Baby, it's cold outside...

                                                   Frost at Preston

I’m careful when I park the car in someone else’s village.  Of course, I check to make sure I’m not across anyone’s drive – we live in a house where that’s a fairly common occurrence, and it’s the thing most likely to have me indicted for breach of the peace – but more selfishly, I ponder how often farm vehicles are likely to pass by. How wide precisely is a combine harvester or muck spreader? I play the tortoise and suck in my wing mirrors. Expensive things, wing mirrors.

Down the hill in Bisbrooke is a building that says it was once the Village Hall but looks more like an old Post Office. Then round a bend Baulk Lane drops steeply. The last two days have seen the first serious stay-all-day frosts of winter, and the fringes of the road are icy with the run-off from the waterlogged fields. There’s an extra meteorological peculiarity this week. An unusual configuration of the jet-stream is causing near record high levels of barometric pressure, so if I’m hearing a singing in the ears, perhaps for once it’s not tinnitus.

It’s also Blue Monday, the day when allegedly the New Year glow has finally worn off, and we realise that all our futures are much like all our yesterdays. I guess, whether we’re people of faith or not, this kind of blueness is a common experience, but of course what might be an opportunity to apply a little critical examination to our attitudes and behaviour is craftily subverted by the marketing types. Go on, the siren voices hum, what you need is a little more retail therapy. Something to help you through the darkest days of winter…you deserve it, you know you do…

The ridges of the wolds lie west-east. There’ll be quite a bit of up and down today. This isn’t exactly the Lake District but it is Rutland, where the streams cut just that extra percentage further into the land compared with Northamptonshire. I’m puffing as I reach the crossing of the A47. The literal upside beyond is the wide airy view across a landscape much less wooded, now that I’m north of the patchy remains of Rockingham Forest. The lane rollicks on down a second time before climbing again past the well defended Rutland Alpaca Farm. I’ve never heard of alpaca rustling, but there must be a risk. Preston sits the far side of the Oakham main road. In its main street, the traffic noise subsides around the quietly graceful cottages, the first flowering cherry of the season decorating the entrance to Holly Farm. The church of St. Peter and St. Paul is down a lane on the margins of the village, overlooking fields. There are some advantages to being liminal. It’s good Christian symbolism for our time. We are…edgy, not identified with the mainstream. On the other hand people may not come to find us: it costs them effort, and as they see it, lost opportunities. We’re missing a whole generation of twenty to forty somethings, constantly waiting for a better offer to arrive courtesy of their apps and social media. Perhaps we aren’t being clever enough to draw them in. Or maybe their fate is to find that all else is vanity before they give us a go, a Hail Mary. Will we be up to the challenge when/if they do?

                                          Liminal at Preston

There are many wonderful people, clergy and laity, paid and unpaid, working for and within the Church of England. But is it enough?

Clergy, you sometimes give the impression of thinking you’re not like the rest of us, that there'll be a special place reserved for you in heaven. You are overworked, but do you understand that this is a problem shared by many other jobs and professions, and that it's not OK to use your busy-ness as an excuse for rudeness and evasion? Sometimes, in my experience, you don’t really seem too interested in what other people do between Monday and Saturday. A huge question: does being collegial with the laity preclude being teachers and spiritual counsellors, or will it deny you identity? 

And Laity, ‘we the people’, the ‘priesthood of all believers’, we can't afford to act so smug. We collude with the same reasoning, and disempowered, leave the Church’s work to the ‘professionals’. More than my job’s worth, mate/luv. We don’t skill up with theological curiosity, Biblical knowledge and empathy. What’s a search engine for, for God’s sake? We hide our Christian identity for fear of ridicule. We don’t give the Church too much of our valuable thinking time between Monday and Saturday. It’s Fortnite, footie and Love Island for us (please supply your own weaknesses!)

We all have to raise our game - a lot – if we’re to be successful persuaders – if evangelism is any longer important to us as the Christian Remnant. Cor blimey, guv’nor, Blue Monday’s got to me.

Having given offence to some (and as always, it’s fine for you to tell me I’m wrong), now I’ll make you cry. Whether Michael Morpurgo knew the story or not, the saga of the Preston War Horse ought eventually to have provoked a film or book. You can read it in full on the ‘rutlandremembers’ website, as recounted by Jane Micklethwait. Briefly, in 1912 General Alfred Codrington, the owner of Preston Hall, bought a five year old called Lincoln. He had two sons. On call-up for military duty, the older brother Geoffrey shipped Lincoln to France along with a groom, as sometimes was the custom with well-to-do folk. In 1917 Geoffrey was badly wounded, and his brother William took over Lincoln plus amanuensis. Together and against the odds all three survived the war. As Jane observes, of a million British horses to go to France, only five per cent returned. I’ll let her tell the rest:
            ‘In 1918 Lincoln and his groom (arrived at) Manton station in a special horse carriage attached to the train. Lincoln walked out onto the platform and across onto the road. He stood totally still for a minute or so. His groom left the reins loose over his neck, and without any prompting or need for directions, Lincoln walked back up the hill, past Wing Grange into his old stable at Preston Hall.’

Lincoln lived on until 1926, and to this day, on a mound beneath some hawthorn bushes below the Hall is a stone marking his burial place. This tells you so much about so many things, I think, including the character of the County of Rutland.

I walk the ridge (not the same as walking the line, thank you, Johnny!) looking over a few miles to the gleaming stone facade of what I think is Burley Hill House atop the next undulation, and on to the village of Wing, where lives musical colleague Bill Coleman, distinguished bass player and arranger. Bill has helped me out with dots-writing a number of times, particularly with jazz inflected show tunes, where I just can’t hear how all those clever combinations of brass instruments and rhythm section slot together. At a certain point in the 1980s, ‘Barron Antony’, swapped playing bass in the Barron Knights pop group for windsurfing in New Zealand, and Bill took over, which was where I first met him. In a time somewhat after the band’s heyday, I was occasionally hidden behind a curtain to play extra keyboards on their occasional TV appearances. As I enter the village, I pass Wing Hall which advertises itself as a perfect venue for weddings, bar-mitzvahs etc., and smile to myself that Bill has a ready-made source of income on his doorstep, have keyboard, will busk.

Wing’s little church, also dedicated to SS Peter & Paul, is shut, but there’s another focus of spiritual energy up a side street by the football pitch. For centuries there’s been a grass maze here, whose design is reminiscent of the maze in Chartres cathedral, although that in turn probably owes a debt to pre-historical ritual. For some a maze is just a trivial game, and I suppose that’s how we all come to the idea as kids, especially if there are high hedges where we can become safely ‘lost’. For people of faith it sometimes speaks of our puzzled experience of life, and the elusiveness of certainty or moral progress, maybe even of our mortality, and it contains a universality which reaches out to other religions. In small part it contributes to what I’ve been doing on these walks these last few years, circling and meditating, and so I give it a moment…

Then it’s on, over the fields, less sticky than I fear, into the hamlet of Pilton with its simple chapel of ease and twin bell tower, and further by a sweeping road into the lovely village of Morcott. Two very serious power walkers (male) pass me in Pilton, one wearing shorts - which in view of the temperature is just plain showing off. Later five dogs and three humans scatter as we coincide on the lane, while yet another home improvements van accelerates past. Today they’ve constituted fifty per cent of the traffic. Clearly it’s what you do or have done in Rutland this winter, in lieu of sticking cash in the bank or attic. Vanjanuary.

The tower of St. Mary the Virgin in Morcott is mortar-clad, and in that respect reminds me of All Saints, Earl Barton. It’s not a beautiful material, but speaks of age, and some would call it ‘honest’, which is a double-edged sword of a word. I sit inside, and in a few moments the door opens. A chap has come to put out the bins for emptying. He’s mildly startled to find me there. I assure him I’m OK. He tells me not only has St. Mary’s a claim to be the oldest in Rutland, but also the coldest. From chivalry I hesitate to agree, but thinking again say, well, it is a tad on the chilly side. We gaze up at the high hung electric heaters and I ask how the church is doing. He replies that on a Sunday they get as many as a dozen people for worship. The 2011 census records there as being 321 inhabitants. It’s difficult being a 4% minority, but that’s what we are, and while it’s so cold in our churches, five months of the year at best, it’s the way we’ll remain.

Last week I played the organ in a large urban church. The eucharist ran towards one hour twenty. By the end I was rocking myself back and forth on the organ stool to keep myself vaguely warm and concentrating, despite my Sunday best woollen suit. At one point I thought of reaching for my nearby overcoat, but the console was on public view, and it could have seemed a hostile act. The clergy were swathed in many layers of clothing, and thus insulated from the environment. They detained the children who’d come to be present during the eucharist with a lengthy interrogation of what they’d been up to during the earlier part of the morning’s worship time, while the rest of us twiddled our fingers and hoped to be entertained. I wonder what the future associations of ‘church’ will be for those kids? Baby, it can be cold inside, as well as out. Equally, in our own St. Peter’s, it’s usually nice and cosy on Sunday mornings, but because there’s nowhere to put your coat and scarf, the congregation mostly keep them on. Would you do that in a restaurant? Or a cinema? Or anywhere you wanted to be? When I was teaching it was often a battle to get teenagers to take off their anoraks and coats. It was their way of showing their alienation, that lessons in school were nothing to do with them. As I say, we have to up our game. A lot. 

                                           ....Feed my sheep...

The path to Glaston (no bury!) leaves the Pilton road on a slant to follow a hedgeline until it doesn’t, disappearing into a newly planted field. I tut and slog up the field’s slightly firmer margin by a copse to the main road, then stomp and sigh along the A47 verge until the village games field where I should have emerged.  At the heart of the settlement on the back lane, St. Andrew’s church is charming, with a tower right in its middle. Suddenly I’m reminded of a Beyer Garratt steam locomotive. These were built with heavy duties in mind, articulated into three sections, with the boiler (and the cab) in the middle and two steam engines front and back - I think I may not quite be conveying to you the prettiness of Glaston’s place of worship. As at King’s Cliffe, it’s slightly strange sitting in the nave and peering through an aperture to the sanctuary. One could perhaps try to find symbolism in the bells, ringing out Good News to the surrounding countryside, but my thinking is dominated by the perceived distance from the sanctuary, the implied separation of the holy ones from the common horde of the unwashed congregation.

The last pull up the lane back into Bisbrooke is the steepest of them all. Take 2. ‘This isn’ t the Lake District but it is Rutland etc. etc.’  Penny is standing in the garden of the erstwhile Village Hall/Post Office, where she lives. She remarks that I look contemplative as I drag myself towards the car, just a hundred metres away. I thank her, and say no I’m just knackered, and explain why it’s nice to be described as in contemplation, being on a sort of pilgrimage n’ all. We chat about a wide range of things – the garden, Rutland, a little of Penny’s background, change, friends who audit the contents of churches: it’s amazing the ground you can cover in fifteen minutes. I’m warmed by conversation after a day largely on my own. All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Stones in the North Wall:  18 km. Five hours. 5 deg.C. Bright, sunny and cloudless throughout. 5 stiles. 4 gates. (This was mostly a walk along metalled lanes) 5 churches. 3 open. A startled hare in the fields near Wing, running a long semicircle around me. Twittering birds everywhere, grateful for the sunshine.

Father God

I thank you that your Church unsleeping,
While Earth rolls onward into light,
Through all the world her watch is keeping
And rests not now by day or night…

…So be it Lord; your throne shall never
Like Earth’s proud empires pass away;
Your kingdom stands, and grows for ever,
Till all your creatures own your sway.
Amen.

John Ellerton (1826-93)

Belonging

Last remains of seasonal nosh binned? Christmas tree chopped up and taken to the tip? Decorations re-swathed in tissue paper and returned to the loft?

 This year we broke with family tradition. The Christmas tree was someone else’s and plastic. Turkey was off the menu. Our decorations lay undisturbed in hibernation throughout the Midnight Clear and beyond. We were in someone else’s church for Nine Lessons and Carols and Christmas Eve, which is when the vague sense of alienation kicked in. Though we were delighted to find the congregation of St. Petroc’s, Padstow singing a very Northamptonshire tune to While Shepherds Watched,* we weren’t with our people. We were strangers and guests, inhabiting a slightly skewed, parallel Anglican universe.

 

This blog tells the tale of a journey around the Diocese of Peterborough on foot, visiting every one of its many churches by a long series of roughly circular walks. Each new circle must touch a previous one somewhere on its circumference. At each church I stop and pray for the people of the parish and those who have care for them. The project began in April 2016, two months before the EU referendum took place. It’s likely I’ll finally pitch up at the doors of the cathedral sometime before next December 31^st, when not only will we have left Europe but it’s hoped the final trade t&cs will be in place: two entirely coincidental arcs, the one local, personal and of faith, the other national, corporate and political. Thinking purely about the Church of England my theme has been ‘better together’, even as our people and government have set their minds to being ‘better apart’.  And even though I believe passionately that whether we’re Evangelicals or Catholics or something in between, we need each other more than ever as Anglicans, my experience at St. Petroc’s shows how far I personally have to go to make this actual. How often in church do I think, ‘What am I doing here?... I don’t belong…’ The impulse towards individuality is so strong, the push away from the truly other-seeking Body of Christ likewise. And lurking in the background the difficult question: is faith a matter of what I believe or what we believe?

 I park opposite the village pump by Laxton’s pretty village green, and vault four stiles in quick succession before crossing an undulating field to enter Town Wood. ‘Vault’? No, ‘Haul and clamber’ would be nearer the mark… Robert Frost’s woods may have been lovely, dark and deep but it’s a good job the sky is an ineffable, enlivening wintry blue, because today the going is oozy, wet and steep. Well, not steep exactly...more a gentle incline.

 As I said in the previous post, the ground is more saturated and boggy than at any time in the last three winters. The track though Town Wood suffers from being used by walkers, riders and bikers, probably both pedalled and motor-assisted. In weather like this, the combination doesn’t work. I guess the horses don’t relish such conditions either, but they manage, and trials’ bikers love it – the muddier the better. For those of us on foot it’s just irksome, propping along the path margin on the end of a stick, boots socks and trousers enrobed in mud and ordure. According to the OS my way should emerge from the wood and cross some fields before there’s a short road section into the hamlet of Wakerley. Not so. What I hadn’t spotted was that the criss-cross of ungated tracks marked on the map actually shows an extensive quarry - Mick George’s quarry.

According to the firm’s website Mick started with a single tipper truck in 1978, but now the annual group turnover runs to £120 million. There’s a lot of brass in the muck of aggregates. The quarry site stretches along the low ridge for a mile or more behind mud banks that obscure the view but at least reduce the noise of hacking and digging. The path now follows the lengthy perimeter of the site, initially with considerable difficulty on a waterlogged track, but more easily at the western edge, where one can see the results of past quarrying, the land reduced to scrub, although perhaps mitigated as a new haven for undisturbed wildlife.

 I know I’m a sucker for conspiracy theories, but at some later date will a cash-strapped, centrally-pressured local authority declare this a brownfield site and build cheap and nasty houses where formerly all was sylvan and beautiful?

 

 

After a half hour or so’s deviation, I hit the road Jack, and bounce down to the edge of Wakerley, looking across at an attractively watery Welland valley. I think I may not make a dry crossing to Barrowden, but with the aid of a few strategically placed branches I span a brimming ditch, and then find to my relief that the modern bridge for the old packhorse road was designed for winters like this. I climb Mill Lane, and admire the tranquil loveliness of the long village. There’s not a soul to be seen, not a hair out of place. Every house seems perfect. As at Guilsborough there’s what I take to be the old fire shed, centre of the large green, ready to dispense water and help. Maybe it’s a village hall or scout hut these days. There’s a duck pond too, with the sort of little house which once got a Tory grandee into expenses’ trouble. St. Peter’s church is at the end of the lane.

 

St. Peter’s has undergone internal restoration over recent years, and was re-dedicated last summer. In the porch there’s an impressive list of contributors to the costs of the work; trusts and commercial concerns. Among the credits I note one to Mick George. Well done then to all – to the church and village for knocking on the firm’s door at a time of need, and to their Board for doing the right thing. How we need philanthropy, and every sign we can contrive that there are limits to greed (and growth?) Inside the church I find Phyllis and her vacuum cleaner. My boots are uber-muddy, so our conversation is made within a foot or so of the door – at my behest, not Phyllis’s: she’s very welcoming, and clearly proud of what’s been done to St. Peter’s. The tone is set by a wonderful, light-honey coloured new stone floor. It shows the dirt at the moment because it has to be allowed to settle. Soft, warm light suffuses the worship area. Phyllis tells me that the intention is for a multi-purpose building, capable of running village events as well as the usual regular services. The proportions of the place will help this. The chancel is large relative to the size of the nave, which is almost a square. Everything suggests a community that’s moving forward together. I like Barrowden very much.

When Phyllis mentions the name of the Rector, Chris Armstrong, it slowly dawns on me that Sue went to college with his wife Gerry decades ago. As so often the Wonderful and Wacky World of Faith is revealed to be smaller than I think. There are connections everywhere. Before coming to Barrowden, Chris had a long and distinguished career, latterly as Dean at Blackburn Cathedral, making things new there too.

As I walk back to the village green for a quick sarnie (though sadly not a drink at the Exeter Arms, which is being refurbished prior to new management), I look across the Welland and the dismantled Peterborough-Market Harborough railway to the adjacent disused kilns, which a hundred years ago were designed for use in processing the iron ore from a seam which ran where the quarry now sits. Like the Yorkshire coal mines, beyond the immediate wartime requirements, the financial returns were too meagre in a developing, modern economy: the kilns were apparently never used, but remain as a striking feature in the landscape. How strange that older industrial features often add charm to a rural landscape and modern ones tend to spoil it, in our contemporary eyes.

I pass diagonally over fields by the lovely modern houses which watch over the valley and then climb the wold into Wakerley Great Wood via the conserved church of St. John the Baptist, a spired twin to Barrowden. There are echoes one of the other inside too, both the subject of 19^th century restoration, I suspect, each with a pretty but faintly industrial tiled reredos. St. John’s has been redundant for nearly forty years now. How long should we keep it going without greater purpose? I imagine it isn’t much visited, Grade 1 listed and magnificent though it is.

 

The woods above are Forestry Commission land: there are parked cars and some walkers concluding their afternoon before the light fails. I press on, back over the ridge and down the slope to a view over the site of Fineshade Abbey, of which only the stable block of its successor buildings still stand the other side of the A43.

About Fineshade Abbey, Caroline Floyd of the ‘Friends of Fineshade’ quotes the antiquary John Leyland (1506-52) as saying: ‘From D(e)ene  to Coll(y)Weston a 5 or 6 miles, partely by champain, partely by wooded ground. Almost yn the middle way I cam by Finshed, lately a priory of blak canons, leving it hard by on the right hond; it is a 4 miles from Stanford. Here in the very place wher the priory stoode was yn tymes past a castel caullid Hely, it belonged to the Engaynes; and they dwelled yn it…’

For three hundred years, on the site of an older castle, Augustinian friars served the local community to their better spiritual and bodily health and wellbeing before Henry did for the foundation in the 1530s. Then the toffs took over, until their time came too.

I stroll on over the fields on a track past Laxton Hall, of which I have an eighteenth century print at home. The scene depicted looks pretty much the same even now in its northern elevation. It was a boarding school in the twenties, and has since become a residential care home for the Polish community, a remote but beautiful place to pass one’s declining years. I slide and splosh my way back through Town Wood, fingering the torch in my anorak pocket, but despite misgivings make it to the car before twilight.

In the fondly remembered BBC ‘Home Service’ Round The Horne, the late Kenneth Williams occasionally portrayed a character who from a surfeit of teeth was unable to say his ‘s’s and ‘x’s very efficiently. (Societal norms and senses of humour were way different back then!) I wonder what he would have made of the ‘Sussexes’ (Meghan and Harry)?  The expression must be casting terror into the scripts of newsreaders the English-speaking world over. Beyond all the Press kerfuffle and nonsense, I only observe that for all the couple’s apparently praiseworthy charitable work, they share the growing tendency for naked individualism – despite their privilege, position and wealth, only their interests seem to matter. In the context of this blog however, it strikes me that their moves are a straw in the wind. If the power of the Crown is much diminished, if we very soon have a downsized, bicycling monarchy, relegated to the status of celebrities, how will we deal with an equally relegated, disestablished church. Once there’s a modicum of slippage, sometimes, as in the case of the Berlin Wall, change follows very rapidly. Are we ready for this? How will it affect our sense of belonging, my sister and brother Anglipersons?

 

 

Pegs in the ground:  15 km. 5 hrs. 6 deg. C. Mostly sunny, with a slow build of afternoon cloud. 14 stiles. 9 gates. 3 bridges.

·          The Cornish preference is apparently to sing While Shepherds Watched to ‘Lyngham’ by Thomas Jarman, whose modern relative long-time readers will remember I encountered on a chair outside his Sibbertoft garden a couple of years back. It works very well, but why/how did it emigrate three hundred miles for the purpose. Astonishingly, it seems that when the Cornish miners followed the work to South Australia in the late nineteenth century, they took this particular Christmas combination with them, and it’s still sung that way today in Wallaroo and Tantanoola.

Father God

Odi et amo.
I love that you made me me
As full as I am
Of faults and contradictions.
Well, at least they are
My faults and contradictions.
But you know how sometimes I struggle
To be part of the group;
To subsume my devices and desires
To the needs of others:
To rejoice in the skills
That complement
Or are greater
Than mine:
To exercise patience
When companions are slower
To read the map than I am;
To acknowledge
That I have got things
Utterly and completely wrong.

Bind us together, Lord

Bind us together,
O bind us together with love
Amen.

R.I.P Dan Hennessy ( 1990-2020) : a valued and much missed colleague.