Old Macdonald had a (wind) farm

Quinton churchyard is looking very Iris Murdoch this Monday morning: not a piece of rhyming slang - it's just wet, green, lush and mournful in the Scotch mist - an atmosphere which makes me think of her novels. I retrace my steps ( see post: Tuesday 19th July ) through the lovely Old Rectory garden past the pond and down the road opposite until I pass under the motorway before turning left towards Courteenhall up a narrower lane, which apart from indicating it's a dead end, also injuncts against 'grain lorries' and 'wedding traffic'. I've been to the tiny estate-dominated village just once previously and some decades ago when a young colleague of Sue's rented a house here. It's as I recall: a collection of workers' cottages in two rows, with a view of the big house through a tastefully arranged gap in the hedge, and the church of St. Peter and St. Paul on a little rise. One of the two churchwardens is Julia Wake. Julia is the lady of the house: her husband is Sir Hereward, and their family claim to be descendants of Hereward the Wake. You remember him: he stoutly resisted the Norman conquest up Peterborough way - how very fashionable! - and so has become the stuff of legend often retold. He even gets a mention in songs by Pink Floyd and Van der Graaf Generator. In the twentieth century, Joan Wake was a doughty and important local historian, to whom we owe the preservation of Delapre Abbey in Northampton. I'm thinking tweed skirts and brogues.

If one's wedding is to be 'exclusive' (strange phrase, if you think about it), it seems one can hire bits of the great house and stroll across to the church for the religious stuff at strict C. of E. rates, unless the humanist option is preferred in which case one could get spliced in one of a number of aristocratic bowers minus the energising walk, with the additional benefit of not sullying the bride's wedding train on the way over the dung-free field.

I mustn't be sour, however much fun it is. People should get married, and of course they should have a lovely time, and of course it's valuable income for the upkeep of an undoubtedly expensive estate, but hasn't the wedding business got a trifle out of hand, and over-indulgent, and all rather fin-de-siècle? The answer you're reaching for is...yes!

How distant tranquil (and dare I say it, slightly feudal) Courteenhall is from some other far reaches of the C. of E.. On a recent 'Pointless' appeared Fr. Robb and his wife. He's vicar at Holy Nativity church in Mixenden, Yorkshire, where once a month there's a Rock Mass. Fr. Robb carries a fair old amount of steel embroidery around his face and has long hair reminiscent of Hawkwind c. 1970. I quote from the HN website: 'The Rock Mass is a monthly service for people who love it loud...At a typical service you can expect to be singing songs you're more likely to hear on the Kerrang channel or Planet Rock Radio. As we come together around God's table to meet Him in bread and wine, there are smoke and lights, processions, incense - everything you need to give the authenticity of stadium rock...'

We the church are truly all things: we are all people everywhere.

A bridle way (not a bridal way!) curves up from the village to a flat and open plain. To my left is the wind farm which is now so visible from the M1, and to my right is the large and growing settlement of Roade. The railway bisects the village, trains whistling through to Manchester, Liverpool and Scotland in a deep nineteenth-century cutting which is also a SSSI. I spot that it's 'drop-in' morning at St. Mary's church, so I do. Karen and Pauline serve me coffee and lemon cake, and I chat to various jolly people. Peter is a sprightly chap in his early seventies who explains what's going on. To each 'drop-in' are invited friendly agencies who may be of help to villagers. The CAB have been recently: advice has been dispensed regarding switching fuel bills to lower tariffs from different suppliers and the completion of tax returns. Today Vivienne is representing the local surgery and making sure health support is available and understood to/by those who need it. Another Karen is talking about the 'School of Life' which brings young and old together around the county to swap skills and encourage each other. What good initiatives! Well done, St. Mary's!

Inside the nicely furnished church, one looks down a tunnel through the mid-placed bell tower to a distant high altar: it's a mini-cathedral but with the bells where the 'crossing' might be. The parish style seems to be thoughtfully evangelical. I notice the name of Will Adams cropping up among the clergy, and remember that he was one-time head at Roade comprehensive school, now re-named 'The Elizabeth Woodville School' after the wife of Edward IV. The two of them memorably courted beside an oak tree not far away in the Tove valley.

I stride away across the fields to meet the line of the canal mid-way between Blisworth and Stoke Bruerne. It's underneath me in its famous tunnel right now: a triumph of industrial-age engineering. I pick up 'Boathorse Road' and walk down through the woodland to where the waterway emerges by Bob Nightingale's smithy, a few hundred metres from the village of Stoke Bruerne. Bob is walking up the towpath in his leathers and I say hello. This is tourist Northamptonshire, with celebrated pubs and gardens, a tea-room (much improved!) and lots of information about canal-building. The trick the village has managed is to retain its dignity: there's not a hint of 'kiss-me-quick'. This coming weekend is 'Stoke Bruerne at War' - not internecine disputes in the Parish Council - but a remembrance of the village in WW2/1. The moorings have been allocated in advance, there's a campsite in a field with the first Union flags appearing above VW hippie-vans. I imagine a good time will be had by all, only slightly incommoded by troublesome roadworks on the A508 to put in new drains. I walk up the hill to another St. Mary's, and marvel at the sheer number of dedications to her in this part of the world: I'd never thought of Northamptonshire as a Virgin-cult centre, but maybe it was...or maybe the whole of England was, and I'm just becoming aware of it.

In theory the village of Ashton is very close by, but I miss my path, and it takes me longer to finally arrive by the Mens Own rugby club on the village limits than I'd hoped. I've been to Stoke Bruerne many times, but Ashton only rarely and never stopping to look, although it crops up in my Civil War story about Grafton Regis. It's the first day of the autumn term, and in the church school the kids are having a great time playing catch with their P.E. teacher. (Now don't be silly: they're throwing a ball, not her!) Beside the playground is the little church of St. Michael's, which I regret I can't visit more fully - it's closed of course. I understand how it is. As I passed I saw that someone had pinched the village sign so that the metal surrounds were left standing high like a Barbara Hepworth sculpture, as it were, drawing attention to the space beyond. As the government has recently pointed out, the security of our churches is an issue in so many ways. How do the evangelical and catholic wings of the church think about the spaces in which we worship? Do they feel differently about the sense of the numinous to be found there? Do they also feel differently about 'community'? How can these things be brought together?

Onwards and slightly upwards to Hartwell across fields which have been ploughed. The drizzle has relented, and the soil is still friable and unclaggy, so it's not too much of a nuisance. I always confuse Hartwell and Hanslope. Hanslope has a marvellous spire with flying buttresses and is visible for miles. I shan't be visiting it because it's out-of-diocese. Hartwell's St. John the Baptist is nineteenth century and low-slung, of no great architectural merit but sitting right in the centre of the village. I take the weight off my feet in the churchyard while Hartwell sprawls around me. It stands on the southern edge of Salcey Forest and like Piddington somehow feels like a woodman's town: I suppose the name helps the suggestion along.

The pocket park is having its annual big mow. I pass it and walk on up the bridleway with the wind farm now dominating the skyline to my right. There's a slight whine from the turbines if you're downwind, but otherwise they wheel away silently. Underneath them are sausage rolls of hay, newly harvested, so old farming and new have been successfully combined. Given the density at which they appear in the local countryside round here i.e. there aren't too many of them, personally I don't mind the new generation of windmills. I worry more about the solar farms, from the point of view that some sneaky government may one day deem them to be 'brown-field sites' and slacken planning regulations to allow building on land which otherwise would never have been thought appropriate.

Nevertheless, the windmills evoke for me images which aren't entirely comfortable. When I was small, a young and beautiful Susan Hampshire acted the humanoid face of aliens in the TV series 'Andromeda'. The reality behind the aliens was eventually revealed to be a far less benign and blankly-staring set of massive proto-computer pods.  And in Bill Bryden and Tony Harrison's game-changing National Theatre trilogy of Mystery Plays, the final 'Judgement' play had as its startling centrepiece a steely-lit whirligig, portraying perhaps the circularity of all things, or an alternative perspective of time, or a giddying crucifix. All of this I sense in the powerful machines turning above my head, a rival narrative to the towers and spires of our lovely churches.

Stats man: 24 km (seems to be my distance!). 7.5 hours. Max 22 degrees. Drizzle and cloud. One postman (not knocking twice, but seen twice in two different villages). Two pieces of cake. One yaffle. Three mini-goats, charming. One parrot in a house in Ashton, whistling loudly.

Lord,
I thank you for the variety of your church.
For Drop Ins
And complines
For the Mothers Union
And breakfast clubs
For church choirs
And Rides and Strides
For village shows
And heavy metal bishops
For fetes and carnivals
And worker priests
For eucharists
And Pentecostal hands
For all the countless creative ways
Your people serve and worship you
And try to explain
What faith and community mean.

Sometimes I feel bathed
In the warmth of loving welcome
And the next moment I am
Alienated,
Paranoid,
Even within the walls of the sanctuary.
O Lord, bless us all
As we lead your people in worship.
Grant that what we say and what we sing
With our lips
We may believe in our hearts
And that what we believe in our hearts
May show in our lives.
Amen.

Carmageddon Monday

Two weeks' worth of morning service readings about the Sabbath during the middle of August, the press full of stories about record numbers of cars on the roads over the Bank Holiday, and no one to be seen during a day's walking on B.H. Monday. Excuse me for sounding like a stock character late 60s hippie but 'Hey man, like, what's goin' on?'

I just about remember a stricter Sunday observance, or the last traces of it, from a 50s childhood. Some Sundays were chock full of church even in the mid-1960s. It was still possible for Dad as 'Sunday School Superintendent' (there's a title you don't hear anymore) to arrive in Northumberland Heath at 10 o'clock to prepare for 'Junior Church' and for us to be back home at 12.45. Lunch would be leaping out of the oven on return and would be served, eaten and washed up by just after two so there was time to drive the four miles back to church to set up for the Sunday School teachers' training session which would last until four. Tea would be taken at home and a further journey made to Erith for the 6.30 evening service which would generally finish by 7.30 unless there was Holy Communion. But the cracks had begun to show. No one really wanted to show up for the afternoon sessions, and soon no one wanted to be at both the morning and afternoon services either. Televised cricket crept into the Sunday afternoon schedules (Let's hear it for 'The International Cavaliers'!). Down our way, if people couldn't actually afford to go off to the coast, they would drive up to Dartford Heath of a summer Sunday afternoon to watch other folks on their way there or back. Dad permitted himself a little light gardening if he wasn't required on duty (mowing the lawns = OK: laying paving stones = not OK). We listened to 'Round the Horne' on the Light Programme as we ate our lunchtime braised steak and rice pudding (though I'm sure my mum didn't get the Julian and Sandy jokes!). And soon it was time for Mary Whitehouse and 'The Permissive Society'.

Later on, when Sue and I fetched up in Northampton, an enthusiastic URC minister suggested to his congregation, including us, that it would be marvellous if we could spend all Sunday worshipping the Lord together. Well, as a fully paid-up introvert, not so much!  Was there a confusion of quality with quantity here - as well as a lack of understanding about personality types? And if the answer is that such a thing may prefigure our future in heaven, well I respectfully hope there's something perfectedly practical for me to do when and if I get there, referencing the stuff I've been happily engaged on down here. With perhaps the occasional game of cricket thrown in...

I only mention  this because Sunday observance now has a different context to that of 1960, let alone 1860 or 60 A.D.. And landing it on Anglican clergy the length of the land to preach about the issues that surround Sabbath-keeping in the height of an English summer when everyone seems to have gone to the moon is weird. But lest I forget, one of the ways in which our society's divided is between those who have tons of discretionary time, like me, and those who have none at all, who don't like what they have to do to earn their daily bread, and whose employers would be glad to take from them even the little discretion they have, cf. zero hours contracts.

Although there seems to be a lot of traffic wending its way through the narrow streets of the 'green-hilled village' of Grendon, there's no one about in the countryside at 10 in the morning. It's still and dull, making the newly haircut fields look spectacularly golden in the way that the sand does at Padstow on a gloomy day. On the path to Bozeat though, I have some animal company. I perforce have to make friends with a horse whose field I'm invading: she's curious about the contents of my backpack. And apart from the usual sheep and cattle, there are some alpacas, which raise their snooty heads briefly before deciding grass is more interesting than me.

I call the village 'Booze-i-ert', but no one's very sure where the name comes from. Perhaps it's a variation on the 'bosky' woodland thing, perhaps a reference to the local springs (beau-jet!). It was a shoe town in the nineteenth century, and a seat in the churchyard is dedicated to a member of the Drage family: an important name in local shoe-making. If you bought 'Gola' trainers in the 1970s they were probably made here. I remember briefly working with a bass guitarist who was a 'clicker' in the Bozeat factory. The sound of his bass was pretty clicky too, but it was all the rage then, that Mark King slapping stuff. St. Mary's church is part of the Wollaston benefice: Alpha courses and Bear Grylls to the fore, this year's Christian celebrity of choice. Pray for him. It's a difficult path to tread. I note with approval that the vicarage, which is right by the church gate, has an absolute pile of garden furniture: this is a clergy house which clearly works hard at being for the benefit of the parish. But does the curate who lives there ever get any peace? What about his/her Sabbath rest of Galilee?

The sun comes out. Just across the fields on my way out of town I cross a road where a Subaru estate has come to a dusty halt. In the front are two dodgy blokes, and in the back some lads and more dogs than are feasible for the confined space. I look at them. They look at me, and then roar off, perhaps worried that I've rumbled the nefarious purposes to which they were about to devote their Bank Holiday. Hare coursing? I don't know, but as Laurie Lee once remarked, where the roads are bad all kinds of strange things happen in the deep country.

The fields climb gently away to a barely discernible ridge which is marked by the route of the Three Shires Way and the county boundary with Bedfordshire. A couple of right-angle turns later and I'm following the line of the Roman road which heads south-north towards Irchester. For a mile or two it's a very superior green lane. Traffic isn't permitted between October and April and unlike some byways of its ilk, the path is quite unchurned and puddle-free, sometimes standing a little above the fields  - so I presume that somewhere underneath it there remains a foundation of Roman hardcore. It's an evocative walk in imaginative company with the Roman squaddies who once made their way towards the comparative luxury of whatever Irchester was called in those days, backs sore and lower limbs aching, anticipating a nice bath and a scrape with a strigil.

I make an exception to My Rule and turn off into Bedfordshire to the hamlet of Farndish, the fern covered pasture. There are some nice ancient houses here, and a small church dedicated to St. Michael, now in the care of the Conservation Trust, but unlike Preston Deanery which it resembles in size, sadly it's not open. I eat a sandwich sitting on a low tombstone, and for my impiety am bitten on the lower lip by an ant. For twenty minutes or so it's surprisingly painful. Bear Grylls would have shrugged it off. Walking back through the village I pass some farm buildings which host a few small businesses, amongst them 'Muddy Matches' which as I guess, turns out to be a dating agency for farmers. Its website boasts of a number of happily consummated relationships, but all the quotes are from women...

The walk up to Wollaston is beside a grass airstrip. A light plane has just landed, and has taxi-ed over to the farm buildings. It's a Jodel D117, which of course I didn't know until I looked it up, and it turns out to have had a chequered history. On one occasion the owner managed to run it into the hedge by the road on the far side. Whether he was or wasn't inside it I'm unclear. Some nonsense about hand-turning the propeller while the engine was fired up. He seems to have tried a sort of Le Mans style getaway which didn't quite come off. Another time G-ATIZ hit a Piper Cherokee when landing in Leicester. Is this amount of excitement common for your average single-seat plane? Only asking, but maybe think twice if you get offered a quick lift out of Wollaston any time soon.

Wollaston sits on a south-west facing slope attractive enough to the Romans that they planted vineyards here. It was a shoe town too, though not back then, home to the world-famous Doc Martens brand until manufacturing costs took Mr. Griggs off to China. But there's still an outlet shop, and the name Airware is plastered across various billboards. If Doc Martens has gone, the factory of Scott Bader is still a major presence in the small town - an interesting company whose business is chemicals but whose governance is founded around a Commonwealth. St. Mary's, the imposing church is shut, the pub opposite is shut, the museum is shut, but the pocket park is open and I sit for a few minutes, hot and increasingly thirsty. I had a cold virus last week, and all walkers please note, like all athletes expect that in these circumstances your endurance is likely to be factored down by, say, 25%? I'm struggling today.

I wander down to the attractive cricket ground by the A509, but am annoyed that it takes me a while to find my way out over the road and up the hill to Strixton, a single dead-end street mini-village with the lovely little church of St. Rumwald on guard at its entrance. Usually saints with out-of-the-ordinary names come from Bithynia or Dagestan but Rumwald is almost home-grown: allegedly he's buried in Buckingham. He's also quite annoying and improbable: straight from his mother's womb he was preaching sermons of staggering right-on-ness, and having preached them, he promptly went straight to heaven without passing go. In the nineteenth post-Darwinian century an attempt was made to change the dedication of the Strixton church to St. John the Baptist. As one authority says 'the cult of St. Rumwald has been remarkably persistent'. But let's not be too snippy. We could do worse than dedicate our church to a baby, couldn't we, for who hasn't been inspired by the innocence and trust of new human life?

Stats man: 19 km. 5.5 hours. 22 degrees C, but feeling hotter. Four churches (one out-of-diocese). Twelve alpacas in two groups. Butterflies (mostly white or tortoiseshell): quantity. Only one pair of other walkers! One light aeroplane, slightly dented.

Father God
I'm so good at taking holidays.
As hard as I try to practise Your presence;
to tune in to the beat of Your overshadowing wings,
the world's churn and chatter cancels their rule and rhythm.
Days pass, and I realise
I've known only my own will,
my own thoughts,
my own desires.
While I work, and enjoy my leisure,
in day and night dreams,
through pain and pleasure,
I turn to You again
and praise Your name.
Semper peccator.
Semper penitens.
Semper iustus.
You are my saviour
and I praise Your name.
Amen.

Liminal

It seems an inconvenience, but for today's walk the best sequence of churches suggests I should retrace my steps from Earls Barton to Castle Ashby. But of course, walking in reverse is really a whole new deal. There's the footpath which I missed ten days ago (it turns out the finger post was shrouded in ivy and hidden in a hedge).  Ooh, I'd never noticed that barn - the farm is still pretty much inside the boundaries of the town, isn't it? How lovely this green lane is...(which I'd not really appreciated as I toiled up it at the wrong end of 20k last week). How striking Whiston church is from this side of the valley! How completely the old Northampton to Wellingborough railway line has vanished from the landscape just the other side of the river!

Just past Whiston a combine is whirring away in its own little dust-cloud harvesting the wheat fields, and so I'm lucky enough to enjoy that singular late-summer pleasure as the aroma of nut-toasty cut corn fills the air all the way to Castle Ashby. A tractor pulling a lorry-load of grain passes me on the incline up to the neglected village pub, 'The Falcon'. I've known clergy and others who've muttered about the irrelevance of the traditional harvest celebration because they think their churches are full of supermarket-besotted townies who don't get it. Not me, but then I'm just a 'John Barleycorn' singing folkie.

The first part of the walk gives me a chance to recover. I woke up this morning in the grip of a powerful dream in which I was seethingly angry with everyone - including my lovely family and friends. Yet in real life the previous night we'd come back from a great few days away with excellent food, company and activity. My first reaction on waking to the tightness of chest and teeth-clenching anxiety is a rather shocked 'This won't do at all!', but just as if I'd experienced the anger in my waking state, I find it's impossible to shake off the emotion just by telling myself off. It's perhaps a cliché but this parallel life of dreaming and waking, each as real as the other at the experienced moment, still puzzles (and sometimes alarms) me. How easily we slip from the one to the other. The frightening thought remains, 'How much am I influenced in wakefulness by the dreams I can't control?' And is this true for everyone?

I'm further repaired by coffee and lemon drizzle in the Buttery of Castle Ashby's Shopping Yard. Next door I talk to Janice in her 'Limeblue' emporium. She's been there 23 years and business is still good, if seasonal. She tells me 'The Falcon' is on the Compton Estate's list of things to do. I say how pleased I am about that, and that given how the gardens of the big house have been restored with energy, skill and intelligence, I'm sure the same will be true of the pub/restaurant. Sue and I have visited the place on and off for forty years - it has great character and charm - but apparently the inside's in a poor state. It'll make a difference to the footfall in Janice's shop if they can get it up and running again.

The lane through the village is called 'Compton Road', and my instinctive reaction is to harrumph. We all know that the lordly family own the whole jolly show, so why the need for yet one more namecheck? But when I look on the War Memorial at the names of those who died in the First War, I see amongst the four or five mentioned a young Lieutenant Compton, and my attitude softens. I may think of the road as a tribute to him from now on. There are two 'Private Ashby's on the list of the dead too. Coincidence?

Although there aren't any waymarks to say so, the path from Chadstone to Yardley Hastings is part of the 'Round Northampton Footpath'. The way across the fields between the crops is very dry now, and there are long cracks in the earth where the plates of soil have separated so I have to watch where I put my Merrelled feet. I'm wearing shorts, as I often do, and as I cross the long grass either side of the Castle Ashby drive I wonder idly about the risks of the tick-borne Lyme's Disease. The partner of a one-time colleague became infected - with disastrous results for his long-term health. Maybe I should be more careful with covering my legs.

A flowery little lane brings me into Yardley Hastings by the tradesmen's entrance. In the churchyard of St. Andrew's church I meet Alan. He lives in Rushden but many of his family are buried here. He hasn't come dressed to tend the graves so I think he's visiting just to be in the presence of those he loves. He's very fond of his native county. I say I'm an incomer of forty years, but I am too. As I explain what I'm doing, I'm too eager to say that I'll mention him in the blog: he becomes defensive as he says 'I don't have anything to do with social media', but we part in friendly fashion.

Easton Maudit is a couple of miles away by a path that is bosky at first, but then follows a stream through fields which climb a little to a view looking all the way back to the great house at Castle Ashby. There was a manor house in Easton Maudit once, but the Comptons pulled it down. In fact the village is only half what it once was. As I walk towards the buttressed spire of St. Peter and St. Paul's, I can see lumps and bumps in the west field, with the suspicion of a hollow way between them. The back lane survived until 1840 or so. What caused the depopulation? The village isn't so far from the junction of Roman roads near Irchester, and there's a lot of ancient history here, including a villa. Later I learn that the church-going actor Derek Nimmo lived in Easton Maudit and is buried in the churchyard. Apart from 'Just a Minute' I suppose Derek is best remembered  for a very Anglican role in the 70's TV series 'All Gas and Gaiters' as Noote the Bishop's Chaplain, playing opposite William Mervyn, John Barron and Robertson Hare. Compare and contrast to Tom Hollander's more recent 'Rev'. Which do you think most closely matches the clergy image held by the man/woman in the street? And do we care? As '1066 and all that' has it, 'Write on both sides of the paper at once'! And when will someone write a series about a church congregation without the main focus being on those in possession of dog-collars?

As I continue to Grendon, the one surviving Lancaster bomber drones past me on its way back home to RAF Coningsby, presumably after some summer show. Seeing it flying alone over the fields is peculiarly poignant: the landscape just here wouldn't have looked a lot different in 1943. St. Mary's, Grendon is open. I rest my wearying legs inside and read Psalm 24 out loud: 'The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof...'. When I was in my last year of teaching and feeling the pressure, I used to occasionally escape at lunchtime for a (very) swift transgressive half of well-brewed fullness in the Grendon pub. And at about the same time, we occasionally came with the young people of Abington Avenue URC to the Hall for weekend retreats. We never once went near St. Mary's, which in retrospect seems a bit strange and unfriendly.

And now I get lost. The Nene valley is broadening at this point, and probably because a lot of gravel has been extracted, ancient paths have been diverted or dug up. After a bit of wandering across the first ploughed fields of autumn, I get my compass out and exit a scrappy field system roughly where I intend, by the Summer Leys Country Park, ignoring the pleading looks of thirsty sheep. For the first time since beginning this enterprise, I have to walk along a really hazardous road: it's the cut-through from Wollaston to Earls Barton, and the rush hour is just beginning, but as I turn off onto the Nene Way, Hardwater Mill is as beautiful as ever, one of the most picturesque spots on the Nene, and 20,000 years ago home to at least two woolly mammoths. Eventually I drag myself up the hill away from the river towards Dowthorpe End in Earls Barton, and on to All Saints church with its wonderful distinctive mortared and carved tower, hard by the bailey of a now vanished castle which stood in puzzling, apparently symbiotic relationship with the ancient place of worship, grander than anything in medieval Northampton.

On its bury, the church is both separate from the little old shoe town, yet entirely dominating. Walking the perimeter of the motte, I'm in liminal space, caught up between the present time and that of our Saxon forebears. As was Alan, standing among the graves at Yardley Hastings. As maybe was I, waking in confusion this morning. There are times when the new physics with its talk of multiverses and the New Testament with its perspective of 'looking through a glass darkly' seem to hint at the same wider reality.

Stats man: 24km: 7.5 hrs: 5 churches (two open, one previously visited). One barn owl, disturbed. Two crested grebes. Ten cyclists, three hellos. One country bus, cautious. 18 degrees. Occasional breeze, betokening autumn. Blackberries still mostly green and small.

Dear Lord and Father

I can do absolutely nothing
About #Donald Trump
Or #TheLabourParty
Or even #TeamGB.
In fact the sheer number of things and people I cannot fix
Is utterly overwhelming
And dismaying.
I give in.
I submit.
I put all matters great and small
Into your hands
Together with my family and friends
And commit them to your grace
Which is sufficient
For all our needs.
Amen.

Down with Sergei and the Kool Kats

'On the road again' after the heat of last week and a tummy bug, although unlike Willie Nelson there's no band of jolly vagabonds to enliven the journey, even if 'the life I love' is indeed partly 'making music with my friends'. Yes, I know, that's the second country music reference in three posts. Enough already.

Ecton's a busy little village. The council tip is down towards the Nene, on the right after the bend, and the A45's noise is intrusive when the wind's from the south or the west. I walk down the single long main street past John Palmer's 18thC school and the little Free Chapel where Stephen Meakins used to host lovely and evocative Christmas concerts with the Laurence Lloyd Singers, later The Northampton Chamber Choir. I walk up the path following the signs to 'The Village Hall and Ecton Cricket Club'. I find the hall, and am eyed suspiciously by a lady coming out of the Play Group, but there's only a rough field where I think I once played cricket against the village team. I remember scoring a forty-odd that was worth at least half as much again. An absolutely clubbed shot along the ground into the lush grass would stop dead after about thirty yards. One run instead of four.

Ironically, because of the proximity of the council refuse facility, there's a lot of fly-tipping as the lane nears the A45, including what looks like a load of old asbestos. Watched by a curious buzzard, I climb over another pile of dumped rubbish and follow the old way across the flood plain towards the river. On the far bank above the mill is the church of St. Peter, Cogenhoe, pronounced 'Cook-know' to avoid betraying your non-local origins, or if you want to be really Old Skool, 'Cook-nuh'.

Outside the church someone is preparing to cut the grass. It's Eddie Smith, the vicar. He has responsibility for four churches in his benefice, and since two of them are Little and Great Houghton he's already had a card from me, so he knows the story. He asks me if I'd like to look inside St. Peter's. Of course I say yes please, and we chat briefly while he dismantles a projector screen left from yesterday's service. The church is light and airy, helped by the pale wood and pinky upholstery of the semicircles of chairs. Looking back from the altar, the bell tower is a high open inspiration. We agree that if the Puritans were good for anything it was leaving us whitewashed walls in this kind of building. Eddie isn't keen on what the Victorians bequeathed us in terms of the conventions of church architecture. I suppose I think of Liverpool's Anglican cathedral when he says that. Maybe Guildford too. But back to the last but one post: how do you signpost 'Hello we're Christians. Please come inside and see what we're doing'? The Pokémon Go craze is bringing mostly young people to look at the Weston Favell church, and apparently to Peterborough Cathedral too, but only because they're instantly recognisable. It's another matter entirely of course, what we should do with this unexpected windfall of interest.

I mention to Eddie that Sue and I had worshipped at the Cathedral yesterday, and had been gobsmacked to trip over the immediate consequences of a financial crisis there. Two statements were read: one from Charles Taylor, the Dean, announcing his resignation, and the other from the Bishop, saying that he was going to make a Visitation, and would reserve to himself the powers thereby entailed. We don't go to our diocesan Mother Church very often, but I shall miss the Dean's humour. Occasionally he could get it very wrong, but he had an entertaining way with the Gospel.

Down the accurately named 'Short Lane' is Cogenhoe's Pocket Park. The pond has been deepened and we are advised by a notice not to fall in. I first came across the little park many years ago when the rather sad headteacher of the school at which I then taught conceived the notion that the entire school should go on a ramble at the dog-end of the summer term. Amid many grumbles from the staff as well as the kids we all set off from the Billing Road on a sticky July day and made it as far as the fields at the back of Cogenhoe and the set of stone steps in the wood known as 'Jacob's Ladder' to the locals. It was not an experiment that was ever repeated.

On the way up to Brafield I skirt some wheat fields, now yellow with a tinge of green around their fringes. There seem to be a great  number of dog-walkers in Brafield. All the dogs are small and all are friendly. Their humans and I share that this is a perfect day for a stroll - sunny, dry, but not too warm. So numerous are the pooches, I wonder if this is a sort of Crufts on the move, but no, this is Monday morning and the dogs and owners are just working off the weekend's excess. St. Laurence's in the Lower End of the village is shut, so after a pause I head off to Denton across more fields of wheat, into which the good farmers have cut appropriate swathes to clearly mark the paths.

Approaching Denton from this side, you can just see the church tower nestled down in the dip where most of the village lies. I'm really hoping it will be open, because I know that it's filled with murals by the celebrated Northampton artist Henry Bird. The safety curtain at the Royal Theatre is perhaps his best known public work, shining out in amused fashion at ice-cream guzzlers and coffee slurpers during the intervals. I've seen the murals here once before, when I was inveigled into the annual Historic Churches Bike Ride, but that was before I started to take anything of an interest in the visual arts. I'm anticipating that I'll appreciate them differently and better now. But disappointment awaits. St. Margaret's of Antioch's is shut too, so I shall have to come back another time.

And who, you may be asking, was St. Margaret of Antioch? (No, I didn't know either!) Well, if she existed at all - at least one fifth century pope thought she was apocryphal - she died in 304 after persecution in her native Turkey. She's considered by some to be the patron saint of pregnancy. The best story about her is that she was swallowed by an angry Satan who came to her in the form of a dragon. The cross she was wearing irritated the dragon's stomach, so Margaret was spat out. In the Orthodox churches she's St. Marina, and there are 250 churches dedicated to her in the UK, including most famously, St. Margaret's Westminster.

I love the middle of Denton, and the best place to see it is from the deck of the Red Lion pub, which serves Luscombe's delicious ginger beer. As I sit and watch the world go by, four young women cheerfully carry enormous packs up the Northampton road, presumably on a D of E gold expedition. Either that, or they're masochists.

Via the 'Paradise Ponds' of the hamlet of Chadstone (presumably ancient fishponds serving a long-extinct monastic foundation, or perhaps the big house itself) I walk on past the long view of Castle Ashby and up the drive to its tea-room. We're season ticket holders here, and regard it as our other back garden, with an army of people to keep the plants and arboretum in perfect order, and meerkats to talk to during the summer. In winter the 'children's farm' (who are they kidding?) is closed, and we have to shout to the meerkats from a distance to reassure them all is well with the outside world.

As Sue discovered when she organised a Mothers Union outing to the tea-room earlier in the year, there are wrinkles about freedom of access around Castle Ashby. If you pay the appropriate fee you can get to the gardens and the church of St. Mary Magdalene from the tea-room. If you want to get to the church from the village side and without paying, it appears that with a bit of 'brass neck' you can walk across the façade of the house to do so - as the parishioners presumably do. But if you're a 'forriner' you may have to prove your holy intent to the house security staff, particularly if you're infirm enough to need vehicular assistance - Lord Northampton doesn't like anyone spoiling his view. Though, as Sue has proved, a small coach can make it to the church's car park with -ooh - at least a millimetre's clearance on either side.

The ecclesiastical geography around Castle Ashby explains too well for whom the church here once existed, and it never was for the working people or even the clergy. At Chadstone there's a large Old Rectory, but no church. Was there ever one there? Or has it been 'disappeared'? On holiday a couple of years ago near Alnwick in the North East, we stayed in a house whose owner had once arranged for a whole village to be moved lock, stock and fishing tackle to ease the building of his stately pile. There are examples of such clearances in Northamptonshire too. On the plus side, there's sufficient detritus on the floor of St. Mary Magdalene's to suggest that some of the many tourist visitors to the house make it inside the church. It's much better cared-for now than it used to be. It feels welcoming and friendly in the sunshine.

A late 19thC cleric was sadly killed in a bicycle accident on the road from Castle Ashby to Whiston in the course of his duties. I negotiate the road safely, although the rise of the wold on the approach to the church of St. Mary the Virgin turns out to be more substantial on foot than it is from the insulated womb of the German Car. A path veers away from the road towards the east wall of the church grounds. There I meet Nina with her children and a friend as they pick their way round the edge of a field of maturing (decaying!) rapeseed, and once we're over the stile and in the churchyard, I meet Nina's mum, Jean, who's the churchwarden at the elegant Whiston church (1534). Jean knew lovely Olive Thompson, one of our elderly parishioners in Weston Favell, who died earlier in the year. They'd volunteered together at the Cynthia Spencer Hospice. We agree that Olive was one of the sweetest and twinkliest people we'd ever met, and that we miss her very much.

Jean welcomes me into the church before leaving to spend time with her family. It's a place of many carvings and gargoyles, including the cat emblem of the Catesby family who originally endowed it. The Catesbys came in many varieties, and there'll be different tales to tell of the branch of the family which lived out west at Ashby St. Ledgers. But this eastern lot were Puritans and during the 17thC Whiston was probably something of a fire and brimstone place. The pews are wonderfully aged, although I'm not sure about their comfort-rating were the preaching to become prolix.

Some years ago down in the little village I saw the only adder I've ever encountered in Northamptonshire. It was dead, mind you, in fact rather rolled flat, but nevertheless definitely an adder, and I'm fairly sure it hadn't been placed there as a wind-up - unlike the tarantula I once found sitting on the counter of the now defunct Midland Bank in the Wellingborough Road. Gave me a bit of a shock though. And the bank clerk.

At this point I should probably have done the obvious thing and walked the shorter way back to Ecton. Instead I made foolish tracks towards Earls Barton, hedging my bets as to whether I'd finish the day with a visit to the great Anglo-Saxon church there, and thinking that I'd easily find the entrance to the field path that runs parallel to the main road back to Ecton. But energy ran out, so I decided to leave EB for another day. Then, without the relevant OS Explorer, I managed to miss the path. So the day ended with a long, hot and dusty trek beside the traffic. I'm slowly learning to find merit in any walk, but truthfully there wasn't much in this section, except the company of a couple of red kites. I've seen one go for a chicken before now. Sometime soon there'll be a silly season tabloid story about an attack on a human (as a variation on the usual gull meme). Not for this reason, but it was a relief to reach Ecton church and the car.

Stats man:  14 miles. 7.5 hrs. 21 degrees: beautiful walking weather. One great pub discovery. Three open churches (one assisted: thank you Eddie!) One church clock stuck on  mid-day. Lots of small dogs. Three red kites (when will they reach Weston Favell?).

Great Father of us all
Jesus commanded us to
'Judge not, lest we be judged'.
Sometimes I wonder then how
I can say anything at all?
Isn't all life judging?
When I'm driving
I need to assess
Whether the bloke in that car
Is off his head.
When I'm walking in the city
I need to be aware
Of who's walking too close behind me.
When I'm having breakfast
In Carluccio's
These days I'm waiting
For a shout of 'Allahu Akhbar'
And wondering exactly how
To hit the floor
When the moment comes.
So how do I not judge?
Give me grace, Father
To notice and not to criticise:
To see with discernment
And not routinely think ill of others:
To entertain by my words
But to do it in kindly fashion:
In fact to be a bit more like Olive.
I ask it in Jesus' name.
Amen.

Hello! Who am I? What am I doing here?

Just to recap. My name's Vince Cross, and I'm doing a series of circular walks visiting every Anglican church in Peterborough diocese - at a rate of one walk every ten days so far. I'm about fifty churches into the adventure now (only about 350 to go!), and to read from the beginning, you'll have to scroll down to the bottom and look at each post in turn. Or if you're the kind of person who can cope with working in reverse, you can start here, challenge time's arrow and feel as if you're getting younger page by page.

My Main (and Only) Rule is that each walk has to start and finish somewhere on a previously described circle. Easier than being a Benedictine.

Each incumbent gets a card (probably courtesy of the Royal Mail) to say that I've been wandering around her/his churchyard or church, and that I've prayed for them and the congregation in that place. This is the front of the card they receive: it's a picture I took a few years ago in Lodz. The symbolism seemed to be right.

The purpose is to celebrate our oneness as Christians from different traditions, to say we are more joined than separated.

The blog is also something of an urban/pastoral idyll - a celebration of an English county at this time: the kind of thing a less grumpy Wainwright might have written if he'd liked walking on the flat.

Each post finishes with a prayer reflecting what I felt that day.

If you want to, please write to me at vincecrossmusic@gmail.com

Or if you want to know more about what I do, please visit www.vincecross.co.uk

If you want to use any of the material from this blog, I expect I'll be delighted. But just in case, please check with me first, as of course you would.

Joy in heaven

                                       
                                         A distant view of Piddington.


I pick my way through domestic Wootton in the direction of Grange Park. A neglected strip of woodland divides the two housing districts. In an untidy meadow I skirt a collection of travellers' horses. I'm always distrustful, particularly when like these they're untethered and there are foals, but this lot have their minds on a grassy breakfast and munch on, heads down.

On the other side of the woodland I'm staggered again by the sheer number of houses around me and their apparent lack of coherent aesthetic. I can sometimes see what the architect might have had in mind - an allusion to vernacular Northants three-storey cottages perhaps - but here, viewed from below by the stream, the effect is monumental, more Glasgow than Northampton. The mass of housing is so great that from a parish point of view and with August coming up fast, the Biblical expression about the 'fields being white unto harvest' springs to mind...which is what Grange Park Church is there to address from its 'Kairos Centre'. Since it's Monday morning, the coffee shop is open. Aneta serves me a Kit-Kat and a mug's worth. I chat to Jane and Lester. GPC is a 'fresh expression' running in tandem with the Baptists. (I remember that friends Kathy and Alan Patterson must be involved.) There's a lot of messy church being done: although a retirement village has opened close by, much of the local demographic is young. The vicar, Charlie Nobbs, has been at GPC for thirteen years but is moving off to a diocesan role down the Bedford Road at Bouverie Court, using his experience to foster other pioneering church projects. He's just been to the dentist round the corner (where the Crosses also go to see the excellent Mr Ghaffar) and has had some dismal news about a wisdom tooth. We chat. I put my foot in it by muddling up people we both know well and feel foolish. There's nothing so humbling as being dogmatically wrong. He doesn't hold a grudge and helps me plan my route out of the urban maze.

It's wonderful and important that people work with dedication bringing the Gospel to the attention of those living in places like Grange Park. But, I think to myself, I can readily identify the local school, and the local pub, and the local shops. How do I immediately know where the Christians are? Good publicity and visibly Christian lives are essential, but the Church needs help presenting itself to the passing community. I think we need recognisable buildings, and inside these buildings, helpful focuses of attention for worship. These fundamentals will hit us hard in the pocket, but to avoid being a remnant, we have to do this thing, if only the planners will let us.

Despite Charlie and Aneta's instructions, and mostly because quite stupidly I can't be bothered to retrieve a compass from the depths of my rucksack, I make an exit on the wrong side of the Country Park, and am paid out with a trudge round a field next to the M1. My consolation is a brief sighting of the rump of a deer as it bounds into the undergrowth, startled by my arrival. A path through what seem like back gardens takes one into Quinton. Hang on, this actually is someone's back garden, and very beautiful it is too: I missed the stile in the corner back there!

After I became a full-time musician, Sue and I briefly contemplated buying a house with Nigel the drummer and his partner Angie. Realistically, the places in Northamptonshire we checked out for this mild experiment in not-quite communal living were too grand and expensive, and among them were a lovely but damp-feeling house in Quinton, owned by a surgeon and his wife, who turned out to be the midwife who looked after Sue when Matt was born. Not long afterwards Nigel and Angie weren't 'Nigel and Angie' any longer, so this was something that just wasn't to be. Looking at where we might have lived, we might have done all right financially. Just around St. John the Baptist's church it's all very bijou, even a touch swanky.

I stop at the village seat. A small boy comes to play football in the yard between his front door and some barns. He sees me with a map and asks me if I'm lost - very charming! It begins to rain and I don my anorak, just where a chap is struggling with a strimmer, as one does when the cable needs replacing. Up the road and across the fields the countryside begins to roll, and there are long, green views. At first the paths are properly cut into the fields of wheat, but sod's law, just at the point where there's a long stretch as barley crowds over the footway from both sides, it begins to hammer down under a lively breeze, and despite rainwear and umbrella, I'm soon soaked from above and below. My Merrills are squelching, Goretex or no.

I seek sanctuary in an open Piddington church, another St. John the Baptist, and before long the church treasurer, Jill Watson turns up, surprised to see me eating my sandwich and dripping over their porch. I explain what I'm doing. She was in Weston Favell the other Sunday with their young people and had a look at where we worship. Very different buildings, she says. We have a carpet: they don't. We have a chapel: they don't.  But they have a servery, and an intimate, cosy nave. It's a very nice place to be, Piddington church. In fact I like everything about the village, which by its considerable size will surprise the innocent visitor because here, at the gateway to Salcey Forest, the road stops. As Steve Earle sings it, 'There ain't a lot that you can do in this town/Drive down to the lake and turn back around'. Except there isn't a lake here, just the trees.

But Piddington has a long history, right back to the Stone Age. Its Roman villa is well-celebrated. We even know who lived there at one point, a Tiberius Claudius Severus, probably a Brit who acquired Roman citizenship. Currently the archaeologists to whom we owe the annual excavations are turning their attention to what the gardens might have been like at the villa's peak. From post-holes they've discovered, they think that the Romans cultivated espalier fruit trees around the walls of the vegetable garden. I'm much moved by this ancient sophistication. There's a museum here, but it's only open on Sundays. I'll have to come back another time.

Round the back of Horton's 'The French Partridge' (as recently as the early 1980s Northamptonshire's only restaurant of repute, but tres, tres pretentious back then, despite serving what I swear were tinned potatoes on one occasion!) is the church of St. Mary Magdalene. It's now closed for worship, and from the outside it looks rather sad. I've never been very sure about Horton. The heart of the village is a private road which seems to me to breathe hostility to the world beyond, and the closure of the church just amplifies the apparent lack of warmth, reminding me of that old excluding county set and style we first knew. Sorry, Hortonians, just speaking as I find.

I walk back to Piddington and from there almost down into Hackleton on the Northampton road, looking in vain for the site of the Roman villa, trying to think where I'd have wanted to stick my personal mosaics and hypocaust. It's nowhere advertised, and probably very wise too, to keep the metal detectorist treasure hunters at bay. Hackleton has no Anglican church, but it does have a Carey Baptist chapel so named because William of that ilk preached his very first sermon in the village. The railway from Bedford to Northampton passed to the north of Hackleton, but one of the two stops between these two main towns was called 'Piddington' in recognition of the greater status of that village, even though it was situated more than a country mile away. Near here there were once two branch lines. One took supply trains to the site of a now defunct MOD ordnance depot. And just outside Horton, a bridge over the Newport Pagnell road signifies the disused track of the line which would have once carried punters to the Towcester Races a hundred years ago. The owner of a gracious house sited in the middle of Salcey Forest had himself a station built on this branch purely for domestic use. I believe the platform is still there somewhere in the bushes. Those were the days. Not.

I'm approaching the low point of my day as the weather, which had briefly threatened to become more clement, takes another turn for the worse. It's one of those occasions when the walker's always too hot or too cold. And now I have no choice but to extract the compass from my bag because the ruddy farmer has removed the line of a path towards Preston Deanery. I follow the be-thistled edge
of a field and find another path that will do. It crosses two more fields, goes round the end of a copse and passes uphill towards a sewage plant. Beyond that is a field where the path should continue, but all that's visible is a line of crushed crop where a previous intrepid and very likely irate rambler has pushed through the barley. Since the crop's already damaged I follow in his/her footsteps, only to find that the bloke/girl gave up half way across. And then a clammy hand clutches at my heart as I realise I'm walking without my beloved stick, a precious gift from my dad some twenty years ago. It's been my companion for literally thousands of miles since, once surviving unharmed on a West London tube station for an hour after I'd mislaid it. It's perfectly weighted, light yet stylish, and when reversed, capable of looking daunting in the face of threat from man or beast.

I consider. And then retrace my steps through the barley, past the sewage station, across the fields, round the copse, up the hill and along the edge of the thistly field to where I hope I left it, at the point where I'd been searching my bag for the compass I needed because the ruddy farmer had sown across the path. Grrr! And, be still my anxious heart, there it is, a silver coin in the corner of the swept room, snuggled down in the long grass awaiting my return.

It takes two more attempts before I unlock the secret of the route to Preston Deanery but eventually I reach the small, perfect, spare and beautiful church of St. Peter and St. Paul, now technically redundant, but open to visitors each day, and used by the benefice on special occasions. There are life size cut-outs of greyhounds laid on sacking in the chancel because one lordly owner kept his dogs there in the early 17th Century. In the tower is a mobile of papier mache pigeons. When the unsuspecting visitor enters a cooing soundtrack begins and the mobile starts to move. The tower was once used as a pigeon loft. It's an enchanting place with a chequered history. It is the wider Church writ in small.

The day ends as it began - with animals. On the way back to Wootton I run the gauntlet through two fields which are temporary home to over a hundred inquisitive young heifers. I shake my friendly stick in their direction and they run off to play at the opposite end of the pasture.

Stats man: 24 km. 8 hrs. 19 degrees max. 5 churches. 5 rain showers of varying ferocity. 1 small deer. 1 small hawk. 1 large hawk (red kite). 1 new Prime Minister Designate (female)

Lord

You are my strong staff,
My high tower,
My shelter from the wind and the rain.
In your places
there is delight and tranquillity.
I find joy and tears mingled
within your walls.
By your law of love
I am refreshed and satisfied.
You are balm for my feet
and rest for my aching limbs.
Thank you.
Amen.

Duck rabbit?

Like it says on the tax form (more or less) - if you've had enough of the dark and serious, if one more 'Thought for The Day' themed around Britain's place in the world is going to make you flip your lid - then please go straight to Letter B

A

But for those of you still with me...

There's a terrifying song by Don Henley called 'New York Minute' which describes the precariousness of life in the Big Apple. Aaron Sorkin, who knows a good tune when he hears one, used it in the soundtrack to 'The West Wing's special episode commemorating the events of 9/11. 'In a New York minute, everything can change'.

I suppose Christians recognise drastic, traumatic life-change as much as anyone. The shared experience of any Christian community inevitably means the embrace of others' personal tragedies. At the heart of most Christian traditions is the notion of 'conversion': the swapping of one life for a new one, a dying to the old self through the waters of baptism.

Well, the events of two Thursdays ago were as big a political step-change as I ever want to experience: a punch in the guts, the death of a dream. I truly think, though others will disagree, that for Britain and we British the world will never be the same again, and not in a good way.

Two things. Firstly this is the kind of moment when some of us take comfort in the idea that: 'None can thee secure/But one who never changes/Thy God, thy life, thy cure'. Except I want my God to encompass and identify with change as we experience it, to be 'always becoming'. But that's OK. I don't understand much Wittgenstein, but I've always 'got' the idea he explored in The Philosophical Investigations of the transforming figure, the famous duck-rabbit. Entities can flip, can be perceived as one thing at one moment and another at another - and it probably really happens out there in the universe a lot more than we yet know. If God is all, then I think He's like that too. I'm hoping He's somewhere in this change and decay which all around I see.

Secondly I notice in myself a tendency to read all encountered behaviour in the light of this new, more cruel world. Is this happening to you too?

Which brings me, almost literally, to Harpole...

B

German Car No. 1 needs more attention, possibly on strike over Brexit. So I leave it with the garage as before (see June 2nd) and retrace my steps towards Duston, exercising an urban walker's imagination as to what the developers might have done with the footpath marked on my OS Explorer. Before I locate it skulking behind the hospital, I see something I've never seen before. On the dual carriageway out of town a car steadfastly refuses to give way to an ambulance on its way to a 'shout'. The car ignores the blues and twos for a couple of minutes, blocking in the paramedics. Almost unbelievably, it then gives chase to the ambulance as it accelerates towards the M1; a callous, egotistical, perhaps drug fuelled misuse of the roads.

Then over the next three hours I encounter footpaths that have been removed or deliberately obfuscated, electric fences where they shouldn't be, gates tied shut across a long-distance path, notices advising of bulls in fields where there clearly aren't any, bolts deliberately filed back at kissing gates to prevent them being opened. At one moment a dog noisily worries at my heels before its laughing owner calls it away. Since he's bigger than me (the owner, not the dog) I don't argue, just rage silently at the crassness and unkindness of the world. But...

Having waisted my way through a bean-field, where the mud lay dinted by someone's nag a few weeks previously, I pause at the village limit for Harpole. A notice says that (hurray!) the church is open each day for inspection of the local plan. Local plans are very much the thing, don't you know. On I go, past Carr's Close (J.L.Carr was a Northamptonshire author who wrote a book called 'The Harpole Report', its protagonist being one George Harpole. Carr was in the habit of naming his fictional characters after real Northamptonshire places!), and wondrous to relate, people start to say hello. I've entered an alternative universe called 'Friendly'. It begins with two chaps pushing barrows towards the allotments. It continues in All Saints Church, where Bridget and Graham Paul are tying up the bells, prior to teaching a few campanological fine points to two Rothersthorpe parishioners. Outside again, a couple more people greet me warmly before a young woman walking her dog stops to ask me how far I'm going and to tell me what a lovely place Harpole is. And then I share my stroll on to Nether Heyford up Glassthorpe Lane with Pat who hails from Dorset and is an enthusiastic rambler. Sadly her husband's dodgy knees now prevent them sharing this pleasure together. At this point I feel pretty duck-rabbited. On a dime the world has changed from nasty to nice.

In medieval times, Glassthorpe was a village too, and is mentioned in the Domesday Book, but by the 18thC it had depopulated, and now there's just the farm. It comes to me that an old friend of ours, Roy Hill, once lived with his wife Di in Harpole. A wonderfully gentle man, Roy succumbed to early onset dementia, but in his prime he knew a great deal about 'lost' villages. He must have walked here often. He also properly corrected me when as a Kentish Man I protested that there were no hills and woods in Northamptonshire. There are! Pat, my walking companion, remarks that around here it looks more like Derbyshire and it's true: the hill to be climbed feels much more than its 140 metres. On the far side the sketchy path drops sharply to the Mid-Shires Way which then draws a bead on Nether Heyford.

Once upon a time, Upper Heyford (not to be confused with the place of the same name in Oxfordshire from which USAF F-111s used to take off to bomb Colonel Gaddafi) and Nether Heyford were called Heyford Superiore and Inferiore. Generations ago I guess this may have led to some psychological problems but the inferiors had the last laugh. Upper Heyford is now a tiny footnote on the A45 while Nether Heyford is a large, thriving village with a huge green and an attractive range of buildings including the church dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint Paul. It too is open (I'm having to eat my words from a fortnight ago!) and its light airy interior looks lovingly cared for: a mix of ancient and modern. The quietness inside is deafening: my tinnitus is ringing away merrily.

The furnaces are gone from Furnace Lane now. It leads up to the main drag of the Grand Union Canal. I turn left onto the towpath while the Birmingham to Euston main line thunders away to my right. The canal twists and turns until a little way past a large marina the lane to Bugbrooke appears. I'm disappointed by the pub in the village which despite the notice outside isn't serving food, but not by St. Michael and All Angels Church. A dark wood rood screen separates nave and chancel, rendering the former an indistinct cave of mystery, but the literature on the table by the entrance suggests a robustly evangelical attitude.

For locals of my age the village of Bugbrooke is still synonymous with the 'Jesus People' who bought the 'big house' and much else besides in the 70s at a flowering-time of charismatic religion around the country. It must have been strange (perhaps still is?) to be worshipping or ministering in a local Anglican church which the Christian community in the house next door deems to be in apostasy. In contrast, conservatives like me suspected the Jesus People of  brainwashing. The 'Jesus Movement' certainly threw up some curiosities, among them the 'Children of God', who were founded in California but came to Bromley. Unlike Joni Mitchell who encountered a Child of God on the road to Yasgur's Farm, I met my wispy-bearded adherent on a train out of Victoria. We tried to convert each other. Neither side was successful. I hope he found his way out of what was rapidly becoming a very troubled, even perverse organisation. These days the Bugbrooke 'Jesus People' have become almost mainstream, their pattern of worship and organisation much copied, but still not my cup of tea.

Through fields of barley I come to the Nene Way at Heygates Mill, sitting like a white cathedral on the plain by the river. The Nene Way used to be beautifully appointed and waymarked, but now it's showing age. The stiles are overgrown, and I have to thrust through piles of oilseed either side of the motorway as I pass into the site of Fairfax's 1645 Civil War camp. The village of Kislingbury is close by. St. Luke's is shut but I pause to read a psalm outside where there's a shady bench. An elderly black lab pulls its owner onto the slightly too adjacent grass where it pees uncertainly. 'He likes it here', she says. 'I can see,' I reply.

The Psalm of David (18) speaks uncomfortably of war and revenge: it's language is stark and uncompromising. As I sit I reflect that the Civil War may have been the last time Britain was as divided as it is now. The consequences of that were long-lasting and terrible. And what now? I'd like this duck to turn into a rabbit. Or the other way round.


Stats man:  25 km.   8 hours.   4 churches (3 open!)  21 degrees.  No precipitation. Breeze gusting maybe 20 mph earlier and later. One small hawk. Two squirrels.


Father God
We confess
Sometimes we too have put profit before people
Position before principle
Power before purity
Please give to all in authority
Wisdom and integrity
Sound judgment and a sense of justice
Discernment and a desire for the common good.
We pray it through Jesus Christ
Your Son
Our elder brother and example
Amen.