Kinsham

History and stories are layered here, the countryside, in a way that isn't true of cities. History is present in cities but it is overwritten, so that what used to be there is present only in old photographs or history books. Urban history books record the ongoing evolution of the city. In the countryside there is more space and so things - objects, buildings, stories - coexist, side by side. Yesterday we went to the daffodil afternoon at Kinsham Court. This is a not-very-impressive big house on the other side of the valley from us. The house and estate have had a chequered history, even the little I have come across, and has belonged to among other families the industrial Arkwrights and the aristocratic Harleys, the Earls of Oxford. The Harley Estate still owns huge areas of land around here. To be near Lady Harley, Lord Byron rented Kinsham Court in 1812 for a year or so, and wrote part of 'Childe Harold' there. (I like the idea of living between Wordsworth's river, the Hindwell, and Byron at Kinsham Court. Were they ever here at the same time, I wonder?!) I wanted to see the Kinsham church, which I found when I walked to the remains of Limebrook Priory in December. The Priory is crumbling back into the ground but the church at Kinsham is about the same age - built in 1300 - and so was a tangible link to that time. When I saw it, the church was cold and empty and gloomy, the light fading midafternoon. It is astonishingly plain, meditative, monastic. The huge wooden door - proper church creak - is probably the most ornate thing on show. Yesterday the church was full of people having afternoon tea on a cold bright day. The daffodils were splayed out across the hill above the valley and the pine woods, and the whole place and day felt English and - for a place with so much history - strangely timeless.