After two days of un-May-like warm, gloopy and profuse rain, a pluperfect spring morning with bright skies and blossom of all sorts everywhere: a day that would have made Gerard Manley Hopkins surfeit on adjectives.
I meet our friend Richard P. coming back from coffee at Emmanuel Church as I'm making my way there. Richard's recovering from a hip replacement. He's applying himself to re-hab with characteristic spirit and discipline and looks much better than before the op. Probably because it's such a nice day, the professionally-minded coffee bar is quiet. Louise serves me. She doesn't attend the church here, but asks me where the Catholics can be found. I tell her they're next to the police station and their church looks like a pyramid. Through the glass in the café people are playing badminton in the Emmanuel hall. I go downstairs to the church space, and remember that in these utilitarian surroundings in 1982 I was confirmed by the then Bishop, Douglas Feaver. One day a few years earlier I'd found the Bishop, fully-rigged though not mitred, happily absorbed in a little episcopal downtime, playing honky-tonk piano in the music room at Northampton School for Girls. A notable eccentric, Bishop Feaver.
Outside in the Weston Favell Shopping Centre, the eastern district of Northampton does what it needs to. Emmanuel Church is a one-off, physically almost invisible (it's just about impossible to photograph!) because so integrated into the Centre structure, but faithful in practical and spiritual witness. Its food bank does great work. I pick up the easterly path to St. Andrew's Great Billing through newly-leafed greenery, across the Billing Brook and up through the swathe of open space which the Development Corporation provided when the area was built in the 1970s. Are housing estates still designed in this way? I think not.
St. Andrew's enjoys a delightful, airy situation (any estate agents need a copywriter?) which ought to gladden the heart of any worshipper as they arrive, and it's surrounded by lovely and gracious houses. Elizabeth the First once gave a twenty year lease on the parish to Thomas Tallis and William Byrd to say thank you to the old master and his precocious pupil for their musick. They were wily businessmen, exercising a musical printing monopoly in the mid-16thC. I wonder if they ever actually came here, or did they just gratefully trouser the monies due?
I'm not familiar with the path to Ecton, but it picks its way through the Ecton Brook housing estate, round a pond and into the field beyond. Walking up the rise between the rapeseed (a late-flowering variety this time!) the tower of St. May Magdalene, Ecton is absolutely dead ahead. At this point - the only time that the ancient path on the spring line is still extant out of Northampton - the way is arrow straight for half a mile. If you put a ruler on an OS map, the path, the tower of Ecton, the church at Weston Favell and All Saints Church in Northampton are pretty much exactly aligned. Coincidental? My eye of faith sees ditches to either side of the raised path and wants to think 'Roman!'
At any rate Ecton is a place with much evident history. There are humps and bumps where the village once stretched into the fields to the east before the enclosures. Like Weston, the main street runs down towards the river. This village too has an evangelical past with Wesleyan roots, and at its northern end a pub rejoicing in the name 'The Worlds End'. An inn has been there to welcome strangers off the turnpike since at least 1675, and the current version has its own resident ghost, allegedly. Further down into the village, St. Mary Magdalene is today host only to the blackbirds as choir and congregation, and in the heat of the early afternoon, the porch provides welcome shady refuge. Overhead, two small planes out of Sywell practise some aerobatics. Ecton is still a country village, the first on the way to Cambridge out of Northampton. Will this parish one day become a rural memory as Wellingborough presses in from one side and Northampton from the other?
Up the lane opposite the Worlds End, diagonally across a field, and then onto a byway where vehicular traffic is banned between October and April. To my left the houses of the Rectory Farm housing estate appear, and eventually at the foot of a hill I cross Ecton Brook and follow it on the very edge of the houses until I climb up past the primary school which also serves as a Sunday outpost of Emmanuel Church. Whose Rectory? There's no church surviving here, and Ecton is a mile away at least. I now have a dilemma. My next destination is the long village of Overstone, but to get there I can either walk down a lane where the traffic is dangerous and there's no footpath, or I can cross the Overstone estate where the map tells me there's a golf course and metalled paths without right of way. I choose the latter.
I've found walking across golf courses a mixed experience. Some golfers take the very presence of the most considerate walker as an insult, and on occasion I've been roundly abused just for being. Today the golfers are extremely helpful, which is a good thing because real life on the ground doesn't match the map's aspirations. I am also forced to the conclusion that these days my wispy beard, hat, stick and untidy shorts may have me cast as someone in real need of assistance i.e. I may appear to be a person of no fixed abode or under mental challenge, who should be handled with kid gloves. Together we establish that the only way to Overstone is to run the gauntlet of notices variously forbidding pedestrian access and threatening the walker with attack by unchained farm dogs or Vogon-like security staff. In the event I'm accosted by neither, but this is not a route recommended for quiet pastoral meditation, unless you really and perversely enjoy trespassing.
St. Nicholas' in Overstone is set back charmingly from the main road up a tree-lined lane. It's of no great age (1807) and is where it is because in medieval times (and stop me if you've heard this one before) the Lords of the Manor found the old village an inconvenience and re-located it to where it is now, pulling the church down in the process. The author Peter Ackroyd is very good on the almost mystical continuity in the history of places. The estate at Overstone never seems to have been happy. 'Bad karma, man', the old hippies would have said.
In Moulton, the church office has just closed for the day. 'Moulton Church' welcomes everyone to each Sunday's 'Lord's Supper', and morning and afternoon 'meetings'. Its original dedication to St. Peter and St. Paul isn't obvious on the board. In busy small-town Moulton I've just passed the Evangelical Church on my way in (motto: 'Esse quam videri' -'Be rather than seem' - which is also the state handle of North Carolina). And amongst Baptist folk Moulton is also renowned because missionary William Carey once came to run their church here in the 18thC. A new housing development locally is called 'Carey's Fields', which Anglicans might wrongly assume celebrates a recent Archbishop! I went to a school sometimes known as 'The School for the Sons of Missionaries' (I wasn't), but because of my Baptist upbringing, I was put in Carey House, colour blue. If you were Anglicans like my mates Malcolm and Bob you were allocated to 'Moffatt', colour yellow. I realise I feel slightly unsure about simply calling SS. Peter & Paul, 'Moulton Church'. If I were a faithful worshipper elsewhere in the village, how might I feel about this apparent claim to primacy? But then again, even in this multi-cultural age, we Anglicans are still the 'state church' so perhaps we have a right to assert ourselves.
Stats man: 23 km (too far!) Six and a half hours walking. Five churches plus two outposts. Four churches shut. Two open porches for vagrants like me. Three badly hooked irons out on the golf course, one landing at my feet. One country estate I simply hate(d).
Father God
Thank you for the astonishing beauty of spring,
For the memories that well up like tears,
For the forgotten scents from a childhood beyond reach,
For the hope re-born each year in flower and blossom,
Echoing our daily call to hope and trust in You.
Amen.
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