Speed is the enemy of acquaintance. I like to find out where I am by walking around it, that’s the pace where you can get to know a place. It’s also possible from horseback at a walk or from a bicycle at a leisurely pace, just not if you’re one of those lycra-clad types trying for speed. You definitely can’t get to know somewhere from a car.
So, while staying at Chicheley Hall in Buckinghamshire, I headed north across green fields and under a Simpson’s sky. After I crossed the A422, three buzzards lazily circled on the warm air above a small copse. A farmhouse built of honey-coloured stone sat halfway up the slope I was now ascending. It was called Grange Farm, so many places these days use the term grange without ever having had a connection to a priory or abbey, for that is the original meaning of the word. A grange was a farm which provided food or profit for a monastic order on lands they owned. The word comes from the Latin granica meaning granary.
It was the Cistercians, who were founded in the eleventh century, who first began the system of granges. They were a French Catholic splinter group from the Benedictines who felt that they wanted to more closely follow the original Rule of St Benedict. The Rule was a seventy-three chapter book written in 516 AD which outlined everything that should be done when running a monastery or nunnery. It was, perhaps, the first attempt at a constitution and democracy in a very unconstitutional and undemocratic world but it is not a page turner and makes the 19,000 European Union legislative acts look like a Dan Brown novel. Benedict, by the way, is the patron saint of Europe.
The Rule was, unsurprisingly, big on church services: there was one at midnight and another at three am, this office, as the various services were known, was often said in the dark and the monks were expected to memorise everything. These services usually consisted of a chant, three antiphons, three psalms, and three lessons, along with celebrations of any local saints' days. After all that fun and games, the monks could have a bit of a nap before being up and washed for the office of Prime at six am. Once they had been given their orders for the day - which the Rule said they should carry out cheerfully, however apparently impossible the orders may seem - came private Mass or spiritual reading or work until nine am when the office of Terce was said, and then High Mass.
At noon came the office of Sext and a spot of lunch. They could then rest until the office of None at three pm. Then you did your housekeeping or worked on the grange farm until the light faded. The evening prayer of Vespers was at six pm, then the night prayer of Compline at nine pm, and retiring to bed, before beginning the cycle again. That’s a church service every three hours for your entire life and this is what the Cistercians wanted to stick to more rigidly.
As I carried on up the hill, a yellow Airbus H135 helicopter clattered slowly past in the valley to my left, inspecting the power lines that ran along the treeline there. The word ELECTRICITY written on the side along with the registration G-WPDB which declared its origins to be Western Power Distribution whose fleet of five helicopters is based at Bristol airport, eighty-eight miles in a straight line from where I now stood. The journey would have taken me the best part of three hours by car but it would have been a forty-five minute hop for the helicopter. As I crested the hill, a small wind farm of just seven big, white turbines, came into view. The whole hill seeming to be related to electricity.
I passed the woods at Seven Acre Covert, which I measured as covering more than seventeen acres, and Hollington Wood which was almost forty-five acres; this being the James Bond of farming as it is equal to 0.07 square miles. I emerged onto a lane and a little scatter of houses including the most perfect L-shaped country cottage: pale stone with a thatched roof, white window frames and dark blue doors with a matching navy blue mailbox on the white picket fence surrounding the front garden. Either side of the half-glazed front door were huge piles of chopped logs sufficient to see the cottagers through an ice age or two.
Just after the houses, in a field on my right, was a flock of the shaggiest sheep I have ever seen. You have to be careful putting those two alliterative words together. I think that they were, most probably, Cotswold sheep, known as the Cotswold Lion due to their fleeces resembling lion’s manes. Well, they do if you’ve never seen a lion. To me they looked more like reggae singers with their dreadlocks falling around their faces.
Then I reached the village of Emberton and, I hoped, a place to buy dinner. Now, Emberton is a nice place, a stone built village with horse riders clip-clopping through the early evening warmth and a clock tower with a poem written on it which starts: “Time's on the wing, how swift he speeds his way, Hastening to sink in one continuous day, Pause passing traveller, what thy destiny?"
Well, whatever my destiny was, it was not to be fulfilled in Emberton as they do not have a village shop. That’s probably because it is just over a mile to the town of Olney and, of course, a mile is nothing. Well, actually, a mile is something when you’re hungry, have just walked the three miles from your hotel and will probably now need to walk the four miles back from Olney.
Still, it was only about twenty minutes later that I crossed over the River Great Ouse on the bridge that marks the entrance to Olney. A sign bills it as the “Home of Amazing Grace” but, I have to say, I never got to meet the woman, so can’t pass comment. Another sign has ten cartoon ladies on it, all apparently running towards the church tower and, seemingly, tossing pancakes as they go. They all look as cheerful as a Cistercian.
The people of Olney say that the first pancake race in the town took place on Shrove Tuesday 1445 and is still running today. Not the same race, obviously, they’d have gone three times round the Earth and been completely knackered by now. Since 1950 the race has been an international affair as the people of Liberal, Kansas now run a pancake race of the same length and the two towns share timings to see who is fastest. In 2020 Katie Godof won for Olney, though Liberal is winning overall with thirty-eight wins to Olney’s thirty-one.
The church which is the finishing line for the Olney pancake race, and whose tower was alluded to on the sign, is immediately visible as you cross the bridge. On top, a gigantic stone spire with four gothic-arched windows decreasing in size as they climb up toward heaven. Olney is a pretty and busy little market town and was, for eighteen years, the home of the poet, William Cowper.
There are lots of independent shops and little cafes and bars. You could live a full life within walking distance of Olney and never really need to leave. The prettiest thing in Olney on the day I visited, though, was a dark blue 1967 Aston Martin DB6 Volante which was for sale in a showroom called Desmond J. Smail. It was a snip at £695,000 and I went straight to the market place and bought a lottery ticket. I am, however, still driving a 2005 Saab. I did, at least, finally find some dinner before walking back to Chicheley Hall.
Even though it was over four miles to my hotel, I couldn’t resist a quick diversion to a place marked on my map as Bedlam. After a long slog down the main A509, I headed off into the woods at Bedlam Spinney and crossed the field to Bedlam. I was rewarded by a row of houses, a collection of wheelie bins, some lock-up garages with corrugated asbestos rooves and a seemingly abandoned and overgrown children’s playground. Not worth a diversion but, luckily, only half a mile from my hotel.
As a reminder, from next week I’ll be continuing my AtoZ of the British Isles for my paid subscribers with a new post every two weeks and, on alternate weeks, I’ll be publishing some of my previously paid for posts for my free subscribers.
So, if you’re a paid subscriber, expect to read about Canals and Cow Licks next week. If you’re a free subscriber, I’ll see you in Edinburgh in two weeks’ time.