Having it all

                                                         Tower: Marston St. Lawrence

As I drive down the 'B' road to Thorpe Mandeville I pass a sign advertising Tanks A Lot and laugh. Neat name. Not so sure about the premise: going one-up on the old hat of paintballing for jaded execs who need to revive their testosterone by hauling retired vehicles of death around a 'challenging off-road course'. For extra money (quite a lot of money!) you can enjoy the fun of running over an old banger. There are two levels for this particular speciality. I wonder what the VIP experience might offer - please supply your own suitably outrageous supplement.

Past TM's St. John the Baptist church and the huge Manor House, the lane drops away downhill to Lower Thorpe. This pristine view won't remain unspoiled for much longer. HS2 will sweep across the green valley in front of me. Even if the vein of the railway eventually sits back into the skin of the countryside the scars will take a long time to heal. If you're a returning reader you know what I think about that. At Culworth Grounds a jet-black spaniel cross bares its teeth under the misapprehension that the right-of-way forms part of its territory, and is called off by a small girl who emerges from the nearby cottage to shout. She says sorry. I say no problem. Her mutt was only bite-size. A large murdering gang of crows swoop and dive overhead as I puff on uphill. Avian intelligence is undervalued. Last week on a Dutch quayside, Sue and I watched a gull have lunch on a mussel it had pulled from the harbour wall. The gull picked up the mussel in its beak and twice essayed Barnes Wallis bombing runs bouncing the shellfish onto the concrete underneath with maximum violence. The first run was for softening up. Second time round the mussel shell cracked and rolled. The gull pounced, the meat was forensically extracted and eaten in hasty relish before any klepto colleague could intervene.

At the top of the rise I turn right onto an unmetalled section of the sheep drovers' ancient 'Banbury Lane' and in five minutes find myself looking left and right down Culworth's Queens Street. No jokes please. Time was Culworth was a pretty macho place, synonymous with its 'Gang', softly celebrated in Stuart Marson's song Close to the Wind. Culworth was then quite remote, and its roads were easy pickings for this group of eighteenth century footpads. They threatened ultimate violence, but preferred to knock their victims on the head rather than shoot them. At least one of the gang was a regular churchgoer. They eventually got their comeuppance, going to the gallows on what is now Northampton's 'Race Course' just opposite the White Elephant pub, a mile or so from our house.

Before I go to see St. Mary's church I wander down opposite the green to admire the range of nice buildings. In the old Forge, Miki and Georgie have no Saturday morning customers in the calm, welcoming space of their gallery. Georgie's part-time, Miki owns the business, but a change of personal circumstances means she's looking for someone to buy it. As for so many of us with right angles in the directions of our lives, she's been humming and hahing about whether she really should sell up. They offer me a coffee (probably a Nespresso - nice!) and in twenty minutes we laugh and chat and cover a lot of ground about the dynamic of relationships, personal preferences, clergy, galleries and so on. It's a lot of fun but I have to move on. Thanks, ladies! Since Miki's sorted, Georgie asks me to mention that if there are any well-mannered single men in their later prime of life out there...

I walk up the front path of St. Mary's. The Rector, Brian Fairbank, is just shutting the bird screen door. He's been preparing the church for the wedding of Catrin and Mark. He assures me I'm welcome to have a look round. I do, but I don't twig that he's the Rector until I see his face in the Now we are six monthly benefice publication later on.

Culworth and Sulgrave share a relatively unusual feature in having a mound and ditch remnant of a Saxon manor house plonked right next to the church. I'm put in mind of a similar arrangement at Earls Barton. We look darkly through our glasses at the likely wooden structures of these villages at the beginning of the second millennium, and imagine the astonishment of those early inhabitants were they to see what grew up in succession to their labours. Outside the church door is a particularly touching gravestone. The inscription reads: 'In memory of Charles Bacchus (an African) who died March 31st 1762. He was Beloved and Lamented by the Family he Served. Was Grateful and Humane and gave hopes of Proving a faithful Servant and a Good Man. Aged 16' On the back the initials CB and ED are intertwined. A storyteller's hairs stand on end...

The sun has come out after a dreakh start to the day. The quality of the light and the September warmth make the short stroll to Sulgrave a delight, particularly the walk down the dappled path from the old Windmill (now a posh house, but minus its sails) past the orchard where the pears wait ready for picking just as golden as if they were lacquered Christmas decorations. Everyone knows about Sulgrave and its connections with the Washington family so I won't detain you with that here. The church naturally reflects the transatlantic theme, nowhere more than in the Visitors Book. St. James the Less, like the rest of the village, is always going to be a place of pilgrimage for Americans, but what amazes me is the number of people who trace lineage back to George and beyond. Just in recent weeks I note Trumar Atkins from Tennessee (11th Great Grandson of Laurence Washington), and Andrew Washington from Karori, New Zealand (Robert Washington was his 11th Great Grandfather) and a Mrs. Pargeter from Somerset (George Washington's 7th cousin 6 times removed). Now I know these are perhaps tenuous relations - the six degrees of separation thing, whereby one can feel connection to almost anyone ever comes to mind - but at least these folk have taken the trouble to find out and make the call.

                                                   Inside St James the Less, Sulgrave


The dedication to 'St James the Less' is slightly more problematic than I'd have thought. He may be the apostle James 'the son of Alphaeus'. Or we may be talking about James the brother of Jesus. Or both. Or someone else. I wander round to the Hall by the back lane where I encounter the lady at whom I'd scowled when her dog defecated on the Castle Green (where one is specifically injuncted not to allow such a thing). Since then she has acquired a second dog, and she's now scooping up its doo-doo from the road. Strange priorities. I don't have to pay to get access to the Hall's tea-room, so I have a cup of Earl Grey and a piece of gluten free Orange cake, served at a glacial speed. But I don't mind: it's a sunny space, only slightly marred by the coughing and hacking of other elderly diners. On my way back through the village I pass another dedicated (from the size and professionalism of his backpack) walker going in the opposite direction, He replies with no more than a grunt to my hail-fellow traveller-well-met greeting. Honestly, if you can't enjoy it on a radiant day like this, just find something else to do with your valuable time (Bad Karma: I'll need reminding of this later!)

If I'm honest, after the loveliness of Sulgrave, it's a bit of a trudge to Greatworth. There's a long maize field to be pushed through - though the path has been kept quite clear. Then it's up and down near Stuchbury (another in the long list of deserted Northamptonshire villages), through a farm, across a road and then there I am with slightly stressed legs sitting on a bench opposite St. Peter's. Inside there's a sweet little one-manual Baroque-y organ on which I tootle an improvised tune. It's a very pleasant instrument to play and listen to, but absolutely no use (IMO) for accompanying a congregation. Perhaps I should modify that and say it's an acquired taste. I move on, and keeping the slope to my right, eventually find a hole in the hedge which leads me via a horsey field and a crab apple littered lane to Marston St. Lawrence. It's warm enough for the horses to be sheltering from the heat. Their owner arrives in a 4x4 to dispense water. They ignored me, but as she climbs the stile, they neigh and whinny an affectionate greeting to her.

                                                          On the way to Marston

St.Lawrence' church is spacious and broad of beam, on this day brightly lit by the stained glass above the altar and on the north and south walls. The main door's ajar inside the bird screen. I seize on the pile of music underneath the organ stool and, yes, the blower starts up when I push the button. I blow the mice out of the pipes for twenty minutes with some Bach, and write that I've done so in the Visitors' Book, then immediately reflect that this sounds a) superior b) nerdy. Oh dear! I can't scratch out what I've written now: it will either look messy or draw attention to my snootiness. They have occasional folk concerts in St. Lawrence's, which speaks well of the place. I should think the keening voices and feisty fiddles sound great ringing around the church's airy spaces.

Up the hill out of the village I see the fingerpost for the path I want leaning uselessly, drunkenly askew. From the angle of the nearby metalled lane, the approximate direction of the path's clear enough, but there are no marks on the ground. The field's been sown recently, but in a 'sod you' frame of mind I push up the rise following the line where the path should be. At the top a multi-combine thing is cutting the crop in the next field and decanting it into a trailer. There's no sign of any path cut through the standing crop. Clearly the farmer just couldn't be bothered. Very ostentatiously I take a snap of the situation, making sure that the  bloke in the combine can see me - though he's probably only a contractor. Then I do the decent thing and rejoin the lane, even though I know this will mean an extra two hundred metres walking along the fast and dangerous main road at the top. On the opposite side of the main road, where I want to turn right, the same situation occurs. Fingerposts actually removed this time. No visible path. I walk two sides of a field hoping to pick up the track where it should cross a gullied stream. Nothing. I scramble through a hedge and, confronted by a maize field, try to pick my way round it, looking for a gap to cross the stream further down. No gap. No path. No room at all in fact because the impenetrable maize has been planted right up to a narrow border of nettles which sting me repeatedly for another four hundred metres as the field frustratingly but surely turns back towards the main road. Another two hundred metres of ditch dropping to avoid speeding BMWs, and then I gain the safety of the lane back to Thorpe Mandeville.

I know. You've heard me on this before. But how irresponsible of farmers when they ignore their statutory responsibilities and actively attempt to destroy rights-of-way, thus putting legally entitled countryside users to hazard! It's really not OK. And as I've said before, it erodes support among those of us who'd naturally want to applaud them for what they do. And that's my harvest message to the nation. Grrr!

Statto: 18 km. 7 hrs. (but allow for the tea at Sulgrave, and the organ playing interlude at Marston, and my little local farming difficulties. 21 degrees C. Breezy and sunny after a damp start. 16 stiles to be clambered over. 17 gates to be prised open (and of course closed carefully again afterwards). 6 rickety rackety bridges negotiated (no trolls were harmed in making this programme). A marked absence of wild life, if you don't count the sadly deceased hare on the path at Stuchbury. I wonder what got him?

Lord
I know that I am in the autumn of my days.
I really hate that.
Please stick with me every step of the way
And give me courage and peace as the shades lengthen.
And, I earnestly pray you,
Deal with me kindly at the end of the run.
Amen.

Now what follows is going to sound like a somewhat rambling Thought for the Day. Miki and Georgie and I were talking about how difficult it is to put it all together. Miki wondered aloud whether she was really suited to 'retail', and I echoed that feeling from my own business's point of view. Lucky the person who has the whole package, with both the artistic creativity and the financial acumen. I guess most of our churches are the same: strong points and weak areas. Stuff we do well, and stuff we just don't get - except we very rarely go out of business. Me, being a glass half-empty person, I find it difficult to accentuate the positive, and am so often critical of and worn down by the things churches don't do well. Which is unreasonable. Or is it? Now off you go: break into groups and discuss. Not that it'll get you anywhere. The clergy still make the decisions. And we poor bloody foot-soldiers are still there carrying out their wishes. So eighty year olds are literally still scrubbing the stone floors of church porches (and who will do this in their place once they pop their clogs?)  As Bishop Donald put it recently...clergy are there in an overall leadership role. Well, come on clergy and 'licensed' lay workers, tell me I'm wrong. Who's going to issue accreditation for the real work like floor-swabbing, or tithing? Argue with me. Hello...is there anyone out there?

Them and us

I walk west and then north away from Middleton Cheney along the Jurassic Way. I know this particular section rather well, an old friend I haven't seen for a couple of years. As with human friends, there are new delights to be discovered on re-acquaintance, and there are things I've forgotten.

A farmer has sown a field of maize. I process up a narrow aisle between seven foot plants whose corns are just beginning to show, a jungly, childish pleasure. I enjoy as I've done before the remnants of the old green lane from Warkworth and Banbury as it wends its way between an avenue of low trees on the descent towards Chacombe. In the imagination I'm keeping company with Pride and Prejudice era young ladies out for a walk under parasols, off to do good to the poor folk.

And then I'm caught out as I've been before near here by my faulty direction finding where the path emerges into open pasture. It's the orientation of the South Cherwell Golf Club that does it, this time compounded by the presence of a large herd of frisky, mildly delinquent teenage heifers. I try to steer a path around them, but they're curious and dangerously playful, following too closely on my heels, bounding down the field. I do as you're supposed to do, turn and stare them out, while saying things in tones alternately emollient and authoritative. But this has perils of its own - walking backwards across a tussocky field isn't easy, and falling over would be a very bad idea. For a few moments I'm genuinely frightened. I can't read the heifers' behaviour accurately enough: there's too much head-shaking going on for my liking. I see a patch of worn earth surrounding some dead tree stumps ten yards away, and put these old hedge remains between me and them. The animals do as I hope, and confronted by a psychological barrier they lose interest, returning to making their own entertainment rather than taking the rise out of me. I try to settle my accelerated heart rate. Through a bosky corner, under an ornamental arch and over the next (thankfully livestock-free) field is a cracking view of Chacombe's Big House, half a mile away in the valley.

I like combes. I like the way the word crops up countrywide, and becomes the Welsh 'cwm', denoting a bowl in the landscape at the ending of a valley, often gentle in England as here, but imposing or even minatory in say, Snowdonia. Chacombe is charming and not just because it alliterates. St. Peter and Paul's is hidden behind the shrubbery in Church Lane beside a parcel of common ground. The churchyard is currently being attended to, and pieces of coloured plastic on strings - old supermarket carrier bags - warn the too-casual visitor against falling into the gaping cavity of a broken tomb. The plastic carries odd inter-faith overtones: the scraps superficially resemble Buddhist prayer flags. A notice by the church gate warns me that the path has been treated with a TV-advertised farm grade weedkiller, though it doesn't tell me what I should do about that. I suppose eating my sandwiches off the  paving wouldn't be wise. The church is shut. Had it been open I could have seen the wall painting of St. Peter being crucified upside down, one of only two such depictions in the country. Gory stuff, but perhaps painted in gory times.

The New Testament epistles paint a picture of an early church in which individuals have forgotten they're supposed to be following Jesus of Nazareth, and have latched onto a particularly glamorous disciple as the concrete embodiment of their faith. Peter and Paul were two such focuses of attention. I guess churches dedicated to both of these old-timers, such as Chacombe's, are making an ecumenical statement about seeing all sides of an argument. Trouble is, whereas perhaps Jesus continues to exert an attraction to people in every place and time including ours, Peter and Paul are difficult for the contemporary world to identify with - and maybe becoming more hard to understand with every year that Time puts between them and us. Which of the two would have dealt better with Facebook?

                                                          Parable of the Sower 2

There was once a priory in Chacombe (the Big House is also called Chacombe Priory but it's a more recent building) and on the web I've seen a suggestion that perhaps the old monks' chapel survives. I plan to go across the field to its likely site, but more cows block the way and with my last close bovine encounter too recent a memory, I decide to pass on the opportunity. Moving up the hill I come to the farm at Coton, once a hamlet of about seventy people until a nineteenth century fire destroyed some of the cottages.. Maybe too many painful memories clung to the place: the inhabitants left. The paths are vague but I pick my way round  the farm buildings and rejoin the Jurassic Way as it climbs towards Wardington and the Oxfordshire boundary. I'm making one of my periodic out-of-diocese visits, partly because it suits today's route, but also because Wardington is a gem. It's a village of two halves. The loveliest buildings, including the handsome Manor House, are in Upper Wardington, but the church is in the lower half. Along the back path between the two are some grassy ramparts above the stream. They look like a castle mound. At any rate they're serious fortifications, but I can't find any reference to them in British History Online.  There was activity around here in both the Wars of the Roses and the English Civil War: the ramparts might date from either time, but the lack of information's puzzling.

St. Mary Magdalene's church shares a benefice with one in neighbouring Cropredy, where indeed a Civil War battle was fought on the ridge, but that's not the reason the latter village name might sound familiar. Two Sundays ago it was 'Fairport Sunday' in the benefice, because each year the revered elder statesmen of folk-rock 'Fairport Convention' hold a weekend festival there. Bass player Dave Pegg lives and works in the village, and I once recorded a couple of tracks with Stuart Marson at his 'Woodworm' studio. I first saw Fairport at the Corn Exchange Cambridge on firework night 1970 and was transfixed. They were playing a music I recognised from the works of twentieth century classical composers like Britten and Vaughan Williams, but in a new, exciting and loud way. I loved Richard Thompson's dangerous guitar playing and Dave Swarbrick's impish fiddle work. Dave Mattacks' spare and sensitive drumming was a revelation. Sometimes one can be a bit too quick to say that such and such a musical moment sealed one's fate, but this really was an epiphany, and there's been a bit of me that's been walking round with a finger in one ear ever since. (For less musical readers this needs explanation. This digital tic isn't about hearing protection. It's the way folkie singers self-tune when delivering interminable ballads on the usual subjects of traditional music i.e. cuckolding and/or murder. It's usually mandatory to hold a pint of something Old and Peculiar in the other hand.)

                                                            Wardington from above


Climbing the steep slope up to the ridge beyond Wardington, I come across Anna who's helping her friend Ellie with some 'A' level geographical fieldwork. When I first see her I think she may be burying a beloved pet but actually she's measuring the water infiltration. The view from the top back towards Banbury is truly lovely in the afternoon sun and the walk along the ridge to the east should be a pleasure. But though the farmer doesn't want us to walk along the track on the northern side of the boundary, he can't be bothered to clear the path to the south, so I have to hack at the nettles and maither when I should be enjoying the vistas beneath me. Things slowly deteriorate from a path maintenance point of view the closer I get to Thorpe Mandeville, and particularly as I drop into the deep railway cutting and try to find a way up through the tangles on the other side. Overhead a single-engined jet plane performs some gentle aerobatics - an old Canberra or a Jet Provost? - something relatively ancient with straight wings. I chunter at the sheep who very sensibly run away so that they don't have to hear me swear. It's the combination of farmer behaviours I object to. If you can't be bothered to support me in my best efforts to keep to the rights of way, don't waste your money on notices telling me how private your land is while you neglect the proper care of finger posts and stiles.

At Thorpe Mandeville I head for a restorative GB at the Three Conies pub, served to me by Siobhan. She asks me if I'm walking and I explain. She remembers a church in her native Cork where everyone likes to get married - St. Finbar's: there's a waiting list of two years. I ask if she's put her name down yet. She says she'll have to find a man first. Amanda is having a drink with her family, overhears our chat and comes to the bar to join in. She's from Culworth, just up the road, and we talk about local churches, and how there's always something to be seen, and how they make us feel. When I say goodbye, I walk the length of the village and enter the little church of St. John the Baptist. A wall painting survives, and it's particularly touching. An infant Jesus is being carried on the shoulders of St. Christopher, who of course is the patron saint of travellers. Thorpe Mandeville sits on the drovers' route known as Banbury Lane, which I encountered twenty-five miles away on the outskirts of Northampton. Each year the sheep-minders would have passed this way, perhaps sheltering overnight  at the Three Conies, perhaps taking communion at the church if they were so minded. They would have seen the painting on the north wall of St. John's as they entered by the south door, and perhaps its tender symbolism gave the seventeenth century church-whiteners pause as they stripped the parish church of all other things by their lights idolatrous.

A copy of the church accounts for 2015-16 is attached to the noticeboard in the church porch. There are eleven contributions to the Planned Giving at St. John's totalling some three thousand pounds. Casual giving runs at about eight hundred pounds p.a.. There are a few other contributions to church funds, notably a harvest supper raising four hundred or so. The diocese asks the church for somewhere around £4.5k annually, for which the church will receive about a sixth of a vicar's time. They can only meet their 'parish share' by dipping very slightly into reserves. This is not sustainable.

How could the financial and pastoral resources of a church like Thorpe Mandeville be improved? Without patronising the parishioners, some of whom may be elderly and not so well off, could some church-twinning assist in promoting growth? What about the  church and the pub working together? Is the urban scene always the way to think about reviving the Church's fortunes? What if 'Revival' were to come from Britain's villages?

The way back to Middleton Cheney takes me along the 'Millenium Way', a Rotary inspired project from 2000. No doubt it seemed like a good idea at the time, but the waymarking of the path hereabouts has become sketchy with time, and it requires a bit of native wit to work out the walking line. Just a thought, but I wonder if the installation of second-rate 'Long Distance' paths means that less care is taken with the overall pattern of 'rights of way'?

Stats man: 21 km. 6.5 hrs. 22 deg. Breezy. 26 stiles. 21 gates. 3 bridges. Some leaping about. Some scrabbling under. Good rabbiting and craic at the Three Conies .

Lord
Thank you
For sunny summer days
For good people
For the beauty 
Of stone and wood
For the sense of physical well-being.
Help me to cling to these memories
In the dark times
When they come.
Amen.   

Earlier on the West Wing...

Hello everyone

This is the fifty-first post on this blog, since I began writing in March 2016. It's a small book already!

I'm hobbling from St. Peter's, Weston Favell to the Cathedral in Peterborough by a long series of roughly circular walks, visiting every church in the diocese on the way. So far I've passed through about 160 parishes, which means that sadly I'm almost halfway and a thousand kilometres through my travels. If you have been, thank you very much for following me thus far. But, good news, there's still much excitement to come before the final party - I shouldn't think we'll be done until the summer of 2019. Will my boots last that long?

The holy purpose behind the project is to suggest that as Anglican Christians we're better together (actually even the word 'Anglican' could go into brackets in that sentence.) Despite our different traditions and nuances of belief, IMO there's not enough money or numerical support for us to indulge our theological purity. I think we need each other, in a rainbow coalition of gender, race, and ability, lay and clerical, evangelical, catholic and everything in between, even if it means learning to disagree vigorously but in love. Steve Biko once wrote a book with the double-meaning title 'I write what I like'. I'm sure some of my preferences and prejudices are only too clear. I hope readers will stay with me. Perhaps we all need sometimes to consciously 'read what we don't like', me included.

Enough of the preaching. Only a proportion of the blog is devoted to matters of faith. I'm also trying to record an impression of Northamptonshire as it appeared to one person at a certain point in time, to be added to the tapestry of historical record. It's tempting to think the world is becoming weighed down by too much trivial personal opinion, but it's for others to decide whether the information and comment found here is worth preservation. In the first place I'm simply trying to understand what I see and hear. Inevitably there's personal reminiscence too: fragments of a stuttering autobiography could be disinterred.

A big continuing thank you to Sue and Matt for their support and lively debate about so many fascinating things. Sine quibus non.

A Dilemma

I leave be-locked Kelvin carefully attending to the interior decorating of our downstairs. For his pleasure Kelvin likes to spend his spare time hanging off mountains, putting body and soul at mortal risk. We both like the great outdoors, but by comparison, I am pure soft-core, and as in matters financial, ultra low-risk.

Driving to Farthinghoe, two straws in the wind from Radio 5. Firstly, during an interesting conversation between the presenter and an expert on university choice (it being the day of the 'A' level results), the presenter says, 'So what you're saying is, that although it's Old Skool they should pick up the phone and talk to the universities to see what can be done for them...' (meaning that students could potentially 'trade up' their university choice if they found they had better 'A' level results than expected). So, says I to the radio, is it now really 'Old Skool' to think that we should engage people one-to-one in real-time conversation, rather than texting or e-mailing them? Duh!

Secondly, Ashley Giles, the ex-England left arm spinner, these days a coach, asked whether day/night cricket is a good idea opines, 'Well, something has to be done to keep Test cricket alive. Young people these days have only a thirty second attention span...' To which I would reply that at that rate even 20/20 cricket, let alone the Test Match variety, is destined for society's dustbin along with most everything else we hold dear. Thirty seconds is not enough. For anything at all, really.

And you ask: 'Your point?' Simply that this is what the Church has to grapple with, along with the rest of society. And that giving in to technological fashion may not be the right thing to do - for either society or the Church. How should we Christians deal with this? My later visit to Middleton Cheney puts the matter in stark focus.

                                                       Bringing in the sheaves...

At Farthinghoe I park up by the pub, and walk out to where I can see the land fall away below the fields on the edge of the 'hoe'. The paths marked on the map are a little bit 'suck-it-and-see' on the ground, but the general idea is to walk parallel to the scarp until the ha-ha at Great Purston, which is a very handsome manor house next to a horsey farm. A path seems to have completely disappeared here, but I walk around the manor grounds and cross a derelicted field to a lane, and on, until at a right angle I pick up the track which will take me to Middleton Cheney. The early morning dreakh has dissipated, and now it's warm despite the brisk westerly breeze. No one seems to walk this way much, a state of affairs somewhat encouraged by the local land-owners. Two or three times I have to slash my way through nettles and other undergrowth at stiles, but then by way of a clear path through a cut field I cross the overgrown line of the old railway and climb the other side of the valley to the trench of the A422.

I have a decision to make. Shall I go on into Middleton, or make an out-and-back to Warkworth and Overthorpe, the westernmost parish in the diocese? I do the second thing and pick up the Jurassic Way in the direction of Banbury where it begins its journey back behind me to Stamford and the north-east of the county. The Jurassic Way claims to follow the line of the escarpment, and to have ancient lineage: a sort of cut-price Ridgeway. I've walked the entirety of this minor long distance footpath on a previous occasion and it's quite fun. Today this section seems to be better cared for than I remember. Out of Middleton it dives into what in Northamptonshire terms can almost be described as a ravine: there's a drop of about eighty feet down and up again crossing a cute little bridge at the stream. My previous walk entailed grappling with a field of extremely blue, extremely wet borage on the far side, but this time progress is unimpeded. The church of St. Mary's is halfway between the two villages. Overthorpe implies a place looking down on something, and the thing I assume it's looking down on is Banbury. But then, people from Northampton habitually look down on Banbury.

I'd never really properly looked at this lovely little church in its isolated position. Its sandstone has crumbled away in a most beautiful and photogenic way. Here let me show you...

It's one of six churches in the Chenderit benefice, currently seeking a new incumbent. Ms./Mr. Out of Work Clergyperson, you could do a lot worse...

I retrace my steps, and then cross into Middleton Cheney on the Astrop Road. I have previously thought to myself that Middleton's a bit of an enigma. The Dolphin pub's closed at lunchtime, there are kids hanging around the fish bar, it's all a bit of a mish-mash of the artisan and the posh. And then there's All Saints Church. I knock on David Thompson's door and he gives me the north door key with an apology that the inside might be untidy - there's been a summer holiday event this week. In fact everything is serene, and ah! the glass...

This is pre-Raphaelite, arts-and-crafts heaven. Burne Jones, Morris, Rossetti, Gilbert Scott, they've all had a hand in the stained glass, the painted ceilings, the general Victorian refurbishment of the design. One could spend considerably more time than I have today, taking in each of the artistic lovelinesses in this building. I said I would write a coda to the last entry about St. Peter's, Lowick, so highly rated by Simon Jenkins. Well, we did go back, and knock on Mrs Halifax's door, and look at the interior there, but to be honest it left me cold. True it was a dull day, and perhaps its lucent quality, so much admired by Mr. Jenkins, might have been more obvious had it been as brilliantly sunny as today, but really I think St. Peter's is one for the connoisseurs. A bit like Wagner, perhaps one day I'll grow up to like it more. It's a matter of opinion of course, but I still think more people walking into All Saints, Middleton (only two stars in Simon Jenkins!) would go 'Wow!'

                                                       East window: Middleton Cheney

And yet. The legends on the wall speak of a modest congregation struggling to make ends meet and of an incipient crisis, made much worse by the theft of lead from the roof (such a churlish crime!) They need three quarters of a million to make things right, and it's much beyond their resources to raise such a sum. What the display on the north wall also shows is that this is a congregation with its head firmly screwed on: they understand what the Church's mission is, and they clearly don't want just to be a museum space. Yet along with St. Mary's Wellingborough, of all the places I've so far visited on my Long Walk, this is the one which stands out for exceptional interior beauty. Even Kelvin couldn't have done better. 

                                                        Seven theses: Middleton Cheney   

I'd never realised that really Middleton is a two-centre place. Just out of Lower Middleton Cheney a path turns off through not particularly electrifying fences and eventually fetches up in Thenford. If the village name seems vaguely familiar it's because this is where Anne and Michael Heseltine live, and every now and then they open their grounds to those interested in dendrology and planting. The village is quite perfect in itself, and St. Mary's church is open by both south and north doors to any passing visitor. It undersells itself a little by describing itself as a hodge-podge. I'm chiefly charmed by the remnants of medieval glass, which picks up a faint echo of the glories back up the road in Middleton. Thenford too is one of the Chenderit churches: they still manage one service a month here: it would be very cold in winter.

I had sort of hoped to run into Lord Heseltine in the village. I don't share his politics, except in insofar as I detect a one-nation compassion in his advocacy for business and technology. Whatever one feels about the occasional excess of his actions in his younger political life, I feel there's always been an honesty about the opinions expressed even when they've been unfashionable, or unpalatable to his party colleagues. And he was always notably entertaining when interviewed on Radio 4's 'today' programme. Definitely a person to invite to the fantasy dinner party along with say, Bill Clinton and Judi Dench.

I pass by Ottily's flower stall at the top of Thenford, and leave her 20p as requested, although I do not carry away one of her posies. I suspect Ottily to be of quite early primary school age (although I could be badly putting my foot in it here!) I feel sure Lord Heseltine would heartily approve of her enterprise culture. He and she may even be related for all I know.

 

Stats man:  21 km. 6.5 hrs. 22 degC. Stiff westerly breeze at about 20 mph max. Sundry dog walkers in the villages. Not a soul along the country paths. 24 stiles. 35 gates. 4 bridges. One unavoidable ford. (See the difference to the east of the county in these respects!) What with all the slashing and hacking, quite a strenuous afternoon. Maybe the 3000 metres steeplechase should have been my event.

Lord
We are custodians
Of so much beauty.
Despite their Fall
Our ancestors made marvels
Which inspire and teach us
(Also fallen)
to this day.
Help us to preserve what is best,
And record faithfully what we must lose,
And fashion new glories
From our own skill
To enrich our children
And their children
As we pass on the truths
We believe we have learned.
Amen

And did those feet in ancient time...?

Sue tells me I'm obsessed with the Romans. She's probably right. I am. Not majorly obsessed as I am with recording and cricket. More at the level of e.g. cakes or J.S.Bach's Forty Eight Preludes and Fugues. Here are a few reasons why.

The Romans' interest and presence in Britain is so sharply defined for such a relatively remote historical period. We know to the year when they arrived, and we know to the year when they left, although there are some mysteries about what happened in between. And because of the problematic nature of British history in the later 5th and 6th centuries, there's a sort of 'Was there once a civilisation on Mars?' feel about the whole thing (I don't mean to suggest there really was, or that the Roman occupation is just a conspiracy theory!) But the sophistication the Romans lent British society pretty much disappears when they packed their bags, or so it's alleged, and although their remains and artefacts are all around us and under our feet, most of the time we're unaware of it. Baudrillard would probably therefore demand that they were never here. 17th century sceptics likewise!

The Romans were perhaps the first to bring Christianity to Britain. I was brought up close to Lullingstone Villa in Kent where clear evidence survives of Christian worship during the 4th century. How much further the Christian presence in Britain goes back before that no one knows, though I'd be as sceptical as the next person about Joseph of Arimathea ever pitching up in Glastonbury.

Studying 'Classics' at school heated up an interest I'd had from quite a young age. A few years later I was able to indulge myself teaching Latin before the subject fell off the curriculum at Billing Rd's Northampton School for Boys. With that school's renewed gentrification, it's probably back on the menu now.

So here I am, walking along the old railway line out of Thrapston through the linear 'Town Park' towards the place where two Roman roads intersected - the one from Godmanchester to Leicester and the lesser one from Irchester to Water Newton which more or less follows the line of the modern A605 towards Peterborough. I study the fields for signs of an agger or 1800 year old building rubble and watch my feet carefully lest I miss a denarius glittering in the sun, but of course apart from a suspiciously bumpy field the other side of the hedge when I turn up towards Titchmarsh, there's nothing Romanoid to be spotted. British History Online tells me the crossroads were unusually configured, but what that actually means they don't say. No doubt there was a mansio - there are a number of known settlements close by - so I imagine a lot of drinking, swearing and wenching, and we're close to the River Nene, so maybe some water-related religious stuff as well.

                                   Looking for Romans: Thrapston to Peterborough railway

The 'Crossroads' idea has obvious metaphorical power. For many it will conjure memories of sixties' television through the fictional Crossroads Motel, which brought awareness of the Brummy accent to those living south of Watford. No doubt the writers were hinting that the itinerants passing through the motel, or even those running it (ah, Sandy and Meg!) were often at points of change in their lives. Would they take the 'right' or 'wrong' direction? For me, I'm immediately thinking of the 30's black bluesman Robert Johnson, who's said to have made a pact with the Devil, so rapidly did his guitar technique improve, and so young did he die. His 'Crossroads Blues' became an icon of modern rock blues through Eric Clapton and Cream's definitive live cut, recorded in San Francisco somewhere around 1968. The best guitar solo-ing of its type? I don't know of a better: it still thrills me now whenever I hear it. As with Mahler's Eighth, I don't want to listen to it too often lest the appetite may sicken and so die.

I walk steadily uphill towards the Polopit end of Titchmarsh. I can't find the origin of this striking name, but I do know a 'polo pit' is a place where a novice polo player sits on a wooden horse and practises swinging their mallet. I shouldn't think the name's got anything to do with that, but you never know! Just up the road before Titchmarsh proper is the house where the poet and dramatist John Dryden lived when he were a lad (He was born in the Rectory at Aldwincle where I'm going next).

Dryden spent his adolescence during the turmoil of the English Civil War. He could be interpreted as a rather 'Vicar of Bray' character, saying nice things about the late Oliver Cromwell shortly after his death, but wholeheartedly embracing the Restoration. Mind you, I shouldn't think he was the only one to do that. Perhaps it was in the light of the terrors of the war that he subsequently wrote: 'The sword within the scabbard keep/And let mankind agree/Better the world were fast asleep/Than kept awake by thee/The fools are only thinner/With all our cost and care/But neither side a winner/For things are as they were.'

I don't personally have a feel for this period of English literature, but given that Northamptonshire isn't exactly flush with great writers, you'd think a bit more of a fuss would be made. Go to Eastwood and you can't avoid D.H.Lawrence. The route I'm walking today might make part of a nice 'Dryden Trail', if anyone were bothered.

Apart from a carrot, there are some interesting things to look at in Titchmarsh including the ruins of a castle (probably rather a domestic one) dating to the time of Richard III, when its owner, John Lovell and others of the great and good were parodied thus: 'The catte, the ratte and Lovell the dogge, rulyth all England under a hogge'. I wander past the village shop (opened in 2007 by Alan Titchmarsh, natch!) towards the church of St. Mary's. Outside the shop a woman leaning on her bike offers me a biscuit which I rather churlishly decline by replying that I try not to eat 'junk food' on my travels. She's kind enough not to hold this rudeness against me and when her husband joins us we chat for a full half hour about this and that. We discover we have much in common in the places we know, and in our fears about the world and politics, although we don't share the same nationality - X and Y are mainland Europeans. I walk on to the church animated and cheered by an unexpected encounter. If you get to read this, thank you guys!

St. Mary's is a welcoming place. Like other churches with a wide nave, it provides the worshipper with air and space, and in the contemporary manner allows room for a café area without compromising the spiritual focus of the building. They're very proud of their restored organ. It cost a lot of money, and they're still short of a bob or two. How much is too much for the preservation of such tradition? Compared say, with the costs that might be incurred in evangelism or outreach to the poor? Spikenard anyone? Or can high end/high cost music be evangelism in itself?

A couple of decades ago I produced an album for a Celtic band called 'Chanter'. It may not have been the most successful project in the world. I was ill while we recorded it, and I'm afraid I imposed too much of my own restrictive template on a free-spirited bunch of musicians who combined liberal quantities of liquor, bombards and Mongolian throat singing with the more conventional mix of Irish jigs and reels. The jolly raggle-taggle included an Ulsterman called Brian Aldwinckle who claimed his forebears came from the Northamptonshire village of (almost) the same name. Sadly I see from the band's website that Brian passed away a couple of years ago.

Aldwincle has two churches. All Saints church is in the care of the Historic Churches Conservation Trust, and is where Dryden's dad was in charge. I cross the Nene by the end of the lovely Titchmarsh Nature Reserve, and creep up on All Saints from the village end. It's open and inside I find Kay who's clearing up after an overnight 'Champing' visit by a Wellingborough youth group. 'Champing' is camping in a church, but of course you'd worked that out for yourselves. Kay is friendly and chatty: there are champers in here many days out of the four or five months of summer. I should think it gets a bit chilly at other times of the year. Bats and spiders are all part of the fun. Readings of Dryden's plays might be distinctly optional. Further up the village road is St. Peter's Aldwincle, the regular worshipping village church. It's shut, but there's a children's party going on in the adjoining community hall, and I enjoy the kids' gaiety as I chomp (not champ!) on a sandwich.

Some old fashioned walking ensues. I navigate broad byways through fields of ripening corn with the woods never far away. Apart from the deep, muddy ruts being caused by the heavy duty tyres of modern tractors rather than horses and carts, I could be back a couple of hundred years. Underfoot it's rather squelchy. After a couple or three very dry months, the weather has broken down and there's been a lot of rain. Near Lowick there's a pong in the air from the 'Compost Site', but the village and its church of St. Peter's are ample reward. Lowick itself has that rather architecturally spare feel of Eastern Britain: the warm, honey-coloured sandstone of the west has been replaced by a harder white variety which seems bleached by the wind. St. Peter's rates four stars in Simon Jenkins 1000 Best Churches, one of only two to receive the accolade in the county. Seen from far and wide, the tower rises majestically to command the fields. Jenkins describes the building as 'eccentric perpendicular'. I don't have time to search out a key this time, but if I get back in the next week or so, I'll add a coda to this post about the inside.

Down towards the lane towards the stream is a cottage with a stunning garden which would have done credit to Gertrude Jekyll. It belongs to Gill. I tell her how lovely it is, and we fall into conversation. She apologises for not stopping her pruning and cutting back, and of course I say how great it is to see someone else doing the work. She and her partner haven't lived here long. She's a garden design professional, and if you look up 'Lowick Design' on your web browser of choice you should find her. For the second time today, there are coincidences. They used to live in a village halfway between Den Haag and Amsterdam (our Matt lives in DH), and their daughters went to the British School in Voorschoten where friend Carole Waters taught until very recently.Gill's family name is 'Gardiner', which given her current profession is a bit of a gift. I laugh and tell her that the designer who has so beautified our own garden over the years is Jay Pink - also a suitably flowery name. Gill started her working life as a child psychologist before her second calling took over. Jay has gone from garden design into psychotherapy (practising  not receiving it!)

As I return towards Islip, Thrapston and the car, an older gentleman emerges from a side turning on the track maybe forty yards ahead of me, along with his sandy coloured lab cross. The dog bounds down towards me, barking, growling, jumping, generally being objectionable. I tell the dog loudly to desist. The owner does and says nothing. As I draw level he mutters 'He's young and excitable'. No apology. With all the compressed, potential-mad-axe-man-fury I can summon, I hiss, 'Not everyone likes dogs!' I can't abide rude and unacceptable behaviour in the over-sixties. How can their sons and daughters, grandsons and grand-daughters ever be expected to turn out couth and polite?

As a footnote to my comments on Thrapston last time out, the brown tourist info sign on the city limits advertises the 'Victorian tea-shoppe'. This place of pilgrimage proves elusive. Let's ignore the historical solecism in the spelling. According to Google I later find it's permanently closed. Oh, Thrapston!

Stats man:  18 km. 6 hours (I spent a long time chatting!) 20 deg C. 2 stiles. 7 gates. 5 bridges. One great crested grebe. Numerous kites scouring the newly shorn fields looking for rodents. One idiot dog walker. And to be fair, several other courteous and pleasant ones!

 What didn't I see? Roman coins. An adder. A slow worm. Not even a toad - perhaps more surprising given how wet the surface was. Where are all the toads these days?

Dear Lord

Thank you for the surprises of life.
Thank you for the people I meet
Who raise the spirits
Who show me new things
Who suggest new angles
On old problems
Who remind me not to be cynical
But to be hopeful always
And to enjoy the beauty
Of the world you made
And which we try to maintain.
Amen.

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