Untitled Page

John Clare country’: Barnack, Helpston, Castor and Milton Park

On the 23^rd July 2008, the project team – accompanied by Prof. Stephen Daniels and Charlotte Lloyd of the Arts and Humanities Research Council – visited several sites in the Soke of Peterborough (previously part of Northamptonshire, incorporated into Huntingdonshire in 1965 and now part of Cambridgeshire). The team started the day in Barnack, home of the medieval quarries from which stone – known as Barnack Rag – was dug to build Peterborough and Ely cathedrals. The impressive pre-Conquest tower of the village church of St John the Baptist may also be built from the local stone. The tower is one of the few early 11^th-century towers in this part of England and is decorated with characteristic Anglo-Saxon ‘long and short’ work. The early 14^th-century chancel and Perpendicular period south chapel also proved worth a look, as did the beautiful painted ceiling in the chancel.

Next the team made their way to the parish of Helpston, the birthplace of the poet John Clare. The first stop was Swaddywell Pit nature reserve, a limestone grassland once part of Helpston Heath. In the 18^th century, the heath provided grazing for the villagers’ sheep, cattle and geese, some of which were tended by Clare in his youth. The heath was finally enclosed under a parliamentary act of 1809, a loss which Clare lamented in several of his poems. The destruction of Langdyke Bush, an ancient hawthorn tree on the heath, also gets a mention in Clare’s poetry. The tree stood on a Bronze Age barrow which was later used as an Anglo-Saxon meeting place and medieval place of execution, and the mound is still visible today 700 metres south of Swaddywell.

Having seen the heath, the team then made their way into Helpston village where Clare was born in 1793 and lived for the first 40 years of his life. Here they visited the cottage in which Clare lived with 12 members of his family, along with the John Clare memorial and St Botolph’s church, where they saw the graves of the poet and his parents.

Following lunch, the team moved on to Castor where the church bears a unique dedication to St Kyneburga, the daughter of an Anglo-Saxon king of Mercia who converted to Christianity and established an early convent on the site. The church houses Roman and Saxon stonework, but the earliest in situ material dates from the re-consecration of the church in 1124. The highly decorated crossing tower, north and south transepts, and south doorway survive from the Norman church, but the chancel, south aisle and tower top were all rebuilt in the 13^th and 14^th centuries.

The final stop of the day was at Milton Park near Peterborough, owned by the Fitzwilliam family in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and now home to their descendants Sir Philip Naylor-Leyland and Lady Isabella. Mr Robert Dagliesh, the chief agent, kindly led the team on a tour of the 500-acre park, currently managed in hand and grazed by a flock of 1500 commercial breeding sheep along with a herd of old English Longhorn cattle. The team saw the 18^th-century lake, the parkland designed by Humphrey Repton in 1791 and a number of the lodges constructed during the 1790s, as well as the kennels built in 1767 to house the pack of fox hounds established by the 4^th Earl Fitzwilliam.