ON TIPTOE

 

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 with its telecoms mast, and the cone of Colborough Hill (all of them relative Leicestershire mountains at over 200 metres) before joining the Oakham Road. Here there is more traffic, and more frequent verge-leaping to be done. In 1941 a Wellington bomber crashed on Whatborough returning from a mission over Boulogne. Five of the six on board were killed. The two pilots were 23 and 19 years old respectively. One of the crew who was a few years older than the others survived but died two years later from polio. Just now, in the light of the war in Ukraine, I read these kinds of stories slightly differently. There are sheep clearly visible on the top of Robin-a-Tiptoe, and the vegetation is a darker, more heathland colour because of an ancient enclosure which over the ages people have variously interpreted as Danish or Roman. The sheep are significant. The hill’s original name was ‘Howback’, but it now takes its name from a sheep rustler who was rescued from hanging because he was too tall. His accusers couldn’t find a branch high enough, so on ‘tiptoe’ he was still able to touch the ground.

As for Whatborough… 

Clearance 

Were we born to despise

colour, wealth or race?

What is it veils our eyes?

What truths do we not face?

 

If bad conscience is wiped clear

No crime is disallowed.

We silence what we fear

We cloak ourselves in cloud.

 

We nudge

We compel

We move

We rend

We force

We expel

We hate

We ‘cleanse’

 

The history of the world

Is all contained in this

The ‘good’ a foetus curled;

Ought misconstrued as is.

I still believe in moral progress, but these days only just. It seems old habits die hard. The regression to oppression is always with us. The above stanzas were a reaction to the medieval clearance which occurred at Whatborough, a political act depriving the poor, further enriching the powerful, the church authorities at very least passive in what was done, if not actually colluding. It was a pattern repeated the length and breadth of Britain. And so, in different ways, in different places, it continues…the Palestinians, the Rohingya, Rwanda (and I’m thinking of its internal difficulties not our possible mis-use of it) and so on, with much of this activity fuelled by prejudices we should recognise in ourselves. And unfettered, would our current political leaders act differently, given the evidence we have before us?

For Christians, Paul’s painful self-examination: ‘Why do I do the things I hate, and fail to do what I know I should?’ is a daily experience. This analysis means nothing to most people. 

I pass through Halstead after a lung-challenging climb and use the tradesman’s entrance to arrive in Tilton via a scrubby path. It’s coffee n’chat at St. Peter’s, as it is every Friday morning, but because I arrive a couple of minutes before midday I’ve missed most of it. I hear good humour shared and sound advice administered as I sit and take in the monuments, the broad nave, and the apparently slightly offset chancel.  Jim talks to me about the Digby family, whose name is still writ large in local cartography. I encountered traces of their forebear Sir Everard at Stoke Dry a few years ago, a man implicated in gunpowder, treason and plot, and executed for it. (I’m not a lover of camp wit, but it’s hard to hear the name Everard without thinking of Larry Grayson’s fictional friend who loved dancing the Gay Gordons). Sir Everard’s son Kenelm, who Jim now mentions to me, is a man worthy of an entire saga to himself. Please look him up, to see if you agree.

 

Digbys in Tilton

On the hill

I could make a pun, like,

‘Tilton at windmills’

but doubtless it’s been done before.

A mason once had fun, carving

‘mooning men’ gargoyles;

then was shown St. Peter’s door.

Children in the sun at the

‘Tiddlywinks’ school;

A whole new world to explore!

Legends Tiptoe in the

high Leicester hills

and from what I know it’s sure;

each village, every one, has its

own close secrets.

So tell me more…

Tell me more!

Before arriving in Rutland, I didn’t realise how distinct and how jealously guarded the characters of individual villages are. I should have understood this. I once heard it said that in Manchester, the individual suburbs of the contemporary city each had their own dialect which made the speaker’s origin instantly identifiable. I subsequently asked a Mancunian singer of roughly my own age if this was true, and he confirmed it, even from his own childhood and teenage years in the fifties and sixties. This has consequences for rural ministry. We cannot by fiat assimilate different villages and expect anything other than rejection, at least in the short term. They are themselves and they don’t necessarily want to become something else.

I walk back to Launde round the other side of the hills, following the line of the disused railway for some of the distance to Oxey Farm. It is now a very quiet area, to which not even the caravaners have found their way this June. Perhaps when the trains were still chugging their way through the deep cuttings, one felt closer to civilisation than one does now, though I suppose the number of trains per day wasn’t very great on this backwater of the Great Central (?)

 At Launde the car is a lot muddier than it was than when I left it. From the marks on the bodywork, I suspect it’s made close acquaintance with bovine backsides and slobbering mouths. The guilty cattle are nowhere to be seen, having been seen off from the tree’s shade by the sheep, somehow.

15 km. 4 hrs. 24 deg. C. Clear blue and sunny all the way.   Launde – Tilton – Launde. 

It should have been the festival of Barnabas last Sunday, but he was slipped to Monday instead, perhaps deemed unworthy of consideration on the Sabbath.

Another sometime walker

Barnabas.

Now there was a guy.

An encourager

No pushover

Up for a scrap

if he thought it was right.

Loyal to a fault.

Took on Paul;

Said the lad Mark

deserved a second chance.

Paul intransigent,

Was having none of it.

A hook was slung;

Barnabas treading a different path

Still stayed close.

 

Frustrating not to know

How he was called

and where

and what came next.

Just think…

if he’d

put pen to paper

(not the other man!)

What then might have been?

 

St. Peter's Tilton from the south