Leader

Dylan’s ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ is on the car stereo as I drive into Oakham on a Monday morning. He’s an old man now, but how does he still manage to sound so cool? This is Dylan as Tom Waits, that drawly voice, even more hoarse with age, picking out the merest outlines of melodies implied by the lo-fi-ish, bluesey backing. He’s so steeped in Americana he knows how little you have to do. My initial take on the album differs from some of the critics. This is a finally dark album, retrospective and name-droppy in an almost parodical way (Simon and Garfunkel skewered him about this tendency even in the 1960s: cf. ‘A simple desultory Philippic’ on ‘Parsley Sage etc.’) And this is Dylan not far from death – at least in his own mind. I hope he hangs on for a cantankerous decade or two yet, especially now he’s found a band who can keep time –  or a producer who’s persuaded him musical synchronicity isn’t necessarily bad. I can’t hear much about faith in these new lyrics, but maybe I’ll find it on the next listen or two. Is this a theme he’s left behind, or has he found a resting place on his journey?

Oakham castle walls

Rutland still seems comme çi comme ça  about re-opening post-Covid, at least this early in the week. A previous watering-hole of choice in an Uppingham garden centre is shut until tomorrow. The car park behind Oakham Museum isn’t sure if it’s free today, and the little café I liked so much a few months back is also closed. But opposite the market square, Stray’s is open for coffee and straight-out-of-the-freezer choccy cake. The customer goes in one way and out the other, but the loos are open, and the tables separated. The staff handle the flow of traffic nicely.

I’ve fallen over a few times on the Big Walk, but only on one other occasion with serious risk of permanent damage. By the level crossing next to Oakham station is an attractively old-fashioned footbridge in rhubarb and custard. I pause at the top to watch and photograph a southbound freight train thunder underneath me. As I extract camera from pocket a chap asks, ‘There’s not a steamer coming through is there?’ I bluster, trying to deflect the implication I might be someone who cares about locomotive numbers. Distracted, as I begin to descend the stairs on the far side, I mis-step on the third or fourth rung, and pitch forward, rolling another two or three steps, only preventing myself from falling the whole and literal nine yards by grabbing desperately at the metal below the handrail to my left. Seriously, this might have been a hospital job or worse, and no one wants to be in hospital right now. A guy with a Scottish accent who’s standing at the foot asks anxiously if I’m OK, commenting that the steps are dangerous, which is generous of him. I inspect my bloody knees, apply Savlon, and go back to see if they are, but they aren’t, not really. I was just stupidly careless, and really should know better.

I follow the main road up to Barleythorpe, and then turn left on Manor Lane which zig zags before climbing to a ridge near Mill Hill at about 180 metres - near top whack for Rutland. Some joggers pass me, and then there’s John hobbling towards me down the hill with his well-behaved trio of dogs. John’s probably the wrong side of eighty, but a doughty sort of chap, because he only walks about as well as me after my fall down the stairs, there’s a steep gradient to the lane, and he’s parked his car at the bottom when he could equally well have driven another quarter of a mile and enjoyed an easy stroll along the top. We talk about maps, and John marvels at the way early map makers managed to make sense of the landscape. He enthuses about an early cartographer called George Carey, and I don’t think to say: ‘that’s funny, same name as the Archbishop…’. It’s only when I’m at home later and look up this interesting coincidence that I discover it’s Matthew Carey who published his ‘general atlas’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But the point’s well made – how much skill and sheer hard graft went into producing those beautiful early editions, and what a debt we owe to William Roy and the Ordnance Survey: something that would certainly deserve a place in my ‘top hundred things about Britain’.  John also tells me about his church life in Leicester, first at St. George’s and then the Cathedral. He recommends the little conserved chapel at Withcote near Launde, which I failed to get to on a very muddy day last autumn.

 

The view from the ridge is wonderfully airy, and I bounce along until the path drops round a copse. The settlement of Langham comes into sight. It straggles a bit, does Langham, but is very pretty and homely nonetheless. It comes as a slight shock to see the signpost say Nottingham is just twenty-five miles away…nearer than Northampton…and I laugh at my rump of ‘southernist’ chauvinism: we’re very nearly oop north! Simon Jenkins talks approvingly of the ‘stage-set’ presentation of the south side of SS Peter and Paul’s church from Church Street, and it’s true: the longwise view through the immaculate churchyard to the handsome south transept is lovely. I’m looking for the memorial stone to Laurence Martyn, the father of a friend, and eventually realise it must be in the separate burial ground which lies a quarter of a mile distant beside the way to Ashwell. I follow the signs to the little cemetery, find the flat stone and spend a moment clearing aside some of the grass. One can be moved even by the demise of people one never knew, feeling grief vicariously for those left behind, partners, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren.

I’m not bound for Ashwell today, but am walking the long way round to Burley using bridle paths rather than yomping along the road. At a junction with a lane I see a young woman in a high-vis jacket putting up a sign, warning drivers of roadworks. I ask her if she’s digging a hole. She laughs and says no, she’s just cutting the grass between the bridle path and the highway. I say how impressed I am with the way Rutland maintains its verges: someone’s got their head screwed on properly in Oakham Town Hall. This pleases her, though she qualifies it by saying that some of the ‘ecology’ is from necessity, because of budget cuts. Her name’s Helen. She tells me they try very hard to work with anyone who has local knowledge in the service of preserving flora and fauna. For example, the books apparently say there are no dormice in Rutland, but the locals know there are. Metal on gates is an inhibitor to their passage, so Helen’s team try to put wrappings on the metal to encourage the mice to pass. I don’t say so, but find this extraordinarily affecting – an echo of the Biblical ‘sparrow’s fall’. 

As we chat, a weathered country person on a bike creaks past out of the bridleway from the direction I’m headed. Helen seems to know him. They swap nods. In a couple of hundred metres up the increasingly overgrown path, I come across a motley collection of caravans, some burned out or cannibalised, surrounded by a stretch of detritus.  A single cock crows from somewhere within the ramshackle agglomeration, but there’s no sign of human presence. Was the man on the bike the site’s sole resident? I think to myself that however appalled I am at the mess, surely no one would choose to live in such a rural slum, would they?

The Old Smithy: Burley

Burley House is the imposing pile I saw months ago across the valley from Ridlington, shining out to the south from its hill site. It has to be distinguished from ‘Burghley’ of course, where the horse trials take place, which is not so far away, and is even larger and more grand. I mooch up the tree-lined lane, past the re-purposed outbuildings and workers’ houses, now dwellings for an altogether richer clientele. Holy Cross church lies right beside the Big House, in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust since the late 1990s. A lady from one of the houses assures me I shall be able to get a key next week, and it’s worth a visit.

 

It’s a deep, enduring pleasure to walk the beautiful English countryside on a beautiful fresh, slightly autumnal July day: it makes the heart sing. But sometimes, standing in the middle of such privilege, old and new, the discrepancies between this and most people’s experience of life becomes overwhelming. There’s been much talk about ‘bubbles’ from the point of view of controlling the Virus. It’s a metaphor that works: we’re very comfortable living within our own frames of reference. And this is true for the Church too. I’m going to quote selectively from the Church Times leader for June 26^th. Its title was ‘What next’?

‘No Church true to the name was ever set up as a self-help club; but the travails of running an institution with staff and buildings seemed to be consuming most of the C of E’s energy before the pandemic…

‘The pandemic has acted on the Church like a disease, depriving it of the use of the faculty that had come to define it. But like a body forced to re-purpose itself after an amputation, it is discovering that other limbs, other brain cells, can do the same work, just in other ways…

‘Many clerics have discovered how hard it is to live without the status, visibility, and the trappings of leadership and/or service…

‘Lay people have shown themselves in many instances to be better equipped to do the work of the Church when reduced to one of its basics: supplying the needs of neighbours…

‘…it is in this sense that the Church must disappear. For too long it has restricted its idea of the work of God…to the activity of the self-confessed workers of God…the weight of these times is to be borne by all. The work of salvation can only be accomplished together.’

Dormice in Rutland:  17 km. 5hrs -ish. 20 deg C. Breezy and fresh feeling. Butterflies everywhere in the meadows, dancing.  2 stiles. 10 gates. 4 bridges.

Great Father of all

I fell over again today

And you saved me.

Your right hand lifted me up

Bruised and battered

And set me on a straight path.

You healed my wounds

And poured balm on my troubled soul.

I will tell of your goodness

To this new generation

That they may look beyond themselves

And trust in your unfailing love.

Amen.