Saturday 8th June - Four Marys Walk

One of the things I find hardest to get used to about life in the country is how small rural congregations are.  I realise that the majority of British people aren’t Christians, but I’ve spent most of my life living in towns where there were enough people overall that the numbers of them who went to church would still produce congregations of a couple of hundred or so, of all ages from children through to elderly people.  Some would hold several services each Sunday: a traditional Communion service early in the morning, a family service in the late morning, and a service for students in the evening.

In a rural parish, it’s more like the scene in The Vicar of Dibley where Geraldine, newly arrived, asks in her typically irreverent way, ‘What kind of crowd do you pull at these gigs?’ and is told that the usual congregation is five worshippers.  ‘What about at Christmas?’  ‘Oh, that’s totally different – it’s four then, because one person spends Christmas with her sister.’

So churches are merging.  Obviously, I don’t have any religious objection to this.  All of us are one church of God.  If anything, I wish that congregations of different denominations in the same area would merge, with the Anglican church and the Methodist chapel in one village deciding to work together – especially if the Anglican church has mostly elderly people and the young families go to the Methodist church, so that joining forces could create more of an all-age community.

In practice, however, it’s more a matter of different Anglican churches sharing a vicar, who either has to get to multiple services in different villages per day or rotate services from week to week and try to communicate when there is going to be a church service where.  Our parish, Beacon Trinity – itself a merger of Holy Trinity at Binegar, All Saints at Oakhill, and St James at Ashwick – is merging with four churches dedicated to two saints named Mary: the churches of St Mary Magdalene at Chewton Mendip   and Ston Easton, and the churches of St Mary the Virgin at Emborough  and Litton.  We had tried to think of an interesting name for this combination, but settled on the simple ‘East Mendip’.

On Sunday morning, PDB11 was going to be playing the organ at Chewton Mendip at 9.30, which was earlier than it was practical for me to walk there.  But I decided to spend Saturday exploring the route around the four Marys.

I set out along the familiar route to Holy Trinity Binegar, and from there headed north, past Lechmere Water (I think this name comes from laecc (stream), and mearc – (boundary) – but it’s fun to imagine the lake having been inhabited by leeches, or even by lecherous merfolk) up to Emborough Church, located on Manor Farm. 

The church has been closed for services since 1978, and I had to walk through the farmyard to get there.  However, the church door was unlocked for anyone who wanted to come in and pray or just enjoy the 12^th century architecture and read about the building’s history in the guidebook.  The guidebook at one point referred to it as ‘St Michael the Virgin’, which didn’t inspire much confidence (though, as most angels don’t seem to be interested in sex, St Michael probably is a virgin).

I’m not really a mediaeval architecture buff – my mother would have appreciated this place far more – so I just rested, said a prayer, read a sheet of paper left in the church with a poem for closed churches, and had a snack of dried fruit.  The latter felt a little irreverent, but really, what’s wrong with eating in church?  Eating a wafer and drinking a sip of wine is the central part of Communion services (and for many of us, drinking coffee and eating biscuits afterwards is a more important time of fellowship).  Jesus described himself as ‘the vine’, while fig trees represent the blessings of God  and the ‘sycamore tree’ up which Zacchaeus climbed in order to catch sight of Jesus was not the sycamore maple, but the sycamore-fig.

I also noticed, pinned to the door, a poster advertising a celebration of summer at the church and churchyard on Saturday 6^th July at 3pm – ‘Please bring your own picnic.  There will be a bake sale and cold drinks available.’  I texted PDB11 to let him know.  Emborough Church may be retired from active service, but it clearly isn’t dead.

From there, I walked on to Chewton Mendip.  On my way, I passed an empty house for sale – but the door was open downstairs, leading to a room in which the departing owners had left various things they hadn’t wanted to take with them.  Mostly there were just pieces of junk, but I saw a dolls’ house which was more of a dolls’ palace.  It was a four-storey building, five feet high, decorated in pink and teal, with two walk-in giant baths or paddling-pools, and pictures printed on the walls of everything a doll could want: a kitchen and a pet dog, a bike and sports equipment, a guitar, drum kit and record player, a desk with a computer, and lots of posters, mainly bearing inspirational messages.  There was no three-dimensional miniature furniture except the paddling-pools, but this would simply have left more room for playing.  This was clearly a dolls’ house intended for a child to play with, rather than for an adult to decorate with intricately modelled miniatures.  I hope the owner had grown out of playing with it, but I felt sorry that they hadn’t been able to find a neighbouring child to give it to before leaving.

I followed along the River Chew, and saw more damselflies than I had ever seen in one place before, bright turquoise with lacy black wings, flitting about and perching on the plants growing out of the river.  The Chew is so small at this stage that it is more of a Nibble, but I did see a surprisingly decent-sized fish slightly further on.

At Chewton Mendip, I saw a poster advertising a village fête in Litton that day, but I could see that it would be nearly finished by the time I reached Litton, and so it was.  People were beginning to pack away stalls, and happy children were walking away with the things they had bought, but it had clearly been a good fête, with lots of games like hook-a-duck and coconut shy and hoop-throwing, face-painting, and stalls selling books and plants and bric-a-brac.  It was like a smaller version of the way Oakhill Village Festival used to be.  I hope we can go back to having festivals like that again, if the church, the school and the Village Hall Committee can manage to work together.  But if not, it’s good to know that it’s going on somewhere fairly near.

All in all, I walked 15 miles, which brings me up to 138 so far.  It wasn’t my longest walk, but it had been a good day.