Ambling in Clanfield

I spent most of the day today, from early morning until lunchtime taking a wander around the village of Clanfield. I had recently discovered a campervan service, repair and conversion business tucked away at the end of the long track-like road called Mill Lane. A fascinating find. 

One might call it an industrial estate, though unlike any I have ever visited. At the end of the lane, and into the complex, I was met with the extraordinary sight of several beat-up, half-cannibalised cars, all, or mostly, of high-end branding - Mercedes, BMW and the like. And in a large covered area, several Rolls Royces, including the classic 'Silver Cloud', all in various states of repair and disrepair. Cars such as these were built to defy time, yet here they were, reflecting time's passing as old barns or weathered gravestones

My reason to visit was less exotically interesting - I was here to get a repair done on my campervan. The campervan business was across a small wooden bridge over the stream called Broadwell Brook, among other enterprises including upholstery, welding, guttering and the like - a busy place more or less in the middle of nowhere.

I was met by Paul, an engaging guy who filled me with every confidence that the pop-top roof repair on my van was nothing like the terminally problematic issue I had feared. After a quick check on some details, Paul gave me a 3 hour window of opportunity to take a wander back along Mill Lane to  the main village of Clanfield, whilst he did the necessary work.

I enjoyed the 20 minute walk , and sought out the church, as is my wont when coming to any village. And as always with such church visits, St. Stephen's did not disappoint - it offered, as all churches do, the unusual and unique embedded in the familiar styles and layouts of these ancient buildings. 

St. Stephen Statue, Clanfield Church

Immediately engaging was a very eye-catching large figure carved in an angled niche in a corner of the tower. This was St. Stephen, carrying a pile of stones and maybe a book. Walking up to the South door entrance, I was met by a friendly lady who introduced herself as Ros, and she immediately alerted me to a pile of plaster on the entrance floor - the result of water damage finally doing its worst. Not easy to dawdle and enjoy the Romanesque tympanum over that South door! But my chat with Ros convinced me that another visit would be a good idea...there is much to see and enjoy in St. Stephen's. 

I learned from her that she was just tidying up after a group of Zen Buddhists had enjoyed a night's sleep on the church floor - using carefully-arranged kneelers as mattresses. It seems this is not an unusual occurrence for such folk on their spiritual treks along the Thames path and environs. 

My chat with Ros led me to share some local history knowledge, and she told me about a unique character called William Tayler, who hailed from the hamlet of Grafton, close to Clanfield. He went to London and entered into service in a household in Marylebone, London in Victorian times, and kept a diary which is published as The Diary of William Tayler (1837). This journal offers a candid look at the daily routines, gossip and hardships of a 19th century servant. It offers local historians a picture of the contrasting lives of the rural working class poverty in the Clanfield and Grafton area with the structured reality of the rhythms of urban domestic service.

Ros's parting gift to me apart from a gratis copy of an old leaflet describing the highlights of the church, was the recommendation to visit Blake's Kitchen in the village, and enjoy one of their signature cinnamon buns! 

And so I wandered along to Blake's and enjoyed a coffee and bun as recommended. A fine place, with outdoor and indoor space, an on-site post office, and a friendly atmosphere. An excellent way to await the call from Paul, which duly came to let me know that the job was complete on my van. It was time to wander back along Mill Lane, check the job, grab the invoice and say my grateful goodbyes.

Blake's Cinnamon Buns

What to say about this visit? And why, really, have I narrated these details? In simple terms, I guess I might say the walk was a pilgrimage of sorts. This village, which yes, I've driven to through a few times, but which until this day I have never explored, was the birthplace of my father in August 1920. 

He was the 7th child of my grandparents, who went on to produce 3 more offspring. My grandfather was a cowman/farmworker, and by all accounts did not settle for long in each place where he found employment. By serendipity, the campervan business was here in the village, and I was glad to be drawn here for an enforced couple of hours. 

Here I was able to absorb the  contrasts and a sense of a place known by the likes of William Tayler. Here was a place which had not substantially changed in the 100 years between his time in Grafton, and the time of itinerant farmworkers in the early 20th century. And I was able to reflect on how those workers' cottages have now become desirable Cotswolds residences for folk with leisure time to enjoy coffee and genteel socialising. And how Zen Buddhists and the grandson of one such worker are blessed with the time to wander free and comfortable among the pathways his ancestors trod in a whole other world.

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Postscript ( June 9th 2026)

A review of the 1921 Census tells me that in that year:

Edwin ( b. Hatherop, Glos ) worked at Northcourt Farm

The Farm manager was a Mr F Bowden

His co-workers were:

•             Alfred Benfield  b. Grafton
•             George Shayler b. "Oxfordshire"
•             William Temple b. Clanfield
•             William Parrott b. Clanfield

Edwin lived at The Green in Clanfield. No house number/name is recorded.

He lived there with his wife Mary and children:

•                         Edwin Jesse b. 1910 "Oxfordshire"
•                         Pam   b. 1911 Hampton Gay
•                         Rupert b. 1913 Hampton Gay
•                         Alice b. 1914 "Oxfordshire"
•                         Percy b. 1916 Kencot
•                         Hector b. 1919 Bampton
•                         Kenneth b. 1920 Clanfield

... and the story continues.

Restored workers' cottages 2026 , The Green , Clanfield

The Green, Clanfield 2026

Northcourt Farm for Sale 2026: PDF Here (May 2026)

Alone on a Wide Wide Sea

I have just read "Alone on a Wide Wide Sea" by Michael Morpurgo, prompted by the enthusiasm of my Granddaughter. A children’s adventure novel certainly, but beneath that it is really a meditation on exile, memory, loss, survival, and the sea as both destroyer and redeemer.

Morpurgo’s novel draws on the real history of post-war British child migration schemes that sent thousands of children to Australia, often with terrible consequences.

The novel is divided into two linked journeys.

The first half tells the story of Arthur Hobhouse, an orphaned boy separated from his sister Kitty after the Second World War and shipped to Australia as part of a child migration programme. He arrives believing he is being given a new life, but instead finds exploitation and brutality on an isolated farm in the outback. 

Arthur survives through friendship and resilience. Morpurgo drives the narrative forward, describing a series of Arthur's life-events which captivate the imagination, and links us seamlessly to the second half.

The second half shifts to Arthur’s daughter Allie, who undertakes a solo voyage from Australia back to England. I will avoid spoilers, tempted as I am to share some magical moments which permeate this narrative. Suffice it to say that Allie's journey becomes both literal and spiritual: an attempt to reconnect broken family lines across oceans and generations.

What makes the book linger in the mind is not merely the plot, but its atmosphere of immense distances — emotional as much as geographical.

Morpurgo uses images of horizons, empty oceans, birds, stars, and weather. The title itself comes from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and the albatross motif consciously echoes that poem, which is a feature of the story. The sea becomes almost metaphysical: indifferent, beautiful, terrifying, and yet somehow healing too.

In this novel, the story of healing is sublimely told.

I reflect on two themes here: the story of the Cospatrick disaster which I researched with colleagues in 2024 for our local history group. And then my recent reflections on the life of H.W. "Bill" Tilman, whose many sailing adventures included the ocean around Cape Horn and the Atlantic, traversed also by Allie and described so dramatically and engagingly.

This story also belongs to the larger emotional history of British emigration — especially the severing of family ties through oceanic distance. The Cospatrick tragedy represented the Victorian age of migration: long sea passages, uncertain futures, and the terrible vulnerability of emigrants once they crossed the horizon. [ More about the Cospatrick is here ]

Here is a clip from a 1991 talk for the Wychwoods Local History Society. It is a moving account of the fate of one individual child at journey's end. 

There are several particularly striking parallels for those post-war journeys undertaken by Arthur in the novel: conditions in the 1870s, of course, were vastly different from those on post-WW2  vessels, but children were still travelling into the unknown with little agency over their fate, the sea functioning simultaneously as pathway and threat, the emotional violence of permanent separation from homeland and kin.

Memory preserved through small personal relics — in this novel, Arthur's talismanic key; in emigrant histories often letters, or keepsakes, discovered through research and enquiry over time.

In both the Cospatrick story and Morpurgo’s novel, one senses how migration was often narrated publicly as opportunity, while privately it could feel like abandonment, rupture, or exile, or worse.

Albeit in simpler language, Morpurgo writes about the the sea almost in the older literary tradition of, say,  Joseph Conrad  rather than modern children’s fiction. The sea is not merely scenery; it forms character and challenges assumptions. And we can see this operating in the stories of Tilman's expeditions, certainly.

Another interesting aspect  is how the novel treats memory across generations. Arthur’s memories are fragmentary and damaged — he barely trusts them himself by the end. Allie effectively becomes the historian of her father’s life, working with her family to trace her family story, piecing together identity through , travel, testimony, and objects. This resembles the work of local history societies in miniature such as ours: recovering broken human narratives from traces left behind.

Morpurgo’s prose is deceptively simple. Sure, we can classify him only as a children’s author, but books like this work because they understand that children’s literature of this quality can carry adult historical themes with skill and panache.

Two Small Figures: a History of Introspection

 

Here we are with some thoughts around two images I encountered over  half-century apart.  I came across the first image in  1967, when I was doing  German literature  at school. The course included Alfred Andersch’s novel Sansibar oder der Letzte Grund, in which the work of Ernst Barlach, his Lesender Klosterschüler — the Reading Monk — was a central image and important symbol. My copy of the book had the photo of the carving. I wrote about this here : Der Lesender Klosterschüler

The second encounter came recently, while revisiting the BBC documentary series Art That Made Us, which opens with the Anglo‑Saxon “Spong Man,” discovered in Norfolk. I enjoyed the co-incidence that  Norfolk was my domicile for many years, and that earlier blog piece on Barlach had been written there. The BBC documentary’s brief glimpse of the Spong Man prompted me to think some more about the clear and instinctive parallels which these figures present.

Two Figures, Two Worlds

At first glance, the Spong Man and Barlach’s Reading Monk belong to entirely different cultural universes. One is a small clay figure from the 5th or 6th century, found on top of  a cremation urn in an early Anglo‑Saxon cemetery. The other is a modernist sculpture carved in 1930, shaped by the artistic and political tensions of interwar Germany. Yet both are seated human figures gathered into themselves, their postures expressing a timeless interiority, in spite of the 1,500 years between their creation.

The Spong Man was unearthed at Spong Hill, Norfolk — the largest early Anglo‑Saxon cremation cemetery known in England. Its date places it in the turbulent period following the end of Roman rule New migrant communities were establishing themselves and religious life was a mixture of ancestral practices and emerging influences.

The posture is simple: elbows on knees, hands raised to the cheeks. Whether guardian, mourner, or ancestral presence, the figure conveys a moment of inward attention. The rough modelling does not disguise – but actually enhances -  the emotional clarity. It expresses a  capacity to turn inward to find solace  in times of uncertainty.

Ernst Barlach’s Lesender Klosterschüler belongs to a very different moment of transition. Created in 1930, it reflects the spiritual searching and political unease of the Weimar years. Barlach’s simplified forms and inward‑turned figures stood in opposition to the rising ideological rigidity of the period. His work was later denounced as “degenerate,” removed from public spaces, and in some cases destroyed.

In Andersch’s novel, the Reading Monk becomes a focal point for the moral imagination. Each character sees something different in the figure — spiritual inheritance, intellectual freedom, resistance to oppression. The sculpture’s bowed head and gathered posture represent an enduring stillnes. More about this is in my earlier notes in  : Der Lesender Klosterschüler

Despite their differences, both sculptures rely on posture as the primary means of expression. Their inwardness is conveyed not through facial detail but through the geometry of the body: the Spong Man forms a compact loop of thought, the limbs enclosing the head. The Reading Monk forms a downward arc, the robe and bowed head creating a sheltered space of concentration.

Both figures simplify the human form to reveal an interior life. Each came into being at at time of cultural instability — one after the collapse of Roman Britain, the other on the eve of totalitarianism.

Notes:

The comparative observations on posture and inwardness draw on  publicly available information from:

- Norfolk Museums Service for archaeological information on Spong Hill

- The British Museum (which holds the Spong Man) for basic object detail

- The Ernst Barlach Stiftung (Foundation) for biographical and catalogue information on Barlach