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.
