Dear Friends,

I have wanted to share Ronald Blythe’s wonderful writing with you for some time.  He is a Reader in the Church of England but also an author who has been writing about rural life in his native Suffolk for nearly sixty years.

He wrote his articles ‘Word from Wormingford’, the village where he lives, for the Church Times for over twenty years.

Here is one that he wrote for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity in 1992, it is a wonderful description of rural church life:

“Late summer on the calendar, early autumn on the ground and in the air.  The harvest is in and its aftermath begins to flourish on the stubble.  The cracked fields look as though they haven’t been rained on for a year.  Their dust films our shoes as we set out on the annual church farm walk.  The King’s Farm cows shake their heads as the congregation threads its way across their pasture and a great meadow to Vicky’s, where lemonade awaits us.  Some of the congregation are acres ahead and the carrying talk reminds me of the calling conversations held by farmworkers many years ago, or by fishermen in their boats.  Little Horkesley, on a Sunday afternoon is equally calm and yet full of chatter.

We are full of Sunday dinner and footpath maps, as we walk through Vicky’s tall wood where every tree reaches for the skies, over the stripped pea fields, past the reservoir and then across the lane to Knight’s Farm.  We are met with an astonished chorus by calves, guinea fowl, cockerels and other creatures at this invasion.  Is there to be no rest, they ask?  The walk has taken us through ancient growing landscapes, Crabb’s, Knowle’s, Breewood Hall and Hay Farm.

We stop for tea and Mr Knighton brings me two letters to his great-grandfather from John Wesley and I sit and read them by the barn.  At six we move to a lawn set out with straw bales and we sing Evensong.  Vicky reads from the Book of Ruth, Chapter 2, and I do a makeshift sermon.  We sing the evening hymns and the animals join in.  There are forty of us.  Unless you are acquainted with fields, woods and farm, why would you live in the countryside?  How could you worship in a village church, unless you know something of the seasons?”

Blessings

Ann