in other dioceses, and not knowing whether to count the occasional oddball chapel, tin shack or derelict site!)

I've walked five hundred and thirty two kilometres in the course of twenty-eight different walks (I'll leave you to do the further arithmetical analysis on that).

I've written - ooh, far too many words - probably a short book already, and the walking and the writing have both been enormous fun. The experience has exercised my little grey cells as well as my quads. As the old pop song has it, there've been far more questions than answers. Perhaps the next few years' walking will find me some of the latter - there's still a very long way to go.

'And last week on the West Wing...'

If you're reading this, you probably know already, but just in case...

I'm walking to Peterborough by a series of circular routes which pass through every parish in the diocese, hoping eventually to visit each single church. The only rule is that every new walk must start somewhere on the circle of a previous one. Each incumbent gets a calling card through the post when I've visited their parish to say that I've been there and that I've prayed for them and their parishioners. The image on the card's front is the one you see above.

And your point is?

My point is that as our late and regrettable Prime Minister said: we're all in this together. None of our churches can be little islands on their own. We need to find ways to share and co-exist that don't just do the minimum or pay lip-service to that idea. That means me, and that means you, people of Peterborough Diocese, and that means clergy of the same - get wid da program!

So what about all the other stuff you waffle on about?

Well, it may be hubris, but I'm also writing a personal snapshot account of the way I find Northamptonshire in these transitional moments of the twenty-first century. Doubtless other people are doing the same thing from different angles and with different conclusions, and jolly good too. As at all other times in history, we need to chronicle these things, sighing over what we've lost, delighting in what we see, and fearing for what may come.

Where have you been so far?

Here goes:  (They sound like bus routes from a fifties' timetable...)

Walk 1:     Weston Favell - St. Matthew's, Northampton - Holy Trinity, Northampton - RC          
                   Cathedral, Northampton - Holy Sepulchre Northampton - St. Peter's Marefair,           
                   Northampton - All Saints, Northampton - St. Giles, Northampton - St. Michael's,
                   Northampton - Christ Church, Northampton - SS Peter and Paul, Abington - Weston
                   Favell   ( 27.04.16)

Walk 2:     Weston Favell - Great Houghton - Little Houghton - Little Billing - Weston Favell
                    ( 08.05.16)

Walk 3:     Weston Favell - Emmanuel, Northampton - Great Billing - Ecton - Rectory Farm -                  Overstone - Moulton - Weston Favell  ( 14.05.16)

Walk 4:     Holy Trinity, Northampton - St. David's, Kingsthorpe - St. Mark's Whitehills -   
                   Boughton  - St. John's, Kingsthorpe - Holy Trinity, Northampton  ( 21.05.16)

Walk 5:     Sixfields - Upton - Berrywood - St. Francis, Duston - St. Luke, Duston - Dallington -                  Kings Heath - St. James, Northampton - Sixfields  ( 02.06.16)

Walk 6:     Northampton Town Centre - Far Cotton - Hunsbury - Rothersthorpe - Milton Malsor -                 Collingtree - Wootton - Hardingstone - Northampton Town Centre  (23.06.16 ) 

Walk 7:     Sixfields - Harpole - Nether Heyford - Bugbrooke - Kislingbury - Sixfields ( 07.07.16)

Walk 8:     Wootton - Grange Park - Quinton - Piddington - Horton - Preston Deanery - Wootton
                   (19.07.16)

Walk 9:     Ecton - Cogenhoe - Brafield - Denton - Castle Ashby - Whiston - Ecton ( 26.07.16)

Walk 10:   Earls Barton - Whiston - Castle Ashby - Yardley Hastings - Easton Maudit - Grendon -
                   Earls Barton   (12.08.16 )

Walk 11:   Grendon - Bozeat - Farndish - Wollaston - Strixton - Grendon  ( 31.08.16 )

Walk 12:   Quinton - Courteenhall - Roade - Stoke Bruerne - Ashton - Hartwell - Quinton     
                   (07.09.16) 

Walk 13:   Wollaston - Irchester - Great Doddington - Wollaston   ( 17.09.16)

Walk 14:   Boughton - Chapel Brampton - Church Brampton - Spratton - Brixworth - Boughton
                   ( 25.09.16 )

Walk 15:   Milton Malsor - Blisworth - Gayton - Milton Malsor  ( 29.09.16 )

Walk 16:   Moulton - Pitsford - Holcot - Moulton  (07.10.16 )

Walk 17:   Gayton - Tiffield - Easton Neston - Caldecote - Pattishall - Gayton   (15.10.16 ) 

Walk 18:   Pattishall - Cold Higham - Litchborough - Greens Norton - Pattishall  ( 04.11.16 )

Walk 19:   Greens Norton - Abthorpe - Towcester - Greens Norton   ( 24.11.16 )

Walk 20:   Towcester - Alderton - Paulerspury - Towcester   ( 29.11.16 )

Walk 21:   Paulerspury - Lillingstone Lovell - Silverstone - Paulerspury   ( 12.01.17 )

Walk 22:   Alderton - Grafton Regis - Cosgrove - Furtho - Potterspury - Yardley Gobion -
                   Alderton   ( 23.01.17 ) 

Walk 23:   Cosgrove - Stony Stratford - Passenham - Deanshanger - Wicken - Cosgrove
                    ( 28.01.17 )

Walk 24:   Abthorpe - Wappenham - Bradden - Slapton - Abthorpe   ( 02.02.17 ) 

Walk 25:   Wappenham - Syresham - Radstone - Helmdon - Wappenham   ( 20.02.17 )

Walk 26:   Radstone - Halse - Brackley - Turweston - Whitfield - Radstone   ( 04.03.17 )

Walk 27:   Brackley - Hinton in the Hedges - Steane - Farthinghoe - Charlton - Hinton in
                   the Hedges - Brackley   ( 10.03.17 )

Walk 28:   Charlton - Newbottle - Kings Sutton - Aynho - Croughton - Charlton  ( 27.03.17 )

If you follow in my footsteps, have fun, and take care...

                                                                                                                  Vince

Unchurched

Sue worked for many years at University College London. It was founded in 1826 as a resolutely secular institution to contrast with the 'old' universities at Oxford and Cambridge, which led Thomas Arnold to describe UCL as 'the Godless place in Gower Street'.

Today I begin in church-free (but hopefully not God-free) Charlton, although looking at the crossroads near the top of the village and the walled enclosure to its south, surely the remains of a medieval chapel must lie somewhere underneath? Churches 'take' in a particular location for many reasons, but please don't think the needs of a working population are by any means top of the list in determining their persistence! The wishes and convenience of the rich and powerful usually tend to be paramount. Thus today's faithful have to tread the nicely tarmacked path which runs the half mile from Charlton's small burial ground up between the fields to St. James, Newbottle when they want to worship.

I follow in their footsteps, but only before shaking a fist at the rapidly vanishing rear-end of a bright metallic blue BMW which hurtles into the thirty limit at something more like sixty. As it rounds the bend where I'm standing it confronts an unexpected oncoming car, and the driver nearly loses control. Had he done so, that could have been the end of me.

Paul Hayter's father, Canon Michael, once wrote lovingly about Newbottle:

                                  'The road here goes no further - stop and look
                                   Across its mown-grass verge and dry-stone wall
                                   To see St. James's church. Its square stone tower
                                   Has stood here for eight hundred years or more
                                   The nave and chancel for a hundred less.
                                   All's country made, and unspectacular,
                                   But fully fit to be a house of prayer.
                                   The churchyard, closed a hundred years ago,
                                   Is filled with lichened gravestones, and enclosed
                                   By oak, horse chestnut and a copper beech;
                                   Its gates embowered in an arch of yew;
                                   Its grass kept short by being grazed with sheep.
                                   In spring the snowdrops, then the daffodils
                                   Emblazon either end; return each year,
                                   Their promise of new life again fulfilled.'

Betjeman couldn't have put it better.

From near the church I enjoy the first of a series of broad views far across into Oxfordshire from the vantage points of the ridge which runs north-east to south-west along the edge of Northampton's county. A bridlepath takes me over a stream and up to the high farm at Astrop, passing  'Rosamund's Bower' on its hilltop perch. It would have been a jolly place for a tryst. On further investigation there seem to be lots of bowers with Rosamund's name attached. She was the alleged mistress of Henry II, and there's a vaguely local connection, so I suppose it's not impossible they rode up here for a snog. She was schooled by the nuns of Godstow, near Oxford, to whom she returned when the affair went wrong to die disappointed and rather before her time. Subsequent legends have her dispatched by a vengeful Eleanor in ways various and gory.

From the farm it's pretty much a straight line to the church at Kings Sutton, although some of the route is along a busy road, which involves a lot of stepping onto the verge, and saying thank you to the more polite motorists. It's a lovely, bright spring day, but not withstanding I don my high-vis jacket in self-defence.

Cities are defined by the existence of a cathedral (sometimes!) Maybe a settlement should now be called a town if it has a railway station, which Kings Sutton does, half way between Banbury and Bicester on the line which takes the traveller into Marylebone in a little over the hour. I wander up to the village (town!) green and enjoy the view across to SS. Peter and Paul with its lofty, elegant, buttressed spire. Going forward into the churchyard, I gently push the church door open, but heads turn at me from the chapel on the far side: a Lenten service is taking place, and I've interrupted them mid-sermon. I cross to the pub for a ginger beer. It's warm enough to sit outside and I indulge myself listening to the gossip of two friends who meet too infrequently. 'We must do it again...Yeah soon...It was really good fun, wasn't it?...Thank you...Shall I get the coffees?'  The worshippers leave the church, un-noticed by the coffee drinkers.

St. Peter and St. Paul's is in the care of the Bishop of Richborough. If 'Ebbsfleet' has contemporary, transient, jarring resonances, at least Richborough, with its history of invasion and its still-extant gaunt Roman walls says something about the continuation of tradition, which is partly what these Christian colleagues want to underline. I don't agree with them in their concerns or specific beliefs about the role of women, which I think tends to lead them into weird places - 'taint' and all that. And if they want to join the church in Rome, then I'm not sure what would be so bad about that, for them or for we who 'remain'. Richborough was a point of embarkation as well as arrival. But much better still if we can all stay together and rub along as multi-hued comrades on the pilgrimage.

There's a problem, apparently growing with every passing year, about how we can amicably disagree in the twenty-first century, both inside the church and also when we're wearing our non-churchy, political hats. At any rate, St. Peter and St. Paul's are clear that everyone is welcome within their walls, and unlike some, they pay their parish share to Peterborough, as so they should.

But we're all so sensitive to nuance these days, sometimes appropriately, and sometimes maybe to our detriment. The other evening at home we were watching a telly programme about the choristers of Salisbury, where both boys and girls contribute to the cathedral's worship, although with what degree of mutual integration wasn't exactly clear. I started out encouraged and charmed (partly by the appearance of the Dean, June Osborne, long time fan of Bruce Springsteen), but as the programme developed I began to feel uneasy. The further we went the more the emphasis seemed to be on the boys, not the girls, and there was something about the way the director had lit their faces which seemed to be too lingering, to have too much of the 'pin-up' about it. I was put in mind of a 2018 calendar currently on sale in Rome's many ecclesiastical and tourist shops featuring pretty young priests, which made us unsure whether to giggle or shudder. The Church's recent history, both Roman Catholic and Anglican has left us all wounded. And this week it tripped up once more, in the matter of Jeffrey John and Llandaff, although it may be that the Press has been mischief-making again, as it habitually will.

                                                               Garage: Kings Sutton.

Eschewing my compass and relying on my faulty sense of direction, I miss my way across unwaymarked fields outside Kings Sutton, and unnecessarily visit a sewage farm and another out-of-town cemetery as I make my way to Aynho, 'the apricot village', via Walton Grounds where there's yet another deserted settlement. The trees are just coming into blossom, and although the village is bisected by a busy 'A' road, I always think this place is the first intimation of the comfortable Cotswolds as the traveller moves west. And nowhere is the architecture more refined and splendid than around the church. Up a short drive I can peek to my right at the dignity of the Big House, and then turn left to be confronted by St. Michael's late medieval tower. Rather extraordinarily it's tacked onto a Georgian nave and chancel of massive, prosperous proportions, like some ginormous stable block. Maybe the interior doesn't quite match the quality of the exterior, but those lavish quantities of honey coloured dressed stone on the outside are hard to beat. I think about whether I have time to call on Simon the Rector and his wife Heather, and decide that I don't and anyway it's Friday, and they may be enjoying a hard-earned day off. The Astwick Vale benefice (stop me if you've heard this one before!) is geographically vast. I think to myself that here we're in the Kuiper Belt of the diocese: this is a place which feels like it belongs to Oxford. It's the downside of having a cathedral at one end of the patch. Even suffragan-led Brixworth is a fair way from here in sentiment and natural allegiance.

A path slopes down beside the stately park between stone walls. I can't help it. I always look at walls like this and think of money: we know too well what it costs to have someone rebuild even a short portion of a collapsed domestic dry-stone wall. After one such occasion, I took a holiday in Cephalonia, and sitting in a roadside café, remember looking at the tiered retaining walls along a Greek hillside and calculating that I was looking at hundreds of thousands of quid in English expenditure. Emerging into the open, a herd of farm deer look at me nervously from behind a secure fence, but even though I mention blackcurrant sauce and 'Wellington', they've learnt enough to ignore me after taking a precautionary, assessing sniff in my direction. Without the fence they'd have been over the hills and far away before I'd said 'caramelisation'.

In due course I come to a road, and crossing it, follow a manicured drive towards a farm that's clearly more than just a farm. Two vaguely corporate types clutching clipboards and charts pass me and say hello, all checked shirts and brown corduroys, a bit like old-school BBC Studio Managers. Soon I reach signs which tell me I'm passing through the property of 'A Day in the Country'. This is another example of country experience as bonding activity, but unlike the paintball outfit encountered on the last walk, this variation is posh and expensive. Visitors can 'bodyzorb' (no, thank you!) or from the sounds emanating from well-maintained sheds, perhaps try their hand at milking a cow or feeding the swine, whilst drawing suitable business lessons from the activity. I can just imagine the post-experience testimonies:

'After a day in the country, I felt somehow so much more grounded, and you know, real...Our business model really benefited from getting down and dirty together...Meeting that yokel on the drive changed my whole perspective on what it is I do...

Sometimes we Crosses have gloomily speculated that the destiny of the English countryside is as 'theme park'. Sorry to repeat myself, but if there's any silver lining at all in Brexit, it's maybe that this trend can be reversed.

All Saints, Croughton is another of Simon Dommett's churches, and it has some wall-paintings. Part of the south side is swathed in plastic, and the church is shut, so I can't get a look. But medieval wall-art isn't really the point about this village. It's hard not to have one's eye drawn to the communications 'golf-balls' which are the visible part of RAF Croughton, now the home of the US Joint Intelligence Analysis Centre. This is big potatoes is terms of European/NATO/Western defence. Gone are the days when one could get up-close-and-personal views of F-111s flying out of Northamptonshire to bomb Libya on the orders of what Don Henley once described as 'this sad old man we elected king' - Ronald Reagan. Now under the leadership of another old man, sad or otherwise, the important stuff is mostly in concrete bunkers. We wait to see whether this new and huge investment on British soil will be retained or relocated under the new regime. Probably we should want to see it retained, even if it means Russian nukes are undoubtedly targeted on this corner of our county, ancient churches, wall-art and all. And that gives a whole new meaning to 'unchurched', don't you think?

Stats man:  22km. 13 degrees C. Sunny throughout, initially undermined by a keen north-easterly breeze. 6 stiles. 19 gates. 9 bridges. 1 nice little tunnel near Aynho (Under a garden. No military significance.) A woodpecker, green. Two deer near Charlton, free-roaming. A number of de-hibernated squirrels, busy. March hares, several and bouncing.

Lord
We are truly a rainbow coalition.
Aren't we?
Or do you see us differently?
We value so much what makes us all individual.
We just love our selfies.
But perhaps you mostly see what we share:
Our sin;
Our poverty of spirit;
Our pride and lack of charity.
Help us to be content that you know us each by name,
And give us grace and creativity
To work together humbly for your greater glory.
Amen.

Take a closer look...

                                             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.