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.