Sunday 26 December 2021

Buon natale da Siena


To hell if it looks pretentious, and in any case we feel a bit reborn ourselves, for at least three reasons: 1) getting away from blighted Blighty, 2) doing it by train, rekindling happy memories of Interrails past, and entering France/crossing Paris on the very last day when it was possible to do so and 3) seeing Italy again, the country I love more than any other, after a painful two-year-plus absence. Thus the first glimpse of an Alpine rock-face before Chambery.

Impressions of Torino in detail must wait, but what a glorious, spacious city, and how amazing to see the Alps so clear from so many streets. This was new, and seemed miraculous to us. Then on to Firenze, and the impact of Baptistery and Duomo was so different from previous visits (not sure why).

Now we're in the bosom of friend Sophie's warm and welcoming home in Siena. With her friend Pia joining us, the Swedish tradition of a big feast on the eve was adopted, and before that I managed to slip out to an intimate service at 6pm that had taken my fancy, in the district of the Oca (goose) contrada (Palio connections to be explained some other side). 

I think I did well, because the Oratory of St Catherine which belongs to Oca isn't usually open. It's a jewel, with Neroccio di Bartolomeo's statue of the saint very much central, putti by Sodoma above and finely detailed scenes from the life around the wall. Not right to photograph during the service, so the few shots I took were on departure, but you can see how lovely it is. 

Later we strode out for Midnight Mass in the Duomo, so very different from when J and I attended 34 years ago. Then the building was packed, and Italians stood around and smoked or showed off their fur coats. This was a very sombre affair. The old ladies certainly weren't out - not the right time. But it IS so refreshing to be in a country where vaccine passes admit you to restaurants, museums, trains and places of entetainment. Masks on the streets, too. Why didn't our hapless government ever do all of this?

Wednesday 8 December 2021

Horror and part-redemption: Ančerl and Haas


The still from an infamous film is not quite what it seems. Conductor, composer taking a bow, orchestra and smartly-dressed audience are all Jewish prisoners in Theresienstadt/Terezin. Two days later - the sickening cynicism of the Nazi propaganda machine! - they'll all be deported to Auschwitz. Few will survive. 

Conductor Karel Ančerl was one who did, though his wife and son were murdered in the gas chambers. Arriving in Auschwitz, he stood in line with his friend, said composer Pavel Haas. Mengele was ushering him on the path to extinction when Haas, weakened, coughed. 'No, that one'. And because of this obscene twist of fortune, the composer was lost to us and the conductor went on to greatness at the helm of the Czech Philharmonic. After the liberation of Auschwitz, he also found the orchestral parts - except the one for double-basses - of the work being performed in the film, Haas's Study for String Orchestra. 

Ančerl features in the film about the film, apparently not downloadable but to be found on YouTube (the title is 'The Führer gives the Jews a city' in capitals). Thankfully it is not the unadulterated propaganda exercise about happy life in Terezin. It's all in German, without subtitles, but an essential watch, if you can bear it. The great man's steely precision about the facts and circumstances is moving in itself. Needless to say several 'students' on my Zoom Czech music course were deeply involved - two had relatives who were in Terezin and/or were murdered in Auschwitz. Pictured below: members of the dressed-up Terezin audience several days before slaughter.

In every class, we've found something profoundly moving or troubling. Just think of the infant mortality and premature deaths which dogged the lives of the great Czech composers. As we moved through the decades, it became such a pattern that I felt I had to ennumerate. Smetana lost three daughters between 1854 and 1855, and his wife, who died of scarlet fever, four years later. Dvořák and his wife lost three children between 1875 and 1877. Janáček wrote in his 1924 autobiography that he would 'bind Jenůfa simply with the black ribbon of the long illness, suffering and laments of my daughter Olga and my little boy Vladimir'. No sooner had Josef Suk begun to mourn the death of Dvořák, his father-in-law, intending a five movement memorial with a triumphant conclusion, than his wife Otilie, Dvořák's daughter, also died. Thus the Asrael Symphony became a monument of almost unrelieved sadness.

Even though Bohuslav Martinů and his wife Charlotte had no children of their own, he had cause to mourn the remarkable young woman who may have been the great love of his life, conductor and composer Vítězslava Kaprálová (pictured above). Like another composer who should have gone on to greater heights, Lili Boulanger, she died at the age of 25. That was in 1940, just as the Martinůs were fleeing the Nazi occupation of Paris and marking the first stages of their difficult journey to the USA.

If, as the late, great Jiří Bělohlávek insisted, we accept Gustav Mahler as a Bohemian - he was born in Kaliště before the family moved to nearby Jihlava - then here's the most devastating chronicle of family loss of all the 'Czech' composers. Apart from the major loss of his life, the death of his four-year-old daughter Maria ('Putzi'), of the 14 children to whom his mother gave birth, six died in infancy, sister Leopoldine of a brain tumour at the age of 26, while 21-year old Otto committed suicide, and the greatest shock of all to the young Gustav, it seems, was the death of his brother Ernst of pericarditis, aged 14. On the manuscript of the work he defined as his official Opus One, the fairytale cantata Das klagende Lied, at the point where one of the two brothers in the forest lies down to rest - his sibling is about to slay him - the composer wrote 'Ernst' in the margin. Below are stanzas written out by Mahler in 1879.


Das klagende Lied got a look-in when I covered fairytales in the sixth Czech music class. Curious how events of great emotional significance have intruded on every instalment. Smetana's Má vlast, the fountainhead in so many ways, could be seen or heard in filmed or recorded concerts of special import: most recently, perhaps, when Rafael Kubelik returned to his newly-liberated country in 1990 (there are Japanese films of all the movements played by a conglomerate orchestra under him in Tyn Square, as wel as the famous sound recording of the Prague Spring Festival concert with the Czech Philharmonic). A thrilling, fast and often rough performance has been preserved from a radio broadcast of Václav Talich conducting the work under German occupation. It's so moving to hear the audience, in the midst of wild applause, break in to the Czech national anthem (which you get at the end of this excerpt - there's a complete performance on YouTube which stops before that point).


The Hussite chorale featured in Má vlast's last two symphonic poems, 'Tábor' and 'Blaník', runs through to Karel Husa's Music for Prague 1968 - I need say no more of the significance of that. Tomorrow we'll be focusing on Martinu in the 1940s but also remembering Haas and other Jewish composers who were murdered under the Nazis. I steel myself once again for a tough time and will try not to blub again. Then, in just over a week's time, it will all be over - the 10 Czech music classes as well as the 10 Opera in Depth surveys of Jenůfa and Julietta (which the students now accept as another of the 20th century's greatest operas). My thanks to visitors Nicky Spence, Mark Wigglesworth, Jana Boušková and Josef Špaček. As for the latest special guest, I can't wait to expound on the three Monday afternoon hours we spent in the company of Gerald Barry, ostensibly covering his latest operatic masterpiece, Alice's Adventures Under Ground, but roving far and wide to embrace, among other things, Miss Marple, Edward and Mrs Simpson, The Power of the Dog and linen napkins daubed with lines from Beethoven's letters. More anon.

Sunday 31 October 2021

Damsels and dragons


Of the -fly variety, that is. I'm far from acquiring expertise in the field of anisopterophilia (no idea if there's such a word, but I claim it using the Latin word for 'dragonfly'), but these amazing critturs, descended from bigger ones who flew around before the dinosaurs, have stolen the scene for me this summer. 

The first I espied on a plank of wood by the smaller of the ponds on Epsom Common - I've already used one shot in my post on the natural discoveries made during hospital visits, but there's no harm in putting up another since I now have reason to believe it's an Emperor dragonfly (Anax imperator), which was to be my final companion of the season back at the Wetlands Centre (zoom to the end of the piece for other images).

Then we have another damselfly to complement the one above, which takes first prize for sheer peacock beauty if not size (the Beautiful demoiselle, I think, Calopteryx virgo; more on the context soon). On the banks of the river Brue at Bruton, where we'd stopped to see the outwardly splendid church with its tall tower. Likeliest candidate here is Large red damselfly (Pyrrhosoma nymphula). 

Even when the wings are spread, you can't see the black spots which make such an impression when the creatures are whizzing about.

This was on the first day of our blissful August stay with friends Andrew and Deborah at Lacock - we'd just been to see the latest exhibitions at the amazing Hauser & Wirth Somerset, which really should have had a post of its own, had I but time. On the sunny Sunday, we walked the valley of the By Brook river via Slaughterford (beautifully situated tiny church) to lovely (deservedly touristed) Castle Combe. Flood damage had closed off what Deborah said was one of the most attractive stretches of the walk along the river beyond Slaughterford, but we rejoined it at a loop, and this is where damsel- and dragonfly activity was at its liveliest. I've never seen a dragonfly curving its back to lay eggs on vegetation and water, but that's what we got from what I'm fairly sure is a Brown hawker (Aeshna grandis).

I think you can just about see an egg being popped out into the water in this film.

It was here, too, that I saw my first Beautiful demoiselle, but there were more on the river banks by the pub where we had a drink before the last, wonderful stretch to Castle Combe.

By far our richest dragonfly time was on a magical late afternoon walk around Hickling Broad nature reserve, part of the same Norfolk day the earlier rewards of which I blogged about here. For starters, our way was guided by one particular creature always flying on ahead of us and coming to rest on the ground at times. A knowledgeable nature lover confirms that this is probably that elusive crittur the Norfolk hawker (Aeshna isosceles).

Here's a closer view of the miraculously wrought wings.

The best was yet to come - when we reached the outlook over the Broads, which Jill had promised us would be glorious, dozens of dragonflies were sunning themselves on the wood, or flying around. 

Only Common darters (Sympetrum striolatum), male and female, but in what abundance.



They ignored the ladies in our party, but seemed to like landing on us men.


More sunbathers lined the way along the path - Brown hawkers among them.

Thereafter we were rewarded with a return through a very lovely oak wood, long tailed tits the only avians to spot, but what a libellulously rich excursion. 

In mid-September dragonflies were still abundant at the London Wetland Centre - whole swarms of them one late afternoon along the east side of the sheltered lagoon. And this brings us back to the wonderful, and prolific, Emperor dragonfly, last seen there in early October.



Now it's time for the migrating birds to take over, but the dragonflies were the main event for me during August and September. You can see why.

Thursday 21 October 2021

Harp swirls for Czech Music Zoom class 1


My Opera in Depth course this term - half devoted to Janáček's Jenůfa, the other to Martinů's Julietta - had already been under way for three weeks before I launched the Thursday class, a more general survey of a genuinely Czech music from Smetana through to Martinů, with a preludial look at 18th and early 19th century works by Bohemian composers in the European lingua franca of the time. 

The main point, though, was to reach the epic at the heart of Czech musical experience, Smetana's Má vlast, which launches every Prague Spring Festival on the exact anniversary of this founding father''s death. And I was lucky to know the Czech Philharmonic's principal harpist since 2005, the vivacious Jana Boušková, who with her colleague Barbara Pazourová usually kicks off the stirring first symphonic poem in a magnificent sequence, 'Vyšehrad', capturing the essence of the proud castle which stands above the River Vltava.

Jana accepted the invitation without hestitation. I'd become friendly with her at Paavo Järvi's Pärnu Music Festival, the best in the world for connecting with musical hearts and souls; and indeed she was invited there because she'd played in the Má vlast which Paavo conducted in the 2016 Spring Festival.

That year Jana and Barbara played the opening statements of the work's main theme, plus cadenzas, together; as it's written in the score, the second harp plays the melody and the first elaborates. Jana has actually played alongside five of her students in a Prague Conservatoire opener conducted by the late, great Jiří Bělohlávek. The one I had to hand to show the class was with a mere five harpists (students minus Jana). 

Another beauty of our introductory session was that I moved on to the most celebrated of the six symphonic poems, 'Vltava' (still better known outside Czechia as 'The Moldau' - but in the transcription made by the harpist and contemporary of Smetana Hanuš Trneček, in Jana's performance at a Czech Philharmonic fundraiser in the Rudolfinum during the first Covid spare, to help fund Prague hospitals (the number you see on the top right is the figure in Czech korunas, which shot up throughout).On the CD featured up top, Jana has referred to Trneček's work, but the transcriptions of the first three symphonic poems and of the rest of the works on a superb disc are her own.


The students warmed immediately to Jana - how could anyone not? - and there was much emotional discussion of the high level of musical education and literacy in that remarkable country. It was also vital, when Jana grew up, to have music as the world you inhabited when life under the Soviets was not so good - and to think of touring to the unimaginable rest of Europe or America as a top player, as her mother did (her father was a flautist in the Czech Philharmonic, so the couple played beautiful Mozart, inter alia, together). If you click to enlarge the image, Jana isn't difficult to spot - she has the Prague Old Town skyline behind her.

Today we move on to the Hussite chorale used in the last two symphonic poems of Má vlast, 'Tabor' and Blanik', as well as in crucial works by Dvořák (Hussite Overture), Suk (Prague) and Karel Husa (Music for Prague 1968). I'm still mapping out what the other eight classes will bring, though I'll divide fairly equally between 19th and 20th centuries, and the four greats, as depicted in this postcard of which I'm so fond, will have the lion's share.

The 10-week course on Wagner's Tristan und Isolde ended the week before we started this one. We had a virtual post-course drinks on the Friday, to which Dame Anne Evans was able to return, having been voiceless in the final class. Many laughs were had by the small but very vocal group on that evening  (Annie second from left in the bottom row).

I was also  delighted to record a Tristan chat with Robin Ticciati on the heels of his run at Glyndebourne, concluded with an orchestrally unforgettable Proms performance.


Equally thoughtful (and the other great British conductor as far as I'm concerned) was Mark Wigglesworth on Jenůfa, squeezing in the time to speak during work with the BBC Philharmonic in Salford (hence the dull hotel room background).

Just recorded another Jenůfa conversation, this time with tenor Nicky Spence, which I hope to air on Monday. Indebted to Mark for suggesting Nicky would make an excellent guest when I was running the course at the Frontline Club. As he did, and I love the generosity of all these exceptional artists, true Menschen all - that goes for Jana and Anne every inch as much as the men. Further guests, TBC, will materialise on the Czech music course anon. Not too late to join - just comment with your email here; I won't print but I promise to respond.

Saturday 16 October 2021

Purged


It may seem melodramatic to declare it, but I knew this was coming. The previous 48 hours had seen the removal of two good colleagues on LinkedIn, Cezary Bednarski and Neil Trevitt, both passionate fighters against this misgovernment's many misdeeds, as I have tried to be alongside putting up the usual musical and cultural posts/links. So the writing was on the wall.

I wouldn't claim that LI itself is being politically selective in whom it targets; its AI is very random, a failure I've already highlighted here (when I threatened to leave and couldn't keep it up). But there has clearly been an invasion of right-wingers trying to shut down commenters they don't like. It's quite easy to do. I have in the recent past reported ad hominem attacks, and I make sure not to do them myself (there is a difference between implying that someone has made idiotic comments and saying 'you're an idiot'). But to distinguish the present government from previous Conservatives, I label them the 'Torons', which might be cause for complaint among lily-livered crypto-fascists. 

I've also been trying to wage a battle against anti-vaxxer misinformation, and one of those offenders might have taken exception to my linking to and quoting from an article on AlJazeera which calls them 'the callous cretins who kill'. I'd say that LI deals with about one in 10 clear transgressors when reported. I would have made enemies there too.

Why do this on a site which is supposedly for business contacts? Because I believe it's all connected. I do the work stuff there too, the shop-window 'look at this' links to reviews and blog posts, as well as the support for musical organisations when their posts come to my attention. And I value the exchanges I've had on LI, how much I've learned from what other people draw attention to. 

At the same time it's taking concentration away from a lot of what I should be doing (like writing Volume Two of my Prokofiev biography). I have the emails of some of the people I value on there, so we can stay in touch. Am I going to try and get back in when the LI stasi don't even give a reason for the dismissal? No. Submit passport details? Really? No thanks*.

So it's goodbye to the only form of social media I use. I find myself quite indifferent about no longer being able to access the site; but I'm furious that some political bully has forced me off. Let's see what my pals proceed to do on there - they'll let me know.

 *UPDATE (17/10) - my LI friend Willemijn Heideman suggested a simple form I could use, bypassing the document-furnishing**. And now, having been kicked off with no explanation, I've been reinstated with no explanation. As I commented below, I won't be using the site much, if at all.

**It turns out that didn't get me back on as three days later I was asked to give a screenshot of the issue. Possibly canvassing on the site linking to LI did it for me.

Monday 11 October 2021

Norfolk Churches 234-44: Wensum Valley loop


Above represents the high-noon of our latest walk for the Norfolk Churches Trust (begging-bowl still out here) - actually around 3pm, when we finally had our picnic lunch in full sun in the splendid isolation of St Mary's churchyard, Great Witchingham before walking across fields to St Faith, Little Witchingham, a treasure half-hidden in the woods. Thanks to a crucial discovery, it's no longer 'disused and ruinous', as Pevsner found it in 1962.

Lucky as we were to have every church to ourselves, there was a major disappointment this time as we collected 10 in 14 miles (a distance I was dreading owing to my poor right knee, all strapped up, but in the end no more than a minor inconvenience): no one sitting inside to welcome us at any of them, and refreshments only on offer in two. I'll expand on my big beef about this when we get to Elsing, but a very plausible reason for the lack of pride or interest on the locals' part may have something to do with the route's close proximity to Norwich: presumably these are dormitory villages for people who commute to and from the city, so a sense of local ownership is absent.

Anyway, where we started could not have seemed more remote: St Peter Ringland, where a lady who'd just opened up encountered us in the churchyard and reminded us to shut the door behind us when we left. Here's the merry band of 2020 reunited: Cally, J, Kate, Jill - who worked out such a wonderful walking route for us, as always - and Fairless.

Nor could a church have been richer in treasures. The clerestory windows still have much of their medieval glass scenes and figures - you might have thought they were too high for the iconoclasts to get at them, but evidence suggests this was not their original place - and above them is a hammerbeam roof disguised by ribbed coving ('concave under-surface', declares Pevsner's glossary).


This, says Pevsner, is 'what has made Ringland famous among Norfolk churches'. Closer to the mark in an overall appreciation is Simon Knott in his thorough and always entertaining Norfolk Churches site: 'There may be bigger churches, there may be more famous ones, but none so artistically and historically significant as St Peter'. Knott begins with an appreciation of Norfolk man Munro Cautley and his 1949 Norfolk Churches and their Treasures, but since I'd not heard of either, I refer you to the relevant entry for enlightenment. Pace Pevsner, the beauty first is in the ensemble of clerestory and roof



and next in the details of the glass. I've not been as thorough in my documentation as I might have been - time was short at the start of our route - but you may certainly decipher Saint John the Baptist, donors, Annunciation, Crucifixion and Virgin and Child.






Even so, the most fascinating glass of all is the roundel in a lower window opposite, of a centaur with vine leaves growing out from his tail, and playing a fiddle, quite a good symbol for musicians walking the route.


There's more, not least a font with four lions - like the one at Acle, but that has wild men too - at the base and against the bowl, Evangelists, angels and flowers,



 

and another of those painted rood screen bases in which Norfolk excels, in this case not necessarily from the church (thinks Nott). There are only eight disciples out of 12 - a ninth panel is placed on a wall - and iconoclastic defacement has occurred, though the colours are bright. Thus Nott: 'The survivals here are St Jude, St John, St Andrew and St Peter on the north side, and St Matthew, St James, St Thomas and St James the Less on the south side'.



Our day's plan was a complicated one (at first), and only made possible by two cars. Thus both took us to a church we would only come near to on our return to Ringland (in the dark, as it transpired), All Saints Weston Longville, before going on to Elsing, where Jill and Fairless drove back to Ringland and then back again together in one car (geddit?) From Elsing our walk could properly begin. But I leap forward. All Saints is hedged in close by houses, so a slightly harried setting, though with plenty of lichened gravestones.


Its fame is due partly to the diaries of the Rev James Woodforde - refer to Nott again on that - and partly to the north aisle wall painting, a mid-14th century Tree of Jesse. I'm intrigued not only by the grapes, but also by the green paint among the colours.





There are also two vivid St Johns flanking the chancel arch - the Baptist with his lamb the finer of the two,


the Evangelist with his poisoned chalice.


The rood screen is handsome and graceful in its tracery and the painting (presumably touched up, but very pretty)



Pevsner thinks 'the twelve paintings on the dado thoroughly bad'. Really? Aren't we lucky to have them?



Just as well that he finds the sedilia and piscina 'delightfully decorated', for this was my favourite thing in the church. How wonderful to find figures including a Green Man among the foliage.









Not having brought the Pevsners (the churches are split between the two volumes, one too many to carry), and seeing no guide, we might have missed the brass to Elizabeth Rokewood (died 1533) with two kneeling children, had it not been reproduced on a wall - a tell-tale carpet suggested it was underneath, and so it proved.

This floor memorial included only because I like the name.

A much-restored window above the south aisle has some original glass. We missed two medieval angels (not for the last time on this walk) further along.

The 14th century door to the side is handsome, or at least grand, both inside and out.



So on we drove to Elsing, getting lost in the maze of lanes on the way. The bicycle ornamentally flowered by the wall is a reminder of how we might have rode, rather than strode, for our cause, and collected more churches; but of course you see so much more on foot, and use paths where no bike should go.

The inn opposite looks quaint - but strange to find a mermaid so far inland.

I'd been anticipating St Mary Elsing with such excitement after what I'd read, but it let us down on several fronts. We spied a lady with a little dog going in to the church and out again - the dog had peed just inside the door - but by the time we entered there was only an old man sitting there (these were the ony two people we encountered inside any church on our entire route). I think he must have been hard of hearing because he didn't answer our greetings, and there was no signing-in form. Turned out he was a former resident returning from Kent - I gathered from what he wrote in the visitors' book that there had been possibly a death of a son which necessitated a return memorial visit. Later I got talking to him and learned that he was 92 and walked three miles a day. 

The lady came back, and we asked if we could get the key to what remained of the church's famous brass - of Sir Hugh Hastings (d. 1347), who because he founded the church had pride of place incarcerated in a wooden box in the middle of the chancel - but she told us that the person who had it was 'indisposed'. J got understandably shirty about no-one bothering to have this treasure open on the annual display day for the Norfolk churches.

Never mind. There was a full replica, including reconstructions of the missing parts, up against the west wall.

Two angels hold Sir Hugh's pillow; 'Over his head,' writes Pevsner, 'a cusped ogee arch at the apex of which  a plaque with tiny angels receiving his tiny soul. Steep gable and in it Sir Hugh on horseback in an octofoiled circle...To the l. and r. broad band with on either side four tiers of canopies and mourning relatives under them (two of them lost). They represent or represented among others Edward III, Thomas Beauchamp Earl of Warwick, Lord Grey of Ruthyn, Henry Plantaganet Earl of Leicester, the Earl of Pembroke, Lord Stafford.'



The chancel does at least have two visible memorials worth noting: an elegant script on a memorial wall plaque to 'Dame Anne, Sir Anthony Browne his wife, in hope of resurrection unto life, 5 October 1623', and below it a stone tomb chest with two Browne family crests.

I like this three-pigs insignia on a floor memorial, too (poignant, or pointed, in the light of the current wave of totally unnecessary slaughter).

The octagonal Decorated font has a tall Perpendicular canopy with some of the original colouring on the west side.


You can see the church is large and wide, but - and our lack of meeting with any kind of reception didn't help - unwelcoming. The church guide quotes a 'scathing historical reference' to the effect that 'the East Window has been beautifully adorned by painting, and indeed have all about ye Church w'ch were never broken by design, but Suffered from fall to ruin by the Incuriousness [the guide's bold print, or the reference's, not sure which] of the Parishioners'. The incuriousness of invisible villagers was certainly a blight on this walk. True, the East Window also suffered from having its glass blown out by a gale in 1781. There are fragments of original glass in a fraction of the window

and they include this ass or ox, presumably from the original Nativity.

Otherwise what remained has been gathered into two of the south chancel windows, with three saints (Matthew, Jude and Philip) and a medley of other fragments. At least this glass had the benefit of recent restoration by the Churches Conservation Trust.



By the time Jill and Fairless returned, the sun was beginning to break through

and we got glimmers of it, framed by two silver birches, on our first stretch of woodland walk

with plentiful fungi, suggesting a long mycelium, and a couple of the bracketed variety, lining our left hand side.


Crossing a minor road, we entered a small local wood of significance,

crossed a field of big swedes

and headed along an oak-lined path up a gentle incline

to the hill above Lyng, a pond on our right and a handsome beech stand of the kind Paul Nash loved to paint, rather disfigured by the motor-cycle course below it, on our left.

The messy farm continued to blight the view on the road down to Lyng, and we met lots of folk heading in the opposite direction to a local yard sale - all the rage in Norfolk now - before crossing the bridge and heading via a lane of old cottages to the green churchyard of 13th century St Margaret.

The church was dark inside, missing a north aisle arcade, and with a chancel rebuilt in 1912. It felt not especially loved, nor rich in furnishings, but it does have a fine south door,

a 13th century octagonal font of Purbeck marble

and steps up to the bell tower with a fine arch above.


Lyng straggled northwards like a suburb of Norwich, but the coffee addicts among us were delighted to find a decent machine, and good cakes, inside the local shop-cum-cafe, and took a lazy breather at tables outside, well behind our time schedule by the time we'd finished. Fortunately our cicerona relaxed into a che sarà, sarà mood and so there was no pressure from this point on.

The village is more attractive as you walk towards the Wensum, and the famous view of the old bridge and mill house does not disappoint.

After this we had a long walk in nature until the next church. First we took a path alongside Sparham Pools, a bird sanctuary, but with little avian activity at this time of year.

This was the only stretch where we encountered other people. Ahead of us I saw a lady unleashing four little dogs. In the idiotic way that is my wont, I did a little bark, and set them off - they all came running towards us. The lady was rather tearful - among them was a little Chinese Crested Dog, so much more attractive than the usual hairless variety (horrifyingly they put down many of the hairy ones because it's not what people want). and it had been at death's door with two near-fatal illnesses. This was its first bark and its first lively movement. So I am clearly something of a dog whisperer, or rather barker.

We also encountered a group of garlanded girls - so pretty an idea for a hen gathering (our friend Pia gave us garlands for our wedding party), though I see from a similarly-adorned crowd at Clapham Junction Station yesterday that it's a thing.

Our map-reader - you see how I'm passing the buck - carried on up the hill (yes, hill, very undulating, Norfolk) instead of taking the right turning. but that gave us a fine perspective on a broad valley. We also encountered a lady picking damsons, very defensive about our getting a share. At that point we realised we needed to come back down the hill.

The next stretch was attractive, though flat, at first on a boardwalk over poplar- and willow-lined tributaries of the Wensum

abundant with dragonflies, the rather familiar Common Darters. This photo isn't brilliantly in focus, but wait until I unleash my dragonfly post in the near future - it's been a summer of revelations on that front.

Then a well-kept farm, with a fine dappled perspective on our left

and a woodshed with a lone hollyhock on the right.

There was a short stretch of road to be negotiated. You can see who the main employer is here - probably having trouble getting the staff right now - though the sign makes 'Bernard Matthews' look like another village.

Turning off from the built-upness ahead, we walked into the secluded heart of the walk. What a wonderful arrival at St Mary Great Witchingham, though you couldn't see the tower at all from our approach. Then, suddenly, there was the church in its leafy surroundings.

Another view from the west end.


The churchyard is beautiful and quiet - we'd left busy roads behind - so perfect for our annual picnic in honour of Jill's mum, the late Mary Dunkerton, warden of All Saints Burnham Thorpe, who always prepared chicken rolls with mango chutney and coffee buns. Jill sticks to the rolls. I hope no-one is shocked that gravestones were appropriated, but this for me is a lovely photo of Kate and Fairless.

The church was locked, so Fairless and Cally went off to knock on the door of the lady with the key. Not a happy encounter: 'I've been bothered by five people already today'. 'Well, it is the big day of the year for the Norfolk churches'. Eventually she conceded that we would leave the church open for the rest of the afternoon and the key in the door. 

The 15th century south porch makes a good start, with flint flushwork friezes delineating M for Mary.

The spandrels above the entrance feature an annunciation scene (the Virgin in the niche above is missing). Regretfully I didn't snap the Virgin of the annunciation, in shadow, but this detail of the Archangel Gabriel shows how fine the work is.

Without the key, we would have been deprived of seeing a beautiful, light-filled interior and some unmissable treasures. First, the late 15th century Seven Sacraments Font, defaced but rare in having the original colour.

Each panel is impressive - this is extreme unction - 

but the bonus is the Assumption, which would have been the correct dedication of the church. The rays are also to be found in one of the glorious East Window panels of East Harling, the biggest glory of last year's walk.

The late medieval nave roof has figures along the ridge.


In the south aisle are a Victorian eagle lectern and associated steps from the chapel of New College Oxford. Here they once served as a pulpit.


Much older carvings are to be found on benchends - this row has an angel at one end

and what looks like a devil at the other.

The monument to Oliver Le Neve in the chancel has a dramatic story behind it. This High Church Tory, hunter and farmer came to live at Great Witchingham Hall in 1692. Four years later the Whig Sir Henry Hobart of Blickling lost his seat in Parliament and, on learning that Le Neve had accused him of cowardice during William III's Irish campaign, challenged him to a duel on Cawston Heath. Le Neve was wounded in the arm, but Hobart died of a wound to the stomach. Le Neve fled to Rotterdam and returned in 1700 to stand trial at the Assizes, to be cleared. His only son died four months before his own demise from apoplexy in 1711.

I'm assuming this Elizabeth was the wife of an earlier Oliver Le Neve (the father?) The script is pleasing. 

The route to Little Witchingham was across fields above a valley. Fabulous late afternoon light made it all look rather romantic,


and in the flowering ivy along the lane we reached, there were dozens of Red Admiral butterflies (maybe the two here aren't so clear in the size of image).

St Faith, Little Witchingham, is almost hidden in a wooded area where the lane curves round.

'Ruinous' it certainly was when Pevsner published the North-East Norfolk and Norwich volume of The Buildings of England, and in the Shell Guide to Norfolk by Wilhelmine Harrod and C. L. S. Linnell, we read that 'Little Witchingham church, nearly a ruin, has an early carving of the Crucifixion on the outside wall of the chancel'.

But in 1967 the art historian Eve Baker climbed in through an empty window, peeling ivy away from the whitewash inside and discovering a wall painting beneath (a framed newspaper obituary on one of the pillars celebrates a similar redeemer, Tom Davey, who had some rather nasty opposition over the years from Satanists at St Mary the Virgin, Houghton Hill - we have to include that next year. Here's a lively homage to him on the Norfolk Churches Trust website). The NCT put in a programme of conservation at Little Witchingham which eventually resulted in the building passing into the hands of the Churches Conservation Trust. What you see on entering, especially on a sunny afternoon like hours, is a clean, spare wonder.

On the north wall is a whole series of ind-14th century (pre Black Death?) paintings dealing with Christ's Passion. What looked at first like three graces turns out to be the scourging


and what looks like a crucifixion is in fact the deposition, its incompleteness somehow only adding to the magic.

Clearest of all, on the right, is the 'noli me tangere' of the risen Christ to Mary Magdalene in the garden. The vine-patterning below makes a link to the Tree of Jesse painting in Weston Longville.

On the opposite wall, there are a few paintings to be made out, though the subjects aren't clear (Cain and Abel or Abraham and Isaac, perhaps, in the second?)


No mistaking the Evangelists' symbols in the spandrals of the south arcade opposite, though. The best ones, which I have here, are the eagle of John, the lion of Mark and the angel of Matthew. The ox of Luke was partially destroyed in a 17th century shortening of the south aisle.



Finally, just a few more general perspectives. I didn't want to leave the interior behind then and I'm equally reluctant to do so now.



Next came an easy amble down Kett's Lane, strewn with crabapples,

to a valley with a small stream, and Swannington - I'm so glad we took the alternative route round the back of the early 18th century Swannington Manor with its splendid brick end-gables and the topiary which, somewhat surprisingly, a branch of the path closely skirts.


The park in the front of the house is almost as attractive, with a great copper beech,

and there, across the road at the end of the driveway is the tower of St Margaret.

We were now getting to the point where, just after 5pm, we might have expected churches to be shut, but this one wasn't. Again, radiant late afternoon light in the interior, approached via another of those Perpendicular porches with flushwork lettering - this one spells out I H S Nazarenes (Jesus of Nazareth). In the spandrel, as you can just about see in the second photo, there's a dragon with people on the left and other figures, including an armoured lady, with the dead dragon on the right. St Margaret! I wouldn't have worked it out without Simon Knott's help. Above is an intriguingly bitten-off sundial.




This church was not only open late, but had a wealth of refreshments and an open kitchen where we were even able to make cups of tea, oh joy. It had a well-cared for feel , with armorials handsomely ranged along the north wall.

The chancel is wide and has a grand assembly of glass in the east window, 


including two 17th century heads of Christ from the continent.


Even the windows without much glass look handsome with the green beyond them.

I couldn't quite make out the wall painting of St Christopher compared to its clarity on a church board reproduction,


but there is a decided gem of a piscina using a Norman capital with St George and the dragon on it.


Next to it is a 'sumptuous Dec Sedilia with ogee arches and large leaves in the spandrels' (Pevsner).

More handsome lettering and crest on a floor memorial.

The surroundings demanded more lingering than we could, by this time, afford: the view across to the timber-framed cottage is attractive

and there's plenty of space around the church, which looks good from every angle.

We retraced our steps back to the manor, crossing the stream on another boardwalk with poplars

and then met a couple of busy-ish roads to get to early 14th century St John the Baptist Alderford, its tower dwarfed by a high pine.

This one was shut, but would have been anyway because the Norfolk Churches Trust is carrying out renovation work inside. 

Here we could at least see 'the plate for the knocker with cross-wise fleur-de-lis extensions' (Pevsner). What we missed were another Seven Sacraments font and some fragments of medieval glass. Anyway, we tramped around the outside


 and J and Fairless did some stretching - we were beginning to feel the strain of the walk.

A little more road walking took us past a handsome house, verging on Strawberry Hill Gothic (though there's a 1666 date beneath a chimneystack)

and then we turned right to cross Alderford Common, a 'Site of Special Scientific Interest' with 'thin layer of glacial sands and gravels over chalk' giving rise to diverse features - including this first stretch, what felt like primeval woodland.

Then we were heading back down into the Wensum valley again, sun setting to our right.

We didn't encounter a single car on our descent along Station Road (the station is disused), so all the more curious to come across this sign for the first time.

St Andrew Attlebridge, on a mound above a villagey collection of buildings, is lucky that the Fakenham Road now bypasses it. 

Surprisingly it was still open, but there wasn't a lot to see inside (and I missed what I should have noticed, a 16th century brass presumably concealed under a carpet). This last of the clear windows showcasing the scene beyond seemed the most attractive thing about the interior at the time.

But the porch had a carved stone panel which I don't find mentioned in any reference work

and one corbel of interest.

The priority, however, was the division of the rhubarb cake Kate had made that morning and carried around with her all day - moist and delicious.

By now I felt I'd pushed through the pain in my right knee (praise be to the support pad), but J was suffering and found himself faced with the choice between sitting in the porch and waiting for us to pick him up when we had regained the cars, or pushing on. Which he boldly did.

So we crossed the Wensum one last time just before meeting the busy road


and were lucky in our last goal, St Margaret Morton-on-the-Hill. Jill had phoned the lady of Morton Hall to see if she'd keep the church in the grounds open for us. She was delighted to do so because the Norfolk Churches Trust had helped in its preservation, more of which anon. That also meant the gate to the long drive was open, alongside the fanciful gatehouse

and now we crossed the private estate, sun truly sinking now on our right

while the track between high-banked woods further up the hill plunged us in near darkness (the flash keeps it bright here).

Then a left turn took us to the hall and the church above it. Still open!

The tower collapsed on Easter Sunday 1959. 

Crucial work was done in the 1970s, when Lady Prince-Smith of the Hall enlisted the help of the Norfolk Churches Trust. A board of press clippings gives information.

A glass screen now separates the (open former) nave from the east end of the church.

The font was moved east to its present location

and there's one notable brass, of Katherine Awdley (died 1611), taken away at the time of the church's seeming demise but restored to the Hall after the rebuilding.

This lady was the aunt of Robert Southwell, hung, drawn and quartered for his Jesuit faith and canonised as a martyr by Pope Paul VI. An annual service is still held here in his memory (thanks again to Simon Knott for this information - he got to talk to the lady of the house, but we didn't want to disturb her at the late hour).  

The curious twofold nature of the present construction can best be seen from the north,

where a tailfeatherless peacock was strutting and darting about between the gravestones (very distantly glimpsed here) in the twilight.

Heading south-east from the church, it felt like we were on a high plain, with the crescent moon above the maize field to the right,

the last of the light behind us

and dark woods ahead.

Here, I fancy, we may have lost our bearings a little, but it was exciting to walk through the trees with the regular sounds of hooting owls

until we came out of the wood and down to a field near the lane that would take us back to Ringland.

What sounded like an Elvis impersonator at a not-too-distant Saturday night party was oddly haunting; meanwhile the owls we recognised and a bird we didn't (with a weird upward glissando) kept us company along this secluded valley.

Then finally, there we were, back where we started.

A pint at the blissfully close pub for those of us who had only to wait while cars were retrieved provided a nice coda, but the usual concluding meal out seemed a stretch too far. We were in any case meeting up with musical friends Susie and Michael with irrepressible terrier Tristan and conductor David (Jill's near neighbour) the next lunchtime at the Suffield Arms, art dealer Ivor Braka's latest fantastical creation/re-creation, a very happy occasion.

The only thing I didn't manage to tick off as a success was the intended swim at Overstrand; just as on our last visit, the tide was at its highest and the water rough. But an essential walk along the promenade to get sea air and sun together wasn't bad at all.

Just for the record, here are all links to previous chronicles (which don't go back as far as the walks from Burnham Thorpe) :

South Lopham to Roudham, 2020

Around the Bure Valley, 2019

Metton to Hanworth, 2018

Happisburgh to Winterton, 2017

Honing to North Walsham, 2016

Cromer to Southrepps, 2015  

Mileham to Bittering, 2014  

Beechamwell to Gooderstone, 2013 

Ingoldisthorpe to Thornham, 2012

East Rudham to Helhoughton, 2011

Wormegay to Castle Acre, 2010  

Walpoles to Wiggenhalls, 2009 

King's Lynn to Sandringham, 2008