It's bright but blustery. I walk westwards into the buffeting gale. Here and there sections of trees have pulled away from their main trunks and straddle the bridle path, the legacy of Storm Doris which passed through violently the previous Thursday. This year the names given to the winter storms accommodate both British and Irish tastes, though I should think the number of parents in either country donating the handle 'Doris' to a new daughter must be vanishingly small. For a while the path funnels into a green lane towards Halse, with a ditch clearly visible to one side. This is an old east-west route now of no importance, but perhaps it was once an alternative to the 'Welsh Road' for driving sheep to market. It would be interesting to put a metal detector on that ditch!
Halse is a settlement on a straight 'B' road running south towards Brackley. Along both sides are prosperous detached houses, and where I turn right, there's an old wooden mission church now a Village Hall, either itself once a 'Chapel of Ease' or on the site of an older building. I didn't know, so perhaps you don't either, that 'Chapels of Ease' were sometimes built within large parishes where the distance to the main parish church was too great for comfort, and indeed the hike into either Radstone or Brackley would always have been an inconvenience, unless you were uber-dedicated or felt particularly burdened by sin. I walk paths across undulating farm land in the rough direction of the bigger town. Two very friendly sheep, probably not far off delivering their spring lambs, rush across the field towards me, and look reproachful when I tell them I have no food unless they're partial to Waitrose sandwiches. A couple of stiles further on, I hear a farmer's shout, and looking back see the sheep cantering in his direction. There's a whole flock in another adjoining field, so I wonder what makes these two animals so special?
Soon I'm in the environs of another farm where old machinery seems to have come to die. I see it's a problem, getting rid of old trailers, harrows and horse boxes, but someone, some time, is going to have to clear up the mess. Significantly perhaps, the nice stiles and waymarks closer to Halse have now disappeared, and it's only when I finally successfully identify which piece of scrappy woodland is 'Fox Covert Wood' that I'm sure I'm on the right track. My compass has de-magged again. My fault, for leaving it too near the mobile phone in my rucksack. The speaker inside it is probably responsible for the reversal of polarity. Mental note to self to always wear compasses geekily round my neck from now on.
There are lots of 'Fox Coverts'. Would it be wrong of me to suggest that hunting types have always actively colluded in providing fox sanctuaries, so that at the chosen moment these supposed scourges of the countryside (I mean the foxes!) can be driven out for the pleasure of the Hunt? I've never really bought into the argument that it's all about protecting the chickens.
Brackley is bigger than Towcester, although with the infills of new housing in both places it's hard to be sure by how much. The field paths deposit me in a housing estate, and I pick my way down to the Banbury Road to enter the town. It's fun to look at the successively older houses as one approaches the centre. First are the very recent builds, then comes the seventies' stuff, then a few representatives of the nineteen-thirties, then some small Victorian semis, then grander villas of the same age, and finally the stone cottages and town houses of greater antiquity. The Georgian Town Hall is swathed in plastic, having a facial. Opposite me is the 'Green Room' café, to which I go for a tea and cake session. At an adjacent table are some lunchtime refugees, who from their conversation and demeanour perhaps work for Brackley's most famous commercial enterprise, the Mercedes motor-racing team. No, Lewis Hamilton is not among their number.
Wikipedia points out that Brackley is built around two centres, and this turns out to be palpably true on foot, although I'd never noticed it when driving through, not that one does these days, not now there's a by-pass. The High Street is handsomely broad, and along one side is the old bit of Magdalen College School, the home of the establishment's sixth-form, with its ancient Chapel, reputedly the oldest building in use in any British school. I imagine this is a hotly disputed factoid. Many universities claim to be 'the oldest', and it partly depends on what you mean. In this case the Chapel of St. James might contain stones which are really old, but does that do it for you? The High Street rises as I go east, and then flattens out at the top of the hill where I notice a small park to my right which is in the care of the National Trust for reasons not immediately obvious. The settlement thins out. And then, when the ground begins to fall away again, down near the Great Ouse is 'Old Town' with its large church of St. Peter. At one point here, the curve of a high wall suggests the kind of protection I've more often encountered in French towns and villages, although I remember a similar example up in Kirkby Stephen. There's a funeral in the church so I can't go in. The hearse (a Mercedes, naturally!) is open, waiting to receive the coffin in a few moments' time. The funeral directors look very smart. It's an upscale affair, which is kind of what I'd expect just here.
By the bridge under the A43 at Brackley near the site of the old station on the Great Central.
Depending on whom you read the River Great Ouse rises in Syresham or Whitfield. It forms the county boundary on the eastern side of Brackley. I cross into Buckinghamshire like it's a foreign country and walk on into pretty, civilised Turweston. The electoral roll of the The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Turweston is quite small. On entering the beautiful little church with its Burne Jones-like stained glass, the senses are filled with that characteristic musky smell-mix of cold and damp which almost defines the ancient numinous. For Lent the Buckingham Deanery has a series of Evensongs: 'Lessons on renewing the church - Nehemiah style'. I quote: 'In our Lent sermons we will look at the methods Nehemiah learnt and successfully used as he led the demoralised Jews to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem'.
Well, firstly, wow, this is great, some serious thinking's going on here, and congratulations, whoever thought this up has remembered that as Christians we've inherited the Old Testament too. But then slightly more disconcerted thoughts arise. Someone has decided what the lessons to be drawn are, have they, and they're going to tell the people of Turweston and elsewhere what they should do? I suppose I've got used to the idea that during Lent we should sit together and share perspectives on the Christian life in an attentive, listening mode. What do we make of the notion of 'authority' as applied to the Anglican Church in 2017. Does it have a right to any? How is it derived? How mediated? In the particular, what kind of Temple might we be rebuilding, and to whose specifications?
The wind has moderated a great deal, and it's now a rather glorious walk under sunny skies on to Whitfield. A hawk hovers over the river, happy dog-lovers exercise their canine friends, the occasional light plane takes off from Turweston airfield, the ground is drying remarkable quickly. The farm in Whitfield (the Northants side of the Great Ouse and therefore back in Peterborough diocese!) is a puzzle. There are scores of horse boxes in the yards, and a rough notice outside advertises the next 'race meeting'. I don't remember Whitfield cropping up in the racing results. The church of St. John the Evangelist is opposite a sometime pub. On this day, this doesn't feel an altogether happy place. I can't give you a reason: the village just has an aura of anxiety about it. The literature in the church largely features The Farming Community Network, which aims to give support to farming folk in trouble. The litany of likely difficulties reads: tiredness, overwork, inheritance, loneliness, isolation, depression, form-filling, regulations, debt, pollution, environment, bereavement. Rural poverty and distress is real. How will Brexit affect it - for good or ill?
The small organ in St. John's isn't locked, and the switches to turn it on are obvious. Unsure of the etiquette, I don't usually do this, but to cheer myself and the building up and let God know I'm there, I start up the blower and improvise for ten minutes, exploring the few stops on the single manual. It mostly works OK. I wonder when it was last played and by whom.
I'd been expecting trouble crossing back over the A43 (the OS map was unclear if it was possible) but in the event it's a breeze and via the lumps and bumps of the disappeared Nether Radstone I make my way back to the Audi. As I approach, I see a sign I'd missed. 'Private verge!' it reads, 'Do not park here'. Or words to that effect, polite but definite. Stroppy old me of course wants to know who the verge belongs to? And do they get a lot of nuisance parking here? Really? Why?
On the way back home, I have to go to Brackley on the slightly better made, more westerly road. Very soon I hit a succession of new roundabouts that mark the housing estates being built on the northern side of town. The project is to be called 'Radstone Fields' and rightly so. This is how I think things will work. HS2 will be built in a sweeping arc about a mile away, and then just as is happening now between Brackley and its by-pass, all the land up to the rail line will be consumed by housing and warehousing. No one has let on that this will be so, but I believe the tacit government view is that the land in a broad swathe between say, Cambridge and Oxford, Wellingborough and Coventry should be swallowed by development over the next twenty-five to fifty years. All of it. It's simply expendable to those living in the south. It's what you pass through on the way from Manchester to London. I hope that in some dusty archive, virtual or hard copy this rambling (lol)document will survive, my version of Cobbett's 'Rural Rides', an elegy for forgotten, quiet rural beauty, so that when next such a thing is proposed elsewhere, say between Bristol and Exeter, it can be reviewed as one tiny contribution to the ensuing debate.
Stats man: 17k. 5 hrs. 11C. Blusterous at first, gusting to 40 mph, moderating later, tho' always breezy. 12 stiles, 13 gates, 6 bridges. One solitary bee, a risk taker in urban Brackley after lunch. The two friendly sheep. One large slice of orange polenta cake (thank you, the nice ladies of 'The Green Room').
Father God
I'm torn.
I mean it when I sing
'We thank thee that thy Church unsleeping,
'While earth rolls onward into light,
'Through all the world her watch is keeping
'And rests not now by day or night'.
This great hymn always makes me cry.
The fellowship of the Church is a wonder,
Stretching backwards and forwards through time,
Girdling the earth with faith.
But I spend a heck of a lot of time
Moaning and griping
About the Church's inadequacies:
Its leadership;
Its muddle;
Its lack of rigour;
Or commonsense
As I see it.
Father
Of course it's imperfect
As I too am imperfect.
By your grace
May we all work towards
The perfection we glimpse
In Jesus Christ your son
Through whom we pray.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment