Own work: Portrait III

Penny - aka Ms Fidget - at a moment of repose i.e. asleep.... anyway not entirely happy with it.

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.

Ryhall and Uffington II

     After lunch we headed east along the north bank of the Welland to Uffington.  This is a small estate village that now, unhappily, has to contend with a main road running through it.  Alas the great house, which was the seat of the Berties, the Earls of Lindsey, burnt down in 1904 and was not replaced. It was of the same type as Belton, but smaller, more compact. It's loss is a great pity. 

     What does survive, however, are the small landscape park between the village and the river, and where it's possible to trace the course of the now defunct Stamford-Deeping canal, and a number of beautiful Victorian estate workers cottages scattered through out the village; but the greatest survival, aesthetically, are the pair of elaborate wrought iron gates facing each other across the busy main road; one giving access to the house and its demesne, and the other, smaller, the church.  Erected in 1679, by the Hon. Charles Bertie, Pevsner suggests they may be the work of John Lumley. The whole assembly of house and village and park, though damaged by time and late Modernity, has still more than a hint of the seigneurial.

   And so to the church. It sits in the midst of everything at the back of what is a large churchyard.  The path from the house is lined grandly with yew trees.  There is an elegant west tower and spire, aisled nave and chancel with a north chapel - the Casewick chapel.  Uffington is a large parish and contains a second stately home: Casewick Hall the seat of the Trollope-Bellews.  This late gothic chapel was their place of burial and worship.  I can't think, off hand, of another church that was shared by two landed families.

  Anyway, from the outside the church appears wholly Perendicular, there is in particular a fine west door in the base of the tower.  Worth searching for if you ever visit.  However the inside is completely different; whereas Ryhall church is bathed in light Uffington is dark: church as cave.  More of a schatzkammer too.  This is the result of a thorough going and lavish restoration in 1866 by the local architect Edward Browning, son of Bryan Browning, favourite of this blog.  There are encaustic tiles, and mounds of sculpture - the huge corbels in the nave seem almost Arts and Crafts in style rather than Gothic revival.  The nave arcades are early 13th century, a little earlier than those at Ryhall.  There are three three monuments in the chancel, one medieval and two Jacobean.  The finest, well my favourite anyway, commemorates Roger and Olyver Manneres on the south side of the chancel.  The Casewick chapel, which is tall and narrow inside, is spoilt by being glassed-in with screens, but on the whole the clutter is kept to a manageable level.  Blue carpet in the nave though is a mistake.

Own work: Portrait II

Continuing my series of pencil-crayon portraits I drew the bf last weekend when he came to stay for a few days.  I'm reasonably happy with the results, but I think I've elongated the his head slightly.

Ryhall and Uffington I

     A fortnight ago A paid a visit and we headed off to Stamford for lunch and where I had three drawings in an exhibition in the Arts Centre.  On the way we stopped off at Ryhall as I really wanted A to see the village church.  Ryhall church is something I've been familiar with all my life, the spire - which is visible from the main road - acting as a sort of promissory note of the good things to see below.  However it was only this year on a blisteringly hot day that I actually, finally went inside.  It did not disappoint.
     Ryhall sits in a bend of the Gwash at the very eastern edge of England's smallest county, Rutland, and the older parts of the village are very pretty.  It is a place of soft undulating hills and great open arable fields and grey limestone, a long way it feels from the heart of the county where the landscape is that bit more pronounced, sometimes dramatic, the agriculture is mainly pastoral and the villages of are of orange and gingerbread coloured marlstone.  See my posts on Oakham and Uppingham to get an idea.  Oakham, the county town is definitely 'East Midlands'; Ryhall more 'Lincolnshire', perhaps even a little 'East Anglia' for it is here that the sky begins to really predominate over the landscape.
      Anyway back to the church.  It really is superb.  Small and, as they say, 'perfectly formed'  The tower and spire are noble Early English, strong and handsomely proportioned.  The nave and chancel Perpendicular gothic.  Quite a work-a-day design in that the parapets are quite plain and there are no pinnacles; a robustness that compliments and harmonises with the tower (18.09.2019: Thinking about this this morning, they represent a continuation of the Decorated way of doing things as though the Perp windows are later insertions, which they are not.  Just goes to show the limitations of stylistic labels!  Think of the academic discipline of 'architectural history' as a sort of equivalent to Biology and its taxonomy. Both Enlightenment projects.) Not that the masons didn't have fun; some of the tracery design is quite unusual, and there all sorts of beasties and strange faces haunting the architecture.  The west end of the north aisle has the remains of a anchorite's cell.  It could be that these scant remains mark the site of the hermitage established by St Tibba, the Anglo-Saxon saint who I've mentioned before on this blog who first entered into the religious life at Castor under the her cousins Kynesburga and Kyneswitha.  Like Castor, Ryhall was a small place of pilgrimage.
     The interior is very spacious and deeply satisfying; and, as you might expect from all those large perp windows and lack of stained glass, is light-filled.  There is more interesting sculpture on the Early English arcade, and there are a host of monuments in the chancel.  The earlier ones are the most interesting, though, I suppose, more metropolitan critics would dismiss them as a crude and provincial.  Who cares? They're very enjoyable. Alas there is probably too much modern clutter, which seems to plague churches these days and detracts from the aesthetic, and far more importantly, from the spiritual atmosphere of the place. It needs to be removed.