Fields of Gold (almost...)

Martians who’ve been accompanying my every ululation and undulation since 2016 might well scratch their heads and wonder if everything they’d been told about the British weather is a load of old Boris. Rain seems to intervene only infrequently. It’s a fair cop. I choose the days on which I walk carefully, aided by the panoply of modern forecasting - multiple sources, weather radar etc. etc . And yet…

 Even in the twenty-first century the Met and BBC sometimes contrive to get things so annoyingly wrong. Like today, for instance. At eight this morning there was no mention of precipitation anywhere near Oundle. Yet here I am two hours later, standing outside Barnwell’s Montagu Arms, and the rain’s hosing down. But hey, I have an anorak, and an umbrella, and Goretex boots.  What’s the problem with a little dampness now and again? I’m told it’s what you have to expect as you get older.

 In one way, there’s no problem at all. Walking in the rain can be a blast. I have very happy memories of getting soaked in various nice places throughout my life. At the age of twelve and half way up Snowdon, quizzing mystified passers-by on what they were doing there and where they’d come from for a National Parks survey, I learned that if you were wet through to your underwear, eventually you dried out again, quite possibly several times in one day. A first girlfriend got persuaded into the Kentish woodlands in a cataclysmic downpour because we weren’t going to let a little thing like that prevent our courting, were we? (and we’re still corresponding as friends more than fifty years later so it can’t have been too bad an experience). According to the Baptists, childhood Bank Holiday Mondays were made by God for walking and family bonding, and were then as now usually blessed not just in showers but in torrents.

 Sod’s law operates. The first part of today’s walk isn’t along roads but tracks through fields of barley and wheat, where the farmer has very helpfully cut good paths for the rights-of-way. But they are rather narrow paths, and the grain has seeded down the middle, in a rather exaggerated version of the way grass grows down the middle of extreme country lanes. After a few hundred metres I’m soaked to the waist; boots, socks, trousers, anorak, M & S n’all. I squelch for most of the rest of the day.

 

The paths on the way to Thurning are well kept but often ridged by the tyres of farm vehicles. I’m quite surprised how quickly they’ve become tacky/slippery, and how much dirt is accumulating on my boots. It’s hard going. I turn away from the Alconbury Brook up to the village, which is a collection of lovely houses in a compact summer-flowery settlement whose population struggles to make three figures. I’m disappointed not to find St. James the Great open, because the excellent Northamptonshire Surprise website says ‘The best Arts and Crafts church in the county…a perfect, if small, well-preserved example of Anglican high church decoration…The spirit of William Morris hovers here – indeed the draperies come from his emporium.’  I’ll have to come back.

 This week courtesy of Radio 4’s The Life Scientific I’ve become aware of the ‘Dunbar number’, named after its anthropologist ‘inventor’ Robin Dunbar. As an undergrad Dunbar studied under the great Nico Tinbergen at Oxford, and based on a lifetime study of both animals and humans his contention is that there’s a more-or-less magic number of 150, which is the quantity of individuals with whom the average human being can maintain stable relationships. Extroverts may manage more, introverts less. He also connects the number to the average size of medieval settlements (by which ancient standard, Thurning is today on the smaller, less sustainable end of the spectrum). Dunbar’s number raises a number of interesting questions for me. The first is whether this is merely ‘true but trivial’ - insofar as there’s only so much time in the day, and staying close to even the most intimate circle of friends is sometimes difficult. Keeping up regularly with as many as 150 seems to preclude work, telly or days out walking, but please understand this is me talking - at best a ‘sociable introvert’, aka miserable git! Another intriguing possibility is whether at this precise moment in human history Dunbar’s metric might be changing. Is it easier to keep in touch with more people now because of social media? Or are the people we’re close to more demanding than they were, so in practice, might Dunbar’s number actually be decreasing? And what does this have to say about patterns of church organisation and church growth?  We’re apt to be very worried when congregations fall in number. Is 150 the optimum size at which we should aim before we divide or re-plant (And I hear a lot of people say ‘We should be so lucky…’) And what would Dunbar predict about the combining of communities, say, making one from two lots of fifty. Does this result in a successful congregation of one hundred? Or does our church experience lead us to think the actual number would be much less than that. A problem for the Church is that we become very attached to our roles. If Gladys is the inadequate organist in church A, perhaps discouraging people from attending services where her poor accompanying and scatter of wrong notes are only too obvious, but is replaced by the organist from church B when the two churches combine (who may be able to dash off Widor’s Toccata to the satisfaction at least of himself, if not entirely to the more musically snobby, thus maintaining the numbers at the Sunday Eucharist), do we think Gladys will be among the congregation to appreciate his superior skills? Perhaps not.

 

On the door of St. James in Thurning is a woven picture of a pilgrim; hat, staff and scrip. He looks not altogether unlike me. I try a selfie, for the purposes of comparison, and fail hopelessly. It’s a generational thing. Appropriately for the dedication of the church, there’s a scallop shell on the gate. I’ll see one or two more during the day in various places. Opposite the church in the old school building is ‘Jade College’ where pilgrims can learn holistic massage, which might come in quite handy for travellers.

 I retrace my steps to the Alconbury stream, which gives its name to today’s next village destination ‘Luddington-in-the-Brook’. The suffix is to distinguish it from a village up the road, now usually called Lutton, formerly known as ‘Luddington-in-the-Wold’. Today’s walk is unusual insofar that it takes in all the villages in the newly-named ‘Brookfields’ benefice bar Lutton: a reminder that incumbents like Cathy Brazier have a Herculean task as they draw together a collection of Dunbar country communities to love and serve each other. Judging by the jolly, engaged, edition of the Brookfields mag I pick up later in Polebrook, she and they’re making a good fist of it.

 However. As you’ll see from the foregoing, the question keeps nagging away as to whether this is the future of our Church. I think the parochial system is worth hanging on to, if for no other reason than that national disaster might one day make it crucially important. So then people, let’s not just sell off our ancient churches for private housing. But what could be done with Church/public/private initiatives, to supplement our Christian functions in a community-facilitating way? We’re getting used to food banks. What other kind of banks, for profit or not-for-profit might our churches host without compromising the core salvation enterprise – and maybe even enhancing it? Villages (or Dunbar communities anywhere) need honest, artisan shops, and opportunities to share – machinery/ transport/ coffee. And yes, cake with the caffeine, if you must.

 

I walk on to Hemington. As Johnny Nash once opined:  ‘I can see clearly now, the rain has gone/It’s gonna be a bright (sing those b/v’s, soul-sisters) (bright), bright, sunshiny day’ – and it’s now warm and humid enough that I choose a route along the road, rather than the longer one through the fields. On either side are fields of barley, wheat and (less pleasingly) decaying oil-seed. The corn isn’t toasty yellow-brown yet, but it’s going that way, with just that interesting, sophisticated undershade of not-quite green where the breeze is rippling the surface.   Hemington’s church, at the top of the rise, is shut and barred - as Luddington’s was - but it gets a good press from other writers on the Web. On the little green at the end of the village’s Main Street, is a pretty decorated sign telling you what you need to know about Hemington . Around the bend I pass a large and ancient , spreading, oak tree, which may be the one depicted on the sign. Another scallop has been tacked in at head height onto its bark.

 

 I walk the straight lane towards Polebrook with the site of the World War 2 airfield on my right. In the distance I can see the one remaining collection of surviving buildings from that era, now re-purposed. In the fifties the airfield had something of a revival. It sited a deployment of Thor ICBMs which were the West’s nuclear shield at the time. The now-available accounts of the reliability of these missiles is hair-raising. If there’d been an attack to which we and the Americans had responded, the chances of successful launches on our behalf would appear to have been slim. One imagines the Russians would have done no better. But only one missile needed to get through for the death of millions. MADness indeed. Deterrents don’t have to work. The protagonists just have to be in doubt that they will. And what don’t we know today about the details of our own ‘security’?

 

All Saints in Polebrook is the only church I find open today, and very lovely and moving it is, not least because of the beautiful chapel in its surprisingly spacious transept which is dedicated to the memory of the American WW2 flyers stationed locally. Amongst their number was the heart-throb actor Clark Gable, who was strapped in for a few missions over Germany for publicity and propaganda reasons (which is not to minimise the risks he undertook). The most literally awesome story is that of Lt Truemper and Sgt Mathies. They were aboard a Flying Fortress (nicknamed Ten Horsepower) on a bombing mission over Leipzig when it was attacked by German fighters. The co-pilot was killed, the pilot severely wounded. Truemper told Mathies to take over the controls of the ‘plane (neither had any flying experience) while he did the navigating. They contrived to get back to the very fringes of Polebrook. All the other crew were ordered to parachute to safety, while Truemper and Mathies attempted to land. They crashed into a nearby field and were killed. It’s an extraordinary and humbling story. No spur of the moment gallantry this, but calculated self-sacrifice on behalf of others, which makes it all the more suitable as a focus for the attention of worshippers at All Saints, and passers-by like me.

 

Just over the border in Cambridgeshire is the village of Little Gidding, subject of one of T.S.Eliot’s Four Quartets, poems seasonal, contemplative, of Time and Eternity, and apt to my moment alone in Polebrook’s ancient church.

 

‘You are not here to verify,/ Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity/ Or carry report. You are here to kneel/ Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more/ Than an order of words, the conscious occupation/ Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. / And what the dead had no speech for, when living, /They can tell you, being dead: the communication/ Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living./ Here, the intersection of the timeless moment/ Is England and nowhere. Never and always.’

 

The route back to the car takes me through the elevated hamlet of Armston, and then across the fields behind Barnwell Manor, one time country home of Prince Richard and his family, although they now live a less expensive life in Kensington Palace. The Manor has become an up-market (presumably  very upmarket!) venue for the display of antiques. One cannot duck economic necessity. But for royalty, the Church, all of us as individuals, pain is thereby entailed.

 

Tears for souvenirs:  19.5 km. 6 hrs. 23 deg. Rain and sun, and an enlivening breeze. 1 stile. 16 gates. 4 little bridges. Slugs a-plenty. A buzzard on the hunt. Guns popping on the Barnwell estate. 4 villages. 4 churches. One open.

 Dear Lord

 I carry in my heart always:

‘Summer and winter, and spring-time and harvest,
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above,
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To thy great faithfulness, mercy and love...’

And as the congregation with one voice sings:

‘Pardon for sin, and a peace that endureth,
Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide;
Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow,
Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside’…*

I shed tears.

Amen.

* from 'Great is thy faithfulness':  Thomas Obadiah Chisholm 1866-1960

 

 

 

 

Skulking Dudley

Lynch Lane leaves Titchmarsh downhill to the east. It rained a bit last night and the grass on the track is dewy damp even at 9.30 in the morning.  A herby smell reminiscent of marijuana is steaming off the hedges, and that’s quite nice because (sniff) there’s a sewage farm in the immediate vicinity. Of course it’s always possible that once upon a time something nasty happened to someone here at the hands of a mob, but probably not. The American connotations of ‘lynch’ don’t seem right here. On the other hand ‘linch’ is dialect for a man-made or natural terrace in the landscape, so maybe that’s the derivation. As I turn across some fields I pass some large, horned, brown and white sheep. I don’t recall having seen any like them on my travels, and nothing on the web readily identifies them, so here’s a picture. Any ideas?

There’ve been two stories about sheep on the news media this week. The first was about a number of recent cases of sheep rustling in Northamptonshire - if that’s an adequate description, because ‘rustling’ conjures up a sanitised Wild West image - a herd spirited away under cover of darkness. No, this was a gang slaughtering scores of animals right where they stood, leaving the stripped carcasses behind them in the fields, an extraordinarily callous crime with health issues associated, since for one thing the perps couldn’t possibly know how/if the sheep had been recently medicated and with what. So, if anyone makes you a too-good-to-be-true offer of lamb chops, I’d steer well clear, if I were you. The second story concerned the possibility that post-Brexit forty per cent of Britain’s sheep population might be culled. Of course I can’t vouch for the truth of this, but it’s clear that in terms of occupational risk, farmers believe themselves extremely exposed because of the loss of EU subsidy. To further deplete our rural economy seems crazy, but in these days of national self-harm, nothing surprises me anymore.

 

I’ve chosen the nuance of today’s route because I felt compelled to travel past or through what’s marked on the OS as ‘Skulking Dudley Coppice’. The Dudleys were a family who lived in Clopton, where I’m next headed. There are various accounts of how this particular scion came to murder or was himself murdered, but at any rate it’s said that ever since medieval times his unquiet spirit has roamed between the village and the coppice, causing the local population so much anxiety that as late as 1905 the then Bishop of Peterborough, Edward Carr-Glynn, came with a bell, book and candled entourage of twenty-one local priests to exorcise SD’s ghost. The legend of Skulking Dudley is the kind of tall tale usually cooked up to encourage a flagging tourist trade, but you might think, though I couldn’t possibly say, that staycations in Clopton are a niche market. As I stroll the sylvan path along the edge of the coppice I can see evidence of quarrying, so perhaps SD was invented to keep the local kids from harm. How prosaic is that thought! As one who claims to have reintroduced the phrase ‘gilding the lily’ to the US through the agency of a friend,  I encourage my readers to henceforth apply the term ‘Skulking Dudley’ to politicians and others in public life displaying brazen pusillanimity. They are legion. Name them, brothers and sisters, name them!

 

On the border between the two counties, Clopton more resembles a Cambridgeshire village than a Northants one. It straggles untidily along the B road, and St. Peter’s church is actually on the far side outside the village limit, but close to the Manor House. Although it has a saddle-backed tower, the church looks remarkably well-ordered, viewed from a distance. And this turns out to be a well-founded suspicion, because despite some of its genuinely ancient contents the building dates from only 1863. To my eye, the externals are an affectionate attempt at fakery of the medieval, and in a way, none the worse for that: it’s a handsome building, and if it serves to remind us in this confused present that we’re members of a Body of Christ comprised of many past generations, then that’s good.  Nevertheless, I come away a little sad. Inside, the sanctuary is dominated by an ugly portable display detailing aspects of the church’s short history, majoring on First War memorabilia. There are cobwebs over many of the pews. The back of the church has become a secular second hand lending library. One of those recently ubiquitous plastic cut out mannequins designed to remind us of the First War fallen occupies one of the front pews. I can laugh to myself that it’s a memorial to Skulking Dudley, but actually the image strikes an odd note for the midsummer visitor. By the door is a sign inviting parishioners to a cheese and wine ‘do’ – a Eucharistic variation for the well-to-do?

 

I must be careful. As I think I’ve mentioned before, years ago, my father published a history of the Baptist church of which he’d been a member for more than sixty years, man and boy. Most of what he wrote was definitely good, valuable local history. Then he came to more recent events in that place - of which he had a very low opinion. Despite advice to the contrary, he wrote of these developments in a trenchant, caustic spirit, and caused great unhappiness as a result. And I am my father’s son. I know there’s the possibility of hurting good people for whom, for example, St. Peter’s Clopton may be the apple of their eye, their solace in times of fear and sadness, their one safe refuge. Nevertheless, I’d hope for better ministry to the local population and visitors than this. And of course I’m bound to examine my own inadequacy and lack of faith and discipline as I write. Back in Weston Favell we forgot to turn up for our own stint of church cleaning last weekend.

 

The weather today is uncomfortable. It’s muggy, with the clouds gathering and the breeze stiffening as I walk quickly over the little plateau towards Barnwell, wondering if one of the hinted-at ‘isolated thunderstorms’ from this morning’s forecast is going to catch me out. A few monster raindrops spatter my shorts and shirt as I drop down a hundred feet or so between fields of unripened wheat and out of mobile-phone reception, but in the event nothing more dramatic happens. This summer seems to have been sunnier than the previous one, though the wheat seems to be slower developing. Is this a misapprehension on my part, or despite the ever-improving science of agriculture is there still a natural variation in the growing of crops once meteorology is taken into account? (As there might be year to year, say with snowdrops or primroses…?)

 

There are two churches in Barnwell, or rather one and a half. All Saints is the half.  I come to it first, on the southern edge of the village. It’s not much more than a memorial chapel for the Montagu family, but it’s a fascinating space. The rather rough pews are crammed into the chancel (which is all that remains of a formerly much larger church). Some sit on top of the family vault. Where they’ve been prised off the floor for an interment in years past, they bear the scars of crowbars or chisels. The font is shoved into an inaccessible corner, not much used of late. Hymnbooks and a few Evensong booklets are strung out along a covered bier at the back. The chapel is filled with funerary monuments and legends. The most unusual is in the shape of a highly decorated, narrow obelisk attached to the south wall. It commemorates Henry Montagu who died very young in 1625, a victim of drowning. A curious thing. I see that in a round orifice towards the bottom of the memorial, there’s what looks like a vividly painted orange. Goodness! It is an orange! And now, back home, I see that there’s at least one picture of the memorial on the web showing exactly the same thing. So, good people of the virtual world, what theories can you come up with for this? Was the late, poor little Henry fond of exotic oranges? In lieu of larger floral decorations, has this been thoughtfully placed as a single natural feature in a space of otherwise cold, unyielding stone? Or is someone just having an (apparently iterative) laugh?

 

Barnwell is charming, with twin lanes either side of a brook which at the moment is clogged with vegetation. A rap – I mean a recitative - from Mendelssohn’s Elijah pops onto today’s internal playlist: ‘Now Cherith’s brook is dried up…’ A landscape gardener is labouring away on the opposite pavement, hammering into shape the frames for some raised beds. She heaves them energetically over the back garden wall of one of the pretty almshouses founded by local sixteenth century worthy Nicholas Latham. I walk up over the flags to high-steepled St. Andrew’s where there’s a memorial to Latham, and chuckle at the sign there which brings to mind a line from Sue’s least favourite hymn:  ‘But the steep and rugged pathway may I tread rejoicingly’. I’m sorry to find the door locked, and go for a GB at the Montagu Arms. The talk behind the bar is of chips cooked in goose fat. I say that’s not fair: I’m not stopping to eat.

 

                                                      There may be trouble ahead...

Going south on the Nene Way I cross the disused Oundle railway line where the one-time Barnwell station building looks rather forlorn, and trek parallel to it along to Wigsthorpe, now just a farm, before turning right along an exposed length of the B662 to the roundabout, then down to the Nene bridge with Lilford Hall just in sight, and up the other side to the hamlet of Pilton. Across the field is the beautifully situated church of St. Mary’s and All Saints. The Lilfords, once and perhaps still the patrons of the parish, have gone from Lilford Hall now, and it’s in the hands of the Micklewright family, who judging by their enormously comprehensive website love it to bits. I enjoy the woodland walk from there to Thorpe Achurch very much indeed, climbing through the trees on a series of terraces (linches!) until I emerge on the lane by St. John the Baptist’s church. The presence of a church in Achurch (as you might assume!) suggests plenty of possibilities for conversational confusion. The rector here in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was Robert Browne, who lived his later life in Lilford Hall. Ecclesiastically speaking those were his quiet years, because as a young man he’d taken against the Church of England and founded the ‘Brownist’ movement, which Congregationalism sees as its predecessor. However, he clearly remained of uncertain temper, despite his calling. He was arrested more than thirty times and died in Northampton gaol, where he’d been imprisoned for punching a constable. The Lilford Hall website says that there are plans to restore the literally dilapidated St. Peter’s Lilford in  fitting memorial to him, as the ‘Father of Pilgrims’ (because there are Congregationalist links to the Mayflower). But does this story need a bit of unpacking?

                                                        St. Mary's and All Saints' Pilton

The description of the early Church as recorded in the first chapters of the Book of Acts hangs over all denominational Christians as…what? A challenge? An attractive ideal? A reproach? It was perhaps all those things to the young Robert Browne, and it still attracts and reproaches today. Where, beyond the Holy Spirit, does day to day authority reside in the contemporary Church? With the clergy or with the people or in both together (remembering that the clergy are a sub-division of the people)? Really? And if there’s an imbalance of administrative and spiritual authority between ordained and lay in the Church of England as we experience her today – as I feel there is - what should we do about it? I read Rev. Robert Browne’s life as a troubled sell-out, perhaps because the appeal of country comforts grew ever more irresistible…but it ended badly for him. To be fair the fates of those who made the trip to Virginia were pretty mixed too.

 

Clergy are paid professionally for their Gospel Labours, and they’re overworked, and the pay will rarely if ever reflect the hours put in.  But particularly in this media-saturated day and age, the antennae of The People are quick to spot attitudes which border on the controlling, patronising or contemptuous. All we like sheep have gone astray, but judgment on the matter is God’s not ours. Lovely friends among the clergy who read this, I truly don’t mean you, but don’t tell me you’ve never encountered such attitudes amongst your colleagues. The difficulty is that the fecklessness of God’s people and their redemption is all of our business, and a very perplexing one it is too - as both the Old Testament and current politics make clear. Better together. Laity and clergy, and just occasionally, that way round.

 

What happens next on today’s walk is pretty perplexing too. I walk down the lane to Thorpe Waterville, and by way of a little path around a smallholding where I say hello to two engaging junior pigs, either inquisitive or hungry – I don’t speak pig, so don’t know – emerge onto the main Oundle road. I cross safely enough, but find that the path ahead to Titchmarsh is thirty yards further on behind a metal barrier in the direction of the flow of traffic. I wait for a gap between the evening rush hour cars and decide to make a run for it. But just then a car pulls out from the drive close behind me. I see him or her, hesitate, trip over the kerb, and measure my length in the road right in front of the traffic. Timewarp.  The car which has just pulled out steers around me where I lie and hightails it off to Thrapston with nary a backward look, presumably concerned that I might accuse them of causing the fall. From a position on my back looking up at the traffic which is following on, I judge that I can roll close to relative safety hard against the barrier, and even in that split second give thanks that I’m not concussed and haven’t broken anything. As I limp up the road towards the path, two guys in a white van stop and ask me if I’m OK, effectively stopping the queue of traffic behind them: the story of the good Samaritan rewritten. Perhaps they’d have set me on their donkey and put me up for the night in Thrapston if I’d asked.

 

I hurl myself over a stile into a field of maize where the bloody farmer hasn’t bothered to maintain any semblance or hint of the right of way, inspect my wounded knees, and shout and swear at the skies about the character, antecedents and future prospects of the driver who couldn’t spare thirty seconds of his time to enquire about my health and make sure I wasn’t a traffic stat. It’s not K2 or the Australian outback, but there are always dangers in hiking, even of such a domestic nature, and – note to self - it’s a bad idea to get over-tired. I don’t want to spend an eternity haunting the A605, do I? There are enough Skulking Dudleys already.

 

Hunt’s Book of Hours:  24.5 km. 7.3 hrs. 23 deg. Sunny, then cloudy, then sunny again, with a lively westerly breeze during the middle part of the day. The butterflies today were amazingly beautiful and numerous. Not many people to talk too. The walking easy and flat apart from the last tedious push through crops where the path had been rubbed out.

 

When will you save the people?

O God of mercy, when?
The people, Lord, the people,
But children, women, men.
God save the people, yours we are,
Your children as your angels fair.
From vice, oppression and despair -
God save the people!

Shall crime bring crime for ever,

Strength aiding still the strong?
Is it your will, Creator,
That we shall toil for wrong?
‘No’, say your mountains: ‘No’, your skies.
The clouded sun shall brightly rise

And songs be heard instead of sighs

God save the people!
Amen.

 (Ebenezer Elliott 1781-1849. Altered.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Divisa in partes tres (duo)

Part the first

The main street of Cottingham/Middleton meanders prettily towards the junction of the back roads to Great Easton and Rockingham. The entire population seems to be sprucing up their homes: there’s decorating and roofing action on all sides. I’m just about the only person not in dungarees. Homes Under The Hammer has a lot to answer for.  The local postie says a friendly, smiley hello. My day is cheered. I bid her the same as I park near the primary school and heave myself up the hill past the church, hoping there’ll be a footpath beside the B road out of town. There is…for a while…but when it disappears the verge is verdant and flat and largely minus beer cans, and there’s not a whole bunch of traffic. The view across the Welland valley gives me lovely glimpses of the hill village of Bringhurst on the far side. Wonder of wonders, it’s sunny and warm most of the way into Rockingham. The last week has seen some drenching downpours: we’ve had the heating on every evening at home.

 

 I cut across a field on the Jurassic Way for a couple of hundred metres  and emerge by Rockingham’s Sondes Arms, but sadly the village seems shut this Monday morning. I’d been hoping for coffee and cake at The Barn, but despite rumours to the contrary on its website there’s nothing doing. I thought I remembered a small gallery, but although I can see picture framing in progress through an open door, there’s no display of the Matisse prints of yesteryear. I puff up the hill, admiring as I’ve done for forty years the way the Oakham road twists down the scarp and then runs straight between the broadly spread cottages, as dramatic a view as any in Northamptonshire.  I hang a right into St. Leonard’s churchyard in the lee of the Castle: a muscle-strengthening climb for the peasants from their front yards: a gentle health-giving stroll for the gentry down out of their elegant drawing room. The view of the valley from the churchyard is mostly obscured, but a gap in the trees allows me to look across two county lines to my next destination at Caldecott.

Gaul, as you well know, was divided into three parts. Well, the East Midlands is divvied up more ways than that, but today is a three counties walk, though my decision to tack Caldecott onto the itinerary is a last minute whim, quickly regretted. The A6003 takes Route One over the valley floor, and for the section up to the Leicestershire border it’s fine: there’s a roadside path.

 

But the county of Jonathan Agnew and Richard III offers only thigh-high Arnco barriers to both sides for a while from this point, with narrow margins marked by white lines  - a hint to cyclists or a warning to incautious motorists they're in danger of denting their precious metal. Whatever, it’s an unfriendly environment for walkers, so my thought is to detour via the bridlepath of Long Lane and then bend back to Caldecott. This cunning plan is scuppered by the recent rain fuelled growth of vegetation. I don’t fancy fighting my way through thistles for a third of a mile, but neither do I want to risk nemesis from oncoming traffic. I utter a St. Christopher’s prayer and opt for the tarmac.

 

Where the defunct Rugby to Stamford railway line once crossed the main road, the noble county of Rutland restores a kerbed path. So what’s your beef with pedestrians, Leicestershire?  I say thank you and start enjoying Caldecott. St. John the Evangelist’s is open. Stepping inside, I read Psalm 80 out loud, with its litany: ‘Let thy face shine, that we may be saved’.  My head's full of Boris Johnson, so the psalmist's prayer strikes a chord. St. John’s is pleasant and well-cared for, but it’s not the most peaceful church. The Oakham road curls around its east side and the roar of traffic is more or less constant. If the organ’s particularly wheezy perhaps the frequencies might cancel each other out, but otherwise the parson’s preaching is always going to have urban overtones. There are Roman tiles in the church’s northern walls. It’s said a Roman temple may once have stood in St. John’s shoes.

 

 When I was small the county of Rutland seemed rather exotic. I remember being quite excited when Dad drove us through it on one of our holiday forays to Scotland. It was partly the curiosity value of its  being the smallest English county, but it also intrigued because of the ‘land’ suffix which otherwise only applied to certain remote northern-waste counties - Westmorland, Cumberland, Northumberland…Greenland. My arrival in it now marks a certain point in the Big Walk. The yet-to-be-explored diocese falls into three parts: firstly Rutland, secondly the flatter lands to the east of the county and north of Titchmarsh which also comprise the open territories of the former Rockingham forest, and thirdly the enclave around Peterborough itself. But not necessarily in that order!

 Outside in Caldecott’s churchyard there’s an array of similarly constructed, solid, stone cube-shaped tombs. One is the last resting place of ‘King Henry Stokes’, whose last Will and Testament is preserved in the National Archives at Kew. It describes him as a ‘Gentleman of Caldecott’, so there’s no pretension in his name beyond his parents’ wish for the success and character of their offspring. The Surrey and England cricketer Kenny Barrington greatly impressed people in the Caribbean by his humour and skill when he toured there in 1953. Two decades later I taught a Barrington Harrison down on Northampton's Billing Road. The Stokes family live still in the memory and imagination of local people in Caldecott. One was a teenage First World War hero, sunk and drowned, his brother killed at Ypres. A new housing project up the road is named after them all, presumably. Either that or Ben Stokes has fans locally.

 Overhead a buzzard is duking it out with two crows (only ever one winner!) as I walk the lane to charming but expensive Great Easton, which is close to being the perfect English village, everything commodious and easy on the eye. Notwithstanding, there’s always grit in the oyster: The Sun is being given a makeover. Let's hope it’s going to survive as a pub. A place like Great Easton deserves to have a landlord’s ( m. or f.) welcome at its heart. Up Church Bank, in what’s probably the most ancient part of the village, is fragrantly scented St. Andrew’s, lilies within, roses without. The artist Rupert Cordeux was here during the heavy rain last week, and notes his thanks in the visitors’ book. He’s known for his paintings of churches, and also apparently for cardboard model kits of cathedrals – if I’ve got the right bloke.

 

Time Team came to Great Easton for their first Big Dig in 2003, encouraging the villagers to dig test pits and share what they found with the nation on TV. Not a lot came out of the pits, but it seems typical of their community spirit that the citizens of Great Easton were willing to be guinea pigs. Looking in the church magazine, there’s a whole lot of community still going on: Grimsby fish to buy on Wednesdays, a ‘Summer Bonanza’ coming up, Good Companions for the older folk, a B&B, Tai Chi, Yoga, Singing with Sally. It would be nice to live here. Not far away, in Nevill Holt, there’s even Leicestershire’s annual equivalent of  Glyndebourne to enjoy each summer.

 The first fields on the other side of the village are sheepy and overgrown now, but when walking the Jurassic Way in the opposite direction here a decade ago, I was alarmed to find myself in the middle of an ‘incident’. A girl had fallen from a horse. She was badly hurt. There was nothing to be done - she was already being attended to by the medics and an air ambulance was clattering in. She was soon on her way to hospital.

 The hilltop village of Bringhurst is very ancient; an easily defended site. I wend the lane to St. Nicholas’ church, which is very plain inside and in the throes of decoration. On a chair near the bell tower there’s a notice giving thanks for assistance with the project - not to the diocese but to a waste management company. This makes me smile. To quote Daphne in Frasier, ‘I don’t know why’. Perhaps they’re putting in a loo, for the convenience of worshippers.

 Isn’t it strange how a stripped ancient church can still retain, even amplify, its holiness? I suppose the IKEA aesthetic is a useful contemporary reference, insofar as many of us quite like that white paint/fabric and wood/stone vibe, but that’s as a place to live in, not somewhere to find God. Many of us need our church (small ‘c’) to be something other. Many of the ‘shed’ free evangelical churches set up the place of worship as a theatre – and even some Anglican congregations see this as a way-to-go. Personally I’m not inclined to find raked seating plus a stage as a natural residence for the numinous, even though as a performer or as a member of an audience I’ve known special things to happen there, and sometimes those moments have had spiritual overtones.

 

 

 

                                                                 Bringhurst churchyard 

Two things. Firstly God can creep up on us unawares anywhere, any time. I suspect I mostly walk around with my eyes shut.  Secondly, people are drawn in to churches for any one of countless reasons. But maybe we aren’t relentless enough in finding our own church’s USP, and plugging it for all its worth. And I suppose that could even include looking like the Fabric Committee just popped into IKEA one afternoon.

 Hancock’s half-hour/Gove’s Gimbles* :  14.5 km. 4.25 hours. 20 degrees C.  Sun and cloud, and an intermittent, capricious, southerly breeze  Four churches. Three open. Nine stiles. Eight gates. Four bridges.

 *Matt Hancock and Michael Gove have been eliminated in the endless political accompaniment to the cricket World Cup. They will not be our Prime Minister. This time.

 

Part the second

I’ve been meaning for some time to ‘clean up’ an untidy detail from one of last winter’s walks. I should have included the outlying church at Weston-under-Welland when staggering on from Ashley to the pretty chapel of ease at Sutton Bassett, but my energy then was at a low ebb and my hips very sore. So now I park up at the end of Mill House’s farm track, and walk down the road into Weston before finding my way back to the car via a short section of the Macmillan Way. St. Mary’s church is shut, but I can see from the notice in the porch that there are nineteen souls on the electoral roll representing twelve families. Down in the valley, this seems a depressingly small remnant from which to build a Kingdom. From the highest point on the hill above the car, the view is beautiful and wide-ranging, and midway through a lovely afternoon the possibilities seem endless.

 Boris’s bits: 2.25 km. 40 minutes. No stiles. Six gates. No bridges. Hope in the heart.

 

 

 

Father
We can only begin
From where we are.
Give us the gift
Of working smart.
Open our eyes
Set us on our front foot
Stiffen our resolve
Help us find joy
So that we can better commend you
To all we meet
All with whom we work
All whom we love
Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

Steeltown

Here I stand with my own kin/At the end of everything/Finally the dream has gone/I’ve nothing left to hang upon/I came here with all my friends/Leaving behind the wait of years/Leaving alone in a flood of tears…

 (…from ‘Steeltown’ by the band Big Country: a song about the effects of the closure of the Stewart and Lloyds steel plant in Corby. It topped the UK charts in 1984.)

 

 

                                               Church of the Epiphany: Central Corby

There are lots of men in shorts on the end of dog leads by Great Oakley’s Village Hall, and it’s not particularly warm. But in June perhaps it just feels wrong to take the morning constitutional in trousers. There’s an unseasonal scent of woodsmoke in the air too, but the temperature’s good for a town stroll, warm but not oppressive. Not so many eggs frying on the pavements today.

 With Northampton, Wellingborough, and Kettering behind me on the Big Walk, once I’ve beaten Corby’s bounds, there’ll only be Peterborough to go in terms of major conurbations. I strike out on a cycle path beside the dual carriageway with the railway station in my sights. Corby owes a lot to William Holford and the work of its Development Corporation, back in the days when thought was given to the wider welfare of the citizenry beyond providing everyone with four bedrooms and a titchy back yard. The cycle path snakes between wide grass verges putting distance between itself and the traffic, although I see at least one cyclist perversely ploughing along against the wind, mixing it with the container lorries and petrol tankers. Rather her than me. There are about 60,000 inhabitants of the town, compared with the 1600 there were in the nineteen twenties, but walking around it, one gets a rather better idea of exactly how much land has to be flattened and tamed in order that a population of such a size can live comfortably. The answer is…a lot.

 I come to Corby with prejudices. When Sue and I first became Midlanders, the place had a tough reputation. Venturing the possibility that one might go and teach there drew an intake of breath and sucking of teeth from fellow teaching professionals. As a twenty-six year old I went for an interview at one of its comprehensive schools, supported for a prestigious post as Head of Boys Pastoral Care by one of the LEA advisers. The panel more or less offered me the job. I temporised. They appointed someone else, and the LEA adviser was far from amused. I’d panicked, you see, unsure I could cope in that environment, with unemployment and anger in the air. Maybe I was right not to dip a toe in the hot water. Sir Keith Joseph announced the closure of Stewart and Lloyd’s in 1979. It became an unhappy place.

 You know the story of how the Corby workforce was recruited from Scotland in the 1930s, and how haggis eating, Scottish country dancing, bagpipes, accordions and men called Jimmy became commonplace slap bang in the middle of Northamptonshire. I wonder, will I hear Scottish accents on the streets today? Nope. I’m listening carefully, but hear only conventional TV English, a smattering of Northamptonshire vernacular, quite a lot of Eastern European, but nothing to remind me of the Krankies, Billy Connolly or Nicola Sturgeon.

                                               Open for business in Corby village (and selfie)

 Just past the railway station by a roundabout on the edge of Corby village, and opposite a shed which offers live music and tattoos, sits ancient St. John’s Church, its exterior looking a little ravaged. I walk around it, and then see Paul Frost, the vicar, unloading cassock and surplice from his car. I say hello. Paul, tanned, fit and youthful looking, was once a youth worker at Moulton, but after some time in Kettering, he’s been the incumbent here for seven and a half years. There used to be a second church in the benefice, at the Church of the Epiphany in the ‘new’ town centre, but the congregation there was struggling, and Paul tells me it’s now been re-opened as a gym, with a chapel attached. He encourages me to go and have a look. I say I will. (Later on, I look up Paul’s name on the web and find an Anglia TV report from 2015 which runs the headline: ‘Cage fighting vicar hosts classes at former church…’  Well, as I say, Paul looks jolly fit – and I say this with respect from one former R.E. teacher to another – but the content of the report nowhere establishes that he actually does any cage-fighting himself on a regular basis. That’s the Press for you!)

 Corby has always had a rep as a rather physical place, from well before the arrival of the tartan army. Every twenty years there’s a tradition of holding a Pole Fair ( the next one is due in 2022). This once involved a lot of rumble-tumble misrule whereby pairs of marauding yokels trapped unsuspecting/naïve/ignorant inhabitants, then hoisted them up on a pole before dumping them in the stocks, to be freed on payment of a fine. So that’s a note to self: avoid Corby Village any time in 2022.

 The town centre is on a rise past Coronation Park from today’s angle of attack. My approach is disturbed by a gentleman with Tourette’s or some similar affliction who’s coming up rapidly behind me at the pace of an Olympic 20km race walker, yelling obscenities loudly and angrily, but alternating this with an impassioned request for help. I take cover by the corner of the Church of the Epiphany, and thinking of innocent bystanders stabbed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, let him pass.

 I explain myself to the chap on the front desk of the erstwhile church, and he leads me through the gym to the small chapel at its side. I pray, and look through the windows at what’s going on, amazed, and to be honest, aghast. I don’t do this stuff, never have, and even to be in the vicinity of that environment, I regress to the terrors of P.E. lessons in the gym at school. Press-ups? Can’t do those. Rope-climbing? Not a hope. Squat thrusts? You’ve got to be kidding me. At least everyone present today is obeying the notice on the walls which injuncts against toplessness. A splendid looking chap who looks as if he has his Harley parked outside is doing terrifying things to his chest with weights and pulleys. The sheer amount of tech inside the place is staggering, a vast array from the heavy metal design book dedicated to the tearing in half of dictionaries. Stop it, Vince.  Enough already of the purple, sub-Bill Bryson prose. This is an appropriate, clever initiative to show that Christians are concerned with the whole person, and that we’re there to meet people on their own patch, immersed in their own concerns, as Jesus would have done. Good stuff, a model, and food for thought.

 

Back outside I walk down to where I can see another church marked on the map. It’s a URC, and as I reach it the man with Tourette’s comes past me in the opposite direction, still effing and blinding. My heart is stirred. I wish I could reach out and heal him as if I was Jesus. But I’m not and I can’t. Who will help him?

 

The town centre in Corby is much, much smarter than I remember it. A couple of decades ago I stopped off to see what it was like, and came away saddened. Now, although some of the sixties’ shops are showing their age, the place is quite bright and perky. And for 20p the town centre toilets are the cleanest I’ve seen anywhere, full stop. Still no Scottish accents though. I think I notice that more people smoke in Corby than other places I go – casually on the street, outside banks, hanging out the doors of bars. I eat a sandwich in the sunshine and then move on up towards Occupation Road. There I find a Romanian deli and the Catholic church of Our Lady of Walsingham. I cross over past a water tower into an estate of workers’ houses from the thirties’ boomtown, brick built, careful and solid, reminding me of a mini Hampstead Garden Suburb. These were not erected, as one suspects a lot of comparable modern housing is, on a principle of ‘built-in obsolescence’: they were made to last.

 

 

 

 Further along I come to the copper-roofed church of St. Columba and the Northern Saints on Studfall Avenue, whose architect, it seems to me, was nodding at Sir Basil Spence’s design for Coventry Cathedral. St. John’s apart, many of the places of worship in Corby have something of a common style – and to my mind this is one of the more distinguished. The website looks promising too, showing apparent engagement in the Street Pastors scheme, as well as linking to the local food bank. It comes to me that for all their same-i-ness, at least the mid-20^th century developers allowed for churches in their plans. Fat chance these days.

 

                                                            Thoroughsale Wood

 

Over the road, the theme of today’s walk continues. The Development Corporation left Corby a legacy of good open spaces, and I enjoy the early summer greenery of Thoroughsale Wood very much. The path is beautifully maintained and buggyable, and even the undergrowth at its sides has been trimmed back and the grass cut, so that the walker feels safe in this remnant of ancient Rockingham Forest. Are those in charge of Corby simply better at running their town than, say Northampton’s leaders? Or do they have access to targeted regeneration funds? What has been the benefit to Corby to have been part of the EU, and, sobering thought, is it destined to return to decline over the next decade yet again, as presumably, we leave?

                                                       

                                                       St. Ninian's: Church of Scotland, Corby

On through the Beanfield area of town, past another Catholic church, some Baptists, another Wee Free hall, St Ninian’s Church of Scotland (Ah!) and St. Peter and St. Andrew’s C. of E.. St. Ninian’s gets the prize for the prettiest spire. The food bank is run from St. Peter and St. Andrew’s. I go round the back of the church hoping someone’s at home, so I can find out who uses their facilities, but I guess this is a programme which runs most sensibly in the mornings, so the door’s locked.

A little further on I take a breather on a pub bench. There’s a chap sitting on another seat ten metres away, leaning on a walking trolley. He hails me, and tells me that kitted out the way I am I shouldn’t be taking my ease: it’s not fair!  And lo and behold, he does this in an unmistakeably Scots accent. I laugh, and say I’ve been walking all day and he’s the first Scotsman I’ve met. Ay, he replies, a lot of people think that, but actually I come from Wales, near Merthyr Tydfil. This is Malcolm aka Budgie. His dad was a miner and as the coal industry declined – and perhaps for better wages and conditions – moved his family including the ten-year old Budgie to Corby. Budgie is 68 now. He has chronic asthma and his back is broken after life as a bin man. I guess he may have worked in steel in his early days. There have been other health problems along the way, but Budgie is determined to wring the most from every day. He is Corby personified, and I am moved.

Today and tomorrow they’re holding the 75^th anniversary commemoration of D-Day. It makes the tears flow to listen to some of the accounts of sacrifice made for the sake of freedom. Corby played an important part in the weeks after the initial invasion. The steel tubing produced here was crucial in allowing the rapid laying of communications under the Channel: the employment of what was at that time leading-edge technology in a moment of absolute crisis.

 How can it be that we are simultaneously celebrating this one-ness with Europe in being freed from the shackles of Fascism, while half our nation are gloating at the prospect of economic and political isolation? I despair. And if you are a Brexiteer, beg you to think again.

 

‘Here I stand with my own kin/At the end of everything/Finally the dream has gone/I’ve nothing left to hang upon…'

 Rory’s reasons* : 15.5 km. 4.25 hrs. 18 deg. Sun and cloud. No stiles, gates or bridges. Three C. of E. churches (four if you count Church of the Epiphany). Only the latter open. The genuine tartan-wearing, sporran-sporting Scotsperson elusive to the last.

 

·        Rory Stewart is an interesting oddball candidate for the Tory leadership: the only one to say the Emperor of No-deal Brexit has no clothes. I shouldn’t think he stands a cat in hell’s chance, but he almost makes me think I could vote Conservative…

 Father

I thank you again for the sacrifices
That have been made for me.
Help me never to undervalue
What it cost my parents
And grandparents
And those of their generation
Who died in the service of freedom.

I thank you for the times

When our country and peoples
Have acknowledged you
And striven to do your will
In public and private.
I pray that we
In our time
May find the courage and discernment
To promote your Kingdom
On our planet.
Amen.