In Search Of God Knows What

I'm fascinated by the idea of pilgrimage. Indeed, without being too pretentious about it, I've always regarded many of the walks I've done and journeys I've made as pilgrimages of sorts. However their real meaning or, if you like, spiritual significance often doesn't become clear until long after the event.

During our Norfolk weekend we visited Walsingham. In the Middle Ages this was second only to Canterbury as England's greatest pilgrim destination. Walsingham became a shrine in 1061 when Richeldis de Faverches, a local well to-do widow, received a vision of the Virgin Mary, who revealed to her the house in Nazareth where the Annunciation had taken place and where the Holy Family had lived after the birth of Jesus. To quote from James Harpur's book Sacred Tracks (2002):

The vision of the Holy House was repeated two more times, and the Virgin instructed Richeldis to memorize its dimensions and to build a replica on her estate. Richeldis was not sure where to locate the shrine, until one morning she woke to see what she interpreted as a divine sign: on one of her fields were two rectangular dry patches in the heavy dew. Having to choose between the two spots, she told her workmen to raise the wooden structure on the one nearest two wells. But as hard as they tried the builders could not get their structure to fit the space. Disgruntled after a day of frustration, they left their tools and materials on the ground and went home. That night Richeldis prayed for guidance, and as she did so the Virgin and her angels erected the house on the other patch - much to the astonishment of the workers when they discovered it next morning.

Walsingham came to grief in 1538 during the Reformation, and the priory to which the shrine was attached became a ruin. Only one elegant arch remains (see photo). However its revival began in the late 19th century, and now people come from all over the world to visit both its Anglican and its Catholic shrines. Despite the odd shop selling Mary-memorabilia and general tourist tat, this historic village is essentially peaceful and unspoilt. We loved it there and will go again. I'd like to retrace the route known to the medieval pilgrims (many kings and queens of England among their number) as the Walsingham Way - popularly called The Milky Way, which was also a name for the Way of St James, the famous Camino pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. Remember that Bunuel film?

Apart from Harpur's book mentioned above, I'd recommend, out of the many, many books on the subject, Nicholas Shrady's Sacred Roads: Adventure from the Pilgrimage Trail (Penguin Books, 2000) and Jonathan Sumption's Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion (Faber & Faber, 1975). I also very much enjoyed On Pilgrimage: A Time to Seek by Jennifer Lash. In 1986 Lash learned she had cancer, and after a painful operation embarked on a solitary pilgrimage through France to Santiago. She died in 1993. She was a remarkable woman. She had 7 children; 2 of them were the actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes.

Peace Comes Dropping Slow

I hadn't realized it till just now, but yesterday was National Poetry Day. To mark this here's the poem that first turned me on, as a teenager, to poetry and the outdoors. I know it's an anthology piece and full of adolescent yearning. But I still love it and always will.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes
dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the
cricket sings;
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

W. B. YEATS

There's a hypnotic beauty, a still magic to this poem that I find indescribably moving.

Ordinary Life

It's a beautiful October afternoon here at home on the Notts-Lincs borderline. Wide, light-blue skies. Slanting sun silvering the crisping birch leaves. Motionless, mauve-tinged clouds hugging the horizon. Some fields yellow with stubble, others newly ploughed and shining black. Hares and pheasants. Nothing's exotic here. It's your average English countryside. But days like this make you appreciate the ordinariness, the everydayness of your own back yard.

The photo shows part of my own literal back yard. The pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handles? No make-over team here, if you don't mind. Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, Carol Smillie, Alan Titchmarsh, please keep out.

Norfolk Poets, Norfolk Property

This by Helen Ivory from the Poetry Society's website:

There's something about Norfolk - the coastline, the marshes, the pace of life - that seeps under the skin. It is relatively inexpensive here, which, added to the romance, is probably why it has become a byway for poets. Edwin Brock and George Barker were long-term residents and wrote of the region. Anthony Thwaite has lived here since the seventies, Peter Scupham and George Szirtes since the nineties, and Kevin Crossley-Holland has the north-Norfolk tides running in his veins.

Not as inexpensive now as it used to be, Helen. House prices have shot up here over the past few years. As everywhere. However, I suppose you can still live relatively cheaply if you need to. There's just not so much to spend your money on. Except the delicatessen at Cley, of course! Myself, though, given the choice, I'd rather live in France or Spain - or Scotland or Wales - for quality of life and value for money. Norfolk, like Suffolk and many other desirable areas, has a mass of holiday lets and second homes; and increasing property prices are preventing many young people from buying locally.

All of which has very little to do with this poem by Norfolk poet Edwin Brock:

Five Ways to Kill a Man

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince, and a
castle to hold your banquet in.

Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.

In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation's scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no-one needs for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways
to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat
is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

Norfolk Naturally

The nature reserve of Cley marshes is managed by the Norfolk Wildlife Trust, the oldest of 47 wildlife trusts around the country. It looks after over 40 nature reserves and other protected sites including 10 km of coastline, 9 Norfolk broads, 9 National Nature Reserves and 5 ancient woodlands.

Cley is a starkly beautiful area of freshwater pools, grazing marsh and reedbeds. You can follow boardwalks through the reedbeds leading to thatched hides which overlook some of the pools. The northern edge of the reserve is a shingle bank which extends westwards to Blakeney Point, a National Nature Reserve cared for by the National Trust and well known for its seals. Beyond the shingle the North Sea pounds.

Here at the weekend I saw a grey phalarope, a ruff, little stints, little egrets, some avocets, several Egyptian geese, a flock of curlews; and I just missed a Sabine's gull. You might think I'm a knowledgeable birder from all this. No, not at all - I'm a generalist at heart. Specialist at nothing. Hoping to know a little about a lot. Just interested in the world. Especially the natural world.

But we mustn't forget that few things are "natural". Whatever that means. This area certainly isn't. It's been carefully managed for decades to attract a wide variety of birds. And it does attract them - in staggering numbers. Most days of the year it's possible to tick off more than 100 species in the vicinity. Rarities are commonplace. Reedbeds are constantly cut - otherwise they would deteriorate and be no good for thatchers or for the birds, which include rare bitterns and bearded tits. Water levels are carefully regulated.

Once, 750,000 years ago, rhinos, hyenas and elephants roamed here. In medieval times Cley was a bustling port on a tidal estuary. In the 1600s land was reclaimed from the sea and the big ships could no longer anchor. Later the coming of the railways brought a rise in the number of outside visitors. Now there's the nature reserve - and very appealing and wild-seeming it is too. In the future, global warming and higher tides will mean more flooding, more salinity - and the environment will change again.

Environments are continually changing due to natural events, human interference or, more usually, a mixture of both. This is a fact - and it's not always a morally, ethically or emotionally loaded issue. Nice to see here a success story with nature and humankind in partnership. Which is often not the case...

The photo shows high tide at Blakeney.

Food Glorious Food

I love the English counties of Cumbria, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Devon and Cornwall. Indeed they're some of my favourite areas of the country. But they can often be, at certain times of the year, just too full of people - and their cars and caravans and children and dogs and barbecues: all the assorted paraphernalia of the British on holiday. At times like these I like to turn to the quiet footpaths, byways and coastlines of Northumberland or Norfolk, two of the best kept secrets of the UK.

We've just returned from a long weekend in Cley-next-the-Sea on the north Norfolk coast. This whole stretch of coastline is outstanding - wild and unspoilt, with mile upon mile of spit and shingle, river and creek, mudflat and saltmarsh, reedbed and sandbank. Lovely villages - which were often important ports long ago - line its length, from Hunstanton to Sheringham: villages with distinctive flintstone churches, sometimes with round towers; and houses and cottages built of flintstone, with red pantiled roofs.

Cley has much to recommend it. There's the famous landmark windmill. Out on the marshes there's the bird reserve, one of the most important in Europe. There's the smoke house, where you can buy anything from smoked olives to smoked eels.

Last but not least, there's one of the best food and wine shops in the country, let alone the county: the unpromisingly named "Picnic Fayre". It's small, it's homely-but-sophisticated all at once, it's full of freshly made breads and cakes, pies and sausages. I noted that some staff were in there at 7 o'clock on the Sunday morning preparing stuff. The focaccia loaf we bought was the best I've ever tasted outside Italy. The Norfolk sausages were sensational. There are wonderful cheeses. There's an impeccable choice of wines - at all prices. There are gorgeous olives, and taramasalata, and nuts presented in all kinds of different ways. It's like being transported to France. Just go there and revitalise your taste buds. God, there's so much more to life than Spar and Tesco..!

I promise I'll get to the walks and the wildlife soon... The photo was taken at Blakeney Quay, one mile west of Cley.