Water to a dry land

                                                     Laden chestnut tree: Maidwell

It's another naught-for-your-comfort morning on the news media, but nevertheless the clocks are striking eleven, not Orwell's thirteen as I park opposite Maidwell's Primary School. (Incidentally, I've learned that writing analysis proves from this first sentence that I'm not the author of the New York Times 'op-ed' about the chaos within Trump's White House: it contains a weighty twenty-seven words and there's no use of the word 'lodestar'. A current conspiracy theory runs that either VP Pence wrote the piece - because the latter expression plus an average sentence length of a crisp 17-18 words are his 'tells' - or it was someone good and sophisticated enough to forge his style. Smoke and mirrors or what!)

It must be a 'training day' at the school. The car park's full, but the building is as quiet as St. Mary, Maidwell's churchyard. The kids are off enjoying last moments of freedom in shopping precincts or playing Fortnite on their computers, unapproved and unsupervised. Meteorologically these are the early days of autumn, and actually that feels right this year, the shifts in the quality of air and colour barely perceptible but there.

In the street I immediately have a thought-provoking conversation with a parishioner accompanying a delightfully sleepy and docile grandchild, still wide-eyed years away from world-worry. We talk about the churches I may visit. Kelmarsh will be a treat, with beautiful Victorian restoration. We agree about the quality and charm of Cottesbrooke. We talk about the fact that so many churches are locked. Locally there've been anxieties about the proximity of the village to the A14, and the 'travellers' who've broken through the metal barriers to camp on the Brampton Valley Way, which will form part of today's expedition. This Maidwellian has valuable, possibly unique, experience of maintaining the structural integrity of churches, and clearly cares deeply about our heritage. The question is raised as to whether PCCs and wardenships should be open to those who are non-communicants. A number of local churches fail to find people willing to be wardens. I struggle to deal properly with the suggestion. I want to reply that faith is the major criterion for these posts, but that complete and utter confessional orthodoxy isn't a requirement, and indeed most of us would fail the test if it were. Nevertheless, there's still something of a gradient from being, say, a 'Friend of St. Boris the Apostle's church' to being one of St. Boris's officers. On the other hand, the churches need all the help they can get. And I'm reminded of my often-voiced thought that sometimes it seems arbitrary whether people define themselves in or out of the Christian 'crew', which is why the Gospels urge us not to be so judgmental. Some express or find faith through action, some through theory. Faith without an element of doubt is mere fanaticism.

The lane peters out in the fields and becomes a green track as it winds down to the Brampton Valley Way, which long-time readers will remember follows the line of the old Northampton to Market Harborough railway. It's now a linear park for walkers, joggers and cyclists with some mini-adventures thrown into the mix for all. After half a mile or so I confront one of them - the Kelmarsh tunnel. This route was once major enough to warrant an up line and a down line. It carried significant volumes of freight until its closure in 1981, and if you look at the angles and links, on to Leicester and beyond, you can  see why this should have been so. Lying in bed in our first little house in Kingsthorpe's Clover Lane, we could hear the two-tone horns of the diesel motive power during the night and early morning. The down line tunnel has been preserved for the use and enjoyment of people like me, but I've foolishly left my torch at home, so having peered through the portal of the 480 metre bore, despite the fact that the tunnel floor seems dry and flat, I opt for the bridleway diversion, which takes me beside the A14 for a short while before hanging a 90 degree turn into a wondrous little pocket park on the 'Midshires Way'. Here there are new plantations of shrubs and trees, and artfully placed seats. The blackberries are done, but the less edible autumn berries are beginning to show in reds, vermilions and purples. At the lane I begin a slog along to Kelmarsh Hall on the main Brixworth road. The tea-room there is decorated in the most tasteful grey and white, and unlike Cottesbrooke, it seems I can get  Earl Grey and tray-bake without having to stump up a full entrance fee to the Big House. So I do, and observe the comings and goings of the other grey-hairs. The conversations are conducted in muted tones today: I fail to pick up any juicy gossip, or cutting-edge political comment.


Predictably, Kelmarsh's church is closed, so I'll have to make do with any pictures I can find on the web later. I can't quite work out the church's dedication, which is ostensibly to St. Denys, but possibly to St. Dionysius, to whom a church is also dedicated in Market Harborough - and surely these two can't be the same person? St. Dionysius was a very Orthodox saint, a writer of tracts about glory and celestial orders, a reputed witness to the death of Jesus' mother Mary, a member of the Athenian Areopagus.

I briefly retrace my steps and then gratefully accept a walkers' tunnel diversion which leads me down through the pretty woodland of New Covert to the Kelmarsh north portal on the Brampton Valley Way. I walk on, untroubled by human company, until the road to Arthingworth. Hereabouts every village has a country estate and/or Hall near its heart. In Arthingworth a handsome, new brick wall surrounds the money and keeps the plebs at bay. I notice a cricket ground is planned within the walls, and wonder if this will be for Arthingworth C.C., or a private John Paul Getty-like club.

Hurrah! A notice welcomes me to St. Andrew's church, and the inside is beautifully tended and preserved. The main body of the building is very narrow, with extra width to the right hand (south) side. There's a prettily decorated reredos, and smartly designed and fashioned stations of the cross adorn the clean and painted walls. It's a relief to find a church open, but oddly, I'm having one of those days of walking emptiness, and don't quite know what to do with the opportunity. As Paul Simon once sang: 'My mind's distracted and diffuse...'

Amongst other stuff, I'm still pondering the implications of two bits of radio I heard yesterday. One was ex-Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks comparing social media comment about young people with the actual views of a group of sixth-formers. They were startlingly intelligent, but nihilistic, and their grasp on the boundaries between 'morality' (with its defining universalisable requirement), and their own 'chosen' path in life, was tenuous. In them post-modernism was writ large.

Then later in the afternoon I caught a conversation between Radio 5's Nihal Arthanayeke and the grime artist Ghetts, now in his thirties after more than a decade in the music business. Ghetts was a bad boy in his teenage years, and in consequence says he understands the attitudes and violence prevalent among the class of urban 2018...the 'young men' as he pointedly refers to them. Ghetts is heavily influenced by his Seventh Day Adventist family upbringing. He prays every morning, but finds it more difficult at night - I guess because of his performer's lifestyle. As I listened in the car, I tried to imitate Ghetts' street-speak, but couldn't get close to combining the vowel quantities. 47 year old Arthanayeke's DJ background came to the fore during the interview, slipping from Radio 5's revised RP into Brixton/Moss Side/Sparkbrook. Where is the Church's connection with this? Is sleepy Arthingworth even in the same universe? There's interesting inter-generational stuff going on here. Arthanayeke's attempt to 'get down with the kids' wasn't much more convincing than the Church of England's. Don't try, bro, is my advice. They won't love you for it.

                                               'Do not play' says the notice on the organ at
                                               St. Andrew's. There's been water damage, but
                                               the rest of the church looks in good order.

Across the fields to Harrington, the fields are bone dry. The temperatures may have dropped here in the Midlands, but there's been very little precipitation. The plates of the soil underfoot are still solid, dusty and cracked. The farmers seem to have left the stubble. They haven't ploughed it in yet. Maybe the ground's too hard, or there'd be a risk of erosion if they did?

Harrington is fascinating. On the slope up to the village is the area known as The Falls, the bones of an extensive garden and ponds once belonging to a lost Great House. The earthworks run across two large fields. I suppose the archaeology's been done, but who knows? Now cows graze where once gracious ladies and their dandified gents strolled...and perhaps before them, in medieval times, monks. Modern Harrington has its delights too: the Tollemarche Arms, and a gin distillery. And St. Peter and St. Paul's, set at the end of the village, looking out to Rothwell one way and a broad uninhabited hillside the other, its autumn churchyard singing in the low dappled sunshine with a profusion of white and purple cyclamen.

After Harrington, an annoyance. Two bridleways which might have carried me across the A14 are closed. I think maybe they never had bridges, and now, quite rightly, it's been deemed unsafe to attempt a crossing of this motorway-grade highway at ground level with or without a horse. However the consequence is a lengthy detour returning me to the Midshires Way Covert. I'm hot, footsore and jaded. And then, halfway down the Park I meet Steve carrying a watering can. He's been tending some newly planted acanthus, and he's a friend of Andrew Presland who bought the strip of land from the Kelmarsh estate and planted the trees and bushes. Wow! We talk on, and it becomes apparent there's a Christian connection. Steve and Andrew are in membership at Whitefriars, Rushden, a 'Fresh Expressions' project worshipping in a school on the housing estates there. Andrew is a Deanery Lay Chair and sits on the C of E's General Synod. The Midshires land is sometimes used as a venue for young people to enjoy some camping fun, and hike the Brampton Valley Way. Church in action. No one to staff the parishes here, but incomers doing a New Thing. Water to a dry land.


Back down on the BVW, I need a pee, but if you'll pardon the expression, there seems to be a steady stream of female joggers, who prevent the access to relief. At the Draughton Crossing I take the lane up to the village. I should have known but didn't: it's pronounced 'Draw-ton'. The rustic little church of St. Catherine's is shut, as I knew it would be - it's after five o'clock now.

Halfway between Draughton and Harrington is the site of the late World War 2 airfield from which amongst other missions, the Americans flew Liberator bombers supporting clandestine SOE operations in occupied Europe. It was chosen because it was such a discreet location. After the war agriculture returned, and then as the Cold War heated up, the airfield was re-activated to host three Thor intermediate ballistic missiles, an outpost of the mother-site at North Luffenham. In time these became obsolete, but some of the structures apparently remain. In 2011 they were given Grade II listings. The Chief Executive of English Heritage said: 'The remains of the Cold War are fading from view faster than those of the World Wars. Our Cold War heritage is a complicated and not always easily loved collection of concrete bunkers and silos. but they are still the castles and forts of the second half of the twentieth century, and we want to ensure that the best examples survive...'

Discuss.  Shiver. Give thanks. Pray for future deliverance.

Birdies on the card:  23 km.  7 hrs. 17-21 deg C. Sun, then cloud. 6 stiles. 20 gates. 4 bridges. one tunnel avoided. 4 churches: one open. Where's the wild life?

Inevitably there may sometimes be unwitting inaccuracies of fact in the various posts, for which I apologise. I'm glad to correct glaring errors. So if you're reading this and any mistakes are shouting at you, please drop me a line at: vincecrossmusic@gmail.com

If you'd like to know more about me, please visit my website at www.vincecross.co.uk

Father
Thank you
That if I was making a song about
A Few of my Favourite Things
It would run to the length of
A Mahler Symphony
Or an Elgar Oratorio
Or a triple album by a prog rock band long forgotten.
Countless gifts of love.
Blessings all mine
With ten thousands beside.

Give me grace
To be grateful
But never complacent
Amazed
But never smug.
Amen