vinculafido

  The strange tower of Beeby church Just outside Hungarton I cross what I guess are the remains of real ridge and furrow strips, judging by the sizeable mounds where the plough would have turned. They remind me of the excellent, rather moving Michael Wood TV series of the early 10s in which he tells British history from the point of view of the village of Kibworth Beauchamp, not so far from here.   Next comes a negotiation of unexpected footpath alterations by the landowners at Waterloo Lodge Farm, possibly not officially sanctioned, to allow what from their point of view are sensible divisions of grazing for their various equestrian clients. No help to walkers though, as we work out the deviations from the OS for ourselves. Beyond the road there’s a jolly footpath, mostly nicely cut as a swathe through ripening wheat, which takes me to Beeby. Along the way, where a house’s paddock is being cut by a chap who looks less than overjoyed that a PROW passes through his property, ...

Around here, different estates seem to colour-code their gates I park below the church in Tilton. A sales-type in a fleet car hovers alongside, moves up the street, reverses back, consults a file. A cheerful woman with a dog smiles at me.   ‘Think he’s lost…’ she says. I reply that I once heard a surprisingly large percentage of drivers in London were exactly that. Apart from myself, she’s the last person I talk to until I stagger back to the village five hours later. The ‘Midshires Way’ is a new one on me. I follow its zig-zags along the stony edge and then down the scarp, before turning up the lane to Lowesby, which is a very neat village in thrall to its Hall.  The church of All Saints is shut up. Someone on the web describes it as ‘the most locked of locked churches’ . On the other hand, the Tilton and Lowesby cricket club looks in excellent order, conveniently sited so that whoever owns the Hall can look down upon it unimpeded as if it were a second lawn. Beautifully ...

  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, Whatbor...

  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 n...

  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 B...

  ‘So here it is, Merry Coronation, Have a slice of quiche. Look to the future Where we’re none of us so ri-i-ich….’   (…to be sung to the chorus of Slade’ s ‘Merry Christmas, everybody’)   If you’ve had your fill of coronating (sic) look away for a paragraph or two. Over the last seven years’ blogging, I’ve briefly commented on major public and state events, generally rather blandly - out of respect for any readers. Brexit was the exception. I felt then and think now it was a self-harming aberration fuelled by a minority opinion within one political party, perhaps assisted by foreign ‘bad actors’. Eventually that history will be written, and professional commentators will make their judgments, but not in time for someone like me to say ‘I told you so’, or for my opinions to be proved wrong. And here we are today watching on telly an occasion most of us haven’t witnessed before, and may well not see again. This time there’s direct relevance to this blog, b...