Harry’s Place, Mind the Curb and the Impatient Farmer

Morning broke in Hilperton more or less as the previous day ended – dreary and cool and wet.



The Lion and Fiddle Free House - Hilperton

We packed up the bags and rumbled downstairs to check out of the Lion and Fiddle. The owner was wiping down the bar; his wife was tidying up the lounge. We greeted the 60-ish gentleman, whose name we unfortunately never thought to ask, thanked him for a nice dinner and very nice accommodations (he apologized for the wedding noise and attendant commotion, but there was no need, it was nowhere near a bother for us). The guy had spent many years working and living in the States – Tennessee, among other places – in some capacity in the civil construction trade, and returned to Hilperton a few years ago to run this little free house.

I asked about that term. “Free house”.

A free house is a tavern that is unaffiliated with a particular brewery. In England, and the details of this I’m probably going to get a little wrong, most pubs (“public houses”) are essentially an extension of a single brewery – they serve only their beer product from the tap, or beers approved by the brewery owners - while a “free house” is typically owned by an individual who serves his patrons whatever he likes. I got the impression that a “free house” was a distinction of some merit, and that these things had their roots deep in English history and tradition. It also occurred to me that the great brewpub culture still expanding in the US is rendering the beer topography curiously like England’s, with local breweries opening their own restaurants and serving their own beer, to the exclusion of malt beverages brewed by craft beer competitors, or even the mega-breweries like Miller-Coors or Anheuser Busch. Try ordering a Bud Light in your average brewpub.

Anyway – it was a conversation piece I lofted as we were finishing up the paperwork, but the gentleman certainly didn't need any coaxing for conversation, reeling off stories of Hilperton, famous and long-dead English railroad engineers, driving in the States vs driving in England, the fickle fortunes of getting a share of the Bath tourist trade, etc etc, all with a heavy accent (I don’t know, was it a southern Midlands accent?) that at times left me nodding and “uh-huh’ing” in unconvincing befuddlement. 

I looked at my watch several times, feeling uncomfortable about impolitely cutting the guy off but mindful of a fairly ambitious day ahead of us. The place didn't get a lot of US tourists (“last ones were, oh, a month or so ago,” he half-remembered), and I guess chatting up some Yanks was a rare enough event for the proprietor to savor. 

We finally extracted ourselves from the bar, wrestled the luggage into the VW…and then of course, I had to find a loo (again) before we took off, so with some goodbye-hello-again awkwardness, I went back inside. The owner was gone, but his wife was puttering about, I asked her where the men’s room was and she pointed me down a hallway, and of course I couldn't find the magic door, so I went back up the hallway and apologized, and she re-pointed back the hallway with her free hand while vacuuming the lounge carpet, and I went down there again, spotted a door I would swear wasn't there 15 seconds earlier, and comforted my aging and prostate-cramped bladder. I hate long goodbyes.

Back on the road.

Lacock is a curious place. 

High Street, Lacock

Sharon in Lacock

So much of the village is unchanged since the fifteenth century that most of it is actually owned by the august National Trust, and it’s something of a second-tier tourist destination, owing in no small measure to its prominent role as a backdrop to one of the Harry Potter films. I will confess to never having seen any of the films, nor having read any of the books; I was drawn to the place by an intriguing (and probably fake) YouTube of a purported ghost filmed by a US tourist couple in the churchyard of the village’s ancient St Cyriac’s church a few years back, and figured, eh, while we’re in the neighborhood…

And it’s probably a mild disservice to refer to the place as a “second tier” tourist destination, as after we parked and walked toward the town, we strolled past at least 16 shiny tourist buses all lined up in specially designed parking spaces, their blue-haired and gawking patrons presumably wandering the streets. The buses were everywhere, at least on the outskirts of the village proper; 

Tour buses on High Street- Lacock

off the main drag, the streets were ridiculously narrow. 

Back street - Lacock

Back street - Lacock

Lacock, though, isn't really a museum. People actually live here – people with jobs and cars and kids in school and shopping needs and everything else – so the village exudes this weird, two-tiered kind of vibe; locals going on with their business, overlaid with a steady stream of camera-snapping tourists shooting pictures of their houses and streets and corner shops and front doors. 

Living in a tourist town probably isn’t as big a deal as all that – you can get used to anything – but maybe because of its small size, Lacock just seemed to highlight the dichotomy more to me than, say, York. It did occur to me that homeowners in Lacock are likely to feel strict constraints on them by the National Trust regarding building facades and property improvements that owners of historic properties in my own town (Boulder) must endure as well, so there’s probably a good deal more to actually living here than merely dodging the tourist buses. (But then again, if the village is “owned” by the National Trust, does that mean its residents are all renters?)

I stepped funny off a curb at one point, falling to a knee in the street, tearing my pants and scraping the skin on my kneecap. It actually hurt like hell; I spent about half my time in Lacock limping a little.

We strolled over to the municipal cemetery, a trim if unremarkable late Victorian memorial park. 

A sign indicated that the cemetery was maintained by local “offenders” through a program called Community Payback; we know this here as community service, commonly assigned to defendants guilty of misdemeanor criminal offenses... 

...although I'm unaware if community service troops stateside are commonly thanked for their work. 

The cemetery backs up to a sizable farm, and we heard the owner slapping and swearing at his animals unseen over the fence. An odd moment.  

Next was St Cyriac’s, first dedicated in the 11^th century but largely rebuilt in the fifteen and sixteenth centuries and the village’s medieval church. 

Inside, the Church was a somber affair, predictably elegant with its carved monuments and medieval trimmings, 

St Cyriac Church - Lacock

St Cyriac Church - Lacock

St Cyriac Church - Lacock

St Cyriac Church - Lacock

and the churchyard outside (no ghost, at least none we could see…) was smallish but satisfyingly old. Like many others, there were still-standing monuments in the yard itself as well old, orphaned monuments lined up against the stone wall. (We had seen this first a week and a half earlier, at St Luke’s in London.) And, there were actually other tourists browsing the churchyard.

St Cyriac churchyard

St Cyriac churchyard

St Cyriac churchyard

Back on the road, headed toward the ancient Avebury, but we had saved off another church on the GPS – St Anne’s, just outside the village of Bowden Hill – so we made a minor detour and headed over. Odd church, this one was. Clearly Victorian, with inexplicable and almost mysterious trimmings, the church sat on a gentle hillside overlooking the Wiltshire Plain and hosted a smallish, barely-century-old churchyard. 

The place had the faint scent of country-home wealth, a tidy place of worship for gentleman farmers. A nice lady was tending to one of the graves and greeted us with a smile…but the church itself was locked.

We shot the cemetery somewhat quickly, piled into the VW and headed off to Avebury. 

St Peter and Paul, Locked churches and the Road to Hilperton

If you don’t like standing in line, the ruins of Muchelney Abbey won’t disappoint you.

Apart from the Abbot’s House, which still retains a fair amount of Norman building fabric and throughout which is scattered various bits of recovered carved masonry from the now-vanished Abbey, there is little left of what was once a fairly extensive facility whose history dates to the late seventh century. We liked the place, but could easily see how tourists, especially if they were coming from the poetic magnificence of Glastonbury, not far to the north, would find Muchelney a subdued diversion.

The Abbey foundations lay at soil-level in a grid that really only reveals itself from the air; 

almost nothing remains higher than the visitor’s shinbone. I felt the same kind of melancholy I first experienced at Hailes Abbey, this vague sense of a sacred space defined in skeletal minimalism, a silent and nearly dissolved ghost whose frame is really only appreciated from above, a place that has resigned itself to no longer coaxing the mental image of an actual building.

At the northern end of the Abbey site, we found a number of opened stone sarcophagi – the long-since emptied resting places of clerics, we imagined, looking a little like aliens’ coffins.

But beyond that lay The Church of St Peter and Paul, the parish church for the tiny Muchelney community and a staggeringly old building, with a fair amount of building fabric dating to Saxon times (pre-mid 11^th century). As it was outside the Abbey property, we said goodbye to Dennis and walked around to the church.  The churchyard was laden was sullen, moss-speckled 18^th and 19^th century monuments, some collapsed graves and more stone sarcophagi, a palpably affecting place shrouded in the vestiges of ancient grief. 

Inside, the church was deathly quiet, decorated in places with carved masonry recovered from the Abbey, bands of early afternoon light streaming weakly through the stained glass. 

This is working parish church, like many of the others we saw, but it felt like a great tomb. We loved it. 

On the road again.

Had we wanted at this point to take in one of England’s great abbey ruins, we could have headed north a mere four miles or so and visited Glastonbury, but like a number of other famous sites we found ourselves in relatively close proximity to, we just passed on it and headed east, running into Northover and stopping off at St Andrew’s ..

…then another unscheduled stop at another St Andrew’s, in the village of Holcombe. We spent maybe 10 minutes here: the church was locked, and a side door was covered in spider webs. A somewhat gloomy place, Sharon didn’t like it all, barely snapping a few pictures in the churchyard before urging me back to the car.

The next stop, also unscheduled, was another CCT property, St Mary’s Hardington Bampfylde, 

a Norman era church in the village of Laverton, adorned with some gentle Victorian restoration, swatches of Norman wall paintings still visible and some impressive memorials. We both enjoyed this church very much and spent almost an hour inside – again, with no one else present.

Months ago, as we were recalling our trip through Shrewsbury, we attempted to derive some order and predictability as to when and where we were likely to find churches unlocked. Since then, as we began to research our Dead Englishmen Tour Part 2 (yes, it’s coming up, maybe seven weeks off at this point in time) , we came across Simon Knott’s two incredible websites devoted to Norfolk and Suffolk churches. 

Knott, who lives in Suffolk, has documented virtually every church in East Anglia with photographs and descriptions of each – something north of 1500 in all, including ruined churches and completely vanished ones, represented in most cases by pictures of empty fields – and in his writing, he is not shy about venting frustration over churches that are kept locked. Knott’s perspective as a church-obsessive and a Suffolk native probably gives him greater standing in his complaints about locked churches than do a couple of Nikon-slinging American tourists (I dropped him an email about his website and asked for some recommendations, as we were planning to spend the last leg of this year’s trip in Suffolk, but he never replied – he gets a lot of mail, I guess. That, or my puny and standard issue tourist entreaties weren’t worth the trouble to reply to. No harm – I still enjoy his twin sites very much. )

What I have learned from reading several hundred of his entries over the past few months is that churches are kept locked for any number of reasons – suspicion of outsiders and their motives, a recent history of vandalism, structural peril, inaccessibility (and thus, vulnerability) of the churches themselves, or reasons known only to the local rector or parish council. Which, in the final analysis, was more or less what we thought all along. Some are kept locked, some aren’t, and the locked ones are locked for a reason, some reason, and that’s that. 

Maybe we’d have a stronger opinion on the matter if we lived there, or were, in Knott’s words, “pilgrims in need of periodic spiritual refreshment”, but we don’t live there and seldom thirst for spiritual refreshment, and I think we’re just fine with letting the locals decide themselves whether or not to keep their churches locked. They have their reasons, we’ll leave it up to folks like Mr Knott to judge whether they are valid or not.

But looking back, we were actually pretty lucky. Some of that is due to the fact that many of the churches we visited were in the care of the CCT, and part of their mission is to keep historic churches accessible to the public. We’ll let you know how we fare on the DET2.

Four churches and an abbey, and the skies were turning grey again. Time to hit our last hotel, the charmingly named Lion and Fiddle, in the crossroads town of Hilperton. Yes…where???

There isn’t much reason to visit Hilperton, and we don’t mean that in a snotty, tourist-ennui sort of way. 

At some point, we had it in our heads that we’d stay here because of its proximity to Bath, one of England’s real treasure cities and a tourist favorite, but Bath is west and a pretty big place, and we still had Avebury and Lacock on the itinerary, both east and on the way back to London, and we couldn’t do both. Neither the prospect of driving into Bath (which is generally not recommended), or stopping outside and catching a bus or shuttle (which would have been logistically challenging and a time sink) appealed to us very much, so we decided instead to just have a relaxed evening in Hilperton and an unhurried morning, and head east.

The barkeep, who turned out to be owner’s son, let us into our room, a spectacularly unspectacular accommodation and a pleasing chaser after the regal cush we had (and enjoyed) at Thornbury. Just a little room, clean and utilitarian, overlooking a playground and the hotel’s car park. Some folks get a taste of lofty luxury and want more; we got a taste of it and were grateful for less. It wasn’t a money thing – we just wanted to feel normal again.

We dropped off bags and met the loo, and headed back downstairs for a smoke. There was a wedding reception in progress – or, maybe just wrapping up. The large dining room was completely empty, with ear-splitting hip hop music slamming forth from an unattended DJ station into a room of empty tables. We went out to the patio area, and in a minute or two, a skinny, tattooed woman in her late thirties  in a wedding gown (well, not exactly a gown, but clearly a bride’s costume) and sporting a bit of a sozzle came out with what appeared to be her Dad. She smiled shyly at us; I congratulated her (guessing correctly that she was the bride), and she thanked us. We spent a few minutes talking about the weather to her Dad as she disappeared again, the hip hop continued to play to no guests whatsoever, and I remember wondering if people in England often got married on  Tuesdays.

It started to rain.

We weren’t sure, but the pub at the Lion and Fiddle struck as the only watering hole in town, and as we seated for dinner, a decent stream of locals – a single bloke or two, a couple of families – came in to watch the soccer game on the big screen, some drinking and some having dinner. It felt like a community pub, which sounds kind of trite but not all pubs felt like that to us. Fish and chips, a steak sandwich, a couple of ales and we were pretty well finished for the day. We went upstairs, flipped on the tiny TV and konked out. Our last day with the car was tomorrow, including the one piece I had almost forgotten to worry about: driving back into London to the rental car office.

Oh yeah…that.