I'm looking for the 'Three Hills' and eventually there they are, as plain as three Bronze Age tumuli can be, a short line of nettle covered bumps beside a cow field on the highest point of the rise overlooking the Nene. These round barrows aren't particularly rare in national terms, but they're unusual for Northamptonshire. They must commemorate the great and good Northamptonians of four thousand years ago, and since all three barrows touch each other, the individuals buried there must have been closely related. I think they also tell us something about the countryside of the time, which may have been at least as open as it is today, although presumably the Nene valley was a much wider expanse of marsh and water than it is now. The intention must have been that these monuments should be seen from a distance. I find it rather moving to walk down from this ancient site and then along the river bank into lovely Woodford to the church of St. Mary's, the 'Cathedral of the Nene' with its graceful ordered churchyard looking out over the curve of the water.
There is much that delights me here. The church is beautifully and generously proportioned, even if its claim to be the biggest in the Nene valley seems to miss the point. The organ sounds jolly loud as I sit and tootle - I shouldn't think you'd ever know if the congregation was singing the hymns. There's a church ghost, written up in the local paper during the thirties and attested by a previous incumbent. One of his successors as priest had a glamorous, even raffish film-star name: Luis de Casabianca. He served the parish for more than twenty years, and was evidently much loved: his wife's artwork still adorns the church. In the graveyard can be found a headstone inscribed to 'Kitty the black girl' who died in 1865. Now there's a story begging for some fictional amplification! Best of all, nineteenth century workmen found a mummified human heart amongst old stonework, which Fr. Casabianca's research later suggested belonged to a Roger de Kirketon. He died in Norfolk during the 13th century, but home is where the heart is. In the visitors' book it records that Doreen and Roy dropped by last week. They were married in St. Mary's in 1951. Woodford is a fit destination for pilgrimage, a place where memories hang palpably in the air.
Ringstead. Too often the case...
I keep close to the river rather than walk up into the village, picking up the Nene Way until the line of the old railway to Thrapston sweeps across the river in front of me. I follow its long since de-metalled trackpath up to the A14, where I have to zigzag back to the Nene to cross under the rolling thunder of the traffic. Like Crianlarich in Perthshire, Thrapston used to have two railway stations (the idea of one railway passing underneath another in a rural setting is attractively reminiscent of the layouts of childhood trainsets!) The line from Northampton to Peterborough was opened in 1845. The Northampton Herald recorded that 'The new line, comprising only a single line of rails...has been completed in fifteen months at a cost of about £10,000 per mile, considerably under the estimates.' Compare and contrast with HS2...though £10,000 must have been a fortune in those days. Not a billion pounds' worth of fortune though.
I emerge opposite 'The Woolpack' pub on the Islip side of the Nine Arches Bridge and adjourn to the bar for a drink, served to me by Rachel who asks politely what I'm doing (as per usual I look scruffier than the rest of the clientele). I said I'd give you a namecheck, Rachel, so if you're reading, here it is. Thank you! The last time we stopped at The Woolpack some years ago, it wasn't a rewarding experience, so it's good to find it smartened up. Having crossed the Rubicon of the A14 I'm now in terra incognita. Here be dragons. So how do you say 'Islip'? I default to 'Eye-slip'. But it could be 'Is-slip' or 'Illip' or knowing the cantankerous ways of Northamptonshire folk even 'Ilp'. I walk up to St. Nicholas' church, which still has a rood screen in place, so I assume the style of worship here may be high-ish, although no smell of incense lingers on the air. The church has American connections through the Washington family, and in the corner is a letter of greeting from the Episcopal church in Islip, Suffolk County, New York State. Close by is a list of Rectors, and I see that there was once an incumbent by the name of Thomas Oliver Cromwell East. Poor chap! His parents were setting the bar rather high. Or low, depending on your point of view. At any rate they were covering a range of possibilities in churchmanship. Not a bloke to be trifled with perhaps.
I remember this section of the Nene Way well from a previous walk. From the back of a(nother) pub I stroll down across the stepping stones of a large lawned back garden past a handsome duck pond, swallows dipping and diving around me. After a series of gates I reach Islip Mill where a barn is offered for sale with permission to convert. The barn's a long stone's throw from the river. At first it looks a good proposition, 2.6 acres of land thrown in for good measure. But then a thought occurs. A local is walking his dog. I ask him if the fields flood. 'Oh yes,' he says, 'It's often one big lake around here in winter'. So perhaps not quite such a good proposition then. I'd hoped to cross the footbridge and enter Thrapston through the back door, but gosh darn, the bridge is being renovated and without breaking the British ( no, the World) long jump record, there's no way forward. Mumbling incoherently, I retrace my steps back as far as The Woolpack and then turn across the Nine Arches Bridge into the town. Time was, the main road came right through Thrapston, along with the aforesaid two railway lines, and there was a motor racing circuit just up the road towards Kettering. With all these gone, Thrapston stretches out handsomely, but doesn't quite live up to its promise anymore. Despite its Chancery Lane and its Bullring, it's no Olney. Am I seeking meaningless gentrification? I hope not. I just think it's surprising that given the wealth locked up in the property of surrounding villages, there's been little apparent enterprise in terms of precisely targeted artisan or boutique shops. A real butchers? A great bakery? Maybe they're there and I missed them. Maybe they've been tried and failed. To put it another way, Thrapston seems like a place of ripe opportunity. Oh, and the large and centrally placed St. James' church is shut, although a sale of work is being set up in the hall opposite. I'm in rather a hurry or I'd have gone in and snooped.
Returning southwards, the old Nene Way meanders across the fields to Denford. The wind has dropped ('Draughty place, en'it?' a gentleman had remarked to me as I left Great Addington this morning). The sun is dappling the fields of barley, most of them gold...thank you Sting. A herd of cows has chosen to sit on the path exactly where I want to cross the Nene, and I have to improvise an alternative route. As I do so, a snowy white egret rises calmly in front of me and takes to the sky, describing a great circle away from Denford in search of a quieter fishing pitch at Summer Leys. I eat a sandwich beside some fussily decorated graves in the churchyard of the locked Holy Trinity church which according to achurchnearyou.com has some fascinating acoustic jars in the chancel. I don't even know what an acoustic jar is. Give me a sec and I'll look it up so you don't have to...
Well I never! These turn out to be ceramic vessels set into the walls of churches, more often in France than in England, which are claimed to improve the sound of the singing, a theory being that rather than make the congregation sound louder, they absorb certain frequencies in a flattering way. Another time I'll have to purloin a key and test it out.
There's something very pleasing about the riverside situation of Denford, the way the houses and gardens topple over into the river, the rise of the village up on one bank while the flood plain remains open on the other. I climb the hill and press on to sprawling, untidy Ringstead along a narrow cut in the wheat field past the allotments. The sign beside them says they're in the keeping of the Ringstead charity. The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary church is open, and the aesthetic inside seems to me a little untidy too, which may just mean that's it used a lot (it's the last week of the school term). Should I expect every church to present as an oasis of calm? Not really. Some churches inherit furniture and fittings in a more haphazard way than others. Subsequent affection for particular items on the part of some individuals may mean that a comfortable but unbeautiful compromise has to be reached. A rigorously organised building with a single aesthetic direction may radiate peace to the casual visitor, but could perhaps indicate the iron, domineering hand of one person, clergy or lay, at some past moment. Stan comes in to use the bathroom by the servery. He's been working with a mate on wall-building in the churchyard. Is he a mason by trade, I ask? He denies it. He's a brickie who lives locally, but the company for whom he works has been commissioned to reclaim some of the stone from old outbuildings. The job isn't easy or satisfying: the stone is of poor quality.
In all of the above I'm tempted to find metaphors for the Church's human constitution. In this week's Times I read an obit for Dr. Wesley Carr, one time Dean of Westminster. He clearly wasn't always an easy person to deal with, and for some very good reasons: he was diagnosed with Parkinson's very shortly after taking office in London. There was a very public spat with a well-connected Director of Music, one of those fallings-out so common in the Church, and particularly between clergy and musicians - a matter of great regret to me. Why do we find it so hard to live together? One answer might be that it all matters so much to us. Another is the raw material with which we deal. I've been reading the beginning of St. Paul's letter to the Romans this week, and am reminded how hard it is to understand, literary at one moment, apparently logically shaky at another, the writer's emotion bubbling through and sometimes overwhelming his argument. Describing the frailty of the our creaturely condition his anger explodes alliteratively: asunetous, asunthetous, astorgous,aneleemonas...senseless, untrustworthy, inhuman, unmerciful. I don't think we'd have got on, me and Paul. Yet this is a key New Testament source on which all Christians draw. How will we ever agree? How can we ever be absolutely tidy?
I walk up the long stretch of Station Road, crossing the unseen Roman villa whose site is precisely at the point where the lane hangs a right towards the Addingtons. Looking up to the low ridge, I struggle to make out the Three Hills, the ancient work of people as temporally remote from Jesus and Paul as we are - but at the other end of time's arrow. The landscape around us, physical and mental, is often more puzzling than not.
I Spy: 21 km. 6.5 hrs. 22degrees C. Very breezy at first. 4 stiles (two points) 15 gates (one point) 11 bridges (three points) 5 churches: 3 open (five points) 2 barbed wire fences to be limbo danced (five points for anyone seeing me...) 1 egret (Twenty points and a gold star)
Ospreys have been turning up locally, presumably migrating? I never knew that: always associated them with Scotland. As yet I would struggle to identify one. If I ever did : fifty points!!!
Father God
Please grant me understanding,
Help my unbelief,
Give me love in my heart,
And bless those with whom I live
In like fashion.
Amen.
Oh, and another thing Father,
(Can I pray for this?)
Those people up on the hill
Under the mounds
And those they lived among
None of whom knew Jesus...
(Thinking about them
I feel a frisson of what?
Fear?
Sadness?
My own frailty and mortality?)
I commend them to you,
Suspecting they were just like us
Searching for the Truth.
May we all be found
In Your everlasting Kingdom
As you wrap up the Universe
In the final time.
Amen.
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