The valley was a simple one of two woodland single-track lanes, one high, one low, starting just beyond the bridge from a three-way crossroad with the approach road. The two roads joining to form a loop at the northern valley end, with one road heading to their meeting along the western valley floor through a plantation of mixed woodland, and the other high on the same valley side through older, more established, trees. The eastern side of the valley was entirely wooded and inaccessible. In the case of each road, the woods broke with small scatterings of farmhouses and their associated fields, and the occasional lane headed this way and that off the two tracks. Presumably these lanes went to neighbouring valleys, though how they got there I have little idea, as to my knowledge there were no roads in the intervening woodlands cresting the watersheds. Just into the valley on the lower lane was the small hamlet of _________ with its neat flint-faced pub and church, but the two settlements I was chiefly interested in were half way up the valley, each on one of the roads. Each had the same name, but one "Upper _________" and the other "Lower _________". By the map, they could not have been more than calling distance between them, though separated by several miles along the track. My plan, as much as I had one, was to head up the lowland road first, visiting the hamlet's church at the valley foot, before driving into the plantation to Lower _________, and then back on myself above to Upper _________, before finally returning to the crossroads. It was 11 o'clock and I estimated to be done in time for lunch with my family.
The first church was delightful, compact, but full of material from the reign of the Georges - all flags, commandments, and the donations of grandee landowners. As such, it held my interest for little more than the time it took to survey the nave, and I headed out of the hamlet, past its three or four russet-bricked farmhouses and the public house, and into the woods. What started as a light area of hazel coppice soon darkened as the trees rose along the road, winding further and further into old stock, until, just when I began to wonder if I had somehow missed the settlement, I suddenly broke into a series of fields between the chalk stream and the wooded slopes of the valley, and then entered the village of Lower _________.
In the 1930s a well known Cambridge philosopher had moved to the outskirts of the village and set up a short-lived experimental school in the local manor. While he was never especially clear on why he had chosen this specific village, it nevertheless felt in tune in some way with that perculiar influence: tidy minded, but with an arts and craft ethos, and space to breath around its village green, which was complete with an old thatched well. The church, St Peter's, was 13th C, of a single cell design, with a stout wooden bell enclosure, the whole of flint and red tile and as delightful as the village it was set in. I sat on a rough old bench on the green and took in the winter sunlight, which at that moment began to fill the valley, and I sat there until an animal bleating high up in the direction of the neighbouring village broke me from my revery. Reminded of my next stop, and I set off with high spirits towards the valley head and almost immediately uphill on the climb to the upper road, full of the hope that even greater treasures awaited me on the higher ground, further out from the shadow of the valley as it was.
23 Dec 2019