A monument to the golden age of agriculture

This entry goes back to the start of September and the heritage open days when many private buildings are open to the public. On one of the days I visited a village in the rolling hills to the east of the county. I went there on a Thursday, so the roads were completely deserted.

I went to the village to see the church, which being “redundant” is normally shut up and hard to get into. A local historian has done a lot of work on the village and had put her work on exhibition in the church (the village is so tiny that she has been able to trace the history of every family over several centuries). The day was very hot, the sun almost scorching (it’s nice to think back to that day now we are in the damp autumn).



It took me about forty-five minutes to drive from my home to the village - the roads are very meandering in the hills, so the way was not easy to find. At one point I drove along the side of a shallow valley and looked across at the above farmhouse. My thoughts went back to when I was seven and I went to Shirley and Caroline Smith’s joint birthday party (it was held round a table in the open air, Shirley Smith had a hole in her heart and so couldn’t join in the games, I seem to remember mud pies being thrown at someone…).



I came to the village, except that it wasn’t really a village just two farms, a row of cottages and a few isolated houses. From the road you could see the church, but it wasn’t obvious how you got to it. Eventually I parked my car and asked directions from someone mowing the verge outside his house.



You got to the church by walking a quarter of a mile along a green lane through the fields. In the hot sun the fresh smell of the grass and field flowers was combined with the smell of woodsmoke from a bonfire a long way down in the valley (the thin trailing smoke drifting in the still warm air). As I approached the church I saw the tall tower hemmed around by dark evergreen trees, and despite the blinding glare of the sun overhead, the light among the trees had a violet hue to it - an intense violet light, very beautiful (possibly it was a refraction of some kind caused by the strong white sunlight passing through the dark green trees).



As I got closer to the church I noticed the calls of the birds among the trees. These calls seemed to be on three distinct levels - those which had a sort of churring sound, those that had a clicking sound, and those that were clear calls like whistles. The calls came in waves with a few minutes of churring followed by a few minutes of clicking followed by a longer period of whistles.



The church is redundant, and so the historian has been able to do a great deal of research (poking around basically) unhindered by parochial busybodies (and just as important, no trendy vicar has trashed evidence of continuity by removing gravestones, ripping out pews, carrying out “disability compliance” alterations etc). The historian has recorded all of the graves in the churchyard and, in an impressive achievement, has discovered their family links to each other (they are all related, from the gentry to the cottagers and stockmen). Seeing these box tombs huddled under a cedar tree reminded me of the graves on the Mount of Olives above the Kidron Valley.



Although the building appears to be large, inside it is quite small and intimate, a single aisle leading into a small chancel. The historian had filled the church with displays on the history, flora and fauna of the village. Not sure what the nuts are in the picture above - I should have asked, but I didn’t want to appear ignorant. Cups of tea (from flasks) and slices of home-made cake were on offer, given out by some ladies from the village. In the two hours I was there a brisk traffic of people arrived and departed, mostly people connected to the church in some way (married there, baptized there, parents buried in the churchyard etc). The church was full of friendly chat, and it seemed to me that the chatty live voices were joined by chatty dead ones, invisibly and silently participating. Or perhaps I had been walking too long in the hot sun.



The historian had arranged displays of agricultural implements, including this formidable-looking scythe. She described the lives of the nineteenth-century villagers in great detail. Ploughing followed by hedging and ditching, followed by sawing, followed by seed time, followed by haying, followed by brewing, followed by harvest, followed by threshing - and then the cycle would begin again.



The church contained a mystery in the form of this monument to Henry Anton, described as a Governor of The Gambia. The historian has not been able to find any record of Henry Anton as Governor of The Gambia. Are the official records wrong, or did the family exaggerate the title, boasting of bogus imperial achievements? West Africa had a high mortality rate for Europeans, so possibly Anton fell ill very soon after his appointment and disappeared from the official record. The Gambia was originally acquired as base to accumulate slaves (along the Gambia river), but after British abolition became a “free” territory where slaves fleeing French and American slave traders could settle and farm. The colony was very unhealthy and difficult to administer, and in 1870 the British withdrew, intending to cede it to the French, but local petitions reversed this decision.



The little chancel had windows of orange glass that gave an incredible tangerine glow to the east end of the building. On the walls were 18th century marble tablets commemorating the Pearsons, a gentry family from Surrey who despatched their dead for burial in the remote village of their ancestors, to lie in this lonely orange-hued Valhalla waiting for the Doom.



Leaving the church I walked back to the metalled road. The village originally had two farmhouses, one of which is still standing. Prosperous, well-kept, a monument to the golden age of agriculture.



The other farmhouse has been demolished although some of the barns are still standing. The historian recorded the life of a stockman on this farm (“as a judge of stock he was known throughout the county”). The stockman is buried with his wife in the churchyard, a local newspaper of 1930 recording in an obituary: “And so we laid all that was mortal of him amongst the ivy and the aconites. And the rooks cawing in the trees will keep watch over him, and the partridges will call to him from beyond the hedge.”

Pettifer identifies (corresponds?) this place with Kiriath-jearim: 1 Samuel 6.21 - And they sent messengers to the inhabitants of Kirjathjearim, saying, The Philistines have brought again the ark of the LORD; come ye down, fetch it up to you. 7.1 - And the men of Kirjathjearim came, and fetched up the ark of the LORD, and brought it into the house of Abinadab in the hill, and sanctified Eleazar his son to keep the ark of the LORD. 7.2 - And it came to pass, while the ark abode in Kirjathjearim, that the time was long; for it was twenty years: and all the house of Israel lamented after the LORD.