Today I wandered through Aspley Guise to the village church – St Boltolph’s. There has been a church on this site since 1223 with the current church tower built sometime between 1400 and 1650. For a small village church it is an impressive structure and, as with most English country churches, it has a graveyard around it with headstones dating back almost as far as the church.
As the light was fading (at 3pm) I wandered between the headstones taking photographs. I found myself thinking of that great piece of 18th century English literature – Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.
“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”
I fear my “escape from the madding crowd” may have been interpreted by passing locals as a little strange given some of the unusual looks I received.
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- Headstone in front of trees
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- Ivy covered headstone
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- Weathered headstone
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- Headstone in trees
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- Assorted headstones
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- St Boltolph’s from the churchyard
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- The tower of St Boltolphs
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- St Boltolph’s Church in Aspley Guise
toscanakiwi 
Hey! You’ve been away from business for too long… Whats with this ‘plowman’ in the heading??? Even Grey got it right when he wrote ‘ploughman’!!
Nice to see you are soaking up the English environment and the history. Now you know what hooks me there… and how it calls me back all the time !
Yikes, that’s one that slipped through – or should that be ‘throw’. Corrected with apologies to Mr Gray.
Cheers
G
Not before the email arrived.
:-)
As I often do, I trotted off onto Google Earth to see if I could locate your location. Hardly a challange with the English logic this time. Where else would it be but in Church Street.
According to the clocks, the Google Earth Car went past around three hours earlier than you, and in summer, from the look of the trees.
There is quite a bit of “what you see is what you name it” going on over here. The road off Church Street which runs up the hill is called Church Hill and the lane that runs directly from Aspley Guise past our place to Woburn is called Woburn Lane. All too sensible for my liking.
Cheer
G
I used to walk along Woburn Road to high school- but that doesn’t seem to be related. I have found Woburn Land on Google, but eveidently there was no deer in the back yard of any house when the satelite went over.