Molly Dancing in Ely Revisited

   I cannot believe that a year has passed, but yesterday I was again standing outside The Cutter Inn on the waterside in Ely watching the various teams of Molly Dancers as they took part in this year's 'Mark Jones Day of Dance', hosted as usual by the Ousewashes Molly Side.  The sun shone too, and standing there in the sunshine it felt that spring wasn't too far away.

'Waverley'

   I've been meaning to read Sir Walter Scott for years, decades in fact. Ever since I read Sir John Betjeman's richly evocative essay 'Winter at Home'.  Scott and Cowper were his favourite winter reads he confesses and ones he returned to year after year.
     'And as the great rumbling periods, as surely and steadily as a stage coach, carry me back to Edinburgh, the most beautiful city in these islands, I feel an embarras de richese.'
Recommendation enough.
   And then Scott slipped from my memory, until the end of last year - but then how often do you see Scott's work for sale? - and our trip to Birmingham.  There I bought 'Waverley', Scott's first novel.  The novel of the 1745 Jacobite Uprising, a fitting book to read too after so much enjoying 'Kidnapped' (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886) Thankfully my trust in Sir John B's taste was amply rewarded.  Do not be put off my the book's great length - some 600+ pages - or by the inordinately slow start; this book is a marvel - and that isn't the closet Jacobite in me talking.  It is a beautifully written book.  A friend said it was like a giant snowball rolling downhill and picking up speed as it went, and Scott himself in 'Waverley' writes about how, as a child, one of his chief pastimes was rolling a large stone down a hill - very slow and awkward heavy work at first before the stone gained momentum and went rushing and tumbling to the bottom - either metaphor is apt. 'Waverley' has a narrative drive and sweep that push all, including the reader, before it in to the heart of the fire.  The style is conversational, rather intimate.  The picaresque names suggest some sort of influence on Dickens; and like a Dickens novel there is a great panorama of characters.  They surround the eponymous and, at times, frankly naive hero like the characters that surround the hero in an early Evelyn Waugh novel.  The portrayal of Bonnie Prince Charlie is very flattering; Dr Johnson once met him in London and was not so impressed.  Anyway Edward is serious, scholarly and often purblind to what is actually going on around him.  He is, to begin with, as much acted upon as he has himself agency.  He is however a decent, good man, and this novel is partly about the discovery of goodness in others, even our enemies, and it is partly through those encounters that Edward grows as a character and enters into his own agency. It also evoked in me the 'Lord of the Rings', Tolkien's sprawling novel; in particular in the character of the ardent Jacobite Flora I see an antecedent of Galadriel, the Lady of the Wood.
   I am fascinated by the idea of Tory culture, and Scott is a prime example of the Romantic Tory tradition.  'Waverley' set in the heart of the '45 - the last Civil War experienced on the UK mainland - is often depicted as offering to the reader a simple contrast between a traditionally ordered society - the Highlands clans - and the Early Modern society of Protestant Lowland Scotland and England.  An almost Manichean clash of civilisations.  Scott, I think, is perhaps subtler than that: he recognises poverty when he encounters it; he allows space for his characters to be sympathetic regardless of political position, to be kind.  We feel frustration, even annoyance with some of the Highland customs. One has a sense of the utter futility of it all - the heroic against the prosaic but implacable enemy marshalling all the order and resources of the Modern state - and how dreadful is the end of it all when the snowball crashes apart.
   Robert Burns once described the great Late Gothic church of St Michael, Lintlithgow as fitted for Presbyterian worship, "What a poor pimping business is a Presbyterian place of worship - dirty, narrow and squalid, stuck in a corner of old Popish grandeur...." I suspect that, like Yeats after him (and another Romantic Tory), Scott's argument was as much about the breadth and grandeur of vision, ie culture, as it was about politics.

Bryan Browning V: Barn Hill House

   Continuing my occasional series on the buildings of that remarkable local architect Bryan Browning. Over two years, commencing in 1843 and working for the Earl of Exeter, Browning undertook extensive renovations of the existing late 17th century house, making a complete transformation of the entrance front into one of the most monumental and masculine in Stamford.

Last year in reading....

Market Deeping

   St Guthlac's proud tower looks south down Church Street - towards the Market Place and the stone bridge over the river Welland. This is the very southern edge of Lincolnshire. The street is broad with wide grass verges, and is lined with mostly stone, mostly 18th century, houses.  None are particularly outstanding but all contribute to a satisfying whole - think orchestral players not soloists.  It is all very pleasant, having a quality that is somewhere between the villagey and the urban.

   However Deeping still suffers visually from the period when the A15 thundered through. In fact, like Bourne just a few miles north, Market Deeping feels as though it is place to pass through rather than a destination, which, I think, is a shame.  In the same manner Deeping suffers from Lincolnshire's great and abiding sin of utilitarianism. It looks timeless but has suffered a lot from Modernity: in the late 19th/early 20th century The Old Wake Hall, a medieval manor house just north of the church was demolished; in WWII the village pond was filled in; Halfleet that leads north from the church has been badly filled-in with suburban housing.
   The Market Place - roughly triangular, runs E-W parallel with the river, and is lined with grander buildings, some of them quite urban in scale.  The rather charming Town Hall is by Thomas Pilkington of Bourne and dates from 1835; the alms houses in Church Street are by Edward Browning (we've encountered him before) and date from 1877.

St Guthlac, Market Deeping

   Yesterday, the Feast of the Epiphany, I braved the cold and the damp to visit the small market town of Market Deeping and the parish church of St Guthlac.  It was my first look inside.  It is a small, low slung building; the nave (Early English arcades and Perp clerestory) darkened with late Victorian and early 20th century stained & painted glass.  The chancel in contrast is light filled, where the best glass is to be found in two of the south windows. The walls of both nave and chancel have been scraped down to the bare stone, probably when the church underwent restoration in 1872 under the stern hand of James Fowler of Louth who we have encountered before at Gunby. The Wake chapel on the north of the chancel is now the organ loft.  Perhaps then, a bit of a disappointment. Exterior is however graced by a strong Late Medieval west tower, which with its crisp ashlar stands in immaculate contrast to the humble rubble built walls of the rest of the church.  I suspect that the tower was built under the patronage of that remarkable woman Lady Margaret Beaufort, Lady of the Deepings, mother of Henry VII, grandmother of Henry VIII and descendant of the Wakes. There is, on the s face, a Tudor portcullis.
   The porch contains a really quite beautiful set of nineteenth cast iron gates by Colemans, the local iron founders, and the churchyard gates too are quite fine, though not quite so nice.