Higher Ground

                                                       Anish Kapoor's take on a steeple

Hassle persuading an electronic mailing to 'send'. Truculence from an older gentleman in a Citroen people carrier who clearly doesn't know the Highway Code or the width of his vehicle. A high-sided van stopped in the daftest, most dangerous place on a West Haddon bend. Grr! But people talk about the 'walking cure', and it's so true. Once parked up in the pastoral idyll of Winwick, the Audi safely stowed by the Victorian post box next to the Hall, I step out along the bridleway towards Elkington, serene, even blissed out, under lightly clouded skies.

The July heat has moderated - there was even some welcome, worthwhile rain over the weekend - but the consequence of that's been an upsurge in the fly population. They're everywhere between the hedges, attacking ears, eyes, hair and arms in search of juicy sweat. Just past Elkington a woman is applying a new anti-fly spray to three pretty ponies. She isn't convinced it's working.

These days Elkington is more or less just the name - the cash-strapped County Council has provided a village sign for travellers as they approach on the not-very-metalled byway. Three or four dwellings, and that's about it. The Plague took toll of the medieval inhabitants such that there was a single-figure population by the early 1400s. After that the village never recovered. There was a church here once, but now no one knows where it is. Elkington parish and its occupants were under the eye of the monks at Pipewell, which is a fair distance away over near Corby. What drew them here? Well, the Romans thought it was a good place to be - there are four separate but perhaps related settlements close by, and on top of neighbouring Honey Hill there are earthworks and traces of an active Mesolithic past. The OS map draws my attention to a 'chalybeate spring' on the edge of the escarpment so maybe folk came to take the waters. The iron salts in such a source have long been thought to promote health. There's a chalybeate spring in Tunbridge Wells' famous 'Pantiles'. The physician of the man who discovered it (the 3rd Baron North) claimed it could 'cure the colic, the melancholy and the vapours; it made the lean fat, the fat lean; it killed flat worms in the belly, loosened the clammy humours of the body, and dried the over-moist brain'. Blimey, rush me some of it! It would appear there's a business opportunity awaiting some budding entrepreneur in Elkington.

I toil up sheep-nibbled Honey Hill and admire the view from its 214 metre summit, which allegedly takes in five counties. That would be Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Rutland and...well, Beds, Bucks, Oxfordshire or Lincolnshire I suppose, although all of these seem rather a stretch to me. A legend on a stone overlooking the valley suggests that this was where the Jurassic Way was instituted in 1994 by three chaps one of whom was a Councillor Ray Cross. The inscription tugs at the heartstrings. I have a greatly missed uncle of the same name, but his stamping grounds were Kent and Sussex, not the East Midlands. I'm briefly puzzled because I know I've been here before but have no memory of it, then realise that, silly me, it's because I walked what (in view of NCC's financial difficulties) should perhaps now be called the Borassic Way in the opposite direction.

                                                                    No pasaran...

The village to which I'm heading is Cold Ashby. It's the highest settlement in Northamptonshire at about 656 feet. I guess that makes the lane which approaches it along the ridge the highest road in Northamptonshire. A seventy-something in a Renault Megane coupe and sports shirt is lost. His sat nav tells him the golf club should be where it manifestly isn't. Consulting the OS I try not to be too smug as I correctly re-route him. Nevertheless such is the power of IT that he's clearly dubious about my advice. And yes, cold Ashby golf club is indeed, you've guessed it, the highest golf club in Northamptonshire. However in the absence of a lunchtime-opening pub, it looks as if it might  have offered me some food if I'd been prepared to yomp down the drive to its clubhouse.

I work my way into the village past a clutch of prestige cars which don't quite match the houses outside which they're parked (noted: two Porsches, two Mercedes, an Audi TT and a Lexus all within a hundred metres or so) and locate St. Denys church. In a way the Benefice of which it's part, by calling itself the 'Uplands Benefice' is conforming nicely to the local characterisation. This is clearly the highest group of churches in the county. But only in one sense.

 As you approach St. Denys, the view's dominated by a nineteenth century stone lych-gate. Arcing across it is the message: 'Death is the gate of life'. It amuses me to find that, albeit this may be true, the gate's firmly locked...because this is the approach to the north door, and presumably, unless you're the Devil, you won't be attempting access. The way to the south door is round the side and a little unprepossessing, but I open it and am greeted by a perfume which may be polish or may be floral but which is entirely delightful. There's something very lovely about St. Denys' stripped stone walls, which crowd in and enfold the community of worshippers. A nineteenth century wooden gallery hovers at the back, holding up a little pipe organ and a few chairs. There are beautiful flowers everywhere. Courtesy of Maureen and Mick who arrive to see if they need any further watering, I learn these are the legacy of the weekend Flower Festival. There were 200 in on Saturday, but Sunday's rain reduced the walk-up to 90 or so. By the lectern is a little floral arrangement propped up on a copy of William Boyd's 'Any human heart'.  Remaindered or redundant books end up in many places, usually the tip, but this isn't such a bad end. Or so says this author...

Maureen has Parkinson's and has to think about where her legs will go next. I remember my friends John and Mark who both have the disease, particularly Mark, for whom surgery hasn't worked, and pray that clever doctors and scientists will soon find better solutions for those suffering so much from this debilitating family of illnesses.

I sally on down the road to Thornby where St. Helen's church is locked. It's a small thing, but all that greets the visitor is a tired and dirty, folded over notice on the church gate asking him/her to prevent their mutt from fouling the churchyard...and so I can tell you nothing more about this congregation, other than that there's a Flower Festival here too, later in August and themed around popular musicals. Down the lane from the Red Lion pub opposite St. Helen's is Thornby Hall, currently home to the Nagarjuna Kadampa Meditation Centre. I've looked them up on Wikipedia so I know there's a World Peace Café and I can get coffee and cake between 11 and 3, and perhaps a perspective on 'contemporary Buddhism' at the same time. But things never work out the way you anticipate. A middle-aged chap is doing some general tidy-up gardening down the main drive, and he's agitated. He's come across a poorly bunny, huddled in by the wall in among the leaves. To me the little thing looks on its last legs, and I wonder if it's perhaps a victim of the disease which seems to be affecting the rabbit population at the moment and not, as he surmises, the subject of an attack by malign creature unknown. I offer sympathy but no opinion, and then on arrival at the café find that the bunny's plight has excited general anxiety. They can't dispatch the animal, because of their beliefs (and regular readers of this blog will know I would be unable to do so either), but they're pondering crazy and unworkable fixes, including contacting Pet Rescue in Wellingborough - which is miles away. I offer the thought that making it as comfortable as possible without compromising hygiene is all that can be done. So after my Americano and Lemon Drizzle, I come away having considered an ethical problem with which I identify, but none the wiser about contemporary Buddhism. Oh, except that Michael Jackson and The Beatles ('Love me do') were on the café playlist, and why should I be surprised by that? And that the anticipation and mild pressure/guilt trip laid on visitors and residents alike to attend the one o'clock meditation reminded me of Christian house parties. 'You've just got time to get there, if you really hurry...'

We're better together, we religious folk, we political folk, we human beings, because we're made that way. Of course we need to honour our individualism too, and stand up for what we believe to be right and true, without making our beliefs mandatory on others. It strikes me that very often I'm happier defining myself by what I'm not and labelling others by the traits I dislike, than saying positively what I am and what I stand for. I suppose that if I do the latter I put myself up for criticism, and particularly the charge of hypocrisy. But negative definitions too easily slip into name-calling. Diversity is substituted by divergence.

The path back to Winwick is largely a glorious green lane, rolling up and down past sheep, cattle and arable crops. A couple of posts ago I appended the title Et in Arcadia ego to a winter picture of me walking taken by son Matt. It's what I feel as I walk now. How to describe it? Contentment? A sense of being at home in this environment? A creaturely understanding of myself in relation to God and his creation? And where did this deep inner relaxation come from? Was it my early earthing experience as an only child roaming the woods and heathlands of Kent? Or maybe even some kind of remote folk memory linking me back through the centuries to those who knew only this rural life, and for whom the city was a still-distant dystopian night-sweat?

Yards on the card:  15 km. 23 deg. C. 4.8 hrs. Cloudier in the morning, sunnier in the afternoon. One pub open at lunchtime. Two churches. Five cattle grids. Seven stiles. Twelve gates. Windmills a-whining. One Young Australian (braided hair) and one Young American behind the counter at the Peace Café.

Father God
Thank you.
And thank you.
And thank you.
Amen.

P.S. Sometimes I read older posts back to myself, and am embarrassed as I read. They're too much a window on the soul. Cut the rhetoric, Vince, and concentrate on the story. This week I'll simply record that Northampton County Council is in dire straits. It may be a 'canary in the mine', and other local authorities may shortly also struggle to make ends meet. Whatever, our Council is in 'special measures' and no one is quite sure whether this is a result of central government retaining power while starving the local level of funds, or whether it's appalling incompetence by those we've elected to be our Councillors. And no one yet knows how deep the cuts will be and where they will fall. I look for patterns, but as one walks through a landscape they're rarely clear. History will lend greater objectivity, just as in a summer as dry as this, the ancient marks of habitation and human activity rise up from beneath the turf to become visible to those who fly above.

'Higher Ground' - from the incomparable Stevie Wonder's album 'Inner Visions'. I always thought that this song marked a Buddhist re-incarnationist phase of his life. But apparently it's a lyric born of a sense of being given a second chance after a near-fatal car accident, a determination to make a better fist of things this time round. The Collect for Grace, says Bishop Feaver, reflects the notion of each day being a Resurrection after the previous night's death.