I park the car near Apethorpe’s stocks, and bring to
my mind’s eye the political scoundrels I’d like to see sitting there,
justifying their inanities, half-truths and knowing lies in the face of the
public’s rotten tomatoes (Don’t hold back, now!) At the village limit the
road’s still damp by the little stone bridge despite a dry couple of days: the rain
of a week ago was intense enough to make the stream flood. An autumn track hung
with brown and gold veers away to the left. I follow it up the rise towards
Bushrubs Wood, sharing a morning hello with two lady riders, who’ve politely
slowed so that we can pass without a hoof-spatter of mud. The horses look
askance: I just cost them a premature end to an energising gallop. Bluefield
farm is an attractive spread beyond the wood; a lovely, tranquil place to live.
Was flax a major crop here years ago?
Clockwise progress today. Now the daylight hours are shorter, I don’t
fancy picking my way through the trees after twilight were I to have a bad
map-reading day, so we’ll do the bosky bit first. By the entrance to the
privately owned woods of Little Morton Sale, a notice tells me to keep to the
path or take the consequences. Turning left up a track as wide as a ‘B’ road
between lovely broad-leaved cover, a strongly constructed estate bridge takes
me over the cut of the railway which once ferried the citizens of King’s Cliffe
to Peterborough’s shops. Up ahead I think I see a deer, but it turns out to be
a lanky, over-inquisitive hound taking its jogging owner for his daily
constitutional. I shoo its rude nose away. Eventually the
woodland clears to old quarry workings on either side, the track now paved
with densely packed hardcore, emerging anticlimactically by a noisy industrial
park, clank and grime. Across the Roman road I enter the Forestry Commission greenery
of Bedford Purlieus, where Time Team once searched for high status villas, and
were disappointed (although do archaeologists ever admit regret?) that the local
inhabitants two thousand years ago weren’t all that posh. Well, yes. This is
artisan country. Anyone who made it big cleared off to Gloucestershire to find more
genteel neighbours. Plus ca change. On the eastern edge of the Purlieus I’m
curious to see ‘Cook’s Hole’, but find the path diverted because of the
ever-expanding quarry: there’s now a hole bigger than Cook ever imagined,
whoever Cook was. Crossing the A47 with care on a really hazardous bend (N.B.) I
take the lane into Thornhaugh.
There’s a sign which says I’ve arrived at the village
limits, but actually the settlement is still a good twenty minutes away on foot,
where there’s another sign plus a twenty mile an hour speed restriction. (Who
lives here then?) In sheer acreage Thornhaugh is an unusually large parish for
the number of residents, and the Big House is left out on its own behind the
usual defensive walls and gates. Once upon a time it probably made its own
arrangements for religion: St. Andrew’s,
the village church, is sunk down among the commoners’ cottages in a little
valley well out of sight of the aristos, far too long a walk for dainty and noble
ankles. I’d wondered how to pronounce the village name, but as you can see,
it’s Thornhaw. A notice proclaims that it won a Proby award (surely not PJ!)
as a best kept village in 1991. It’s still neat as a pin, if a little
clinically so. A familiar refrain: the church is closed, so I sit on a bench by
the door, open a packet of sandwiches and watch the world for a while. A note
in St. Andrew’s porch tells me that the church is part of the Watersmete
benefice, so-called because all of its six parishes have streams or rivers flowing
through them. In Anglo-Saxon Thornhaugh means ‘thorn-enclosed low lying meadow
beside a stream’. The note further implies that within living memory the mill
here was used to crush bone into meal. 
The graceful spans of Wansford’s ancient bridge are the
backdrop for a horsey field. A notice tells me not to feed one of the
inhabitants: it’s been poorly, and recycled Macdonald’s won’t aid recovery. The
Nene Way to Yarwell is very squelchy: the water meadows have been doing what
water meadows are supposed to do. The Angel at Yarwell is festooned with
cobwebs (artificial!) spiders, skulls and all the usual Hallowe’en tat. Eleven
years ago when I visited friends in South Carolina, I was fascinated by the
prevalence of temporary graveyards in front gardens and witches’ hats by front doors as the first Obama election came to its climax. I haven’t seen any
make-believe cemeteries in Weston Favell yet, but I guess it won’t be too long. As a
reply, there’s a fine and tasteful display of pumpkins in the windows of the
little church of St. Mary Magdalene.
Every year I ponder whether the function of our solemn, annual remembrance of the departed is
replicated in the secular Hallowe’en. Are we all really dealing with our own
mortality? Maybe even the recent youthful fixation on ‘zombies’ (and I don’t
mean the fine Rod Argent/Colin Blunstone sixties’ band) is dealing with a fear
of losing one’s identity in e.g. dementia. In a few days’ time we’ll make
our Weston Favell All Souls’ commemoration, which always provokes such a mix of
emotions for me. As the names of deceased parishioners are read, their faces
come powerfully to mind, and it’s hard to believe they’re not still with us in
the pews week by week, dispensing kindness and faithfulness, being tiresome as
fellow-worshippers can sometimes be. And then there’s the terrifying thought
that one day my name will be among them, and that others will think of me in
much the same way. And somewhere in the mix is a ridiculous, funny memory of
Sir Michael Redgrave reading the ‘List of Huntingdonshire Cabmen’ on Spike
Milligan’s quirky, subversive, Q7 telly
programme of yesteryear. I always have to check that I’m not smirking
inappropriately!
Nassington isn’t far along a muddy by-way, where a
mum’s dutifully allowing her two tinies to splash and dirty their trousers in
the ruts and puddles. As I get to St. Mary’s (the Virgin this time), the air’s filled
with the sounds of a thousand starlings perching on the knobbly bits of the
spire (there’ll be a technical term, but I don’t know it). Though Cromwell’s
men scraped most of the walls clean, ghosts of some of the paintings remain,
disappearing into time’s distance like the image of Jesus on the Turin Shroud.
In the north aisle stands the bottom half of a Saxon cross, astonishing to
contemplate, a link across a thousand years of time to people who thought (so
we believe) more or less as we do about faith and mortality, inducing shivers of
wonder, making Nassington in Tom Wright’s words ‘a thin place’.
A thought strikes me as I hobble back to the car. As
we peer through the Brexit cloud of unknowing (with another general election
now set to further weary the people), I realise that for me the impossibility
of resolution has a familiar feel. Frustration about it sits on me rather
as it does on my contemplation of the Christian Trinity. None of us can quite see,
or perfectly articulate, how God is One and Three at the same time – which is
perhaps why clergy fight shy of preaching on Trinity Sunday. In the end I’m
happy-ish to live with the ineffability and mystery of traditional doctrine. But with
Brexit, in the end, there’ll have to be a practical choice between A and –A. Everyone knows it. And it will leave a great number of people
unhappy because they’re losing faith - of a kind.
I thank you for the great cloud of witnesses
People humble and high-born
Differently-gifted to me
Some who have gone before
And some who are yet to see the light of day
Testifying to the wonder and mystery
Of the world you have made
Bearing me up
On the wings of their faith and steadfastness.
May I be worthy
Of their example and teaching
In words and in action
Amen.
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