The church at Melcombe Bingham ...

This Tuesday, I went for a walk with Penny to Melcombe Bingham - we drove to Ansty in Penny's Micra - we saw dark woods, silent villages, immense fields, full of unharvested wheat -

I kept a look out for crop circles - I'd read, fascinated, John Michell's Flying Saucer Vision - I wondered if I might see arcane symbols, marked out in these somehow slightly sinister fields -

Penny drove with daredevil skill down narrow, twisting, lanes - high hedges bordered the lanes, with passing places grudgingly inset into the hawthorn and bramble -

Ansty turned out not to be a single settlement, but many - a Brigadoon or Sargasso Sea  of Anstys - Lower Ansty, Higher Ansty, Ansty Cross - but Penny was unerring in finding where we should go for our walk -

We parked near a noble village hall, once the original Hall and Woodhouse Brewery - I remembered wistfully how I'd loved draining glasses of Golden Champion -

We set off, heading across pasture with sleepy cows and innocent, jaunty, calves - we climbed over stiles set in venerable hedgerows - we walked down a hollow way, set between high banks, thick with ferns and docks - the branches of ancient oaks and ash and beech met over our heads -

We passed the site of Melcombe Horsey, abandoned as a result of the Black Death - sad mounds and furrows in the grass cast passing shadows -

The church at Melcombe Bingham was beautiful and spare - inside, I looked at the monuments to members of the Bingham family - many had died young, the span of their foreshortened lives recorded in elegant lettering -

I spent some time staring at the memorial to Thomas Bingham - deare Child - he died before his first birthday in November 1710 - his parents, Richard and Philadelphia Bingham expressed the wish that his dust may never be disturbed - 

Leaving the church, I noticed that there was a stuffed owl, with yellow glaring eyes, perched up near the roof of the nave - the sight of this bird lifted my spirits -

 Outside the church, I looked up to see a delicate weather vane - vague clouds swirled over the sky -