Happy St. George’s Day!

Happy St. George’s Day, which (at least in the Catholic Church — I think!) has been transferred to today, Monday 24th, as yesterday was a Sunday.  Whether yesterday or today, wishing a very happy feast to all who cherish England.

The view south-west from Risby in the Lincolnshire Wolds, 10th August 2021.  Lincoln Cathedral is visible on the horizon, seventeen miles away.

‘Blessed be the time that apple taken was!’

A contribution to a virtual Advent Calendar of art, music and poetry compiled by members of Deo Gratias, a circle of Catholics in their twenties & thirties meeting fortnightly in London to discuss artistic and cultural expressions of the Christian faith.

Adam lay ybounden,
Bounden in a bond;
Four thousand winter
Thought he not too long.

And all was for an apple,
An apple that he took.
As clerkës finden 
Written in their book.

Ne had the apple taken been,
The apple taken been,
Ne had never our ladie
Abeen heav’ne queen.

Blessed be the time
That apple taken was:
Therefore we moun singen
Deo gratias.

This carol is one of several medieval lyrics, sacred and secular, that are preserved in a remarkable and unique fifteenth-century manuscript, possibly originating from Bury St. Edmunds, and now held at the British Library (Sloane MS 2593).  Like many medieval verses it is macaronic, combining Latin and the vernacular, and, as well as offering an aching glimpse into medieval Catholic England, it expresses in a nutshell one of Christianity’s great theological paradoxes, the ‘felix culpa’ or ‘happy fault’ — the realisation that, in so far as Adam’s sin led to our redemption by Christ, we may actually rejoice that the sin occurred, so wonderful is that redemption.  We hear it in the Exsultet at the Easter Vigil: ‘O happy fault; O necessary sin of Adam, which won for us so great a Redeemer!’

Wearing its learning lightly, and with (I think) a particularly English humour, this carol expresses the same idea, but this time with respect to Mary.  The carol begins with Adam ‘bounden in a bond’, an allusion to the medieval idea that he lay in limbo until Christ’s Harrowing of Hell on Holy Saturday.  I love the wry humour of the lines ‘Four thousand winter / Thought he not too long,’ which strike me almost as brotherly teasing; the same with ‘And all was for an apple, / An apple that he took’.  It is an acknowledgement of a kind of solidarity with Adam; an admission that he and we are all in the same pickle.

And yet — the poet says — if the apple had never been taken, if Adam had not sinned, Mary would never have been Queen of Heaven (since, implicitly, we would have had no need for Christ to save us).  Hence, strange to say,  ‘Blessed be the time / That apple taken was!’  This is the ‘felix culpa’, and a (surely deliberate) echo of the Exsultet.  And so, one senses to his own amazement, the catechist declares, ‘Therefore we moun singen [may sing] / Deo gratias.’  It is one of the most marvellous paradoxes of Christianity, and here is expressed concisely and with winsome humour, and also with the Marian devotion for which medieval England was renowned.

Several composers have set the carol to music. The best-known setting is probably Boris Ord’s, which has regular outings at the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge.  Benjamin Britten also included a version in his Ceremony of Carols.  But I think my favourite is the setting by Philip Ledger, with the words ‘Deo Gratias’ as a haunting refrain.

Finding Adlestrop

Yes.  I remember Adlestrop —

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly.  It was late June.

In fact it was the twenty-fourth of June: today is the anniversary of the ‘afternoon of heat’ that inspired this much-loved poem.  On this day in 1914 Edward Thomas was aboard the London to Hereford express, climbing up over the north Cotswolds, on his way to the poets’ colony at Dymock in Gloucestershire.  It was, as he recorded in his journal —

[…] a glorious day from 4:20 am and at 10 tiers above tiers of white cloud with dirtied grey bars above the sea of slate and dull brick by Battersea Park — then at Oxford tiers of pure white with loose large masses above and gaps of dark clear blue above haymaking and elms.

Then we stopped at Adlestrop, through the willows could be heard a chain of blackbirds songs at 12:45 and one thrush and no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam.

Stopping outside Campden by banks of long grass willowherb and meadowsweet, extraordinary silence between the two periods of travel — looking out on grey dry stones between metals and the shining metals and over it all the elms willows and long grass — one man clears his throat — greater than rustic silence.  No house in view.  Stop only for a minute till signal is up. 

Another stop like this outside Colwell [Colwall, just west of the Malverns?] on 27th with thrush singing on hillside above on road.

I hope I do Edward Thomas no disservice in observing that it is as much because of circumstance as the poem’s beauty in itself that this poem is so fondly and firmly remembered.  Within three months of that afternoon Britain was at war; three years later Thomas was dead, killed by a shell at Arras.  In March 1963 they came for the station as well: if you turn in your copy of Richard Beeching’s ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’ part 1, section 3, to page 109, the list for England of ‘Passenger Stations and Halts to be Closed’ — a list which reads, Ian Hislop has observed, ‘like the names on a war memorial’ — there it is, the fifth item from the top, ‘Adlestrop’, in cold dispassionate print between Addingham and Ainsdale: so callously tin-eared, so ruthlessly bureaucratic and ignorant, so bone-headedly inevitable, that there is something actually poetic and tragic about its presence on this list.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop — only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Thomas recorded the event because he knew it was fleeting, one of those in-between moments that we so seldom remember to remember — but did he realise how fleeting how much of it was?  For it is not only the moment that is now lost, but the country, the world in which it was possible.  Not only ‘that minute’ but most of what was in it and around it: the locomotive, the station, the silence aboard stationary carriages; no doubt most of the birdsong too.  The Dymock colony, the whole reason for the journey — the whole set of circumstances upon which it was contingent.  The railway survives — Brunel’s ‘Cotswold line’ from Oxford to Worcester is still one of Britain’s loveliest —  but of the station, other than the stationmaster’s house, nothing is left but the sign, mounted on a bus stop in the village  — only the name.  

The poem itself seems in retrospect as fragile and precious as the moment it is describing: written just in time, in the last years when such a poem could be made, by Thomas or anyone else.  This one vignette of a single signal-check has been pressed and hardened by the tremendous historical forces around it into a tiny treasured gem, standing not only for itself, but for all those other unwonted moments of ‘extraordinary silence’ that were possible, and about which poems could have been written, in that old world before the war.  Almost by accident, then, we have this snapshot from a time, perhaps the last time, when Deep England could still make a riposte to the modern world, could conspire to bring a modern express train to a grinding halt and ambush its passengers with her shocking stillness.  Thomas’s sketch — which even in finished form retains the jotted-down freshness of his original journal entry — is now as strangely dizzying as one of those old autochrome photographs, so real we can scarcely believe it.

The site of Adlestrop station is between Kingham and Moreton-in-Marsh stations on the climb to Chipping Campden summit; the precise coordinates are 51.9360°N 1.6591°W, immediately north-west of the overbridge carrying the road from Adlestrop to Oddington.  On this cab-ride video of the journey from London Paddington to Hereford, the site can be seen just after the bridge at 1h 16m seconds.  (The former stationmaster’s house can just be glimpsed on the left).

Thomas was absolutely correct, by the way, to speak of ‘Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’ — the county boundary crosses the railway less than a mile from the station in the up direction. (Its rough position is indicated by a caption on the cab-ride video at 1h 14m 40s; the line it takes is rather convoluted but it makes its final crossing of the railway at the end of the wall of tall trees on the right).  Thomas’s last line was as accurate as it was evocative.

What does it mean, I wonder, that at the poem’s centenary in 2014, a special train was organised to recreate the ‘unwonted stop’, slowing down at the old station so that the lines could be read over the loudspeaker?  Here is a video taken from aboard the train —

— and here is another from the overbridge itself, where the poem was also read as the train rounded the curve.

I cannot help feeling that something deep and beautiful is happening here.  These people have come to a particular place at a particular time — in other words, come on pilgrimage — for the sake of a much-loved, long-remembered poem.  Poetry often seems to be at its strongest when it works through the memory, and this poem, in touching not only our minds and hearts but the English landscape and time itself, has become a kind of memorial — one not of marble or granite, but made up of all four of those elements: minds, hearts, landscape, time.  Thus, just as the poem has come to stand for a whole vanished world, so this remembrance of the poem was a remembrance of that world.  To remember Adlestrop is to remember England.  And, even though it has been blotted out of the landscape and is no more than a memory, Adlestrop station still persists; it still somehow belongs to the English landscape, and the poem keeps it there. 

So for that minute a lost world lived again, proven still to abide in many minds and hearts; and poetry sustained it, poetry summoned it into sight.  Poetry is deeper than we know; it is as deep as England, as history, as life itself.

Happy St. George’s Day!

Wishing all readers a very happy feast of St. George, who was, as all sensible folk agree, a jolly good fellow all round.

The village and station of Corfe Castle, seen from the castle itself (January, 2019).

Lincolnshire Towers: St. Wulfram’s, Grantham

The steeple of St. Wulfram’s church first caught my eye, as it must many people’s, at about 105 miles per hour, the speed at which non-stop express trains hammer through the Lincolnshire town of Grantham, shooting out onto the high embankment across the town, leaning into the curve — and there, soaring above the chimneys and rooftops flashing jaggedly by in the foreground, there is Wulfram’s tower, with the same serenity with which it has weathered the seven centuries of its age; and the spirit soars with it.  The vision hangs and swivels, lingering for perhaps fifteen seconds, and is gone, and the train is pressing on towards Lincolnshire’s borders and London, or Yorkshire, or Scotland.

There are those who call the East Coast Main Line dull and boring, mainly because, south of County Durham at least, it runs relatively straightforwardly through England’s flatter counties.  But there are more than mountains to be seen from the window of a train.  For this line, as much as any other, I am sure, is proof of the poetry conjured up by that conspiracy if churches and railways.  Four medieval cathedrals — Durham, York, Peterborough and Lincoln — can be spotted to varying degrees at various points along its length, and plenty of other fine churches greet the eye as well, from the fifteenth-century spire of St. Mary Magdalene at Newark-on-Trent to Doncaster Minster’s Victorian Gothic, or handsome St. Peter’s at Offord D’Arcy.  But of all these, save perhaps only Durham, the sight of St. Wulfram’s at Grantham is surely the most thrilling.  Here the line speed (105mph beats ninety at Durham!), the eye-level view from the embankment, the church’s proximity to the railway, and, above all, the sheer beauty of the steeple, all conspire to lend those few seconds of the journey a meaningful, harmonious, unforgettable form, that of a theatrical scene, revolving like a snow-globe.  In other words, they turn Grantham into a poem.

St. Wulfram’s spire from a passing London train, 6th June 2017

Other travellers have noticed this before me.  For the writer Peter Hitchens, who ‘normally make[s] a point’ of looking out of the window whenever he comes this way, this is ‘one of the loveliest steeples in all England’.  And, according to the BBC programme Songs of Praise, which came to Grantham in 1980, ‘a certain Fr. Stanton’ would apparently stand up in the middle of the compartment to raise his hat in honour of the spire and its builders, and request his fellow passengers to do the same.  For myself, I resolved one day to visit Grantham properly, and to savour the poem more slowly, more closely, and from within.

That resolution was to be fulfilled one brisk autumn day in 2018. The train had pelted headlong from London, so it was barely mid-morning when my sister and I alighted half-way up England, under shredded bands of cloud scudding intermittently across the face of a kindly sun.  Off we set, through a pleasing warren of terraced houses immediately east of the station, down to where the Great North Road swoops in.  Even now it is not difficult to imagine the stage-coach days, with the inswooping mail trailing its column of dust, all wheels and thumping hooves and harnesses ajangle.  Not far along the road we found the majestic Victorian Guildhall, a building worthy of a major town on the Great North Road, with a statue of Isaac Newton outside, and a bustling local writers’ fair inside.  I was warming to Grantham already, sensing a certain self-respect that did not need to give itself airs (or maybe a down-to-earth-ness, appropriately enough for Newton’s home patch).  But there was no time to linger, for there was business to attend to.  Our plan was not to head straight for the church, but to hare up Hall’s Hill, the rise bounding the town to the east, in order to admire the great steeple from afar.  Hindered only by a bush full of angry wasps, which we doubled back to avoid, we climbed up high enough to be able to look back down on the town, and watch the sunlight and shadow cascading over it, and the fast trains hurtling through in the middle distance.

The view westwards from Hall’s Hill, 3rd November, 2018.

There in the autumn noon stood the tower that has been the glory of this broad, shallow valley of the young Witham since about the year 1320.  We were looking at a sight instantly recognisable, by this one essential feature, to twenty generations before us.  Briefly this was England’s highest steeple, until within ten years Salisbury Cathedral’s spire overtook it.  The two projects were not in fact unconnected, as Julian Flannery explains in his peerless Fifty English Steeples (Thames & Hudson, 2016), because Grantham actually belonged to Salisbury diocese: clearly one spire was not enough!  In any case, according to Flannery’s comprehensive theodolite surveys, St. Wulfram’s remains England’s fifth highest surviving medieval steeple after Salisbury and Norwich Cathedrals, the fellow Lincolnshire steeple of St. James’ in Louth, and St. Michael’s in Coventry (that is, the ‘old’ Coventry Cathedral).  It is worth mentioning in passing that three of the four highest medieval steeples of English parish churches are to be found in Lincolnshire: Louth amid the dreaming Wolds (287 feet), Grantham in south-western Kesteven (274 feet), and fen-defying Boston (266 feet).  This is to say nothing of Lincoln cathedral, once the tallest building in the world by virtue of its 520-foot central spire.  (Even after this spire collapsed in 1549, and the two others at the west end were taken down in the eighteenth century, Flannery believes that what remains of the central tower ‘may just exceed’ St. Botolph’s at Boston.)

The spire seen from Park Road.

But I am day-dreaming.  St. Wulfram can be put off no longer; it is time to go down the hill, threading through the suburban houses and the park — all almost conspicuously unpretentious, as if the town thinks the tower is showing off enough! —  to see the great church at closer quarters.

The west front.

So this is the steeple before which Ruskin swooned.  Here, as well as anywhere, it is possible to see the glory of the Gothic: the sheer verticality of everything, every little detail doing its bit to add to the upthrust of the whole.  The whole structure is straining towards Heaven, and the wide traceried windows let in Heaven’s light.  Flannery pointed out the one major mistake made by the builders in the staircase at the south-west corner, which was built too far out at the bottom, and which unfortunately, by becoming more pronounced as the tower tapers with height, throws the whole slightly off its symmetry.  Yet this lesson was learned here once and for all; the error was not repeated in any of the later great English towers.

Looking west from the chancel.  The tower stands right over the west door.

Considering the steeple’s emphasis on verticality, there is an interesting contrast waiting inside the church: the enormous and spacious width of its interior.  The two side-aisles are each almost as broad as the nave: John Betjeman even declares that the ‘power of the grand interior is horizontal rather than vertical’ (Best British Churches, Collins, 2011 edition, p. 400).  The church impresses us first by its height, then by its breadth.  In the north wall an alcove is visible where St. Wulfram’s relics are likely to have been displayed.  I wonder what grand processions there have been through this church over the years.  One spectacle that has been recorded for posterity is the visit of the BBC programme ‘Songs of Praise’ in 1980, which, for all sorts of reasons, in texture, language and content, seems caught at a curious, fascinating position, between the old Britain and the new.

We were, I think, about the only visitors at that point on the Saturday afternoon, but there were quite a few townsfolk pottering around.  Chairs and parts of a dismantled stage were being cleared away and loaded into a van after a secular awards ceremony the previous night, and a youngster no more than ten years old was being given a lesson on the mightly organ.  (I hope he will one day support a mighty surge of singing, as in Songs of Praise above!)  I bought a tea-towel showing the great spire (it has to be a particularly large tea-towel to fit the tower in) and we took our leave.

From the south-west.

This being a non-party-political blog, no party-political allegiance should be read into the detour we then made to see the building where, on October 13, 1925, Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, was born.  This red-brick corner shop is, I think, revealing about her character, even though it is no longer Roberts the greengrocer but a chiropractic clinic.  This must have been, as has often been pointed out, and which seems in common with Grantham in general, an unpretentious but decent place to grow up; plain and unvarnished but dignified and unbowed (and is even raised slightly above the level of the road).  The Methodist church where the Roberts family worshipped is only a few doors down.

Margaret Thatcher’s birthplace, North Parade, Grantham.

It seems arguable that this building goes some way to explain both Margaret Thatcher’s sympathy as a politician for those who worked hard to earn their living, which aided her electoral success, and her apparent lack of sympathy with those who were not capable of doing so, which is generally acknowledged to have precipitated the end of her premiership.  I was also struck by the shop’s position actually right on the old Great North Road, and not far at all from the railway either; she must, as she was growing up, have felt London and the wide world beckoning to her the moment she stepped outside the front door.

Almost directly opposite Margaret Thatcher’s birthplace is one of the most curious Catholic churches I have ever seen.  From outside, St. Mary the Immaculate is a solemn, sober early nineteenth-century neo-classical edifice.  Inside, however, it is completely different: the church seems to have been altogether transformed in the 1960s, so that the altar now faces north, not east, along what must once have been the length of the church, rather than its breadth.  I don’t think I have ever seen a church with an interior differing so dramatically from the exterior.  This surprise certainly competes with the contrast between horizontal and vertical in St. Wulfram’s!

Inside the church of St. Mary the Immaculate, looking north

Daylight began to fade as we drank hot chocolate in Cafe Leo along Westgate, and so the time came to take our leave of this reserved, unshowy town with its ardent steeple, and of the unsung, wide-skied county in which it is set.  But not for long, for another tower further east, that of St. Botolph in Boston, was soon to beckon me back to Lincolnshire.

Postscript: Writing this at Whitsuntide, I am reminded of Philip Larkin’s famous poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’.  Poetically at least, this week is the sixty-fifth anniversary of the journey it records.  It was down this line that Larkin’s train came that ‘sunlit Saturday’.  He would have passed through Grantham, and one of those weddings may well have been solemnised in St. Wulfram’s church.  Truly England is a poem.

Lincolnshire Towers

St. Wulfram’s church, Grantham, 3rd November, 2018.

Of all our counties I suspect few more strongly than Lincolnshire of keeping hidden, somewhere, the last remaining corner of Deep England.  For a start, there is so much of it in which to hide: after North Yorkshire it is the second-largest of the ceremonial counties, while the density of its population is the seventh lowest overall (ranking forty-second of forty-eight).  All that undisturbed, unmotorwayed acreage, almost as wide as mid-Wales, largely spared by industry and development, and unblemished by any major conurbation, in which Deep England might yet linger.  The river Trent, the Humber estuary, the Fens and the Wash, once its arteries of commerce, have come to serve as buffers against the cutting edges of modernity; and even its western, inlandmost parts are only incidentally served by the Great North Road and the East Coast Main Line (which latter never comes within thirty miles of that coast while Lincolnshire has anything to do with it).  It is true that the county has a grittier side — Scunthorpe steelworks, the port of Grimsby with its face set like flint against the North Sea, or the austerely dead-flat southern Fens — but its heart, the landscape of the Wolds or south Kesteven, has an otherworldly softness, even a tameness, about it.  That homeliness is matched by the place-names, among which even those of Danish derivation retain only a slight angularity: Willoughby… Hagworthingham… Scamblesby… Then there are all the old railway stations whose names appear in Flanders and Swann’s song ‘The Slow Train’, hinting at the heavy blow struck here by the Beeching Axe: Mumby Road, Dogdyke, Tumby Woodhouse.  Even the name of the county, with its buttery consonants, has a welcoming warmth to it.  And consider Bag Enderby in the light of Bag End, the name of Bilbo Baggins’ home in Tolkien’s Middle Earth.  If in these parts the mythical Shire can shimmer just beneath the surface, then why not very Deep England itself?

It is worth noting, too, that many Yellow-Bellies themselves — as Lincolnshire people are called — can fairly be said to be in sympathy with the ideals of Deep England. One of the most famous, indeed the son of a rector of Bag Enderby, and born nearby at Somersby, was Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose verses tell of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and vanished Lyonesse, and of many things loved and lost.  Or there is the late Roger Scruton, arguably the most articulate defender of Deep England in the past forty years, who began life in the tiny hamlet of Buslingthorpe near Market Rasen.  I concede, however, that Isaac Newton (Woolsthorpe) and Margaret Thatcher (Grantham) are harder to square with this list…

In any case, Lincolnshire has form where the preservation of Deep England is concerned.  The March of Progress always seems to be missing Lincs: is it too much to hope to find something that it has left alone altogether?  Not necessarily, is Lincolnshire’s murmured answer.  I think of Ruddock’s, the old-fashioned stationers and bookshop in Lincoln’s High Street, to which I paid tribute here at the time of its sad demise in 2017.  Or the quirky Bubble Car Museum near Boston.  And Lincolnshire sausages of course, the glorious centrepiece of any Full Deep English Breakfast.  Then there is another, less tangible but momentous example: whereas, in more urbanised parts of the country, who knows how many traditional folk-songs had been forgotten by the end of the nineteenth century, in Lincolnshire some were still remembered.  Here the last folk-singers lived just late enough to coincide with the earliest recording equipment and the Edwardian folk-song revival which saved so many tunes from extinction.  It was in the north of the county that the composer Percy Grainger discovered, and duly recorded and transcribed, such beautiful melodies as ‘Brigg Fair’ or ‘Rufford Park Poachers’.  That we can hear the voice of Joseph Taylor of Saxby-All-Saints, a man born in 1832, singing the songs of his youth, is cause to be thankful not only for Grainger and the singers who sang for him, but for the county which had preserved that folk-memory for so long.  Those songs are not only artefacts of the past, but to many ears some of its profoundest and most vivid evocations: this is borne out by the misty and chromatic arrangements that many composers made of them, Grainger’s own ‘Lincolnshire Posy’ being an example.*  Things linger in Lincolnshire: the old is slow to fade, and the new takes time to set in.  As I was once told by the guide on a rooftop tour of Lincoln Cathedral: "When the cranes go up in Lincoln, you know there’s a recession on the way."

This is not simply happenstance, either.  The county has a definite streak of rebelliousness, and its people stick by their principles.  I count very much in their favour the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536 against the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which in turn sparked off the Pilgrimage of Grace, the most serious popular opposition to confront Henry VIII; also the Lincolnshire Martyrs, who include two canonised saints.  The knowledge that Henry VIII hated Lincolnshire, declaring it ‘one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm’, only makes me fonder of it still.  Less clear-cut morally is the tradition (if that’s the word) of poaching, which does, it must be said, have in its defence the injustice of the eighteenth-century enclosures of common land by wealthy land-owners.  The song ‘Rufford Park Poachers’, as sung by Joseph Taylor, with its pleasingly defiant declaration —

A buck or doe, believe it so,
A pheasant or an hare,
Were put on earth for everyone
Quite equal for to share […]

— captures the spirit, as does the more famous ditty ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ (apparently a favourite of George IV; presumably it was not his hares that were being filched!).  Those landowners had come to see the land merely as an asset or a useful resource, whereas for the poachers and ordinary folk it was simply home, and home for their minds and spirits as much as for their empty stomachs.  To this day, it is not Lincolnshire’s way to follow the herd or pay heed to fashion overmuch, and this tendency to dig in heels, combined with the fondness for old things, creates conditions highly favourable, I would say, to the secret abiding of Deep England.

For it is not altogether unthinkingly that Deep England drowses green and gold in the haze of the afternoon.  I like to believe that those who dwell in that lost land are awake and alive to truth and beauty, pondering great thoughts and bold deeds over another hearty round of ale.  The proof that such folk did once live in Lincolnshire —  if they do not live there still — is plain to see in the heirlooms they left us, which stand amid the low rises and shallow hollows of this gentle county, startling us with their beauty: I mean the towers, the great audacious medieval church towers, with their youthful exuberance, their sheer verticality, which everywhere point heavenwards.

The crossing tower of Lincoln Cathedral, 20 March 2014.  With its original spire, it once stood at 520 feet; without, it is now 271 feet high.

There is of course Lincoln Cathedral — in John Ruskin’s estimation ‘out and out the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles and roughly speaking worth any two other cathedrals we have’ — which, when it still had its spires, was the tallest building in the world from 1311 to 1548.  The highest spire, 520 feet tall, crowned a county that never naturally rises higher than 551 feet above sea level.  But these are not Lincolnshire’s only towers.  The relative prosperity of this region in the Middle Ages, as well as its ready access to the raw material of the Great Limestone Belt (which stretches south-west from Lincolnshire’s Kesteven through Rutland, Northamptonshire and the Cotswolds, all the way to Somerset), provided conditions favourable to the building of great towers by any self-respecting town.  So it is that Lincolnshire came to possess some of England’s greatest treasures.  At Louth it boasts the tallest medieval parish church tower in England, St James’s, whose spire stands at 287 feet.  St. Botolph’s at Boston (the ‘Boston Stump’) has the tallest church tower to its roof: instead of tapering to a spire, the masonry shoots straight upwards to a height of 266 feet.  The spire of Grantham’s church of St. Wulfram, 274 feet high, sweeps into sight at 105mph when beheld, sudden, serene, from express trains on the East Coast Main line.  And hundreds of other towers, less lofty but all distinctive, all dignified, lay claim to their segment of the wide Lincolnshire sky, each raised up in intercession for its parish and all souls there dwelling.**  That is because the folk of these parts in the Middle Ages committed their wool-wealth to the dressing of their homeland for Heaven, ornamenting this lowest-lying of counties with ardent upliftings of passionate stone.

As Julian Flannery says so movingly in ‘Fifty English Steeples’, an epic volume of detailed architectural surveys of medieval church towers, and one of the most treasured books on my shelves, 

England was never more beautiful than in the two brief decades between the completion of Louth [church tower in September 1515] and the arrival of the English Reformation.  The pre-industrial landscape was dominated by the steeples of 17 cathedrals, 900 monasteries and 9,000 churches.  The spire of Lincoln Cathedral was the highest man-made structure the world had ever seen, and the construction of the great chapels at Westminster, Windsor and Cambridge had reached its magnificent conclusion.  Within a generation the monasteries had been dissolved, church-building had ceased, Lincoln spire had fallen, and medieval England had passed into history.  [p. 9]

Yet, for all the reasons above described, I have my suspicions that it is in Lincolnshire that the lost beauty he describes has lingered longest, and in particular in Lincolnshire’s towers that it survives most fiercely.  In a series of articles to come, I hope to describe what I found when I went to see some of them for myself.

St. Botolph’s church, Boston (the ‘Boston Stump’), under scaffolding on the 2nd February, 2019.  The tower is 266 feet high.

* Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy was used as the incidental music for John Betjeman’s 1964 BBC film Branch Line.
** One other Lincolnshire tower, that of the parish church of Deeping St Nicholas, photographed from the Peterborough-Spalding line on the 20th March 2014, illustrates the title banner of this blog.

Autumn Report

Kimbolton church and the Shropshire Hills, seen from near Hamnish Clifford.

My findings in Herefordshire the other week were these: red apples, blue hills, and all colours in between; oaks, August-laden still but tinged with first rust, and gold leaf in ardent proliferation at sunset.  In short, mid-October England illuminated like a manuscript.

The mysteries of the variations in flavour between the different shires and stretches of Britain, their particular characters by which each part is kept not quite like anywhere else, and their elusive boundaries that stubbornly veil where one part ends and another begins, will never be exhausted by the artist’s brush, the writer’s pen or walkers’ conversation.  They are as intangible, as fine, as endlessly surprising and as defiant of definition as the changing of the seasons.  What is it makes this part of the world so poetic, these English counties nearest Wales?  How is their character made?  Perhaps I will never work it out!  It has the tenderness of arable lowland England, but, lent a Welsh inflection, is hiraeth-tinged, by those ranges of high hills, beacons into the distance beckoning.  England and Wales mingle and shimmer against and with each other, like two misty, chromatic chords.  This is bittersweet borderland, neither quite one nor the other.  Those mythical lands, the distance and the past (the land of lost content, the blue remembered hills) are brought enticingly near.  They are almost within reach…

I am sure this is not just fancy.  Others have seen the same.  A list I once compiled of favourite composers and writers from these counties ran to two dozen.  And look at the land itself: to the north are the Shropshire hills, which are Malcolm Saville and Housman country; to the south is Gloucestershire, the land of Herbert Howells, F. W. Harvey and Ivor Gurney, along with Dymock of the five poets; to the east lie the birthplaces of Masefield and Elgar, and westwards — well, out in the west is the heart of Wales, where all speech is song.

If I had come to Leominster in search of a retreat, I was not the first: St Edfrith found it a suitable place for a priory in the year 660 A.D.  It was at the priory church — at least its second incarnation, having been suppressed not long after the Norman Conquest and refounded in the twelfth century —  that I found this anonymous poem waiting to greet me in the porch, mounted on the inside door:

  Pause — ere thou enter, traveller — and bethink thee,

  How holy, yet how homelike is this place:

  Time that thou spendest humbly here shall link thee

  With men unknown who once were of thy race.

  This is thy Father’s House: to Him address thee

  Whom here His children worship face to face.

  He at thy coming in with Peace shall bless thee,

  Thy going out make joyful with His Grace.

Peace and prosperity to all towns whose church doors are adorned with poetry, especially if the words wear their careful craftsmanship as lightly as these!

Holy and homelike indeed was the church, large as it was (the north aisle was once the Norman nave, which gives an indication of the enlargement it underwent in the Middle Ages).  I had been there for a quarter of an hour when the organist, in suit and tie, came out for practice.  It was practice which he did not really need: I found myself eavesdropping on some fine music, a serene prelude by Gordon Slater, some full-throated Bach, and some other pieces.  Some people had been around at the beginning but they had disappeared.  The music played and the sunlight streamed generously through the south windows.

Across the nave and north aisle of the priory church of St. Peter and Paul, Leominster.

Many things are good and right about the town of Leominster: its size, its nearby railway station and the easy reach of unruined countryside from the middle of town.  I fell into conversation with a few townspeople, who were very friendly.  On the other side of Eaton Hill, eastwards along the Herefordshire Trail, lies a definitive escape from the growl of the A44 and A49, land rising and falling, and boughs laden with summer-sweetened apples, for this is cider country.  And this homeliness is always ringed by the ‘blue high blade’ of hills: Titterstone Clee Hill and Shropshire are particularly visible to the north.  And no noise, apart from a hidden tractor, and one or two pheasants exploding ludicrously out of hedgerows.  On my way back westwards I came through an orchard at just the moment that the setting sun was aligned with the rows of the trees, and the rays shone straight down the aisles of apples.

Gold leaf in proliferation.

Even apart from this, it would have been worth going all the way there just to make the journey back to London.  Not via Newport, Bristol Parkway and Swindon, but by “the pretty way”, as a fellow visitor called it, from Leominster to Hereford, and then by direct train from there to London.  It took an hour longer than the Newport route, but what does an hour matter?  The start of the journey was all in mist, but a few miles east of Hereford we burst out of it into sunlit clarity, where we remained for the rest of the journey (Ledbury, Colwall and Campden tunnels excepted).  This was not only the ‘pretty way’ but the poetic way: past apple-orchards towards Ledbury, the home town of John Masefield, then tunnelling directly under the Malvern Hills, onwards through Worcestershire, within a few miles of Edward Elgar’s birthplace at Broadheath, dramatically high over the river Severn into Worcester and then, turning along Brunel’s line, past Evesham, Honeybourne, Morton-in-Marsh, over the north Cotswolds and actually through the old Adlestrop station of Edward Thomas’s famous poem, down to Oxford, thence shadowing the Thames via Reading and the high-rise-block-choked route to London.  

Great Malvern and the North Hill of the Malverns.

I have the honour, then, to report that in the manuscript of England many old things linger and are still to be seen.  What St. Edfrith, many poets and ordinary folk sought and almost found is still there for the almost-finding: something like the mythical realm of Deep England, something like the Land of Lost Content, something like home.  It might have been just over the next hill.

The river Avon near Evesham (Worcs.).