The Viking Way: Donington On Bain To Tealby

On either side the river lie / Long fields of barley and of rye, / That clothe the wold and meet the sky. The Lady of Shalott ALFRED LORD TENNYSON

From Donington I followed the river Bain northwards. It was hardly a river, more of a narrow stream choked with willowherb. Approaching Biscathorpe, I disturbed a noisy flock of greylag geese feeding in the stubble.

A magnificent horse chestnut tree at Biscathorpe.

Biscathorpe was the site of a former medieval village, but there's little trace of it today.

This part of the Viking Way cuts directly north along the Wolds' plateau. Note the chalk,  the  ever-present cornfields and the lump on the horizon — which is a Bronze Age barrow (or earthwork tomb) called Grim's Mound.

The long, straight track.

An intriguing street name. I wonder if it has a Viking origin?

Tealby ford.

I spent the night at Pear Tree Cottage B&B in Tealby. It was a perfect summer afternoon — warm and sunny — and I was served a pot of tea and homemade cake in the garden.

Bardney To Woodhall Spa: Memories, Sweet Memories

Back on the Viking Way you could tell it had been raining overnight. But this afternoon was dry and bright — and breezy.

I left unremarkable Bardney behind me, with its ploughed fields and its sugar beet factory, where British Sugar turns, err, sugar beet into sugar. Who would have thought it.

The path took me past more turned and tilled fields, and yet more of the same. Every now and then I skirted a lime wood. The area used to be full of them. Thankfully there are still some left. But rich, black earth mainly filled the landscape...

... a landscape which became flatter and flatter with each mile I trudged.

In Southrey I was surprised to come upon this thatched cottage — a rare sight in Lincolnshire. 

I was also pleased to discover the Church of St John the Divine. (Note to my American readers: this has New England written all over it, don't you think?) Though sadly the weatherboarding is now PVC and the windows plastic.

The village backs onto the river Witham. It was nice to see the river again. There was a pub, a landing stage and two goats. 

There was also the trackbed of an old railway line which had been turned into a cycle path and named the Water Rail Way. After eating my sandwiches and drinking from my flask of coffee at a handy bench and table by the waterside, I decided on an impulse to deviate from the Viking Way and follow the Water Rail Way as far as Woodhall Spa. I love deviating from 'official' routes. It gives you a heady illusion of freedom. 

Here's the view east along the river...

... and here's the view west. In fact, the furthermost bench and table you can see is where I ate my lunch — to the sound of clucking moorhens and droning Vulcan bombers from nearby RAF Coningsby.

I rather enjoyed walking along the river bank. Above me crows and gulls were being battered by a strengthening wind. Clouds raced across — some of them dark — but no rain came.

Then all of a sudden I chanced on this signboard about the Bardney Pop Festival of 1972, which had been held in a field close by. Bardney had never had a pop festival before, and it certainly hasn't had one since. And yes, you've guessed it — I'd actually been at this legendary event! In an instant I went back forty years. In my mind I watched again on-stage cameos of the Beach Boys, Don McLean, Joe Cocker and Sha Na Na. If you enlarge the pic you'll find that the local pub did so well it ran out of beer — twice!   

Soon after the signboard I found this curvy wooden sculpture inscribed with the words For men may come and men may go but I go on for ever — a line from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem, The Brook. Tennyson is one of Lincolnshire's most famous sons, and he was born not far away in Somersby Rectory. 

At this point my camera battery sadly ran out of juice, so I wasn't able to take stunning shots of the nudist colony round the next corner, or of an air ambulance crew involved in the daring rescue of a farmer trapped under his tractor, or of the elusive and legendary wild lions and tigers native to these parts...

Only joking.

I was, however, waylaid by this frozen procession of Rastafarian sheep...     

Finally, after three hours, I arrived at Woodhall Spa. And once more my memory took me straight back to my youth. For it was here that I'd seen the film Doctor Zhivago for the first time — in Woodhall Spa's quaintly authentic Kinema In The Woods.

A Somersby Interlude

She came to the village church, / And sat by a pillar alone; / An angel watching an urn / Wept over her, carved in stone... From Maud by ALFRED LORD TENNYSON

Half-way along my walk in the Wolds lay the tiny village of Somersby, birthplace of the venerable Victorian poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Tennyson's father, George, was the rector of Somersby and Bag Enderby, and the father of twelve children (Alfred was the fourth). George was a violent man, a depressive, and dependent on drink and drugs, so Tennyson's mother must have had a very hard time. All of George's children were born in the vicarage, which, in my picture, is the white house on the right, and is now called Somersby House. The imposing, castellated dwelling on the left is Somersby Grange, probably designed by Sir John Vanbrugh, who also designed Castle Howard, the grand stately home in Yorkshire where much of the TV series Brideshead Revisited was filmed...

On the other side of the road is St Margaret's Church, built of greenstone blocks with brick repairs and a slate roof...

In the churchyard there's a rare example of an original stone cross (most churchyard crosses were destroyed in the English Civil War)...

And above the church porch is this sun dial dated 1751...

Inside the church you can see a plaque on the wall commemorating Tennyson, the font where he was baptised, and, near the lectern, a rather scary bust of the great poet...

Just before I left the church I noticed a 'Prayer Tree' on one of the south-facing window ledges...



I rested on a handy bench near this signpost and ate my sandwiches...

After which I took a right-of-way through a farmyard and meandered back to Brinkhill on grassy footpaths and green lanes...

(You can find my other posts on Tennyson here and here.)

Tennyson Country

Old yew, which graspest at the stones/That name the underlying dead,/Thy fibres net the dreamless head,/Thy roots are wrapped around the bones. In Memoriam: A. H. H. TENNYSON.

On either side the river lie,/Long fields of barley and of rye,/That clothe the wold and meet the sky. The Lady Of Shalott. TENNYSON.

Continuing my saunter from Hagworthingham to Bag Enderby, I finally arrived at Bag Enderby churchyard. An English country churchyard would not be complete without its yew tree. You can see Bag Enderby's yew in the picture below.

3 facts about the yew tree: 1. Its wood was used for English longbow making; 2. its leaves and bark have been used in medicinal drugs to reduce high blood pressure and alleviate hypertension; 3. its presence in churchyards often betokens a site of pre-Christian, pagan or Celtic origin - so the yew may have been there long before the church.

Saint Margaret's Church in Bag Enderby dates from the early 15th century, and is built mainly of greenstone - that's sandstone laced with the mineral glauconite, which turns green when quarried and exposed to the elements:

Opposite the church was this magnificent but lopsided horse chestnut tree, its 'candles' blowing in the wind...

... and inside the church was a map of the river Lymm, Tennyson's childhood river (really more of a stream), which I'd just crossed half an hour beforehand, and an information panel about the illustrious poet himself:

However the most interesting object in the church was this octagonal, medieval font, ornamented with stone carvings:

Tennyson was born in 1809 in the nearby village of Somersby where his father, George Clayton, was rector. He was rector at Bag Enderby too. He fathered 12 children, of which Alfred, our budding poet, was the fourth. Alfred and his siblings most probably played in and around this ancient, hollow tree I found on an overgrown green close by the church. Only the stump remains:

Legend has it that John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached beneath this tree. Not too astonishing - as Wesley roamed the length and breadth of England and Wales for many years evangelizing under trees, in fields, at market crosses and anywhere in the open air he could find an audience.

I left behind me the ghosts of the Tennyson children, and the photograph of a very Victorian-looking Alfred Lord Tennyson, and the murmur of his babbling brook, and set off down a different path back to Hagworthingham...

(I've written before about Tennyson and his poetry here.)

To be continued...

Two Poets Who Happen To Be Women

It's a long way in cultural, political and sexual mores from Alfred Lord Tennyson to Carol Ann Duffy - but now the Poet Laureateship links them both. After many weeks of speculation Duffy was appointed yesterday to the role. I've got to admit that I've had a bit of a block as far as appreciating Duffy's poetry is concerned - but I'm sure it's probably just a personal twinge of literary myopia. Everyone else seems to love her. As I write this I'm making a mental note to read more of her stuff and perhaps form a more enlightened opinion. This poem of hers, however, I liked immediately on hearing it read on the radio today:

A Child's Sleep

I stood at the edge of my child's sleep
hearing her breathe;
although I could not enter there,
I could not leave.

Her sleep was a small wood,
perfumed with flowers;
dark, peaceful, sacred,
acred in hours.

And she was the spirit that lives
in the heart of such woods;
without time, without history,
wordlessly good.

I spoke her name, a pebble dropped
in the still night,
and saw her stir, both open palms
cupping their soft light;

then went to the window. The greater dark
outside the room
gazed back, maternal, wise,
with its face of moon.


(RIP: UA Fanthorpe, who died last Tuesday, 28 April - another outstanding woman poet. Though I don't really like the term 'woman poet' - after all, you don't generally say a 'man poet' or 'male poet', do you, you just say 'poet'; however, Duffy herself has nothing against the term, feeling that women poets often differ quite widely from men poets in many of their themes and how they treat them, eg the subject of childbirth. And perhaps chocolate?)

Half Revealing, Half Concealing

The sonorous, melancholy style of the 18th century poet Thomas Gray has brought to mind another poet, but a much greater one; one whose life spanned the subsequent century of the Victorian era: Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Can I make a plea for Tennyson? He's little read nowadays, I know. He's come to represent the royalty-loving, reactionary poet of literary convention, penning as Poet Laureate (he succeeded Wordworth to this post in 1850 and kept it till his death in 1892) swathes of verse on popular classical and mythological themes. Yet Tennyson deserves to be considered a little more deeply.

He was born quite near here in Somersby, Lincolnshire - a rector's son and the 4th of 12 children. His life was shattered when a close friend and fellow poet, Arthur Henry Hallam, died suddenly of a brain haemorrage in 1833. Also that same year his second volume of published verse had been critically savaged. He didn't write again for 10 years. But all this resulted in his greatest poem, the long and moving elegy In Memoriam A. H. H., which contains these wonderful 3 stanzas from Section V:

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

Tennyson is talking here about the inadequacy of words. This is a very modern preoccupation. As is Tennyson's obsession with dreams and trance-like states, found in poem after poem. On the surface not very Victorian at all - perhaps a precursor of all that came afterwards in Freud and Jung, Woolf and Lawrence - and just about everything in serious 20th century literature. The Unconscious was there all the time. It just needed to be discovered. Or rediscovered.

Many years ago, in my school days, there were 2 English teachers who held diametrically opposed views about Tennyson. The one loved him, and forced us to learn off by heart The Lotus-Eaters and Ulysses - which I still think are 2 of his finest poems. The other found in him all music and no meaning, all sound and no content. I disagree with this. As I've hinted above, if you read between the lines Tennyson's foot was tentatively and unconsciously wedging open the door into the 20th century (the word 'tentative' is not one you'd normally associate with Victorian poets!)

His religious doubts were also strikingly modern - he tended towards a kind of Pantheism - and he wrote that There lives more faith in honest doubt,/ Believe me, than in half the creeds (In Memoriam).

Yes, Tennyson (in common with most poets of any era) was occasionally pompous and sentimental, that's undoubtedly true. But we must be careful not to judge him out of context, from the standpoint of the cultural mores of our own vastly different times.

These are a few lines from the stirring Ulysses. This is the older Ulysses, made weak by time and fate, but still strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. I identify with the following lines completely:

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone...

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Do these sentiments remind anybody of the older Yeats, the Yeats who wrote An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick (Sailing To Byzantium) but who also wrote Why should not old men be mad? (Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?) But I am not content (Are You Content?) and A foolish, passionate man (A Prayer For Old Age)?

I'll end with a quotation from the druggy, dreamy, hypnotic The Lotus-Eaters:

There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.
Here are cool mosses deep,
And thro' the moss the ivies creep,
And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,
And from the craggy edge the poppy hangs in sleep.