Hotter than July...oh, it is July!

At the Anglian Water lodge by Pitsford Causeway, nice Mark behind the counter doesn't charge me for a permit since all I want to do is walk along the Pitsford and Walgrave arms of the reservoir and find a way out to the village of Old, rather than degrade Pitsford Water's fish stocks or spend hours in a bird hide hoping for a sight of the Great Crested Hoopoe Duck. Nor does he charge me for parking the Audi beside the ranger's office, but he doesn't know if it's physically possible to do the route I have in mind. Don't worry, Mark, I did!

Perhaps this is the best bit of walking to be had at Pitsford, but if you want to try it, please go and make sure the office near Holcot are OK about that first. The paths are mostly cut into the grass, although some are currently blocked for access because of unspecified ongoing ecological projects. There are good shady sections through woodland dells, which is helpful to me because even at ten o' clock today it's obvious it's going to be a 'scorcher'. If you're a birder with an interest in waterfowl, then you're well catered for with well-constructed hides and viewpoints. A coot alerts the large flocks of ducks further up the shoreline to my presence, and they swim to the middle of the lake for safety. I wonder if I'll be able to follow the angles of the bays easily enough, but in the event it's fairly clear where I need to hop over a fence and pick up the path which zig-zags from Walgrave to Old through fields of barley, oats and wheat. A small sheep field then brings me into the heart of the village.

I must 'fess up'. On what I know will be a really hot day, I lay out my various necessary accompaniments before leaving home. High vis jacket: check. Sandwiches: check. Anorak (there are thunderstorms forecast): check. Hat: check (lol). Water bottles. Yeah, what happened to those water bottles? Oh bother, I realise half way round the reservoir, they're still sitting on the dining room table back home, aren't they?  Note to self - and to all who read - this was a very silly thing to do. Getting dehydrated is Very Bad, particularly if you're knocking on a bit. So as I enter the village, I'm still pondering my options. Village shop? Waiting for the pub to open? Hammering on a villager's door and begging for alms? Or maybe (an outside bet, this...) the church will be open and will have a servery with a tap...?

 There is no village shop, nor is the pub open, but the church comes up trumps, so I don't have to shyly importune startled locals. Inside St. Andrew's I find the Rector, Karen Jongman, who looks after a benefice which also includes Walgrave, Hannington and Scaldwell. The church is lovely and light with high walls along the nave. We talk about various churchy matters, music included, over a pint of extremely welcome water, and I realise/remember that this is a benefice which is lucky to have two of the county's best church musicians resident close by - Ian Clarke and Andrew Moodie. Karen's own tastes (and her husband's) are for jazz with a traditional flavour, although like me in her teens she once liked something more modern on the jazz spectrum. I admit to her that the ability to 'swing' is not a musical skill I find easy - as is often the case with players whose background is in either rock or the classical arena: the loping freedom of rhythm which tends to place the felt beat slightly ahead of where a computer or metronome would put it eludes us. And we find the chords too complicated. And the egos of jazzers...but that's another matter.

Old used to be called 'Wold', and around the village the ancient name still occasionally makes an appearance. The place certainly has an airy feel to it, although the surrounding countryside is no more than gently undulating. Its current moniker achieves continuing fame courtesy of the local haulage firm 'Knights of Old', which gives a chuckle to some of us when we see their lorries pass, and always makes me think of Jan Struther's children's hymn: 'When a knight won his spurs in the stories of old/He was gentle and brave; he was gallant and bold/with a shield on his arm and a lance in his hand/For God and for valour he rode through the land.'

The weather forecast today is annoyingly unpredictable: both the BBC and the Met Office have been pondering the possibility and timing of thunderstorms for a few days now. Briefly they bring forward the likelihood of problems to the early afternoon, although there are no signs of it in a largely cloudless sky, but I take a conservative approach to my route, and so retrace my steps almost to the reservoir boundary before following the track up to Walgrave. There's something satisfying about a circular walk which I think is partly (in me at least) down to a rather human 'Ooh, aren't I clever' tendency, as well as the more mystical, magical symbolism of a completed circle, but there's something to be said for 'out and back' walks too. The further I go in a day, the less I'm inclined to turn around and look at the landscape from different angles, but a 180 degree view of things can be interesting and revealing. The hill up which one has toiled is scarcely noticeable when gravity and momentum are aiding rather than hindering progress. The line of a path across a field which wan't picked up easily in one direction is stonkingly clear in the other. The sun illuminates the fields and buildings differently.

I remember Walgrave as being 'Walgrave St. Peter's', but I can see no reference to this in any map or article - and I'm sure I remember once seeing a road sign which read 'Walgrave St. Mary's', but now I think maybe I'm making this up. At any rate another of Karen's churches is the high-spired St. Peter's, just above the village green. It's distinctly hot now, and the shade inside is a relief.

I can't help it. The junk box of my brain makes a connection between the long-form of the village name and sixties' singer 'Crispian St. Peter's', so the soundtrack to this part of today's walk is his hit 'You were on my mind', much beloved of Tony Blackburn c. 1966. Crispian (actually Robin) was largely a one-song-wonder, although his career continued with reasonable success thereafter. He was born in Swanley, Kent, where my parents live (and I like this) was once part of a group called 'The Country Gentlemen'. The song was written by Canadians 'Ian and Sylvia'  and it recently turned up on a Steve Earle/Shawn Colvin album, who probably never knew it had been such a huge hit in England. Just thought I'd share all that with you. Too much information, probably.

I have a drink at the pub, set off, reach the edge of the village, climb a stile, realise I've left my walking stick at the pub, mumble and grumble wordlessly the way old folk do, retrace my steps, and then decide not to take the path across the fields after all because there are horses blocking the way, standing in the shade of the trees on the brow of the hill, and I don't want to have to make nice with them. There's an alternative route which takes me off the road half way to Hannington, so I can still enter it by the pretty route, across a little garden field where the hay has been newly mown.

There's not much to Hannington, but as you can see the church has a bisected nave, which isn't common, and which though you might call it a design feature, could scarcely be commended as a thing of beauty or an aid to contemplative worship. It's...well it's just in the way, folks. The church is set up on a little mound, and the suggestion is that this might have been the village's moot point before the church was built - by which I don't mean that it was an irrelevant earthwork, just that people met there to chew the fat about who had nicked whose pig, or the possible options for entertainment at the Harvest Supper in 968 AD.

The sky's still wonderfully blue, and there's not the merest suggestion of sturm und drang, but I take the direct route along the road back to Holcot, the reservoir and the car...and then regret it. The heat is reflecting savagely from the tarmac and my left ankle is sore. England, having elected to bat, are now making the South African bowlers suffer under the sun at Lords. This is a not inconsiderable consolation.

CODA. Yesterday's Times trumpets that the government intends to make a billion pounds available for the building of by-passes. This perhaps will include the completion of the northern by-pass to Northampton. It will pass close enough to Walgrave and Old and Hannington that villagers are already taking part in consultations about the likely impact on their communities. As the CPRE have reminded everyone, research shows that by-passes do not solve traffic problems: they increase them. And once a by-pass is built, as I've previously remarked on more than one occasion, the logic is for infilling at least up to the new boundary created by the road. Which may be the real reason the government is willing to spend the money.

Stats man: 17 km. 5 hrs. (Some wandering around in both Old and Walgrave). 28 degrees. Little in the way of breeze. 5 stiles. 7 gates. A lot of bridges (lost count). One barbed wire fence safely negotiated. A distant heron. Numerous ducks - but I can't tell you what sort ( which can provide an alternative polite vernacular as in 'Him? He can't tell his Teal from his Widgeon!' ) Some cheery villagers in Old. Three churches - all open!

                                       Wall painting and flowers: SS. Peter and Paul, Hannington

Lord
Thank you for the wonders of your creation,
Always new,
Always astounding in their beauty.
Please help me to see myself
And all those I meet
As part of this panoply of love
And to treat us all
Accordingly.
Amen