Aston Upthorpe

Woke up to an empty house, the ache of muscles after unaccustomed exercise and a quiet melancholic mood. Lost myself in my books and music for a while but then my newfound "goal setting" prompted the effort to push myself out the door and into the world. I drove around the local villages, stopping for a couple of short walks, before squeezing down the narrow green lanes to Aston Upthorpe, a tiny village minutes from the centre of Didcot but a world apart. I parked up in the car park at the village hall and walked down to the little churchyard with its handful of marked graves and multitude of dead under its uneven ground and ancient yew tree. The houses that line the lane are big, obscenely expensive and look down on you. Their suspicious eyes watched my every shambling step and an occasional driver slowed his car and craned his neck to make sure I wasn't stealing the silver.

The church is what drew me to stop and take my camera for a walk. As you round the sharp corner beside it its imposing, wonderfully weathered timber porch arrests you and pulls you in. The place was deemed worthy of a short entry in Pevsner and although you'd be forgiven for shrugging your shoulders at it the real treasure lies in the details, under the plastered on nineteenth century render and tiles the fabric is a mixture of the centuries. The place dates back to the eleventh century - a thousand years of English history. The porch is seventeenth century, the roof thirteenth, the nave is Norman. For the last couple of weeks my imagination has been escaping into the eleventh and twelfth centuries, submerging myself in The Anarchy, Stephen of Blois, Empress Mathilda, the Angevin Empire, the Plantagenets, the ever fascinating Eleanor of Aquitaine, rereading the poetry of the Occitan troubadours - particularly Bertran de Born, so today I was most drawn to that tiny high window in the left of my picture, a feature from their time, a tangible physical connection. Round the back, on the South side of the nave, they have scraped away the render of the Victorian "restorers" to leave the Norman door exposed along with the bricks stuffed into it by later hands. As usual in my churchyard musings I was the only living inhabitant in its crowded space, today that suited me completely.