Three Hills

My dad wouldn't have approved - not that I ever saw him use a compass - but he was methodical to a fault, and less accustomed to assuming than I am. I'm sure he'd have bothered to check his angles where the path turns off the Great Addington to Cranford road, and so would have avoided the less than chuffed half hour I spent tramping the fields trying to find the proper way to Woodford. I still laugh at the joke of Pooh and Piglet's misapprehensions in respect of the increasing number of Woozles-or-is-it Wizzles as they plod round a wood in the snow (check it out if you don't know the story or need cheering up) but I think A.A.Milne learnt his stuff about Ashdown Forest the hard way. Walking round and round the rough pasture fields I try to remind myself that getting lost is half the fun. Possibly, but not when there are miles to go before you sleep.

I'm looking for the 'Three Hills' and eventually there they are, as plain as three Bronze Age tumuli can be, a short line of nettle covered bumps beside a cow field on the highest point of the rise overlooking the Nene. These round barrows aren't particularly rare in national terms, but they're unusual for Northamptonshire. They must commemorate the great and good Northamptonians of four thousand years ago, and since all three barrows touch each other, the individuals buried there must have been closely related. I think they also tell us something about the countryside of the time, which may have been at least as open as it is today, although presumably the Nene valley was a much wider expanse of marsh and water than it is now. The intention must have been that these monuments should be seen from a distance. I find it rather moving to walk down from this ancient site and then along the river bank into lovely Woodford to the church of St. Mary's, the 'Cathedral of the Nene' with its graceful ordered churchyard looking out over the curve of the water.

There is much that delights me here. The church is beautifully and generously proportioned, even if its claim to be the biggest in the Nene valley seems to miss the point. The organ sounds jolly loud as I sit and tootle - I shouldn't think you'd ever know if the congregation was singing the hymns. There's a church ghost, written up in the local paper during the thirties and attested by a previous incumbent. One of his successors as priest had a glamorous, even raffish film-star name: Luis de Casabianca. He served the parish for more than twenty years, and was evidently much loved: his wife's artwork still adorns the church. In the graveyard can be found a headstone inscribed to 'Kitty the black girl' who died in 1865. Now there's a story begging for some fictional amplification!  Best of all, nineteenth century workmen found a mummified human heart amongst old stonework, which Fr. Casabianca's research later suggested belonged to a Roger de Kirketon. He died in Norfolk during the 13th century, but home is where the heart is. In the visitors' book it records that Doreen and Roy dropped by last week. They were married in St. Mary's in 1951. Woodford is a fit destination for pilgrimage, a place where memories hang palpably in the air.

                                                    Ringstead. Too often the case...


I keep close to the river rather than walk up into the village, picking up the Nene Way until the line of the old railway to Thrapston sweeps across the river in front of me. I follow its long since de-metalled trackpath up to the A14, where I have to zigzag back to the Nene to cross under the rolling thunder of the traffic. Like Crianlarich in Perthshire, Thrapston used to have two railway stations (the idea of one railway passing underneath another in a rural setting is attractively reminiscent of the layouts of childhood trainsets!) The line from Northampton to Peterborough was opened in 1845. The Northampton Herald recorded that 'The new line, comprising only a single line of rails...has been completed in fifteen months at a cost of about £10,000 per mile, considerably under the estimates.' Compare and contrast with HS2...though £10,000 must have been a fortune in those days. Not a billion pounds' worth of fortune though.

I emerge opposite 'The Woolpack' pub on the Islip side of the Nine Arches Bridge and adjourn to the bar for a drink, served to me by Rachel who asks politely what I'm doing (as per usual I look scruffier than the rest of the clientele). I said I'd give you a namecheck, Rachel, so if you're reading, here it is. Thank you! The last time we stopped at The Woolpack some years ago, it wasn't a rewarding experience, so it's good to find it smartened up. Having crossed the Rubicon of the A14 I'm now in terra incognita. Here be dragons. So how do you say 'Islip'? I default to 'Eye-slip'. But it could be 'Is-slip' or 'Illip' or knowing the cantankerous ways of Northamptonshire folk even 'Ilp'. I walk up to St. Nicholas' church, which still has a rood screen in place, so I assume the style of worship here may be high-ish, although no smell of incense lingers on the air. The church has American connections through the Washington family, and in the corner is a letter of greeting from the Episcopal church in Islip, Suffolk County, New York State. Close by is a list of Rectors, and I see that there was once an incumbent by the name of Thomas Oliver Cromwell East. Poor chap! His parents were setting the bar rather high. Or low, depending on your point of view. At any rate they were covering a range of possibilities in churchmanship. Not a bloke to be trifled with perhaps.

I remember this section of the Nene Way well from a previous walk. From the back of a(nother) pub I stroll down across the stepping stones of a large lawned back garden past a handsome duck pond, swallows dipping and diving around me. After a series of gates I reach Islip Mill where a barn is offered for sale with permission to convert. The barn's a long stone's throw from the river. At first it looks a good proposition, 2.6 acres of land thrown in for good measure. But then a thought occurs. A local is walking his dog. I ask him if the fields flood. 'Oh yes,' he says, 'It's often one big lake around here in winter'. So perhaps not quite such a good proposition then. I'd hoped to cross the footbridge and enter Thrapston through the back door, but gosh darn, the bridge is being renovated and without breaking the British ( no, the World) long jump record, there's no way forward. Mumbling incoherently, I retrace my steps back as far as The Woolpack and then turn across the Nine Arches Bridge into the town. Time was, the main road came right through Thrapston, along with the aforesaid two railway lines, and there was a motor racing circuit just up the road towards Kettering. With all these gone, Thrapston stretches out handsomely, but doesn't quite live up to its promise anymore. Despite its Chancery Lane and its Bullring, it's no Olney. Am I seeking meaningless gentrification? I hope not. I just think it's surprising that given the wealth locked up in the property of surrounding villages, there's been little apparent enterprise in terms of precisely targeted artisan or boutique shops. A real butchers? A great bakery? Maybe they're there and I missed them. Maybe they've been tried and failed. To put it another way, Thrapston seems like a place of ripe opportunity. Oh, and the large and centrally placed St. James' church is shut, although a sale of work is being set up in the hall opposite. I'm in rather a hurry or I'd have gone in and snooped.

Returning southwards, the old Nene Way meanders across the fields to Denford. The wind has dropped ('Draughty place, en'it?' a gentleman had remarked to me as I left Great Addington this morning). The sun is dappling the fields of barley, most of them gold...thank you Sting. A herd of cows has chosen to sit on the path exactly where I want to cross the Nene, and I have to improvise an alternative route. As I do so, a snowy white egret rises calmly in front of me and takes to the sky, describing a great circle away from Denford in search of a quieter fishing pitch at Summer Leys. I eat a sandwich beside some fussily decorated graves in the churchyard of the locked Holy Trinity church which according to achurchnearyou.com has some fascinating acoustic jars in the chancel. I don't even know what an acoustic jar is. Give me a sec and I'll look it up so you don't have to...

Well I never! These turn out to be ceramic vessels set into the walls of churches, more often in France than in England, which are claimed to improve the sound of the singing, a theory being that rather than make the congregation sound louder, they absorb certain frequencies in a flattering way. Another time I'll have to purloin a key and test it out.

There's something very pleasing about the riverside situation of Denford, the way the houses and gardens topple over into the river, the rise of the village up on one bank while the flood plain remains open on the other. I climb the hill and press on to sprawling, untidy Ringstead along a narrow cut in the wheat field past the allotments. The sign beside them says they're in the keeping of the Ringstead charity. The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary church is open, and the aesthetic inside seems to me a little untidy too, which may just mean that's it used a lot (it's the last week of the school term). Should I expect every church to present as an oasis of calm? Not really. Some churches inherit furniture and fittings in a more haphazard way than others. Subsequent affection for particular items on the part of some individuals may mean that a comfortable but unbeautiful compromise has to be reached. A rigorously organised building with a single aesthetic direction may radiate peace to the casual visitor, but could perhaps indicate the iron, domineering hand of one person, clergy or lay, at some past moment. Stan comes in to use the bathroom by the servery. He's been working with a mate on wall-building in the churchyard. Is he a mason by trade, I ask? He denies it. He's a brickie who lives locally, but the company for whom he works has been commissioned to reclaim some of the stone from old outbuildings. The job isn't easy or satisfying: the stone is of poor quality.

In all of the above I'm tempted to find metaphors for the Church's human constitution. In this week's Times I read an obit for Dr. Wesley Carr, one time Dean of Westminster. He clearly wasn't always an easy person to deal with, and for some very good reasons: he was diagnosed with Parkinson's very shortly after taking office in London. There was a very public spat with a well-connected Director of Music, one of those fallings-out so common in the Church, and particularly between clergy and musicians - a matter of great regret to me. Why do we find it so hard to live together? One answer might be that it all matters so much to us. Another is the raw material with which we deal. I've been reading the beginning of St. Paul's letter to the Romans this week, and am reminded how hard it is to understand, literary at one moment, apparently logically shaky at another, the writer's emotion bubbling through and sometimes overwhelming his argument. Describing the frailty of the our creaturely condition his anger explodes alliteratively: asunetous, asunthetous, astorgous,aneleemonas...senseless, untrustworthy, inhuman, unmerciful. I don't think we'd have got on, me and Paul. Yet this is a key New Testament source on which all Christians draw. How will we ever agree? How can we ever be absolutely tidy?

I walk up the long stretch of Station Road, crossing the unseen Roman villa whose site is precisely at the point where the lane hangs a right towards the Addingtons. Looking up to the low ridge, I struggle to make out the Three Hills, the ancient work of people as temporally remote from Jesus and Paul as we are - but at the other end of time's arrow. The landscape around us, physical and mental, is often more puzzling than not.

I Spy: 21 km. 6.5 hrs. 22degrees C. Very breezy at first. 4 stiles (two points) 15 gates (one point) 11 bridges (three points) 5 churches: 3 open (five points) 2 barbed wire fences to be limbo danced (five points for anyone seeing me...) 1 egret (Twenty points and a gold star)

Ospreys have been turning up locally, presumably migrating? I never knew that: always associated them with Scotland. As yet I would struggle to identify one. If I ever did : fifty points!!!

Father God
Please grant me understanding,
Help my unbelief,
Give me love in my heart,
And bless those with whom I live
In like fashion.
Amen.

Oh, and another thing Father,
(Can I pray for this?)
Those people up on the hill
Under the mounds
And those they lived among
None of whom knew Jesus...
(Thinking about them
I feel a frisson of what?
Fear?
Sadness?
My own frailty and mortality?)
I commend them to you,
Suspecting they were just like us
Searching for the Truth.
May we all be found
In Your everlasting Kingdom
As you wrap up the Universe
In the final time.
Amen.

(It happened) In Monterey

I park up in Old's Mill Lane, and stroll round to pick up the south-westerly path which leads through sheep fields from Grange Farm over a collection of well-kept stiles down to the stream which feeds into Pitsford Reservoir. On the far side I avoid a herd of cows and calves and negotiate with a farm dog that I'm not worth the trouble of his teeth in my knee. Then, after a turn off the track into a dip, it's a short distance to Scaldwell's village green.

Wikipedia isn't very kind to Scaldwell (written by a disgruntled resident/ex-resident?) It is, it says, a tiny village without shops or a pub, and its population is mostly ageing. Well, there are three hundred people living here, which makes it more than tiny in my book, and the ageing thing is probably subject to revision. This is just the kind of place where aspirational thirty-somethings would like to live. Me too, if I could afford it. True, it has no pub, and the button on the village website marked 'Events' has nothing happening in July, dear boy. But there's a Scaldwell Club open on a few evenings a week, so locals can buy a drink without getting in their car and travelling to the fleshpots of Brixworth.

SS Peter & Paul's church is shut, but I eat a sandwich on the bench next to the allotments, and ponder what might be entailed in the 'Bread Service' which has been held every year since the significant one of 1666. There was a lot of ironstone in the fields to the west of Scaldwell, and for fifty years until the early nineteen sixties it was extracted on an industrial scale. One of the saddle-tank locomotives used on the little railway, named after the village, is preserved in a museum in Brockham, Surrey. I daresay all this provided Scaldwell with extra 'bread' for a while.

These days there's no sign of that industrial past, and a long undulating path stretches across ripening wheat fields towards Lamport. It's a moment of high summer, the point when I always feel regret for the passing year and the coming end of the golden time. So many opportunities wasted. So much to do. I think to myself that it's a round half century since 1967's 'Summer of Love', when my affair with rock music really began. The line up at that year's Monterey festival famously included not only Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin (in her role as lead singer with Big Brother and the Holding Company) but also Eric Burdon, The Mamas and the Papas, The Who, The Byrds, The Grateful Dead, Buffalo Springfield and Simon and Garfunkel, amongst others. In the October of 1967, John Peel hosted his first Top Gear Radio 1 programme (nothing at all to do with Jeremy, Richard, James and testosterone fuelled motor cars!) and I was quickly hooked, thereafter attempting to combine my weekend study of Thucydides and Ovid with listening to Skip Bifferty, Mandrake Paddle Steamer, Chicken Shack et. al.. I was an innocent, mostly ill-informed bystander of the political difficulties of the day, and as a South East London schoolboy would have had to answer a definite 'no' to Hendrix's album title enquiry 'Are you experienced?' , but at the domestic level perhaps we all responded to the strait-jacketed post-war attitudes of an older generation with scepticism and a longing to do things differently. So in those regretful memories of mid/late teenage years is also a sense of another golden era ended, not just because of the passage of years, but because 1967's optimism and idealism are largely out of the window today. And yet, and yet, as Stephen Stills sang back then, right now in 2017, 'There's something happening here/What it is ain't exactly clear...There's battle lines being drawn/Nobody's right if everybody's wrong...'

I turn left at the main road and cross the field to Hanging Houghton. This is partly because I love the name of this small village which looks out over the valley from its beautiful position. I also know there was once a chapel or church here, and wondering where it might have been, I want to be in the place to pray briefly for those who live there now without its benefits. I can see a couple of candidates for the building's one-time location, and just generally wander around, nosing, remembering that in Sue's mum's later years we saw the new development of houses here above the farm and were tempted to buy. It would have been a good investment, I think, but the place was certainly too remote for a fit person in their eighties, and perhaps for us too.

The Swan at Lamport provides a lunchtime drink and a loo. It's trying to be a gastro pub, and it's perfectly clean and everything, and the staff are nice, but I'd have preferred to tap up whatever tearoom arrangements are in place at the Hall except it doesn't open until 2. On the road beside the Grand House is All Saints church. Something bad must have happened here in recent times.I can't get in, and the notices advising of the church's surveillance by a security company are obvious and legion. Next to the front door is a small war memorial in the shape of a Celtic cross carrying the name of William Barnard Rhodes- Moorhouse V.C.. Sources variously have Rhodes-Moorhouse as born in Yorkshire, London and Lamport, but it seems that actually the family moved into Lamport Hall later in the year of his birth -1887. His mother was of Maori descent through her own mother, which interestingly gets William included on the Northamptonshire Black History Association's alumni list. He was always clearly fascinated by the mechanical, and became the first flyer to be awarded a VC, killed as a result of injuries sustained in a daring bombing raid on the railway station at Courtrai in 1915. As he lay on his deathbed, he commented that for him the experience of dying, that journey into the great unknown, was like his first solo flight. His family later lived at Spratton, and there's an individual commemoration of him there too.

Away from Lamport, I take the bridleway which runs north-east from the Old road along the crest of the slight ridge at about 150 metres. Eventually this meets another broad byway which carries me south-east to the lost village of Faxton, once the Saxon 'Fakr's Farm'. The breadth of the path is telling. What I'm walking along was once the main access to the little village, and is sometimes given as one reason for its decline - because it was so poorly maintained, and must have been impassably muddy in the sharp dip a couple of hundred metres from the houses. Most 'lost' villages in the South Midlands are the result of enclosures and other regrettable actions by landowners in medieval or post Civil-War times. Faxton held on long after that, recovering after decimation by the Black Death. Its church, unusually dedicated to St. Denis, patron saint of Paris, was only demolished in the nineteen fifties. All that remains of it now is a font and various gravestones lying somewhere in a field, although I don't find them. A watercolour by John Piper, now held in the V&A, shows the ruins of the place before it was finally pulled down. You'll find its likeness on the web. The last Rector of Faxton was W.M. Watkins Pitchford, whose son Denys (was the name a coincidence?) became a celebrated twentieth century author and illustrator in his own right. Did Piper and Watkins Pitchford know each other? I think they must have done. Possibly they met at the Royal College of Art where both studied. Piper had a penchant for wild-looking ecclesiastical buildings but his depiction of Faxton is relatively muted. Under the name BB ( a kind of shot used against geese) Watkins Pitchford wrote many books, often for children, often with countryside themes. The gentle singer and muse of early Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett, was a devotee. No doubt BB's eccentricity and whimsicality appealed. 1967 again.

All that survives of the ancient farm apart from the churchy bits is a single house in a copse. On my hippie kick, I find myself singing an (adapted) Joni Mitchell lyric:

'I came across a child of God
He was walking along the road
I asked him where are you going
And this he told me
He said "I'm goin' down to Fakr's Farm
Gonna join me a rock n'roll band
Gonna camp out on the land and set my soul free"

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden...

And if you know the rest of the song, you'll know why the sight of so many butterflies (everywhere plenteous this year according to D. Attenborough) coppers, whites, red admirals and even one peacock, brought a tear to my eye in this maudlin place, as the bombs still fall, not now in Vietnam, but in Syria, Yemen and in unknown places in Africa. There is still everything to do.   

Stats man:  14 km.  4 hours.  19 degrees. Cloudy but clearing with a chilly north-easterly breeze.13 stiles. 13 gates. 4 bridges. Two churches still standing. Both closed for the day. No one to talk to.but the sheep, the chien mechant and the butterflies.

Dear Lord
I thank you for those who work the land.
Who produce our food.
Who keep an environment
Where I can feel at peace
And feel you close.
I pray for fair and thoughtful trade
For unselfish sharing of the earth's resources
For a restraint of the greed
Into which we all so easily fall.
I pray that in my own habits
And conversation
I may show real solidarity
With the poor of the world.
Lord
Forgive my hypocrisy.
Amen

Hotter than July...oh, it is July!

At the Anglian Water lodge by Pitsford Causeway, nice Mark behind the counter doesn't charge me for a permit since all I want to do is walk along the Pitsford and Walgrave arms of the reservoir and find a way out to the village of Old, rather than degrade Pitsford Water's fish stocks or spend hours in a bird hide hoping for a sight of the Great Crested Hoopoe Duck. Nor does he charge me for parking the Audi beside the ranger's office, but he doesn't know if it's physically possible to do the route I have in mind. Don't worry, Mark, I did!

Perhaps this is the best bit of walking to be had at Pitsford, but if you want to try it, please go and make sure the office near Holcot are OK about that first. The paths are mostly cut into the grass, although some are currently blocked for access because of unspecified ongoing ecological projects. There are good shady sections through woodland dells, which is helpful to me because even at ten o' clock today it's obvious it's going to be a 'scorcher'. If you're a birder with an interest in waterfowl, then you're well catered for with well-constructed hides and viewpoints. A coot alerts the large flocks of ducks further up the shoreline to my presence, and they swim to the middle of the lake for safety. I wonder if I'll be able to follow the angles of the bays easily enough, but in the event it's fairly clear where I need to hop over a fence and pick up the path which zig-zags from Walgrave to Old through fields of barley, oats and wheat. A small sheep field then brings me into the heart of the village.

I must 'fess up'. On what I know will be a really hot day, I lay out my various necessary accompaniments before leaving home. High vis jacket: check. Sandwiches: check. Anorak (there are thunderstorms forecast): check. Hat: check (lol). Water bottles. Yeah, what happened to those water bottles? Oh bother, I realise half way round the reservoir, they're still sitting on the dining room table back home, aren't they?  Note to self - and to all who read - this was a very silly thing to do. Getting dehydrated is Very Bad, particularly if you're knocking on a bit. So as I enter the village, I'm still pondering my options. Village shop? Waiting for the pub to open? Hammering on a villager's door and begging for alms? Or maybe (an outside bet, this...) the church will be open and will have a servery with a tap...?

 There is no village shop, nor is the pub open, but the church comes up trumps, so I don't have to shyly importune startled locals. Inside St. Andrew's I find the Rector, Karen Jongman, who looks after a benefice which also includes Walgrave, Hannington and Scaldwell. The church is lovely and light with high walls along the nave. We talk about various churchy matters, music included, over a pint of extremely welcome water, and I realise/remember that this is a benefice which is lucky to have two of the county's best church musicians resident close by - Ian Clarke and Andrew Moodie. Karen's own tastes (and her husband's) are for jazz with a traditional flavour, although like me in her teens she once liked something more modern on the jazz spectrum. I admit to her that the ability to 'swing' is not a musical skill I find easy - as is often the case with players whose background is in either rock or the classical arena: the loping freedom of rhythm which tends to place the felt beat slightly ahead of where a computer or metronome would put it eludes us. And we find the chords too complicated. And the egos of jazzers...but that's another matter.

Old used to be called 'Wold', and around the village the ancient name still occasionally makes an appearance. The place certainly has an airy feel to it, although the surrounding countryside is no more than gently undulating. Its current moniker achieves continuing fame courtesy of the local haulage firm 'Knights of Old', which gives a chuckle to some of us when we see their lorries pass, and always makes me think of Jan Struther's children's hymn: 'When a knight won his spurs in the stories of old/He was gentle and brave; he was gallant and bold/with a shield on his arm and a lance in his hand/For God and for valour he rode through the land.'

The weather forecast today is annoyingly unpredictable: both the BBC and the Met Office have been pondering the possibility and timing of thunderstorms for a few days now. Briefly they bring forward the likelihood of problems to the early afternoon, although there are no signs of it in a largely cloudless sky, but I take a conservative approach to my route, and so retrace my steps almost to the reservoir boundary before following the track up to Walgrave. There's something satisfying about a circular walk which I think is partly (in me at least) down to a rather human 'Ooh, aren't I clever' tendency, as well as the more mystical, magical symbolism of a completed circle, but there's something to be said for 'out and back' walks too. The further I go in a day, the less I'm inclined to turn around and look at the landscape from different angles, but a 180 degree view of things can be interesting and revealing. The hill up which one has toiled is scarcely noticeable when gravity and momentum are aiding rather than hindering progress. The line of a path across a field which wan't picked up easily in one direction is stonkingly clear in the other. The sun illuminates the fields and buildings differently.

I remember Walgrave as being 'Walgrave St. Peter's', but I can see no reference to this in any map or article - and I'm sure I remember once seeing a road sign which read 'Walgrave St. Mary's', but now I think maybe I'm making this up. At any rate another of Karen's churches is the high-spired St. Peter's, just above the village green. It's distinctly hot now, and the shade inside is a relief.

I can't help it. The junk box of my brain makes a connection between the long-form of the village name and sixties' singer 'Crispian St. Peter's', so the soundtrack to this part of today's walk is his hit 'You were on my mind', much beloved of Tony Blackburn c. 1966. Crispian (actually Robin) was largely a one-song-wonder, although his career continued with reasonable success thereafter. He was born in Swanley, Kent, where my parents live (and I like this) was once part of a group called 'The Country Gentlemen'. The song was written by Canadians 'Ian and Sylvia'  and it recently turned up on a Steve Earle/Shawn Colvin album, who probably never knew it had been such a huge hit in England. Just thought I'd share all that with you. Too much information, probably.

I have a drink at the pub, set off, reach the edge of the village, climb a stile, realise I've left my walking stick at the pub, mumble and grumble wordlessly the way old folk do, retrace my steps, and then decide not to take the path across the fields after all because there are horses blocking the way, standing in the shade of the trees on the brow of the hill, and I don't want to have to make nice with them. There's an alternative route which takes me off the road half way to Hannington, so I can still enter it by the pretty route, across a little garden field where the hay has been newly mown.

There's not much to Hannington, but as you can see the church has a bisected nave, which isn't common, and which though you might call it a design feature, could scarcely be commended as a thing of beauty or an aid to contemplative worship. It's...well it's just in the way, folks. The church is set up on a little mound, and the suggestion is that this might have been the village's moot point before the church was built - by which I don't mean that it was an irrelevant earthwork, just that people met there to chew the fat about who had nicked whose pig, or the possible options for entertainment at the Harvest Supper in 968 AD.

The sky's still wonderfully blue, and there's not the merest suggestion of sturm und drang, but I take the direct route along the road back to Holcot, the reservoir and the car...and then regret it. The heat is reflecting savagely from the tarmac and my left ankle is sore. England, having elected to bat, are now making the South African bowlers suffer under the sun at Lords. This is a not inconsiderable consolation.

CODA. Yesterday's Times trumpets that the government intends to make a billion pounds available for the building of by-passes. This perhaps will include the completion of the northern by-pass to Northampton. It will pass close enough to Walgrave and Old and Hannington that villagers are already taking part in consultations about the likely impact on their communities. As the CPRE have reminded everyone, research shows that by-passes do not solve traffic problems: they increase them. And once a by-pass is built, as I've previously remarked on more than one occasion, the logic is for infilling at least up to the new boundary created by the road. Which may be the real reason the government is willing to spend the money.

Stats man: 17 km. 5 hrs. (Some wandering around in both Old and Walgrave). 28 degrees. Little in the way of breeze. 5 stiles. 7 gates. A lot of bridges (lost count). One barbed wire fence safely negotiated. A distant heron. Numerous ducks - but I can't tell you what sort ( which can provide an alternative polite vernacular as in 'Him? He can't tell his Teal from his Widgeon!' ) Some cheery villagers in Old. Three churches - all open!

                                       Wall painting and flowers: SS. Peter and Paul, Hannington

Lord
Thank you for the wonders of your creation,
Always new,
Always astounding in their beauty.
Please help me to see myself
And all those I meet
As part of this panoply of love
And to treat us all
Accordingly.
Amen

Cords that cannot be broken

On its downslope the lane from Isham to Burton Latimer passes 'The Lilacs' pub on the corner, right by the Independent Methodist Chapel. The pub doesn't look all that ancient, so I wonder which came first. Who was answering whose world view on alcohol, or was it just an accident of opposites? In the dip is the railway bridge, It's forty two steps up and forty three down, with a good sight of the Midland Main Line permanent way from the top of the stairs. On the far side is a scrappy field but the travellers' horses seem to like it. A pretty foal gambols around its mum, revelling in the discovery of the propelling power in its disproportionately long legs.

Emerging into the streets of Burton Latimer it's already hot at eleven in the morning. I know I'm going to get confused by the road layout even with Google Maps at my beck and call, so ask at the nearest convenience store (shouldn't these be christened 'convenient stores' to avoid disappointment?) for a Kettering 'A to Z'. Nothing doing. Such a thing no longer exists, apparently. 'It's the internet', the shopkeeper says morosely. 'Sorry!'

A drummer of my acquaintance who used to play regularly at the WMC in Burton Latimer used to swear that all the inhabitants had one leg shorter than the other. I see no evidence of this as I look around B.L., and declare it a foul calumny. It must have been something in the beer.

With the ground of Kettering's football club (Southern Football League Division One Midlands) on my left I walk towards the windmills which loom over the housing estates. Kettering Town - 'The Poppies', because of their red shirts - are one of the great nearly teams of the English football world. Many's the time they've knocked on the door of the Football League proper, and their record in the F.A. Cup is a distinguished one, but significant glory still awaits them in their new temporary home. Perhaps they'd have been better calling themselves 'The Marxists' to give rein to their fans' grudges against the footballing elites.

St. Mary's church has a narrow frontage opposite a handsome Jacobean house. The latter was once a school, and tells me so by the inscription above its lintel. I walk to the rear of St. Mary's where there's a small modern satellite chapel at the end of a corridor, and eat my sandwich on their bench, admiring the way the churchyard drops away to a second tier, in a lovely garden-like fashion.

For a second week running I'm walking to shake off a sombre mood, this time after the death-dealing fire in the West London tower block. There's a connection. Grenfell Tower is situated in the Latimer Estate, which I know slightly from recording in the area, and here I am in Burton Latimer, which takes its name from the branch of the family which lived here in late medieval times.

This blog is primarily about our corporate life of faith, but I'm one of those who thinks it's difficult to keep religion and politics in two separate boxes, and I also think it would be wrong to ignore entirely the more serious national and international events as I write up my record of what happens during my Long Walk. I hope readers will look particularly carefully at what I am, and am not, saying in what follows.

I was too trivial and flippant in my use of Macmillan's phrase during last week's post. In view of the loss of life, it seems gross to say so, but how unlucky Theresa May must feel, for all that she and her advisers may or may not have dealt humanely or properly with the Grenfell situation in PR terms. For such a terrible thing to have occurred when and where it did, at a time of such difficulties elsewhere in British political life, almost defies belief. These really are the kind of events which cause kingdoms to fall. It's not directly May's fault and certainly not poor Sadiq Khan's. Of course any enquiry will find that things could have been done differently and better. First indications are that the Kensington and Chelsea Council have been extremely inadequate.
 
But behind all the hot-headed talk, for me a great paradox persists. Everyone wants the benefits that a caring, other people-oriented, liberal nation can bestow, after the manner of the Welfare State which has so nurtured our generation throughout the length of our blessed lives. But it sometimes seems as if no one is now prepared to accept the personal consequences of the public financial costs that such a system entails. And if we as the 'indigenous' people can't recognise this, how can it be communicated to the immigrant populations who have joined us, and who may be the ones to have suffered worst in this tragedy? It's simple. If we and our brothers and sisters want to be taken care of, we have to pay central government for the privilege - for hospitals, for social care, for schools, for looking after the elderly - or else the weakest will go to the wall, as they did in this case. The Conservative election rhetoric was correct: there is no 'money tree'. Yet they remain enmired in the dogma of 'low tax', while the Labour Party's slogan 'government for the many rather than the few' is Newspeak. They seem to be exploiting envy of the rich without telling the truth that we must all pay our way. No political party currently speaks for me. Do you feel the same?

The local West London churches have shown well in this desperate situation, and as they always do, ordinary people have responded with warm hearts. But the authentically Christian attitudes which work for the common good in both long-term policy and short-term need will quickly be forgotten, ignored or denied in the Press and the public consciousness, because the message is too difficult. We know the answer lies in the sin which bedevils us all, and in the redemption which God through Christ offers, whether or not in Sydney Carter's words 'Who can tell what other cradle/High above the milky way/Still may rock the King of Heaven/On another Christmas Day'.

Enough. A thousand vicars in a thousand parish mags will be struggling to come to terms with this in next month's edition, and doing no better than me.

I cross the A6 towards Windmill cottages, perhaps originally named after a traditional structure, but now in the lee of a modern and extensive wind farm. It doesn't often happen, but here it does, that a footpath marked on the map and by fingerposts on the ground has simply been abandoned, probably with landowner connivance. I wander forlornly around the front gardens of Windmill Cottages as long as I dare, but can't find its beginning, and when I've made the two-sides-of-a-triangle trip by road I see that the other end's closed off as well. However, crossing the road, I can still walk the last half mile to Cranford St. John over the tussocky fields.

In the church Sue has got the vacuum out while her husband Jem is cutting the grass out back. I nearly give her a heart attack when I suddenly appear on the doorstep. She kindly gives me a few moments to contemplate lovely St. John's by myself, and when she returns I explain what I'm doing. Sue and Jem's walking exploits put me to shame. They're gradually working their way around the coast on foot. 'Oh, the South West Path', I say, but no, they polished that off long ago. Currently they're up to Foulness on the Essex marshes (where my Uncle Maurice and his Fort Halstead boffin colleagues used to go to watch exciting new munitions explode - real life 'Q's from the Bond films) and somewhere around Aberystwyth on the other side of Britain. Sue and Jem like to walk the west coast during summer, and leave the bleak east for wintertime. And they're not the only doughty walkers in Cranford. One of the churchwardens has beaten the bounds of Northamptonshire in times past, sleeping rough in bus shelters and all sorts. Sue and I agree that we're neither of us as young as we were, and that we can't manage as many miles as perhaps we once might have done. And that provincial bus services aren't always as frequent as we'd like.

On a shelf by the plate I spot a 'blast from the past' name, who's recently led a service of worship and praise at Cranford. Trevor Dearing is a now retired Anglican clergyman who saw a charismatic revival at his church in Hainault, Essex during the 1970s,with an emphasis on healing ministry. Some churches in which we were involved became engaged with this continuing Christian tradition at about the same time. As I get older, I find the miraculous oddly easier to accept than I did back then, though in a rather abstract way. Personally I find the greatest possible miracle of all to be our existence here and now. I'm not sure that God needs to give us anything more, or prove himself any further through Supernature when Nature itself is so very extraordinary.

Daniel Foot, Priest in Charge of St. John's these past thirty four years, also has care of the redundant church ten minutes round the corner at Cranford St. Andrew, right next to the Big House, whose gates are being painted today. I spend some quiet minutes in the cool of St. Andrew's, and then head out along the road and field called Top Dysons towards Barton Seagrave.

                                                              St. Andrew's Cranford.

Barton Seagrave is now really a suburb of Kettering, separated from it only by jolly Wicksteed Park. As I sit near St. Botolph's church, below the happily situated cricket ground, I can hear the Park's miniature train hooting its way along the track. The church is solid and Norman, and around it cluster the lovely village centre buildings of age, including a Church conference centre in the pleasing Georgian regularities of the Old Rectory. Over the road is Castle Field where the mottes and baileys are all that remain of the ancient Hall and its fishponds. Thereafter I pick my way through and then below the new housing estates parallel to the little River Ise and the main line out of Kettering. I notice glumly the new-normal four bedroom and no garden format of the houses, doubtless mitigated in the developers' eyes by the view across the narrow valley, partially landscaped for the better walking and convenience of dogs. Eventually I find the path which runs along a section of the old branch line to Thrapston until I can cross the A14, and then am once more thwarted by a right-of-way which ends in a closed field after an annoying nettly path. The only benefit this dead-end confers is the toasty smell as I pass the gates of the Weetabix factory on my way back through the edge of Burton Latimer. If you're going to live in the aroma of someone else's workplace, I suppose this isn't a bad one to have, better than the slightly sour whiff of brewing around Northampton's Carlsberg, but not as nice as I remember the chocolate coated air in York near Rowntree's.

Stats dude:  17.5 km. 5.5 hrs. 23 degrees C. Nice breeze. Cloudy for an hour or so at mid-day, but sunny otherwise. A goodly number of butterflies: mostly tortoiseshell. Kites: mewing unseen in the trees. Pub stops: one, in Cranford. Tea shops spotted for future sampling: one, also in Cranford. 4 stiles. 16 gates. 8 bridges, over river, railway and road.

Lord
This was terrible timing.
And I wish you had
Reached out a hand
And stopped this dreadful fire.
I don't know why you didn't.
I pray for those who died
And for those who mourn...

And now I pray for something else
Let's call it a miracle
That you'll help turn the sword of anger
Into a ploughshare of peace
That somehow something good
May be built
From the ashes of Grenfell
And that our nation
May rise as a phoenix
With renewed credibility
To set the needy world an example
Of mutual love and care
To Your great glory.
I ask it in Jesus' name
Who though without sin
Suffered and died for our sake
Amen.

Muddling through

In the planning, everything on a map seems so straightforward - that path, then that track, past the stand of trees with that stream always to the right. But in Harold Macmillan's somewhat overworked phrase: 'Events, dear boy...'

The previous day was doleful, both because of the confused, messy post-election political situation, so much inflamed by the gleeful, prurient machinations of the press, and because later on we heard that an old friend had passed away earlier in the week, taken too early by cancer, one of the young dancers who forty years ago had been part of our company as we toured Israel. So it's a relief to be out in the open, shaking off the effects of sadness, intrigue, disinformation and alcohol.

There's a weather spike, one of those brief day-long meteorological variations which seem to me to be more frequent. As I leave Irthlingborough eastwards it's very warm and there's a heavy, gusty wind rushing up from the south-west. I'm heavy-legged as I acclimatise, following the Nene Way out of town.

Nature is abundantly doing its thing. Black-headed gulls dip playfully towards the glistening river against the breeze, snapping up insects as they go, before returning at breakneck swooping speed on the extra pairs of wings the gale gives them. Either side of the carefully cut grassy path, where the nettles stand neck high, a thousand kingfisher-blue damsel flies dart and dive. Here and there small tortoiseshell butterflies join the dance. Little pink and white convolvuli poke up between the blades of grass. I hear the distant call of a rare cuckoo, as comforting a childhood memory as chocolate cake. A field of barley ripples silver in the wind.

As I walk I think. (A Cartesian variation!) I could have voted for any of the three main parties with equally good logic, and have never felt as disenchanted with all of them as I do now. Maybe I have a species of what Sartre called 'La Nausee'?  How about you?

What weight should I as a Christian apply to the fact that Teresa May is a Christian? Does it make any difference to me at all? It should mean that our values, hers and mine, might be somewhere in synch. But how could one tell through the froth and spin of party and press releases, the need to pitch a line, any line, that would reel in the voters? My gut instincts are for the left, but they seem like a bunch of incompetent chancers. 48 hours after the event I'm still metaphorically (and sometimes literally) shaking my head. (Since time of writing, news has broken about Tim Farron's resignation, which raises other questions about how people of faith stand in relation to political process)

A footbridge isn't any longer where it once was, so I miss the footpath up to Little Addington: a trifling presentiment of what's to come later in the afternoon. Next to a smart allotment (for benefit of clergy?) is St. Mary the Virgin's Church. I eat a sandwich by the back porch in which I see a dusty and not very recently used Alesis electronic drum kit. Relic from a defunct worship band? Churchwarden's guilty pleasure? Unwanted gift?

After GB in the Bell pub, where drinks aren't apparently much of a priority (the gentlemen barmen look most disappointed that I'm not staying for lunch, desperate even, there being no other takers), I press on to Great Addington past the playing field shared by the two villages. It has a lovely view down over the valley to enjoy as one exercises. I pass the house owned by John and Ruth Wayman, whose son Robbie was a childhood friend of our Matt. Robbie is now an airline pilot, which I find slightly scary for reasons with which many parents will identify. Our lives in their hands. That's the way of things, folks, and the more so with each decade we survive.

Even in a regional town, kids go on to do extraordinary things in our vivid and brave new world. Back in the nineteen seventies at the School for Girls in Northampton, Suzanne Skey was perhaps never going to set things alight academically, but she had a great and sensitive skill as a dancer, sufficient to carry her on to a coveted place at the London School of Contemporary Dance. Who'd be a dancer? They practise their art through a constant background noise of injury and discomfort for little in the way of financial reward, and as with all athletes, time at the top can be short. We know little of Sue's subsequent career, but it was certainly varied and enabled her to see the world, dancing in what would now be described as burlesque in Paris (she loved the costumes) and spending some time being sawn in half by her boyfriend in a Mexican circus.

All Saints at Great Addington is open, and inside I enjoy the coffee maker placed beside the pulpit - to stimulate the preacher or keep the congregation awake? - and the remnant of the staircase up to the long ago-removed rood screen. On the wall there are photographs of Uganda where missionaries Jane and Derek Waller have been after leaving South Sudan. These two brave people have now taken up an invitation to serve in Madagascar, where hopefully life will be less threatening and more stable. Africa seems to get into the hearts of some, like our old friends the Glovers, and won't let them go. As with so much else in 2017, conceptually the notion of 'mission work' now seems very complicated. There's aid and relief work in all its many forms, and there's the legacy of colonialism, and there are questions abut who should be preaching to whom, as Africans sometimes point out. And there are many interfaces between the Muslim and Christian worlds, in Birmingham as well as in Kampala.

Away from Great Addington, everything is at first peachy, though walking westwards into the increasingly robust wind is becoming strenuous activity. The pull up to lonely Poplar's Farm (is this correct use of the apostrophe, OS? Did it once belong to a Mr. or Mrs. Poplar? At any rate, it's currently refitted and vacant!) is a hard one, considering it's only a rise of 150 feet at most. There are lots of windmills hereabouts, which tells you something, as does the lack of trees. There's nothing to break the force of a gale. But as I start to zig-zag across the countryside, avoiding the need to risk life and limb along the main road, things go awry. All the fields here are arable: rapeseed, barley and wheat, and there are very few gates and stiles as a result, which means there are very few waymarks. And unusually the topology as I'm viewing it doesn't match the map at all in terms of trees and field boundaries. I turn left too early, and convince myself that the 'paths' I'm following along the field margins match the cartological plan. But by the time I twig that I'm very much mistaken (and then only by intermittent sight of the water tower at Finedon which is presenting itself in the 'wrong' position), the configuration of fields and ditches sets me a problem solved only by a series of dodgy moves through dense hedges and relentlessly unyielding crops which leaves me frustrated and sweary. Eventually I complete my yomp into Finedon along the heavily trafficked A6. Thankfully there's a cycle track/footpath, or else I'd really be in trouble.

Finedon was once called Tingdene, which I rather like. I don't know what to make of it. I've been through the place often enough on the main roads, but never stopped to look. More than most places of its size there's almost a sense of 'town and gown'. There are areas along and just off the 'A' roads which are clearly of the working people, and sometimes what's on offer through the shop fronts reflects that. But behind the popular façade there are lovely old houses in various vernacular building styles, and close by you'll find antique shops, posh beauty parlours and an upmarket funeral directors' - just past the Conservative Club, should you feel the need. And the Vicar of graciously proportioned St. Mary's is Richard Coles, radio presenter, author, former keyboard player with chart-topping Communards and priest. He is, though he might not thank me for saying so, rapidly turning into a national treasure. An energetic chap too. He's just become Chancellor of the University of Northampton. Sue and I swapped smiles with him in Waitrose the other day, so although he doesn't know me from Adam, we're almost mates, me and Richard. The only problem is, we need more clergy like him. I suspect we might not agree about a lot of things, but no matter. He can't carry the burden of being the acceptable face of public Anglicanism all on his own. Well, him and Justin, I suppose. And John. Try Richard's recent book: 'Bringing in the sheaves'. It would make a fantastic study for housegroups, at least in my Fantasy Parish Church...

                              For the ashes of Dr Who fans: funeral directors': Finedon


I think I'm on the home stretch now, walking back over the hill to Irthlingborough past what I presume is a shaft to the tunnel between the two towns referred to a couple of posts ago. But even now, when the line of the path should be obvious, veering away on a slight angle from an overhead power line, I get on the wrong side of a hedge and pay for it with an exhausting trudge along two sides of a field sown with rape right up to its deeply ditched boundaries. Eventually I emerge near the cricket club where I stop and watch a few overs to calm myself down. The batting is efficient, the bowling workmanlike and the fielding elderly even though this is Division Two of the County League. The car park is full of Audis and Mercs. I take away the memory of a beautiful pull for four through midwicket, a shot I would have loved to have been able to play but never could.

Stats man:  23 km. 7 hours. 22 degrees C. Wind gusting 40 mph. 3 stiles. 5 gates (and two of those church ones!) No one to talk to: everyone's head is down, either to cut through the wind or because they too are suffering from political nausea.

Lord
From where we are
We see no plan
No solutions
Little mercy
Scant integrity.
We trust
That reality
Is not as we perceive it
Or that our reality
Is a mere illusion.
But please Lord,
Give us a glimpse of the truth
At least in part
For without a vision
Your people may perish.
Amen.

Night Sweat

I found myself in a bad dream last night and woke up sweating just after two. In these cases does the sleeping self decide to opt out of running a particular film, much as one switches off the telly when there's e.g. one too many grisly shot of the pathologist at work in a shock-horror movie? And how exactly do such dreaming experiences integrate the self, as psychologists intimate they do, if they're so scary? Both malign, pursuing protagonists in this instance were old friends, neither known to the other in real life. Both would undoubtedly be horrified to know the roles in which my mind had cast them during my personal psycho-drama. Of course it's an unsettling thought that one might feature similarly in the dreams of others: until this moment, that had genuinely never occurred to me!

In any event, it settled my procrastinating determination to walk today and make the most of the sunshine. I leave Raunds travelling east with, unusually, only one objective in mind. Hargrave is a small village on the edge of Huntingdonshire, just off the road to St. Neots. Like Raunds and Stanwick, it's a parish in the 'Four Spires Benefice', but it's stuck out on something of a limb.

                                                                       Spire no. 3


These days Huntingdonshire is a non-metropolitan district of Cambridgeshire, not a county, but maybe in the meaning of 'Raunds' there's a folk memory; the very name of the town means 'boundaries'. I suppose it's possible the markers to which it refers may go back even further. Where exactly was the border between the Catuvellauni and the Iceni in pre-Roman times? Or nearly a millennium later, between Mercia and East Anglia? I daresay there was hinterland and dispute. Strangely this lack of certainty extends to Northampton even today. It's always struck us as anomalous that we're stuck with Anglia TV: Man falls off bicycle in Beccles. Arguably Northampton looks more to the west and the north than the east for all that the Diocese of Peterborough extends its reach right down to Cotswold-facing Aynho. For whatever reason, to the east of Raunds the villages are more widely spread, the roads a little more like those of the fens, resembling a grid. It's a different kind of land. Just a mile from Hargrave Huntingdonshire reaches its highest point at the Three Shires Stone - a measly 263 feet. Apart from the Isle of Ely and the Holland district of Lincolnshire, Huntingdonshire's maximum height is the lowest of any county. And that includes Norfolk and Cambridgeshire!

Oh, the pure and atavistic joy of the first mile's walking in May! Birds are carolling from every tree and bush, with blackbirds the loudest and most expansively tuneful against the fluting ostinato alto voices of the wood pigeons. A distant cockerel is parading himself and the wind's a gentle zephyr. The far away scrapings of an industrial digger add a Charles Ives element to the symphony. Up the gently rising gradient to Mere Farm, I'm unreasonably pleased with myself as I spot the moment the path dodges from one side of a hedge to the other. My internal soundtrack is selected highlights from yesterday's concert in Abington church. It's always interesting to see which things stick and loop around the head when you've been working on them. We sang Parry's 'I was glad' so of course that's in there, as annoyingly are bits of the Cantique de Jean Racine: a piece of which I heartily disapprove because of its cloying sentimentality, quite unlike the uncompromising, steely darkness of the same composer's Requiem. But the novelty of yesterday's gig was Bizet's Te Deum, hitherto unknown not only to me I suspect, but probably all the other singers too. It's an enthusiasm of Tim Dolan, Abington's Director of Music, and I can see why. It's a slightly crazed mash-up of martial tunes and gothic diminished chords written when Bizet was still in his teens. The work was given a firm thumbs-down by the musical establishment of the time. It's as if young Georges had to get down in a single piece every musical idea he'd had that year. Some of the individual parts are good, which is why they still function as 'ear-worms' but taken as a whole, my provisional judgement is that the piece is a car crash, though weirdly huge fun. It could of course have been the reason for my subsequent nightmare...

The church of All Hallows, Hargrave sits in the middle of a small village whose population numbers no more than 250. There's a Top Farm and a Bottom Farm, and a sad failed pub in a boarded up, Grade 2 listed building, the Nags Head, whose fate at the time of writing is yet to be decided, but which surely has no future as a hostelry, unless on a remote off-chance the community were to decide to run it as a project. I sit in the sun-dappled churchyard and think about the future of the inn as compared to the church. Hargrave is in one sense quite isolated, which is part of its charm. The limited support All Hallows can garner, the relatively small income it can generate for the wider Church means that as things are it can only merit inclusion in a benefice like Four Spires rather than standing on its own feet. And yet, the Church (capital C) is very aware of the challenges posed by the likely housing expansion - not on Hargrave's doorstep to be sure, but not so very far away by road. What's the logic here? Can we envisage a church like All Hallows finding something special, distinctive and different liturgically, and offering it to the public so that there'd be the possibility or likelihood of new walk-up to its ancient doors. Surely we don't want this beautiful little place of worship, with parish history stretching back to the Domesday Book, to go to the knacker's yard along with the Nags Head? Churches exclusively for the young. Churches exclusively for the old. Churches designed and stripped for social action. Churches devoted to contemplation. Churches representing the best of every liturgical tradition and none. How could benefices plan to strategically diversify their product? Here I am, Lord. it is I Lord...

It would mean the sacrifice of personal preference in many instances. But what's the alternative? Niche  and genre are important modern words, even if neither is very English.

I walk the long, roundabout way back to Raunds under a hot sun through alternate fields of rising grassy wheat and rapeseed - which is now turning olive green and just beginning to hint at its cabbag-ey finale. There are paths flanked by luxurious bridal trains of creamy-white cow parsley, and I skirt a lovely resonant wood. The views are long and shimmering. At one point I push through an overgrown field entrance, certain of the route's direction, although on the diagonal across the green wheat the walker's line is discernible only to the faintest degree. I enjoy the pleasure of wading through the crop on the sandy soil, much as one would find delight in crossing virgin snow, and then stop in the middle of the field to look behind me. I'm surprised to see that the wheat has closed over my track again. You wouldn't know I'd been there, and in the moment I find a metaphor for my existence. For all that in my human arrogance I think I'm so significant, I have to accept and understand that I'll leave very little mark on the ground.

Stats man:  14 km. Just a shade under five hours (I went very slowly today). 24 degrees C. Two stiles. Seven gates. Six bridges. But when is a bridge a bridge? A rather subjective matter this, but I tend to include the smaller ones which prevent me getting my feet wet, and sometimes ignore/fail to notice the bigger ones. And when is a gate a gate? Also a matter of opinion. I count gates I actually have to open, but on this walk the farmers have often very thoughtfully left a clear person-shaped space beside the closed five-bar. Stiles? Getting fewer, I reckon. Perhaps because they're more expensive to maintain than gates?  One church: shut. Walkers: not a single one - from the leaving of Raunds unto the returning of the same.

Lord
Help me to lift my eyes to You
From the turmoil of everyday life
The deluge of communication
Social media
Gossip and trivia
Argument and counter argument
Alternative facts and temporary truth.
Let me be astounded again
By the thrill of Your creation
And Your care for us
And to remember (thank you Sarah)
That we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
By Your grace
Sanctify all our lives.
Amen


And then came the news from the Manchester Arena. A waking-life, shared nightmare.

Whatsoever things are lovely...

Ian Brady, who with Myra Hindley tortured and killed those poor children so many years ago died yesterday in prison, probably mad and unrepentant, and the radio and other news media are all over it this morning. It's hard to ignore the story, or not be shocked by it all over again, but what more is there really to be said? Is it true, as John Donne wrote, that every person's death diminishes me? I don't feel diminished by Brady's passing, but don't even know if that's what Donne meant. I only know what the Greeks knew, which is that evil usually spawns new evil, and dismounting the carousel is hard.

Whatever, the news casts a pall over the beginning of the day. The weather is strange too. A plume of warm air has been sucked up from the continent, and outside the car it's sticky and humid under cloudy skies and a strong breeze. Tomorrow the wind will die, and we shall have rain all day, probably starting at five this afternoon, so there's an incentive to throw off the media-induced glooms and get walking.

On a cheerier note - unless you suffer from coulruphobia - the circus has arrived on the Higham Ferrers rec. I search out the path which takes me over the A6 by-pass to the east of town, and though my direction finding is out of sorts today, I eventually find the track which climbs gently beside the rapeseed fields to the Water Lane end of Chelveston. Over the fields the farmer has suspended a couple of animal/crow scarers which resemble Red Kites (the ornithological sort!) bouncing airily on the end of pieces of wire. High overhead a real buzzard is hoping they're fooling no one. There's no water in the ford at Water Lane: although it's rained a little over the last five days, the Daily Express, ever the voice of meteorological doom, has been trumpeting the likelihood of impending drought, and there've been the first suggestions from water companies (all hoping that Mr. Corbyn doesn't win the election and nationalise them) that we should be careful with our hosepipes unless we want them banned.

Either Chelveston originally came in two parts or St. John the Baptist church is hedging its bets. Actually its assignation is to 'Chelveston cum Caldecott' so maybe the latter. A few posts ago I remarked on the number of Hardwicks there are. If anything there are more Caldecotts: Smith to Hardwick's Jones. No surprise: there's a plethora of cold places in Britain to fit the name. But then, the caldarium in Roman baths was the place for a hot plunge so there's a mild lexicographical puzzle here. I think the link from 'Cald' to 'Cold' is the more probable. People like a good moan.

The church is down a leafy path backing onto fields and on it there's a memorial to the American airmen who were based at the local RAF station during the last war. They undertook some of the riskiest bombing missions in WW2 but their success exacted a terrible price in casualties. There's another memorial right in the centre of Chelveston too, by the Star and Garter pub where I have an early lunchtime drink, hanging outside the door waiting for it to open, the image my dad hoped never to see cultivated in his son. If I'd walked in the opposite direction today, clockwise rather than the other thing, I might have arrived at St. John's in time for Tuesday afternoon tea and cake. Bad planning.

The airfield came back to life with a vengeance in the fifties when the Americans constructed an 11,000 foot runway to take their B-47 Stratojets, part of the bomber-led nuclear deterrence fleet. But when De Gaulle founded France's independent 'Force de Frappe', he ordered the American parent airfields off French soil, and with the coming of ICBMs, the politics and strategy changed, so there's now little to betray the existence of such a large facility. Back then, was the Star and Garter full of Carolinian and Californian voices, and the yard stuffed up with Chevys and Pontiacs to pull the local girls? I guess so.

Out of the village I walk through fields to Stanwick (don't pronounce the 'w' unless you want to be immediately identified as an incomer). I obviously look like I'm a local, because just inside the village a woman winds down the passenger window of a grey Golf.

Her: (peremptorily): Where's the High Street?

Me: (amiably, as I think...)  I haven't a clue...

Her: Well, that's not very helpful.

Me: Sorry, I'm a walker (stating the bleedin' obvious - I'm wearing shorts, have a rucksack, a stick and am carrying a map. My hat is 80's vintage cricketing fashion.) I'm a foreigner. But let's look at the map. The church is...back there...so if you hang a right at the corner, it should take you round in a circle...

Her: (huffy, now) Don't bother. I expect we'll find it.

Me: ...and back to the middle of the village. High Streets are usually next to the church, aren't they...

But by now they've already moved off without a thank you or goodbye.  'How do I find...?' dialogues are a staple of English Language Teaching materials for children. I must have recorded at least fifty tokens of the type, and they generally don't run like the above. Is there money in 'How to speak rude: a new approach to learning English'?  Later on, having walked up the churchyard on Stanwick's little hill, I see Mr and Mrs Golf trying to find their way into the village bistro (Stanwick has a bistro?) They're dressed as one might for a nice lunch if one were seventy-five, so probably they're late and had a row about it, you know, she spent a crucial five minutes too long on her face, and he insisted they went the country route. But honestly, I ask you! Along the way I meet all sorts, and most of them, like the cheery lady with her dogs near Chelveston, are lovely so the clever/dumb balance has to be maintained. 'Whatsoever things are...' Forget it, Vince, it doesn't matter. Move on.

St. Laurence Stanwick, and St. Peter's Raunds are part of the '4 Spires Benefice' which since last February is in an interregnum (i.e. they're between vicars). This group of churches is aptly named: the spires of both are awesomely high and beautiful, both benefiting (I'd have made a good estate agent) from their situation, raised above the communities they serve. Both prove to be shut, though as so often, if I'd had the gumption to plan ahead, or had wanted to spend the time now, I could have tracked down a key from one of the holders. But I just read a psalm, say a prayer, and think about the places, trying to be aware of my prejudices and presuppositions. Most of life seems to be about clearing up misunderstandings, usually one's own, sometimes other people's. Mrs Golf thought I was the one being rude, didn't she?

It's a short stroll up the road past Stanwick's Pocket Park and Raunds' rather bleak playing field into Raunds itself. The skyline behind the playing field is dominated by the Warth Park warehouse development. Well, that's what Northamptonshire does for the UK economy. Because of our centrality I suppose, it's convenient for all kinds of large-scale producers and logistics companies to have their own vast shop floors here. But in terms of the space they occupy compared to the number of people they employ, what's the net long term benefit?

                              'Er, Claire, does that include Tudor motets and Schubert lieder?'

There's something about Raunds. In the olden days i.e. the nineteen seventies, this was one of the pretty ways to Cambridge, as opposed to the more mundane route through Bedford. It's still a useful back double if there are problems on the A14. Then it always seemed to be tumbleweed o'clock in the middle of town with groups of young people standing on the corners jostling and prodding each other, and deciding who was going to go out with whom next week, if only to the chippie. There wasn't much else to do after the shoes went, but still the place has an air about it, a style that hints at the North Country. By the gate to the little park in the centre is a plaque commemorating the 1905 march to London protesting the low wages of shoe workers. They walked there, and some of them walked back too, and they won a concession from the government of the day.

I'm hoping 'Library Plus' will sell me a book on the history of Raunds but the nice, helpful woman in charge has nothing to offer, except a rather particular imprint about one of the excavations undertaken at the time the warehouse developments began. There's a lot of Saxon stuff under the ground here and on one occasion it drew in Tony Robinson's Time Team for a hectic weekend poke around. I follow the old Meadow Lane down towards the river and the site of the medieval village of Mallows Cotton (sounds like something from Midsummer Murders!). For company I have an unusually large number of dog walkers, and in a little while I see the logic. An upside of the warehouses is a trade-off in nicely manicured paths angling back towards the town centre. I plunge on, trusting the map that I can get under or over the A45 to join the Nene Way on the far side of the river and the wetlands. However what looks feasible on the OS turns out not to be so in practice. Maybe I've missed something. My next intended port of call should be Irthlingborough, but pitching up at the roundabout where the road from Stanwick meets the dual carriageway, I think I've been thwarted. Then I see a brown tourist sign on the other side of the road, and follow its pointing finger into 'Stanwick Lakes', which I suppose I always had down as a fishing facility, but which I now find is a large outdoor pursuitsy expanse under the care of the Rockingham Forest Trust with a Visitor Centre, and cycling, and walking, and rock climbing (walls presumably) and an adventure playground. I don't fork out for the lottery, but the money of those who do is going to some good places.

The weather's looking less promising so I deny myself a cup of coffee, and guess at a direction through the park. Eventually I find the path which brings me up over the weir and on into Irthlingborough past the remnants of the sadly deceased Rushden and Diamonds Football Club. Even the little that remained to them in the history books has this very week been taken away. Forest Green Rovers have been promoted to the Football League Two. Previously Rushden and Irthlingborough (the Diamonds bit!) were the smallest community to host a club in the main Football League but the mantle has passed on.

People who live in Irthlingborough. 1. Big Jim Griffiths. For many years in the eighties he was  a stalwart of Northamptonshire County Cricket Club. Allegedly a quick bowler, he was loyal, willing and tall, with a windmill action and a pronounced pause in his action at the bowling crease. He was one of the worst batsmen ever to play first class cricket, christened a 'wally with the willow', but every dog has his day. Look up the story.  2. Chris Storr. Nice man and excellent trumpet player for Jools Holland's band amongst many. He always came happily to play sessions for us when we could afford to make it almost worth his while. As did Trevor Barry, inhabitant of Rushden and ace of bass. If you watch Strictly he's the one with the hat sitting somewhere near Dave Arch. A lovely player, and amusing, genial company.

St. Peter's Irthlingborough has a lantern tower which was built to guide former generations over the marshy drifts alongside the river. The church looks intriguing, there are lights on, and stuff is happening beyond a door at the side. I want to go in, but if I'm to avoid getting wet I have to press on. Like Raunds and Rushden, Irthlingborough is an untidy place, although the size of the church and some of the surrounding buildings shout 'high status'. Again, its history is about ironstone. There's a tunnel between here and Finedon, now safely shut up, but who doesn't love a closed tunnel? I blame Enid Blyton's Famous Five.

And here I get briefly annoyed, as my personal radar goes awry again, and the signage to the Nene Way abandons me in favour of the 'Greenway' which runs across the new nature reserve/SSSI below the town but which turns out to be the Nene Way in disguise. I have a spat with an unfeasibly large man, his grinning wife and his husky dog which is not on a lead despite the proximity of sheep, and on which he seems to think I should lavish praise as it invades my personal space to importune whatever it is that huskies think they fancy. I do the barking, and tell the owner that I don't appreciate the attention, and then reflect as I burn leather into the distance just how big the bloke was, and whether it was altogether wise to antagonise this particular One Man and his Dog. Whatsoever things are lovely...

And finally, Esther...

22.5 km. 6 hrs. 20 degC. Five stiles. Seven gates. Five bridges. One heron interrupted from his daily work by my incautious approach. One bunny: deaf apparently, judging by his reluctance to take flight.

Last week I mentioned Chester Farm, and the work going on there, which prevented me easily accessing the Nene Way from Irchester. Well, Sue and I went back to have a look later in the week. By 2018 there's going to be a Visitor Centre there too, so right along the valley there'll be a chain of interesting places to visit covering nature, archaeology/history and outdoors stuff. This is very good news from the point of view of education and healthy entertainment. It will be a challenge to maintain it all to the high standards that will be initially set, but could we perhaps see a developing movement equivalent to the great era of park construction undertaken by the Victorians? I'd love to think so.

Lord
We blunder around
Stumbling over the furniture
Falling down stairs
Kicking the cat.
Shine your light upon us
So that we may see well enough
To deal graciously with those we love
And those we don't.
Amen