Landscape challenge

                                                  What a difference a week makes...

How I miss Channel 4's Time Team : the stripey enthusiasm of the late Mick Aston, the puppyish bounce of Tony Robinson (maybe at his best here, as with Blackadder, part of a distinguished team), the dry cynicism of John Gater, the amused rationalism of Carenza Lewis, the folksy charm and surprisingly solid academic values of Phil Harding, and yes, the insightful, thoughtful input of Stewart Ainsworth, assessing a landscape for what it might have been rather what it seems to be now.

I'm assessing a landscape too in this blog, though a human one - the landscape of the Church of England, trying to see what might lie under the surface of an institution I think I know so well, dropping by all the churches in the Diocese of Peterborough one by one. I'm trying to place them in context, and see what may become of us all as the twenty-first century progresses. There are more than 400 churches to visit, and I'm nearly half way through my Long Walk.

Part of the fun along the way is the sheer pleasure of map-reading - getting from one place to another by the best route for me on a particular day, matching the printed page to the unfolding landscape of my adopted home county. The Ordnance Survey Maps in all the glory of their detail and reliability are an absolute treasure.

Going south-east on a characteristically wide Northamptonshire lane from Moreton Pinkney, the metalled road turns right at the magnificently named 'Grumbler's Holt'. I'd like it to be a place where someone lugubrious once took a  breather, but apparently the reference is more prosaic: a grumbler was a badger, and a holt was its sett. I say the lane is wide, but by that I mean the width between the hedges on either side. The tarmac road is less than half the width: the carts of previous centuries could only make progress through the mud with a greater space, and if two happened to pass each other, it was more difficult to manoeuvre the ancient wagons than today's cars. Mind you, the gigantic articulated Calor Gas tanker which has just drawn up by the building where I turn left onto Banbury Lane would have proved hard to squeeze past on any single track country road. The driver's leaning on his cab as I approach. He's looking woebegone. Someone's stood him up. He's of eastern European origin. I say hello. "Is of you?" he asks, gesturing at the building and its locked gates. I regret that it isn't, and he sighs. He looks as if he could badly do with a smoke, but unfortunately, given his occupation, this possible is not.

In a couple of hundred metres I turn onto another old drover's road, the Oxford Lane, which winds pleasantly through the trees. That this was once a significant route can be seen by the deep ditches set back in the undergrowth on either side, although these disappear as the bridleway emerges into fields. I hold close to the left hand hedge before clambering over a stile and heading on a diagonal over a lumpy field to the little church of St. John the Baptist, Plumpton, with its scrubbed, boxy pews. If there was ever much to Plumpton, there ain't much now: just a manor house survives. There must have been enough of a village to make it worthwhile for Jesus College Oxford to invest fifty quid in the rebuilding of the church in 1822. It looks like a Conservation Trust church, but there are hymn numbers on the board: someone has been singing O Jesus I have promised recently, which seems apt. There's an electronic organ too.

I have a soft spot for Jesus College Oxford. When I was a teacher, the Northampton School for Boys would send a cricket team of masters and boys to Oxford one Wednesday each May, an inheritance of the days when it was the 'Town and County Grammar'. Those mid-nineteen seventies were gentler times, dear readers, although even then, Mayhem was often found stalking the corridors at Billing Road. But that's another story. I made the trip a couple of times. The first occasion saw my off-stump clinically removed before I'd scored by a rather good quick bowler called Meehan who was playing Minor Counties cricket as well as for his college. The second time I redeemed myself by scoring fifty on a lushly wet and humid day, but I have a feeling Meehan wasn't playing, and anyway the match was abandoned at tea. But I digress.

I can either walk on from Plumpton to Weston by lane or fieldpath, so of course I choose the latter. At the third field a herd of cattle blocks the way, so I revert to Plan A, arriving in Weston by the road which skirts the Hall where once the Sitwell family lived, Sacheverell and Edith of that ilk. I know I should have but I haven't. My education is lacking in respect of all those very English writers of the mid-twentieth century, but I'm not giving up hope. I read Jane Austen's Persuasion on holiday a fortnight ago, and for the first time her humour and style opened up for me. Perhaps I shall be a late-flowering Bloomsbury.

I know there's a good pub in Weston, but shucks, it's not open. Because the clocks have gone back, I'm walking earlier in the day, and the fish van's only just arrived: The Crown's not into serving morning coffee. Well, you wouldn't, not out here. There couldn't possibly be enough takers to make it worthwhile: Weston has a somewhat isolated air about it. The isolation is an illusion however, because really the village is part of a ribbon development which leads up the hill into Weedon Lois.

I love this moniker. There's that thing about American names, isn't there, where it seems a bit random as to which is the given name and which the family name. Anstruther Pyewackett III or Pyewackett Anstruther III? It could be either. Well, so it is with Weedon Lois, which is sometimes referred to as Lois Weedon - who you might suppose to be a Superhero's moll. At one time the village was Weedon Pinkney. Before you get into the village proper, you pass through Milthorpe which is interpreted on the ground as 'Middlethorpe' - presumably halfway between Weston and Weedon. Weedon apparently means 'temple on a hill' and the Lois part I at first think might be a dedication to St. Eligius, a French bishop and friend of the poor.

On the web there are references to the Weedon Lois 'temple' as Anglo-Saxon in origin, but that seems rather unlikely to me. I suppose it might be a reference to an early Christian church hidden under the current one, but more appealing is the thought that there's a folk memory of a Roman temple, part of an earlier settlement where the medieval church now sits by the castle mound. The present day road describes a neat semicircle around the site. As I walk into St. Mary and St. Peter's - an unusual combination - I surprise Sue who's been arranging some flowers. She apologises unnecessarily for the slight derangement to the church interior. It's having a minor post-quinquennial makeover. Sue sheds some light on the church at Plumpton. Her husband was involved with a Trust which has kept it open. There are half a dozen services there each year. We talk a little about how history, tradition and finance interact, and the difficulties our long, rural diocese faces.

Inside the church, you instantly know there's a bit more to this place than an average parish church. The proportions are wrong. The nave's short, the chancel too long, such that for contemporary worship the 'working' altar with its lovely, lively altar cloth has been pitched forward, leaving a narrow choir which stretches onto a space before the high altar. This was a Priory church, and looking it up later on, the village name may be a later dedication not to St. Loy (Eligius) but to St. Lucien, an earlier Romano-French saint whose devotee monks pitched up in Weedon in later medieval times. The nearby spring, which one could speculate might have been the occasion of any putative Roman temple, became a place of healing pilgrimage. Opposite the church, across the road, is a 'new' cemetery, where a memorial to Edith Sitwell looks out over the wide valley beyond. This has been an evocative, holy place down through the generations. I love the overwhelming sense that I now worship as a representative of the great cloud of witnesses who've celebrated and struggled with their faith in a place like this over the centuries.

Up the hill, over the road, onto a bridleway, down the far side with sweeping views to left and right following horsey and human footprints to the stream at the bottom. There's a bridge, and through the gate on the far side another herd of cattle. A bull is facing me full-on, horns and all, head lowered. He even gives a little paw of the ground, to make sure I know he means business, or perhaps just to show off his manliness to the host of adoring female companions. The field is long and thin. It stretches away to either side of me along the stream. I need to cross the short way to the continuation of the path beyond another gate fifty metres away. I pause. Consider options. I retreat and track along the stream, hidden behind the hedge. I can see the herd follow me on the far side of the thorns. Bertie the bull is making good speed with the kind of jaunty, bouncing trot you see in rhinos on the move. They're going much faster than me. I suddenly change direction, double back to the gate, and am satisfied to see the herd has now taken residence at the far end of the field, a couple of hundred metres away. I can safely cross into a field of brassica where the bridleway mysteriously disappears. Did I dupe my bovine friends, or were they just seeking a little privacy to do what Noel Coward suggested? I don't know. Nor do I know why you'd leave a bull in a field through which horses and riders regularly pass. Maybe Bertie's a really friendly chap, as bulls go, and had just spent a bit of time in acting school, mugging up personal presentation skills, in order to become a higher net worth individual.

Woodend is where the wood once ended (duh!), in this case Whittlebury Forest. Not much louder than a mosquito whine, the sound of the Silverstone race track is just about audible on this very still day. There was a Baptist chapel here, now remade into a house with a nod at its former life in the shape of some bright stained glass windows. The cemetery next door remains well-kept, with some graves as recent as the early nineteen nineties, so I guess there was still a congregation meeting here then. Beyond Woodend the road curves downhill with the Hall on the left until the traveller reaches Blakesley over the redundant railway bridge. When there was still a station here, there was at one time also a miniature track to convey lordly visitors and their luggage back to the Hall.

Blakesley is quite a place. It still has a Post Office, always a mark of superiority. It used to have a rather famous annual soapbox derby down its sloping main street. There's a charming little Reading Room, a large village school by the green, a garage with a separate showroom, a business offering personal training and clinical massage, and a lady who makes soft toys under the title of 'Blakesley Bears'.  As I walk to St. Mary's church her car draws up beside me with a very large fluffy example of her handiwork in the passenger seat. A young chap is hauling a flag of St. George up the church tower supervised by his gaffer, a man in his sixties. 'Well, you've got to, this time of the year', he remarks to some workmen doing a bit of walling by the dame school in the churchyard. I think to myself:  'Do we have to?' What price the Church of England?

One thing Blakesley hasn't got at the moment is a pub. The sign outside The Bartholomew Arms promises food and drink every day at lunchtime, but at a moment of need for me and another passing motorist, the doors are locked and bolted. According to the Blakesley Bears lady (who judging from their website may be called Lizzie), the new owners have taken fright and given back the keys. In Moreton Pinkney the story seems superficially similar. The Four Candles - oh, what a lot you have to answer for Ronnie Barker! - opened in July 2016 after years of dereliction, but closed just a year later. So in six hours of walking today there wasn't a single hostelry to be found open. It's not only churches that have difficulty in getting people through the doors.

Marks on the bark: 20 km. 6 hrs. 11 degrees C. No breeze at all. Sky a pearlescent grey with occasional tinges of muted purply blue. Happy morning birdsong. Squirrels and rabbits. 3 stiles. 16 gates. 3 bridges. More walking on lanes and hard bridleways than usual.


Lord
I'm becoming confused
And I wonder whether my confusion is shared.
I worship You each week in church.
With others.
And I try to keep up my own apology for a prayer life.
Just me and You.
In the age of
The Internet and of
Time Shifted Television and of
Constant Worldwide Reflexivity of
Comment
Thought
Fake News
What does all this 'shared experience'
Mean for our celebration of You?

Bind us together, Lord
Bind us together
With cords that cannot be broken.
Bind us together with love.
Amen.