WADE IN THE WATER

 

In a ‘can I be bothered?’ moment I make a mistake, and eschew boots in favour of Merrills.  It’s surprising (duh!) how wet even very gentle rain makes a grass field, and although the finger post away from the lane near Lyndon church suggests a bridleway, there’s no discernible track until the gate where the path enters Lyndon Wood.  By then my feet are very soggy. At the top of the wood I come to the road which skirts the south side of Rutland Water, and have to walk its tarmac for a few hundred metres (no roadside path).  Drivers find the curves here very tempting as they display their inner Lewis Hamilton to partners and mates.  When the view opens up, just before a new track drops down to the reservoir’s perimeter path, the foot-sogginess is worth it. The scene today is absolutely autumn-tranquil. There’s not a breath of air to encourage the sailors. The only boats on a silver misty lake are occupied by meditating fisher-folk, perhaps catching something, perhaps not.

 

As I start to walk east beside the Water, I come across Richard from Charing in Kent. He and his partner are holidaying here, but they’re eyeing up Rutland as a peaceful future home. I say I’m on my slow way to Lincoln. We talk briefly about the Pilgrim Way along the Downs to Canterbury where he often sees gaggles of walkers.  Apart from Richard and me, there are very few cyclists or strollers this morning.

 Edith Weston

They say that bells can be heard at Dunwich

tolling for a town lost to the sea,

but here at Rutland no guilt stains the flood:

the conscience is as clear as the dome of the sky where

the Normanton church points to the lake,

eager to steam for the farther shore,

as preachers urged in the times before

the Gwash was obscured for the nation’s sake

and to furnish a drink for you and me.

Ring out for this: an idyll, a shimmering paradise,

bought by forgotten sacrifice.

 

The Normanton church, rescued and preserved from the waters, albeit to serve as little more than a natty wedding venue, reminds me of a Mississippi river steamer. I’m always looking for the paddle at its side. As far as I can see, remarkably little damage was done to people’s lives when the reservoir was made, but of course there will have been some loss of habitation, and farmers will have sacrificed their fields, probably unwillingly at the time.  I hope those whose lives were disturbed felt well enough compensated, but no infrastructural project of this sort happens without pain. In St. Mary’s church in Edith Weston, there’s a memorial to those folk whose bones were disinterred from Normanton and cremated because of the works.  I suppose the truth is that making a reservoir of this size might not easily be replicated today. And yet the increasing population of the UK demands more water at a time when the arrival of rain and snow seems even more unpredictable than it did in the time of Thomas Barker.

There’s a book exchange in St. Mary’s.  I see a Michael Connelly I haven’t read, and something about Viking London that looks good, and make a note to return with suitable substitutes.  It’s these small community touches that bring our places of worship alive. In her Church Times’ column, Angela Tilby is sounding more prophetically gloomy by the week, but I usually agree with her. She says we need to pay more attention to the language the Church uses to describe its aims and aspirations. Of ‘Fresh Expressions’ she says… ‘(it) never quite disguised the hint of floral deodorant – masking the stink, presumably, of the cobwebs and death of ordinary parish life, patronisingly described as “inherited Church”, full of grandma’s silver, which should have been sold off long ago…’   She makes the correct philosophical point that language and action are yoked.  Careless-speak means careless theology. In Orwell’s ‘1984’, ‘newspeak’ was designed to make certain realities impossible to contemplate or realise. Angela is part of the campaigning group ‘Save The Parish’. Their core idea will make less sense in the cathedral close or the city centre, or to those who have a one-size-fits-all view of the Faith.  Elsewhere in the same edition of the CT, a vicar from Andover with a numerically highly successful parish in Andover remarks ‘As far as I’m aware, Gen Z are equally drawn to the spirituality of liberal Catholic worship as they are to contemporary expressions…it’s not a binary here…I think people are more interesting and complicated than we sometimes imagine…’. I would like to think so.

As I walk the tarmac path beside the lake towards the dam and then on to Empingham, I’m reminded what a benefit the walkway is. There are many senior citizens taking the gentle air, many of them less than capable of a frolic. Walking aids and chairs abound. And today the path is safer, because the more hardcore cyclists have been replaced by amateurs, at least as evidenced by their variety of informal clothing and girths. This is as nice a stroll as any you could take along a seaside front. You just have to wait a bit longer for the ice cream.

St. Peter’s Empingham was once in the medieval fiefdom of the vast Lincoln Diocese, which ruled the roost all the way down to Aylesbury. The lay out of Edith Weston is quirky, with little low pews scattered around its cluttery space. It has a lovely vaulted chancel. At Empingham, they opted for chairs long ago when they pulled out the old box pews. The chairs are second generation now. With the width afforded by the North Transept, it immediately feels like a relaxed place to come and worship. Everything you feel, will naturally take its gracious time here.  In both churches mention is made of the Heathcote family, who in the most famous of the Gilbert Heathcote’s time, must bear the responsibility for moving Normanton village and church so that their own lives might be improved.  I think sadly of my former colleague of the same name, whom I was told died by his own hand, a victim of the failing education system in Northampton during the seventies. I presume but do not know, that there was a family connection way back.  A note in the Empingham village leaflet comments that their main street is unusually wide for these parts, and some of the older houses lack windows that look onto it.  It’s alleged this is because Lady Ancaster did not care to be observed as her carriage proceeded along the road. 

Power corrupts etc. etc.  Everywhere, including in the Church, as we know too well from many recent examples.

Empingham

A sheep who lives by the dam

says she’s not worried at all.

If there were a breach, she adds,

I expect it would be a trickle,

a nice rill through the wall.

With respect, I reply, you don’t understand.

Such a thing would be disastrous,

flooding the land

for miles around, and killing you!

But I am a sheep, she laughs,

we live for food and fun,

and when all’s said and done

the risk is outweighed by the view.

And your children, say I, askance,

for whom you assume that risk?

They’ll be resourceful, she smiles,

Like us, they’ll take their chance.

 

This was written before the catastrophic dam bursts and loss of life in Derna, Libya.

 

Lyndon – Edith Weston – Lyndon:  Edith Weston - Empingham – Edith Weston:

The walk was done in two legs, as well as on two legs. The total distance was 22 km and the travelling time about five and three-quarter hours. The weather was grey and misty first time out with a temperature of about 16 degrees, and sunny the second time at about 19 degrees.

 

‘Wade in the water’ is an African American ‘spiritual’, which carries resonances both of the rite of baptism and of a drive for emancipation and self-determination. As a song it consequently had something of a revival during the sixties.