Apple of my eye

 

                                                                The Old Forge, Tinwell

The sun has rammed his hat on and he’s already been out to play for a few hours as I cross the Welland out of Tinwell and hike the river bank towards Stamford.

The news isn’t good. The Covid figures are on the rise again - in the UK but also more notably in France and Spain. The government’s strategy will be to squeeze the brakes, and try to keep the economy going while depressing the spread of the virus. Can this be done? No one knows.  I want to pray: ‘Lord keep us all safe’, but I’m old enough to know that in earthly terms one day sooner or later he won’t keep me safe. Anno domini and all that. So the most I can pray on this gorgeous morning is: ‘Lord, may we be safe today. Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings’.

There’s quite a stragglegaggle of people down by the water. An older lady ignores my cheery hello. Perhaps she’s deaf. A sprightly young woman with a dog returns my greeting, but rather too loudly because she’s listening to Adele on her headset. A guy with a pack is sitting in the long grass beside the path looking distinctly stoned, so I get nothing from him. A couple are standing facing the river, all concentration. I think maybe they’ve seen a kingfisher or an alligator, but as I get nearer I see they’re muttering into their cellphones. Maybe a multi-million pound deal’s in progress. Another dog walker turns his back on me, though we’re more than five metres distant from each other.

There’s a peculiar aroma of apricot bodywash on the air. At first I think it may have been the sprightly young woman, but she’s long in my rear view mirror now, so what can it be?  Maybe there’s a sewage facility somewhere near and they’ve done what they occasionally do at Billing and freshened the environment for a few miles around with eau de talcum powder – but this is more subtle than that. Well, Rutland’s more up market than Northampton. We probably can’t afford the apricot flavouring.

These days, when I’m out walking, I find I’m more aware of people’s personal fragrances than I used to be. Deodorant uptake seems to be a Big Untold Story this year. I put it down to my heightened wariness of other people: I’m constantly scanning everyone across all parameters lest they be a possible source of infection. Today, even as I enjoy Freemen’s Meadow on the approach to Stamford most people seem a little withdrawn and morose. Well, as I say, the news isn’t good.  Over on the school playing field, I notice the girl teenagers are back in ankle length skirts, as if escaped from post WW1 episodes of Downton Abbey. I know hemlines go up and down, but this novelty had escaped me until now, and I ponder its possible social significance over and above the need of the fashion industry to constantly renew itself. Does it mark the dawning of a new conservatism? Or is it a sub-conscious mimicking of the 1918 ‘flu pandemic? Anyway, the girls and their mums will get over it soon enough, once the skirts have suffered the scuffs and scours of a wet and muddy winter.

As ‘apples of my eye’ go, the view of Stamford from just here is high on the list: it’s mostly the reason I’ve strayed out of diocese/county (because of course Stamford is in Lincolnshire and therefore strictly speaking shouldn’t be included in my Big Walk!) The crisp stone buildings rise up gently from the Welland towards All Saints church. The conspicuous wealth of past generations oozes from every pore. Stamford was a river port, a place where the wool merchants of the North could readily access European trade from the roads the Romans had established centuries before. The very name Ermine Street tells a story. From here the fens stretch out towards the east and the sea. I follow the surprisingly thronged streets around to All Saints front door. It’s open, but as I learn from Jan and Kay who I find cleaning and tidying, this is the first week people have been let inside. It’s a lovely, generous building lit by Victorian glass, magnificent in the sun. The natural slope of the hill raises the east end in a way I find inspiring, echoing both the City of God and the hill of crucifixion. The church has a new priest, Neil Shaw. Jan and Kay think he has a job on his hands. The church has lost a bit of membership. There’s work to be done on relationships – but then isn’t that always so, when a new person arrives to begin their ministry? The interregnum was long. There are a number of beautiful medieval churches in Stamford, giving a clue to the town’s wealthy history, and Simon Jenkins has much to say about them, but All Saints should be its beating Christian heart.

The suburbs of Stamford stretch uphill halfway to Great Casterton along the former Great North Road, passing the site of the Toll Bar at the apex of the hill. The name Casterton requires little interpretation; a farm proximate to a Roman settlement that quickly arose around a military post. The church of St Peter and St. Paul is right by the road at the southern end of the modern village before the crossing of the River Gwash which would have encouraged its development. The poet John Clare whose bucolic verse is so widely celebrated in Northamptonshire and beyond, was married here in 1820.

I’m only a quarter of the way through my sandwich when the parish priest Don McGarrigle arrives in the church porch with his bicycle. Don is an engaging Ulsterman with a ready smile and lively, welcoming manner. I should think he goes down a storm with his parishioners, and considering he’s the same age as me (69) I can only admire his energy. He spends half his week being a Telecoms engineer. I’d already picked up a leaflet for last week’s Café Church before Don appeared, and had been charmed to see that each element in the worship is timed ( 10.38:  Talky Bit 1  etc.) for the benefit of those viewing at home. The final hymn (expected at 11.16!) is described as ‘Crashy Bashy You Shall Go Out With Joy’…

Need I say more. To walk a couple of miles from the relatively High Church splendour of All Saints to this energising, humorous, people-friendly atmosphere in Great Casterton illustrates again my point: we need both places and others to maintain our balance as the Body of Christ. We are truly ‘better together’ – and ‘better in colour’.

Don has recently held drive-in services with the assistance of the local pub. He’s found talented local musicians to provide locked down support, whilst not excluding his nonagenarian organist. This is all wonderful, and I enjoy my twenty minutes inside SS Peter and Paul very much, without sparing John Clare a single thought.

Further up Ermine Street and just to its east, uncomfortably near the slip road to the A1 dual carriageway is Tickencote about whose St. Peter’s church Simon Jenkins is interesting but guarded, although he awards it three stars. Don McGarrigle handed over the keys for this tiny place of worship to the Churches Conservation Trust in 2019, but it’s still used for occasional services and weddings. Perhaps St. Peter’s is best thought of as a true travellers’ church, since human and animal traffic will have passed its doors in huge numbers over the centuries. Now those travellers will pause at the service station just down the road, but if they come to Tickencote at all, they’ll come to see a single architectural feature more overwhelming than in any other church I’ve visited so far on The Walk. The Norman chancel arch frames the altar like a huge stone fireplace, as if someone was presenting a huge secret to the world. In Simon Jenkins’ words:

            ‘…the great arch at Tickencote is like a peacock’s tail, comprising every motif of beakheads, crenellation, odds and ends of faces and much zigzag. The carvings are the forte of the composition, a mass of animals, heads and monsters. The origin of many of these figures is obscure, perhaps Roman, perhaps Saxon, perhaps Viking. “Once the floodgates of fancy were opened”, says the guide, “a full tide of grotesque imagery poured through…”’

For the rest, Tickencote’s church leaves me wondering. I know what I think of neo-Georgian architecture on modern housing developments – there are worse fashion tics, but it leaves me a bit cold. So what should I think about eighteenth century efforts to mimic earlier architectural forms? Perhaps it’s just a contrast to the human warmth radiated by Don McGarrigle, but I leave St. Peter’s Tickencote feeling a trifle chilly despite its one extraordinary interior feature.

Shortly afterwards I have an unpleasant encounter with canines at a farm near Great Casterton. OK, let’s not be coy. I have a run-in with a farmer lady and her three choc labs at Ingthorpe Farm. I arrive at the farm gate, having been much barked at from within, to attempt to walk the right of way which passes through the farmyard. A notice by the gate tells me that because we live in Covid times I should use an undefined alternative track somewhere to my left (why?) although there are no clear markings as to where that is. I stick to what the map says, but can’t open the gate because of the threat from the dogs. The woman calls in one particular snarling hound. I pass through the gate, and then all three dogs hurl themselves across the yard with the intention of eating me. She follows at a canter.

 Me: Thank you for coming to rescue me, but (and I continue somewhat fiercely, though not impolitely) this isn’t OK! This is a public right of way.

 Her: They wouldn’t do anything…

 Me: I don’t know that do I?

 Her: Well, you should use the other path…Covid… (mumbles)

 Me: This is the right of way… (beginning to walk away across the farmyard and looking for the exit…)

 Her: It’s not that way. Do you have a proper map?

 Me: (brandishing map) Yes!

 Her: (to my back and grudgingly)  Sorry…

So… some marks to her for the final, belated apology, but as I say, this isn’t OK either from a dog-owning or land-owning p.o.v. Clearly no proper diversion of the right of way has been granted, even if conceivably it’s been applied for, and property-protecting dogs can’t be allowed to harry walkers doing what the law says they can. And I’m fed up with having dog-owners assuring me their pooches wouldn’t hurt a fly, are great with kids, are just a complete darling etc. etc.. Every year people get badly bitten in public circumstances by out-of-control pets. Children are sometimes killed.

This week there’s been some publicity about ancient, grumpy rock singer and knight of the realm Van Morrison’s latest release of Covid denying/protest songs – government conspiracy etc. In my view a lot of this stuff is just tosh, but there are some worrying aspects to the behaviour of governments national and local at this moment (and this filters down to the way the folk in charge sometimes behave in churches). Laws are made on the back of a fag packet with no proper scrutiny. We’re now controlled to a degree unprecedented in peacetime. It's the unfortunate way of things that in the middle of this chaos and anxiety there’ll be attempts to smuggle in changes to society which aren’t necessary or desirable by any reasonable democratic standards. In this category, though some way down the scale of importance, could be changes on our rights to use footpaths as we have for hundreds of years (as part of a loosening of planning standards?) It’s not a time to let things slip, people. Exercise your rights, and complain where you have to. But if you’re walking through Ingthorpe Farm, take care. It’s a while since I’ve had to say it in these pages, but farmers are our friends, and need support and advocacy. And in return, they mustn’t regard other users of the countryside as their enemies. Or bringers of disease.

Ticks in the box (and flies in the flybottle)  16 km. 4.6 hrs. Flat and easy. Three churches – all open for one reason or another. Thank you, Don.  Five stiles. Eight gates. Four bridges. 20 degrees C. A warm dry day, but very breezy especially later coming back down to Tinwell. 

Lord

Help me to stand up for justice

And not only where it affects me

In some trivial way.

Let me hold dear

The rights of the dispossessed

The powerless

The poor and the weak

And truly to see Christ

In their faces

And so find strength

To relieve the world’s pain

By your grace

And the breath

Of the Holy Spirit

Amen.

 

As the grain once scattered in the fields

And the grapes once dispersed on the hillside

Are now reunited in bread and wine,

So Lord may your whole Church soon be gathered together

From the corners of the earth into your Kingdom.

 

‘I’m still the apple of my mama’s eye

I’m my daddy’s worst fears realised

I’m the other kind…’

(Steve Earle)

How extraordinary that this expression, like so many others, should find its way all the way from The Psalms into (relatively) contemporary rock music…

 

What was I saying?

 

I’m walking from my home church of St. Peter’s, Weston Favell to the cathedral at Peterborough by a series of circular walks. Each walk must touch the circumference of a previous walk at some point. Eventually I’ll have visited every Anglican church in the diocese, active or decommissioned, plus a handful in neighbouring dioceses. I pray for each parish as I pass through it, and send each incumbent a card to say I’ve been. I blog about where I’ve been and what I’ve experienced.

 The project began in April 2016, before Britain committed itself to Brexit, before the rise of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. My theme was and remains that the Church of England is ‘Better Together’ despite our differences in liturgy and churchpersonship. We’re a national church who should be a Christian beacon to a country losing its way, and our common purpose should cause us to cherish what unites us, rather than individualising ourselves by dwelling on our personal likes and dislikes. One Church, one Faith, one Lord.

 And latterly, in the shadow of Covid, I’ve added the thought that we’re ‘Better in Colour’. Life in Christ is truly vivid, shot through with excitement, danger and confrontations. When we’re grey as a Church, or when we see things in terms of noughts and ones, or black and white, we’re probably missing the point.

Holding on by the fingernails

 

After one has crossed the railway line in Ketton, there’s a bungalow at the summit of a small rise named ‘Karajan’. I can imagine calling an Alsatian dog that, but a house?  Was/is the owner a musician, or a refugee from Berlin, or simply an enthusiast for the work of the great Herbert? Perhaps it’s a yelled reply, a one word denigration of the silky skills of Sir Simon Rattle. I’m not brave enough to knock on the door and ask.

The same lane - from Ketton to Collyweston - passes over the Welland and climbs the far hillside on a diagonal. To its right once stood the Palace of Collyweston, and very impressive it must have looked in stone and timber, the seat of Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Tudor successors until 1640, when it was pulled down. What remains today are the markings of the palace’s fishponds, and some significant walls around its lost garden. I pass through a gate into a space that wants me to admire a sundial. All I can see is a small lump of stone which might once have told the time but does so no longer. At the side of St. Andrew’s church is a an annexe which may have afforded Lady Margaret the chance to run the rule over the local priest and hoi polloi, but among the wonders of her palace she also had her very own chapel with a full choir, judging by the number of surplices she required to be made. Various opinions have been offered of this great woman from the ‘politic and contriving’ to far more generous assessments of her worth and achievements. She certainly knew her own mind, and used her great abilities to (literally) keep her head in troubled times, founding a dynasty which changed the shape of England in so many ways. I have personal reason to be grateful. Without her St. John’s College, Cambridge wouldn’t exist. My college boat club still honours her name, though perhaps she might think eight undergrads busting a gut along the Cam a very strange way to make lasting recognition of her life. We don’t choose that by which we are remembered. Hmm: a worrying thought, better not pursued… 

Half way down the High Street is a house fallen on hard times, but a marvellous opportunity for someone handy and enterprising, who, were they able to lick it into shape, might make a very good profit, or fashion a lovely, impressive place to live. It won’t be us, though. I ask a neat lady what’s the story, as she emerges from the convenience store/Post Office. She’s Scottish and hasn’t been in the village long, so doesn’t know, but Collyweston’s a nice place to live. She remarks that in these mask-wearing times it’s strange that she talks to many folk whose full facial features she probably wouldn’t recognise. She knows them only by their eyes.

I could walk to Easton on the Hill along the higher ground and the main road, but prefer to descend the hill, and climb again across the fields until I reach Ketton Drift. This will take me along the western edge of the hidden ‘slate’ quarries which are the main association of Collyweston’s village name. A roof of ‘Collyweston slate’ is a selling point in nice houses, but this slate isn’t really a slate at all. It’s a limestone left to weather until it can be flaked. As I walk the air around me rumbles and reverberates to the sound of unseen aircraft on exercise. Although the skies are partially clear, I can’t see them so they must be very high, but the sonic booms roll from left to right for a full half an hour most of the way into Easton.  Or perhaps they’re just ghost sound effects. Beyond Easton lies RAF Wittering, now only in use for light trainers, but once upon not so long ago, yet another major base for the nation’s attack aircraft. The planes I hear today most likely originate in Coningsby, much further to the north in Lincolnshire.

There’s a postscript to ‘Collyweston slate’. Allegedly, because the stone would invariably start to de-form after some time (though presumably it was still much preferred to the constant renewal required of thatch) and therefore be rendered all higgeldy piggeldy, it became a byword for something going awry, as in ‘it’s all gone collywest’ (a sort of ancient equivalent of something ‘going Pete Tong’). And this was reinforced by an apparently ridiculous male garment which became fashionable in late Tudor times, a kind of smock whose sleeves contrived to end up front and back, with open sides. This too then became known as ‘a Collywest’ – because basically it was a stupid, barking idea.

Easton on the Hill is a beautiful long village in tasteful, often creamy stone, the streets curving sinuously up to the church of All Saints, more or less the last stop on the way to Stamford. I’m privileged to find the church open and spend ten minutes enjoying the silence. To the right of the altar is a side-chapel which today is suffused by a magical pink glow reflecting from furnishings and glass. In the field beyond the church is a small circular garden of peace around the sculpture of an ammonite, and beside it, a stylised labyrinth laid out in stone. I find Neil and Julie there. Julie was born in Easton, but now they live in Stamford, and during these Covid times often walk from their home there up the hill and over the county boundary to the airy views we now share.

As I exit the church I see a couple of names of past incumbents. Culpepper Tanner. Chambers Bate. Don’t you just love that!

I mistakenly think a footpath must find its way across the little field to emerge near the National Trust’s ‘Priest’s House’, but discover it only issues in a garden, so retrace my steps until I can arrive outside the ‘Priest’s House’ by following the village lanes. I pass a bright yellow Chevrolet Corvette as I go, and spend the drop down to Tinwell writing a Steve Earle-like lyric about it: Bright yellow Corvette/All those dollars I spent/Left me deep in debt/No food no rent/Bright yellow Corvette/Best wheels I had yet etc. etc.  As Roger McGough once said:  ‘I don’t like the poems they’re making me write…

On the edge of Easton is a very comfortably proportioned house - the former rectory, far too grand for today’s needs. Here once lived Lancelot Skynner who was captain of the unfortunate HMS Lutine. She was a 32-gun frigate handed over to the British by the French royalists at the end of the siege of Toulon, to prevent her falling into the hands of the Republicans. In 1799 she was carrying bullion to shore up the Hamburg banks under a British flag, when she was driven onto a sandbank in the Frisian Islands and became a total loss. Only one man survived. It wasn’t Skynner. Famously, the Lutine's bell ended up in Lloyd's of London, and every time a ship founders it is rung.

I put aside Americana, and start thinking about a troubling letter I read in the Church Times some days ago, from a lady of senior years and long faithful contribution to the Church of England who’s thinking of handing in her membership card. She lives in Upper Boddington, which I visited on this walk a couple of years ago. I remember village prettiness and a worrying moment with some frisky cows. This lady has had enough of the C. of E. for a variety of reasons. I thoroughly identify with some of them: others are lower down my hit list. Her principal beefs are with lack of leadership during the current crisis, and a feeling that we’re not walking with Jesus in the way we worship and practise our faith. 

It’s been a rough couple of weeks down in my personal C. of E. cabbage patch too, throwing into stark relief all I’ve written here over the past four years. Do I believe any of it? Using that old Lyndon B. Johnson metaphor, am I better inside or outside the tent? Evangelicals would say that this is the Devil’s inevitable attack as I move towards the final weeks of the project, but that’s far too Warty Bliggens for me (in Don Marquis’s poem ‘Archy and Mehitabel’, Warty is a toad who considers that the whole cosmos was constructed entirely to grow toadstools for him to sit under).

The saddleback tower of All Saints in Tinwell is a reminder of one of the things which keeps me going. Faith in England has seen so many changes and the number of the saints who have gone before is so great that even if I feel like separating myself from those immediately around me, it seems a denial of our ancestors’ struggles and suffering to walk away simply because I’m hacked off with current leadership and attitudes. The question as to whether it’s OK to shake the dust off my feet in a particular place is quite different.

The rest of the day’s walk is a beating of the bounds of Ketton’s Cement quarry, which is actually a lot more picturesque and fun than it sounds. Two things to mention. One is that on the main Stamford road opposite All Saints stands what looks very much like a gallows, which if I were a resident I’d find a bit of a downer. Though of course it may be placed where it is to assist in speed reduction through the village, which is a Noble Aim.

The other is one of those encounters with the natural world which comes rarely to the walker, and which makes everything seem all right with the world. On a gently ascending section of the quarry peripherique I very nearly step on a grass snake, which has been sunning itself in a fold of the path. It is so glossily perfect, so wonderfully made, that it makes me gasp, and as it moves politely to one side and slides silkily into the hedgerow, forked tongue darting in the approved snaky fashion, I find myself cooing to it as one would to a baby.

Viral load: 19 km. Five and a half hours.  19 deg C.  Very still and calm, thus feeling mild even during the morning. 3 stiles. 9 gates 3 bridges. Three churches one of which was open. And a vision of perfection in that snake. For a moment I could see why some people keep reptiles – but still think they’re missing the point – this was wonderful precisely because the animal was free to do as it pleased.

 My Father God

 A bit strange don’t you think

That I can

Feel so uplifted

By this delicate little creature…

As I am also sometimes

By the little robin outside the study window,

And yet be brought so low

By the machinations and mean-ness

Of human beings.

 

Please help me to see

Everyone around me

As wonderfully and perfectly made -

As you intended them -

And love them

For their best selves.

And Father,

In my miseries

Over my own inadequacy

Help me to glimpse

The me you want me to be.

Amen.