St John the Baptist, Harringworth

     A came over and after High Mass at St Mary's in Stamford we headed off on a very short jaunt to Harringworth on the Northamptonshire side of the Welland valley - another absurdly attractive stone-belt village.  Very sleepy under this summer's unrelenting sun.  Quintessentially an English scene.  At first glance quite a conventional church, with west tower and spire, aisled nave and unaisled chancel, but things are always more interesting, more individual than that.  And that's what makes visiting an old church like Harringworth worthwhile.

     The oldest part of the structure is the tower - Transitional, built of limestone and richly coloured ironstone.  The spire is later, and oddly has carved heads above the broaches.  The rest of the exterior is Decorated and Perp.  One thing I noticed quickly was the difference in size between the north clerestory and the much smaller south.
     The interior is spacious, perhaps even a little uninspiring - not really a place of mystery but still beautiful.  Another chance however to compare and contrast the two mismatched clerestories - I think the north is Late Medieval except for the west bay which appears to have been rebuilt sometime after the Reformation; I think it is either Elizabethan or Jacobean.  The tower arch has very beautiful Transitional capitals.  The chancel screen is Medieval, and there are a couple of grand benefaction boards either side of the s door and the east window is rather fine; however the notable thing about the interior is the family vault that occupies the eastern half of the north aisle.  "Like something out of a M R James ghost story", I said, gazing down through the railings to the sealed door.

   Next to the church is the Manor House, an house of the late 17th century. And well worth inclusion in this post.

Along the Willow Brook II: Blatherwycke

"He found himself, as he had hoped, afar and forlorn, he had strayed into outland and occult territory. 

                                                                              Arthur Machen "The Hill of Dreams"

 

  After a couple of hours or so in Oundle we headed home, at my suggestion, via King's Cliffe, deep in what was once Rockingham Forest, and a village I hadn't seen for years.  It didn't quite dawn on me at the time but we were returning to the valley of the Willow Brook.  Rockingham Forest is a vast area occupying most of the northern tip of Northamptonshire, a great wedge of upland between the Welland and the Nene.  Even though it is now mostly under the plough it is still a remote and sparsely populated area. Looking on the map it is quite clear how the villages in the forest, with the exception of Laxton, are strung out along this little valley.  Woodnewton, Apethorpe, King's Cliffe they are all very attractive and I made a mental note to return to each for there was something worth returning to in each one.  A little trail of architectural riches.  Priority, though, had to be given to Apethorpe, a small estate village of golden stone which contains a mighty Jacobean House: Apethorpe Hall.

   Anyway, somehow, we took the wrong turning in King's Cliffe and we continued up the valley of the Willow Brook.  This is very likely my fault a) I was more interested in the architecture and looking for traces of William Law the 18th Anglican mystic (Anglicanism's only mystic?) and lived in a sort of exile in King's Cliffe, and b)  I was navigating using the very small road map in the back of my 1970s edition of the Shell County Guide to Northamptonshire.  It was not as though we were truly lost.  I knew we would hit the A43 eventually. So we drove on as the countryside became slightly less ordered, woollier, and then suddenly glimpses of a lake, and then unexpectedly the valley widened out. This was Blatherwycke. It was all very intriguing. An estate village strung out in a great wide circle around the head of the lake and on the far side a walled garden on a low hill. There was no sign of a grand house. That, I later found out, had been demolished in 1948.  Blatherwycke is in fact one of four country estates along the Willow Brook; the last two being Deene and the evocative, ruinous Kirby hall.  We halted at sign declaring the church open to visitors, went through the gate and found ourselves on a wide grey drive, garden on our left and a newly planted line of evergreen oaks on our right.  Beyond them a newly harvested field of wheat climbing up to the horizon and a blue sky.  It was all very remote, and although there was the sound of traffic on the A43 there was a profound silence.  I felt I was somewhere very ancient, somewhere quite atmospheric.  It was the same at the church - which is 'redundant', and managed by the Churches Conservation Trust. It sat sort of nestled between the walled garden and an immense stable block, small and overlooked.  Nothing grand about it at all. I thought of the lost demesne in 'Le Grande Meaulnes' by Alain-Fournier. In fact there is little to say about its architecture of the church at all, except the south side had an accretive, picturesque quality I rather liked. A bricollage of styles. The only things really of note in the interior were the small cluster of memorials to the Staffords and the O'Briens and the memorial (the work of Nicholas Stone) erected by Sir Christopher Hatton to the poet Thomas Randolph:

Here sleepe thirteene together in one tombe

And all these greate, yet quarrel not for roome,

The Muses and ye Graces teares did not meete,

And grav'd these letters on ye churlish sheete;

Who having wept, their fountains drye,

Through the conduit of the eye,

For their friend who her doth lye,

Crept into his grave nad dyed,

And soe the Riddle is untyed,

For which this church, roud theat the Fates bequeath

Unto her ever-honour'd trust,

Soe much and that soe precious dust,

Hath crown'd her Temples with an Ivye wreath;

Which should have Laurell been,

But yt the grieved Plant to see him dead

Tooke pet and withered.

   That said I found Blatherwycke to be the most spiritually nourishing church I visited that day; a place where the two Tolkienian worlds of the seen and unseen were in touching distance.  The lack of clutter was a great help.  It was hard not to contrast it with the appalling clutter we found in Oundle parish church earlier.  Perhaps it's just an Anglican thing, but I suspect the clutter is there because it shields us from either a nothing or a something (I plump for the latter) that is just too dangerous, too difficult to actually engage with. And that's why, I suppose, Law is Anglicanism's only mystic.
   Outside I read aloud from Juliet Smith's Shell County Guide to Northamptonshire.  It turns out we were not the only ones to feel the atmosphere, only she likened the whole place to the setting of a M R James ghost story.

Along the Willow Brook I: Fotheringhay

     Another Saturday, another jaunt.  This time the bf and I headed off to that beautiful and serene market town of Oundle.  It was his first visit.  Avoiding Peterborough, (which, to be honest is almost invariably a good thing), we drove over the Heath (part of the ancient Forest of Nassaburgh) at Helpston and down into the Nene valley at Ailsworth.  This area of upland, which roughly runs w-e between the river valleys of the Welland and the Nene is referred to as the 'Nassaburgh Limestone Plateau'. 

     We drove westward through Wansford, Yarwell, and finally to Fotheringhay - all of these very beautiful limestone villages sitting between the floodplain the Nene to one south and Rockingham Forest to the north.  Fotheringhay, which is really just a single street, sits between the Willow Brook - one of a number of small tributaries of the Nene that flow out of the forest - and the Nene itself.  It is the site of a once great manorial complex - think the Windsor of the House of the York.  There are the remains of a once vast collegiate church, and at the far end of the street the remains of a castle.  And between them the street is lined with two sets of lodgings built for guests - the Old and New Inns.  The castle itself, the place of execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, occupies the defensible position of a narrow strip of land where the Willow almost joins the Nene, before, unexpectedly, both rivers swing away north and south, finally for the Willow to flow into the Nene a mile or so downstream at Elton. Really there isn't much to see of the castle apart from the earthworks just a few scraps of masonry, but don't let that dissuade you from visiting - from the top of the motte there are lovely views of the Nene valley.
   A lot more survives at the church, but big though as it is, it is merely a fragment of a far larger complex of buildings founded by Edward of York in 1411.  The college and the chancel were demolished sometime during the Reformation, probably during the reign of Edward VI. The nave is the work of the mason William Horwood.  The exterior bristles with pinnacles which contrast with the massive lower storeys of the tower, which I suspect is later than the nave, and from which rises an elegant octagonal crown. The interior is a delight. Vast, big boned, something of the sublime about the space under the tower.  The nave itself is broad and full of light; there is very little stained glass.  Church as cage of light, an English, late Gothic interpretation of Abbot Suger's desire that church architecture make manifest the Divine Light of God.  It is also, thankfully, devoid of clutter.  Georgian fittings - altarpiece and box-pews - rub shoulders with Elizabethan tombs and a fantastic medieval pulpit re-coloured in the 1960s.  All parts are in harmony. Serene.

Oundle

   A fortnight ago I went to Oundle, a particularly attractive small market town in Northamptonshire, about 10 miles or so west of Peterborough, in the valley of the Nene.  What makes it attractive is the visual unity.  There isn't necessarily unity of style - the streetscape is pretty varied, but there's nothing too extreme as all of the architecture - Victorian and after architecture - is well-mannered and polite. There is however unity of scale, and lastly and most importantly there is unity of materials.  Everything, well almost everything, is built of stone.  Limestone.  Including the roofs, which are of Collyweston Slate - a limestone that is very fissile and can be cleaved like slate. There are a few grand houses, but again like so many small places in England there is nothing really extraordinary about the architecture.  There is nothing as consistently 'architectural' about Oundle as there is about Stamford.  Judging by the architecture, I would guess that Oundle's heyday was probably in the 17th century.  The rather imposing Talbot Inn in New Street, for instance, dates from 1626.
   One of things, however, that does help give Oundle character and individuality is the presence of a large 19th century public school, and whereas at Oakham, Uppingham or Stamford the schools are quite nucleated, here in Oundle the school is more diffuse in the urban structure.  In certain parts of the town school buildings tend to predominate, but visually they are good neighbours being well mannered Gothic Revival.  The parish Church, St Peter, has a beautiful tower and spire - a very suave piece of Decorated Gothic.  The Roman Catholic church a the far end of West Street, which is by Arthur Blomfield, 1878-9, started off belonging to another denomination ('The Buildings of England' does mention which one), and like the school buildings is a well-mannered piece of Gothic Revival.  A satisfying design, in fact, from a less than front-rank Gothic designer.

The Talbot Inn, the elegant War Memorial to the left looks, to me, as though it's by Sir Reginald Blomfield.