vinculafido

  As I drive down the steep little hill to park outside Launde Abbey a cassocked figure, possibly the deputy warden or chaplain, is shoo-ing a small herd of heifers away from the parking spaces. He explains, though I’d guessed, that on a hot day the cows are looking for shade and don’t like sharing space under the adjacent tree with the sheep. (Better together, boys and girls!) Perhaps I’d like to consider parking my car in the open, where they won’t want to be? I decline, and then soon afterwards - but too late - question the wisdom of my decision. After all, he knows his local animals, and I don’t. He’s a very competent shoo-er -not in the average clergyperson’s job spec.   Though herding cats may be.   It's up and down all the way to Tilton on the Hill. Sweet-scented and shimmering in the midsummer sun, the countryside here makes me think of rural Devon or Somerset away from the moorlands. I follow the narrow lane between the broad top of Robin-a-Tiptoe hill, Whatborough Hill

  Holygate Obliteration and obfuscation in the papers, in the landscape. What was once, is not now and will not be again   You remember those hillcrest villages in Tuscany or the south of France? Here at Ridlington much the same: an ancient rectangle atop the ridge; a street plan perfectly preserved; the church on a bury so visible below; a castle (its earthworks cut by a swimming pool) and then an end to the metalled road where I can walk on to the sunset and another county as if it was two hundred years ago; a peddler of trinkets or a man herding sheep. Such peculiar freedom; history coming alive in the dried up tubers of one’s bones.   I’m not in fact a tinker, more a spacecraft, sling-shotted (is that a word?) this way and that round the parish planets of our own diocesan solar system, now heading out towards other galaxies. And in those star systems, who knows, not just things being done slightly differently, but entirely non-carbon-base

  To recap.   Walking has been part of the distinctively Christian story from its beginning. How many miles must Jesus have clocked up as he and his caravan of disciples followed the Palestinian paths and tracks? Even his birth involved a mandatory pilgrimage from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Today many of us find solace in trekking to holy places. Beginning in 2016, by the end of 2021 I’d been on foot to every one of the roughly four hundred parishes in the Diocese of Peterborough, and now I’m walking from our new home in Rutland’s Morcott to the neighbouring dioceses. My walking is partly for fun and for health reasons, but also to make a point. So far this season I’ve symbolically linked my old and new projects by walking from Peterborough to our driveway, and now the pilgrimage proper begins, by closing my front door and setting out west towards Leicester and the setting sun. As I go, I’m still insisting that we Anglican Christians, so apparently divided and few in number are BETTER TOG