Friday 4th May

A blackbird egg?, found on the lawn where it must have been dropped by a scavenging bird.

Yesterday Weaver of Grass mentioned Virginia Woolf, and it rather jelled with the meeting about the church we had attended. Viewed slightly askance by some members (what the hell are non-believers doing here?)  One of the things that interest me are 19th century vicars and their ability to become amateur archaeologists. Well the new vicar is not looking for another job, his mission is the mission of Jesus he told us in no uncertain terms, the history and upkeep of the church did not interest him.  Our church pays a certain amount of money to the diocese, when questioned by the treasurer and someone else he defended the rather large sum, but if you would listen to people in the village, The Church of England has enormous land holding and buildings which could easily be sold off too back the pensions of the vicars.  Was this the old tithes system of a tenth of the worth of the village I wondered...

So back to Virginia Woolf, well she had the same interest in vicars  as myself and had written an essay on two of them.  One was the Reverend Skinner, I had often walked his Somerset landscape with Moss in tow, wondering about this miserable man but then if you had read his diaries about the terrible conditions of the villagers in Camerton, poverty and drunkeness just to start with, and then the terrible loss of his children to illness, you could understand his unhappiness and ability to throw himself into his work, which unfortunately was trashing the prehistoric barrows of Somerset.

Here is her essay and the one I wrote ten years ago such a long time and immediately memories of walking with Moss to the Ashen Hill barrows come to mind.

Moss and I walked many miles, these great barrows follow presumably the line of a prehistoric trackway, and I remember we had to walk through a herd of young bullocks, Moss tight on a lead though he would never chase anything