Saturday. Sunny...April...Saturday! The weekend traffic jostles Blue Audi as I head north-west. At Rothersthorpe Services there's a bit of cheery sub-continent Exchange and Mart. A car of uncertain age and temperament is sold, then kangaroos around the parking lot. Perhaps the purchaser's just learning to drive and the car's a present from a benefactor. Blue t-shirted collectors for Cancer Research UK dominate the entrance to the café: intimidation in a good cause. Two young men in track suit bottoms swagger towards the Gents, hips loose and thrust forward, displaying their procreational possibilities to any passing females the way young men of a certain athletic demographic are apt to do. Further on up the road a Bike Club (of the Electraglide in Blue variety) park their beards in a layby to admire metal and swap stories of Easy Rider derring-do.
All relatively quiet in Hellidon though, except the pub's still being refurbished to the sound of Polish jokes and Radio 1, so there's no morning coffee to be had. A scotty dog wanders out onto the Green to sniff my boots. And this is all very welcome bucolic normality on the morning Allied cruise missiles have struck chemical weapons' facilities in Damascus and Homs. As I drove in, I'd been pondering the odds on a Russian reply in kind against Akrotiri.
Just around here the parishes and their churches are inconveniently grouped for my purposes. First up today I'm retracing my steps in the direction of Badby. The English cricket season has drifted into its wettest start for more than a decade. Match after match is being abandoned because of soggy outfields. The cricket authorities have become complacent about the good April weather of recent years. And just here the fields are sodden too after weeks of regular precipitation. The sheep look ragged and miserable - hard going for them and for me. The gentle drumlin shapes of the hills are softly outlined in the morning light: it's a joyful walk despite the squish and squelch. The sheep are tolerant enough of my presence, but as a microlight passes over (and now I remember there's an airfield close to Hellidon) they scatter. I join a green lane and pass to the south of Arbury Hill. Soon there are lovely views across the valley at what in a grander landscape would be called the 'head of the pass'. Thereafter the line of the old way is for a while marked by scrub trees on both sides. Soil erosion is causing them to slip slowly down the hill. I turn on to the metalled road and greet three walkers, who return my shouted hello with puzzled diffidence. They're in that class of person one encounters in the countryside who for whatever reason at that moment look uncomfortable. Maybe they're lost, though if so they don't ask for directions. Maybe they're up to no good: they're certainly appear ill-assorted for age and equipment. Of course, they may be saying the same about me - muddled old codger, looks like a tramp, might be a bit bonkers, best not to engage etc. etc.
Arbury Hill
The entrance to Badby from this side is called Bunkers Hill and I remember a similar name for a lane I used to walk in Kent as a teenager. I suppose these may have been bunkers from which to shoot, or perhaps bothies to which one retired for a sandwich and a nip in between reducing the squire's pheasant population. At the top of the descent is Whetherday's Garden Centre, which like others of its ilk seems to be branching out into 'collectables'. That this is a trend I know from sometime guilty afternoon pleasure Antiques Road Trip.
I think I've observed this before in a previous post, but prolonged or effort-heavy walking induces obsessive or unexpected mental process in me, perhaps due to lack of oxygen. So as I enter the village this fine spring morning I catch myself humming over and over again the verse of a much-loved hymn from distant childhood:
'Glad that I live am I
That the sky is blue
Glad for the country lanes
And the fall of dew
After the sun the rain
After the rain the sun
This is the way of life
Till the work be done...'
It's a bittersweet thing, to rehearse something so meaningful but from so far in the personal past, to know that despite the intensity of the moment's experience how close the work is to being finished in one's own life.
The path onwards to Staverton follows a rushing stream (well, rushing today at any rate) fed from springs which mark one of the sources of the Nene. A little way along is the ruin of a mill, unmarked on the OS. The path goes ahead invisibly over richly brown ploughed fields, but the waymark posts are clear on the far side, so the decent and sensible thing is not to disturb any sowing or clag my boots and I zigzag the margins uphill to a copse which opens onto Staverton's rather sad-looking playing field. No one's playing footie this Saturday afternoon, nor for a few past, judging by the the random distribution of the goalposts and the faintness of the pitch markings. St. Mary's church is over the road presiding over the aura of calm organisation Staverton radiates.
Inside floor heaters are scattered around the four quadrants, and it does feel chilly, but the sanctuary is filled with beautiful light. I love the gargoyle on the back wall, tongue hanging out either lasciviously or in urgent need of a pint. It looks as it it's escaped from an Indian or South American temple. But why just the one? Was the stonemason humoured with this single piece of fun as compensation for his earnest toil on the more regular tasks? But no more than that, Joe! 'Twouldn't be right in God's church...
Less happily there are sundry rather tatty photographs of past incumbents displayed near an unusually large honours board for churchwardens. Would it be cranky of me to suggest that if the photos are going to be there (presumably because they have continued meaning for the congregation) they should be re-framed and freshened up? I notice that one of the portraits shows Rev. Allan Wintersgill, Rector here in the 1980s and father of Andrew, organiser of Northampton's Great Knights Folk Club. Time was, the best folk club in the county was to be found at the Dun Cow in Daventry, just a couple of miles away. I must have sung there in company with Andrew once upon a time.
I eat a happy sandwich in the sun-dappled churchyard and reflect on where I am with the Church and its organisation. For a few months I've been reading St. John's Gospel with growing puzzlement, partly assuaged by the writing of Tom Wright and Richard Bauckham. I've been shocked by the strangeness of the Gospel's language, so elliptical, so dualist, so challenging. Are you in or are you out? it keeps asking, but the in-ness or out-ness is to a relationship not the membership of a body. That only comes later in the New Testament ( ordinally though not chronologically) once Paul's fierce voice comes to the fore. So John's Gospel poses a challenge to me and the Church as it searches, in common with many other institutions, to find 'relevance'. To illustrate what I mean I heard a Radio 5 discussion the other day which forecast the death of Sport as we know it, Jim. The argument runs that Young People are far more interested in video-gaming (which is campaigning to be recognised as a 'sport'), and that football, tennis, cricket etc. etc. are destined to be numerically overwhelmed in the foreseeable future. No, I don't believe it either. But I'm not so sure about organised Christian religion. And I don't know if it's my imagination, but I think I can detect in the increasingly frenetic and shrill yoof-biased presentation of sport on telly that there's a growing insecurity about its cultural hegemony. It's not only Christians who fear the immediate future as a 'remnant'.
I pop into Staverton's Countryman pub where Susanne serves me a GB and has time for a brief natter after a hectic patch in the kitchen and at front of house. She worked in Improvement at Siemens, husband Rob in Safety for an airline. Restructuring provided the opportunity and now here they are in the village with their enviable business background, running a place that's thriving (and perhaps benefiting from the loss of a competitor in Hellidon for the time being!). Seems to me it requires enormous energy and liking for people to do what they do. I'll be coming back.
I walk along the embankment and through the gate guarding the viaduct to enjoy the panorama, then retrace my steps and slosh along to Lower Catesby. You'll know the name, forever associated with the Gunpowder Plot. I'll encounter the family later and more tangibly when I get to Ashby St. Ledgers. Here they're just a medieval memory. The nineteenth-century chapel of St. Mary and St. Edmund is down a straight well-kept drive. There's a gate to a muddy paddock and stepping stones which take one in unorthodox fashion across the dirt to its locked front door. In the foreground two black and be-horned sheep beat a retreat, while a third white sheep of a different breed (sorry folks, my townie ignorance of farm animals is showing badly!) comes and nuzzles me, absolutely tame. Or absolutely starving. A little further back some cattle, also black and be-horned raise a head and sniff in my direction, but thankfully keep their distance.
It's a rather stiff-legged walk from here up the metalled road into Hellidon where the banks beside the back lane have been sown with many clumps of primroses. What a delicate spring glory they are, a re-discovery of recent years in our countryside, as I think, after some decades of decline and neglect; flowers which together with lily-of-the-valley are a direct line into the five year old Vince's perception of what every English woodland garden should be. Glad that I live am I.
Marks on the Park: 15 km. 5 hrs. Wind: minimal. Going: very soft ( Tiger Roll won the Grand National 10-1) 18 degrees C. 18 stiles (some rather high) 21 gates. 8 bridges. 2 cattle grids. Lots of daffs. In the absence of larks, an exaltation of primroses. Two large, bright yellow butterflies. Many solitary bees on the forage. Two churches. One open.
My re-vamped personal website is now live at: www.vincecross.co.uk and if you click on Blog it will take you straight to the site you're now on. So now you have two ways of finding me!
Lord
I thank you for the memories
About which I write at such length.
When they begin to fade,
Deal with me gently
And give me some grip on the past
So that I can continue to be thankful
For the people I have known,
The places I have seen,
The sheer immensity
Of all that I've been privileged to experience.
May what I share of the past
Be truthful,
Be generous and
Be a witness
To your love and care
For all your creation.
Amen.
I love it!
ReplyDeleteShin Splints Walking